Gun violence in the United States: A radical leftist perspective

What is the radical leftist solution to the gun violence in the United States happening right now?

Of course overthrowing capitalism would be a massive blow to the issue, but what coherent solution could we offer to solve or ameliorate the issue right now? Us lefties aren't generally supportive of strict gun control, but which gun control measures could we tolerate and support that would address the issue? Alternatively, what are some solutions we could promote which don't involve gun control?

We need coherent proposals for addressing the social problems we face right now, ones which we favor. Otherwise, we let liberals and reactionaries define the spectrum of positions and methods of addressing the issue, and that doesn't help us, especially when strict gun control measures are likely going to be the solution provided by the American "left". Unless we are comfortable with that solution (which I doubt), we need an alternative.

Other urls found in this thread:

thetrace.org/2016/01/chicago-crime-guns-chart/
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/
theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/untangling-gun-violence-from-mental-illness/485906/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_mental_disorders
nraila.org/articles/20000111/it-s-not-just-gun-control-laws
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Actually punishing the guilty offenders and not giving into idpol/political correctness would be a good start.
Take Chicago.
Please.
But seriously, more people get shot there on an average weekend than pretty much the rest of the country combined, and they have some allegedly stiff gun laws.

But though possession of a handgun is illegal, it's a misdemeanor, meaning they get a few months in county at best, and possession by a felon isn't treated any worse.
The average felon in Illinois has at least 10 prior convictions, tacking on one more for illegally possessing a handgun won't change anything.

Personally, I think those guys should be locked up and kept that way, because most of them are the textbook definition of lumpens.
They have no revolutionary potential or class-consciousness, and the fact is that a lot of them have made far more money through criminal activity than their peers do through legal enterprise.
The average crack-dealer makes more in one afternoon that the average worker makes in a month, and trying to tell them to go legit and play by the rules isn't going to work.

And before some bleeding heart comes in and starts whinging about racism and poverty and education, I can tell you from first hand experience that most of those guys living the gangsta lifestyle give no fucks about that shit.

They are a lost cause, and the sooner they're treated like the scumbags they are and not being coddled or excused by well meaning but ultimately foolish do-gooders, the faster that bullshit will stop.

Yes, there is some legitimacy to the argument about economic conditions and opportunity, but ultimately, people have to be held accountable for their own actions.

These clowns aren't raising their own people up from poverty, they're feeding into and fueling a dangerous, wholly manufactured lifestyle that ultimately only exists to perpetuate more crime and death.

An entire generation of people has been raised to believe they have no alternatives for success but to be a basketball player, a rapper or a criminal, and they eschew education because of farcical racial beliefs being perpetuated by their own people and the porkies running the show.

Is it fair?
Probably not, but I'll be damned if I can think of a solution that doesn't ultimately involve draconian measures, even though I'd prefer one.

Remove the stigma from mental issues and illness so that people aren't afraid to seek help.

With Chicago, however, only the counties where Chicago resides have strict gun laws. Outside Chicago, especially in rural counties, gun laws are still lax, so Chicago residents could simply drive out of town to legally acquire a weapon. Once they have that legal firearm, they can bring it into Chicago, either to use or to resell on the local black market.

>Despite having some of the toughest gun regulations of any city in the country, Chicago continues to record thousands of shootings per year. As President Obama has pointed out, that isn’t a failing of the city’s gun laws. The problem is that most of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from neighboring states with lax gun laws. A study released last year by the city found that almost 60 percent of firearms recovered at Chicago crime scenes were first bought in states that do not require background checks for Internet or gun show sales, like neighboring Indiana and Wisconsin. Of the remaining crime guns, nearly half were purchased at three gun shops just outside the city.

Source: thetrace.org/2016/01/chicago-crime-guns-chart/

What would that solve, beside bloating our already unprecedently massive prison population and funnel more funds into the private prison industry? Wouldn't it be better to promote rehabilitative measures which address the problems rather than just locking them up in what amounts to training grounds for hardened criminals?

When those actions are the product of a system which shaped them to act that way, and they are not given a support system which prevents them from taking that path or reshapes them to live a different life, then there is no point blaming (and punishing) them. It doesn't solve the problem; it just continues the failed policies that the United States has been upholding for decades.

