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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I see value in both @hydroacetylene and @huadpe’s answers. A little police state is not a bad thing—not when police are the raison d’etre of the state. The problem is incentivizing them to remain little.

I don’t see a way to let police preempt shooters without also letting them preempt and inconvenience anyone else. The Tang China tack, punishing police for false alarms? There’s no way to know what could have happened. Red flag laws? It helps if civilians have to bring the accusation, but still, there’s incentive to confiscate first and ask questions later. Police will always be incentivized to disarm the populace. It makes their job strictly easier.

Tribalism makes this all worse. So long as Our Team is getting disarmed and Their Team is doing the disarming, both sides are correct to recognize the incentives. I don’t know if it’s physically possible to depoliticize this. Changing how the media reports gun violence has to be a start. “If it bleeds, it leads” has never been in the public interest.

In summary: I don’t have a good answer, and think that most mainstream ones are pointless or counterproductive. It’d be nice if we never talked about it, but anyone aiming at an innocent was immediately drone-struck. We’re so far from that world that I’m not sure what is best. That’s why I’m venting here instead of, I dunno, running for office.

Yeah, but other than making you feel less icky seeing people with guns in public, what does banning open carry actually accomplish? I can't think of a single mass shooting that would have been prevented by such a law. Has a mass shooter ever been misidentified as a lawful citizen peacefully open carrying? This is exactly the sort of "I can't identify any way this would actually help solve the stated problem, but it would make me feel better emotionally" policy suggestion that makes gun rights supporters distrustful of "compromise" legislation.

Hell, your first suggestion for a reasonable compromise to alleviate the problem of mass shooters is to... moderately inconvenience a group of shockingly law-abiding people in a way that has no plausible impact on mass shootings but does prohibit a lawful activity that you already dislike for unrelated reasons anyway. This is why gun rights supporters aren't interested in compromise. If every suggested "compromise" for decades takes the form of a pointless restriction that seems almost deliberately designed to do nothing but antagonize you, eventually you stop giving your opponents the benefit of the doubt that they're operating in good faith.

Discharging a firearm in your front yard is not an example of open carry. I would be absolutely shocked if what he did was not already illegal under current law, and on the off chance it wasn't, why not ban the dangerous and concerning activity he was actually engaged in rather than a much broader activity that almost exclusively penalizes law-abiding individuals?

Discharging a gun in your front lawn without a good reason (self defense), is already a crime in the vast majority of jurisdictions (including that person's according to some reports). Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

At least in rural areas it's pretty frequently legal to engage in target shooting on private property: as far as I know in Texas it's legal to discharge firearms on your own property outside of city limits provided you're at least 300 feet from neighboring occupied buildings. Within city limits it's generally a local law issue. Rifle and shotgun shots (presumably mostly for sport or hunting) are not an uncommon sound if you start wandering backroads.

Which would make this another example of "just enforce the law you losers" cases.

As far as I can tell, the suspect in question wasn't in the US legally, and thus couldn't have legally acquired the firearm in question.

How would visit from the police stop him from murdering the family, exactly?

This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that your top policy suggestion, taken in the most charitable light, would do absolutely nothing if he was shooting a gun in his back, not front yard (because then there is no way to see it as open carry).

Really, your comment is an extremely clear example of how the policy proposals of gun control people only serve to annoy the out group, and have very little effect on actual criminals.

He wasn't stopped by the many other laws he violated. Assuming enforcement of your specific policy will not suffer the same problems as laws related to immigration or deported foreign nationals not being allowed to purchase firearms is special pleading.

I don't think you should be able to show a firearm unless you're in a place / circumstance where you can legally discharge that firearm.

Could you clarify? The place you've described is "any place", which doesn't disallow non-uniformed shooters, and the circumstance you've described is "with justifiable belief in an imminent unprovoked threat of death or grievous bodily harm", which does disallow police officers and security guards at any time before it's too late to go get a gun.

And it makes it so that if you see someone strapped, you can know it's a problem and run/call the cops/etc.

Sadly, this rule would only be reliable if certain false prerequisites like "concealed carriers' clothes never shift the wrong way" were true. There are a lot of people who never want to open carry but who also never want to go to jail (or worse; IIRC I read about this in the discussion of a CCW holder killed by police) for not concealing well enough.

Sure. Under my rule, you can concealed carry in public, but you can't pull out your weapon until and unless there is in fact a justifiable belief in an imminent threat. You can open carry if you're allowed to hunt in that area or if it's a range or somewhere else shooting is allowed.

This would also have the effect of making it a crime to open carry a gun inside your own home, in any city or county that bans shooting within the municipal boundaries.

Sure. Under my rule, you can concealed carry in public, but you can't pull out your weapon until and unless there is in fact a justifiable belief in an imminent threat.

This is supposed to be the rule for police and security guards already in most places.

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