#second amendment reform

[garthnadermemestash]

Sign that bill Biden and nobody under 30 gonna vote!

[liberalsarecool]

Well-regulated is another way of saying background checks and red flag laws.

It's in the Constitution.

[lilithism1848]

[queerism1969]

[angelx1992]

[aalt-ctrl-del]

Don't listen to those gun nuts. None of them, and I mean absolutely none of them, understand statistics. They couldn't tell me the difference between a p-value and a z-value, let alone how to calculate either. They throw out stats they don't understand. Nothing you said was wrong. We are desperately in need of common sense gun reform, and the good news is we are working getting there. If you can, vote and encourage others to vote too. The right candidate is on your ballot, but they can't help usher in the gun reform without your support.

True.

They love to talk about their guns and how the guns will keep us safe. Then when you discuss the people that get shot up in places where we don't expect, like groceries stores, places where you don't expect confrontation likes clubs, they can't handle it.

This was like one of the first shots of the police I saw when we got the bodycam footage

Good officers put their lives on the line for the people. They go out there to serve in these sort of situations, recognizing they may not make it home. Unlike Uvalde, where the cops were armed to the teeth in tactical gear and armor, Nashville's enforcers went in like they just got called out of the street (an oversimplification and does not warrant the time it took to prep for this engagement, in less than 10 minutes).

But the shooter had AR high caliber weapons. People killing guns. I know gun phillics like to defend these light-weight but powerful rifles, so that they can manage pest animals like 'prairie' dogs, but the yield of these weapons decimates the body. Forensic Investigators need dental records on some of the victims to identify who was slain. They're torn to pieces.

And that is just the children. Adults are larger, more hardy in structure. But a good clear shot will splint the head and eviscerate everything atop the spinal cord. If the body doesn't go down first, which is what did happen to the shooter - cause Nashville did try to apprehend without putting the shooter down.

This pixel right here

A body. Understandably, it was blurred. The officers called this person, knowing they were close to the shooter. This was right after they pass the pictures on the wall with the children.

So there is this thing with gun ownership, as with dealing with any sort of weapon. You need to comprehend the responsibility and undertake an amount of respect for the weapon. This is not a prop, this is not a 'hobbyist' collectors item. This is a functioning tool with a history attached to it. No other asset can be owned, that has the sort of history a gun or sword, or whatever sort of weapon like a deactivated grenade might hold.

Guns are vastly different. They have a difficult and sordid history, and people need to understand that when they think they should own this weapon. Because this is a weapon with a purpose, and that is part of the ownership of this tool.

One of the aspects of the tool is understand what to use it for. And for whatever reason, the correlation between this tool and its intended result... should be scrubbed. The gun philics don't want to associate their collectors item with a weapon of terror or slaying children - which is what it is now. You try and describe to them what these weapons are meant to do, what the lack of gun reform and dismissal of improved legislator will do, and they want to spit 'statistics' about violence in 'the hood' the technical term for 'mass shootings', and all the good that guns do for people.

Which valid. People have been allowed the right to protect themselves from small time thieves and opportunistic predators (human, btw). People have defended their families, their friends, because a gun was involved. To be American is to have that right that is listed in the constitution, and we should be proud of that right.

At the same time, these gun philics are very proud to own AR and high caliber weapons, people killer guns. Weapons meant for the chaos and messiness of war, the battlefield, the "kill them before they kill you" situation.

It is the equivalent of owning a severed finger. Or the skullcap of a child. or collecting the molars of people from the grocery store. The jawbone of a grandmother picking peaches from the produce section.

There is a balance with rules and rights. I have these rights, and so do others in the same category. I acknowledge my rights can be misconstrued, violated by those with unethical agendas. The factor that I would like this right, can be abused by someone else, and there are consequences for that right, for this privilege.

Gun philics demand to have their right, but revoke wanting to contend with the consequences. Rather work to better improve this right and prevent mass shooting events, they bawl "MY RIGHTS ARE BEING INFRINGED ON!! YOU CAN'T HAVE ALL MY GUNS!"

