Alright, honest question here regarding white men's support for Trump: Isn't the level of ethnic diversity that America is approaching basically unprecedented? I'm not trying to defend Trump supporters, but is there really any country we can use to compare with what's happening here? It's understandable (but unfortunate) that the demographic in power is reacting so negatively to it.
It's just, I see (specifically) European posters on this board lamenting the horrible racial issues we have over here (and dismissing their own far right-wing movements as "small") but isn't the comparison basically unfair? Unless we're seeing European countries with emerging minority-majority generations of young people like we are.
Obviously as a straight white dude I wish other straight white dudes weren't so awful.
Yeah, Europe can be annoying on these issues. Just look at how they're suddenly clutching pearls over their social net when some brown people might get some of it too.
What would real gun control be? I usually see it presented as a Supreme Court issue rather than a legislative one.
Things like closing the gun show loophole, expanded background checks, psych evals, mandatory safety and training classes, gun registration, etc.
An assault weapons ban isn't going to do much if that's all it is.
Virtually none of this will pass, and most of it wouldn't really do anything either. The gun show loophole only matters if you need to avoid a background check (something that most mass shooters would pass anyway), background checks are inherently going to leave out people without records (aka lone wolf mass shooters), and psych evals won't do much either (since most of them aren't actually mentally ill; we just use the circular logic "How do we know they're crazy? They killed people! Why did they kill people? Because they're crazy!". Training courses would be nice, but again, they won't do anything to stop most mass shooters.
Realistically, there's nothing to do about it unless we severely crack down on the 2nd through the courts. Turn gun rights into what the right's done for abortion rights; erode them until it's basically intellectually dishonest to say "Hey, you still have the right to bear arms!"
This is a really good article about mass shootings and histories of violence:
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/14/11922576/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-gun-domestic-violence
Here are my feelings on gun control: mass shooters don't necessarily come out of nowhere. They generally have histories of anger, violence, substance abuse, family trouble, and very frequently domestic violence. The problem is that we don't consider those histories to be mental illness. That's just normalized as "being an asshole" as part of a culture of toxic masculinity until they go ahead and kill people.
Large-scale gun control seems very challenging given the constitutional requirements in America. But violent crime in general is ticking downward -- it's mass shootings that are ramping up. And it's already clearly constitutional to deprive specific people of access to guns. So although we probably can't ban guns in general, we can do our best to ban possession of guns by people who are likely to use them to commit mass shootings.
To start out, I think we should have a federal ban on gun possession or purchases for people who have a TRO, a restraining order, or a conviction for domestic violence. If we get the watchlist ban, we should just add these people to the watchlist, since we know from data that they are actually very likely to be violent dangers to others. I'd seek to expand this ban over time to other specific groups of people with histories of violent behavior. I think this is a policy that has constitutional backing, might actually be achievable, and might actually have an impact on mass shootings in America.
I'm all for more watchlists to restrict gun ownership. And I'd require some form of insurance and massive taxation on weapons so that they become prohibitively expensive to own and people will guard them better than they do.
Oh, you left a loaded gun in your car and it was stolen and used to commit a crime? Cool, the liability insurance you have to pay a month determined that you were at fault and so you get to cover the damages! That'll get people to lock the damn things up at home.
How can Trump be dumped at this point?
A quick rule change to unbind the delegates on all ballots would do it. I think they could convince enough of them to accept their parachuted candidate. Or they could whip up some superdelegates on the spot. How doesn't really matter; it's the risk/reward of whether it would be worth it to ditch him.
If I was a Republican strategist, I'd dump Trump. He's really fucked up in the last month with the electorate, and it's showing badly from almost all sources. You can't run from the guy if he's at the top of your ticket. To run him means that he represents your party, and that stench will destroy most of their careers. Trump is right-wing McGovern or Mondale; he'll end up eroding every one of their victories for the last 30 years with this reputation. We're talking governors, senators, representatives, hell, even dogcatchers here. No one will be able to say their a Republican until a right wing Bill Clinton can come in and explain that he's not like the nutjobs were.
And that's a long time away, politically. If they can't find such a candidate in the next 16 years, then the Court will likely end up 7-8 deep with liberal justices, Congress will get fixed of its gerrymandering (preferably by computers instead of just Dem rigging), and a majority of states will be lead by left-wing governments who will accept most federal programs that require consent from the states. Trump is going to bring in a disaster for the GOP platform (regardless of whether he even knows what's on it) for the next 3 decades. Dump him (again, if you're a Republican. If you're a Democrat, then enjoy the fire currently raging in the dumpster behind the largest Goodyear tire factory in the country).
