[U.S.] Gun control

time for a separate thread on USA's unique issue.

Conn. elementary school shooting (http://news.msn.com/us/children-among-dead-in-shooting-at-conn-school)

"Principal, school psychologist and gunman are also among the dead.



NEWTOWN, Conn. — At least 27 people were killed, including an unconfirmed number of children, in a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Friday, according to reports from Reuters and The Associated Press. If confirmed, it would be one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. It comes after a series of shooting rampages in the United States this year that have killed multiple victims.

The suspected shooter, the father of a student there, was also killed, CBS News reported. The principal and school psychologist were among the dead, CNN said.

An official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way told the Associated Press the gunman apparently had two guns. The school district remains on lockdown as police investigate the shootings. There are unconfirmed reports of two shooters, according to a local newspaper.

President Barack Obama has been notified about the shooting and will receive regular updates throughout the day, White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Friday.

Carney called the event "tragic" and said there would be time later for a discussion of policy implications.

Obama remains committed to trying to renew a ban on assault weapons, Carney said.

LIVE: Updates from the shooting site

Some students were reportedly being treated for trauma. A dispatcher at the Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps said a teacher has been shot in the foot and taken to Danbury Hospital. Dr. Patrick Broderick said the hospital had treated only three patients from the shooting scene. The hospital is on lockdown to protect the privacy of victims and to allow staff to do their work unreported.

The school superintendent's office says the district has locked down schools as a preventive measure to ensure the safety of students and staff.





State police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance says they have a number of personnel on the scene to assist.

The Courant reported that police said a shooter was in the main office of the school shortly after 9:40 a.m.

Groups of students — some crying, some holding hands — were being escorted away from the school by their teachers, the Courant reported.

A staging area has been set up for students and their parents near the school.

Related: Tips for talking to kids about scary news

The district is made up of four elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school.

Newtown is in northern Fairfield County, about 45 miles southwest of Hartford and 80 miles northeast of New York City."

the problem; there's already 300 million guns in private hands in USA.
300 million.

Nothing is going to change, and too many guns are in circulation to greatly ease these shooting crimes. Violent crime is actually way down in USA, to around historic levels. Our culture is too addicted to violence, and our country is founded on violence. Violence has always been used as a means to get what we want in this country. It isn't going to change anytime soon, or at the very least, it's going to take a lot for things to change.

Americans, in particular conservatives, are just hawkish about guns. All people know is that violence is the means to solve problems. We're an unstable, sick society.

40% of guns in the USA are sold without ANY background checks. Guns are sold at Walmart. Guns are sold at gun shows. Guns are sold over the internet. Guns are sold from person to person. Guns are sold to criminals, legally and illegally. Our country has a DRAMATIC issue with psychological illness that is swept under the rug, and people who have severe mental and emotional problems are walking the streets, not diagnosed, and allowed free reign.

Nothing will change anytime soon. The damage is so far reaching that it's going to take a long time for things to be reversed.

President Barack Obama has been notified about the shooting and will receive regular updates throughout the day, White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Friday.

Carney called the event "tragic" and said there would be time later for a discussion of policy implications. Obama remains committed to trying to renew a ban on assault weapons, Carney said.

Typical "non-response". This shooting was done with two 9mm handguns. And lets say they had the large capacity clips (that each hold I think 30 bullets, as opposed to 10 for the regular one).

The ammo clip issue has long been known, as with the Gabby Giffords shooting (where 6 ppl did die, including a child). Obama has put zero weight behind limiting clip capacity, OR closing the gun show exemption from even the inadequate background checks that are required @ retail stores.

Clinton's now expired Assault Weapons Ban addressed neither of the above either. Sure the Republicans are worse on this, but liberals "shut up and take it" from Democrats in the WH, just like on the now "dumb war" in Afghanistan. :shrug:

This is very upsetting, there needs to be a federal ban on owning guns period. I don't fucking care if you live in a hunting state. This came just off the heel of another shooting in an Oregon mall a few days ago.

Democrats are in the pockets of the NRA, almost as much a Republicans. Gun control isn't a major winning issue for liberals. The truth of the matter is that a lot of Democrats and independents and most Republicans don't think guns are the problem. We are a sick country. If you talk about gun laws, then you're a anti-gun nazi. Guns and violence are completely normal in the USA and people are numb.

The fact that people are continuously allowed to fall through the cracks in our society and develop anger issues, hatred towards society, and people who have psychological/emotional issues are shunned by our society, along with the complete lack of resources mental health institutions have in our country, are huge parts of the problem. People ignore warning signs. People with issues of anger, depression, whatever it may be, generally refuse help. We need a conversation on the issue of psychological/emotional distress and illness.

Homicide rates are going way, way down in the USA. Gun violence rates are way down. If anything, we should be surprised that this doesn't happen more often, but this year has been a major major horrific year, and a conversation is so long overdue. Will it happen? The NRA refuses to talk about gun control. Guns have become so political, so the issue really isn't about safety anymore. It's pathetic.

This is very upsetting, there needs to be a federal ban on owning guns period."the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

I honestly think the problem is the violence porn. The First Person Shooters, the Sopranos, the 'action adventure movies .... plus WAY too much free time. If you live long enough in fantasy land, the temptation to make that fantasy real when you under too much real world stress can get to you.

Typical "non-response". This shooting was done with two 9mm handguns. And lets say they had the large capacity clips (that each hold I think 30 bullets, as opposed to 10 for the regular one).

The ammo clip issue has long been known, as with the Gabby Giffords shooting (where 6 ppl did die, including a child). Obama has put zero weight behind limiting clip capacity, OR closing the gun show exemption from even the inadequate background checks that are required @ retail stores.

Clinton's now expired Assault Weapons Ban addressed neither of the above either. Sure the Republicans are worse on this, but liberals "shut up and take it" from Democrats in the WH, just like on the now "dumb war" in Afghanistan. :shrug:

Shooting was apparently done with .223 rifle, just like Batman movie theatre guy. Though police also reported he had multiple weapons.

Capacity restrictions are meaningless, promoted by people who have no technical understanding of guns. Finnish school shooters both employed .22 pistols with just two TEN-ROUND magazines. It didn't stop them from shooting almost 20 people combined. Seriously, it makes almost no difference whether you have 10-round or 30-round clips (in fact smaller might be better, large clip makes gun unwieldy and prone to jamming). Changing the magazine takes just few seconds from unexperienced shooters, and split-second from trained one.

As for Assault Weapons Ban, it was completely stupid to the point of being hilarious. All it did was that it controlled how guns LOOKED. But nobody has ever been killed by looks of the gun.

"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

Ban ammo. No constitutional violation there.

Nothing is going to change, and too many guns are in circulation to greatly ease these shooting crimes. Violent crime is actually way down in USA, to around historic levels. Our culture is too addicted to violence, and our country is founded on violence. Violence has always been used as a means to get what we want in this country. It isn't going to change anytime soon, or at the very least, it's going to take a lot for things to change.

Nothing will change anytime soon. The damage is so far reaching that it's going to take a long time for things to be reversed.

What country do you know that was not founded on violence?

This is very upsetting, there needs to be a federal ban on owning guns period. I don't fucking care if you live in a hunting state. This came just off the heel of another shooting in an Oregon mall a few days ago.

I realize that this is an emotional response and I understand it. I don't see how any decent human being cannot be heartbroken about this. :sad:

But spouting that there should be a federal ban on guns is feel good talk. First of all how do you confiscate all of the guns that are already available? Do you expect criminals to give up their guns because the federal government says so (let's avoid the constitutional issue for time being)?

Nothing to see here

Please just ban it :sad:

Americans care more about who marries who and who gets an abortion, than we do about who buys a gun and is fragile due to emotional distress.

We have easier access to guns than mental/emotional/behavioral health treatment.

Americans care more about who marries who and who gets an abortion, than we do about who buys a gun and is fragile due to emotional distress.

Can you honestly stop complaining about this all the time. All these tragedies that have happened recently are really disgusting and something must be done. Stop bringing irrelevant information into threads.

It's not irrelevant information. It's the sign of a completely sick country.

I honestly think the problem is the violence porn. The First Person Shooters, the Sopranos, the 'action adventure movies .... plus WAY too much free time. If you live long enough in fantasy land, the temptation to make that fantasy real when you under too much real world stress can get to you.

Bullshit. This is just a convenient excuse and always has been. Violence? Blame tv and music! Of course it's The Sopranos and Marilyn Manson who are making people massacre dozens of people!

All I'll say is the longer people keep sticking their heads in the sand, the more these things will happen. Look at the number of mass shootings before and after the assault weapons ban was repealed and tell me there's not a cause and effect.

Bullshit. This is just a convenient excuse and always has been. Violence? Blame tv and music! Of course it's The Sopranos and Marilyn Manson who are making people massacre dozens of people!

Exactly, that's not what is causing this. Heavy metal is even more popular in Europe and they watch all the same violent movies and they don't have people shooting up schools and movie theaters every six months.

What happened today was another massive tragedy. I feel sick thinking about this. Thee poor people and their families. Surely this is yet another example why much tougher gun control needs to happen in America and needs to happen soon. How many more of these incidents do we need. I cant believe some were using this as an example to need more guns and to give teachers in classrooms guns :rolleyes: this needs to stop. Tough gun laws and buy backs worked really well in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre so I see no reason why it couldn't work in the US.

What we had here, was an inability to communicate

atlantic monthly's article

The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control)

The Century 16 Cineplex in Aurora, Colorado, stands desolate behind a temporary green fence, which was raised to protect the theater from prying eyes and mischief-makers. The parking lots that surround the multiplex are empty—weeds are pushing through the asphalt—and the only person at the theater when I visited a few weeks ago was an enervated Aurora police officer assigned to guard the site.

I asked the officer whether the building, which has stood empty since the night of July 20, when a former graduate student named James E. Holmes is alleged to have killed 12 people and wounded 58 others at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, still drew the curious. “People drive by to look,” he said, but “not too many.” The Aurora massacre is noteworthy, even in the crowded field of mass shootings, as one of the more wretched and demoralizing in the recent history of American violence, and I was surprised that the scene of the crime did not attract more attention. “I guess people move on,” he said.

I walked up a slight rise that provided an imperfect view of the back of Theater 9, where the massacre took place, and tried to imagine the precise emotions the victims felt as the gunfire erupted.

“The shooting started at a quiet moment in the movie,” Stephen Barton told me. He was shot in the opening fusillade. “I saw this canister-type thing, a smoking object, streak across the screen. I thought it was a kid with fireworks playing a prank.”

Barton is 22 years old. He had been preparing to leave for Russia this fall on a Fulbright scholarship. “The first feeling I remember was bewilderment. I don’t remember having a single thought before I was shot, because I was shot early on. I was sitting in the middle of the row, toward the back. I got blasted in my head, neck, and face—my whole upper body—by shotgun pellets.”

As he lay wounded on the floor by his seat, he said, his bafflement gave way to panic. “I had this unwillingness to accept that this was actually happening. I wanted to believe that there was no way that someone in the same room as me was shooting at people,” he said. “So it was disbelief and also this really strong feeling that I’m not ready to die. I’m at someone else’s mercy. I’ve never felt more helpless.”

In the chaos of smoke and gunshots, Barton saw the emergency exit door open, and managed to escape into the parking lot. “If I hadn’t seen that door, I might not have made it,” he said.




I left the theater and drove into Denver, to meet a man named Tom Mauser, who lost a son in the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, 19 miles from the Aurora theater.

Daniel Mauser, who was 15 years old when he died, tried to hide from the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Harris found the boy under a table in the school library. A classmate told The Denver Post shortly after the massacre, “Eric shot him once, and Daniel pushed chairs at him to try to make him stop, and Eric shot him again.”

After the murder of his son, Tom Mauser became a gun-control activist. In the days after Columbine, advocates of more-stringent controls of firearms thought they could feel a shift in the culture. People were disgusted that Harris and Klebold, neither of whom was of the legal age to buy firearms, had found a way to acquire guns: an 18-year-old woman, a friend of the two shooters, bought three weapons legally at a gun show, where federal background checks were not required.

After Columbine, Colorado closed its “gun-show loophole,” but efforts to close the loophole on the national level failed. The National Rifle Association and other anti-gun-control groups worked diligently to defend the loophole—misnamed, because while loophole suggests a small opening not easily negotiated, about 40 percent of all legal gun sales take place at gun shows, on the Internet, or through more-informal sales between private sellers and buyers, where buyers are not subject to federal background checks. Though anti-loophole legislation passed the U.S. Senate, it was defeated in the House of Representatives. On top of that, the 1994 ban on sales of certain types of semiautomatic weapons, known as the assault-weapons ban, expired in 2004 and was not reauthorized.

After the Aurora shooting, gun-control activists who expected politicians to rise up in outrage were quickly disappointed. Shortly after the massacre, John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, suggested that stricter gun laws would not have stopped the shooter. “If there were no assault weapons available and no this or no that, this guy is going to find something, right?,” Hickenlooper said. “He’s going to know how to create a bomb.”

Hickenlooper’s statement helped Mauser realize that his side was losing the fight. “I had deep anger when I heard that,” he told me. “I heard the same kinds of statements from some people after Columbine: ‘Well, you know, they had bombs, too.’ The fact is that the deaths were from guns.”

Mauser believes the public has grown numb to mass violence. “People say ‘How tragic’ and then move on,” he said. “They’re told by their governor, their political leaders, that there’s no solution. So they don’t see a solution out there.”

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 47 percent of American adults keep at least one gun at home or on their property, and many of these gun owners are absolutists opposed to any government regulation of firearms. According to the same poll, only 26 percent of Americans support a ban on handguns.

To that 26 percent, American gun culture can seem utterly inexplicable, its very existence dispiriting. Guns are responsible for roughly 30,000 deaths a year in America; more than half of those deaths are suicides. In 2010, 606 people, 62 of them children younger than 15, died in accidental shootings.

Mauser expresses disbelief that the number of gun deaths fails to shock. He blames the American attachment to guns on ignorance, and on immaturity. “We’re a pretty new nation,” he told me. “We’re still at the stage of rebellious teenager, and we don’t like it when the government tells us what to do. People don’t trust government to do what’s right. They are very attracted to the idea of a nation of individuals, so they don’t think about what’s good for the collective.”

Mauser said that if the United States were as mature as the countries of Europe, where strict gun control is the norm, the federal government would have a much easier time curtailing the average citizen’s access to weapons. “The people themselves would understand that having guns around puts them in more danger.”

There are ways, of course, to make it at least marginally more difficult for the criminally minded, for the dangerously mentally ill, and for the suicidal to buy guns and ammunition. The gun-show loophole could be closed. Longer waiting periods might stop some suicides. Mental-health professionals could be encouraged—or mandated—to report patients they suspect shouldn’t own guns to the FBI-supervised National Instant Criminal Background Check System, although this would generate fierce opposition from doctors and patients. Background checks, which are conducted by licensed gun shops, have stopped almost 1 million people from buying guns at these stores since 1998. (No one knows, of course, how many of these people gave up their search for a gun, and how many simply went to a gun show or found another way to acquire a weapon.)

Other measures could be taken as well. Drum-style magazines like the kind James Holmes had that night in Aurora, which can hold up to 100 rounds of ammunition and which make continuous firing easy, have no reasonable civilian purpose, and their sale could be restricted without violating the Second Amendment rights of individual gun owners.

But these gun-control efforts, while noble, would only have a modest impact on the rate of gun violence in America.

Why?

Because it’s too late.

There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million new guns enter the market. This level of gun saturation has occurred not because the anti-gun lobby has been consistently outflanked by its adversaries in the National Rifle Association, though it has been. The NRA is quite obviously a powerful organization, but like many effective pressure groups, it is powerful in good part because so many Americans are predisposed to agree with its basic message.

America’s level of gun ownership means that even if the Supreme Court—which ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment gives citizens the individual right to own firearms, as gun advocates have long insisted—suddenly reversed itself and ruled that the individual ownership of handguns was illegal, there would be no practical way for a democratic country to locate and seize those guns.

Many gun-control advocates, and particularly advocates of a total gun ban, would like to see the United States become more like Canada, where there are far fewer guns per capita and where most guns must be registered with the federal government. The Canadian approach to firearms ownership has many attractions—the country’s firearm homicide rate is one-sixth that of the U.S. But barring a decision by the American people and their legislators to remove the right to bear arms from the Constitution, arguing for applying the Canadian approach in the U.S. is useless.

Even the leading advocacy group for stricter gun laws, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has given up the struggle to convince the courts, and the public, that the Constitution grants only members of a militia the right to bear arms. “I’m happy to consider the debate on the Second Amendment closed,” Dan Gross, the Brady Campaign’s president, told me recently. “Reopening that debate is not what we should be doing. We have to respect the fact that a lot of decent, law-abiding people believe in gun ownership.”

Which raises a question: When even anti-gun activists believe that the debate over private gun ownership is closed; when it is too late to reduce the number of guns in private hands—and since only the naive think that legislation will prevent more than a modest number of the criminally minded, and the mentally deranged, from acquiring a gun in a country absolutely inundated with weapons—could it be that an effective way to combat guns is with more guns?

Today, more than 8 million vetted and (depending on the state) trained law-abiding citizens possess state-issued “concealed carry” handgun permits, which allow them to carry a concealed handgun or other weapon in public. Anti-gun activists believe the expansion of concealed-carry permits represents a serious threat to public order. But what if, in fact, the reverse is true? Mightn’t allowing more law-abiding private citizens to carry concealed weapons—when combined with other forms of stringent gun regulation—actually reduce gun violence?

This thought has been with me for nearly two decades. On December 7, 1993, a bitter and unstable man named Colin Ferguson boarded an eastbound Long Island Rail Road train at the Jamaica, Queens, station. As the train pulled into the Merillon Avenue station in Nassau County, Ferguson pulled out a Ruger 9 mm pistol he had bought legally in California (which had a 15-day waiting period) and began walking down the aisle, calmly shooting passengers as he went. He killed six people and wounded 19 others before three passengers tackled him while he was reloading.

If someone is shooting at you, it is better to shoot back than to cower and pray.
I had been an LIRR commuter not long before this happened, and I remember clearly my reaction to the slaughter, and I remember as well the reaction of many New York politicians. Much of the political class, and many editorialists, were of the view that the LIRR massacre proved the need for stricter gun control, and even for the banning of handguns. I shared—and continue to share—the view that muscular gun-control regulations, ones that put stumbling blocks in front of criminals seeking firearms, are necessary. But I was also seized by the thought that, had I been on the train, I would much rather have been armed than unarmed. I was not, and am not, under the illusion that a handgun would have necessarily provided a definitive solution to the problem posed by Colin Ferguson. But my instinct was that if someone is shooting at you, it is generally better to shoot back than to cower and pray.

Would a civilian firing back at Ferguson have wounded or killed innocent people? Quite possibly yes. Is that a risk potential victims quaking under train seats or classroom desks might accept? Quite possibly yes. Especially when you consider the massacres that have been prevented or interrupted by armed civilians before the police arrived.

Many of the worst American massacres end not in the capture of the gunman but in his suicide. In the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, for instance, the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, killed himself as the police were set to capture him. But in other cases, massacres were stopped early by the intervention of armed civilians, or off-duty or retired police officers who happened to be nearby.

In 1997, a disturbed high-school student named Luke Woodham stabbed his mother and then shot and killed two people at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. He then began driving toward a nearby junior high to continue his shooting spree, but the assistant principal of the high school, Joel Myrick, aimed a pistol he kept in his truck at Woodham, causing him to veer off the road. Myrick then put his pistol to Woodham’s neck and disarmed him. On January 16, 2002, a disgruntled former student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, had killed three people, including the school’s dean, when two students, both off-duty law-enforcement officers, retrieved their weapons and pointed them at the shooter, who ended his killing spree and surrendered. In December 2007, a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle and two pistols entered the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and killed two teenage girls before a church member, Jeanne Assam—a former Minneapolis police officer and a volunteer church security guard—shot and wounded the gunman, who then killed himself.

And so I put a question to Stephen Barton, who described feeling helpless in the Aurora theater: Would he rather have been armed, or at least been in the theater with armed patrons, when the massacre started?

“Intuitively it makes sense for people to have that reaction, to want to defend themselves,” he said. “It’s easy to say that if more people had guns to defend themselves, they could take criminals down, but I don’t think concealed-carry weapons are the answer.” In a dark and crowded theater, he said, facing someone wearing bullet-resistant armor on much of his body, a gun, even in trained hands, would have been unlikely to do much good.

I put to Tom Mauser a variation of the question I had asked Barton. What if a teacher or an administrator inside Columbine High School had been armed on the day of the massacre? Unlike the theater in Aurora, the school was brightly lit, and not as densely packed. If someone with a gun had confronted Harris and Klebold in the library, he or she would have been able, at the very least, to distract the killers—perhaps even long enough for them to be tackled or disarmed.

“That kind of speculation doesn’t solve anything,” Mauser said. “I don’t know if that person might have shot my son accidentally.”

But the worst thing that could have happened to Daniel Mauser did, in fact, happen. The presence in the Columbine library of a well-trained, armed civilian attempting to stop the killers could hardly have made the situation worse. Indeed, the local police—who waited 45 minutes to enter the school, while a SWAT team assembled—were severely criticized for the delay.

But Mauser remained implacable. “We know that if the country adopts this vision that everyone should be armed—that administrators and janitors in school are armed, that people are walking around armed—we won’t be safe,” Mauser told me. “In Aurora, if five people in that theater had guns, they could have just ended up shooting each other or innocent people in the crossfire. It just makes sense that if people are walking around armed, you’re going to have a high rate of people shooting each other.”

Earlier this year, a man who was upset with the anti-gay-rights position of the Family Research Council entered the group’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and allegedly shot and wounded the building manager (who subsequently tackled the gunman). At the time, Washington’s mayor, Vincent Gray, said: “We don’t need to make more guns available to people … The more access they have, the more they threaten people.”

The District of Columbia does not allow for concealed carry, though its residents can now apply for a license allowing them to keep handguns at home, thanks to the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in a case brought on behalf of a D.C. man who wanted a gun for self-protection.

I called Gray to ask him about his assertion that more guns mean more violence, noting that he himself travels the city with armed police bodyguards, a service not afforded the typical Washington resident. “Well, first of all, I’ve never even seen the guns that the security people have. When I travel outside the city, I don’t have security. I would be fine without security,” he said. “But we have 3,800 police officers to protect people. They may not be at someone’s side at every moment, but they’re around.”

Concealed-carry permit holders commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population.
I asked him whether he could envision a scenario in which an armed civilian might be able to stop a crime from occurring. “There are those who believe that if they have a weapon, they can combat crime, but I don’t think that way,” he said.

The police, of course, have guns to stop crime. So why couldn’t a well-trained civilian also stop crime? “If you have a gun on you, that’s just another opportunity to use it,” Gray said. “It’s the temptation of the moment. I just think the opportunity is there to create more violence.”

In 2004, the Ohio legislature passed a law allowing private citizens to apply for permits to carry firearms outside the home. The decision to allow concealed carry was, of course, a controversial one. Law-enforcement organizations, among others, argued that an armed population would create chaos in the streets. In 2003, John Gilchrist, the legislative counsel for the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police, testified, “If 200,000 to 300,000 citizens begin carrying a concealed weapon, common sense tells us that accidents will become a daily event.”

When I called Gilchrist recently, he told me that events since the state’s concealed-carry law took effect have proved his point. “Talking to the chiefs, I know that there is more gun violence and accidents involving guns,” he said. “I think there’s more gun violence now because there are more guns. People are using guns in the heat of arguments, and there wouldn’t be as much gun violence if we didn’t have people carrying weapons. If you’ve got people walking around in a bad mood—or in a divorce, they’ve lost their job—and they get into a confrontation, this could result in the use of a gun. If you talk to emergency-room physicians in the state, [they] see more and more people with gunshot wounds.”

Gilchrist said he did not know the exact statistics on gun-related incidents (or on incidents concerning concealed-carry permit holders specifically, because the state keeps the names of permit holders confidential). He says, however, that he tracks gun usage anecdotally. “You can look in the newspaper. I consciously look for stories that deal with guns. There are more and more articles in The Columbus Dispatch about people using guns inappropriately.”

Gilchrist’s argument would be convincing but for one thing: the firearm crime rate in Ohio remained steady after the concealed-carry law passed in 2004.

It is an unexamined assumption on the part of gun-control activists that the possession of a firearm by a law-abiding person will almost axiomatically cause that person to fire it at another human being in a moment of stress. Dave Kopel, the research director of the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, in Denver, posits that opposition to gun ownership is ideological, not rational. “I use gay marriage as an analogue,” he said. “Some people say they are against gay marriage because they think it leads to worse outcomes for kids. Now, let’s say in 2020 all the social-science evidence has it that the kids of gay families turn out fine. Some people will still say they’re against it, not for reasons of social science, but for reasons of faith. That’s what you have here in the gun issue.”

There is no proof to support the idea that concealed-carry permit holders create more violence in society than would otherwise occur; they may, in fact, reduce it. According to Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, permit holders in the U.S. commit crimes at a rate lower than that of the general population. “We don’t see much bloodshed from concealed-carry permit holders, because they are law-abiding people,” Winkler said. “That’s not to say that permit holders don’t commit crimes, but they do so at a lower rate than the general population. People who seek to obtain permits are likely to be people who respect the law.” According to John Lott, an economist and a gun-rights advocate who maintains that gun ownership by law-abiding citizens helps curtail crime, the crime rate among concealed-carry permit holders is lower than the crime rate among police officers.

Today, the number of concealed-carry permits is the highest it’s ever been, at 8 million, and the homicide rate is the lowest it’s been in four decades—less than half what it was 20 years ago. (The number of people allowed to carry concealed weapons is actually considerably higher than 8 million, because residents of Vermont, Wyoming, Arizona, Alaska, and parts of Montana do not need government permission to carry their personal firearms. These states have what Second Amendment absolutists refer to as “constitutional carry,” meaning, in essence, that the Second Amendment is their permit.)

Many gun-rights advocates see a link between an increasingly armed public and a decreasing crime rate. “I think effective law enforcement has had the biggest impact on crime rates, but I think concealed carry has something to do with it. We’ve seen an explosion in the number of people licensed to carry,” Lott told me. “You can deter criminality through longer sentencing, and you deter criminality by making it riskier for people to commit crimes. And one way to make it riskier is to create the impression among the criminal population that the law-abiding citizen they want to target may have a gun.”

Crime statistics in Britain, where guns are much scarcer, bear this out. Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, wrote in his 1991 book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, that only 13 percent of burglaries in America occur when the occupant is home. In Britain, so-called hot burglaries account for about 45 percent of all break-ins. Kleck and others attribute America’s low rate of occupied-home burglaries to fear among criminals that homeowners might be armed. (A survey of almost 2,000 convicted U.S. felons, conducted by the criminologists Peter Rossi and James D. Wright in the late ’80s, concluded that burglars are more afraid of armed homeowners than they are of arrest by the police.)

Maybe it’s possible to distract a heavily armed psychotic by throwing a pencil at him. But the psychotic would likely respond by shooting the pencil thrower.
Others contend that proving causality between crime rates and the number of concealed-carry permits is impossible. “It’s difficult to make the case that more concealed-carry guns have led to the drop in the national crime rate, because cities like Los Angeles, where we have very restrictive gun-control laws, have seen the same remarkable drop in crime,” Winkler told me. (Many criminologists tend to attribute America’s dramatic decrease in violent crime to a combination of demographic changes, longer criminal sentencing, innovative policing techniques, and the waning of the crack wars.)

But it is, in fact, possible to assess with some degree of accuracy how many crimes have been stopped because the intended victim, or a witness, was armed. In the 1990s, Gary Kleck and a fellow criminologist, Marc Gertz, began studying the issue and came to the conclusion that guns were used defensively between 830,000 and 2.45 million times each year.

In only a minority of these cases was a gun fired; the brandishing of a gun in front of a would-be mugger or burglar is usually enough to abort a crime in progress. Another study, the federal government’s National Crime Victimization Survey, asked victims of crimes whether they, or someone else, had used a gun in their defense. This study came up with a more modest number than Kleck and Gertz, finding 108,000 defensive uses of firearms a year.

All of these studies, of course, have been contested by gun-control advocates. So I asked Winkler what he thought. He said that while he is skeptical of the 2.45 million figure, even the smaller number is compelling: 108,000 “would represent a significant reduction in criminal activity.”

Universities, more than most other institutions, are nearly unified in their prohibition of licensed concealed-carry weapons. Some even post notices stating that their campuses are gun-free zones. At the same time, universities also acknowledge that they are unable to protect their students from lethal assault. How do they do this? By recommending measures that students and faculty members can take if confronted by an “active shooter,” as in the massacre at Virginia Tech.

These recommendations make for depressing reading, and not only because they reflect a world in which random killing in tranquil settings is a genuine, if rare, possibility. They are also depressing because they reflect a denial of reality.

Here are some of the recommendations:

Wichita State University counsels students in the following manner: “If the person(s) is causing death or serious physical injury to others and you are unable to run or hide you may choose to be compliant, play dead, or fight for your life.”
The University of Miami guidelines suggest that when all else fails, students should act “as aggressively as possible” against a shooter. The guidelines, taken from a Department of Homeland Security directive, also recommend “throwing items and improvising weapons,” as well as “yelling.”
Otterbein University, in Ohio, tells students to “breathe to manage your fear” and informs them, “You may have to take the offensive if the shooter(s) enter your area. Gather weapons (pens, pencils, books, chairs, etc.) and mentally prepare your attack.”
West Virginia University advises students that if the situation is dire, they should “act with physical aggression and throw items at the active shooter.” These items could include “student desks, keys, shoes, belts, books, cell phones, iPods, book bags, laptops, pens, pencils, etc.”
The University of Colorado at Boulder’s guidelines state, “You and classmates or friends may find yourselves in a situation where the shooter will accost you. If such an event occurs, quickly develop a plan to attack the shooter … Consider a plan to tackle the shooter, take away his weapon, and hold him until police arrive.”
It is, of course, possible to distract a heavily armed psychotic on a suicide mission by throwing an iPod at him, or a pencil. But it is more likely that the psychotic would respond by shooting the pencil thrower.

