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Re: “How do you feel about the AMA getting involved with gun control?”Let us review the specific content of the AMA proposals:Advocating for schools as gun-free zonesWe have already seen how well this works. Gun-free zones attract mass shooters because mass shooters have every reason to expect that they will face no armed opposition. This proposal is continued unilateral disarmament. One would naturally expect members of the AMA to be very familiar with the consequences of the biological expression of unilateral disarmament in AIDS. The AMA’s position on this topic is a social form of AIDS.Gun-free zones attract attacks.A ban on sale of assault-type weapons, high-capacity magazinesThe term “assault-type weapon” is meaningless and reveals fundamental lack of familiarity with firearms and firearm legislation.The first question here is: What is an assault rifle? To the US Army:“Assault rifles are short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachinegun and rifle cartridges. Assault rifles have mild recoil characteristics and, because of this, are capable of delivering effective full-automatic fire at ranges up to 300 meters."US Army Small Arms Identification and Operations Guide – Eurasian Communist Countries, pg 100 para 90Real assault rifles are strictly regulated by federal licensing as machine guns under the Federal Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the ironically mistitled Firearm Owners' Protection Act of 1986.The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 entirely banned the new manufacture or importation of automatic weapons for civilian use after May 19, 1986. That left roughly 150,000 registered automatic weapons in private ownership and eligible for transfer between individuals.The transfer of such weapons is handled by the ATF's NFA branch. Basically, anyone wanting to own a fully automatic weapon needs $15,000 to over $60,000 to buy a weapon from an already licensed owner willing to sell one of theirs, plus pay a $200 federal transfer tax, plus pass a background investigation of National Agency Check with 10-point fingerprinting.As a result, real legal automatic weapons available for civilian purchase in the US are very rare, very old (at least 32 years old), and extremely expensive collector’s items traded between the very wealthy.The second question then is: What is an “assault-style weapon?” To proponents of banning them, an “assault rifle,” “assault weapon,” “military-style weapon,” or “assault-style weapon” is a rifle with the following features:Folding stockPistol gripMagazine clip “extending significantly below the pistol grip”Flash suppressorBayonet mountObviously, “assault weapons” are characterized by how they look. Real assault rifles are characterized by how they work.The appearance of “assault weapons” is determined by injection-molded polymer plastic parts that attach to the receiver and barrel of a rifle to make it look “military.” But simply detaching those parts and attaching different parts for a stock and foregrip completely changes the appearance with no change in function – the same ammunition, the same capacity, the same firing rate, the same range, and the same accuracy, like this:The difference is really polymer parts, like these:Banning these polymer parts is all that a ban on “assault-style” or “military-style” weapons would accomplish. It is an ineffectual gesture borne of fundamental unfamiliarity with how firearms actually work.Similarly, the proposal to ban “high capacity magazines” is unfamiliar with guns. The following is a video with actual firing comparisons showing how little difference magazine size makes in firing rate:So this particular proposal from the AMA only displays fundamental ignorance about firearms and existing firearm legislation to speak intelligibly on the subjects.Expanding domestic violence restraining orders to include dating partnersThis is already available via protection orders:“A protection order may include many different provisions, including:No Contact Provision: Prohibiting the abuser from calling, texting, emailing, stalking, attacking, hitting, or disturbing the victim.Peaceful Contact Provision: Permitting the abuser to peacefully communicate with the victim for limited reasons, including care and transfer for visitation of their child.Stay Away Provision: Ordering the abuser to stay at least a certain number of yards or feet away from the victim, his or her home, job, school, and car. The stay-away distance can vary by state, judge or the lethality of the situation, but is often at least 100 yards or 300 feet.Move Out Provision: Requiring the abuser to move out of a home shared with the victim.Firearms Provision: Requiring the abuser to surrender any guns he or she possesses (about 2/3rds of states) and/or prohibiting the abuser from purchasing a firearm.Counseling Provision: Ordering the abuser to attend counseling, such as batterer's intervention or anger management.