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27 Reported Killed In Connecticut Elementary School Shooting
Several readers sent word of a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. According to most reports, 27 people are dead, including 18 children. The alleged shooter is dead, a man in his 20s. He was armed with multiple weapons and may have worn a bulletproof vest. According to CBS, "It is unclear if there was more than one gunman at the school. Miller reports authorities have an individual in custody who investigators said may be a possible second shooter." (Investigators now say the person being questioned is not a suspect.) One student was quoted as saying, "I was in the gym and I heard a loud, like seven loud booms, and the gym teachers told us to go in the corner, so we all huddled. And I kept hearing these booming noises. And we all started crying." Another, 8 years old, said, "I saw some of the bullets going down the hall and then a teacher pulled me into her classroom."
The gun lobby is untouchable in America.
It is time to amend the 2nd amendment.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
The school is a gun-free campus, plus all visitors have to register at the office.
Our country makes it too easy for nutcases to have guns. I, for one, would give up the right to bear arms for everyone, and not miss it.
Bruce Perens.
My heart goes out to those people in Connecticut my thought and prays are with you. 18 children among 26 dead in Connecticut school shooting in Newtown Conn this gunman should be burned at the stake cause lethal injection is two good for him. These types of people are the problem in this world.
http://thetechnologygeek.org/
You have to be the biggest fucking piece of shit to pull something like this. They should quit releasing these douchebags names as they are absolute nobodies.
... as the economy will continue to spiral down and crazy people get laid off and need to get their grudges out. The "fiscal cliff" is only the starter.
Weapon sales have been through the roof for a while now. The more, the merrier
I'm sure Fox News will try to spin this somehow
Clearly, if we made school shootings illegal, things like this wouldn't happen. Banning drugs and abortions makes them go away too.
The signs aren't working and these kids, teachers, and parents deserved better.
God left them.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
This just makes me incredibly angry and sad at the same time. The shooter was a PARENT of one of the kids at the school? Seriously? As an American, I have to wonder how we can be so screwed up that events like these are a regular occurrence.
It sounds like some adults put themselves in harms way to try to stop or slow down the shooter. They are heroes. To the bastard who did this, you'll rot in hell.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I think this one is a Poe.
I cannot believe that someone could target children like that. My two daughters are the same age as the dead and I will have to hug and hold them for a long while tonight. My heart goes out to those parents.
Arm the kids? Or how about, enforce the Gun Free Zones with armed guards, and a single point of entry. Otherwise, what's the point of GFZs?
Seriously? Mentally insane people go to a k-4th grade school and start killing people, and you post how it's related to a political party's stance on something?!?
Republican or Democrat no one wants to see this happen.
You say tighten gun control, did they get the guns legally in the first place? Should we be locking up anyone who might have a breakdown, or might be outright crazy?
It's a tragedy, and as the father of 2 that aren't even old enough for school yet I can't imagine what the families are going through, but pointing fingers doesn't help here.
Apparently the White House [1], let alone the NRA, doesn't think it's time to discuss the culture that causes these kinds of shootings - a culture where guns are not only freely available, but generally untraceable and too often get into the hands of folks who should not have them (ie, mentally imbalanced, felons, and domestic terrorists).
If the unquestioning defense of the 2nd amendment means we can't even discuss why disturbed or evil individuals who shouldn't have access to these kind of armaments have the "right to bear arms", then we're fucked as a country.
Let's not even get into the fact that the NRA and gun-lobby have effectively made the process of tracing how these weapons get distributed to the wrong hands is never questioned and the illicit channels aren't closed.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
As someone posted elsewhere: "I don't want to take your guns away, but if the price of freedom is 18 dead elementary school kids 3 times a year, I don't want to be free. "Gun control" doesn't have to mean "take away guns". Stop arguing against that straw man."
Gun owners jumping right to slippery-slope arguments are not helpful.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
Yeah, if only those kindergartners were armed, right? FFS
Has to be a very low and pathetic individual to shoot up an elementary.
Already started I see... This won't get to the root of the issue, which is that we have a serious mental health issue in this country. If you screen for this at an early age and catch the cases, you can treat these people and these kinds of things will start happening less often. Trying to take all the guns won't do a thing. It is too easy to make explosives and get your mass killing that way and explosives are usually deadlier. Take the guns, the nuts will use explosives instead. Better to get to the root of the problem and start screening those who have problems, getting them treatment and onto no weapon lists early.
The Real Problem isn't guns. Crazy Bastards will always be able to find a way to get a gun illegally, or use something else.
How about we make it easier for Crazy Bastards to get treatment for their Crazy Bastardness?
What is the correlation between mass shootings and the closing & defunding of mental health institutions?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
as much as I'd like to see stricter gun control, better mental health care would make it a bit of a moot point whether the nutcases have guns because then they wouldn't be nutcases.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Should nuclear bombs be banned because people could misuse them?
of which your post is one, funnily enough.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
What about Columbine. The attackers had grand plans to blow up the school. Now how are you going to make it illegal to have the chemicals that are necessary to make pipe bombs?
This is an enormous tragedy, and prayers and help should be sent immediately to the families and victims. However, people need to stop jumping to conclusions about the cause of this tragedy, and stop the knee-jerk reaction calling for gun control. First, the gunman, like the one in Aurora, Colorado probably used semi-automatic weapons which are not the same as automatic weapons that are used by the military. Second, anyone crazy enough to kill numerous human beings, especially children, would find a way to do so if guns regulated like in England (hence a recent report states that gun violence is on the rise in England). For those that don’t know the story of the Bath School massacre, here it is from Wikipedia. The Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, on May 18, 1927, which killed 38 elementary school children, two teachers, four other adults and the bomber himself; at least 58 people were injured. Most of the victims were children in the second to sixth grades (7–14 years of age) attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest mass murder in a school in U.S. history and the fourth-deadliest massacre in U.S. history, behind the Oklahoma City bombing, the Mountain Meadows massacre and 9/11. The bomber was school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe, 55, who was enraged about a property tax levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack. He died in a car bomb he set off after he drove up to the school as the crowd gathered to rescue survivors from the burning school. On the morning of May 18, Kehoe murdered his wife by beating her to death, then set his farm buildings afire. As fire fighters arrived at the farm, an explosion devastated the north wing of the school building, killing many schoolchildren. He used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside the school over the course of many months. As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle with his Winchester rifle, killing himself and the school superintendent, and killing and injuring several others. During rescue efforts searchers discovered an additional 500 pounds (230 kg) of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol planted throughout the basement of the school's south wing. Kehoe apparently had intended to blow up and destroy the whole school.
It looks like the first few comments have already been about guns and the second amendment, so I want to throw this out there. There have been spree killings all over the world, even in countries with more restrictive gun laws than the USA. Most of these killings were done with firearms, but many were done with other weapons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers
I think that rather than arguing about gun-rights in general, we would be better served by working to identify the kind of people that feel they need to resort to this type of violence and getting them the help they need before they snap.
150 years ago, there was no running water, few government funded roads, no municipal sewage, and a ton of insane asylums. Why? Because insane people have been recognized as an issue for hundreds of years. There are almost half a dozen abandoned asylums scattered across Connecticut, which is a small-ass state, btw. But people aren't any saner, for the most part. We've just decided tax cuts and overseas wars are a better way to spend money, instead of treatment for the mentally ill and criminally insane.
That's the problem with people - complete lack of empathy.
The GP believes that he would have been there with his own firearms and gunned down these people. Or if all of the teachers had concealed carry he would have been taken out immediately. Or that if every child had had a gun, he would have been stopped before he even got his firearm out.
Many a gun proponent has been turned by having a spouse or child killed. The rest just don't believe it can ever happen to them.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What, you don't like the idea of a bunch of kindergarteners with AK-47s running around?
I think the idea is more that the teachers or administrators should have had the option to be armed. Not saying that's a good idea, especially with how good kids can be at getting a hold of things they shouldn't, but if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
And there's the counter question: how many more would die because of a child managing to get one of these firearms and deciding to take a little retribution on his/her friends who were mean recently, the bully, or that mean unfair teacher that gave him/her a bad grad or stopped him/her from picking on Bobby who obviously started it.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Our culture is crashing. What is going on is just unimaginable.
This
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'll happily give you pricks a flu shot for your $800-$2000 guns.
Dumb motherfuckers.
Hey next week we'll have handcuffs for cannabis patients. yeay, they can turn their guns in too
Now the only people with guns will be crazy psychopaths. YEay,,,,
Next week after that we'll do random DSM 5 + TSA testing...
how is this news for nerds ???
Good job asshole.
[...] but if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
Irrelevant. There would be far, far more OTHER incidents (kids getting hold of the guns, teachers unable to cope with the stress of teaching and seeing an easy way out, etc) which would have led to MORE deaths.
If we allowed those kids at school to carry guns they would have been able to stop this before so many people got killed.
I want the headline to read, police remove gun from mass child murderer's "cold dead hands"
I can 3d print, or make a gun on my CNC machine. including the bullets. what now gun control? I say fix the social issues first, then gun control becomes a non issue.
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
Not to seem too callus but I think the root of the problem here is that we here in America tend to have bad coping skills. What ever the cause of this person deciding to go on a killing spree it was not that he had a firearm at hand.
According to [1] these are the leading causes of death in America in 2009.
Heart disease: 599,413
Cancer: 567,628
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
According to [2] there were only 11,493 Firearm homicides.
And information provide by [3] there were 34,485 motor vehicle deaths
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
[2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm
Thank you for covering this, slashdot!
Nobody else is!
I looked all over and nobody was running this story.
You rock!
Stories like this are why we read the site.
Batman never uses guns to fight bad guys.
Where's Batman when you need him?
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy.jpg
That's from two massacres ago.
As usual people are trotting out the age old adage: "Gun's don't kill people, people kill people" or some variant. To those that support this opinion, what is it that makes Americans so much more blood thirsty than the rest of the world? Why is it America has so many mass shootings compared to other developed countries? Comparatively, the UK has a far lower homicide rate than the US (The entire country of 60 million has less homicides than NYC (pop 8 million)), if that's not due to gun control, what is it due to?
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
My thoughts are with those unfortunate parents whose grief must be too hard for anyone to bear
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
Yeah, if only those kindergartners were armed, right? FFS
Yea! I mean, it's not like there's a single adult in an elementary school, right?
Sheesh...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
N00bs got pWned!
[FPS Doug] Boom! Headshot! [/FPS Doug]
I for one blame the video games that are available these days. Things like Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Halo, etc encourage violent behavior and blur the distinction between real life and fantasy. We should hold these game companies responsible and sue them so hard that their children's children are still in so much debt they can never repay it. If I were a judge I would require the CEO of the software company to personally meet with the family of each and every child killed this morning to discuss today's violent video games, the realism, and the possibility that they have an effect on the behavior of some people that play them. There is blood on your hands assholes.
Trolling? Really? Today?
of cowardly, fractional men.
Seriously, you could "try" and take away all the guns...but if you really wanted one, you could always get one. Same with drugs, the black market is ALWAYS there.
And the libs always tend to forget that guns actually help save lies as well. I was reading an article not too long ago about a single mother who was sleeping with her newborn child, when she heard someone trying to break in. She grabbed her shotgun, and as soon as the two perps walked into the house, she shot them dead. Now if she didn't have her gun, she could've been killed and her baby orphaned.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Bullshit.
It's a tradeoff.
If more people had guns, then there would be more smaller incidents (loose cannons who wouldn't have had a gun otherwise, and quickly get stopped by others with guns), but fewer major incidents like this.
Not to mention, who would you want to have the guns?
* The students? Yeah, that'd reduce the killings.
* The teachers? They have enough distraction as it is without the added distraction of making sure the students don't get to the guns.
* The administrative staff? Still a risk of the students getting to the guns - or if they are in a safe, not being anywhere near ready-enough-at-hand for use.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
target shooting? hunting? both seem like amusements that maybe we could afford to lose in the name of safety. (How many people really need to hunt for their food in this day and age?) Also, they might not have to go - the restrictions could be on firearms ill-suited to those activities, not to mention forms of those activities without firearms.
If it's something else you'd miss, sorry, but those are my best guesses.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Oh ffs, I'm not from your country nor am I conservative, and you're full of shit.
Boy, the knees are jerking like crazy now.
these "fucking lunatics" get their guns the same way so called sane gun nuts do.
I see a lot of posts in here about banning guns. They are far more controlled where I live (Canada), but rest assured shootings that happen in Canada are always with black-market guns. It's not the people who legally purchase and register firearms doing these things, it's those who obtain them illegally.
You may argue that making guns harder to get, like here, reduces this kind of thing. That may be correct. But no matter what, people can get anything, and they will, if sufficiently demented, do something bad.
What's the answer to that?
Does every American have a constitutional right to amass an arsenal sufficient to kill dozens of his or her fellow citizens? Are we doomed to see more and more massacres like this?
LIBERALS are responsible for this. THEY are the ones who push for gun control so that good people cannot STOP insane shooters like this. This would have gone nowhere had everyone in that school had good access to deadly enough weapons to respond in kind to that shooter.
Teachers hear gunshots, grab their 9 mms, head into the hall. Blast away at the janitors who are shooting back with their AK47s. Both groups start to take casualties from the administrators firing .50 cam Brownings mounted to A/V carts. The lunch ladies lob grenades out from the cafeteria, taking out large swaths of combatants, including the third grader who set off the original firecracker.
If the students had been armed, this obviously wouldn't have happened. Wake up sissy liberals, it's time to give to our kids the tools to defend themselves.
Let's face the facts: Psychopaths like this do this sort of thing for one reason and one reason only: They have a narcissitic need to get their names on TV and in the newspapers and have the whole country talking about them, and they know from past history that this sort of atrocity will get them exactly what they crave.
If it wasn't guns, it'd be a propane tank -- and if the psychopath knew enough to BLEVE the tank, he could take out ten times as many kids as this one did.
If I may make a modest proposal, if you really want to prevent these things, what needs to be done is shut down the sensastionalistic reporting of these incidents. Don't give the psychopaths what they want, and they won't do it. Outlaw reporting of these incidents. Send any reporters who violate the ban to prison, and shut down the media outlets that violate the ban.
Do it for the children.
(Constitution? What's this Constitution you speak of? Haven't we aready established that it's a dead letter if you intone that "Do it for the children" incantation?
Criminals also don't follow laws against theft, murder, etc. And?
will it take before you finally realize that your impotent little attempts at manhood enhancement are not worth the lives of sane people? Just because you don't have the moral backbone to face up to the damage that people like you are responsible for does not mean that your betters should just sit idly by and be politically correct so you can pretend to have any respectability.
Let us wipe this persons name from the face of the earth. Let us not speak his name. Let us and his family, friends, and anyone else forget that this killer ever had an identity. Do not speak his name.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
This is the simple fact opponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Less guns mean less gun violence.
Period.
Our country makes it too easy for nutcases to have guns. I, for one, would give up the right to bear arms for everyone, and not miss it.
I am sorry, but I think that you have it wrong. While we need stronger gun laws, the last thing that I want is to give up our rights (plenty of pols continue to nibble at them).
The real issue is that we make it too easy for ANYBODY to own a gun. What is needed is better education for access to hunting and target guns, combined with psych tests for access to automated weapons. We have medicals administered to Pilots for even a PRIVATE license. Yet, giving something far more dangerous as an automated weapon and we have little requirements for it.
What I find interesting is that you even acknowledge that we make it far too easy for nutcases, but want to deny it to all. Far better to do medicals and scan against the nutcases.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
did you just stop at that point and not read the rest of my post? I pretty well made that case. I was arguing against spiffmastercow's aregument against a pretty obvious (and probably intentional) misinterpretation of krovisser's comment.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It is really sad that we have come to a place in society where anyone would every willingly choose to harm a child and then show the unmitigated cowardice to kill themselves so as to bypass the humiliation and suffering that will be administered to them by way of their punishment.
However.
I know a lot of gun "nuts" and to tell you the truth they think the same way we "nerds" feel about guns. "Why are all computers registered why can anyone do anything anon?" "Most of pedophilia is spread by way of the internet and communications therein so we should be able to track every piece of everything so we can put a stop to those nutjobs". "More people are victimized daily by computer crimes than were killed today by firearms we should track everything". That is the attitude of a lot of Americans, could these crimes on computers be perpetrated without computers? Sure. Should we regulate the Internet more? Maybe. Could these crimes be committed without guns? Sure. Should we regulate the Internet more? Maybe. Its the same logic.
And before everyone rips this for comparing computer crimes to murder, I am not putting them in the same category. I am simply stating that to a group of people with little interest and/or need for guns who immediately shout gun control when something bad happens while the gun owners shout no (as a majority) it is the same as when the world sees bad things happen at the hands of those with computers and shouts Internet restrictions, filtering, and monitoring while the IT crowd shouts no
One looking at it from both sides can't help but see the fact that it is not the tool in the hand, it is the screw loose in the head and our society is causing it. We can filter, we can lockdown, we can control all we want but do you think that stops a hacker? Do you think it will stop a killer? If they want to do bad things I don't think the law is even going to slow them down.
And just for the record, I have been in IT since I could read, and an avid hunter since I could carry a gun, and a father with 4 children 8 and under.
[citation needed]
I've given up caring about the people who die in gun massacres in America.
If you have a friend who keeps on doing stupid things over and over and getting hurt, and he (or she) refuses to take any action at all to address this, in the end you just stop caring.
After every one of these massacres, people say how awful it is, but nobody DOES ANYTHING to change the situation.
I don't care anymore.
Before everyone goes full-retard and uses this to push pro/anti-gun control agendas, Keep in mind that the last time this kind of thing happened it was with the batman thieter nut who shot the place up with firearms that are legally obtainable in Canada (all except the cheap noroco AK-47 knockoff that would count as a standard long-gun if it werent for stupid canadian "looks like an ak-47" law. In this case you cant argue for having someone armed in the school because kids cant be trusted with guns. And if they release info about what kind of firearms this nut was using, id be willing to bet they are legal with a PAL and RPAL in Canada so you cant argue for stricter gun control. (Most would argue that canada has mostly reasonable firearms laws)
The problem lies with the man who for whatever reason rationalized the decision to commit an atrocity of this nature. You gotta be a special kind of messed up to kill a bunch of kids, like taliban shooting girls-japanise guy knifing up a kids school kind of messed up.
So shut the fuck up and support those who lost in this tragity.
for the benefit of other readers: Poe's Law is an internet adage saying it's hard to distinguish parody of extremism from actual extremism..
You seem to be saying it's a parody. However, I have heard the AC's argument form serious pro-gun folks. (Is that a sign of how actually extreme the US gun lobby is?)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
This is about the worst thing anyone can do, I mean, these are fucking children for fuck's sake! :(
Every time these incidents occur, there is a tremendous and instantaneous outpouring of these same old arguments "guns don't kill people..." "outlawing guns is not going to prevent crazy people from getting them..." The arguments never change, the politics never change, and these incidents happen again and again.
The definition of 'crazy', or one of them, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. HOW MANY TIMES do we have to hear about shooting rampages in our own schools, malls, movie theaters, workplaces, before people will begin to ask themselves if maybe their outlook is simply wrong? How many people would have to die before you, Mr. 2nd Amendment Defender, would reconsider your own viewpoint? Just do this exercise for me - say a number out loud.
Doubt is essential in a deliberative society. If you can never doubt your own viewpoint, then the freedom to discuss and debate it is worthless.
https://www.facebook.com/rlanza
The proposals I've seen always turn out to be "give up the right to bear arms for everyone not wearing the right uniforms". But that idea has also been frequently tried, and it doesn't always work well either, and when it fails the ensuing death counts have gone into the millions.
I live in NH and we have some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation and are ranked 47th in incedences per capita of violent crime. Rampage killers don't care about gun laws, but maybe if there was better help to identify and treat this it could have been prevented. This person is a sick fuck and gun laws wouldn't change that. FWIW: I don't own a gun
"A computer is a tool to do work, a car a tool to drive, a CONDOM to kill. THATS ITS ONLY PURPOSE to kill. Equating CONDOMS to anything other than a weapon to harm mame or kill people or animals(?) is a corrupt argument. The fact is CONDOMS ARE ONLY MEANT TO KILL AND THATS THE ONLY PURPOSE FOR THEM."
the suspect was 20 yr old and had a child in elementary school... assuming a 5yr old.. can we talk about a 15 yr old father who is clearly separated (RTFA) and had issues as being somewhat of a problem?
Yeah, more people firing weapons with panicky children running around, what could go wrong?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
U.S. Mass shooting incidents since Columbine:
1999: Columbine: 14 dead, Atlanta: 13, Fort Worth: 7
2002: Washington DC: 10
2003: Chicago: 6
2004: Wisconsin: 6
2005: Wisconsin: 7
2006: Pennsylvania: 6
2007: Virginia Tech: 33, Omaha: 9, Washington St: 6
2008: Chicago: 5, Northern Illinois University: 5, Washington St: 6
2009: Alabama: 10, North Carolina: 8, Santa Clara: 6, Binghamton NY: 13, Texas Southern University: 6, Fort Hood: 13
2010: University of Alabama: 3
2011: Tuscon: 6
2012: Colorado: 12, Wisconsin: 6, Connecticut: 27
I can't compare this with other countries, because I don't have the data. But his is not a record to be proud of, this is shameful. We are a violent society.
Less guns mean less gun violence.
And yet, overall violence does not decrease.
You can kill a person just as easily with a knife - you can kill a lot of people just as easily with a knife.
Talk to China, Japan or the UK for more info.
Well, one thing is clear, we need stronger knife control. Perhaps we might allow private citizens to own blenders, though, for those harder-to-chew foods.
Except we have the rest of the industrialized world that proves your point false. Look at the numbers dead from gun violence in almost any modern 1st world country that bans guns and you'll notice that per capita, we have shitloads more.
The reason why is we have the guns everywhere, legal or not.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Didn't really know what part of Conn. they moved to recently. Last my wife heard from her was EVERYTHING is in lock down. Her children would be middle school age so probably not at that school but she can't contact them and hasn't seen them yet. (As of 2 hrs ago.) Cannot image how this must feel as a parent. Just, so, so sad.
More guns will solve the problem!
Fewer guns will solve the problem!
When, in reality, each has it's own set of problems, and both sides are more interested in the idea of being right, and having things a certain way, than what is actually best.
Get the fuck over yourselves, people are hurt and you are using it to fucking proselytize. Enough playing devils advocate to a lot of this shit, pointing towards a more moderate view. You're all a bunch of arrogant bastards who don't give a damn who the fuck gets hurt, so long as you can twist it towards your pathetic agenda.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I'm not pro gun to tell you the truth, I am pro freedom. If someone shouldn't have the right to regulate what I choose to do on the Internet, whom I choose to worship, whom I choose to marry, what I choose to smoke, how I choose to live, then why should the have the right to regulate what tools I possess in my home.
I am making the argument that we need a societal change not further regulations that only ever cost more and never solve the problem.
For instance:
We ban drugs and I doubt that it has had much effect on pot smoking since the 60's.
We had the Clinton gun ban and it didn't to any good, violent crime rates have statistically increased since it began and have climbed just as steadily since they have been removed.
We limit alcohol and I don't remember it every slowing down a party when I was in high school.
We can ban it all we want but until we start changing how society views its relationships and connections with society as a whole it won't do any significant good.
This guy, whatever else was wrong with him had decided that little children were worthless and it would be of no consequence to him or his life to remove their lives. If he however had seen just how important each of us is to this world and truly believed that the life of someone else was worth as much or more than his own, I cannot see that he could have done such a thing.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
I do. It's much more relevant now than any other time.
Criminals don't abide by the laws, but with good enforcement and harsh sentencing for criminals using a gun the chance they'll carry one (and use it) decreases.
Britain has harsh gun laws: it's pretty much an automatic minimum-five-year jail sentence if you handle a gun without a license. Shootings are rare, mass-shootings + suicide far rarer, and accidents (child getting gun, etc) very rare too. Knife crime is possibly more common that the US (I haven't checked), but I prefer it that way.
Some criminals have guns, but they're careful with them. They're kept hidden somewhere (hidden in a relative's house, and carried to and from the scene by a young gang member in an attempt to avoid the penalty for possessing a gun).
For example, 12 years for possessing a firearm, ammunition and knives with intent.
Or 18 months for a 13-year-old holding a gun for an older gang member.
Shootings by criminals aren't the problem. Shootings by perfectly legal people having guns are the problem. Obviously after such a shooting they are criminals, but previously they were law abiding citizens.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Maybe if parents weren't getting pregnant and then neglecting their children, their children wouldn't turn out to be "lunatics" and shoot defenseless kindergartners. There's one proposed solution
citation provided asshole
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
...high. Probably already diagnosed and on meds, but the committal laws in our country are so week and the health and services budgets so slashed this guy was allowed to walk around along with all the other assholes muttering to themselves on the street.
No way did someone not know he was nuts already. Criminal negligence at best.
You're reading it wrong: you presume that the tag "Stuff that matters" is somehow a parallel statement implying that because what is posted here is news which nerds would find relevant and interesting that, by definition, that material matters. One might make the same "mistake" with the wording of the 2nd amendment, which would imply that the right to bear arms is there as a necessity of the need to have a well regulated militia.
If you read it like the NRA reads the second amendment, however, then you realize that this site contains both news for nerds of a technically interesting nature AS WELL AS news which matters and is completely devoid of all technical content - completely separate things, mashed together for no reason at all.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
http://www.juancole.com/2012/07/58-murders-a-year-by-firearms-in-britain-8775-in-us.html
Try google.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
guy blew up a school over taxes.. no guns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
169 killed..no guns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
3000 killed.. no guns..
Yep.. some more laws will make us safe!!
I have to return some videotapes...
Let us momentarily suspend our political leaning as to the cause of this and just understand that the cost of a society in which there is such high population density will inevitably result in a certain, hopefully small, percentage of crazy people who will do something like this. Let us track down those crazy people, help them if they can be helped, protect the rest of society from them if they cannot be helped, and move on, grieving for those who we have lost.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
fallacy.
1) Gun laws aren't an oxymoron by any definition.
2) Being a criminal does not equate to getting a gun.
3) Gun laws make it harder for criminal to get guns,. And it keeps getting harder.
4) Crime drops when gun laws are enacted.
5) If having a gun was illegal, you would have an opportunity to know someone was going to kill people when you found them with a gun.
6) Same thing if someone was getting Ammo.
7) teacher firing a someone one in a panic situation means more people would have been likely to die.
8) How many gun deaths are their in Japan?
All the evidence shows, overall, people are safer with very strict gun laws. You can make trite logical fallacy all you want, becasue that's all you have.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have a question for the Slashdot community: Does this shooting alter your opinion on the issue of gun ownership rights vs. gun control laws? Even a little, in either direction?
Please note: My question is NOT, what is your opinion now; rather, it is, how much did your opinion CHANGE?
We have a large enough community here that I think the numbers will be statistically meaningful.
Thanks, all.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Irrelevant. There would be far, far more OTHER incidents (kids getting hold of the guns, teachers unable to cope with the stress of teaching and seeing an easy way out, etc) which would have led to MORE deaths.
Oh, so now teachers are the sociopaths and we don't know how to make a working safe? Lovely.
The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them. There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools, and quite literally - we have most massacres occurring at schools. It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.
Sorry that reality doesn't fit your fear conditions, but we ought not base policy on your misunderstanding of how the world works. Especially a policy that takes away a teacher's right to self (and mutual) defense. I, for one, would be much happier if my kids' math teacher had a gun (in a safe) at school (I know he's an excellent shot). I'd gladly contribute to the school armory fund.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
See: EVERY FUCKING COUNTRY WITH STRICT GUN LAWS.
Also, look at the decrease in crime in Chicago since 1982. When the started enacting tough gun laws.
People make police, but we can't make good policy buy ignoring data.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But not less violence http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html
Citation please.
https://www.facebook.com/rlanza
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The one thing Americans do with more enthusiasm than killing non-Americans is killing each other. What a bloody country!
Teacher, hell what about just paying for 1 or 2 armed security officers at the school. It helps with shootings, kidnappings, or any other kind of crime that might happen on school grounds.
Even without crazy people like the shooter it would be a good idea.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be more military dictatorships.
This is the simple fact of gun control that you can't deal with.
Less guns means more civilians killed by their government
Period.
Feel free to push your own personal agenda by appealing to people's emotions.
For policy, what do scientific studies say?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if doing so increases crime?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if doing so resulted in more children being massacred, on average?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if it allowed for more abusive police?
Would you still advocate more restrictive gun laws if doing so allowed the country to perform genocide?
Give it a rest already. My sympathies go out to the families and survivors of the tragedy in Connecticut, but using the incident to drive wrong-headed policy will only make matters worse.
We're engineers and scientists, we think for a living. Don't let your heart rule your head.
Case in point http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/in-china-22-school-students-stabbed_816680.html
Yet if you look at those states in the U.S. with the least restrictive gun laws: those places where you can get guns more easily, get conceal carry licenses (if those are even required), as well as more kinds of guns, you'll find that those states have no more gun violence (per captia) than those with the most restrictive gun laws. In fact, often they have less gun violence.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
There are 300,000 gun related deaths in the United States each year. Therefore, by your logic,we can never discuss gun control.
My work here is dung.
Such as? It's hard to have an actual discussion when you fail to cite or highlight something to back up your point.
President Obama refuses to call for additional gun control today, despite being a DEMOCRATIC party president with major political capital from just being emphatically reelected. The Democrats have abandoned this issue en masse. The gun lobby already has answers prepared (if people at the school had guns the only dead person would be the shooter, etc.) and they have traction among the population. Federal court struck down a concealed carry law in Illinois 2 days ago and it doesn't seem likely that the Supreme Court will roll that back.
It's clear the NRA has won on this issue. I don't think anyone can deny that, no matter what political party they belong to.
When I hear about this, why is it always schools? Is it because only the ones in the schools are newsworthy and the others are just not news anymore? Or is there something that makes people hate schools so much that they want to kill it?
Why not malls or other places?
People here will most likely come up with some reason that will be related to body count: defenseless victims. I just wonder if that is the only reason and I doubt it is.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If I look at the cross section of my friends who are NRA members, most are Republicans. Of those, most are for limiting all government programs, but especially those which treat "fake" illnesses like mental instability. They post about how the government shouldn't be providing social services because it raises the taxes which chip away at the money they work for every day in their jobs.
