Question for gun folks...
- Thread starter Cody
- Start date
- Location
- Bountiful, land of rocks
Finally explains why an AR 15 weighs as much as 15 boxes that you might be moving
Houndoc
Registered User
- Location
- Grantsville
True. But also worth noting a lot of 'gun rights groups ' have not been supportive of red (or think they call it yellow) flag laws.Another time that the government failed to prevent an issue.
Had the on-books laws and rules been followed, the Maine shooting would have been prevented.
Making me give my son a background check before I give him his own gun won't solve ignoring mental health issues in other people.
Maine mass shooter had numerous run-ins with authorities, warning signs before shooting
Maine's authorities are trying to piece together the events that led to the worst mass shooting in the state's history. Those same authorities are also facing growing scrutiny on the shooter.www.ksl.com
Because yellow or red flag laws make it possible for YOU to see my post on RME about being mad at the government and storing ammo, to call the cops, and begin the process of having my guns removed. That’s not right. An angry ex-girlfriend, a dumb neighbor, or any other non-authority figure can cause a lot of drama quickly.
It would be impossible to write a perfect law that catches all the bad guys without harming innocent citizens. If someone has been committed to a mental institution for hearing voices telling them to go on a shooting rampage… You have my support and removing his guns. But that’s a pretty specific and hard law to write. Truthfully, I would have thought something was at least in place already for mentally committed persons.
If there is not a law in place already and one is too difficult to write that won’t affect innocent citizens, then sometimes there is an unfortunate price to freedom.
A lot of evil slips through the cracks in a lot of ways in our country. But we can’t punish a good people every time a bad person does something wrong.
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Also, on a personal side.. I have a relative who was undergoing a mental disorder. He surrendered himself to a mental crisis center, stated his 'intent' about going on a rampage, and turned his guns in to the police. He was arrested immediately at the center, taken and held in jail, not a hospital or crisis center, and spend gobs of money on attorneys. He was in jails for months. It was a huge deal in our family, and made news stories here in Utah. He was deemed in-eligible for gun ownership. The guns he turned in were grandpa's classic rifle and shotgun, along with some cheap stuff. He wasn't allowed to get the guns out of the police station, and no one else was allowed to get the family heirloom guns either.
So my personal experience has me being shy about laws and such that can be used wrong or are not extremely well written. And history says, laws are not well written
So my personal experience has me being shy about laws and such that can be used wrong or are not extremely well written. And history says, laws are not well written
ID Bronco
Registered User
- Location
- Idaho Falls, ID
Nor am I
They deter people from getting mental health help.
I have a son who is a great trap shooter. He is on the High School team and he has very high functioning Autism. If you met him you'd think he was odd but pretty normal. He needed some extra help at school while he was young, so he had some evaluations. Does a special ed class in elementary mean he could never be competent to own a firearm? What if a teenager needed some help with depression, then many years later he can't own a gun as a normal adult. I do not support laws that although might be well meaning would restrict peoples rights. I do not trust any govt official or really anyone at all to write a law that would not have terrible unintended outcomes.
- Location
- Stinkwater
I'm not either. Too easy to be abused, by anti-gun activists or a government body with a disarmament agenda, or both. "Oh, it'll only be used when a person is truly mentally ill" you say, and I'm sure you mean it, but who defines mentally ill? What happens when the extreme religious right seizes power and defines homosexuality as a mental illness again? What happens when a fascist party is in control and defines anyone from the opposing party as insane? These are not extreme examples. These things have happened in history, and they will happen again. Things like red flag laws put in place by well meaning voters enabled those abuses, and a democratic voting body and a free press did not prevent them. And won't prevent them next time.
I haven't been following this thread so maybe this has been said already, but here's the deal with gun laws - every single one of them is an infringement on a Constitutional right that is intended in part as a check against an authoritarian/fascist government, a right that I'm increasingly worried we're going to need in my lifetime. Courts have ruled that no right is absolute and they are correct, of course there have to be limits, but anything more than the absolute minimum is too much. If gun laws that restricted access to weapons and made it easier to disarm a potential killer were the ONLY way to prevent a massive epidemic of killings then I might be on board. I'm not, because a) it's not happening. Violent crime is down across the board over the past few decades and still dropping. b) I don't think they would work, there's far too many undocumented firearms in circulation for any sort of meaningful gun control to work at reducing gun violence. c) even if there WERE a massive violence epidemic and we COULD realistically disarm everyone, guns aren't the problem. Firearm ownership levels have been pretty steady over the entire history of the US, so even IF violent firearm-related crime was rising, clearly it isn't the guns causing it. d) even if guns WERE the actual cause of a wave of violence that could be prevented by simply taking the guns, I don't care. I think there's bigger fish to fry.
