Man, I just don’t get how that many people would like coke. It’s a shitty high, that doesn’t last nearly long enough, that has massive implications for your long term health, and it costs way too much for what you get. $50 of weed = enough for a week+. $50 of coke = maybe 30m if you’re not sharing. I’m glad I never really got it, it’s too much of a rich persons drug for me to have ever been able to service an addiction to it.
Worth noting that a gram of coke currently goes for a nationwide average of around 100-150 USD in Switzerland, and about 200-250 in the US, per the data I looked up.
Different supply levels of and ease of access to various drugs make them comparatively more or less expensive. Combine that will a user base of above-average wealth and it makes sense.
I agree regarding the absolute value of the two drugs though. Coke is fine, I suppose, but nothing I want to shell out the money for - but then again, I’m not in Switzerland so who knows.
Holy fuck prices have gone up since I got sober. The current Swiss price is higher than the street price where i am in the US in 2012 when I last did the stuff.
Note: unless you know someone, MOST cocaine you get (especially in the US) is complete shit and has been for decades. Likely less that half actually cocaine.
So unless you have a contact up the food and I mean really up the chain. You’re not getting cocaine in the US, you’re get a mix of street trash with some Fentanyl to make you get the numb lips, vibrate sense. (unless they put too much in and then you die)
This is the main reason that legalization and regulation should be considered, at least in my opinion. People are going to do drugs, until the end of time. Even if it means playing Russian roulette with Fentanyl, they are still going to do it. We should focus on harm prevention and rehabilitation, not punishment.
Yup, I had a friend OD a few years ago. Had moved out of the city and got clean. Came back visiting and was just going to have “night” out and got bad shit.
Not really the same as cocaine, but I feel the same way whenever I see cigarette prices now. I remember being able to get a pack of GPCs for a dollar before I quit in 2000.
Always found coke highs were like an hour or two max, maybe mine wasn’t best but all night? Mean it wasn’t nothing after an hour but it was at the stage where coke’s name should be ‘more?’. If it did that to me in my party days I’d have said it was cut with some speedy stuff. That said I had a decent tolerance to most things at that point so my experience may not be usual either but it may not just be quality level is all I’m saying.
I’ve found the initial rush of coke to last for maybe an hour or two, but then there’s an afterglow where you’re still feeling it but not to the same intensity. The problem is that people will want to re-up as soon as the initial rush wears off which causes a much higher rate of usage.
You have it the other way around. Amphetamines last for QUITE a bit longer than cocaine does. Cocaine lasts like 90 minutes max, 30 minute peak at best if your body chemistry allows it. You can get high as fuck off a single dose of speed and be good for several hours, like a 4 hour peak.
Also, nobody is cutting that shit together, have you ever even done either of those drugs before? You’d know that you can’t mix the two, you’re either going to get high off the coke or the amphetamine, that’s because the coke will block amphetamines so you’re basically just going to get extra stimulation and that’s it.
I know this thread is about cocaine but you made a blanket statement about people using drugs having mental health problems. There’s plenty of recreational drugs out there and people use them for all sort of reasons, some of them might have mental health issues, none of them need your judgement.
And it’s not just the coke parties you don’t get invited to.
I didn’t say every one using drugs has mental health issues. Wrong user.
I will say that drug users live in this weird bubble that over normalizes it. Most people are “boring” and don’t do more than light drinking. We have parties. We have a good time. We don’t generally want to hang out with coke heads.
Sorry I thought i was replying to op’s smart comeback.
I will say that you too are putting “drug users” in one big bunch and judging them. No one wants to hang out with coke heads, I did mention recreational use. Your boring friends that only do light drinking are recreational drug users too BTW.
Just making sure you don’t claim something on people who didn’t say it.
Also, your stance on me and other anti-drug folks as boring nerds who know no fun is hilarious to say the least and only reinforces the notion about drug heads not imagining what genuine fun even is.
Imagine that for a second. No coke. No weed. No alcohol. Just a company of close friends, evening talks, board games, and tea. You don’t need to alter your mind in a slightest, because you have a completely real, not externally induced, fun. That’s the kind of parties I throw and participate in with my friends, and it’s lovely and creates a lot of moments we all cherish for long, long time.
