At least the guns are okay
- Thread starter The Thriller
- Start date
Haven’t been here in a while. Admittedly, didn’t read this entire thread, but did read a good portion.
As a pro 2A person, here is my thoughts on it:
Gameface makes a lot of great points. I’m far from a “gun nut”. I don’t dig deep into the particulars of Glock vs Smith and Wesson vs Kimber vs any other manufacturer. I don’t spend hundreds or thousands adding accessories to my firearms. When I hear someone call for gun confiscation, I laugh. Never gonna happen. When I hear terms like “clip”, “anrmor piercing”, and “assault rifle” come out of the mouths of anti gun people I roll my eyes. If you want to talk, learn the language. Learn the particulars. It will go a long way to build bridges.
I hate the permit-less concealed carry laws. When Utah passed it not all that long ago, I was pissed. I wrote my state legislators urging them not to pass this. When it was passed, I checked to see how they voted. If they voted for it, I wrote them again explaining that I was highly disappointed in them and wouldn’t be voting for them again. But I also agree that these laws play a very small or no role in mass shootings.
I think there should be more/better stipulations on buying a gun. The fact that I can walk into a gun store and walk out 10 minutes later with a gun and boxes upon boxes of ammo for it is down right scary. Because I have a CCP, I don’t even have to wait for the background check. All they do is call the state BCA and verify it. I would LOVE to see a waiting period on purchasing firearms. A week? Yes! Two weeks? Sure! I would also be 100% on board with limiting the amount of ammo a person can buy at any particular time.
I would also LOVE to see any firearm sale not through a licensed dealer go away. I like Gameface’s idea of exempting inheritance transactions. I think even if I sale my firearm to my dad, it should go through a dealer. It should also follow any waiting period rules and laws.
I think laws should be in place that enforce proper storage of firearms. If someone can’t get to your guns, I think it would help. Too many guns are just left out, within reach. Safety cannot be taught enough. Maybe make it a requirement that someone has to show proof they have a way to safely store it before it can be purchased? I’d be on board with that. I personally own 5 firearms, each a different caliber. I have one handgun locked up in my truck. I have one handgun locked up in my nightstand. All of my rifles are locked up in my storage shed, not even on my property. They are all LOCKED UP. The rifles all have trigger locks on them AT ALL TIMES, in addition to them being locked in the storage shed.
I don’t have the statistics, and I’m not going to do the work to find them, but how many mass shootings have been done using firearms actually legally owned by the perpetrator(s) vs how many using firearms not legally owned by them?
I think the root of most mass shootings comes down to mental health. We, as a society, as a country, as a world, as humans, need to do a better job of recognizing and treating our menta health. IMO, guns are the scapegoat. If we could find ways to treat each other better, love each other more, bully less, accept more, hate less, we could make huge strides.
As a pro 2A person, here is my thoughts on it:
Gameface makes a lot of great points. I’m far from a “gun nut”. I don’t dig deep into the particulars of Glock vs Smith and Wesson vs Kimber vs any other manufacturer. I don’t spend hundreds or thousands adding accessories to my firearms. When I hear someone call for gun confiscation, I laugh. Never gonna happen. When I hear terms like “clip”, “anrmor piercing”, and “assault rifle” come out of the mouths of anti gun people I roll my eyes. If you want to talk, learn the language. Learn the particulars. It will go a long way to build bridges.
I hate the permit-less concealed carry laws. When Utah passed it not all that long ago, I was pissed. I wrote my state legislators urging them not to pass this. When it was passed, I checked to see how they voted. If they voted for it, I wrote them again explaining that I was highly disappointed in them and wouldn’t be voting for them again. But I also agree that these laws play a very small or no role in mass shootings.
I think there should be more/better stipulations on buying a gun. The fact that I can walk into a gun store and walk out 10 minutes later with a gun and boxes upon boxes of ammo for it is down right scary. Because I have a CCP, I don’t even have to wait for the background check. All they do is call the state BCA and verify it. I would LOVE to see a waiting period on purchasing firearms. A week? Yes! Two weeks? Sure! I would also be 100% on board with limiting the amount of ammo a person can buy at any particular time.
