LeeEsq: Many people off the Internet still want the War on Drugs to continue though. The more aggressive police tactics have a lot of political support even though you wouldn’t know this if you spend a lot of time on certain blogs or reading certain authors. The War on Drugs might be winding down but it is going to be a very slow one.

Sure, but imho it's more realistic to think ending the war on drugs would work than it is to expect drug dealers to submit to background checks.

Discussions about gun control SHOULD be discussions about the war on drugs because that's the biggest number we can actually do anything about. Yes, the issue is politics, and that normally gets blamed for most lack-of-gun-control, but most gun-control attempts aren't workable on the face of it (which is a real part of why the NRA is so successful at stopping them).

Orlando, combined with Sandyhook, showcase pretty well the lack of use of background checks and/or sanity checks. One passed everything, the other would have failed so killing someone and taking her guns was part of the plan.

What "improvements" do you want? Bring back stop-and-frisk? Outlaw gun-free zones? Something else?

Saul Degraw: The big issue is that I do think the NRA has a very Cavalier attitude towards mass shootings and sees them as acceptable collateral damage for unlimited gun rights.

I don't own a gun myself so I mostly don't view myself as having a dog in this race, but after every mass shooting we see a bunch of policy "solutions" that wouldn't have prevented the shooting and are pretty openly one step further towards disarming everyone. Admittedly that's not the plan for this year but it does seem to be the world view fueling it.

Thank you.

Saul Degraw:
@Dark Matter
“2) Thug on thug crime.
Solutions: End the war on drugs. Maybe ‘stop and frisk’ in some areas.”

I think this will help but won’t solve the problem completely. A lot of fights can be territorial and over other issues. There is also the matter of collateral damage. Just because someone is in a poor and crime-ridden neighborhood does not mean that they are collateral damage.

Without the war on drugs, street gangs become the gangs of "West Side Story" again, where the gang leader wants to drop and get a real job so he can have a girl.

Saul Degraw:
@Dark Matter
“3) Mass murder by nuts.

I think this one depends on perceptions and how we define gun massacres.

According to the article, there have been 1002 mass shootings since Sandy Hook as of June 14, 2016. That seems like an epidemic to me. The article hedges though and states:

You're mixing your numbers. Your first quote, Vox's article claims 1002 mass shootings (300 a year or so), but that includes domestic incidents, drug crimes, and even injuries. But the Harvard School of Public Health's definition results in basically 2 a year. IMHO the moment we mix our various problems we end up with distorted views of what's going on and why because the drug war's numbers are so great. I'm good with talking about Orlando and how to reduce it, but Orlando was stunningly rare.

In Orlando, the shooter passed various background checks, mental health checks, might have planned his crime for years (if the FBI is right about him not being gay), and basically kept reloading until someone else with a gun forced him to retreat (we don't have a total number of bullets he fired yet, but I expect it's going to be in the hundreds).

The only thing I see to work with there is getting rid of these fake "gun free" zones. This was a crowd of young men, some of them are going to be current/former military/law enforcement.

Sir,

First of all, good article, you seem to be fact driven which is a good thing.

On the other side of the aisle, I don’t see a lot of good faith interest in trying to find ways to do things that the Constitution does allow to identify that .1% and keep them from murdering people. When the NRA opposes pre-purchase background checks, it’s difficult to take their claim to want to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys seriously.I'm not with the NRA but it's very easy to see "pre-purchase background checks" become "no one, ever". Given how difficult some members of government want to make it to have a gun, it's difficult to believe the gov will administer this in good faith. One of the big purposes of rights is to prevent government abuse.

As I see it, we have four, mostly unrelated problems.

1) Suicide. Note it's somewhat dishonest to include suicide in with gun crime because other countries which are gun free have similar suicide rates.
Solutions: Not sure we have one.

2) Thug on thug crime.
Solutions: End the war on drugs. Maybe 'stop and frisk' in some areas.

3) Mass murder by nuts.

This is so rare it really shouldn't be driving the discussion, but somehow it is. We don't have a solution. A 'background check' wouldn't have stopped the last guy (a professional security guard who has passed mental health checks), nor anyone who is willing to plan things for months/years. IMHO it's worth pointing out that disarming the victims with these 'gun free' zones seems counter productive.

4) Government sponsored mass murder.

One government run genocide can easily be thousands of years worth of these others, hundreds of thousands if we exclude suicide and drug crimes. Our own government probably can't be trusted over that period of time, and has committed crimes probably worth the name 'genocide' within the last few centuries.

Yes, the gov has an army, yes, armed citizens can't stand up to it... but so what. If the gov needs the army to deal with every small hick town then it's lost right there.

Will H.:
Redefinition is exactly what happened in Second Amendment jurisprudence.
Prior to 1970, it was generally accepted that the right to bear arms was a right held by the states.
After about ten years of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history by the NRA, the individual right came to be accepted.

The typical person back when the 2nd AM was passed would have been a farmer (90% rural back then), and farmers like guns. The typical person would have lived within a day or two's ride of dangerous animals, indians, etc. They'd just lived through a repressive government where the common man had picked up his guns and overthrown the government.

This is not a description of someone who would be in favor of central government control over guns, any more than it's a description of someone who would be in favor of central government control over speech or assembly.

Lack of vouchers is how we get parents being forced to send their kids into what they know are failure factories.

RE: Unintended downsides
1) $10k is FAR too much. The gov has things to do other than BI, and having children shouldn't be a lifestyle. "Basic" should mean "poverty" (a min wage job easily takes you above that).

For example, median household wage is currently $52k(ish), I have 4 kids.

2) Giving out free money is popular, if we go down this road the gov will be under huge pressure to increase the BI (just like Social Security was originally intended to be a very basic low key top off, not your entire retirement).

3) The Purity of this system is great, but I'm not sure what happens after we get lots of political meddling.

I like the idea... a lot... but only if it's replacing existing systems (i.e. not a massive tax increase) and not in addition to them.