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And you still got mass shootings and other more general terror attacks after that, obviously, so it didn't fix the problem and wasted a bunch of time, money, and life. Of course, the "clearly 1 Stalin wasn't enough, how about 50 of them?" ratchet-tightening is proposed, and then it happens because Something Must Be Done(tm), and then it happens again, etc.
When gun owners point out "compromise means we get nothing", this is what we mean. The compromise is supposed to be "if we agree to these restrictions you stop fucking coming after us, because mass killings are going to happen either way" but every time for the last 100 years we've been Defected upon, so the only option is to Defect right on back. Ball's in their court; they could make the first move and fix it, but while we don't hate them...
Part of the problem is that gun rights advocates really have no solution to this other than “it’s the price I’m willing to pay for freedom”, which clearly isn’t compelling to those who don’t own guns and who don’t think gun owners will imminently defend them from the tyranny of the federal government) and so don’t “benefit” from this right.
On other issues, “both sides” have “solutions”. On crime, the left has their asinine restorative justice or ‘crime is a problem of inequality’ or whatever bullshit, which is obviously stupid but acknowledges that the problem exists, they’re not mostly saying “yeah I accept current crime rates are fine and they’re the price I’m willing to pay, forever”.
Gun rights advocates compare things to cars or whatever, but even there the industry is clearly working toward self driving, and deliberate vehicular attacks on civilians are rarer than shootings anyway. There is a nonchalance among gun rights advocates that is grating. Personally, I think they should use the NRA’s lobbying strength to push for a massive reversal of deinstitutionalization. Lock the crazies up for life, and I’ll become the staunchest gun rights supporter in the country. This would also solve the homeless issue.
But...they do directly say this. Reparations are a forever thing, and the class they want those reparations to go to commits the vast majority of the crime, therefore they're willing to allow them to commit crimes.
And then, of course, in 2020 they went out and committed, aided, and abetted a massive amount of crime in support of that goal. So while they might claim it's "only temporary" I have no reason to believe that their permanent solution is going to be any different (of course, that depends on your definition of crime; if they re-define a [n action that is a crime, from the classic liberal viewpoint] so it's only a crime when race X does it, which they explicitly state they believe, and then the trendline goes down... has crime objectively decreased?).
Well, yeah- if the Federal government's not fully on my side and I'm worried about getting attacked by backwards gun owners I'd be afraid too, especially if I use and approve of the use of political violence to get my way. Besides, it would be even worse if they had control of the Federal government, because they could take the bureaucracy (that always imposes the rule changes my enemy wants as quickly as it does for the rules I like) and maybe even resist it once I take the government back.
I'd be fine with this, especially because we have an oversupply of people who a.) want to do social work and b.) are all on hair-triggers for any kind of abuse, so I'm not as worried about Nurse Ratched or "lobotomy is a solution to literally every problem" as I would be in the '50s. We might have to revisit it in 60 years if b.) stops being true, but it'll solve the problem for a couple of generations at least.
(Of course, there's always the possibility that, just like in the Soviet Union, China, Australia, the EU, and the UK, you get dissidents being gulag'd for hate speech- it always seems to get used on the liberals eventually and there are more of those on the [current] right than the left- so I don't trust the Right has enough trust in government to build a system that the Left would then be looking for any excuse to turn on the Right, as the Left thinks opposition to their policies is a mental defect anyway. So does the Right, of course.)
Outside of the last 20 years gun rights advocates have accepted every compromise and received nothing in return so yeah, I'd be nonchalant about pressing the "Defect" button too. We have no trust that what we do now won't be abused in the future (for instance, the Swiss do background checks in a secure and private way- but they also have social consensus that guns are fine so they can get legislative and executive co-operation, whereas New World countries obviously lack that, which leads to inches given becoming miles taken in a direction that coincidentally never favors the pro-freedom side).
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I'll accept the nonchalance of gun rights folks over the bad faith, willingly under-informed righteousness of the gun control people. When you haven't done the basic homework to know that saying "thirty magazine clip" is nonsense, I can't respect your credibility or good faith in the argument. Much less when you start extending squishy gun aesthetic terminology to other weapons (what the hell is a military style knife?)
The emotional-memetic takeover of the firearm debate is pretty much complete. It's actually a non-issue in the popular consciousness. When it does matter, in SCOTUS rulings, the court is moving ever towards more permissive gun laws because it's literally the second amendment to the Constitution. It's a bit paranoid and jaded, but I have the thought that when your average twitter warrior launches something like "another mass shooting in the U.S., when will we learn?" their fatalism is actually a tacit admission that they don't want to push the issue because they know where that ends up in the judiciary. Phrased differently; they don't want to legally fuck around and find out.
Plus one to @2rafa's support for re-institutionalization. It's yet another bizarre walking contradiction on the left; "Everyone needs therapy. You should go to a therapist!" only applies to PMC pseudo-depression and anxiety. When you're so schizophrenic that you can't see, on the other hand, it's "people have the right to be unhoused on their own terms!"
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The point is that neither do the gun control people.
And the other side remains uncompelled. Doesn't that prove "having solutions" has nothing to do with their reaction?
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