When the United States was young, a person had to be 21 years old to be considered an adult. In order to vote, the person generally would have worked for 8 years (a young man would start work at age 13 and become eligible to vote at 21). This changed in the 1970s, according to Wikipedia: “After the voting age was lowered in 1971 from 21 to 18, the age of majority was lowered to 18 in many states.”
At the same time, the no-fault divorce revolution turned the U.S. from a monogamous society into a polygamous one. From H.L. Mencken’s 1922 book:
… the objections to polygamy do not come from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer half or a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man to the whole devotion of a third-rate man.
Salvador Ramos may not have been able to calculate child support formula profits in all 50 states, but he was probably smart enough to know that a woman would be better off financially as a “single mom” who had sex with an already-married dental hygienist and harvested the child support than choosing to enter into a long-term partnership with a high-school dropout such as himself. Wikipedia says that Ramos’s mom was using drugs and having sex with at least one guy other than Ramos’s father. ABC reported that Ramos’s grandfather was a convicted criminal. Mr. Ramos was thus, at best, the “third-rate man” of Mencken’s example. See “‘Incel’ Texas school shooter Salvador Ramos’ chilling live streams reveal ‘disturbing threats to girls’” (The Sun) for how his interactions with females had gone.
Compared to the early days of the Republic, therefore, we have “adults” with 0-10% of the years in the workforce and a much higher percentage of the males recognize that they’re never going to be selected for mating.
Is it time to recognize that Americans should neither vote nor buy guns until they’ve shown some sort of evidence of adulthood, e.g., working for 8 years? It is tough to know for sure, but maybe after 8 years of W-2 labor Salvador Ramos would have become accustomed to his low status in society and incel-hood.
I’m reluctant to “fight the last war” by proposing a policy change that would have prevented a particular recent tragedy, but I don’t think Salvador Ramos is the last problem 18-year-old this nation will produce (criminality is heritable, for one thing, and the U.S. is packed with criminals).
(I don’t think it would be sufficient to use a simple age threshold, e.g., 21 or 25, because there are plenty of Americans who never take on what used to be considered adult responsibilities, e.g., by working.)
I’m particularly interested in hearing what the gun owners who read this blog have to say!
Related:
- Florida requirements to purchase a gun (must be 21; 24 if convicted of a crime while a juvenile)
- “Invoking Uvalde, Trudeau out to freeze handgun sales” (Politico) lays out Canada’s path to a society in which there is no private gun ownership (“assault rifles” banned two years ago; handguns banned this year; everything banned by 2024 if Canadians meekly submit this year?)
- “A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths” (The Atlantic, 2012): “The only guns that Japanese citizens can legally buy and use are shotguns and air rifles, and it’s not easy to do.”
I’m well along the way of thinking you’re right, but the full exegesis will have to wait until later tonight as I’m on my way out to door to attend to something important.
Haven’t kept up with the onslaught of mass shootings now happening every hour. It sounds more like Putin declared war on US & Ukraine deployed the foreign legion to the high schools. The current generation of parents is probably more on top of the news cycles.
The lion kingdom knew it was on a 3rd rate path & it was in for a hard life but never entertained violence. In hindsight, being single for 50 years was arguably easier than the alternative & intimacy can always be bought for less than the cost of a relationship.
The media wants us to believe relationships are essential to survive, most men are in relationships, & intimacy has to be free when it really isn’t that way. Most men aren’t in relationships & intimacy is paid for.
While the media and our president would love to show us how guns and violence don’t go together and use the victims of those mass shooting events as a rally against guns and violence, they always to look the other way when there is already daily shooting in cities like Chicago [1] and Baltimore [2].
So go ahead and set an age limit, require a minimum set of W-2 years, require annual retraining and certification, restrict what type of guns can be sold and require guns to be locked at all times except when must be used — non of this will make much of a difference in the number of overall lives saved from guns if you have a blind eye on what’s happing in inner cities.
But yes, it will be a feel-good legislation to pass so everyone will pad each other’s back for passing it.
