Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
Obviously there's more gun suicides where there's more guns. And there seems to be a correlation between suicide rates and gun ownership, which makes sense, guns make suicide easy. But that usually isn't part of the rallying cry for gun control. It's just one part of the debate that comes off as disingenuous to me. Americans are concerned mostly about one particular type of gun violence - mass shootings. That's what sparks gun control debates. Not domestic violence, suicides, or gang violence. Which is kind of unfortunate because mass shootings are the type of gun violence/death that's probably least impacted by gun control. Most mass shooters could have bought weapons no matter what the background check required. (though some of them could have been slowed down some based on the types of weapons available, etc.)
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The loud voices that react to specific events seem to be concerned only about the specific events. But the people who care deeply about reducing gun violence in the US, and people who work hard on a daily basis, regardless of the latest incident, to try to raise awareness about gun violence in general - they really do care deeply about all of this.
Just read through this thread, and look at the calm and reasonable and well-reasoned arguments digamma makes at every opportunity, with mention of reasonable measures that could be taken to reduce the overall number of gun deaths in our country, I'm quite certain I've seen him reference the number of suicide deaths that could be prevented with reasonable gun control measure, with references to available data comparing states that have implemented laws at the state level compared to those that don't.
And then watch as, every time, he gets completely ignored as the loudest amongst the group goes back to shouting at each other about what could or couldn't have done to stop this one individual shooting today - when the actual argument is NEVER about one very very specific set of circumstances, but about gains that could very easily be made with reasonable change that almost everyone is generally in favor of outside of the NRA.
It gets old, and sad, and disheartening.