RE: Gun control, campaign control
I am a gun owner and not a member of the NRA and to bring a diffrent point of view to the conversation i would like to bring up a couple issues. i am sure they will not change your point of view but i would like to lay them out . I will try to keep it short.
When did mass shootings become a thing? I would say they actually became more prevolent in the mid 70's because of Deinstitutionalization and the more wide spread practice of using antipsychotic drugs that could be administered in the home. I am sure your eyes are rolling back in your head and can visualize me sitting here with my tinfoil cap on, but i read your whole article so please do me the same in return. I promise i am not totally insane. By allowing people with pshycological issues to roam around in the public instead of an institution, eventually they are going to have some sort of episode. Mix in the other factor of the antipsychotic drugs that people are administering to them selves under the quise that they will take them correctly or be able to deal with the side effects that often include thoughts of suicide then you make the situation worse. Most all of the mass shootings in my life have been commited by people on some sort of antipsychotic drugs.
Authorities droping the ball and failure to prosecute the rules that are already on the books. Part 1 - dropping the ball. In almost all of these mass shootingsyou can trace it back to someone screwing up before the incodent. The recent florida shooting highlighted how poorly the entire case was handled. The police was sent to his house on over 20 occasions for various violence calls , he was reported to the FBI on multiple occasions for writing on websites that he wanted to be a famous school shooter
part 2- Failure to prosecute the laws on the books. In a local case where i live there was a Female officer that was pregnant that was shot by a convicted felon in a traffic stop who should have never had a gun. he was later killed in a shoot out with the police. After the investigation was over they tracked the gun owner down to be his girlfriend who was a straw purchaser for him. This is suposed to be highly illegal. After it was all said and done she got sentenced to unsupervised probation.That is insane. ENFORCE THE LAWS WE ALREADY HAVE.
If you made it this far thank you very much for listening to my thoughts.
To answer the second point first, absolutely agreed that laws that go unenforced are useless. We do need to do a better job of enforcing the paltry laws we have now, in addition to whatever new ones happen.
However, that is stymied by current laws that restrict law enforcement's ability to do its job. For instance, ATF (The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) is effectively banned from... using computers. No kidding:
From: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/atf-nra-battle-guns/
Even enforcing the background checks is actively undermined.
So yeah, let's enforce the laws we already have. That means getting the NRA out of the way and letting law enforcement actually use 20th century tools (to say nothing of 21st century tools) to do its job. But that won't happen until the NRA's stranglehold on Congress is eliminated.
To your first point, my limited googling just now hasn't found a solid resource tracking the rise in mass shootings. The best I've found is from Mother Jones, here:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map/
which only goes back to the early 80s but does show a clear upward trend. However, half of those recorded have happened since 2006. So there's a definite recent-change, not something from the 70s.
I will completely agree that the dismantling of the public mental health system was a terrible thing. We as a country completely ignore mental health and when we do pay attention it's just to use it as a scapegoat, especially so we can write off white-males as "just a mentally disturbed lone wolf, nothing to see here". (Of course, if a Muslim shoots someone then it's clearly because he's Muslim. But that double-standard is a topic unto itself.)
That said, blaming that for the rise in mass shootings is not, as far as I'm aware, supported by the data. Most people with a mental illness are not a threat to anyone; those that are, are primarily a threat to themselves. Gun suicide I can totally see linked to mental health issues, and we absolutely need to take more steps there (both on the gun side and the mental health side). In short, citation needed.
I did a quick google search and this poped up. i skimed through it and it pretty much says what i was thinking so i will throw it out there.
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/madness-deinstitutionalization-murder
Well i believe we both laid out our sides pretty well true to our beliefs and we can let the readers so what they do and make up their minds. With that being said I hope you have a good day. Steem on my friend.