DL Open Thread Wednesday June 22 2022
Senator Ron Johnson should be in jail. He wanted to hand-deliver fake electors votes to Mike Pence. That’s something I didn’t know. Good job Jan 6th hearings.
Senate negotiators reached a bipartisan gun safety bill to take firearms away from dangerous people and provide billions of dollars in new mental health and ER/Trauma units in schools.
The bill does not ban assault-style rifles or high-capacity magazines or significantly expand background-check requirements for gun purchases. Oh well. All hail glorious bipartisanship. Here is Coons on twitter:
Progress. After years working to address the scourge of gun violence in America, we now have a bipartisan bill that I believe will save help lives. I hope my colleagues will join me in voting for and swiftly enacting this important step forward into law.
It still needs to pass. We’ll see. In the meantime let’s cheer this as the thin edge of the wedge and a first step to taking away all guns from everybody. If this bill does nothing and goes nowhere, at least that will annoy the fuck out of the right people.
Al Mascitti name drop in court this a.m.
Press corp and Steve Wood reminiscing about an Al column on this trial – like the olden days.
Next up: references to Ralph Moyed columns about crooks on the state payroll?
Norm Lockman? Celia Cohen? Is this trial getting the band back together?
I’m what you guys would call a gun guy (or a gun nut). I shoot competitively and cycle what you might consider a large amount of ammo and possess many “high capacity” magazines. I also own an infamous “AR, (that I paid way too much for and haven’t fired in over 6 years)” I’m not a contributor to any gun lobbying groups.
I have bought guns over the internet and from private dealers. Every single transaction has been background checked with the ATF and goes through a FFL to FFL dealer. I’m really not seeing these kind of transfers going on.” Straw purchases” are another story. I believe that is where the federal laws could have had the greatest purchase.
“and possess many “high capacity” magazines”
What are the high capacity magazines for, and why “many?”
Why shoot competitively? How desperate to win at something does a person have to be?
I can understand competitive shooting, or hunting, and an appreciation for the engineering of a gun. That all seems reasonable to me, as long as it doesn’t morph into a rightwing political perspective.
I don’t get the high-capacity magazines though. Is there some “continuous rate of fire” competition?
I understand hunting. I don’t understand the desire to turn things into competitions. Target shooting requires nothing more than good eyesight and a steady hand. Horseshoes takes more skill.
There’s lots of things I don’t understand the urge to turn into a competition — why do we judge and score gymnastics but not ballet? — and I can only attribute it to a quest for self-validation.
The need for Turning everything into a competition is its own discussion for sure. AFA shooting sports, only trap or clay pigeon shooting uses anything I would call “field ready” weapons. Biathlon, target, etc uses guns/bows so hyper optimized to the task that they’d be about useless outside a meet. Unless it is “Jimbo’s moonshine tasting and ‘76 Vega shoot up”, no one is breaking out their cos-play tac-gear, AR weapons, and high cap. Magazines for “competition”.
I agree that if people are going to shoot guns, I’d rather they shoot clay pigeons than real ones, unless they’re really that hungry.
Our turn-everything-into-a-competition obsession reached what I hope is its lowest point with the competitive eating circuit.
Even lower competition is “number of likes.”
Universal registration seems like common sense to me, and they’re against it. If they won’t allow that, why compromise? So I say push to ban the AR-type guns again, and not just their sale but their possession, and then relent in exchange for universal registration and raising the age to purchase military-type weapons.
But I’m sure our centrist overlords better understand the strategy of letting Republicans crow in victory while we waste money better spent elsewhere on trauma centers in schools, for chrissake.
After all these years in opposition, Democrats still don’t understand how to play their hand.
It is impossible to support the second amendment and not support gun control
Fine with me. I work with such folks and may even have one or two myself. Where we usually diverge is in the notion that having weapons present makes a home “safer”, carrying a weapon means someone won’t get the drop on you and plug you regardless, and that many (most?) mass-shooters we’re just like us, I.e. law abiding owners, right up until they blew their gasket and dropped the hammer. As long as we can agree that two of the three above are untrue, I have no problem with “gun nuts”. Better get to policing our own as the outliers are giving the “gun grabbers” every legitimate reason they need to enact laws to protect their own rights to life and liberty.
I think most gun owners agree with what you say. The extremists drive the policy, unfortunately, and they aren’t thinking logically about it in the first place.
My pitch to gun owners is simple: Though AR-type weapons cause a small fraction of gun injuries and deaths, they get the vast majority of the negative publicity when someone commits mass murder. They’re not worth the fight.
Unfortunately, as with the GOP in general, the moderates can’t or won’t reign in the extremists, who are being egged on by people who stand to profit.