Nobody in the NRA ever seems to be asking Congress to fund programs to evaluate and assist the mentally unstable. Quite the opposite, they're more likely to call them weirdos or outcasts or cheats, living off the government dole and asking for service after service for nothing. These are the same people who made fun of the little kid in high school, or hurled epithets from their truck window at the way they dress or called them godless fags as they walked by on the street.
And, for the record, a crazy fucker walking into a gym with a pipe bomb would be better. (1) the total death toll would have been lower and (2) the chance of the person going through with it would have been lower, as it's hard to light your own death fuse. It's why most suicide bombers don't actually activate their own explosives - they're remotely detonated by handlers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
PROTIP: Correlation is not causation.
The US simply has a very high level of desperate and crazy people. Masses and masses of insane religious schizos, extreme poverty gradients, generally being an anti-social dog-eat-dog society (Which is the cause for the former two.) aka. ultra-capitalist law-of-the-jungle feudalism, extreme obsession with wars and murder and hate...
Under all those things, the actual effect of the people losing the freedom because they can't stage a revolution anymore simply becomes invisible. And the possibility of staging a revolution was the whole point of keeping the population armed. If anything they are not armed enough... with weapons and defense against social engineering (aka lobbyism aka politics aka marketing aka PR aka news aka propaganda aka churches)!
Because the reason they didn't already have multiple revolutions is because they are grown to be passive-thinkers without an actual free will, completely under the control of social engineers.
Think about it, what is wrong with society that someone does this?
Studies show that assassination attempts are more about gaining fame than about hate. I imagine that part of the motivation of going on a rampage like this is knowing that your face will be plastered all over the world, and that if you make it bad enough, people will talk about it for YEARS. Look at Columbine. The DC shooter. How about the unibomber? You can all probably picture his face, or at least the sketch with the shades and the hoodie, but can you remember any of the victims? People that act out like this want attention. We give it to them only when they do something tremendously awful. This is a cultural problem that we have, and one that some other countries are facing. Some countries have anarchists that blow up trains. Some countries have mass stabbings or axe-wielding crazies breaking into schools (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14909839). We have school shootings.
I hope that I never learn the name of the guy who did this, and never see a picture of his face. I only hope to hear about the victims that are suffering greatly from this tragedy.
A gun in a safe may not be of much use. It would be almost a worse tragedy if you had to resort to throwing a safe at someone. Before this misery in Connecticut today, I saw a surveillance video from earlier in Spring. Two guys try to hold up what appeared to be a slot machine parlour. One geezer was out of his seat and shooting the bad guys about three two five seconds after they announced the holdup. No trying to remember a safe combination for him.
Their they're doing there hair.
Gunman Photo
Note that it says "injured", and not "killed."
Cynical Idealist
.. you keep exporting weapons everywhere too.
It's not the Constitution itself that enumerates a right to bear arms, but rather the second amendment to that set of central laws.
Some people don't understand that the constitution can be changed by the people it governs via amendments. Some people think that you should simply believe that those laws mean whatever you want, and that people were monumentally stupid about human nature 200 years ago.
Some people believe that rather than going through the effort of actually changing the Constitution to reflect a consensus of what the people deem to be correct, it should mean whatever we want all the time.
I don't *own* any guns yet, although I have fired them before (never at another human, thankfully), but if I *did* own any guns, I'd say that if you have the courage of your convictions, then don't post anonymously. If you want to tell me "fuck you", don't be all covert about who you are...you don't need to be secretive.
There's this great thing called the *First* amendment that means you can say whatever you want, basically, but you probably think that's a silly anachronism, too.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
The proof's in the pudding; are you actually going to put up some numbers, or are you just saying whatever pops into your head without thinking first?
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to. You need to consider the biology, see them as a person. You need to work at it.
To kill someone with a gun, you need to be in the vicinity of the person and you need to point at them. You don't need to humanize them at all.
There is a difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
That is patently untrue as rates of total gun violence in the United States is based on all shootings. This includes accidents and suicides. Those figures are not used in EU gun violence rates. Furthermore if you compare apples to apples, the murder rate in the US is similar to the EU, just bu different means.
Here, have some numbers:
Land Mass:
Europe- 10,180,000 Sq/KM
US- 9,826,675 Sq/KM
Population:
Europe- 836,398,000
US- 309,496,000
Murder Rate:
Europe- 4.83 per 100,000
US- 4.58 per 100,000
Gun Ownership:
Europe- 12,000 per 100,000
US- 90,000 per 100,000
You are a liar.
Period.
I love how you say the same thing Zemran just got done saying, and you manage to get more mod points than he did.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be more violent crime than in the U.S.
This is the simple fact proponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Less guns mean more violence.
Period.
There you go, fixed that right up for you. Don't worry it is an easy mistake to make considering a lot of people seem to believe that all violence must be caused by guns when in truth violence can be caused by so many things from cars, plans, knives to bleach. Restricting an argument to just gun violence is short sighted and stupid kind of like saying a computer is only a computer if it is running an intel chip with a windows operating system.
Yea, but what about the whole picture? It's not like they just shrug and go back to being law abiding citizens because they have a slightly harder time getting a gun.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
that the people who want citizens disarmed are always the same people who want to run our lives through government force.
Even moreso, apparently adults got themselves between the gunman and the children a few times. Personally, I'd rather one of them had a gun, too.
I have heard of such donation programs. I figured the value of the meat (whether eaten, sold or donated) was significant, but I wasn't sure whether one came out ahead compared to the cost of the equipment.
I wondered if some people had delusions of grandeur about of their need to hunt. I'm not surprised that it's realistic in some cases.
I have nothing against people who enjoy it whether or not they need to do it, but it's not a personal hobby of mine, and supporting my interests doesn't seem to have such a risk of collateral damage.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Rodney King brought a tire iron to his holdup. Should he have gotten a worse penalty if he had brought a gun along? Can you imagine what life would be like with a crease in your skull from a tire iron? (I'm sure British slashdotters have a different name for this tool--tyre iron, perhaps?)
Their they're doing there hair.
I was not agreeing with him. It was to point out his absurdity. Just because criminals don't follow the law is no reason to not have the law. Laws are not only deterrents but also to provide punishment. Or are you goong to claim we should abolish laws against murder since criminals will do it anyway?
you can kill a lot of people just as easily with a knife.
Yeah, if you anesthetize them first.
Most obviously shooter was using à galaxy S3
As a resident of Connecticut on someone who grew up near Newtown and had serval friends from Newtown, please keep the families in your thoughts and prayers. This is crisis and a traumatic experience for many people, please keep that in mine. This is a very tender time for many folks.
A lot better than 20+ dead i imagine.
I'm not sure how you can possibly argue that 22 non-fatal stabbings are as violent as 27 murders through guns. Do you have any ability to understand gray-scales, levels of violence and sliding scales of anything?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
While we sit here and navel gaze at the gun, the shooter, how they obtained the materials, and a zillion other things....
There are 18 children that won't be celebrating Christmas (or the religion of their choice) this year.
There will be 27 fresh graves planted before school is out for winter break.
There will be 27 families that will have an empty place at the table and a hole in their hearts for the rest of their lives.
So, gun lobby - tell it to the mothers of the slain children how your backing of 2nd amendment was such a good thing. How they had to die so you could have your little toy. 49 states are conceal and carry. Lot of good it did.
Too bad the shooter is dead... he should be locked in the room with the mothers. All each one of them have is a bobby pin. And no one comes out until all are satisfied that justice has been served. Better get a mop and a bucket.
FredInIT
The difference that gun control makes is obvious: http://nos.nl/artikel/451509-22-chinese-kinderen-neergestoken.html
In China, man knifed 22 kids, wounding them. NOT killing them. US man kills 27 people, 18 kids.
Nutters exist around the world and around the world we suck at dealing with them.
Try this, about a year ago, a pedophile in court testified that he had asked his doctor BEFORE the offense, for voluntary castration. His doctor refused. Why? Because the doctor felt uneasy doing it, probably doing the leg crossing men do when castration is discussed. BUT it is NOT your penis about the removed, it is someone who has feelings he hates but can't stop and he wants to be stopped. All it takes is a snip. Or even just pills. But the doctor refused because the DOCTOR couldn't imagine being castrated being in that situation, that not being a "man" anymore might be better for the patient, for society then the doctor having to do something he is uncomfortable with.
To stop people from committing crimes, you must take actions on thoughts. That is scary and easy to be scared off. But if you are a hero for saving someone from commiting the crime of suicide, why aren't you a hero if you stop someone from comitting another crime? If I take you car keys away when you try to drink drive, people will cheer. If I lock you up in a mental ward where you can be cured instead of acting on your paranoia, it is a thought crime?
There are some deranged people who really need to be locked up, to protect us but also to protect them. But to do so is EXTREMELY expensive, this guy might have been saved and all his victims BUT would YOU have been willing to start paying say 5 years ago for counseling to stop today? Considering most of the west has been CLOSING mental hospitals, the answer is rather obviously: NO.
Right now, it is NOT possible for pedophiles to get voluntary help let alone castration. It is NOT possible to have yourself committed for an extended time, hell even getting locked up for a single night is hard.
We, the "normal" people like to believe everyone can be cured. MUST be cured. That for some people a decent jail cell is just the better option, for their own happiness and ours. We seem to have no problem locking insane people up for life in a hellish jail that will only increase their problems AFTER a crime but NOT protecting themselves BEFORE the crime when it is obvious they are an accident waiting to happen.
Of course, thought crimes, that is scary as hell... but so is letting people who are in obvious need in help fall ever deeper into trouble because WE want to be free.
There is no easy answer to this, it ain't right to punish the obviously insane but locking all of them up also goes against our ideas of justice.
Don't think this is just a US problem. Netherlands saw 2 recent incidents with students killing themselves because of bullying and a while ago, a mass shooting by a nutcase who got a gun permit despite being known to be insane.
It is a world wide issue and it is NOT about guns, guns just make the killings larger, it is about inadequate mental care for those who need it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And that's irrelevant; gun laws take something away from everyone (including people who don't abuse guns), while the rest just stop you from hurting others.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Even if, with a wave of a magic wand, *all* gun ownership were outlawed, and *all* manufacture of new guns ceased, there's more than enough guns to supply evil, malignant people in their quest to do evil.. There would be widespread non-conformity with registration and/or confiscation (witness Canada's travails with, and final scrapping of the Canadian Firearms Registry)... Hell, gangsters and criminals in Eastern Europe/Russia are excavating WWI and WWII battle sites to recover/rebuilt/reuse what are often much more powerful firearms (fully automatic) for criminal purposes. With an FBI estimate of 200 million privately owned firearms (plus those owned by military/LEO/Museums that could also be misappropriated for criminal purposes) and there would be guns to assist criminals for the next century or two.
What hard data? Cite?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I don't care if the TSA was effective; security will nearly always be less important to me than freedom.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Bang Bang Shoot Shoot
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Asshole eh? Wow.. somebody has sand in their vagina...
Yet Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the U.S. and oopsie...
I say this as a moderate Dem with a libertarian bent: civilian gun owership will not be outlawed in the US within your lifetime. Witness this and this. We need to disarm criminals, close the gunshow loophole, and find a mechanism to weed out the mentally unstable with respect to weapons purchases. The last is the trickiest, especially considering doctor patient confidentiality.
Was the gun running Linux? What's the angle here for a tech news web site?
The problem really is that law abiding people will follow the law and not carry guns when told not too. This has been shown to increase the likely hood of non lawabiding to assault people due to the low risk on their part. No matter the laws criminals will have guns in the US. This is unfortunate but true due to our culture. So the best thing would be to arm the lawabiding people to allow them to protect themselves. Really it is a classic arms race issue, and restricting people from self protection will ultimatly end up hurting more.
Revoking the rights of the public does not stop criminals. It will only embolden them and allow them to assult general people with impunity. Self defense is generaly a right any sane person should support, other wise you are just classifying some people as not deserving to live. I am not arguing freedom as such, just that the time to restrict guns was over hundreds of years ago and there is really not much we can do about the availablity of them. So the only other option is to arm the people at risk, i would support full training and support for those that would carry. Imagine how different these situations would be if each teach was a licensed and trained armed respondent.
Gun Control did not, nor would it have stopped it if there was full restriction like in DC. On the other hand if the school was not a no carry zone and instead allowed licensed adults to carry, things may have been different. The situation may still have happened but not have had such a terrible cost.
Truly the use of guns wrongly is horrible and should be prevented. But the access to guns should be allowed, legal, and maybe even encouraged for those at risk to being attacked. Any no carry zones automaticaly puts a high risk target on those in that area. Restricting guns will only affect those who follow the law, and removing the ability to respond in a dangerous situation is like telling someone they are not allowed to protect themselves or those under thier care. Any attempt to remove the use of guns in the US is truly doomed due to the availabilty long standing culture of the US. Even a door to door raid country wide would fail. Only the law abiding would be disarmed and the criminals would be able to continue harming the public. The situation is unfortunate but that is what is so dangerous about an arms race. Both sides must be armed or conflict WILL occur due to one side pressing an advantage.
the problem is that we really have no capacity to prevent access to firearms, nor edged weapons really. The majority of the protection from having a gun is the likely hood you will respond with it. So just having it prevents crimes. On the otherhand it would seem any type of edged weapon is more likely to get you attacked as people are just not as threatened by them, just as you said nearly any adult could reasonably be able to defend against them. How would you propose protection a disarmed populus from an armed criminal?
Really it seems a lot of the issue with states and countries with a large amount of guns is really a cultural issue. The US is still very much about freedom to carry, even proponents of gun control have been found carrying so it seems a lot of the arguments against right to carry is just people trying to prevent others from carrying (ie protecting themselves as they will be). Since that is true it ends up being self prophecising and endless arm race. Countries like japan have true disarmement of the populus and their culture supports it. Many other countries do not, it is not like we could go to afganastan and just sweep and get rid of the guns (we tried). It doesn't work there nor here it seems. So the reality is we need to arm the public just to prevent a larger loss in life due to the criminal side using weapons. As to the capabiluty to respond, The protection of the gun is not absolute, but peoples accuracy even at five feet is very poor. Most would be able to respond if trained before they are hit (unless obviously the first one hit, which would be unlike
Your impotent attempts at enhancement do not work, otherwise you might have the spine to actually post under your actual account.
Looks like the wild fucking west to me.
How many gun deaths are there in Switzerland?
The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them.
You're joking, right? Does that "hard data" count every arrest of an armed person by an armed cop as a "crime prevented by guns"? Or does it point out that if there weren't any guns in the US, there would be anarchy, with many more deaths? If you want "hard data", look at the number of murders per 100,000 people in the US versus other western countries with stricter gun laws. That at least *suggests* that just the opposite of what you claim is true.
sorry about the typo
This doesn't belong on slashdot. It isn't "education news".
captcha: rejoices
that's why we are calling out cowards like you.
Not to be a jerk toward the people in Conn., but yeah you pretty much target the same areas with a gun that you would with a knife, Head, neck/torso. If you don't you are likely just going to mame them and not kill. firearms are also known as ranged weapons. They simply let you be farther away from your target.
Don't blame me for redundant posts. I can't type very fast. Hence the user ID.
in North Korea.
I do believe in ending the drug war, on marijuana at least. However, drug abuse harms mainly the user themselves, and gun abuse harms mainly other people.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
And yet when you look at total violence and actually factor in knife and blunt object violence the countries that have strict gun laws are more violent on average.
Just look at England, it was shown that yeah gun violence went down something like 60% after they enforced the stricter gun laws.... unfortunately stabbings and clubbings went up by roughly 60% meaning violence rates didn't change at all - all that happened was a shift in what kind of violence was being performed.
And also not enough...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nra-sets-1000-killed-in-school-shooting-as-amount,28352/
I'm not really making gallows humor. Seriously, does it have to be a thousand before you get some half-decent first-world gun control you smalldick fuckers?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I was listening to the local anti-American socialist/communist radio station, and they had the fat loudmouth Ed Schultz and his sycophant callers hollering about how we need to "stand up to the NRA" and ban guns. It's always the same "people" - the Left, who are always seeking more power for the State.
I for one think that anyone who advocates gun control or gun bans deserves to be killed. Any politician who tries to enact gun control legislation or gun bans as a result of this needs to be killed, preferably after being tortured.
The problem I see is that not being a criminal, you can buy a gun in the US. Then, for whatever reason, you commit a crime - with that gun.
In a country where guns are prohibited, as a non-criminal, you didn't buy a gun. If you go disturbed enough to be in a state where you might come to commit a crime, you still don't have a gun. People who buy guns in countries where guns are prohibited have been criminal for much longer to have that kind of access.
The problem with non-criminals being allowed to buy guns is that when they finally snap, they have a gun.
My
I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them
With an average of 35 homicides per day committed in the USA with firearms, I would say the window for airing those strong feelings is pretty damned small.
Oh, well as long as we're imagining...
Seriously this is the wrong site to be discussing this topic. There are reddit, dailykos and million other places. Slashdot needs to focus on its mission
Saw an article recently that mentioned if you exclude gang killings (which don't compare with the situation in European cities), the homicide rate from guns in the US is very comparable to that in Europe despite the availability of more guns.
If you take care of the poverty issues that drive desperate young men to live a life of crime due to the break down of families in the ghettos, does the violence drop to the normal for people who who aren't impoverished?
I have mod points at the moment but not enough to knock down all the boneheaded arguments of the form "it's a problem of poor (insane) behavior, not the ease with which people can act out" - and the related, equally foolish argument "knives kill people too".
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else? If you followed the link to the knife attack in China (http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html), you'll see that 22 children were wounded, none reported dead. So, 22 wounded is the same as 27 dead?
There is a valid argument for legal gun ownership, but neither of these come close.
Again, the existence of guns in such wide availability in the US denotes that criminals will get their hands on guns no matter what the laws are.
Making guns patently illegal is simply the only option that works.
Will it be done in my lifetime? Fair guess is no, but that doesn't have anything to do with what the 'problem' is and what would effectively solve it to manageable levels.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to. You need to consider the biology, see them as a person. You need to work at it.
What, because you have to be closer to them? If you're already at the stage where you're killing people with anything, I don't think you can count on some vague "humanizing" factor. We're not talking about normal people here.
Yay! All hail the true American way! (But where is the car chase?)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Computers were initially invented to calculate trajectories of naval cannons in order to more efficiently kill humans.
This just in! having a low UID =/= having a fucking brain.
BTW, all your "points" are false.
5) If having a gun was illegal, you would have an opportunity to know someone was going to kill people when you found them with a gun.
Congradu-fucking-lations. "oh look that person has a gun, he is here to kill us" " Sooooo glad we can't do any fucking thing about it because we are all safe and snuggly because we don't have guns" Fucking idiots.
this is what innocent victims of drone strikes in Afghanistan have to deal with every single day! It doesn't even make the news anymore. I wonder if such a cavalier attitude to violence ever has any 'blow back' on a society?
Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws.
They're often not criminals when they get the gun. They might be people with criminal intent, but they're often not.
Crimes of opportunity and passion are usually committed with the tools at hand and account for a very large fraction of homicides.
I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
Yet you did.
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to
I think the guy who did this latest shooting really really wanted to kill people.
So lets talk about 18 children dead and how many would still be alive.
Who would you rather face? A gun wielding attacker or a knife wielding attacker?
I thought so.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
This is not a gun control issue. This is a lunatic control issue that seems to be somewhat unique and growing in the United States.
Compare gun control policies in places such as:
Switzerland where the laws are similar to the U.S. and, unlike the U.S., there are over 500,000 FULLY AUTOMATIC casualty rifles in personal possession, yet gun related crimes are very low, bordering non-existent.
United Kingdom where gun laws are very strict and even the vast majority of police officers are not permitted to carry guns, yet they have regular and increasing occurrences of gun crimes.
What these places lack, so far, is a new breed of attention seeking suicidal maniacs who wish to incur large death tolls in schools. For some reason a growing number of these people have shown up in the U.S.
A perplexing exception is the recent Norway gunman who, despite strict gun laws in Norway, legally obtained several semiautomatic weapons before going on a killing spree at a youth camp that killed ~71 people.
Laws or lack there of are not the problem. Lunatics are the real issue.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
The point is that this all doesn't have anything to do with gun laws. Maybe it would be advisable to have a properly vetted, armed cop / security person per school. But to do that you don't need gun laws that are so loose that basically anyone can buy guns in droves. The Virginia Tech murderer was a diagnosed psychopath, an extreme loner, a known stalker of female students -- and he could still buy his guns without problems. The legislation that allows this is INSANE.
I will always walk around unarmed, as do the overwhelming majority of people in modern day America (let alone the UK). With that in mind, I'd rate my survivability as far higher if I were attacked by a lone crazy person with a metal club or a knife than I would if I were attacked by a lone crazy person with a semi-automatic handgun.
Can I imagine life with a caved-in skull? No more so than having my brains blown out. But can I imagine life after being smacked in the ribs with a crow bar? More so than after getting a couple of bullet-shaped holes in my chest.
Enough is enough
In a Steven Segal movie, here's what happens: the brave teacher pulls out his own gun and takes the bad guy down before he can shoot any of the kids.
In reality here's what happens: armed citizens rush to take down the gunman. Some of them miss, injuring / killing more kids in the process. By the time the police arrives at the scene, they're incapable of distinguishing the perpetrator from the well meaning people also holding a gun. One of them is possibly shot by law enforcement.
Adding more guns to the situation is just a recipe for disaster.
The USA is a lost cause. I say we block off the boarders with them as much as possible and just let them slide off in to oblivion. Once they kill themselves off, maybe then we can let them back in to the world.
My country may not be much better but at least we have some sense when it comes to firearms.
Point of this? Other than defamation.
So the right to arm bears stems from a fundamental realization that government unchecked rides over people's rights, and armed bears will mitigate that.
The flip side is that now every bear has arms, and, well, might use them. For freedom we are free - and with liberty comes license. It is no crime to ban the mentally ill from having weapons- they are known to not make good judgement; it is a crime to ban the mentally healthy from protecting themselves from each other and from the social compacts gone awry.
Consider prohibition and how well it works for both alcohol and weed. It doesn't. The same logic applies to weapons. If law abiding people can't defend themselves, criminals can - and they have less internal restraint.
Enacting stronger gun laws after there's already 200M+ guns out there isn't going to help, unless you repeal the 2nd Amendment and start taking guns back.
You can completely forbid the sale of guns unless you pass 17 background checks and 27 psychological evaluations, and there will still be 200M guns in the US that can be stolen / borrowed / lost.
Criminals don't give a single solitary fuck about whatever felony weapons beef you're going to stack on top of the multiple counts of capital murder that is going to send them to a gurney with a series of injections. After all, if they gave a fuck about the law, they wouldn't be murdering people, which carries a much heavier penalty than any gun charge.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
look at the number of murders per 100,000 people in the US versus other western countries with stricter gun laws
Hmm, you're talking about Greenland? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_world_by_intentional_homicide_rate.png
Try this?
The best is the enemy of the good
What if the dude who did it voted for Obama and is a liberal? Would that make you any less of a bigot? Or maybe you should look at the person who did it and figure out why he did it before you blame your particular group you want to hate on? You are being a bigot when 27 people are killed? Seriously? Your world view is skewed into 'we vs they'. It is the same sort of thing that goes to what that guy did. But go on, get your being a bigot on and segmenting our population into small portions that are easily controlled.
Its not right wing nut jobs and jerk themselves off while chanting 'freedom uhh uhh freedom uhhh uhh' its *IN* our freeking constitution for goodness sake. If you do not like #2 what others are you willing to do without? How about #1? What about 4, 5, and a true democrate would probably love to get rid of 13 (which they bitterly fought to not have enacted)? Which ones pal come on we are picking a choosing are we not? You want to get rid of 2. I am sure there are thousands of people who want to get rid of other ones. Also if you get rid of #2 you make our armed forces illegal. Bet you never thought of that did you? Who would fight for your right to make bigoted remarks on the computer?
Yeah, more people firing weapons with panicky children running around, what could go wrong?
I'm curious, what is you're ideal solution? We keep trying the "just huddle in the corner and hope the shooter doesn't shoot you" method, over and over again unarmed people show that can die like sheep with the best of them until the gunman is finally pout down. IF you advocate a gun ban, I'm curious to know how you would deal with the millions of guns already out there. We found out in this latest incident in Oregon that the gunman stole the gun he used. Would you advocate the feds going house to house, kicking in doors, and confiscating guns at gunpoint, until all guns are confiscated? Or are you going to say the current method (unarmed, hide cowering) is the best solution?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Question for all you gun haters -- would you feel better about this incident if the attacker used a homemade bomb instead of a gun? This is an honest question.
...is that folks are using this story as a political foil.
18 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE DEAD! VIOLENTLY.
However, the very first thing that people think of is the age-old political battle about guns.
This kind of abstracting our fellow humans into avatars is not something that I particularly like about modern times.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
I am sick and tired of the NRA knee jerk activists that are first to scream, don't call attention to the fact that we want to keep our guns, lots of guns, semi automatic people killing guns because of a flawed Supreme Court decision, in the face of yet another MASS shooting of innocent people in public areas, Theaters, Malls, Schools. Its not just the people that do the killing, its the guns, the gun culture, the easy access to guns. Criminals can get easy access to guns because there are so many around to buy or steal. If they were rare, the price would be higher and you would have fewer criminals being able to afford guns (free market supply side economics at work, how can you argue with that). The specious argument that it is people not guns that do the killing, I would argue that a person without a gun would not be able to go into a school and kill 20 children , or into a theater and mow down rank after rank of people in a easy, impersonal way.
Lets have some sanity about guns as a privileged and not a right or if you like a right that is regulated in a sane way that prevents or make this kind of travesty rare.
The gun lobby has no solution to this problem. They are silent on the matter and want you to be silent too.
MOD PARENT UP
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Guns are not allowed in Belgium: two days ago there was the commemoration of six people killed by a motherf*cker last year.
There are *many* guns allowed in Switzerland and you certainly don't have the same rate of shooting that you do in the U.S. Same for Canada.
Give up the right to own guns and you're giving the monopoly of violence to the state.
It's in your constitution ffs!
If you outlaw guns you'll have criminals still owning them and you'll have mass-murderers finding either guns or another way to kill a lot of people.
The overlooked word is 'countries' which is significantly different than city or state. Gun crimes would likely decrease if the entire country were locked down. Given the porous borders of cities and states in America, strict gun laws in one area would only have a minimal effect.
Apparently in 1998, there were 121 accidental firearm deaths in children 15 and under.
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/whitney.pdf
Much better than 20+ dead.
I hope those who are grieving love ones find support in their time of need. As my fiance and I are just entering the phase of deciding whether or not to have children, I can not imagine what the relative of those victims are going through. I actually grew up in that town and while I did not attend that particular elementary school, I did live near by. It's odd to hear of something like this from home and the small-town-feel community will never be the same.
Still not sure why this is on /. though...
Correlation = causation, ehh?
Hm, I'm sorry, I think I misread you. Still, nice link, eh?
In China, it is forbidden for private citizens to own firearms, for the most part. Yet, this guy went and carved up 22 people at an elementary school today with a knife. Do we need knife control laws now too?
How about better identification and treatment of mental illness that causes people to want to kill children? That sounds like an actual solution to the problem, rather than a band-aid on cancer.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And by you I meant "multi io".
Oh, I agree. Giving guns to six year olds would be so much better an option. Letting their teachers loose in the classroom with automatic weapons could never go wrong.
Think of the savings for the education system. You wouldn't even need to make teachers redundant!
Just bury them.
WHY ARE YOU SO FUCKING STUPID?
The Conservatives in this country are already formulating their excuses for this tragedy... I mean, you can't go out and buy hand grenades or bazookas at Walmart.
Ironic little bit of ad hominem you got there, douchebag.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
How many lives of children (intentionally put "children" there to point out different level of reactions people have with a word) are ruined by corruptions like conflict of interest, regulatory captures, bribery, etc. that lead to loss of jobs, loss of property, and general instability? Heck, maybe we wouldn't have so many serious mental illnesses if the country's finances were more stable.
Just mentioning because almost everybody seems to be clinging to the topic of "guns."
Hm, I'm sorry, I think I misread you. Still, nice link, eh?
Yeah, kinda interesting. Afghanistan seems to be about as violent as France. :-P
>>The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them. There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools, and quite literally - we have most massacres occurring at schools. It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.
Bullshit
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/11/oregon-mall-shooting/1762473/
But the gun grabbers would rather have the 20+ dead children than yet another well publicized defensive use of a firearm.
You are actually so very wrong. Studies have proven that a child who plays these games does not necessarily have an increased propensity towards violence. Hell, when faced with the reality of a violent situation, most children break down into sobbing masses of useless flesh.
We can quibble about the gun laws etc, but the real question is how do we become a more humane society. What forces normal people in to this kind of destructive act ? Can be it linked to the fundamental breakdown of the family bonds ? If and when a person is driven to extreme stress do they have some help available ? Could a Universal Health Plan which provides for Mental Health have prevent people from going over the edge ? Why not people have their guns but require them to prove that they are a stable and responsible citizens ? Whats wrong with Licensing ?
An automatic .223-caliber rifle is an item that is already illegal in the United States (unless you happen to have a Class 2 License from the BATF)
Perhaps your perspective could use a little dose of reality.
Do you own a handgun or a semi-automatic? Are you a police officer?
If you answered 'yes' to question one and 'no' to question two, then you are a coward and you're worthless human trash.
The article you quoted mentions that gun crimes in Chicago are down 9% overall. 438 deaths this year. Article mentions 900+ homicides in the early 90s. I think you may have accidentally posted an article that agrees with the person you were attempting to refute.
That's the sort of ineffectual cost-prohibitive knee-jerk reaction we expect from the masses. I thought slashdot was better than that.
I'm glad that assault weapons are banned in Connecticut... oh, whoops.
That same lunatic can inflict the same damage driving a car into a crowd, but guns are the problem. Do I have that right?
You had to go all the way back to 1927 for that. How many mass shootings have happened in the United States this year? Heck, I count 23 instances of school shootings in the United States with more than one victim in just the last ten years.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Period?
Funny, Switzerland has and extremely high number of guns to its population, yet does not have that high amount of gun violence.
