There's a lot of cyclical debates in the US that are globally pervasive. People in the jungles of a pacific island who have never seen an outsider's face, and live as if it were 10,000 years ago still have opinions on US politics relating to abortion, freedom, and guns.
Now I like to occasionally banter with people online about their wrong opinions regardless of which side they're taking on these issues. I've found my opinions quite fluid over a period of years, from unconditionally liberal to something more adult, a blend of liberal and conservativism. But with that muddy terrain comes a lot of uncertainty in my views, too.
I am simply not sure about abortion rights and issues. I couldn't say repealing Roe V Wade or whatever was objectively good or bad. I might lean one way or the other in principle, but within that is a whole mushroom cloud of nuance that is never really debated, and deliberately mis-reported.
The same applies to freedom, drugs, guns, the border, and economics.
My interest has never really been to solidify an opinion, but to organize the bullshit and throw it in the shredder. This requires people to challenge my opinion, for me to fight back, and update accordingly.
When it comes to the gun debate, there's a lot of bullshit, and you don't have to be an American who has experienced a life in America to know what bullshit smells like (hint: It smells a lot like the USA, a whiff that floats across the Pacific and Atlantic).
So I hear you demand to hear my current opinions. What do I think about Gun rights in the US?
People on the right are constantly whining that the government is trying to steal their guns. In some ways, that might be true, by reducing capacity, or gun types, even perhaps with direct attempts to straight up ban them all. But it isn't going to happen and I think deep down everyone on both sides knows that.
What politicians tend to do is politics 101 cookie cutter stuff: over-demand (lean far to the left/right), and compromise a middle-ground (act closer to the centre). If you say 'Ban guns!' and get outrage, dial it back and say 'ok fine just get rid of grenade launchers'. They'll creep one way, the next government will creep the other way, and nobody really quite reaches the ban hammer.
Trump did things (or will do things) a little different, as he pushed to the point of grating across actual legislation, providing a robust test of the constitution and all the layers below. But it's essentially the same thing. Aim for the stars and if you're lucky, you might land on the moon. Aim for the moon and you'll come crashing back to Earth.
Now, perhaps if reality was wildly different to what it is now, it's possible we'd see a world where the majority of US citizens vote to repeal the second amendment, and things start moving in that direction. But the idea of getting guns banned now, in the current universe, is pretty laughable.
The political division in the US is trending in the direction of civil war. Granted, that's pretty much certainly not going to happen beyond talk, but it's a trend direction. You hear whispers of it among the dissatisfied. In what world does anybody think this is the most likely time people will see a mass shooting and think 'ok forget all my beliefs and threats to my freedom, take my gun'.
Even putting politics aside...
I was watching a YouTube documentary last night about Kensington, a neighbourhood in Philadelphia. The streets are the absolute quintessential painting of the US drug problem. Without even focusing on individuals per se, the host walking through the streets is protected by fully armed locals, the streets behind him littered with hunched over fentanyl zombies, some of them dying at any given time in the day. Not a cop in sight, probably due to the risk of stepping on the needles that raise the average altitude of the streets by a few centimetres.
Do people think a federal ban on guns would make these decrepit slums of the US safer?
Hasn't there been a war on drugs for decades? Where is that war? I didn't see it in this cop-free documentary of 'people' openly overdosing on the sidewalks. A billion dollars per year spent on drugs in that neighbourhood alone, presumably the pawn shop industry is thriving there.
It might seem sensible to get rid of guns from the view atop the plethora of ivory towers scattered across California and New York, but across the majority of the States, that concept simply makes no sense.
The interesting thing is, both sides, left and right, agree that mental health is a huge issue in this debate. Yet little seems to be done about it.
Fun fact, over 50% of deaths by guns in the US is suicide. It's hard to say whether that number will be reduced and replaced with merely attempted suicides by means of becoming permanently paralysed jumping off things instead, but it's hardly solving the issue of suicide if all guns just Thanos-style clicked out of existence. So before you even start, it's already 50% inefficient.
The AI I use for these pictures is the literal worst
For your classical random mass shootings which make up a small minority but blasts the most impact, which one of these killers were mentally stable and just decided to do it one day?
For gang-related shootings - turf wars and the like - which of those guns are legally obtained, or obtained with hunting deer in mind?
We can't always simply blame the underlying causes, for sure, but Americans also need to acknowledge that putting all your effort into banning guns is as deceptive a distraction tactic as the abortion debate and the race & gender debates. A ban won't happen because everybody knows it's won't actually solve anything.
At best, it might reduce the angry dad who has lost everything to a backstabbing wife and wants to take it out on society by shooting her first, followed by the kids and himself. This man would have legally acquired a gun, and if they were banned, he would no longer have that opportunity.
He would simply stab them and axe up a school like they do in China, instead.
For the rest - 50% suicides, and 30% or whatever gang violence and random massacres - they are going to have a plentiful flow of illegal guns in the same way those in Kensington (hell, even the entire prison system) have a steady supply of fentanyl. The only difference is nobody is gonna be around to protect you because the police have been defunded and painted over with ACAB graffiti to the point that they all resigned.
The Gun problem in the US is exactly that - a problem. A huge one. It's actually beyond madness that it is as bad as it is.
But, like closing the barn doors after the horse has bolted, it's too late. And y'all need to accept it. Nobody disagrees, left or right, that the underlying causes are what needs to be dealt with, the sickness that the US is suffering. It's just, for some reason, not as newsworthy when there's a slow, steady stream of suicides and drug-related cardiac arrests passing by thousands of times per day.
Perhaps when the political divide has healed up again with some more common ground, fewer 104-year-old's leading the charge and the government actually take bipartisan measures to dissolve the drug, economic and mental health epidemics, the discussion can be re-opened, tentatively, softly, and gradually.
But while the majority of the country believe the other half is a literal enemy worse than that of the Soviets and Nazis because either they don't respect the screaming, self-diagnosed anxiety humans in blue hair dye, or they don't respect the gun-toting, bible-bashing hicks guzzling gas and melting icebergs for a laugh.
As they said years ago, love him or hate him, Trump was a symptom of something far more concerning. The fact he's the current favourite to return says a lot about how little anyone is ready to listen and learn from each other.
But hell, what do I know? I'm British.
Ok admittedly, this one's pretty great
