229. Headscratcher

It is pretty funny how NRA aficionados focus on where shootings are happening or the particular root issues of the shooter. By funny, of course, I mean horrendously deceptive.  There's the direct cause of angry males having access to guns that they somehow always skip over. 

The main reason I don’t like Joe Rogan is that he imprinted into his easily convinced audience the simplistic retort “This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.” That was like a million shootings ago and people still say it! People gloss over the fact that Joe is implying we are crazier than the rest of the world. Or forgetting to imply that we could have both problems. 

It's tantamount to looking at traffic accidents around a city and focusing on the locations and motivations of the culprits (valuable variables on themselves), but completely ignoring a total lack of safety systems in the intersections. 

We need stronger laws for who gets access to guns. Yes, this will make that lethal hobby a little harder for some. But that's ok, we play board games and learning new board games is tough! But our (non-lethal) hobby is worth it. 

Some people into this lethal hobby will say this is an intrusion into their freedoms. To this I got to say, you're not as free as you think. Venezuela, my country of origin, was free (in the 80s and 90s at least). We were free to drive under the influence, we were free to drink beers while driving, speed, use stoplights as mere recommendations, etc. If a cop was bored and tried to ticket us, we were free to bribe them. Pure freedom! We were super free, but our society wasn't super safe. 

There are a lot more restrictions in the United States than in Venezuela. They have been accepted, and that's because these make sense at society level. More gun regulations would just be more of that sensical safety net. 

Let's make it easier to sue salesmen of deadly weapons to dangerous men. Why not have a referral system with consequences. You'd think twice about endorsing your uncle Frank, who thinks Bill Gates pees contrails into his water system, as a responsible gun owner if you knew this could be used against you in the future. Why isn't there a federal cooldown period for purchase? We've left it to states, and that's been predictably ineffectual.

It's frustratingly simple to inch towards a better system, but all-or-nothing mentality has stifled this debate. Of course any one of these won't stop murders with guns, even all of them together won't. But they will have a measurable effect and damn it, aren't we worth it?