Those measures you're promoting, however, are essentially the same that Reagan promoted with his War on Drugs. Reagan's policies only provided the illusion of a fix because the troublemakers were locked away instead of on the streets. That only inflated the prison system to an unsustainable level and facilitated the rise of private prisons; when the victims of the policies got out, even the lowly drug dealer was hardened and weaponized into the current crisis that is ongoing in poverty-stricken neighborhoods today. Now, the problem is even worse, only now there are more guns.


That's a pretty vague solution, and mental illness doesn't even appear to be a major contributor to non-suicidal gun violence:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/untangling-gun-violence-from-mental-illness/485906/

Addressing mental illness may significantly lower gun-related suicides, but it doesn't seriously address the issue of gun homicide or mass murder.

You can't really get rid of guns now that there's one in almost every house, so the solution must focus on getting rid of the social conditions which make people turn to violence. Every bit of evidence from the past decades has shown that a punitive "justice" system only makes the problem worse and that the main causes are economic and mental health related.

Overhaul the whole "justice" system and turn it into a proper justice system which focuses on rehabilitation and harm-prevention rather than punishment and cruelty. This would necessarily involve firing every single cop, prison guard and judge, and replacing them all with people who aren't corrupt authoritarian scum.

Massively improve provision of mental health care, especially for young people, and restructure schools so that they are a bit less like prisons. Abolish any kind of "zero tolerance" policies.

Legalise drugs, and treat drug addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal one.

Increase funding to social mobility programs to allow poor families to move out of areas which suffer from heavy gang violence.


Of course, I don't expect most Americans to support any of these. The culture there is very much one of "if violence doesn't solve the problem, get a bigger stick". Nowhere is that more apparent than in the American approach to "justice".

The murder rate is at its lowest its ever been in history but you wouldn't know that watching the idiot box news channels that are owned by several corporations that need the public in a constant state of fear to prop up their crumbling authority so that the people will cry to them please take away our guns please spy on us please, please, please mister government.
And the public lets them do it because they need a distraction from their shitty lives because they cant find a job, or are in massive debt, are cant pay their bills.
And how the left has been taken over by corporate third way democrats that use multiculturalism as an illusion of progress whilst leaving the oligarchy intact.
And how the sjw's dont care about economic rights and workers rights because a white guy wore a sombrero and there arent enough black people in pokemon.
And how Hillary is going to win and the corporate news media will never shut up about how she broke the glass ceiling yasss girl yasss but she will just send more niggers to prison and start more wars and continue to prop up the oligarchy but shes a women yasssssssssss

at least both Holla Forums and Holla Forums agree on this. to eradicate gun violence (and pretty much all violence) we need to remove any person whose skin is darker than printing paper.

niggers and nigger culture are detrimental to a white society and what you get in the end is black people absolutely incapable of performing white jobs (like having a chimpanzee for president) and white people trying to do "black culture" things, like smoking weed, getting shitfaced, or having braided hair, also rendering them incapable of performing their roles.

That's because your brain has been crippled by growing up in America. When all you have is a sledgehammer, every problem starts to look like a guy who hasn't had enough bones broken yet.

From an outside perspective, American culture is sick and rotten to the core. There are no quick fixes. Any effective solution is going to take decades to work. Sociology can tell you what those solutions are if you do your research, but I'm sure evidence based policy is somehow deeply unpatriotic. The American way is to just keep trying the same thing over and over until one side ends up dead.

Mein gott that picture is pure cancer

You want my perspective? Take a look at the stressors in people's lives. When did the mass shootings (because they don't give a shit about people being gunned down in normal violence on the streets beyond getting to point at the statistics) actually start? Well, seeing as the rash of mass shootings started only relatively very recently, but americans have had very easy access to guns similar to modern ones for about a century by now, we should maybe ask what's changed in the last decade or so. Well gee, maybe it's that more and more the "middle class" is being ripped apart and people are facing a nihilistic despair more and more. If we look at most of these shooters, most of them seemed like fairly average people, but they also all seem to have a certain level of despair to them. These are people who look around themselves and realize that they have no future. Going out and shooting people is their scream of rage and hopelessness to the world and they are going to make themselves heard at any cost. These are people who are alienated from themselves and others so much that they struggle to find meaningful interactions at this point. They are almost all depressed to fuck. I guarantee you that every single one of these mass shooters considered suicide right alongside their thoughts of murder.