[1] https://graphics.suntimes.com/homicides/
[2] https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2022
Better to stick your head in the sand and pretend there is no problem w/ guns in the U.S.A. You’re doing great!
I did not own a gun until I was 30 years old. Maybe those who are too immature to own a gun should not vote either.
It used to be that 18-year-olds were considered mature enough to get married. Maybe they were a century ago. Not any more.
Whatever age or other criteria (years working, property ownership, military service) is used to determine eligibility for gun ownership, the same criteria should be used applied to other markers of adulthood – eligibility to vote, sign contracts, buy alcohol, etc.
If one is going to be held responsible criminally at age 18, then they should also get the privileges.
I don’t think no fault divorce law or third rate men makes any difference. Some people are just crazy. So the kid in question could have got himself married and had kids and then been a menace to his family, particularly if they grew afraid of his “strange behavior”, “DV”, etc. and attempted to flee.
If he was just “third rate” but still sort of sane, he could have got himself some neck and arm tattoos, and then boarded a flight to Ukraine to “fight the Russians”, and then the ladies would like him better for being a “war hero” with “interesting” stories to tell.
Too late now, but still worth a try – how about eliminating immigration of un-undesirables into the US.
Hopefully they start by deporting you!
Implement “3-strikes” laws and capital punishment; eliminate early parole; lock-up violent offenders for lengthy periods.
We already tried that.
Remember that everthing in the media is necessarily an anecdote, so don’t get fooled. Statistics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#/media/File:20201023_UNODC_Intentional_homicides_by_country_-_highest_rates_and_most_populous_countries.png
And the trend is downward, at least from the crack years
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/
It’s up in the last couple years, but that’s almost certainly due to a combination of the media riling up their “base” and cops going on a work-to-rule labor action since Saint Brown and Saint Floyd’s ascensions.
Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) has an interesting idea. He says that congressmen should propose a law that will rise the legal age to own a gun. At the same time this law should age limit the access to social media. The damage that social media does to kids and teenagers may be not as visible as mass shootings, but none the less lethal.
Frances Haugen’s testimony on Facebook’s internal research on girl suicides caused by them was chilling.
I agree that voting age should depend on year of real world experience. So for someone who spent 5 years on getting PhD count should start at 27, with bonus months for summer jobs while in high school or college, with maybe counting 2 years for each year being medical school student/ post doc at liberal u8niversity department (are there any others?) for extra hardship and slave labor without any absence of possibility of career advancement. Even with all extras I do not see how typical Ph D can be allowed to vote before attaining age of at least 30.
And those who remain in academia never attain proper maturity to vote.
For those mentioning crime stats, I understand the issue is NOT stopping criminals killing criminals, or some other unfortunate poor person in poor neighbourhoods. The issue is stopping random acts of violence with a high body count.
About the age thing, people will say that if you are old enough to serve in the military you are old enough to own a gun.
The simplest answer is to get people to sit a test (for free, even), where people are asked actually hard questions about law, liability, self defence, and whatnot. Once you pass said test, you can buy guns. This should screen out the likes of mr ramos. How to screen out more studious nuts is anybody’s guess
Start here: Make crime with illegal handgun FEDERAL offense with mandatory FULL 2 year prison sentence. Re-appropriate defunded police budgets towards synchronized big city gang reduction and prevention programs with harsh penalty for all law transgressions. Get rid of the gun-show loophole. Raise age of semi and auto gun ownership to at least 25.
Anon: But a fair number of the shootings that upset people are committed with legal guns used illegally (i.e., to shoot people at random). I don’t see how clamping down on illegal guns would stop the events that are front page news. Obviously, there are tons more shootings and murders that happen every day in cities such as St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc., with handguns. But Americans don’t seem to care about those.
