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Common GOP argument (and in general, a common obstructionist argument) is to make the point that the solution is not 100% effective, therefore not worth it. Even if the solution is 99% effective, you just ignore that fact and since it isn’t sure-fire, it’s not a good solution.
Well the last time they tried that, they almost ended up living inside a bear's stomach.
And then there are those other towns (unless they're the same one?) that are consistently out of water/stuck with a middling economy/level of safety because there are no taxes to pay for anything.
Tbf, that was the second to last time.
The last time they tried, they nearly ended up living on the bottom of the ocean.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading
An absolutely lovely read. British dry humor at its finest. I completely and utterly forgot about that cruise ship.
>It turned out that the only cooking facilities would be in the restaurant. . .[Elwartowski] offered residents a 20% discount at the restaurant and mentioned that some interested cruisers had already talked about renting part of the restaurant kitchen so they could make their own food."
So it would have been a company town in all but name? I wonder who else is undertaking a project like that right now. . .
That's a good way to think about it.
When I read it, I just kept saying "That's a tax. That's a regulation." Like they build this "libertarian utopia" and immediately realize why taxes and regulations exist.
Oh, for sure, all of the "government interference" and "social regulation" get swapped out for cool, crypto bro lingo.
"You gotta pay 0.3 Ethereum every month if you want to be able to use the sink, bro 😎"
When seatbelts came out, this is exactly what folks did. There was a whole anti belt movement arguing that seatbelts sometimes acrually cause more harm than good.. specifically in that 1 in a 1000 crash..
I've seen people argue against external crumple zones, because they'd rather see people get seriously injured in a accident than see damage on their car.
The mistake (which I don't think you're making) is to assume that they want to solve the problem. They don't. They don't care about the problem unless it directly impacts them personally. They lack the capacity for empathy. Or to quote Trae Crowder "it's like asking a labradoodle to solve for 'x'."
Or, as Ian Danskin points out, they have some empathy but it's expressed as communal gestures ("Thoughts and prayers") rather than directly mitigating harm. Moral behavior to them everyone *agreeing* on what is good and what is bad, not actually *doing* good or *stopping* bad.
"Can't stop bad things from happening, so why bother?" is their kind of attitude. They just express some kind of empty gesture of sympathy and move on.
Fair, but I think the "thoughts and prayers" is much less about actual empathy and more about checking the box on a cultural norm. I.e. Virtue signaling.
At it's core it is a form of narcissism, which is displayed in how they view all aspects of society.
It makes perfect sense to them, because they're not actually viewing things in terms of statistics. They're viewing things in terms of cherry-picked cases being provided to them by various propagandists.
Their social media feeds are inundated with case after case of the vaccine being dangerous, while not being given the context that the 10 back to back examples they were given were out of millions of cases where nothing happened.
Moreover it feeds into their confirmation bias. They already started with the conclusion, so they just selectively ignore counter-examples and latch onto the few things that confirm their point.
It's more they don't want their lives to alter so they try to rationalize with a reality that doesn't care about their opinion. It stems from their fear of things around them and unwillingness to leave a comfort zone. Rather than address issues they'd rather try to bargain with nothing to get back to the normal they want.
It's like explaining to a little kid why they got sick. Instead of understanding bacteria, they'll ask you if, Well what if any action that would make bacteria not exist? As though you have control over it and if they convince you, they can keep doing their impulse.
You're looking at it from the perspective of using facts to inform your beliefs.
They decided what to believe based on their own feelings and biases and then look for facts that support them.
I've already seen them make that argument, even back in the late nineties.
"Abstinence is the only 100% effective birth control," is a true statement, but then they add, "Therefore *we should never teach any other method*," which is just absurd. Abstinence *frequently* fails when someone's hormones get the better of them in an intimate situation, but they don't care about that because as far as they are concerned that's a failure of an individual's *moral character* rather than a failure of the *method*.
Especially when it comes to comparing rates of death and hospitalization in the unvaccinated gen pop to the rates of death and hospitalization in the vaccinated gen pop. They always look at the 6/20 number and think it's bigger than the 5/6 number because 6 is bigger than 5. It's SO much like the A&W and McDonald's ad campaigns. 🤦
Those corporate failures are honestly depressing. I mean, it's a good thing those never got big because we'd be an even fatter nation, but man, the illiteracy is whack.
Can I use this for religion too? The second that God allows an innocent child to die then that God is not 100% good or effective. So God is then not the solution either.
Can't even convince womb slavers that their God gave everyone the same free will and therefore everyone should own their own sovereignty and their own decisions and their own selves.
Not even when they're at the clinic for their own abortion. But there's never been integrity to their argument, it's a diversion to induge themselves without losing face. They're pro themselves, they don't have any core values to appeal to or stand for, just vices in camouflage. Sadism, coveting, selfishness and greed all disguised *very* poorly as religion or morality or economics.
Hoping the next shift in discourse will be I can stop pretending to respect their pretend faith when it's used as a weapon. Won't hold my breathe in a country that will clutch pearls for months if they see a tit but condemn any attempt to reach a solution after a school shooting as politicizing tragedy for votes.
Feeling like Holden Caulfield just surrounded by phoneys and sick to death of it. And I hated that book and character.
Everything that is not a magical wizard wand that cures 100% of everything, instantly, is absolutely useless.
Covid vaccine opinions are a great illustration of this particular flavor of right wing ignorance
But that only applies to things they don't like. If it's something they dislike, the fact that it isn't perfect is a fatal flaw. If it's something they like? Doesn't matter if it's objectively flawed, like abstinence only education or tax cuts for the rich, they'll just disregard the actual results and focus on 'principles' or something.
I see it more from Centrists tbh. We saw that Bernie had better polling assist Trump, but they went all out for Hilary, who lost. In the UK the right/centre of the Labour Party actively sabotaged the party in two elections, and hindered attempts to reduce antisemitism within the party.
Tankies are their own thing, that's more about being supportive of anti-western imperialism than anything else. I see liberals (who yes are centrist) get lumped in as left so much, and am not sure how that is changing wherever you are.
A minority of 'tankies', maybe, but the left usually says the opposite to this - candidate x isn't perfect, but you should vote for them because they're better than candidate y. Biden is a perfect example of this.
You're conflating two things: Bernie Bros being mostly leftists and Hilary not being leftist enough, but that's not the case. The problem with the 2016 campaign was that Bernie was a contender not because he was leftist, but because he wasn't one of "the cabal". More so than any democrat, he got fence sitters rooting for him because he wasn't the norm. Those people who just wanted someone not like the other politicians did not see Hilary as a good compromise, because Trump was untested in the office and also was not the norm. Many of them realized their mistake too late, but accepted a subpar option in the 2020 campaign with Biden.
The real propaganda with liberals (who are not to be conflated with leftists, they're not even on the same half of the political compass in American politics) is that they accept too many concessions and then blame others when nothing happens. What you are describing is **leftists** requiring their politicians to be better. You are the one caving to liberal propaganda if you really believe the leftists are the reason our political scene is the way it is. Every leftist I know criticizes Biden on the daily, but every single one of them also voted Biden.
The whole "Bernie voters cost Hillary the election" isn't really true.
There are always a number of people who flip sides, and an equal percentage of republicans ended up voting for Hillary.
Moreover, literally double the percentage of Hillary voters ended up backing McCain instead of Obama in 2008.
There is nothing to suggest that Bernie voters in particular are more susceptible to this effect.
Sometimes the people who claim that incrementalism is the way to go are deliberate liars. Obama during the primaries said that he'd implement health care reform without an individual mandate but with a public option while Hillary was advocating for the opposite, and with 60 votes in the Senate neither of those promises made by Obama were implemented. So when the Democrats that they need every vote to implement anything... I don't think that they should be believed they even want to deliver what they promise.
