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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Switzerland has a ton of guns per capita. But they are highly highly regulated (with strict background checks) and they haven’t had a mass shooting in 20 years. Let’s try their way![/quote]

As a Swiss I thought about that a lot. It boils out to a difference in mentality and social structure. We have troubled and violent young people too. They act out in many ways, but are have more social interactions and an overall healthier social fabric around them. Young men go to military service and then bring their service rifle home. They relationship to guns is not a passionate one. Rural people like to go the shooting range. But it stops there. Also we have a direct democracy. So if the people want to change gun laws, they do. [/quote]

The direct democracy piece is the absolute key, isn’t it? Our American tragedies at this point feel utterly impossible to change because they’re structural. I would love to be wrong. I want to see change. I live in a blue-blue-blue area, so my voting tendencies are exactly the way things tend to go around me at the local and state levels. I’m imagination-depleted at this point, because I don’t see on the national level any ability - ANY - to fix this:

- EO cannot be used as a real remedy
- the composition of the SC won’t change, and Heller won’t be changed or contested 
- the Senate is now on vacation
- nothing happened after Sandy Hook, Vegas, after Giffords was shot, after Scalise was shot (he was more fervent in his 2A support after nearly dying)

What on a practical level can someone like me, without massive funds to donate ala Rebecca Mercer, actually do? I don’t have family or friends to try and wheedle into reason who are red-state voters. The structure of electoral politics and federalism and minority rule make my voice a nothing. What can I do? I don’t want to be hectored, I want to be guided. I want to do anything that matters, beyond texting, small buck donations, and smugging with blue-wave Twitter dopes. I want the work to matter, even if it doesn’t succeed for a long time. [/quote]

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