Majority seem to agree that some action should be taken around gun violence but no one agrees on what the solution is. A lot of people say put restrictions on purchasing and owning guns. Why is there not outrage to ban alcohol which leads to over 140,000 deaths per year in America alone? I understand ban on drinking didn’t work before but was it causing over 100,000 deaths each year during the ban? And if that ban really had no impact, why would guns be impacted?
Some people give the example of “cars causing death so should we ban them” but cars have much more benefit in saving lives and what not so I don’t think that example holds ground. But alcohol I would think should be considered as a parallel.
Edit: would your answers change if we replace ban with heavily regulate and restrict, more than currently is.
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We tried banning alcohol a century ago. It didn’t go well. (We also have banned marijuana largely at the federal level.. and that’s also going not very well)
We tried that once. It didn’t go great.
I don’t see how they’re at all correlated. They’re very different issues with very different considerations.
Americans don’t want to ban guns, lmao
I don’t know that the majority of Americans want to ban guns. This might be a flawed premise from the start.
As soon as anyone tells me I am not allowed to do something that isn’t harmful to others, I get my back up and want to do it. I don’t know if that is a me thing or an American thing, but banning anything in this country in the last century hasn’t really worked out.
Group punishments are a bad idea. For example, the rest of the class is great but the trouble-making students cause an issue so I therefore punish the whole class and not the bad kids. That’s not exactly fair.
Same with alcohol. The majority of Americans drink reasonably, and those who do so excessively should not cause the others to lose drinking privileges.
Also, Prohibition is what led to a massive spike in gang violence and leaders such as Al Capone.
We tried that, didn’t work very well.
Because bans don’t work. Most Americans realize this.
With alcohol, it spawned a mafia empire that persists to this day. People found ways to make alcohol on their own. Others bootlegged it at great profit. It arguably created a more alcoholic culture as people shifted to higher alcohol beverages (beer requires a lot of space). And it ultimately had no effect.
What has worked is education and changing cultural norms.
This is also why talk of banning guns fail. There are 400 million firearms in this country. They aren’t going away. A large percentage want them. Only education and cultural norms will change this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
We should ban drunk driving. Also, ban murder. Rape. Assault and battery. Stuff like that.
Alcohol can never be banned. It’s a whole different scenario to ban something 95% of the country likes. Republicans and Democrats alike would riot together if alcohol was made illegal. That’s probably the one thing they can agree on lol.
As for guns, you’ll never be able to remove them all. It’s just not feasible from a logistical standpoint. There’s 393 million registered guns in the US. 46% of the worlds firearms are owned by Americans. Think about those numbers, then come up with a plausible way to confiscate them all lol. That’s not even counting black market guns with serial numbers scratched off on the streets.
Aside from the fact that most people don’t want to ban guns so your whole premise is false…
We banned alcohol once in our history already, and that went horribly.
Banning alcohol basically gave organized crime a business niche to fulfill.
You can still work against alcohol consumption and still keep it legal. Cultural and social issues do not have to be at the point of a gun.
The Soviet Union tried prohibition once and tried very hard to curtail alcohol consumption in the 80’s with disastrous results both time.
Tried that a long time ago, didn’t work out well at all
There are a couple of problems with your assumptions.
Bottom line is that we don’t ban everything that is harmful. It’s all about weighing costs and benefits – and we can’t make everybody happy when doing that weighting. Fireplaces are terrible for indoor air quality. Working the night shift is terrible for your health. Drinking even moderate amounts is associated with higher risk of various cancers.
These arguments are all about balance and compromise – you don’t get to ban something just because it’s shown to be dangerous – otherwise we would ban people from climbing mountains, or just getting out of bed in the morning.
In every case you are weighing up the benefits you get from the harm they cause. Americans like owning guns for a variety of reasons. But, widespread gun ownership creates dangers that don’t exist in other nations. Does the former outweigh the latter? Is there a particular reason why gun rights should be treated as more important than other forms of rights in the US? These things are debatable – IMO the evidence from the rest of the world suggest that Americans would be better off without guns. But it’s a debate.
You have the same debate with alcohol. But, tied into it you have the evidence that the individual desire to continue drinking is far stronger than the government’s ability to stop it. Ultimately, governments can only achieve things by banning that the public are willing to accept should be banned – 50 years of the war on drugs and Americans are taking just as many drugs as they were before it started. The net number of lives that war has saved is probably close to zero.
We already banned alcohol. It contributed to the guns. What do you think the gangsters were selling in the 30s? If your product is illegal, you use violence to protect your supply and turf.
I’m kinda sick of this logic that we need to protect adults from themselves and live in a little padded world provided by the government. (Not talking about guns that’s a different ballpark) California’s government also keeps trying to ban ecigs and “protect the kids” but what they’re really doing is restricting adults access to it in a hope to prevent addiction. Sounds like a good thing, right? But where do you stop?
Rock climbing is dangerous, skydiving is dangerous, *driving* is one of the most dangerous things we do. You want laws when there’s no infrastructure to enforce those laws (you *really* think modern US cops could handle the prohibition better than the old ones did?) Sounds like a lot of tax payer dollars going to cops and not things like education and Healthcare. If you’re worried about alcohol related deaths, I would worry more about the underlying addiction.
More than half of all American adults have had alcohol by the time they’re 18. There are 331.9 *million* Americans according to the 2021 census. I can’t find a good source on ages, so assume most of those people are adults. 140,000, as sad as it is to say, is like a drop in the ocean.
EDIT: Forgot to mention this, but have you considered the widespread use of alcohol for uses unrelated to drinking? If you think people won’t try to do something more stupid than drinking a beer, then you don’t know people.
(For context) I used to be a custodian at a prison. During the pandemic, everyone was losing their marbles, and in a misguided attempt to prevent infection, they distributed foaming hand sanitizer to some of the yards. The next day, TTA was filled with inmates puking their guts out. You might think to yourself, well those guys were desperate. How do you think the US as a whole would react?
I see alcohol based cleaner flying off the shelves, so do you ban those too? Alcohol is one of the cheapest and (Realatively) safe cleaners available to the public.
Dumb people will die, addiction kills, you can’t save them all.
Banning shit never works, there’s plenty of examples in U.S history like prohibition, Abortion and the war on drugs. It always exacerbates the problem by making people go outside the preview of the system where they must rely on the black market and criminal elements making the perceived problem much worse. Regulation however is much more reasonable and it makes sense to regulate the flow of guns like we do with vehicles and other things
The majority of Americans are not on board with banning guns
Something like 70% support the 2nd amendment
lmao at this dumbassery
How are the ideas of banning guns and alcohol even close to the same? I don’t know where OP is from but the US isn’t the only country in the world with alcohol. Other countries where alcohol is legal, which is most counties, also have alcohol related deaths. We aren’t the only country that allows private gun ownership, yet we have the highest rate of gun violence.
I’m not offering any sort of solution or taking any sort of stance with this comment. Just showing that your question has flaws and really doesn’t make sense at all.
If you ban something, you lose the ability to regulate it. People can still easily make alcohol if they have the knowledge and sell it on the black market. The black market is unregulated and there’s no way to ensure everything on it is clean and safe. Better to regulate what you can and encourage responsibility.
Gun control ≠ banning guns
Anyone who tries to convince you that the majority of gun control advocates want to ban all guns or repeal the second amendment is lying.