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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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I'm an ex-Mormon and Satanist, I'm largely a socialist, I am very pro-gun and would support revocation of the NFA of 1934, and also pro LGBTQ+, feminist, pro-abortion, in favor of raising top marginal tax rates to 95%, instituting wealth taxes on total assets owned or controlled in excess of $100M (and total seizure if convicted of trying to conceal the ownership), support revoking corporate personhood through constitutional amendment, I'm in favor if widespread public transit, and favor taxing oil companies out of existence to pay for it, support Ukraine without reservation, blah blah blah.
I am unelectable for any political party in the US.
Depending on how your gun policies are, I might be able to swallow that in exchange for everything else
I'm generally in favor of the fewest possible restrictions; I'd rather change the cultural attitude and situations that lead to violence in the first place than restrict the tools that people use. Cramming tons of poor people with no hope for a better future into a very small area, for instance; that's a pretty solid predictor of bad outcomes.
First, I think that any costs associated with laws on gun ownership should be covered by income and wealth taxes. (I also think that state and national parks should be funded the same way; I oppose fee-based gov't services. It's it's a public good that the gov't should be performing, then it should be fully funded.)
I would absolutely favor mandatory training for people that wanted to own firearms, but I'd also make sure that training was on-demand, easily accessed, and paid for by income taxes and not fees. (So, like, Cook County, IL couldn't have only one class every month that meets 30 miles east of O'Hare at 3:30am on Tuesday morning, with a maximum of five spots open, all to make sure that very, very few people can legally own firearms.) I do generally think that people should know under what circumstances they can legally use lethal force, and I'd support free--as above--classes for anyone that wanted a carry permit. Carry permits should be free to people that have attended the classes. I support free universal background checks on all firearm transfers. I'd have to consult with how to make background checks on private transfers work, because I wouldn't want Joe Schmoe holding onto a 4473 that I filled out--too much personal information--but I also don't want the gov't having a database of all private transfers that would become a de facto registry.
I'm generally in favor of removing the rights from someone once they have been convicted of a violent offense, but not usually otherwise. (I think that 'violent offense' would need to be carefully defined so that states couldn't e.g. redefine speeding as a violent offense.) I think red flag laws might be a good idea--people planning acts of mass murder usually 'leak' information in the days or weeks prior--but the way they're currently implemented is not good at all, and it can take months to get your rights back.
If we're going to have guns, then I support mandatory training. If you can't pass a safety test, you shouldn't have a gun.
I think there's an ideological gap that's maybe insurmountable on this issue. I don't want other people around me to be lethally armed. Have you met people? What's the line? "People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.". I don't want the guy who's parking spot got taken from him to pull out his gun. I don't want someone to shoot the kid who rang their doorbell unexpectedly. A guy I used to work with would say "An armed society is a polite society" and I'm like, no. If you're pulling out guns to settle traffic disputes, you have a failed society. I don't want to live in a world where people think it's okay to pull out a lethal weapon over minor problems. I don't want to always have my speech chilled because at any moment the other guy can just shoot me dead, so I better make nice. That's the world I imagine where everyone's carrying a gun.
I also live in a city. Most of the time there's stuff you don't want to destroy behind anything you might be shooting at. Maybe it's different out in the sticks where you have wide opens spaces. I don't want to have to think about stray bullets because some macho idiot got mad that someone took his seat on the bus. I don't want to live in fear that the guy sitting next to me on the train is going to switch from fondling his gun to firing his gun.
And I know people can do violence without guns. Fists and knives and trucks and bombs exist. But those are less efficient, useful for other things, or difficult to get. A fist fight over a bus seat probably everyone walks away from. A gun fight, probably not. And yes, knives exist, but they don't seem to have the mystique that makes people stupid, and are less likely to kill a bunch of people real fast.
Probably the best compromise would be to have gun laws be at the state or city level. Nebraska is very different than new york city. I don't know how you'd handle people traveling though.
Watching from outside, imho the American gun control issues are hampering cooperation in more important areas.
I know you consider it a very emotional issue but compared to tax reform, lgbtq rights, racism, employee rights, homelessness etc, it's not worth getting stuck on.
Saying this as someone who lived in countries with both high (although not US level) and low gun ownership.
Yeah I'm not a single issue voter on guns. If the guy in this thread was a serious candidate they'd have a good shot (no pun intended) at my vote, depending on the alternatives and other details.
That I would oppose. Once you start creating standards for the exercise of rights, it becomes very, very easy to set the standards high enough that it's functionally impossible to pass. We've already seen that kind of nonsense with literacy tests for voting in the south after reconstruction. I support making people sit through training, but I would oppose requiring passing a test.
