So, is it still too early to talk about the guns?

[MineralMan]

Another Colorado school shooting. When does it stop being too early, I wonder?

[JHB]

1. Why, the next shooting of course...

...but then it'll be too soon after that shooting.

[ScratchCat]

2. Why not talk about

The people who committed the crime, why they committed the crime and what we can do to prevent people from wanting to commit such a crime?

[MineralMan]

3. We are talking about that. We're not talking about the guns.

The young man who did the shooting use a gun, see? What if he hadn't had access to one?

The bullets came from a gun. We're talking about the shooter, but not about the guns.

[maxsolomon]

7. the question is HOW, not why.

HOW did they get their pistols? HOW will the negligent parents escape accountability?

[ExciteBike66]

12. Easier to identify a gun than it is to identify a mentally ill person, methinks.

Easier to ban guns than predict who will go crazy in the future...

[Shell_Seas]

4. On the contrary. It's too late.

[MineralMan]

5. It's always too late, after someone uses a gun to kill people.

Always. Maybe we should start talking about the hardware people use to kill other people.

[gratuitous]

10. Yep, the Goldilocks Moment is never right now

It's too early, or it's too late, it's never just right. One of the reasons it's never just right is because the people who are heavily, personally invested in maintaining the murderous status quo stall and quibble and nit-pick and fly-speck from the moment the smoke clears and we stop and feel we have to respond to their stall. They won't get it, they'll never get it, they refuse to get it. We need to cut them out of the conversation because they're not operating in good faith. They aren't "just asking questions," they're advocates for continued bloodshed on a mass scale.

[maxsolomon]

6. What's to talk about?

this is the price gun owners have decided the rest of us will pay for "freedom", whatever that is.

i'm constantly surprised gunners aren't agitating to repeal the limits on full-automatic weapons.

[Kaleva]

8. School shootings are no longer a big issue. One can see that here at DU

The tragedies no longer generate the numerous threads posted over the course of a few weeks like they used to. No calls for the shutdown of the Gungeon and there's very little activity in the Gun Control Reform Activism group.

[MineralMan]

9. Well, the Gungeon is a dead zone, too.

[Kaleva]

13. Another example of how interest in gun control has waned here.

[MineralMan]

15. Really, the activity on all of the Groups, with few exceptions,

has gone way down. The Religion and Science Groups are pretty active, but most groups have slowed down.

[Kaleva]

17. Going back to your statement.

It's never to early to talk about gun control here at DU. I'm just saying you won't get the interest in the discussion that one would have a few years ago.

[friendly_iconoclast]

14. I checked and the Gungeon has been busier than the Civil Liberties, Education, Drug Policy, and

...(save for one poster) the Foreign Affairs groups over the last 90 days.

Not to mention that the Gungeon has always been more active then the Gun Control Reform Activism
group, and that has been consistent ever since DU3 was formed. As of writing, the OP count over the past
90 days is Gungeon 83, GCRA 15.

Given the above, one might just get the notion that the attentions and concerns of DUers in general might not be *quite* be
where some DUers devoutly wish them be...

[Kaleva]

16. But it's not as busy as it used to be. That's my perception.

I have not gone back several years and looked at the number of new threads and the number of posts in those threads and compared that to the past few months but it does appear to my that activity in the Gungeon isn't at the levels it once was.

[friendly_iconoclast]

19. It's not, and I think that there's a few reasons for that

1. Non-Michael Bloomberg operated gun control advocacy groups have tended to have fallen by the wayside
over the past few years- and even MB and his puppet Shannon Watts are being supplanted by student activists
who aren't into corporate-style, astroturf control of messaging

2. (and strictly my impression, FWIW) candidates are going the "Obama route" on gun control during the
lead-up to Nov 2020- issue fine words to selected audiences while not actually doing much if anything in office.

$10 says a hypothetical Biden/Harris ticket will go that route once their campaign crunches the numbers.

The "Ban all/some of them now, the rest of them later" crowd are gonna be SOL.

[Kaleva]

21. Much of the traffic at Gungeon was driven by the debate between the factions.

[mr_lebowski]

11. Well, if someone interjects 'BS' or 'Bernie' into the thread it'll get more attention ...

The thing that bums me out even more is that threads about Trump's attacks on the Natural World ... get so little attention on a liberal forum.

Sometimes it kinda seems all a majority of posters really want to do is a) rant about Trump Admin (ranting which I'm 100% behind), or b) bicker about Candidates for 2020, esp. Bernie.

Almost anything else is falling by the wayside these days.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

18. Why would you think it's too early?

I'm in the Eastern time zone so fine by me.

[friendly_iconoclast]

20. Me too! The gun control crowd is split into two major factions at the moment:

1) The corporate-style, astroturf messaging of Michael Bloomberg and his Glyphosate Mom, Shannon Watts, and...

2) Student activists, who don't seem to care very much for the 'capitalism-safe' approach-
and might be twigging to the fact that Bloomberg, Watts, et al, are doing just that...

[Captain Stern]

22. No. It isn't too early. Nor it is too late.

I've seen lots of conversations about guns here.

Certainly no harm can come from having one more.

Maybe we could start the conversation off by saying nobody 'needs' a gun, then we can go to why some people do need one. Then we could take it to where at least nobody 'needs' an 'assault rifle'. We can even do that without even knowing exactly what an 'assault rifle' is. Somebody can throw something in there about automatic weapons, then somebody else can explain the difference between automatic and semi-automatic. Then, we (meaning the few people left that were still reading the thread) could say nobody would ever need a semi-automatic anything.....and then, we could argue about that (of course, it's obligatory that someone will have to chime in about 'machine gun'...that's just how we roll).

And then there's that whole thing about having to admit (I'm not putting this on anybody else, it's me) that banning all guns would result in some people dying earlier than they otherwise would have. But banning guns would result in less deaths by shooting overall.

After we sort of get that cleared up, we can check back on the Constitution, and argue about what the Second Amendment actually means. What 'militias' are and what 'well regulated' means is always fertile ground for conversation.

[MineralMan]

23. I'm pretty sure you're missing my point.

It's not DU I'm talking about.

[Captain Stern]

24. If you weren't talking about DU, then you're absolutely correct in saying I missed your point.

If you were talking about our country, and wondering when we would seriously start discussing gun control....I think that's still a very long way off.

If we can't seriously discuss it here, how can we reasonably expect our country to seriously discuss it? I don't think we can.

We have a good sized faction of people that are against any effort by our government to impose even the most basic of regulations that would hinder people from committing harm with guns, even though they don't want 'bad people' to have easy access to guns either. They think that those kinds of laws would be a start to 'taking away their guns'.

I'd love to be able to tell them that 'nobody is trying to say a law abiding person can't own a gun', but I can't honestly say that. Because there are so many people out there saying stuff like 'confiscate all guns', or let's have the Supreme Court 'reinterpret' the 2cnd Amendment (because militias)

So, as far as our country having a serious discussion about how to curtail gun goes....I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime. I'm fifty-five.