Trump had a similar idea about banning Muslims from entering the country “until we figure out what’s going on.” Should we do something similar? Every time there’s a radical Islamic terrorist incident, no entry of Muslims for a period of time and shut down every mosque. My hunch is that imams would be a hell of a lot more careful about who they were preaching to and what they were preaching if they risked being padlocked for a month after a terrorist attack.

And before anyone offers the objection that freedom of religion is protected by the Constitution, so is the right to keep and bear arms.

@1 If it applies even when a Christian terrorist commits an act, sure. As long as it’s applied to all religions, it’s not discrimination. But the Christians would never allow their churches or immigration to be restricted just because one of their congregants decided to commit an act of terrorism.

An ancillary yet equally as important issue that must be addressed is the strengthening and enforcement of campaign finance laws as well as the repeal of Citizens United. Unfortunately, I probably have a better chance at winning the Powerball. The NRA’s (and other big donors’ ability to funnel money into politicians’ coffers must be brought under control.

@2, ok. How about the next time, similar to many of these mass shootings and terrorist incidents, law enforcement gets a report of a dangerous person and doesn't act on it or concludes there's no basis to act on it. Can we imprison people without probable cause for a month afterwards?

Or how about there's an outbreak of a lethal sexually-transmitted disease among a subset of the population that engages in particular sexual practices. Can we forcibly quarantine them for a month? It's been done in some countries.

I've been wondering why these kids? Why now after so many shootings? What makes this time different? Yet this time does feel different. Like something really is finally going to happen to address this issue.

@6: it felt that way after Newtown, too. all those righteous grieving parents. but the @1, 2, 4, 5s of the world are always with us, quibbling, poking holes in half-formed ideas, throwing out red herrings and slippery slopes.

"it's WAY too late for Gun Control in America" -Steve Earle, Live at the BBC, 1988.

I like it.

Of course, it would be preferable to convince the gun-buyers that having more guns around means that they, personally, are in more danger. Because they really seem to have some Wild West fantasies about their ability to pick off bad guys without getting hurt. But somehow it's hard to convince the idiots that they're being idiots,

So yeah this is the right direction.

Black Lives Matter was going to change everything too. How often do you see people talking about them anymore?

You have to give the NRA credit for one thing. Its members keep showing up, reliably, and they stay on message. But staying focused without anything spectacular happening lately, especially when there's something more photogenic happening right now, is not something the left has a good track record on.

Gun nuts accuse "leftists" of trying to ban all guns every frigging day of the damn week, month and year.

It now makes sense since we apparently have a gun massacre every day of the damn year.

They see the carnage and don't give shot about the dead, and fear the grownups sensibly are going to restrict their play with penis-substitute bang-bang toys.

#6: I suspect a big part of the reason it's not going away this time is because the (largely white, affluent) students themselves are talking about, including directly on the Twitter to Trump himself. It gives the media something to report on—they certainly can't talk too much about dead kindergarteners. But spunky teenagers forcefully, adroitly hitting Trump where he lives? That they can cover.

It's so difficult because there's truth on both sides. It's true that gun could have laid out on the street perfectly safe until somebody picks it up and uses for ill effect.

It's true the kid couldn't have done the damage he did without the gun.

It's true the bad guys don't respect whatever law is passed.

It's true we have to find a solution.

Honest to jebus I don't know the answer. I feel the tide turning however. Time will tell.

I'd really just like gun advocates to admit that they're ok with shootings. Enough with the fake "thoughts and prayers" bullshit. Just come out and say a few thousand dead every year is worth it.

Kind of like when republicans finally came out and said openly that health care is a privilege for the elites. That the wealthy can have whatever they want and the poor can go fuck themselves and die in the street.

Lets take a moment to honor the sacrifice of our brave schoolchildren who laid down their lives to protect our right to have guns.

I was raised in the thick of gun culture, and I can tell you the usual stuff isn't working and a change in tactics is needed.

The NRA, et al does a great job of creating a steady drumbeat against any gun laws. They have magazines, a TV channel, and lackeys on talk radio & Fox. The message? Guns are freedom incarnate, you are going to be the hero that stops crime someday (but only if you are armed), and agreeing to even the smallest of sensible gun laws is the first step towards a total confiscation and the inevitable communist-Nazi regime that will follow, because only your private arsenal is what has kept it from happening already.

Any sort of competency test is viewed as an outright ban, as the requirements would (in their mind) be made so difficult that no one would qualify. Any sort of reasonable tracking of firearms is rejected, as it would only be a matter of time before "the government would use any list to go and confiscate all firearms". Even background checks are rejected on the basis of "because then the government would know what you've got", and the few background check laws we do have only got passed when a clause was added to force the deletion of the record, and make having a database of that info a felony. 

It's not an understatement to say that many gun owners obsessively treat their guns like Gollum & his precious... constantly living in fear that some government liberal is going to steal them away.

In that light it makes sense how so many could believe the Alex Jones Infowars conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was a liberal plot, using dummies and actors, to try and make guns look bad so they can then ban them.

So what to do? Attack the culture itself with our own steady drumbeat of messages. Create an ad campaign like the anti-smoking ones. About 12,000 people are murdered by guns a year (very few of them are from mass shootings with assault rifles, btw), and thousands more are from suicides. About 40 toddlers kill themselves or another with a gun (with even more resulting in just injuries). A weekly update on all those deaths, plus a constant refrain of fact-based refuting of the gun lies (such as proving that guns are *not* used to prevent crime a million times a year.... every gun owner believes it because the NRA tells it to them several times a month).