Then go bury their guns in a bunker like a demented squirrel.

You say, "These are the people slain by a weapon meant to kill people. This is what having those rights has done, and if we don't work now to fix it, we can expect more of this."

Then they scream, "THIS IS LEFTIST PROPAGANDA! YOU'RE SWAYING PEOPLE TO YOUR IDEA OF THINKING."

Propaganda would entail, I have adjusted the thing or presented it in a fashion which misconstrues the truth of an event. Or, I have fixed in in a manner which hides some facet of the context of the situation.

The forensic investigators and morticians have gone onto the stand for the trial of these mass shooting events, and that has been called propaganda. Telling the truth and nothing but that ugly truth, has been labeled propaganda. How the police doing their job, happening to march by a dead body maimed by a mass shooter, is suddenly propaganda, is beyond morbid. That is a dead body, we are going to look at this person, they are no longer going to be with their family, they will no longer visit friends. They were killed in the hallway of an elementary school, a few feet from pictures of smiling children.

And people will be upset for pointing that out. "it's too soon to pass legislate on guns." "We can't pass reform or study the laws today".

We should be looking at the dead bodies. We should be looking at the faces of the law enforcement as they march into these situations, to DO THEIR JOB CORRECTLY AND WITHOUT HESITATION, and instead of praising them for the masterful job they did or saying they are heroes, do better to pass reform, so they are not going into these narrow hallways to hunt down an active shooter.

The fact of the matter is, we are making the streets unsafe for the police force who are doing their job. We've left schools vulnerable to attack by these people, because the ones who seek a weapon for killing people with intent to kill people, either seek our children or vulnerable citizens in a space that should be safe. There will be no "good people" with guns, because the "bad person" with the gun has the people killing rifle, and whoever is the good person with the gun is more likely to be carrying a pistol and not in the right stance or position to go Rambo like they envision them self doing in the astronomically low value situation of someone coming into their area to shoot up a cinema.

A last note, people don't really get how fortunate Nashville was, that the shooter confessed they were going to go out and shoot up a school. That the police got there and got inside, and that everything did go as it was meant to. But despite all that, we have casualties. It could have been worse, it could have been better, but the fact of it all is that it should not have happened in the first place.

[qqueenofhades]

I feel like it's important to point out that in the last few days alone, in the middle of the ongoing flap about How Old He Is, Biden has announced two MAJOR pieces of progressive legislation/priorities for his second term: a) major SCOTUS reform, term limits for SCOTUS justices, a constitutional amendment nullifying the "president god-king" ruling, and b) legislation to cap/stabilize rent costs nationwide and financially punish landlords who raise their tenant's rent by more than a certain percentage (the news I saw had it as no more than 5%) in a year.

It is important to note that aside from these both being necessary and needed (the SCOTUS reform alone, holy shit) Biden's response to challenges to his candidacy is to go MORE left, not LESS. The conventional wisdom for 800 years has always been that Democrats Need To Go More Centrist, a mainstream and longterm Democrat like Biden has absolutely heard it over and over, and we have heard so much about how we need to court Republicans who are tired of Trump by being more conservative. Biden is not doing that. He is making the electoral gamble that the way to win is by going even more left, which would also have implications for his policy agenda in a second term, especially when he was freed of re-election concerns and could just go "fuck it."

Now we, and I cannot emphasize this enough, need to reward him for the move leftward and incentivize him to do it more. When you shout endlessly at politicians to be more left and then just bitch at them for not being even more left even when they move in that direction, you discourage them from doing so and make the hoary old Move To The Center narrative come back yet again. So:

[cynicalclassicist]

Yeh... that says it all with Trump.

Voter: Can you explain for school shooting victims what your gun policies are.

Trump: Well we have the 2nd amendment right to bear arms and people need guns for protection, entertainment and hunting.

