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Lewiston, Maine shootings leave at least 16 dead
(www.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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When I searched to see if Maine had red flag laws, all the top results were people opposed to them.
There's a good chance the shooter was one of them, since it looks like he is a "responsible gun owner" that's even more "responsible" than most.
Of course, the pro-gun crowd will seethe if you call him that, but the reality is that he had their full support when he bought a semi-automatic weapon. He still had it when he started hearing voices. He still had it when he started prowling the streets in open carry. Fuck, they probably would have given him the benefit of the doubt when he raised it to fire on an innocent person, as long as he was staunch Republican.
But the moment he pulled the trigger, it becomes "Oh that guy? Yeah he was never one of us. Doesn't count".
Then they'll claim its a mental health problem because he had mental health issues and the gun he used to maximise the number of people he killed and wounded had nothing to do with it.
Then they'll insist that they'll totally entertain the idea of gun control after a mental healthcare system is built that can cure every single man, woman and child in America of serious mental health problems, even the ones that don't want care, so completely they can be trusted with guns for the rest of their lives because they'll never falter and also fuck you we're not paying for it.
He had mental healthcare.
He also had a legally purchased AR-15.
He legally did not. They ask you on the BG check if you have any mental health issues.
Tell me again how gun control laws would have stopped this?
A pretty simple how for that case would be to have a protected database where mental health professionals and institutions would report individuals with issues deemed worryng enough to bar from purchasing a gun. Then during the background check they would reference that db. If the person being checked is verified to be in that db fail the check. Maybe have some revaluation options or whatever but it's not hard to imagine how reasonable laws that are actually enforced could actually help. The half baked laws that are half assed enforced and then held up as an example of any laws at all being fundamentally impossible just isn't convincing.
This won't work. Do you want more unmedicated people with guns?
People with mental health issues wouldn't ever seek care if owning a firearm was linked to healthcare. Now we're stigmatizing mental health treatment.
We want people to get care and be managed so they can live a normal life.
If they wanted that, they'd do things like oppose red flag laws, insist background checks remained functionally optional, oppose effective waiting periods and oppose mandatory safe storage laws.
Is "some people care more about their guns than the safety and mental health of themselves and their family" supposed to be an argument for the existing gun laws?
Who exactly is "we" here?
The pro-gun community rushes to blame anyone but themselves, all the while seething with indignation that they get lumped in with people who murder their partners or kill as many children as they can, just because they bought the same guns, from the same stores, under the same systems, with the same requirements as the murderer.
But boy they're not shy doing unto others.
Half the world population will experience mental health problems in their lifetime. If the 80% of mass murderers using legally purchased guns is a low enough figure to sweep under the rug, the fraction of a fraction of mentally ill people carrying out mass murders isn't even a speck of dust.
This man received urgent mental healthcare, to the standard that modern healthcare can provide anywhere in the world. Then he killed 20 people and injured over a dozen more with his legal firearm.
If you're so certain that mental healthcare is the answer, you can give up your guns until you finish building your perfect healthcare utopia. Maybe you could start with the military, since apparently you have to be mentally ill to kill someone with a gun.
Until then, the current gun laws are horrifically and demonstrably inadequate at keeping guns out of the hands of violent people, despite 25 years of pro-gun cultists insisting that they and they alone have the solutions.
Yeah that's an issue that I would anticipate as well but at least now we are exploring options and identifying what may or may not work and what the trade offs are rather than pretending that it's an impossibility like Mario was doing.