This is the part of the conversation where nearly every gun control advocate I've had it with gets mad. They say "well what are you going to do then, nothing?" Exactly right. Nothing. The 2A is too important to be fiddled with like this. IF there is a problem, it's literally a mental health problem brought on by stress. The amount of firearms floating around hasn't changed, but you know what has? Wealth and power disparity. We live in a society that is increasingly and deliberately divided into the haves and have-nots, and the haves are very very good and getting better at making sure that the have-nots are too busy fighting each other for scraps to do anything about it. The people that snap and shoot up a church or a mall or their workplace are the extreme, but they're literally just doing what their sick head tells them they have to do to fight for scraps. You want to reduce gun violence? You can do it by taking away the stressors that are driving it, and in the process do a LOT of other good besides. But taking the guns, while it might might make some people feel better, won't actually accomplish anything except make it easier for a bad-actor government to disarm us. And while we're looking down the barrel at a narcissistic fascist who's building a private army of brownshirts and LITERALLY trying to overthrow the federal government, I'm not willing to make it easier for the federal government to disarm me. And I think anybody who IS willing to make it easier is showing a terrible lack of foresight.
All that from a long haired hippy 🤣😁
glockman
I hate Jeep trucks
- Location
- Pleasant Grove
There was a yellow flag law in place in Maine. The difference between Yellow and Red flag is
Yellow flag requires Police to make the assumption a person is unfit and invoke legal process to remove guns (unconstitutionally)
Red allows anyone to make the assumption that invokes legal action to remove the guns (unconstitutionally).
In this instance, the dude was reported in New York with a red flag law and in Maine with a yellow flag law. Both times he was reported BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT through his behavior while on military duty.
If both of those laws in both of those states can't resolve the issue when the reporting party is the government, military and police themselves, how much more evidence do you need that A) the government is inept and B) These laws will not stop gun violence.
There are too many drunk drivers. The solution is to ban sober drivers from driving. That is the logic behind gun control.
It's even more clear than that.
Since the 90's, crime is down double digits. Population is up and there are 30 million more AR-15's in the hands of private citizens than in the 90's. It's not just proof that guns don't cause the crime, it's irrefutable proof that there is absolutely zero correlation between gun ownership rates (even black rifles) and crime rates.
If you didn't know, and you wouldn't from the news, the US ranks 92nd out of 180 countries for murder per capita in spite of having an order of magnitude more firearms than the second most armed country. ZERO CORRELATION between guns ownership and murder.
Lastly to Kevin's point. Australia banned private firearms ownership in 1996. In 2020, they locked their citizens in their homes and arrested them for walking in parks. It took less than 30 years!!!
I fully expect to die on this hill in my lifetime. Tree of freedom, blood of tyrants and what not.
Houndoc
Registered User
- Location
- Grantsville
I don't find that a comforting statistic.
Spork
Tin Foil Hat Equipped
- Location
- Saratoga Springs, UT
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics
- Location
- Grantsville, Utah
You didn’t get your freedoms by way of comfort.
glockman
I hate Jeep trucks
- Location
- Pleasant Grove
I assume you would like to be closer to 190, wouldn't we all.
One thing to consider is the countries with the lowest homicide rates are a fraction of the size of the US. If you look at individual states that have similar population to those countries, we have several states, most with lots of firearms per capital who have comparable homicide rates to the lowest countries. Utah is actually pretty high at something like 5 homicides per 100k.
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glockman
I hate Jeep trucks
- Location
- Pleasant Grove
@Houndoc if you want to reduce the number of people who are murdered, the least effective use of time and money is to enact more gun control laws. This can easily be seen by the world stats I listed and also by the fact that Alaska and Alabama are the only states in the US on both the top 10 firearms per capita and homicide per capita. If gun control laws improved homicide rates the crossover between those lists would be at least 50 percent.
You can even pick up your SBA3 bicycle handle bar on amazon for cheap.
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- Location
- Stinkwater
ftfy