[thesebright-lights]

Israel used to have school shootings and terror threats and then they armed the teachers and places guards in every school and they haven’t had a shooting since. We protect banks, politicians and celebrities with armed guards, why aren’t we doing the same for our schools since they are literally defenseless until (and sometimes even after) the cops show up. It blows my mind that we aren’t hiring unemployed and trained veterans to guard our schools.

I want to make it clear it that I am not completely against armed officers in schools- I think they’re absolutely a necessity in certain districts, mine included. However, there are still a lot of issues that need to be addressed.

So, as someone that attends a school with armed guards: many are absolutely useless in crisis situations, even trained police officers.

I mentioned in another post that there was a stabbing at my school- I want to mention that while I was in the district, I was not yet in high school, so what I am about to say I learned from teachers that were present on the day it happened.

The schools only police officer ran out of the building during the stabbing and never came back. He was armed with a gun, and the student in question only had knives, no gun. There was absolutely no reason for him to run away. Instead teachers were the ones trying to save students. It was two teachers that tackled the student to the ground. I know that at least one of them was injured, which all could have been avoided, had that officer been even remotely competent. Thats one of the many reasons the police need reform.

Moving on to things I’ve seen in my time here, the officers at the school never do anything to stop fights. Once again, it’s always teachers or our principal. I’ve seen them quite literally just stand there and watch students fight, maybe they’ll yell, but that’s it. On top of that, there’s rarely ever a female officer on shift, so if a fight happens in a girls restroom (which is where fights among girls always seem to happen here), no one is there to stop it. Granted, this is more of an issue with the school, and I’m not sure how helpful one of those officers would actually be, but still- these fights either go until one of the girls is seriously injured, or some of their friends forcibly stop it. That shouldn’t happen.

These officers also get fired at am alarming rate. Usually it’s for creeping on female students, but we also had one more recently that was getting high in the boy’s bathroom with students (he was in his early twenties for context). Like, come on. I know this kind of thing is bound to happen, but the turnover rate for these officers is insane. There is a systemic issue when multiple people are being fired for this kind of thing yearly.

I also don’t think having armed teachers is a good idea. I don’t know about other districts, but here someone would absolutely try to take a teachers gun- probably just for shits and giggles (people take things from teachers here all time as dares or whatever), but I'd still worry that a student could accidentally hurt themself or someone else.

Officers and guards keep theirs in holsters attached to their hip, and to my knowledge nobody has ever successfully gotten one of theirs. Teachers doing that might not go so well.

There’s even more things I could talk about, but tldr, we need serious police reform, and kids are stupid and shouldn’t be around guns in school.

[validblogname]

I see a video of a guy twirling handguns around on his finger Over and over like yo-yo tricks, kinda showy And people are just loving it

unpopular opinion coming this is not a bad place to tune out lol

I hate the idea of guns being so casually handled, I admit But in this case I’m looking at it like: Remember when porn was only on the computer. Only if you paid, or had age verification

Then it became mainstream And has even turned into a lucrative lifestyle

So here we are with tiny little death machines And we’re bandying them about like some toy yo-yos

I feel that the issue here is: the attitude we’ve adopted about them. We’re getting a little too casual with playing god here, if I do say so myself And in doing so it has proliferated

As they become more commonplace The statistics change in a bad direction Too many of our own people Our family and friends, neighbors, countrymen, Are dying at the hands of our own people

You have every right to own the damn things But we should be steering away from portable death machines As a casual, desirable thing in the first place

I’m absolutely taking the stance of pro-life on this one because Even though it hasn’t quite touched me personally yet, Nobody said it has to…

I am anti-gun because I am anti-killing YOU I am anti-killing your neighbor, our bus driver My teachers or my kids

The easiest and most practical way to protect ourselves: • stop planting the seeds of our own demise.

[fatehbaz]

The government of Australia’s northeastern state of Queensland has stunned rights experts by suspending its Human Rights Act for a second time this year to be able to lock up more children.