“Protection orders may include children, other family members, roommates, or current romantic partners of the victim. ...”Domestic Violence: Orders of Protection and Restraining Orders - FindLawThe federal requirements for reporting people to the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) includes the following category:“The subject of a protective order issued after a hearing in which the respondent had notice that restrains them from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of such partner.”About NICSSo regardless of state law, federal law requires anyone under a protective order to be reported to the FBI NICS.Apparently the AMA did not research existing laws before framing their proposals.Removing firearms from high-risk individualsThis is actually required by federal law. Furthermore, legal access to purchasing firearms is supposed to be barred for people with known histories of mental illness and domestic violence who pose a danger to others.The FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has checked more than 305 million firearm purchasers for disqualifying factors in law enforcement databases with more than 1.8 million denials since its inception on 30 November 1998. Disqualifying factors include a history of mental illness or domestic violence that poses a danger to others.The problem is, national, state, county. and municipal authorities are not complying because national, state, county, and municipal legislators have not funded the resources and staff needed to comply with federal law. Most of the past mass shootings in America would have been prevented if they did.Gun background check system riddled with flawsProblems Plague System to Check Gun BuyersSupporting increase in legal age of purchasing ammunition and firearms from 18 to 21I frankly think that the biggest problem with America’s youth is that USA culture provides them with too little responsibility rather than too much. As a veteran myself, I consider it ludicrous to consider an 18-year old mature enough to die in service of his or her country but not to own a shotgun or rifle of their own as a citizen.Opposing federal legislation permitting “concealed carry reciprocity” across state linesThis proposal only offers hindrance of the most trusted law-abiding firearm owners in the US. This is an ill-considered proposal that only interferes with law-abiding citizens.Supporting gun buyback programs in order to reduce the number of circulating firearmsGun buy-back programs are ineffective at removing firearms that would be used in crimes from circulation. Because gun buy-back programs offer small amounts of money (typically about $200–$250) well below market value for any decent firearm, gun buy-back programs collect the most useless, cheap, broken, and rusted excuses for guns that are not sellable otherwise.Evidence-Based Justice: Gun buybacks bring in the wrong gunsGun buybacks popular but ineffective, experts sayA waiting period for firearm availabilityPeople knowing that they were at risk of assault by abusers have been killed during waiting periods for firearms they tried to buy. This is a singularly clueless proposal of a practice that has no credible statistical evidence of actually reducing violence or crime while actually getting innocent people killed.No statistical evidence that a waiting period for handgun purchases reduces violence, lawmaker saysBackground checks for all firearm purchasersThis proposal refers to “universal background checks” — a proposal to expand NICS checks to include all private exchanges and sales between non-FFL (Federal Firearm Licensee) individuals.Out of the 16 most lethal recent mass shootings:The following people purchased firearms legally from gun shops after passing NICS background checks:Nikolas Cruz;Devin Patrick Kelley;Stephen Paddock;Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer;Omar Mateen;Steven Kazmierczak;Seung-Hui Cho;Charles Andrew Williams;One L. Goh;Charles Carl Roberts IV;Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.The following people had undiagnosed mental illness and obtained their firearms criminally:Dimitrios Pagourtzis (theft);Gabriel Parker (theft);Adam Lanza (murder and theft);Jeffrey James Weise (murder and theft);Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold (strawman purchases);Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (strawman purchases).Out of the 16 most lethal recent mass shootings:10 involved firearms purchased legally from gun shops after passing NICS background checks;5 involved firearms acquired criminally;1 involved firearms both purchased legally from gun shops and acquired criminally.Out of all 16 of the most lethal recent mass shootings, none involved firearms exchanged legally between private individuals. “More” or “universal” background checks are not a meaningful contribution to preventing mass shootings. They are a red herring for appealing to uninformed emotion.CONCLUSIONThe proposals presented by the American Medical Association (AMA) are:Too uninformed about firearm operation and technology to speak on the subjects;Too unaware about existing firearm legislation to know how firearms are already regulated;Too unaware of what the real problems are,to participate in meaningful discussion, much less offer effective solutions.The AMA members should either return to practicing medicine or educate themselves on these issues before presuming to speak.