Boosting the age to purchase semi-automatics to 25 might help some, at least for Uvalde. If a kid has a personality problem that is a couple of standard deviations from normal, its probably best they aren’t able to legally purchase semi-automatic rifles with 30 round mags that can be quickly and efficiently swapped with more 30 round mags. Wasn’t long ago that the norm was bolt action rifles or lever action rifles that held less than half dozen rounds and were relatively slow to reload.
Paul, you have long memory, definitely pre – clip or magazine loaded firearms semi – and fully automatic firearms of 1920th and even pre- magazine – fed 1850-th Spencer lever action repeater rifle and pre – 10 round clip fed 1895 Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle that with few days of training can be learned to be operated very quickly.
Why do we even discussing gun control measures before reinstating juvenile responsibility that was nixed under Obama-Biden? Clearly, if Uvalde’s mass-murderer’s had his deserving juvenile record he would not be able to by a rifle. No doubt that failed Obama-Biden administration juvenile delinquents policies made Uvalde mass-murder possible.
I think that Florida’s law that requires juvenile offenders wait till age 25 to buy firearms if they behaved themselves 7 years as adults makes sense.
If you want to know what American Democrat Marxists ideal former USSR did to maintain highest murder rate of all large countries except for denying its citizens right to bear arms except licensed non-rifled shotguns? – It had partial criminal responsibility start at age 14, shipping young teens to very harsh penal colonies and sometimes moving them up to adult Siberian GULAG. If you guys anyway emulating Soviet-style repressive state machine, why not start with this common sense approach?
Bolt action and lever action was more the norm maybe just 20 years ago.
Now that you mention it, the occasional nut case in possession of a semi-auto is less terrifying than the Soviet / Siberian Gulags. I read most of the way through “Gulag Archipelago” back yonder.
How about only land-owning men can vote?
Sam: I think we can say that the original restriction to “men” can be read as a restriction to “those who work for wages.” Also, with 50+ gender IDs, I don’t see how it is rational to restrict to just 1 out of 50. Finally, as the U.S. population keeps getting expanded via low-skill immigration, land ownership will be out of reach even for those who work hard. I think we could say that anyone who works at least 1,000 hours in a year has worked that year and then after 8 of those, he/she/ze/they is an adult.
It is clear that MIT statists should come up with at least algorithmic weighted system (in my experience they had problems doing it for simple projections) to decide who of us will live or die defenseless, forget “all people created equal” at least on this great mental resource.
Why here, at this programming intellectual stronghold, we at all discussion staff like
const int voting_age = 21;
int const* firearm_age = &voting_age ;
?
Should not we read through thorough model definition that might reflect real world to at least some degree?
Here we are discussing how to subvert universal freedoms on dumb-dumb level.
This should be the entry point for each commenter; most comments here do not pass the muster
“Are you discussing how to subvert universal freedoms on dumb-dumb level?”
After Columbine in 1999 (this is just past the time when middle and upper middle class people began to have widespread Internet access, and they planned their attack for almost a year, you can read more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Harris_and_Dylan_Klebold )
something in the culture changed. Actually many things since then.
This is going to take a couple of posts, so I hope nobody is annoyed.
I was a member of a high school rifle team in a NY suburb of suburban NJ for three years and captain of the team in my senior year (1988). For three years we had more than 20 kids of both genders (varsity and jv) load competition bolt-action rifles onto a school bus with all the ammo and accoutrements at least twice a week while school was letting out – sometimes three or four times a week at the peak of the season. The guns were right out there for everyone to see (all in boxes, of course.) We didn’t get any strange looks or protests. The police in my town regularly drove past the high school while this was going on and never batted an eye. We had kids from all across the spectrum on the team: guys and gals who went on in life to become doctors, a VP for Bank of America, honor students, real-estate agents, nurses, car mechanics, printers and just about everything else imaginable.
IT WAS INCONCEIVABLE to us that someone – especially anyone on our team – would ever perpetrate a crime like the ones we see today after being kicked off by Harris and Klebold. Several of the people on our team came from families that owned lots of guns: handguns, shotguns, rifles and AR-15s also. My family didn’t own any at the time, and many of the other tryouts’ families didn’t either. Our coach was (apart from his teaching) a gunsmith and an international record holder in competition long-range shooting and still is.
