Nire Bryce

I don't mean to be a downer because I think control is an important fight, however:

it's only difficult to make in useful quantities if you can buy it on the open market, once it's banned setting up a manufactury for it isn't that big of a deal for the side that's got generational wealth, good funding, and controls the majority of small-footprint manufacturing shops.

this is why I say it's at most optimistic a 10 year horizon if everyone started working at it today before any sort of useful ban can even be thought about, everything without doing the hard work is just creating an even scarier way for them to find each other. The right wing have stockpiles of the stuff, stockpiles of guns, they have chemists, they're the people most likely to work for the current manufacturers in management roles, etc.

controlling bullets solves the problem the same way guns do: making politicians able to ignore it after buying votes, without actually solving the underlying problem. But most people advocating for this when I go to town halls and council meetings and state house listening sessions just want more controls for point of purchase, and that's their like, aim point. the furthest they can imagine.

so we get things like the assault weapon ban, that effectively bans scary looking things but not the actual class of weapon, such that there's loopholes people make and sell parts to circumvent boldly, online.

it's a complex topic, but much more complex after the militias showed their stores in 2017-2019 and beyond.

the j6 guys walking in formation, holding backpack handles to not get split up? all their guns they already bought, 8+ years ago.

if people want to do spree killings after the gun ban, they buy guns off people on Telegram, like they already do. They're planning to murder so the felony possession isn't going to hold them back.

I don't mean this to harp on it, but to show the long road as I see it. Half measures for election wins, focusing on the wrong descriptions when writing bans, etc, are labor and influence and favor trading that could have gone elsewhere, and I'm so tired of seeing everyone putting years into bans only for all the work to be thrown away in two years when the political pendulum changes direction. The opportunity cost for it is massive with the supreme court the way it is, and the number of shady lawyers employed by the other side who can twist any law to get around it.

it's not that I don't think it's important. It's that until things change, there's urgent needs that aren't a 10 year horizon, and because of being limited to that horizon we can work on the better control methods instead of throwing ourselves at a brick wall every year and not making durable progress.

longer timescales are a grim calculus, but they mean we can build scaffolding and support to have the final product stick. but yeah, I get it :/