What exactly does substance use have to do with mental health?
Nobody uses drugs as a way of having a good time, they are used to enhance a good time. If you aren’t having a good time sober, you aren’t gonna have a good time peaked either unless you took a LOT.
If you’re having a genuinely good time, there’s little in there to improve. If you’re actually happy, or actually relaxed, or anything, really, you can easily get even to overwhelming levels without using anything - assuming you have a healthy psyche and are currently in a good condition.
But then people have anxiety disorders, they may be depressed, they might have BPDs, they may have extreme burnout - and then to curb it and have a truly good time they need substances - to let go, to induce positive emotions, to relax.
Honestly this shows even with casual alcohol drinkers - remove alcohol and the party will appear bland and empty to them, they won’t be able to open up and have equally good time. They would look for alcohol in order to make the party good again. This is very problematic. And the same goes for party drugs - go ahead, hold a party with friends into drugs, but remove the substances, alcohol, etc. Not such a wonderful time, huh?
People with healthy and good mental state and no addictions can absolutely have wonderful and amazing moments with their friends without “enhancing” their feelings in any way; there is no need to enhance anything, it peaks already. If it doesn’t, look up why.
People. Cocaine is not maryjanes. You can get addicted badly to cocaine. There’s tons of neurological effects that will cause you to not function proplerly in society. By all means smoke your ganja but don’t equate hard drugs with it.
Lots of highly addicting stuff is legal, I don’t care if people do cocaine. Make it legal and safely accessible so drug addicts can participate in society and not have to fund cartels
Yes, light and legal drugs are not okay as well. They too may cause severe health (including mental health) issues, as well as addiction.
THC, alcohol, nicotine and even caffeine cause significant and measurable harm, and you’ll be much better off by restricting them long-term, unless you have medical indications to consume them.
If you need any of them to relax or to have a good party or to stay productive, remember it is NOT sustainable and actively harmful and something has to be done about the way you organize your life. You can’t go on like this forever, it will get you eventually
Yeah it’s always the same thing. “Guys, you can smoke cigarettes, but weed will fry your brains and leave you completely useless to society. Legalizing would be a disaster”.
Idk, it seems like a pretty big jump in addiction potential. I don’t hear of too many people going into sex work to support their alcohol and cannabis habits.
I do support at least decriminalization of all drugs though. As long as it coincides with adequate education, harm reduction, and therapy resources.
I have a completely different problem with cocaine. Namely that it is extremely exploitive to the people who grow the coca. It takes about two acres of coca plants to produce just one kilo of cocaine. Obviously, that means the people who farm it are paid virtually nothing and live on starvation wages. If it’s really cheap in Switzerland, that makes it worse.
On top of that, coca plantations are responsible for huge amounts of deforestation in an area of the world that should not be deforested.
However- hundreds of thousands of people are working in coca plantations and own small coca farms and if this all ended, they wouldn’t even have the meagre wages they make from coca farming. So I don’t know what the solution here is.
Nobody is saying that people should start taking cocaine. Just that you shouldn’t get your life ruined by having it / using it.
Also, knowing that what your getting isn’t mixed with mdma, amphetamines, ketamine and being able to properly monitor your dosage instead of guesstimating the purity and doing brain arithmetic is very helpful.
There’s a major difference in having the person who sells it to you wanting you to quit vs wanting you to consume more.
What consenting adults do with their body is their own business.
Bodily autonomy is an all or nothing thing. Whether you’re talking about abortion, gender affirming surgery, taking a dick in the ass and in the mouth at the same time, or shooting meth into your dick. It’s all the same thing.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but this brings up the next round of tough questions:
If your bodily autonomy is absolute, fine, but what happens when your choices and their impact start to spill beyond your own personal life?
If you want to go wild with hard drugs, okay fine, whatever. But when you need medical attention because of that decision, should insurance providers or the state be obligated to spend in order to treat you?
When your addiction costs you your job and support network, should the collective taxpayer have to subsidize your poor life choices?
I don’t mind the notion that individuals should have final say over what happens to their bodies, but that sort of assumption of responsibility, at some point, cuts both ways…and the flip side of some of these decisions would suggest that the individual should bear all consequences of their decisions…which seems unlikely in practice. We’re not going to see an addict rushed to an ER and the hospital toss them out into the street saying, “This was your decision! Sorry!”