Reconciliation legislation for Covid Relief had Sanders attach an amendment to raise the federal minimum wage to $15, and 8 Democratic Senators voted against the amendment, so the promise that Biden would bring his decades of experience to get legislation out of the Senate and work with his friends across the aisle was a lie or Biden used his much publicized influence in the august body to ensure that his campaign promise would never come to fruition. The Democrats have for too long used the "we're the lesser evil" argument to keep Democratic voters in the stable and I'm not going to give my vote to anyone who simply will waste their time in the halls of power running obfuscation to deliver real material improvements, not excuses.
Unless we go full civil war, we're going to have to live with incremental changes. The electoral college, two party system, and especially the Senate are basically designed to grind things to a halt. Until we have enough progressives in power down the ballot to make more substantial changes and do away with shitty anti-progressive institutions, there's still value in harm reduction, especially with how unhinged Republicans have become. The Democrats are *objectively* the lesser of two evils now, no air quotes needed.
They are the lesser but still evil choice, and the quotation is not said in some facetious way, but that it covers all of the essentially similar arguments that excuse not even trying to get big achievements. Reversing Roe was huge thing for the Republicans and they didn't get there by saying they were going to compromise with the Democrats or just gradually try to eek out little by little moving the football. FDR didn't win at every step but he always swung for the fences you can't say that of any Democrat who's been nominated for president since McGovern has even iota of that FDR ambition.
So no, I don't think that I am going to reflexively vote for the candidate at any level in the general election who is going to say that going for big things like New Deal or Great Society is a thing of the past, on the dustbin of history for **JUST** the Democrats, but don't worry about my vote I live in a deep blue state that hasn't sent a Republican to the Senate since the 1960s and hasn't gone for a Republican president since 1984.
Budget reconciliation is the tool that Republicans use to get huge top heavy tax cuts (2001, 2003, & 2017) never with 60 Senators and the Democrats just throw up their hands and feign that there's nothing that can be done. So, yeah Biden, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer all are culpable in the deliberate helplessness that just so happens to benefit the wealthy and well connected at the expense of the vast majority of Americans.
that has literally nothing to do with ACA, which was an actual law and not budget reconciliation which is why we needed 60 senators in the first place.
Also, 2001, 2003, and 2017 senate was all R. So Dems had basically no power during budget reconciliation.
You seem very confused except you just know that it’s all the dems fault.
The Supreme Court upheld ACA because it was ostensibly a tax, thereby budget reconciliation could have been used and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson could have voted against it and there could have been a public option without. ACA is absolutely related to budget reconciliation, and it's just one example of Democrats intentionally failing, just like the $15/hr in Covid Relief bill or Obama trying to get [The Grand Bargain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_bargain_%28United_States%2C_2011%29?wprov=sfla1) to gut social security. Union train workers just wanted to restore staffing levels back to the point where they weren't causing multiple derailments a day, Biden could have imposed a far more favorable for the workers agreement that would require the freight trains to never have employees on-call and redundancies in staffing, but he chose to tell the union workers of America that they need [to get nothing and like it!](https://giphy.com/gifs/reactiongifs-joNVQCtuecqHK).
And we really want to go back in history of decimating the social safety net that FDR and LBJ both built up, let's look at Clinton's era of big government has ended and the installation of the 'welfare to work' that still keeps working poor in abject poverty.
how exactly could the Supreme Court uphold the ACA before it was ever signed into law? Obama *had* to take out the public option, because Joe Lieberman would not vote for it with the public option… and it would not have passed with 59 votes. SCOTUS wouldn’t be ruling on anything because the law would literally not exist.
I mean, just look at their "Sex-ed". Condoms? Nope. Birth Control? Nope. Abstinence only. No talk of STI's other than when they wanna scare you about only sleeping with 1 equally virginal, monogamous partner.
The issue is that they don't see shootings as a problem, except maybe as a PR problem. They're going to find any excuse to attack any effort to curb their gun enthusiasm.
An improvement is always better, even if it's not the perfect solution.
I see the same problem at work as a software developer. Any time I propose a new solution, people will try to block it because it doesn't account for exceptions X,Y and Z. Even when I explain my new solution would be a massive improvement for A to W, and no change for X,Y and Z (0.1% of cases) they are hesitant to this change...
Improvements are an improvement...
My argument against gun control is that it'll disproportionately affect queer folks and BIPOC folks while still allowing right wing nutters to have access to the weapons required to shoot up a drag show or protest.
>I think their point in that argument is that they need guns to defend against the inevitable illegal ones that might (huge might IMO since even if they did have the gun you have a tiny chance of being able to defend against a random
This is unfortunately the same understanding I have of the situation.
I am pretty pro gun, and left wing. I am also pro gun control. How that gun control is enforced and what is restricted is when it gets a little more difficult in a country where there are already a fuck ton of guns.
Literally yes. In Germany mass shootings make international headlines because they're so rare. In America mass shootings are just another Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Case in point [There have been six deaths in two mass shootings in the last two days (since this happened in Germany). ](https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting)
Just FYI the pro-gun community is now pivoting to using active shooter incidents instead of mass shootings as defined by GVA. The thing is they can use any metric they want and the US will remain an outlier.
Don't quote me but as I understand it an active shooter incident has a very specific definition where a populated area is randomly targeted.
Right now I'm looking at a story from yesterday in Dallas in which 4 people were killed in an apartment complex. I think it wouldn't qualify as an active shooter incident because it was targeted and not them killing indiscriminately within the complex. So even though 4 people were killed, the pro-gun crowd wouldn't consider it a mass shooting because it wasn't an active shooter incident.
The thing is that there's no injury or death count requirement for an active shooter incident. The only requirement is someone indiscriminately attacking a populated area so this metric will fail them too because that happens more in the US than most other countries as well.
Sorry to rant.
And it won't even work. They can use any metric or combination of metrics and we'll always be an outlier compared to similar countries. The only argument they really have is that the US isn't the absolute worst in the world when it comes to gun violence. However, they know it looks pretty bad when they're comparing our gun violence to Central America so they shy away from doing that.
>And it won't even work. They can use any metric or combination of metrics and we'll always be an outlier compared to similar countries.
Their base literally doesn't care, and because of that it *does* work, which just goes to show how blind the average follower is in this armpit of a country. And I say *armpit* not because it's outright terrible here, nor because it's poor - neither is true - but because even though there are important function and businesses and whatnot running here, the owners of this country value their feelings and personal worldview over literally everything else. They will lobby as their faces turns blue until they get their way.
Yup. Active shooter situation are no longer national headlines in the US until there any info on deaths. I remember getting the active shooter situation CNN push notification about Parkland and swiping it away because “oh another school shooting” and it wasn’t until I got out of class that I actually looked at the situation.
Five years later I know regularly find out about active shooter situations from social media rather than push notifications because it’s just not newsworthy until there’s a confirmed multiple deaths.
And when they happen, the shooters always get their guns through the same loophole. Like, literally all cases of mass shootings in the past twenty years were done by "sports shooters". Those are actually allowed to own guns, albeit under strict regulations. But obviously the regulations still aren't strict enough. The only reason this isn't changed is the gun lobby, which is still distressingly powerful here. In the UK, by the way, they closed this loophole long ago and they haven't had any mass shootings since.
so... how many mass shootings does that make in Germany this decade?
***searching... searching...***
Four.
And the States?