Disclaimer: This is a Pakistani perspective on the question.Let's start this with a story.Ajay Kapur was the director of Global Strategy Research at Citibank, during the oil spike in the first decade of the 21st century where oil would go on to reach 140 bucks a barrel in 2008 (and 160 USD a barrel in around 2014 I think).Ajay headed research into why the US equity market was not being impacted by the spike in oil prices. Logically speaking, a spike in oil prices in the US should lead to a spike in fuel prices at the pumps leading to less disposable income in the hands of US consumers. Which means, they would purchase fewer goods and spend less, leading to a businesses having less income. This would lead to a reduction in economic activity that should translate into a decline in stock prices for companies impacted by the reduced income.The disconnect between stock market and the economic situation of the US was explained when Kapur factored in the fact that the US was a plutonomy: where the vast majority of its wealth was held by a small, concentrated cabal of families whose economic sway was vastly more powerful than the numerically larger but economically less powerful working class (and shrinking middle class).Ajay’s purpose for these findings was to figure out which stocks his clients should invest in in the US market during a high oil price period, and he correctly identified luxury companies as the stable stock to invest in. Plutocrats are not impacted by fuel prices. They don’t live on budgets and from paycheck to paycheck. Their spending on luxury items would remain as is even during a recession and thus this stock would continue to yield profits to its investors.But the more disturbing revelation of Ajay’s report was as follows:Kapur’s insight was that, if the majority of a country is owned by very few people, it doesn’t necessarily matter what the oil price does. The oil price is important to people who are on a budget. If the cost of daily commute doubles in the space of a couple of months, then inevitably that will reduce the amount of money you have to spend on other things: holidays, trips to the cinema, even food. But if you are very wealthy, then the proportion of your income that you spend on travel is very low, so your spending will barely be affected at all. If your customary purchases are Birkin bags, Sunseeker yachts, or fourth home, perhaps in Miami, then changes to the oil price don’t matter, which has important consequences for the profitability of the companies that make those products.Kapur thought too many of his fellow analysts were looking at the average consumer, when, in an age of inequality, the average consumer’s role in the economy was increasingly marginal. He used the word ‘plutonomy’ to describe economies where the wealthy have a disproportionate share of the assets (he claimed to have invented it, although it dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth century when it was used as a synonym for economics), places like Britain, America or Canada. His analysis was original and provided a fascinating insight into how the kind of luxury spending detailed in the previous two chapters is affecting the world.‘In a plutonomy, there is no such thing as “the US consumer” or “the UK consumer’”, or indeed “the Russian consumer”,’ Kapur wrote. ‘There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.’ According to the Citigroup analysts’ research, the top million households in the United States had approximately the same wealth as the bottom 60 million households. And rich people have relatively little of their wealth tied up in their homes, meaning that a far higher proportion of that wealth is disposable. If you looked at just financial assets, and exclude housing from the calculation, the top million households held more of the sum total of American wealth than the bottom 95 million households put together.Moneyland: The Inside Story Of The Crooks And Kleptocrats Who Rule The WorldWhen wealth concentration and inequality reach such heights that your average citizen isn’t really owning much of the economic pie anymore, then answer me this: In a political system where political factions need money to generate influence and presence and retain political power, who should they approach as potential donors?The average citizen? Or the plutocrats?If 20 families in my country own 60–70% of the wealth in it, what exactly is my impetus as a politician to serve the needs of the people when my access to the wealth that drives the political machinery stems from only a few notable wealthy elites?If you have 5 million people living in desperate poverty, illiterate and malnourished vs 200 living in ultra-elite, wealthy status, it’s not hard in a democracy to manipulate electoral politics and voting in a manner that the votes of the 5 million end up not counting despite their numerical advantage.Which is why democracy runs aground in nations like Afghanistan or the Latin American banana republics.Americans surely must feel that their country is a democratic one. They can vote, they have separations of power, there is freedom of speech, courts of law.But I suppose if you posed the same question to black communities wracked with police brutality, gang warfare and urban decay the concept of being a democratic nation suddenly