And the mitigation measures seem equally unlikely to fly with the “strict bodily autonomy” crowd: increased insurance premiums or exception clauses in policies in order to keep expenses reined in for the rest of the policy holders/taxpayers who aren’t using their strict autonomy in a way that adversely affects others.
While it’s fine to conceptually discuss these decisions in a vacuum where it only affects the individual, in real life application, these decisions have impacts outside the individual in almost every case, which fundamentally shift the discussion.
I struggle with this line of thinking because there are so many legal things people can do to increase their probability of being a burden in the national healthcare system. Alcohol, junk food, working too much, gambling too maybe. I can’t wrap my head around a system that would be “fair” and not fall into a black mirror episode dystopian “good citizen” points system. I’d rather just pay more than my fair share, knowingly subsidise people who make bad choices, and not live in the dystopian society.
Theres a separate argument about the drugs increasing crime probability that I also don’t buy entirely. Those crimes are crimes already, so making these other “precrimes” also crimes seems a bit weird - not to mention wildly ineffective at reducing harm or use of the substances in question. I’m sure we can identify books and films that increase future criminal probability too.
Bodily autonomy does hold some water for me as an argument, but for me it’s more about finding a way to minimise societal harm while maximally hurting the businesses profiting from these dark economies we have created through prohibition. But this brings up another round of tough questions: do we do this for all substances? Forever? Is this really the path of least societal harm? (I honestly don’t know)
There are plenty of “hard drugs” you can do with very little damage to your body. Cocaine is not one of them. In fact, it’s one of the worst things you can do for your heart.
Considering that mass shootings aren’t a common thing in the Western world as a whole, that isn’t really relevant. One is more than most countries in the West have had in decades.
Absolutely. I just think that it's silly to draw attention to guns being easily attainable in this context, when there have been so many more mass shootings in other European countries.
The timeline for the shootings seems like it’s that economic fuckery and downturns precede upticks in shootings. It is very alarming that there has been three of them this year.
I’ve had friends that were cocaine addicts and some that really hit the bottom. This seems insane to me, this isn’t a fun and easy drug like weed imo. I’ve always lumped coke with meth and heroin.
Its harm potential is somewhere in between. To put it in perspective, alcohol is worse than heroin. And like alcohol addicts, your friends should be able to get a clean and safe source to reduce damage, and the help they need without any fear of persecution.
You can’t criminalize problems away. It evidently didn’t help your friends.
I don’t think alcohol is worse than heroin by any means, although the harm that alcohol does is definitely underestimated.
I’d also like to say that I don’t necessarily think the use should be criminalized. Putting addicts in jail solves nothing and the justice system should be concentrating on the ones that sell it. Making it legal will just make more addicts, and won’t help the ones that currently are.
It’s also harder to stop abusing something if it’s sold in every city legally. Dealers go to jail and their numbers can be deleted.
Decriminalization but making the sale highly illegal while offering free rehab to the ones that need it is the way forward imo.
What is the source of that image? I’m questioning its validity. They have cannabis as more dependency forming and physically harmful than GHB. Unless it means something it doesn’t say, like they’ve weighted the results by how many users there are of each drug or something.
Interesting - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg, which pulled it from an expert survey in the UK.
I think they were asking for the source because the link you shared is just Wikipedia to a file. I was wondering about the original source of data too.
Edit: full link came out weird like yours. No wonder we were confused.
I love GHB but it needs to be way higher on dependence. It’s extremely easy to be addicted to. Benzos as well. Benzos are just under heroin in levels of dependency.
Edit: full agree with you, LSD isn’t even on this chart if the chart was real.
You should totally question the validity, but I’d pause before dismissing it entirely. It’s supposedly based on an opinion survey of psychiatrists and a group of ‘independent experts’ (footnote incoming) published in the Lancet in 2007. Edit: I said things that weren’t true about the Wikimedia image that I have removed - it’s based on the table near the bottom of the article.
DOI is 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60464-4
You should ask our friend ANNA if she’S heard people talk about this during her time in the ARCHIVEs.