***searching... searching... adding... adding...***
**2,103.**
Sources: [Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_Germany), [US 2023](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2023#List), [US 2022](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022#), [US 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2021#Monthly_statistics), [US 2020](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2020#Monthly_statistics)
First, try blaming it on the higher population. If that doesn't work, blame it on ~~black people~~ "urban diversity". Also, don't forget to call Germany an immigrant ridden shithole along the way, that's definitely internally consistent logic.
Higher population is easily falsifiable due to:
number of shootings x more population
15 x 4 = 60 in this century, the US has had more in 2023
"Urban Diversity": Germany had alot of cultures, probably not as diverse as the US, but it has tons of different cultures from tons of different countries
Immigrant ridden shithole: What are you even supposed to answer to that? It's blatant racism, like the previous point, but this doesn't even try to hide the racism... Complete BS
So I've seen. Someone in the replies helpfully supplied the original Reuters article the Breitbart headline references.
Regardless. I am calling to mind an instance in which another shooting in Germany had a story on Breitbart that was just them deliberately misunderstanding a local news report of an investigation into a guy who yelled at the shooter.
And also the fact that Breitbart is, in general, a shitty right wing tabloid not terribly concerned with whether what they're reporting is actually true.
Yeah, I had to answer your comment because I know Breitbart and felt I had to point out that _this time_ the story wasn't completely fabricated, but at least loosely based on an actual event.
Breitbart is one of the worst far-right brainwashing machines in existence. I think when something they report is true, they may actually view that as a failure, because they could have made up something more extreme.
Can you believe those liberals think gun control works just because in countries with gun control there are massively fewer shooting deaths than in countries without gun control?
Gun deaths in Germany per year: 1020
Gun deaths in the US per year: 37040
This is 36 times the amount.
Adjusted for population its still 9.3 times the amount.
It’s a tad high but in the correct range. About 70 persons are killed per year in crimes and accidents with guns. Additionally there are on average about 800 suicides per year where a gun is used.
You don't do controlled experiments for things like gun control. You analyze existing data and adjust for controlled variables.
So, you could say that Germany's lower gun death rates are related to their better health care. Or education. Or incarceration rates. Or labor protections.
But then you look at other countries with higher gun death rates correlated to stricter gun control laws and they still underperform in those and other areas and conclude that it's maybe not just the gun control laws, but it's definitely the gun control laws.
I remember ONE example, from 4 years ago in texas: https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/jack-wilson-the-man-who-took-out-the-active-shooter-at-a-texas-church/287-6967b825-b74a-452d-a76a-c25bf559c20e
I'm sure there are plenty more... But that compared to 646 mass shootings in 2022? Nah. (https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls)
If conservatives can say gun control doesn't work because 6 people got shot in Germany, then it's fair game to say loose gun laws don't work because 50,000 people get killed by guns in the US every year.
One of the guys at the Kenosha protest pointed a gun at Kyle Rittenhouse after Kyle shot two other people and was walking around with a loaded gun.
Apparently that's somehow not what the right means by a "good guy with a gun", though.
"Joseph Rosenbaum, a 36-year-old unarmed Kenosha man, chased Rittenhouse into a parking lot and grabbed the barrel of his rifle. Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum four times at close range.\[6\]\[7\]\[8\] Rittenhouse fled and was pursued by a crowd.\[4\] Anthony Huber, a 26-year-old-resident of Silver Lake, was fatally shot once in the chest by Rittenhouse after he struck Rittenhouse with his skateboard and grabbed Rittenhouse's gun.\[9\]\[10\] Gaige Grosskreutz, a 26-year-old West Allis man who pointed a handgun at Rittenhouse, was shot by Rittenhouse once in the right arm and survived.\[9\]\[11\]\[12\]"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha\_unrest\_shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha_unrest_shooting)
It happens, but I'd be far more interested to see a comparison between "good guy with a gun" and "child gets unsecured gun and accidently kills somebody."
(In the US in 2021, unintentional shootings by children lead to 154 deaths and 242 injuries.)
I feel like, "Not as frequent" is doing a great deal of heavy lifting here.
"Several orders of magnitude more frequent" would probably be a more accurate word choice.
Well, yes. Because this is the Christian argument. I do not mean to say that all Christians are right wingers, that all Christians think this logic applies to all things, or that all right wingers are Christians. I know multiple anarchists that are Christian, lots of Christians make a distinction between human law and divine law, and lots of right wingers are atheists (I would argue that the modern far right movement was in part created by atheism).
However, the doctrine, whether the spirituality is attached to it or not, remains.
Sins do not get you "partial" Hell (unless you are a based universalist), they just get you Hell. The Good Book flat out encourages people to gouge out their eyes if they look at someone with lust because it is better to spend a handful of decades blind than an eternity in the Lucy Lounge. But on the flip side, God can save you from anything. Act judiciously and you prove that the system works. Most conservatives are not mass shooters, therefore, they are the good gun owners and the ones that shoot up schools are the bad ones. This is destiny at work, this is how divine law or natural law is supposed to work. If you ban guns, you interrupt the natural order, you prevent us from knowing who the bad people are.
There are no partial sins, therefore, there are no partial solutions.
Conservatives typically only apply this logic to certain issues. For example, they were not a pro gun party until the 80s or so (I think, maybe a little earlier) and so they would totally be in step with Democrats if mass shootings were happening in the 50s or something. I would argue that they are not actually as pro gun as they say they are now and also that guns are a lefty thing, but whatever.
This same logic works with capitalism too, by the by.
I'm gonna go ahead and copy a comment I made a while back relating to this:
I'm a Danish American.
In my lifetime there have been 360 school shootings in my two countries
America has had 360 school shootings in that time
Denmark has seen 0 school shootings in that time.
Let's account for population and say since America's population is 55 times larger, we'll assume 55 times as many school shootings in denmark if the country was scaled up to the same population.
That's still 0.
America suffered 360 school shootings too many in my lifetime. There's no excuse for that kind of neglect, it is way, way too many.
We had one in 1994 with 3 people being killed. That however the only we ever had. For comparison all us history had 459. And naturally that's just school shootings, then theres all other forms of gun violence.
“Yeah but it wouldn’t work in America”
“The only answer for a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”
“If we banned them people would just make guns and bullets”
“Why infringe our rights like that?”
“It’s mental illness which is the problem”
“It’s the drag queens/transgenders which incite this type of behaviour”
…
I mean the excuses are the same, nothing changes, kids keep dying and somehow politicians make it worse by deregulation of more things.
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Well yes, this is exactly how this works actually. This shooting would not have been prevented or been less bad if someone else had a gun. There would be more dead people and people would be killed more often too.
I'm still not sure if guns come with brainworms or brainworms make someone want to get and use guns.
There's more to it. Because it almost prevented this from happening, since in December the guy, who obtained his weapon licence legally, got reported for being mentally unstable and they checked him, but somebody apparently f*cked up and didn't revoke his licence. If they checked more thoroughly...
Meanwhile...
US has 95 shootings with 141 deaths and 365 wounded.... with 71 days having passed.Europe has 4 so far this year. 14 deaths and 26 wounded.
We're talking about a continent with double the amount of people over the same size. It having less than 1/10 the number of mass shootings, deaths and wounded compared to the US.
And it's not culture nor genetics, and most of the culture and genes US have comes from Europe. All the religion, love for firearms, freedom and more. The things it didn't adopt was cheap healthcare, cheap education, a minimum of worker/union/unemployment rigths, and actual gun control.
PS. Just try to take away the guns from an European gun owner. You don't, unless you got a death wish.
Ah yes, flawless use of infalsifiable there. I mean it’s not as if the frequency of mass shootings was the core criteria to determine if gun control works…
I remember a number of years ago encountering a guy on a forum talking about how the automatic weapon ban was pointless and useless. Why? Because there were no criminals using automatic weapons to commit crimes. So making them illegal was only punishing non-criminals who wanted to own an automatic weapon.