The existence of these policies suggests that universities know they cannot protect their students during an armed attack. (At Virginia Tech, the gunman killed 30 students and faculty members in the 10 minutes it took the police to arrive and penetrate the building he had blockaded.) And yet, these schools will not allow adults with state-issued concealed-carry permits to bring their weapons onto campus, as they would be able to almost anywhere else. “Possession or storage of a deadly weapon, destructive device, or fireworks in any form … is prohibited,” West Virginia University’s policy states.

To gun-rights advocates, these policies are absurd. “The fact that universities are providing their faculties and students with this sort of information is, of course, an admission that they can’t protect them,” Dave Kopel told me. “The universities are unable to protect people, but then they disable people from protecting themselves.”

It is also illogical for campuses to advertise themselves as “gun-free.” Someone bent on murder is not usually dissuaded by posted anti-gun regulations. Quite the opposite—publicly describing your property as gun-free is analogous to posting a notice on your front door saying your home has no burglar alarm. As it happens, the company that owns the Century 16 Cineplex in Aurora had declared the property a gun-free zone.

“As a security measure, it doesn’t seem like advertising that fact is a good idea,” Adam Winkler says of avowedly gun-free campuses, though he adds that “advertising a school’s gun-free status does provide notice to potentially immature youth that they’re not allowed to have guns.”

In Colorado, the epicenter of the American gun argument, the state supreme court recently ruled that the University of Colorado must lift its ban on the carrying of concealed handguns by owners who have been licensed by local sheriffs. (The university has responded by requiring students who own guns to move to a specified housing complex.) The ruling has caused anxiety among some faculty. The chairman of the faculty assembly, a physics professor named Jerry Peterson, told the Boulder Daily Camera, “My own personal policy in my classes is if I am aware that there is a firearm in the class—registered or unregistered, concealed or unconcealed—the class session is immediately canceled. I want my students to feel unconstrained in their discussions.”

Peterson makes two assumptions: The first is that he will know whether someone is carrying a concealed weapon in class. The second is that students will feel frightened about sharing their opinions if a gun is present. (I could find no evidence that any American educational institution has ever seen fatalities or serious gun-related injuries result from a heated classroom discussion.)

Claire Levy, a Colorado state legislator, says she intends to introduce a bill that would ban guns once again. “If discussions in class escalated,” she argues, “the mere fact that someone is potentially armed could have an inhibiting effect on the classroom. This is genuinely scary to faculty members.” The push to open up campuses to concealed-carry permit holders, Levy says, is motivated by ideological gun-rights advocacy, rather than an actual concern for campus safety. Guns, even those owned by licensed and trained individuals, she insists, would simply make a campus more dangerous. “American campuses are the safest places to be in the whole world,” she said. “The homicide rate on campuses is a small fraction of the rate in the rest of the country. So there’s no actual rational public-safety reason that anyone would need to bring a gun on campus.”

However, the University of Colorado’s own active-shooter recommendations state:

Active harming incidents have occurred at a number of locations in recent years, and the University of Colorado is not immune to this potential. While the odds of this occurring at CU are small, the consequences are so potentially catastrophic it makes sense for all students, staff, faculty and visitors to CU to consider the possibility of such an incident occurring here.
In making her argument against concealed-carry weapons to me, Levy painted a bit of a contradictory picture: On the one hand, campuses are the safest places in the country. On the other hand, campus life is so inherently dangerous that the introduction of even licensed guns could mean mayhem. “You’re in this milieu of drugs and alcohol and impulsive behavior and mental illness; you’ve got a population that has a high propensity for suicide,” she told me. “Theft is a big concern, and what if you had a concealed-carry gun and you’re drinking and become violent?”

For much of the population of a typical campus, concealed-carry permitting is not an issue. Most states that issue permits will grant them only to people who are at least 21 years old. But the crime-rate statistics at universities that do allow permit holders on campus with their weapons are instructive. An hour north of Boulder, in Fort Collins, sits Colorado State University. Concealed carry has been allowed at CSU since 2003, and according to James Alderden, the former sheriff of Larimer County, which encompasses Fort Collins, violent crime at Colorado State has dropped since then.

Despite the fact that CSU experienced no violent incidents involving concealed-carry permit holders, the university governing board voted two years ago to ban concealed carry. The ban never went into effect, however, because the state appeals court soon ruled against a similar ban at the University of Colorado, and because Sheriff Alderden announced that he would undermine the ban by refusing to process any violator in the county jail, which serves the university’s police department.

Alderden, who recently retired, told me that opponents of concealed carry “make an emotional argument rather than a logical one. No one could show me any study that concealed carry leads to more crime and more violence. My idea of self-defense is not those red rape phones on campus, where you get to the phone and tell someone you’re getting raped. I have a daughter, and I’d rather have her have the ability to defend herself. I’m not going to violate a citizen’s right to self-defense because someone else has an emotional feeling about guns.”

Though Colorado is slowly shading blue, Alderden said he believes most of its residents “still don’t rely on the government to protect them.” He added: “Maybe in Boulder they do, but most people believe they have a right to self-defense.”

Boulder may be the locus of left-wing politics in Colorado, but it is also home to the oversubscribed Boulder Rifle Club, which I visited on a bright early-fall morning with Dave Kopel, of the Independence Institute. The existence of the rifle club surprised me, given Boulder’s reputation. But Kopel argued that gun ownership and sport shooting are not partisan phenomena, and he made the plausible assertion that Boulder is home to “the largest population of armed vegans in America.”

I wanted to understand from Kopel the best arguments against government intervention in gun ownership, and Kopel wanted to fire some of the many handguns he owns, so we alternately talked and shot. Kopel brought with him a bag of guns: a Ruger Mark II .22 LR pistol; a Springfield Armory XD‑9 9 mm; a Glock 9 mm; a Springfield Armory 1911 tactical-response pistol (similar to a Colt .45); and a Ruger Alaskan .45 revolver, powerful enough to drop a bear. The Ruger Alaskan is the most powerful weapon we used, but the act of firing even a .22 underscores for most thinking people the notion that firing a gun is a serious business. Kopel argued that a law-abiding citizen is less likely to get into a confrontation after a traffic accident or an exchange of insults if he or she is carrying a weapon: “You’re aware of the power you have, and you naturally want to use that power very carefully.”

I expressed to Kopel my concern that the overly lax standards some states set for concealed-carry permitting means that the occasional cowboy gets passed through the system. Florida—which has among the most relaxed standards for gun permitting, and granted a license to George Zimmerman, who famously killed Trayvon Martin, apparently during an exercise in freelance vigilantism—is a case in point. (Zimmerman has pled not guilty, claiming he shot Martin in self-defense.) Applicants in Florida must submit to a background check, take a brief class, and pay $112 to obtain a license.

In Colorado, the standards are slightly more stringent. Permit seekers must submit to criminal checks, fingerprinting, and safety classes, but in addition, they must pass what James Alderden referred to as the “naked man” rule: if a local sheriff learns that a person has no criminal record, and has not been deemed mentally ill, but nevertheless was, say, found naked one night in a field howling at the moon, the sheriff is granted the discretion to deny that person a permit.

Kopel argued, correctly, that Florida, like Colorado, has seen a drop in crime since 1987, when it started granting concealed-carry permits—which suggests to him that permit holders are not, in the main, engaging in crime sprees or taking the law into their own hands. But for Kopel, the rigor, or laxity, of the permitting process from state to state is not his principal concern, because he believes that in most cases, the government has no right to interfere with an adult’s decision to buy or carry a weapon. Those who seek to curtail gun rights, he insists, are promoting the infantilization of Americans.

“If they get their way,” he said of the anti-gun forces, “people who are the victims of violent crimes wouldn’t be able to fight back; women who are abused couldn’t protect themselves; criminals will know that their intended victims, who have no access to the black market, will be unable to defend themselves.

“It’s more than that,” he went on. “Telling the population that they are incapable of owning a tool that can be dangerous means you are creating a population that loses its self-reliance and increasingly sees itself as wards of the state.”

James Alderden put it another way: “Your position on concealed-carry permits has a lot to do with your position on the reliability and sanity of your fellow man.”

The ideology of gun-ownership absolutism doesn’t appeal to me. Unlike hard-line gun-rights advocates, I do not believe that unregulated gun ownership is a defense against the rise of totalitarianism in America, because I do not think that America is ripe for totalitarianism. (Fear of a tyrannical, gun-seizing president is the reason many gun owners oppose firearms registration.)

But I am sympathetic to the idea of armed self-defense, because it does often work, because encouraging learned helplessness is morally corrupt, and because, however much I might wish it, the United States is not going to become Canada. Guns are with us, whether we like it or not. Maybe this is tragic, but it is also reality. So Americans who are qualified to possess firearms shouldn’t be denied the right to participate in their own defense. And it is empirically true that the great majority of America’s tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners have not created chaos in society.

A balanced approach to gun control in the United States would require the warring sides to agree on several contentious issues. Conservative gun-rights advocates should acknowledge that if more states had stringent universal background checks—or if a federal law put these in place—more guns would be kept out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally unstable. They should also acknowledge that requiring background checks on buyers at gun shows would not represent a threat to the Constitution. “The NRA position on this is a fiction,” says Dan Gross, the head of the Brady Campaign. “Universal background checks are not an infringement on our Second Amendment rights. This is black-helicopter stuff.” Gross believes that closing the gun-show loophole would be both extremely effective and a politically moderate and achievable goal. The gun lobby must also agree that concealed-carry permits should be granted only to people who pass rigorous criminal checks, as well as thorough training-and-safety courses.

Anti-gun advocates, meanwhile, should acknowledge that gun-control legislation is not the only answer to gun violence. Responsible gun ownership is also an answer. An enormous number of Americans believe this to be the case, and gun-control advocates do themselves no favors when they demonize gun owners, and advocates of armed self-defense, as backwoods barbarians. Liberals sometimes make the mistake of anthropomorphizing guns, ascribing to them moral characteristics they do not possess. Guns can be used to do evil, but guns can also be used to do good. Twelve years ago, in the aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s murder, Jonathan Rauch launched a national movement when he wrote an article for Salon arguing that gay people should arm themselves against violent bigots. Pink Pistol clubs sprang up across America, in which gays and lesbians learn to use firearms in self-defense. Other vulnerable groups have also taken to the idea of concealed carry: in Texas, African American women represent the largest percentage increase of concealed-carry permit seekers since 2000.

But even some moderate gun-control activists, such as Dan Gross, have trouble accepting that guns in private hands can work effectively to counteract violence. When I asked him the question I posed to Stephen Barton and Tom Mauser—would you, at a moment when a stranger is shooting at you, prefer to have a gun, or not?—he answered by saying, “This is the conversation the gun lobby wants you to be having.” He pointed out some of the obvious flaws in concealed-carry laws, such as too-lax training standards and too much discretionary power on the part of local law-enforcement officials. He did say that if concealed-carry laws required background checks and training similar to what police recruits undergo, he would be slower to raise objections. But then he added: “In a fundamental way, isn’t this a question about the kind of society we want to live in?” Do we want to live in one “in which the answer to violence is more violence, where the answer to guns is more guns?”

What Gross won’t acknowledge is that in a nation of nearly 300 million guns, his question is irrelevant.

New Yorker article

THE RIGHT DAY TO TALK ABOUT GUNS (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/the-right-day-to-talk-about-guns.html)

THE NEW YORKER ONLINE ONLY


DECEMBER 14, 2012
THE RIGHT DAY TO TALK ABOUT GUNS
POSTED BY ALEX KOPPELMAN



“I don’t think today is that day,” Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, said on Friday. He was responding to a question about gun control and the shooting in an elementary school in Connecticut that reportedly claimed the lives of twenty-six people —including twenty children between the ages of five and ten years old, as well as that of the shooter and, separately, one of the shooter’s parents. (The reports about what exactly happened are still somewhat shaky and unconfirmed. It’s likely that, as in most situations like this, some of what we now think we know will turn out to have been wrong. I will update this post as the day goes on.)

Carney’s response was a predictable one. This is the way that we deal with such incidents in the U.S.—we acknowledge them; we are briefly shocked by them; then we term it impolite to discuss their implications, and to argue about them. At some point, we will have to stop putting it off, stop pretending that doing so is the proper, respectful thing. It’s not either. It’s cowardice.

It is cowardice, too, the way that Carney and President Obama and their fellow-Democrats talk about gun control, when they finally decide the time is right. They avoid the issue as much as possible, then mouth platitudes, or promise to pass only the most popular of measures, like the assault-weapons ban. And then they do nothing to follow through.

But it is, from a purely political perspective, understandable. We are, all of us, angry now. Bewildered. And those of us who support gun control are perhaps maddest of all—right now. When it comes to Election Day, though, it’s the pro-gun people whose vote is most likely to be determined by this one issue. Those who want tighter restrictions, well, they typically have higher priorities to consider first. Put simply, supporting gun control is unlikely to help your typical politician much, but it’s very likely to hurt them. And Democrats know the numbers: they can’t lose any more white voters than they already have, especially not white voters in union families. And a lot of union households are gun-owning households, too.

No wonder, then, that Carney says today is not the day to talk about gun control. If both the Democrats and the Republicans had their way, we’d never talk about it again.



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/the-right-day-to-talk-about-guns.html#ixzz2F4FpTK8y

What happened today was another massive tragedy. I feel sick thinking about this. Thee poor people and their families. Surely this is yet another example why much tougher gun control needs to happen in America and needs to happen soon. How many more of these incidents do we need. I cant believe some were using this as an example to need more guns and to give teachers in classrooms guns :rolleyes: this needs to stop. Tough gun laws and buy backs worked really well in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre so I see no reason why it couldn't work in the US.

WTF? Someone actually suggested this!? :help:

New Yorker article in April, 23.

BATTLEGROUND AMERICA (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore)

copied from another thread;

That's not true. Hospitals - yeah. No metal detectors in school entrances, there's a guard, though, who will not let an adult enter without depositing ID, explaining why he's there/a parent...

But Israel have very strict gun control. You have to have a good reason to carry a gun, self defense, unless you're living in a dangerous zone (and lets not get into what is considered to be dangerous, also depends on the amount of terrorism in that area) doesn't apply. And civilian would never get a permission to use a rifle.

EVEN Israel has tougher gun control laws than America :facepalm:

Nothing is going to change, and too many guns are in circulation to greatly ease these shooting crimes. Violent crime is actually way down in USA, to around historic levels. Our culture is too addicted to violence, and our country is founded on violence. Violence has always been used as a means to get what we want in this country. It isn't going to change anytime soon, or at the very least, it's going to take a lot for things to change.

Americans, in particular conservatives, are just hawkish about guns. All people know is that violence is the means to solve problems. We're an unstable, sick society.

40% of guns in the USA are sold without ANY background checks. Guns are sold at Walmart. Guns are sold at gun shows. Guns are sold over the internet. Guns are sold from person to person. Guns are sold to criminals, legally and illegally. Our country has a DRAMATIC issue with psychological illness that is swept under the rug, and people who have severe mental and emotional problems are walking the streets, not diagnosed, and allowed free reign.

Nothing will change anytime soon. The damage is so far reaching that it's going to take a long time for things to be reversed.

For Christ's sake please stop with correlating violence with mental illness. Just because XYZ may be experiencing emotional/mental distress or even psychosis does NOT make them more violent. So just stop with this crap. Yes people with different kinds of mental illness do commit acts of violence but this is a small percentage in the grand scheme of things. Substance abuse and alcohol as factors are higher on the risk scale compared to mental illness (Schizophrenia, Bipolar, BPD, etc.) So why do you not wait for more information to come out before spouting more crap (just like you did with the Twitter/FB). And even if evidence comes out that the shooter had mental health difficulties, it by no means indicates that every 'disturbed' (as you are trying to hint) individual should be locked up in a mental institution for the public's safety. Mental disorders in general are not sufficient causes of violence. There is more to it than that. Forcing people with anger issues, depression, etc. into treatment is not the answer either. The issue at hand is not emotional distress/mental illness, it's the ease of accessibility to guns.

I think the main problem now is the trending of this kind of mass shooting; mad people will think this is kind of a fashion and copy it, like how serial killing was very epidemic in 1970s-1980s. I agree that more strict gun control law would prevent in some level; however, US gov't needs to focus more on the people's psychological health––American society has a major problem, if its citizen feels they can just grab a gun and shoot 20 children dead without any kind of moral constraint. Morality is important, and I think because US culture, as it is right now, encourages the value of superficiality over substance; that's why people are getting madder, stupider, and less kind.

"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"
Is ths a serious response to this tragedy?

What is is your next answer? "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".

First of all, alcoholism is an illness, and another illness that is IGNORED in our country, and stigmatized, as well as not taken serious whenever it is brought up in conversation. Now, I'm not implying that all people who commit these crimes are disturbed, or even trying to correlate violence with mental illness, as that would be a horrific thing to do. Because it's not as simply to state the issue is mental illness. It's emotional distress. And personal distress. And that's the fact. It is distress and/or illness. There is no point in glossing over that. And it's not that mental illness=crime. Or emotional distress=crime. It's crime=emotional/psychological/personal distress/illness. People who are in distress, who are in despair, who are angry, who have untreated psychological or behavioral problems, people who are desperate, commit these acts. They are not in a healthy state, for one reason or another.

Time to start getting fucking real instead of trying to be cute about the real world.

"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

That's not the whole portion. You have to add

"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of...."

Since the first phrase is meaningless now, the 2nd phrase should be meaningless too. Clearly, WAY outdated, and moreover is HARMFUL to the security of the individuals.

First of all, alcoholism is an illness, and another illness that is IGNORED in our country, and stigmatized, as well as not taken serious whenever it is brought up in conversation. Now, I'm not implying that all people who commit these crimes are disturbed, or even trying to correlate violence with mental illness, as that would be a horrific thing to do. Because it's not as simply to state the issue is mental illness. It's emotional distress. And personal distress. And that's the fact. It is distress and/or illness. There is no point in glossing over that. And it's not that mental illness=crime. Or emotional distress=crime. It's crime=emotional/psychological/personal distress/illness. People who are in distress, who are in despair, who are angry, who have untreated psychological or behavioral problems, people who are desperate, commit these acts. They are not in a healthy state, for one reason or another.

Time to start getting fucking real instead of trying to be cute about the real world.

But guns makes those killings SO MUCH EASIER.

What happened today was another massive tragedy. I feel sick thinking about this. Thee poor people and their families. Surely this is yet another example why much tougher gun control needs to happen in America and needs to happen soon. How many more of these incidents do we need. I cant believe some were using this as an example to need more guns and to give teachers in classrooms guns :rolleyes: this needs to stop. Tough gun laws and buy backs worked really well in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre so I see no reason why it couldn't work in the US.
It is not just someone, it is the position of the NRA that if every body is armed, these tragedy will not happen.

I imagine they also want those little kids to be armed as well.
After all, after their teacher, the only adult in the room, is killed, someone has to take him the bad guy down.

First of all, alcoholism is an illness, and another illness that is IGNORED in our country, and stigmatized, as well as not taken serious whenever it is brought up in conversation. Now, I'm not implying that all people who commit these crimes are disturbed, or even trying to correlate violence with mental illness, as that would be a horrific thing to do. Because it's not as simply to state the issue is mental illness. It's emotional distress. And personal distress. And that's the fact. It is distress and/or illness. There is no point in glossing over that. And it's not that mental illness=crime. Or emotional distress=crime. It's crime=emotional/psychological/personal distress/illness. People who are in distress, who are in despair, who are angry, who have untreated psychological or behavioral problems, people who are desperate, commit these acts. They are not in a healthy state, for one reason or another.

Time to start getting fucking real instead of trying to be cute about the real world.

Isn't this equating crime and violence with mental health difficulties or am I slow to understand here? :confused: People who are not in distress or despair, who are not angry and with no untreated/undiagnosed disorders commit these acts too. Yet you seem only bothered by those who are not in a healthy state, for one reason or another. You don't have to be be under distress, despair, etc. to shoot people. One more thing. Don't you realise that you are really only adding to the stigma attached to mental illness and those who suffer from it?

The USA is not the only country with mental health difficulties yet you almost always hear about these kind of shootings in the US compared to other countries. Why might that be? Are Britons less distressed than Americans or could it be that access to guns is not as easy as it is in the US? What do you suggest be done to "get fucking real" then?

What happened today was another massive tragedy. I feel sick thinking about this. Thee poor people and their families. Surely this is yet another example why much tougher gun control needs to happen in America and needs to happen soon. How many more of these incidents do we need. I cant believe some were using this as an example to need more guns and to give teachers in classrooms guns :rolleyes: this needs to stop. Tough gun laws and buy backs worked really well in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre so I see no reason why it couldn't work in the US.

I certainly would not object to having undercover armed guards at schools. As for teachers having guns it's a knee jerk reaction to go WTF? However let's say that a teacher who was trained with firearms had been there. Could at least some of those kids been saved? I don't know.

But one thing that we do know for sure because it happens in all of these kinds of situations. The police cannot protect anyone. All that the police can do is what they always do; secure the crime scene and put up the yellow tape around the bodies and begin an investigation. A hell of a lot of good that does. :mad:

That's not the whole portion. You have to add

"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of...."

Since the first phrase is meaningless now, the 2nd phrase should be meaningless too. Clearly, WAY outdated, and moreover is HARMFUL to the security of the individuals.

The SCOTUS disagrees with you.

Isn't this equating crime and violence with mental health difficulties or am I slow to understand here? :confused: People who are not in distress or despair, who are not angry and with no untreated/undiagnosed disorders commit these acts too. Yet you seem only bothered by those who are not in a healthy state, for one reason or another. You don't have to be be under distress, despair, etc. to shoot people. One more thing. Don't you realise that you are really only adding to the stigma attached to mental illness and those who suffer from it?

The USA is not the only country with mental health difficulties yet you almost always hear about these kind of shootings in the US compared to other countries. Why might that be? Are Britons less distressed than Americans or could it be that access to guns is not as easy as it is in the US? What do you suggest be done to "get fucking real" then?Actually, yes, the USA has by FAR the highest percentage of mental, emotional and behavioral health issues, and has one of, if not the worst, healthcare services across the board, let alone on mental health, where costs have been getting CUT. So yes, the USA is not a healthy country, compared to other countries. USA is also largely an uneducated country, with one of the worst graduation rates, dropout rates, and so many who go to school hate it and have no ambition and drive..........there is no passion for school. There is no importance placed on school. So the crime issues in the USA aren't a coincidence knowing these two things.

No, I am not adding to the stigma attached to mental illness, that would be me blaming mental illness for crime, and I'm not. I'm blaming the countries' lack of care towards overall health for our countries' citizens for the reason people fall through the cracks and commit incidents such as this. All too often it's "I never could have seen this happening from this person"...............yet virtually every mass murder has a backstory of domestic violence, of mental/emotional illness, of dropping out of school and being withdrawn. There is always a backstory yet it's ignored. We need to stop ignoring these backstories, ignoring the signs, and start addressing them.

Some people are just plain evil, and commit evil acts. Some people are raised in a culture of violence and that's all they know, and they become violent themselves. However, no-one is BORN violent. No-one is BORN evil. This can be prevented, and nothing is being done to prevent it.

But guns makes those killings SO MUCH EASIER.
I agree, which is why gun laws need to be much stricter. But with so many guns in circulation and with undercover Mexico-US gun trades, that is going to be hard to stop. We can stop selling guns in Walmart, we can make registration much harder to obtain, make people get tests so they know how to use a gun, make a person give up their gun if they commit a felony, things like this can help matters immensely. But the problem is the damage that has been done is already so deep that it's going to be hard to wipe away everything.

The worst part is that some lunatic american will use those kind of event to advertise and promote the case to not have gun controls. Some will say that it's their rights to have guns and that if more people had guns, those kind of events wouldn't happen. That if people in that school were carrying guns, they could have defended themselves etc.... BUT this is totally wrong and an absolute stupid thinking.

First, this was in an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, what do you want? To give guns to a 5 years old child, even having guns floating around kids is highly dangerous! What if a kid find his teacher's gun and start to play with it thinking it's a toy? I'm so sick of that. It's purely insanity and it causes acts like this. Wanting to do your own justice, that's the same mentality that this guy had when lashing out on dozens of people. He wanted revenge! Just don't do anything and give them more guns to avenge themselves! Gun control is a necessity in any civilized country! Seriously, I think I'm so sicken by those people going on about the rights to carry a gun or an arm that I'd seriously consider abolishing the right to carry a firegun in any circumstances except for certain functions like Policemen and others highly formed person. You wanna go to hunt? Learn it the old fashion way and go out like Katniss with your bow and arrow! It will do the job PERFECTLY! There's not a single normal citizen that could convince me that they need any kind of firearms!

Oh and to those who are so strict on the american constitution it's only written that you shouldn't restrained people to get arms....they don't tell you what kind of arms. So yes let them have bow and arrow but firearms could be easily forbidden and the constitution would still be all respected. Anyway, that phrase was made hundreds of years ago when you had to defend YOUR COUNTRY to any kind of invasion. These days, the army is protecting your country, not your citizens. I wonder if all those pro guns in the USA are that strict on EVERY amendments of the constitution?

I certainly would not object to having undercover armed guards at schools. As for teachers having guns it's a knee jerk reaction to go WTF? However let's say that a teacher who was trained with firearms had been there. Could at least some of those kids been saved? I don't know.

But one thing that we do know for sure because it happens in all of these kinds of situations. The police cannot protect anyone. All that the police can do is what they always do; secure the crime scene and put up the yellow tape around the bodies and begin an investigation. A hell of a lot of good that does. :mad:

Yes, I really get this idea of the teachers being armed. But no way that stops the problem completely, and in fact it could create new tragedies. What's gonna happen if a teacher goes insane? People wouldn't even blink twice if they have a damn gun in their bag, because teachers are allowed to. Not to mention the possibly problems if there ends up being two people having a gun fight in the middle of a classroom. There just has to be a better way. Just giving the teachers guns is not going to solve the problem.

The worst part is that some lunatic american will use those kind of event to advertise and promote the case to not have gun controls. Some will say that it's their rights to have guns and that if more people had guns, those kind of events wouldn't happen. That if people in that school were carrying guns, they could have defended themselves etc.... BUT this is totally wrong and an absolute stupid thinking.!
Saddly, that is true

The SCOTUS disagrees with you.

From Jill Lepore's NYorker article

"The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon.

It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously.

In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights."



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2F4TjmGpb

All I'll say is the longer people keep sticking their heads in the sand, the more these things will happen. Look at the number of mass shootings before and after the assault weapons ban was repealed and tell me there's not a cause and effect.

There is no cause & effect. For umpteenth time, all Assault Weapon Ban ever did was to control gun aesthetics. It was completely irrelevant in stopping mass shootings, because guns with exact same firepower were still available when the "ban" was in effect.

Yes, I really get this idea of the teachers being armed. But no way that stops the problem completely, and in fact it could create new tragedies. What's gonna happen if a teacher goes insane? People wouldn't even blink twice if they have a damn gun in their bag, because teachers are allowed to. Not to mention the possibly problems if there ends up being two people having a gun fight in the middle of a classroom. There just has to be a better way. Just giving the teachers guns is not going to solve the problem.

I never claimed that arming teachers is going to solve the problem. But one thing that we know is that unarmed people are sitting ducks.

I never claimed that arming teachers is going to solve the problem. But one thing that we know is that unarmed people are sitting ducks.

AND Armed people are all potential killers

The Power of NRA

Gun Showdown at Work (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324595904578123640080351414.html)

GOP's Business Backers Fight NRA Push to Let Employees Leave Firearms in Cars

Comments (164)

By JOE PALAZZOLO

Gun legislation in some Southern states is forcing Republican lawmakers to choose between two core values of their party: the right of business owners to control what happens on their property and people's Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Their dilemma is the result of bills pushed by the National Rifle Association that would let employees bring firearms—ranging from handguns, rifles and shotguns—to work and store them in their vehicles, even against an employer's wishes.

About 20 states have passed so-called parking-lot bills since 2004, including an expansion this year of a gun-rights law in Maine. But a split has started to materialize in GOP-controlled legislatures in some of the country's most gun-friendly states. Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee have refused to support such laws, proving receptive to a push by business groups in those states that have argued that the rules trample on their property rights.

Businesses in other states have sought to oppose parking-lot bills by emphasizing the liability dangers that such legislation could create, but those efforts have been less successful.

"We are opposed to guns people saying what we can do on our property," said Wayne K. Scharber, interim president of the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce & Industry. Executives at several large companies such as FedEx Corp. FDX +0.42% and Volkswagen VOW3.XE +0.29% also testified against the legislation in that state earlier this year, saying it would hamper efforts to ensure workplace safety.

The number of victims of workplace homicides aged 16 or older decreased by 57% from 1993 to 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Of 458 homicides in 2011, 358 were by shooting.

The NRA argues, however, that many employees, particularly those who work far from home, are vulnerable to violent crime on their way to and from work. If their employers ban guns, they spend the majority of their time unarmed.