We've been upset since before Columbine, but with no movement at all. Instead of outrage at this mass shooting, then waiting a few more months until getting outraged at the next, let's start the slow drip, drip, drip towards change. Remember, a river carved the Grand Canyon, but it didn't do it in a month.

@6 It's b/c the young generation of teen and college aged kids (the 14-24 you, not millennials who are older) have been increasingly politically active and even radicalized in the last year to year and a half. Even the ones who are not themselves political will be aware of what is going on and have peers who are. Of course we're talking about a small percentage of them- most people aren't ever engaged and same is true for any generation. Also, their politics are contentious- just as many are far right reactionaries which is always scary when it appears en mass in a youth cohort. But yes, there is SOMETHING happening and it is with the kids and it is growing very fast, in a way that only youth culture can grow. IMO, we are living in a time in which the world is going to be reordered, for better or for worse, and the engaged kids today know that. It's terrifying and exciting at the same time.

*That should say '14-24 y/o' not 'you'- I have no idea how old you are! :)

@11 actually DYI gun builders do go through background checks to purchase the "lower" piece of a gun. To Dan Savage, Washington has closed the gun show loophole with initiative 594. Bump stocks will probably be banned with SB5992. Definitions for forfeiture of weapons associated with domestic violence have been expanded. Family members can petition the court for forfeiture of firearms for other family members. Protection orders can include firearm forfeitures. The key term per the US Supreme Court is "reasonable restrictions". With the 50/50 delegate split in Olympia, Dems don't want to push too hard and GOP does not want to be to obstructionist. The time is perfect to be bipartisan.

@9 Movements and societal changes never really look from the inside the way they seem later from the outside. Occupy was considered a total failure. BLM is still very visible, but the conversation around police violence has shifted to the mainstream so it seems the activists are quieter (they're not). Likewise the right has done some to redirect those narratives- re: standing for the flag, respecting the troops, football controversy. Both movements are directly responsible for the other rising movements and political engagement that we see today on the left. Just like how the Tea Party and Ron Paul revolution both seem to be over but the current reactionary far right and admin is coming out of the groundwork laid by them.

Do you know the joke about the Velvet Underground? That only a few thousand people bought their albums when they came out but every single one of them formed a band? It's sometimes hard to see the massive impact something in one time has on a movement in another until you are there looking back.

Gun ownership was higher in the 50's, yet we hardly had any "mass shootings."

Most mass shootings, as they are recorded, are actually drive by's or gang related, with handguns. Most are committed by POC.

That said, we need to address the core cause of these shootings. The people who commit them. We need to understand why. Alienation, broken families, identity issues(Nikolas de Jesus Cruz was half Hispanic and half Jewish), depression, and anger issues. If we don't address these social problems, then we'll keep getting pyschopathic mass killers.

@11- Closing the gun show loophole here was a great start. Way past time to do it nationwide. and its time to put some teeth into the system. How about if you do transfer a gun without the background check, you are personally liable for whatever it gets used for?

@22 - what kind of guns were generally in private hands in the 50s? What fraction of them were semi-automatic, and what fraction were capable f firing more than 10 or so rounds without reloading? As you correctly point out, there are a lot of things that make people crazy or evil enough to do a mass shooting. But what all of these outcomes have in common is that it was all too easy for the shooter to get a weapon with a very high capacity to kill people. It's time to stop that.

@1 etc.- constitutional rights are generally bounded by some reasonable limits (no yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, etc.). Why is the Second Amendment different?

@11- Closing the gun show loophole here was a great start. Way past time to do it nationwide. and its time to put some teeth into the system. How about if you do transfer a gun without the background check, you are personally liable for whatever it gets used for?

@22 - what kind of guns were generally in private hands in the 50s? What fraction of them were semi-automatic, and what fraction were capable f firing more than 10 or so rounds without reloading? As you correctly point out, there are a lot of things that make people crazy or evil enough to do a mass shooting. But what all of these outcomes have in common is that it was all too easy for the shooter to get a weapon with a very high capacity to kill people. It's time to stop that.

@1 etc.- constitutional rights are generally bounded by some reasonable limits (no yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, etc.). Why is the Second Amendment different?

@22 makes the most sense to me. As one example, the AR-15 rifle went on sale in the early 60s, and it did not represent any change in technology. More than gun sellers, the media gets rich off of these tragedies, and you can bet the next killer is watching right now and seeing the world fame that will be his. The one whose Grandma turned him in was specifically comparing himself to killers gone before and wanting to outdo them. No inanimate object caused that. The success of our drug ban tells me we don't have anywhere near the police state needed to enforce a gun ban, and I can't bring myself to wish that we did. So, universal health care, decriminalize drugs, abolish the apartheid in this country, find some way to honor victims without lionizing their killers and publishing stats about their 'accomplishments'. This is the path to less death IMO.

I suspect that the full benefits of gun control laws would not be evident for many years because we're so over saturated with guns, BUT, these weapons of mass destruction would be greatly reduced right away (except to those who can afford them on the black market).

When sensible gun control laws and regulations are passed, and scrupulously enforced, younger generations and their children would definitely be free of this gun scourge.

Also, @3, I agree that campaign finance reform and a repeal of citizens united are essential to the solution.

Here's a more practical idea that requires no government action at all: a corporate campaign to choke off credit-card revenue to gun sellers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/busin…

As a Canadian living with a completely different reality, the answer is so clear. It's all about the access to guns. Thank goodness American youth are stepping up to the plate. I see hope for your future. Check out my perspective, which is in line with much of what we think up here. theteenbeanandin-between.com