While we should have better access to mental (and physical) health care, that’s probably not going to fix the too frequent “Someone knocked on my door so i shot them” murders that happen too often.
It also won’t solve the “and then the police shot him” murders.
There are a lot of things wrong with the US and its dominant culture. I’d say most of the blame and the blood is on conservatives. Which makes a kind of sense - if you have a shitty system and you are fighting to keep it as is, you’re probably a shitty person with shitty takes making the world worse.
If someone just thanos snapped away the conservatives, or at least the authoritarian subset of them, many problems would vanish overnight.
The “funny” thing about the police shooting people for having guns is that it essentially means Americans don’t actually have the right to own/carry guns. They only have the right to buy them.
Even if you don’t have a gun it’s a problem, if you are are stopped by police for a random check^1. You are asked for your license and registration papers. You move your hand 1 cm to get it, cop suddenly realizes you could theoretically have a gun, then decides to shoot you first because self defense.
The possibility that literally everyone can have a firearm makes living there so much more dangerous compared to not having the option of shooting back whenever it would be needed for actual self defense.
^1 probability for random police checks has an inverse proportionality to the whiteness of one’s skin color.
Police cannot shoot you (legally) for carrying, now whether they follow the law is a different matter
They just claim they feared for their life and now they’re declared not guilty. There is no specific law saying they can just shoot you for having a gun, but there’s plenty of other laws, precedents etc. making it absolutely legal for them to shoot you for having a gun.
Of course, this is why body cams are one of the greatest innovations in policing.
Healthcare is unobtainable for most, housing is now a pipe dream for most, prosperity falling apart, working until you die. “We need to incarcerate all the drug addicts and kill the crazy people”.
If only the mass shooters would just target the rich instead of the general public, but I agree with you. A Thanos snap on a good chunk of the conservatives would fix a ton of shit.
Healthcare is unobtainable for most,
What do you mean?
housing is now a pipe dream for most,
What do you mean?
I guess it’s not technically unobtainable, it just puts you into financial ruin to utilize healthcare. I call that unobtainable if you’re trying to be financially responsible.
When I look at housing and I see that it has to consume %50 or more of people’s annual budget, that means young people need to earn around 115-150k/yr in order to become homeowners, and that’s only after banks have shifted the goal posts. Young professionals are also much more likely to be saddled with 30-65k of student debt.
When you combine that with the inflation spike that happened last year, and the rising rents, there’s many people earning only $25/hr but rent is $2k/month.
Just fucking good times. The next spike will probably be the suicide rates.
That thanos snap better take care of a all the very corrupt politicians and unchecked capitalists as well pretty please.
Mental health is a scapegoat for discrediting people via appeal to authority fallacy.
We all know if that happened the democrats would fuck it up. They’d stop everything they were working on and set up conservation efforts for conservatives. They’d have musicians raise awareness of the unprecedented threat the conservatives are under and tell everyone where they can donate to those left griftless. The real shitty thing is that without the Republicans around to fuck it up it’ll probably actually work.
Oh I long for the day we can tour a historical conservative town reenactment.
“Over here, notice the giant American flag, and even more prominent Trump 2024 flag. On the other side, a comically large truck requiring a ladder to enter, believe it or not, these were often chosen for low fuel efficiency and modified for extra pollution. Up ahead we see a teenager who has just been kicked out of their parent’s house for being gay, a house containing a meth lab, six churches, and a neighbor wielding an AR-15 ‘just in case’.”
It is not only the authoritarian conservatives that want gun rights