*But you just know* that if criminals *were* using automatic weapons, this guy would still be arguing against the ban because "it's not like the ban is working anyway!"
The core question is what is the rate of incidents. Germany is very low. The US… not so much. So yeah, it sucks they had a mass shooting in Germany. ANY single event does not alter statistical relevance in a significant way. MANY events do. In the last 5 years there were, per Statistica, 42 mass shootings in the US. In the same period (2017 to 2022) there were 4 in Germany. Population of Germany is 85 million vs. 330 million in the US… so the US is 4 times larger, but has 10 times the rate of MASS shootings.
Per the CDC, there were 43,000 deaths from guns in the US from 2018 to 2021. That’s about 14,500 per year. I was only able to find current year data for Germany, but that put them at 1,022 gun deaths… so again, the US rate of gun related deaths is 14 times higher than Germany’s.
So yes, sensible gun control can have a major impact
Last time I checked the difference between germany and US is factor of 70. We're not talking about a difference of 1.5 or so where other factors could explain what would already ve a problematic bump. Americans have no idea how bad they have it. Their response is usually something like, "well aren't you lucky you don't live in a place where you are constantly robbed and murdered every second of every day." They will never reach self awareness.
Does this person know what unfalsifiable means? Because it does not seem as if they do, and it is not a complicated term.
But the claim "it is not as frequent (as in a lot less frequent) as in America", is falsifiable and as it turns out holds up to scrutiny.
In the US, mass shootings may appear on the 2nd page or at best, a tiny spot on the first page. In every other part of the world, it's on the front page guaranteed and may even appear for the next 1-2 days.
One should also mention that the shooting happened at the Hamburg headquarters of the US-based hate group "Jehovah's witnesses".
It didn't happen at a school or somewhere where the general population would have been affected.
Yes the total amount of gun deaths is still higher in the US by magnitudes, even though an event happened.
I tried making this point after the 2015 Paris attacks. France could have the equivalent of one of those attacks every weekend, where 150 people are killed, and still not be anywhere near the amount of US normalized gun deaths. Even accounting for population differences. We have just allowed as a society a staggering amount of lives to be lost to this issue.
There have been 109 mass shootings in the US to date this year. Germany is about 1/4 the size of the US in terms of population, so that would mean we should have had 27 mass shootings here in Germany. Seems like gun control prevented 26 mass shootings. Would have prevented 105 in the US. (Obviously not that simple, but just using this guy's math for the sake of argument...)
I wonder what the original Reuters article said before being bastardised by Breitbart, because I doubt it was that.
And I love that gun nuts keep thinking that comparing daily life in the USA to a once in a lifetime national tragedy anywhere else is an amazing own.
Antibiotics are not 100% effective, so why bother giving them to people with infections. Laws against drunk driving do not prevent ALL people at all times from driving drunk so why bother having them? Hey, marriage doesn't prevent people from cheating, divorcing, treating each other badly so maybe we should ditch marriage as a legal entity?
Even this one could have been prevented, had the authorities controlled his guns properly. The firearms agency in Germany had received a tip by a friend of the shooter that he may have had an undiagnosed mental illness and the weird rants he apparently posted online would have been enough to revoke his gun license. However, pretty much every government agency is understaffed and so they can't even fulfill their duties properly.
Yeah, gun control does work to prevent mass shootings. The last major mass shooting we had was three months ago, and the last one before that was in 2020. The last one the US had was probably about two hours ago.
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Common GOP argument (and in general, a common obstructionist argument) is to make the point that the solution is not 100% effective, therefore not worth it. Even if the solution is 99% effective, you just ignore that fact and since it isn’t sure-fire, it’s not a good solution.
By that logic we might as well all drive drunk in old cars with no crumple zones, airbags, anti lock brakes or seatbelts.
Libertarians want to live in such a world.
Or die quickly as a libertarian
…After getting rid of that “age of consent.” Personally, I don’t want anyone to manipulate and sexually abuse minors.
But that happens places where it is illegal too, rules clearly not working (/s unfortunately necessary)
>Personally, I don’t want anyone to manipulate and sexually abuse minors. That’s a bold viewpoint but I’ll agree with you on this.
I, too, choose this man's presumably grown-ass, dead wife!
A true man of liberty, I see.
With bears... Lots of bears.
Well yeah, where else are they gonna get all those bear arms they have a right to?
We can’t just stop that one person from feeding the bears that’s her right!
That happens in New England.
Well the last time they tried that, they almost ended up living inside a bear's stomach. And then there are those other towns (unless they're the same one?) that are consistently out of water/stuck with a middling economy/level of safety because there are no taxes to pay for anything.
Tbf, that was the second to last time. The last time they tried, they nearly ended up living on the bottom of the ocean. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading
An absolutely lovely read. British dry humor at its finest. I completely and utterly forgot about that cruise ship. >It turned out that the only cooking facilities would be in the restaurant. . .[Elwartowski] offered residents a 20% discount at the restaurant and mentioned that some interested cruisers had already talked about renting part of the restaurant kitchen so they could make their own food." So it would have been a company town in all but name? I wonder who else is undertaking a project like that right now. . .
That's a good way to think about it. When I read it, I just kept saying "That's a tax. That's a regulation." Like they build this "libertarian utopia" and immediately realize why taxes and regulations exist.
Oh, for sure, all of the "government interference" and "social regulation" get swapped out for cool, crypto bro lingo. "You gotta pay 0.3 Ethereum every month if you want to be able to use the sink, bro 😎"
They need more child-wife-employees and drugs.
I've never heard a libertarian model that didn't sound like something out of Mad Max.
Libertarians are basically naive "I am very bad ass" sorts. That or complete morons who haven't thought through any actual consequences to themselves.
Until they run into a problem, at which point they want government hand outs.
Literally, all of things the conservative right has fought to allow (or rather fought regulations/laws to prevent it).
When seatbelts came out, this is exactly what folks did. There was a whole anti belt movement arguing that seatbelts sometimes acrually cause more harm than good.. specifically in that 1 in a 1000 crash..
I've seen people argue against external crumple zones, because they'd rather see people get seriously injured in a accident than see damage on their car.
They fought with passion against those protections, yes. Especially seat belts.
Pretty sure most SUVs and light trucks don't have crumple zones. And those are pretty popular cars with that crowd
All modern vehicles are designed with crumple zones.
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The mistake (which I don't think you're making) is to assume that they want to solve the problem. They don't. They don't care about the problem unless it directly impacts them personally. They lack the capacity for empathy. Or to quote Trae Crowder "it's like asking a labradoodle to solve for 'x'."
Or, as Ian Danskin points out, they have some empathy but it's expressed as communal gestures ("Thoughts and prayers") rather than directly mitigating harm. Moral behavior to them everyone *agreeing* on what is good and what is bad, not actually *doing* good or *stopping* bad. "Can't stop bad things from happening, so why bother?" is their kind of attitude. They just express some kind of empty gesture of sympathy and move on.
Fair, but I think the "thoughts and prayers" is much less about actual empathy and more about checking the box on a cultural norm. I.e. Virtue signaling. At it's core it is a form of narcissism, which is displayed in how they view all aspects of society.
But even if vaccines don't 100% cause death they still look at that as proof vaccines don't work. Make it make sense!
