OR…we could actually tackle the problem at it’s core and create meaningful changes that would curb the violence over all without even touching guns:
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Ending the War on Drugs
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Ending Qualified immunity
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Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
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Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren’t 30-40 kids for one teacher.
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Single Payer healthcare
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UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
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End for profit prisons
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Enforce the laws already on the books
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Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don’t turn to violence/gangs to survive.
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Increase the minimum wage
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Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don’t turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
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Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
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Banning Insider Trading for Congress
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Term limits
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Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
Very good, very nicely done list. Add to it strict gun control and it will be very close to perfect
Yea gun control isn’t solving shit. We don’t have a gun problem we have a society one…mexico has some of the strictest gun control out there but tons of deaths. Same with Brazil… it’s society.
Yeah, let us just fix all the society problems real quick. Then we only have to worry abour kids killing themselves and each other with random guns lying around, some suicides, and very occasional family feuds turning murders. But that all is a very reasonable price to pay, those are just people, who the fuck cares.
Or we could just touch guns instead of pretending we only need to completely fix every aspect of our society instead.
450+ million firearms. When they effectively banned firearms in Australia…60% was the turn in rate. You know how many millions will be left? Which the majority will stay in the crimals hands? And that’s if 60% handed them in. It’s not happening
270 million fewer firearms sounds great. Australia’s 60% turn in rate wasn’t 100% and it worked, and having fewer firearms in circulation means fewer firearm deaths and fewer firearms available to criminals and a continual reduction over time as new firearms aren’t added to the system.
Gun nuts just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks. Sometimes it’s that all those guns aren’t a problem, sometimes it’s that it’s too big a problem. You’re just tedious.
I wish you the best of luck in addressing that symptom in a society where such bans aren’t commonly-supported, where the law isn’t conducive to such, where there’s such an incredible established base of ownership, and where “fuck the government and/or police” is the prevailing theme.
By all means, when you’ve discovered some way of meaningfully and feaaibly surmounting these, share with the class. You’ll be the first to have done so.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will focus on the root issues - the pressures toward violence - rather than only caring someone decided to use a rifle to when finally pushed to the brink.
Ending the War on Drugs
Sure. So do you mean fully legalizing all drugs for recreational use? Or just not cracking down on pot? Or something in between? I’d want to know exactly what you mean by this one, in detail.
Ending Qualified immunity
Disagree. Dramatically limit Qualified Immunity, but don’t eliminate it entirely. Sometimes violating a law is required in the process of enforcing other laws. So, only extend qualified immunity as far as the officer in question can prove to a jury that the officer’s violation was actually required for law enforcement.
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Since schools are run at the state level, the simplest way to do this would be to pool all the tax revenue ear marked for schools at the state level and distribute based on student population. Something like $X + $Y/student, as some costs are basically fixed but others directly scale with student body size.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren’t 30-40 kids for one teacher.
The previous item would probably directly fix this for the worst outliers.
Single Payer healthcare
Obvious. Sure, it’ll raise everyone’s taxes but well implemented it would raise everyone’s taxes by less than what they are already paying for insurance + copays. The rough part would be when it first happens, as a bunch of people who have been avoiding medical care that wasn’t going to immediately kill them for financial reasons flood the system in the first months under it.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
This is one of those things where it, something very like it, or some drastic change in the entire economic system is going to happen, and it would probably be better for everyone if it was well thought out. I’m personally fond of the idea of UBI + single payer healthcare, removing most other forms of public assistance aside from a few narrowly targeted programs (single payer eliminates most of your health care government programs, UBI replaces at least SNAP and TANF, etc). Then, eliminate the minimum wage, replacing it with a maximium wage (essentially the total compensation of the highest compensated employee must be no more than X% of the median employee or Y% of the lowest paid employee, whichever is lower - the C-suite can’t get a raise without the workers getting one too).
End for profit prisons
Another obvious one.
Enforce the laws already on the books
Your literal first item is specifically about not enforcing laws already on the books, and the second is about limiting what an officer can do to enforce the laws already on the books. I assume you have specific laws in mind with this item?
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don’t turn to violence/gangs to survive.
UBI/single payer would already solve this.
Increase the minimum wage
This is very much a choose one or the other sort of thing - do you want UBI or a high minimum wage? Because they solve the same problem, and the UBI solution also doesn’t indirectly harm people who were making more than the new minimum wage but not dramatically more.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
This should have been done 40 years ago. Roe was a shoddy decision from a legal standpoint. While I’m pro-choice from a policy standpoint, Roe was never more than a band-aid and should never have been treated as more than a band-aid.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Another obvious one. Though that would make them easier to bribe, so that might require additional enforcement. Maybe make them keep their assets in a blind trust while holding office.
Term limits
For who? Everyone? Just Senate? Just the House? All of Congress? SCOTUS? How many terms? This is one of those things where a lot of details are sorely needed.
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
Sure. Either Ranked Choice, Preference, or something else that approximates the Condorcet winner.
This is all pretty typical progressive policy positions but out of the entire list only 2-3 are actually about gun violence. No amount of term limits, ranked choice voting, or cracking down on Congressional insider trading is going to impact gun violence, for example.
I started reading your comment expecting to disagree with a lot of what you said but ended up doing the opposite. You seem like an intelligent person. Maximum wage in particular is something I’ve never heard of but seems good in theory. I could see this being easily circumvented by corporations just registering their different departments as their own businesses though.
That’s just a question of implementation. You could easily do something like count wholly owned subsidiaries as part of the parent corporation.
The whole point of a maximum wage is that it essentially creates a curve for compensation - the more the top gets paid, the more at least half the employees have to be paid and the more the bottom employees have to be paid.
This means that huge corps like Amazon and WalMart have to pay substantially more to be able to pay what the executives they want will demand but small businesses operating on thin margins can get away with lower pay. Which means it simultaneously promotes small business and does a measure of wealth redistribution from the obscenely wealthy.
Also UBI and minimum wage solve the same problem and UBI does it better so it makes sense to go with UBI and drop minimum wage.
Ok… what do you tell the parents of children that will get killed in the meantime? Because your solution is a good way to solve the issue in 30 years.
Yeah, let’s give guns to kids because clearly the solution to gun violence is more guns!
Will they? How likely is a parent to actually have to have that discussion?
None of this changes the mentally ills right to go shoot up a school,office,building or anything.
They do, however, provide the necessary institutions to reduce pressures and otherwise provide de-escalation options preventing those individuals from wanting to “go shoot up a school,office,building or anything”.
That would be the entire point to addressing the actual underlying issues.
