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Poll: What gun legislation would you support?


What gun legislation would you support?  

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http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/23/bipartisan-support-for-some-gun-proposals-stark-partisan-divisions-on-many-others/

 

This poll mirrors one that was released by the Pew Research Center this past June, after the Congressional baseball shooting.

 

Keep in mind that these are "generalized" proposals.  Not specific.  For example, the definition of "Mentally Ill" would need a lot of specificity.  How one chooses to define that would make all the difference for many people, pro or against.  I just wanted to see if our board's response in this current climate would differ from the national one 8 months ago....

 

Also trying a strategy to parse out Dem/Rep, like the Pew poll did.  I had to be a little creative, since every question has to have an answer.

Edited by Kiyoat Husker
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If you are Independent/ Centrist, and TRULY do not at least lean one way or another, .... I guess you could vote in both sections?

 

For the record,   If you feel that you fall in this category I believe you are giving yourself WAY too much credit for being non-partisan.  Like, Jesus-level.

 

Image result for look at the big brain on brett gif

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fwiw.....shouldn't it be longer waiting periods to get the guns?  i thought you could carry them out the store right away now...but to be honest i haven't bought a gun in years.  my old shotgun is plenty for me.    

 

also....to me it's the large capacity magazine that defines what an assault rifle is.   let people have those guns but not the high capacity magazines.  if you can't kill what you are hunting with 3 shots you are not much of a marksman and should have to pass some sort of marksman test before you get another hunting permit.  lol

Edited by commando
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The problem with this kind of poll is the loss of detail/nuance. For example, I'm not in favor of banning assault (depending on definition) weapons and high capacity magazines but I am in favor of licensing/regulating those items. And if we're going to bar the mentally ill or people on no-fly or watch lists, then I want to know how people get labeled in those ways and also how they get those labels removed; otherwise, I'm opposed to barring without thoughtful definitions and processes.

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Preventing the mentally ill -- strongly oppose
Expanding the BoR deprivation of those on no-fly lists -- strongly oppose
Background checks -- strongly support
Assault weapons ban -- support
Federal database -- strongly support
High-capacity mags ban -- support
Concealed carry -- oppose
Guns in schools -- uh, STRONGLY oppose
Shorten waiting periods -- strongly oppose
Concealed carry without a permit -- you're kidding, right? 

 

For everything I do support: as you all know, I want the contemporary interpretation of the 2A overturned, if not the amendment in its entirety. So long as it stands, it's in the Bill of Rights, and restrictions on any of those should be met with suspicion. How do you justify it? I mean, technically, laws in any of these areas I do support... if they are allowed to stand, the 2A is being rather generally trampled upon. It's a good result. But it bears treading carefully. 

 

For example, something not mentioned here is a gun license requirement. I support that end result, but the thought that citizens should have to actively prove themselves to the government to be worthy of their basic rights is downright dystopian. There's no way forward, IMO, that doesn't at least casually (or maybe overtly) treat the right to bear arms as not a real right. Which, naturally, I don't think it should be!

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First things first...I do not identify with Democrats or liberals or Republicans. At all. But since I am still fiscally conservative I voted in the conservative section. However I don't think it correct to lump Repubs and conservatives together, not anymore.

 

I guess my only comment is a couple questions for @zoogs, I guess I can sort of see the concern with banning gun sales to all persons designated mentally ill. That could be a pretty wide ranging category but surely you would be for it with some stipulations and in the right circumstances, right?  But the one that really caught me off guard...those on the no fly list. Please tell me you're against this only because the no fly list is terribly mismanaged. Surely you would be for it if the list was actually only dangerous people that our government has determined to be extreme risks, right?

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5 minutes ago, Comfortably Numb said:

First things first...I do not identify with Democrats or liberals or Republicans. At all. But since I am still fiscally conservative I voted in the conservative section. However I don't think it correct to lump Repubs and conservatives together, not anymore.

 

I guess my only comment is a couple questions for @zoogs, I guess I can sort of see the concern with banning gun sales to all persons designated mentally ill. That could be a pretty wide ranging category but surely you would be for it with some stipulations and in the right circumstances, right?  But the one that really caught me off guard...those on the no fly list. Please tell me you're against this only because the no fly list is terribly mismanaged. Surely you would be for it if the list was actually only dangerous people that our government has determined to be extreme risks, right?

 

So my position is most easily described as bigly anti-gun, bigly pro-civil liberties. It's not so much the idea that the present government is doing a poor job of deciding who is on the list and who is not, it's that I am highly skeptical of giving our government the power to arbitrate who gets what we consider to be their natural rights protected, and who loses these protections. "Dangerous people don't deserve rights; who's dangerous? Whomever the government tells you is" is this really scary idea to me, not least because it actually seems bipartisan.

 

It's the same way with mental illness, which does not make a dangerous person (they have rights, too, which are often neglected by public consideration. Or worse, as in this case, they're harmed by the vilification). 

 

Guns are the problem. Ergo, we have to decide that because guns are a problem they must be restricted in all these ways, and you have to (for example) demonstrate that you should be allowed to use a gun. We require licenses for operating motor vehicles! When what we have instead is certain people are dangerous, dangerous enough that they have access to a receding set of protections of their civil liberties, this is a problem. 

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Also, to touch a little more on the mental illness question, I just do not believe it even addresses the problem. As long as we are a free society without Minority Report technology, or some absurd police state of the kind Trump is proposing (find the mentally ill people early! lock them up! j...f'n...c :(), there's going to be some person who is by all possible accounts OK, and then one day they snap and commit a crime, and we come to understand that they've been troubled for a while. Or maybe it was even spontaneous, snapping under the culmination of pressures kept at bay for a time.