doesn’t have much of a glow to it.And I guess when Kent state university students were being gunned down in their college campuses for protesting against their country’s participation in war crimes in Southeast Asia, well America must not have felt very democratic back then.Similarly, put 50 Pakistani elder men in a drawing-room to discuss politics and they will feel that it’s quite a democratic setting.Ask their wives who have been banished to the Kitchen to cook feasts for their pleasure, and ask how much democracy exists in the stench and heat of the Kitchen, amidst hot burning metal pans and sweat pouring through silk shirts.The tribe may define their tribal Jirga as democratic, even as it passes death by stoning sentences. The Swedes may define their democracy as flawed if the Prime Minister takes a BMW to work instead of a bike.Democracy itself is a difficult thing to measure. We have tried though. We have indexes that measure how free a country is.These same indexes declared Russia quite free in the 90s, under Yeltsin, even as young women disappeared from the streets, kidnapped to be trafficked into brothels in Europe. Or young Russian men dying in wars in Chechnya and succumbing to AIDS, alcoholism, and despair that wracked post-USSR collapse Russia.If you ask somebody from Pakistan, they will define the perfect democracy as “corrupt” politicians hanging from lamp posts, judges and generals calling the shots and liberal “fascists” put in their place.Same for other countries like America where the Republican definition of democracy varies immensely from the Bernie Bro's definition of it.Quite often: Democracy's definition changes to suit the advantage of the person defining it. The college-educated, suburban soccer mom might voice her opposition to the illiterate getting a vote.The army man may say that veterans should have a greater say in a democracy than civilians.The rural farmer may want to stick it to the big city types and reduce the power of urban, populous areas in favor of the vast countryside with maybe a dozen people per dozen square kilometer.Given all this differences in perceptions for what it means to be a democracy among people, as well as difficulty in agreeing to what standards a democracy should be measured by, the important thing to keep in mind when trying to study China’s democracy is simply that the definition of democracy and perception of it in China may not be the same as the one man, one vote democracy of the other nations.From the Pakistani viewpoint: China’s democracy is built, not around the principle of equal representation, but wealth circulation.But it seems quite clear to us at least that the Chinese government ensures a sense of equality and representation among its citizens not by giving them a vote directly, but by circulating wealth among them so that they remain relevant and key players to the Chinese economy. And thus, retain a relevant voice in public affairs by means of their individual economic power.There has been a concerted attempt to paint China’s political and economic philosophy as a capitalist or semi-capitalist, particularly from the proponents of capitalism who are eager to use China’s success to bolster the credentials of the free market, neo-liberal, deregulated form of economics.But the view from Islamabad sees the PRC leadership as still fairly dedicated Marxists who still uphold the philosophy of Marxism even as their methods have changed.Central to the concept of the Marxist theory of labor is the fact that society is split between the working class who produce all the goods and commodities that society needs through their labor. And on top of them is a ruling class that takes the surplus-value of their labor and returns to them a fraction of the value while keeping the remaining portion with themselves while having contributed no labor to the production of goods.This is the basis of the strained social relations in society and the injustice that characterizes it. That one class takes more than it puts into society in terms of labor (whether physical or intellectual). And leads to the emergence of class warfare.If you don’t want to go all out with Marxist revolutionary tactics and seize the means of production/abolish private property: the softer approach is to circulate wealth in your society by returning a greater fraction of the surplus-value of labor put in by the working class back to them.Wealth circulation can take many forms: It can be a literal transference of wealth from government taxation to the working class. Or it can be the implementation of social welfare programs, affordable healthcare, education, and subsidies, etc.This lessens the alienation of the worker from the product of their labor and the surplus value they are deprived of, leading to a softening of class warfare lines and a just, equitable and egalitarian society to rise.The Scandinavian nations can be good examples of this.But note, that the definition of the just and equal society in Marxist POVs is not based on concepts like freedom of speech, the right to vote and so on. But on economic terms. Almost as if the ideals of freedom of speech and the right to vote can only arise properly from the seed of an economically just society where wealth