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Hugo Stiglitz

By Hugo Stiglitz
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scottsins

scottsins 1951

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What's the number and why do you think it will make a difference? Parkland psycho used 10 round magazines because they fit better in his duffel or whatever

I’ll just throw out the number 8. I think it “will make a difference” because reloading CAN take time away from murdering.

Would it have made a difference in Parkland? No fucking idea and it is a red herring logical fallacy ploy to insist that any solution be perfect and eliminate 100% of the targeted problem.
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4th&Five
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Fuck off. You vote for this shit. Explain that to your kids. 

Pancho
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3rd leg of my move from Houston to the Bay Area, and I made it to LA.   I’m just now catching up on the news in my hotel.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—I don’t have kids, but this e

royiv
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WTF world are we living in when people are having a discussion about survival rates of certain rounds? People are being terrorized by gun violence and we're discussing which bullet has worse/better ch

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G650

G650 13846

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9 hours ago, South Austin said:

My dad served 27 years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer, and has never owned a firearm in his life.

Yeah my Pap was a Marine who did two tours in Vietnam and owned zero firearms.

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28696

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7 minutes ago, Satchel said:

You have some control issues, don’t you?

I have some gun control issues. And I’m sick and tired of having to see that same demonstration over the years.

Also, would you rather know how to properly embed a tweet or not? 

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B00M

B00M 6248

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1 hour ago, scottsins said:

I’ll just throw out the number 8. I think it “will make a difference” because reloading CAN take time away from murdering.

Agreed, the seconds spent reloading allow people to flee, if they're not trapped.

I think 10 rounds is the lowest limit in any state today? NY tried for 7 and got struck down (2013?). States appear to grandgather-in existing magazines or spend years/decades fighting legal battles to actually achieve bans.

Today 3D printers are in nearly every high school. They can be had for $100. A magazine is 3 simple plastic parts with a simple spring. The CAD models for common mags are all over the internet. A middle schooler can make a 30 round AR or glock magazine in a day or less, start to finish.

Criminals will ignore but appreciate the advantage these limit laws give them. They're misdemeanors in the states I looked up. Law abiding citizens that have to and can afford to, will permanently modify or replace standard magazines (30, 20, 10 round) to comply. People that can't, won't. 

The typical suburban mass shooter will simply practice changing 7, 8, 10 round magazines, and the heroic police will continue to wait outside for him to run out of ammo or targets. 

I just don't think this is the place to spend limited federal political capital. 

 

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TXSG8R

TXSG8R 3325

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1 hour ago, B00M said:

Agreed, the seconds spent reloading allow people to flee, if they're not trapped.

I think 10 rounds is the lowest limit in any state today? NY tried for 7 and got struck down (2013?). States appear to grandgather-in existing magazines or spend years/decades fighting legal battles to actually achieve bans.

Today 3D printers are in nearly every high school. They can be had for $100. A magazine is 3 simple plastic parts with a simple spring. The CAD models for common mags are all over the internet. A middle schooler can make a 30 round AR or glock magazine in a day or less, start to finish.

Criminals will ignore but appreciate the advantage these limit laws give them. They're misdemeanors in the states I looked up. Law abiding citizens that have to and can afford to, will permanently modify or replace standard magazines (30, 20, 10 round) to comply. People that can't, won't. 

The typical suburban mass shooter will simply practice changing 7, 8, 10 round magazines, and the heroic police will continue to wait outside for him to run out of ammo or targets. 

I just don't think this is the place to spend limited federal political capital. 

 

How often does a law abiding citizen need more than 10 rounds to defend themselves? Where the fuck do all these long gun, multi magazine home defense shootouts happen? It’s pure fucking fantasy.

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

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SIAP but I think the shitty police response is more a red herring than anything else and worse, it will be used by the NRA types as their newest excuse. "We need more and better police with more tactical weapons."

I mean it would have been cool if they kicked down the doors and took the kid out, but it seems like he'd already done his worst by then. Still, "fuck the police," but beware this as the new trend in gun nut excuses. 

