Current Affairs - The Bear and Badger

Facewon

Christchurch says what up..

Facewon

As does Brevik.

Yossarian

This is still pretty rare outside of the US, TBF.

I think what may have changed in America is Fox News. There’s now a 24 hour right-wing spin machine, defending white nationalism, pumping out conspiracy theories and demonising the left. This doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, even our tabloids, as awful as they are, don’t compare to having this type of propaganda on TV all day every day.

acemuzzy

I doubt we're immune though :-/

Yossarian

No, I’m not claiming we’re immune, just why the US seems to be further along with this.

Online communities certainly have the ability to cause people to start believing this sort of thing, I’m just saying that we don’t have a mainstream broadcast outlet that’s starting people down that path.

Diluted Dante

Also we don't fetishise guns, and access is rather restricted.

poprock

It’s the guns. Remove the guns, remove the guns, remove the guns.

Take a big fat wad of federal money. Buy back all the guns at way above retail in a one-time amnesty. Sell the millions of good, working, modern ones back to your own military at a knock-down price if you want to. Criminalise all gun ownership overnight, the day after the amnesty and police the ban aggressively. Genuine jail time for owning a gun after that day, pumping even more cash into the private prison management industry.

g.man

That would lead to civil war.

Yossarian

Yep, and Fox would likely be egging it on.

poprock

Yep, and it would still solve the problem within a generation.

They like a bit of ‘collateral damage’ in America anyway, don’t they?

Yossarian

It’ll solve a problem, and is probably worth doing, but I’m not sure it’ll affect the political turbulence that Dyno was talking about. If anything, it’ll likely exacerbate it, at least in the short term.

poprock

I don’t care about their general political turbulence, but I do want it to stop being so damn easy for mentalists to kill lots of people in five minutes. If you can go back to the days of American crazies needing to learn how to build bombs before they can make their ‘point’ then you’ll have a lot less deaths.

Yossarian

I don’t disagree, but the political turbulence itself may yet result in a lot of deaths and is worthy of consideration alongside gun control.

poprock

Consider it after gun control.

Yossarian

It may well be too late by then.

poprock

How about bullet control? Could they try that? Let everyone keep their guns a bit longer, but completely cut off the supply of ammo. Again, might take a generation or two to trickle down to nobody having any ammo left, but it’d be a big fucking help. And again, offer a shit-ton of money in a bullet amnesty – make selling the fucking stuff to your local government so attractive that the majority of people do it.

g.man

People would just make their own.

poprock

Not as many people.

hunk

The gun is a cultural US icon.
The gun is the ultimate symbol of the American right. It's the symbol of self assertiveness, the symbol of taking matters into your own hands, the symbol of survival and independence, the symbol of distrust in the adequate functioning of government and authority (leftover sentiments of days gone by aka the wild wild west).

It's also an obvious phallus symbol to toxic masculinity but there you go. Not to mention it's enshrined by law in the form of the 2nd amendment. Good luck getting that out of the system.

Tempy

Cloudflare gave finally taken 8chan offline.

It’ll all move somewhere else probably.

I_R

Most of the big ideas need the 2nd amendment repealed, which isn't going to happen and would probably be political suicide to try.

The best that can probably happen is Trump issuing an executive order that puts you on a register if you buy a semi-automatic rifle or makes you wait a month (these both might be unconstitutional), add some hoops to jump through so the crazy guy goes and does what he wants with as handgun instead of an assault rifle because he can't wait.

LivDiv

I don't think there is a way around it without working with the NRA.
The rhetoric is that most gun owners are responsible and that is probably true, so let's see it.

1.
Amnesty on all unregistered guns.
They can be handed over for destruction anonymously or alternatively checked for safety, given a new serial and re-registered.

No arguments about taking mah gunz or that responsible owners can't afford to replace guns they may have just bought mistakenly or lost paper work for etc.

This is indefinite but after a set period of time, say a year, punishments for being caught with unregistered guns are severe and assume the highest of criminal intent.

2.
Align rules across states for background checks.
Introduce driving test type licenses that must be obtained from a registered gun shop and/or range.

3.
For anything above a hand gun or bolt action hunting rifle have annual mental health and background checks.

Each grade of weapon should have a set number of hours per year/quarter put in at a registered and licensed gun range.
At first it seems counter intuitive to have people practice using weapons but it gets people like these incels into a public space. (might even do them some good)

Encourage range owners, staff and responsible gun owners in general to be aware of the people using their range and report concerns of unusual behaviour or activity. Gun owners take pride in their hobby so encourage them to support it having a good image.

4.
Remove guns and bullets from non-dedicated stores such as Walmart.
Any new fire arms purchase to be signed off by a gun club where the customer has put in the majority of their hours.

poprock

One of the scariest things I’ve ever seen was the first time I encountered an aisle of semiautomatic rifles in a general American superstore. I was buying groceries, turned a corner, and there’s the fucking never-ending rack of firearms from The Matrix.

Yossarian

Tempy wrote:

Cloudflare gave finally taken 8chan offline.

It’ll all move somewhere else probably.

They’ve stopped providing protection, they don’t have the ability to take them offline, that’s up to their hosting company. Still, it does at least leave 8chan open to being DDOSed to oblivion.

LivDiv

@Pop
Agreed.
Thing is after a while it normalizes them and people lose the respect for them that is required.

I_R

LivDiv wrote:

I don't think there is a way around it without working with the NRA. The rhetoric is that most gun owners are responsible and that is probably true, so let's see it. 1. Amnesty on all unregistered guns. They can be handed over for destruction anonymously or alternatively checked for safety, given a new serial and re-registered. No arguments about taking mah gunz or that responsible owners can't afford to replace guns they may have just bought mistakenly or lost paper work for etc. This is indefinite but after a set period of time, say a year, punishments for being caught with unregistered guns are severe and assume the highest of criminal intent. 2.

There's only a registry for machine guns and a specific federal law banning the states from creating their own registry. This stuff is so far gone that I don't think we can get our heads round it.

poprock

Fucking hell. Trump’s response to this is to make a speech suggesting that maybe the government could consider gun control but only on the condition of tougher immigration laws at the same time.

I’m starting to think he actually believes his own garbled rhetoric.

LivDiv

Mexicans can't get shot in American malls if they aren't in America.

hunk

poprock wrote:

Fucking hell. Trump’s response to this is to make a speech suggesting that maybe the government could consider gun control but only on the condition of tougher immigration laws at the same time. I’m starting to think he actually believes his own garbled rhetoric.

It's the Art of the Deal.
This is what You want, this is what We want.
Let's bargain!

poprock

Yes. Bargaining with human lives. Making America great again.

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