 

A good way of framing this that I heard comes from ... I think it was Pod Save America, but it may have been The Weeds. We point to this shooter and say, he's a troubled kid. Well, there are "troubled kids" in every city and town in the country. The next shooter, and there obviously will be one, is probably going to be someone who slipped more under the radar. Like the last shooter. The problem is the ready access to guns. 

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I wish you would've just answered no twice. It would've been less scary than knowing what you really thought. I think about the only thing we agree on is that it would be nice to have some licensing requirement. But I'm sure if you expounded upon that it would become clear that we actually do not agree at all. 

 

I really cannot stand the sentiment that an inanimate objects is more to blame than the sick person who puts it into action. You want to deal with a symptom of the problem rather than the actual problem. I could lay an assault rifle with a high capacity magazine on my living room floor and it would not harm one single person until some deranged person laid their hands on it. That is more of a people problem than a tool problem. I'm not very concerned about the constitutional rights of people who would kill others. I'm all for limiting availability of some high risk guns because it will help the problem but I believe we have to get much better and more active in addressing the actual  problem of the people who pull the trigger.

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JMO, but "I'm not very concerned about the constitutional rights" of people who have committed no crime and cannot be tried and convicted of murder or even intent to murder is a far scarier thought than "guns are really bad."

 

There is not a low risk gun. There are lower price-to-pay guns in the sense that they're not extended mag assault rifles, maybe (cue the "you guys have the AR-15 all wrong" folks, who maybe are right!) ... but gun violence doesn't take a big scary weapon. To ameliorate gun violence, we need to get at the source, and get to a place where there are fewer guns. Your house is a much lower risk place to be when there is not an AR-15 lying on the ground. Our world is a much safer place to be when there are not many guns lying around many places.

 

Granted, I will admit that if we banned all people, gun violence would also stop. But you won’t find everyone. And suppose you did — the extremely malevolent, murderous, committed to criminality types. Great, they’ve lost their nominal rights protections and can’t buy a gun. That’s going to stop them when the gun population abounds?

Edited by zoogs
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First,  I am all for tougher gun laws and hope something gets done with it.  Second, can we quit talking about "assault rifles".   Assault rifles are already illegal to possess so that topic needs to be thrown out.   The gun of subject is the AR style weapons, which are NOT assault rifles.  Here is a good description of the difference: http://www.thefirearms.guide/blog/educational/assault-rifle.    As commando and I have stated before in a couple threads,  the high-capacity magazines and bump stocks are the culprits.  Take away those and the AR becomes just like any other semi-auto hunting rifle. 

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6 hours ago, Comfortably Numb said:

I wish you would've just answered no twice. It would've been less scary than knowing what you really thought. I think about the only thing we agree on is that it would be nice to have some licensing requirement. But I'm sure if you expounded upon that it would become clear that we actually do not agree at all. 

 

I really cannot stand the sentiment that an inanimate objects is more to blame than the sick person who puts it into action. You want to deal with a symptom of the problem rather than the actual problem. I could lay an assault rifle with a high capacity magazine on my living room floor and it would not harm one single person until some deranged person laid their hands on it. That is more of a people problem than a tool problem. I'm not very concerned about the constitutional rights of people who would kill others. I'm all for limiting availability of some high risk guns because it will help the problem but I believe we have to get much better and more active in addressing the actual  problem of the people who pull the trigger.

You've probably heard the following Devil's Advocate viewpoints before, and I'm not trying to convince you to my perspective. Instead, I would simply request you reflect on them in comparison to some of your own opinions.

 

1) In regards to violent gun deaths, we are an anomaly among other countries we deem ourselves equal to or better than. We are embarrassingly more violent than the U.K., Germany, prominent Asian countries, etc. Those whom we do match up well with include Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Phillippines. It's pretty poor company to be associated with.

 

2) We deal with inanimate objects all the time rather than the 'sick person' who controls them. That's why we now have seatbelts and seatbelt laws. That's why we limit the amount of Sudafed you can buy. Yet, we don't have many people standing up and saying "the problem is people who want to make drugs, not the Sudafed!"

 

3) It's far more difficult to accomplish tasks like becoming a citizen, getting a driver's license or a passport. Hell, it's significantly more difficult to buy a suppressor (an item that is not dangerous by itself) than it is to buy a gun.

 

Again, not trying to convince you or anyone to my line of thinking, but they're important to consider especially when we go so far to say that someone's opinions on this matter might be "scary." I think all of the things I mentioned here are far scarier than the idea of stiffer gun laws.

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6 hours ago, Comfortably Numb said:

I wish you would've just answered no twice. It would've been less scary than knowing what you really thought. I think about the only thing we agree on is that it would be nice to have some licensing requirement. But I'm sure if you expounded upon that it would become clear that we actually do not agree at all. 

 

I really cannot stand the sentiment that an inanimate objects is more to blame than the sick person who puts it into action. You want to deal with a symptom of the problem rather than the actual problem. I could lay an assault rifle with a high capacity magazine on my living room floor and it would not harm one single person until some deranged person laid their hands on it. That is more of a people problem than a tool problem. I'm not very concerned about the constitutional rights of people who would kill others. I'm all for limiting availability of some high risk guns because it will help the problem but I believe we have to get much better and more active in addressing the actual  problem of the people who pull the trigger.

 

Why should we be repealing laws that make it harder for mentally unstable people to purchase a gun?

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I'm happy to see some balance in the poll now, with (i think) 11 D / 8 R voting! (not everyone checked the tally box)  I think there are still a good number of people that might still vote, so I'll hold off on analysis, but once again, I am somewhat surprised at the results.

 

In general there appears to be more galvanization of people towards some kind of gun control, on both the left and right.  I think there is just disagreement on what would be the most effective.

 

I'm guessing if I did the exact same poll two weeks ago there might be some slightly different answers, but maybe not.

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