this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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The gun control debate is the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since the election of Lincoln. It has singlehandedly ensured that the Democratic Party will never achieve practical dominance, funneling literally millions of single-issue voters into the GOP's arms. If American progressives were capable of seeing farther than the ends of their own noses, they would push to drop it from the Democratic platform. Two reasons for that:
We'll rid our society of guns the same day we go back to the way things were before AI. In other words, when we find out how to put things back inside Pandora's box: it's never going to happen. Besides, the brief window in time where it was possible ended the very instant it became possible to manufacture guns at home on a prosumer-grade CNC machine and a 3D printer. You can't un-fuck that goat.
People who have universal medical/vision/dental/mental health care, a social safety net, and a job that pays a fair wage generally don't care anywhere near as much about shooting people as desperate/poor/sick people do. It's idiotic to treat a sickness by ignoring the disease and treating the symptoms, it's like clearing your basement of black mold by putting a coat of paint over it. There's no way in hell I'll support disarming the working class, and certainly not when they're getting constantly fucked the way they are now.
Agreed. If we just set this issue aside and focused solely on everything that contributed to making someone want to shoot up a school we'd save far more lives more quickly. I do believe that we need gun control, but like you I don't think we'll get it so why waste our time trying for something that will never happen?
Part of it, I'm sure, is the natural human tendency to think emotionally and allow Perfection to become the enemy of Better when you get worked up. Some people go so far into this that they actively sabotage the exact thing they want, because they'd rather not have it at all if it can't be done their way.
But really, I think what it comes down to is that the idea of poor people (or worse, poor non-white people) getting ahead and having a good quality of life sickens them. More people than say so out loud have an emotional attachment to the existence of the wage-enslaved underclass of Little People, people who do things for you but don't matter, people you're better than. They might want gun violence to stop, but on no account do they want people from projects and trailer parks to look them straight in the eye and say "we're equals". Even poor people fall into this, any current or former poor person you ask can tell you all about the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.
Consider this: if people didn't have to worry about paying a red cent to check on their weird heartbeat or get that cough checked on; if they weren't afraid for their homes or families if they lost their job; if they weren't scared of not being able to pay for their bipolar meds or their insulin; then other people would have a shitload less domination and control over them. In short, the kind of person who ascends to a position of party policymaking would lose one of the only things their broken brains are capable of taking pleasure in. The only things they'd have left are abusing their children and murdering sex workers, and while those are popular pastimes for political leaders of all stripes, they're increasingly risky to get away with. It's going to be a long uphill battle to remove the artifical sources of despair in our country, and I believe they'll do quite a bit to try and keep those sources flowing. I also suspect that some of the purportedly benevolent advocates of gun control are really just motivated by fear: deep down, they think "if you had any sense, you would kill us for what we're doing to you". As much as I hate to spew the rhetoric of communists, capitalists (as in the ones with real capital, not normal people who believe in private property and entrepreneurship) should be viewed with perpetual suspicion in every circumstance, trusted only as far as they can be thrown, and the ones who call for gun control are just wolves calling for sheepdog control.
Do you really see a large number of gun-control-centered liberals talking about getting guns out of the "inner city" or away from "urban youth," though? Because what I've observed is most of the people who are concerned about gun control are trying to get guns out of the hands of largely young white men who shoot up schools, churches, grocery stores etc. I can't recall the last time I heard someone who identified as left of center complain about "violence in Chicago" — that beat is exclusively on the right.
It doesn't matter who they claim the impetus is for their proposals, because too many of the orgs and platforms they use (e.g. Giffords, Everytown) are run by people who very openly say they believe no one should own guns.
Biden is constantly talking about an assault weapons ban, but if you actually look at his platform, it has expanded that definition to essentially be all semiauto rifles, and is copied directly from Waters' and Fienstein's own bills they reintroduce every year.
Progressives don't realize that their anti-gun rhetoric is being shaped and championed by a bunch of rich neolib politicians (like "I bought my way into a presidential campaign" Bloomberg, who runs Everytown) who want only the state to have guns.