urbanSTL

Trololzilla wrote: ↑

Apr 02, 2022

As a final aside, strict gun control is inherently racist and classist. 

While I think this has been (very intentionally) in many past efforts at gun control, I don't believe it is necessarily true of a lot of measures we could take. There are a lot of counties out there with different gun control strategies that we can learn from, I believe we could enact equitable gun control measures if the broad political will to do so ever materializes.

^^ nah. maybe in practice if the laws are inequitably enforced, but there's nothing *inherently* inequitable about gun control or user restrictions on any other dangerous devices.

Trololzilla wrote: ↑

Apr 02, 2022

As a final aside, strict gun control is inherently racist and classist. 

It doesn't have to be, but it probably would be. The reason we don't have gun control now was that loosening restrictions reinforced racist and classist structures. If reintroducing gun control can further racist agendas then we'll get gun control, and not a second before. Basically the Powers That Be are agnostic regarding guns, and will choose whichever direction seems most racist/classist at the time.

Trololzilla wrote: ↑

Apr 02, 2022

As a final aside, strict gun control is inherently racist and classist. 

As a non-American this statement puzzles me. So most countries in the world pursue racist and classist policies that result in much fewer gun deaths?

^A lot of gun control measures are targeted at urban gun ownership. Gun culture is so baked in in the rural US that for anything to have a chance it'd almost have to be localized, and everyone is worried about those scary city folks with guns, which is more or less code for black people, and especially poorer black people. Other measures would add cost to gun ownership, like licensing or insurance requirements. These aren't necessarily a bad idea, but they would certainly affect poorer people more. (And since insurance costs are so tied to where you live it would pretty quickly descend into "let's make it hard for the black folks to get guns." Doubtless licensing authorities would work out much the same way. A dozen in JeffCo. None in St. Louis.)

As to the rest of the world business, I suspect it's a mixed bag. Gun ownership in the UK certainly looks to be classist at the surface of it. If you're wealthy and have land, no problem. But if you're a poor guy from Belfast that's probably a different story. Other European countries are doubtless different, but I'm not really familiar with how gun ownership works in Germany. I understand it's permitted, but there are certain restrictions you have to follow. And in the end . . . ? I think I'm okay with gun ownership rights being classist. Particularly given that poorer people would still be able to join gun clubs and learn to shoot and use guns without actually owning them anyway. I do not own guns, but I've most definitely shot them on any number of occasions. (The Scouts, for instance, own plenty of target rifles. Probably target pistols too. And it's always good to have some farmer friends.)

But I digress. In answer to your question, the US can always find a way to make something that should be race or class neutral racist and classist. There's a long and carefully honed tradition of awful.

^ but, again, that's not inherent ism. that's applied ism.

symphonicpoet wrote: ↑

Apr 03, 2022

^A lot of gun control measures are targeted at urban gun ownership. Gun culture is so baked in in the rural US that for anything to have a chance it'd almost have to be localized, and everyone is worried about those scary city folks with guns, which is more or less code for black people, and especially poorer black people. Other measures would add cost to gun ownership, like licensing or insurance requirements. These aren't necessarily a bad idea, but they would certainly affect poorer people more. (And since insurance costs are so tied to where you live it would pretty quickly descend into "let's make it hard for the black folks to get guns." Doubtless licensing authorities would work out much the same way. A dozen in JeffCo. None in St. Louis.)

As to the rest of the world business, I suspect it's a mixed bag. Gun ownership in the UK certainly looks to be classist at the surface of it. If you're wealthy and have land, no problem. But if you're a poor guy from Belfast that's probably a different story. Other European countries are doubtless different, but I'm not really familiar with how gun ownership works in Germany. I understand it's permitted, but there are certain restrictions you have to follow. And in the end . . . ? I think I'm okay with gun ownership rights being classist. Particularly given that poorer people would still be able to join gun clubs and learn to shoot and use guns without actually owning them anyway. I do not own guns, but I've most definitely shot them on any number of occasions. (The Scouts, for instance, own plenty of target rifles. Probably target pistols too. And it's always good to have some farmer friends.)

Gun ownership in the UK works in a similar way to other European countries, including Germany: sporting and hunting rifles are allowed, subject to licensing that is issued by local police for a 5-year period. You need to be able to show that: (i) you have a good reason to own a gun, (ii) you can safely store the gun in your home, (iii) your family doctor is ok with it (a form of psychological evaluation), (iv) other people that have known you for a while can vouch for your good character. Most other European countries are variations of this. The main difference being that handguns are allowed in many European countries but not in the UK, and other countries tend to have stricter psychological evaluation criteria.

Do you need resources to satisfy these criteria? Of course you do, but you also need to go through a licensing process to drive and own a car for example. Are drivers licenses and insurance requirements classist and racist as well? The lengths to which people in this country try to justify the almost complete absence of firearms regulation as a completely normal thing baffle me.