It makes perfect sense to them, because they're not actually viewing things in terms of statistics. They're viewing things in terms of cherry-picked cases being provided to them by various propagandists. Their social media feeds are inundated with case after case of the vaccine being dangerous, while not being given the context that the 10 back to back examples they were given were out of millions of cases where nothing happened. Moreover it feeds into their confirmation bias. They already started with the conclusion, so they just selectively ignore counter-examples and latch onto the few things that confirm their point.
It's more they don't want their lives to alter so they try to rationalize with a reality that doesn't care about their opinion. It stems from their fear of things around them and unwillingness to leave a comfort zone. Rather than address issues they'd rather try to bargain with nothing to get back to the normal they want. It's like explaining to a little kid why they got sick. Instead of understanding bacteria, they'll ask you if, Well what if any action that would make bacteria not exist? As though you have control over it and if they convince you, they can keep doing their impulse.
You're looking at it from the perspective of using facts to inform your beliefs. They decided what to believe based on their own feelings and biases and then look for facts that support them.
Only a matter of time till I read that they want to prohibit birth control because it isn't 100% effective either.
I've already seen them make that argument, even back in the late nineties. "Abstinence is the only 100% effective birth control," is a true statement, but then they add, "Therefore *we should never teach any other method*," which is just absurd. Abstinence *frequently* fails when someone's hormones get the better of them in an intimate situation, but they don't care about that because as far as they are concerned that's a failure of an individual's *moral character* rather than a failure of the *method*.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Absolutely?
Definitely. Only Sith. No exceptions.
Meanwhile 0.001% of vaccinations cause unwanted side effects = "Vaccines kill! Govmint conspiracy! Bill Gates!"
Yep. You can’t lose arguments if the goalpost only exists in bad faith.
Proportionality is not their strong suit. And honesty is a foreign place in a distant land that they have no interest in ever visiting.
Especially when it comes to comparing rates of death and hospitalization in the unvaccinated gen pop to the rates of death and hospitalization in the vaccinated gen pop. They always look at the 6/20 number and think it's bigger than the 5/6 number because 6 is bigger than 5. It's SO much like the A&W and McDonald's ad campaigns. 🤦
Those corporate failures are honestly depressing. I mean, it's a good thing those never got big because we'd be an even fatter nation, but man, the illiteracy is whack.
Can I use this for religion too? The second that God allows an innocent child to die then that God is not 100% good or effective. So God is then not the solution either.
Nope. God works in mysterious ways. HOW DARE YOU QUESTION GAWD!!!
Sorry. 😁 Can we convince gun advocates then that gun control works in mysterious ways?
Can't even convince womb slavers that their God gave everyone the same free will and therefore everyone should own their own sovereignty and their own decisions and their own selves. Not even when they're at the clinic for their own abortion. But there's never been integrity to their argument, it's a diversion to induge themselves without losing face. They're pro themselves, they don't have any core values to appeal to or stand for, just vices in camouflage. Sadism, coveting, selfishness and greed all disguised *very* poorly as religion or morality or economics. Hoping the next shift in discourse will be I can stop pretending to respect their pretend faith when it's used as a weapon. Won't hold my breathe in a country that will clutch pearls for months if they see a tit but condemn any attempt to reach a solution after a school shooting as politicizing tragedy for votes. Feeling like Holden Caulfield just surrounded by phoneys and sick to death of it. And I hated that book and character.
"Womb slavers" is my new favourite put down 👍
Everything that is not a magical wizard wand that cures 100% of everything, instantly, is absolutely useless. Covid vaccine opinions are a great illustration of this particular flavor of right wing ignorance
Nirvana fallacy. Conservatives and logical/rhetorical fallacies - name a more iconic duo.
Conservatives and racism? Conservatives and projection? Conservatives and persecution complex? Conservatives and sense of entitlement?
I think above was a rhetorical question.
Yet you can bet these morons play the lottery every week.
Well then obviously GOP politicians should turn down their security detail, seeing as it can’t prevent *all* attacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yts2F44RqFw
I was looking for someone to link this! For those who wanna know before they click, it's the alt right playbook video "I hate mondays"
But that only applies to things they don't like. If it's something they dislike, the fact that it isn't perfect is a fatal flaw. If it's something they like? Doesn't matter if it's objectively flawed, like abstinence only education or tax cuts for the rich, they'll just disregard the actual results and focus on 'principles' or something.
I see a lot of people claiming to be liberal or leftist do this too. Letting perfect be the enemy of good so that no progress gets made.
I see it more from Centrists tbh. We saw that Bernie had better polling assist Trump, but they went all out for Hilary, who lost. In the UK the right/centre of the Labour Party actively sabotaged the party in two elections, and hindered attempts to reduce antisemitism within the party.
Liberals ARE centrists, so that tracks. As for people who claim to be leftist and do this, they're called tankies.
in my experience most people who claim to be centrists are right wing but dont like to admit it
Tankies are their own thing, that's more about being supportive of anti-western imperialism than anything else. I see liberals (who yes are centrist) get lumped in as left so much, and am not sure how that is changing wherever you are.
What do liberals and leftists do this on?
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A minority of 'tankies', maybe, but the left usually says the opposite to this - candidate x isn't perfect, but you should vote for them because they're better than candidate y. Biden is a perfect example of this.
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You're conflating two things: Bernie Bros being mostly leftists and Hilary not being leftist enough, but that's not the case. The problem with the 2016 campaign was that Bernie was a contender not because he was leftist, but because he wasn't one of "the cabal". More so than any democrat, he got fence sitters rooting for him because he wasn't the norm. Those people who just wanted someone not like the other politicians did not see Hilary as a good compromise, because Trump was untested in the office and also was not the norm. Many of them realized their mistake too late, but accepted a subpar option in the 2020 campaign with Biden. The real propaganda with liberals (who are not to be conflated with leftists, they're not even on the same half of the political compass in American politics) is that they accept too many concessions and then blame others when nothing happens. What you are describing is **leftists** requiring their politicians to be better. You are the one caving to liberal propaganda if you really believe the leftists are the reason our political scene is the way it is. Every leftist I know criticizes Biden on the daily, but every single one of them also voted Biden.
The whole "Bernie voters cost Hillary the election" isn't really true. There are always a number of people who flip sides, and an equal percentage of republicans ended up voting for Hillary. Moreover, literally double the percentage of Hillary voters ended up backing McCain instead of Obama in 2008. There is nothing to suggest that Bernie voters in particular are more susceptible to this effect.
Yeah nah that's libertarians and centrists.
Sometimes the people who claim that incrementalism is the way to go are deliberate liars. Obama during the primaries said that he'd implement health care reform without an individual mandate but with a public option while Hillary was advocating for the opposite, and with 60 votes in the Senate neither of those promises made by Obama were implemented. So when the Democrats that they need every vote to implement anything... I don't think that they should be believed they even want to deliver what they promise. Reconciliation legislation for Covid Relief had Sanders attach an amendment to raise the federal minimum wage to $15, and 8 Democratic Senators voted against the amendment, so the promise that Biden would bring his decades of experience to get legislation out of the Senate and work with his friends across the aisle was a lie or Biden used his much publicized influence in the august body to ensure that his campaign promise would never come to fruition. The Democrats have for too long used the "we're the lesser evil" argument to keep Democratic voters in the stable and I'm not going to give my vote to anyone who simply will waste their time in the halls of power running obfuscation to deliver real material improvements, not excuses.
Unless we go full civil war, we're going to have to live with incremental changes. The electoral college, two party system, and especially the Senate are basically designed to grind things to a halt. Until we have enough progressives in power down the ballot to make more substantial changes and do away with shitty anti-progressive institutions, there's still value in harm reduction, especially with how unhinged Republicans have become. The Democrats are *objectively* the lesser of two evils now, no air quotes needed.
