Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
The problem is the convert to automatic things and not the motivation to kill a bunch of people that has been apparently increasing and almost always carried out with legal and far too easily available non-converted semiautomatic weapons.
It is the scary looking things.
Edit: added text in italics since I left out an obvious detail
Don’t know where you’re going with the rest of your comment, but that part is the sine qua non of our violence problem.
Without the prevalence of guns, the motivation isn’t as much of an issue. Prevalence of guns isn’t a huge deal if there is a low motivation to use them to murder people. Both are necessary for the issue to be as bad as it is in the U.S.
I think the normalization of murderous intent, (and how it manifests itself in lesser forms of violence) is a much bigger problem than murder.
I think that suicide is twice as large a problem as homicide.
I think suicidal ideation (and how it manifests in depression and self harm) is a much bigger problem than suicide itself.
I don’t think anyone with the motivation to murder or kill themselves is “cured” of that disease by taking away the guns. I think it masks the symptom, while the disease festers and grows.
I think we need to deal with the social/cultural issues long before we ban every object that can be used by a sufficiently motivated person to cause harm.
Can we not do both? Metaphorically - and literally - stem the bleeding? Sure, people will switch to knives, trucks, whatever else. However, as countries who have heavily regulated firearm ownership recently, like Australia, have shown, violent crime goes down significantly once it becomes much harder to access firearms. Some of this does actually boil down to psychology - there’s a heavily-studied mental disconnect between pulling a trigger to shoot at a human being, vs physically assaulting a human being with a knife or blunt object with intent to kill. This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
Taking guns affects gun crimes.
Addressing the societal/cultural/economic issues affects guns, knives, bombs, cars, bludgeons, and barehanded crimes.
Knives are used to kill three times more often than rifles. For ever 100 rifle killings, there are another 300 knife killings. Consider these 400 crimes, and take all the rifles. All of them. Assume 100% effectiveness: all rifle crimes are eliminated, and none of the rifle-criminals switch to knives. Best case scenario, 25% effectiveness; 300 of those 400 are dead.
Now, focus on the socioeconomic conditions that lead people to kill. Focus on the murderous intent. Your social/cultural approach only needs to have 25% effectiveness to achieve the same result. When we target the whole of the problem, we don’t even have to be very good at it to achieve phenomenal results.
To answer your question, yes, we can do something useless and pointless, and address the societal issues, and work the actual problem.
What we can’t do is just the useless, pointless something, without addressing the social issues, and expect anything to actually improve.
We must enact universal healthcare. We must fundamentally address economic disparity with a punitively high top-tier tax rate like we had until the 1970’s and 80’s. We must address food insecurity, housing insecurity.
We must soften or eliminate criminal sanctions for non-violent offenses, and we must throw away the key for habitual violent offenders, a
Just guns, you don’t hear about mass bludgeoning with candelabra. It’s always guns, no need to bring in what aboutism, the US has one problem when it comes to murderous intent, and it’s guns.
Sure let’s work on mental health too, but keep your eyes on the ball, it’s the guns.
Did I say mental health? It’s not mental health. It’s socioeconomic despair. It’s a societal issue, a cultural issue.
You want to see a strong correlation with violence? Look at age of motherhood. The mean age of women when they have their first child.
Australia and Europe commonly wait until they are in their 30’s to have children. The average child in these areas is raised by mature, economically stable adults. Murder rates in these areas are a tiny fraction of the world rate.
Compare to Central and South America, where the average mother is 18 to 22, and the murder rates are large multiples of the world rate.
The correlation holds true across nations, across regions, across cities, across demographics. If you know the age of a motherhood in a given area, you can predict the homicide rate in that area. If you know the homicide rate, you can predict the age of motherhood.
Contrast with guns, where the nation with by far the highest access to guns in the world has a homicide rate well below the world average. The rural areas of that nation have near universal gun ownership, yet the violence is clustered in impoverished areas, where the majority of the population doesn’t actually have guns.