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28696

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16 minutes ago, TXSG8R said:

How often does a law abiding citizen need more than 10 rounds to defend themselves? Where the fuck do all these long gun, multi magazine home defense shootouts happen? It’s pure fucking fantasy.

It’s gun ownership as a political statement. 

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Bateshorn

Bateshorn 9853

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4 hours ago, TexLonghorn said:

Absolutely.  If Satchel cannot define "assault rifle" to Vibes' satisfaction, then the obvious conclusion would be that no action should be taken at any level.

Ah, the ye old “It’s not technically X weapon, because you mis characterized/named technical component D, thus your entire argument is invalid.”  
 

A gun rights classic. Only slightly less invoked than “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”

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B00M

B00M 6248

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21 minutes ago, TXSG8R said:

How often does a law abiding citizen need more than 10 rounds to defend themselves? Where the fuck do all these long gun, multi magazine home defense shootouts happen? It’s pure fucking fantasy.

Are you replying to the right post? I didn't even mention self defense. I was just trying to speak about the practicality of laws given what's already out there

 

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TXSG8R

TXSG8R 3325

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34 minutes ago, B00M said:

Are you replying to the right post? I didn't even mention self defense. I was just trying to speak about the practicality of laws given what's already out there

 

What does a law abiding citizen need guns for typically outside of hunting? 

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tchookem

tchookem 3899

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How would you define an assault rifle?
 
One of only a few tools allowing a user to kill multiple children in only a few moments.

In fact, I'll just stay calling a firearms "children killing tools". Is that better, you worthless troll?
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Satchel

Satchel 6908

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5 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

How would you define an assault rifle?

 

An assault rifle is defined as a weapon designed to deliver fatal wounds to multiple individuals within a short time period; it has no other purpose. The AR-15, the civilian version of the military assault rifle (M16 or M4), has become the most commonly used rifle in US mass shootings.

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B00M

B00M 6248

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7 minutes ago, TXSG8R said:

What does a law abiding citizen need guns for typically outside of hunting? 

I didn't think we needed to beat this horse again but self defense, sure. And unfortunately, looking more inevitable as the years go by, resisting a tyrannical, fascist right wing government. 

 

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B00M

B00M 6248

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4 minutes ago, Satchel said:

An assault rifle is defined as a weapon designed to deliver fatal wounds to multiple individuals within a short time period; it has no other purpose. The AR-15, the civilian version of the military assault rifle (M16 or M4), has become the most commonly used rifle in US mass shootings.

It's the most popular rifle in the US...

But even per https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/

Assault weapons account for just 16% of mass shootings

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SimonBolivar

SimonBolivar 10890

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1 hour ago, B00M said:

It's the most popular rifle in the US...

But even per https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/

Assault weapons account for just 16% of mass shootings

Quote

In other words, mass shootings that involved an assault weapon accounted for 25 percent of all mass shootings deaths and 76 percent of injuries. While not used in the majority of mass shootings, when they were, it left six times as many people shot per incident than when there was no assault weapon.

 

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28696

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It’s pretty simple. If you were a soldier going into battle, which guns would you choose to take with you? Those are the ones no ordinary citizen should have access to. The ones designed specifically to be the most efficient killers of other people.

Another proposal is that we could just ban every type of gun that is used in a mass shooting event and whatever’s left over remains legal. (That’s my proposal and I’m mostly being facetious but it’s a proposal nonetheless.)

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Dahobbs

Dahobbs 17407

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5 hours ago, B00M said:

It's the most popular rifle in the US...

But even per https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/

Assault weapons account for just 16% of mass shootings

"In the 12 years from 2009 to 2020, there were at least 30 mass shootings (16 percent of those with known weapon data) that involved the use of an assault weapon, resulting in 347 deaths and 719 injuries. In other words, mass shootings that involved an assault weapon accounted for 25 percent of all mass shootings deaths and 76 percent of injuries. While not used in the majority of mass shootings, when they were, it left six times as many people shot per incident than when there was no assault weapon."

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Sawbonz

Sawbonz 27296

Posted
Posted (edited)
9 hours ago, B00M said:

It's the most popular rifle in the US...