We started the year with a comprehensive safety indoctrination period before anyone touched a gun. When I was elected Captain I also learned that the coach wanted me to meet with him privately every so often. My side job was to keep my eyes and ears open so that I could discuss with him any members of the team that might be “in crisis.” Things like: “Yeah, [name] just broke up with his girlfriend but we’re helping him out and he’s doing OK.” Safety was a shared responsibility. Anyone who couldn’t handle that didn’t make the team. Period.
Anyway, we rode in that bus over thousands of uneventful and mostly boring miles. Sometimes the coach doubled as the bus driver. If we had wanted to subdue him, we could have commandeered the bus and driven it down major highways in NJ with 20 or more competition rifles shooting out the windows. Nobody even in their wildest imaginations (so far as I know) ever broached that crazy scenario, and I only think of it now because the culture has changed around me so radically. If anyone had ever tried using one of those guns for destructive purposes, they would have been mobbed and waylaid by everyone else on the team.
Eleven years later Columbine happened and the culture had shifted. Since then it has shifted even farther.
More on that in my next post….
Addendum: Small addition to that post. We never “brandished” our rifles. The only time we ever wore our gear and/or carried our guns through the school was the one day per year we all marched down to the gym – with the bolts removed from the guns – to have our team photos taken. We were proud of that because we were: 1) Undefeated in every match we ever participated in among our peers 2) State Champions seven years in a row (IIRC) and 3) National champions in my junior year. So we were justifiably a little proud of ourselves on those days and wore all our gear. More later….
I’ll be as brief as possible:
1) Cultural changes since 1988: How should I list them all? We can begin with the Internet, which has made it attractive and easy for a person suffering from a specific kind of crazy to study the previous murderers he wishes to copy. But there are plenty of others, little things like, you know, women don’t have babies but men do. Children should be able to inject hormones to change their genders without their parents having a say in it. Mass immigration and identity politics that actively inhibits the “melting pot” and instead encourages everyone+dog to think of their “identities” first.
2) The mass shooters we’re talking about here are not the gangland shooters who blow their rivals away in an act of vengeance or while protecting their turf. Those guys intend to survive their murders. The people who are doing these things need to be understood first as SUICIDAL – because they intend to die during the commission of their crimes. They just want to copy the other fuckups and take as many innocent people as possible out with them.
What is that? A failure of socialization? People dropping the ball – either intentionally or not in the school system? We know we can’t blame the schools! Drugs and criminality driving them to commit horrible crimes while taking themselves out for some reason?
3) Maturity: I worked either officially or unofficially (off the books) starting at age 12. My father at one time ran a company with more than 100 employees and I spent more than one night sleeping on a computer room floor holding IBM mainframes that *we built ourselves*. Even when I was in middle school I understood what working really meant – and especially for an organization where lots of people depend on you. Some of the kids I see working today giggle when they intentionally fuck up. Like it’s no big deal, you know, OMG LOL WTF.
We now have, it seems to me, this extended period of pure adolescence that lasts into the mid and late -20s for a lot of people. Harvard has a grade scale where a 20th percentile result means you get a “B” so you can stay “in the womb” and be surrounded by all the comforting and cossetting that only our University system can provide at great expense.
3) The glorification of Thug Life and especially the music. Guns are playthings and revenge toys. This is true in video games, music, and pop culture, to an alarming degree for someone who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s.
4) Total Cop Failure: What happened in Uvalde is a very deep and fucked up situation. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time this has happened. Nikolas Cruz was well-known to the FBI. They had a detailed tip regarding what he was planning to do. Someone “forgot” to forward that information on to the Miami Field Office.
We have plenty of areas to look at, and now we’ve got so many examples of these mass murder/suicides that you’d think SOMEONE would want to spend some time as a Ph.D. and arrive at some sensible conclusions, but that’s not what’s happening….