It’s not a completely objective harm/dependence measure, for sure, but the opinions of experts aren’t meaningless - it’s worth reading the article and judging the authors’ claims rather than this image. Though I will say the number of participants seems really low.
On LSD,
the opinion thing should be underlined and considered heavily (particularly in the UK, where rave culture is/was more top of mind than other places and LSD is/was in the mix, albeit I don’t think to the same degree as MDMA and other compounds), but also
as crazy as it may sound, dependency can develop in some users. I’d argue it looks VERY different than dependence to other substances (frequency is obviously much lower, given rapid tolerance, and some people may not call once a week or every two weeks dependency*), but it still exists. Given that this is basically an expert opinion poll it’s actually placed more or less where I’d expect to see it.
*Though in online discussion groups for folks interested in such compounds, those folks often do call that level of frequency a sign of dependency. Should note I’m talking specifically about macrodoses, not microdosing.
(Footnote) from page 1049: “These experts had experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services.”
The data in the paper is obtained solely from questionnaire results obtained from two groups of people: the first comprised people from the UK national group of consultant psychiatrists who were on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction, while the second comprised of people with experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services; the experts are not named and were chosen by the authors.
Thanks for the graphic, but many of those are laughably wrong. I guess it depends on their specific definitions. But for example solvents do irreversible damage with every use; meanwhile heroin is a drug available with a prescription (usually just in hospital use) and doesn’t do almost any long term damage on its own.
My friend’s brother just died of heroin overdose a few weeks ago and I just couldn’t help but feel for him. How many dark alleys did he have to go to to get his high? How many sketchy people were involved? Did he have access to clean needles? He overdosed alone, and likely felt subhuman due to being relegated to the fringes of society just to get his high.
Legalization would not have kept him from getting high, but it certainly would have enabled him access to clean drugs from a safe place, clean needles, and possibly made him viewed as someone who enjoyed getting high and not a piece of shit addict. He had a problem and it being illegal only made it worse for him.
Legalize it all. He was an adult, it’s his body. He can do what he wants with it, it’s nobody’s place to tell anyone what you can or cannot consume. He loved getting high on heroin and I don’t see a problem with that.
I agree with you. I know a lot of people who are cocaine addicts and their addiction makes them all incredibly unreliable. They stay up partying until 7am then crash for 12 hours the day of a big event. I’ve also known people who died due to tainted cocaine. It’s not a safe drug by any means. I’m all for decriminalization and treating it like a health issue, but it should not be taken lightly.
I don’t think that would be a good idea. We want it to be refined so it’s high purity and safe (or as safe as it can be).
If anything I would suggest the opposite – make it legal when refined, and have a government agency certify they meet a certain quality. You’d want to encourage people to take the refined version, which has known composition and materials. The unrefined street product would be illegal, but the only “punishment” would be confiscation. No jail time, except perhaps for manufacturers who are knowingly getting people sick with their product.
See its traditional use in leaf form. It’s way less potent and it’s a lot easier to tell if something is wrong with a leaf than if someone cut something into a powder post inspection.
Potency with coke is a real problem. It’s TOO good. And we get it refined in large part because of our silly policing policies around it. It’s silly to be policing a leaf the way we do when there’s coffee beans lining our shelves.
Yeah there is no safe amount of cocaine to do. There is also no safe amount of alcohol to do. At least if shit is legalised people can decide to use cocaine or not with informed consent and can be sure they are actually getting pure cocaine.
I had a friends cousin die from using cocaine but it was because they had bought it off a street dealer and it was tainted with fentanyl. They just wanted to have a little extra fun on a night out on vacation. They’d be alive and well if cocaine was legal.
Prohibition doesn’t work. It just adds suffering and stigma to addiction. One of the biggest factors to addiction is isolation something that criminalizing health issues greatly contributes to.
Nonsense. Alcohol is a carcinogen, every part of your body it touches has an increased risk of developing cancer. It is directly neurotoxic. It damages the liver and stomache. A bottle of it can kill you. Stopping taking it can kill you.
Weed taken orally is physically very safe. It can still be habit forming and there are other unwanted side effects but to act like it is physically comaparable to alcohol is silly.