But even per https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/

Assault weapons account for just 16% of mass shootings

How do they stack up percentage wise in terms of fatalities?

 

edit I see it’s already been addressed with quotes from the very paper you linked but clearly did not read

Edited by Sawbonz
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Horn Under a Bad Sign

Horn Under a Bad Sign 20333

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The real reason nothing will/can be done. Taken from the Atlantic:


 

After each of the repeated mass shootings that now provide a tragic backbeat to American life, the same doomed dance of legislation quickly begins. As the outraged demands for action are inevitably derailed in Congress, disappointed gun-control advocates, and perplexed ordinary citizens, point their fingers at the influence of the National Rifle Association or the intransigent opposition of congressional Republicans. Those are both legitimate factors, but the stalemate over gun-control legislation since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term ultimately rests on a much deeper problem: the growing crisis of majority rule in American politics.

Polls are clear that while Americans don’t believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, it’s highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Biden’s emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.

That’s because gun control is one of many issues in which majority opinion in the nation runs into the brick wall of a Senate rule—the filibuster—that provides a veto over national policy to a minority of the states, most of them small, largely rural, preponderantly white, and dominated by Republicans.

 

The disproportionate influence of small states has come to shape the competition for national power in America. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party had done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. Yet Republicans have controlled the White House after three of those elections instead of one, twice winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The Senate imbalance has been even more striking. According to calculations by Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America, a center-left think tank, Senate Republicans have represented a majority of the U.S. population for only two years since 1980, if you assign half of each state’s population to each of its senators. But largely because of its commanding hold on smaller states, the GOP has controlled the Senate majority for 22 of those 42 years.

The practical implications of these imbalances were dramatized by the last full-scale Senate debate over gun control. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, the Senate in 2013 voted on a measure backed by President Barack Obama to impose background checks on all gun sales. Again assigning half of each state’s population to each of its senators, the 54 senators who supported the bill (plus then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opposed it only for procedural reasons) represented 194 million Americans. The remaining senators who opposed the bill represented 118 million people. But because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires the backing of 60 senators to move legislation to a vote, the 118 million prevailed.

The outcome likely would not differ today. Last year, the House passed legislation to expand and strengthen background checks. But it, too, has been blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

That impassable opposition reflects the GOP’s reliance on the places and voters most deeply devoted to gun culture. Polling last year by the Pew Research Center found that the share of Republicans who live in a household with a gun (54 percent) far exceeds the share of Democrats who do (31 percent). (In all, Pew found that four in 10 adults live in a house with a gun and only three in 10 own one.) A 2020 Rand Corporation study found that the 20 states with the highest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Republican lawmakers (32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states that President Donald Trump carried in the 2020 election (17 of 25). In an almost mirror image, the 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Democratic lawmakers (also 32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states Biden won (16 of 25). The 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership have more than two and half times as many residents (about 192 million) as the states with the highest gun-ownership rates (about 69 million). But in the Senate, these two sets of states carry equal weight.

In their opposition to gun control, Republicans in Congress clearly are prioritizing the sentiments of gun owners in their party over any other perspective, even that of other Republican voters. The Pew polling found that significant majorities of Americans support background checks (81 percent), an assault-weapons ban (63 percent), and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines (64 percent); a majority also opposes concealed carry of weapons without a permit. Majorities of Republicans who don’t own guns shared those opinions, as did Democratic gun owners, by even more lopsided margins. Even most Republicans who do own guns said in the polling that they support background checks and oppose permitless concealed carry (which more red states, including Texas, are authorizing). Despite all of this, Republican elected officials, in their near-lockstep opposition to gun control, have bent to groups like the NRA in equating almost any restrictions as a sign of disrespect to the values of red America.

Even though the NRA has weakened institutionally, its influence inside the GOP has been magnified by the reconfiguration of American politics along geographic lines. When Congress, during Clinton’s first term, created the national background-check system through the Brady Bill and later approved a ban on assault weapons (which has since expired), significant numbers of congressional Democrats representing rural constituencies opposed the legislation, while significant numbers of Republicans with big suburban constituencies supported it. But three decades of electoral re-sorting has significantly shrunk both of those groups. As a result, when the House passed its universal-background-check bill in 2021, only eight Republicans voted for it, while just a single Democrat voted against it.

