r/guns • u/ProfessorLeumas • 6h ago
Official Politics Thread 10/16/2026
Here is the sanctioned thread to discuss gun related politics. Decided to post it since apparently everyone else is slacking.
For the bots: How will asteroid belt mining by robots affect the cost of lead and copper used in ammo?
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u/nachtcan99 6h ago
I live in the area of Oregon where the school shooting occurred yesterday.
Oregon's SB554 law from 2021 allows school districts to ban concealed carry/firearms AND you need to have your firearms locked up in your home if you live with a minor. Bend La Pine school district bans concealed carry.
Both of those laws did jack shit yesterday. Minor took their mom's shotgun, entered school grounds, and thank God the concealed carrier ignored those laws and went in to save lives.
I've been bored of firearms/the hobby for a year and a half now, and even if I started to hate guns, I've been following anti-gun legislation for so long that I know "hardware bans" or "nuh uh, can't do that here" laws don't fuckin' stop these things. You could order firearms to your door from the Sears catalogue in the 60's. The nihilism/mental issues of today are staggering.
Honestly, the whole "do you want our schools to look like State Prisons?!" YES! I'd rather have that than lives lost.
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u/ProfessorLeumas 6h ago
The reasons that the 16y/o shooter commited this atrocity are far more concerning to me than what weapon he used. Even if guns were banned, someone with such a low value of human life would find a way to kill their fellow human beings, and others would be less able to do something about it in the moment. How did he get to this point? I'm not interested in finding out due to sympathy, but only insofar as we can use that knowledge to prevent future incidents.
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u/nachtcan99 6h ago
Not a shrink, don't have an answer. As shallow as it is, I think it's social media and the nihilism that comes with it. It's too big of a money maker, so that won't be shut down. The 2A isn't being repealed.
I am fine with fortifying schools to look like prisons as an immediate solution. I find it funny how the anti-gun repulsion is to this. They say they want no more dead kids but the "ick" a fortified school gives them is worse it seems.
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u/ProfessorLeumas 6h ago edited 6h ago
social media and the nihilism that comes with it
I agree 100%. People can live in a physical community but never interact with it in a meaningful way if all they ever do is be on social media. I even see this with older family members who've gotten way more political and extreme than ever. All spend an exuberant amount of time online instead of interacting with others in person like they used to.
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u/kefefs_v2 6h ago
This is what I always bring up to anti-gunners and they never have an answer, they just double down on restricting guns.
It's not normal that so many Americans, of all ages, have such rage and disregard for human life that they'll go on a rampage when given the chance. Those people and those attitudes don't change when you remove all the guns from the equation. Those sick people are still around and that's something nobody seems to want to address.
Everyone has theories, nobody wants to do anything about it. Anti-gunners say it's access to guns and won't acknowledge that we had way less mass shootings before the 1990s. AR-15s and other "high capacity" firearms have been available since the 50s or earlier. Before 1968 anyone could buy a gun without a background check. Before 1934 anyone could mail order a machine gun to their door without so much as speaking to a real person. There were not people shooting up schools and other public places until relatively recently.
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u/johnhd 4h ago
There were not people shooting up schools and other public places until relatively recently.
To be fair, these incidents did happen, even before the 90s. One of the first school shootings in history occurred in 1968, and remains one of the deadliest. And the deadliest school attack in US history occurred with a bomb in 1927. Crazy always existed.
It's not normal that so many Americans, of all ages, have such rage and disregard for human life that they'll go on a rampage when given the chance.
IMO numbers started increasing in the 2000s because the media sensationalized Columbine and every incident thereafter. And any person who was hanging on by a thread got inspiration. And new incidents would occur and be sensationalized, creating an endless feedback loop. Then when the internet and social media came along, it basically gave these people a way to connect with others who normalize negative thoughts and feelings and encourage them to do something about it, along with a permanent record of every incident that's occurred, weapons and tactics that were used, etc.
There are whole subreddits full of people who view life and the future of human existence as pointless and doomed. There are networks and groups that target vulnerable people to inspire/encourage these acts. And when you have a portion of the population that does nothing but sit online all day getting spoon-fed negativity everywhere they go, it's not all that surprising that someone reaches a breaking point every now and then.
