Politics is not about reason, it’s about harnessing base emotions to gain power. In this case, armed citizenry + paranoid culture = destabilization and eventual autocratic rule. I try not to think about it too much!

While I share your frustration with our inability to get a handle on the gun problem, I've yet to see you propose a way around the obstacle posed by the fact that the Constitution does specifically protect the right to arms. Yes, it has been misinterpreted, but it is there. Maybe, in a hundred years of Democratic presidents, we get a Supreme Court majority that will interpret the 2A in a much more restrictive fashion (such as limiting it to real militias, not the Gravy Seals). But I'm not holding my breath.

The document would have to be amended to have any real lasting effect. My question is, how do we address that without opening ourselves up to altering other constitutional protections that conservatives would like to kill off, such as free speech and freedom of (from) religion?

What to possess is based on the methodology used as measurement, qualitive-quantitative.

I can't imagine what led Charles to believe reason has a place in the American political system. It's all performative nonsense geared toward fundraising. See, e.g., the millions of uneducated blue collar workers who gladly donate money to a billionaire who owns a private jet equipped with gold plated toilets.

It’s almost as if you can’t predict what an active shooter will do so you have to be prepared for anything because, spoiler alert, an active shooter is a maniac with a gun who isn’t acting logically. Trying to someone tie this to capitalism is pretty funny seeing how Marxist societies are pretty much governed at the end of the barrel. I guess in those societies both humans and things are equally worthless.

@7, etc.: Every so often, the hardcore authoritarianism inherent to Charles’ Marxist worldview slips through the smiling humanist mask:

“You can throw more guns at a crisis caused by guns (that will do, thank you), but you can't just ban or regulate them?”

Hey, banning use of certain drugs, and all sex work, certainly rid our society of every last problem related those activities, so why not try it with the guns? Indeed, why not, Charles?

melt the guns

Fascinated that people can't see the link between capitalism and (the) guns (industry). I mean, I thought that was pretty clear, and it comes from people who normally decry the link between big business and government.

@3 Switzerland is awash with guns, but absolutely heavily regulated (common sense, that). People love to say "It's not the guns! Look at Switzerland!" without knowing or consciously leaving out the situation there.

God damn you, Charles! You fuckin' asshole! Everything's a fuckin' travesty with you, man! And what was all that shit about Marx? What the fuck has anything got to do with Marx? What the fuck are you talking about?

The outfits that sell these active shooter drills are self-propagating bs based on no solid research who exist to bilk workplaces, school districts and municipalities based on fear. Wish you'd found a second to go into that.

@7: "Marxist societies are pretty much governed at the end of the barrel"

So true. But not all "Marxist" societies (those that claim a basis in his ideology) actually follow his philosophy. It's almost as if they adopted the label so as to appeal to a certain subset of the public. The "useful idiots".

Marx preached against disarming the workers.

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
― Karl Marx

@15: "The outfits that sell these active shooter drills" ... don't want to get sued should their bad advice lead to an injury or death of a client. Like Charles said, "The course on dealing with an active shooter (and I do not want to get into the details) was really fuzzy."

Of course they are fuzzy. Most likely at the insistence of their attorneys.

@13: “Fascinated that people can't see the link between capitalism and (the) guns (industry). I mean, I thought that was pretty clear,”

Why do you imagine (the) guns (industry) requires any link to capitalism?

‘As of 2004, "of the estimated 500 million firearms worldwide, approximately 100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s".[4]’ (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47)

@18 I'm sorry, I thought it was pretty obvious. The weapons industry markets and sells machines designed to kill people in order to maximize profits, a key element to capitalism. Using these profits, they then lobby government officials to eliminate barriers to people buying their killing machines, errr, "products," so that more people will buy them and they make more money, meaning they can lobby more. The drive for profit inherent in capitalism creates perverse incentives for an indistry churning out machines designed to kill, errrr, "for sport."

For more perverse incentives, see also: the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, etc., ad nauseum.

'What capitalism does is transfer the innate human ability to cooperate, share ideas with others, and depend on others, from humans to things.