Chris Patterson, owner of Hokes Bluff Auto Parts in Gadsden, Ala., said he supported the legislation out of concern for the safety of employees who travel long distances to work. "That's their privilege, being that their vehicle is their personal property," said Mr. Patterson.

But amid Republican divisions on the issue,the NRA, one of the nation's most powerful and well-funded lobbying groups, is having to rely on pro-gun Democrats to carry some of the bills. Democrats in Alabama have already refiled bills for the legislative session that begins in February, and lawmakers are expected to do the same in Tennessee. Democrats carrying the bills say they believe gun rights should trump employers' property rights.

"You're not violating a person's property rights just by keeping a gun locked in your vehicle," said Rep. Craig Ford, a Democrat who in October submitted a parking-lot bill in Alabama.

In addition to forming an alliance with Democrats, the NRA is targeting one-time allies who refuse to back such laws.

When Republican Debra Maggart, a staunch supporter of the gun group over her seven-year career in the Tennessee House of Representatives, decided with other members of her party to hold up a parking-lot bill introduced by Democratic Rep. Eddie Bass this year, she felt the consequences. The NRA spent tens of thousands of dollars on attack ads against Ms. Maggart, the only member of Republican leadership to face a primary challenge. One NRA flier declared: "Debra Maggart wants to shred your Second Amendment rights."

Ms. Maggart said she opposed the bill because it encompassed properties such as day-care centers and colleges. "They singled me out to bully our caucus into voting for a poorly written piece of legislation."

Ms. Maggart, a lifelong NRA member who owns a Remington shotgun, ultimately lost to the NRA-backed candidate by 971 votes in the primaries in August.

The NRA didn't respond to repeated calls seeking comment.

In Georgia, another Republican—state Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers—faced consequences after his caucus rebuffed NRA efforts to provide more protections for gun owners by prohibiting employers from enforcing gun bans in parking lots.

The NRA gave Mr. Rogers only a "B" rating while giving his challenger in the primary race, Brandon Beach, the top rating for a candidate with no legislative record on gun issues. "My voting record on NRA issues is perfect for 10 years," said Mr. Rogers, who is a member of the NRA. He attributed his lowered rating to "tactics used by certain paid lobbyists" that have tarnished an "otherwise outstanding organization."

In Alabama, debate over the gun legislation has consumed more legislative energy with each year, lawmakers and lobbyists said. "The issue has split the Republican Party down here," said Michael Sullivan, an Alabama lobbyist who represents the NRA. Mr. Sullivan has pushed parking-lot legislation in the Alabama house and senate, but never both in the same year, he said. He has tried to persuade Republican lawmakers with the argument that state and federal government impose many workplace regulations on business owners, including anti-discrimination laws and safety regulations, and that the parking-lot legislation is no different.

"To say they can circumvent the Second Amendment right of gun owners is a very hollow argument," he said.

Mike Hubbard, the speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, said he has asked the business community and NRA leadership in Washington to compromise on a bill.

Prospects for an agreement seem dim, however. "Republicans would rather side with big business," said Rep. Craig Ford of Alabama, adding that Ms. Maggart's defeat in Tennessee "set a precedent for what the NRA is going to do elsewhere."

Write to Joe Palazzolo at joe.palazzolo@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared December 1, 2012, on page A3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Gun Showdown at Work.

There is no cause & effect. For umpteenth time, all Assault Weapon Ban ever did was to control gun aesthetics. It was completely irrelevant in stopping mass shootings, because guns with exact same firepower were still available when the "ban" was in effect.
A suggestion to you and ptkten.
A set of findings (by reliable and reputable institution) before and after Assault Weapon Ban should setlle your argument.

Just saying "there is no cause & effect" is not enough.
This remind me of the conservative claiming they did not trust the polls.. w/o giving proof why the polls were wrong.

Yes, I really get this idea of the teachers being armed. But no way that stops the problem completely, and in fact it could create new tragedies. What's gonna happen if a teacher goes insane?

Then the other teachers will have guns to take her out.

I never claimed that arming teachers is going to solve the problem. But one thing that we know is that unarmed people are sitting ducks.

You may be right that it would help. But it seems to me that it should be a last case scenario; instead we need to find a way to stop these situations from happening as much as they do, way before they get to the point the teachers need to be shooting people. But unfortunately politics dictate that that conversation is out of bounds on a national level, even after this I doubt anything will change.

Someone needs to shoot down the NRA.

"U.S. NEWS Updated July 22, 2012, 1:56 p.m. ET
Few Politicians Call for Gun-Control Changes (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444025204577543033015396416.html)

By JESS BRAVIN And JAMILA TRINDLE

The congressman from Aurora, Colo., called on Congress to reinstate a federal ban on assault weapons Sunday as police continued their investigation into the mass shooting at cinema in the Denver suburb that left 12 people dead.

"We've got to do something," said Rep. Ed. Perlmutter, a Democrat, speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation."

But only a smattering of politicians, mainly Democrats, joined him in demanding a legislative response to the massacre, in which suspect James Holmes allegedly unleashed an arsenal of legally bought weapons on an auditorium packed with fans watching the premiere of the latest Batman movie, "The Dark Knight Rises."

"It's time for this country to do something and that's the job of the president of the United States," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on "Face the Nation."

While expressing remorse for the victims and outrage at the violence, neither President Barack Obama nor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, has asserted that easy access to firearms and ammunition had contributed to the massacre.

To the contrary, many Democrats avoided any suggestion that gun laws should be tightened, while some Republicans speculated that more lives could have been saved had some audience members drawn weapons themselves and returned fire in the theater.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said that restrictions on guns impede people's freedoms and aren't effective.

"I don't think society can keep sick, demented individuals from obtaining any type of weapon to kill people," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "Any person who wants to harm another individual is going to find a method of doing that," he said.

Mr. Holmes's Aurora apartment had been booby-trapped with explosives, authorities said.

"If it wasn't one weapon, it would have been another. I mean, he was diabolical," Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said on CNN's "State of the Union." "If there were no assault weapons available, and no this or no that, this guy is going to find something, right? He's going to know how to create a bomb."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), speaking on "Fox News Sunday," said there was no legitimate use for assault weapons on American streets. "These are weapons that you're only going to use to kill people in close combat—that's the purpose of that weapon," she said.

Sen. Feinstein had championed the federal assault-weapons ban after a gunman used such a weapon to kill eight people at a San Francisco law office in 1993. The ban expired in 2004."

—Daniel Lippman contributed to this article.
Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Jamila Trindle at jamila.trindle@dowjones.com

I never claimed that arming teachers is going to solve the problem. But one thing that we know is that unarmed people are sitting ducks.

So the solution is providing with guns as many people as possible?

I honestly think the problem is the violence porn. The First Person Shooters, the Sopranos, the 'action adventure movies .... plus WAY too much free time. If you live long enough in fantasy land, the temptation to make that fantasy real when you under too much real world stress can get to you.

What a crock of shit.
Even if you'd be right, banning/heavily limiting guns would prevent tragedies the easiest way as possible.

Someone needs to shoot down the NRA.

YAS

AND Armed people are all potential killers

Well, more homicides are done by bare hands and knives than guns. So your average housewife is a potential killer.

A suggestion to you and ptkten.
A set of findings (by reliable and reputable institution) before and after Assault Weapon Ban should setlle your argument.

Just saying "there is no cause & effect" is not enough.
This remind me of the conservative claiming they did not trust the polls.. w/o giving proof why the polls were wrong.

Lets repeat one more time: AWB did not make guns any less deadly. AWB-compliant guns had exact same firepower as pre-AWB guns.

So tell me, what possible effect AWB could have?

Well, more homicides are done by bare hands and knives than guns. So your average housewife is a potential killer.

You can't commit mass murders like this one with your bare hands or knives. I can't comprehend why people would be pro-gun. Is that an American thing?

What a crock of shit.
Even if you'd be right, banning/heavily limiting guns would prevent tragedies the easiest way as possible.

It's not possible to "ban/heavily limit guns" without seriously curtailing civil rights (ie. mass confiscations, ban on hunting, shooting sports etc). That is, obviously, completely unrealistic prospect. And even the countries where guns ARE heavily restricted, constantly see mass murders. There have been dozens of mass murders in China over last 5 years, for example.

Well as long as the gun debate drowns out the health debate, mass murders will continue to happen. People are so brainwashed. It's really a tragedy, and an embarrassment.

You can't commit mass murders like this one with your bare hands or knives.


Really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_%282010%E2%80%932011%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebei_tractor_rampage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_attack_on_the_Dutch_Royal_Family

I can't comprehend why people would be pro-gun. Is that an American thing?

No. I'm not American, for starters.

Why people are pro-alcohol? Alcohol kills much more people every year than guns, many of them totally innocent. Yet nearly anyone can buy that stuff, even though it has almost no benevolent use.

I'll tell you why. Because most people are hypocritics. They only want to ban things when it doesn't bother THEM. Most people use alcohol in one way or another, so they don't want to see it banned. Fewer people use guns, so there are more people calling for their ban.

As long as you are allowed to go on your drinking, I sure as hell am allowed to go on with my shooting.

It's not possible to "ban/heavily limit guns" without seriously curtailing civil rights (ie. mass confiscations, ban on hunting, shooting sports etc). That is, obviously, completely unrealistic prospect. And even the countries where guns ARE heavily restricted, constantly see mass murders. There have been dozens of mass murders in China over last 5 years, for example.

They do it every day, what would change?


yeah yeah "other counties have murders anyway" mantra...

Fuck gun hawks. Gun hawks are selfish pieces of shit who care more about metal more than human lives and safety. Incredibly selfish, horrific individuals.

It's not possible to "ban/heavily limit guns" without seriously curtailing civil rights (ie. mass confiscations, ban on hunting, shooting sports etc). That is, obviously, completely unrealistic prospect. And even the countries where guns ARE heavily restricted, constantly see mass murders. There have been dozens of mass murders in China over last 5 years, for example.

seriously curtailing civil rights?

the right to own a gun shouldn't be a civil right, so i don't see that it curtails anything. one could argue that having a law against murder curtails "civil rights", but you aren't complaining about that :shrug:

Really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_%282010%E2%80%932011%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebei_tractor_rampage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_attack_on_the_Dutch_Royal_Family



No. I'm not American, for starters.

Why people are pro-alcohol? Alcohol kills much more people every year than guns, many of them totally innocent. Yet nearly anyone can buy that stuff, even though it has almost no benevolent use.

I'll tell you why. Because most people are hypocritics. They only want to ban things when it doesn't bother THEM. Most people use alcohol in one way or another, so they don't want to see it banned. Fewer people use guns, so there are more people calling for their ban.

As long as you are allowed to go on your drinking, I sure as hell am allowed to go on with my shooting.

Your selfishness is astounding. So your argument is that guns shouldn't be banned because you want to keep shooting? OK sicko.

Well, more homicides are done by bare hands and knives than guns. So your average housewife is a potential killer.

Mass murders like this are not made by knives or anything other than guns. It is not IMPOSSIBLE to happen, but it is less likely in this day and age. Do you even know how many of those crazy shooting has happened this year only in the USA? At the very least, 15! 15 crazy shooters entering a public place and killing at least 87 people and wounding hundreds of people! All done with firearms! It takes 1 minute to enter a place and to shoot a few people, having people carrying guns with them wouldn't help saving those people that would be dead already. Having more people carrying guns would just create more opportunities for killing to happen not even mentioning accidents. Having gun control doesn't stop you from going hunting. In Canada we have gun control and many people hunts with firearms with the permits. Also, EVEN IF you'd ban any kind of firearms even to hunt, you are still able to hunt with bows and arrow which is much closer to a sport than killing the little deer that you've been feeding for 2 weeks with a gun that could explode its head off.

Lets repeat one more time: AWB did not make guns any less deadly. AWB-compliant guns had exact same firepower as pre-AWB guns.

So tell me, what possible effect AWB could have?
Your assertion is highly technical, it sound like a selling pitch to someone looking for alternative to assault weapon. You are saying the non- assault weapons, handguns are as effective as assault weapon.
That is not what I and ptken are interesting in.

What we care about the number of mass killing incidences and the number of deaths per incidence. That is it.
There is no doubt that assault weapons are more effective at killing large number of people in a shorter time and than regular handguns.
That is why the military prefer them to handguns
The majority of mass killing have occurend using assault weapons.

AND Armed people are all potential killers

I would have much preferred that someone was armed and could have possibly taken this killer out before he murdered as many people as he did. How about you?

So the solution is providing with guns as many people as possible?

Is your solution the status quo? In case you haven't noticed very few people attack people that they know are armed. Make of that what you will.

Deadliest Mass shootings (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444330904577538930952618066.html?m od=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_3)

HippityHop is the kind of person harmful to America. Harmful to the humankind actually.

HippityHop is the kind of person harmful to America. Harmful to the humankind actually.

Brilliantly argued.

I agree, which is why gun laws need to be much stricter.

Chicago has the strictest gun control laws, yet it is among the most violent cities.

Brilliantly argued.

I would not argue that earth is 6000 yo. Same reasoning applies.

Is your solution the status quo? In case you haven't noticed very few people attack people that they know are armed. Make of that what you will.

You expect children to carry guns? How is it safer when everybody is armed? Again I can't comprehend so please elaborate your logic.

Sadly, as long as people violently riot, guns are needed. LA riots proved this.

PmsKGhLdZuQ
From the NRA play book.

How do you think everybody having guns would have stopped the LA riot?
You forget the rioters would have guns too!

The store owners without guns had their shops burned down by rioters. The store owners with guns have their shops still standing today.

Wtf is this reasoning ?! So weak.


Sent from my iPhone using Verticalsports.com Free App (http://www.verticalsports.com/mobile)

I would not argue that earth is 6000 yo. Same reasoning applies.

If you're a big enough fool to analogize those two things, no wonder your discourse is at such a low level. Until you make a non emotional argument, enjoy!

The store owners without guns had their shops burned down by rioters. The store owners with guns have their shops still standing today.

What if the rioters had guns 'to protect themselves'?

Wtf is this reasoning ?! So weak.


Sent from my iPhone using Verticalsports.com Free App (http://www.verticalsports.com/mobile)

Let's pretend that you're a criminal. Would you prefer to attack unarmed victims or people who you know are armed? Whatever honest answer you give is fine with me.

Is your solution the status quo? In case you haven't noticed very few people attack people that they know are armed. Make of that what you will.
So those 5-10 yearls old can now pack gun in their backpack, in addition to book.

Have you thought how reassuring it would be to a kid when her mother packs her school books in the morning and reassures the child, "do not forget to ue your gun if you see the bad guy".
You reasoning on this issue is increasing becoming extreme and nonsensical

What if the rioters had guns 'to protect themselves'?

Actually I lived in Los Angeles in 1992 some of the rioters did have guns. But when they found out that people were shooting back they got the hell out of there. They didn't think that looting businesses where they might get killed was worth it.

What Obama must do about guns (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/what-obama-must-do-about-guns.html)

"December 14, 2012
WHAT OBAMA MUST DO ABOUT GUNS
Posted by David Remnick


Barack Obama has been in our field of vision for a long time now, and, more than any major politician of recent memory, he hides in plain sight. He is who he is. He may strike the unsympathetic as curiously remote or arrogant or removed; he certainly strikes his admirers as a man of real intelligence and dignity. But he is who he is. He is no phony. And so there is absolutely no reason to believe that his deep, raw emotion today following the horrific slaughter in Connecticut—his tears, the prolonged catch in his voice—was anything but genuine. But this was a slaughter—a slaughter like so many before it—and emotion is hardly all that is needed. What is needed is gun control—strict, comprehensive gun control that places the values of public safety and security before the values of deer hunting and a perverse ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment. Obama told the nation that he reacted to the shootings in Newtown “as a parent,” and that is understandable, but what we need most is for him to act as a President, liberated at last from the constraints of elections and their dirty compromises—a President who dares to change the national debate and the legislative agenda on guns.

So far, Obama, who has shown far greater nerve on a range of issues from health care to gay rights, has held himself hostage to the political adage that there is no ground to be gained in proposing anything stronger than piecemeal gun legislation. He has held himself hostage to the electoral calculus that swing-state voters—in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Colorado, for starters—would reject him if he went deeper on the gun issue. But he won those states. Now it is time for him to risk their affections—to risk disapproval in general—in the name of saving lives.

The Obama-Romney debates were disgraceful in a number of ways: their obsession with the phony Benghazi issue (which has now sunk Susan Rice as a potential Secretary of State); their failure to debate the world beyond Israel; the lack of a single question about climate change. One of the most dispiriting exchanges came when Candy Crowley of CNN had a woman named Nina Gonzalez ask about gun control:

QUESTION: President Obama, during the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your Administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?
OBAMA: We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves.

But there have been too many instances during the course of my Presidency, where I’ve had to comfort families who have lost somebody. Most recently out in Aurora….

So my belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement.

But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theatres don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault-weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control….

It was fine that Obama favored renewing the federal-assault weapons ban that ran out in 2004, but he knew well that the ban had not been nearly enough. He also knew that many Democratic legislators had lost their seats when they dared to challenge the orthodoxy promulgated by the National Rifle Association. It is hard to believe that Obama, a decidedly liberal teacher of constitutional law at the University of Chicago and a former protégé of Laurence Tribe at Harvard Law School, really and truly believes that the Second Amendment is to be read the way that the N.R.A. and the Republican Party say it is.

When he was a young politician on the South Side of Chicago, Obama took a less frustrating view of things. He was living in a city where the media was filled every day with reports of gun mayhem, and his view was firm. In 1996, when he ran for state senator in the Hyde Park area, his campaign filled out a questionnaire on his behalf that had been issued by the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organizations, in which he was asked, among other things, “Do you support state legislation to: ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?” Obama’s campaign answered “Yes.”

But Obama’s circle in the 2008 campaign knew the perils of such a clear-cut answer, and Robert Gibbs, the candidate’s close adviser and eventual press secretary, cast doubt on whether Obama’s team in 1996 had reflected his position accurately. “Why [his aide] filled out the questionnaire the way she did I have no idea, because it didn’t reflect his views,” Gibbs said at the time. The 1996 questionnaire also reflected similarly liberal views on abortion and the death penalty—views that Obama would later moderate, claiming that he had never approved the questionnaire.

It remains a question whether Obama’s 1996 staffer truly failed to reflect the nuances of Obama’s views. That is for the historians. And, at the moment, it barely matters. What matters is that Obama, having just won reëlection, is liberated to do the right thing. After the Tucson shootings, he talked about having—cliché of clichés—a “national conversation” about gun violence “not only about the motivations behind these killings but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental-health system.” This conversation never happened; further gun violence, of course, did.

A report in the National Journal points out that gun sales have gone up during Obama’s first term; the report attributes the sales spike to fears by gun owners that the President was on the brink of making moves to restrict gun purchases. If only it were true. Gun ownership is on the decline, over-all, but America still has a horrific gun problem. As Ezra Klein points out in the Washington Post, eleven of the worst twenty mass shootings in the past half century have taken place in the U.S.

President Obama is a decent man, and he clearly felt the tragedy in Connecticut deeply. That was evident from his brief statement at the White House today. We have grown accustomed to what will happen next. The President will likely visit a funeral or a memorial service and, at greater length, comfort the families of the victims, the community, and the nation. He will be eloquent. He will give voice to the common grief, the common confusion, the common outrage. But then what? A “conversation”? Let there be a conversation. But also let there be decisive action from a President who is determined not only to feel our pain but, calling on the powers of his office, to feel the urge to prevent more suffering. His reading of the Constitution should no longer be constrained by a sense of what the conventional wisdom is in this precinct or that. Let him begin his campaign for a more secure and less violent America in the state of Connecticut."



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/what-obama-must-do-about-guns.html#ixzz2F516sWUy

Let's pretend that you're a criminal. Would you prefer to attack unarmed victims or people who you know are armed? Whatever honest answer you give is fine with me.

I would rather attack the unarmed one. Quite loved how this is your strongest argument and you can't even see how stupid it is.


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December 14, 2012
NEWTOWN AND THE MADNESS OF GUNS
Posted by Adam Gopnik



After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.

Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.

All of that is a truth, plain and simple, and recognized throughout the world. At some point, this truth may become so bloody obvious that we will know it, too. Meanwhile, congratulate yourself on living in the child-gun-massacre capital of the known universe.



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html#ixzz2F51YHsyc

So those 5-10 yearls old can now pack gun in their backpack, in addition to book.

Have you thought how reassuring it would be to a kid when her mother packs her school books in the morning and reassures the child, "do not forget to ue your gun if you see the bad guy".
You reasoning on this issue is increasing becoming extreme and nonsensical

How in the hell do you get from what I posted that I want 5-10 year olds packing heat? Some of you all are so caught up in emotional responses (understandable of course) that you just make up stuff.

I have suggested that trained teachers might have guns and certainly there should be armed security at many places. It's a different world now.

And those of you who want the status quo (except for the fantasy that somehow criminals will turn in their guns if a law is passed) how do you propose to save at least some of these innocent lives? Call the police? Yeah that works all the time. :rolleyes:

Let's pretend that you're a criminal. Would you prefer to attack unarmed victims or people who you know are armed? Whatever honest answer you give is fine with me.
Criminals rob banks all the time. They know bank have security guards.

What is missing you argument and people like who argues the same thing, is the element of surpise in any mass shooting.
I ask again, would you advocate the children to alos have guns in their backpacks?
And even if they did, do you think at their age, they would have the presense of mind to get the gun out of their bags and shoot?
Keep in mind, even adults would be capable to keep their cool under the circumstances

They did have guns. That's why they chose to target UNarmed store owners, rather than get into a gunfight with armed store owners.

Not in the video you posted. I saw two shop owners scaring away looters. Is that all? Everybody must be armed to prevent riots? That's your argument. So we'd have rioters with guns vs store owners with guns. Yeah that makes sense.

I would rather attack the unarmed one. Quite loved how this is your strongest argument and you can't even see how stupid it is.


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So you agree with my "stupid" position? :lol:

Tough gun laws and buy backs worked really well in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre so I see no reason why it couldn't work in the US.

Changing our Constitution is extremely difficult. Our forefathers intentionally made it that way. Therefore, the Second Amendment will be extremely difficult to ever be repealed.

So you agree with my "stupid" position? :lol:

You are not very subtle, aren't you?
The fact I would attack the unarmed ones is irrelevant on this issue because if there was guns control, I would not have any guns anyway.


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Actually I lived in Los Angeles in 1992 some of the rioters did have guns. But when they found out that people were shooting back they got the hell out of there. They didn't think that looting businesses where they might get killed was worth it.

And this was enough to convince you that a society where everybody is armed is safer..?

To be honest, I suspect him of trolling us because the "teachers should have guns" argument can't come from a sane mind.


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I don't think the problem would be solved until the outdated second amendment is repealed

Criminals rob banks all the time. They know bank have security guards.

What is missing you argument and people like who argues the same thing, is the element of surpise in any mass shooting.
I ask again, would you advocate the children to alos have guns in their backpacks?
And even if they did, do you think at their age, they would have the presense of mind to get the gun out of their bags and shoot?
Keep in mind, even adults would be capable to keep their cool under the circumstances

I have never advocated children carrying guns in their back packs and you know it.

How many bank robberies do you know that have had mass shootings? The only one that I can remember was in North Hollywood in the 90s (IIRC) and those guys went in with body armor. The police (who were outgunned)m finally managed to wound them and fortunately let one of them die on the street.

I take it that your position is that you'd much prefer these kinds of massacres to having non criminals armed. Obviously not everybody will or should be armed. But don't be surprised when these kinds of things happen.

I remember after the Virginia Tech shootings somebody on this board said that they would rather beg for their life than have non murderers armed. Good luck with that.

You are not very subtle, aren't you?
The fact I would attack the unarmed ones is irrelevant on this issue because if there was guns control, I would not have any guns anyway.


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Wrong! If you were a law abiding citizen as most of us are you would not have any guns.

How in the hell do you get from what I posted that I want 5-10 year olds packing heat? Some of you all are so caught up in emotional responses (understandable of course) that you just make up stuff.

I have suggested that trained teachers might have guns and certainly there should be armed security at many places. It's a different world now.

And those of you who want the status quo (except for the fantasy that somehow criminals will turn in their guns if a law is passed) how do you propose to save at least some of these innocent lives? Call the police? Yeah that works all the time. :rolleyes:
Well, advocating everyone should be armed lead to the logical conclusion.
Even if I accept your premise that the teacher should be armed, don't you the gun man will have shot him/her first?
Wasn't there a campust police at Virginia Tech?
I presume it is professionally trained police force.

But you overlook here is the element of sruprise in case like these.
Had the teacherr been armed, s/he would not have had the time to get to her/his gun before being shot.

And this was enough to convince you that a society where everybody is armed is safer..?

Again, you pulled that out of your ass. But look, if you'd rather be shot down like a dog, that's fine with me. If you would prefer to have the police come and rescue you in this kind of situation that's fine with me too.

Well, advocating everyone should be armed lead to the logical conclusion.
Even if I accept your premise that the teacher should be armed, don't you the gun man will have shot him/her first?
Wasn't there a campust police at Virginia Tech?
I presume it is professionally trained police force.

But you overlook here is the element of sruprise in case like these.
Had the teacherr been armed, s/he would not have had the time to get to her/his gun before being shot.

Then your position is clear. Call the police. I ain't mad at you.

Again, you pulled that out of your ass. But look, if you'd rather be shot down like a dog, that's fine with me. If you would prefer to have the police come and rescue you in this kind of situation that's fine with me too.

Getting upset are we? As I said I really can't comprehend your logic so correct me if I'm wrong. What exactly is your argument then?

His argument is : everybody armed, shoot first.


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Again, you pulled that out of your ass. But look, if you'd rather be shot down like a dog, that's fine with me. If you would prefer to have the police come and rescue you in this kind of situation that's fine with me too.

I indirectly posed a question earlier you didn't answer. Arming teachers quite obviously creates new issues. What do you propose we do about these new issues (such as teachers doing the shootings, and the obvious danger of children being caught in the crossfire of two or more people having a gunfight in the middle of a densely crowded area)? Don't you agree that this should be the absolute last resort to stop these types of situations? Arming people is simply logically the least effective and most likely to go wrong solution being proposed here. If you agree then, what do you suggest be done before it comes to a gunfight in the middle of a classroom?

And comparing people in the streets during a riot to teachers during school is a false equivalency for obvious reasons. There are many more dangers involved if people whip out guns to protect themselves when possibly 20-30 children are packed into the same small room.

Then your position is clear. Call the police. I ain't mad at you.
No, I did not say that.
What I said is that the position you are advocating will not reduce the violence.
How did you go from there to "call the police"

I don't think the problem would be solved until the outdated second amendment is repealed

If immigrants don't like the American Constitution, then they should not come here. Yet, immigrants' #1 preferred destination is America by far.

His argument is : everybody armed, shoot first.


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But when he is shown the fallacy of his agrument, he runs away from it.

If immigrants don't like the American Constitution, then they should not come here. Yet, immigrants' #1 preferred destination is America by far.

LMFAO WHERE DID IMMIGRANTS COME FROM. I am dead how did you even jump to "STAY AWAY FROM AMERICA IMMIGRANTS!" from someone disagreeing with the 2nd Amendment. They literally have nothing to do with one another.

It worries me that people think carrying weapons is some kind of entitlement, or symbolic of their civil liberty.

No, I did not say that.
What I said is that the position you are advocating will not reduce the violence.
How did you go from there to "call the police"

Granted it may not reduce the violence. But we know what we get with the current situation.Now what is your solution to these kinds of situations?
I'll wait for your own words.

USA - 90 school shootings and 257 deaths

Europe - 16 school shootings and 91 deaths

Canada - 9 school shootings and 26 deaths

South America, Asia, and Australia - 8 school shootings and 29 deaths

If immigrants don't like the American Constitution, then they should not come here. Yet, immigrants' #1 preferred destination is America by far.
What does this have to do with immigrants?
Leaders who advocate gun control are several generations American born?

But when he is shown the fallacy of his agrument, he runs away from it.

I ignore bullshit.

LMFAO WHERE DID IMMIGRANTS COME FROM. I am dead how did you even jump to "STAY AWAY FROM AMERICA IMMIGRANTS!" from someone disagreeing with the 2nd Amendment. They literally have nothing to do with one another.

Because non-Americans are always saying how bad America's Constitution is, yet they would do anything to immigrate here.

I ignore bullshit.

So you ignore you.


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Because non-Americans are always saying how bad America's Constitution is, yet they would do anything to immigrate here.

So basically they have nothing to do with one another and you're just xenophobic? Ok. I already knew that, but it's nice to have a reminder that you haven't changed.

So basically they have nothing to do with one another and you're just xenophobic? Ok. I already knew that, but it's nice to have a reminder that you haven't changed.
Unfortunatelly, that has been Williamstera catch-all , go-to argument when he is out of cerdible way of defending his position.

Out of the blue, he injects immigration in the discussion, hoping to get kneejerk anti-immigrant posters on his side.

I indirectly posed a question earlier you didn't answer. Arming teachers quite obviously creates new issues. What do you propose we do about these new issues (such as teachers doing the shootings, and the obvious danger of children being caught in the crossfire of two or more people having a gunfight in the middle of a densely crowded area)? Don't you agree that this should be the absolute last resort to stop these types of situations? Arming people is simply logically the least effective and most likely to go wrong solution being proposed here. If you agree then, what do you suggest be done before it comes to a gunfight in the middle of a classroom?

And comparing people in the streets during a riot to teachers during school is a false equivalency for obvious reasons. There are many more dangers involved if people whip out guns to protect themselves when possibly 20-30 children are packed into the same small room.

