Joe Biden's "Imagine" tweet

[krispos42]

5. Oh boy

I can't predict election Republicans? Really?

Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Do you really think that Clinton and Gore's gun-control attempts didn't convince 269 Floridians to switch from Democrat to Republican because of that particular piece of culture war legislation? Dolt45 won three critical states by a combined total of, what, 70,000 votes? Do you really think that Democrats screaming about "assault weapons" constantly for 30 years didn't cement a net of 70,000 voters against them?

For much of the last 20 years, the GOP has held most of the governorships and most of the legislative assemblies in this country. While obviously there are many reasons for this, the fact is that gun control drives up Republican turnout in greater proportion to driving up Democratic turnout. And the gun control legislation is not some "morally correct thing to do" thing like minority rights or woman's rights or protecting the environment. It's part political pandering, it's part culture war, and it's part avoiding criticism of things like capitalism, the drug war, and American society.

Yeah, there are gun laws that we can implement that will be somewhat effective, but those are not what the Democrats trot out with flourishes and fanfare.

You probably want to ban "assault weapons". Well, rifles are used to murder about 400 people a year. AR-15s and AK-47s are a kind of rifle, so the signature piece of legislation that the Democrats resurrect on a regular basis would ban a subset of rifles that are used to murder 400 people a year. While handguns are used to murder about 8,000 people a year.

They're responding to mass shootings by focusing on the guns used. Again, not discussing the role that media plays, or the economy, or our social safety net, or other social or economic issues, but they've decided that the thing to blame is rifles designed 60 years ago because, dammit, guns should all look like they did in 1912!

It's window dressing. "They look evil and modern, so ban them! Who can stand against that idea??? It's a winner!!!" says the Democratic minority. And then an election goes by, and... they're still a minority. It's taken an economic collapse, a pandemic, and a toxic racist sexist criminal lying whining conman president for us to get to the point where we *might* be able to get the House and the Senate and the Presidency... maybe. Something that we should have far more often!

Clinton's gun ban (and see how the Clinton name is now irreparably linked with a gun ban) did virtually nothing to combat gun crime, any more than that corrupt bastard Giuliani's "broken windows" policing did anything to fight crime. Crime fell steeply in the 90's all over the country.

And banning new sales of "assault weapon" rifles can't account for a 50% murder rate drop when rifles only account for 5% of all murders. The math makes no sense.