Oh sure, but there's the other two thirds that were permitted, which is no small amount.
Mass shooting in Main
- Thread starter Specter Von Baren
- Start date
If you have a culture of wide permissibility of gun ownership, the inevitability is relative ease of access of guns even to those guns are technically restricted to.
The reason being is that enforcement or responsibility has to be upheld by all gun owners. And yet we know that a substantial proportion of the population are not necessarily very reponsible, which means there are a lot of cracks in the system for guns to fall through into the wrong hands. To give an example of the Sandy Hook shooting, a legal restriction on Lanza owning guns was pointless if he knew how to get his mother's. Some people will not lock their guns up securely and leave them easy to steal. Some people may lend them out, or give them as gifts. Some people may sell them to others bypassing normal checks. And so on.
America has the world's highest prison population per capita, has brutal and overreaching police forces, and is the only Western country regularly implementing the death penalty. The issue is categorically not that the US is too lax on punishment.
That's not true. In California $950+ is considered a felony (Grand theft), and <$950 is considered a misdemeanour (Petty theft). Both are enforceable and punishable.
On paper yes. But store security cant stop people. And the police are not chasing people down, at least not right now. Google looting in california and you see mobs of people looting department stores, gas stations, it is all over the place.
Which means prison is not a deterrent. The thing that stops crime is making the ounishment for crime something scary. And if people arent afraid of prison then there is nothing that keeps people away from those choices.
Additionally the problem is the west is we dont culturally demonize criminality. There is too much forgiveness for being a criminal which again reduces consequences. As an employer i can no longer ask people if they have ever been convicted of a felony.
Well yeah, it'd be a shit search engine otherwise wouldn't it.
Depends. There is plenty of evidence on this - what is shocking is how little the evidence actually informs policy or public belief.
Some punishment of significance is better than nothing. So at the bottom end of crime, more serious consequences can have some modest effect. However, this eventually ends, and for moderate-high level crimes the severity of punishment almost completely useless as a deterrent. Countless judicial systems have found that when they pile on the penalties for crimes, people just carry on committing crimes much as they did before.
Even more serious penalties for minor crimes can be problematic. If you pile someone into prison for two years for a modest crime... who are you putting them with? Their social circle, the people they are around, the people they need to fit in with... will be criminals. That's potentially a major negative influence on them. If the prison is violent and dangerous, it's potentially going to traumatise them, desensitise them to poor conduct, etc. Plus, with that level of criminal record, there's a fair chance that it will make their post-prison lives much harder (e.g. fewer job opportunities, broken social lives). And by making their lives harder, fair chance that will end up encouraging them towards more crime to get by.
What actually works much more potently as a deterrent is likelihood of being caught. People commit crime because they don't care, they don't think, or they don't think they'll be caught. Not much can be done about the first two, but the third...
I think the whole punishment as deterrent survives for two reasons. Firstly, superficially, it makes sense - it takes knowing the actual data to realise this is a false perception that doesn't work out well in practice. Secondly, and I think much more potently, it feeds a lot of people's visceral desire for vengeance against evildoers, particularly likely to be stoked by fear of falling victim to criminality.
California is such a joke that a reporter interviewed a guy on live TV going to the grocery store asking if he knew there'd been like X amount of thefts here and he was like "that checks out, I've stolen from here as well". He straight up admitted on live TV that he steals shit from the store, that's how little people are afraid of being taken in for stealing in California.
I think bottom crimes, or things in which no one is hurt like theft, or possession of drugs whatever, basically the stuff that doesn't really deserve jail time should just come with a very expensive fine. Slap it onto someone's credit like a student loan where not even bankruptcy can remove it. Because the punishment of none payment then becomes ruination of your pocket book. That way the tax payer isn't funding prison time for someone who stole a TV, or did some crack.
Save prison for armed robbery, murder, grand larsony, fraud, shit like that.
It's weird because it's like some people aren't going to be deterred regardless what the punishment is. Even the death penalty wont stop every crime worthy of death. Partly because the death penalty takes too long, and there are too many appeals, so someone sentenced to the DP can be in prison for decades before anything is carried out and sometimes it's appealed down to life in prison instead.
I don't know I wish there was a clear answer to the crime issue, but I think the core problem America specifically has is that we are too big of a country, with too many economic situations with too much diversity of people and cultures which ultimately is unpoliceable. Top that off with a frankly shit government too busy trying to be politically correct rather than enforcing basic principals like boarder patrol.
America has shown the problems with the "Great Melting Pot" experiment, where too many differences make nothing agreeable. Other countries don't have this issue because the vast majority of people in the country are from that country. Japan for example is 93-something percent Japanese so all the policies in Japan cater to one specific people and that's what makes them so smooth in how things run. Germany is 86% German, etc etc etc. Not to say these countries are perfect either, because everyone has problems, but things are better.
Then also consider that America has like 4x the sheer number of people over most other countries except India, and China. And China controls it's population through oppression and iron clad punishment for breaking rules, plus that social score thing or whatever the fuck it is.
So is the answer tyranical? Maybe? Hopefully not. But maybe the solution is Splitting America up into small chunks of individually ran bodies with total control over their small portion of people. Perhaps we could call these smaller governing bodies "states" or something.......oh wait a fucking sec.....
October 27, 2023 news on the Maine shootings investigation
The Lewiston, Maine, shooting rampage suspect was found dead Friday night, police said, about 48 hours after the attack that left 18 dead and 13 wounded.
Fearful Maine residents stay home amid massive search for suspect in killing of 18 people
Heavily armed police surrounded a home as they searched for a suspect who authorities say killed 18 people in a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine.
apnews.com
Shopkeepers in California have the right to detain, search, and even use non-deadly force on suspected shoplifters.