Seems there must be some other factor at work here.
Period.
Japan, where I lived for 10 years, has *nothing* like this. Yes, the occasional crazy has been known to hack and slash up random people with a knife, but a) those incidents are much less frequent than in the US and b) the amount of damage is limited by the relatively indestructive nature of the weapons. And while it's not as simple as "nobody can get a gun", not having access to guns definitely limits the ability of nutters like this guy to wreak havoc on such a massive scale.
I hated a lot of shit about Japan but reading articles like this as my daughter prepares to enter kindergarten really makes me think hard about moving back.
It's not a citation per se, but you can ask anyone who lives or has lived in a country with strict gun laws how many gun massacres they have each year, and the answer is going to be a hell of a lot less than the ridiculous number we have here in the US. Connecticut School? Oregon Mall? Sikh Temple of Wisconsin? Aurora movie theater? Jesus.
Reconsider your right to bear arms in the 21st Century.
I'm not talking about overall violence.
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather live in a world where there a good chance of getting robbed than a good chance of getting shot.
The occurrences in Japan and China are exceedingly rare. A few knife massacres in a nation of >1billion is not the same as having a mass murder per week with guns in the US.
And you did not refute my point.
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
There are thousands of weapons collectors, shooting competitors, and enthusiasts who have gone through the process to own Class III weapons. Only two murders have been committed in the last 50 years using legally obtained automatic weapons, and in one of those the perpetrator was a law enforcement officer. But rather than require background checks, fingerprinting, and registration, the NRA and other fanatics want semi-automatic handguns, shotguns and rifles with quick-change magazines to be available off-the-shelf and on-demand for any reason. The system to regulate Class III weapons has shown itself effective at keeping powerful weapons out of the hands of hooligans. But the fanatical NRA is going to ruin gun ownership for everyone because of the irrational fear of the "slippery slope" phenomenon.
There are other countries that enjoy high rates of gun ownership, such as Sweden, but officials simply ask a few basic questions, like 'do you have a hunting license?' or 'do you belong to a shooting club?' If neither, why do you need a gun? Of course, Sweden has a low rate of violent crime so self-defense is rarely a valid reason. Collectors can own weapons also, but they need to show they have a valid collection, not just an armory of heavy weapons waiting for the apocalypse.
but if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
The shooter apparently had body armor, so likely yes.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I did not say less violence.
My point stands:
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to. You need to consider the biology, see them as a person. You need to work at it.
Yeah, no. Stabbing someone is easy; just hold the knife firmly, and swing your arm in the general direction of the victim. It can happen in a brief flash of rage. There are more spots where you can stab someone and kill or seriously injure (we're talking maiming) than there are places that are...er, safe to stab. Organs, arteries, ligaments/muscles...you don't want to get stabbed.
The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them..
I'm unaware of such "hard data". Cites please. Btw, if you are referring to John Lott's important work, note that the National Academy of Sciences reviewed this and did not back his core claims.
It is impossible to predict what would have happened had the audience been armed - or even a small minority of the audience - but I suspect that like here, there would have been fewer deaths. Possibly not 0, but fewer.
It is completely possible that there would have been 0 deaths there because the gunman wouldn't have picked a spot where he might encounter armed resistance who might be a better shot than he was. It isn't so much the quick draw wild west winner as the deterrent effect of knowing there is likely to be someone around - probably off duty cop, ex cop, active duty military, ex military, who will kill you that would help reduce the crazies. Joe Random Good Citizen probably wouldn't have the psych training to weather the surprise attack well - even if he/she were a good shot. But there are those who could and would. They are the true deterrent effect that would put a stop to the nuts.
The MAD philosophy of the Cold War era worked - even with regimes which were not what we would consider the most stable.
Incorrect. Europe has extremely strict gun laws. Could you point me to a few dictators of which you speak in Europe?
Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Germany...all have strict gun laws.
They do not have dictators. Your assertion is disproven.
Try using real figures, the most listed on the page you reference 31,224 in 2007 - 300,000 is off by an order of magnitude.
By the way, more people die in motor vehicle deaths each year than by firearms, yet we don't require anyone going to purchase a car to get a background check...
But not less violence compared to places with extremely strict gun laws.
You are comparing state to state.
try comparing the rate of gun violence in Texas, a place with some of the least restrictive gun laws, to places in Europe. Ireland, for example. What do you find?
Don't ban guns. Doesn't work.
To stop school shootings, ban schools.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
My thoughts are with those unfortunate parents whose grief must be too hard for anyone to bear
While your argument is logically correct, in cases like this usually we don't have to do with criminals but with long-term lunatics or people who just flipped, who were not criminals till that point in time.
Stricter gun laws would supposedly make it harder for a lunatic their hands on guns, and almost impossible for somebody who just got pissed off and short-circuited to find a gun in short period of time.
Once we ban all forms of guns once and for all, we'll have a utopian society where everything will be beautiful and everyone will live a blissful existence. We can prove this by verifying that there were 0 murders throughout history until those bastards developed the gun.
It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.
Or perhaps the people most likely to go postal are disproportionately likely to be at or near schools, and have a lot of their hopes and fears invested in the things which go on at schools? This guy's mom worked there.
How many of these school shooters were had no personal connection to the school in question, and so could have been just as well expected to shoot up a mall or a movie theatre if not for the "gun free zone" thing? Any of them? I think your impromptu psychoanalysis has a few gaps in it.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
I for one when I have to go to the bathroom really badly can miss the combination on the bathroom a few times before success. I suspect if there is a shooter around the same would hold. Also if a gun wielding person (don't want to leave out the ladies) comes into the classroom, what would you think he would do if he saw the teacher start opening the safe?
that's right and how many people's lives were saved by firearms? shitton more than 121. And 121 is less than 1 per million people, i'll take my chances with letting law abiding citizens own guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
I am going the nut case route and say this was to distract us from the criminals that run the USA. They allowed the mexican cartels to move guns and drugs around while laundering TRILLIONS of dollars for them... we have all forgotten about this with 18 dead children. How many kids have the cartels and by extension our government killed just here in north america?
Oh look, an uncited, grossly oversimplified, sweeping generalization. Rather than argue about all the cases where that has failed miserably in the real world, and the handful of odd examples where things like legalizing CCW had virtually eliminated crime, let's pretend you're right and stick to the one thing people of your mindset can never deal with - you've already got over 300 millions guns here, in the hands of 80 million people. You're past the point where they could ever be eliminated. There is absolutely no practical way for you to remove the firearms, you don't even know where most of them are or who owns them - ergo, the very suggestion that you're going to eliminate or reduce them is shot down (no pun intended) by the fact that you could never, ever accomplish it. So try and think of something productive and actionable instead of telling us all your insightful, groundbreaking generalizations. That way, we don't have to waste hours pointing at places like DC and Chicago.
To do what McVeigh did you have to be pretty smart, do some clever planning, get large quantities of materials, and basically put a lot of stuff together.
To do what McVeigh did:
You need to have attended a high school level chemistry class, or do an internet search.
You need a truck or van which you can easily rent.
You need some fertilizer from your local superstore garden department or feed/farm supply store.
You need some fuel from your local gas station.
You need a mental illness.
It's not anything that anyone of basic functional intelligence couldn't accomplish in two hours or less. McVeigh was a raving lunatic, he was not a mastermind.
Mental illness is the issue, not guns, not fertilizer, not ANYTHING else but mental illness.
An 8 year old child? Or a teacher who goes to an elementary school with a gun under his belt?
If only there were laws about this sort of thing, then everything would be OK. What we need to do is keep passing laws until this kind of thing stops happening. Who's with me?! Call your representatives, tell them we need more laws!
False.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
Has the existence of a law ever stopped a criminal? Those of us who know better don't need laws because we know how to behave. Those who don't know how to behave will ignore the law. What you're saying is that, in effect, laws are equivalent to Burger King menus: for every crime, the punishment will be "X years in jail." You want fries with that? Further, when judges have discrepancy to adjust a punishment, codified punishments become judgement calls, in effect, so, yes, in fact, we don't need laws.
You are equating gun violence with all violence, this just isn't the case. In countries with more restrictive gun laws, knife crime has gone up. You're just trading one problem for another. Period.
In case you want some citation:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9024711/Knife-crime-rises-by-ten-per-cent.html
Banning weapons would patch the symptom, but not cure the disease. (If weapons should be banned, it's another discussion - I don't wanna touch this issue now).
The main problem is that we allow all kind of nutcracks to go loose without restrictions at the same time we fail to uncover these nutcracks before they do any harm.
I understand I'm dangerously flirting with absolutism here. However, I don't like the way this is going neither.
I don't want kids being murdered (by weapons of any kind) at schools, and I don't want to see them jailed inside schools that looks like prisons neither.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
5) If having a gun was illegal, you would have an opportunity to know someone was going to kill people when you found them with a gun.
How so?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
raise you one knife wielding lunatic in China who basically just did the same thing.
http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2012/12/14/man-stabs-22-children-at-chinese-elementary-school/
I assure you, removing a firearm from the equation does nothing to inhibit the violence the human race
likes to dispense upon each other from time to time. It is VERY hard to stop this type of violence if the
individual is willing to give up their life in return.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
This is the simple fact opponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Less guns mean less gun violence.
Period.
That's actually really easy to "deal with" since this is just a simple case of the false-cause fallacy.
You: There are more shootings in the US, therefore it is because of weaker gun laws.
Reality: Crime, in general, is higher in the US than many other countries. Obviously gun-related crime will be higher as well.
If you want to feel all warm and fuzzy by putting blame somewhere, a much more rational place would be to lay it on the dismal state of the mental health industry in the US.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
The only way out of this downward spiral is to improve the society in general or start another world-war that will clean-out the shit from the gene pool. It's amazing what a decimation of the population does to the survivors for one or two generations.
Disclaimer
The above comment is bollox.
Truer words have rarely been sig lined.
And you don't even have to ban guns.
STOP SENSATIONALIZING IT.
These people who do this sort of thing has issues, one of them is typically a deep unsatisfied need for attention and people to pay attention to them. The fact that it'll be in the news for a long time to come just reenforces that need. Sure, they guy who did it is dead and it really doesn't get him any useful attention, but in his warped mind he got the attention he was craving.
Continually making this shit so high profile just encourages others to do the same thing. You HAVE TO DO IT BETTER THAN THE LAST GUY OR NO ONE WILL GIVE YOU ANY ATTENTION. If you aren't bigger with a more gruesome crime, the news will pass you over, then you don't get the attention you crave.
Stop blasting it over and over on the news. Don't say his name on TV or the radio. Don't acknowledge the persons former existence. Other loonies will take notice that doing so is no longer the way to get attention.
We do this too ourselves by broadcasting it to every radio, tv and cell phone practically WHILE ITS HAPPENING so that EVERYONE starts paying attention.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Knife wielding attacker, but then I'd prefer to be armed at the time. I'd also prefer that any teacher that wanted to be armed be armed, and that any student that wanted to be armed be armed.
I don't think the amount of violence perpetrated would change significantly - gang violence in the streets of some big cities is proof that violence against students will occur regardless of whether there are safe gun-"free" zones in schools or not. Open carry, however, might seriously reduce the likelihood of nuts targeting areas where there are likely to be lots of people who would shoot back.
I happen to think the Constitution got it right with the 2nd amendment.
It's been done before. So start digging up some statistics.
There's no need to GUESS at this sort of thing. In the past, kids have brought their guns to school. They didn't carry them around the halls like some sort of liberal dystopian fantasy. There is precedent here.
There's no need to guess. You can look this stuff up. See how the numbers work out.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
so instead of just losing the money (and getting it back later through insurance) the geezer escalated the situation by actively using violent action through the use of a weapon.
is that a positive outcome?
did the two guys die?
the only stupid one here is the one going to extremes... that would be you...
Chicago is located next to Indiana, which has some of the most fucking stupid and lax gun laws in the country. So, yeah, we end up with more guns than say -- New York -- which is surrounded by slightly less bat-shit crazy states.
Which is exactly why most firearms hobbyists, like myself, choose to get a concealed carry permit, if available in their state. Ideally, teachers would be allowed this option as well.
Apparently the White House [1], let alone the NRA, doesn't think it's time to discuss the culture that causes these kinds of shootings - a culture where guns are not only freely available, but generally untraceable and too often get into the hands of folks who should not have them (ie, mentally imbalanced, felons, and domestic terrorists).
If the unquestioning defense of the 2nd amendment means we can't even discuss why disturbed or evil individuals who shouldn't have access to these kind of armaments have the "right to bear arms", then we're fucked as a country.
Let's not even get into the fact that the NRA and gun-lobby have effectively made the process of tracing how these weapons get distributed to the wrong hands is never questioned and the illicit channels aren't closed.
It's about protecting and enhancing the profits of the gun makers, and thereby the bonuses of their CEOs, Boards of Directors, Wall Street investors, etc.
They consider a few dozen, or a few hundred, or a few thousand dead childre as unimportant. They really don't care, and their hearts go out to no one, because their hearts have been replaced with cash registers.
Body armor doesn't get rid of the kinetic energy of a bullet.
Plus, you can always aim for the head.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You can get "oh-shit" safes with biometric (fingerprint) or other quick release locks, that schoolchildren couldn't reasonably open.
that's right and how many people's lives were saved by firearms?
citation?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
The only way to settle the gun control argument is to put all the pro gun people and anti gun people in an arena and let them fight it out.
JoeR
Anybody who thinks a knife is less deadly than a gun has obviously never tried to defend themselves against a knife attack. You have to get closer to the victim, true... But that's not of much consequence, as the victim is probably unarmed, and in this case they were little kids.
Every fucking country with stricter gun laws. Fuck, travel a bit north and look at Canada. Or just fucking google search "list of countries by gun violence". This is not rocket science, and I'm not even going to go through the effort of making a "let me google that for you" link.
Lemme guess, you're one of the "civilians should be allowed to own and easily obtain fully automatic weapons" people, aren't you?
It seems to make more sense when compared to 'ban all guns!!!'
Read John Lott's "more guns, less crime" - he wasn't even a gun guy when he wrote it (but the NRA adopted him soon thereafter). Bush, yeah, that one, didn't want to sign "shall issue" concealed carry laws in TX, but after he did, violent crime went down. We sure as hell can't solve this with just locking people up for long periods, in the USA we already have more people incarcerated (mostly for drugs) per capita than any other country on the planet - there's no room, even in our crony-capitalist privately owned prison system.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Another mind control victim has gone off like a well placed human time bomb.
It's 9-11, one Manchurian candidate at a time.
I think you can measure the march toward the goal posts by the length of time between these sordid population control events. They seem to be picking up in speed and hysterical intent.
Guns don't kill people. America kills people.
If you've lived in this country for more than 10 years, and haven't had the insatiable urge to go on a GTA style rampage, something is wrong with you. American society doesn't place value on the individual. It's a society of too many different peoples and cultures all competing economically, religiously and culturally over petty material goods.
This country is a battlefield. Nobody gives a shit about anybody else. Everyone around you is a competitor trying to take what you have. So when people want to commit suicide to escape the existential void created by American life they take their competitors with them.
It's very simple.
So I was watching a CNN stream, and some retired guy-who-has-had-experience-with-guns (can't remember, maybe he was a sheriff or something) comes on saying (paraphrasing): "Yeah, I support the Second Amendment, but I think people wanting to own a gun should pass very strong controls to know whether or not they are mentally stable enough to have it." And the newscaster [i]fucking cuts him off[/i] before he can finish the sentence.
Now please tell me where exactly was the guy not making sense. You might want to know I'm Spanish before answering.
Your news outlets are seriously fucked up. And I'm making a generalization here, because if this is CNN, and I can't even begin to imagine how Fox will be.
When I go to the US, I'm [b]fucking[/i] cutting whatever cord it is that goes into my television.
No. The absurdity is in conflating laws that criminalize owning a particular thing with laws that victimize others. Victimizing others generally is the sort of thing that is always wrong and harmful rather than just wrong and harmful in a vanishingly small (but spectacular) number of cases.
There is no logic in it. You might as well ban cars and backyard pools next. You will get much more mileage out of either of those.
This "ban them" meme is just the result of a what in a movie would be some hysterical female character screaming at the male lead "do something". Then he goes and does something stupid just be seen "doing something".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Those countries likely never had much of a history of people having any freedom at all or the ability to own things in general.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Lets have some sanity about guns as a privileged and not a right
So, treason is cool now? Passing laws in direct violation of Constitutionally enumerated rights is fine?
While we're at it, let's make a list of other Constitutional amendments we prefer to ignore. How about those pesky 13th, 19th, and 24th as well?
Your conclusion presumes that there are no ways to inflict violence aside from violence.
Less gun violence != less violence.
See: Australia
http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/violent%20crime.html
"The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them."
You seem to conflate "hard data" with "statistics I I pulled out of my ass".
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html
It's interesting how much you complain about fallacies, considering how many non-points you make.
4) Assumption, with many, many real-world examples of that failing
5) Assumption
6) Assumption, plus you apparently don't know how many people can load their own rounds, making that moot
7) Assumption, also not something brought up in this discussion at all?
8) Oversimplification
1 and 2 are just pretty much useless retorts against the GP's idiot presentation, but more power to you. 3 is the only logically valid point you made, but if you actually do your homework, you'll find that it's debatable - if nothing else, because you're never, ever going to do anything significant to reduce the 300M firearms already here. If you're going to preach about "trite logical fallacies", you might want to avoid making posts riddled with them.
I'd like taht number too. But since you can't get an accurate number on how many lives, you can only estimate... in any case the various estimates range from millions to hundreds of thousands of injuris/deaths. Good lucky finding an unbiased source on that.
Regardless 121 people a year.. you have a better chance of being struck by lightning.
Not one, NOT ONE, of the over 100,000 legally-owned automatic weapons in civilian hands has been used to commit a murder in over 70 years. Even murders using illegally-owned automatic weapons are pretty rare.
More killings using alternative means.
This is the simple fact that proponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Shootings by anybody shooting anybody are the problem.
Why have a law about murder with a particular tool, when there is a law about murder already?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
What we've ended up with is neither security nor freedom... only tyranny coming at us from both our own government and from dangerous criminals.
As a 15 year police veteran, I urge everyone who lives in a state that allows it to get your concealed carry license and a quality handgun and learn how to use it and carry it with you everywhere you go. And if you live in a state where it's difficult or impossible to get your license, then move. If you only knew half of what I've seen "out there" in the world, you'd arm yourself to the teeth. It's much more dangerous out there than you are led to believe by your government or the mass media. And we the police, yes the government, are not able to protect you even if we had a mandate to do so and actually wanted to do so. All we do is clean up the mess afterwards. You're really on your own... and if the economy doesn't come back soon it's going to get much more ugly out there.
captcha = repress :-/
So long as violence is more accepted in our society than love this will continue to happen. Why are violent movies like "Saw" rated R and Porn rated X. All loss of life on screen should be 18 and over!
yeah, his mother should have pulled her gun and shot her son. FFS
"27 Reported Killed In Connecticut Elementary School Shooting"
Slashdot. News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
If finding kids quivering in terror in closets hours after the shooting finished is not the most compelling argument for RFID tagging kids in school... then I don't know what to tell you.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them.
Guns don't kill people and they don't prevent crimes. People do. Duh. Get your ideology straight. Also, SOURCE?
Where? Where has it been shown that any mass shooter was a member of "a well regulated militia"?
"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."
How many of the US citizens actually have used they guns in self defense or in a situation of danger with positive results? It's a serious question, no joke here. Yeah... I know, here in Slashdot, freedom is the way to go, and I love this page for that, however defend the need of own a tool made especially to kill people, when the only thing that you need to get one is a credit card, it's look to me like the extreme point of that visión. Sorry for my English.
You can't read can you?
More violence != more gun violence.
It means more beatings and knifings.
I'm going to type this in all caps for emphasis.
EVERYONE WANTS A LAW(S) OF SOME KIND BECAUSE IT MAKES THEM FEEL LESS HURT AND LESS HELPLESS IN THE FACE OF THIS TRAGEDY.
But a gun isnt responsible for this. It was the person holding it. If a car runs down 12 people in a crosswalk you dont blame the car you blame the driver.
Human beings are remarkably fragile for being so prolific. The number of everyday objects that can kill when used in the wrong way is staggering. A truly deranged person need not go further than the gas station with $20 and a 5 gal. gas can if they want to kill a crap-ton of innocent people.
Significantly spiraling populations and high population density mean that if a dangerous mental illness effects 1/100 or 1/1000 then there are literally hundreds of people walking around as ticking time bombs in every major city.
Dealing with people with dangerous mental health issues is unfortunately the "elephant in the room". Nothing the gun control lobby wants will do anything to solve this problem. They cant seem to wrap their brains around a law that would actually be truly preventative. It is of course illegal to commit murder or to go on a killing spree and if you do so after you are caught the law will deal with you if you don't kill yourself. This is ONLY punitive; it is in no way preventative. Crazy people don't care that the last person who went crazy and killed people was punished.
To prevent a tragedy like this you need to segregating those who are both dangerous and mentally unstable or require the mentally unstable to be licensed and regularly re-licensed as safe to be around the rest of society. Nothing less will prevent future tragedies.
Make all the gun laws you want. They are not going to prevent a thing. There are literally thousands of ways for one deranged person to kill innocent people. Guns are the least of our worries. Taking away people firearms only means people cannot defend themselves in their homes when some psycho pops a cog over their daddy issues and decides to go on a killing spree through their neighborhood.
Is the event tragic? Yes. So are many others. It is somewhat funny that the more the nannies try to control guns the more often we seem to have events like this. Even so, taking a look at any 10, 20 or 50 year period the odds of being kill in a mass shooting (ie, more than 2 or 3 dead) are infinitesimal. Frankly your children have a higher chance of being struck by lighting (or being killed in a car crash or getting cancer) than being killed by a mad (or otherwise) gunman. Of course, none of that is politically correct but maybe thats part of the problem too.
Those are the number for accidental deaths of children. You know, children going into the gun cabinets of responsible gun owners and killing themselves or eachother? Or people who watched too many action films trying to save somebody's life?
Accidental deaths for adults are ten times higher.
And none of these 27 who died today are part of any of these numbers, they're in the "homocide" category.
Combined homocides are 100 times higher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ushomicidesbyweapon.svg
Accidental injury rates are *much* *much* higher.
Here's some solutions.
1) Heavily regulate firearms.
2) Work on getting Supreme Court justices in place who will interpret the Second Amendment to allow heavy regulation legislation to occur.
3) Regulate the sale of bullets.
4) Re-institute the assault weapon bans that were in place.
I'd rather live in a world with knife violence than a world of gun violence. I can run from a knife.
"Reality: Crime, in general, is higher in the US than many other countries. Obviously gun-related crime will be higher as well."
But not if guns are made more difficult to get. The idea that if there were less guns made available, due to heavy regulations and outright bannings of assualt rifes, would have NO effect on gun crime is stupid.
Less guns = less gun violence.
There's someone sending multiple mod points long after the discussion started. Their purpose is to hide this and other anti-gun discussion. Of course it could be anyone, but I know that there are many PR companies that hold multiple moderation accounts on web sites that perform moderation. I can just imagine who they work for.
Bruce Perens.
China is a nation of 1 billion people. What is the rate of mass murders in China due to Knife Assaults?
In the US we have mass murders, on average, about 1 per week.
Less than there are in the U.S.
Less guns = less gun violence.
They have less guns, and they have less gun violence.
Apparently in 1998, there were 121 accidental firearm deaths in children 15 and under.
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/whitney.pdf
Much better than 20+ dead.
Can you cite any sources that aren't over a decade old?
Lot of shit can change in 14 years.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
For 20 years I have watched supposed intelligent, progressive thinkers on slashdot try and justify the pro-gun lobby in the US and the "right to bear arms".
It a mantra that is repeated over and over and over after every massacre - and its insane.
To look at the rest of the world, no one comes close to America when it comes to the frequency of random mass shootings like this.
Australia, for example, is still feeling the affects of its last massacre. 35 people were killed in a horrific incident in Port Arthur, Tasmania - in 1996. 16 years ago.
You can cite other examples from around the world, but no one beats the US for the predictability and inevitability of another event like this occurring again.
It amazes me that there are still people arguing that the best solution to the problem is to have *more* guns. There are far more armed civilians in this country than any other country on the planet, and yet these kind of events are happening increasingly often in America. Clearly this is not working as either a deterrent, or helping to keep people safe. The free availability of guns and ammunition is definitely making it much easier for the nutjobs to do an unbelievable amount of harm before the police, or anyone, can respond.
Your citation says nothing about countries with strict gun control laws. Can you specify which countries on that list have strict gun control laws and which do not?
Yeah, more people firing weapons with panicky children running around, what could go wrong?
If this were a discussion about drunk driving, you could say the same thing about the number of driver's licenses issued, and it would still be a strawman.
I can tell you one thing that wouldn't have happened, though - the lunatic would not have been able to go through the school completely unopposed. Hell, the knowledge that any of the faculty might have the equipment to put his rampage to an end may have even prevented the incident entirely.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
How many fatalities in that incident? Zero.
Its not about curing them, its about damage limitation.
Invaders must die
If you want "hard data", look at the number of murders per 100,000 people in the US versus other western countries with stricter gun laws
You can't make good conclusions based on just that alone. You'd have to take into account societal factors, poverty, et all. The US is not a homogeneous country like many Western European countries are.
As soon as you start asking that, you really have to also estimate how many lives were SAVED by gun-owners stopping violent crimes, for starters. (In the U.S., that's not an insignificant number.)
You also have to ask if the Chinese government would have so much ability to trample on their citizen's individual rights if the masses were armed. That's really the main reason the U.S. Constitution includes the right to keep and bear arms, in the first place. I don't think folks like Jefferson and Franklin were so concerned that people might miss out on the chance to compete in target shooting in the Olympics, or that they'd have to go back to bow-hunting. It was clearly a way to ensure the people were in a "power position" if they had to negotiate with an authoritarian government.
yes. and it's a point that gets made over and over that people don't want kids to kill themselves playing with the a gun. It does not happen often enough to warrant any concern. As for actual homocide, it's true we liek to kill each other way to often. It's also true that number, even when counting suicides is less than people killed by cars. I hear a fuck ton more about gun control than car control. It's also true when you take away people with a criminal background that homocide number drops way down. So basically unless you're a criminal guns are an insignificant threat to your life. That morning commute though...
1) I will not be punished for the evil acts of another. Others may have done horrible things with guns, but I did not. I will not submit to being punished by having my rights trampled because of their actions.
2) If you don't want to live in a place where there are lots of guns, move. There are plenty of nations in this world where you can go where there are few or no guns and they will welcome you. Vote with your feet. I want to live in a place where guns are common and freely available. If you don't want to, you are free to leave.
As expected, most of the comments seek to blame guns. Well I've never had a gun so I have no personal axe to grind there, and I'm not even in the US but in the UK where guns are very strictly controlled. And yet, I don't blame this tragedy on Americans having guns.
Instead I blame it on three things that seem far more strongly correlated to nutters going postal:
1) The widespread violence on American TV and in films provides daily role models for the mentally unstable. Television is immensely powerful as an influence on weak or poorly educated personalities. In Europe we have nowhere near the American level of obsession with screen violence, sex is far more our adult cup of tea, which American religious fundamentalism suppresses.
2) A general dislike for social responsibility and extremely wide support for looking after your own interests and nobody else's is endemic in the US, a part of the national culture. Indeed, any suggestion to look after your fellow man is often greeted with total disdain. Clear minds can distinguish between lack of social responsibility and actual hatred of others, but the mentally unstable may not quite see that distinction because it is a rather thin one. It's a dangerous outlook to have on society.
3) The American Way (at least in cities) seems to apply far more pressure on people's lives than is typical in Europe. Our social safety nets like national health are powerful devices for giving people the sense that someone cares about them, and there is no strong cultural pressure to "succeed" in business here, nor to keep up with the Jones's. As a result, it is also rare here for people to feel like they're failures and to lose all hope for the future.
These are all important things that can make the difference between just tolerating another boring day and deciding to end it all and take others with you. Nutters are not created by guns, but by conditions in their environment, and there is no shortage of alternative methods of mass killing. Would anyone feel better if that person hadn't used a gun but instead locked the children in a room and sprayed it with gasoline? I don't think so.
Don't focus so much on the means by which this tragedy was perpetrated. The means are not your main problem.
One word: Mexico (and I live here).
And yet we have fewer murders here. Strange. Probably because we can defend ourselves. I love Indiana.
The MAD philosophy of the Cold War era worked - even with regimes which were not what we would consider the most stable.
Yes, it did work. And it worked because the men with access to "The Button" were aware of the real consequences of those actions and could think to the future to how those consequences would pay out. IE, the mindset of very very few teenage high schoolers.
In America, how do you stop somebody from committing mass murder with a gun?
Can you do it with legislation outlawing guns? Presently, the answer is a resounding NO. You can't just pass a law taking guns away, because the right for a US citizen to bear arms is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. I think efforts to pass such legislation are a waste of energy because they will never clear the constitutional hurdle.
So, how about changing the Constitution? Well, there are two ways to do that. Get two-thirds, or 34 of the 50 individual State legislatures to request that Congress assemble a national constitutional convention to rescind the second Amendment. Failing that, get Congress itself to assemble a constitutional convention by getting two-thirds of sitting members of both the Senate and House to agree, but then you have to get three-fourths, or 38 of the 50 State legislatures to ratify it. The Founding fathers wanted it to be hard for the constitution to be changed on a whim by popular opinion -- that's the 2/3 part of the requirement for the State-initiated constitutional convention. And they wanted it even harder for the federal government to change it -- that's why a constitutional convention initiated by the US Congress requires 3/4, not 2/3, of the fifty State legislatures to ratify it. I seriously doubt the ability of any movement to accomplish those kinds of majorities in both the Congress and the State legislatures. Fwiw, the former method has been unsuccessfully tried twice, the last being with the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies. I'd have to say changing the Constitution gets a pretty resounding NO, as well.
So what's left? This may sound a bit like a certain modest proposal from Johnathan Swift, but I deliberately quoted everybody's favorite SF author in the subject because his pragmatic observations on an armed citizenry formed the basis for what I think may be (the only) possible solution to the problem of random citizens killing eighteen grade-school kids with guns they can legally obtain.
