The actual reason that we lost on gun control.

[krispos42]

45. Part of the problem was that the legislation proposed...

...was the same oft-tried and oft-rejected idea. The gun-control side has been trying to get these same ideas implemented since the original federal laws were expiring in 2004.

Of course, the inconvenient fact is that Connecticut had an AWB in place that mirrored the now-expired federal one when Fuckwad's mom bought the rifle, and it was still in place when the slaughter occurred. The rifle used at Newtown was not an "assault weapon".

The general public may not be aware of this... I had a long conversation with my neighbor on Thursday, and she was not aware of this. And she's smart and politically involved. When I told her the definition of "assault weapon", her jaw dropped in surprise. And for the record, I used the definition, without prejudice, of the 1993 AWB.

For example, she did not know that an "assault weapon" could be a rifle, OR a shotgun, OR a pistol.


Universal background checks, if done properly, are an excellent idea. But waging a war on protruding pistol grips and magazine size under the auspices of preventing future spree killings... it's weak tea in the real world, however much a victory it would represent inside the Beltway.


The Republican Party is a far-right extremest party that has plentiful propaganda to convince people that the population is far more rightward than it actually is. Like you, I don't have an answer, but there are a few ideas that I think will break up the media and corporate machine so that the deafening chorus is defeated.

However, gun control is not one of them. It will not break up the big banks, it will not re-impose Glass-Stegall, it will not motivate the DoJ to start throwing bankers and traders in prison. It will not break up corporate monopolies. It will not break up media empires. It will not diminish the plutocrats and their hold on elections. It will not usher in instant-runoff voting or publicly financed elections. It will not rid us of black-box voting.

All of these issues are ones that the most strident pro-gun-control voices have failed to accomplish. Likely because of the reward of going along with the perceived inevitable-ness of the continued drift towards corporatism compared to the wrath of having millions of dollars being spend against you in a primary or a general election.

Facing ongoing disgust from the liberal base over these issues, they seem to have latched onto the gun issue for the 2014 campaign issue, and are vilifying the NRA with all the gusto that I wished would be focused on the big banks.

Even if, tomorrow, assault weapons were re-defined and re-banned and universal background checks were put into place, we would still have tens of millions of people in economic desperation, millions of children being failed by schools, millions in prison or on probation because of prison-industrial relationship with government, tens of thousands dying unnecessarily because of a broken health-care system.

And no statistically significant reduction in violent crime.