Again arming teachers may not be the answer but it might be an answer. Clearly many of these places (schools, malls, theaters) are soft targets and we might have to institute things like metal detectors. But I suspect that most people in the US would rather take their chances than to live like that.

The only point that I made about the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 is that when the shooters were shot back at they high tailed it out of there and looked for softer targets.

But every time these shootings happen, we get a big cry about what should be done. But what is clear is that when nobody else has a gun other than the criminals you get what you get.

But every time these shootings happen, we get a big cry about what should be done. But what is clear is that when nobody else has a gun other than the criminals you get what you get.
Adam Lanza has no criminal record.
By all account of people (older adults and people his age) who know him, he was "nice" kid.
The guns were legally acquired.

Adam Lanza has no criminal record.
By all account of people (older adults and people his age) who know him, he was "nice" kid.
The guns were legally acquired.

Argument won.


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Some people don't get it do you? The killer is not some gangster mob who went into a school killing people. This is an adolescent who you will never expect to go on a mass killing spree, but could because he somehow had access to guns that he should have no business to. What's with the we can't get rid of guns completely and hence gun control does not work? Do people not understand the concept of large numbers? Extreme situations will always occur, but you make it such that statistically an average person cannot just get a gun legitimately and do mass harm. Trust me, if it were some gangster instead of Lanza, people can make WAY MORE sense out of it, though it doesn't cut their losses in anyway. These killings can be reduced. It may not go away forever, but it may be once every ten years instead of 6 in 1 year. That is a scenario which I'm sure everyone is happier with.

Out of the blue

It's not out of the blue. I am making my observations on all the Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, and other non-Americans who denounce America's laws, yet they would love to immigrate here.

Adam Lanza has no criminal record.
By all account of people (older adults and people his age) who know him, he was "nice" kid.
The guns were legally acquired.

That's all well and good. Of course it is a complete dodge of the question that I asked you.

I don't want to misunderstand you.

In your own words what is your solution to these kinds of acts?

you make it such that statistically an average person cannot just get a gun legitimately and do mass harm

Chicago has the strictest gun laws in the nation, but it is among the most violent cities.

It's not out of the blue. I am making my observations on all the Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, and other non-Americans who denounce America's laws, yet they would love to immigrate here.

Just shut the fuck up. Immigration has no bearing on this issue at all. If you want to use this shooting where 20 young children's lives have been robbed to advance your xenophobic agenda, please at least have the human decency to wait a week. The only relevant issue here is gun control, if you can't stay on topic then you should just shut the fuck up.

I would have much preferred that someone was armed and could have possibly taken this killer out before he murdered as many people as he did. How about you?

Oh yes of course cuz obviously the teachers who haven't been shot among the kids already could have ran into where the killer was and shoot him. FOR THAT DAY only maybe a teacher would have killed the killer. Not before that killer would have killed loads of kids and teachers as well tho. Then those same teachers on any other day would be potential killer themselves, maybe shooting eachother because they are depressed or maybe a kid would steal or find one of the teacher's gun and they'd start playing with it and shoot their friends or the teacher or whatever...what would you do then? Shoot the kid? The more you let armed people walk around freely the higher are the risk that something is gonna turn bad. You can't deny that. So what maybe having teachers with guns at school would have saved a couple of people today, but in all due respect to those poor families and those innocent people there might be dozens of accident related to armed teachers in school every years causing the death of much more innocent people. You would only cause more problem.

you want to use this shooting where 20 young children's lives have been robbed to advance your xenophobic agenda

You're using the tragedy for your gun control agenda

Changing our Constitution is extremely difficult. Our forefathers intentionally made it that way. Therefore, the Second Amendment will be extremely difficult to ever be repealed.

AMENDMENT [II.]

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of
a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed.

OK, pray tell: who runs said "well regulated" militias? :scratch: And B4 you cite the SCOTUS (in the Heller Case, by a 5-4 vote) declaring the right individual by following the words like a color-by-numbers game, nothing in the Constitution itself makes the SCOTUS the absolute arbiter of what the Constitution means. It merely says:
Article III, Section 1

The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.

Re. your Youtube, the reporter herself described those store owners as firing @ "anything that moves". Which is the exact opposite of a "well regulated militia".

Oh yes of course cuz obviously the teachers who haven't been shot among the kids already could have ran into where he was and shot it. FOR THAT DAY only maybe a teacher would have killed the killer. Not before that killer would have killed loads of kids and teachers as well tho. Then those same teachers on any other day would be potential killer themselves, maybe shooting eachother because they are depressed or maybe a kid would steal or find one of the teacher's gun and they'd start playing with it and shoot their friends or the teacher or whatever...what would you do then? Shoot the kid? The more you let armed people walk around freely the higher are the risk that something is gonna turn bad. You can't deny that. So what maybe having teachers with guns at school would have saved a couple of people today, but in all due respect to those poor families and those innocent people there might be dozens of accident related to armed teachers in school every years causing the death of much more innocent people. You would only cause more problem.

Aren't you describing exactly what happened today? I'll ask you the same question that I've asked others. How would you prevent these kinds of situations?

You're using the tragedy for your gun control agenda

My agenda is thinking about every single innocent life that should not have been lost today. And you? You are using it to hate on every foreigner coming into the country. Do you see the difference? Agendas are rooted in intentions, and mine are based on good and yours is based on hate, which makes your agenda totally deplorable and despicable.

And if you feel your view is so worthwhile to make now, I dare you to go on a TV station and broadcast your message. I dare ya. If you don't, then your pathetic views is rooted in nothing.

My agenda is thinking about every single innocent life that should not have been lost today. And you? You are using it to hate on every foreigner coming into the country. Do you see the difference? Agendas are rooted in intentions, and mine are based on good and yours is based on hate, which makes your agenda totally deplorable and despicable.

The families of the victims do not want the tragedy politicized, yet you are doing so for your gun control agenda.

Aren't you describing exactly what happend today? I'll ask you the same question that I've asked others. How would you prevent these kinds of situations?

Your fallacy is rooted on how far back along the timeline you chose to look at. If there were gun control laws, the killer wouldn't be using a gun. He might have been using a knife, but the tragedy's magnitude would be hundredfold less.

You want to have a situation where a gun might save a situation, but for every of that situation there are ten more that would take away lives. The net effect of having guns is losing lives. The net effect of gun control laws is saving lives. It's a no brainer that cutting it at the source is the only foolproof method.

OK, pray tell: who runs said "well regulated" militias? :scratch: And B4 you cite the SCOTUS (in the Heller Case, by a 5-4 vote) declaring the right individual by following the words like a color-by-numbers game, nothing in the Constitution itself makes the SCOTUS the absolute arbiter of what the Constitution means. It merely says:


Re. your Youtube, the reporter herself described those store owners as firing @ "anything that moves". Which is the exact opposite of a "well regulated militia".

I've often made this exact point. The court usurped this power in Marbury vs. Madison. However everybody has come to accept the court's power to do this and it's probably for the best.

It's much the same thing as people are beginning to believe (IMO) that the President is some kind of potentate that all of the other branches should defer to. And it doesn't help that the congress has become so pussified that they have willingly given up much of their power to the executive branch (the War Powers Act for example). :(

OK, pray tell: who runs said "well regulated" militias? :scratch: And B4 you cite the SCOTUS (in the Heller Case, by a 5-4 vote) declaring the right individual by following the words like a color-by-numbers game, nothing in the Constitution itself makes the SCOTUS the absolute arbiter of what the Constitution means.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/articlev.htm

The United States Constitution is unusually difficult to amend. As spelled out in Article V, the Constitution can be amended in one of two ways. First, amendment can take place by a vote of two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate followed by a ratification of three-fourths of the various state legislatures (ratification by thirty-eight states would be required to ratify an amendment today). This first method of amendment is the only one used to date. Second, the Constitution might be amended by a Convention called for this purpose by two-thirds of the state legislatures, if the Convention's proposed amendments are later ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures.

So, Democrats not only need a filibuster proof majority, they need a two-thirds majority. Good luck with that.

The families of the victims do not want the tragedy politicized, yet you are doing so for your gun control agenda.

If you stop with your xenophobic agenda I will stop with my gun control "agenda". And by stop I mean you stop posting in the gun shooting thread and gun control thread for two days, and I will follow suit. Deal? This is a gentleman's agreement, let's see how much you can actually act on a compromise.

If you stop with your xenophobic agenda I will stop with my gun control "agenda". And by stop I mean you stop posting in the gun shooting thread and gun control thread for two days, and I will follow suit. Deal? This is a gentleman's agreement, let's see how much you can actually act on a compromise.

No, because sadly, you are far from the only one who using this tragedy to further their gun control agenda.

Your fallacy is rooted on how far back along the timeline you chose to look at. If there were gun control laws, the killer wouldn't be using a gun. He might have been using a knife, but the tragedy's magnitude would be hundredfold less.

You want to have a situation where a gun might save a situation, but for every of that situation there are ten more that would take away lives. The net effect of having guns is losing lives. The net effect of gun control laws is saving lives. It's a no brainer that cutting it at the source is the only foolproof method.

Let's stipulate that you are correct about everything you say. However we live in the world we have. If I had the power of the Q :devil: I would have never allowed the Chinese to invent gunpowder. But that's not the way of the world.

Of course even without gunpowder Ghengis Khan is said to have been responsible for over 40 million deaths.

Now please answer the question that I asked. How would you prevent these kinds of situations.

Aren't you describing exactly what happend today? I'll ask you the same question that I've asked others. How would you prevent these kinds of situations?

OK maybe you need to realize that those sick person are not crying out loud they are going to shoot dozen of people with assault guns! They cannot be detected that easily until they've shot a few people. You seem to forget that arming every single soul on earth wouldn't prevent any massive shooting. Specially if they intend to kill themselves afterwards. The same story would be there.

If you'd put laws that forbid assault weapon to any citizen and put gun control and registration the government would know who has access to arms and what kind. OF course this is not something you can do in one day, but if less weapons are freely in circulation and harder to get, as well as bullets for them, people won't be able to get those arms so easily. That second amendment is seriously taking WAY TOO seriously. The amendment doesn't say you can have firearms or any type of arms. Forbiding a type of arm is not against the constitution. I have no idea but I'm guessing a bazooka is not legal in the USA for anyone to own and yet nobody complains to their rights about that. As far as I know a bazooka is an arm. If you take the amendment so literally then you could own that. That's some serious bullshit to use the constitution to support your "Far West" view.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/articlev.htm

The United States Constitution is unusually difficult to amend. As spelled out in Article V, the Constitution can be amended in one of two ways. First, amendment can take place by a vote of two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate followed by a ratification of three-fourths of the various state legislatures (ratification by thirty-eight states would be required to ratify an amendment today). This first method of amendment is the only one used to date. Second, the Constitution might be amended by a Convention called for this purpose by two-thirds of the state legislatures, if the Convention's proposed amendments are later ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures.

So, Democrats not only need a filibuster proof majority, they need a two-thirds majority. Good luck with that.

Of course the danger that a Constitutional Convention presents is that anything goes. There are people who don't like the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech (especially speech that they don't like). There are many people alive today who believe that they could do much better than the original writers of the Constitution.

No, because sadly, you are far from the only one who using this tragedy to further their gun control agenda.

Why shouldn't gun control advocates "us[e] this tragedy"? It's a perfect example of what happens when you have lax gun ownership standards. And they want to lower the likelihood of it happening again.

Should we have not increased airport security after the 9/11 attacks because that would've been "using [a] tragedy"?

No, because sadly, you are far from the only one who using this tragedy to further their gun control agenda.

Ha as expected, you're just a coward and a wimp. I make a perfectly decent offer and it seems the reasonableness of the offer scared the bejeezes out of you. And while the whole of TF knows that about you, it's always nice to have proof of this.

OK maybe you need to realize that those sick person are not crying out loud they are going to shoot dozen of people with assault guns! They cannot be detected that easily until they've shot a few people. You seem to forget that arming every single soul on earth wouldn't prevent any massive shooting. Specially if they intend to kill themselves afterwards. The same story would be there.

If you'd put laws that forbid assault weapon to any citizen and put gun control and registration the government would know who has access to arms and what kind. OF course this is not something you can do in one day, but if less weapons are freely in circulation and harder to get, as well as bullets for them, people won't be able to get those arms so easily. That second amendment is seriously taking WAY TOO seriously. The amendment doesn't say you can have firearms or any type of arms. Forbiding a type of arm is not against the constitution. I have no idea but I'm guessing a bazooka is not legal in the USA for anyone to own and yet nobody complains to their rights about that. As far as I know a bazooka is an arm. If you take the amendment so literally then you could own that. That's some serious bullshit to use the constitution to support your "Far West" view.


So I get from your answer that you would ban firearms. You do realize that you're not the first to come up with that idea. It's a nice fantasy but impractical. Please give me a practical solution for what happened today.

If you think that we just have to accept these things, that's fine. Just own it.

Let's stipulate that you are correct about everything you say. However we live in the world we have. If I had the power of the Q :devil: I would have never allowed the Chinese to invent gunpowder. But that's not the way of the world.

Of course even without gunpowder Ghengis Khan is said to have been responsible for over 40 million deaths.

Now please answer the question that I asked. How would you prevent these kinds of situations.

I can't with certainty, I doubt anyone can. An average person who goes completely bonkers and decides to kill is a rare occurrence in itself. Nothing short of a set of fortunate circumstances could have prevented this e.g. police officers just happening to be on site for a totally different reason. When these extreme, and rare which I emphasize, situations occur despite all the measures, there's really nothing much one can do. It's like a person who has the most healthy lifestyle dies young because he got hit by a bus. But you give yourself that chance for that to occur so infrequently that one person dies in ten years rather than 5 mass killing in a year.

Basic scenario: Say 1 in 50 million people suddenly goes bonkers per year and decides to shoot people. In country A with gun control laws, only 1 person in maybe 10 years manages to get firearms because it's so hard to get. In country B where firearms are easily obtained, 5 people per year can get firearms easily, and goes on killing spree.

Country A mass killing toll in 10 years: 1
Country B mass killing toll in 10 years: 50

Which do you want?

So I get from your answer that you would ban firearms. You do realize that you're not the first to come up with that idea. It's a nice fantasy but impractical. Please give me a practical solution for what happened today.

If you think that we just have to accept these things, that's fine. Just own it.
It's is totally practical. Many civilized countries have those kind of laws in place and it works. The gun related crimes are lower than in the USA. Just take Canada for example where it is much safer than in the USA. Of course it is not gonna stop all of those massacre but it will prevent some and will prevent other crimes as well.

Explain to me why legislating the guns is impractical?

It worries me that people think carrying weapons is some kind of entitlement, or symbolic of their civil liberty.

again from Lepore's NYorker article

"Gun-rights arguments have their origins not in eighteenth-century Anti-Federalism but in twentieth-century liberalism. They are the product of what the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet has called the “rights revolution,” the pursuit of rights, especially civil rights, through the courts. In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. than of black nationalists. In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Establishing a constitutional right to carry a gun for the purpose of self-defense was part of the mission of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was founded in 1966. “Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community throughout the nation,” Huey Newton said."

"In the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense. Fights over rights are effective at getting out the vote. Describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right gave conservatives a power at the polls that, at the time, the movement lacked. Opposing gun control was also consistent with a larger anti-regulation, libertarian, and anti-government conservative agenda. In 1975, the N.R.A. created a lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, headed by Harlon Bronson Carter, an award-winning marksman and a former chief of the U.S. Border Control. But then the N.R.A.’s leadership decided to back out of politics and move the organization’s headquarters to Colorado Springs, where a new recreational-shooting facility was to be built. Eighty members of the N.R.A.’s staff, including Carter, were ousted. In 1977, the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, usually held in Washington, was moved to Cincinnati, in protest of the city’s recent gun-control laws. Conservatives within the organization, led by Carter, staged what has come to be called the Cincinnati Revolt. The bylaws were rewritten and the old guard was pushed out. Instead of moving to Colorado, the N.R.A. stayed in D.C., where a new motto was displayed: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” "

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2F5Or6afE

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2F5OVKEvO

It's is totally practical. Many civilized countries have those kind of laws in place and it works. The gun related crimes are lower than in the USA. Just take Canada for example where it is much safer than in the USA. Of course it is not gonna stop all of those massacre but it will prevent some and will prevent other crimes as well.

Explain to me why legislating the guns is impractical?

I've never said that legislating about guns is impractical. There is a lot of legislation in the US concerning guns. But outlawing guns is impractical.


Incidentally this is an interesting article concerning gun violence in Brazil. The World Cup is going to be there in 2012 and the Olympics in 2016.

It's informational only.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonoberholtzer/2012/07/24/we-have-a-lot-of-guns/

I've never said that legislating about guns is impractical. There is a lot of legislation in the US concerning guns. But outlawing guns is impractical.


Icidentally this is an interesting article. Concerning gun violence in Brazil. The world cup is going to be there in 2012 and the Olympics in 2016.

It's informational only.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonoberholtzer/2012/07/24/we-have-a-lot-of-guns/

What do you mean by outlawing guns exactly? Cuz I'm not sure that's what I've said.

I've never said that legislating about guns is impractical. There is a lot of legislation in the US concerning guns. But outlawing guns is impractical.


Incidentally this is an interesting article concerning gun violence in Brazil. The world cup is going to be there in 2012 and the Olympics in 2016.

It's informational only.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonoberholtzer/2012/07/24/we-have-a-lot-of-guns/

Can you respond to my point? Thanks. Else I'll take it that you agree with me.

Adam Lanza isn't a criminal, and most mass murderers have limited to no criminal records.

The thing with most mass murderers..........most people don't expect them to do it. That's because most mass murderers aren't insane. Most mass murderers appear to just be the "socially awkward" types, loners, a bit weird, but not murderers. They often have familial issues, are social outcasts, have behavioral problems, and have depression issues. Adam Lanza's parents divorced in 2008, he had major problems with his mom, and his parents were ordered to take parental guidance classes during their divorce hearing. Adam had behavioral issues connected to his OCD and Asperger's.

The familial problems usually lead to these kids being exposed to horrible things, exposed to sociopathic, violent behavior, they are regularly abused themselves, and that damage their psyches, makes them angry, brainwashes them, traumatizes them, or exacerbates the fact they already have behavioral/personality concerns. This is what happened to Ted Bundy for instance, he developed severe personality/emotional disorder due to his upbringing. There is virtually always a backstory. It's either that or they're just kids who are socially awkward and internal, and they are socially rejected, and that leads to depression, which leads to anger, which leads to this.

That's why the entire idea that all murderers are insane or evil is so incredibly false. No. Most of them are emotionally/personally distressed/dysfunctional, these issues are unresolved, which leads to mental issues, which leads to acting out. And unlike mental illness, it's VERY VERY difficult to exactly pinpoint emotional distress because most people with emotional issues hide their issues, either due to shame and depression, or because they're simply beyond the point of being helped. That's when you have a Columbine happen. A fair few of these socially awkward loner types have some undercover issues and their behavior isn't because they're born evil. It's usually one or several events that occur in their lives which lead to them snapping.

So I get from your answer that you would ban firearms. You do realize that you're not the first to come up with that idea. It's a nice fantasy but impractical. Please give me a practical solution for what happened today.

If you think that we just have to accept these things, that's fine. Just own it.

I'll give you an example. Here, in my country (full of racism and violence, as some posters claim), we don't walk around carrying guns and - guess what - this kind of violence never happens here, not only here, but in this whole region. Of course, we still have criminals killing each others and it is an issue, but this type of violence in a school, shopping mall, cinema!!!!!! NO!

But feel free to believe that arming the whole nation will prevent mass shootings. I believe that you're (yourself) a proud owner of a gun, perhaps even a sane human being who'll never use it unless you're in self-defense, but how 'bout others? Do you believe that some psycho would never kill your child? Good luck with that.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. This is not a gun control issue. This is a society issue. In an era where technology can connect people from all corners of the world it seems more are disconnected than ever. Disconnected from families, neighborhoods, communities, ect... Illinois and New York have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet, crime rates still rise. Gun control is nothing more than a totalitarian response to social/moral issues.

^^

Flavia P, I know you're as outraged as me. But I think your point about mental health is divergent on the gun control issues being discussed here. I think it's better for everybody if you created a new thread to discuss the mental health perspective of the problem, this thread is clouded enough as it is.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. This is not a gun control issue. This is a society issue. In an era where technology can connect people from all corners of the world it seems more are disconnected than ever. Disconnected from families, neighborhoods, communities, ect... Illinois and New York have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet, crime rates still rise. Gun control is nothing more than a totalitarian response to social/moral issues.

There is a fallacy here. Of course people kill people. What we are arguing is people not being able to use GUNS to kill people, and death tolls from this scenario would be far less because of the removal of an automated mechanism to kill people. So let's not go down this fallacious path, it's divergent from the topic at hand.

I can't with certainty, I doubt anyone can. An average person who goes completely bonkers and decides to kill is a rare occurrence in itself. Nothing short of a set of fortunate circumstances could have prevented this e.g. police officers just happening to be on site for a totally different reason. When these extreme, and rare which I emphasize, situations occur despite all the measures, there's really nothing much one can do. It's like a person who has the most healthy lifestyle dies young because he got hit by a bus. But you give yourself that chance for that to occur so infrequently that one person dies in ten years rather than 5 mass killing in a year.

Basic scenario: Say 1 in 50 million people suddenly goes bonkers per year and decides to shoot people. In country A with gun control laws, only 1 person in maybe 10 years manages to get firearms because it's so hard to get. In country B where firearms are easily obtained, 5 people per year can get firearms easily, and goes on killing spree.

Country A mass killing toll in 10 years: 1
Country B mass killing toll in 10 years: 50

Which do you want?

I would actually prefer Country C mass killing toll in 10 years: 0

But as much as I would love to live in Utopia, I realize that Utopia does not exist and we have to take the world as it is until it can be changed.
And the US does have gun control laws.

People kill people.

Yes, killers kill people. If this person was unarmed, would he ever have a chance to kill someone? One unarmed person against twenty others has no chance. OTOH, one armed person can kill hundreds. That's really simple.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. This is not a gun control issue. This is a society issue. In an era where technology can connect people from all corners of the world it seems more are disconnected than ever. Disconnected from families, neighborhoods, communities, ect... Illinois and New York have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet, crime rates still rise. Gun control is nothing more than a totalitarian response to social/moral issues.

Guns make it easier to kill people. There was a knife attack in China today. 22 people were wounded bun 0 people died. Do you think that if the attacker had used a gun there would be no fatalities?

It's not out of the blue. I am making my observations on all the Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, and other non-Americans who denounce America's laws, yet they would love to immigrate here.
How do you know that?
Also, they have not immigrated yet, why do you refer to them them as immigrants.

Why did nyou know just call them foreigner inseatd of using the heavy loaded word of immigrants, at a time where many anti-immigrants americans do not cate to differentiate between legal immigration and illegal immigration.
This weak argument is giving credence to the poster who said yours is a xenophobic argument

I would actually prefer Country C mass killing toll in 10 years: 0

But as much as I would love to live in Utopia, I realize that Utopia does not exist and we have to take the world as it is until it can be changed.
And the US does have gun control laws.

Utopia is impossible because every event has a non-zero chance of happening. So the only thing we can work on is frequency.

The so-called gun control laws in the US are super mild, it basically only involves registering guns after certification of sanity and competency (and very poorly enforced most of the time if I might add), and this is only in a few states as well. We're talking about the next step: removing civilian rights to guns. That's the gun control law we are talking about.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. This is not a gun control issue. This is a society issue. In an era where technology can connect people from all corners of the world it seems more are disconnected than ever. Disconnected from families, neighborhoods, communities, ect... Illinois and New York have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet, crime rates still rise. Gun control is nothing more than a totalitarian response to social/moral issues.
I had predcted this bumper sticker reation earleir in this thread

Is ths a serious response to this tragedy?

What is is your next answer? "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".

Guns make it easier to kill people. There was a knife attack in China today. 22 people were wounded bun 0 people died. Do you think that if the attacker had used a gun there would be no fatalities?

And without a knife, no one would even get seriously injured.

There is a fallacy here. Of course people kill people. What we are arguing is people not being able to use GUNS to kill people, and death tolls from this scenario would be far less because of the removal of an automated mechanism to kill people. So let's not go down this fallacious path, it's divergent from the topic at hand.

Sorry, it is not a divergent path. It is as I said, a totalitarian response to an issue that is being ignored. What is going on in the society at large that is bringing about such things? You can go down the line and take away guns, what next? Another weapon of choice will take its place. People will still be killed. Also, no way are you getting rid of guns. Otherwise, as it goes, police, military, and criminals are the only one's with them. Citizens left defenseless to wait for help from criminals. Or citizens left defenseless against an oppressive government. Take my opinion for what it is.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/articlev.htm...

So, Democrats not only need a filibuster proof majority, they need a two-thirds majority. Good luck with that.

I'm not talking about amending it, just having the 2nd Amendment understood as it would be without the lousy grammar, like recognizing the right to bear arms "wherever well-regulated militias shall exist".



I've often made this exact point. The court usurped this power in Marbury vs. Madison. However everybody has come to accept the court's power to do this and it's probably for the best.

It's much the same thing as people are beginning to believe (IMO) that the President is some kind of potentate that all of the other branches should defer to. And it doesn't help that the congress has become so pussified that they have willingly given up much of their power to the executive branch (the War Powers Act for example). :(

Even "M vs M" dances around the point, stating mainly that the SCOTUS decides where the other 2 branches are in conflict. Chief Justice Marshall only wrote that the Constitution takes precedence ova ordinary laws, not who decides what it means:

If courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.



And you're 100% correct about them not saying Congress must declare war, as the Constitution says. Even the War Powers (Resolution) (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/warpower.asp) has never been accepted as valid by any President since it was passed in 1973, and Obama made a mockery of it (and of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm)) by doing err, regime change in Libya. :shrug: If dubya (and Deadeye Dick Cheney) did that, the Obama diehards would have been calling to impeach one or both of them.

Some people don't get it do you? The killer is not some gangster mob who went into a school killing people. This is an adolescent who you will never expect to go on a mass killing spree, but could because he somehow had access to guns that he should have no business to. What's with the we can't get rid of guns completely and hence gun control does not work? Do people not understand the concept of large numbers? Extreme situations will always occur, but you make it such that statistically an average person cannot just get a gun legitimately and do mass harm. Trust me, if it were some gangster instead of Lanza, people can make WAY MORE sense out of it, though it doesn't cut their losses in anyway. These killings can be reduced. It may not go away forever, but it may be once every ten years instead of 6 in 1 year. That is a scenario which I'm sure everyone is happier with.Exactly. But the problem is just that-----most mass murderers aren't thugs. They aren't people you can typecast. Which means the issues of gun laws are going to be harder to change. It's easy to change gun laws when people can highlight the problem and the problem is so obvious to anyone. But we can't do that now. Well, we can, but for politicians, in particular conservatives, who like to demonize inner-city lower-income persons for crime, they can't do it, because they aren't the ones who commit these mass murders. So instead they'll just put a band-aid over the wound instead of healing.

again from the Jill Lepore article

"Ronald Reagan was the first Presidential candidate whom the N.R.A. had endorsed. David Keene ran Reagan’s Southern campaign. Reagan’s election, in 1980, made it possible for conservatives to begin turning a new interpretation of the Second Amendment into law. As the legal scholar Reva B. Siegel has chronicled, Orrin Hatch became the chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, and commissioned a history of the Second Amendment, which resulted in a 1982 report, “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” The authors of the report claimed to have discovered “clear—and long-lost—proof that the Second Amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.”

In March of 1981, John Hinckley, Jr., shot Reagan, the White House press secretary, James Brady, a D.C. policeman, and a Secret Service agent. He used a .22 that he had bought at a pawnshop. A month later, the Times reported that Harlon Carter, then the N.R.A.’s executive vice-president, had been convicted of murder in Laredo, Texas, in 1931, at the age of seventeen. Carter had come home from school to find his mother distressed. She told him that three teen-age boys had been loitering nearby all afternoon, and that she suspected them of having been involved in stealing the family’s car. Carter left the house with a shotgun, found the boys, and told them that he wanted them to come back to his house to be questioned. According to the trial testimony of twelve-year-old Salvador Peña, Ramón Casiano, fifteen, the oldest of the boys, said to Carter, “We won’t go to your house, and you can’t make us.” Casiano took out a knife and said, “Do you want to fight me?” Carter shot Casiano in the chest. At Carter’s trial for murder, the judge, J. F. Mullally, instructed the jury, “There is no evidence that defendant had any lawful authority to require deceased to go to his house for questioning, and if defendant was trying to make deceased go there for that purpose at the time of the killing, he was acting without authority of law, and the law of self-defense does not apply.” Two years later, Carter’s murder conviction was overturned on appeal; the defense argued that the instructions to the jury had been improper.

When the Times broke the Casiano murder story, Carter at first denied it, saying the trial record concerned a different man with a similar name. He later said that he had “nothing to hide” and was “not going to rehash that case or any other that does not relate to the National Rifle Association.”

James Brady and his wife, Sarah, went on to become active in the gun-control movement, but neither the assassination attempt nor Carter’s past derailed the gun-rights movement. In 1986, the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment achieved new legal authority with the passage of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” This interpretation was supported by a growing body of scholarship, much of it funded by the N.R.A. According to the constitutional-law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law-review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment were “written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the N.R.A. or other gun-rights organizations.” In an interview, former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The debate narrowed, and degraded. Political candidates who supported gun control faced opponents whose campaigns were funded by the N.R.A. In 1991, a poll found that Americans were more familiar with the Second Amendment than they were with the First: the right to speak and to believe, and to write and to publish, freely."


