For people who are immersed in gun culture, someone walking around with an AR-15 is as American as apple pie.
But for a growing part of the country, the image of a rifleman walking through a supermarket or a protest brings mass shootings to mind.
The law tends to be pretty clear on the point that unless you’re actively breaking the law, carrying a gun doesn’t allow people to treat you as an aggressor for reasons of self-defence. You can’t point a gun at someone just for walking into Walmart carrying three legal guns and an ammo belt.
Legal realities aside, though, wide swathes of the country have come to see open carry as an imminent threat of violence. And people are inevitably going to respond in kind.
This feels like a recipe for an escalatory spiral of violence. How sustainable is a legal framework that allows it?
Snuck out this morning with important documents, which are going to a secure location. Now it'll be much harder for them to do damage. Hooray!
Let's not concern ourselves with marijuana too much, though it has some relation to drug use at large.
The concern is more policies like this: Oregon 1st state to decriminalize possession of drugs, Feb. 2021 and this: Baltimore will no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, low-level crimes, March 2021
California's Prop 47 in 2014 was one of the first initiatives to slow prosecution of hard drugs. A 2018 report written by America's national police organization on homelessness, pp. 7, 8, discusses problems with that policy.
>One consequence of Proposition 47 is that without the threat of incarceration, the justice system lost much of the leverage it once had to get people into drug treatment programs.
As does this article: How Prop. 47 Fueled the Homeless Epidemic -- Top law enforcement official says failed state policies are responsible for the drug addiction and mental illness crisis
Increasingly, it seems, some conservatives are agreeing with the liberal view that the War on Drugs ought to end.