 

The Senate’s small-state bias is impeding legislative action on other issues on which Americans broadly agree, including climate change, abortion, and immigration. As with gun control, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support acting on climate change, oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, and back comprehensive immigration reform, including offering legal status to undocumented immigrants (especially young people brought into the country by their parents). The House has passed legislation reflecting each of those perspectives. The Senate’s inaction on these issues again reflects the outsize influence of those states with the highest gun-ownership rates—which also tend to be those enmeshed in the fossil-fuel economy, with high shares of culturally conservative white Christians and low shares of immigrants.

If there is any hope for congressional action on gun control in the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedy—or another mass shooting in the future—it almost certainly will require reform or elimination of the filibuster. Otherwise, the basic rules of American politics will continue to allow Republicans to impose their priorities even when a clear majority of Americans disagree. The hard truth is that there’s no way to confront America’s accelerating epidemic of gun violence without first addressing its systemic erosion of majority rule.



 

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Chad Fuck

Chad Fuck 17455

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The real reason nothing will/can be done. Taken from the Atlantic:


 
After each of the repeated mass shootings that now provide a tragic backbeat to American life, the same doomed dance of legislation quickly begins. As the outraged demands for action are inevitably derailed in Congress, disappointed gun-control advocates,
, point their fingers at the influence of the National Rifle Association or the intransigent opposition of congressional Republicans. Those are both legitimate factors, but the stalemate over gun-control legislation since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term ultimately rests on a much deeper problem: the growing crisis of majority rule in American politics.
Polls are clear that while Americans don’t believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, it’s highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Biden’s emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.
That’s because gun control is one of many issues in which majority opinion in the nation runs into the brick wall of a Senate rule—the filibuster—that provides a veto over national policy to a minority of the states, most of them small, largely rural, preponderantly white, and dominated by Republicans.
 
The disproportionate influence of small states has come to shape the competition for national power in America. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party had done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. Yet Republicans have controlled the White House after three of those elections instead of one, twice winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The Senate imbalance has been even more striking. According to calculations by Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America, a center-left think tank, Senate Republicans have represented a majority of the U.S. population for only two years since 1980, if you assign half of each state’s population to each of its senators. But largely because of its commanding hold on smaller states, the GOP has controlled the Senate majority for 22 of those 42 years.
The practical implications of these imbalances were dramatized by the last full-scale Senate debate over gun control. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, the Senate in 2013 voted on a measure backed by President Barack Obama to impose background checks on all gun sales. Again assigning half of each state’s population to each of its senators, the 54 senators who supported the bill (plus then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opposed it only for procedural reasons) represented 194 million Americans. The remaining senators who opposed the bill represented 118 million people. But because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires the backing of 60 senators to move legislation to a vote, the 118 million prevailed.
The outcome likely would not differ today. Last year, the House passed legislation to expand and strengthen background checks. But it, too, has been blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
That impassable opposition reflects the GOP’s reliance on the places and voters most deeply devoted to gun culture. Polling last year by the Pew Research Center found that the share of Republicans who live in a household with a gun (54 percent) far exceeds the share of Democrats who do (31 percent). (In all, Pew found that four in 10 adults live in a house with a gun and only three in 10 own one.) A 2020 Rand Corporation study found that the 20 states with the highest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Republican lawmakers (32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states that President Donald Trump carried in the 2020 election (17 of 25). In an almost mirror image, the 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Democratic lawmakers (also 32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states Biden won (16 of 25). The 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership have more than two and half times as many residents (about 192 million) as the states with the highest gun-ownership rates (about 69 million). But in the Senate, these two sets of states carry equal weight.
In their opposition to gun control, Republicans in Congress clearly are prioritizing the sentiments of gun owners in their party over any other perspective, even that of other Republican voters. The Pew polling found that significant majorities of Americans support background checks (81 percent), an assault-weapons ban (63 percent), and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines (64 percent); a majority also opposes concealed carry of weapons without a permit. Majorities of Republicans who don’t own guns shared those opinions, as did Democratic gun owners, by even more lopsided margins. Even most Republicans who do own guns said in the polling that they support background checks and oppose permitless concealed carry (which more red states, including Texas, are authorizing). Despite all of this, Republican elected officials, in their near-lockstep opposition to gun control, have bent to groups like the NRA in equating almost any restrictions as a sign of disrespect to the values of red America.
Even though the NRA has weakened institutionally, its influence inside the GOP has been magnified by the reconfiguration of American politics along geographic lines. When Congress, during Clinton’s first term, created the national background-check system through the Brady Bill and later approved a ban on assault weapons (which has since expired), significant numbers of congressional Democrats representing rural constituencies opposed the legislation, while significant numbers of Republicans with big suburban constituencies supported it. But three decades of electoral re-sorting has significantly shrunk both of those groups. As a result, when the House passed its universal-background-check bill in 2021, only eight Republicans voted for it, while just a single Democrat voted against it.
 
