Smudgie Buggler posted:

Why would you make a claim that's so easy to falsify?

There were 53,023 total incidents of gun violence in the USA in 2015. 4,372 of those incidents involved cops in some way (shooting or getting shot at).

Of those incidents that involved cops, 1140 ended in a cop killing someone (actually not all of these are gun deaths, but the vast majority are). Of those 1140 killed by cops, 303 were black. This would indicate that about 1,162 of the 4,372 incidents of gun violence with cops involved also involved at least one black person who wasn't a cop.

In 2013, there were 5,723 murder victims in the United States, 2,491 of them black.

You are massively more likely as an American of any race to be shot by a fellow citizen than by a cop.

KING BONG posted:

Economic disaster (Recession)

Civil Rights (Police brutality, systemic racism, and riots)

Cold War 2.0 (Sort of)

Space Race ( I think North Korea just kicked that off. Their test launch wasn't as much about nuclear capabilities as it was of, "Hey, we can independently launch poo poo into space, let's hack the sun!"
The only thing we are missing is a World War. I'm hoping we dont get one and we kinda stick to this World World War Lite thing instead.

punk rebel ecks posted:

So far in this thread we have smaller district lines and back off of gun control as suggestions.

Anything else?

punk rebel ecks posted:

So far in this thread we have smaller district lines and back off of gun control as suggestions.

Anything else?

Inferior Third Season posted:

You are bad at statistics, because you fail to take into account that cops are a tiny fraction of the total population, but account for 1/5 of the shooting deaths.

Smudgie Buggler posted:

No, that's a perfectly valid observation, but it's a) not what Troika said, and b) insanely banal.

A person whose job it is to deal with violence and crime on behalf of the community is more likely to shoot someone than Joe Citizen. Wow, holy poo poo.

It didn't even occur to me that the original thesis was that trivial. I doubt there's a first world country in which that isn't true.

icantfindaname posted:

a long-term campaign of fighting for low level seats in local, state and municipal office. winning the presidency is great but ultimately to fix the country, somebody is going to have to go into the trenches and kick the tea partiers out of school boards and planning committees across the nation

Rent-A-Cop posted:

I'd actually be surprised if most western European police forces out-homiceded their populations.

Iceland's cops have killed what, like one person? Their total firearms murder rate can't be that high but I bet it's greater than one murder ever.

icantfindaname posted:

a long-term campaign of fighting for low level seats in local, state and municipal office. winning the presidency is great but ultimately to fix the country, somebody is going to have to go into the trenches and kick the tea partiers out of school boards and planning committees across the nation

NNick posted:

Guns really aren't the issue. There is no 'issue' Democrats can drop that would be a political gain. It would simply move people to vote the other side or not vote at all. Gun control is a policy tent that naturally aligns with Democrats because they have compassion. Democrats receive more money and support for supporting the issue than if they were to abandon it.

quote:

I think there is a much larger portion of potential voters who are turned off at a youngish age by how corporate both parties are. Democrats are seen as weak - because they capitulate on their values to 'win' elections - most recently on people running away from Obamacare.

The Democratic party is extremely elitist when it needs to be grass rooted funded and ran - particularly at the local level. Many small time mayors, city people, etc. think way too much of themselves. Worse, they seek funds from people (the wealthy) who by in large don't agree with their base. Focusing back on the base is definitely the path of least resistance, but it will have to come from top down because people don't trust the Democratic party.

Helsing posted:

This is why I think the real test of Sanders will be whether the coalition of activists he's helped to build will actually remain intact after he loses. Because the kind of changes they envision are going to take decades of struggle to even be plausible, not a single cathartic and exciting presidential campaign.

Jarmak posted:

The problem with the assault weapon stupidity is that not only does it antagonize gun owners it's plainly stupid policy.

Seriously it's like so loving dumb to anyone with the slightest knowledge of guns it actively discredits gun control in the same way "the internet is a series of tubes" discredited the anti net neutrality crowd.