is circulated and resources distributed fairly.This is the basis of the Chinese democratic ideal: Not to blindly give the vote and freedom of speech while having no plan for economic wealth circulation. But to develop a system of wealth circulation first that allows for wealth redistribution and poverty alleviation.And it has worked:China's poverty reduction at a crucial stage: white paperBecause human freedom and rationality as ideals and the human intrinsic desire to live in a free, just society can only arise if the material and economic conditions a person finds themselves in are just in a material manner.Otherwise, you end up with a democracy where the top 1% wealthy elite control the bulk of the economic pie and utilize their wealth to control media, political, law enforcement institutions to control and neutralize the voting power of the millions under them.But if you have a large, educated and materially well off society that is capable of thinking about subjects beyond their day to day survival, then political ideals like freedom and democracy have a better chance of automatically manifesting (bar some external manipulation).Countries like Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan right now are examples of nations where the ideals of one man, one vote and democracy were implemented without any care given to the economic systems of wealth circulation and wealth redistribution.A democratic system without institutions strong enough to implement a nationwide, effective taxation system, anti-corruption bodies strong enough to ensure the tax was spent on the public welfare and legislative bodies honest enough to implement social welfare and public benefits programs is a democratic system that gives way to rapacious exploitation.And you end up with elected parliamentarians looting the public exchequer, tin-pot dictators offshoring billions in wealth, political parties implementing tributary payoffs to maintain goons on the payroll. Billions if not trillions in wealth are offshored, misplaced, misspent or not utilized at all.And a democracy becomes a desperate scramble to steal and accumulate as many resources as you can to protect your clan, family or tribe at the expense of everyone else. Public education remains underfunded. Children die of treatable diseases on hospital floors. The police serve as hired thugs for the ruling elite. And the folk at the top accumulate and concentrate wealth and the products of the working class’s labor while the working class toils in misery at the bottom retaining a fraction of the value they create.This is the heart of the reason why post-colonial nations that adopted democracy before they could adopt strong institutions capable of taxation, anti-corruption and wealth circulation remained trapped in systemic poverty.Which is how we end up with countries where you are free to vote as you please but you can die of thirst and starvation, gunned down in the street by opposing political factions, die of treatable disease and have the grim duty of watching your children grow up malnourished and illiterate.The right to vote can mean so little in a society built upon economic injustice.China may have adopted capitalistic ways of generating value but they have retained the Marxist philosophy behind what to do with that surplus-value. In that, this surplus-value is invested back into the working class as affordable education, healthcare, jobs and so on to return to them the very value they create.And this economic justice is what translates into their attempts at creating a just society where the CPC manages and reduces the tensions between the working class and the owners of private property.Every revolution carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.– Princess Irulan (Dune, Frank Herbert)If you think the CPC has cracked the code to economic justice though, you would be wrong. And even within the mighty political iron framework of the CPC, cracks have begun to appear:Eric Tse, who recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School of Finance, was gifted about US$3.88 billion in his family company's shares on Tuesday.That's not surprising, as his father Tse Ping was previously a committee member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country's top political advisory body.On October 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the younger Tse attended Beijing celebrations open only to invited guests and dignitaries.The company statement on Tuesday said Tse's parents had transferred the shares to him "to refine the management and inheritance of family wealth." The document was signed by the company's chairwoman, Theresa Tse -- Eric's sister.Shares aside, Tse also gained a new position -- executive director of the company's executive board committee. According to the company statement, before being given this role, he previously served as CEO at the North America arm of recruitment company Liepin.CNN has reached out to Tse for comment.Tse is part of a new wave of wealth in China. A "rich list" released earlier this month showed that although Chinese wealth is concentrated in the hands of tech entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical moguls -- like those in Tse's family -- are