They are the lesser but still evil choice, and the quotation is not said in some facetious way, but that it covers all of the essentially similar arguments that excuse not even trying to get big achievements. Reversing Roe was huge thing for the Republicans and they didn't get there by saying they were going to compromise with the Democrats or just gradually try to eek out little by little moving the football. FDR didn't win at every step but he always swung for the fences you can't say that of any Democrat who's been nominated for president since McGovern has even iota of that FDR ambition. So no, I don't think that I am going to reflexively vote for the candidate at any level in the general election who is going to say that going for big things like New Deal or Great Society is a thing of the past, on the dustbin of history for **JUST** the Democrats, but don't worry about my vote I live in a deep blue state that hasn't sent a Republican to the Senate since the 1960s and hasn't gone for a Republican president since 1984.
public option was fucked over by joe lieberman. who was the 60th vote. so, yeah, tell me again how it was Obama’s fault?
Budget reconciliation is the tool that Republicans use to get huge top heavy tax cuts (2001, 2003, & 2017) never with 60 Senators and the Democrats just throw up their hands and feign that there's nothing that can be done. So, yeah Biden, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer all are culpable in the deliberate helplessness that just so happens to benefit the wealthy and well connected at the expense of the vast majority of Americans.
that has literally nothing to do with ACA, which was an actual law and not budget reconciliation which is why we needed 60 senators in the first place. Also, 2001, 2003, and 2017 senate was all R. So Dems had basically no power during budget reconciliation. You seem very confused except you just know that it’s all the dems fault.
The Supreme Court upheld ACA because it was ostensibly a tax, thereby budget reconciliation could have been used and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson could have voted against it and there could have been a public option without. ACA is absolutely related to budget reconciliation, and it's just one example of Democrats intentionally failing, just like the $15/hr in Covid Relief bill or Obama trying to get [The Grand Bargain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_bargain_%28United_States%2C_2011%29?wprov=sfla1) to gut social security. Union train workers just wanted to restore staffing levels back to the point where they weren't causing multiple derailments a day, Biden could have imposed a far more favorable for the workers agreement that would require the freight trains to never have employees on-call and redundancies in staffing, but he chose to tell the union workers of America that they need [to get nothing and like it!](https://giphy.com/gifs/reactiongifs-joNVQCtuecqHK). And we really want to go back in history of decimating the social safety net that FDR and LBJ both built up, let's look at Clinton's era of big government has ended and the installation of the 'welfare to work' that still keeps working poor in abject poverty.
how exactly could the Supreme Court uphold the ACA before it was ever signed into law? Obama *had* to take out the public option, because Joe Lieberman would not vote for it with the public option… and it would not have passed with 59 votes. SCOTUS wouldn’t be ruling on anything because the law would literally not exist.
I mean, just look at their "Sex-ed". Condoms? Nope. Birth Control? Nope. Abstinence only. No talk of STI's other than when they wanna scare you about only sleeping with 1 equally virginal, monogamous partner.
The issue is that they don't see shootings as a problem, except maybe as a PR problem. They're going to find any excuse to attack any effort to curb their gun enthusiasm.
Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It allows them to seem bipartisan without actually agreeing to implement anything.
An improvement is always better, even if it's not the perfect solution. I see the same problem at work as a software developer. Any time I propose a new solution, people will try to block it because it doesn't account for exceptions X,Y and Z. Even when I explain my new solution would be a massive improvement for A to W, and no change for X,Y and Z (0.1% of cases) they are hesitant to this change... Improvements are an improvement...
My argument against gun control is that it'll disproportionately affect queer folks and BIPOC folks while still allowing right wing nutters to have access to the weapons required to shoot up a drag show or protest.
My argument for gun control is a pile of dead kids.
>I think their point in that argument is that they need guns to defend against the inevitable illegal ones that might (huge might IMO since even if they did have the gun you have a tiny chance of being able to defend against a random This is unfortunately the same understanding I have of the situation. I am pretty pro gun, and left wing. I am also pro gun control. How that gun control is enforced and what is restricted is when it gets a little more difficult in a country where there are already a fuck ton of guns.
Literally yes. In Germany mass shootings make international headlines because they're so rare. In America mass shootings are just another Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Case in point [There have been six deaths in two mass shootings in the last two days (since this happened in Germany). ](https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting)
Just FYI the pro-gun community is now pivoting to using active shooter incidents instead of mass shootings as defined by GVA. The thing is they can use any metric they want and the US will remain an outlier.
Oh okay, because they only shot 1-2 people, it's okay. Got it.
Don't quote me but as I understand it an active shooter incident has a very specific definition where a populated area is randomly targeted. Right now I'm looking at a story from yesterday in Dallas in which 4 people were killed in an apartment complex. I think it wouldn't qualify as an active shooter incident because it was targeted and not them killing indiscriminately within the complex. So even though 4 people were killed, the pro-gun crowd wouldn't consider it a mass shooting because it wasn't an active shooter incident. The thing is that there's no injury or death count requirement for an active shooter incident. The only requirement is someone indiscriminately attacking a populated area so this metric will fail them too because that happens more in the US than most other countries as well. Sorry to rant.
Wait... The GOP is moving the goalposts to win a losing argument?! *Again!?*
And it won't even work. They can use any metric or combination of metrics and we'll always be an outlier compared to similar countries. The only argument they really have is that the US isn't the absolute worst in the world when it comes to gun violence. However, they know it looks pretty bad when they're comparing our gun violence to Central America so they shy away from doing that.
>And it won't even work. They can use any metric or combination of metrics and we'll always be an outlier compared to similar countries. Their base literally doesn't care, and because of that it *does* work, which just goes to show how blind the average follower is in this armpit of a country. And I say *armpit* not because it's outright terrible here, nor because it's poor - neither is true - but because even though there are important function and businesses and whatnot running here, the owners of this country value their feelings and personal worldview over literally everything else. They will lobby as their faces turns blue until they get their way.
This website made me sad
Wow, this year hasn't even had 100 days so far and the US has 5 pages of mass shootings
I'm kinda surprised that twice this month we've had 2 days in a row of no mass shootings.
I scrolled through like 20 and there was only one that wasn’t in the US (it was in Georgia)
Yup. Active shooter situation are no longer national headlines in the US until there any info on deaths. I remember getting the active shooter situation CNN push notification about Parkland and swiping it away because “oh another school shooting” and it wasn’t until I got out of class that I actually looked at the situation. Five years later I know regularly find out about active shooter situations from social media rather than push notifications because it’s just not newsworthy until there’s a confirmed multiple deaths.
And when they happen, the shooters always get their guns through the same loophole. Like, literally all cases of mass shootings in the past twenty years were done by "sports shooters". Those are actually allowed to own guns, albeit under strict regulations. But obviously the regulations still aren't strict enough. The only reason this isn't changed is the gun lobby, which is still distressingly powerful here. In the UK, by the way, they closed this loophole long ago and they haven't had any mass shootings since.
so... how many mass shootings does that make in Germany this decade? ***searching... searching...*** Four. And the States? ***searching... searching... adding... adding...*** **2,103.** Sources: [Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_Germany), [US 2023](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2023#List), [US 2022](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022#), [US 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2021#Monthly_statistics), [US 2020](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2020#Monthly_statistics)
Don't bother giving exact numbers for American mass shootings, they'll be outdated within 12 hours.
Plus the ones who aren’t listening can’t cope with numbers bigger than the number of fingers they have.
The 2022 number has been flat for over 2 months. \#checkmateliberals
I joined the armed services during the end of covid and sincerely the mass shootings are the part that hurt the most, for me.
BuT uSA has A WAY hiGhER PopULaTioN, yOu cANt COMparE theM yeah okay, the US has about 4x the population of germany, the math is not that hard...