I understand where you're coming from, because I know a lot of dumb people that are armed, and I've met more than a few people that I wouldn't personally trust with a gun. I had a college roommate that shot himself in his hand because he was fucking around with his handgun without, y'know unloading it. On the other hand, I've also lived in a city, and I lived in really shitty parts of that city (specifically, I lived in Chicago; I lived in Little Village half a block south of Douglas Park, Humboldt Park before gentrification started, and Austin). I've had experiences with the CPD that made me very, very aware that they were not going to be there to help me if anything happened. I had someone spend ten minutes trying to kick my front door in, and cops just... Didn't show up. My now ex-wife called and said there there was a "domestic" ongoing (e.g., she was saying I was trying to kill her), and cops didn't even show up for over 45 minutes. Where I currently live, cops are at least ten minutes away, and that's if they are willing to drive 80mph on mountain roads. Fundamentally, cops can't protect you, and if you aren't white and don't "respect their authority", they probably won't try.
...But I think that most of those things can be addressed culturally and economically rather than through additional legislation restricting rights. Violence is, more often than not, an issue related to--but not directly caused by--poverty and opportunity.
You're probably the most reasonable pro gun person I've talked to in a while.
Do you think the right to own a gun is more real than the right to drive a car? Because we require a driver's test (and insurance and other stuff) for a car, and if you took cars away a lot of people would be fucked. Way more than if you took guns away. (Which is also a bunch of separate issues. We should be less car centered)
I don't really accept that the right to have a gun is a fundamental right. I know it's in the Constitution. That provides legal backing for it but not like moral or ethical backing, to me.
You're right that poverty other issues cause a lot of problems. And our policing system is utter garbage. That's why if you were a serious candidate, I'd consider voting for you even with the disagreements on this.
Yes. One is part of our constitution, and is recognized as fundamental to having freedom at all. The other is convenient and necessary for modern life in the US, but the need could be eliminated through appropriate public policy.
I argue that the moral and ethical right comes from the right to defend your own life (and the lives of others) and freedom, with violence if necessary. If you accept that you have that right, then accepting that people have the right to use the most effective tool for that is a reasonable conclusion. Some countries do not recognize that the individual has the right to defend themselves; those countries tend to also prevent citizens from owning pepper spray and tasers, since those can both be lethal.
You could make an argument that travel is a fundamental right, and if you accept that the most effective tool comes with the right then access to a car becomes a right.
I don't know if I accept that having a right also means you have the right to the most effective tools to execute it. You have the right to speech but airwaves are restricted. Many places have laws limiting noise made in the early morning.
Some of that probably comes from recognizing that you may have the right to talk about how great Widgets are, I have the right to sleep at night.
You might have the right to defend yourself, but I want the right to not live in mortal fear because that guy carries a fully automatic gun on the bus I need to take.
Damned if I didn't agree with most of your points. Common sense is a hell of a thing, yet so rare.
I would vote for you. Especially cause Satanist, but I support your entire platform.
Hello doppelganger. Except, I'm ex-JW, just a garden variety humanist, and have no clue what the nfa of 1934 is.
So in the US when we want to make something illegal, and that thing happens to be a constitutional right, we levy a tax against it. Then we only issue tax stamps to very select few people, or simply refuse to issue them at all. NFA 1934 is one of those weird tax scheme that makes you obtain a $200 tax stamp to have certain types of weapons. They are heavily controlled and non-transferable without going through a similar process.
Here's more info about it if you care to look into it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act
We also did this with Marijuana during that same time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937
You know, Im obviously one person so my input matters very little, but Id much rather vote for a candidate with your ideals than any of the present options. Hopefully one day there will be a candidate with these ideals and the recognition needed to win the election
Honestly, all of politics is compromise. It's very unlikely that there's ever going to be anyone that perfectly aligns with my personal opinions. So I have to pick and choose, and decide which things are absolutely critical for me, and which ones I will bend on. For me, church/state separation, reproductive choice, and LGBTQ rights are my tops for individual rights; gun rights matter to me, personally, but I'd be willing to bend on that if it meant removing the evangelical stranglehold over state and local gov't.
You have my vote already!
Consumerism is the third leading cause of why we're boiling ourselves out of a planet
Corporate culture of prioritizing quarterly growth and profits above all other factors
Excessive reliance on meat based meals
Would you happen to have some idea what to do about all the school shootings?
