US Senate Republicans block assault-style weapons ban as mass shootings rise
US Senate Republicans block assault-style weapons ban as mass shootings rise
GOP: Gentlemen Gentlemen this is a mental health issue which is we can't ban 2A rights.
Everyone: Ok then give us better mental health?
GOP: Nope that's commie talk. Just get Jesus. (Also shocked why people hate them)
I support the 2nd. I also support single payer healthcare, including dental coverage and expanded mental Healthcare services. Then again, I dont support Republicans.
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.
I'm really happy with the level headed reasoning in this post and the replies. Feels like I'm not alone in thinking "gun bans are stupid" and "can't we address systemically WHY people feel the need to flame out in a blaze of violence, to reduce violence?"
Also BTW there's a "Socialist Rifle Association", and I might not agree with them on 100% everything obviously, I just think it's cool and they seem alright.
I just wish Dems would stop trying to ban any guns, and not because I'm against gun control, but because it's a losing issue. It's never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down. Given that that's fairly undeniable, why lose the people who organize and vote on this issue alone?
This has been said about many issues in the past. Effecting change isn't easy but giving up doesn't help. Americans support gun control. Only our crappy political system stands in the way.
On both sides, Republicans block any gun control, and Democrats only propose useless legislation
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.
it's a losing issue. It's never passing through this Congress, and if it ever did, the Supreme Court would strike it down.
You know, that's exactly what people said about Roe v. Wade and about banning abortion.
Turns out that you can keep losing on an issue for 50 years, yet winning only once will drastically change the trajectory of the entire issue.
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.
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.”
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.
Seriously. Pivot to mental health funding or something. At least that has a chance of passing and even if it doesn't cut down on shootings it will still help people.
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.
Plus if they focused on mental health and preventive measures they could maybe bring over some fire arms enthusiasts, who otherwise vote republican or atleast get them to not vote.
Mind you the effectiveness may be scattershot at times since its alot easier to get the guy going postal than it is to get the an ideologically motivated shitbag.
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.
What do you propose? Just accept the massacres?
Advocate for shit that would actually change things.
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.
Because it wasn't the reauthorizing of the assault weapons ban, it was an entirely new version of... The same measures we had 2 decades ago...
The fuck are you talking about it would never pass Congress or the supreme Court, it's the same damn thing we already had you muppet.
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, until eventually the dam breaks and the 2A dies. 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.
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.
My feed:
All too often the sad but true story about the US of A.
Wow it's almost like if you immerse yourself in nonsense and hyperbole then it will permeate every space you visit. Who would have thought?
It's your feed and your preferences dude, false equivalency if I've ever seen one.
You wanna fix American politics and with that nearly all other problems with it?
Stop the "winner takes all" system you have right now.
You'll get a hundred political parties that have to compete with eachother. People will start voting more because now there are parties they can actually agree with and you get rid of this "always nearly 50/50" bullshit and one big party that blocks any proposal to actually improve the country
Want to stop the bank on assault rifles? Good luck stopping 20 parties
It's called First Past The Post system.
CPG Grey has a series of fun videos explaining why we have shity politicians. https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/
Banning specific guns is pure theater, even if it passes. There's zero real safety in it.
Speaking on behalf of the rest of us, we think it would be cool if we tried to see if it would go differently before we just accept the opinion of random people on the internet with zero proven credentials to weigh in on the subject.
If that’s okay with you.
Really? Prove it. You're statement is full of hot air. Pure posturing.
you ever notice that when a vote is 49-51 conservatives win whether they're the 49 or the 51? Or how if it looks like they're gonna lose the vote by a large enough margin to actually lose that they can just prevent a vote from happening at all? You ever wonder how the government dare call itself "representative" and then ignore something that 92% of us want?
The Constitution was designed to make change difficult because the founders feared a strong government. It's unfortunately a design feature. It's why it's harder to actually address a problem instead of preserving the status quo.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans moved to block a ban on assault-style weapons put forward by Democrats on Wednesday, as the United States recorded the highest number of mass shootings for the second year in a row.
The motion, put forward by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, would have reauthorized the Assault Weapons Ban, which first passed in 1994 and expired 10 years later.
The ban covers certain semi-automatic firearms and large capacity ammunition magazines, and ushered in a decrease of deaths from gun violence while it was in place.
"The American people are sick and tired of enduring one mass shooting after another," Schumer said on Wednesday in a speech bringing the motion to the floor.
"Americans have a Constitutional right to own a firearm," he said in a speech on the Senate floor, arguing that the bill was about "trying to label responsible gun owners as criminals."