The Senate’s small-state bias is impeding legislative action on other issues on which Americans broadly agree, including climate change, abortion, and immigration. As with gun control, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support acting on climate change, oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, and back comprehensive immigration reform, including offering legal status to undocumented immigrants (especially young people brought into the country by their parents). The House has passed legislation reflecting each of those perspectives. The Senate’s inaction on these issues again reflects the outsize influence of those states with the highest gun-ownership rates—which also tend to be those enmeshed in the fossil-fuel economy, with high shares of culturally conservative white Christians and low shares of immigrants.
If there is any hope for congressional action on gun control in the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedy—or another mass shooting in the future—it almost certainly will require reform or elimination of the filibuster. Otherwise, the basic rules of American politics will continue to allow Republicans to impose their priorities even when a clear majority of Americans disagree. The hard truth is that there’s no way to confront America’s accelerating epidemic of gun violence without first addressing its systemic erosion of majority rule.


 

Can you cite the article?
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B00M

B00M 6248

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31 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

edit I see it’s already been addressed with quotes from the very paper you linked but clearly did not read

I quoted a bullet point from the largest anti-gun group in the US. It's not like I cherry picked data from a pro gun site. It's weird to me that they'd highlight the 16% stat and bury the injury/fatality data. Maybe it's because the largest school shooting in US history is still VTech so they realize it's not really about the particular firearm used? 

 

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Sawbonz

Sawbonz 27296

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Posted (edited)
8 minutes ago, B00M said:

I quoted a bullet point from the largest anti-gun group in the US. It's not like I cherry picked data from a pro gun site. It's weird to me that they'd highlight the 16% stat and bury the injury/fatality data. Maybe it's because the largest school shooting in US history is still VTech so they realize it's not really about the particular firearm used? 

 

If it were “buried” how did 3 different posters find it in a minute or two?

Honest question have you ever taken a statistics class?

Edited by Sawbonz
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B00M

B00M 6248

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Posted
25 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

If it were “buried” how did 3 different posters find it in a minute or two?

Honest question have you ever taken a statistics class?

I don't understand why you're bring so argumentative but you can have the point if you want it this badly.

Yes, AP stats in HS and engineering stats a couple years later at UT. 

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Hagbard Celine

Hagbard Celine 10658

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1 hour ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

The real reason nothing will/can be done. Taken from the Atlantic:


 

After each of the repeated mass shootings that now provide a tragic backbeat to American life, the same doomed dance of legislation quickly begins. As the outraged demands for action are inevitably derailed in Congress, disappointed gun-control advocates, and perplexed ordinary citizens, point their fingers at the influence of the National Rifle Association or the intransigent opposition of congressional Republicans. Those are both legitimate factors, but the stalemate over gun-control legislation since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term ultimately rests on a much deeper problem: the growing crisis of majority rule in American politics.

Polls are clear that while Americans don’t believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, it’s highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Biden’s emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.

That’s because gun control is one of many issues in which majority opinion in the nation runs into the brick wall of a Senate rule—the filibuster—that provides a veto over national policy to a minority of the states, most of them small, largely rural, preponderantly white, and dominated by Republicans.

