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1
Obviously, his story can't be true. How could he be shot in an area where handguns are illegal?
Ok, I can already foresee the responses about how of course DC's gun ban doesn't work because the rest of the country allows handguns. Ask yourself this before posting that, "do you really think a young stupid boy who would shoot someone over a cellphone would turn his illegal gun in if guns were completed banned in the US?"
Handguns are legal in DC. The process is just really tedious and expensive to get one legally. It does have magazine size limits though.
2
The Heller decision was decided in June 2008, which is right around the time this occurred from what I can tell (t-shirt in DC). They were still de facto illegal, and in actuality still are, due to DC not putting in place their regulatory structure until months after the case was decided.
3
Shooting someone is also illegal, but clearly it happened in the District anyway, and the fact it is illegal did not stop that young man from shooting Brian. Should we just drop that law too?
No, for several reasons:
A) Although not everyone abides by the law — whether it bans trying to murder someone for their phone, or owning a gun — most people will. Neither law will stop every crime, but it will be a deterrent for many.
B) Even though the shooting happens, and no amount of laws against shooting other humans will ever stop every single shooting, the shooter can still be arrested, tried in a court and, if guilty, sent to jail.
15
Who the fuck is talking about a complete national gun ban? Shove your straw man up your own ass.
13
This was really, really good.
For real.
1
What really puzzles and surprises me when I read this article was not the racial stuff. That was actually pretty standard white liberal fare. Nor was his standard issue stoicism and that whole "mind over matter" plowing thru with willpower bullshit. Been there, heard that.
What really jumped out is that for a country with a monumental chunk of the world's civilian, peace time gun violence, we know barely anything about what actually happens to somebody when they get shot. This is very strange. People routinely talk about ACL surgery and chemotherapy and hip replacements and having appendices removed. But nobody ever talks about:
"It turns out that even if a bullet only causes minor internal damage, doctors have to cut you wide open — to perform a procedure called an exploratory laparotomy — to make sure they’re not missing anything dangerous or fatal. "
How come the media never talks about stuff like this? When the talking heads have yet another animated discussion about Gun Violence, why doesn't anyone mention that treatment involves getting cut wide open? This procedure is likely to be expensive as hell. How much of it does insurance cover?
Given that civilian Americans have a much higher risk of getting shot by their countrymen more than most other people in the world, it's strange that we know very little about the protocols and procedures that follow when you get shot. I wonder how powerful the gun lobby would really be if more and more survivors of gun violence discussed their experiences. I wonder how powerful the gun lobby would be if victims talked about how they suffered in pain and struggled to pay for the medical care they needed. It seems to me that it's in the gun lobby's interests to prevent such discussions from taking place just as the war establishment benefited from nobody seeing pictures of the coffins of dead war veterans.
This is not just a story about race. This is a story about the very real individual effects of getting shot. And that's something gun control advocates have simply not brought out enough into the public debate.
1
The harsh reality is that it's mostly young black or hispanic male civilians that are shot. This demographic also typically has limited family support and the stories of their suffering do not sell well to a media consumer that is viewed by the media makers as mostly white. Please note, I'm not agreeing with the media makers, but that's the decision process at hand here.
2
Yes, I remember that exact video. Since when did posting a discussion of it for an hour with a prominent writer constitute "silence"?