For accidental deaths of children?
Looks like the U.S. is down to 62
http://johnrlott.blogspot.ca/2012/09/accidental-firearm-deaths-for-those.html
My point was that more children die accidentally from mishandling of firearms than could have been saved by the unlikely event of a Rambo being a teacher in this school. Serial killer stories and mass shootings are one hell of a lot more common than action heros.
Why accidental deaths dropped, anyone can speculate. Gun control? better education and awareness? Who knows.
This is how an american responds to suggestions that work in other countries: "But we're like, so .. different man. You can't possibly understand the challenges we face."
It's horseshit.
"Old man yells at systemd"
you mean less than zero? (because that is how many died in China)
One gun does help against many guns.
If multiple armed criminals are coming at you all at once, chances are you're gonna die no matter what becuase if there's a group, they have already convinced themselves they have nothing to lose.
They're not gonna "just scare you" and let you live if you comply with their demands like a good little sheep.
You might as well take out as many of them as you can, else you're a coward.
9-11 proved that hijackers intend on killing you anyway so you'd better fight back. That forever changed how airplane passengers will react to a hijacking.
Any armed criminals are just the same nowdays. If a group of them has targeted you, you're toast.
Case in point: The Wichita Kansas Massacre
Another one: Murders of Channon and Newsom in Tennessee
The whole problem is that all these so-called "gun free zones" are actually target-rich, helpless-victim-rich zones and that's a cold hard fact, jack.
The same was true for Laughner in Tucson. The guy was clearly batshit loco, and the first gun shop he tried to buy from refused to sell. The second one, however, didn't raise any red flags and sold a weapon and ammo to him without question.
/* No Comment */
HOW they did it is irrelevant.
You want to put a stop to these things you have to address WHY they did it.
The screaming for "gun control" is a BS excuse for being unwilling to actually address the problem.
Come on, the GP has obviously analysed the madman's mind correctly where he does a calculated decision based on evidence and facts using logic. Right?... Hang on... Something's not right.
If what you try isn't working, then keep trying harder.
Especially you wild west carry every where shittards.
Fuck you because this happened because of you.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you.
And kids died. I am willing to bet more died in a year across all America in individual shootings compared to a single massacre, massacres make the national news, individual deaths hardly make to the news. Having guns easily accessible and available cause deaths. End of story.
Here is a citation. Not for what the parent wanted though.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
I am fully aware of that. It seems like a moot point because what could average people with average firearms do against modern military-grade training and hardware? The difference wasn't so great in the late 1700's, so it made sense then. At best, opposing gun control on those grounds is fueled by paranoia and takes the law too literally, to the detriment of common sense.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
It's funny Tunisia which has the lowest private gun ownership in the entire world just overthrew their government.
Blaming the victims is a popular hobby of right wing and rapists. It should never work in real life.
1) Gun laws aren't an oxymoron by any definition.
This is your opinion, but as you will see, you haven't supported it very well.
2) Being a criminal does not equate to getting a gun.
Obvious. What's the point?
3) Gun laws make it harder for criminal to get guns,. And it keeps getting harder.
Unfortunately, this just isn't true. Criminals have easy access to guns, even in places with tougher gun laws. As the GP rightly pointed out, criminals do not follow the law. That alone does not mean that guns laws have no effect on the ease by which criminals can obtain guns, so your theory could still be correct. However, the reality has shown that gun laws are far more effective at making it harder for honest citizens to obtain firearms for their own self protection than they are at preventing criminals from having guns.
4) Crime drops when gun laws are enacted.
Yeah... this isn't true either, one of the most-cited counterexamples being the steep rise in violent crimes in Washington D.C. after the gun ban of 1976. At best, as the NY Times pointed out, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. Of course, this isn't the only counterexample, by far, but I only need one to prove your assertion incorrect, so I'll leave it at that.
5) If having a gun was illegal, you would have an opportunity to know someone was going to kill people when you found them with a gun.
Umm, no... You realize that the vast majority of armed robberies do not end in any shots even being fired, right? The threat is usually enough. Obviously the posession of a gun by a criminal does not imply his intention to kill. These points are so easy to counter, it makes me wonder at how serious you are.
6) Same thing if someone was getting Ammo.
Similarly false, and even more absurd.
7) teacher firing a someone one in a panic situation means more people would have been likely to die.
Most likely, you feel like you would panic in that situation and so you imagine in your mind that others would act as you think you would. Your imagination does not match reality. Common citizens are capable of training with firearms in order to react appropriately, and it really doesn't take much training. This is obviously true because many common citizens do train and choose to carry concealed weapons. Nobody is suggesting that it is a good idea for untrained people to use guns. The scenario you envision where clueless people flail their guns around in "panic situations" exists in some fictional hollywood movies and your own imagination.
In reality, it would have been a very good idea for the teachers to be able to opt to retrieve training (if they wish) and be allowed to keep a gun on their person for such a situation. The body count could have been much lower.
8) How many gun deaths are their in Japan?
Gun deaths are lower in Japan, so you assume this has something to do with gun laws? This is a simple case of the false-cause fallacy. In reality, crime, generally, is lower in Japan than the US. It follows that gun-related crime would also be lower, but it does not follow that gun laws have anything to do with this; that's just your assumption. A much safer assumption is that the US has culture and class-disparity problems, not to mention the dismal state of the mental health industry.
All the evidence shows, overall, people are safer with very strict gun laws. You can make trite logical fallacy all you want, becasue that's all you have.
Thanks for your little list, but it isn't really "evidence" so much as it is a list of incorrect assumptions. If you really want to provide some evidence for your claims, try to avoid taking logical leaps and instead try providing links to some real research or something.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
made me smile :)
This is ridiculous. You can also run away from someone with knife, you can lock yourself in a closet, you can be 10 feet away and be relatively safe from someone with a knife. None of these things are true when guns are involved. Guns make mass killings very very easy, knives absolutely do not.
I for one blame the video games that are available these days. Things like Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942, Halo, etc encourage violent behavior and blur the distinction between real life and fantasy. We should hold these game companies responsible and sue them so hard that their children's children are still in so much debt they can never repay it. If I were a judge I would require the CEO of the software company to personally meet with the family of each and every child killed this morning to discuss today's violent video games, the realism, and the possibility that they have an effect on the behavior of some people that play them. There is blood on your hands assholes.
I'm not surprised that this is currently modded as Flamebait, particularly in this forum. And perhaps the AC parent went too far -- I certainly would not have said it in quite this way. However, I think there is much in the media today that glorifies violence. Movies, TV and video games depict and glorify violence in increasingly graphic ways. Ditto for some music.
Whether intentional or not,the cumulative effect of these games, movies and TV shows is a desensitized society. Think of how graphic Psycho was considered in its day and compare that to any of the video games mentioned by the parent. And in case you doubt that video games can be used to that end, Google military training video games.
I'll likely get modded down for this as well, but hey, do I get to keep my geek card if I mention that violent video games were one of the training techniques in Ender's Game?
Which one is more efficient and cheaper? Which one will save more lives? Paying one or two guards who can't be everywhere and will always do nothing but call the police or actually taking the guns out of people's hands and making the place safer for everyone?
Engage the NRA reality distortion field if you like. The truth won't change.
Wow, a sane post? I agree. The only way to even attempt to prevent these incidents, and actually enforce the GFZs, is to have a single point of entry, metal detectors, and armed guards. Anything other than that is just fantasy land. The problem isn't JUST guns. While banning and zapping them all out overnight would definitely help, we are missing a point. The US is massively more violent than other countries, guns or not. What needs to happen are more sane gun laws. Banning the so-called "assault" weapons has had little effect, other than grandstanding. The NICS system is a good start (minus the scary records keeping forever part), but it's link to mental health is non-existent and needs work. I think this is the area that needs the most attention, as it's a common thread in these shootings.
That, and mandatory gun safety classes and proficiency tests would be really nice. But then you've opened the door for what results in states like NJ, where CCW is pretty much banninated. Yet gun crime in major cities is... well, just like any other major city.
Keep in mind though that having our second amendment comes with the price that every once and a while, someone thought able to have a gun shouldn't have had one. It'll never be solved. It's a matter of how much society thinks it's worth. I believe it worth it to have the second amendment to at least have a chance at preventing Wichita Massacre like events, even if sometimes the wrong people die.
But I seem to be becoming more of a minority these days.
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
Less Guns =/= Less Violence
p.s. I'm not yelling
More guns = more odds for gun play. It is quite simple.
I'm sick of the same morons repeating the same thoughtless talking points (on both sides.)
In nearly ALL of these situations the gunmen shoot most their victims so quickly that having people nearby with guns would not lower the count by much. Besides, as has been documented plenty, trained police mistakenly shoot the wrong person often.
Say that every teacher had a gun in their desk locked up and it took 2 minutes for them to respond-- this would become widespread knowledge and even a crazy person could adapt their rampages accordingly. Nutcases manage to do far more complex things than work around such simplistic policies... especially the paranoid types.
If there is a GOD;
GOD BLESS THESE CHILDREN
The adults too
and
All the Families
It's ok to cry now.
In real life aiming a small target like a head is much harder than aiming a gun in a game. Get real. All police enforcement are taught to shoot the biggest target, the body, you have a much better chance of hitting, regardless of the armour.
Exactly! And looking at this citation I can see that some are worst places than USA in reference to gun control laws and they have a rate much less than the USA rate. They even have a better rate than Canada, well known for its strict gun control laws. Clearly the gun control laws cannot explain everything.
Same reasonning could be applied to schools. Let's look at the stats. Most massive killings happened in schools. Forbide schools and the mass killings will vanish.
I believe the situation is a little bit more complex than these naïves statements try to reduce them to.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Arguing about gun laws after a mass shooting is a waste of time. The US is already saturated with guns and an outright ban wouldn't suddenly stop or lower gun crime. It would help but take decades to have an effect. How often is a school shot up? Even if there are a few shootings a year its a spit in the bucket compared to the number of people (including children) killed each year by random gun violence in the US. Poverty and ignorance are two of the worst "diseases" the country is dealing with that often lead to gun violence. And they often go hand in hand.
We should instead be talking about what triggered this guys rampage. The modern world is a tough place to live, the rat race of life. There are plenty of people who are stressed out over money, relationships and social appearance who become pushed over the edge. That or they were mentally unstable to begin with. You cant stop things like this from happening, only hope to curb them.
Guns do one thing though, they turn an otherwise weak individual into a force to be reckoned with. I am sure if you took guns away completely, the murder rate would drop. stabbing or bludgeoning someone to death takes a lot more effort than squeezing a trigger.
You forgot to add:
9) How many gun deaths are there in Mexico where private gun ownership is all but illegal.
Or did that not fit with your cherry picked talking points?
Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/TqXhG.jpg
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Freedom is messy. The rest of the world is made up of mostly slaves.
Mental health is worse here than anywhere else. In other developed countries the mentally ill get access to therapists and medications. In the USA if you can't afford your Abilify ($600 in USA, $160 in Canada [price for US citizens without Canada's universal health coverage], $25 mail-order from India) this month, then you just don't get to have any.
Combined with no-questions-asked access to lethal firearms and a cult-like obsession with 'personal responsibility', you can see why we have these kinds of atrocities. Medically needy people in America see people just like themselves doing fine or thriving in "socialist" European countries, while in the USA they either pay 50% of their income on health care, rack up medical debt, forced to quit their jobs and "spend down" all savings - including 501k and 401k plans - just to qualify for the few situations Medicaid actually covers them (mainly children and their parents - single adults without dependents are out of luck until 2014 when Obamacare kicks in).
Something just seems off when the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth leaves its most vulnerable suffering sometimes worse than what is seen in third world countries. Suppposedly there should be enough philanthropists to magically fill in the gaps, but it is often quite deficient. There are non-profit hospitals with executives earning record salaries and bonuses, and endowments from donors that add up to billions, yet more and more often they are turning away those with limited ability to pay, or they suck dry all savings from a struggling family, even forcing them first to max out their credit cards and home equity lines before offering any charity care. If there is a delay in making these payments the hospitals are halting treatment, even for cancer. If they suspect you can ask or beg for money, they will halt treatment on a regular basis until you pony up the cash, and this is after you have already made several lump-sum payments of tens of thousands of dollars. Bill collectors will walk in with physicians in the middle of examinations and halt the exam if you "refuse" to cough up more thousand-dollar bills. If you doubt this just search Google about how hard it was for one family to afford treatment at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. And no, this isn't an issue just for the uninsured, there are too many cases where insurance denies essential coverage or limits are maxed out.
Another disconnect is the cost of a bachelors degree, which is free or low cost for many Europeans, but many in the US are overwhelmed by student debt and living worse than if they just pursued a skilled trade through an apprenticeship. The only thing government has done in the past 10 years is to close more escape routes from desparation situations, such as bankruptcy reform that leaves anyone earning $1.00 more than median income absolutely screwed for five years - and that's only if they stick to the plan and pay 100% of their disposable income to creditors, who are usually medical providers with billing practices totally out of sync with the actual costs for services.
This sort of disparity where you can have wealth beyond your wildest dreams if you are smart, work hard, know the right people and have good luck, or due to random misfortune, regardless of how hard you work or how educated you are, you can still find yourself struggling the rest of your life to provide your family's basic needs. If you're wealthy you pursue asset protection planning, including medicaid planning [that's right - the rich have plans to transfer their wealth so they can qualify for medicaid to pay their nursing home bills - Google it! ], to protect your fortune, so the wealthy can withstand such calamity. But there are no such plans to help those just starting out and haven't created or protected their wealth in time for when the SHTF.
This artificially created scarcity and disparity in the US economic system no doubt pushes many people over the brink. Our system has become much less about capitalism (which isn't all bad) to a system of survival of the fittest. In a country with too many guns and too many untreated mental nutcases, trust me, you don't want to play the survival-of-the-fittest game.
You've made a ton of comments in this thread, so you obviously have strong thoughts on this topic and appear to 'have all the answers'. By your own admission, "criminals will get their hands on guns no matter what the laws are" yet you also say (in the same post) "Making guns patently illegal is simply the only option that works". So, if you've already taken it that criminals will get guns no matter what you do, then the answer is to make guns illegal? You make absolutely no sense. Re-read your own words. Indisputable fact: there are millions and millions of guns (old, new, handguns, shotguns, rifles, legal ones, illegal ones, etc.) in possession of folks (some legally, and some illegally) in the United States. From a practical standpoint, what are you proposing?
After this sickening unconscionable tragedy I'm certain that the 2nd Amendment will be looked at with some more rational eyes.
However, all that is very complicated to get anything done.
What can all us regular outraged people do?
Demand that Walmart stop selling guns an bullets! They are probably the biggest sellers of guns in the US. They can just stop selling them.
There is no law saying you have to sell guns. They often don't sell things, like music, based on moral grounds, this should be the biggest moral ground there is.
I'm sure they wouldn't like:
"Our products helped kill 20 kindergarten children at close range"
Guns for self-defense can make sense, but that seems balanced out by its own set of problems, and not solely mass shootings. If a physically smaller person is armed, they could defend themselves against someone bigger - or attack someone bigger. A dangerous big guy would be even more dangerous when armed. If they're both armed, I don't see how that's any better than neither of them being armed.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm beginning to suspect there's more to this than the press is letting us know. Seems like every few months someone in their lower 20's goes on a shooting rampage. Started off small with the columbine shootings and has progressively gotten more popular. Its like its a cult following. Maybe they're not telling us all the facts because they don't want to send everyone into a panic.
Good point.
- Mad, ingenous - they've both left you puzzled -
"Ryan Lanza". Heard on TV news that perpetrator is/was Adam Lanza, and that the police are questioning his brother. Maybe this is the brother.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
so now teachers are the sociopaths
Well some teachers ARE sociopaths. It's just sort of a flaw in humanity and it pops up every now and then. (I think you mean a more generic term like "crazy", you don't have to be a sociopath to go on a killing rampage)
And the concern here is that an EXTREMELY small percentage of us just go bat-shit crazy and start killing people. So, no, of course all teachers are crazy. But enough of them are crazy (and/or bound to go crazy) to make arming them a very bad idea.
Remember that it's not just your kid's math teacher who is a good shot that has the gun, it's also his failed cross-eyed jock PE teacher who just got a divorce and lost his kids.
Teachers have a right to smoke. But we don't let them do it at school.
A gun nutter muttering about the "gubmint comin' and takin' me liberties away'?
My solution, you can own an artillery gun but not an assault rifle or a handgun. Also the shells are locked in the militia depot, not in your back yard.
Good luck going off to a rampage with that.
The crux of the issue that everyone is missing here is your healthcare system. If you aren't employed, you don't get very good healthcare - that is a sad fact that precipitates these events. Mental health is a healthcare issue. When people just start having mental issues, they often go undiagnosed, performance issues happen at work and you get let go from work. You have no extended coverage. So now you have people slipping through cracks, undiagnosed, and likely unable to pay for ongoing medication or treatments, in a society that has relatively easy access to firearms. Notice how many of these murderers are men in their early 20's? That's usually when schizophrenia manifests itself. It also coincides with the low point of the income/age line of your life - when healthcare available money and insurance coverage is also likely lowest. So yes, you can try to make guns harder to get, but you need to address the mental health problem.
Big difference between fantasy and reality. Penn & Teller found a kid who was awesome at first-person shooters, had seen blood and gore all over the games, probably fired millions of virtual rounds. One shot with a real AR-15 (a very light-recoil gun) and the kid was crying because it scared him.
Meanwhile, one of my kids loves to shoot pistols, but can't stand the virtual violence of such games.
Our Government wouldn't do that to us.. Just ask any Zionist.
I don't want to live in a world like that.
On the other hand, stabbing 26 people and killing them is not so easy, even if you are Rurouni Kenshin.
Stop watching movies and pay attention to real life dear Anonymous Coward.
So wait, are you suggesting that we fire enough bullets at the assailant that the transferred momentum would... accelerate him out of the room?
That's a bizarre self-defense strategy.
Relevant: http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing. The thing that I suspect is tricky in comparisons (of many kinds) between the US and countries like Japan is that I strongly suspect that their society/culture/values are much more homogenous (this is a guess on my part) than what exists in the US. I've also heard that, generally speaking, the Japanese are very polite people -- more so than the average American (probably true of many countries).
Where is Toshir Mifune when you need him?
Gun levels have been rising in Australia. NSW watered down the Port Arthur gun laws in 2004, coincides well with the bump in assaults on that graph.
I'd also like a clear amendment to the 2nd amendment, but I figure the gun nuts would be just as unreasonable about that.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
My question is why all this hate against children?
Jack of all trades,master of none
Me thinks you listen to Glen Beck too much.
Get real, no such thing. Most of Europe have extremely strict gun crimes and no dictators. One maniac went around with a shotgun shooting people in UK previous year, it's still talked about. It's a daily occurrence in USA, not even worth time on local news.
You're forgetting that getting from where the U.S. is right now to where the desirable countries are right now is a simple matter of legislation. U.S. criminals are already armed. People already know where they can get firearms. If guns were made illegal, gangs would start bringing huge quantities of guns in from Mexico. Gun advocates and anti-government types would start distributing guns for free. The police would be even more eager to knock down innocent peoples' doors, knowing they wouldn't be shot at.
You know how gun advocates say, "disarming the law-abiding citizens won't stop gun violence"? It's true for the U.S. A gun-free utopia is not in the near future for us.
Yeah. It'd probably be at least 40, or maybe even better than that.
If an attacker is threatening violence, there is no guarantee that the victim will not die. Even a punch to the face can result in death. In order to safeguard ones own life, the death of the attacker is an acceptable resolution.
The situation at hand is not about guns.
The situation is that our culture promotes violence and stupidity everywhere.
This needs to stop. We need to put more emphasis on cultivating a healthy society. It is culture that shapes men.
Gun control will not fix the problem. The real problem lies much deeper.
The disease needs to be cured, not the symptoms.
Captcha: Stifle.
Promote values that you wish to see in a society, and give those who excel in them prestige, and society will shape itself.
Do you think America is the best even in the crazy stats? Nope, not true.
Rest of the civilized world have better care for the mentally disturbed, that's a given but the average is not significantly different.
What is different is USA has easily accessible guns, causing deaths.
Im glad you brought that up. Notice the bombs didn't work? bomb are extremely harder to make, and even more difficult to make reliably.
Guns can be bought off the shelf and work really well.
I will tell you it should be illegal to put those chemicals in a way that is design to explode.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Your post provides a compact summary of a big part of the disagreements between the pro-gun and anti-gun sides -- the tradeoffs involved between government controls and individual freedoms.
Why and how did he get entry to the school? After all the murders why are our schools not locked down tight? Doors that allow for exit while stopping entry. The elementary next door ya cant get in unless you get buzzed in and theirs a camera and they do look. If he was so heavily armed it should have stood out. I don't know its just a horrible thing, time is needed in order for things to be thought out right
Jack of all trades,master of none
Judging by the charts here it looks like there were about 200,000 homicides with guns in the last 20 years (not counting suicides). So... a little more concerning than lightning strikes.
Theft and murder are bad in themselves. Gun ownership is not harmful by itself. Gun bans are proxy laws aimed at preventing something other than gun ownership. Laws against theft and murder are not. See the difference?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ever notice how cowards like this never go on a killing spree at the gun range?
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I can guarantee you that if I had a gun and heard shooting........I would still run in the opposite direction regardless.
The instinct of self preservation is strong in me.
Actually no gangs would not be bringing in guns from Mexico, the Mexican gangs are using guns smuggled in from the United States.
Off the top of my head, here are some cool facts to support your argument:
1. Both Japan and the U.S. have long borders shared with a country that is wracked by organized crime.
2. At one time Japan, like the U.S., had a very strong gun culture resistant to restrictions, but Japan has now paved the road for the U.S. to place restrictions on guns.
3. Japan, like the U.S., is waging a huge (and losing) war on organized crime in the form of the drug wars, proving that this will not prove a problem for the U.S. if we decide to take guns away from citizens.
4. Japanese citizens, like the U.S. citizens, has a very significant distrust of the central government, so much so that lots of people would be willing to have guns illegally to protect themselves from the government. Thus, the same situation in the U.S. will not stop us from taking the citizens' guns away.
5. Japan's founding fathers also were in favor of the common people having guns because they knew that would restrict tyrants. Since Japan has successfully implemented gun control in spite of all these things, we know the U.S. can do so as well.
Except for when the target is wearing body armor
Nicely worded. You nailed the reality that the anti-gun crowd has no practical answer to -- the existence of the millions of guns already out there. As you state, we could pass countless new laws, but what does any of that do with the guns already in existence? And then we have the issue of the 2nd Amendment -- regardless of how one feels about guns. It would not surprise me to see a 'clarification' of the 2nd Amendment regarding certain types of weapons (AR-15 type weapons) in my lifetime. However, even if that were to happen, there are still 200M+ guns out there. Any no matter what we do (or don't do), there will still be murders (sadly). It's not as if there were no murders before guns came into existence (even if we could magically eliminate all existing guns).
if only those kindergartners were armed,
Do you actually believe that you sound clever when you toss off a quip like that?
No, the kids shouldn't have been armed. The adults responsible for their safety should have been armed, trained, and able to return fire to protect the kids from the attacker. When someone goes berserk and starts shooting innocent people, what is needed most of all is a rational, armed defender to take them out.
-jcr
What do you mean maybe that's what we should be asking? That's exactly what we should be asking.
Pretty sure the psychopath that shot these kids up today doesn't care about how harsh his punishment will be...
But the gun grabbers would rather have the 20+ dead children than yet another well publicized defensive use of a firearm.
...against some other maniac with a firearm.
Agreed. The reality of the 2nd Amendment can't be ignored. We (United States) have an established process for amending the Constitution. If you think we should change the Constitution, fine -- but follow the law. And it's not okay to disregard the parts of the Constitution that you don't agree with.
You have to be the biggest fucking piece of shit to pull something like this.
Sigh, I wish Slashdot had a minimum age.
Has it occurred to you that someone who goes to kill a large number of children might be mentally ill? Spend some time reading up about insanity in the legal sense.
They should quit releasing these douchebags names as they are absolute nobodies.
His name is already out, less than 12 hours later. What's the rush, aside from vigiliantism? His family and friends will be vilified, even though they probably had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Please help metamoderate.
> My thoughts are with those unfortunate parents whose grief must be too hard for anyone to bear
Why? Those thoughts are useless. You signal how very compassionate you are, but the only actual position you take is "don't take our guns away".
I think it's highly indicative that you chose a misogynist insult in relation to a gun violence discussion. Women-hatred and violence have been vile bedfellows forever
...that you had been there with a weapon to stop this asshole. Fucking coward, killing his mom's class of kids.
If the other brother had anything to do with it, I say waterboard that fucker for the rest of his life, amputate every limb and dangly bit and make him eat it, and bury his body at the bottom of a latrine.
A single armed person at that school could have saved lives.
Which one is more efficient and cheaper? Which one will save more lives? Paying one or two guards who can't be everywhere and will always do nothing but call the police or actually taking the guns out of people's hands and making the place safer for everyone?
How do you propose to take "the guns out of people's hands and making the place safer for everyone?" anyway?
Do you think everybody will just turn them in peaceably? Do you think the gangbangers will comply? How could this even be accomplished with any reasonable degree of success? Many if not most guns in the US are long guns like rifles and shotguns. Most of those are not registered/licensed in any way and there are no records of ownership.
Do you plan on going in and rounding up whole neighborhoods and holding everyone in detention facilities while all the houses, properties, businesses, and everything is thoroughly searched? Do you set up checkpoints around every neighborhood afterwards to prevent guns from being brought back in?
I'll hand over my guns if forced to.
They'll get the bullets first, however.
"Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence ... From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable . . . the very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that is good" (George Washington)
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined" (Patrick Henry, 3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions 45, 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1836)
"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military. The hired servants of our rulers. Only the government-and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws." (Edward Abbey, "The Right to Arms," Abbey's Road [New York, 1979])
I, too, Mr. Abbey.
"To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm . . . is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege." [Wilson v. State, 33 Ark. 557, at 560, 34 Am. Rep. 52, at 54 (1878)]
For, in principle, there is no difference between a law prohibiting the wearing of concealed arms, and a law forbidding the wearing such as are exposed; and if the former be unconstitutional, the latter must be so likewise. But it should not be forgotten, that it is not only a part of the right that is secured by the constitution; it is the right entire and complete, as it existed at the adoption of the constitution; and if any portion of that right be impaired, immaterial how small the part may be, and immaterial the order of time at which it be done, it is equally forbidden by the constitution." [Bliss vs. Commonwealth, 12 Ky. (2 Litt.) 90, at 92, and 93, 13 Am. Dec. 251 (1822)]
"The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the "high powers" delegated directly to the citizen, and `is excepted out of the general powers of government.' A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power." [Cockrum v. State, 24 Tex. 394, at 401-402 (1859)]
I'll trust those quoted above over you or the government, thanks.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them. There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools, and quite literally - we have most massacres occurring at schools. It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.
Got a cite for that? And how many of those were murders prevented?
I can never browse /. again because it's clearly for people how can't see beyond knee jerk emotional reactions or think critically about problems beyond "More gun control will fix this huurrrr." When facts prove it would not. I hate to put it this way but I feel like someone should get a "high score" without using firearms, because there are far more efficient/cheaper/easier ways to do it just to make a fucking point that crazy people are crazy.
I would be dead if not for my legal right to carry. Come tell me to my face that I shouldn't be allowed to carry a firearm because I'm not military or police.
Fact is this is a tragedy but it's not the gun committing the act, it's a mentally ill human being that has been hurt by a society that doesn't want or know how to help. Increasing gun control won't help the social/cultural issues behind the reason why they are doing what they are doing.
I was not agreeing with him. It was to point out his absurdity. Just because criminals don't follow the law is no reason to not have the law. Laws are not only deterrents but also to provide punishment. Or are you goong to claim we should abolish laws against murder since criminals will do it anyway?
Murder, theft, rape are BEHAVIORS. These are actual morally wrong acts. You have to make certain actions illegal for a basic functioning society. Yet the idea of making the possession of certain things illegal is relatively a new concept. The idea here is that the illegal item is so strongly correlated with an illegal ACTION, that possession implies action. That is why cocaine is illegal. If you possess it, you're guaranteed to be using or selling it, and not simply keeping it safe one day for controlled pain relieving purposes for when SHTF.
Gun control is very different. Unlike cocaine, there is NOT a strong correlation that simply possessing a firearm implies murder. Note, I said murder not kill. Murder is wrong, killing is not necessarily so. Yes a gun's true purpose is to kill. Most people own a gun for self defense, to kill in self defense. Killing in self defense is morally and legally justified. Its justified just like being able to work and earn a living - its far more messier and gruesome, but your right to defend yourself is not less than your right to work and earn a living - both are for the purpose of the pursuit of one's happiness, or life.
...or hell, any machine tools whatsoever.
It's almost as if you believe that scarcity is a problem when it comes to getting weapons. For fuck's sake, a bunch of asshats with *box cutters* destroyed the twin towers - shall we start outlawing any sharp and pointy object?
The discussion our government needs to have - but likely won't have because "it's too hard" - is of mental health and mental health care in this country. We still live in a country were people with mental health issues are chastised and treated as irregulars to be shamed. We have the ability to help these people but we don't do anything, and end up with this.
... well, possibly ever. I would favor leaving gun laws alone for decades if we instituted universal health care immediately. We are dealing with people that we can help, but we instead as a society opt not to.
And of course this is all made a thousand times worse when these people lose their jobs - and lose their health care as well. This leaves them in a place where they are no longer able to get the help they need to become healthy and contributing members of society. Eventually, they end up doing this.
I am far more liberal than any president this country has elected since
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
4 words ... explains it all ...
"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"
This historical recount of US history really explains everything if you ask me.
Obviously, you've never been robbed. Or if you have, you subscribe to the " Take anything you want, just don't hurt me " mentality. :|
( Tip: This feeds into their reason for doing the crime to begin with, it's easy money with little risk. )
What happens when your attacker decides they don't want you identifying them later on ?
What happens when your attacker isn't a single entity, but a mass of them ?
What happens when your attacker decides to just beat the shit out of you just because of ( insert some stupid reason here ) ?