Almost no sources on the gun debate, either left or right, will look any further into why someone would do something like this beyond some vague, handwaved "mental health". When you start actually asking the question of "why", the silence suddenly becomes deafening.

I miss serail killers, you dont see those guys anymore.
I was borned in le wrong generation.
Mass shooters are so boring, i mean if youre going to mass shoot someone you are doing it for fame, so like kill some important people like politicians or bankers, not school kids.


Have mass shootings increased or have the coverage increased and for what purpose?

Also why is the narrative only on white males and muslim terrorists, and the death in places like Chicago by black gang bangers just ignored.

A few weeks ago an indian guy shot his professor but that has gone down the memory now hasnt it huh.

Not a deranged white guy or muzzie.

also a bit more on the psychology these people are alienated for various reasons, either they are losers who cant get laid, have some gripe with the government, or are just plain schizoid and think lizard men want their brain.

The losers seek glory, they want fame, to be remembered, and they will, till the next shooter.
The political ones sometimes have legit political grievances or are just retards and think killing a bunch of people will make you think huh, this murder is actually right about not paying taxes and stopping wars in the middle east.

The crazy ones just want the voices to stop.

Yes. The two are intrinsically linked. When they started getting 24 hour coverage, they started happening more, which meant they got more coverage, which meant they happened more.

I'll let you decide.
But the answer is money.

Haha yeah dude people totally shoot up schools because they're poor lmao XDDDD everything is about le economics and I am totally not inventing a narrative to support my fucktard ideology XDD

Military training should be compulsory (though service shouldn't). Maybe as a part of a regular secondary education. Everyone should know how to defend themselves and take up arms when necessary. Everyone should have to pass firearms certification for open carry, with concealed carry shilled to the moon and back throughout. How likely are criminals to start shit with regular folks if they know there's a good chances they have a weapon on them and know how to use it?

Wildwestism when?

I support all those and that's basically my solution, as well, but I didn't know if that was the popular position on the radical left. Not a lot of my views are. Even when I was a liberal, though, my perspective on guns was generally that we should eliminate the conditions which cause the need and desire for guns rather than simply implement gun control measures under the belief that it will solve the problem. That method is basically like the trickle-down equivalent for gun policy.


That "black culture" didn't exist in Africa or basically anywhere else where capitalism wasn't.


Basically.


Both. Probably because mass shootings are becoming more frequent and have higher body counts.


Come on fam, the Wild West was a hellscape of vigilante justice and mass murder as a daily occurrence. Stop watching Western movies.

I actually didn't say they were poor you illiterate. In fact most of these people are "middle class" and I actually mentioned that.

Except it wasn't. People were reticent to engage in violence because even if you were lucky enough to get good treatment for your wounds, you would probably be fucked up for life.

No U. Seriously, look at some actual stats on violence in the "wild" west. Shit was almost entirely made up to romanticize the living conditions, just like the muh bootstraps narrative today.

The solutions is to establish some fucking communism.
I know you're looking for current solutions, but looking at the U.S. it should be obvious that mass incarceration, gun control, the death penalty, etc. are band aid fixes at best. As long as you have an economic system that produces both a permanent underclass of impoverished people who can easily turn to drugs or crime, and an increasingly overstressed, atomized and alienated society of workers leading to domestic violence, gun crime and mass shootings, people will keep on shooting each other in this country. And there will always be that argument that it's not their fault, the material conditions of their birth/life/society are to blame, because at some level that's always true.
In an equal communist society there would be none of these conditions, and thus no poverty, economic stress, or individualistic social stigmas. But if gun violence did still happen, I'd be comfortable in severe punishment, since the perpetrator would be solely to blame for their actions.

I'm just trying to find ways to ameliorate the immediate suffering of the proletariat while we work on the long-term communist movement. In doing so, we may attract sympathizers and fellow travelers (if not outright supporters) for providing and promoting coherent solutions to serious crises. They may be temporary solutions, and we can articulate that whenever we promote our solutions and contextualize it within the greater communist movement, but solutions must nevertheless be achieved. People are suffering and dying right now. No serious radical leftist should ignore that.

Your statements there are fine, and should be promoted, but they should be promoted in conjunction with more immediate solutions which could help improve our standing among the proletariat and temporarily improve their conditions so that they are not so overstressed, atomized, and alienated that they are incapable of achieving any form of class consciousness or participate in any revolutionary struggle.

