NorCalAthlete

You say you want to abolish ICE. Are you aware of how significant a role they play in fighting human trafficking?

We spend far more on healthcare than we do on the military already. Why is it that every time someone wants to talk about bloated budgets they target the military, but ignore that we already spend more on the very things they want increases for?

https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/total_spending_pie%2C__2015_enacted.png

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324

Care to comment on The School Shootings That Weren’t by NPR?

Out of all “gun violence”, the vast majority every year - roughly 2/3 - are suicides. That leaves around 12k homicides.

That includes police involved shootings, by the way.

It’s not even close to the top 10 causes of death in the US - even if you include suicides.

Bloomberg (the former mayor) and other billionaires throw tens of millions of dollars to fund gun control groups. His spending alone utterly dwarfs the NRA’s spending, and he is on record stating if they start to catch up he’ll just dump more at it to outspend them. As a billionaire, he has the ability to do this, and at least he’s putting his money where his mouth is.

But make no mistake - the vast majority of gun control efforts are every bit profiteering as much as they accuse gun manufacturers of doing. “Common sense” legislations with holes so big John Madden could fill an hours long podcast with commentary on. Blatantly unconstitutional measures that fall afoul of multiple amendments, let alone the 2nd, that they KNOW will get struck down in court - and they’ll leave the people involved hung out to dry, like when they lost the Sandy Hook suit.

All of this is spurred on by media like the OP here, who stir, stir, stir the fear pot.

Don’t get me wrong - I do have sympathy for people who have had to live through events like this. I was stationed at Fort Hood in 2009. That one happened right across the parking lot from my company’s building, and I had friends in there who barely escaped. There is a lot of raw emotion surrounding gun violence. But we cannot make progress on addressing root causes if we are constantly whipped into a hyperbolic frenzy about the gun itself. There are over 600 million guns in the US, and that’s just the ones we can track. Pandora’s box was opened and there’s no going back from it. We need to find ways to work around it and live with them and move forward together, and those solutions do not include getting rid of all the guns. That’s an idealistic pipe dream.

Maybe if we didn’t hold guns up on this pedestal of being some super powered mythical instant win command respect or fear thing, it wouldn’t be the first thing disturbed and deranged people turn to when they lash out. Maybe if we looked at why they felt disenfranchised in the first place and took the hard steps to assess and address those issues (commonly poverty / economic opportunity, no social safety net, etc) we would make more progress.

Roughly 6,000 veterans per year commit suicide, with half (a little over 3,000) choosing a firearm.

Roughly 500 people a year are killed with an “assault weapon”/“AR15-style” rifle.

So by simply addressing veteran issues you’d do more to save lives than an assault weapon ban.

That’s not a sexy fundraising issue though. Bloomberg isn’t shelling out tens of millions and making big public statements about funding veteran support programs or job retraining (though he has enough philanthropic efforts I’m sure he’s got some token thing going around that).

Gonna cut myself off here because this is getting long but yeah. It’s frustrating to see posts like this AMA that are designed to just rile people up enough to pass some other BS nonsensical gun control legislation that won’t budge the needle on violent deaths and will be struck down in a few years anyway.

Question regarding this as I’m unfamiliar with Minneapolis / St Paul’s history with regard to police hiring - I know the common argument in other areas is that it’s difficult to recruit from the locals if the locals don’t want to be cops or can’t qualify (background check fails, psych test, etc). Did that play into the previous requirement being struck down?

Follow up question on that - have there been discussions on reconciling potential conflict between wanting more stringent hiring practices for better quality police vs systemic racism and abuse using said hiring practices as gatekeeper devices to continue discrimination?