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Trump needs to tread carefully on this gun control stuff he's talking about this morning. Background checks are one thing I support. The slope becomes dangerous when we're talking red flag/ERPO laws.
The problem with all the red flag laws I've seen, is they are written sloppily, which leaves them rife with abuse. Due process must be protected. Evidence has to be involved. You can't just have people essentially SWAT'ing each other to get guns taken away for whatever reason.
I also do not like the throwing around of "all mentally ill people" not being able to have 2nd Amendment rights. "Mental illness" is a fuckhuge spectrum of disorders & issues, varying from person to person.
We've seen under Obama an effort by gun control activists & Dems to disarm our Veterans because of PTSD diagnoses. That's absurd. PTSD doesn't always make someone a danger. Its symptoms vary dramatically from person to person.
All of us want these horrific crimes to stop, for violent crime in general to be reduced, to save lives, but how we go about it cannot be done recklessly. I say this as a survivor of gun-involved domestic battery & who lost 4 family members to a massacre.
The 2nd Amendment & public safety are not mutually exclusive. We can have both. We need to address mental health. We need to combat gang & drug violence. We need to target the root causes of WHY someone chooses to engage in violence.
We need to harden security at soft targets like shopping centers, schools, colleges & hospitals. Slapping a 'no weapons' sign on the entrance does not save lives. Denying carry permits & disarming CCW'rs does not save lives.
This past week, gun control advocates have demanded the return of the 'assault weapons' ban. They believe that outlawing scary looking rifles will end gun violence. It won't even put a dent in it. This is a half-assed, lazy & ignorant solution.
Under the 1994-2004 AWB, it had no effect whatsoever on the murder rate, nor the violent crime rate in our country. Guns like the AR-15 are used incredibly rarely in crimes, resulting in less than 150 deaths a year, out of 39,000 (2017).
60% of the death by gun is suicide. You won't stop suicidal people by taking guns. ERPO's target suicidal people won't keep them alive. They need emergency help. We need more inpatient treatment hospitals & ER-style mental health clinics.
About a dozen cities in the United States make up approx. 40% of the murders by gun. A large portion of this is gang & drug related violence. A focus on combating those two can further cut down on gun violence. Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, DC, etc
Every time one of these tragedies happen, we get an obsessed focus on mass shootings & ONLY mass shootings. They're so horrific, of course, because of so many killed in such a quick time period. But in the big picture, its a tiny fraction of the carnage.
Time & again, everyone just kinda shrugs at the day to day pointless death & suffering that never gets addressed. If we truly want to cut down the numbers of victims, we must also focus on suicide (mental health) & inner city violence (gangs/drugs).
And addressing these issues will have an even larger domino effect impact on our society, because so much of this is connected to other issues. Guns are used in only half of suicides. There's a whole 45,000 people a year who do it. They matter too.
And by fixing our catastrophically broken mental health system, we can domino effect fix the substance abuse crisis that kills about another 150,000 Americans every year (drug ODs and alcohol-related deaths).
Further it will cut down on drug & alcohol-related homicides. Substance abuse plays a large part in violent crime, homelessness, burglaries & domestic violence. Changing our justice system & how we penalize addiction can be changed too. Get them mandatory inpatient rehab instead.
This type of focus on the root causes can not only have an impact on gun violence, but so much more. Banning spooky rifles does fuck all. We all want a solution but we've yet to try actually addressing these issues at their core.