Even under those conditions, punishment in any form would be an ineffective method of achieving a solution and would moreover compromise our core principles. Punishment has poor to no efficacy in reconditioning; rehabilitative methods are much more preferred. Unless your reason for punishing them is based on some reactionary notion of retributive justice or so-called vengeance "ethics, in which case I wouldn't really consider you fit for a communist society, it is irrational to resort to punishment techniques to address misconduct in a communist society.

yall dumb

Objectively, violent crime in the US has been slowly going down for decades.

The reason spree shootings happen is because some people simply lose their fucking minds. If there were no deaths, the perpetrator of the Pulse shooting would have been memed to hell and back because his profile seems like a bad joke.

Honestly, that chart is Holla Forums worthy for how obviously deceptive it is.

Wow, maybe want to grace us with some of those famous unemployment statistics that only count people on the unemployment rolls, while you're at it? Like said, your statistics only damn your argument further.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_mental_disorders
>Previous widely cited large-scale surveys in the US were the Epidemiological Catchment Area (ECA) survey and subsequent National Comorbidity Survey (NCS). The NCS was replicated and updated between 2000 and 2003 and indicated that, of those groups of disorders assessed, nearly half of Americans (46.4%) reported meeting criteria at some point in their life for either a DSM-IV anxiety disorder (28.8%), mood disorder (20.8%), impulse-control disorder (24.8%) or substance use disorders (14.6%). Half of all lifetime cases had started by age 14 and 3/4 by age 24.
>In the prior 12-month period only, around a quarter (26.2%) met criteria for any disorder—anxiety disorders 18.1%; mood disorders 9.5%; impulse control disorders 8.9%; and substance use disorders 3.8%. A substantial minority (23%) met criteria for more than two disorders. 22.3% of cases were classed as serious, 37.3% as moderate and 40.4% as mild.

>A 2004 cross-European study found that approximately one in four people reported meeting criteria at some point in their life for one of the DSM-IV disorders assessed, which included mood disorders (13.9%), anxiety disorders (13.6%) or alcohol disorder (5.2%). Approximately one in ten met criteria within a 12-month period. Women and younger people of either gender showed more cases of disorder.

I simply googled "gun violence statistics" or something of the sort and uploaded one of the infographics I saw that was remotely related. I don't personally endorse its contents, but it's better than a generic graphic of a gun with blood or whatever.

Libertarians are your best friends on this issue.

Socialis-
Well, okay then.

To reduce crime, and thus gun violence, you need to reduce poverty.
Have jobs programs, expand social security, have a single-payer healthcare system that also covers mental health, etc.
Basically, have a strong safety net and welfare programs.

Well, you could try gathering up the poor and ex-cons, teaching them trade skills and basic theory, and forming unions of activist workers ready to appropriate the means of production. It might be a hard sell for the poor but prison populations are already massively exploited in America for forced labor so you might find a receptive audience there. If you've a revolutionary mindset this might actually be a great way to jumpstart some rebellions against the capitalist order.

Unless you just want to be a reformist wimp, in which case I dunno, it's hard to meaningfully address the causes of violence without falling into limp-wristed liberal bandaid politics. You could try mass employment programs for the poor provided you could get the capital and political will to do it; I read somewhere that some South American city made a deal with all their gangs to turn in their weapons and get jobs, so now that city has gotten a lot safer since all the gangbangers have jobs showing tourists where they used to kill people.

Listen comrades, what we need to do first is take away all the guns from working class citizens. After that we can do armed revolution against the US government.

T.

Switzerland has a gun ownership rate of one per every two people. Almost every household has an assault rifle.

More guns. An armed society is a pleasant society.

No, you're thinking about it wrong. There are plenty of guns in America already. What we need are more powerful weapons. The terrorist with an AK isn't going to start trouble if all the law abiding citizens are carrying grenades and flamethrowers. No burglar is going to fuck with the guy who has a fully functional tank parked in his drive. School shootings wouldn't happen if all the teachers and kids had rocket propelled grenade launchers to defend themselves with.

Liberal party USA.