I say there’s no safe amount of cocaine because it is directly cardiotoxic and has been known to cause heart defects in healthy young men at moderate doses.
I don’t think ant drug should be illegal I just think people should be aware of the dangers of substances so they can make an informed decision.
Sure, but what chemicals do we have that are safer? Pretty much all of our over the counter drugs will fuck you up long term if taken regularly, and lots of them are acutely dangerous.
“We hypothesize that THC neurotoxicity is attributable to activation of the prostanoid synthesis pathway and generation of free radicals by cyclooxygenase.”, would make THC, by definition, a carcinogen.
I also agree with your last statement completely. My issue is that everyone touts weed like it’s God’s greatest gift to mankind, and it very clearly is not. Stoners are easily identifiable by their inability to think clearly and quickly even when sober for stints. Weed absolutely affects the brain.
But shouting it’s safety from the heavens is not at all responsible, simply because not enough research has gone into the substance. Even CBD is a neurotoxin, albeit with some observed neuro-protective properties: advancedsciencenews.com/how-the-brain-protects-it….
If those neuro-protective properties failed in other parts of the brain for reasons of age, mice brains being significantly different, medications, or health conditions, the results would be devastating.
And that’s not a dumb opinion, it’s something I’ve noticed from multiple close friends becoming heavy users, and then stopping use because they couldn’t think clearly. If you had read the articles, it’s actually from THC’s neurotoxic effects on the hippocampus.
Ok, good to know. I also try to make sure people understand weed is addictive and has withdrawal symptoms and all that. You were the one who brought weed up originally though. And there is still no doubt that cocaine and alcohol are more dangerous than weed.
Yes… from the perspective themelm argues. Any drug/substance can throw you in a downward spiral if you dont have a reason for living, meaning in your life.
Not the perspective I was arguing. I was arguing that people should be allowed to make informed decisions about what they want to put in their body and that criminalizing drug use doesn’t help anyone but criminal drug gangs.
I was agreeing with you… In the part that criminalization increases social isolation… It was just a remark towards @Sweetpeaches69, who tries reductio-ad-absurdum, which for weed (like any substance) has negative effects on the body, and mind (and in it’s specific case the mixture of the two - brain).
I was mostly trying to tell about the biggest impact of weed I can see (and so I write) is the use during difficult times in life (nobody became an addict out of a fulfilling and good life, fairly sure it is a saying even in English?) can exacerbate life problems.
Yes but they aren’t legalizing it because it’s fun and safe they are legalizing it because jailing people over drugs does not help them and there is no point in filling your jails with such a high percentage of your population.
I’d say legalization is actually better in this case, as you can provide licenses to pharmaceutical manufacturers subject to QA regulations, lab accreditations, etc. Decriminalization just means that guy with 1:1 cocaine:fentanyl is probably getting a ticket rather than arrested.
[Was going to put a ‘doesn’t help when the guy overdoses’ comment here, but thinking about it now people do overdose (and die) on just cocaine too. One of the factors that make this a different conversation than cannabis. Don’t know the thresholds for overdose re: just coke, though]
Regulation and the obliteration of the illegal drug trade which directly harms millions in the pursuit of profit.
It should however, (and I cannot stress this enough) be privatized. This would be a fucking nightmare and simply move the profit motive causing the harm to another source
At least then you can take the money out of the cartels and despotic regimes. You can then use the tax money raised to offset the harm these drugs absolutely do through social policies and rehabilitation programs that actually work
Also helps ensure the drugs are clean. The US marijuana legalization process has absolutely not been perfect but the regime of testing for pesticides and mold is very effective.
If cocaine were legal and regulated you wouldn't be hearing all these stories of people dying of fentanyl overdoses from doing shitty cut coke.
It does make me wonder where they swiss government will acquire their coke. With weed, it’s fairly easy to grow it wherever you need to, but with coke, you pretty much have to be in certain regions, yeah?
If that’s the case, is this still going to be supporting those same cartels? If more countries legalized, we could maybe hope to see legally grown, harvested, and processed coke without all the slave labor and shit. Could be a real boon for South American countries, too, if the cartels lost power, and the cocoa plantations could be nationalized.