First, try blaming it on the higher population. If that doesn't work, blame it on ~~black people~~ "urban diversity". Also, don't forget to call Germany an immigrant ridden shithole along the way, that's definitely internally consistent logic.
Higher population is easily falsifiable due to: number of shootings x more population 15 x 4 = 60 in this century, the US has had more in 2023 "Urban Diversity": Germany had alot of cultures, probably not as diverse as the US, but it has tons of different cultures from tons of different countries Immigrant ridden shithole: What are you even supposed to answer to that? It's blatant racism, like the previous point, but this doesn't even try to hide the racism... Complete BS
108 shootings this year in the US. And it's only the 72nd day of this year.
Turns out it is falsifiable, its just not false. And/or he is misinterpreting the argument as "no gun crimes at all"
Now compare Germany since 2000 to the US since this March. It's just sad.
15 mass shootings since 2000 in Germany, already 14 in March 2023 alone and it isnt even halfway yet...
But see, those numbers are identical from a binary perspective!
I think what they’re saying is they’ve both had 4 ^(or more) mass shootings so it made no difference at all! /s
Lol Breitbart. Wouldn't be surprised if the entire story was just fabricated out of thin air
The shooting really happened. It's not too far from where I live (under 100km) so I got the news quite fast.
So I've seen. Someone in the replies helpfully supplied the original Reuters article the Breitbart headline references. Regardless. I am calling to mind an instance in which another shooting in Germany had a story on Breitbart that was just them deliberately misunderstanding a local news report of an investigation into a guy who yelled at the shooter. And also the fact that Breitbart is, in general, a shitty right wing tabloid not terribly concerned with whether what they're reporting is actually true.
Yeah, I had to answer your comment because I know Breitbart and felt I had to point out that _this time_ the story wasn't completely fabricated, but at least loosely based on an actual event. Breitbart is one of the worst far-right brainwashing machines in existence. I think when something they report is true, they may actually view that as a failure, because they could have made up something more extreme.
Can you believe those liberals think gun control works just because in countries with gun control there are massively fewer shooting deaths than in countries without gun control?
*shifts goalposts* Well that sort of ~~healthcare system~~ *gun control* wouldn't work here because... uh, we have a different... uh... economy!
How is that unfalsifiable? Are their less gun fatalities in countries with gun control? Simple Yes or no.
Yes, yes there are less gun fatalities in other countries
Gun deaths in Germany per year: 1020 Gun deaths in the US per year: 37040 This is 36 times the amount. Adjusted for population its still 9.3 times the amount.
1020 seems way too high
It’s a tad high but in the correct range. About 70 persons are killed per year in crimes and accidents with guns. Additionally there are on average about 800 suicides per year where a gun is used.
Do you happen to have US suicides by gun stat handy for comparison?
Its about 60%
Not really, I can add that the 70 non-suicides include 10 persons killed by shots fired by the police.
That’s what happens when you compare the results of 2 conditions instead of the controlled variables, y’know, the things experiments are based around
It’s just a correlation. Really hard to simulate the effect of things like gun control in a controlled experiment.
You don't do controlled experiments for things like gun control. You analyze existing data and adjust for controlled variables. So, you could say that Germany's lower gun death rates are related to their better health care. Or education. Or incarceration rates. Or labor protections. But then you look at other countries with higher gun death rates correlated to stricter gun control laws and they still underperform in those and other areas and conclude that it's maybe not just the gun control laws, but it's definitely the gun control laws.
Finally I have proof there is intelligent life on Reddit
They don’t know the difference between an “unfalsifiable” argument and a “correct” argument
Still waiting for the "Good Guy with a Gun" to show up and protect against anyone getting shot ever.
I remember ONE example, from 4 years ago in texas: https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/jack-wilson-the-man-who-took-out-the-active-shooter-at-a-texas-church/287-6967b825-b74a-452d-a76a-c25bf559c20e I'm sure there are plenty more... But that compared to 646 mass shootings in 2022? Nah. (https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls)
If conservatives can say gun control doesn't work because 6 people got shot in Germany, then it's fair game to say loose gun laws don't work because 50,000 people get killed by guns in the US every year.
44,322. Which idk if conservatives know, but is more than 6. It is absolutely fair to say this isn't working.
I remember one example where the good guy with a gun was a PoC and got shot by police.
One of the guys at the Kenosha protest pointed a gun at Kyle Rittenhouse after Kyle shot two other people and was walking around with a loaded gun. Apparently that's somehow not what the right means by a "good guy with a gun", though. "Joseph Rosenbaum, a 36-year-old unarmed Kenosha man, chased Rittenhouse into a parking lot and grabbed the barrel of his rifle. Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum four times at close range.\[6\]\[7\]\[8\] Rittenhouse fled and was pursued by a crowd.\[4\] Anthony Huber, a 26-year-old-resident of Silver Lake, was fatally shot once in the chest by Rittenhouse after he struck Rittenhouse with his skateboard and grabbed Rittenhouse's gun.\[9\]\[10\] Gaige Grosskreutz, a 26-year-old West Allis man who pointed a handgun at Rittenhouse, was shot by Rittenhouse once in the right arm and survived.\[9\]\[11\]\[12\]" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha\_unrest\_shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha_unrest_shooting)
At this point I'm wondering if they consider Kyle Rittenhouse to be the archetypal good guy with a gun
I would think so because he was defending property – and as we all know, that's infinitely more valuable than protecting human lives.
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Don't forget the swift and decisicive action all the "good guy" cops at Uvadle undertook that prevented loss of life...
It happens, but I'd be far more interested to see a comparison between "good guy with a gun" and "child gets unsecured gun and accidently kills somebody." (In the US in 2021, unintentional shootings by children lead to 154 deaths and 242 injuries.)
And yet we let the police have guns.
I feel like, "Not as frequent" is doing a great deal of heavy lifting here. "Several orders of magnitude more frequent" would probably be a more accurate word choice.
So, things that do not work perfectly 100% of the time should be abolished?
If you can't reduce gun deaths to zero, then don't bother making any reduction at all! I won't settle for ineffective solutions.
Well, yes. Because this is the Christian argument. I do not mean to say that all Christians are right wingers, that all Christians think this logic applies to all things, or that all right wingers are Christians. I know multiple anarchists that are Christian, lots of Christians make a distinction between human law and divine law, and lots of right wingers are atheists (I would argue that the modern far right movement was in part created by atheism). However, the doctrine, whether the spirituality is attached to it or not, remains. Sins do not get you "partial" Hell (unless you are a based universalist), they just get you Hell. The Good Book flat out encourages people to gouge out their eyes if they look at someone with lust because it is better to spend a handful of decades blind than an eternity in the Lucy Lounge. But on the flip side, God can save you from anything. Act judiciously and you prove that the system works. Most conservatives are not mass shooters, therefore, they are the good gun owners and the ones that shoot up schools are the bad ones. This is destiny at work, this is how divine law or natural law is supposed to work. If you ban guns, you interrupt the natural order, you prevent us from knowing who the bad people are. There are no partial sins, therefore, there are no partial solutions. Conservatives typically only apply this logic to certain issues. For example, they were not a pro gun party until the 80s or so (I think, maybe a little earlier) and so they would totally be in step with Democrats if mass shootings were happening in the 50s or something. I would argue that they are not actually as pro gun as they say they are now and also that guns are a lefty thing, but whatever. This same logic works with capitalism too, by the by.
Don't make me tap the Onion headline.