I'm fine with the solution detailed in the first paragraph, but that's not really a viable strategy unless we have fairly sizable organizations in the United States to do so. I personally don't trust the CPUSA to participate, though the SPUSA and smaller radical leftist organizations might be willing. In any case, that is a tactic we need to pitch in our local organizations and chapters, and start collaborating within cities and states to actively engage the poor and ex-con populations through workshops, reading clubs, open discussions, and protests.

While anyone in any such party should make those suggestions in their respective groups (if they haven't been recommended already), we need to appeal to larger organizations and seek to develop networks which could facilitate that.

As for the suggestions in the second paragraph, those could easily be promoted in the context of the larger campaign as a means of attracting new members and sympathizers.


Yes, and Japan has drastically lower gun violence—some of the lowest on Earth—due to their strict gun control policies.

Most of these guns are old, unsuitable for self-defense (i.e. bolt action rifles) or owned by a small, obsessive clique of lumpens.

The gun is the harbinger of democracy. The firearm and the printing press are the two inventions that ensured the death of hereditary rule (partially, at least; now we have feudal oligarchies kept legitimate by the state under the guise of a 'private' sector) Want to stop gun violence? Stop poverty. Scarcity leads to desperation, which leads to animosity. It's really that simple, and the only way to stop it is to make sure people are able to live off of the work that they themselves have control over.

But the most important reason to have an armed populace is mutually assured revolution. A state is held together by a monopoly on force. If the potential of violent resistance exceeds that of violent coercion, there can be no state. In the sixties, police brutality and suppression of civil rights got so fucking bad that black populace started arming themselves and threatening retaliation, which forced the state into compromise. That's not to say everything's all better now, but if America never had the second amendment, the police state we've dealt with up til now would have been even worse.

The solution is stop being moralists.

Most of the "deaths" are actually suicides. The rest are often avoidable through mental health, gang behaviour solutions.

For those that aren't avoidable, which is often, too bad tbh. You can't infringe on peoples' liberties just because some things are a bit dangerous. This is often just liberals whining about muh humanism. Pure ideology *sniff*.

They're called labor unions, the technique described worked pretty well back at the tail end of the previous gilded age.

Gun control is the least of their distinctions. Even leaving aside obvious differences such as wealth and culture, their justice system is tyrannical to an extent Americans would find unacceptable.
nraila.org/articles/20000111/it-s-not-just-gun-control-laws


True, it's mostly magpie-like collectors, but our household gun ownership rate of 35% is still somewhat higher than the 10%-20% of most other countries.


True, we've only had one civil war, while most other present day 1st-world countries continually rotated through violent insurrections throughout the same two-odd centuries.

Japan also has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, and they spend most of their money on public infrastructure because they don't have a standing army to waste it all on.

The UK is also an island nation that holds a ban on most firearms, but the impact it's had on crime rates has been negligible. China also has serious anti-gun laws, but that hasn't stopped the high crime rates that come as a result of poverty. More importantly, most of the crime carried out in China is perpetrated by the state. If the people were armed, the state would be more hesitant to fuck with them as much as they do.


It's funny, because a big reason people are against anarchism is because "What if we get invaded?" but even in the absence of a military, America is so armed to the fucking teeth that it would be too difficult for any country to take a hold of the mainland.

The notion that gun ownership is a meaningful check on state power is absurd in contemporary society and died a laughable death during World War II. The current military capabilities of the state far surpass those of any citizen's militia or armed revolution and no amount of fully-automatic weapons can pose a serious threat against that apparatus. Need I remind you that the military in Western nations has armored tanks, stealth bombers, armed drones, and a host of advanced and experimental technology that is not even currently deployed? I wouldn't put it past the United States or other Western powers to even utilize ICBMs or thermonuclear weapons as a last resort in quelling any serious revolution.

It's simply ridiculous to believe that, in this day and age, we could carry out an armed revolution through the equipment and training currently available to citizens. Any such revolution must as a prerequisite have majority support among military personnel, lest they stamp out any insurrection with patriotic zeal. For those reasons, it's no longer tenable to contend that citizens have a right to be armed as a check against the state and to facilitate a revolution if one is ever necessary. That is no longer possible in contemporary society.


Nowadays, labor unions in the United States are basically proletarian hierarchies which attempt to maintain and perpetuate their existence just like corporations do. The vast majority of labor unions no longer participate in class struggle in any meaningful sense; their interest is more in earning minor concessions (which will inevitably be erode or repealed) than raising class consciousness. Unless we begin new labor unions, or radicalize the current ones, I don't see how labor unions in their current state have much revolutionary potential.