More later…
Addendum: Does anyone know what Ramos’ juvenile arrest record contained? I don’t.
Finally,
We all know that Guns are Bad and the White Man is even Badder. And in truth, gun retailers and the companies that produce weapons – defensive handguns, sporting rifles and “tacticool” guns for Mall Ninjas are complicit in the popularization and easy glorification of weapons.
But the problem is larger than that: we have billionaires and multi-billionaires funding various pressure groups whose aim is nothing less than disarming everyone in America. This doesn’t just include “assault weapons” as they’re currently construed. It now also includes handguns. It’s impossible to look at their efforts and not conclude they want them all taken away.
We have something like 90 million (and more because of COVID and Black Lives Matter) people in this country who own guns, and the vast majority of them do so responsibly. I’ve been to events in my own small town where there are well over 400 people who are all armed with various types of weapons. What is it about the maturity of those 90 million people that’s different from the handful of crazy copycat people who commit these horrible crimes?
And why don’t we do a better job of identifying and stopping that vanishingly small minority of them? If you closely examine them, they do fall into a couple of clearly identifiable categories and patterns, but somehow we’re missing them.
I don’t profess to know the answers to this problem. Mass shootings of this kind make me sick for weeks afterward. But I know that they are happening because something has changed and/or broken in the culture, and we are doing an awful job of fixing it.
This is the best documentary on Adam Lanza that I’ve seen. I think everyone should watch it and think about it carefully. Lanza was developmentally disabled and that is why his parents moved to Newtown, CT. He was also not very well-equipped to live on his own in society – and his mother was trying to basically force him to do so.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/raising-adam-lanza/
I won’t end this series of comments with a rallying cry for guns, but I will say this: if you allow them to be banned because of the actions of a handful of deeply deranged people, you’re wrong, and you shouldn’t. Are there any reasonable people left in our culture who aren’t so deeply entrenched in the party line?
I saw the pbs frontline – yes I can recommend it as well.
I don’t doubt culture has accelerated things. However, these killings have been going on for years. Remember the Las Vegas shooter? What about “going postal”? – it was so frequent it became common usage. What about the Texas A&M 1966 mass shooter?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting
The Virgina Tech shooter killed a bunch of people with just handguns, didn’t even need an “assault rifle”.
I’m libertarian and when I was younger I was all pro-2nd amendment. But living in Europe for 15 years now, makes you realize it is kind of crazy that just anybody can buy a gun and kill a bunch of people for no reason. Of course, disarming the population has its dangers (and doesn’t stop crime and criminals from getting weapons – leaving civilians defenseless).
I’m now at the point where I think it is pointless to discuss changing laws. There are 400 million guns in circulation already in the USA. Even if you stopped selling guns tomorrow you can’t stop the killings.
Alex what you described is that your gun use was closely supervised and took over a year to finally acquire and use (if I understood correctly). Perhaps if peop;e had to spend a year in training before using a gun (talk about a cooling off period!) maybe that might help.
d-man, is it fair to label your position a libertarian and vie for government regulation (of firearms in this case, that used to be sold in Sears to pre-teens)?
You live in in your society of your choice – European welfare society, where welfare is dispensed to middle class, not just poor and where regulatory authorities if governments are still higher that those of US federal government.
Do want to make America another Europe? You may suffer from more competition, I could live USA for good old Europe from USA where federal government role matches European governments.
Or changed USA would have hard time finding those willing to serve in military and would not spend as much on war materiel and as a consequence could stop backing Europe. Europe would need to start looking for new alliances and change to meet standards of new allies and maybe share its territory with new allies – Putin, Chinese communists, etc…
With all its gun control, Europe suffers from shootings. Gun control in Germany is harsh and often makes little sense (for example medieval arms getting confiscated from a well-to-do collector), and just yesterday to people were murdered in supermarket shooting in Germany, no need to search for historic examples.
