How insane is it that you could own a deadly machine like an AR-15 and not need to register it?

[krispos42]

233. I waded through the statistics from the FBI

Here's how it looks 1985 through 2019. Rifles are the green line near the X-axis.




Regardless of how much concentrated trauma a mass shooting causes the vast majority of homicides are single-victim incidents. Regardless of how much media attention is focused on a AR-15s, 20 people are murdered with a handgun for every person murdered with a rifle. A person dies in this country every 11 seconds while the mean time between rifle deaths is 24 hours.

Mass shootings have become part of our social fabric. A few decades ago it was pretty much unthinkable. It simply was not something that people thought of. Now it's talked about so much it's never far from anybody's thoughts. Including people who are mentally unstable. And now we're burning school shootings into our children's brains in kindergarten by holding lockdown drills every semester.

We're marinating in it, and it's become... not unexpected, and definitely not unthinkable. Normalized, almost. Mass shootings are covered nationwide for days on end and discussed and debated endlessly on social media. Victims, shooter, victims' families, shooter's families. Friends and neighbors of victims and shooters. And then comes the politicians and pundits and the blowhards and the experts. And then we focus on the hardware, as if the hardware is the core of the problem.

The downside of instant communication is that every news story is presented as if it's local. What happens in Sioux Falls, South Dakota can be covered live and in person from Boston to San Fransisco. For days. It didn't used to be this way.

Unfortunately, I have no solutions, except get progressives running things so we can fix society. Republicans and conservadems can't. Unfortunately, gun control pushes drive Republicans to the polls far more than Democrats.