The NRA is basically on the same level as FOX News and Breitbart in journalistic honesty and integrity. It's a completely disreputable source that doesn't even verify its claims or provide citations for them. Even worse is that you cited the NRA-ILA, which is the self-professed lobbying arm of the NRA. Shall we also cite right-wing "thinktanks" to substantiate our claims and just pretend that they too should be taken seriously as credible sources?

You do remember that these super duper modern militaries have lost repeatedly to ragtag guerillas throughout the post-WWII period, right?

Unlike the state political system, unions are private entities without anything in particular to protect them from democratization or replacement. Historically, unions have been proven repeatedly as the only method through which the lower classes can stand up for themselves as a practical political bloc.

Are you saying you actually disagree with their justice system statistics, or especially their factual description of the law, in Japan, Britain, and Canada? Of course the NRA are shills, they're hardly coy about it, but since they're practically the only organization covering this topic without an implicitly official anti-gun agenda, they're still the best place to look for challenges against whatever anti-gun argument is making the rounds.

Low-quality sources like the NRA are perfectly useful so long as you take what they say with a grain of salt, confirm what they say, and ignore areas they're clearly wrong about.

Can you provide an example wherein a popular revolution engaged in guerrilla warfare against a state apparatus with roughly equivalent military capabilities as the United States and succeeded in overthrowing that state without the support of that state's military? As far as I am aware, any and all contemporary guerrilla resistance, from FARC–EP in Colombia to the activities of the YPG and PKK in Kurdistan and Turkey, have not had popular support and thus were not popular revolts against any state or military apparatus, did not experience the full brunt of the military capabilities of those states, and did not pose any serious threat to the states they are combatting. Just because some guerrilla tactics have been viable in winning territory or engagements in certain marginally developed regions under certain special circumstances, I wouldn't consider those activities (and their relative success) to be applicable to a hypothetical revolt in the United States or some similar country.

I'm fine with the use of labor unions to achieve our goals, but I am highly suspicious of the current labor unions in countries like the United States and doubt their revolutionary potential in their current state. Many of the leaders of those labor unions have connections to the political apparatus which prevent them from serving the class interests of workers outside of incremental reforms, and moreover do not appear interested in challenging the political and economic systems under which they operate. If we are to use labor unions as a means of achieving our goals, we need to either retake the unions currently in operation and radicalize them or we need to start new unions which can seriously compete with them.

I'm saying that I do not trust their claims precisely because they are dishonest shills and fail to cite reliable and independent sources for their statistics. Perhaps if the NRA or NRA-ILA were to have a shred of journalistic integrity and actually provided citations to independent research on the topic that corroborates with their claims, I could excuse using them as a source on those topics alone. The link provided above provides no such verification, however, and for that reason I dismiss those claims as being as dubious as anything the NRA or NRA-ILA purports.

If there is trustworthy and independent research or sources which corroborates those claims, then I have no problem accepting those claims as true. I refuse to trust the NRA or NRA-ILA, though, and will not accept any claims they make that are themselves not corroborated by sources of that nature. That is the same policy and approach I have for all explicitly reactionary outlets, especially the likes of FOX News, The Blaze (Glenn Beck's media network), and Breitbart.

Anyway, that article is over 16 years old. Any data or information it is relaying, even if true, is likely to be outdated.

Much as I am pro-gun, I doubt this. Look how heavily armed the US is and yet our police are plenty more willing to fuck with us than plenty of other countries with much lower firearms ownership rates.

Nobody can convince me that gun control wouldn't be a good idea in an ideal society, but I'm prepared to overlook that whilst we need them for a potential revolution. Still, I think the points of anti-gunners are mostly accurate.

A lot of anti-gunners dont' actually make points though. Almost half their points are barely better than what you'd see on Holla Forums, with >lookadisgraff.jpg and a whole bunch of correlations that they then immediately explain as being causation, the dumbest strawmans ever to exist, and a widespread utter fucking ignorance of the subject they literally have no fucking clue over. A lot of them will tell you that pistol grips and sling points make guns billions of times more dangerous, and that there is no "legitimate purpose" for such a gun, even if it's otherwise identical to a "safe" gun.