And so you (the animal with a large brain, hands, and two feet) become estranged from what is essentially you, from what is of your own making."

wow.
Capitalism's
stolen our Humanity

commodified
our Existence

they've
Captured
the Planet.

brilliant.

what if WE
want it
Back?

@19: And yet, a place that had no capitalism produced one of the most prolific and deadly gun designs ever seen — and put many of them into the hands of terrorists, worldwide. (Where was the profit in that? Oh, right — there wasn’t any!)

So, it would seem the link between capitalism and the mass production of mass-killing machines isn’t as unequivocal as you seem to believe.

@17 Just think there's a little more to be said than calling them fuzzy. It's a whole industry selling false security and doing no good for anyone, and putting kids through pointless, stressful drills over and over.

"@19: And yet, a place that had no capitalism produced one of the most prolific and deadly gun designs ever seen — and put many of them into the hands of terrorists, worldwide. (Where was the profit in that? Oh, right — there wasn’t any!)

So, it would seem the link between capitalism and the mass production of mass-killing machines isn’t as unequivocal as you seem to believe."

@21 Actually they didn't just give the AK47s away, they sold them, and the profit went to the state. In the US, the exact same thing is happening although it is privatized -- US weapons also go to terrorists, military regimes, etc.

But I think, despite my trying to make it as obvious as possible, you're still missing the point. The conversation is about rampant mass killings in the United States and the profit motives of weapons manufacturers in the United States, not who mass produces weapons. Saying, "Oh yeah, well the USSR made a bunch of rifles and they kill people too and they were communist" doesn't actually have much to do with the conversation at hand.

The United States is the only modern, developed country with mass killings, including children, on this horrifying scale. The marketing of guns and defense of absolutely insane laws to facilitate their purchase and use is a main reason why. It's pretty simple.

@22: "and putting kids through pointless, stressful drills over and over."

It doesn't sound like Charles sat in on a grade school exercise. You don't tell kids to "trust your instincts". You tell them to get under their desks. Same thing for earthquakes, tornadoes, global thermonuclear war, etc. They don't need situational awareness. They just need to duck and cover when told to do so. It's the adults' job to worry about what might happen until then.

@24 - Sorry, that's not the case. School programs such as "ALICE" tell kids in school to decide if they should run or stay, and to possibly attack someone armed. It's big business, and even though it's obviously not the focus of Charles' article, feels too important to gloss over. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/10/20905029/newtown-castillo-parkland-school-shooting-alice-training

@23: “The conversation is about rampant mass killings in the United States and the profit motives of weapons manufacturers in the United States, not who mass produces weapons.”

Actually, Charles’ argument was clear (for Mudede values of “clear”): “…capitalist sociality is an inversion of human sociality…Things have a greater value than humans. This is the lesson at the heart of the system we live in. This is why it's so hard for reason (or plain humanism) to prevail. This is why it's so hard to impose even rudimentary gun rules.”

This argument fails when confronted with an avowedly Marxist state which designed, produced, and distributed worldwide huge amounts of mass-killing small arms, with utterly callous disregard for the many humans who wound up on the wrong ends of those killing machines.

Looking at it from the other direction: there are today countries with capitalist economies, which produce small arms, but which do not have American levels of mass killings. So again, to Charles’ point, capitalism cannot alone be the answer.

If you want to explain why Americans do violence to each other at multiple times the rates of other inhabitants of industrialized democracies, then you might want to start looking at America culture, not merely American economics.

@25: "School programs such as "ALICE" tell kids in school to decide if they should run or stay, and to possibly attack someone armed. "

That's most likely the high school curriculum. Not for younger ones. High school kids. Like the ones that used to enroll in their school civilian marksmanship programs. And who, in a few years, are going into the military and being handed M-16s (real assault weapons). Or as they reach adulthood, be free to take the bus to Third Avenue and risk confrontation with the local armed heroin dealers. Somewhere, they need to learn "fight or flight" as well.

If you really think that these are children and should not have to deal with lethal technologies, then let's remove them from the deadliest one. No more driver's license.