US Senate Republicans block assault-style weapons ban as mass shootings rise

If dems got off the 2A stuff they would get more voters ::cough cough:: Texas. I know people that are like yeah abortion is not a deal breaker for me but guns are. Mostly people who are too old to have kids anyway. I'm sure Mass shooting will go down once we have social nets to get people the help they need. Guns are like Cars. Fine when used by responsible adults baaaad otherwise. No one does these things because they have happy content lives.

Same, well said

I support legal safe gun ownership, usage, and training. I believe the second amendment doesn't apply anymore though. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." This is not true anymore. It was written in a time where standing professional armies weren't the norm by people who never expected the US to reach a state to have one.

Gun ownership should be protected by the 9th amendment to an extent though, as abortion and all of our other traditionally held rights are.

On both sides, Republicans block any gun control, and Democrats only propose useless legislation

Americans support gun control. Only our crappy political system stands in the way.

What do you think the other person meant when they said, "It’s never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down."?

This has been said about many issues in the past.

Which issues? Civil Rights? Gay marriage?

Those are issues in which the American people were opposed, and then societal views changed. As you pointed out, that isn't the case here. Americans already favor reform, but they aren't going to vote these people out based on the status quo.

Newtown was the wake up call, if nothing changes after a bunch of small children get massacred, you're not getting change. Not without wholesale changes. Proposing an AWB is political theater, nothing more.

That's the opposite situation. Pro-life voters and pro-gin voters are the 2 largest single-issue voting groups in the country.

Look at it this way. If you swapped Trump and Biden's positions on abortion but changed nothing else, how many pro-choice Democrats would have voted for Trump?

Basically zero, right. Meanwhile, millions of pro-life Republicans would have flipped because abortion is the singular issue upon which they base their vote.

Guns are in the same boat. Hundreds of thousands of voters vote strictly based on their love of guns. There's no political advantage in the general election for being anti-gun, and the Dems are sacrificing a whole lot of seats to fight this losing battle.

Yeah nevermind that the constitution says "shall not be infringed"' If abortion rights were in the constitution there would be no way of banning it, just as it is with firearms.

Imagine just for a second, that they drop the issue and gain control of all 3 branches and then actually do something about it rather than constantly struggling to win because of single policy voters.

Roe had good results, but it wasn't a good decision.

Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision.

Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach to difficult legal questions were not surprised, however, to hear her say just the opposite, that Roe was a faulty decision. For Ginsburg, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion was too far-reaching and too sweeping, and it gave anti-abortion rights activists a very tangible target to rally against in the four decades since.

Ginsburg and Professor Geoffrey Stone, a longtime scholar of reproductive rights and constitutional law, spoke for 90 minutes before a capacity crowd in the Law School auditorium on May 11 on “Roe v. Wade at 40.”

“My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.

“Roe isn’t really about the woman’s choice, is it?” Ginsburg said. “It’s about the doctor’s freedom to practice…it wasn’t woman-centered, it was physician-centered.”

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-offers-critique-roe-v-wade-during-law-school-visit

Yes, there's no way Roe would have been overturned by that Congress or that Supreme Court (50 years ago). Just like this Congress and Court will not allow significant gun control. Republicans gerrymandered districts and refused to seat a justice, thereby changing those things. Thank you for proving my point.

It's also a lightning rod issue that turns more voters away than it attracts.

Sure there are staunch anti-gun people under the Democrats' tent but they're not the kind of people who will vote Republican if the party suddenly scaled back or ended its decades long futile efforts at gun bans.

On the other hand there are a ton of white working class voters on the suburban-rural fringes of swing states who would absolutely at least consider a Democrat if the party wasn't so easily cast as "gun grabbers and job killers who only care about minorities".

You get a pro-union, pro-legal-gun Democrat on a ticket who speaks on issues affecting rural whites as much as they do urban non-white voters (who are equally important), and you'd have a winner in many of these areas where they've been quite red, but not so rabidly Trumpy as other areas.

Even moreso if that's a change that happened at the party/platform level.

I feel like from a campaign strategy standpoint, guns are just a lose-lose for the Democratic party. Playing to a base that would be loyal anyway for other reasons, even if the party dropped that position completely (which would not only eliminate a deal breaker issue for rural Democrats but also eliminate a cornerstone of the GOP platform in "protecting the second amendment"). Unless they did a complete about face and suddenly became as cozy with the NRA as Republicans, anti-gun voters might be upset, but they're still voting blue.

After all there's still abortion, electoral reform, racial justice, the environment, education, foreign policy, infrastructure, legal weed, LGBT rights, healthcare, and a host of other issues where the Dems are still their people.

I'd be fine with changes to all manner of healthcare and insurance coverage, including single payer.

Republicans block efforts for increased healthcare of any kind let alone mental health. They also block preventative measures like red flag laws.