I just woke up, so I may be just talking out my ass, though
I'm honestly totally ignorant to whether they can be grown indoors at scale outside of their normal growing region, but that's a good point to bring up.
If you go to Peru, you can buy coca leaf tea, grown by legitimate companies, sold entirely legally. It’s amazing for adjusting to high altitudes, if you ever go to the Andes, I highly recommend you drink the tea.
There’s huge illegal growing operations, but there’s legal ones. It’s not that hard to grow - I think it likes high altitudes and moisture, but although it’s not as easy to grow as “weed”, I’m pretty sure it’s easier than coffee
Yeah, drinking a large amount of liquid is what I’d call “leg work”. You can’t just do a bump or smoke something, you have to pace your tea intake… Much harder to overdose or go on a bender
That's only true if you believe the lies that the "war on drugs" was actually about drugs. It never has been, it was always about having an excuse to incarcerate and beat down groups they didn't like; minorities, the poor, and the left.
When you look at it that way, it's obvious that the war on drugs is actually a really successful means to an end. Just try not to have a heart and think of the countless lives they ruined to keep a boot on peoples' neck.
No, we keep it illegal and go the Ollie North strategy. Invent a more addictive form of cocaine (crack), and sell it to minorities to fund secret wars for oil in South America.
I have lived in Germany for 7 years. I hold a STEM master‘s degree and was working an industry job that paid market rate salaries. With 50k€ in savings I was still denied mortgages because 50k was just barely covering the additional purchase costs (such as realtor and notary fees).
For a modest condo with a small garden in a small-ish city in central Germany I would’ve had to work and pay the mortgage until I retired, because the average house was 600k EUR. And most of the properties sold at that price still needed significant renovations.
If that is not f^cking crazy, then I don’t know what is.
Yeah the salaries in Europe do not jive at all with the housing prices in major metros. At least in the US a STEM job is probably gonna pay north of 6 figures if you’re in a decent metro area. I live in the EU now and if I switched from freelancing for American clients to working a full time job here I would be taking a major pay cut to do it. The pay is god awful but rent is fairly comparable to where I used to live on the US west coast.
While the prices are surely very high, they are not that high everywhere. My sister just bought a small house with small garden in a smallish city (50k people living here) for 260k. And we are 30min train ride from the next major city
The point of my comment was not really that there are no cheaper options. The point is that I should be, by most measures, firmly middle class and should be able to afford to buy a house around the place where I work. It’s not Munich or Hamburg, and I was not looking for something close to the city center. I was just looking for a decent house for my family.
I dunno what you’re doing wrong but I bought an apartment in Germany a couple years ago and that wasn’t my experience at all. I saw plenty of nice places big enough for a family of three for 250-300k. We had a little bit more than 50k in savings and were able to buy something much bigger than we need with a large garden (we spent 440k), but could easily have gotten something big enough with 50k savings. We’re in a medium/large city but just not right in the middle, more towards the outskirts. Still only 15 mins bike ride to the centre though!
The Minister of Human Capital reminded the population that whoever blocks the street will not get paid any money on their social plans
Why? Because people were and have historically been forced to march/protest here by social organizations. No one can force you to march. The social organizations will be audited (because the picketer leaders STEAL the money they manage and instead of giving the plan to the people, they keep it for themselves, THAT’S WHY THE INTERMEDIARIES HAVE TO BE TERMINATED AND THE PLAN MUST BE TERMINATED). GO DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE WHO NEED IT.
REMEMBER: Social organizations (the intermediaries of the Polo Obrero, Movimiento Evita, Barrios de pie, etc.) do not have the power to remove plans.
Demonstrating is a right, but it is also a right to move freely through Argentine territory to go to the workplace/manage health/security emergencies/etc.
Those who promote, instigate, organize or participate in the street blockages will lose all types of dialogue with the Ministry of Human Capital.
The only ones who are not going to get paid for their social plan are those who go to the march and block the street/roads: The one who blocks the street does not get paid.
Beneficiaries of social plans can REPORT to 138 if their plan is cut for not attending a march or if they are threatened with cutting it. Also through the MI ARGENTINA app.
only rich assholes being protected by the fascists think it's a good idea for the government to charge people to protest.. fascists have no beliefs.. they have power and the ability to bully anyone who disagrees with them..
