I want to take a little bit of time to talk about the reality of whether gun safety regulations
work to reduce not just gun violence but violence more generally because the right has a lot
of really concise and neat sounding talking points. I've said before, the right has the
advantage on framing George Lakoff has written about this. Uh, abortion is murder, so it
should be illegal. That is a really simple talking point. And the left position on abortion
is not the opposite of that. It is nuance that is complex and on guns, the right has
guns don't kill people. People kill people. More guns would make a safer a gun. Free zones
are the problem because only good guys follow the rules and the bad guys will bring guns
into gun free zones, more guns, less crime. People will find a way to do the killing even
without a gun.
So banning guns are making them harder to access, doesn't do anything. Now there are
actually a whole host of ways to think about this and all of them point in one direction,
which is actually gun safety rules and restrictions do work. There was a really good post on our
subreddit by a user named not stylistic say on, and some of their ideas are in this segment.
Now, one argument that's common is it doesn't matter what you make illegal people will get
it if it's a good way to kill people. Has anybody heard of a mass killing via grenade?
Grenades are easy to detonate. They have a big blast radius. You don't have to be nearly
as accurate as you do with a firearm yet there are no mass killing incidents involving grenades.
Well, why not? It turns out there's really strict regulation of grenades. They're really
difficult to get.
Another example, m four and ar 15 rifles are very similar. Different barrel sizes. The
[inaudible] has a a some firing modes, three round burst and fully auto firing options,
but all else being equal, m fours are harder to get. They're more expensive. The mass shootings
are overwhelmingly Ar, fifteens and never m fours. Wow. What a shocker. What about just
in general, fully automatic weapons, fully automatic weapons would do a ton of killing
in a mass shooting, but they aren't used because you need to jump through all sorts of legal
hoops to get them. They're really expensive. So the laws do work. The guns that are more
difficult to get and more expensive aren't used in mass shootings. So then some people
will bring up, well the real problem is handguns and individual homicides, not mass shootings
and the types of firearms used within them. It's really a distraction.
You can kill one person in many, many different ways. And it is difficult to stop a determined
person from killing one other person. But the success of mass shootings or mass killing
events is much more dictated by the firepower and the destructive nature of that fire power
that's available. And if you zoom out and you look at studies across many countries,
the theme, the arc is homicide rate goes down when gun restrictions are made law. But it's
gotta be taken seriously. It can't be just one law. There's a study published by Oxford
University press. What do we know about the association between firearm legislation and
firearm related injuries? What we learn is that it usually takes a pretty major legislative
overhaul. It's not just background checks alone to see significant changes, restricting
access to guns and their purchase is associated with a reduction in firearm deaths.
This tells us that just passing background checks is likely to have only a very small
effect. What we need is a combination of 100% universal background checks. Yes, restrictions
on the most deadly weapons requiring permitting and licensing for guns. I'd like to see mandatory
insurance policies for gun owners as well and Elizabeth Warren is proposing a lot of
this stuff and I'll get to that a little bit later. When you look at countries like South
Africa and Australia, even when you look within states in the United States that have made
changes, the results are very clear, but in the end, none of this matters because on this
issue the facts don't matter. They are well funded. On the pro gun side. They're well-equipped
to dismiss any study and to tell you that you're a bad person for wanting this stuff
and you're against freedom. And in the end, in addition to these changes legislatively,
there has to be a cultural change.
I've been talking about this for years. At this point, we need to stop being a culture
where so many people want so many guns. We need to stop being a culture where so many
people see guns as a tool to solve problems, be the societal, political, cultural, personal.
We need to stop being a culture that raises so many radicals and extremists, but we also
need to do all of these other things which any other civilized country would have done
if they were in our position, which countries like New Zealand so quickly did once they
suffered a mass killing event like this. So the policies work, but they don't work individually.
They need to be a package of policies. But the culture is a big part of this and so many
other things relate to this. None of which, none of which the pro gun fetishist American
right wing connected to the very well funded a gun lobby is willing to even consider. Let
me know what you think. I'm on Twitter at d pacman. I hope you'll follow me there. I
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