We need to protect public schools for sure. Most schools are protected but some are not yet. This should change. US government herds children into large schools which causes a lot of unproductive time, child bulling, child indoctrination and in some cases hiding criminal behavior. US federal government, state governments and local governments should protect schoolchildren in schools those children are made to attend.
d-man, population of United States alone is equal estimated population of entire Earth during Genghis-khan era. Potentiality for centralized abuse and repression and resulting misery could in disarmed and as a consequence shut-up population could easily surpass those caused by Genghis-khan rule and has potential of causing much more bloodshed. 2nd Amendment is one of the things that made America the success and now America is a victim of its own success.
I thing that federalism, which is also the only lawful way of government in America, is the better way to address local issues that revoking freedom in centralized manner in such a huge country.
@D-Man: The point that I’m trying to make is that they don’t do it for “no reason” – from our side of things, yeah, filtered through the media which provides information in tiny bits and pieces, never the complete story – to scare the shit out of people and make them angry at the NRA and gun owners – you never understand the story.
Well, the Virginia Tech shooter, Cho, was also a very fucked-up person for a long time prior to the day he decided (after planning it) to take a lot of people out with him:
“The Virginia Tech Review Panel’s August 2007 report (Massengill Report) devoted more than twenty pages to Cho’s troubled history.[3]: 21 [87]: 31–53 At three years of age, he was described as shy, frail, and wary of physical contact.[88] *****In eighth grade, Cho was diagnosed with severe depression as well as selective mutism, an anxiety disorder that inhibited him from speaking in certain situations and/or to specific people.[89][90]***** While early media reports carried reports by South Korean relatives that Cho had autism,[91][92] the Massengill Report stated that the relationship between selective mutism and autism was “unclear”.[87]: 34–35 Cho’s family sought therapy for him, and he received help periodically throughout middle school and high school.[87]: 34–39 Early reports indicated Cho was bullied for speech difficulties in middle school, but the Virginia Tech Review Panel was unable to confirm this, or other reports that he was ostracized and mercilessly bullied for class-, height-, and race-related reasons in high school, causing some anti-bullying advocates to feel that the Review Panel was engaging in an authority-absolving whitewash.[93][94] Supposedly, high school officials had worked with Cho’s parents and mental health counselors to support him throughout his sophomore and junior years. Cho eventually chose to discontinue therapy. When he applied and was admitted to Virginia Tech, school officials did not report his speech and anxiety-related problems or special education status because of federal privacy laws that prohibit such disclosure unless a student requests special accommodation.[90]”
He stopped his own therapy. Federal laws prevented VA Tech from disclosing the fact that he was a very fucked-up kid, who had severe problems since at least the eighth grade, and he discontinued his own therapy. Then he shot the place up.
Sorry, forgot the link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting
The story is similar (but a little different) with the Colorado theater shooter, James Holmes. He was accepted into a very competitive program at the University of Colorado. He was in waaaaay over his head and his brain came apart, so he decided to kill a bunch of people in a movie theater. He planned it out as well as his suicide pact with himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Holmes_(mass_murderer)
Gosh I wonder why we keep seeing all these fucked-up people who want to commit suicide and take out dozens of others – even when everybody knows how fucked up they are!?!?
For that the NRA is guilty, the 90 million gun owners in America are guilty, and everyone must surrender their weapons to stop the carnage, says Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden.
BTW for Captain Mike Bloomberg: how many people die from medical malpractice in the United States every year?
“Polygyny increases competition among men and the pool of unmarried males, which contributes to greater violence, risk taking, and substance abuse in society (if the top 10% of males take an average of three wives, 20% of men will be unable to marry). Complex plural families—composed of multiple wives and children related as half-siblings—are prone to jealousy and conflict. Even accounts sympathetic to polygamy identify jealousy as a big problem, and diminished genetic relatedness is a risk for sexual abuse. Polygamous families are characterised by much higher levels of violence and stress in the home, as well as worse health outcomes for women and children.”
