Because people are dying Michael. Another mass shooting today in Tulsa yesterday, right? When do you start to admit there's a real problem? It's so unbelievably surreal having this conversation. Gun legislation is necessary. This will necessarily affect people who own guns.
It's like seatbelt laws. When was it? 1984 that mandatory seat belt laws were introduced? These saved countless lives, yet when they were introduced, there were protests. "I'm a safe driver, why should I have to wear a seatbelt." But you can't pass a law that says only reckless drivers have to wear seatbelts. So everybody is affected. And now that the laws are in place, now that this little slice of common sense has been normalised, it seems crazy to us that anybody was ever against this brain-dead obvious legislation.
Why did the mass shootings only start happening a couple of decades ago? Well, as I said, partly because the assault weapons ban expired. I already linked you to data showing the spike in mass shootings after 2004. Then there's the number and cost of these guns. Technology improves, prices go down, and it gets easier and easier to commit mass shootings.
I'm not even going to address the "school shootings are a minuscule proportion..." Seriously Michael, I think you're a smart, decent guy, but this is just fucking ghoulish. Do you have children? Think about somebody saying this to you if your child was one of the victims. Again, you get indignant at the suggestion (not by me by the way) that Republicans don't care about mass shootings, but think about what you're actually saying here. What exactly is the acceptable number of children massacred in their schools to prevent you from being personally inconvenienced? Put a figure on it. A percentage.
I mean, if the solutions are things like red flag laws and tighter background checks and waiting periods and closing the gun show loophole, you probably won't even be inconvenienced! I presume you already own your guns.
And I don't know what scenario are you imagining where a man tries to attack a woman and she has time to draw and aim her weapon. I used to teach women's self defence. This is pure fantasy. If you're being attacked, they're almost certainly too close for you to draw a gun before you even know what's happening. And by the way, how many women do you think are hiding semi-automatic rifles in their purses? Also, you're going to have to back up that "one estimate." This sounds an awful lot like extremely weak confirmation bias.
The question of where the evil people came from is fine. But solving the mystery of human evil is, I think you'll agree, harder than solving the mystery of how a single human being can kill 60 people in 60 seconds. It's not that people aren't willing to dig deeper, it's that you're desperately trying to ignore an answer that's right on the surface. That's what's so frustrating. It's like talking about the problem food wastage and food distribution in the context of famine and having somebody ask, "well, why aren't scientists figuring out a way for humans to live without food?"