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2F5Un098j

"This issue has been delivering voters to the polls since 1970. Conservatives hope that it will continue to deliver them in 2012. Keene, in his lifetime, has witnessed a revolution. “It’s not just the conservative political victories, the capture of the Republican Party, the creation of a conservative intellectual élite,” he said, “but the whole change in the way Americans look at government.” No conservative victories will last longer than the rulings of this Supreme Court.

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

In 2002, Keene’s son David Michael Keene was driving on the George Washington Memorial Parkway when, in a road-rage incident, he fired a handgun at another motorist. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for “using, brandishing, and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence.” I asked Keene if this private tragedy had left him uncertain about what the N.R.A. had wrought. He said no:

“You break the law, you pay the price.”

I asked Keene if any public atrocity had given him pause. He explained that it is the N.R.A.’s policy never to comment on a shooting.

I asked him how he would answer critics who charge that no single organization has done more to weaken Americans’ faith in government, or in one another, than the N.R.A.
“We live in a society now that’s Balkanized,” Keene said. “But that has nothing to do with guns.” "

"In an average year, roughly a hundred thousand Americans are killed or wounded with guns. "

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2F5VN5bXz


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2F5VEsCv0

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. This is not a gun control issue. This is a society issue. In an era where technology can connect people from all corners of the world it seems more are disconnected than ever. Disconnected from families, neighborhoods, communities, ect... Illinois and New York have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet, crime rates still rise. Gun control is nothing more than a totalitarian response to social/moral issues.Today, two madmen went to two different elementary schools. Each attacked more than 20 kids. The one in the US was using a handgun; 27 people died, including 20 school children. The one in China was using a knife; he stabbed 22 kids, presumably it took him more time to do this than the one in the US. None of the kids in China died.

See the difference? See how this is a gun control issue? There will always be madmen. Since guns are much more dangerous and immediate than any melee weapon, we'd rather have madmen with knifes than guns, thank you very much.

Sorry, it is not a divergent path. It is as I said, a totalitarian response to an issue that is being ignored. What is going on in the society at large that is bringing about such things? You can go down the line and take away guns, what next? Another weapon of choice will take its place. People will still be killed. Also, no way are you getting rid of guns. Otherwise, as it goes, police, military, and criminals are the only one's with them. Citizens left defenseless to wait for help from criminals. Or citizens left defenseless against an oppressive government. Take my opinion for what it is.

If the next step is knives instead of guns, I will feel safer a hundred times more. At least I know if I meet a criminal welding a knife I will have a much more of a survival chance. And there's a fallacy about quoting a statistically unlikely scenario to defend your view. You want to use a gun to counteract a situation where it may be used justly, but that very gun brings up 10 more scenarios where it can be used unjustly, all for preventing a scenario which does not happen often. The only thing you achieved with introducing guns to the masses is to make what was originally a event with a small probability of happening i.e. gun crime, into an event which is now much MORE likely because you relax gun laws.

^^

Flavia P, I know you're as outraged as me. But I think your point about mental health is divergent on the gun control issues being discussed here. I think it's better for everybody if you created a new thread to discuss the mental health perspective of the problem, this thread is clouded enough as it is.The thing is, though, the issues interconnect. The problem is, people with emotional/personal distress are getting guns. Both issues have to be fixed. Can't talk about one without talking about the other. Gun hawks think the problem falls 100% on these emotionally distressed individuals. Gun law advocates think the problem is primarily guns. The real problem falls in the middle. But people take extremes on both sides of the issue, and nothing gets done, there is more divide, and zero accomplished

The thing is, though, the issues interconnect. The problem is, people with emotional/personal distress are getting guns. Both issues have to be fixed. Can't talk about one without talking about the other. Gun hawks think the problem falls 100% on these emotionally distressed individuals. Gun law advocates think the problem is primarily guns. The real problem falls in the middle. But people take extremes on both sides of the issue, and nothing gets done, there is more divide, and zero accomplished

Disagree. The issue is heavily weighted towards the removal of guns. A deranged person cannot possibly do as much damage without a gun. Simple. A gun can kill one person per second. A knife can only kill one person in at least 30 seconds. Removing the guns will at least reduce these kind of incidents by 90%. Only if you want to remove the remaining 10% that we will then look at your perspective.

Chicago has the strictest gun laws in the nation, but it is among the most violent cities.The violent crimes in Chicago are due to gang-related activity, particularly in South Side neighbourhoods like Englewood. This is a serious problem, but lets not compare apples to oranges.

Also, who knows? Probably things would be even worse for Chicago with laxer gun laws.

Sorry, it is not a divergent path. It is as I said, a totalitarian response to an issue that is being ignored. What is going on in the society at large that is bringing about such things? You can go down the line and take away guns, what next? Another weapon of choice will take its place. People will still be killed. Also, no way are you getting rid of guns. Otherwise, as it goes, police, military, and criminals are the only one's with them. Citizens left defenseless to wait for help from criminals. Or citizens left defenseless against an oppressive government. Take my opinion for what it is.

Different argument here.

How can that be a totalitarian response? :lol: What IS totalitarian, anyway? If we repeal the 1st amendment, then that's the way to totalitarian society, not the 2nd amendment?

I think I'll feel much safer when gun carriers are limited to police, military, criminals like you said :lol: Criminals don't really commit mass killing, do they?

And the last bolded part. :lol: I don't think civilian carrying a gun will deter an oppressive government :lol: There's freedom of opinion, election, press, systematic checks and balances for that.
What that civilian can DO, is kill another civilian :shrug:

The violent crimes in Chicago are due to gang-related activity, particularly in South Side neighbourhoods like Englewood. This is a serious problem, but lets not compare apples to oranges.

Also, who knows? Probably things would be even worse for Chicago with laxer gun laws.

This is my point. A gang won't go to school, shopping mall or cinema and kill random people. Of course, as you stated, it's still a huge issue. But if you have to carry a gun when you're going to cinema... I mean, if someone starts shooting random people, you'll need some time to react... or maybe you'll be dead before you get a chance to react.

Disagree. The issue is heavily weighted towards the removal of guns. A deranged person cannot possibly do as much damage without a gun. Simple. A gun can kill one person per second. A knife can only kill one person in at least 30 seconds. Removing the guns will at least reduce these kind of incidents by 90%. Only if you want to remove the remaining 10% that we will then look at your perspective.

It's so simple a logic but apparently many don't seem to understand it :sobbing:

Disagree. The issue is heavily weighted towards the removal of guns. A deranged person cannot possibly do as much damage without a gun. Simple. A gun can kill one person per second. A knife can only kill one person in at least 30 seconds. Removing the guns will at least reduce these kind of incidents by 90%. Only if you want to remove the remaining 10% that we will then look at your perspective.
If a person didn't have unresolved illness, they wouldn't think to commit such a crime in the first place.

SO HippityHop what is Outlawing guns for you?

If a person didn't have unresolved illness, they wouldn't think to commit such a crime in the first place.

Right now it's deciding which one is more probable/easier to enforce: people with no access to guns vs. people with no unresolved mental issues. For me it's definitely the former. The latter involves genetic variations, which always ensure there are crazy people, psychology of human interactions which will always make mental illness a taboo subject, not to mention treatment efficacy of psychological disorders is far from being 100%. The issues for gun control have clearer boundaries and achievable goals.

Chicago has the strictest gun laws in the nation, but it is among the most violent cities.

Totally irrelevant, as when Wayne LaPierre of the NRA says that about Washington, DC. The point is that there are no "border checkpoints" crossing between states and cities, so DC is flooded with guns from next-door VA. (I guess Chitown's come mostly from IN and WI, perhaps from other locales in IL itself). As you'd be among the first to object to "stop and frisk" everyone entering a city (a 4th Amendment violation anyhow) what's your point?
:confused:

Amendment IV

Search and arrest

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

If a person didn't have unresolved illness, they wouldn't think to commit such a crime in the first place.

Not necessarily true. Someone can be sane for all their life but one day something snaps and they go on a rampage and it's too late. When they come to their sense they realize it but it's already done. You don't really know the reasons for some of those actions. Of course mental illness is a big part of it but it's not necessarily an illness that they've had for a long time therefore doubtfully resolving.

I certainly would not object to having undercover armed guards at schools. As for teachers having guns it's a knee jerk reaction to go WTF? However let's say that a teacher who was trained with firearms had been there. Could at least some of those kids been saved? I don't know.

How is the idea of a 50/50 gunfight between a teacher and a lunatic a better solution than not giving the shooter easy access to guns. A teacher can battle a knife attacker with a wooden chair. You can´t fight a semi-automatic handgun with a chair. They had a knife attack in a Chinese primary school today and afaik, although many were critical injured, none of those children have died yet.

I wonder what anti gun control guys think about NRA.

Bastion of American freedom, maybe? :hysteric:

Well, more homicides are done by bare hands and knives than guns. So your average housewife is a potential killer.

Really? Not in the USA according to statistics of the United Nations.

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html

Only in countries with much lower homicide rates and stricter gun laws.

United States of America Percentage of homicides by firearm
66,8 66,0 67,9 67,8 67,9 67,0 66,9 67,5
Number of homicides by firearm
11040 10660 11360 11730 11630 11030 10300 9960
Homicide by firearm rate per 100,000 population
3,8 3,6 3,8 3,9 3,8 3,6 3,3 3,2

United Kingdom Percentage of homicides by firearm
10,8 7,5 9,4 7,1 8,3 7,1 5,9 6,6
Number of homicides by firearm
96 68 73 50 59 53 38 41
Homicide by firearm rate per 100,000 population
0,2 0,1 0,1 0,1 0,1 0,1 0,1 0,1

Germany Percentage of homicides by firearm
33,8 30,5 28,6 29,4 26,9 26,1 29,9 26,3
Number of homicides by firearm
277 247 230 214 186 171 188 158
Homicide by firearm rate per 100,000 population
0,3 0,3 0,3 0,3 0,2 0,2 0,2 0,2

Australia Percentage of homicides by firearm
13,2 12,3 12,1 8,9 16,4 13,3 11,8 11,5
Number of homicides by firearm
42 37 32 23 46 34 31 30
Homicide by firearm rate per 100,000 population
0,2 0,2 0,2 0,1 0,2 0,2 0,1 0,1

Right now it's deciding which one is more probable/easier to enforce: people with no access to guns vs. people with no unresolved mental issues. For me it's definitely the former. The latter involves genetic variations, which always ensure there are crazy people, psychology of human interactions which will always make mental illness a taboo subject, not to mention treatment efficacy of psychological disorders is far from being 100%. The issues for gun control have clearer boundaries and achievable goals.This is all true, which is why I agree, that gun control laws need to be enacted and need to be enacted ASAP. I agree that it's easier to restrict gun access than treat those with illness, which is why gun control is an issue that, when addressed in a serious manner, can be resolved very quickly. I only disagree that it's not a pressing issue, illness. I think both are pressing issues that can be resolved at the same time. We can resolve gun laws while also working to resolve the very poor treatment, education and the stigma around those with illness.

Dem. lawmaker: To get gun control, Obama must ‘exploit’ shooting

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/14/dem-lawmaker-get-gun-control-obama-must-exploit-sh/

A veteran Democratic lawmaker believes the nation will go along with stronger gun control laws if President Obama “exploits” the Newtown, Conn., tragedy and nudges Congress to action.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who represents portions of New York City, said he was encouraged by Mr. Obama’s statement on Friday afternoon that the mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 young children, requires “meaningful action” by Congress, but hopes those words turn into concrete legislation.

“These incidents, these horrible, horrible incidents … are happening more and more frequently. And they will continue to happen more and more frequently until someone with the bully pulpit, and that means the president, takes leadership and pushes Congress,” Mr. Nadler said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz.

Mr. Nadler was asked whether the Newtown tragedy could be the turning point in many Democrats’ longstanding struggle to enact stronger gun laws.

“I think we will be there if the president exploits it, and otherwise we’ll go on to the next” incident, Mr. Nadler said.

Not necessarily true. Someone can be sane for all their life but one day something snaps and they go on a rampage and it's too late. When they come to their sense they realize it but it's already done. You don't really know the reasons for some of those actions. Of course mental illness is a big part of it but it's not necessarily an illness that they've had for a long time therefore doubtfully resolving.It's true, someone can snap and they go on a rampage, but that's usually due to something causing such a reaction. It happens where a person who has no real emotional, mental or personality issues commits rampages, but it's not often, because these people have the ability to rationalize their behavior, think things through before doing something rash and barbaric. There is usually some sort of reason there that leads to a person being so removed from appropriate response or behavior, that they would do something like this. They snap because they either are sociopaths who want to see others hurt and enjoy the rush of hurting people, or they've been pushed to the point where they want to hurt other people the way they're hurting.

It's really not a mental illness issue, it's an emotional/personality issue.

Dem. lawmaker: To get gun control, Obama must ‘exploit’ shooting

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/14/dem-lawmaker-get-gun-control-obama-must-exploit-sh/

A veteran Democratic lawmaker believes the nation will go along with stronger gun control laws if President Obama “exploits” the Newtown, Conn., tragedy and nudges Congress to action.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who represents portions of New York City, said he was encouraged by Mr. Obama’s statement on Friday afternoon that the mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 young children, requires “meaningful action” by Congress, but hopes those words turn into concrete legislation.

“These incidents, these horrible, horrible incidents … are happening more and more frequently. And they will continue to happen more and more frequently until someone with the bully pulpit, and that means the president, takes leadership and pushes Congress,” Mr. Nadler said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz.

Mr. Nadler was asked whether the Newtown tragedy could be the turning point in many Democrats’ longstanding struggle to enact stronger gun laws.

“I think we will be there if the president exploits it, and otherwise we’ll go on to the next” incident, Mr. Nadler said.He's right. Is it PC? No. But it's true.

Lexington's notebook
American politics

Gun control
The gun control that works: no guns (http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2012/12/gun-control#comments)
Dec 15th 2012, 4:56 by Lexington

I HESITATE to offer thoughts about the school shooting in Connecticut that has seen 20 children and seven adults murdered and the gunman also dead. Your correspondent has been in the rural Midwest researching a column and heard the news on the car radio. Along with a sense of gloom, I found I mostly wanted to see my own, elementary school age children back home in Washington, DC, and had little desire to listen to pundits of any stripe: hence my reluctance to weigh in now.

To be fair, on NPR, the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne had sensible things to say about President Barack Obama’s statement on the killings, and how it was probably significant when the president seemed to suggest that he was minded to take action on gun control, and never mind the politics. On the same show the moderate conservative columnist, David Brooks, expressed sensible caution about assuming that stricter gun controls could have stopped this particular shooting.

Switching to red-blooded conservative talk radio, I found two hosts offering a “move along, nothing to see here” defence of the status quo. One suggested that listeners should not torment themselves trying to understand “craziness”, though it would, the pair agreed, be understandable if some parents were tempted to remove their children from public education and homeschool them.

To that debate, all I can offer is the perspective of someone who has lived and worked in different corners of the world, with different gun laws.

Here is my small thought. It is quite possible, perhaps probable, that stricter gun laws of the sort that Mr Obama may or may not be planning, would not have stopped the horrible killings of this morning. But that is a separate question from whether it is a good idea to allow private individuals to own guns. And that, really, is what I think I understand by gun control. Once you have guns in circulation, in significant numbers, I suspect that specific controls on things like automatic weapons or large magazines can have only marginal effects. Once lots of other people have guns, it becomes rational for to want your own too.

The first time that I was posted to Washington, DC some years ago, the capital and suburbs endured a frightening few days at the hands of a pair of snipers, who took to killing people at random from a shooting position they had established in the boot of a car. I remember meeting a couple of White House correspondents from American papers, and hearing one say: but the strange thing is that Maryland (where most of the killings were taking place) has really strict gun laws. And I remember thinking: from the British perspective, those aren’t strict gun laws. Strict laws involve having no guns.

Since a couple of horrible mass shootings in Britain, handguns and automatic weapons have been effectively banned. It is possible to own shotguns, and rifles if you can demonstrate to the police that you have a good reason to own one, such as target shooting at a gun club, or deer stalking, say. The firearms ownership rules are onerous, involving hours of paperwork. You must provide a referee who has to answer nosy questions about the applicant's mental state, home life (including family or domestic tensions) and their attitude towards guns. In addition to criminal record checks, the police talk to applicants’ family doctors and ask about any histories of alcohol or drug abuse or personality disorders.

Vitally, it is also very hard to get hold of ammunition. Just before leaving Britain in the summer, I had lunch with a member of parliament whose constituency is plagued with gang violence and drug gangs. She told me of a shooting, and how it had not led to a death, because the gang had had to make its own bullets, which did not work well, and how this was very common, according to her local police commander. Even hardened criminals willing to pay for a handgun in Britain are often only getting an illegally modified starter’s pistol turned into a single shot weapon.

And, to be crude, having few guns does mean that few people get shot. In 2008-2009, there were 39 fatal injuries from crimes involving firearms in England and Wales, for a population about one sixth the size of America’s. In America, there were 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2008.

I would also say, to stick my neck out a bit further, that I find many of the arguments advanced for private gun ownership in America a bit unconvincing, and tinged with a blend of excessive self-confidence and faulty risk perception.

I am willing to believe that some householders, in some cases, have defended their families from attack because they have been armed. But I also imagine that lots of ordinary adults, if woken in the night by an armed intruder, lack the skill to wake, find their weapon, keep hold of their weapon, use it correctly and avoid shooting the wrong person. And my hunch is that the model found in places like Japan or Britain—no guns in homes at all, or almost none—is on balance safer.

As for the National Rifle Association bumper stickers arguing that only an armed citizenry can prevent tyranny, I wonder if that isn’t a form of narcissism, involving the belief that lone, heroic individuals will have the ability to identify tyranny as it descends, recognise it for what it is, and fight back. There is also the small matter that I don’t think America is remotely close to becoming a tyranny, and to suggest that it is is both irrational and a bit offensive to people who actually do live under tyrannical rule.

Nor is that the British are relaxed about being subjects of a monarch, or are less fussed about freedoms. A conservative law professor was recently quoted in the papers saying he did not want to live in a country where the police were armed and the citizens not. I fear in Britain, at least, native gun-distrust goes even deeper than that: the British don’t even like their police to be armed (though more of them are than in the past).

But here is the thing. The American gun debate takes place in America, not Britain or Japan. And banning all guns is not about to happen (and good luck collecting all 300m guns currently in circulation, should such a law be passed). It would also not be democratic. I personally dislike guns. I think the private ownership of guns is a tragic mistake. But a majority of Americans disagree with me, some of them very strongly. And at a certain point, when very large majorities disagree with you, a bit of deference is in order.

So in short I am not sure that tinkering with gun control will stop horrible massacres like today’s. And I am pretty sure that the sort of gun control that would work—banning all guns—is not going to happen. So I have a feeling that even a more courageous debate than has been heard for some time, with Mr Obama proposing gun control laws that would have been unthinkable in his first term, will not change very much at all. Hence the gloom.

Guns in America
Broken hearted (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/12/guns-america)
Dec 15th 2012, 2:07 by R.W. | NEW YORK


“WE were in the gym and heard loud bangs”, said a nine-year old boy after the horrific shooting in Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, where at least 26 were killed, including 20 children. The shooter, who was dressed in battle fatigues, was 20-year-old Adam Lanza, whose mother may have been a teacher at Sandy Hook. His mother was found dead at her home. Lanza was declared dead at the scene.

Before the school went on lockdown, children reportedly heard screams over the school’s intercom system. Around 9:40 this morning, not long after the start of the school day, police received word they were needed at the school. As part of a newly implemented security programme, emergency texts were sent to parents. Fighting tears, an ashen-faced and unusually emotional Barack Obama, in an address to the nation said, “Our hearts are broken today.”

And so they are. The stories of heroic teachers who protected their young charges by ushering them into bathrooms and closets are only just beginning to emerge. The images of the surviving children being led out of the school, visibly frightened or dazed, while holding hands are chilling. Parents reunited with their children at a nearby firehouse. Twenty sets of parents waited in vain.

Even in a country as accustomed to gun violence (and, increasingly, mass shootings) as America, the murder of 20 children in their elementary-school classroom is uniquely shocking. Earlier this week, a masked gunman killed two people at a shopping centre in Oregon. Over the summer, there were murderous gun rampages at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and at a cinema in Colorado. In September, a gunman killed five former colleagues at a manufacturing plant in Minnesota. That same month Mother Jones published a piece showing that of the 139 guns possessed by the shooters, more than 75% were obtained legally.

A tearful President Obama noted that the nation has “endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years” and said that meaningful action is needed to prevent any more from happening, “regardless of the politics”. Unfortunately, other gun-related incidents, such as the one which left Gaby Giffords, an Arizona congresswoman, severely injured and killed six others, did little to push politicians to fight for gun control.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, urged Mr Obama to send a gun bill to Congress. Because of gun violence, he said, “not even kindergarteners learning their A, B, Cs are safe”. Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund, wondered what it will take for politicians to stand up and put sensible gun laws in place. Every three hours, said Ms Edelman, a child or teenager is killed by a gun.

America is not alone in suffering mass shootings. In 1996, a gun massacre in a Scottish school in Dunblane killed 16 children and one teacher. The political impact was significant. The next year the Firearms Amendment, which prohibited private ownership of cartridge handguns, was passed. Security in British schools quickly improved, too.

As it happens, halfway around the world, on the same day, a deranged man attacked primary-school students at a school in China’s Henan province. He had a knife. Twenty-two students were wounded. None died. Adam Lanza had a pair of handguns, and a .223 semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle, which looks like this.

Eleven days ago—since when two mass shootings have taken place, this one in Newtown and another earlier this week at a shopping mall in Oregon—the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) president, referring to yet another shooting, bemoaned the media “[seizing] on the back of this national tragedy to try to piggyback their anti-Second Amendment national agenda right on top of the back of the national tragedy and try to force it on Americans all over the country.” Mr LaPierre, like the NRA’s Twitter page, has been silent today.

"Adam Lanza had a pair of handguns, and a .223 semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle, which looks like this"

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wWoUzuRVAF4/TeNVrloD7hI/AAAAAAAACJo/2YtOfS0JVIo/s1600/weapons%2B6.jpg

Democracy in America
American politics

Guns in America
The NRA’s star may be on the wane (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/04/guns-america)
Apr 19th 2012, 20:25 by N.L. | ST LOUIS


ONE of the things Europeans find incomprehensible about America is its love of guns. There are two reasons they don't get it. One is that Europeans live in a much more urbanised, regulated and crowded part of the world. More importantly the concept of owning a gun as an essential civil liberty is entirely absent. There is no second amendment guaranteeing the right to bear arms, and there is little sense that it is up to the individual to defend one's family and property.

The organisation most associated with America's culture of guns is the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—which drafts model legislation—have been enormously successful at pushing pro-gun laws in state legislatures. These days the debate is no longer whether assault rifles ought to be banned, but whether they should be allowed in bars, churches and schools. One group, Students for Concealed Carry, even argues that carrying concealed weapons on university campuses would be an effective means of self defence.

On the face of things, then, the NRA is a wealthy and powerful organisation. At a recent event, one speaker boasted about the political pain the organisation caused Bill Clinton during his presidency. More recently, according to OpenSecrets.org, it spent $7.2m during the 2010 election cycle. Its influence can also be seen in the way politicians respond to its demands. For example, at the height of its powers in the 1990s it succeeded in quashing research into gun-related injuries and deaths by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Paul Waldman, of the American Prospect, has recently argued that the NRA's dominance is a myth. He has looked closely at the figures and writes, “Despite what the NRA has long claimed, it neither delivered Congress to the Republican party in 1994 nor delivered the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.” He also argues that NRA money has no impact on congressional elections, as it spreads its money over so many races, and that NRA endorsements are “almost meaningless” as most go to incumbent Republicans with little chance of losing.

One also has to wonder if the organisation has a winning strategy for the future. Although the number of firearms in the country continues to rise, most of these sales are to repeat customers. Over the last three decades the number of households with guns has steadily declined. Changing demographics are blamed. For one, America has become more urban (gun ownership is less common in cities). White males, the gun-loving sector of American society, also make up an increasingly smaller percentage of the population. What the industry actually needs is more Latino, black and female gun enthusiasts. But the NRA isn't delivering these.

The people who turn up to NRA conventions, like the one held this week in St Louis, remain older white men. At this year's event, the main sign of women in the hall were the skimpily clad girls advertising guns. The NRA's magazines feature ads for leaf mulchers and Viagra, but not apparently the "sexy, fast and practical" bra gun holster.

More cause for concern came on April 17th, when the American Legislative Exchange Council ended its task force responsible for promoting pro-gun legislation. This followed the controversy over ALEC's ties to "stand your ground" laws around the country. ALEC will now focus its efforts on jobs, free markets and growth, but not firearms.

All of these developments suggest an attenuated NRA. The organisation has had its political power called into question, lost an ally in promoting gun laws, and caters to an ageing demographic, on top of pushing a potentially dangerous product that is of less interest to American households. Time will tell, but it seems reasonable to wonder whether the NRA has as much firepower as it claims.

"Adam Lanza had a pair of handguns, and a .223 semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle, which looks like this"

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wWoUzuRVAF4/TeNVrloD7hI/AAAAAAAACJo/2YtOfS0JVIo/s1600/weapons%2B6.jpg

lol when I see guns like that I cannot understand ANYONE that can justify the need to have one of those type of guns. There's not a SINGLE good reason to possess such a gun.

Adam Lanza isn't a criminal, and most mass murderers have limited to no criminal records.

The thing with most mass murderers..........most people don't expect them to do it. That's because most mass murderers aren't insane. Most mass murderers appear to just be the "socially awkward" types, loners, a bit weird, but not murderers. They often have familial issues, are social outcasts, have behavioral problems, and have depression issues. Adam Lanza's parents divorced in 2008, he had major problems with his mom, and his parents were ordered to take parental guidance classes during their divorce hearing. Adam had behavioral issues connected to his OCD and Asperger's.

The familial problems usually lead to these kids being exposed to horrible things, exposed to sociopathic, violent behavior, they are regularly abused themselves, and that damage their psyches, makes them angry, brainwashes them, traumatizes them, or exacerbates the fact they already have behavioral/personality concerns. This is what happened to Ted Bundy for instance, he developed severe personality/emotional disorder due to his upbringing. There is virtually always a backstory. It's either that or they're just kids who are socially awkward and internal, and they are socially rejected, and that leads to depression, which leads to anger, which leads to this.

That's why the entire idea that all murderers are insane or evil is so incredibly false. No. Most of them are emotionally/personally distressed/dysfunctional, these issues are unresolved, which leads to mental issues, which leads to acting out. And unlike mental illness, it's VERY VERY difficult to exactly pinpoint emotional distress because most people with emotional issues hide their issues, either due to shame and depression, or because they're simply beyond the point of being helped. That's when you have a Columbine happen. A fair few of these socially awkward loner types have some undercover issues and their behavior isn't because they're born evil. It's usually one or several events that occur in their lives which lead to them snapping.

People with mental health difficulties (including those with personality disorders) are less likely to be violent to others. They are more likely to hurt themselves. You know that, right? And not everyone with family problems comes out dysfunctional as you are trying to frame. Being emotionally unstable does not mean you're going to shoot people dead whenever something goes wrong. Emotionally unstable is one of the personality disorders that can be diagnosed. The hallmark of this disorder along with emotionally dysregulation is the harm to self and suicide risk. 10% do kill themselves. Not 10% end up on shooting rampages because they have "unresolved illness". It's a bit insulting really. It is true that most offenders will have a diagnosis of personality disorder(s) but this doesn't mean that everyone with such diagnosis poses a risk to the community. You need to keep other co-morbid conditions (substance abuse for instance) in mind as well. And even so, the ones likely to commit acts of violence or rather crimes like this are those with psychopathic tendencies or antisocial behaviour. (Even then, not everyone with an antisocial personality is a psychopath. It's not so simple as black and white.) So you're acting like let's sympathise with those with mental health problems but those with personality disorders will not receive the same treatment because it's their personality that's wrong--it's them that's bad. Is that what you're trying to say?

Regardless of what illness they may or may not have, access to guns makes it more lethal. Just like other posters pointed out, guns do more damage than knives for instance. The guy at China injured children but none of them were dead whereas the guy with guns killed more than a dozen. So yes the issue is more of a gun control than mental illness/emotional problems/personality dysfunction.

It's true, someone can snap and they go on a rampage, but that's usually due to something causing such a reaction. It happens where a person who has no real emotional, mental or personality issues commits rampages, but it's not often, because these people have the ability to rationalize their behavior, think things through before doing something rash and barbaric. There is usually some sort of reason there that leads to a person being so removed from appropriate response or behavior, that they would do something like this. They snap because they either are sociopaths who want to see others hurt and enjoy the rush of hurting people, or they've been pushed to the point where they want to hurt other people the way they're hurting.

It's really not a mental illness issue, it's an emotional/personality issue.

People with personality problems can still rationalize their behaviour you know. Just because you're hurting doesn't give you the green light to shoot children. Even those with emotional/personality problems can still rationalize that. Using a black-or-white approach to it is not practical and foolishly simple. Mental illness and personality problems are too complex for that approach to be realistic.

People with mental health difficulties (including those with personality disorders) are less likely to be violent to others. They are more likely to hurt themselves. You know that, right? Yes. Which is why I've been stressing the emotional/personality issues. Because that is the primary issue. But mental health issues are still a huge issue, and it's part of the framework of the entire problem in the USA. Which is pretty much a complete lack of care towards anyone who has internalized demons, or are socially awkward, or seek treatment for whatever their issues are.

