The best way to learn is to research what you don't know. I tried to provide links with articles explaining and analysis, but the best researcher is yourself. The bills posted are only about 30% of what's at least passed 1 chamber of congress. A fair chunk of the rest amount to renaming Post Offices and Stimulus/Covid related bills. I supplied the link showing all the bills being debated or proposed that have made it through at least 1 chamber. Its a .gov website. Many bills don't make a vote so that's why I filtered my search based upon that criteria. Here's the link again... https://www.congress.gov/search?searchResultViewType=expanded&q={"source":"legislation","bill-status":"passed-one","congress":117} You can scroll all the way to the bottom and refine your own custom search criteria to all sorts of variables. Once you click on a link to the bill you are curious about, wait for the page to load and then look to find the little "roll call" hyperlink, and after you click it, it will take you to yet another page to view the voting results. You can view the exact text on the bills' landing page and even get brief summaries and other relavant information. Its a gov website. If you think the bills posted are targeted or politically biased (I understand skeptism) then I urge you to look for yourself and post anything that might influence the data set.
Instead of banning guns they should give out harsh punishments to people carrying a gun during the commission of a crime. Harsh punishments that don't get plea bargained away. We should focus on gun criminals instead of guns.
Libertarian... Lets see... Ya know, I dont know! Havent heard a peep from them since I registered over a decade ago. Whatever their stance is, its probably "I disagree. Less government." And I probably agree with that.
Or just crime. I'd rather look at the symptoms and causes of the issues and look at solutions targeting these areas as opposed to harsher penalties. If someone is robbing a bank its because they don't have money. If someone robs a gas station or mugs someone they are after money, possibly for drugs, possibly for food ect. If you start to take away and treat the underlying causes then you also remedy the response to the underlying cause. Its the difference between treating the symptoms vs curing the disease. Look at drugs. We added penalties to try to stop the use but instead we just lock people up while the use maintains. If you decide to judge people who commit crime with a gun, harder than someone committing the same crime but without a gun, or you impose mandatory minimums ect, then you only exacerbate the situation. Its crime and the reasons that drive it that are the issues imo, not so much guns. Using a gun isn't illegal, but committing crime is. I'd like to see these communities have increased wages, school funding, housing, healthcare, ect. I did the numbers in another thread, but the point is that you can't make it by on min wage ect alone. If you're a kid and your choices are to work 40hrs a week and still not be able to make it, or just barely, then why the hell would you want to join or participate in that system? If you create a system where a guy can work and still have some $$ left over ect, actually get ahead, then imo you'll see people sign up and want to work vs opting out, because busting your rear for no pay is like a big FU. You still need laws and jails ect, there will always be crime and you need to have some deterrent, but the crime is being caused by issues that are being ignored, not necessarily because the penalties aren't steep enough, imo. Remove some of the causes and decrease the responses to, ie decrease crime. I'm not for trying to solve socioeconomic issues with jails. Get more teachers, get better schools, better facilities, community programs and centers, subsidized healthcare including mental health, subsidized housing, essentially invest into these communities as if they were ritzy white areas. Education is huge. Poverty is huge. Having a place to go to bed is huge. If these folks commit a crime and you lock them up for longer because they used a gun, all you're doing is "out of sight out of mind." Nothing gets fixed. Not all of the people are innately bad guys, imo many are pushed and funneled into the life based on the pressures exerted from a low socioeconomic standing which is persisted through policy ect. You need jails ect because theres always going to be those guys, and no amount of investment will make a difference, but there's a huge chunk that fall victim to circumstances beyond their control and its in these cases that positive change is possible, imo. Adding mandatory sentences or harsher penalties is like turning the heat up on the steam cooker. They are already acting out, imo ignoring the causes for increased punishment is almost the exact wrong thing to do. The investment made by the state should outweigh the cost they spend to treat the symptom, imo, but it seems most of the money is spent on incarceration ect as opposed to remedying the causes.
People that don't care about laws don't make exceptions for gun laws. If a criminal wants a gun he or she will get one. I am not against background checks, I am against unlimited timelines for them. Right now the system is so overwhelmed half of them aren't getting done in the 14 day timeframe, so people are buying guns with no background checks at all. If they are going to pass laws they need to have the personnel in place to enforce them, not extend the timeframe to whenever the fbi has time to complete it. 14 days is plenty of time. It's not like they are shuffling papers around, everything you have done wrong in your entire life is on a damn computer.
The goal is to get the gun criminals off the street. I realize most criminals wouldn't consider not carrying a gun because of harsher penalties, my point is that while they are sitting in prison for 20 years they are not out there menacing other people. I don't care about the excuse, in my mind nothing excuses a person for shooting another person because you need their shit.
The goal is to stop crime. There are several different techniques that have their specific use. I advocate a new or amended approach because the old way isn't working or has many drawbacks. I agree that you need a deterrent though I think policy exploration needs to be directed at more than just LE. LE and jails aren't the answer to all of our societal ills, imo they just move the issues out of sight out of mind..