Judging from Post editor Sally Buzbee’s introduction to the project, as well as from my own reporting, the paper talked to dozens of survivors and family members and weighed the enormous range of their opinions about this issue to craft the feature. It was so much better than I was expecting that it initially blinded me to the way it was bad. But bad in a kind of routine way: The media, as well as certain kinds of activists, believe we need to be presented with graphic, grisly evidence to grasp what are simply facts. This grisly evidence, they posit, will change hearts and minds.
It will not. Upwards of three-quarters of American voters support almost every commonsense gun law. And we know why political leaders haven’t heeded their call: the gun lobby, and its disgusting political servants. But the Post tried, anyway, with its multimedia “Terror on Repeat” project. I won’t impugn these journalists’ motives. I’ll assume they are good. I’ll just tell you what I saw, and why I would like to spare people seeing the same thing. Especially survivors.
So what you’re saying is that we can’t simply ban a single weapon type, we need to ban them all in order to effectively end mass shootings in the US.
Okay! I’m on board with that, if that’s what it takes.
I’m saying that it’s logistically impossible to solve via legislation (on guns) alone. We need to address the systemic problems that we face as a country, and until we do that the violence will continue. I’m all for gun control measures that will make that violence less destructive, but a flat ban will not fix it.
Which then brings us back to how every other country that has tried it has obviously failed. Because obviously, numbers don’t scale.
But please, continue to blow more smoke over the issue. Tell us again how we’ve done nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.
You’re right, I’ve not presented any potential solutions. All I’ve said is fund public health initiatives, address the systemic issues that are leading to violence, and enact sane limits on firearms sales.
But please, go ahead and continue misrepresenting my argument if it makes you feel better.
Except the party that wants to get rid of guns wants to do those things, and the one that doesn’t want to get rid of guns doesn’t want any of those things, and people still vote for the latter because they want guns.
I vote Democrat because there’s nobody viable who’s farther left. I’ll admit it’s frustrating as a gun owner because so many Democrats are tremendously ignorant on the issue, but I agree with them a hell of a lot more than Republicans.
I just want non insane or just plain ignorant gun laws and a decent social safety net, is that too much to ask?
Considering a decent social safety net will “hurt the economy” and “prevent job growth” it is in fact too much to ask
Won’t someone think of the poor multinational corporations that might lose half of a percent of their annual earnings. Hell, they might not make their yearly 5 percent growth targets!
No, the party that wants to get rid of guns says it wants to do those things, but doesn’t actually follow through. In states and cities with Democratic veto-proof super-majorities, most of the things that Dems say they want still doesn’t happen. Take, for instance, affordable housing. We can all agree that good housing that was cheap enough to afford for anyone working full-time–including at minimum wage–is a good thing, right? So we shouldn’t have any problem changing the zoning in an already residential area to allow high-density affordable housing, right? And yet, as soon as the cards are down, Dems turn into NIMBY. Sure, we want to house homeless people, but not near me. Reform criminal justice, but also arrest these black people trying to have a barbecue in a public park. Decriminalize drugs, but arrest the homeless junkies near my Whole Foods.
And I will point out that the states that have Deocratic super-majorities–California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, etc.–still don’t adequately fund all the shit that would actually solve the underlying problems that lead to violence. (I know for a fact that Illinois has moved money away from public schools to charter and magnet schools, while the public schools in Chicago are literally falling apart.)