making ground. Pharmaceutical moguls make up 8 percent of China's rich list, double that of 10 years ago.Eric Tse, 24, just became a billionaire overnightAlas, nothing lasts forever. And while it seems that the engine of economic growth will continue to churn, for now, it appears that the political will and appetite within state institutions inside the PRC to restrain and contain the wealth concentration of wealthy, politically well-connected elite will slowly erode as the comforts of a post-revolutionary government settle in a Brezhnev style ossification of state apparatus.It should be kept in mind that the systemic damages from wealth concentration aren’t apparent immediately but take decades to manifest. And while the wealth concentration today may seem like a harmless side effect of Asia’s economic rise, 3 to 4 decades down the line the picture will be of ultra wealthy Chinese billionaires offshoring billions in wealth to starve public universities of research funds and pushing a shrinking middle class into poverty.Exactly what’s happening in America today.And THAT will be what undermines China’s democratic ideal far more than any ability or inability to vote.This is not a deterministic future though. And the anti-corruption drives under Xi have yielded results that can be measured empirically if you know what data to look at:In 2015, the accountancy firm Deloitte published a study of Swiss watches headlined Uncertain Times, which described how leading manufacturers of exclusive timepieces were gloomy about the future. The reason for the misery came not from a recession, or from any problem with the products, but rather from the fact that the government in China was cracking down on corruption, which was harming sales of the kind of lavish gifts that crooked officials had previously accepted in return for favorable decisions. ‘The pessimism about China and Hong Kong can be explained by the lower rates of growth in the economies of many emerging markets, and also the anti-corruption and anti-kickback legislation in China: these developments have led to a fall in the sales of luxury products,’ Deloitte’s analysts wrote. ‘81% of watch executives indicated that demand in China has fallen over the past 12 months due to anti-corruption legislation.’Luxury watches are popular among officials since they provide a discreet but effective way of advertising their power. In 2009, the Russian newspaper Vedomosti mischievously published a compilation of photographs of the watches worn by top officials at public events, noting each one’s price and contrasting that with the declared income of the official in question. The cheapest watch belonged to the head of the Audit Chamber, costing a mere 1,800 Swiss francs. The majority were in the $10–50,000 range, beyond which a handful of officials had really splashed out. The deputy mayor of Moscow won both first and second place, with watches costing $1.04 million and $360,000; while Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov’s watch came third, with an estimated price of $300,000. The article caused some embarrassment to top officials, which is perhaps why the official photographer photoshopped a $30,000 Breguet timepiece off the wrist of the Patriarch of Moscow, as he sat at a highly polished table in 2012. The photographer neglected to remove the watch’s reflection, however, which both made the Patriarch look ridiculous and also rather undermined his attempts to argue for a return to asceticism and traditional values under the moral leadership of himself.The watch controversy has not led to any concerted anti-corruption campaigns in Russia (perhaps to the relief of the manufacturers of luxury products), but a serious Chinese anti-corruption campaign began in 2012, with tens of thousands of people indicted, including members of previously untouchable classes – leading figures in the military, central government and provincial administrations. Officials stopped flaunting their wealth almost instantly, with dramatic consequences for the kind of businesses that Kapur had suggested his clients invest in, including businesses that produce luxury food and drink. France’s Bordeaux region had exported a mere 12,000 hectolitres of wine to China in 2005 but, within seven years, that had increased almost fiftyfold, to 538,000 hectolitres, with the ostentatious buying patterns of wealthy Chinese people utterly transforming the economics of French wine production. When the anti-corruption campaign started, and Chinese officials were no longer quite so willing to publicly imbibe bottles of Château Lafite, the region’s exports dropped by a quarter in two years. ‘Certainly, we are seeing fewer wealthy Chinese arriving on private planes and buying up €50,000 of wine in one go,’ a wine merchant rather laconically told a trade publication.The same thing happened to other Western manufacturers who had profited from booming sales of the kind of prestigious products popular among China’s Moneylenders. In 2014 the Scotch Whisky Association blamed what it euphemistically referred to as the ‘Chinese government’s austerity campaign’ for the fact sales to China and Singapore (which often re-exported to China) had dropped. By the end of 2016, sales to these two Far