I would also LOVE to see any firearm sale not through a licensed dealer go away. I like Gameface’s idea of exempting inheritance transactions. I think even if I sale my firearm to my dad, it should go through a dealer. It should also follow any waiting period rules and laws.
I think laws should be in place that enforce proper storage of firearms. If someone can’t get to your guns, I think it would help. Too many guns are just left out, within reach. Safety cannot be taught enough. Maybe make it a requirement that someone has to show proof they have a way to safely store it before it can be purchased? I’d be on board with that. I personally own 5 firearms, each a different caliber. I have one handgun locked up in my truck. I have one handgun locked up in my nightstand. All of my rifles are locked up in my storage shed, not even on my property. They are all LOCKED UP. The rifles all have trigger locks on them AT ALL TIMES, in addition to them being locked in the storage shed.
I don’t have the statistics, and I’m not going to do the work to find them, but how many mass shootings have been done using firearms actually legally owned by the perpetrator(s) vs how many using firearms not legally owned by them?
I think the root of most mass shootings comes down to mental health. We, as a society, as a country, as a world, as humans, need to do a better job of recognizing and treating our menta health. IMO, guns are the scapegoat. If we could find ways to treat each other better, love each other more, bully less, accept more, hate less, we could make huge strides.
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
Are our mental health issues really that much greater than these countries?
Republicans often blame mental health problems for these mass shootings, so why did they vote this way?
View: https://twitter.com/ojeda4america/status/1576270665446920192?s=46&t=QT7YFlZ_IlHq81PpZAhKgw
At some pt, ya gotta do something, right? Either fund mental health or restrict guns. Right now the status quo is thoughts and prayers. Needless to say, praying isn’t helping.
Republicans often blame mental health problems for these mass shootings, so why did they vote this way?
View: https://twitter.com/ojeda4america/status/1576270665446920192?s=46&t=QT7YFlZ_IlHq81PpZAhKgw
At some pt, ya gotta do something, right? Either fund mental health or restrict guns. Right now the status quo is thoughts and prayers. Needless to say, praying isn’t helping.
I am all for funding mental health treatments. 100%. My wife has been suffering from mental health issues for the better part of a decade. The help just isn’t there. Getting an appointment to see a therapist or psychiatrist is an absolute joke. She went through a treatment where they literally electrically shocked her brain. Getting that approved by the insurance was ridiculous. She literally chooses not to take a medication because of the cost.
LogGrad98
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Another thought as I read through this again is that this is largely the social media impact. Everything, literally everything, gets at least a few minutes in literally everyone's feed at one point or another, or someone posts something about it on a forum like this, or you hear about it from a friend who saw it on social media. This is a huge issue, in my opinion. I mean it is good to be informed, I guess, but hearing about every single bad thing that happens skews our perception of the world in ways that are causing real harm to people aside from the **** like this.
Take the mania about letting a kid play outside. The statistics for child abduction, particularly from strangers, is flat for the past 60+ years. It hasn't changed in all that time, no different today than in the 70's or 80's. But when I was a kid we never thought twice about being outside to play, riding my bike 5 miles to visit my cousins, stay out till the street lights came on wandering all over the town, all this at 8, 9, 10 years of age. Now we are in a climate where if you let your 10 year old kid ride their bike 3 blocks to visit a friend someone calls CPS or the police to report you for neglect. Because, you know, there is a stranger waiting behind every bush to steal your child away!!!! I must report it, someone must protect that child, the parent probably wants to get the kid kidnapped on purpose!!! This social policing is hurting families. We had CPS called on us and I went through an uncomfortable discussion with police and CPS because the neighbor said "they let her ride her bike all over the place, god knows what else is going on in that house", after they saw our 11 year old daughter ride her bike 2 blocks to visit a friend without us watching her the entire way, so of course they assumed something else was going on in that house. **** that bitch. And there have been reports of children being removed from homes for other such neighborly policing then being returned when they realized it was just a kid playing outside while mom and dad were in the backyard or making dinner or some such. Or, the very worst, leaving a 13 year old home *GASP* ALONE!!!!, for a couple of hours. The horror!!!!!
Kidnapped children make headlines, but abduction is rare in U.S.