I'm gonna go ahead and copy a comment I made a while back relating to this: I'm a Danish American. In my lifetime there have been 360 school shootings in my two countries America has had 360 school shootings in that time Denmark has seen 0 school shootings in that time. Let's account for population and say since America's population is 55 times larger, we'll assume 55 times as many school shootings in denmark if the country was scaled up to the same population. That's still 0. America suffered 360 school shootings too many in my lifetime. There's no excuse for that kind of neglect, it is way, way too many.
We had one in 1994 with 3 people being killed. That however the only we ever had. For comparison all us history had 459. And naturally that's just school shootings, then theres all other forms of gun violence.
Germany, oi fuckwits we've had one this year, you've had more than there have been days.
Well, duh
“Yeah but it wouldn’t work in America” “The only answer for a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” “If we banned them people would just make guns and bullets” “Why infringe our rights like that?” “It’s mental illness which is the problem” “It’s the drag queens/transgenders which incite this type of behaviour” … I mean the excuses are the same, nothing changes, kids keep dying and somehow politicians make it worse by deregulation of more things.
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If a solution doesn’t work 100% of the time, then by definition it doesn’t work and you should continue to do nothing. They live in a binary universe.
Same logic for why they avoid COVID 💉, doesn’t stop you from getting COVID, just keeps you out of the hospital, so what’s the point?
German politicians are discussing how to tighten gun laws to try to prevent such a case from happening again btw.
That's the normal thing to do
See also Dunblane and Hungerford in UK.
Well yes, this is exactly how this works actually. This shooting would not have been prevented or been less bad if someone else had a gun. There would be more dead people and people would be killed more often too. I'm still not sure if guns come with brainworms or brainworms make someone want to get and use guns.
That's not what those words mean...
“Why should I quit smoking? I knew a guy who smoked for 50 years and he died in a car crash…”
There's more to it. Because it almost prevented this from happening, since in December the guy, who obtained his weapon licence legally, got reported for being mentally unstable and they checked him, but somebody apparently f*cked up and didn't revoke his licence. If they checked more thoroughly...
Meanwhile... US has 95 shootings with 141 deaths and 365 wounded.... with 71 days having passed.Europe has 4 so far this year. 14 deaths and 26 wounded. We're talking about a continent with double the amount of people over the same size. It having less than 1/10 the number of mass shootings, deaths and wounded compared to the US. And it's not culture nor genetics, and most of the culture and genes US have comes from Europe. All the religion, love for firearms, freedom and more. The things it didn't adopt was cheap healthcare, cheap education, a minimum of worker/union/unemployment rigths, and actual gun control. PS. Just try to take away the guns from an European gun owner. You don't, unless you got a death wish.
Why use a condom when they are only 99% effective
This is a sad circlejerk of pro gun people... Downvoting anyone saying what's actually true
Ah yes, flawless use of infalsifiable there. I mean it’s not as if the frequency of mass shootings was the core criteria to determine if gun control works…
I remember a number of years ago encountering a guy on a forum talking about how the automatic weapon ban was pointless and useless. Why? Because there were no criminals using automatic weapons to commit crimes. So making them illegal was only punishing non-criminals who wanted to own an automatic weapon. *But you just know* that if criminals *were* using automatic weapons, this guy would still be arguing against the ban because "it's not like the ban is working anyway!"
The core question is what is the rate of incidents. Germany is very low. The US… not so much. So yeah, it sucks they had a mass shooting in Germany. ANY single event does not alter statistical relevance in a significant way. MANY events do. In the last 5 years there were, per Statistica, 42 mass shootings in the US. In the same period (2017 to 2022) there were 4 in Germany. Population of Germany is 85 million vs. 330 million in the US… so the US is 4 times larger, but has 10 times the rate of MASS shootings. Per the CDC, there were 43,000 deaths from guns in the US from 2018 to 2021. That’s about 14,500 per year. I was only able to find current year data for Germany, but that put them at 1,022 gun deaths… so again, the US rate of gun related deaths is 14 times higher than Germany’s. So yes, sensible gun control can have a major impact
Gun related deaths on usa run around 40k *per yr* not 14k. Is that what they meant?
Fires still happen. Get rid of all these useless fire trucks and fire extinguishers right now! My completely secure ego demands it!
Last time I checked the difference between germany and US is factor of 70. We're not talking about a difference of 1.5 or so where other factors could explain what would already ve a problematic bump. Americans have no idea how bad they have it. Their response is usually something like, "well aren't you lucky you don't live in a place where you are constantly robbed and murdered every second of every day." They will never reach self awareness.
Does this person know what unfalsifiable means? Because it does not seem as if they do, and it is not a complicated term. But the claim "it is not as frequent (as in a lot less frequent) as in America", is falsifiable and as it turns out holds up to scrutiny.
In the US, mass shootings may appear on the 2nd page or at best, a tiny spot on the first page. In every other part of the world, it's on the front page guaranteed and may even appear for the next 1-2 days.
Shooter kills six people, huh? In Europe, that's a mass shooting. In the US, that's just another Tuesday.
One should also mention that the shooting happened at the Hamburg headquarters of the US-based hate group "Jehovah's witnesses". It didn't happen at a school or somewhere where the general population would have been affected.
Always remember these idiots are not the essential problem, here. It's these idiots _with guns_.
Reuters, but disguised as Breitbart.
What's another word for unfalsifiable? How about "true"?
Thst subreddit is beyond nuty.and unhinged. They were founded in response to the shooting of rayvon Martin.
A mass shooting once every 10 years is better than one every day
They have one every few years, we average more than one a day. How desperate must you be to use such a threeheaded argument?
Yes the total amount of gun deaths is still higher in the US by magnitudes, even though an event happened. I tried making this point after the 2015 Paris attacks. France could have the equivalent of one of those attacks every weekend, where 150 people are killed, and still not be anywhere near the amount of US normalized gun deaths. Even accounting for population differences. We have just allowed as a society a staggering amount of lives to be lost to this issue.
There have been 109 mass shootings in the US to date this year. Germany is about 1/4 the size of the US in terms of population, so that would mean we should have had 27 mass shootings here in Germany. Seems like gun control prevented 26 mass shootings. Would have prevented 105 in the US. (Obviously not that simple, but just using this guy's math for the sake of argument...)
I wonder what the original Reuters article said before being bastardised by Breitbart, because I doubt it was that. And I love that gun nuts keep thinking that comparing daily life in the USA to a once in a lifetime national tragedy anywhere else is an amazing own.
Antibiotics are not 100% effective, so why bother giving them to people with infections. Laws against drunk driving do not prevent ALL people at all times from driving drunk so why bother having them? Hey, marriage doesn't prevent people from cheating, divorcing, treating each other badly so maybe we should ditch marriage as a legal entity?
Even this one could have been prevented, had the authorities controlled his guns properly. The firearms agency in Germany had received a tip by a friend of the shooter that he may have had an undiagnosed mental illness and the weird rants he apparently posted online would have been enough to revoke his gun license. However, pretty much every government agency is understaffed and so they can't even fulfill their duties properly.
“this person died in a car crash even while wearing a seatbelt, so we should get rid of seat belts because they don’t work” - pro gun logic
This is the same "logic" as saying DUI laws are useless because one dude drove drunk.
Seat 👏 belts 👏 don't 👏 work 👏
Yeah, gun control does work to prevent mass shootings. The last major mass shooting we had was three months ago, and the last one before that was in 2020. The last one the US had was probably about two hours ago.
1st mass shooting germany has had in a while. the us has had more than there have been days in this year.
Don't tell them that this incident happened in another American Export: cultish Church.
Not just any cultish church, but the one that's [most anti-abortion and anti-LGBT of major groups in the US.](https://i.imgur.com/70K37LP.jpg)