Planet America

[President Bush]

I wonder if an educational campaign might help. I can see PSA commercials saying, "No....it's not ok to shoot people just because you think they might be bad. That guy you saw on youtube saying what he would do if anyone ever (fill in the blank) is just an asshole shooting off his mouth. If you actually shoot someone, you are probably going to go to jail. Does that seem unfair? We don't care because you're a moron anyway."

Maybe the marketing department can think of a better way to phrase it.

I think (and have expressed on ISF before) that a long-term educational marketing blitz will be an absolutely essential component of the solution to America's gun problem, but it is not the only one. No effective gun control will work without popular support. America has to convince a majority of its population that they neither want nor need guns, and that's going to be a very hard sell. Education is the way to address the "want" part. You still have to address the "need" part though, and that's going to be tricky too.

Make sure we can view the long-term educational marketing blitz through night vision googles.

[arthwollipot]

Have you noticed that in modern Hollywood movies the heroes don't smoke? Sometime in the late 80s Hollywood made a collective decision to not depict characters that are supposed to be heroic as smoking.

That's one example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Guns need to stop being cool.

[Admin]

Have you noticed that in modern Hollywood movies the heroes don't smoke? Sometime in the late 80s Hollywood made a collective decision to not depict characters that are supposed to be heroic as smoking.

That's one example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Guns need to stop being cool.

There's your issue, right there.

Every ad I see for an American TV program features some clown with a gun.

I suspect things are too far gone to ever change.

[arthwollipot]

I firmly believe that for as long as people say "it will never change", it will never change.

[stanky]

That's paradoxical, Arth.

[arthwollipot]

No it isn't. Once people stop saying "it'll never change", it might have a chance of changing. Saying "this needs to change" is the first step in changing something.

[Admin]

I firmly believe that for as long as people say "it will never change", it will never change.

There's probably some truth in that, but America has this tiny problem called the Constitution, which specifically encourages gun ownership that no other country has.

As you know, both our countries and UK had major shooting incidents and we said "fuck that" and changed the gun laws.

You can't do that in America and the filth sitting on SCOTUS for the next 40 years will ensure that nothing changes while they're alive.

[grayman]

Have I ever mentioned that sometimes I have to block a busy road for up to twenty minutes as we switch out cars in my train?

Have I ever mentioned how worried I am that some impatient driver with a gun is going to kill me because he had to wait?

Or someone taking a random shot at the locomotive, just because they could?

I think about it often.

[Admin]

Have I ever mentioned that sometimes I have to block a busy road for up to twenty minutes as we switch out cars in my train?

Have I ever mentioned how worried I am that some impatient driver with a gun is going to kill me because he had to wait?

Fuckin' hell, I can see that as an almost certainty at some stage. A bloke in NZ got murdered for holding up a stop sign at road works and Mrs A's company has almost weekly threats against their roading staff.

Can you fit an Oerlikon on the roof just in case?

[President Bush]

I firmly believe that for as long as people say "it will never change", it will never change.

There's probably some truth in that, but America has this tiny problem called the Constitution, which specifically encourages gun ownership that no other country has.

As you know, both our countries and UK had major shooting incidents and we said "fuck that" and changed the gun laws.

You can't do that in America and the filth sitting on SCOTUS for the next 40 years will ensure that nothing changes while they're alive.

Thanks to US Supreme Court case "New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc VS Bruen".

Saul Cornell’s corner of academia has historically been sleepy. So few scholars share his specialty that the Fordham University professor jokes that he and his colleagues could hold a national convention “in an English phone booth.”

But in the months since a landmark Supreme Court decision upended the standards for determining the constitutionality of gun laws, Dr. Cornell has been booked solid. An authority on the history and laws around American weapons, he has served as an expert witness in at least 15 federal cases on gun control laws, which is roughly 14 requests more than he used to get in a busy year.

Gun historians across the country are in demand like never before as lawyers must now comb through statutes drafted in the Colonial era and the early years of the Republic to litigate modern firearms restrictions. From experts on military gun stamping to scholars of American homicide through the ages, they have been called — many for the first time — to parse the nation’s gun culture in court.

Cases now explore weapons bans in early saloons, novelty air rifles on the Lewis and Clark expedition, concealed carry restrictions on bowie knives and 18th-century daggers known as “Arkansas toothpicks,” and a string-operated “trap gun” that may or may not be comparable to an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

“This is what the courts have unleashed upon us,” said Darrell A. H. Miller, a Duke University law professor and faculty co-director at the Duke Center for Firearms Law. “Suddenly everyone is looking for early Republic scholars to tell them what the culture and norms around firearms law were in the 18th century.”

In a 6-3 decision last June, the Supreme Court dramatically shifted the standard for firearm restrictions. Writing for the majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas found that gun laws should be judged not by the longstanding practice of balancing gun rights against the public interest, but according to the Second Amendment’s text and the “historical tradition” of gun regulation.

The constitutionality of gun constraints, he suggested, would hinge on whether the government could show a “historical analogue” in the law, either in 1791 when Americans ratified the right to bear arms, or around 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment extended protections against federal infringements on gun rights to the states.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/us/g ... court.html

Hysterical.