Only Ted Stevens' analogy made way more sense.

gobbagool posted:

Making laws that are ignored, and everybody recognizes that they are ignored, like the NYS SAFE Act, does nothing to help the rule of law, but rather makes an entire class of otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals. Funny that the SAFE Act only resulted in a few thousand registered "assault weapons" out of the 1-2 million estimated to exist in NYS. To your point exactly, Andrew Cuomo attempted to outlaw magazines that held more than 7 bullets in the process, effectively rendering useless every single modern sporting rifle in the state. Now, did he do that out of ignorance, or malice? My guess is, the deep thinkers of the administration wanted to keep the existing limit of 10 rounds, but Cuomo, being half the politician his father was, with twice the mouth, arbitrarily declared 7 a better number than 10 and went on tv and had a Howard Dean-esque meltdown about killing deer. Yet here we are, 2+ years later, stuck with the stupid SAFE act that everybody is ignoring, but it's still on the books. He'll continue to get re-elected in NYS because he holds the correct opinions on BLM and Abortion, but that's as much because the Republican party barely exists here any more.

gobbagool posted:

Making laws that are ignored, and everybody recognizes that they are ignored, like the NYS SAFE Act, does nothing to help the rule of law, but rather makes an entire class of otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals. Funny that the SAFE Act only resulted in a few thousand registered "assault weapons" out of the 1-2 million estimated to exist in NYS. To your point exactly, Andrew Cuomo attempted to outlaw magazines that held more than 7 bullets in the process, effectively rendering useless every single modern sporting rifle in the state. Now, did he do that out of ignorance, or malice? My guess is, the deep thinkers of the administration wanted to keep the existing limit of 10 rounds, but Cuomo, being half the politician his father was, with twice the mouth, arbitrarily declared 7 a better number than 10 and went on tv and had a Howard Dean-esque meltdown about killing deer. Yet here we are, 2+ years later, stuck with the stupid SAFE act that everybody is ignoring, but it's still on the books. He'll continue to get re-elected in NYS because he holds the correct opinions on BLM and Abortion, but that's as much because the Republican party barely exists here any more.

Jarmak posted:

The worst part is that the mag size bans are actually the most sane of these policies. I can actually understand (though not necessarily agree) with wanting to ban civilian firearms with detachable box magazines. For 10 years we had federal legislation banning firearms on the grounds of things like bayonet lugs and flash suppressors.

Liquid Communism posted:

Yes, which was one of the most embarrassingly useless federal firearms restrictions ever, and was allowed to sunset with little fanfare because it accomplished nothing .

The AWB is absolutely not what you want to model any effective gun control policy off of, because it was purely about scary looking cosmetics.

Regarding 'box magazines', you do realize that you are appealing to an effective ban on 90% of pistols and rifles developed in the last century, yes? Other than 1800's era tube fed rifles, revolvers, most shotguns, and the rare few break action rifles, the vast majority of firearms use a detachable box magazine.

enraged_camel posted:

It would be even more fun if they carried fake flags with Arabic text on them.

Liquid Communism posted:

Yes, which was one of the most embarrassingly useless federal firearms restrictions ever, and was allowed to sunset with little fanfare because it accomplished nothing .

The AWB is absolutely not what you want to model any effective gun control policy off of, because it was purely about scary looking cosmetics.

Regarding 'box magazines', you do realize that you are appealing to an effective ban on 90% of pistols and rifles developed in the last century, yes? Other than 1800's era tube fed rifles, revolvers, most shotguns, and the rare few break action rifles, the vast majority of firearms use a detachable box magazine.

gobbagool posted:

I wonder when we'll see the first mass killing with a mosin, bayonet affixed. 100% SAFE Act legal!

Jarmak posted:

yes, I do, I wasn't advocating it, I was simply stating it at least targeted a feature that actually made sense from a "limit mass shooting capability" standpoint.

Though you're over stating a little bit in regards to rifles, that was really a WW2 era advancement not a 1800's era, there's a lot of rifles with fixed box magazines (granted many of those weapons were designed in the 1800s and then used up through WW2 so I guess that's a bit of a wash).

Liquid Communism posted:

At the end of the day, mass shootings are a terrible thing to base sweeping gun laws on in the first place. They are the rarest of firearms crimes, and are generally committed by perpetrators whose plans are only obvious in hindsight, and for whom only mass confiscation of all privately owned firearms would really stand as a preventative measure. Most of them have clean backgrounds and no reason to be denied on a background check, or obtain their weapons (as the Sandy Hook killer did) via murder and theft.

Liquid Communism posted:

At the end of the day, mass shootings are a terrible thing to base sweeping gun laws on in the first place. They are the rarest of firearms crimes, and are generally committed by perpetrators whose plans are only obvious in hindsight, and for whom only mass confiscation of all privately owned firearms would really stand as a preventative measure. Most of them have clean backgrounds and no reason to be denied on a background check, or obtain their weapons (as the Sandy Hook killer did) via murder and theft.