One thing about the Las Vegas 2017 shooting, there was a victim of that shooting that escaped, but was later killed in the Thousand Oaks shooting in 2018. Living in a country where the chance of being caught in two mass murder events is slim, but not impossible.
The Las Vegas shooter was able to ride the freight elevators with his loads of guns and ammo. right up to his floor because he was a “medium roller” who was recognized and appreciated (meaning: he tipped them) by the “back of the house” staff. He was a little bit different, smarter, and able to delay his gratification a bit more than most mass shooters. But he was a fucked up person too, and the staff at the Mandalay Bay apparently never asked him: “Hey, what’s inside all these great big travel bags you’re taking up the freight elevator?”
@D-man: BTW, Paddock had considered other venues to carry out his final atrocity, including a hotel in Chicago, where he intended to shoot up Lollapalloza from a hotel window. He evidently didn’t know anyone in Chicago well enough to pay them to allow him to hoist all the guns up the freight elevator and instead settled on the Mandalay Bay because it was a much easier and more convenient place for him. He was something of a math whiz, at least when it came to gambling, and he also had an elaborate staging operating involving a rented condominium that he used to get his logistics in order. Paddock was probably over 140 IQ. Nobody to my knowledge has ever discerned a “motive” for his crime but I think that’s exactly what he wanted. Anyway, if you look into his history he was also a troubled person who wanted to take out his anger on innocent people. He was just quite a bit smarter than some of the others.
The whole gun “debate” is retarded.
The right to defend oneself is the basic right of a free man. Slaves are prohibited to defend themselves from their masters. If you argue that you don’t need that right, you have a slave mentally, and, frankly, I’m not sure why anybody should listen to opinions of slaves.
Having the right is meaningless without being afforded ability to exercise the right. Since most people are not superhuman martial artists, this means access to the weapons at least on parity with these used by criminals. This means guns. And if you consider propensity of governments to go full genocidal, it means that people must have unlimited right to own weapons to be able to defend themselves from rogue governments. Yes, even nukes.
So, the clowns bleating for “gun control” are, in fact, masochists who want to be abused by the people with guns. Or psychopaths, who want to be the only ones with guns. That’s your typical “liberal” crowd: a bunch of masochists ruled by psychopaths.
Excuse me, but seeing that crowd makes me rather unwilling to go unarmed. I grew up in a place where the ideological brethren of these “liberals” organized GULAG. I also didn’t forget what National Socialists, Khmer Rouge, Red Guards, and that liberal idol, the Butcher of La Cabana (and all other socialist regimes and dear leaders) did.
So, dear Democrats, the reason I’ll keep my “assault” rifle is that I fear the time may come when I will need it to go exterminating your vile offspring, when it will attempt (and it will, as “anti-fascist” riots demonstrated to anyone with eyes to see) to start another bloody hunt on “enemies of the people”. And the knowledge that I have this rifle, along with millions of other decent people and their rifles, is the only thing which keeps your leaders from turning USA into the USSA, concentration camps and stuff. (Not that good ole’ USA didn’t try that already… EO 9066 is an indelible stain, by that liberal hero and cannibal*, FDR.)
* This is about the only proper appellation for a kind of a man who liked a souvenir made out of bone of a killed enemy soldier. Not any different from these lampshades made out of human skin.
> The whole gun “debate” is retarded.
This contribution certainly qualifies.
@Alex, what was the US population when you were in school? what was the cost of an automatic rifle in today’s dollars? what was it’s general availability (i.e. the ability to get one off the shelves as a kid)?
As much as I might agree that social mores today facilitate extreme behaviours, the larger the sample size, the cheaper and the more available the means of the extreme behaviour, the more likely it is.
@Federico:
I’ll have to do some research to find the prices circa 1985, but there was a gun store within walking distance of my home in the NJ suburbs that used to have them hanging on the wall in a strip mall on a suburban street. I think they were Colts, which would have been more expensive.