If you follow the constitution, the right to bear arms is for a well regulated militia. Not for a stressed 18 year old buying an AR-15 at Walmart to shoot up rioters from another state.
You might not like where that logic goes. The Supreme Court took a stance in United States v. Miller (1939) that the NFA’s provisions on short barreled shotguns could be enforced on the basis that it’s not a weapon that would be used by a well-regulated militia.
That brings us to a conclusion that literally nobody likes. The government could ban shorty shotguns and .22 rimfire, because those aren’t militia weapons. It could not ban fully automatic weapons or even rocket launchers.
We have to come up with something. I am a gun owner. There are legitimate uses for them. But a rifle marksman course requirement? Gun safety classes? 30 day waiting period? Mental health screening? Accountability if you buy it for someone else who uses it to commit violence? Anything?
Something has to stop the senseless violence.
I know that it won’t stop it.
People in Brittain use knives… Acid in the middle east.
The difference there is that the harm is limited to a few people and not these mass casualty events.
Hey don’t cry about unborn babies but be pro school shootings there bud. The founders had single shot musket rifles not semi automatic rifles. If you want to be constructionist then ban the sale of anything other than breach loaders with separate shell and powder charge and have a good day.
First off, I’m pro-choice. I’m just not an ignorant naive tool like you seem to be. The founders weren’t idiots they knew tech wasn’t going to stop, you could also own warships during those days, the equivalent of owning a nuclear attack sub basically. If you think the 2nd only applies to single shot muskets, then the Internet isn’t covered by the first amendment in your mind. Being ignorant of history doesn’t magically make you correct.
Look, there are ways to make this work. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have guns. I own one myself. However, maybe there should be a 30 day waiting period? Mental health fitness assessment? Anything?
If you’re actually wanting to solve our violence problem, you go to the root of our societies issues, not the tool used. All of these things below would curb our violence as a whole 1000xs more than any new gun control can.
We can start with:
Single payer healthcare
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren’t 30-40 kids for one teacher.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don’t turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don’t turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
I wish they’d bring back the draft. Draft men and women over the age of 18 for like two years; it doesn’t need to be for combat roles either. You get job training, you learn self-discipline, how to work in a team, really a lot of life skills. And then when your enlistment is up, you get training on how to find a job, how to write a resume, how to pass an interview, you get to use the GI bill and (in my hypothetical scenario) would keep Tricare. And more people would care about where and when we deploy our military, because they actually have a stake in it now.
If people learned how to defend themselves and then also everyone knew how to use them suddenly gun culture changes and it’s like a tool instead of a status symbol. If you don’t want to serve, there are non-combat roles. If you don’t like it then hey maybe you should invent bullet proof kids.
Mandatory conscription is probably my most “out there” political belief. I think the benefits would be vast! I don’t think it would prevent mass shootings in America, though.
Conscription doesn’t mean war. It means being prepared. And yes maybe we could be more prepared to deal with this stupidity and remove the gun culture if it wasn’t special anymore.
I think one of the benefits would be less war since every citizen would be personally affected by it. Also all the public works and infrastructure. And healthcare. It could be great! Maybe it would help with all the “lonely men” culture that we hear so much about, and likely plays into some of the gun culture. I guess we’ll never know since that won’t happen here, though.
He’s taking over a country drained by kirchnerism for years, of course people are hungry…
This recipe repeats all over latin america, left governments fuck the country over for 10+years, the moment they get voted out. Hur Durr it’s all because this new guy… Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia. The only reason Brasil didn’t suffer from this is because their economy is much stronger than the rest of Latin America.
Evolution of Chile, Argentina and Venezuela’s GDP per capita. Chavez was president from 1999 to 2013, Bachelet (Chile) was president from 2006 to 2010 (as well as later, after this graph), the Kirchner ruled in Argentina from 2003 to late 2015.
I don’t think anyone is going to argue that the left is perfect, but most leftist governments in South America in the last two decades have been positive, with Maduro’s being a pretty blatant exception.
So, in the mind of this one anarcho-capitalist, you should only have the right to protest if you have enough money. My surprise is limitless and my jaw has broken the whole floor.
telegraph.co.uk
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