Less guns != less violence. Less guns makes it easier for criminals WITH guns to commit violent crimes because you give them a force monopoly.
If they don't use guns, they'll use knives, bats, chains, fists, numbers, whatever. Unless you're super-ninja-jedi-dragonborn, you'll simply become
another statistic.
How many Americans here own or have access to some type of firearm?
I'll take a rough guess of 70% of Americans on this forum have access to a firearm
(Feedback requested: Would you say that is an under or over estimation??)
OK now's the kicker!
How many of you are "PART OF A WELL REGULATED MILITIA"?
I'd guess around 10% (I'm including Ex/army and police as "militia style" entities)
So 60% of Americans here illegally own or have access to a firearm!
Read your 2nd amendment and correct me if i'm wrong...
it's not new laws you need. It's enforcing of current laws around the 2nd amendment!
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
You want to take my gun away from me because someone else abused his gun.
Fuck you.
Yes, because banning drugs worked so well, didn't it?
Or do you believe guns will magically disappear into Unicorn mountain to reappear as rainbows?
Americans live in and help create a culture of FEAR. These angry people have some sort fear under emotions uncontrolled by their lack of sanity and in many cases LEGAL, PROFITABLE drugs. We hear more of the gun fight with the controlling lobby than about the drugs many nutcases take which helps to mess their minds up even more; but our TV sponsors and big donors do not like such conjecture or scientific investigations (that isn't privately done by people with conflicts of interest.)
Americans can't even find their problems; if you can't find the causeS you can't solve them. They only focus their short attention spans on 1 topic at a time excluding all others -- real life is complex and our current childish approaches have no hope of solving them. Hell, the whole aim for a perfect solution is foolish in itself; one can only hope for a good approximate "solution."
It's not working for Chicago is it?
There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools...
In fact, the scant evidence we do have points quite the other way. But when a teacher or student (college) intervenes in a shooting, somehow this seems to not be newsworthy.
Children can't get into the cabinets of responsible gun owners.
Try again.
Gun control debate? That's all you dogfucking shitrags can do?
How about some sort of mental health system to help people long before they go off like time bombs?
Motherfucking geek loser piles of pig ignorant shit. Fuck all you geek fuckers.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
Ahem, selected countries with strict gun laws have fewer shootings by criminals. On the other hand, some countries with strict gun laws have more. Some countries with lax gun laws have fewer, and some have more.
It's got much more to do with history and sociology than with gun laws.
So why don't these madmen randomly attack police stations and monster truck rallies?
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
The Aussie laws were changed some 20 odd years ago to ban automatic weapons, it has not made a significant difference in the number of gun deaths (~200/yr). However it has made a repeat of the massacre that triggered the laws virtually impossible to anyone but a trained sniper. There are plenty of legitimate reason to own a gun, here in Australia "self defense" is not one of them. There is (currently) no legitimate reason for owning a semi-automatic weapon in Australia. Hand guns have never been culturally popular in Australia even when you could buy them at the hardware store. However you can still own one if you join a registered gun club.
Gun laws are not black and white, it's not an binary choice between guns and no guns. If Uzi's are available to the general public then you will get more people dying at these kind of massacres simply because that is what those weapons are designed for. When semi-auto are available you will get massacres like this one, simply because they make it possible. When all that is available is a musket, someone will just take it off him after the first shot.
Arming primary school teachers won't deter anybody, nor is it a sign of a healthy society. These nutters have decided to go to war with society, they know it's a suicide mission and that's often part of the goal. If they had a nuclear missile they would use it, so it's probably best not to give nuclear weapons to the general public, I agree with the laws here and draw the line at semi-auto's, others will place it elsewhere. The culture of the country affects normal people, nutters want to blow it all up. Where US/AU differs culturally with guns are the attitudes surrounding shooting people to protect property, most Aussies think people are more important, even if they do deserve to be shot. Carrying any sort of weapon for self defense is seen as a somewhat cowardly behavior, but someone living in the bush should still keep a shotgun handy to scare off drunken troublemakers.
We still have just as many nutters, there was one in the news the other day, he whacked a cop with a hammer without warning, stole his gun, then ran off to a nearby park and shot himself in the head.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
When are you dumb arse Americans going to pull your heads out of your arse and do something about allowing guns to be own by retards?
Right to bear arms by arse! Right to kill innocent would be more accurate.
I'm not talking about overall violence.
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather live in a world where there a good chance of getting robbed than a good chance of getting shot.
The occurrences in Japan and China are exceedingly rare. A few knife massacres in a nation of >1billion is not the same as having a mass murder per week with guns in the US.
And you did not refute my point.
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
First, your equation is nonsensical. By the same token, NO CARS = NO ACCIDENTAL CAR DEATHS or NO ALCOHOL = NO DRUNK DRIVERS etc. Second, China's government throws people in jail for just for having opinions that are not liked by the state--so, terrible example for comparison. As for Japan, I counter with an apples and oranges defense, they may not have the gun violence problems we have, but they have WAY more incidents with sexual predators (molesters, peeping toms/up-shotters, rapists, etc.) per capita than we do.
Making gun ownership illegal isn't the same as denying a substance. For one thing, there has to be a manufacturing base behind the making of a gun that isn't just soil, water and a seed. For another, once you have a gun, that isn't the end of the story. We could do more to regulate ammunition. We could do more to screen people getting guns. We could check those who are registered as having guns, to make sure they still have their guns. We could regulate the very repair of a weapon, they do not last forever. We could do so much more.
Your comment was labeled as insightful, a terrible mistake. Your comment shows a terrible lack of imagination. There is a great deal that could be done. Almost always there is some sign that real mental screening would have detected. You can argue that we won't catch everyone, you can argue that "they'll still find a way". But we'll catch most, and those that will "find a way" probably won't find one as effective as this.
That translates to lives. All else is nonsense.
We imagined that making schools gun free zones would keep this sort of thing from happening.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
And yet, overall violence does not decrease.
False.
You can kill a person just as easily with a knife - you can kill a lot of people just as easily with a knife.
Also false.
So you're comparing a movie generalization of what could happen to your own mental image of what could happen.
Pardon me for not believing either.
In this country seeking help for mental health issues is taboo. It's deeply ingrained that people who suffer mental health issues are either to be blamed, shunned or laughed at. It's woven into the very lexicon of our culture. "Nutjobs", "wackos", "loonies" - the list is nearly endless. It's a deeply ingrained bias that needs to be dealt with.
The gun debate may be important but it is distracting us from that larger issue of creating a healthy, happy, and safe society. Mental health needs to be treated like physical health. Regular (annual?) checkups should be something everyone does.
But the 2nd doesn't apply... it's a "Gun Free Zone". Isn't this what you wanted?
You are the most despicable piece of crap ever to post on /. How the fuck dare you try to turn this around, blame the anti gun lobby, and have the audacity to post something as disgusting and evil as claiming that someone on the opposite side of this issue "wanted" this to happen. You and your ilk are the cause of this atrocity. You have blood on your hands. I hope there's a hell for you to burn in, you disgusting, disgraceful, sick, twisted shit fuck.
Fuck you. Fuck you to high heaven.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Are school massacres a semi regular event in any other country in the developed world? No.
Next.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Irrelevant. There would be far, far more OTHER incidents (kids getting hold of the guns, teachers unable to cope with the stress of teaching and seeing an easy way out, etc) which would have led to MORE deaths.
Right--because if teachers could carry guns in school, they'd suddenly decide to kill themselves instead of going home (or to their car) where they can legally have a gun.
I'd also like to see how these kids would mysteriously get a hold of guns though. Mine stays holstered to my hip unless it's locked away in the safe. How exactly is a kid supposed to grab it, tug hard enough (and at the correct angle) for the retention system to release the gun and then click off the safety and kill someone....without me slapping the child's hand away?
Maybe they'll beat me to death with a chair first, then take the gun and kill...oh, wait....I'm sorry to shatter your nice little liberal reality there, but a determined person can kill someone without a gun. Easily. The guns don't matter, the people do. A gun simply gives you an advantage. So who do you want to have the advantage? The good guy or the bad guy?
Obligatory. http://xkcd.com/774/
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
My thoughts are with those unfortunate parents whose grief must be too hard for anyone to bear
Oh it's never the right time to talk about gun control, is it? At least that's what gun nuts like you have brainwashed the rest of the population into thinking.
You know, from a certain point of view, you might be right that it's not the right time. Not because it's too soon, but because it's too late.
I think your proclaimed sympathy for the victims would be a bit more convincing if you didn't trot out the usual NRA talking points in an attempt to shut down all discussion about gun control after the latest school massacre.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
But what about deaths of straight people?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Evidently not all gun owners are responsible.
More guns will solve the problem!
Fewer guns will solve the problem!
When, in reality, each has it's own set of problems, and both sides are more interested in the idea of being right, and having things a certain way, than what is actually best.
Get the fuck over yourselves, people are hurt and you are using it to fucking proselytize. Enough playing devils advocate to a lot of this shit, pointing towards a more moderate view. You're all a bunch of arrogant bastards who don't give a damn who the fuck gets hurt, so long as you can twist it towards your pathetic agenda.
What's so "pathetic" about an agenda that seeks to end this sort of thing once and for all?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Yeah, more people firing weapons with panicky children running around, what could go wrong?
A lot better than 20+ dead i imagine.
This from a person who undoubtably never heard the term 'collateral damage' before.
You can get "oh-shit" safes with biometric (fingerprint) or other quick release locks, that schoolchildren couldn't reasonably open.
Sorry. Due to budget cuts there will be no batteries for safes this year.
(Also, when it comes to safes with guns and children, 'reasonably' doesn't cut it. I want it damn-near impossible for them to open it.)
"Flamebait"=/="I disagree".
It simply shows closed-mindedness, intolerance for differing opinions, and an inability to argue your position.
Then again, it IS really, really hard to argue for gun bans when there are examples like Chicago and Washington, D.C. to show how dramatically and LETHALLY wrong-headed such bans are.
Apparently by their actions, silencing opposing views and quashing any rational debate is the only thing the anti-gun people are left with.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just curious: The Port Arthur gun laws are federal law; how does NSW water them down?
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
So why don't these madmen randomly attack police stations and monster truck rallies?
Because all the mad men are already there protecting and serving the shit out of you or being entertained by large vehicles.
Seriously. I think the media coverage of these events inspires these guys. They have to stop reciting every little detail over and over. These shooters are not just raging against something, they want to become infamous. And CNN is making these guys infamous. The media should just report some basic facts and then change the topic. Don't show video, don't show pics, don't play 911 calls and most important stop leading witnesses through each moment of the crime. The shooter's fantasy is people reciting the horror over and over on prime time TV. Please stop!
Are you suggesting the borders separating cities and separating countries are anywhere close to equivalent? Then why bring up a *city* in a *country* with lax gun laws?
Yeah, there are definitely cultural influences as well, hence my writing "it's not just as simple as 'nobody can get a gun.'" At the same time there are many societies around the world where assault weapons are not available, and -- surprise! -- massacres perpetrated using assault weapons don't occur.
Generally I think people should be able to own small-caliber firearms for personal defense -- I have been mulling over buying a .22 pistol myself. However there is NO reason, no reason whatsoever, why ordinary citizens should be able to equip themselves with semiautomatic assault rifles. There is no practical reason why such weapons should be allowed to be sold on the open market in any way, shape, or form. I agree with the other responder that guns laws are not black and white, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for the availability of assault rifles or other military-grade weapons.
As always, the Onion nails it.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/right-to-own-handheld-device-that-shoots-deadly-me,30742/
Now lets see, if you ban guns and reduce their numbers, you also effecitvely increase their prices, especially on the black market.
The price increase rules out A LOT of the crazies because they can not afford to buy a gun, or take much longer and have a greater risk of getting caught for other crimes if that is what they are doing to get said guns.
Guns are a bad thing and always will be. Just because you think you have the right to something doesn't make it good. Guns aren't a tool to most people now, it's a piece of 'sporting equipment' and I'm sorry but the line was crossed when that happened.
if you outlaw stealing only criminals can steal
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
You may not be mad about that, but I bet a law against saying "fuck" would kill you.
Last year 29 kids were killed by falling TVs in their house and on average 18,000 people are inured every year from them. This is just what was reported and documented. Before people start jumping on the bandwagon that guns kill when these horrible tragedies pop up, remember.... there are many other common things that can happen in and around your house that are statistically just as dangerous as guns to children.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/12/falling-tvs-children-deaths/1764539/
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
This is the simple fact opponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Less guns mean less gun violence.
Period.
"There is no social benefit in decreasing the availability of guns if the result is only to increase the use of other means of suicide and murder, resulting in more or less the same amount of death. Elementary as this point is, proponents of the more guns equal more death mantra seem oblivious to it. One study asserts that Americans are more likely to be shot to death than people in the world’s other 35 wealthier nations. While this is literally true, it is irrelevant—except, perhaps to people terrified not of death per se but just death by gunshot. A fact that should be of greater concern but which the study fails to mention—is that per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this."
Source Harvard Study done on Murder Rate vs Gun Ownership:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
I wasn't done.
A major factor here is when a child is killed with a gun in a school, it is instantly world wide news and people grab their pitch forks. When a child is killed by a falling TV, it may get a few seconds in the local news or in a community paper and not many people outside of the family ever hears about it. Both are equally tragic, both are equally as dangerous. People know about guns, barely anyone even thinks about a TV falling. People need to think about these dangers. Don't just jump on the ones that make the national news.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
less boats=less boat violence
on a grander scale, if we all went back to gun-toting, old west style, far more innocent people would be killed by strays and arguments, you know, like the old west. that fantasy is just that.
less chihuahuas=less chihuahua violence.
Well some teachers ARE sociopaths. It's just sort of a flaw in humanity and it pops up every now and then.
roughly 1-2% is all
Actually, as an observation, the gunman was armed with multiple violations of that law...
Passing a law doesn't make it so. This one's roughly analogous to someone passing a law that bans gravity in a certain area of space- only the law abiding will honor it.
I work in one of these "killing zones." While I have a handgun carry permit in the US state in which I live, my Second Amendment rights under our Constitution somehow seemingly don't apply where I work. If just one person in the path of this destruction had been legally armed (which is fully Constitutional), the slaughter *might* have been avoided. It might not have. But there would at least be a chance, statistically.
I live in a "red" state; yet, the legislation barring any educational institution from barring handgun carry permit owners to legally carry firearms on campus was tabled and not even voted on. There are prominently posted signs around the campus saying that weapons possession on campus is a felony. Small consolation if a pile-o'-crap gunman chooses to pick our particular killing zone to express his/her frustrations.
You have no actual rights if you cannot defend them yourself. So many millions of people have died, trying to educate us on this elementary principle.
a determined person can kill someone without a gun.
such an apologist copout. how many "heat of the moment" situations would result in less deaths(either by assailant cooling off, coming to their senses or not inflicting a fatal blow in a split second) if they had to use something else? a fuckton, that's how much. that and that alone should count for something, but you'll never care. hell, as far a saving people's lives, they could reduce quite a bit of driving deaths if they lowered the speed limit a paltry 5mph, but you don't care. it's all about you, you, you.
How about needing to successfully pass a psychological test in order to have the right to a gun?
Where do you get this nonsense?
1) What long border are you talking about? Japan is surrounded by oceans on all sides.
2)huh?
3)Which side are you arguing?
4)not true at all. they're more ambivalent than anything.
5) Who, exactly, are Japan's founding fathers? the Shogun? Politicians post WW2?
Yep.
This is absolutely tragic and horrible. That said, why must the pacifists always go straight to the gun control issue? Let's imagine a world where firearms in the U.S. have been totally abolished, from ownership to manufacturing. Do you really think the government is going to give them up too? Laughable. So now you've got a situation where the government can abuse its power and all you'll be able to do in response is throw rocks. To make matters worse, you've also given a huge shot in the arm to criminals who sell guns on the black market. Yeah, that sounds like a much better world to live in. You think we would have learned this lesson from prohibition. Think things through to their logical and realistic conclusions.
He is referring to the reality that even though a vest might stop the bullet from penetrating the body, there is still a large amount of blunt force trauma that results from the impact.
This reminds me of so called missing white woman syndrome. When something similar or even worse happened in Iraq or Vietnam by US soldiers, the killers didn't usually even face any serious sentences (these are just two examples of the cases that news reporters bothered to report, but there has been countless other cases that were never reported):
Haditha killings
My Lai Massacre
As always in these situations, there are multiple hundreds of posts on both sides of the gun control issue. There is the inevitable discussion on whether or not having armed teachers would make a difference or not. Here is a useful link and some information about "Active Shooters"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter
"SEALE Police Academy (Bedford OH) manager Ron Borsch reports their research has determined that aggressive action — by even a single individual — is the most effective countermeasure in stopping the active shooter. For example, initially single unarmed civilians have accounted for half of mass-murder preventions."
Guns suck, but they are a fact of life in America. We have to deal with that reality. We cannot disarm the entire population. There will always be nut jobs out there with the willingness to harm others. The only sane and compassionate response is to allow people to defend themselves, while doing everything possible to create a loving society that diminishes the likelihood of these behaviors emerging in the first place.
The occasional incident makes you want to move to another country? Really?
And maybe the problem is culture, not guns.
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Actually, I think that there is. People in other countries with accessible guns don't go on rampages nowhere near as often, even adjusting for population and number of guns available.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else?
You're asking the wrong question. Is it easy to construct a tool designed specifically for the purpose of killing many people at once, which is not a gun? The answer is yes, and they have seen widespread use by terrorists already.
Yeah, if only those kindergartners were armed, right?
No, you fucking idiot. If only the TEACHERS were armed. You're just being silly. Go be silly somewhere else.
That guy is just using his god given right to carry arms and shoot up anyone he deems a threat, like school kiddies, America is a free country it's just another day over there.
For the record, I do not support NRA. I was a member for 1 year. After reading the literature they sent me and the fear mongering contained within. I did not renew my membership and I feel they do more harm then good. The real awakening for me was the letter I got from them that said the very fact Obama has not banned all guns is proof that he wants to and will ban all guns if I vote for him.
I support the rights of private citizens to be allowed to act responsibly and to be allowed to be responsible for their own lives and safety. I do not and will never again support the NRA.
"By the same token, NO CARS = NO ACCIDENTAL CAR DEATHS or NO ALCOHOL = NO DRUNK DRIVERS"
These statements are correct. If there were no cars, you'd have no accidental car deaths.
But I'm not saying we should get rid of guns completely. I'm pointing out that in places where there are less guns, you tend to have less gun violence. Therefore, to get less gun violence, we should reduce the amount of guns available or make them more difficult to get. pretty basic.
A law against theft or murder restricts a particular unlawful activity.
A law that bans possession of firearms restricts a particular item on the grounds that it might be used for unlawful activity.
The more direct analogy is laws banning possession of lockpicks. On which opinions vary widely, from outright ban, to "can own with a license, need to show reasonable cause", to legal unless used in commission of a crime. If you want to argue the same spectrum for guns, by all means, let's do so.
Is boat violence a problem? If it was, we should consider reducing the number of boats. But it's not.
Europe also has rather porous borders, and widely varying gun laws. A citizen of the Czech Republic could go buy a handgun there and travel to any neighboring states pretty easily, for example.
I think we need to focus more on taking the people who do this off the street than trying to take the guns off the street. Like one poster said... look at how the war on drugs has gone. The fact is that in places where gun owenership was relaxed there is drastic lower crime rates. I didn't believe it was true but then I spent time to research it and it is true... When the public is armed crime is lower. You can google the results of the FBI crime reporting and check it agaist places that have relaxed gun laws.
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather live in a world where there a good chance of getting robbed than a good chance of getting shot.
When the probabilities are about equal, sure. What if they're not? Say, legalizing gun ownership would mean that you're twice as likely to get shot by a criminal, but ten times less likely to get raped (as a woman).
LESS GUNS = LESS GUN VIOLENCE
Compare the availability of guns to an average citizen in the USA and Switzerland with their corresponding gun violence rates. It's not as simple as that.
I guess that even NRA isn't insane enough to demand the right to bear nuclear weapons. Mentally unstable person with nuclear weapons can cause enormous damage and MAD doesn't work with insane persons. BTW, I heard that president Nixon used to order nuclear attacks when he was under influence of alcohol, but luckily the orders weren't ever followed.
Weapons have some valid uses. It is just unfortunate that weapons tend to draw nutters like some magnets.
Id rather live in a world where I can run from a knife or a beating than deal with guns.
Why don't you ask the British which they prefer? They have this huge wave of thuggery supposedly. DO you think the British would like to introduce guns into that mix?
Why, you destroy them. You offer people money to bring in their guns so that they may be destroyed. You ban the sale of new assault rifles. it will take time, but the other option is too terrible to imagine...an ever increasing supply of guns.
I agree with you entirely. The problem is, you are one of those nutjobs for spouting that old line. How many of those 22 stabbings would have survived because stabbings are not as lethal as shootings? I bet at least one. That's one more future for some kid. Isn't that worth it?
I'm almost sick at myself, for spouting another old line "think of the children," but for once I think this is a time we should think of them.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
There is clearly a problem here and shouting at people isn't helpful.
America has numerous problems, one is general violence, another is the multiplier effect of freely available guns: A crazy with a gun is more deadly than a crazy with a knife. Ergo, guns are a problem, no matter what gun lovers want us to think.
Also, the "moderate" view, which I guess is "meh", doesn't move us from the status quo, so nothing is fixed. Either of the radical views will change things, but which one to pick?
I think it's obvious that strong gun control and heavy penalties for gun use in crimes would be a positive step. The fact you have gun lovers fighting this just means you will never have safety in your lifetime. Good luck with that.
Fuckton is a great cite. Very well researched and great use of specific numbers.
American loves guns, the trouble is the way that they love guns.
I think the guy who did this latest shooting really really wanted to kill people.
I don't think so. I think he sorta wanted to kill, and decided to might as well do it since the gun was right there.
The lesson: Systems-level design enables actions to happen. The harder the system, the more desire needed to overcome it.
Before the iPod, only the people that REALLY, REALLY wanted to listen to portable MP3 players actually did it. After the iPod, with systems-level design improvement, the people that sorta kinda wanted to listen to MP3s now started to do it..
Let's make the system really tough, so it eliminates casual actions on guns.
Ban guns, ban ownership, ban manufacture, ban import, ban possession, ban possession of ammunition, etc.. We can do it!
There are no words. So I won't be posting any for awhile.
And kids died. I am willing to bet more died in a year across all America in individual shootings compared to a single massacre, massacres make the national news, individual deaths hardly make to the news. Having guns easily accessible and available cause deaths. End of story.
And you pulled that straight out of your ass.
You're an idiot, and a dangerous one. People like you are why there is still tyranny on the planet. Please DIAF.
Soon.
"End of story."
We need to disarm criminals.
We need real, effective and certain ways of dealing with the mentally ill.
We need to stop dabbling in the chemistry of the brain at random.
We need to stop raising children that don't understand the pain side of human interaction. Winning all the time, being fair all the time, no real consequences for being an asshole, and some of them go way down the bell curve and act out when they are adults is a surprise? Some people you just can't reach without making it clear to them they'll get pain, or destroyed if they don't behave.
These types of things are just going to get worse. MUCH MUCH worse when this next generation grows up and becomes hit with the cold reality of a life of drudgery and discomfort that is adulthood.
If there aren't guns around when the little shits take over, it'll be something else. They'll still go on rampages and they'll still kill.
"Society" by trying to be "nice" has created monsters with no real sense of trying to not do wrong.
Or do you believe guns will magically disappear into Unicorn mountain to reappear as rainbows?
It's "Candy Mountain" Charlie! Candy Mountain!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Alright, I'll do it... it's right there in the Hall of Fame:
Voices From The Hellmouth - Slashdot - Posted by JonKatz on Mon Apr 26, '99 08:26 AM from the Geek-Profiling dept.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
He needed to try a lot harder to beat the high score. Also he should of broke into Wikimedia's server rooms and killed some abusive deletionist admins.
So wait, are you suggesting that we fire enough bullets at the assailant that the transferred momentum would... accelerate him out of the room?
That's a bizarre self-defense strategy.
Wow, you're really reaching. Leave that strawman alone, he's done nothing to you.
Tell you what; smartass. You wear some body armor and I'll shoot you in the chest with your choice: 9mm pistol, .223 rifle, or 12-ga shotgun, all from 30 feet away, which is reasonable for the distances involved in a similar situation and the weapons used.
Let's see how capable you are of doing much except laying there waiting for the paramedics after any one of those. You'll be lucky not to die from internal injuries or be crippled for life (think colostomy bag).
Body armor MAY, I repeat, MAY save you from being killed, but it's NOT a "Superman" suit. Take it from somebody who HAS been shot while wearing body armor. You are no longer any threat to anyone or anything 98% of the time after only a single hit.
Please shut your ignorant cake-hole. Your comment has actually lowered the cumulative intelligence of the entire planet.
This is how an american responds to suggestions that work in other countries: "But we're like, so .. different man. You can't possibly understand the challenges we face."
It's horseshit.
It's not horseshit, it's a reflection that the violence is part of a bigger problem.
And yet, the country with the deadliest act of gun violence in recent times had 75 fatalities and occurred in a country with much stricter gun laws than the US.
You lose on the face and the premise.
The US has an issue with violent crime and murder, it appears that we take as a sport. Perhaps we should figure that bit out.
All these arguments I read about guns being "freely and readily available" - they're neither "free" nor "readily available" if you've actually ever tried to purchase a firearm. Using that phrase betrays a person's ignorance of how gun laws really work. I wish guns were free; I'd own a whole lot more! Guns are expensive!
If You can not shoot the (tall) adult with (short) 5 years olds between you and him, then (1) you are a terrible shot or (2) you need to review your geometry.
Uh I said the wide availability of guns if you care to read. If you don't remove the guns, then laws aren't going to make any difference.
If there weren't 200 MILLION guns in this country you think gun violence would be the same level? Other countries show us this isn't true.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Facts are stubborn things. You're gun is many times more likely to kill or injure you or your family than save them.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
yes because cars aren't only good at mass killing people. Guns have no other purpose than to quickly discharge projectiles at lethal velocity.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
be careful with the term clips, gun nuts get kinda crazy about it...
Be careful with the term "monitor", computer nuts get kinda crazy about it when you call it "the computer"...
I'm uncertain that attempting to promulgate correct definitions by explaining incorrect usage qualifies someone for a "nut" epithet. Unless, I suppose, you intend to paint with a *very* broad brush that covers most of the population with any level of education.
We watch people killed by 10's if not 100's each day on the TV, and it usually involves guns. Real or dramatized, we witness them.
We participate in killing online in a hundred different games. usually with a trigger-based device. We practice and perfect it.
In the context of so many killings we have witnessed and performed, isn't this behavior just a part of our mental norm?
Sent from my ENIAC
This happens in other countries as well. You could get rid of guns but they will find other ways to commit mass murder.
This is what happens with over population, people alienate themselves and feed off of there thoughts and do not listen to anyone else. Even when people know there is something bothering that person, once they are at a certain point there is really no way to stop what they feel or think.
This could be a case of lets get a thrill, get some payback, we have nothing to live for anyway. This is something this person let stew in there mind for sometime, I am not going to say ban guns but I am not going to sign up to the retards known as the NRA either. Really do not understand this shooting at all due to kids being involved (murdered), is the school in a wealthy neighborhood? If so then there may be your motive.
That is the only thing I can think of for one person to intentionally target kids..
After the 1996 gun ban in Australia, there was a buy-back program. Given the reduction in mass shootings, it would seem to have had the desired effect. I'm sure a few conspiracy gimps buried their guns under their shed floors, but in general, no you don't need to kick in people's doors.
Most guns on the black market seem to be stolen from the homes of legitimate gun owners. Indeed, guns are a highly sought after item for thieves because they are one of the few items that holds their legal retail value on the black market. Reduce the number of legal guns in the community and you gradually reduce the number of illegal guns. (This is partly because they are often discarded after use, to avoid being linked to the crime. That increases the rate of churn.) This rule, of course, breaks down when you border a high-gun area. So it doesn't work in individual states within a country, or countries with porous borders neighbouring the US.
[That said, I had the same reaction to the "huddling in the corner of the gym" part. That's just retarded.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
4) Crime drops when gun laws are enacted.
Given that, perhaps you can explain why the states with the most permissive carry laws in the US have the lowest rates of violent crime?
7) teacher firing a someone one in a panic situation means more people would have been likely to die.
One "oops" beats 28 "gotcha!"s
All the evidence [I just made up] shows, overall, people are safer with very strict gun laws.
In the immortal words of Wiki - [citation needed].
You're all a bunch of arrogant bastards who don't give a damn who the fuck gets hurt, so long as you can twist it towards your pathetic agenda.
Of course I care who gets hurt - Not me or mine! Just like the rest of you frauds pretending you care about anything but the same.
And if my "agenda" means making damned sure my loved ones have the legal right to defend themselves when some whackjob bursts in on them and open fire - Damned straight I'll use this tragedy to push my agenda!
Now look - I won't pretend I give the least damn about the victims here. But if every teacher in that building had carried, do you seriously suppose the shooter would have made it through two rooms full of kids?
I have to reply to your comment even though I promised myself to stay out of this thread.
Don't become too bitter and try to understand that not everyone is simply trying to win arguments, although some are. Everyone is enraged as you are at this tragedy. However, people have colored perceptions and that affect how they will respond to what just happened. For example, if you see my posts, I'm more left than right, and my first reaction to this afternoon was, "This is terrible!" and after my emotions were riled, my next gut feeling was, "enough is enough! how can anyone justify these lax gun laws anymore?..."
However, a right-leaning person might see this and their first reaction is "This is terrible!" and after their emotions are riled, their gut feeling would be, "enough is enough! why weren't any of the adult allowed to bear arms, they could have stopped this asshole!..."
My first though wasn't, "this will score me points on slashdot!" and I'm sure no libertarian or rightie thought, "shit, now I have to make arguments on slashdot." We're all fucking mad and we're all just being emotional in our own way. At the end of the day, this didn't need to happen, and we all agree on that.
Actually no gangs would not be bringing in guns from Mexico, the Mexican gangs are using guns smuggled in from the United States.