 

The disproportionate influence of small states has come to shape the competition for national power in America. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party had done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. Yet Republicans have controlled the White House after three of those elections instead of one, twice winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The Senate imbalance has been even more striking. According to calculations by Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America, a center-left think tank, Senate Republicans have represented a majority of the U.S. population for only two years since 1980, if you assign half of each state’s population to each of its senators. But largely because of its commanding hold on smaller states, the GOP has controlled the Senate majority for 22 of those 42 years.

The practical implications of these imbalances were dramatized by the last full-scale Senate debate over gun control. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, the Senate in 2013 voted on a measure backed by President Barack Obama to impose background checks on all gun sales. Again assigning half of each state’s population to each of its senators, the 54 senators who supported the bill (plus then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opposed it only for procedural reasons) represented 194 million Americans. The remaining senators who opposed the bill represented 118 million people. But because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires the backing of 60 senators to move legislation to a vote, the 118 million prevailed.

The outcome likely would not differ today. Last year, the House passed legislation to expand and strengthen background checks. But it, too, has been blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

That impassable opposition reflects the GOP’s reliance on the places and voters most deeply devoted to gun culture. Polling last year by the Pew Research Center found that the share of Republicans who live in a household with a gun (54 percent) far exceeds the share of Democrats who do (31 percent). (In all, Pew found that four in 10 adults live in a house with a gun and only three in 10 own one.) A 2020 Rand Corporation study found that the 20 states with the highest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Republican lawmakers (32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states that President Donald Trump carried in the 2020 election (17 of 25). In an almost mirror image, the 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Democratic lawmakers (also 32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states Biden won (16 of 25). The 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership have more than two and half times as many residents (about 192 million) as the states with the highest gun-ownership rates (about 69 million). But in the Senate, these two sets of states carry equal weight.

In their opposition to gun control, Republicans in Congress clearly are prioritizing the sentiments of gun owners in their party over any other perspective, even that of other Republican voters. The Pew polling found that significant majorities of Americans support background checks (81 percent), an assault-weapons ban (63 percent), and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines (64 percent); a majority also opposes concealed carry of weapons without a permit. Majorities of Republicans who don’t own guns shared those opinions, as did Democratic gun owners, by even more lopsided margins. Even most Republicans who do own guns said in the polling that they support background checks and oppose permitless concealed carry (which more red states, including Texas, are authorizing). Despite all of this, Republican elected officials, in their near-lockstep opposition to gun control, have bent to groups like the NRA in equating almost any restrictions as a sign of disrespect to the values of red America.

Even though the NRA has weakened institutionally, its influence inside the GOP has been magnified by the reconfiguration of American politics along geographic lines. When Congress, during Clinton’s first term, created the national background-check system through the Brady Bill and later approved a ban on assault weapons (which has since expired), significant numbers of congressional Democrats representing rural constituencies opposed the legislation, while significant numbers of Republicans with big suburban constituencies supported it. But three decades of electoral re-sorting has significantly shrunk both of those groups. As a result, when the House passed its universal-background-check bill in 2021, only eight Republicans voted for it, while just a single Democrat voted against it.

 

The Senate’s small-state bias is impeding legislative action on other issues on which Americans broadly agree, including climate change, abortion, and immigration. As with gun control, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support acting on climate change, oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, and back comprehensive immigration reform, including offering legal status to undocumented immigrants (especially young people brought into the country by their parents). The House has passed legislation reflecting each of those perspectives. The Senate’s inaction on these issues again reflects the outsize influence of those states with the highest gun-ownership rates—which also tend to be those enmeshed in the fossil-fuel economy, with high shares of culturally conservative white Christians and low shares of immigrants.

If there is any hope for congressional action on gun control in the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedy—or another mass shooting in the future—it almost certainly will require reform or elimination of the filibuster. Otherwise, the basic rules of American politics will continue to allow Republicans to impose their priorities even when a clear majority of Americans disagree. The hard truth is that there’s no way to confront America’s accelerating epidemic of gun violence without first addressing its systemic erosion of majority rule.



 

and there it is

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