Turns out it’s not actually the guns. It is the motivations of the people carrying them. When those people are figuratively beaten into submission, living paycheck to paycheck with no legitimate prospects, no way to get ahead, saddled with debt, no equity… Violence is not a gun problem. It’s not a mental health problem. Violence is what happens when you systematically subjugate people, and some of them decide they don’t need to obey. Violence is a socioeconomic problem. It is a cultural problem. More specifically, it is a problem of corporate culture, where people do everything they can to take everything they can from everyone they can, and give back as little as they can to as few as they can.
We need universal healthcare. We need to eliminate food insecurity. We need to eliminate housing insecurity.
We need to restore the protections we had against 19th century robber barons. Specifically, we need to reinstate a confiscatory top-tier tax rate. The only people that businessmen hate paying more than workers is the IRS. A confiscatory tax rate forces them to choose between the two.
We need to kill the concept of “renting”. We need to create a owner-occupant credit against residential property taxes, to hold them where they are, or lower them slightly for anyone living in their own properties. A “landlord” who wants that tax credit will have to issue a “land contract” (rent-to-own arrangement, recorded with the county) or a private mortgage to secure the occupant’s credit against that property’s taxes. The occupant will then be paying a fixed rate for the duration of the contract, and will be earning equity.
It is much more feasible to fix those three factors than to enact any form of gun control, and any of those factors will reduce violent crime far more than even a total confiscation could ever hope to achieve.
Holy fuck this is a convoluted waste of words to avoid reality. Want to see a correlation? Bullet wounds and deaths, where you find the first you almost always the latter.
But sure age of motherhood, IRS and landlords. Mate I agree you need to fix all the social issues you have over there but fuck,kids getting shot while at school? It’s the fucking guns that you have everywhere!
When you walk in and find your kitchen flooded do you go and close the water mains or start speculating about the rate at which the snow is melting up in the mountains?
That’s actually an excellent analogy. Here, we have the river overflowing its banks, and you’re busy trying to find the water main. Can’t hurt to shut off the water main, eh? Every little bit helps?
Simpleton.
So instead you sit down, get on lemmy to show your deep knowledge of river banks through hundreds of words while thr rest of the house gets wasted.
All while your neighbours, the ivilised world, is fine and is trying to convince you to close that fuclimg mains and check your pipes.
But no, you sit there doing nothing to fix the problem and try to convince everyone it’s the river banks… and calling them simpletons!
Yes, without guns it is slightly harder to kill people. Now, how do you plan to take their guns when they can make them in a day on a 3d printer?
Bruh this was already hashed out in his post. Not even a comment, literally in the
post you responded tooriginal post.Why not both?
That is what I’m saying, it is both motivation and the already easily available semiautomatic guns that are the problem. The scary automatic conversions are a distraction because they sound and look scary, even though they are used in very few mass shootings.
Just like silencers and the ‘assault weapons’ baloney that didn’t address the majority of gun deaths which are caused by pistols even after suicides are excluded.
Gotcha, last sentence sounded a little bit pro-gun though hence my response. I still think the ease of access is the main issue, by far. I would probably be dead if I was american as I could’ve easily got a cheap 9mm to off myself during the worse times. It was easier to reach out than to buy a glock and I seriously think it saved my life.
“It is the scary looking things.” Sounds pro gun?
Weird.
Kinda dismisses the real criticism people have with guns yeah. They are not advocating against them simply because “they look scary”.
I’m saying the people who are making and enforcing laws are focused on the scary looking parts of guns instead of the actual problems of motivation and prevalence of guns as a whole. Instead they ban cosmetic things like in the 90’s assault weapons ban while doing nothing about the actual problems like pistols in general and how easy it is for people to acquire them.
Automatic conversions are already illegal and were never that hard to do before 3d printing. Yes, they need to do something, but it doesn’t address the underlying issue of mass shootings and why people are doing them and automatic weapons don’t tend to increase the number of casualties in most mass shootings.
I understood that the first time yeah. And I think you agree with me since you edited your comment to further explain your idea. I’m not contradicting your argument, I agree with it and appreciate that you addressed my criticism. I think it’s a hot enough topic to warrant being a bit less open to interpretation, especially in text form.
Thank you for the feedback!