Eastern markets were down by almost 50 percent. Any investors who had bought into wine or spirits producers in the hope of riding Kapur’s plutonomy wave would have had a very rude shock.Moneyland: The Inside Story Of The Crooks And Kleptocrats Who Rule The WorldThere will always be a fork in the road moment for nations where they can choose what kind of future they want by deciding what aspects of society they are willing to tolerate and which ones they aren’t. Quite often, it’s the leaders at the top who set the pace for this tolerance and the lower hierarchies adjust accordingly.From our experience in Pakistan, we have been a flawed democracy at times and a military dictatorship at others. In either case, we have seen the power of our votes neutralized in a system where economic resources are concentrated and offshored or integrated into tributary systems. And not given back to the toiling masses as education, healthcare, and subsidies. Leaving millions trapped in desperate poverty, willing to sell their votes for a single meatloaf (this happens literally btw).Forget freedom and democracy, people are not even aware of what the power of their votes mean in a society where the wealthy elite control the levels of public education and media.So perhaps we would be keen to explore whether we too, should adopt the approach of establishing economic justice before we establish democratic ideals. Or perhaps democratic ideals are something that could arise as a consequence of economic justice.Only time will tell.

Let's keep in mind the main fundamental “goal" of imprisonment, which is to enact punishment for crime. Nothing more, nothing less. Once someone is sentenced, imprisonment is the punishment, that's it. Loss of freedom is where the punishment ends.How we can improve US prisons is by enacting the following (which should already be implemented, given most free citizens already think the following are happening)Stop overcrowding. Only allow the number of inmates inside a facility per the facilities original specs. Stop warehousing the inmates.Ensure recidivism stops by actually providing educational programs and/or trade school programs. Offer life essentials education/training.Properly diagnosis any and all mental health issues. Provide medication if applicable and educated those suffering about their mental health issues, the importance of taking their medications and what happens if the refuse their medications.Stop For Profit Prison. Our tax dollars are taken from the free citizens and should be properly allocated. No money should ever be made off those suffering or money “pinched” out of the prison coffers. The prison should have to submit a prospectus which outlines the funding needed and where funds are allocated. Yearly audit's must be made to ensure funds are properly spent.Mandatory counseling for inmates and those family members who want to join in. We need to get to the root cause of why inmates commit crimes in the first place and come up with personal plans to achieve success once the inmates are released.Employment resources.Edible foods. Healthy foods. Inmates should not be forced to eat slop or high sodium foods due to cost. Inmates are wards of the State and should be treated as such. If the State is taking ownership of inmates for their duration we need to treat them they way we would treat anyone we are in charge of their complete care.Provide free local calls or only change data rates the inmates family phone plans change. No money should be made to ensure family/friend connections. Whatever the individual phone company charges for a call (usually unlimited calls per plans) is all that should be charged. Prisons don't run a side phone company.Offer more necessities in commissary for at cost pricing. Prisons should have contacts with big box companies where family/friends can order approved merchandise and ship direct to inmates. Should be able to order extra clothing such as socks and underwear. Approved healthy snacks/food items. Soap, shampoo, toothpaste, etc. TVs, tablets, etc approved electronics. These items are already offered. Inmates pay $250 for a TV but unable to take with them when they leave. Should not charge full price for used rentals.Treat each and every inmate fairly and humanly. Inmates are still human and most will be released at some point. Respect is a big deal for everyone, inmates are no exception. Treat all others as you yourself would want to be treated.Let's start by implementing these top 10 and go from there. Guarantee prison reform will be off to a good start by these 10 items alone. Forgive my use of calling all prisoners inmates. I don't really know the difference between inmates and convicts (I do know there is a difference, just don't know what that exactly is).I am a huge advocate for prison reform and truly believe it can be achieved, more importantly, started now by simply following the above mentioned list. Trust me it will be cheaper for all tax paying citizens if we hold the prisons accountable and start treating the inmates the way we should be treating them. Once the “undesirables” start to feel as if they matter and are members of society, the sooner they will act like it and become active and productive members of society.