Guns

[Bonefish]

Mexico.

Fucking DC AND CHICAGO WHERE ITS ILLEGAL TO OWN HANDGUNS.

[Phoebe]

Are those are supposed to be examples of places where there are no guns?

[WillyGilligan]

I believe those are examples of places with strict gun laws. While it is possible that the laws are failing due to wording or enforcement, the fact that these areas with heavy gun control have huge problems with gun violence is a point against the concept. At best it's insufficient, and some argue that it's counter productive because the criminals have illegal guns and have a low likelihood of targeting a citizen who is armed and are thus emboldened in attacking citizens.

If gun control is insufficient to stop violence in these areas, then there are other problems which need to be dealt with. It is even possible that dealing with those issues would be sufficient without the gun control laws. If there were no guns, there would be no shooting; but it seems that we lack effective means to make that happen. Then there is the fact that other forms of violence still happen in the absence of guns, and citizens with guns can have at least a strong deterrent effect on those forms of violence.

[Phoebe]

Or maybe it's that the high rates of gun violence, which went along with a lot of people having guns in that area, prompted a handgun ban that didn't do much to stop the gun violence. What these definitely aren't examples of are places that lack guns. To extend the analogy I was remarking upon with bemusement earlier, this would be like people who don't eat very many calories at their regular meal times but have tons of snacks anyway.

And just to clarify, I wasn't making an argument that we should get rid of all the guns. I was remarking with amusement upon the fact that the same people advancing an argument about calories-in completely reject their own argument on guns-in.

[Phoebe]

[buckett]

It's also almost like they are urban areas in close proximity to states/localities with far less strict gun laws, because our country is maniacally obsessed with guns, and it's pretty simple to cross state lines with them.

[Phoebe]

But if it is incredibly easy to bring guns into those locations despite restrictive laws, how will they function as examples of failures of gun restriction?

[buckett]

Exactly

[WillyGilligan]

[WillyGilligan]

[Phoebe]

So this is one of those situations where I am honestly trying to be charitable, and I realize that I come across as some sort of angry combatant trolling you on the internet. Instead you should picture an old lady laying in bed nursing a cup of coffee, waiting for her kid to get ready so she can take her to school, barely speaking above whisper volume.

I think you're making an excellent point about the fact that whatever solutions we pursue here, we have to deal with the reality that many people will still have guns. I think that's far less of a challenge than most pro-gun people seem to think it is. Let me be clear for the thousandth time that I am a pro-gun, gun-owning kind of person, and don't support legislation that would make it illegal for me to own guns.

That said, the idea that the promise program or any program like it has failed someone who goes on to commit a mass killing is totally beyond the bounds of my understanding, and I would need someone to walk me through that causal chain step by step. In what possible, imaginable way has that program led to the situation where parents greeted their children's dead bodies at a school, which I noticed you never mentioned until you started talking about the promise program, as if all the other things we were talking about in this thread were more causally divorced from the horror of parents greeting dead bodies at that school. Jesus Christ, I say, meaning it.

A program that tries to make it more likely that young people who have committed nonviolent, minor offenses will be connected to resources they are probably lacking access to in their lives, such as counseling and mentoring and intensive academic support, is not the reason why one of them goes on to shoot up a bunch of kids. If a participant in that program goes on to shoot up a bunch of kids, that program no more failed him than did every other school he's been in and every other adult who made a significant connection to his life. There is absolutely no need to revisit a program that has an over 90% success rate because one of the people who received its services committed one of the most horrifying crimes in the nation in recent memory. Or let's put it this way: the program needs revisiting in the way our entire society needs revisiting, but even less so because the program is one of the few things actually helping the society become better in that respect. I promise I'm not trying to say these things to be rude; this is how far away I am from understanding how anybody could possibly point the finger of causal blame at this program for a mass shooting.

[WillyGilligan]

My instinct in these situations is to become verbose, but I will try for brevity.

Can you describe what "revisit" means to you?

Talking about the dead now is less about the Promise program and more to do with the 2 hours of daily commuting I do where I ruminate on topics like this and it being 1:30 when I posted that after the board lost my first draft. It also seems like you are holding the program as sacred and immune to all criticism, which i think is true of very few things.

I have some thoughts on "causal", "blame", and "responsibility" that I may need to go into, but that might be after I grill tonight.

[Phoebe]

I don't know what is meant by revisit, or review, or whatever looking-into this program's far-right critics have in mind. Most programs need review, so it's not that this program is different and beyond criticism. It's that we have no reason to think that this program, its interventions, its rules, its staff, whatever, contributed to setting this person on the path to mass murder. It's not impossible, but it's very unlikely. So there is no reason to point a finger at this program as opposed to anything else he encountered in life.

[bralbovsky]

Weird how a program fails a single child and it ought to be revisted or scrapped, while gun ownership is sacred and immune to criticism.

Chicago has poorly written laws. The penalties for gun possession are less than the penalty exacted by the gang for surrendering the gun, for example.

Nothing humanity espouses or creates should be absolutely sacred and immune to criticism, especially if the purpose of the criticism is to make life more sane and livable.

[WillyGilligan]

[WillyGilligan]

[Bonefish]

[Phoebe]

On this Promise program topic - I don't know if it is worth pursuing. Let's hypothetically grant that any of the premises that might motivate an argument against the program could be true, though I don't think they are. What is the evidence that this guy or any others like him would have been convicted of felonies that disqualified them from purchasing a gun in Florida, had the school system not intervened with additional counseling or whatnot? The Promise program does not exist to excuse felonies. If a kid commits a felony, the program does not excuse it and then send him for extra mentoring as an alternative. So what exactly would the program have prevented? Even if every kid who had ever been in a fight in school or vandalized property was referred to police and received a misdemeanor conviction for it, that would not disqualify them from purchasing an AR-15. So... where is the argument?

Meanwhile, if the police had actually followed up with an arrest after any of the dozens of calls they had, because this kid was attacking his mom, shooting someone's chicken, and whatever the heck else he did, he might have ended up with a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction, or a gun law violation of some other kind, that would have disqualified him from purchasing his AR-15.

I'm not even going to explore the other side of this, which is the elephant in the room of kids legally being able to purchase AR-15 with minimal restrictions or inquiries into their background. For some reason that completely causally relevant element is passed over, and the finger of blame lands on progressive school discipline policies. I just... I have no idea. Today is not the day for me to address that broader issue, after I had to spend my afternoon listening to racist yahoos whine about how libruls are so darned mean and hateful.

[Bonefish]

18 year olds are not "kids". The are adults, with all the legal rights and responsibilities that entails. When you have to sign up for selective services when you turn 18 in order to exercise your right to vote, you cannot tell me that it is ethical to therefore deny you the full rights of citizenship. We obviously trust them enough to put a helmet on their heads and send them to a foreign country to kill foreign people with machineguns and explosives, particularly artillery and bombs. We trust them enough to hold them accountable for their crimes. We trust them enough to allow them to enter into legal contracts. But guns? Nope. We can't trust'em with guns.

It's ludicrous because we don't have a rash of people being killed with AR-15s. Yes, we have these shootings, which don't amount to anything. You take away the AR15s, and then they use pistols, with largely the same result. In fact, most of the shootings are done with pistols. But it's the unfettered access to AR-15s? Why don't we see more death from AR15s? Why are handguns, which require an age of 21 and purchase permits from local law enforcement, the most common weapon used to murder people in this country?

Where does the laser beam focus on AR15s come from?

[Phoebe]

The focus on that weapon came above
When Promise program did not stop him from
Buying a certain weapon that was used
That was not what it was supposed to do