Well we’re coming on 48 hours since 17 people were killed by a deranged gunman who wanted to turn FL into a white ethnostate (WTF is a “white ethnostate”?). AFAIK this includes genocide against all the non-white residents in FL because I don’t think they’ll just all pack up and leave nicely. Leaving that aside, not only has there not been a vote for gun control, there has not even been a bill proposed to control gun access for people who shouldn’t have guns. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. I have voted on more gun control bills than Congress at this point.
Getting (more) serious at this point, there are 3 common characteristics of a mass shooter we know of for sure: Male, white, and domestic abuser/abused (one or the other sometimes both). So our gun control law has to block people who fall into all of those categories from getting anything more deadly than a single-shot .22 rimfire (action doesn’t matter so long as each round is loaded into the gun one at a time and has to be either fired or removed before another round can be loaded) because “right to bear arms for hunting”. Easiest one to work with is the “domestic abuser/ed” especially the “abuser”, because there are a lot of white males who own guns and are not abusers and don’t commit mass shootings. Incidentally this profile is also a close fit for people who use cars as weapons against cyclists and pedestrians, except for the minority of abused women who kill with cars. Maybe we need to have an annual review of domestic abuse and drivers to get killer drivers off the roads. But back to gun control, there used to be restrictions against domestic abusers having guns, but those were overturned, mainly because it caused too many LEO to lose their guns. Which is also troubling. I’m not sure what the intersection of the sets of deadly cops and domestic abusers is, but I’m pretty sure there is one.
The problem is there is no defined “domestic abuser” law that’s consistent from state to state, thus no registry of abusers to use to prevent abusers from getting guns or taking away guns from people likely to do a mass shooting. So that’s step one, making a national definition for “domestic abuse”. Step 2 is making a registry for people convicted of it, and maybe a “3 strikes” law that 3 accusations in a limited time puts you on the registry because in some places getting an abuser in jail requires a victim in the hospital for an extended stay, or even a body in the morgue. I can’t make people convict, but if there’s an arrest that means there was evidence of something worth arresting someone over, and 3 times in a limited period of time is the smoke that identifies the fire.
Now this is not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, which is what we have now.
Witch on a Bicycle 