Capitol Hill Blue Forums Thread Like Summary - Political Footballs or Hot Potatoes

I like free-flowing threads, and there are a number of these topics on other threads. My approach for this thread is to name various political issues where the country or ourselves have come to loggerheads and solutions, even obvious ones, seem impossible to achieve. It may require a massive change in representation or rules, but I'd enjoy hearing people's thoughts on the subjects.

I'll start with a few front burner ones:
Abortion illegalization: (I'm in favor of the Roe v. Wade formulation, not Casey, but there is room for reasoned discussion);
Immigration reform;
Climate policy;
Gun regulations.

Re guns and who should have access to them, and what kind, I like to use an automotive analogy.

Nobody cares if you cruise down the street in your Toyota Camry or Ford F150.
No one is concerned if you own a 12000 HP NHRA type top fuel dragster.
No one gets upset if you race your top fuel dragster at the track every weekend.

The problems start when folks think they can drive their top fuel dragster on Main Street.
Of course you certainly can drive your Camry at the track too if you like.

But a 12000 HP top fuel dragster sure as Hell isn't a Camry.

I believe that the Republican side has one thing, and nothing else, on their minds - KEEPING THEIR JOBS! They believe they have to fight everything Democratic because that's how they get elected! They have defined the devil (Democrats) and are fighting that devil to save the nation! The interesting thing is that the Dems, on the other side, are doing, exactly, the same thing. This kinda takes up all the time, insofar as what they are actually there for to do.

I suspect the pity should be saved for the rest of us. The real shame is that there is no way to vote the whole bunch of them out of office and start over from scratch. I am NOT, however, suggesting that we have a Constitutional Convention which would be a genuine sh*t show! (and probably destroy the nation)

I expect nothing and am seldom disappointed.

School shootings are usually carried out by students or former students.

Racially motivated shootings are usually carried out by young men.

Random massacres by older men.

All symptoms of the same disease.

There were plenty of domestic terror mass murders before 1968, but they were usually carried out by the KKK against Black people, so nobody "counted" them. I think one thing we have to look at is who is doing the murdering now: Mostly young men who have been raised in a culture that tolerates young men spending countless hours doing simulations of mass killings in front of their computers and watching entertainment that glorifies that. Where that intersects with parents who tolerate or promote gun use and then ownership by their young male children, you get real-life mass shootings. These are essentially "suicide-by-cop" gone mass media amplification. These guys compete for "most kills" before dying by police gunfire.

To fix it, there are a bunch of things we could do. Like make sure they don't gain access to weapons of mass murder potential. Ban all "shooter games". Stop making movies and TV shows that show killers as heroes. Make sure all young people can access mental health help via required public school counselors and psychological assessments. Take kids away from insane, abusive, and negligent parents. Institute zero tolerance for school bullying. Promote other activities that they could enjoy besides the things that steer them into mass shootings. (Which horror of horrors might include safe sexual activities, since pubertal hormones surging are probably a significant contributor.)

I'm on the mental health side of the argument too. Guns were all over the place before the shootings started and everyone played with them like they were toys.

I'll point to suicide by firearm as an indicator of mental health issues as well as fatal drug overdoses.

I think the numbers show that there are too many crazies among us to allow AR15s with high capacity magazines to continue to be sold like bags of popcorn.

Schumer's proposed bipartisan agreement addresses school security, mental health, and gun control. Just going after guns won't solve the problem.

At the root of the homeless/mentally ill problem is actually the incessant drive from Republicans to cut taxes. The math is simple: If you cut taxes enough, then government can't perform things that government can handle best. So YOU get to deal with mentally ill people in your face and homeless people crapping on your back porch! That's what we voted for, so that's what we get.

I shot a dove once when I was a teen. It's funny, I've killed a lot of animals when I worked in medical research, fished, taken abalone, killed rattlesnakes, but always for a good reason. Higher purpose, humane euthanasia, safety, or to eat them. But that dove was the only thing I ever killed just for sport. That was more than 50 years ago, and that's the one I regret to this day.

Gun Violence is a multi-layered problem, no doubt. It requires a holistic and whole-of-society approach, which are particularly difficult to achieve in our fractious present. I liked your post, Greger, as succinct:


Mental health is a major factor, but not a complete explanation or solution. Indeed, political rhetoric on the subject is making matters worse. Plus, it tends to take attention away from the victims. What we, as a society, tend to do is throw everything together as if it one problem, when in fact it is a series of problems that coalesce. You've identified several of them.