If your problem is just with ineffectual enforcement, then fine, but you initially implied that the law itself was permissive of shoplifting under a certain value, and that's not the case.
Corporal punishment/ death penalty also doesn't function as deterrent.
So you want to... make it harder for ex-convicts to rejoin society and make an honest living? And you think this will reduce recidivism? Lol no.
Well the idea is a trade off, instead of making people ex-cons in the first place for minimal offenses you slap them with a fine instead. Then they are not ex-cons in the first place. And for more severe crimes, then yeah you don't get to come back to society easily, or perhaps even at all. If you kill someone why should you get to come back? You think this guy in Maine should just do some time and get to come back into society in 20 years? I don't, fuck this dude.
Okay, but a lot of criminals don't have much money to pay fines - in many cases may have taken to crime for financial reasons. Or we end up imprisoning them for non-payment of fines. Ugh.
I don't thnk anyone convicted of murder (1st degree) could be described as getting off lightly.
But whether they are let back into society, and to an extent when, is better determined by their likelihood of reoffending rather than mere sentiments of punishment. That can potentially be a difficult thing to work out, of course. But fundamentally we should not be locking up (at considerable cost) people who we have good reason to believe have a good chance of productive, law-abiding lives in the future just because they once committed crimes, even serious ones, in the past.
Although I am pragmatic enough to think maybe that in a few cases, the most egregious and severe, imprisonment for many decades or life may be reasonable irrespective of rehabilitation.
We're not talking about the mass shooter in Maine. We're talking about much broader topics of criminal justice.
Say someone is sentenced to twenty years for something, and then released. If you make it as hard as possible for that person to make an honest living, they're going to be likelier to return to a life of crime due to a lack of alternatives. You'd be making people less safe, and increasing crime, in the zeal to intensify punishment for no discernible benefit.
Yeah that's a risk I suppose. If the punishments we have now do nothing to deter, then it's logical to say that we have to change our punishments the question is how?
So what crimes are worth 20 years, but not worth life? If you miss 20 years of living in society what real chances do you have of coming back into it at that point. Not to mention what does 20 years in prison do to someone's mind, their mentality of the world, and should you get a second chance if what you did was worth keeping you away for a huge portion of your life in the first place?
Are there not crimes that people do that make them unworthy of ever offering them a second chance at life? Surely there are because you can serve life in prison, or face death entirely, so in what different are crimes worth a lot of time, but not the rest of your life time? What's even the point of that.
Unless you do alternative punishments, like if you rape kids we just cut you in half, crippling you for life. Or in some countries where if you steal, they just cut you fucking hand off. And then lo-and-behold not a lot of people steal anything.
Let's be real we're never going back to any sort of punishment system like that. So that doesn't leave us a lot of real options outside of revamping how the prison system works. In that we need to find suitable punishments for minor felonies, and higher punishments for long sentencing crimes right?
I don't know, maybe nothing would work and you are always going to have people doing some shit somewhere, in which case it circles back to the idea of stopping mass shooters with tighter gun laws, which I think we've established in a round-about way wouldn't work.
You can look up all the Propositions that have made being a criminal easier in California like Proposition 47 and many others. And the fact that California doesn't have enough cops to actually handle the crime in the first place.
I dunno, I don't think further impoverishing poor people for doing poor people crime is gonna have that great of an effect.
See, when I figure out why my argument doesn't make sense after writing it out, I usually just don't post it afterwords.
What part of the country gets to be the white ethnostate and how are you defining white, precisely?
I never mentioned race. I don't think the problem is race, the problem is culture. That isn't to say different cultures are a problem in and of themselves.
America has a huge mixing of culture that happens no where else in the world. As a result you have problems that don't exist anywhere else in the world. Culture clash is a very real thing.
But you also have factors of America simply being too fucking big, and perhaps dare I say it....to "free". Because you can point at other countries with HUGE lands masses like Russia, China, Brazil, India. But each of those countries has either a scary government police enforcement, and/or also doesn't have it's population spread out the way America does. A lot of Brazil for example is forest and people aren't living out there. 96% of china's population is relegated to the Eastern portion of the country. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/122... language,, northwest, and northern frontiers. So despite their giant populations, those populations are all gathered up and easier to police on top of a lack of cultural diversity.
So it's not a matter of dictating a "white" anything. It's about cutting down the portion of the populace expected to adhere to the same nationally regulated body that is simply spread too thin.
Ok but this is a forum about sharing thoughts an ideas, so even if an idea is bad it can still be worth sharing because it might help someone else have a better idea around it. Or we can just insult people to, that's fine.
!?! People who've been away for 20 years can reintegrate into society. Its not impossible, provided that society doesn't constantly put up barriers.
So you think all lengthy prison sentences should just become life? Regardless of severity, regardless of rehabilitation, regardless of literally any other factor?
If you want to make the criminal justice system even more arbitrary, an even bigger expression of pointless vindictiveness, then your approach is the way to go.
....countries with corporal punishment and/or mutilation as punishment actually have pretty terrible crime rates. It. Doesn't. Work.
Of course it needs to be revamped. But you're not really proposing a true reform: you're just proposing.... massively increasing the severity of punishment, and extending the biggest possible punishment to mid-level crimes. You're essentially proposing that they just double down on the approach that's already failing, while also becoming infinitely more arbitrary and cruel.
Your approach would massively increase crime, while transforming society into an abusive authoritarian hellscape.
Crazy idea: we address the primary root causes of crime, such as destitution, addiction, homelessness, mental health and alienation from the political process.