Jarmak posted:

I'm not sure why you're arguing with me

Liquid Communism posted:

D&D is like a bat signal for shitposters.

icantfindaname posted:

Helsing posted:

One of the main selling points of every subforum with active posters these days is the amount of it generates on the rest of the forums.

blowfish posted:

fixed

-Troika- posted:

Hasn't there been at least one mass shooting where the shooter rolled up with some kind of stupid 100 round mag he bought off the internet that promptly jammed?

rudatron posted:

So to add some class to this debate,I think it's important to remember that fun control it's also a single issue for some voters, so if the dems abandoned it, they could actually end up worse off if the number of pro-gun converts is less than the anti-gun demoralized.

These a reason political coalitions are the way they are, I mean ideally you'd be better off with a direct vote on each issue, but that has it's own problems.

Helsing posted:

The Democratic party cannot be realistically expected to lead the charge on this. Political parties, even powerful ones like the Democrats, don't have the capacity to engineer widespread social change.

This is why I think the real test of Sanders will be whether the coalition of activists he's helped to build will actually remain intact after he loses. Because the kind of changes they envision are going to take decades of struggle to even be plausible, not a single cathartic and exciting presidential campaign.

quote:

Bad at Losing

I expected Obama to be a better loser, specifically to be better at losing. There were a lot of items on the table, a lot of them weren’t going to happen, but it was important for the new future of liberalism that the Obama team lost them well. And that hasn’t happened.

By losing well, I mean losing in a way that builds a coalition, demonstrates to your allies that you are serious, takes a pound of flesh from your opponents and leaves them with the blame, and convinces those on the fence that it is an important issue for which you have the answers. Lose for the long run; lose in a way that leaves liberal institutions and infrastructure stronger, able to be deployed again at a later date.

Let’s take an example of a lose: immigration. The assimilation of Hispanics into a central part of the United States is a long-term project, one that will go on beyond this Congress and any bill it may have passed. Securing Hispanic votes is central to any theory of an emerging Democratic majority. And it was going to be possible that any bill wouldn’t pass, given how difficult immigration bills were to move in the Bush years.

So this should have been something that was lost well. Here’s my major memory of the Obama administration on immigration:

quote:

Whenever Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and other immigrant-rights advocates asked President Obama how a Democratic administration could preside over the greatest number of deportations in any two-year period in the nation’s history, Obama’s answer was always the same.

Deporting almost 800,000 illegal immigrants might antagonize some Democrats and Latino voters, Obama’s skeptical supporters said the president told them, but stepped-up enforcement was the only way to buy credibility with Republicans and generate bipartisan support for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.

On Saturday, that strategy was in ruins after Senate Democrats could muster only 55 votes in support of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act…

This is losing poorly. It makes major concessions without getting anything in return, conceding both pieces of flesh and the larger narrative to the other side. This unnecessarily splits those who support the Democrats on whether or not to support these actions. It doesn’t name the opponents of the effort to figure out ways of deploying pressure to change things. Without an obvious fight it’s not signaled that it was a priority. And the ultimate problem is that it doesn’t leave the coalition in better shape for the next battle.

This is true of many issues, ranging from unions fighting for the ability to unionize easier to the technology groups fighting for Net Neutrality. Why should these groups be happier with the past two years, even if they thought on day one that they wouldn’t win anything? How are either stronger for the next battle?

Candidate Obama’s chief blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, recently asked Why is Obama leaving the grass roots on the sidelines? by not engaging those on the unprecedented email list Obama was able to create. I’d go further and ask where are the newer and/or stronger liberal groups that have emerged in the past two years? So many seem demoralized and confused and few new ones seem to exist at all, which is disturbing given the volume of people Democrats had in Congress going into this session.

This is a problem regardless of whether or not you think Obama is a progressive boxed in by failed institutions, a centrist Democratic in awe of Rubinomics who accidently stumbled into the largest downturn since the Great Depression, or a political neophyte who never fought a battle and, as an old-school liberal told Bill Greider “”was rolled by the bankers, then he was rolled by the generals, then he was rolled by the Blue Dogs and other Democrats who had no interest in going along with what he proposed.” Regardless of where the Democrats want to go they need people and institutions to help them get there, and it’s not clear that we are any closer to getting those in place.

In my book, this matters. As Ziad Munson’s ethnography of the Pro-Life movement argued “mobilization occurs when people are drawn into activism through organizational and relational ties, not when they form strong beliefs about abortion.” People aren’t simply acting out unconscious political codes and rules like a processor, and people aren’t simply rational consumers maximizing a matrix of orthogonal political preferences by choosing among competing parties. Politics is a process, and a person’s political habitus is created by engagement in institutions based on their views that in turn change those views and push on the institutions themselves. If we want a dominate liberalism, institutions to engage people need to be grown and nurtured.

Helsing posted:

risk averse political class