It’s not a mental health issue. There are people with mental health issues all over the civilized world and those countries don’t deal with mass shootings weekly, even if the citizens are allowed access to guns. It’s the relatively unrestricted access to firearms with minimal to no oversight of gun owners, and no rules to secure said firearms.

Edit: well, here we go again.

https://abc7.com/unlv-active-shooter/14148302/

Advocate for shit that would actually change things.

Enforce our ban on domestic abusers owning firearms. We already passed it, but no one enforces it. It would eliminate a huge chunk of gun violence in the nation, but its not as appealing to the mob as the "assault style" ban.

What do you propose?

I guess I'd ask you the same question. I don't have a proposal because I don't think any of it will make it through Congress. And if it somehow made it through Congress, the Supreme Court would strike it as unconstitutional.

Short of voting out these members of Congress and balancing the court, there's no hope of reform. So drop the issue to appeal to more voters. Win more elections, balance the court, then you're in a position to effect change.

Also, AWBs are pretty useless. They tend to grandfather in existing weapons and they exclude handguns, which are the weapon used most often to commit murder. Magazine limits, which were in the 1994 law, were the only piece to show a genuine reduction in violent crimes.

Are you under the impression the politics of 1994 are remotely similar to 2023? Have you read the Supreme Court cases of Heller (2008) or Bruen (2022)?

Name call all you want, but you're the one tragically out of touch. This Congress, especially the Republican majority in the house would NEVER pass this bill. SCOTUS has completely changed gun rights in this country since 2008. First finding an individual right to gun ownership, then drastically reducing those gun limitations that are allowable under the 2nd amendment.

I suggest you do some reading before spouting nonsense. Your comment somehow states the bill is simultaneously "entirely new" and also the "same damn thing". Muppet.

Disagree. The solution is to push for as much gun control as possible,

That's essentially nothing.

...until eventually the dam breaks and the 2A dies.

And I think elephants should fart rainbows, but both of our proposals lack any consideration of how we make that happen.

In the long run, gun ownership in the US will resemble how it works in other Western countries, which is to say not much at all.

Eventually? There are roughly 400 million guns in this country...how many generations is "eventually"?

I'm not even disagreeing with you, but hoping doesn't make it happen. How do we get there? What are the steps? Does your projected path take into account the systemic impediments?

And now you have lost anyone who like me would be open to voting Democrat more often instead of third party, because I don't want to flat out lose my 2A rights. I don't want to vote Republican because I don't want to lose other rights in the slide towards religious fascism either. If every side is running on a platform of pick which rights you least want to lose, at least I'll have my guns for protection when the fascists do successfully pull a coup and society collapses.

Like Mexico where the schools have been hardened since the 80s and there are millions of guns and criminals?

Try again. The "Western nation" schtick is incorrect and getting stale.

Ask James Brady.

Wasn't there some Congress Lady that got shot in the face and was still like "I support guns..." 🤦‍♂️

No

So the US has never had any issue with guerilla warfare when the adversaries had mostly small arms? Cool it with the American exceptionalism.

It's not even that, it's shocking to me because most of the people who love guns are on the side of the fascists anyway. Fight the government? They're going to vote for the authoritarians.

No one thinks like that or talks like that. No one imagines using arms like that. This sort of thinking is a "gotcha you stupid people" sort of thing.

Anyway, trying to correct this nonsense is exhausting. Posted about it last night if you want a look.

Yeah, there's thousands of Palestinians that would agree with you. Oh wait, they can't because they're dead.

And it would be nice to do something about that instead of making laws that do nothing but piss off a demographic. I gave you three great alternatives and you still tried to pretend like I said let's kill those kids.

The old AWB literally bans certain guns by name and certain cosmetic parts. That's it. They can rename the childkiller 2000 into childkiller 3000 while reworking the buttstock to fit around the thumb hole clause. It literally drives more gun sales, not less.

And it grandfathers in all the guns already out there. It's a fucking nuisance law, not a solution. It's not even a step in the right direction because I can buy an AWB legal hunting rifle and run it with old 30 round magazines for the same effect as the scary black gun with a fore grip and flash hider.

How do you read shit like "make external magazines illegal and weld all the guns so they can't take them" and think this guy likes the gun lobby?

Think for half a second. Read beyond the fucking title.

No one- and I mean no one- has it harder than someone who has 12 rifles that look like they were designed for military use but can't buy a 13th because of some stupid law that is designed to cause them literal physical pain.

Those dead kids wish they had it so bad.

No expertise at all. Just a decade in the military doing grunt jobs. Nothing happens until we materially affect the speed with which semi auto weapons can fire, and their spread in the country. Revolvers and bolt action weapons are perfectly fine, even as militia weapons.

No, you couldn't. Familiarize yourself with 10 U.S. Code § 246 which actually defines exactly what the militia (both organized militia and unorganized militia) are:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246

I don't have demographic data to reference, but I imagine the United States has a LOT of male citizens between the ages of 17 and 45.

State militia. Those were the well regulated militias being referenced. Johnny's anti government friends club does not count.