The ruling Labor Party last month [August 2023] pushed through a suite of legislation to allow under-18s – including children as young as 10 – to be detained indefinitely in police watch houses, because changes to youth justice laws – including jail for young people who breach bail conditions – mean there are no longer enough spaces in designated youth detention centres to house all those being put behind bars. The amended bail laws, introduced earlier this year [2023], also required the Human Rights Act to be suspended.

The moves have shocked Queensland Human Rights Commissioner Scott McDougall, who described human rights protections in Australia as “very fragile”, with no laws that apply nationwide.

“We don’t have a National Human Rights Act. Some of our states and territories have human rights protections [...]. But they’re not constitutionally entrenched so they can be overridden by the parliament,” he told Al Jazeera. The Queensland Human Rights Act – introduced in 2019 – protects children from being detained in adult prison so it had to be suspended for the government to be able to pass its legislation.

---

Earlier this year, Australia’s Productivity Commission reported that Queensland had the highest number of children in detention of any Australian state. Between 2021-2022, the so-called “Sunshine State” recorded a daily average of 287 people in youth detention, compared with 190 in Australia’s most populous state New South Wales, the second highest. [...]

[M]ore than half the jailed Queensland children are resentenced for new offences within 12 months of their release.

Another report released by the Justice Reform Initiative in November 2022 showed that Queensland’s youth detention numbers had increased by more than 27 percent in seven years.

---

The push to hold children in police watch houses is viewed by the Queensland government as a means to house these growing numbers. Attached to police stations and courts, a watch house contains small, concrete cells with no windows and is normally used only as a “last resort” for adults awaiting court appearances or required to be locked up by police overnight. [...]

However, McDougall said he has “real concerns about irreversible harm being caused to children” detained in police watch houses, which he described as a “concrete box”. “[A watch house] often has other children in it. There’ll be a toilet that is visible to pretty much anyone,” he said. “Children do not have access to fresh air or sunlight. And there’s been reported cases of a child who was held for 32 days in a watch house whose hair was falling out. [...]"

---

He also pointed out that 90 percent of imprisoned children and young people were awaiting trial.

“Queensland has extremely high rates of children in detention being held on remand. So these are children who have not been convicted of an offence,” he told Al Jazeera.

Despite Indigenous people making up only 4.6 percent of Queensland’s population, Indigenous children make up nearly 63 percent of those in detention. The rate of incarceration for Indigenous children in Queensland is 33 times the rate of non-Indigenous children. Maggie Munn, a Gunggari person and National Director of First Nations justice advocacy group Change the Record, told Al Jazeera the move to hold children as young as 10 in adult watch houses was ���fundamentally cruel and wrong”. [...]

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[Critics] also told Al Jazeera that the government needed to stop funding “cops and cages” and expressed concern over what [they] described as the “systemic racism, misogyny, and sexism” of the Queensland Police Service.

In 2019, police officers and other staff were recorded joking about beating and burying Black people and making racist comments about African and Muslim people. The recordings also captured sexist remarks [...]. The conversations were recorded in a police watch house, the same detention facilities where Indigenous children can now be held indefinitely.

Australia has repeatedly come under fire at an international level regarding its treatment of children and young people in the criminal justice system. The United Nations has called repeatedly for Australia to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to the international standard of 14 years old [...].

[MR], Queensland’s minister for police and corrective services, [...] – who introduced the legislation, which is due to expire in 2026 – is unrepentant, defending his decision last month [August 2023].

“This government makes no apology for our tough stance on youth crime,” he was quoted as saying in a number of Australian media outlets.

---

Text by: Ali MC. "Australian state suspends human rights law to lock up more children". Al Jazeera. 18 September 2023. At: aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/18/australian-state-suspends-human-rights-law-to-lock-up-more-children [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[sjbattleangel]

The NRA is a white supremacist terrorist organization. Every one of their supporters has blood on their hands.

"Stand Your Ground" is an unjust law that was created so that BIPOC could be lynched freely.

