"Senate Dems introduce 'assault weapons' ban bill on 205 gun models"

[krispos42]

52. Yup. Because, you see there's this funny thing where the party in power gets to do shit

Like, pass laws and enforce laws and appoint judges that interpret the laws. And if we're not passing and enforcing and appointing, then the Trump-sucking REPUBLICANS are.

Maybe you've just forgotten or something, but we, Democrats, can't make life better if we're not in charge.

Remind me again... how many votes did Al Gore lose Florida by?

Oh yeah, 537. So if a mere 269 working-class gun owners had decided that Al Gore wasn't that bad on guns and pulled the (metaphorical) lever the other way, the entire Dubya travesty would have been avoided.

A single cinema's worth of voters pissed at Al Gore because Gore looked them in the eye and told them obvious lies about 'assault weapons'. 90% of gun murders are done with handguns, and Gore said that the problem was pistol-grips and bayonet mounts on semi-automatic rifles. And they didn't vote for him.

And what was it in 2016? Something like a few tens of thousands of voters in three critical states voting the other way would have Hillary Clinton as president?

If we make society better, the violence will go down! But we can't fix the ills of society, the root causes of violence, if we're not in charge!

This was proven when we made society better in the early 70's by making contraception (the pill and the IUD, for example) widespread and common and legalizing abortion nationwide.

We made society better by removing lead from gasoline, paint, and other consumer products, and we in general began cleaning up the environment.

We didn't do those things to lower the crime rate, we did them because they were the moral and ethical things to do. However, by making society better, we also lowered the crime rate a generation later. With fewer children being poisioned by lead, and fewer children being born to mothers that weren't ready to raise them, the crime rate dropped by a third between 1990 and 2000. Fewer children were born into desperate situations that fostered a life of crime, and fewer children had the increased aggression and decreased intelligence and empathy caused by lead poisoning, so there were fewer career criminals entering adulthood.

That's what I want to do. Attacking the hardware will not fix society; it's not a hardware problem. Obviously there are some things we can do but the fundamental problem is not hardware.