A 13-year-old Wisconsin girl who escaped her captor this week nearly three months after her parents were killed and she was kidnapped has drawn international headlines, but abductions of children by strangers remain rare, according to U.S. data.
www.reuters.com
The drive to report everything and police what everyone else does in the minutest detail, like the rise of the "Karens", and the social media push that everything bad is happening in our own backyards is destructive to the fabric of society, imo.
Yet another way social media has been a cancer on our society.
LogGrad98
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Huge issue, maybe the single biggest issue in society right now that is looming like an iceberg, where we are only recognizing and really understanding the very tip of the problem, and everyone glosses over because we are so ill-informed, everywhere around the entire world. Yes the mind is mysterious, but mental health issues is one underlying factor, and often a huge one, for so many societal issues, including crime, abduction, divorce, bankruptcy, suicide, absenteeism, lost productivity, parental neglect, bullying, you name it. We need to take this seriously as a society, yet we do not. It really makes people uncomfortable to discuss at all, so we just don't. Someone's significant other is acting weird, they are arguing a lot, they sleep a lot, they cannot hold down a job, they have a lot of negative talk about themselves, they are sad all the time, they have a really short fuse, they occasionally mention they think about ending it all, and yet what happens is more likely divorce than getting help because the other one has no idea, zero, nada, how to help, or often any frame of reference at all to even recognize or understand depression for what it is, let alone empathize at all, and often it is damaging enough they don't think about help at all, just getting away. It is way worse than anyone thinks or acknowledges or admits or understands, pick a form of denial there.
How do we break though this one is the problem. It is a very tough nut to crack, if we ever can or will. Somehow we need to break the stigma associated with it. Like we have been doing with weed use, and about time. How do we do the same thing for mental health issues?
But I will tell you that voting against funding things like this doesn't help at all, even if the funding bill isn't perfect and includes some **** they don't like, we have to ****ing start somewhere.
The Thriller
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It’s not guns.
It’s not mental health.
It’s the trans community. They’re the problem.
www.foxnews.com
It’s not mental health.
It’s the trans community. They’re the problem.
TUCKER CARLSON: The trans movement is targeting Christians
Fox News host Tucker Carlson voices his concerns following the Nashville school shooting on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
www.foxnews.com
There have been 376 school shootings since Columbine. 1 of them was by a trans person.It’s not guns.
It’s not mental health.
It’s the trans community. They’re the problem.
TUCKER CARLSON: The trans movement is targeting Christians
Fox News host Tucker Carlson voices his concerns following the Nashville school shooting on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
Yep, the problem is obviously trans people...
gandalfe
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I wonder if we could get stats on what percentage of the shooters were bullied in school? Because I bet this guy was.
I bet it is extremely high, like 80% or more. I wouldn't be surprised if it was almost all of them.
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
Doesn’t Bullying happen everywhere and at any time? Bullying happened 30 years ago but the weapons and ammo available now weren’t available then. Bullying happens in Canada, France, and Finland, right? Yet they aren’t seeing insane mass shootings. The difference between us at other times in our own history and with other countries is the ease of obtaining an overwhelmingly amount of weapons and ammo in this country.
Why don’t we attempt to do both? Divert more resources for mental health AND institute gun bans and buybacks? Try that for 15 years and let’s see the results. If we don’t see the desired results, we can always return to the status quo. Of course, gun manufacturers, the NRA, and the *** clowns on Fox News won’t like this. But whatever. It’s worth a shot, right?
Bullying happens in a lot of places and a lot of different times. Weapons and ammo were just as available in the U.S. 30 years ago, or 50 years ago.
I'm in favor of solutions. I'm not in favor of an "assault weapon ban" because that doesn't actually mean anything. What is being banned? Flash suppressors? Bullpup foregrips? Accessory rails?
Why don't people take a technical approach to the problem instead of using meaningless buzzwords and LOUDLY talking about **** they don't actually know anything about? That would be a welcome first step.
I'm here for solutions, not ********.
I can tell you that a major issue for me has been learning how to “behave” when my wife is struggling. She has a tendency to be very short and angry. It’s hard for me to not react negatively when my wife tells me to go **** myself when I ask if she has anything planned for dinner. I struggled with it for a long time. I’m still not great at it. The thing I have to remind myself is that my wife is sick. It’s not her real self saying that to me.