“Since we’ve established that anecdotes matter when it’s your point to be made, let’s briefly note a few uniquely American stories from the past week. In a small town in Alabama, 32 people were shot (four killed) at a birthday party. Also last week, in upstate New York, a 20-year-old woman was shot and killed by a 65-year-old man after the car she was in mistakenly turned into his driveway. (Police said it was “a very rural area with dirt roads,” poor cell service, and “easy to get lost.”) And in another case of a “good guy with a gun” defending his castle—a 16-year-old boy in Kansas City, looking to pick up his siblings from a friend’s house, mixed up the address and was shot in the head by an 84-year-old man after mistakenly knocking on the man’s door. And because this is America, the anecdotes can go on and on—like the two cheerleaders shot in Texas for accidentally opening the wrong car door in a parking lot, and the 6-year-old girl and her dad in North Carolina who were shot by a neighbor, reportedly after an errant basketball rolled into his yard. That’s five different states, in just a few days.”

— America’s Tragedy Is Its Culture of Fear—Armed With Millions of Guns

[robertreich]

From Robber Barons to Bezos: Is History Repeating Itself?

Ultra-wealthy elites…Political corruption…Vast inequality…

These problems aren’t new — in the late 1800s they dominated the country during America’s first Gilded Age.

We overcame these abuses back then, and we can do it again.

Mark Twain coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel to describe the era in American history characterized by corruption and inequality that was masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.

The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th marked a time of great invention — bustling railroads, telephones, motion pictures, electricity, automobiles — which changed American life forever.

But it was also an era of giant monopolies — oil, railroad, steel, finance — run by a small group of men who had grown rich beyond anything America had ever seen.

They were known as “robber barons” because they ran competitors out of business, exploited workers, charged customers exorbitant prices, and lived like royalty as a result.

Money consumed politics. Robber barons and their lackeys donated bundles of cash to any lawmaker willing to do bidding on their behalf. And when lobbying wasn’t enough, the powerful turned to bribery — resulting in some of the most infamous political scandals in American history.

The gap between the rich and poor in America reached astronomical levels. Large numbers of Americans lived in squalor.

Anti-immigrant sentiment raged, leading to the enactment of racist laws to restrict immigration. And voter suppression, largely aimed at Black men who had recently won the right to vote, was rampant.

The era was also marked by dangerous working conditions. Children often as young as 10, but sometimes younger, worked brutal hours in sweatshops. Workers trying to organize labor unions were attacked and killed.

It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.

But Americans were fed up, and they demanded reform. Many took to the streets in protest.

Investigative journalists, often called “muckrakers” then, helped amplify their cries by exposing what was occurring throughout the country.

And a new generation of political leaders rose to end the abuses.

Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt, who warned that, “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.

After becoming president in 1901, Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up dozens of powerful corporations, including the giant Northern Securities Company which had come to dominate railroad transportation through a series of mergers.

Seeking to limit the vast fortunes that were creating a new American aristocracy, Congress enacted a progressive income tax through the 16th Amendment, as well as two wealth taxes.

The first wealth tax, in 1916, was the estate tax — a tax on the wealth someone accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherited it. The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets were sold.

The reformers of the Gilded Age also stopped corporations from directly giving money to politicians or political candidates.

And then Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin — you may have heard of him — continued the work through his New Deal programs — creating Social Security, unemployment insurance, a 40-hour workweek, and requiring that employers bargain in good faith with labor unions.

But following the death of FDR and the end of World War II, when America was building the largest middle class the world had ever seen — we seemed to forget about the abuses of the Gilded Age.

Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

It is also a time of extraordinary invention.

And a time when monopolies are taking over vast swathes of the economy, so we must renew antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

Now, another generation of robber barons is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.  

Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we need to protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

Voter suppression runs rampant in the states as during the first Gilded Age, making it harder for people of color to participate in what’s left of our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age. So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

The question now is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: Will we fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few?

We’ve done it before. We can — and must — do it again.

[angelx1992]