Most of the guns Mexican drug cartels use are full military weapons that come from either the Mexican military or other countries in South and Central America.
According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.
This means that the 87 percent figure relates to the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced and not from the total number of weapons seized by Mexican authorities or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. In fact, the 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in Mexico in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing. This means that almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States.
The remaining 22,800 firearms seized by Mexican authorities in 2008 were not traced for a variety of reasons. In addition to factors such as bureaucratic barriers and negligence, many of the weapons seized by Mexican authorities either do not bear serial numbers or have had their serial numbers altered or obliterated. It is also important to understand that the Mexican authorities simply don't bother to submit some classes of weapons to the ATF for tracing. Such weapons include firearms they identify as coming from their own military or police forces, or guns that they can trace back themselves as being sold through the Mexican Defense Department's Arms and Ammunition Marketing Division (UCAM). Likewise, they do not ask ATF to trace military ordnance from third countries like the South Korean fragmentation grenades commonly used in cartel attacks.
Of course, some or even many of the 22,800 firearms the Mexicans did not submit to ATF for tracing may have originated in the United States. But according to the figures presented by the GAO, there is no evidence to support the assertion that 90 percent of the guns used by the Mexican cartels come from the United States -- especially when not even 50 percent of those that were submitted for tracing were ultimately found to be of U.S. origin.
A gun ban in the US would give the cartels yet another highly-lucrative smuggling market to go along with drugs and human trafficking. Instead of a gang-banger with a 9mm, think rocket-propelled grenade launchers, rockets, and heavy machineguns.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
You can kill a person just as easily with a knife - you can kill a lot of people just as easily with a knife.
"Can", yes. "Just as easily", no.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Don't kid yourself, the toll can vary.
Going Postal, Pre-Pistol - How did mass murderers operate before the advent of modern weapons?
Hundreds of other mass murderers have perpetrated their crimes without automatic firearms. Frenchman Pierre Riviere killed his mother, sister, and brother with a bill hook in 1835. In 1932, Julian Marcelino, a Filipino immigrant of relatively small stature, managed to kill six and wound 15 on a Seattle street using only a pair of blades. In 1915, Monroe Phillips shot seven dead and wounded 32 with a shotgun in Georgia.
Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns.
The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929, when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s, staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names. Others point out that the mass murder rate fairly closely tracks the overall homicide rate. In the 2000s, for example, both the mass murder and the homicide rates dropped to their lowest levels since the 1960s.
A mass murderer’s weapon of choice depends somewhat on his victims. Attacks with guns, fire, knives, and bare hands are far more likely to be directed against family and acquaintances than total strangers, while mass murderers prefer to use explosives against people they don’t know. Also of note: Those who use firearms in a killing spree turn the gun on themselves 34 percent of the time, while only 9 percent of mass-murdering arsonists take their own lives.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It's not horseshit, it's a reflection that the violence is part of a bigger problem.
There are guns in other countries, violence in other countries, and crazy people in other countries.
The problem IS AMERICA.
Sign 'm up for Afgan duty. Obama's USA needs every abled bodied trigger in Afgan to kill Afgan's and Niggers.
A crazy guy attacked a bunch of kids at a school in China yesterday.
He was armed with a knife, not a gun.
Death toll: ZERO
1) Gun laws aren't an oxymoron by any definition.
Pedantic. What is obviously meant, is that gun laws that restrict freedom generally have the opposite effect from intent.
2) Being a criminal does not equate to getting a gun.
Likewise, getting a gun does not equate to being a criminal.
3) Gun laws make it harder for criminal to get guns,. And it keeps getting harder.
Not really. Gun laws make it harder for law abiding citizens to get guns, for sure. FBI statistics show that less than 10% of guns used in crimes are aquired by legal means, and less than .01% of guns aquired by legal means are ever used in a crime. Criminals get guns easily, and new gun laws won't effect that in the slightest.
4) Crime drops when gun laws are enacted.
This is straight up false. Look up John Lott. Again, criminals by definition don't obey laws. Unless you meant laws that reduce restrictions, and legalize or liberalize concealed carry. Then yes, in that case, new laws cause a drop in crime. Criminals like their victims unable to defend themselves.
5) If having a gun was illegal, you would have an opportunity to know someone was going to kill people when you found them with a gun.
Wrong again. If having a gun was illegal, you could be charged with possesion. Anything beyond that is thought crime. As I mentioned above, very few guns ever fire bullets that take human life. There must be a whole lot of other uses for guns than killing people.
6) Same thing if someone was getting Ammo.
See above.
7) teacher firing a someone one in a panic situation means more people would have been likely to die.
You miss the point again. The primary reason we need to get rid of 'gun free' zones is prevention. If a spree shooter knows there is potential of return fire, they are less likely to pick that location. Why do you think these incidents ALWAYS occur in gun free zones? You also obviously have no idea what sort of training goes into a carry license in most states that allow it. If we were to allow teachers guns, it would likely be a program like we established for airline pilots, with specific engagement/response training required. Finally, any rounds coming back at an attacker will likely stop the attack. Are you really saying it's better for everyone to cower in fear, and wait to be slaughtered like sheep? This mentality always baffles me. Then again, I am not a coward, so I guess I can't understand the coward mentality.
8) How many gun deaths are their in Japan?
The Japanese people are not free citizens, and do not have indivual rights like US citizens do. Asian cultures are deeply rooted in a different mentality. In Japan, the police extract confesions through physical force. Crime itself is much more rare in Japan, due to the Asian cultural importance of the whole rather than the individual, and the overall homogeneous nature of the population. Finally, "gun deaths" is a false metric. Japan has a suicide rate over four times that of the US. You can't compare Japan to the US with regard to crime or firearms and have it mean anything useful.
All the evidence shows, overall, people are safer with very strict gun laws. You can make trite logical fallacy all you want, becasue that's all you have.
On the contrary, all the places in the US with the strictest controls on firearms have the highest rates of criminal firearms usage. Chicago, LA, DC, etc. You complain about logical fallacy, but all you have as evidence is lies, lies, and more lies.
Logic and statistics are on the side of Liberty on this issue. Always have been, and always will. Gun control is a dead end.
GG
If you want "hard data"
hard data. Strange that the violent crime rate in the US is lower than Sweden's or Canada's. It'd be interesting to see differences in reporting statics.
Who is John Galt?
Bullshit.
You
PROTIP: Correlation is not causation.
But it can be a bloody big hint. And this one is a neon sign two stories high flashing "IT'S THE GUNS!"
For example: Australia severely restricted certain classes of firearms after a particularly bad mass shooting. The number of mass shootings in the 16 years since the change dropped by at least an order of magnitude. Prediction, experiment, result.
There were no significant complicating factors, we didn't have a major reduction in poverty, or improvements in mental health, nor changes in law enforcement which could explain the result. This is demonstrated by other crime rates not changing significantly during the same period.
Same country, same culture, same crime rate; single change in the law, single result.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I just read this.. this... I cant even imagine Why something like THIS must happend to Schole 'God' they just kid
The world has survived and even prospered WITHOUT computers and can do so again. They are NOT "indispensable for the life of everyone". They are useful tools just as are cars, guns, washing machines and all other tools.
Also, the original reason for the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution was clear and well understood by those who added it to the law of the US. It was felt then and still holds that there may be a time for the citizens to exercise that ability and right.
Remember that it's not just your kid's math teacher who is a good shot that has the gun, it's also his failed cross-eyed jock PE teacher who just got a divorce and lost his kids.
Let's assume for a minute that the loser PE teacher does want to shoot up the school. He can bring in a gun from home and shoot up the school. Nothing is changed in the argument that it would be better for the other teachers to be able to defend the children from him.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do we know he was trying to kill those kids? How big was the knife? Was he just making slashing motions at their bodies instead of stabbing them? And hell, a machete would have been a lot more effective. I really don't think he was trying very hard. I'm pretty sure if I wanted to kill a room full of kids with only a bladed weapon, I could easily get a few kills. Very easily.
...but I know that there are many PR companies that hold multiple moderation accounts on web sites that perform moderation. I can just imagine who they work for.
Ah, it's "them", of course. Yesss, clearly. <slowly takes two steps backward...>
You know, I do feel safer because you've given up any firearms you may have ever owned. I hope you've also given up sharp objects, given your apparent mental state.
No doubt I'm part of the conspiracy as well. I mean, obviously this is exactly the kind of smear campaign that someone running a double-reverse counter-astroturfing program would do, and those are *everywhere* now. Hey, have you checked your threads at chemtrailscentral.com in the past few hours? My associates have been busy suppressing your ability to spread The Truth there, too (the sylphs are a lost cause man, they can never win against the chemtrails... give it up already).
Excuse me, I have to go to a mandatory, all-hands meeting at the subterranean volcano base now...
He dares because the blame DOES lay with the anti-gun people, "gun-free zones" ARE free-fire zones for nutcases such as this shooter, and by the history of their radical actions, such a scenario as a false-flag op by the anti-gun nuts is a real possibility.
Fuck you. Fuck you to high heaven.
Don't you have some jackboots to spit-shine with that nasty tongue?
"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
C'mon...tell me *I'm* the "most despicable piece of crap to post on /."! Pretty-please? Coming from someone such as yourself, I'd wear it like a badge of honor...hell, I might even be tempted to "make ya famous" and put your quote in my sig!
Go ahead...make my millennium! BWAAHAHAHAHA!
Sheesh! What a maroon!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Just take Connecticut, it's a veritable melting pot of different ethnic groups from all over the world.
I'd also prefer that any teacher that wanted to be armed be armed,
These are primary school teachers. Think about the personality type that chooses to teach in a primary school.
and that any student that wanted to be armed be armed.
Students aged 5-10 years?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
You're missing the point. The question is "why are there so many nutjobs?", not "why are there so many guns?" You can take away all the guns you want, but that doesn't solve the problem of the nutjobs. Those nutjobs will just find another way to kill people. As a society we need to find out why nutjobs like this aren't getting the medical help they need. Why are some people driven to commit acts like this, and what can we do as a society to remedy the root cause? The guns are not the cause, they are just a tool. I don't think anyone has ever touched a gun for the first time and been instantly transformed into Evil. There is another psychological/sociological cause that we need to figure out...
taking out large swaths of insurgents
FTFY
If you want "hard data", look at the number of murders per 100,000 people in the US versus other western countries with stricter gun laws. That at least *suggests* that just the opposite of what you claim is true.
No, it aggregates places like Chicago, which has very strict gun laws and a very high gun crime rate, with places like New Hampshire, with very sparse gun laws and a very low gun crime rate.
Compare New Hampshire and Illinois and you'll see a different picture - it does not make sense to aggregate different jurisdictions with different laws and try to draw conclusions.
For more data and statistics, check out "The Bias Against Guns" from your library.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yeah, there are definitely cultural influences as well, hence my writing "it's not just as simple as 'nobody can get a gun.'" At the same time there are many societies around the world where assault weapons are not available, and -- surprise! -- massacres perpetrated using assault weapons don't occur.
Switzerland and Finland have a private gun ownership rate of more than half that of the US. Shouldn't the massacre rate in those countries be about half that of the US?
Who is John Galt?
What do you think of Lott's criticisms of the panel review (largely based on the dissenting panel member's criticisms). Do you think they are valid?
Link just in case you haven't read them.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Given the choice between the two, I'd rather live in a world where there a good chance of getting robbed than a good chance of getting shot.
I live in a fairly affluent suburban neighborhood in the US. I'd say my chances of either are a lot less than that of a person in an equivalent type neighborhood in say Britain.
Who is John Galt?
Or perhaps the people most likely to go postal are disproportionately likely to be at or near schools, and have a lot of their hopes and fears invested in the things which go on at schools? This guy's mom worked there.
People get upset with their moms who work at all kinds of places. The question is not whether this guy had a connection to the school (he surely did) but whether the guarantee of no defense encouraged his actions.
Since schools have such a small percent of the population at any given time, and they make up 20% of all massacre locations (in the US), it can't just be a coincidence.
If somebody wants to make an argument that schools incite such hatred in people that they feel a need to lash out at them, I haven't heard it (but I'd listen).
Anyway, regardless of why people shoot up schools, I think the children deserve to have protection while they're there.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Here's some hard data for the number of murders per 100k citizens in various countries. The US has a murder rate over 2.5 times that of any other country with strict firearms control so it does not seem to do anything to improve that. However the same article also has stats for property crime which suggest that the US does seem to do better there than other countries. Finally there is child abuse and neglect where again the US has a rate over twice that of other countries with firearm control.
So while are argument could be made that firearms may suppress property crime they seem to have an appalling effect on the rate of murder. Given that if I have to be the victim of a crime I would much rather be robbed than murdered it seems that firearms make things worse not better.
Sorry the link to the article got omitted: here it is.
What is different is USA has easily accessible guns, causing deaths.
Switzerland and Finland have a private gun ownership rate of over half that of the US. Should the "caused deaths" there be around half that of the US?
Who is John Galt?
Do you realize that Grenland has a population of few K?
By your very map, Europe appears much lighter than the US.
Man....
I have a daughter that is 9...
I have a son that is 7...
Either one could have been there today... and I could dealing with the thoughtless, pointless loss of either...
If there had been a teacher, principal, any adult there today who was armed, lives "would" have been saved.
However, lives still would have been lost.. no doubt there.
Yes, the anti gun advocates could argue that if there were't guns to begin with, this never would have happened.... but I argue, then the crazy individual could/have would have used gasoline in the form of a molotov cocktail, or fertilizer and some other chemical combo in the form of a bomb.....
Weapons/guns are not our problem, people with destructive mentalities are!
In today's day and age, you're not going to get rid of the nut cases -- they are here to stay... get used to it. ...
But think about this -- where are the shooting occurring? Locations that are easy targets -- locations that do NOT allow conceal carry -- theatres, schools, etc
How long are we going to allow our children, friends, and family to die at the hands of these psychopaths and stand aside unarmed while they do it????
Wake up people.....
And you may forcibly take back from them what they've taken from you, and you may kill them in self-defense if they're trying to kill you. Same difference.
If a criminal doesn't obey the laws, law-abiding citizens need to be free to respond in similar kind, and have the means to do so if necessary.
I think Lott is opinionated, inflammatory, and important. I suspect he is probably wrong in his concealed carry conclusions. However in a complex matter like this, as in pretty much any scientific inquiry, those of us who are not specialists should rely on the consensus of the experts. In this case, there is no consensus on how concealed carry affects murder rates, so holding a strong opinion is unjustified. (It follows that we can expect a lot of ideological shouting.)
One thing that is known to raise murder rates is high and sustained unemployment. Neither concealed carry laws nor unemployment rates appear relevant to this shooting, however.
I am a foreigner living in the USA. I don't understand. We don't have guns back home. Why do you? I can't believe this stupidity.
What is the president going to achieve by pretending to cry? Just ban all the guns already!
I have to disagree with this one to an extent. Having lived in Europe for a few years, I think the culture has more to do with it. There is not the same stressful lifestyle that we have in the US. The political climate in the US is more about conflict than compromise. Everywhere you turn it is a constant stream of bad news. Parents are too busy trying to keep up with the Jones' that they do not spend enough time with their own children. Many people are working 60-80 hours per week, if not more, and can barely pay their bills (or at least, pay for what they believe they "need" based on the garbage on TV). What's worse is that these people are led to believe that it isn't good enough.
In Europe, there are strict labor laws that allow individuals time to relax and unwind. One major adjustment for me was that everything seems to shutdown after normal working hours (including stores that we take for granted as being open late here in the US). Additionally, there are programs/laws in some countries that allow mothers to work part time so they can raise their child but still receive their full time pay. Lastly, I found the people in Europe to be much more friendly and far less judgemental than many people in the US.
I know I may be rambling, but I think the lifestyle and culture we have in the US is one of the factors that drives people to commit these types of horrible acts. If giving up my 2nd ammendment rights prevents this from occuring, I'd do it in a heartbeat. However, I'm not convinced that will save them until other aspects of our lifestyle changes.
Asshole eh? Wow.. somebody has sand in their vagina...
Just an observation: any point you hoped to make was erased in this bystander's mind the moment you decided to use a sexist retort.
School stabbing sprees in China were quite the trend there for a while. Note, there were deaths in several other instances. Note: the assailants in these cases could have done more damage to youngsters with an axe handle, but for some reason they are apparently drawn to smallish knives.
The only question is: how do we contain the amount of guns in circulation, and how do we contain the violence when a gun gets abused?
That's the wrong question(s).
The right question is "How do we reduce violence and murder, especially among those innocent victims who did not start the violence?"
By phrasing the questions as you did, you've made several false assumptions. Among them:
- Reducing the guns "in circulation" will reduce violence.
- Violence with-gun is all that matters. Violence with-axe, with-baseball-bat, with-car, with-fist, etc. is somehow just a creampuff-toss.
What if reducing the number of guns in private hands INCREASES violent victimization and increasing the number of guns out there REDUCES it?
If that is the case would you be willing to work to get more guns into the hands of people?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There are millions of guns in private ownership right now.
How exactly would one ban them? It just doesn't seem any more possible than sending all the illegal immigrants back to Mexico or stopping the flow of narcotics.
Never mind the fact that large number of people don't want guns banned. So at best, we might get a watered down half measure that costs a bunch and does nothing to address the problem and unjustly annoys innocent people.
I mean we could stop this sort of thing altogether if we just monitored every citizen 24 hours a day and proscribed exactly what they can and can't do and where they can and cannot be.
It is a complex problem and the answer is not in any way as simple as some are suggesting. In perspective, as horrible as this tragedy is, as freakonomics has pointed out, many many more children die every year from swimming pools than from guns. And I am not necessarily in favor of gun ownership. It's just don't see a ban a) happening and b) working.
How dare you try to inject common sense into this discussion!!! The nerve! Too soon! Too soon!
Spain had a dictator ~40 years ago, Germany ~80 years ago. Not that I agree with GP poster at all.
Amen
with a firearm could have stopped this.
The essence of the constitution is to determine your own destiny, for the individual.
If you do not want to do this, and you trust government to protect you, then you will find yourself dead on the floor as the government arrives to clean up the mess.
I read the stories of people cowering in the corner, and praying. Has our country come to that where a bunch of adults cower in the corner and beg for their lives because they lack the courage to defend other people?
Our society is dying. Everywhere you look you have people wanting others to take care of them, to make the future safe and that means removing all freedom to the individual.
You can live safely as a slave and be treated like an animal, or you can live free and determine your own destiny by taking care of yourself and stop cowering in the corner waiting for the government to arrive to solve everyones problems.
Look, either you wait for the government to come and shoot the guy, or you do it yourself.
At least if you do it yourself, fewer people will die.
Until people basically change, guns will be a requirement for all free people. To be free to make your own decisions, to be free of government tyranny.
But most importantly, people must defend and protect each other in their communities.
You depend on the government to do it and you will watch helplessly as your community members are executed in cold blood.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
How is that a sexist retort?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Looks more like a normal insult to me. There's no indication that the person was intending to insult women at all.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Fewer shootings =! Less violence
Criminals also don't follow laws against theft, murder, etc. And?
Incorrect. Criminals do follow these laws. Mostly. Potential criminals are dissuaded. Mostly. Not a lot of people going around stealing AND murdering AND all other things, they are actually fairly law abiding apart from wear they feel the need to make exception. Plenty of bank robberies occur without a weapon being used precisely because, while bankrobbery itself is a crime which will result in a prison sentence, the criminals know that they will be facing a lighter sentence if they don't use a gun, and view this as an acceptable tradeoff against their expectations of success. The vast majority of criminals are opportunists, not sociopaths, and if they are sociopaths, they are not irrational sociopaths. They play by the rules to the degree that they are able to satisfy their other objectives.
But do you see any parallels to that in the situation of a killing spree? Is the culprit going to be concerned with incurring additional charges? Will the consequences of murdering with an illegal assault rifle be so severe that the person decides it's better to instead use a legal baseball bat to effect the same purpose? Laws do not and will not ever protect against crazy mass murdering freaks. I'll bet even most people who have gone to prison whether for theft, murder, or other charges, would still consider what this guy did at an elementary school absolutely abhorrent. However, laws can certainly defang the day-to-day ability of honest people to defend themselves.
If you want to protect against mass murder by depriving the general populace of the offending instruments, why not go after diesel fuel and plant fertilizer as well as alarm clocks, cell phones, remote controls, and just about everything in the cleaning aisle of most department stores.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Making guns patently illegal is simply the only option that works.
Just like the war on drugs.
Averages are pretty much irrelevent to this, whether it is average gun ownership, average mental health or average anything else. These sort of massacres are extreme outliers, way out on the tail of the bell curve.
What you need to be doing is working out why the tail in the US is so much longer and fatter than the tail in the rest of the world.
I don't think it's gun ownership per se, but the combo of more nuts, nuttier nuts, poor treatment of nuts, and easy access to guns all contribute.
hahaha nice.
Guns can now be 3D printed. So just like copyright laws have stopped illegal downloads anti-weapon printing laws will be just as successful?
haha sure buddy. You take 20+ people dead I'll take the other odds any day.
Today in China, there was a nut who tried to attack school children. Guns are very hard to get in China, so he used a knife. 9 Children were hurt, 2 will have to stay in hospital overnight (none were killed). Today in America, a nut tried to attack school children. 27 people were killed. People don't kill people, and knives don't kill people. Guns kill people.
Like Mexico, for example.
For example: Australia severely restricted certain classes of firearms after a particularly bad mass shooting. The number of mass shootings in the 16 years since the change dropped by at least an order of magnitude. Prediction, experiment, result.
Even if you go back to 1860 and include mass deaths which weren't committed with firearms, the number since Port Arthur (one) is not less than an order of magnitude than those preceding it.
... magnitude (lower) than ...
after reading all the back and forth, I actually laughed out loud at this. These are slashdot ac gems and the reason this site is the awesomeist.
Pretty much everyone is cool with bypassing the framework for legitimately changing Constitutional protections when the system is inconvenient for them. Doesn't matter if it's Republicans and privacy rights or Democrats and gun rights. Anyone willing to do so is in the same class as everyone else willing to do so, and none of those people should be allowed near government. Unfortunately, that's a pipe dream since government is full of people elected for their willingness to be corrupt by lots of people willing to look the other way when that corruption benefits them.
I actually think it's more sexist to say that it's a misogynist insult because they're implying that a women's sexual organs are something to be ashamed of.
Well, I don't really think that's sexist either, but they're just being absurd. By the way, words and phrases can have multiple meanings, you numbskulls! Just because he used the word "vagina" in an insult doesn't mean he's insulting women!
Well, obviously they do not have strict gun laws because they do not have rampant gun crime.
You have to admit, having the explicit thread lightning-rodded a lot of comments that otherwise would have cluttered other threads.
Somalia doesn't have any gun control laws and it's totally working out for them!
It's less about the laws and more about other factors, like our terrible health care system, poverty, perceived antagonism of the state versus the people.
Liberating guns is worse than getting rid of all of our guns. Both tasks are essentially impossible.
We should instead follow countries like Switzerland, which is very restrictive in its laws of use but permissive in ownership.
if you get shot, chances are you will live. 6 out of 7 people shot, live.
Criminals purchase banned, unregistered, or otherwise prohibited guns. We don't have details about this madman yet, but dollars to donuts he didn't procure his guns illegally.
It makes no sense to have strict gun laws at the city level when the federal government does not cooperate to enforce the laws you mentioned.
Yep. And gun companies, powerless against the scourge of supply/demand, will be forced by those criminals to continue to produce weapons. Seriously, yes you can 3D print most of a gun nowadays, but... Seriously?
AFAIK, each time such a tragedy has happened, the NRA immediately rallies to protect gun ownership (something that even Bowling for Columbine already pointed out, and that was God knows how many years ago).
I lived in various countries where gun ownership is not banned, but fairly tightly controlled. Two of those countries are known as the safest in the world, so there is as far as I can tell no POSITIVE correlation between gun ownership and safety..
"The only people with guns are people in the military"
Apparently you live in a different Switzerland than I do. Must be some alternate reality.
First, lots of people hunt, and they hunt with their privately owned rifles. Second, basically anyone can own a gun. You are just required to register it with the local police. I know, because I have two, and the registration process was pretty simple. I don't know the rules about carrying a gun in public, because it's not something I've looked into.
That said, there is no trace of the American "cowboy culture" here. Owning a gun is not a manly requirement, like it seems to be in the US.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When cunts post ghoulish crap like this.
Sure it's lower, if you count a multiple murder as one (1) incidence of violent crime and treat a punch up in a pub carpark as another.
I mean, are even Daily Mail readers stupid enough to fall for such a ridiculous oversimplification? Seems some people are...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Are you crazy? Teachers having guns in the classroom? Really? More guns is the answer is it? Do you realize how insane that sounds?
Strange really how the USA has the highest rate of firearms related deaths for Western World Countries. In fact, the USA has a higher rate of firearms deaths than a lot of 3rd world countries too. Strange isn't it that those countries with less guns and stricter gun laws have fewer deaths? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
More guns equals more people dead by guns. End of story.
Who's to say that somewhere, sometime, a teacher will not also go amok?
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
How much worse would it be without the most restrictive gun laws in the country?
Actually, the problem is probably that once you step out of the bounds of Chicago, the gun laws are as lax as anywhere, and it's not as if there is a medieval wall built around Chicago with limited entrances where everyone is checked for gun possession. City-specific gun laws are pretty futile.
Are you arguing that this isn't 'stuff that matters'?
How the motherfuck was that moderated as off topic? It is exactly on topic! The interplay between the right to bear arms and the mis-use of that right is exactly the conversation we should and do have whenever these mass murders take place.
Sheesh. If a teacher is unable to cope with the stress of teaching it seems like the easy way out is to not be a teacher. Killing himself or his students seems like the really, really difficult way out.
"NRA isn't insane enough to demand the right to bear nuclear weapons"
Don't be so sure. The plain language of the 2nd amendment gives every single person the inviolable right to bear any arm in all situations no matter what. It absolutely, positively gives every person the right to take bombs into court houses, elementary schools, airplanes, neighbor's houses, or the halls of Congress. Here, read it for yourself:
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"
It's pretty clear isn't it? If I can't take grenades onto the commuter airplane, then I have been restrained from bearing arms. My rights have been infringed.
That, of course, is totally preposterous, similar to other preposterous arguments that come from the NRA.
Criminals buy guns from non-criminals. Gun-shop owners abide by laws. If you don't allow the sale of 50-round clips then jackasses like this murderer won't have access to 50-round clips.
I suspect that was already clear to you but you chose to ignore it.
Almost nobody wants to ban all guns. That isn't the only kind of 'gun control law'.
If a guy is coming after you with a knife, he isn't going to stab you once and leave you alone. Five or more stabs in rapid succession... and you're left for dead. Knives are incredibly deadly weapons, especially since everyone seems to consider them not so deadly -- an attacker is much more likely to use it without realizing the damage he's actually about to do.
Of course that is true. In America we want to balance public safety with public freedom. It's a very hard balance. In my opinion we are currently out of balance toward too many of the wrong kind of gun, whereas European countries (for instance) are out of balance toward too few guns.
One of the teachers was a gun owner and owned multiple firearms.
Her son used them to murder twenty children.
I don't know about where you are, but we do have at least a few ex-military types around here who are working as teachers in the school system. One of my kids has an ex-medic as a history teacher for example. He was in the life saving business in the military, but he still knows how to shoot. I suspect he would be fine armed as a teacher regardless of what age kids he was teaching. So I think your first point is off target.
This tragedy did involve elementary aged kids, but I think it was a general point being made about being armed rather than pointing to this particular situation.If you are attacked by anything (including weapons or hands) you are better off armed provided you actually know how to use the weapon you are armed with and are willing to use it against a person. Both points are significant. In general, if you are attacked then the higher the differential between what the attacker is using and what you have to defend yourself with the better. It doesn't help to just add a gun or knife if you've not learned how and when to safely use it. The further you can project your defense, the better.
I know that it has gotten nutty enough around here that your kid can't bring a full set of silverware to school in their lunch - even plastic - because the knife could be used as a weapon - to say nothing of guns. Even the plastic stuff they issue with school lunches is a useless spork that won't cut anything because those plastic fork tines could be dangerous, you know. You can't bring a plastic toy soldier as part of a diorama without the fruitcakes in the administration becoming alarmed. Don't try to do a diorama of the Marines on Iwo Jima raising the flag or the thought police will get you. Why do you have toy soldiers at home - are you a counter revolutionary? Go get counseling and then come back to school. And be real careful what is depicted or printed on your T-shirt. Wouldn't want to be sending the wrong message or make somebody nervous. Seriously - it has gone positively bat shit crazy.
Send an aspirin to school because your kid has a headache or because your kid has tendon problems from sports and needs an aspirin at mid day and get them suspended for having a "drug". Can't have that. Instead, go to the doctor and get a prescription for a timed release aspirin or go to the school nurse to dispense the aspirin at the proper time. It has gotten insane and shootings like this don't help any with rational rules and responses to crisis by the administration. When I was growing up, we had many kids came to high school with rifles in gun racks in the back window of their pickups. They had been hunting over the weekend or were going hunting after school or might go hunting next month. It was just where their hunting rifle lived when not in use. Nobody thought anything of it and nothing happened as a result. Yes, I know, I'm old and from the West, thank you. Get off my lawn.
It isn't the weapons that are the problem. It's the lack of teaching of morality and lack of consequences and lack of love and lack of family bonding or sticking together to name just a few that this generation of parents has dramatically failed with. I say this at the risk of elevating the hackles of the anti-religious zealots on slashdot, but not going to church, Sunday school, and believing in a higher power with eternal consequences for your actions as parents does raise its own set of problems both with people of parent age and their kids. Yes, you can raise good moral kids if you aren't religious and don't go with them to church or send them at all. Shift your sweat pumps back to neutral.
But the world we live in has gotten worse the further the nation has moved away from God - whether it is the games the kids play, the books and magazines they have access to, or the stuff they watch on TV, the internet, or at the movies. There is very little that is bad for adults to read or view. I'm pretty firmly against imposed external censorship of any medium by whatever administration you choose to pick. But I do think pa
You people apparently have no interest in fixing your country. The quotes refer to a different time, a different era. You country is broken and innocent people are suffering because of it. Become civilised.