Went to get a package today and on way back up I shared the elevator with the crime lab photographer, he was going to 11 so I asked what was going on- he said it looks like a suicide (he wasn’t sure if it was gun or hanging). Idk which neighbor this is yet (building is heavily populated by SLU law students) Talk to people and point them to places that can help.

Trololzilla wrote:

gary kreie wrote: ↑

Apr 02, 2022

Smart guns in the past were aimed at preventing unauthorized or accidental firing. But that spooked the 2nd amendmenters. “They’re trying to control our guns”.  So I considered a smart gun that never inhibited its firing by anyone. It just documents by law in extreme detail who what and where the gun was fired, which is not protected by the 2nd amendment. Silencers are already illegal. This law would require gun shot noise and a ton more detail to be made available to police anytime a gun is fired. And hopefully reduce gun violence through prosecution.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The main problem with smart guns is that they introduce more points of failure to what is inherently a tool that has to be as reliable as possible considering it can be used for self defense in life-threatening situations. Even if it didn't lock out the trigger as they've been presented in the past, there's absolutely no way they'd fly in this country, most likely due to privacy laws, endless litigation by deep-pocketed gun supporters, and the potential to cause issues with the operation of a gun.

Also want to point out that suppressors (aka silencers) are not illegal in the slightest; most states (including MO) allow them provided you follow the proper legal process of obtaining them, including paying the tax stamp. Hell, you can even legally buy kits to make your own silencers to save some money.

As a final aside, strict gun control is inherently racist and classist. 

In my proposal to document with electronic data capture & transmittal post gun firing, I intentionally left out all features that would ever prevent a gun from firing. Hence your concern about points of failure when a gun has to be reliable would be totally mute.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

kipfilet wrote: ↑

Apr 03, 2022

Do you need resources to satisfy these criteria? Of course you do, but you also need to go through a licensing process to drive and own a car for example. Are drivers licenses and insurance requirements classist and racist as well? The lengths to which people in this country try to justify the almost complete absence of firearms regulation as a completely normal thing baffle me.

I don't think anyone here is trying to justify the lack of gun regulation. Several of us are attempting to explain the reasons it's been so difficult, not suggest it should stay that way.

Given your explanation of UK gun law it indeed does sound quite classist. The wealthy landowner likely has wild game on their estate and thus a good reason to have a hunting rifle. They have good access to healthcare to get a good evaluation from their doctor. They have a good network of fellow hunting enthusiasts of long standing to vouch for them. The poor bloke from Belfast has none of this, and thus it sure sounds to me like it would be one heck of a lot harder for someone with limited means who wished to take up sport shooting to do so. So it very well might be that most wealthy countries DO pursue an inherently classist structure of weapon regulation. That's probably completely typical. But at the end of the day I fully believe this is a price worth paying. Kindly don't assume I'm attempting to justify anything.

I'd be altogether in favor of implementing something akin to the German system as you describe it. All of the steps you mention are reasonable, even if they do require resources. But if we're going to succeed we need to address the lines of opposition we will encounter. And classism and racism are two very logical lines of attack that absolutely will occur and will get traction. The largest populations of firearms owners in the US are not the landed aristocracy. Quite the opposite. So they will be suspicious of something like that. And the powerful lobbyists behind the companies selling munitions will jump on that in an aristocratic New York minute. How do you head them off? Guns have nearly all the rural votes and quite a lot of urban money. Solving the problem is going to require more than someone saying "Why don't we just do what Europe does?" Particularly in rural America that question answers itself. We've got to find a different way to sell this. Even if those are, in the end, the solutions we come to.

Not too long after the Forum Meetup earlier last night at Urban Chestnut... 

KMOV: 42-year-old woman killed in double shooting in the Grove

This all took place at Manchester & Kentucky, with one victim driving up to the QuikTrip seeking help after being shot. Reddit posters were quick to question whether or not this had anything to do with Sunday night parties at Shi Sha, which apparently has had issues like this before, but for which nothing so far has definitively linked the venue to this shooting. The other comments centered upon the number of shots actually fired, saying maybe 30 bullets exchanged between shooters; in the KMOV video, evidence tags for bullet casings go all the way up to the 60s. 

^^Yeah, I noticed that. Not too comfortable when we were standing out on the street talking just a bare few blocks away. Not that I'm going to quit going to the Grove. (Crap has happened in my own neighborhood too. The young lady shot on her porch walking home from the bus last summer was about a block from me. The shootout in the police officer's house a couple of years back was maybe two blocks.) But it's always disconcerting when it gets that close. This is a serious problem we need to fix.

Which brings us to the second part.