I wish my wife were more open with her struggles. She refuses to tell the kids about it. She only tells me when she’s having a really bad episode. I have gotten to the point where I can see the signs, but she is very good at hiding it. She puts on a great front. I think that’s leading to some issues with my kids not wanting to go to her with issues. And because they know my wife and I discuss everything related to our family, they aren’t all that open with me either. I think my oldest daughter (18) has figured it out. I think my oldest son (15) knows there’s something going on, but isn’t sure what it is, but he may have a pretty good idea. Luckily, my wife has found a therapist that seems to be helping and I think we’ve finally found a good combination of drugs as well. The stigma of depression and anxiety, while getting better, is still very very real.
The thing about is that if it doesn’t work, you know as well as I do that we won’t return to the status quo. I love the idea of buybacks. I think people will be more inclined to sell their firearms to the government than have them taken away.
Guns and ammo have always been easily obtainable. I don’t think it’s easier now than 30 years ago to buy a gun. Admittedly, I wasn’t buying guns 30 years ago, but I was in sporting goods stores then and saw them everywhere. Getting ammo is probably easier. You can literally buy it online and have it show up at your front door. I would be open to limiting that option.
Look at how some of you all make death and mass shootings a trolling opportunity. This happens on www.jazzfanz.com and it's disgusting. This is why there will never be an answer. Too busy trolling...
LogGrad98
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I feel for you, for sure. I know when my depression set in, it was a result of my cancer treatment and the trauma of that experience that triggered it, and one of the things I resent the most about it is my kids would never get to know the father I could have been. Instead they got this distant, quick to anger, moody, introverted guy for 10 years before I figured out what I was dealing with and how to minimize the impact on my family, even if imperfectly. And even after I started into therapy and medication it was nearly another decade before I felt I had at least a little handle on it all. It still affects me every single day, but as you said, I put on a really good front and very few people realize I am dealing with this thing on my back every day. I am glad to hear you have her on the road to improvement. There is no such thing as recovery or cure for this, it is about incremental improvement, and learning to live with it, and you are doing the best thing you can in supporting her and trying to recognize that she doesn't mean to act that way, but we still do even when we know we are hurting people, which is where things like thoughts of suicide come in. I thought legitimately for years that my family would be so better off without me, that I would be doing them a favor. Thank goodness I got past that point and now have learned to live with what I have and make the best of it. I got so lucky that my wife is fantastic, but for us it helps that she dealt with depression as well, so she gets it. Makes it easier but sometimes, when both of us are having a bad day, or week, it can get self-reinforcing and end up in a spiral that isn't good. But that doesn't happen very often, thank god. And mostly all that means is we waste an entire weekend bingeing netflix and eating junkfood and eating quart after quart of ice cream (that is mostly me).
But I totally get that it is so tough to understand what it is doing to someone if you have not experienced it yourself. I told a friend of mine that it makes me think of chemo. You can imagine that it is tough, but until you are uncontrollably vomiting on the floor in the kitchen after a particularly brutal chemo treatment, you cannot really know what it is like, and depression is a lot the same. Unless you have been there it is hard to empathize with someone dealing with that. I feel guilty a lot for what my depression has done to my wife and my family even though they know what I have been dealing with and they understand, and some of them are dealing with it as well, but it still hard to shake the guilt. And frankly, we are all still responsible for our own actions, we are not absolved just because we are dealing with this kind of thing. We still own how we treat other people, even if it is partially beyond our control. Getting help is the first step and will lead to good things.
I applaud you and your efforts and support, my friend. It is a tough path to walk for sure.
LogGrad98
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IAWTP
The tough thing with ideas like buybacks is that only the responsible gun owners will really take advantage of that. I suppose it will curtail the accidental shootings that are purely happenstance, but for the majority of gun violence it won't do much to move the needle. Maybe slightly reduce the guns that get stolen then used criminally. But really the effect overall will be minimal.
It is really tough to figure out what to do about guns, without just wholesale attacking it like the war on drugs, only, you know, figuring out how to make it actually effective.