"You can take away all the guns you want, but that doesn't solve the problem of the nutjobs." Very true. You just take away a very, very efficient way for these nutjobs to administer death.
I can see the US making their schools similar to how UK schools are now after Dunblane. They all now bare a remarkable resemblance to Stalags !! ie: High security fencing all round security doors CCTV EVERYWHERE You can't play on the school fields like we used to be able to do. Everyone has to be "buzzed in" A sad indictment on todays society. Also... In the days when the 2nd amendment was drawn up Muskets were the dominent firearm. A musket probably takes a skilled militia about 30 seconds to reload Each round The second amendment needs ammending or at least enforcing.. ie: You only have the right to bare arms re: 2nd amendment If that firearm is a Musket !! Just as deadly, but to all intents and purposes..Single shot ! Can't see that happening mind but ...
Switzerland's firearm-related suicide rate per population is about the same as US but 140 times larger than Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
US has a HUGE gun fatality rate. That doesn't mean that any country with somewhat smaller gun crime rate has "hardly any".
Welcome to the lunatic fringe Mr Huckabee...
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/huckabee-schools-place-of-carnage-because-we-systematically
"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"
Law enforcement has released few details on the alleged gunman, but Huckabee suggested that the separation of church and state may have spurred his rampage.
"[W]e'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," Huckabee said. "If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that."
He said those suffering from a crisis from faith should look to God in the community's response to the violence. But he added that "Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end."
And Mr Huckabee is not alone in his evil version of Christianity..
Christian radio host Bryan Fischer took to his American Family Association radio show this afternoon to say that God didnâ(TM)t stop the horrific Connecticut elementary school shooting spree because he does not go âoewhere he is not wanted.â
Fischer made the case that, in his mind, God would have protected the shooting victims had there been a system of school prayer and a respect for the Ten Commandments in public classrooms.
âoeWhere was God when all of this went down?â Fischer began. âoeHereâ(TM)s the bottom line: God is not going to go where he is not wanted.â
He explained: âoeWeâ(TM)ve spent 50 years telling God to get lost. Telling God we do not want you in our schools. We do not want to pray to in our schools. We do not want to pray to you before football games. We do not want to pray to you before graduationâ¦. We donâ(TM)t want your word read in our schools.â
---
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
unless he means "better' as in a higher body count
and are you going to let them raise your property taxes to pay for their firearms training and periodic re-qualification?
It belongs to the entertainment industry. The problem is the coupling of justice with violence. I've seen this bloody development in movies, tv, and computer games over my lifetime. The hero is done bad to by some bad guy or guys, the hero takes it over and over again until he decides not to, then he goes on a bloody over-the-top rampage of justified violence against the bad guys, against those who have tortured him. The audience roars in approval, feeling the good guy is finally getting justice and his violence against the bad guys is fully justified. We all feel good. We all feel good about it from a young age and over and over and over again. This is the way to do it. The body count increases in each decade. The "creative" ways that masses of people are killed becomes more clever and more sick. We are a society spinning downward by elevating psychopathy to a position of the norm in our entertainment and we all act surprised when it spills over into the real world. It isn't guns. There have always been guns. What has changed is our toleration of bloody murder and revenge as entertainment. Holding up guns as the problem is cowardly. Let's accept the obvious: children learn from the entertainment they are soaked in from birth. Let's stop admiring the producers of violent revenge themed movies and games. Let's stop the Rambo Effect on society.
E Proelio Veritas.
so you're saying ownership of a firearm escalates the possibility of it being used (by you or someone else) for unlawful activity.
much like having a drink and taking a drive is now effectively outlawed. no one cares if you are measurably impaired behind the wheel, you are just statistically more likely to injure someone else. you blow the number and you're done, even if you could do laps at Daytona at 200 MPH. the escalated possibility is why.
own a gun, blow .08, it's the same thing.
The UK Daily Mail is like the newspaper version of US Fox News, but without the religion, and not *quite* as right wing
Predictably for a society that thinks you can borrow your way to prosperity this tragedy has immediately devolved into an argument about guns. This is quite depressing and utterly pointless.
If you believe that removing any given inanimate object from the population with change human nature you are irredeemably incapable of critical analysis; unfortunately you can still vote and are therefore a threat to society because of your constant wailing of nonsensical distractions.
If you believe that some sort of pre-intervention can identify these individuals or that any sort of physiological counselling can stop these events (a la Minority Report) you are at least trying to address the actual problem. But you are unrealistic in the extreme and destined for absolute failure..
Taking the Security Theater of the TSA as a real world example, several trillion dollars have been spent. The Constitution is in slightly smaller shreds than it was before. And flyers are being exposed to untested and possibly deadly new forms of radiation. Meanwhile the real world threat has NOT been eliminated. But it has been NEUTRALIZED by the simple (and free) expedient of the other 100 plus passengers on the plane taking responsibility for their own lives! There have been several high profile psychotic episodes and even the infamous "shoe bomber" - who single footedly is responsible for the gut wrenching stench now permeating the security areas in every American airport. Not a single one of these incidents at any time threatened the safety of the flight nor did any perpetrator ever reach the remarkably expensive and sensationally over hyped secure cockpit door. Put bluntly a statistically significant portion of the people who were there (boots on the ground as it were) simply rendered the individual physically incapable of completing his plans.
So
Can you eliminate guns, bombs, or ANY other item that can be used as a weapon?
No. It is not physically possible. Once something has been invented it exists.
Can you eliminate crazy people?
No. Crazy strikes on it's own schedule.
Can you at least separate these two groups?
No. Not with absolute certainty.
Can we then add heavily armed specially trained government officials tasked solely with preventing these events.
No. Regardless of their training and commitment these super-men can only point their weapon in one direction at a time. And they are beyond question assured to become the first target in any attack. With the added problem that whatever mob stopping, generally unobtainable super weapon you gave them for the performance of this impossible task is now the property of the guy who just knifed him from behind while he was taking a piss. (for example).
Literally the ONLY solution is the one used by Google to power a huge minority of the Internet (Search, YouTube, Maps, etc). Massively distributed processing - in this case not fewer guns but many many more!!
In the case of schools, require every employee to have a concealed weapon on his person at all times. Make it a condition of employment. Perhaps a Taser is good enough. But you shall not sit idly by and hope nothing bad happens to the children whose parents left you responsible for their well being.
The irreconcilable flaw with this solution is that it does not add more power to the centralized government. Exactly the opposite it boldly states for the world to see that there is a finite limit to what The Government can do for you. And that there comes a point in the real world where you either take responsibility for your own existence or leave its continued state to the whim of other parties who may have a very different view of the future.
We are making the wrong choice. Insanity - repeating failed actions and expecting a different outcome.
And all those kids using their parents guns.
No emotional connection to them.
Idiot.
I mean, are even Daily Mail readers stupid enough to fall for such a ridiculous oversimplification?
The Telegraph too. Unless you have access to the details of how the reporting is done that's you can't state that with any credence.
Who is John Galt?
I keep on noticing, that in the last several years we have had an increased notice of these paramilitary style attacks on innocent people for whatever twisted reason the attackers have. I know I am treading in shark-infested waters, but I think the real culprit that is emboldening these sociopaths to these actions is our youth adopting the military "Call of Duty" lifestyle. We have spent the last decade glamorizing the military, and all its cool facets, that we are making it a positive thing to explore malignant uses for all sorts of weapons, and all sorts of tactics for inflicting pain and misery on an enemy. Now, I am not saying the military is at fault, not by a longshot, but I think the marketing and our (USA) society's passive training to obtain more soldiers from it's youth is becoming quite a catalyst for all sorts of these armed attacks. Weapon Control, is not completely the answer, and one must only look to China's mass stabbings, including the school stabbing rampage to see that banning certain weapons only moves the crowd to another choice. We must look deeper into the psyche, and we will probably reach a close, or the same conclusion. I hate to attack gaming, I am a gamer of all sorts.. But I think we need to research the mental state of all the youth who play Call of Duty and Halo, etc, etc, and find out if there is a powerful impression on how they act out on retaliation from different adversity from society.
The solution is to close down all the schools problem solved
Then there is no school children to shot
Why won't someone think of the children plus
Think of all the money city's and towns could save not having to pa
Teacher's, schools and what not
Meds. Anyone know the real numbers/percentages of these mass murderer chickenshit cowards who have been on psych meds? They're all clearly hopelessly fucked up but are they getting a next-level tragic boost from engineered brain chemistry?
Does fucked-up human PLUS performance/coping enhancers EQUAL enhanced fucked-up human?
An interesting point that has been mentioned so far: When dealing with persons of a criminal mindset, you can be sure that even if guns were outlawed, the criminal would find a way to cause harm/obtain a gun.
Whilst this is true, it does not take into consideration persons without a previous history turning bad; and persons of an angry "nature" not quite willing to track down and deal with the black market. Even by the time they did, they might have had time to cool off...
They may resort to knives and blunt objects for melee attacks, but that kind of damage, compared to a long-range rapid-fire weapon, yields a much lower chance of high body count.
As to the argument of the "tool" not being the problem - no, it's not the initial cause I suppose, but accessibility makes it extremely easy for the mentally unstable, who proponents of this argument like to hold up, to cause the damage they do - indeed, there are Bad People out there, suffocating their children in cars, and bludgeoning their wives with baseball bats... but come on, haven't we seen enough shootings in the history of the USA (and the world) where other persons had guns but it failed to prevent a massacre, or only made it worse? I still don't see how you could repurpose a firearm to be of any use other than making more dead people. And as said before - the alternative assault methods don't easily offer the instant-high-body-count which so addles us.
How can I phrase this better... of the set of people who have the mindset and will to kill people, the body count is different when all have access to guns, as opposed to when only a highly restricted subset have access (namely, those willing to deal with the black market or other illegal route).
There are plenty of other ways to kill lots of people without purpose-designed tools (read: items designed primarily to be weapons), as any diligent chemistry and physics student can demonstrate, or even just a crafty person. Funny that the crazed killers always opt for the pre-made weapons (guns, knives, legal or illegal) whatever the country.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
I think this is a terrible tragedy and should be treated as such.
With that said, I cannot believe the idiocy of some of these comments.
Some you believe you are so educated and have this all figured out. You think that by taking guns away and giving up rights that it will all go away. If you believe that you are a fool and a worthy victim. You are also an irresposible citizen and a drone.
Giving up rights does not stop crime. And Murderers already break several laws in the act of commiting the crime. So why the "Educated" always want to "Feel" safe by putting up no gun signs, rather than BEING safe and learning methods of self protection are totally beyond my comprehension. Adding new laws and restricting firewarms is not the answer, as evidenced by the tragedy we have here.
I blame the government and the State of Connecticut for this and forcing teachers and students to be unsafe. These things have happened before in places like UTAH and Isreal and the teachers were allowed to own concealed weapons and bring them on campus for safety. Guess what, the murderers that tried to harm people in those schools died themselves and that was the end of it. But you don't hear that in the news do you. If one of those teachers had been armed at this school, we would have had a hero instead of a tragedy.
Wake the hell up.
I'll be frank. I am sick and tired of the nice people trying to be "civilized" and "Disarm" ourselves, caving in to the unfounded thought that less guns equals being safe.
Lets put this in to perspective.
People, they want to "Feel" (Not be..., but feel) safe. Having a gun, concealed or not doesn't make you safe. It gives you a tool (if you have the training) for a possible incident that you may encounter in this very "civilized" world we live in. You know, the one where you can get robbed at gunpoint, and then are told by the company to lay down and "pray" you don't get shot and die. Screw that, I've got a family to feed and care for and I will protect myself regardless of the law, or the policy. If the person attacking died, then his judgement will come from god as will mine. It may create hardships and I may even go to prison for doing it because of our countries new lack of worth that it's citizens place on life, but I would have brought awareness to the issue locally and I would have prevented the same deed from happening again. They will continue to do it because if they succeed, it re-affirms an easy way to survive.
So here are the steps that people take to "feel" safe.
1.Politely tell people to leave guns at home. Tell them it is so we don't scare or offend anyone.
2. Post signs in public places telling customers that guns are not allowed on the property (Which they have their right to do. I then don't shop there and then call or write them to tell them why. Those signs are telling criminals it is safe to harm others there. You don't see this happening at gun stores do you?)
3. Put metal detectors at the doors and spend thousands of dollars other security scanners and devices, etc and such to protect kids at schools, prevent guns in stores, etc. etc.
4. Ban guns because they have now become a social stigma because they are no longer "Normal" in society.
Tell me which of these steps stops any criminal from perpetrating an act of deadly or severe injury? Name a country that has implemented all of this and has solved the problem. It may feel good, but it doesn't work. It is a flawed thought process.
Makes for good movie and banter, but it ain't gonna happen in reality. If you believe any of what you posted, your an idiot.
And then scrap ALL that when you can print one out at home...
Do Australian police have the duty to protect citizens? That may be the biggest difference about self-defense as US LEOs do NOT have to protect citizens (SCOTUS said so). Shame when a criminal has the right to kill you IF he can get there before the police can.
Ever heard the phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc?
Thought not.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Madmen attack schools for the same reason fur activists fuck with old ladies in fur coats, and not bikers. They know they're unarmed, and can't fight back in a gun-free zone.
"Gun-free Zone" is shorthand for "First person to walk into here with a gun, owns the place."; in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; in the kingdom of the disarmed, the man with a 9mm and plenty of ammo is king - even if he illegally owns it, and technically, shouldn't have one if he was a law-abiding citizen.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The main source for illegally owned firearms is the stockpile of legally owned firearms
3d printed guns are purely ornamental
All armed guards and checkpoints would do is use up one or two bullets early on in the rampage. The cost to provide bunker like checkpoints and the time it would take to process the kids in and out of them would be prohibitive.
It's like trying to regulate firearms in the middle east. The USA has far more guns than most places, so there's the practical problem of getting rid of them. And the USA is far bigger than most countries. EU sized, not France sized.
You think he's only going to hit you once. That's cute.
Well, if you keep up with the news, turns out the guy was an Honors Student and a nerd who ran LAN parties with his friends.
So be glad that they're still in the "ban guns / ban psychos" phase before they inevitably move on to the "ban nerds & nerd activities" phase. We're certainly going to be hearing more of this here.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shooting of criminals than in the U.S. The rapists rape,
the burglar's burgle, the kidnapper's kidnap, and so forth, but apparently less guns means less gun violence.
People need to know. People have a right to know. Without knowing, who can tell that there is a problem? Shutting up the media wont stop the demented. It may even encourage a grander scale of an atrocity to get that attention.
I think it's highly indicative that you chose a misogynist insult in relation to a gun violence discussion. Women-hatred and violence have been vile bedfellows forever
As a woman I will say that sand in the vagina is not just a female issue. Go sex it up on a beach or other sandy location where sand is introduced to the orifice a penis is entering. Do not assume that the use of the word vagina is an insult to women. THAT is true misogyny..
yeah ... and go to jail for posting inflammatory stuffs on facebook.. go UK!! lol
A lot of Italian newspapers (for example http://www.ilmessaggero.it/primopiano/esteri/strage_usa_connecticut_armi_madre_killer_obama/notizie/238271.shtml ) are reporting that the killer had "Asperger, considered a serious autism form".
common sense, dude.
You people apparently have no interest in fixing your country. The quotes refer to a different time, a different era. You country is broken and innocent people are suffering because of it. Become civilised.
The quotes are just as relevant today as they were then. The quotes are not dependent on the technology level of the people. The quotes teach a lesson about human nature, which hasn't changed much in 10,000 years. They are also about man's relationship with government, and like man himself, the nature (not type) of governments has also not changed, because governments are made up of those same humans that have not changed their basic nature and behaviors in 10K years.
Those quotes teach lessons about the nature of man and his relationship with government that would have been true 5,000 years ago (adjusted for time-shift, e.g. swords/guns) and will be just as relevant 5,000 years from now.
They are like Sun Tzu's "Art of War" in that the principles set forth hold true over time because they deal with human nature and behavior which, again, has changed very little in 10,000 years. Freedom is freedom and tyranny is tyranny across the ages, citizens will struggle to be free and governments will always seek ever-more power over them, whether the citizens and government employ flintlocks and horse-drawn wagons, phasers and starships, or M16s and fighter jets.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
And this one is a neon sign two stories high flashing "IT'S THE GUNS!"
Why? It was a grown man in a room with few small exits filled with small children. Anything from history that has ever been called a weapon, baseball bats included, would have resulted in comparable devastation. A gun is just a convenience. Someone with the desire to murder a roomful of children and complete personal removal from the consequences is the problem.
I will concede that the gun may have aided in deterring and stopping other adults from intervening, but that is less significant in this case than in any other mass shooting that I have heard of, considering the high ratio of potential victims to people physically comparable to the shooter.
To call out this one in particular as the event that screams "IT'S THE GUNS" blatantly disregards the more substantial problems.
Having 1 or 2 armed police around would make more sense.
Drug 'em up, ignore the warnings on the drug inserts that state clearly the drugs should never be administered without conjunctive therapy...
If you really think that's how things would go, you're willfully ignorant of how most trained shooters behave with firearms.
If you're arguing that teachers who would desire to carry could be required to take tactical training courses, fine. Saying they would all choose to carry, that those who did wouldn't take their responsibility to know they were shooting at a bad guy, and/or that they'd would even fire at all (giving away their DEFENSIVE position), is just the same as saying "teachers are stupid".
That's not true and neither is your silly scenario.
Switzerland and Finland have a private gun ownership rate of more than half that of the US. Shouldn't the massacre rate in those countries be about half that of the US?
A Finn here, hi. Wikipedia has a chart on that. Switzerland is above the "half" mark, Finland is below. This is of course just a statistic and they are just one way of putting it, and here in Finland the vast majority of guns are hunting weapons, and laws on owning handguns have been made more strict in the last few years (we have had our school shootings, sadly).
2 "seriously" injured, 20 others lightly wounded, no deaths (so far). This is what happens without easy access to automatic weapons. You're going to have sociopaths and psychotics everywhere, but only in the US (and maybe Afghanistan) will they have such easy access to such lethal weaponry. Absent this lethality, it's a lot more difficult for these people to create such efficient carnage.
You want your "right to bear arms" organized around individuals and not through State militias? Give everyone access to a 1776 -era state of the art musket. See how many kids they can shoot on a rampage then...
Da Blog
So why don't these madmen randomly attack police stations and monster truck rallies?
Maybe they aren't mad, just pretending.
Which is why the _only_ viable solution to the problem is socially-organized change, like during the 60s. No amount of extra guns will fix the problem. You are already at a severe disadvantage against the government if that's who you fear (in a very real, physical sense). Never mind that any small group of "differently-minded" individuals with a compound somewhere is not nearly organized or distributed enough to make a stand in any real sense, and that only invites an antagonistic relationship between the two sides of the issue which will never be satisfied until enough blood has been split (and how many liters do the little guys have to spill?). Or are you satisfied with just being martyrs? That's crazy. Which is why people call those kinds of groups crazy, even if they are well meaning and sincere.
No, it's the slow, deliberate, unified action of like-minded individuals that you can begin to affect change that will last.
Wanna bet?
The video is of a 3 year old opening locked gun safes.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The gun-nuts of America are working on getting this pitiably poor record of massacres up to standard. there'll be a new massacre along soon, just as soon as someone gets hacked-off enough with life to take a new crack at the record.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
if they were armed, do you think as many would have died in this incident?
I hear this argument a lot. When Gabby Giffords was shot, there were two people present who had guns on them. Those two people didn't prevent the shooter from harming anyone; they thought if they pulled out their guns, that they themselves would have been shot.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
A 20 year old can't just easily get multiple firearms and a bulletproof vest unless there's a large enough legal market to make a huge supply. A psykopath was arrested last year here for assaulting multiple caseworkers. He said he wanted to kill all of them, but he was too chicken to use a knife and while he tried to get several firearms, it was just too difficult for him to get, so he as a desperate last effort tried unarmed assault. Many lives were saved because guns were hard to obtain.
Freedom > security. Fuck off with your TSA mentality.
indeed it's an issue.Should we allow uzi's simply because we can print pea shooters? yes that's just today and the printers get better etc. We have a clear and present danger NOW that we should be doing something about.
What was suggested after Colorado? How about Tuscon? Mostly I heard 'Its too soon to talk about it; don't politicize it". Those people have the blood of 20 children on their hands...not that it seems to matter to them.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I'm proposing perhaps we shouldn't have millions and millions of guns in this country. Nothing will change without removing the overwhelming number of guns from the situation.
Yet because of the 2nd Amendment its apparently sacrosanct to even discuss limiting guns. Maybe, just maybe, the founding fathers needed to raise and army and the best way was to allow everyone to have a gun and so the 2nd Amendment was created as part of our founding documents? Maybe they only considered single shot muskets? maybe they would have a slightly different take on 25 clip Uzi's on every street corner?
We have to remove the guns, or this will keep happening. Do you disagree with that? If so, how would you suggest we prevent this from happening in the future?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Everything has its price.
Second amendment freedoms are paid with blood of innocents.
Lower local/state/federal "debt" is paid with less of a safety net to catch and care for the mentally ill.
Tough-it-out, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, self-made-man mentality is paid with shame and violent reactions when reality can't support the tough-guy ideal.
I find it funny how, when it comes to gun violence, people start thinking that correlation = causation. That's especially true after some sort of tragedy. It gets annoying when people completely disregard factors such as the culture, the environment, poverty, etc.
right. Because nobody _ever_ has a negative emotional reaction to police officers or rednecks. moron.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
I was replying to a someone who wrote "Correlation is not causation", and they made that comment regarding the earlier comment that "in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S."
When I wrote "this one", I was referring to that correlation.
However:
It was a grown man in a room with few small exits filled with small children. Anything from history that has ever been called a weapon, baseball bats included, would have resulted in comparable devastation.
9 adults, 18 children. Given the typical adult:child ratio in schools, that means a lot of adults tried to attack the gunman. If 9 adults tried to tackle a guy with a baseball bat, he would have to be extraordinarily lucky or skilled to not be disarmed. Likewise iron bar, knife, sword, bow, cross-bow, or anything except guns. (A sword would be the most effective on that list. But few people would have the skill these days to defend themselves from a group of determined attackers.)
Modern guns are fundamentally different weapons. That's why they were invented, why they fundamentally changed the battlefield. A stand-off weapon; rapid rate of fire; simple to use, with no real training required at the range we're talking about. That makes it extraordinarily difficult for unarmed bystanders, however brave, to take down even a single shooter. No other weapon has the same tactical effectiveness. Again, that's why they were invented.
I will concede that the gun may have aided in deterring and stopping other adults from intervening
And that is a vile libel, given the stories of individual and group heroism that have emerged. The adults who died, according to reports, specifically put themselves in the line of fire to protect children.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Yeah. Maybe having an armed guard for each school isn't practical. I didn't claim to know that it is. My main issue was the outrageous legislation that allows basically anyone, no matter what mental problems he has, to own guns. If you want to end this insanity, and think it through, this has some uncomfortable consequences, e.g. some current gun owners would have to be forced to give up their guns, and the others would have to be required by law to actually lock their guns away safely whenever they're not carrying them.
Keep your right to bare arms... but how about we BAN ALL BULLETS? Sure there will be enough bullets stock piled for 100++ years - but... someday there will be no more bullets in this country.
All this talk of "well we need to screen people better before they get guns" is utter bullshit. There is absolutely no way to predict what someone is going to do in the future. Insane people were sane once.
You are hiding behind the 2nd. We have many things in our formative years which are important to us at the time but as we grow and develop we realise that those thing have a time and a place and we forsake them as our knowledge and understanding grows. The 2nd amendment is preventing the US from becoming a safe place to live as you talk of freedom -- what about the freedom of someone who chooses not to carry a firearm to be free of being surrounded by people carrying deadly weapons? Why are they not free to be in a place where people don't have the instant ability to kill them? You need to give your country a chance to grow.
And what are the comparable survivability ratios for people hit with a metal stick? Better or worse than 6 out of 7?
That's completely idiotic. You could argue the same thing about just about anything. There is a big difference between people who break gun laws and people who murder, steal, etc. And guess what? The latter aren't based on silly little statistics; they always hurt people.
No, true misogyny is hating women, and defending woman-hatred. It's almost entirely done by men. So while I admit it's possible you're a woman, I kind of doubt it, because defending what is obviously intended as a sexist insult by pretending that it's not is a pretty classically misogynist piece of behaviour.
The poster assumed the gender of the OP was female and created an insult based on their sex alone. That is misogynist behaviour. You may be desensitised to it, because we all, sadly, hear so much of it, but it is indeed misogynist.
I have not implied that a woman's sexual organs are something to be ashamed of. I have highlighted that an insult based on a woman being a woman is misogynist. That is a very different thing. It's got nothing to do with the use of the word "vagina". If he'd said "calm down, dear", as David Cameron did to one of his own MPs recently here in the UK, that would be just as sexist without referring to sexual organs.
In a world where hundreds of millions of women are raped, cut, beaten, abused in other ways and killed simply for being women, I will continue to call out misogyny when I see it. And encourage you to not waste energy defending this particular insult by trying to convince yourself, me or others that it is not sexist, but instead put some energy into making the world around you a safer space for the women you know and care for.
I'm not seeing where he assumed that the poster was female. I'm pretty sure that's just a general way to say that someone seems angry or grumpy.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
You are hiding behind the 2nd. We have many things in our formative years which are important to us at the time but as we grow and develop we realise that those thing have a time and a place and we forsake them as our knowledge and understanding grows. The 2nd amendment is preventing the US from becoming a safe place to live as you talk of freedom -- what about the freedom of someone who chooses not to carry a firearm to be free of being surrounded by people carrying deadly weapons? Why are they not free to be in a place where people don't have the instant ability to kill them? You need to give your country a chance to grow.
I say what good is being "safe" if one has no freedom? Solitary confinement in a prison is safe, but I'll take my chances out here, thanks all the same.
Human nature has not changed in 10,000 years, as much as you'd like to believe people are all "civilized" now. The nature of people and governments has not changed. The principles I've outlined and the quotes I provide are just as relevant and important now, today, as they were at the nation's founding.
One of the biggest reasons for high levels of violence in the US is that the 2nd Amendment has already been overly-restricted and regulated.
Just as the answer to speech you disagree with is more speech, so too the answer to high levels of criminal violence is allowing more people the ability to be armed to protect themselves and their families and communities while deterring criminals.
Most of the other nations of the world either ban guns or severely restrict them. The US does not prevent citizens from immigrating to another country. They are free to go where the core principles on which that nation is founded suits them.
They are NOT free, however, to take other people's freedoms from them and change the basis on which the nation was founded for some illusion of safety, for an unarmed people will never be safe, particularly from abuses and tyranny from their own government.
The US was formed as an open, free society. Open and free societies have risks because freedom means people can sometimes behave in unexpected and sometimes negative ways. The only way to eliminate risks are to remove the freedoms that could allow a person to act in a manner outside of the government-prescribed "safe" manner. People who exist under such a system are what is know as "serfs" "subjects" and "slaves". An armed man is a citizen. A disarmed man is a slave.
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." - Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book, 1774-1776
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin 1775
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe." - Noah Webster
"I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." - George Mason Co-author of the Second Amendment during Virginia's Convention to Ratify the Constitution, 1788
"Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence ⦠from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable ⦠the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference â" they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." - George Washington
"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand arms,
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Good morning shilly! A) Google me, Cylithria is my real name. I assure you that I am a woman. :)
B) "It's almost entirely done by men." - I assure you it is not. Women can and do hate women. I spent 20+ years working with Airmen, Sailors, Soldiers, Marines, and Reservists or National Guard. The misogyny was almost nil. 20 minutes in a ladies restroom at a large event.... Sweet Butter Jesus the misogyny!
Sorry, I am not one to argue much. Think what you choose. IMHO the OP was not attempting a slam on women. If you ever encountered sand in a vagina you might see my point.
Have a great day.
Funny, Bruce... for someone with as many intellectual accomplishments as you have, how is it exactly that you missed the fact that you're advocating taking away someone else's right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Explain to me how depriving each and every one of your countrymen of a right endowed upon them by their Creator based solely on the actions of a person who clearly stepped beyond the boundaries of the social contract does not constitute blatant hypocrisy?
I have the same right to Life as everyone else here, including you, does. Derived from that right is the right of self-defense against all entities who transgress against us in proportion to the severity of that transgression. Should someone attempt to use lethal force against me, I am morally and ethically permitted to use the same in response: Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back! As a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record, for you to exercise prior restraint against me, to deprive me of the ability to defend myself in a proportional manner to the threat, you are directly violating my right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. You are also purposefully giving the transgressing party an advantage they would not possess were I to have the Liberty to arm myself accordingly and as such are setting up the situation where the transgressing party is far more likely to kill me.
So, by advocating unjust prior restraint, you are:
1. violating the right to life
2. violating the right to liberty
3. violating the right to pursuit of happiness
4. violating the right to due process
5. aiding/abetting the initiation of force/use of violence against an innocent party
6. aiding/abetting the murder of an innocent party
So, in light of 1-6, can you explain to me how your actions, were they to become more than simple words, do not constitute a transgression against every person who is subject to your whims? Do you know what's ultimately sad about this? The crazy sonofabitch who shot up that school was crazy; presumably you aren't.
Last I checked, we're supposed to respect each other's rights, not stomp on them in an emotion-driven tit-for-tat to soothe our own bruised egos. You're supposed to be smarter than this, Bruce. It's not rocket surgery.
The attachment to guns is not rational. Whenever someone starts that nonsense about how you can kill someone with a knife, a rock, etc., so we'll have to get rid of those if we get rid of guns, I would say this: Imagine you're at a crowded basketball game. Some nut runs onto the court carrying a) an automatic rifle b) a rock or knife. What will your reaction be in each case? Do you even bother to get out of your seat if you're 15 feet away in case b? How many people will be killed by the rock or knife before the person is subdued? If 2 people rush the rock-holder, he's pretty much going to be stopped.
No sir...they are as free to spout nonsense as you and I.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Lets have some sanity about guns as a privileged and not a right
So, treason is cool now? Passing laws in direct violation of Constitutionally enumerated rights is fine?
While we're at it, let's make a list of other Constitutional amendments we prefer to ignore. How about those pesky 13th, 19th, and 24th as well?