I we need to do a couple of things: 1) the gun manufacturers have to stop this “be a mall ninja tacticool” BS they’re peddling. 2) we have to stop looking away from these outlying kids and semi-adults who are at the margins or have fallen off the edge and nobody gives a damn until they pull the trigger on a few dozen souls. 3) we have to reckon with the changes that have taken place in society – including the Internet – that have facilitated the copycat phenomenon.
These are not healthy, well-adjusted kids and adults who do these things. They’re extreme suicidal cases usually with a lot of comorbid mental health and/or developmental problems. We’re not flagging them and we’re not stopping them after we know about them!
Nobody wants to offend anyone!
What is an automatic rifle ? Machine guns have been effectively banned for sale since 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act
I moved to Europe because in the big scheme of things, I realized that as Americans we fund their defense, so I might as well enjoy the benefits of the USA’s vassal states (30+ days of paid vacation, good healthcare, no working on weekends, cheap childcare,
free higher education, etc), which btw, the benefits were setup/encouraged by the American occupiers to keep the Germans from getting enticed by the promises of Communism. If you do the math and compare all taxation in Californication and Maskataxachussetts to Germany/Austria you will find that it’s no different. Except here you get something for your taxes (because they are not funding a world empire). We are the suckers in this arrangement as Trump said.
Yes I traded freedom for security (Benjamin Franklin is rolling in his grave). But where’s the freedom in the USA now? You can’t speak your mind because you’re likely get canceled (the digital guillotine). You are tied to a job just for the health insurance benefits, where’s the freedom in that? The mish mash between capitalist and socialist policies in the USSA (it is already socialist btw as documented in this blog) is a rotten mess. We all know everything the government touches get’s corrupted, but it gets doubly corrupted in the USA because it meddles with the free market incentives (see Healthcare and Student loans for higher education! See housing, see wall street bailouts). In a real free market, health insurance would be like getting car insurance. Do you change your car insurance every time you change a job?
The choice was pretty simple – a functioning social market state (Germany) or a dysfunctional pseudo-capitalist state with selective socialism for the lazy and the rich?
The singular “freedom” these nutters care about is that they can own guns with zero oversight.
They’re huddled under their beds clutching a rifle because in their fevered minds BLM is coming to get them…
@baz: I’ll bet you have some hairs up your nose. Hal Atosis probably has some up his a**. Why don’t you knit them together?
Macho Grande: is that supposed to make some kind of sense?
Dman: My daughter has the same outlook in the UK (or did until the nutty Brexit). She and hubby kinda stumbled into it, no objective analysis like yours. They have prospered enough to retire someday in Berlin if they can wrangle a Portuguese passport in one of those investment-incentive deals.
D-man, nobody is tied up by benefits to their jobs in USA, one of the reasons is that medical benefits have huge deductibles anyway. It is worse, in many cases people tied up to work because of crony “woke” capitalist / government cartel makes moves in many cases financially unfeasible as you going to be played anyway and “woke” big tech alternative is not very appealing. But you can always try start-ups if you can get their owners attention and like to work around the clock.
baz, try moving to communist China, I heard it is a very safe place. Leave us some freedom.
I want to know how how the Uvalde shooter, a total screw-up in a family of total screw-ups managed to get together ~$4000 worth of guns and ammo without anyone noticing the missing money or the present firearms.
@SuperMike:
Yeah. Well, his father was a multiply-convicted criminal whose current job is digging telephone pole holes. The shooter is a guy who couldn’t graduate from high school and whose smartphone was in his grandmother’s name. She’s the first person he killed.
And for a high-school (almost) drop-out (they wouldn’t let him graduate and he was ANGRY about that) he also had a truck that is worth about $40,000 right now, plus the money to buy the rifles and the ammo. He couldn’t afford his phone bill, but somehow he could afford that truck and the guns and ammo in a rural Texas town……..I guess the money FALLS FROM THE SKY in Uvalde, right into the hands of high-school dropouts. As I’ve said before: “We should all move to Texas.”
I still want to see the contents of his juvenile arrest record. Does anyone have that, or has it been protected by federal law?