Crimes, like fires, have three elements: means, motive, opportunity. Take away any of the three, it affects the outcome. Firearms, too often, are the means. That has increased over time. Not only are there more people than when we were growing up, there are far more guns. That circumstance is not insurmountable, but it is big and complex. The solution will have to be multi-layered and complex as well.

Well, you can't ban shooter games. You CAN try, but we know it doesn't work, and we know what happened when the "Parents Resource Music Center" got created by Tipper Gore. If you want the Frank Zappa of online gaming to tear do gooders a new one, that's how you get that rolling.
Zappa had some good points, by the way.

School bullying IS indeed one of the motherlodes, because it's been on the rise...you're absolutely right.
Show of hands, who here can guess what peer group has been getting fed super-sized helpings of the basemost deepest darkest hate messages lately, and from whom?
Show of hands again, what peer group has also been getting fed with supercharged messaging about the role of women in the world, and by whom? That last one is tricky because it's not just everyone's favorite domestic terror group masquerading as a political party...they have help from online resources devoted almost exclusively to refined curated anonymous hate.

As has already been more than adequately described by others much smarter than me, the average school age kid these days is bombarded by social media messages that tell them they're inadequate, and then they're picked on mercilessly by classmates who are addicted to the refined anonymous online hate groups.

Combine that with parents who are at the end of their resources and their rope, and you wind up with kids who entertain ideas no adult should even be forced to deal with on a daily basis. A ratings obsessed news media that will chase sensationalism over substance, and no one is really sure what's fact anymore, then add in the wannabe Lord of the Rings styled offerings from reality TV and you have the perfect cocktail to raise a generation of kids who dream of wasting everyone instead of climbing the ladder to opportunity, hard work and reward.
Limiting access to the most hardcore weapons of war would help a great deal, too.

Safe sexual activities are going to be a nonstarter until we first teach kids to reject the hate messaging about women.
The kids who have guidance from healthy messages about women (or any partners) are already enjoying the company of their sexual partners.
That group needs unfettered access to contraceptives, sex ed and family planning help.

Looking back, this thread may be attempting to bite off too much, but I'm still game. As I re-read my last post, I realized that all of the problems I listed - and many more besides - are as multi-faceted as the gun violence issue. Using that as a template, though, is helpful: each problem should be broken down into its constituent parts to be analyzed and addressed.

Gun/violence. There are, obviously, two components, although there are numerous potential sub-components - what kinds of guns, what kinds of violence - and how they are related. Further, for example, is a crime being accomplished through the use of a gun (e.g., armed robbery), or is the gun the crime itself (brandishing, purchasing without authority)?

Starting with the second half: America Is Having a Violence Wave, Not a Crime Wave (Atlantic): As violent crime rose in 2020, property crime continued a years-long decline. "A historic rise in homicides in 2020—and continued bloodshed in 2021—has incited fears that after years of plummeting crime rates, the U.S. could be headed back to the bad old days, when a crime wave gripped the country from the 1970s to the 1990s.

But the FBI’s “Uniform Crime Report” for 2020, released Monday, suggests something stranger: Perhaps America is in the midst of what is specifically a violence wave, not a broad crime wave. Even as violent crime rose, led by significant jumps in murders and aggravated assaults, property crime continued a years-long decline.

“There was no crime wave—there was a tsunami of lethal violence, and that’s it,” Philip Cook, a crime expert at Duke University, wrote to me in an email."

This suggests that the sudden and dramatic increase in 2020-21 may be a blip, not a trend. It could be related to the pandemic, and/or the toxic influence of Trumpism.

Similarly, with the first half, it appears that the fascination with AR-15s is influenced by current events, but that the sale of rifles, in general, is continuing to decline. Tallying America’s fascination with AR-15-style rifles (Phillip Bump, WaPo).

"About every nine seconds in 2020, a rifle was either manufactured in or imported to the United States. It was the equivalent of a new rifle for every 100 U.S. residents. And, remarkably, it was a slower year than normal.

The massacre of 21 people at an elementary school in Texas this week — 19 of them schoolchildren attending class — has again prompted discussion of the country’s fixation on firearms. That means talking about rifles, particularly the AR-15 variants that have so often been used in mass shooting events. The weapon used in Uvalde was an AR-15 variant; so was the one used in Buffalo less than two weeks before. More than 30 people were killed in those two incidents.

As it turns out, a national focus on AR-15-style weapons is perhaps unexpectedly a key driver of sales of the weapons." (Emphases mine)

The number of households with firearms continues to decline, but the number of overall weapons continues to increase. The share of such weapons which are AR-15s fluctuates wildly, largely based on current events.