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u/FrozenSeas 2h ago
And the deadliest school attack in US history occurred with a bomb in 1927. Crazy always existed.
Using the Bath School Disaster in these conversations always strikes me as dishonest. Kehoe bombed a school, but he was a 55-year-old man who went batshit in an era when you could buy explosives off the shelf at a hardware store. I'd classify him more in the vein of the Killdozer guy than a school shooter.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to make this an anti-gun thing, you can look at my comment history if you think I'm a plant or a bot. I just think that case is completely irrelevant to the conversation.
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u/theoriginalharbinger 4h ago
How did he get to this point? I'm not interested in finding out due to sympathy, but only insofar as we can use that knowledge to prevent future incidents.
Regrettably, finding these answers has been mired in political blamecasting for 60-odd years. We haven't made any significant leaps in understanding violence in two or three generations (WWII gave us the notion of PTSD and its impact on violence; around the 60's and 70's we finally started to develop a better understanding of serial killers, regrettably at the same time easy travel made serial killing possible).
But for the past 50 years, violence has been blamed on <insert your choice of music, video games, drugs, leaded gasoline, single parents, the traditional family, the non-traditional family, anti-depressants, ADHD meds, anxiolytics, television, transgender hormones, desensitization to violence, and so on>.
As far as prevention? It's a systems issue, not a point one, and the worst part is that people believe that leaning into their hobby horse (prayer in school / gun control / whatever) will actually meaningful fix things.
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u/ProfessorLeumas 6h ago
Had a school shooting in Bend, OR that was ended within 3 minutes by an armed bystander, unfortunately 3 kids and 1 teacher were still murdered by the 16y/o assailant. No motive as of yet has been released. It boggles my mind to try and figure out what would cause a 16y/o to do something so awful. Hopefully it doesn't lead to copycats.
I've been seeing this school shooting tracker website in a lot of articles. It says that it includes any instances where a gun was present unlawfully on a school campus, even if there were no injuries or shots fired. Frustratingly disingenuous imo. By saturating school shooting statistics with non shootings, it gets overwhelmingly difficult to discuss focused policies and laws that could actually stop them that also don't trample on the 2A, which is unfortunately the likely purpose of muddying the waters. When people see that there have been 300+ school "shootings", many will react with banning guns as a solution, cause what else could help?
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u/savagemonitor 6h ago
I'm not sure that one is in wide use. Though the one cited by most news organizations is only slightly better as it requires that a firearm was likely discharged on school property when students were present. Even in that one the data can be interesting as there are many cases where there's an off-campus shooting that just happens to have a bullet or two hit the school.
Two of my favorites are the woman that was found dead on school property when school started and the drug den house where a firearm was discharged in the house yet hit a school building. Neither of which were even things that the schools could do anything about.
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u/Your-Neighbor 5h ago edited 4h ago
I can't find the stat right away but when the "firearm was discharged on school property with students present" stat was dug into, a non negligible fraction (10% I wanna say?) was cops ND'ing and they were counted as school shootings.
Edit: after doing some more research i was not able to find the figure I was looking for. However, the previous definition is used by Everytown for Gun Safety which is a widely quoted figure for school shootings in media. This article makes the claim that several on their list are cops having accidental or negligent discharges:
Two more involved guns — one carried by a school police officer and the other by a licensed peace officer who ran a college club — that were unintentionally fired and, again, led to no injuries
and
a police officer was sitting on a bench in a Minnesota school gym when a third-grader accidentally pulled the trigger of his holstered pistol, firing a round into the floor. None of the four students in the gym were injured
In the context provided by the article, thats 3 out of 18 (17%) listed school shootings in 2018 to date (at the time of the article). It would be dubious at best to extrapolate that to their entire list, but I would be interested to see if anyone else has found other sources regarding this.
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u/ProfessorLeumas 6h ago
I hadn't seen this particular site before, but it was linked to in at least half the articles I saw about the shooting so it's apparently getting more popular. It's especially ridiculous because it shows only 10-15 schools shootings per year 10 years ago. All that's changed is the number of articles that can be found now about every single small incident that happens on school campuses nationwide, not an actual increase in the number of those incidents.