The idea that the 2nd Amendment means that all Americans should have an unfettered right to own whatever kinds of modern armaments they want is a pretty recent one. I don't have the source in front of me right now, but my recollection is that there was a campaign in the 1970s or so to change the popular interpretation from "to form a militia (ie, army) you need guns" to "every single American should own an assault rifle."
If you actually read the 2nd Amendment, while I can understand how the current interpretation came about, it should also be pretty easy to see how the previous interpretation was formed.
Furthermore, I challenge you to explain what the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is.
Is it to ensure that America can be defended from outside threats? If so, then the US Army surely does a much better job.
Is it to ensure that every average American can have the ability to defend themselves from criminals in their home? If so, I challenge you to support that without twisting the Amendment's wording significantly.
Is it to ensure that average Americans can have the ability to overthrow their government if the government is seen as no longer representing the will of the people? If so, then the Amendment is quite obviously hopelessly outdated and its purpose no longer possible to fulfill without going to lengths that I think most Americans would find absurd (eg, permitting any random nut to own a tank, fighter jet, or cruise missiles).
The idea that questioning the unrestricted individual right to bear arms in the 2nd Amendment is treason is ridiculous. Such was almost certainly not the intent of the Founders, and statistics seem to seriously call into question the wisdom of continuing to uphold it (the NRA's talking points notwithstanding).
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
That last sentence that you quoted was certainly improperly worded on my part. I meant that a gun aids in deterring intervention and stopping those who intervene, which is the point of most of your reply and was not meant to trivialize anyone's sacrifice.
My point was that this is event in particular, even with 9 adults and 18 children, when compared to typical mass shootings among peers, had an outcome that was less facilitated by firearms than those other massacres. I did not say that it wasn't a factor, just that it was not appropriate to flag this event as being the one in particular that finally highlights the stupidity of U.S. gun practices.
Focusing on the guns instead of the whole event makes it sound as if there was a guy who sincerely wanted to murder his mother and a bunch of children, did not care about the consequences, and everything was just fine until he found a gun.
I am appaled at peoples ignorance when this information is so readily available from multiple sources. The sad fact is that killings in schools happen in multiple countries with diverse cultures and laws.
I included the Belgium one to demonstrate that the type of person who would commit such an act will use whatever they can get a hold of.
March 1996, Britain: A gunman burst into a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, shot and killed 16 children and their teacher, then killed himself.
April 26, 2002, Germany: In the town of Erfurt in eastern Germany, 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser opened fire after saying he was not going to take a math test. He killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman at the Gutenberg Gymnasium, before killing himself
Sept. 23, 2008, Finland: Student Matti Saari opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwestern Finland, killing nine other students and one male staff member before killing himself.
Jan. 23, 2009, Belgium: A man with a white painted face and blackened eyes fatally stabbed two infants and a woman at childcare center in western Belgium
March 11, 2009, Germany: A 17-year-old gunman dressed in black combat gear killed more than a dozen people, including nine students and three teachers at the Albertville Realschule school in Winnenden. He fled and later killed himself after a gunbattle with police
How does something like this get modded insightful? There's nothing insightful about it. The subject he was replying to was dealing with allowing teachers to CCW and poster gives a herp-derp knee jerk response that has nothing to do with either refuting or supporting the idea and is only tangentially related to the subject at all.
Insightful could have been, depending on your point of view, something like: "Well, I don't know if I'm comfortable with that, I don't trust most teachers without going through some sort of process", not the drivel posted.
Deletionists will eventually decide that their lives are "not notable" and go on a spree with abusive admins to try and revert their moms.
Yes it's Americans; Americans who rely on pills to solve their problems, and live in denial about their egregious side effects:
http://medicalwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2011/09/mass-violence-caused-by-anti.html
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372
https://www.google.com/search?q=ssri+violence
The core of American society now centers around pills, violence as entertainment, and disintegrating families ("the kids are good with it") - oh - and denial. It's not a wonder there is so much apparent confusion about the cause of such an event. The scientific evidence is available, Americans only have to accept it and deal with the reality that drugs are drugs, whether it comes in the form of a prescription or in a bag in a back alley, and personal accountability is at an all-time low.
Sent from my ENIAC
Therefore, because criminals do not abide by laws, we should abolish all laws. After all, with the current system, only the criminals benefit from not having to follow them.
What kind of crazy bullshit-town thought-factory does this tidbit stem from?
If we, as society, want to reduce the occurrences of incidents like this, we need to curb the supply of guns. If everybody and their mother has an arsenal in their home, it's no wonder that criminals have easy access to innumerable instruments of death. If that wasn't the case (like it is in many, many civilized countries), incidents such as this would occur less often. Plus, people would stop killing their friends and relatives due to thinking they are burglars, too.
Apparently though, we, as a society deem having schoolyard massacres once or twice a year an acceptable price for pretty much unlimited supply of guns to everybody and their mother. Even those mentally unstable people you know.
In order to kill somebody with a knife, you need to really, really want to
I think the guy who did this latest shooting really really wanted to kill people.
And with a knife he would have been a WHOLE lot less efficient. You simply cannot slice open 18 kids as fast as you can mow them down. That's cold and calculating, but unfortunately it's the truth. With a knife he'd have killed maybe 2 or 3 kids, not 18.
Countries like Australia and New Zealand, with firearms laws close to the US (Australia) and UK (NZ) and both have much much lower rates of murder and such? They both have a large number of minorities, so homogeneity doesn't seem be a good reason.
If the link is poverty, then the solution is better welfare in the US? Australia and NZ have lower taxes and better welfare than the US as well.
Learn to love Alaska
It is completely possible that there would have been 0 deaths there because the gunman wouldn't have picked a spot where he might encounter armed resistance who might be a better shot than he was. It isn't so much the quick draw wild west winner as the deterrent effect of knowing there is likely to be someone around - probably off duty cop, ex cop, active duty military, ex military, who will kill you that would help reduce the crazies. Joe Random Good Citizen probably wouldn't have the psych training to weather the surprise attack well - even if he/she were a good shot. But there are those who could and would. They are the true deterrent effect that would put a stop to the nuts.
Good to know there is no gang violence in the US. The gangs are armed, and they called a truce to not shoot any armed people, in case someone shot back.
Learn to love Alaska
perhaps you can explain why the states with the most permissive carry laws in the US have the lowest rates of violent crime?
They haven't passed the laws because they didn't have high crime to require it. Gun control laws lower gun crimes, but there are plenty of other ways to get lower crime. You sound like you are arguing that proof gun control works doesn't prove gun control works because there are places where gun control wasn't used.
Learn to love Alaska
So, treason is cool now? Passing laws in direct violation of Constitutionally enumerated rights is fine?
It's been done for generations now, what's one more? Also, I never saw them advocate violating the Constitution. It wouldn't be a violation of the Constitution if the Constitution was changed first.
Learn to love Alaska
I thought it was the conservatives who refuse to treat mental illnesses as actual illnesses. If he'd gotten treatment, he'd have killed nobody.
Learn to love Alaska
I keep hearing this as if it were some nefarious organization. What is the gun lobby?
It's millions of Americans who don't want to see further erosion of our rights, and we support organizations that lobby on our behalf, and contact politicians directly to tell them our feelings on the subject. Politicians are rightfully afraid of going up against millions of constituents of both parties who have very strong opinions on the subject.
Focusing on the guns instead of the whole event makes it sound as if there was a guy who sincerely wanted to murder his mother and a bunch of children, did not care about the consequences, and everything was just fine until he found a gun.
Read up about the Australian example I mentioned earlier. A ten-fold reduction in mass-shootings immediately following a nation-wide restriction on certain gun-types. Do you think that we somehow also reduced the number of nutters, the number of wanna-be mass-killers, by 90%?
I know people in the US have this idea that somehow the nutters will always find another way, that the guns are irrelevant. "The causes are more complex." But it's simply, and with the Australian case, demonstrably untrue. Guns increase the killing rate of mad bastards. Guns increase the efficiency of killers.
Ten times.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I hastily agree that they deserve protection - but not by people whose profession isn't protecting people. Cops, not civilians, should be armed where there are a lot of kids in one place.
> that schools incite such hatred in people that they feel a need to lash out at them
That's a pretty extreme way of putting it, but I would definitely say that schools and universities are definitely in the position of serving as the focal point for a lot of very stressed-out people's stress. Some of that has to do with actual educational stuff, some of it is just an outcome of their natural proximity to young people, who are pretty good at stressing each other out, and who don't typically have super well-formed senses of self yet.
Other popular massacre locations are workplaces, which serve as the focal point for most people's professional stress in their adult lives, and nightlife spots, which are where many people's social anxieties are most manifest as grown-ups. When they were young, school was both.
I think "Schools incite such hatred that..." is wrong because it suggests that the above stresses are the real cause of the attacks, which is obviously wrong. I survived being a social outcast and freaking out about my grads, and striking out with girls at bars and hating my boss, and didn't hurt a fly. But obviously large populations have in them all sorts of statistical outliers, people with mental and psychological problems which are exacerbated or triggered by exactly the sorts of situations which schools put them in.
Are you crazy? Teachers having guns in the classroom? Really? More guns is the answer is it? Do you realize how insane that sounds?
It may sound crazy to somebody who doesn't understand the issue, but emotional thinking isn't appropriate for sound policy. Study the statistics (do it yourself or read John Lott's work or the National Academy of Sciences report - especially the panel reports) and you'll find it makes perfect sense.
Strange isn't it that those countries with less guns and stricter gun laws have fewer deaths?
The main cause of gun violence in the US is the strident "War on Drugs". That's easily proven. You only need to look at Switzerland, where every house is required to keep a military-grade gun in the home (and some homes are required to keep heavier ordinance) and see that they have the lowest rate of gun crime to understand that correlation != causation.
More guns equals more people dead by guns. End of story.
That's wrong by a factor of 1:100 if you do the math (please don't be afraid of science). But why bother with reason when Hollywood-style scaremongering will do, right? Oh, here's a reason to bother - 20% of US massacres happen in gun-free-school zones.
Did you know that Israeli teachers carry semi-automatic rifles on class trips? There was an attempted massacre there. They changed policy, now there aren't any.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They had a massacre in Australia, they banned guns, no massacred since. See, I can do that too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#The_Port_Arthur_massacre_and_its_consequences
Ever heard the phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc?
Oooh, Latin, you win.
Causation requires correlation. Because two things are correlated does not mean there cannot be causation.
To determine which is which, we need statistical methods. Look into the work done at the University of Chicago and the review done by the National Academy of Sciences (paying attention to the panel reports). This particular link has been shown to be causative. "Field trials" of new gun bans have shown exactly the predicted outcome as well.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Fair enough, but you'll also find a dramatic spike in overall violent crime in post-ban Australia.
The proper lesson to learn from Israel is that arming teachers doesn't cause safety problems of its own.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I could argue that a car or a bomb are significantly more efficient ways to administer death. Until we figure out why our biology/society produces psychopaths, and how to treat it, it's just another cat-and-mouse game...
Incorrect. Europe has extremely strict gun laws. Could you point me to a few dictators of which you speak in Europe?
Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Germany...all have strict gun laws.
They do not have dictators. Your assertion is disproven.
GP probably thinks that Hitler is still in charge of Germany, and King George III of England.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Well, if you keep up with the news, turns out the guy was an Honors Student and a nerd who ran LAN parties with his friends.
So be glad that they're still in the "ban guns / ban psychos" phase before they inevitably move on to the "ban nerds & nerd activities" phase. We're certainly going to be hearing more of this here.
Where's Jon Katz with another whiny "Hellmouth" article when you need him?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Actually, I own an Uzi. Yes, a real one. Automatic weapons are legal, though many hoops must be jumped through to obtain them. It's still less paperwork than say, starting a business and hiring a single employee. Legal automatic weapons in the US have the lowest fatality of any firearms. Any legal automatic weapon used in a crime has pretty much been committed by a law enforcement officer. Anyone that can legally buy say, a .22 single shot rifle, can also buy a legal full auto AK-47 or even an RPG for that matter. Or cannon, we have a large number of those in private hands as well. It's simply a matter of cost.
Honestly, US has many reasons for our crime rates. Which have been dropping for decades, as I recall. Most of the homicides are in states with the most restrictive gun laws. I don't subscribe to the theory that more guns directly means less crime. It's a mixture of socioeconomic factors, culture, how we deal with mental illness, etc. We'd dramatically lower crime rates if we quarantined anyone with any form of mental illness or poverty. Ah, I would not want to live in such a country nor do I think it's remotely a good idea. I do think we need to do more to deal with mental illness, but that can be tricky with our laws and Constitutional rights. It should be hard to lock people up for life if they have committed no crimes. US laws are not good at locking folks up prior to a crime being committed. This has its good and bad points.
If you could magically ban all guns, it wouldn't change a lot of the underlying issues.
China is a nation of 1 billion people.
1,344,130,000 in 2011.
Pretty big number... so big we can round down - dropping the equivalent of the entire population of the United States - and nobody bats an eye.
Designed to be built with the level of machinery in a 1930s bicycle repair shop in five man-hours. With third-hand, untraceable, 20 year-old tooling a person could easily crank out two STENs a day from his garage.
The police are only minutes away.
If you (somehow manage) to take the gun out of the homicidal maniac's hands, they're still a homicidal maniac. You think that if this person couldn't get access to a gun they wouldn't have found another way? They could probably have made a bomb with things they found lying around the house.
Once something snaps in their head and they decide they want to kill lots of people, preventing access to a particular tool isn't going to do any good. There are lots of other tools they could use to accomplish the same thing. If you really want to do something useful, figure out why they snapped in the first place.
Hell, the knowledge that any of the faculty might have the equipment to put his rampage to an end may have even prevented the incident entirely.
Considering they took their own life at the end, I'm not sure the threat of getting shot would have been much of a deterrent.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Hell, the knowledge that any of the faculty might have the equipment to put his rampage to an end may have even prevented the incident entirely.
Considering they took their own life at the end, I'm not sure the threat of getting shot would have been much of a deterrent.
Perhaps not, but had the principle been armed and trained, the act of getting shot would have ended his spree before it began.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Dear readers, in middle of cool tech news, interesting stories about Raspberry PI, Cisco, Apple, etc we find a sad story of a shooting in the US. I believe it has been thoroughly covered in all popular news media and besides the fact that Slashdot is a US published media this story its of none what so ever relevance to modern technology. Its sad that you have to drag the story also here into this place.
If I can't trust a teacher with a gun, why on earth would I trust them with my kid?
And they're just as free to own up to their false accusations in court and be barred from reporting on anything until a court determines otherwise, just like you and I.
That doesn't change the fact that this company, its subsidiaries, and its owners are all well-known liars that should be shut down.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
We sacrifice to the altar all the time.
First Amendment principles mean we have to allowe the Westboro Baptists to protest, even if it means hearing their hate.
Most of us here would like to keep the 4th Amendment principles on search and seizure even if it means some terrorists and criminals slip through and kill people.
I know the 5th Amendment's principle of no double jeopardy has let criminals go free, yet I still support it. I don't want anybody tried twice no matter how obvious the guilt appears to be.
You have Gary -- murder capital of the U.S.A. -- fucking Indiana. NEXT.
Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from the consequences of one's speech...for instance, yelling "faggots" at a group of bikers because you thought it was a cute joke on Southpark, or telling your wife what you really think about her hot friend. Fox and the rest of Broadcast News have gone the way of dead tree editorializing: there is bias, spin, sketchy fact-checking, and occasionally some outright fabrication. I watch Soledad in the morning on CNN, but it's still clear to me where her personal political beliefs lie on the spectrum. "Scooping" unconfirmed facts could well result in a libel suit, although in this case I'll wager the Connectinut's brother will shy from the spotlight for a minute. The essential thing is that no speech, which hurts nothing but feelings, can ever be banned.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
There's a town in Georgia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw,_Georgia) which requires every house to have a weapon and a person trained in its use. It's about the same size as my town, which is pretty liberal biased (college town) and about the same size (30-35k pop).
It turns out that their violent crime rate is almost identical to ours, and their property crime rate is 25% higher. Anecdotal, yes, but arming the town seems not to have reduced crime at all. By your recommendation, there should have been zero violent crime, and only a small fraction of property crime.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Laws don't stop you from doing anything they merely tell you what the punishment is for getting caught.
I'm pretty sure it's the culture of our country not our gun laws that cause us to be gun crazy. I know plenty of previously law abiding citizens that would become criminal if guns were outlawed outright. Remember grasshopper correlation does not imply causation.
You can't prevent this from happening in the future. If not guns then bombs if not bombs then chemical weapons all of which can be made from common household items easily. You won't stop the outcome you'll just change the means.
Only because people don't have a clue how to use them. I 100% support gun laws that require someone to know how to use the guns that they buy.
Someone doesn't know how hard it can be to kill something with a gun.
But Australia never had that many mass shootings to begin with and actually had another one (Monash Uni) after the Port Arthur incident. Firearms deaths in Australia also had been on a steady decline for many years prior to 1996 and the only reason that gun control advocates can point to a big drop in firearms deaths is if they start at 1996 which includes the Port Arthur death toll which was an anomaly. There have been studies that have shown that the changes in Firearm laws in Australia have had zero affect on the rate of firearm deaths. The $500 million that the Howard government spent to buy guns from law abiding citizens would have been much better spent on mental health care.
Your argument is invalid.
Ever seen anyone do the "mad minute" challenge with a SMLE? Someone with one of those could easily repeat the Port Arthur massacre. Farmers can own some semi-automatic weapons and pump shotguns. Both of which are very effective when dealing with lots of feral animals. IIRC, there was a guy in the UK who killed 10+ people with a single shot shotgun. While certainly not as slow to load as a musket, he could still inflict a lot of damage. As a friend of mine who was a Marine said: "If you are prepared to die, you can use anything to kill people. Lots of them."
Season's Bleedings courtesy of the NRA.
Man Kills 9, Wounds 17 in Philippines Knife Rampage
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,277253,00.html
You are wrong.
Cultural differences and percentage of guns per population play a big role as well, not gun laws per se. Again how were the statistics gathered? Does this include firearm deaths by police and military forces against citizens? Are these statistics accurately reported in dictatorial and third world countries. Within the US the stats are exactly the opposite. LOOSER gun control means FEWER gun related deaths and LESS crime. http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
Agreed, but those criminals that violate laws often do become incarcerated. We need the same for gun ownership.
Shockingly enough, in countries where there are strict gun laws, there appear to be less shootings by criminals than int he U.S.
While non-gun petty and violent crime have risen as the number of firearms in private hands has decreased.
This is the simple fact opponents of gun control simply cannot deal with.
Less guns mean less gun violence.
And a fact that proponents of gun control in the U.S. ignore is that drunk driving kills more people each year than firearms, by about 15%, and vehicle crashes in general kill 4,000 times as many as guns..
In 2010, 8,874, people were killed by firearms.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
In 2010, 10,228 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes
http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html
In 2009, 35,900,00 people were killed by automobiles.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf
Yet I don't see the Dianne Feinstein's of the world on a mad rush to ban alcohol, or ban automobiles. If the push to ban guns was about deaths of citizens, young children, then we'd have banned cars long ago, or passed laws to make it much harder for people who just don't have the coordination and brain power to drive a car safely, etc, etc, and we'd have banned alcohol outright, again (with the same results).
Pull the blinders off people. Stop drinking the Kool-aid. The push to ban guns is about political ideology of the left, not saving lives. Always has been, always will be. Mass shootings like this are simply a timely opportunity to push their ideological agenda again, hoping the outrage will put enough wind in their legislative sails to pass something.
The 2nd amendment to the U.S. constitution guarantess us the right to bear arms. And it puts no limitations on the types of arms.
There is no guarantee in the constitution of a right to own or drive an automobile, or consume alcohol.
Seems to me if the concern were truly for dead children, as is being claimed here, then we'd surely embark on passing legislation to once again ban alcohol, and if we really want to cut down on deaths, ban automobiles.
citation provided asshole
Chile, the country with the lowest rate of firearm related deaths (according to that Wikipedia list at any rate, I'm not sure how much I trust that list) may have "restrictive" gun laws but they are still more permissive than some parts of the U.S http://escapeamericanow.blogspot.co.il/2008/09/bring-your-gun-to-chile.html Ukraine, Belarus, and probably other countries which are listed as having very low fire arm death rates are also listed as having higher murder rates than the U.S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate Of course both thesae lists aren't good statistics, even is all the numbers are accurate they were gathered at different years from 1992 for canada to 2012 for South Africa You don't think things might have changed in those 20 years? One final point Correlation is not causation - something my 6th grade math teacher demonstrated by "proving" that paved roads cause traffic accidents.
Facts are stubborn things. You're gun is many times more likely to kill or injure you or your family than save them.
Yes facts are stubborn things, your opinion is not a fact. http://www.pulpless.com/gunclock/stats.html http://ericwalczak0.tripod.com/id10.html The facts appear to be that a gun in the home (in the U.S) is ~10 times more likely to be used in saving a life thant in killing orinjuring the owner or a member of his houshold.
Making guns patently illegal is simply the only option that works.
Please, tell me more how criminals obey laws.
Banning them doesn't work. That's been proven over and over again. These shootings are happening in "Gun free zones." They attract this stuff like a magnet. The only common sense thing to do it eliminate these gun free zones and allow concealed carry. Crime rates will plummet. Works every place it's tried. Check out Switzerland? Israel? Other very well armed countries? Check out places with strong "gun control" - they have the worst problems of course.
Even so, the dude in Colorado had a bomb in his apartment. Don't you think that if he didn't have access to guns he would have bombed something like Tim McVeigh did? Of course.
Isn't that the same thing Hitler said ?
This tragedy was not committed by a CRIMINAL. Criminals don't generally use assault rifles, they use handguns. Rifles are really hard to conceal ya know?
There are 300 million guns in this country. As such it's pathetically easy to get your hands on them legally or criminally. If there were only 1 million guns in this country, the rate of violent crime from guns would drop precipitously.
Sandy Hook, Columbine and Tuscon were all done by people who weren't criminals. If the guns simply weren't in circulation, they wouldn't have had access to them to use.
So you remove them from the environment and hey, how do you shoot someone with a gun that doesn't exist?
Obviously they do exist now and banning them takes time to take effect, but isn't removing assault rifles from civilian hands a good idea?
Re: Bombs. # of bomb deaths vs # of gun deaths. The former isn't a serious problem. And hey, we regulated fertilizer after OKC...so you're ok to regulate guns now right?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
So, what's the colour of the sky on your planet? I think I detect a hint of bitterness. Am I wrong?
His reality is somewhat out of date. Modern body armour is surprisingly good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejD1Gml-ZGc
Don't exactly crumple at the first hit, do they?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When was this? Thirty years ago?
Coincidentally, the same percentage of statistics are made up on the spot.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nope. The first electronic computer was developed to prevent people being killed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/colossus_computer
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This tragedy was not committed by a CRIMINAL. Criminals don't generally use assault rifles, they use handguns. Rifles are really hard to conceal ya know? ...
So you remove them from the environment and hey, how do you shoot someone with a gun that doesn't exist?
Obviously they do exist now and banning them takes time to take effect, but isn't removing assault rifles from civilian hands a good idea?
In a word, no. You don't give up liberty for security. You deserve neither. That's because that is what you'll have. Neither security nor liberty.
The point that I was making is the gun doesn't make a difference. The people did. As you point out, they weren't known criminals. Making a bomb as happened with the recent Colorado and with Columbine, they would have concentrated on making the bomb a lot more effective. Just like McVeigh did and he nearly knocked the building down. Not having an armed public is very dangerous because politicians feel free to do whatever they want. What are you going to do? Nothing. If you're armed and everyone is armed - we could do quite a bit. I know people think the military negates that entirely as they are so powerful. I'll point out even as restrictive as they are in Iraq, they were very effective against the very best the US Military could dish out. Imagine if they were armed as well as we are, the US military wouldn't have stood a chance unless they kill everyone. They know it. So did the Japanese in WWII, so did the Soviets into the 1980s that we know of.
The real answer is to change society so we give a damn again. We need better ethics like we used to when people went to church. You have some rights, other people have rights too. We should also make it clear that you don't have a right to some things - like an abortion for example. Think you do? Where is it in the Constitution or amendment. I don't buy the privacy bit. I think it should be legal, however it isn't a right. Being able to have guns was so important that they made it a right. They restricted the government from being able to take them from you. They felt it was that important, along with the first 10 amendments that are individual rights. Don't give them away so easily, we fought hard to have them. Concentrate on the real problem.
We should also not cover these as we do. Just tell us that a school was shot up, not who did it. That's what they want. Go out in a blaze of glory. Everyone knows them now. Should be nope - you're the same loser you were before. There is also this thought that because they were bullied it somehow excuses this behaviour. Well everyone gets bullied, even the bullies. Just the way it is, there's always a jerk. Sometimes that jerk is your boss.
Ever hear about this one? No, of course not. It doesn't say what the media wants it to say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting
Even before I clicked the link, I had a feeling it was going to be North Hollywood.
The body armor there was SWAT body armor. That was serious tactical body armor. The kind of vest that your average citizen can get is not of that magnitude. Even the best stuff you can obtain legally, (NIJ level 3 ... like this http://www.armorco.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=385) will stop a 9mm but not a rifle round. Even stopping a 9mm is going to result in some serious bruising, and if at close enough range... broken / cracked ribs.
Now keep in mind, I have never been shot. This is all second hand information that I have received from guys who work in law enforcement (LA Sheriff's Department and LAPD). Unless a person is on pain killers or drugs (meth, pcp, etc), they are not going to take more than a couple of rounds, even if they do have a vest.
Its very simple: the people in power are corrupt and rotten, and the gun is a particular tool that can take them out of power or prevent an increase in their power.
Obama can squeeze out fake tears all day long, but the fact is he is only crying because we are still armed and it limits his power. That's why he and a lot of other little Hitlers and Stalins want to disarm the population.
A disarmed person is a slave.
Not so shockingly, you are full of shyte. You are just repeating the same mythological bullshit you've been spoon fed and are dumb enough to believe.
In nearly ever jurisdiction where guns are banned, two things happen: increase in crime and loss of freedom. The criminals are still armed, only now they have little to fear from their victims.
Guy kills several people with a gun, and the idiots in our news media say "Gunman kills XYZ...".
However, see a guy kill a dozen with a knife, and it says "Man attacks shoppers..." or some other low key heading, and they don't mention the weapon used at all. Why aren't people who kill with knives called knifemen, or like the german guy who killed a couple dozen with a baseball bad not called batmen or clubmen?
Answer: because guns are used by citizens limit the power of government, and you have a lot of little dictators in government who can't handle the idea of an armed population telling them "Hell no", and enforcing it with lethality.
It has nothing to do with safety or concern over dead children, and the laws won't help any of that anyway. Never have, never will.
Notice that the top homicide rates are for countries with some of the most strict gun control laws. Looks to me like you proved the opposite of your stated point.
There is not one single case in history where you are correct. 100% of them show the exact opposite of your utopian fantasy.
Criminals in areas where guns are illegal trade them on the black market, from overseas, or simply set up shop and make their own.
Or, shockingly enough, since no one is armed... they just use other weapons to do the same damn thing to their victims.
Unarmed "citizens" are slaves, always have been, always will be.
Yet because of the 2nd Amendment its apparently sacrosanct to even discuss limiting guns. Maybe, just maybe, the founding fathers needed to raise and army and the best way was to allow everyone to have a gun and so the 2nd Amendment was created as part of our founding documents? Maybe they only considered single shot muskets? maybe they would have a slightly different take on 25 clip Uzi's on every street corner?
The Founders wanted the Second Amendment to make sure citizens were able to use lethal force against the state and federal government if necessary, in order to protect their freedom, and to otherwise provide for and defend themselves. This requires them to have whatever weapons which are capable of countering their opposition. The Founders knew well this meant ever increasing firepower, they were not stupid.
We have to remove the guns, or this will keep happening. Do you disagree with that? If so, how would you suggest we prevent this from happening in the future?
No, we do not have to, and if we want to remain free, we cannot remove the guns. You cannot possibly expect that if the citizens disarm, that the government and the nation's criminal underground will also disarm. Unless they do, we become slaves.
The problem is not the weapons, it is our lazy, incompetent society, full of people who can't be bothered to be personally responsible for their actions. We tolerate things from people today that are destroying us. Violence is merely one of many signs of our internal problems.
The good thing is that those problems can be solved, and without the need to disarm free people and turn them into slaves.
You worry about "25 clip uzis..." but don't seem to understand that they very reason there are so many is because the cowards carrying them use them to intimidate and terrorize UNARMED people. As soon as people are armed and trained to defense themselves, those cowards won't want to be anywhere near a gun. They also would not have easy access to the guns if we actually enforced decades old existing laws, and actually started punishing these losers for their crimes.
But no... instead we spend ten times as much money enforcing punitive laws to support corporate welfare, punishing people who have done nothing wrong, all because a bunch of uncreative morons want government mandated cashflow for themselves, even if it means destroying our freedom.
How about when people are irresponsible, we let them take the fall instead of bailing them out? How about instead of coddling a murderer and spending millions caring for them and trying to "figure out why they did it", we instead just shoot them and spend the money helping the victims?
There are a lot of solutions to violence that don't involve the undesirable, unattainable, and idiotic disarmament of free citizens.
Body armour for all kids in USA hanging on every classroom wall and bulletproof lockable doors that cant be shot out please
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Care to name them? Because we're higher than all the rest of the industrialized countries...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Or, shockingly enough, since no one is armed... they just use other weapons to do the same damn thing to their victims.
And you know what? A lot less people die because they use weapons that aren't as massively lethal as a 30 round clip.
Take Australia. Not a single mass shooting since they banned assault rifles in 1996. Homicides by gun went down 60% between 1996 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in deaths by other weapons.
Care to try again?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
How about when people are irresponsible, we let them take the fall instead of bailing them out? How about instead of coddling a murderer and spending millions caring for them and trying to "figure out why they did it", we instead just shoot them and spend the money helping the victims?
You call the constitution sacrosanct and then want to through jurisprudence out the window? JUST WOW
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Yep. There are fewer gun murders where the average person doesn't have access to guns.
Now, let go of your ignorant prejudices and look at the big picture. The violent crime rates are several times ours.
So, cherry picking data works to prove a false premise. Imagine that.