And not everyone with family problems comes out dysfunctional as you are trying to frame. Everyone? No. I didn't say everyone. I said often. And when I say often, it's because the numbers back this up, and there is a connection to familial issues and violence, crime, drugs, abuse, self-harm, and we can go down the list. Without your family, kids who are already vulnerable and more at-risk aren't going to respond well.

Being emotionally unstable does not mean you're going to shoot people dead whenever something goes wrong. True. Never said it did. Most people who are emotionally unstable do not commit mass murders or crime.

Emotionally unstable is one of the personality disorders that can be diagnosed. The hallmark of this disorder along with emotionally dysregulation is the harm to self and suicide risk. 10% do kill themselves. Not 10% end up on shooting rampages because they have "unresolved illness". It's a bit insulting really. It is true that most offenders will have a diagnosis of personality disorder(s) but this doesn't mean that everyone with such diagnosis poses a risk to the community.Never said that everyone with emotional/personality illness needs to be checked so they won't go on a rampage. More like, we need to look out for them because they often fall through the cracks, and we need to provide these individuals help. Because people tend to focus on mental illness and insanity. When most of these similar incidents have little to nothing to do with insanity.

You need to keep other co-morbid conditions (substance abuse for instance) in mind as well. Substance abuse, though, is heavily connected to suicide, social isolation and heavily connected to emotional illness. So it's pretty much right in line with what I've been saying. People who have emotional/individual consternation, they turn to drugs/alcohol, they become hooked, they become more depressed, they become socially isolated, and often times they become delusional and irrational. All of this leads to increased crime rates, STD rates, domestic violence rates and burglary rates.

And even so, the ones likely to commit acts of violence or rather crimes like this are those with psychopathic tendencies or antisocial behaviour. (Even then, not everyone with an antisocial personality is a psychopath. It's not so simple as black and white.) Anti-social behavior is, again, often connected to emotional/personality problems, or is simply an immutable characteristic of an individual. But can be resolved with treatment, counseling, and support.

Most mass murderers aren't psychopaths. Psychopaths generally know what they're doing and aren't going to do something so blatant that will end their lives. In fact they love their lives too much to end their lives the way these mass murderers do. Dead or alive, these mass murderers' lives are over. They don't value their lives because they have internalized, unresolved issues.

People who are anti-social differ from psychopaths in the sense that, they usually do actually care deep down. They care but don't know how to care, or they've been damaged (whether those feelings are deserved or not is another thing) to the point where they are numb, and seek to hurt others they way they've been theoretically hurt. They hate authority and they hate structure, yet want acceptance.

So you're acting like let's sympathise with those with mental health problems but those with personality disorders will not receive the same treatment because it's their personality that's wrong--it's them that's bad. Is that what you're trying to say? Absolutely not in the slightest. Not in the slightest. What I am saying is that mental illness is not the main cause of these incidents, so it's not something that needs to be focused on regarding these incidents. We need to focus on the actual causes of these crimes.

People love to run to "this person is insane", when the reality is the suicides, the mass murders, the crime, the self-hatred and insecurity, the compulsiveness, are generally emotional/personality battles. Which is very hard to explain in many cases, and very hard to diagnose and discuss, because people can appear normal yet be internally struggling so much. Whereas those with developmental/mental disorder, there are more clear signs. It's also taken more serious, both in the health community and socially.

Regardless of what illness they may or may not have, access to guns makes it more lethal. Just like other posters pointed out, guns do more damage than knives for instance. The guy at China injured children but none of them were dead whereas the guy with guns killed more than a dozen. So yes the issue is more of a gun control than mental illness/emotional problems/personality dysfunction.I agree it's the bigger issue, without doubt, because the bottom line is, an ill person with a knife is less destructive than an ill person with a gun. But what we need to strive for is having no ill people with weapons. That needs to be the goal. That's basically what I've been saying. Focusing on one issue isn't the answer.

People with personality problems can still rationalize their behaviour you know.Yes, they can, hence most of them do not commit these sorts of crimes, but still, they commit more crimes than those without such illness because they either do not care or are too far gone to empathize and ration. In fact people with personality/emotional distress generally live their lives without ever getting significant treatment or treatment at all. It can be hidden and repressed to a certain degree. That's actually the bad thing. People repress illness which allow them to get worse instead of getting better.

Just because you're hurting doesn't give you the green light to shoot children. Even those with emotional/personality problems can still rationalize that.100% agree. Totally. We all need to take responsibility for our behavior and our actions. But when a person is sick, I don't think calling them names like "animal" or "freak", or whatever else, is going to help matters. We can be strong with our feelings while also keeping things in perspective.

Using a black-or-white approach to it is not practical and foolishly simple. Mental illness and personality problems are too complex for that approach to be realistic. True. This isn't a black and white situation. We don't know the full details regarding the suffering or whatever illness Adam Lanza was going through, or really, anyone with illness, since ultimately, we can't go inside their heads and read their thoughts. All I want is that we don't completely ignore the issue of health. The reality is a society where kids are completely and utterly unsafe is not a healthy society and we need to answer to that.

Everyone? No. I didn't say everyone. I said often. And when I say often, it's because the numbers back this up, and there is a connection to familial issues and violence, crime, drugs, abuse, self-harm, and we can go down the list. Without your family, kids who are already vulnerable and more at-risk aren't going to respond well.

Some individuals are predisposed to several disorders. You don't have to come from a broken family to develop mental health difficulties. So whilst it's true that an invalidating environment aggravates the risk, it's not the sole cause of personality disorder. Not every individual with a diagnosis of personality disorder suffered sexual abuse, trauma, etc. in their childhood.

Never said that everyone with emotional/personality illness needs to be checked so they won't go on a rampage. More like, we need to look out for them because they often fall through the cracks, and we need to provide these individuals help. Because people tend to focus on mental illness and insanity. When most of these similar incidents have little to nothing to do with insanity.

But it's not this simple. It's not easy to assess someone and the risk she/he may pose to her/himself or others. As I said mental illness and personality disorders are far too complex to be "easily spotted" and kept in check.

Substance abuse, though, is heavily connected to suicide, social isolation and heavily connected to emotional illness. So it's pretty much right in line with what I've been saying. People who have emotional/individual consternation, they turn to drugs/alcohol, they become hooked, they become more depressed, they become socially isolated, and often times they become delusional and irrational. All of this leads to increased crime rates, STD rates, domestic violence rates and burglary rates.

Substance abuse commonly co-occurs in people with mental disorders including Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and other mood disorders. It's not exclusive to those with emotional/personality problems. So it is not just "heavily connected" to emotional illness.

Anti-social behavior is, again, often connected to emotional/personality problems, or is simply an immutable characteristic of an individual. But can be resolved with treatment, counseling, and support.

Most mass murderers aren't psychopaths. Psychopaths generally know what they're doing and aren't going to do something so blatant that will end their lives. In fact they love their lives too much to end their lives the way these mass murderers do. Dead or alive, these mass murderers' lives are over. They don't value their lives because they have internalized, unresolved issues.

People who are anti-social differ from psychopaths in the sense that, they usually do actually care deep down. They care but don't know how to care, or they've been damaged (whether those feelings are deserved or not is another thing) to the point where they are numb, and seek to hurt others they way they've been theoretically hurt. They hate authority and they hate structure, yet want acceptance.

I mentioned psychopathy in relation to the Ted Bundy reference. I know antisocial personality differs from psychopathy, I didn't claim otherwise.

Absolutely not in the slightest. Not in the slightest. What I am saying is that mental illness is not the main cause of these incidents, so it's not something that needs to be focused on regarding these incidents. We need to focus on the actual causes of these crimes.


What are the causes of these crimes then? People with personality disorders also experience other kinds of mental health difficulties. Making a clear cut distinction between mental illness and personality disorders is not simple. In reference to the emotionally unstable personality for example, whilst it is classified as a personality disorder, evidence suggests a biological and genetic cause similar to "true" mental illnesses such as Bipolar. Several scientists suggested it to be reclassified as a mental illness because there is more to it than just maladaptive patterns of behaviours. This is also the reason why the new version of the DSM is dropping the "axis" that distinguished mental disorders from personality disorders. Do you see what I'm trying to illustrate here?

People love to run to "this person is insane", when the reality is the suicides, the mass murders, the crime, the self-hatred and insecurity, the compulsiveness, are generally emotional/personality battles. Which is very hard to explain in many cases, and very hard to diagnose and discuss, because people can appear normal yet be internally struggling so much. Whereas those with developmental/mental disorder, there are more clear signs. It's also taken more serious, both in the health community and socially.

Once again, suicide risk is more linked to mood disorders and psychotic disorders. Personality disorders (mostly 3 out of the 10 types) come second. Not true. One can easily hide their developmental/mental disorder as well. If anything, I believe personality disorders (especially ones such as Borderline, Antisocial, Paranoid) may have clearer signs than several other mental health problems. Whose fault is it then? For a very long time a diagnosis of personality disorder was a diagnosis of exclusion because of the false belief that they are untreatable. Several professionals also consider them "lesser" than "true" mental illness for one reason or another, hence why the focus is less on them. Moreover, personality disorders are hard to treat, time consuming and carry so much financial costs.

I agree it's the bigger issue, without doubt, because the bottom line is, an ill person with a knife is less destructive than an ill person with a gun. But what we need to strive for is having no ill people with weapons. That needs to be the goal. That's basically what I've been saying. Focusing on one issue isn't the answer.

I'll raise that and say what we need to strive for is having no person with weapons (mainly guns) with no good reason. Right now you can shop online for guns from Walmart. Do you realise how crazy this is? Ill or not, it shouldn't be the case.

Yes, they can, hence most of them do not commit these sorts of crimes, but still, they commit more crimes than those without such illness because they either do not care or are too far gone to empathize and ration. In fact people with personality/emotional distress generally live their lives without ever getting significant treatment or treatment at all. It can be hidden and repressed to a certain degree. That's actually the bad thing. People repress illness which allow them to get worse instead of getting better.

There is this false belief that people with personality disorders lack empathy which is not true at all. Some such as antisocial do lack remorse or empathy but this doesn't hold true for most other personality disorders. Once again, personality disorders go untreated and it's not a fault of the individual. Specialist treatments for personality disorders (or mental illness as a matter of fact) are not widely available or easily accessible. Also it wasn't until recently that the notion held amongst mental health professionals that personality disorders couldn't be treated started to change. People don't repress an illness for the fun of it or to get back at others. They may not be even aware they are ill or they may be but can not access appropriate services. You do not blame people for their mental illnesses. Similarly you shouldn't blame someone because their personality is disordered.

True. This isn't a black and white situation. We don't know the full details regarding the suffering or whatever illness Adam Lanza was going through, or really, anyone with illness, since ultimately, we can't go inside their heads and read their thoughts. All I want is that we don't completely ignore the issue of health. The reality is a society where kids are completely and utterly unsafe is not a healthy society and we need to answer to that.

I'm not denying that people with mental health difficulties do not pose a risk. But just because someone may be ill and goes on a rampage doesn't mean we shouldn't focus at the main problem at hand, which is gun control. What should be done is not filter homicidal maniacs, severely depressed or emotionally distressed individuals. The point is to remove the means by which they can act on their desires. Banning and restricting access to guns won't stop people all shooting. Similarly, enforcing laws against rape won't eliminate all rape but it by no way means there shouldn't be laws against rape.

Your assertion is highly technical, it sound like a selling pitch to someone looking for alternative to assault weapon. You are saying the non- assault weapons, handguns are as effective as assault weapon.


Yes. It makes no difference.


What we care about the number of mass killing incidences and the number of deaths per incidence. That is it.
There is no doubt that assault weapons are more effective at killing large number of people in a shorter time and than regular handguns.
That is why the military prefer them to handguns
The majority of mass killing have occurend using assault weapons.

Military does not use "assault weapons". They use assault RIFLES, which is completely different class of weapons. "Assault weapon" is a COSMETIC definition. It contains things like pistol grip, flash suppressor etc. It does NOT define rate of fire, calibre etc.

Today, two madmen went to two different elementary schools. Each attacked more than 20 kids. The one in the US was using a handgun; 27 people died, including 20 school children. The one in China was using a knife; he stabbed 22 kids, presumably it took him more time to do this than the one in the US. None of the kids in China died.

See the difference? See how this is a gun control issue? There will always be madmen. Since guns are much more dangerous and immediate than any melee weapon, we'd rather have madmen with knifes than guns, thank you very much.

Yes, thank you. America is not the land of the free. It is the land held up at gun point by its own laws and its citizens' misguided and socially-entrenched views regarding said laws. How many times do we need to read about shootings like this in USA? I just did a quick search for lists of previous incidents and these mass gun-related killings are beyond doubt a lot more common in the USA than in Europe. There is a reason for that.

And even if fighting to change these laws stopped just one incident and saved just one life? Wouldn't that still be worth it?

Is the insecurity and need for a whole subsection of society to have their lethal toys worth even one human life?

firearm-related death-rate per 100,000 population in one year. USA has the highest number of Western countries.
All countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

El Salvador 50.36
Jamaica 47.44
United States 9.00
Switzerland 6.4
Canada 4.78
Serbia 3.90
Finland 3.64
France 3.00
Belgium 2.43
Luxembourg 1.81
Norway 1.78
Germany 1.10
Australia 1.04
Spain 0.63
Netherlands 0.46
United Kingdom 0.22
Japan 0.07

Just look at the differences between countries. All has to do with gun politics :shrug:

How many people still need to die before this law gets changed? Just think about all the mass shootings etc. All these families probably would still have their loved ones :tears:

lol when I see guns like that I cannot understand ANYONE that can justify the need to have one of those type of guns. There's not a SINGLE good reason to possess such a gun.

Why? I can think of plenty of good reasons. Such as sports, hunting, Army reservist training etc.

Would say, this gun be less offensive and more acceptable:

http://cdn2.armslist.com/sites/armslist/uploads/posts/2011/12/11/249007_01_remington_700_bdl_222_cal_640.jpg

That's the type of gun Charles Whitman used to kill 13 people. Even though it's not a handgun, "assault weapon" or even semiautomatic.

Mexico Shows That Tight Gun Control Laws Don't Work

http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/11/mexico-as-an-example-that-tighter-gun-co

Mexico has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world. But while drug cartels have well-stocked arsenals, law-abiding citizens struggle to get a permit to own a gun.

Even so, in the seemingly tranquil region of northern Mexico, at the foot of the Sierra Madre Mountains, it’s an open secret that many people have guns for protection.

"Most Mexican families do have guns in their homes, and they’re illegal,” said Alex LeBaron, a Chihuahua state representative and native of the town of LeBaron.

The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey estimated (PDF) in 2007 that Mexicans owned about 15.5 million guns, of which 4.5 million were registered in compliance with the law. As NPR noted in a story on this same issue, Mexico has no real gun-rights movement largely because people don't perceive a need for one:

The director of a pro-gun website called Mexico Armado said there is no popular movement at the moment to liberalize the nation's gun laws. Perhaps, he added, that's because anybody who wants a weapon in Mexico — be they a good guy or a bad guy — has no problem getting one.

The assumption is that most black-market guns come from the United States (and not all of it from the BATF). Though, with the drug cartels arming themselves with military-grade weapons that are distinctly not available north of the border, that's obviously not the only possible source.
Seriously? :spit:
You're talking about Mexico for godsake :o Of course it doesn't work there.

Today, two madmen went to two different elementary schools. Each attacked more than 20 kids. The one in the US was using a handgun; 27 people died, including 20 school children. The one in China was using a knife; he stabbed 22 kids, presumably it took him more time to do this than the one in the US. None of the kids in China died.

See the difference? See how this is a gun control issue? There will always be madmen. Since guns are much more dangerous and immediate than any melee weapon, we'd rather have madmen with knifes than guns, thank you very much.

No I don't see difference, because you're cherrypicking examples and ignoring many school stabbings where children were indeed killed. I might just as well cite a recent school shooting in Finland, where nobody died because assailant's gun jammed at critical moment.

Nobody is denying that in general, guns are more deadly than knives, but it is naive to assume that the problem is just guns, with literally scores of similar events where no guns were involved. Most lethal school attack in history of United States was done without guns.

You could just copy and paste the discussions that followed the previous mass shootings. Every single time, there's a call for tighter laws and every single time, nothing changes. It'll happen again and again and again.

That troll is working so hard today

You could just copy and paste the discussions that followed the previous mass shootings. Every single time, there's a call for tighter laws and every single time, nothing changes. It'll happen again and again and again.

True.
Nothing is going to change and there's going to be plenty more mass shootings etc. in the future. More people going to lose their loved ones.
God bless Merica

You could just copy and paste the discussions that followed the previous mass shootings. Every single time, there's a call for tighter laws and every single time, nothing changes. It'll happen again and again and again.

I just hope there will be a breaking point when everyone says "enough is enough" ....

You could just copy and paste the discussions that followed the previous mass shootings. Every single time, there's a call for tighter laws and every single time, nothing changes. It'll happen again and again and again.

They have hit rockbottom now. Killing small children is as low as it gets (and led to changes in Australia and the UK), but they´d probably have to actually show the classroom with the 20 dead children, their lacerated bodies with bullet holes laying in their own blood and cerebral matter to open some eyes.

They have hit rockbottom now. Killing small children is as low as it gets (and led to changes in Australia and the UK), but they´d probably have to actually show the classroom with the 20 dead children, their lacerated bodies with bullet holes laying in their own blood and cerebral matter to open some eyes.

No way.

I refuse to see the images !

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2012-07-20-Blumenthal-strictergunlaws.png

Gun Control Polls Show Longterm Decline In Support

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/gun-control-polls-aurora-shooting_n_1690169.html


Gun Control Polls

WASHINGTON -- If recent history is a guide, the mass shooting is unlikely to move poll results about guns rights and gun control in any lasting way.

Thirteen years ago, another shooting rampage at Columbine High School produced a brief bump in support for stricter gun laws, but that new support had eroded a year later and ultimately gave way to a longer-term decline.

The Columbine shootings attracted by far the most public interest of any news story in 1999, according to the Pew Research Center. That April week, more than two-thirds of Americans (68 percent) said they had followed the story very closely.

The post-Columbine bump had faded about a year later, and support for stricter gun laws remained roughly constant over the next eight years. Following the 2008 election, however, support for stricter gun laws dropped off considerably. By April 2010, Pew Research found more Americans placing greater importance on protecting the rights of gun owners (49 percent) than on restricting gun ownership (45 percent)

Similar questions tracked by Gallup and the Washington Post and ABC News showed similar patterns. Just after the Columbine shootings, Gallup found 66 percent of Americans saying that laws covering the sale of firearms should be stricter, but by October 2010 the pollster found support for stricter laws had fallen to just 44 percent. Likewise, the Post/ABC poll showed a longterm decline in support for stricter guns laws, dropping from 67 percent in May 1999 to 52 percent in January 2012.

I wonder if the people who defend the right to bear weapons would feel the same way if one of their loved ones were killed by a firearm. Or worse - shot and killed in a massacre such as the tragedy today.

Wake up, America. :help:

I wonder if the people who defend the right to bear weapons would feel the same way if one of their loved ones were killed by a firearm. Or worse - shot and killed in a massacre such as the tragedy today.

Very little chance that is happening.

100 victims of mass shooting a year / 300,000,000 Americans = 0.00003% of Americans are victims of mass shooting a year

SO HippityHop what is Outlawing guns for you?

Simple. It's removing the civilian's right to own a gun.

How many people still need to die before this law gets changed? Just think about all the mass shootings etc. All these families probably would still have their loved ones :tears:

Which law are you talking about? If it's the 2nd amendment to the Constitution I would say that's very unlikely. And even if it is changed to disallow civilian ownership of guns how do you enforce the confiscation of guns without violating the 4th amendment?

Seriously? :spit:
You're talking about Mexico for godsake :o Of course it doesn't work there.

Please elaborate. Are you suggesting that people in Mexico are in some way "different"? :devil:

That troll is working so hard today

If you're not going to contribute, why bother posting at all? We know that you exist.

Gun Control Polls Show Longterm Decline In Support
<snip>


It's pretty obvious this would be the case: gun rights groups campaign only for the sole issue of gun ownership and that issue is what majority of them base their voting decisions. By contrast, anti-gun lobby consists of people to whom guns are only one issue amongst the many. Obviously, first group is going to win long-term. Same thing actually happened in Finland: only major party which took clear pro-gun stance enjoyed a landslide victory in elections, pretty much killing off any signifant talk about further restrictions to gun ownership.

Another reason is that despite all the hysteria, violent crime and murder have seen signifant decline (by over half!) in United States following the last 20 years: http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/20/how-likely-are-you-to-be-a-victim-of-a-m

http://media.reason.com/mc/_external/2012_07/murder-rate-trend-1900-2010.jpg?h=474&w=600

Which law are you talking about? If it's the 2nd amendment to the Constitution I would say that's very unlikely. And even if it is changed to disallow civilian ownership of guns how do you enforce the confiscation of guns without violating the 4th amendment?

then let's change the entire Constitution

Which law are you talking about? If it's the 2nd amendment to the Constitution I would say that's very unlikely. And even if it is changed to disallow civilian ownership of guns how do you enforce the confiscation of guns without violating the 4th amendment?
I was talking about Gun politics in the USA in general. Something needs to change

Please elaborate. Are you suggesting that people in Mexico are in some way "different"? :devil:
Drug wars and high criminality rate

I know Australia isn't USA, but wanted to point out:
In 1996, Australia banned semi-automatics. In the 18 years before, there were 13 mass shootings. Since then, none.

Mexico Shows That Tight Gun Control Laws Don't Work

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/28/AR2010122803644.html



It is a lazy and disingenous exercise to compare the situation with Mexico... social, historically and economically, the US is more related and similar to Canada, why don't you compare these 2 countries instead?

Mexico is a failed cognitive because the country is going through internal power struggles that could well be called civil strife, and great, if not most, part of the guns that are now illegally in Mexican hands come from the US, where they are so easily obtained, unlike in Mexico itself...

then let's change the entire Constitution

I think that there are a lot of people who would like to do that.

It is a lazy and disingenous exercise to compare the situation with Mexico... social, historically and economically, the US is more related and similar to Canada, why don't you compare these 2 countries instead?

Mexico is a failed cognitive because the country is going through internal power struggles that could well be called civil strife, and great, if not most, part of the guns that are now illegally in Mexican hands come from the US, where they are so easily obtained, unlike in Mexico itself...

What is the population of Canada?

There is no point in talking with most Americans regarding gun laws. Most Americans are completely numb to violence, and are so incredibly self-centered and selfish that they don't give one iota of a fuck that our murder rates are horrendous compared to most of the world. Americans are used to it. Nope, they couldn't care less. They just care about their "rights".

That's the real problem. People care more about their "rights" and the government "not telling them what to do", than they do about the safety of our country.

Nancy Lanza was an avid gun collector, collecting guns and having them in the home of a child with developmental issues and emotional disorder(s). Her actions have to come under question, as they are completely irresponsible, and falls in line with the problem gun hawks have-----they don't think about safety. And they don't care, as they are too focused on the gun.

Young people in inner-city communities have to see friends and family die daily. In Richmond, armed robberies happen daily. A young 22 year old man was shot and killed outside his own house by armed robbers over a month ago. This cannot continue, it should not continue, but gun hawks DO NOT CARE about the safety of our citizens.

The NRA is horrible and their defenders are horrible. There is nothing else needed to be said. Horrendous and selfish.

I can understand why people need guns for agricultural purposes and also sporting purposes and in Europe people tend to be allowed them provided they conform to the regulations in place. I grew up on a farm and we had a shotgun that was rarely seen or used but it was licensed and properly stored under Irish regulations.

I don't however understand why people feel entitled to owning semi-automatics and the such which are clearly used for non-sports/agricultural purposes and solely to inflict damage on others. The figures don't lie, guns make it easier to kill someone, its a split second thing that can in some cases (clearly not this one) happen in the heat of the moment. With a knife or strangulation it takes a lot more effort and force on someones part to commit murder, its not just a split second thing like a firing a gun can be.

I do feel though gun laws in the states are a bit like the Imperial system, no matter how much the rest of the world proves them wrong they'll just continue "their way" anyway. :shrug:

I know Australia isn't USA, but wanted to point out:
In 1996, Australia banned semi-automatics. In the 18 years before, there were 13 mass shootings. Since then, none.

And I'd like to point out this is not true (for example, Monash shooting in 2002). Also, firearms homicide rates were in strong decline BEFORE the restrictions.

Today, Aussie sports shooters use guns like these:

cw2I-mzGZvM

I can understand why people need guns for agricultural purposes and also sporting purposes and in Europe people tend to be allowed them provided they conform to the regulations in place. I grew up on a farm and we had a shotgun that was rarely seen or used but it was licensed and properly stored under Irish regulations.

I don't however understand why people feel entitled to owning semi-automatics and the such which are clearly used for non-sports/agricultural purposes and solely to inflict damage on others.

Many shooting sports disciplines use semi-automatics, for example all Olympic pistol disciplines, IPSC etc. Semi-automatics are also widely used in hunting.

History has shown that banning semi-automatics is really pretty pointless exercise, since all what will happen is that people convert or switch their guns to alternative methods like lever-action, straight-pull, pump action etc (see the video above). The difference in "safety to public" this makes is completely marginal and simply not worth the hassle. Remember, buyback programs are very expensive: State can't just go around confiscating property from people at will.

December 14, 2012
NEWTOWN AND THE MADNESS OF GUNS (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html)
Posted by Adam Gopnik



After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.

Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.

All of that is a truth, plain and simple, and recognized throughout the world. At some point, this truth may become so bloody obvious that we will know it, too. Meanwhile, congratulate yourself on living in the child-gun-massacre capital of the known universe.



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html#ixzz2F94UFLD5

Some individuals are predisposed to several disorders. You don't have to come from a broken family to develop mental health difficulties.Know that, which is why I said "at-risk" and "immutable", there are people who are immutably at-risk to develop disorder.

So whilst it's true that an invalidating environment aggravates the risk, it's not the sole cause of personality disorder. Not every individual with a diagnosis of personality disorder suffered sexual abuse, trauma, etc. in their childhood.No, but is there a correlation? Yes. And it goes both ways, if not, even more that people with disorder are abused, rather than people who are abused become disordered. No, what happens more often are that kids show signs of developmental problems, of emotional/personality issues, and they are not taken care of appropriately, and are taken advantage of.

But it's not this simple. It's not easy to assess someone and the risk she/he may pose to her/himself or others. As I said mental illness and personality disorders are far too complex to be "easily spotted" and kept in check.There are usually signs. It's not appropriate to play doctor, obviously, it's not something we SHOULD be doing, but there are signs. I know there are signs because I've been in a situation personally where someone I knew and to this day am good friends with, was having internalized problems, was very up and down emotionally, was tense, could smile and look happy yet I knew he wasn't. To get to the meat of the story, I stepped in, as did another friend Casey, and we talked to him and were a helping hand for him as he was dealing with his issues. Today, he is going to counseling and takes medication and is doing well and is the friend I love again, one that is not hurting anymore.

There are signs. Social isolation. Impulsiveness. Anger. Withdrawn. Awkwardness. Alcohol/Drug abuse. Emotional fragility. Manic. Mood swings. Aggressiveness. Manipulative/shady/those who take advantage of others.

There are definitely signs. Social isolation is the biggest sign and consistently, people who are socially isolated or they are unhappy with their surroundings, are the ones who commit mass murders. The problem is most people show these signs and it's almost impossible to pinpoint these signs as the symptoms of a disorder.

Substance abuse commonly co-occurs in people with mental disorders including Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and other mood disorders. It's not exclusive to those with emotional/personality problems. So it is not just "heavily connected" to emotional illness.Again, I know that, and my comment wasn't stating substance abuse=emotional illness. It was more emotional illness=substance abuse. Generally, people do drugs to either feel better or remove themselves from whatever situation they're in, they use it as a coping mechanism. Peer pressure is another common reason. There is usually underlying distress connected to abusing drugs and alcohol.

But yes, substance abuse is common in those with mental disorders as well. So maybe I should just say health, instead. People who are internally unhealthy, internally struggling, often end up abusing alcohol and drugs.

I mentioned psychopathy in relation to the Ted Bundy reference. I know antisocial personality differs from psychopathy, I didn't claim otherwise.Ted Bundy was a psychopath but he was also anti-social and had manic depressive disorder as well. His anti-social disorder and depression and trauma led to him developing compulsive, psychopathic behavior. He had a horrendous childhood and it at the very least exacerbated underlying issues, if not developed them.

What are the causes of these crimes then? People with personality disorders also experience other kinds of mental health difficulties. Making a clear cut distinction between mental illness and personality disorders is not simple. That's right, which is why I'm not making a clear distinction. Of course there is overlap regarding personality/emotional/mental illness. I'm more talking about the base issue. The base issue in most mass murders is emotional/personality illness. Which unresolved, leads to mental illness.

In reference to the emotionally unstable personality for example, whilst it is classified as a personality disorder, evidence suggests a biological and genetic cause similar to "true" mental illnesses such as Bipolar. Several scientists suggested it to be reclassified as a mental illness because there is more to it than just maladaptive patterns of behaviours. This is also the reason why the new version of the DSM is dropping the "axis" that distinguished mental disorders from personality disorders. Do you see what I'm trying to illustrate here?I do. I'm sorry you got the impression I was drawing clear lines between personality/emotional/mental illness. They are very much cross-wired in many ways. Let's say........anxiety. An emotional/personal illness. But often the illness is as a result of mental disorder.

I get it completely.

