Tim Walz has said he’s “sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers” following the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, which left four dead.
Walz, who was named as Kamala Harris’ running mate in the race for the White House in August, spoke about the Wednesday (4 September) shooting at a campaign rally at the Highmark Amphitheater in Erie, Pennsylvania on Thursday.
He told his supporters: “We believe in the freedom to send our kids to school without being shot dead in the hall.”
“The news cycle moves on within a day,” he commented of the incident, adding that kids had returned to school feeling excited and “now we have four dead”.
This is the real takeaway. The Republicans want to do nothing, and the dems want a quick fix in gun control. Neither addresses the root of the problem. The world as a whole needs to invest more in social services, education, and public health. It should be where the majority of money goes really.
I’ve heard plenty of arguments from Dems for mental health care at various levels. Those things need to be funded, and who do you think keeps trying to defund government agencies and services for social/mental health issues? Usually not the Dems. The Dems have plenty of faults, including their lack of spines (in at least some cases), but the lack of funding for social services is not usually one of them.
They talk about it sometimes. But never do anything. And more importantly, it doesn’t even make Americans top ten. I don’t have much faith in politicians doing anything about it until it is in the top 5. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642887/inflation-immigration-rank-among-top-issue-concerns.aspx
What about these ones?
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/838/text
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/46/text
- https://www.bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/3/bennet-wyden-introduce-bill-to-increase-access-to-mental-and-behavioral-health-care-for-kids-seniors-and-low-income-americans
- https://mn.gov/governor/newsroom/press-releases/?id=1055-529893
This took 2 minutes of Googling, and I know that many bills have been proposed at the State level in many different states (including the last link, signed into law by Tim Walz), largely championed by Dems.
On the other hand some of those “quick fixes” are actually modernizing our gun laws to be like other countries that allow gun ownership. We should put all the work in but calling Universal Background Check and Red Flag quick fixes is like calling a highway lane expansion a quick fix. Yes we need a bus system, but the 2 lane road built in the 1950’s isn’t cutting it anymore either way.
One would think it would be a bipartisan idea that a kid with two parents who are addicts should receive some sort of government intervention.
Conservatives hear “sins of the father” and assume it means that children MUST suffer for what their parents did wrong
And yes, I’ve legitimately heard multiple CHRISTIAN conservatives use that line in that manner and it amazes me they didn’t realize they had it fucking backwards
We don’t have bipartisan ideas anymore. Both sides run on hate for their opponent. So they can’t be seen as working with them.
Not really. One side runs on hate. The other side is willing to cross the aisle but won’t compromise to the extreme level the other side demands. Look at the border bill. It was a fair bipartisan compromise, but it wasn’t far enough for the right.
Yes. We need full societal fixes. But gun control is part of that.
14 year olds have no business having unsupervised access to weapons. We need better storage laws. We need better red flag laws, national licensing laws so that everyone with a gun has to take a basic safety course, and we need universal background checks where ALL branches of law enforcement share info with each other.
Start there and you will significantly cut gun violence while we spin up the mental health infrastructure to deal with the rest. Which is going to take time. And money. Neither of which the current government wants to spend.
While I think all of those laws make good sense. I don’t think they will actually reduce gun violence much. Most of them people will just ignore like they do the advice to store guns better. The law will only punish people after the fact. And everyone else will always think that it will never happen to them.
And the system fails to protect people with straight up restraining orders against others. It won’t be able to do much with all the other things you mention.
So focusing on those, and of course never achieving them, is just the carrot on a stick the dems use to get the voters out. If they weren’t a political focus they would actually have a better chance of happening.