^Yeah, I think the expired assault weapons ban got a lot right. The smaller caliber bullets like the 22s give you the potential for much higher capacity magazines, which I suspect is the problem. I was out shooting with the farmer friend mentioned above six or eight years ago and one of his friends brought a .556 AR-15 style rifle with a twin drum magazine. Cheap clear plastic thing that looked almost like a toy, but with . . . I don't know . . . probably a hundred rounds or more. I kept wondering to myself what on earth a hunter needs with something like that? I think we absolutely need to find a way to restrict the capacity and practical rate of fire of readily available weapons. This doesn't even require outlawing anything. The National Firearms Act of 1934 is a nice model that's stood the test of time. Update it with better background check requirements and add features like bump stocks and high capacity magazines to the regulation, eliminating the manufacture of new ones and requiring registration of existing ones. (And add maybe add some licensing and insurance requirements and some stiff penalties for non-compliance.)

It’s still illegal to discharge a firearm in public. Which is what people are doing.

downtown2007 wrote: ↑

Apr 05, 2022

It’s still illegal to discharge a firearm in public. Which is what people are doing.

Murder is usually something people do on impulse, so the easiest way to prevent murder is to not have a bunch of deadly weapons around. Consequences don't work because 99% of murders don't wake up thinking "let me step through the consequences of my 5-point plan to murder somebody next week".

Second-easiest prevention method would be to make people less mad, I guess.

^Good comment. Unfortunately, "[...] unless you're an idiot" is probably the most important part as these debates are almost totally driven by "idiots," both the kind that are shooting themselves/each other and the political/ideological variety that prevent anything actually helpful from happening (and no, that's not a partisan statement). 

Speaking only for myself, as a leftist who's recently come around to a "conservative" position on guns, we probably need to just accept that the US will always be a relatively more (gun) violent place and that, barring some kind of supernatural change in political consciousness, there will be no additional, meaningful regulation of guns nationally or in states/localities, like MO, that don't already have it. Rather, we should direct our energies toward mitigating other factors, many of them economic in origin, that drive violent and other criminal behaviors in general, rather than gun violence/crime in particular.  To be clear, we should use whatever tools are already in the toolbox as best we can, but we shouldn't delude (or exhaust) ourselves seeking new tools through the political process.

Just my two cents. Great discussion as usual on this forum.

^ that’s big misconception on who commits murders. It’s not just poor people.  It’s people who make more money on any given week than most of us here.     So no, finding someone a $50,000 a year job isn’t going to get them to stop making $200,000 a year dealing.

Other 30% of homicides are mostly of domestic dispute variety.  See the recent homicide of 2 sisters in Collinsville.  One girl broke up with her BF (a biz owner) who snapped and shot her, her sister and a dog.   If he didn’t have a gun and just a knife they may have had a chance to get away

^Thanks. On your first point, totally agree. My point is political; that you're going to have more success preventing those murders by taking on "drugs" as an issue rather than "guns." Same goes for your second point; there are political coalitions interested in mitigating domestic violence via public policy, but you're not getting anywhere (at least not in MO and probably not federally) if your solution is denying/removing individuals' access to guns. 

I would of course love to be proved wrong, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Another discussion related to guns but not a a crime in sense of victim & suspect is suicide.   The last time I look I believe my sisters lived and worked in a state, North Dakota, that has a higher per capita loss of life due to gun violence then where i live in California but California has a higher murder rate per capita.   The driver being ease of gun ownership, desire to have guns and how much more likely you will not survive the decision to commit suicide by gun.    

Like comments above, impulse whether it be crime and or suicide never ends well when a gun(s) is available   Kinda like the cliche, nothing good happens after midnight.   In my neck of the woods, the latest national mass shooting was a short distance away from California's state capital when gunmen opened fire on a crowd after a bar fight spilled out into the streets early early Sunday.    People will point to the Sacramento mass shooting and say gun regulation won't work.   I will point to the stats that at end of day your less likely to die from gun violence either by someone you might or might know or by your own doing when you live in a state of gun regulation.  Don't have the data to show but think it is a fair statement other looking at a few states.

Mental health care and mitigating toxic masculinity would probably have a material impact on homicides. Our atomized social fabric isn't doing us any favors as a nation.

This is unbelievable but at the same time believable.  That whole incident where a guy tried to car jacket police officers in their marked car few week ago?    Made up by police

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/cri ... 86c81.html

SP: I apologize if I came across as trying to say you were insinuating something. That was not my intent, and I fully agree with what you wrote. I misinterpreted your initial post (to which I was replying) as trying to justify the absence of gun regulation, which at the end of the day is the one thing that would have the largest impact in preventing most of the incidents that are discussed on this thread.

dbInSouthCity wrote: ↑

Apr 05, 2022

This is unbelievable but at the same time believable.  That whole incident where a guy tried to car jacket police officers in their marked car few week ago?    Made up by police

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/cri ... 86c81.html

The only unbelievable thing is that people still believe the police.