Once again, suicide risk is more linked to mood disorders and psychotic disorders. #1 reason people commit suicide is distress and/or depression. By a wide margin. People who have psychosis often become distressed as a result of their psychosis which leads to them essentially talking themselves into committing suicide. Usually they don't actually want to commit suicide, and become depressed at the thoughts they're having regarding suicide. They may think they want to commit it, but it's an episode they're having that is causing those feelings.

I know what I'm talking about. I'd like it if you didn't talk to me as if I don't know anything.

Personality disorders (mostly 3 out of the 10 types) come second. Not true. One can easily hide their developmental/mental disorder as well. If anything, I believe personality disorders (especially ones such as Borderline, Antisocial, Paranoid) may have clearer signs than several other mental health problems. I disagree because most people have shown once in their lives where they have emotional/personality issues. Most people can display paranoid behavior, anxiety, depression, inconsistency in terms of thought/emotion. Let me make an example: bipolar disorder. My aunt had a severe case of bipolar disorder. My aunt would be happy, smiling in one second, and then literally, the smallest thing could set her off and she'd become enraged. Usually while crying. She would be cheery and happy but deep inside, she knew it (we've talked about it together) was fake, and that she was truly depressed and upset at the world. She was impulsive, went through partners (she is a lesbian), she got in a motorcycle incident while drunk and not riding a helmet, she was an alcoholic and compulsive smoker. Then when you think, this is a mental disorder that causes emotional/personality distress. As we said above, we can't pinpoint these illness as simply an emotional illness, a personality or mental illness. At the end of the day, it's an illness.

Whose fault is it then? For a very long time a diagnosis of personality disorder was a diagnosis of exclusion because of the false belief that they are untreatable. Several professionals also consider them "lesser" than "true" mental illness for one reason or another, hence why the focus is less on them.This is all very true. And much of this entire mentality is that, people think mental illness=insane. And the insane people need to be treated, they may kill people.

Emotional issues aren't seen that way. People tend to believe those with personality/emotional issues can actually deal with their issues, and that it's untreatable because, ultimately, a person can control their emotional issues. And they usually can't because, as we know, the emotional issues usually develop into mental issues, or are immutably connected to mental issues. Hopefully this mentality begins to change.

Moreover, personality disorders are hard to treat, time consuming and carry so much financial costs.Personality/emotional illness is definitely harder to treat, and there is less money to be made off of individuals with personality/emotional illness. That's why it's ignored. It's also because people with personality/emotional distress are usually told to get over it. People who are depressed, people who have anxiety. Are told to simply deal with their emotions and their feelings.

I'll raise that and say what we need to strive for is having no person with weapons (mainly guns) with no good reason. Right now you can shop online for guns from Walmart. Do you realise how crazy this is? Ill or not, it shouldn't be the case.Good point. It is ridiculous, and we need to definitely do away with the militarization aspect of the USA and this disconnection we have towards guns and violence.

There is this false belief that people with personality disorders lack empathy which is not true at all. Some such as antisocial do lack remorse or empathy but this doesn't hold true for most other personality disorders. I know this, and I was specifically talking about *some* who are anti-social. Some, not most, or even close to most. Like I said, most people with personality/emotional disorders are NOT lacking empathy and rationality, and in fact, the opposite is true. They in fact are VERY feeling and that's the problem, they are out of control. Their personal/emotional responses are unhealthy, they are impulsive and acting out of hate and pain.

Once again, personality disorders go untreated and it's not a fault of the individual. Specialist treatments for personality disorders (or mental illness as a matter of fact) are not widely available or easily accessible. I never once implied blame on those with personality disorders. And the entire health industry is pathetic in the USA and many countries, and is an ignored topic, and incredibly expensive and hard to enter. Not to mention, many doctors who specialize in these areas take advantage of their vulnerable clients.

Also it wasn't until recently that the notion held amongst mental health professionals that personality disorders couldn't be treated started to change. People don't repress an illness for the fun of it or to get back at others.Of course.

They may not be even aware they are ill or they may be but can not access appropriate services. You do not blame people for their mental illnesses. Similarly you shouldn't blame someone because their personality is disordered. And I haven't. And due to the fact, yet again, personality illness is often cross-wired with emotional and mental illness, there is little reason to be accepting of one form of illness and not accepting of the other form of illness.

I'm not denying that people with mental health difficulties do not pose a risk. But just because someone may be ill and goes on a rampage doesn't mean we shouldn't focus at the main problem at hand, which is gun control.No, it means you're ignoring the general health of the country to focus on guns. Guns or no guns, an unhealthy society is an unhealthy society. Yes, we need extremely strict gun laws and that is something that is more readily and easily fixed than fixing society, and fixing issues containing to mental health issues. But we can work on BOTH and focus on BOTH at the same time. It's not a one or the other issue. It's bullshit to believe it has to be one or the other.

What should be done is not filter homicidal maniacs, severely depressed or emotionally distressed individuals. The point is to remove the means by which they can act on their desires.Yes. But then we also need to diagnose why they would do something like this in the first place. Because if it's not a gun, it will be a knife, suicide, a car, a bomb. The end goal should be a healthy society, and that's what people are forgetting and not seemingly understanding because they're focused on the quick fix. The quick fix doesn't solve the problem.

Banning and restricting access to guns won't stop people all shooting. Similarly, enforcing laws against rape won't eliminate all rape but it by no way means there shouldn't be laws against rape.True. Banning and restricting access to guns won't stop shooting, but it will dramatically reduce it, and that's why we need a national law implementing comprehensive screening of guns and of people who attempt to buy guns, banning access to guns in retail stores and online, banning guns from anyone with a felony, banning guns from anyone under 21, comprehensive movement towards destroying illegal gun trade and the black market gun industry, and so forth. There need to be strict gun laws, but there also needs to be a conversation regarding why our kids aren't safe, and that is not simply because of guns.

Also, I have to say, you're pretty condescending and I don't like how you put words in my mouth and talk down to me. I'm not a fucking idiot. Show a little bit more respect. Thanks :)

Tougher gun laws seem unlikely even after school shooting (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gun-control-20121215,0,2113370.story)


Friday's massacre at a Connecticut elementary school prompts gun control advocates to press for legislation. But political observers from both parties doubt anything major will be done.


A National Park Service employee lowers flags at the base of the Washington Monument to half-staff on President Obama’s orders. The president also called for “meaningful action” in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting. (Win McNamee, Getty Images / December 14, 2012)


By Richard Simon and Danielle Ryan, Los Angeles Times
December 15, 2012
WASHINGTON — Another mass shooting, another drive for gun control. But will the latest shooting — this time at an elementary school — change the political calculus in Washington and generate more support for tougher gun laws?

"I think the impact of this is going to be inescapable," said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center.

The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., is among the worst shootings in the nation's history and comes after a spate of other high-profile episodes of violence, including mass shootings this year at a Colorado movie theater, a Wisconsin temple and an Oregon shopping mall. The rampage in Connecticut left 27 dead, 20 of them children ages 5 to 10. The shooter then killed himself.

But although the tender age of the victims brought tears to President Obama's eyes and an assertion from him that "We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics," political observers from both parties were doubtful that anything major would be done.

"You think Social Security is the third rail of politics, try guns," said a Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Congress, far from being inclined to tighten gun laws, allowed an assault weapons ban to lapse in 2004.

"You have Republicans getting a lot of push-back from the base on a number of issues, such as agreeing to tax increases and compromising on immigration. Throwing the 2nd Amendment and gun rights into the mix would be devastating to the party," said a congressional Republican staffer, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the issue.

Opposition comes not just from Republicans. A number of Democrats have been skittish about the issue, contending that Al Gore's support for gun control cost him votes in rural states in the 2000 presidential election.

White House spokesman Jay Carney steered clear of the issue when asked about it Friday, saying it was a day for mourning, not policy debates. That stance immediately drew criticism from the left, and gun control advocates moved swiftly to ratchet up the pressure on Obama.

"If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control ... I don't know when is," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.).

"President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown. But the country needs him to send a bill to Congress," New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said.

About 200 protesters calling for immediate action appeared outside the White House, some carrying placards that read, "Today: Sandy Hook. Tomorrow?"

"Condolences don't work," said Pastor Michael McBridge of Oakland. What will work is "action now," he said.

"We've had enough," added Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a leading gun control advocate who sponsored the now-lapsed federal ban on assault weapons, has said she plans to make a new effort to revive the measure.

Adam Lanza, whom sources identified as the school shooter, was armed with three semiautomatic weapons, all legally registered to his parents: a Bushmaster .223 rifle —similar to the military's M-16 rifle — that he left in his mother's car before the shooting, and a Sig Sauer pistol and a Glock 9-millimeter, according to a federal law enforcement source. The source described them as heavy-firepower weapons with rapid triggers.

"Both are able to inflict heavy damage," said the source, who asked not to be named because the investigation was ongoing.

Brendan Daly, a former House Democratic leadership aide, was pessimistic that the latest shooting would lead to real change but hopeful it would at least lead to a debate about the nation's gun laws.

"We have been through this too many times before — Columbine; Virginia Tech; Aurora, Colo., and so many others — and nothing has happened," he said. "It is so frustrating. If we can't act after a classroom of kindergartners was mowed down, I don't know when we will. It will take real leadership from the president and the Congress to oppose the gun lobby."

Phil English, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, expects Congress to take up the issue of school safety but is more doubtful about major gun control legislation.

"We've already passed gun-free school legislation," he said. "There has got to be a response to these incidents, but it probably should be a response other than putting old wine back in old bottles."

Still, some advocates are hopeful that Obama will push more aggressively for gun control now that the November election is behind him.

Polls have shown the public divided over the issue. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted after the July movie theater shooting in Aurora found no significant change in public opinion, with 47% of respondents saying it is more important to control gun ownership and 46% saying it is more important to protect gun rights.

A spokesman for the National Rifle Assn. declined to comment on gun control legislation "until the facts are thoroughly known."

richard.simon@latimes.com

Times staff writer Richard A. Serrano in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Many shooting sports disciplines use semi-automatics, for example all Olympic pistol disciplines, IPSC etc. Semi-automatics are also widely used in hunting.

History has shown that banning semi-automatics is really pretty pointless exercise, since all what will happen is that people convert or switch their guns to alternative methods like lever-action, straight-pull, pump action etc (see the video above). The difference in "safety to public" this makes is completely marginal and simply not worth the hassle. Remember, buyback programs are very expensive: State can't just go around confiscating property from people at will.
You keep defending flagrant access of guns and gun properties. Such a mentality is unhealthy and disgusting. Stop making excuses, guns are a problem. And it's an easily solvable problem in theory. The reason it is difficult in practice is because no-one wants to pay to end this horrific violence, as they are being payed to continue it.

There's no safety in our vast numbers of guns (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1216-lopez-guns-20121216,0,4562115.column)

Even as the toll of violence mounts, Americans' love of firearms keeps growing and lawmakers remain cowed by the gun lobby.

By Steve Lopez
December 16, 2012

In 2009, when I was trying to figure out why gun sales were so brisk, I visited a couple of gun shops in Riverside and Corona.

Back then, part of the reason people were arming themselves, they told me, was that President Obama had recently taken office, and they feared that he would crack down on gun ownership. A Riverside gun shop owner said he wasn't sure whether or not Obama was a Muslim, and if by chance someone took a shot at him, there could be rioting. People wanted to make sure they were armed and ready for war.
:weirdo:
In Corona, another gun shop owner told me that "once private gun ownership is eliminated, there's nothing to stop the government from doing what it wants to do."

He seemed pretty sure we were headed in that direction, but gun ownership is never going to be eliminated in this country. We love guns. We have more than 300 million of them, which is nearly one for every man, woman and child. In 2010, nearly 5.5 million firearms were manufactured in this country, 95% of them for the U.S. market.

And our support for guns just keeps growing. In 1969, Gallup reported that 60% of Americans supported a ban on handguns. In 2011, a Gallup poll found that only 26% wanted a ban.

It doesn't matter how many thousands of lives are lost (between 2001 and 2010, about 270,000 U.S. residents died in shootings, including homicide, suicide and accidents). And it doesn't seem to matter how many mass killings there are, like the one Friday at the elementary school in Connecticut.

This year, there were mass killings at a mall in Oregon, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and a movie theater in Colorado.

We shudder at the horror, we call for prayer, we say something's got to be done, and then we move on.

In 2010, a week after U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded and six people were killed by a shooter who fired 31 rounds into a Tucson crowd, thousands of people attended a Tucson gun show. Some of them purchased semiautomatic handguns like the one Jared Loughner used on Giffords and the others.

In this country, you can legally buy assault weapons. What does that say about us?

Think about it. We have a national legislative body that fears the clout of the National Rifle Assn. more than it worries about the consequences of allowing people to buy weapons designed for war.

There used to be a federal ban on assault weapons, but it died in 2004. And Congress has not found the will to reinstate it. On Friday, referring to Connecticut, President Obama said it was time for "meaningful action," but he didn't explain what he meant by that.

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) used the Connecticut shooting to remind Californians on Friday that a gun control bill of his died this year in Sacramento. California has a ban on automatic weapons, and SB 249 would have closed a loophole that makes it possible for gun owners to use devices that allow weapons to be quickly and easily reloaded. But a legislative committee suggested the matter should be reviewed administratively, by the attorney general, rather than legislatively.

The gun lobby had pulled out all the heavy artillery against SB 249, which was supported by the California Medical Assn. and the California Nurses Assn. Yee said he was flooded with racist, vulgar and derisive comments and caricatures, and that some of his critics told him to go back to China.

Yee told me he thinks most gun owners are responsible people who respect the power of their weapons and don't abuse that deadly potential. But in its zeal, he said, the gun lobby lets deadly weapons fall into the hands of less-responsible citizens.

"For God's sake," Yee pleaded, "how many people have to die before you come to your senses?"

I checked Friday with Annie Get Your Gun, the Corona shop I visited in 2009. Owner Jerry Fried told me sales are up about 35% this year over last, with customers buying firearms for home protection or recreational shooting. His wife, Annie, said it's been particularly brisk during the holiday season.

"People are buying Christmas gifts," said Annie, who noted a run on rifles.

I also dropped in to Turner's Outdoorsman in Pasadena. Several customers had taken numbers, like you do at a deli, and were waiting for their turn at the gun counter. A sign warned that it was the last day to buy a gun and have the paperwork completed before Christmas. I flipped through the store's holiday flier and counted 114 discounted guns, rifles and shotguns.

A shopper who declined to give his name said he was getting his wife a gun for Christmas, and that she'd be using it for recreational shooting. He hadn't heard about the massacre in Connecticut, but I told him a few details and asked if he thought the latest tragedy might bring new calls for more gun control.

"Whether a gun is legal or not, if bad guys want to get it, they'll get it," said the shopper. "You can legislate all you want, and it's not going to stop the bad guys."

I suspect he's right, but that doesn't mean we're helpless to do the things that might make us a little safer.

The vast majority of gun violence does not involve people with mental health issues. But when mental health services are in short supply for many people, guns are nearly as easy to buy as garden tools, and violence is used to sell music, movies and video games, the shocking thing is that we don't have more tragedies like Connecticut.

When I left the gun shop in Pasadena, I noticed that right next door is a place called My Gym, a children's fitness center.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

You keep defending flagrant access of guns and gun properties. Such a mentality is unhealthy and disgusting. Stop making excuses, guns are a problem. And it's an easily solvable problem in theory. The reason it is difficult in practice is because no-one wants to pay to end this horrific violence, as they are being payed to continue it.

Oh, please tell me how it is "easily solvable problem in theory". :lol:

Lets say you somehow manage to ban semi-automatic weapons. Lets say your country of ten million people have 1 million semi-automatic weapons. Half of them modify their gun to some other operating method, rest of them will sell their gun for the State via buyback program. So you buy 500 000 guns for lets say $1000 each. That program costs your nation $500 million dollars.

But that's not all, since you also have to buy back things like optical sights, ammo, magazines etc: after all they have little to no value in free markets if the sports they're used are banned. That'll cost you another $100 million (wild guess). Also, the program's execution itself is not cheap. Whole bonanza probably costs you $700 million dollars.

Then it all comes down to: "do I save more lives by banning guns, or using that money for something else like health care?"

Many shooting sports disciplines use semi-automatics, for example all Olympic pistol disciplines, IPSC etc. Semi-automatics are also widely used in hunting.

History has shown that banning semi-automatics is really pretty pointless exercise, since all what will happen is that people convert or switch their guns to alternative methods like lever-action, straight-pull, pump action etc (see the video above). The difference in "safety to public" this makes is completely marginal and simply not worth the hassle. Remember, buyback programs are very expensive: State can't just go around confiscating property from people at will.
it's not about banning any particular kind of a gun but about control. if you want a gun you should need a licence and you should need to apply for it, not just buy it anywhere. in that way people who want to have guns can be monitored. there are people who need weapons, noone is denying that.

guns definitely do a lot of damage because the threashold to use them tends to be low in senseless situations, like when you have an argument with someone, feel down and want to commit suicide or are generally fucked up. i think the incident in china showed easily that there is a difference between going mad with a gun and going mad with a knife. not to mention accidents. it is in these situations that gun control can be useful.

i also don't understand people who say we should all have guns in order to defend ourselves. i would hesitate to use a gun because i don't want to kill another human, even the one that's attacking me. i am not convinced most of the people would be prepared to use a gun even in self-defence easily, while someone who attacks you might. however, just thinking that everyone might have a gun might make me (and the attackers) more trigger-happy. shoot first, ask questions later. i clearly prefer the police to take care of my safety.

and i think we would be safer even with the thought that criminals have firearms. they don't use them irrationally for the most part. if you work in a bank and a group of armed robbers walk in and put a gun to your head and demand money, give it to them. they won't kill you unless you try to play a "hero". and when gang members kill each other ordinary people for the most part are not affected.

gun control won't reduce the number of murders in gang wars and criminal activities. it will reduce the number of irrational murders, suicides and accidents. irrational murders (and murder attempts), suicides (and suicide attempts) and accidents happen for other reasons too but guns make them more deadly.

i also can't believe some people in the us think guns protect them from a potentially oppressive government :facepalm: in the unlikely case that the us goes fascist i suspect such people would quite sheepishly support their government anyoway and in case they wouldn't their weapons would be useless against the us army that would be used against them.

and the immigration argument is the most ridiculous of all. noone wants to move to the us because of its gun laws or because they think they are moving to a flawless country :lol:

Usually, treating people who are ill like they are ill is actually not the answer. Instead cognitive behavioral therapy is the answer. Changing a persons' view of maladaptive thinking instead of directly trying to change the thinking. You don't want to dismiss a persons' feelings, but their feelings need to be controlled in a more healthy way. It's not that their way of thinking is unhealthy, but it's their attitude towards their way of thinking. That's why calling people with emotional/personal illness even ill, really isn't the answer. I use the term unhealthy instead. Stigmatization isn't the answer.

When thousands of an angry mob violently attack your store, like during the LA Riots.

are you effing insane? This is a RIFFLE! You don't defend yourself with a riffle! Rioters are rarely armed (and would be even less if there would be gun control in place). Defending the citizens is the police job, not the store owners. Store owners who are stupid enough to go attack a bunch of rioters with that kind of weapons deserve to go to jail. As far as I know, there is no major riots every months either.

Oh, please tell me how it is "easily solvable problem in theory". :lol:

Lets say you somehow manage to ban semi-automatic weapons. Lets say your country of ten million people have 1 million semi-automatic weapons. Half of them modify their gun to some other operating method, rest of them will sell their gun for the State via buyback program. So you buy 500 000 guns for lets say $1000 each. That program costs your nation $500 million dollars.

But that's not all, since you also have to buy back things like optical sights, ammo, magazines etc: after all they have little to no value in free markets if the sports they're used are banned. That'll cost you another $100 million (wild guess). Also, the program's execution itself is not cheap. Whole bonanza probably costs you $700 million dollars.

Then it all comes down to: "do I save more lives by banning guns, or using that money for something else like health care?"We save more lives by banning guns. But again, you're highlighting the problem. The gun industry=money. Taking that way isn't something legislators want accordingly. They like money. They like money more than they care about the safety of their citizens. That's the big issue. The underground gun industry isn't going to stop, they'll move out of the country if anything and then continue their black market tradings in Mexico. Delete that, you're deleting money. So I get it completely. It's all a money game and we have to decide whether we care more about dead bodies or cash.

Mass murders are WAY more likely to occur in suburban, small towns. In fact, the majority of urban centers are actually more safe in terms of not being threatened by someone with a gun or knife randomly. The primary reason is social order and social isolation. Basically, people fall through the cracks more often in smaller towns. Also, people are more conservative in these towns, and conservatism leads to repression as well as lack of avenues for people to seek help, or seek a community, they feel comfortable in. This is why you hear most of these types of crimes happen in towns you may never had heard of, where it's "not supposed to happen". People are less vigil, and it's easier to be invisible when you're ill. As well it's easier to commit crime and walk around with weaponry and not get caught. There are also generally less safety protections in place because people don't think such crime can occur in their neighborhoods.

No, but is there a correlation? Yes. And it goes both ways, if not, even more that people with disorder are abused, rather than people who are abused become disordered. No, what happens more often are that kids show signs of developmental problems, of emotional/personality issues, and they are not taken care of appropriately, and are taken advantage of.

There IS a correlation but not everyone who has been traumatized, neglected, abused, etc. develop these disorders. It's a combination of factors.

There are definitely signs. Social isolation is the biggest sign and consistently, people who are socially isolated or they are unhappy with their surroundings, are the ones who commit mass murders. The problem is most people show these signs and it's almost impossible to pinpoint these signs as the symptoms of a disorder.

Exactly. Most people show signs such as social isolation but this doesn't mean they're on their way to becoming mass murderers. You can dislike your surrounding without having homicidal thoughts. You simply dislike them. Pathologizing these behaviours because it deviates from what is considered "normal" is very easy yet what is usually forgotten is examining why it happens. Personality disorders are partly products of society. Despite this, you commonly see people walking around with the dichotomy of them and us when it's known that almost everyone will experience emotional and mental health difficulties some time in their lives.

Ted Bundy was a psychopath but he was also anti-social and had manic depressive disorder as well. His anti-social disorder and depression and trauma led to him developing compulsive, psychopathic behavior. He had a horrendous childhood and it at the very least exacerbated underlying issues, if not developed them.

True but what it illustrates is it takes more than just a horrendous childhood to develop psychopathic behaviour. Placing the blame on parents is not going to solve the problems. Different factors come in to play for it to happen. Unlike physical health, there is a long way to go before underlying causes and factors are fully discovered. You'll often find a research that a disorder is caused by XYZ and then another research that negates it and suggests it's caused by ABC. It's not simple as drawing a blood sample to identify pathology in one's mind or behaviour. Treatment for mental health difficulties is not fully developed either. So whilst in an ideal world we should be looking at both gun control and healthier society, it's not simple. Until there's advancement in the field of mental health, we shouldn't be sitting around not doing anything about guns just because there'll always be homicidal maniacs lurking around and if it's not a gun, then it'll be a knife. The issue should still be tackled.

I disagree because most people have shown once in their lives where they have emotional/personality issues. Most people can display paranoid behavior, anxiety, depression, inconsistency in terms of thought/emotion. Let me make an example: bipolar disorder. My aunt had a severe case of bipolar disorder. My aunt would be happy, smiling in one second, and then literally, the smallest thing could set her off and she'd become enraged. Usually while crying. She would be cheery and happy but deep inside, she knew it (we've talked about it together) was fake, and that she was truly depressed and upset at the world. She was impulsive, went through partners (she is a lesbian), she got in a motorcycle incident while drunk and not riding a helmet, she was an alcoholic and compulsive smoker. Then when you think, this is a mental disorder that causes emotional/personality distress. As we said above, we can't pinpoint these illness as simply an emotional illness, a personality or mental illness. At the end of the day, it's an illness.

The definition of personality disorder states consistency across different situations. You don't get diagnosed with one if you display some of the symptoms once in a while. If this was the case, most of the population would be diagnosed with one or more. Also, regarding your aunt, her behaviour is similar to one who may have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. They exhibit these very same symptoms and behaviours. I'm not saying your aunt has this disorder. What I'm trying to say is you can often see the distress a person is experiencing due to their personality disorders as well.

This is all very true. And much of this entire mentality is that, people think mental illness=insane. And the insane people need to be treated, they may kill people.

Emotional issues aren't seen that way. People tend to believe those with personality/emotional issues can actually deal with their issues, and that it's untreatable because, ultimately, a person can control their emotional issues. And they usually can't because, as we know, the emotional issues usually develop into mental issues, or are immutably connected to mental issues. Hopefully this mentality begins to change.

We've got a long way to go before attitude towards mental health difficulties changes. This is where a problem arises. Looking at emotional or personality issues like it's on the same vein as alcohol/addiction issues is not a right approach. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is a very insensitive thing to say to someone with emotional and/or personality problems. One may think because it's not a "chemical thing" an individual can deal with it but the individual doesn't want to. I'll bet my bottom dollar that those individuals don't "not want to", it's the opposite. They very much do but can't or find it hard for several reasons.

No, it means you're ignoring the general health of the country to focus on guns. Guns or no guns, an unhealthy society is an unhealthy society. Yes, we need extremely strict gun laws and that is something that is more readily and easily fixed than fixing society, and fixing issues containing to mental health issues. But we can work on BOTH and focus on BOTH at the same time. It's not a one or the other issue. It's bullshit to believe it has to be one or the other.

I am not ignoring the general health of the country. All I'm saying is it's easier to focus on guns, even in the short-term to take some actions to reduce casualties than focus on mental health which is very complicated and is going to take longer to tackle. I'm not saying forget about mental health. I'm saying do something about the guns first and foremost then examine why these incidents happen in the first place and come up with a way to intervene early so as to not cause more of this.

Also, I have to say, you're pretty condescending and I don't like how you put words in my mouth and talk down to me. I'm not a fucking idiot. Show a little bit more respect. Thanks

I wasn't. :confused: When I used terms such as "you" I wasn't referring to you personally. I was speaking generally. Several comments of yours began with "I know this" or "I never said that". I am not attacking you if that's what you think. I wasn't talking down to you nor was I treating you like a fucking idiot. I can't help how you perceive things but I can tell you it's not intentional.

I wasn't. :confused: When I used terms such as "you" I wasn't referring to you personally. I was speaking generally. Several comments of yours began with "I know this" or "I never said that". I am not attacking you if that's what you think. I wasn't talking down to you nor was I treating you like a fucking idiot. I can't help how you perceive things but I can tell you it's not intentional.
I'm sorry then, I apologize. I shouldn't have judged negatively. In fact, I shouldn't have judged at all, I am in complete error. It makes sense now when you state you were speaking in generalities.

THE NEWTOWN SHOOTING: KINDERGARTENERS AND COURAGE (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/12/the-newtown-shooting-kindergarteners-and-courage.html)
Posted by Amy Davidson

[Updated at 1 P.M.]

“I heard something like someone was kicking on a door,” a little boy, a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, near Newtown, Connecticut, told a reporter for NBC. He said that bullets were “whizzing by” him in the hallway, but “a teacher pulled me into her room” before one hit him. “The gym teachers told us to go in the corner and we huddled,” another said. “We were in the gym and I heard really loud bangs,’’ a third boy, a nine-year-old, told the Times. “And we heard yelling, and we heard gunshots. We heard lots of gunshots…. We had to go into the closet in the gym. Then someone came and told us to run down the hallway.” The children ran, some with their eyes closed, and made it out.
By then, twenty of the children who had arrived at school that morning were dead, along with six grownups who worked there—that is a preliminary count—and the shooter, a twenty-year-old man named Adam Lanza, and his mother, Nancy Lanza; he’d apparently killed her before coming to the school. (Earlier reports had named his older brother, Ryan; said that their father was dead; and also described their mother as a teacher at the school.) “The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten years old,” President Obama said in a press conference. And then he began to cry.

This is one of the worst school shootings in the history of a country that has had plenty of them. The images from Newtown are hard to shake: the children comforting each other, the parents for whom comfort now must feel useless; the seventeen-year-old who lived near enough to hear the shots and came running, looking for his nine-year-old sister. A teacher leading a line of students, many of them crying, but each, with the orderliness of the very young, with hands on the shoulder of the child ahead. Other children had been told to find a buddy before making a break for it, and did. They were brave. The contrast here is not only between the civility of the children and the cruelty of the shooter, but between what was asked of them at this moment and how little the public and elected officials ask of themselves when it comes to doing something about gun violence. (One of the first questions was not just what kind of gun Lanza had but how many: three, a Glock, a Sig Sauer, an M4.) How do we find ourselves asking kindergarteners to be more courageous in the face of a gunman than politicians are in the face of the gun lobby?

Here is the difference guns make: A man comes to kill his mother. He shoots her and then drives to a school in town for kindergarteners through fourth graders, and gets past the security system—how is not yet clear. On his way down the hall, he turns his weapon on the principal. He finds a room filled with first-graders. He pulls the trigger and keeps shooting until many children are dead. He finds another classroom and does it again. Then he shoots himself.

In what sort of state of rage and nothingness do you have to be to take even one of those steps? Adam Lanza moved from one to another for reasons we will be sorting out for a long time, maybe forever, and the narrative is still jumbled, as the conflicting reports and updates (including to this post) have shown. His mother is dead, and by the time the shooting stopped, so was he. The impulse and the guilt appear to be his alone. But a gun, with the momentum of shot after shot, the continuity of a round of bullets, gives such crimes more force. (As I noted in a post on the Jovan Belcher case, ninety-two per cent of domestic-violence murder-suicides involve guns.) Guns extend the reach of violence, and, with our national silence on senseless gun laws, so do we. Guns make it easier for a killer. They make it impossibly hard for parents who arrive, dazed and pleading, at the firehouse in Connecticut where the surviving schoolchildren were taken, and don’t find the one they were looking for there.