The most recent high-profile killing happened in Lewiston, Maine, where 18 people were shot by a U.S. Army reservist who committed suicide shortly after the shooting spree.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 45%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Conservatives won’t stop standing in the way of progressive gun control until school shootings become a national attraction.
“Hey look kids! A school shooting! So glad we took this vacation to rural America!”
They won't do it until one of their kids is a victim and suddenly it affects them personally. And even then, only one vote will change.
That's their M.O. They don't care when their policies are actively hurting other people so long as they aren't affected.
For $150 a person, you can be taken through a school, wearing a bullet proof vest, during an active shooter drill!
The Republican party is a criminal and terrorist organization. At this point, this is literally political terrorism.
Why is it that my guns are the problem here? I'm a law abiding citizen and yet people think taking my guns away will stop mass shootings?
I fail to see any logic here. I'm not going to give up MY freedoms when others can't behave properly. You'll never catch me shooting at innocent people, so why is it that all these politicians want to restrict MY guns?
We need more responsible citizens carrying firearms, so if whacko decides to shoot at Innocent people they get readily clapped and the mass shooting is over.
Trained armed police, security, citizens, etc. the thug, thief, ought to fear quick and equal or greater force.
I would even say that I am pro-store owners dropping looters and mass thieves. A few of those instances, where people get dropped, and maybe the idea of such theft won't be so appealing anymore.
This isn't about your guns. It's about guns.
This isn't about you. It's about us.
It's such an absurd argument to equate guns with freedom - most free people live without them just fine.
Why is it that not allowing you to own certain types of guns is an infringement on your freedom, yet the ability to drink alcohol before 21, or buy a manpad, or inject heroin into your veins not an equal violation of your freedom?
Because it's never your guns until it is.
I'm sure the owner of every firearm that's been used in a mass killing would have brought that exact question if they had been asked.
All of those guns proceeded to become part of the problem, why should we ever just take your word that yours won't?
An unlimited amount, because nothing will make the US change. Kids being massacred in school, nothing. Concert-goers being plowed down from a hotel window, nothing. Bowlers killed while enjoying a game, nothing.
Apparently no price is too high and Americans will seemingly prioritize their weapons over everything else.
It won't change until people fill the streets. The supreme court has interpreted a right to be in a state militia as the right to carry a gun anywhere. That kind of power bows to nothing less.
Good, anti 2A laws should be struck down.
Repeal and replace 2a.
No
Sure bub they're laughing at what others have died to forge ie your freedom, even your freedom to be a dumbass on the Internet. Others around the world would kill for your freedoms, and have.
Go visit Hong Kong or virtually anywhere and ask if they laugh at one of the most critically and politically acclaimed documents in the entire free world.
Clown.
Good
It’s a small price to pay so we can have dorky looking fake machine guns when a tyrannical leader sends waves of drones and infantry.
Can we not make that the only plan to fight tyranny? I mean, that shit rarely pops up out of nowhere.
It's hilarious to me that you think your semi auto AR-15 is going to do shit against the US Army in the first place. Lmao
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, how else can I shoot artillery strikes out of the air when the government comes for me? /s
According to the article it's the same AWB from the Clinton years.
They can fuck right off. It's not what we need. We need to ban external magazines. This cosmetic shit is bullshit and just posturing to make gun owners suffer.
We need to withhold all federal funding from states that do not send information to the NICS system and we need universal background checks.
Banning external magazines works because every rifle can be retrofitted by welding a magazine in place and loading with stripper clips.
Edit - ITT people who think they have a right to carry guns everywhere but are too afraid to write a reply.
Edit 2 - And apparently most of the ones willing to reply fall into the camp of pretending to care as they've laser focused on one word. No I'm not going to change it. Being a nuisance is not the objective. Cathartic release is not the objective. Cutting gun violence is the fucking objective.
Christ winces bearing the weight of humanity's original sin on the cross when contemplating the thought of having to go to the range to shoot non moving targets at a faster rate.
Lol "suffer." Man, take your head out of your ass and go fuck yourself. People, CHILDREN, are fucking dying.
This cosmetic shit is bullshit and just posturing to make gun owners suffer.
"Suffer" in what way? Having to find a new hobby? Having to use a different boom toy instead of the cool boom toy they want to use? Those poor, poor gun owners!
Compared to the actual suffering of the dying kids and their parents, who do you think has it worse?
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.
We could just ban all guns, unless you're part of a well organized militia. No need to worry about cosmetics or any real particulars that way.
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.
external magazines - you have no clue what you're talking about.
universal background checks.
Again you have no idea what you're talking about. My heart aches for people like you full of opinions on a topic, yet completely lacking in basics of said topic.