I'd start by admitting that school shootings are, despite being extremely sensationalized, also extremely rare. Then I'd look at the risk factors that the FBI outlined after looking at "school shooters". (In scare quotes, because the people that commit random acts of violence in schools---versus targeted violence--are so uncommon that it's hard to draw definite conclusions about risk factors. School shootings are also used by certain organizations to include things like parents shooting each other in the parking lot at a football game.) There's a myth that school shooters are always the victim of bullies, but IIRC it's slightly more common that they'll be bullies. Almost all of them 'leak' information in the days or weeks prior to murders; I do think that there needs to be a way to seriously investigate things like that, but I don't know how you could do that in a way that doesn't infringe on other, equally fundamental rights.
When you get right down to it, a lot of it is an issue of culture, where people feel like violence is a reasonable way to express feelings. That culture needs to be changed, and I believe that it can be changed without removing the tools used in the violent acts.
Violence in general is a very complicated problem, and it's tempting to look at simple solutions and believe that there's this one simple trick that the NRA hates that will turn everything into a utopia. But that's just not so. (Case in point: the UK and Australia both have combined rates of violent crime--battery, forcible rape, robbery, murder--comparable to the US, and, in the case of rape in Australia, likely rather higher. The US does have a sharply higher murder rate though; our violence is more lethal.)
The unfortunate truth is that you can't have rights without someone misusing those rights to hurt other people. If people can drive, sooner or later someone is going to drive a rental van into a crowd, just because they want to kill people and that's the way they can do it. If you allow freedom of religion, eventually an L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, or Joe Smith is going to turn up.
There have been multiple school shootings this year alone. Your statement would have been reasonable had you made it in the wake of the Columbine shooting, but to say it today is frankly absurd.
That is not relevant. Targeted violence in school isn't tolerable either.
Indeed, so we're going to have to solve this problem in whichever way minimizes harmful side effects. Unfortunately, that may involve inconveniencing gun owners, but it's better than depriving everyone of privacy and going full Minority Report.
Mass shootings in particular are usually committed by someone who has no intention of still being alive afterward, and they do indeed almost always end in the shooter's death. That's not merely a “way to express feelings”.
You're contradicting yourself. How can American culture be uniquely violent if those other countries have similar rates of violence?
Because we have guns.
Yes, and we preserve those rights despite that because the alternative is worse.
The alternative we're discussing right now is gun control. Is that worse than the status quo? If so, why?
This equivalence is questionable for two reasons:
That's not actually really relevant to the point. First, despite there being multiple school shootings this year, school shootings are a tiny fraction of the overall homicides in the US, which are, in turn, dwarfed by the number of suicides committed with firearms. Second, looking at your link you provided, you see a lot of things like, "A gun was fired during a fight near a basketball game at Appoquinimink High School. No injuries were reported", and "Bullets struck two windows of classrooms at PS 78 in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. One classroom was occupied by ten adults, but no bullets entered the classrooms" being counted as "school shootings:, which you then compare to Columbine. You are intentionally, and in bad faith, conflating entirely different things, and placing them all under the heading of, "firearms near schools".
It is relevant, because it has different causes, and is thus addressed differently.
Are you willing to engage in good faith, or have you already decided that the only solution is banning firearms?
Which are also often committed with guns…
I'm not talking about suicide.
I did nothing of the sort. There are multiple bona fide school shootings in that list, such as the Michigan State shooting and the Covenant shooting.
That's not a meaningful answer. Let's have some details.
Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you've argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn't seem like good faith to me.
No matter how you define "school shooting", they are rare. The total number of people killed in all shootings that occurred on school properties in 2022 was 40 people, over a total of 51 incidents (that number, BTW, includes suicides). This is in a country over 98,000 public schools (that does not include private schools), and 56M K-12 students.
Any way you want to look at it, that's rare. It's far more common than any other (western, 1st world) country, but it's still objectively a very, very rare occurrence; the odds of any single student dying in a school shooting--including suicides at school--in a single school year are under one in a million.
Once you start removing suicides, parents shooting each other in school parking lots over football games, and other similar incidents, and look only at mass-casualty events--where a person intentionally targeted students at a school in order to murder as many people as they could--your numbers go down even more.
I didn't say that at all. I said that there were things on that list that do not fit the commonly-accepted definitions of "school shooting". When you say "school shooting", people hear Uvalde, or Newport. They don't think, "a bullet went through a school wall at 3am on a Saturday morning when no one was in class", or, "a cop shot himself in the leg" despite those being included on the list of "school shootings".
Because I don't have the FBI report on mass casualty events at schools in front of me. But here's one, I'd suggest giving it a read. The things that motivate mass shooters can't be directly addressed by the kinds of things that are going to reduce ordinary violent crime; you need different approaches.
So no, you aren't engaging in good faith argument. You've already reached a conclusion.