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/12/the-newtown-shooting-kindergarteners-and-courage.html#ixzz2F9jzzvvF

December 15, 2012
CHINA WATCHES NEWTOWN: GUNS AND AMERICAN CREDIBILITY (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/12/china-watches-newtown-guns-american-credibility.html)
Posted by Evan Osnos

The children of Chengping were still filtering into the local elementary school on Friday morning, China time, when a deranged thirty-six-year-old man named Min Yingjun entered the campus. He carried a knife. (China bans private gun ownership.) By the time the security guards got to him, he had wounded twenty-two children and one adult. All survived. China, like most places, had seen this kind of madness before: one especially heavy string of school attacks in 2010 killed nearly twenty people and wounded more than fifty. The killers are as hard to recall in their particulars as they deserve.

A few hours later, on the other side of the globe, when Adam Lanza entered a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, the particulars of his motive were unknown and, in the long run, beside the point. The point was that he carried not a knife but two semiautomatic handguns—a Sig Sauer and a Glock—and a rifle on par with those used by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the time he killed himself, he had killed twenty children and seven other adults, many of them at point-blank range. Only one person that he shot has survived.

As an American overseas for the last ten years, I’ve watched as other countries struggle with the curious fact that the most prosperous, successful, and emulated civilization the world has ever seen lives with the certainty that every few months one of its troubled citizens will casually acquire the tools to massacre a large group of his neighbors: shoppers in a mall, moviegoers, voters meeting their congresswoman, a kindergarten full of children. Even to those who desperately want to be American, this special brand of American madness lies not in the banal fact that deranged men attack children, but in the shame that the rest of us, all of us, allow our laws to enable it. “This is heartbreaking,” one Chinese commentator wrote after the Newtown attack. “Shootings keep happening, people keep dying, but you never see the government or regular people standing up for gun control. Don’t they see the inevitable cause and effect?”

One of the arguments that authoritarian governments use to ward off the call for greater political freedom is to argue that American-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy. They point to American voters who depend on government benefits but denounce the prospect of tax increases to keep up with the costs. Defenders of China’s non-democratic system point out that even as the United States is lashed by growing effects of climate change, we have failed to compel our elected leaders to do much of anything about it. Over the years, I’ve grown used to these arguments, and my response has rarely wavered: Sure, we might make dumb choices sometimes, but we will defend, to the end, the right to make choices at all, because we believe that our collective conscience, freely expressed, will eventually lead us in the right direction. When it comes to guns, it is getting harder to muster that argument abroad. Every new shooting, every new failure of will and citizenship, slashes another hole in our credibility as a way of life.

After the Newtown attack, a Chinese commentator with a nationalist bent wrote, “When I see these democratic elites pretending to condemn the murderer, it seems absurd. You are the people who sustain the gun policy. You are also the people who condemn the shooter.” And another:

As the ‘free, democratic, human-rights-based’ land of heaven, the one that has lectured other countries everyday for a hundred years about ‘freedom, democracy, and human rights,’ even to the point of armed intervention, America should calm down and examine its own gun-control policy.

It takes a lot to make China’s government—beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests—look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it. When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of them concluded, as this one did that, “from the look of it, there’s no difference between a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ country. And there’s no such thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!”

It is a strange fact that in refusing to allow rational gun policies in America, the N.R.A. and its acolytes have damaged precisely the treasure they purport to hold so dear: the moral charisma of American liberty.



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/12/china-watches-newtown-guns-american-credibility.html#ixzz2F9lBuGJF

We save more lives by banning guns.

Do you? Because in those countries which DID go for gun bans, there was no detectable signal in homicide rates following the bans. By contrast, hundreds of millions of money would buy considerable amount of healthcare or mental health services.

LOCKDOWN (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/lockdown.html)
Posted by Jill Lepore


The teacher appreciation box on top of the kindergarten cubbies in an elementary school I know is an old, dented cookie tin whose lid no longer fits. This time of year, it’s stuffed with thank-you notes and gift cards, for bookstores, mostly, or for a stationery shop around the corner, where crayons can be got cheap. Everyone’s been counting the days till the winter holiday, but first comes the school concert, no less wonderful, every year, for being so horribly bad. Report cards will be sent home next week, in manila envelopes that smell, inexplicably, like Cheez-Its.

In Newtown, Connecticut, there were five days left until Sandy Hook Elementary School was supposed to get out for winter vacation when Adam Lanza, twenty, killed his mother and then drove to the school wearing black fatigues and carrying two semi-automatic handguns, a military-style assault rifle, and a hundred rounds of ammunition. In a hallway, he shot and killed the school’s principal, the school psychologist, and three more people. In two first-grade classrooms, he shot and killed twenty very young children: six- and seven-year-olds. And then, it seems, he shot himself.

There is no solace to be found, not in the crushing, aching sympathy felt by everyone on hearing the story, not in the candlelight vigils, not in the agony of the President, who, during a press conference, winced, and was nearly overcome. This is the face of a nation undone.

It has been a hard year. There was a high-school shooting in Ohio, a Stand Your Ground shooting in Florida, a college massacre in California, and, in Colorado, a shooting spree in a movie theatre. There were shootings in hospitals and shootings on the streets, shootings in temples and shootings in shopping malls. There were shootings in kitchens and shootings in back yards. This shooting, a shooting in an elementary school, is a last chapter in an American Book of Job: What have we more?

It has been a hard year, but it has not been an unusual year. A hundred thousand Americans are killed with guns every year; one in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. Here are some other numbers: In Washington, there are four hundred and thirty-five members of Congress and a hundred Senators. For two decades, Congress has been dismantling civil society one piece of legislation, another atrocity, at a time. Some vote this way, some vote that. Meanwhile, there are more guns—enough for every man, woman, and child—more easily bought, more easily hidden, shooting more bullets, faster than ever. Not long ago, a Senate bill that would have made it legal for armed citizens to carry concealed guns between states was defeated by just two votes.

At Sandy Hook yesterday morning, teachers and librarians tucked children behind bookcases, secreted them in closets, and locked them in bathrooms to hide them from the gunman. Elementary school will never be quite the same again, the way that college, after Virginia Tech, was never quite the same, the way that high school, after Columbine, was never quite the same. Children—barely older than toddlers—will be drilled, will be taught what to do when the shooting starts. Duck, hide under your desk, and be still. “Shh,” we will whisper to them as they huddle and tremble. “Be as quiet as a bunny.”

This is the United States in lockdown. On our knees.



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/lockdown.html#ixzz2F9maNrsk

Let's say more people arm themselves for 'self-defense'; how do you guarantee that those people might not in turn use guns for offensive purposes? :help: What if those people get mad and start shooting?

I'd say only one sector will benefit from increasing gun ownership; gun industry. not 'freedom', for sure.

December 15, 2012
AMERICA’S CULTURE OF VIOLENCE (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/americas-culture-of-violence.html)

Posted by Nicholas Thompson


A troubled young man in Connecticut lays his hands on the kinds of guns that no civilian should ever have and does something that no civilization should ever see. The obvious way to prevent the next such massacre is gun control. And, yes, we need it now. Voters need to be loud, politicians need to be brave, and the gun lobby needs to be defeated. Perhaps Barack Obama, no longer up for election, will no longer be chicken. Perhaps the ever-more-obvious data will be persuasive—yes, more gun control correlates with less violence, state-by-state and country-by-country.

But American violence doesn’t just come from the assault weapons we buy and the gun shows we frequent. It’s much deeper than that. This is also the country that supplies three-quarters of the world’s arms trade. These are weapons sales authorized by our government and by a Democratic President. International weapon sales by America between 2010 and 2011 tripled. The same Democratic President continues a policy of targeted (often poorly) assassinations in Pakistan.

This country also supplies most of the world’s violent entertainment. America leads the world in massacres in life, and in film too. Read I.M.F.D.B. for a harrowing catalogue. The most popular movie this week, “Skyfall,” is a load of fun; but every emotional climax involves a shooting, sometimes with small guns sometimes with large ones. Firearms have long been identified with masculinity in popular culture. Ever more they are identified with femininity, too. The most popular video game this week is “Halo 4;” the most popular novel is Tom Clancy’s “Threat Vector;” the second- and third-best-selling works of nonfiction are “Killing Kennedy” and “Killing Lincoln,” respectively. Every author, and every creator, should have the right to make what they want. We need to change the way we think about the Second Amendment, not the First. Still, every civilian has a right to choose what to see and what to buy.

Violence is sometimes essential to art, and often to foreign policy, too. But the slaughter in Newtown, the worst single event in this country in eleven years and three months, should lead to a moment of deep reflection. It’s time to talk about guns; but it’s also time to talk about a lot more.



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/americas-culture-of-violence.html#ixzz2F9oIN0O9

lol when I see guns like that I cannot understand ANYONE that can justify the need to have one of those type of guns. There's not a SINGLE good reason to possess such a gun.

Slippery slope is their argument.
it goes like this.
"If the government bans assault rifles, what will prevent them from banning hunting rifles and sport shooting guns".


Another factor, our country, in the last 10 years, the conservative learned to dismiss any research whose results contradicts their long held views.

You can see that with evolution, climate change, and most recently the presidential polls.

These same group of people are even more suspicious of research done in foreign country.
So citing Australia, England, France and even our neighbor Canada.

Do you? Because in those countries which DID go for gun bans, there was no detectable signal in homicide rates following the bans. By contrast, hundreds of millions of money would buy considerable amount of healthcare or mental health services.

how much do you think it costs to have healthcare and/or mental health care services? I'm pretty sure that for a country like the USA it wouldn't even be enough to sustain the budget for a year. On the other hand, investing money in gun bans would be profitable on the long run and would be much cheaper than that after the first year or so. I dont remember if it's you who talked about the number of money the government would have to pay the gun owner but you exaggerated the amount. First I'll say that the government is not forced to compensate today's gun owner if they would be banned. Let's say they would, they would only need to compensate for the guns and MAYBE the ammos for those specific guns. All the other accessories don't have to be refund in any way! Those wouldn't be banned, you still could buy and possess optical sights or magazines. That's pushing it simply to make it sounds even worse that it would be. It's a pretty lame tactic to try to scare some people. ALl that being said, the government wouldn'T even have to refund anything or the totality :shrug:.

Slippery slope is their argument.
it goes like this.
"If the government bans assault rifles, what will prevent them from banning hunting rifles and sport shooting guns".


Another factor, our country, in the last 10 years, the conservative learned to dismiss any research whose results contradicts their long held views.

You can see that with evolution, climate change, and most recently the presidential polls.

These same group of people are even more suspicious of research done in foreign country.
So citing Australia, England, France and even our neighbor Canada.

The problem is that the USA are ruled by gun companies, petrol companies and other highly damaging companies. Those companies give so much money to the government that they can biased the government and pressure them. Just like the government (republicans) is using religion and church to support their party. It happened before with products known dangerous like some type of plastic that were in baby bottles, or with Tobacco. The companies were sending their own research report to the government and whenever another report from an independent company was contradicting them they were saying it's not how it is done and blah blah blah.

Simple. It's removing the civilian's right to own a gun.

ok please refresh me on the 2nd amendment but I don't recall it saying that every american is allowed to have a ASSAULT RIFLE or any type of guns. It says if I remember well that an american is allowed to have an arm. It doesn't say what type of arms. You can't own a bazooka but yet it's an arm and nobody is calling the 2nd amendment on that. What do you respond to that?

What is the population of Canada?

Canadian population is 34 millions but that doesn't matter cuz with statistics you can easily make a correlation with the same variable. As the USA are about 312 millions you could almost simply divide the american datas by 10 and compare them with the Canadian's. The social and economical background of Canada and the USA are much more similar than Mexico. Comparing Mexico to the USA is like Comparing England with Gabon. Again you're trying to use wrong facts to support your delusional thinking.

Why the NRA Is Still Winning the War on Guns (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/12/nra-guns-2012/60008/)


ELSPETH REEVE 23,984 Views
DEC 14, 2012

The National Rifle Association has been able to maintain its reputation as a respectable organization by portraying itself as a defender of the right to own weapons as a crime deterrent — a means to a less violent society. That's the genius behind its little slogan "guns don't kill people, people kill people." But in the wake of the Newtown school shooting — and a year full of gun violence — it's worth remembering that the NRA has been unmistakably advocating for a more violent society, one in which there are more and more scenarios in which there are no consequences for killing people. And the NRA's favorite laws are passing. The NRA is winning.

It's not just that the NRA has pushed for the end of a ban on weapons that are very effective at killing a lot of people in a few minutes — like the assault rifle that reportedly was used to kill more than two dozen people in Connecticut Friday morning. (Photo of a .223 Bushmaster at right.) The NRA has pushed for laws allowing people to bring guns to work in 17 states. It's pushed for "Stand Your Ground" laws in more than 20 states that encourage the use of those weapons. These laws expand the "castle doctrine," which once allowed people to use lethal force in self-defense in their homes when they fear their lives are at stake but now allow lethal force to be used outside the home, or just to prevent someone from entering a home, without requiring the shooter first retreat. The most famous case this year was in Florida, when George Zimmerman shot to death the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. (Defenders of Zimmerman suggested he must have felt his life was threatened because Martin used curse words on Twitter.)

As Slate's Emily Bazelon points out, the people actually in charge of making sure we have a less violent society — cops, prosecutors — hate these laws. "It's an abomination," former Broward County prosecutor David Frankel the Orlando Sun Sentinel. "The ultimate intent might be good, but in practice, people take the opportunity to shoot first and say later they had a justification. It almost gives them a free pass to shoot." That statement was made after a man shot an unarmed homeless man several at an ice cream store, but before Martin's death. In 2012 we've seen an accelerated repetition of a familiar American cycle: a mass shooting, public outcry, political inaction, followed by a historic victory for the gun lobby.

February 26: Trayvon Martin is shot to death, and his shooter is initially not arrested as he's covered by Florida's Stand Your Ground law.

July 20: 12 people are killed in the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, and 58 are injured.

September 22: In Kalispell, Montana, Brice Harper shoots and kills Dan Fredenberg, who entered Harper's garage unarmed and had not started a violent confrontation. Harper was having an affair with Fredenberg's wife.

October 9: Flathead County prosecutor Ed Corrigan refuses to indict Harper because Harper is protected by Montana's expanded castle doctrine law. The law allows you to kill people just to keep them from entering your house. The state has the burden to prove your use of force wasn't justified.

October 20: Saturday Night Live accurately portrays the essence of President Obama and Mitt Romney's response to a debate question about whether they would do something to control gun violence. "Nothing." "I would also do nothing."

December 11: The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Illinois's ban on carrying concealed weapons in Moore v. Madigan. Illinois was the last state with such a ban.

December 13: "Concealed weapons could be allowed in 'gun-free zones' under bill headed to Michigan Gov. Snyder," Michigan Live reports.

While the NRA wins court fights, laws allowing more guns in more public places continue to spread, often for reasons that defy logic. For example, take the reasoning offered by Alabama state Sen. Roger Bedford, a Democrat, when explaining to Bloomberg earlier this week why he introduced a bill that would allow people to keep their guns in their cars in the workplace parking lot. "This provides safety and protection for workers who oftentimes travel 20 to 50 miles to their jobs," Bedford said. What does this mean? If there's a workplace shooting, people need to be able to have their guns in the parking lot to turn the place into a true shootout? Or does he just mean that maybe people need to be able to shoot to kill while driving down the highway on the way to work?

The fear of the NRA is so engrained in American politics that the group doesn't actually have to be successful in punishing gun control advocates anymore. The Sunlight Foundation reports that the NRA's political arm earned just a 0.83 percent return on investment in its election spending. Of the $10,942,533 the NRA spent in the 2012 election, less than 1 percent of the races ended in the NRA's desired result. So, for example, only 6 candidates it opposed actually lost. (The NRA disputes this analysis, arguing that money spent backing a sure winner should not be considered a smarter investment than money spent on a close race. It's still powerful on the local level — Bloomberg explains it helped defeat Tennessee Republican state House caucus leader Debra Maggart, who opposed a guns-in-the-parking-lot law.)

And here's more proof the NRA has won culturally: any time someone writes that maybe we shouldn't let normal people buy war machines, there is an obligatory disclaimer by the writer either noting a lifelong love of guns or admitting to be a yankee liberal sissy. Mother Jones's Adam Weinstein on Friday: "As a 3rd-gen. gun collector, I say you can have 'em. Now. And go after every tinfoil hat Bircher NRA peckerwood w/a long-gun, too. Now." Slate's Bazelon in October: "Call me a wimp who’s afraid of guns..." Here's mine: The most rabidly pro-gun control people I've ever met were infantrymen who served in Iraq.

The gun people know they are winning. Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, wrote in the South Carolina newspaper The Times and Democrat this week:

Despite the fact that anti-gunners may want to play down the significance of these rulings, the fact is we end 2012 with firearms civil rights in the strongest position they have enjoyed in generations. We intend to improve on that in the year ahead.

I hope he fails miserably. But it's not looking good for the not-even-that-silent rational majority.

Correction: We have clarified the type of weapons that was reportedly used in the Newtown shooting. CNN reports they include a .223 Bushmaster assault rifle. CBS reports two other weapons were a Glock 9mm pistol and a Sig-Sauer pistol. Fox reports there was a fourth weapon.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at ereeve@theatlantic.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

What They're Saying About Gun Control After the Newtown Shooting (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/12/gun-control-statements-after-newtown-shooting/60017/)


ELSPETH REEVE 8,084 Views
DEC 14, 2012

After a gunman carried a Glock 9mm pistol, a Sig-Sauer pistol, and a civilian version of the military's M4 carbine into a Connecticut elementary school and conducted one of the worst mass shootings in history, many voices — big and small, elected and unelected, but all loud — reached out across America Friday, insisting that it's not, in fact, too soon to talk about gun control. And as you might expect, most people talking about more of it. But not everyone. Here's a tally of public figures who've called for a change — or not— in the wake of the tragedy. We've included the parts that explicitly or implicitly address gun policy.

President Obama said this at the White House:

We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.

New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed in a 1993 mass shooting, told Politico she spoke to White House chief of staff Jack Lew before the election and promised to fight for more gun control. On Friday, she explained:

I said, ‘Jack, I know the president is going through an election and I’m telling you after the election I’m coming out full force... I was just giving the White House a heads up that the gloves are off on my side and I was going to do everything I possibly could. … If that meant embarrassing everybody, that’s what I would do...
I want to talk to the White House. I know that they can’t give me an answer tonight, but I want to know what they’re going to do. I need to know what they’re going to do.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement:

We heard after Columbine that it was too soon to talk about gun laws. We heard it after Virginia Tech. After Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek. And now we are hearing it again. For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds. President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown. But the country needs him to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem. Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership - not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on his official site:

While we don’t have all the facts and our focus must be on the victims, this is yet another senseless and horrific act of violence involving guns. We as a society must unify and once and for all crack down on the guns that have cost the lives of far too many innocent Americans. Let this terrible tragedy finally be the wake-up call for aggressive action and I pledge my full support in that effort.

Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, wrote on his Facebook page:

As we mourn, we must sound a call for our leaders to stand up and do what is right. This time our response must consist of more than regret, sorrow, and condolence. The children of Sandy Hook Elementary School and all victims of gun violence deserve leaders who have the courage to participate in a meaningful discussion about our gun laws - and how they can be reformed and better enforced to prevent gun violence and death in America. This can no longer wait.

New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt said:

We can’t just keep saying, ‘Our hearts ache for the victims and their families.’ We have to bring gun violence under control.

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes said:

I hope and pray that the flood of sympathy and condolences offered to the victims and survivors of this unspeakable crime will ignite the dedication and ingenuity of our nation to end this scourge of violence.

New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg:

Americans are sick and tired of these attacks on our children and neighbors and they are sick and tired of nothing being done in Washington to stop the bloodshed. If we do not take action to address gun violence, shooting tragedies like this will continue. As President Obama said, we must act now ‘regardless of the politics.’

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer:

To senselessly lose so many innocent lives breaks your heart... Perhaps an awful tragedy like this will bring us together so we can do what it takes to prevent this horror from being repeated again.

New York Rep. Jerry Nadler said:

If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don’t know when is. How many more Columbines and Newtowns must we live through? I am challenging President Obama, the Congress, and the American public to act on our outrage and, finally, do something about this.

New York Congresswoman Nita Lowey:

Our expressions of sympathy must be matched with concrete actions to stop gun violence.

Rupert Murdoch tweeted:

Terrible news today. When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy.

Officials not calling for change:

Ari B. Adler, press secretary for the Michigan state House Republican caucus, said on Facebook that the shooting was not related to the bill passed the night before the shooting that would allow guns in schools:

Regarding the school shooting in Connecticut, our first concern is thinking about the families and the tragedy they have suffered at the hands of a criminal bent on spreading evil.
What happened in Connecticut, however, is not because of nor related in any way to actions taken by the Michigan House yesterday in approving Senate Bill 59.
In response to outreach from media and Michigan citizens, let me provide some background on the bill and why we have caucus members who supported it:
Under the proposed law, Michigan will have the most highly trained concealed carry licensees in the nation. In addition, statistics show that in a mass shooting incident, the average death toll is higher when civilians have to wait for police to arrive. In situations where a citizen with a concealed pistol is involved as a potential victim, the number of deaths is lower on average. Therefore, having well-trained individuals with the freedom to carry a concealed pistol may be considered a public safety asset that could act as a deterrent against such shootings or, if an evil criminal does strike, may prove to serve as protection for innocent bystanders.
It is the belief of many representatives in our caucus that it is criminals who have no intention of following any law that are the perpetrators of such heinous crimes as school shootings. Strict gun-control laws do not stop criminals from committing evil acts, they merely infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens who might be able to take action against evil if given the chance.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said it was not about guns, but about the lack of religious instruction in public schools. The ex-presidential candidate said on Fox News:

We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools... Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?...
We've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability - that we're not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment... If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that.

The National Rifle Association, in a statement:

Until the facts are thoroughly known, NRA will not have any comment.




No matter which side you fall on, it's hard to ignore that this debate is happening, and happening now. A protest Friday outside the White House demanding more gun control started small...

...and grew as the day wore on, with an official protest at 4:30 p.m.:





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It's Time We Talked About Gun Control (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/12/gun-control-newtown-school-shooting/60006/)

JEN DOLL 13,474 Views
DEC 14, 2012

It is very difficult to come up with coherent thoughts upon the news of the latest mass shooting in America, in which a shooter walked into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and fired guns numerous times upon children and adults. Details remain hazy and evolving, but the AP is reporting 27 killed, 18 of them children (update: 20 children have been reported dead), a brief bit of information that says far more than we can react to in any reasonable, objective manner. Instead, there's that familiar swirl into emotional chaos, a sinking heart, the feeling of nausea, this time worse: These were kids. This is a shooting with more deaths than occurred at Columbine. As we grasp for details and logical reactions, what come forth are instead raw emotions. Horror, sadness, disgust. Fear; concern for our own loved ones, desire to protect them. Empathy for those directly affected. Hatred of whatever it is that's gotten us to where we are, and anger that it seems to be a place in which we are stuck, as a society, and not just stuck, but getting worse and worse. In July, following the mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, the Washington Post published an infographic showing the 11 deadliest shootings in the U.S., 5 which happened after 2006. What is wrong with us?

Shootings of various types have happened again and again in the year I've written about news for The Atlantic Wire, and every time there's another (like in Colorado, or more recently, in a Portland mall), we feel, I think, a compounded reaction based on the human helplessness we tend to ignore or deny in most of the rest of our lives, plus a sense of hopelessness about humanity, and our role in that. All other news becomes meaningless. What do we say; what do we do? Some people are evil, perhaps, but how have we helped them to get there, or how have we failed to stop them? And if it's not our fault, who can we blame? Some options: parents, communities, the law, medicine, a society that makes it easy to purchase guns. A society that can't come to terms with even, really, talking about gun control in any reasonable way that doesn't devolve into anger and name-calling and semi-apologies. A society that blames the timing in which we open up these discussions. People who "politicize" such matters, and people who fail to when they should. The shooter himself. The choices are endless and they all get their time in the blame spiral, because it's really hard to know what to do with all of that dark awfulness. But blame doesn't really help us cope, not in the long-term, and it certainly doesn't help us fix things. Just look at the news.

Responding to reports of the Newtown school shooting, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said President Obama is watching the news "as a father" and that there will be a day in which we review the nation's gun control policy, but "today is not that day." So when is the right time to talk about gun control, or about gun violence, or about what caused the deaths of, according to the latest reports, more than 18 kids today? Because we keep putting it off, just getting angry at each other, pushing further into our little corners and defending things we think we know: If we feel that gun ownership laws in this country are part of the problem, we say lax gun control clearly led to this horrific event in a town thought by its residents to be "the safest place in America." If we think people should have the right to own guns with minimal constraints, we say that guns don't kill people, people kill people. And this is why we have to talk—really talk—about gun control: It's not deniable that guns make it easier for people who want to kill people in large numbers to do so. A gun used by the suspect was identified by a law enforcement source as a .223 calibre rifle, and while the NRA has pushed for the end of bans on such weapons, it's hard to imagine a good purpose for the type of gun pictured being legal in any sort of public sphere. It's also undeniable, inherent to their very existence, that guns do make for a shift in any power dynamic: Why would one who defends gun ownership bother to defend his right to own guns unless it did in fact put him in position of control over someone who doesn't have one, or make him "equal" to someone who does? And yet, sure, having stringent gun control laws—or, in a dream world, no guns at all—doesn't mean people won't kill people. It does, however, mean that fewer people will be able to easily acquire guns with which to kill people. How many scenes like today's photo of bawling children being led to safety do we need before we can come together and say that that would be a good thing, that something really does have to change? If we can't fix humanity, if we can't make all people good, can we at least make it harder for people who want to do harm to kill? Can we talk about this without reverting to name-calling and aggression toward each other that a therapist might say stands in for how we feel about this shooter and what he's done? Can we talk about this now? And if we can't, why can't we? Why haven't we already?

Because these things are in some ways just not comprehensible, and because how we get along and do better together is easier said than done, we don't, or we haven't. Our quibbling and failure to change is sickening, though not as sickening as the thought of the crime itself, and maybe that gives us all some sense of control over our internal emotional spirals of fear and pain. Still, when we claim that people are "politicizing" when instead we should mourn (could we perhaps do both?) or that people are being irresponsible by talking about any of it before we have all the facts, we are really just saying one thing. We hurt. We don't know what the hell we're supposed to do about any of this. Kids died; a twentysomething man killed a bunch of kids. Did we let him do this? While we were all fighting and blaming and yelling at each other, and our elected officials, or most of them, were studiously addressing other problems because it's not the right time yet, did we just let another one of these terrible incidents happen?

One thing is sure: Talking about guns, gun violence, and the children and adults we lost today is something every parent and every person who loves anyone else is going to be doing at their own dinner tables tonight, and even before that, throughout the day. We're going to have to talk about this; we're going to have to form coherent thoughts; and we're going to have to stop simply cleaving to our agendas and our selfish little opinions of what we want and what we think we should have—and when "the right time is"—if this is ever going to get any better.

The faces of those kids in the photo that's being used to illustrate this news story tell us we have to do something, soon, because sometimes it really is too late.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at jdoll@theatlantic.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

TODAY IN RESEARCH
What Research Can Tell Us About the Newtown Shootings (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/12/what-research-can-tell-us-about-newtown-shootings/60022/)


DAVID WAGNER 9,162 Views
DEC 14, 2012

Discovered: Recent research findings about gun control, autism, mass violence, and PTSD to help put the Newtown shootings in context.

Strict gun control laws absolutely have led to fewer deaths in other countries. Researchers under the supervision of Joan Ozanne-Smith of Monash University studied firearm-related deaths over a 22-year period in Australia, finding a notable drop in deaths (especially suicides) after the country implemented strict gun control laws in the late '80s and mid-'90s. The Medical University of Vienna's Nestor D. Kapusta and colleagues noticed similar trends when Austria got tough on gun control in 1997. A number of variables make the U.S. different than these nations—but in Austria and Australia, research shows that deaths have been prevented by gun control. [via BoingBoing]

The link between autism and mass violence isn't clear. Already, we're hearing speculation that Adam Lanza may have suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism that was recently removed from the DSM-5. Research tells us that if that's true, Lanza's mental illness is merely an interesting detail—not a decisive factor in the violence. Research led by the University of Edinburgh's Louise Robinson found that amongst violent offenders in prison, only 4 percent scored above the cut-off on autism spectrum disorder quotients. Considering the question of whether autistic people are more prone to violence, a team of University of Michigan Medical Center researchers found that only approximately 2.27 percent of autistic people exhibit a history of violence.

Bullying and lack of mental healthcare access are common in such shooters. Michigan State University's Hyunkag Cho studies risk factors that make shooters like the one involved in the Virginia Tech massacre prone to violence. Cho and his colleagues found that bullying, parental neglect, and lack of accessibility to mental healthcare are common to these types of gunmen, but that researchers have a long way to go in understanding this topic. "Despite the numerous explanations by the media, politicians, organizations and researchers about the potential cause of the school shootings, we are not united in our understanding of the risk factors, particularly those relevant to racial minorities and immigrants," Cho says. [Michigan State University]

Many of the survivors in Newtown will likely develop PTSD. According to data from Virginia Tech researchers who studied the survivors of a shooting on their own campus, 15.4 percent of the student body exhibited signs of PTSD three to four months after the incident.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at dwagner@theatlantic.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.