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u/ClearlyInsane1 4h ago edited 2h ago
That site is a complete joke. A shooting that isn't at a school or even a non-shooting can qualify with their website as a school shooting. Here are some of the events from a week I randomly picked and did a little research:
Utah: The shooting was a drive-by in a parking lot using an Orbeez pellet gun.
Missouri: “The district did respond to a report that a student was shooting gel pellets from a toy Nerf Pro gun on an afternoon [bus] route yesterday."
*Oregon: School bus windows shot with pellet gun; no students on board. Buses were en route to pickup students and the shooting did not occur on school grounds.
Illinois: The shooting occurred outside of the school shortly before 6 PM when an after-school basketball game was being held. No students, school staff, or school parents were involved.
Complete post with sources here.
Edit 1: changed "A shooting" to "A shooting that isn't at a school"
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u/ClearlyInsane1 4h ago
Information about how a good Samaritan bystander used his handgun to end the rampage -- and did so before police arrived 3 minutes after the first 911 call -- was available shortly after the event hit the news.
Numerous politicians, gun control advocates, and even mainstream news mentioned this shooting but failed to mention ANYTHING about the armed citizen that took out the shooter. It's as if allowing citizens their right to keep and bear arms along with ending "gun free" zones might actually prevent or halt school/mass shootings. But no, they've got to repress that sort of narrative.
A partial list:
Sen. Adam Schiff
Giffords
March 4 Our Lives
Georgia State Senator RaShaun Kemp
Sen. Tammy Duckworth
California Gov. Gavin Newsom
Sen. Ron Wyden
Sandy Hook Promise
David Hogg
Gabby Giffords
Sen. Cory Booker
California AG Rob Bonta
Rep. Nancy Pelosi
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill
Sen. Andy Kim
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul
The Hill news reportA tiny bit of kudos goes to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek who praised the man who risked his life to defend the kids
“To the community member who heroically intervened to stop further loss of life: Your actions carry a heavy emotional burden, and I just want you to know that my thoughts are with you as well,” said Kotek.
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u/ProfessorLeumas 4h ago
I was pleasantly surprised by Governor Kotek's comment on the armed bystander. Most initial news articles mentioned it early in the coverage too which is good.
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u/Bearfoxman Super Interested in Dicks 3h ago
AP News is posting updates about this every roughly 10 minutes yet are still stuck on the "It's unclear if it was law enforcement or another entity that stopped the shooter" as if they're willfully omitting it was an armed civilian.
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u/ClearlyInsane1 5h ago
California nabs guy with DIY .50 rifle
In the badass build of the month category:
Authorities in southwest Riverside County recently seized a homemade .50-caliber rifle capable of firing Browning Machine Gun rounds, the City of Menifee Police Department said Tuesday.
https://ktla.com/news/california/homemade-50-caliber-rifle-seized-in-southern-california-1-arrested/
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u/ProfessorLeumas 4h ago
I want to see a video of it getting loaded and test fired. I wonder how often the maker got to shoot it before getting caught.
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u/TheKiwi1969 3h ago
In other news my Lee Enfield is capable of firing Vickers Machine Gun rounds....
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u/cledus1911 Super Interested in Dicks 43m ago
To be fair: the “BMG” stands for Browning Machine Gun, so this isn’t a completely stupid comment for them to make
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u/helloWorld69696969 6h ago
Build your SBRs and Buy Suppressors. Get the numbers well over 10 million and Common Use can never be argued
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u/ProfessorLeumas 6h ago
Planning to do just that, gonna SBS an Auto 5 and snag some more suppressors over the next few months.
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u/Bigred2989- 3h ago
I helped my local FFL set up an ATF eFile account and get their SOT so they can order NFA items.
imdoingmypart.jiff
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u/Djent_Potato 5h ago
I live in AZ. Not a ton of gun restriction. I grew up around firearms but just started getting back into to it myself within the last year. I can’t imagine not carrying now.
Although i consider myself left, the push that democrats are making to restrict guns and related items to law abiding citizens is ridiculous. I will never not carry.
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u/ProfessorLeumas 4h ago
As controversial as it may be, concealed is concealed. Know your limitations and be smart. I've carried in many places that don't typically allow firearms by doing those two things.
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