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How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Ray Sanchez reports at CNN that the handling of Friday's shooting at Arapahoe High School, just 10 miles from the scene of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, drew important lessons from the earlier bloodshed. At Arapahoe High School, where senior Claire Davis, 17, was critically injured before the shooter turned the gun on himself, law enforcement officers responded within minutes and immediately entered the school to confront the gunman rather than surrounding the building. As the sound of shots reverberated through the corridors, teachers immediately followed procedures put in place after Columbine, locking the doors and moving students to the rear of classrooms. "That's straight out of Columbine," says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. "The goal is to proceed and neutralize the shooter. Columbine really revolutionized the way law enforcement responds to active shooters." Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson credits the quick police response time for the fact that student Karl Pierson, the gunman, stopped firing on others and turned his weapon on himself less than 1 minute, 20 seconds after entering the school. Authorities knew from research and contact with forensic psychologists that school shooters typically continue firing until confronted by law enforcement. "It's very unfortunate that we have to say that there's a textbook response on the way to respond to these," says Trump, "because that textbook was written based on all of the incidents that we've had and the lessons learned (PDF).""
The first rule should be to not give easy access to firearms to the general public in the first place.
We should be reading the text book on how to prevent this kind of tragedies. Treat cause and not sympthoms.
I don't see saved lives but 2 lost lives.
So sad the news is
Columbine really revolutionized the way law enforcement responds to active shooters.
instead of
Columbine really revolutionized the way society identifies and treats those in need of psychological support in order to avoid them turning into active shooters.
The way to deal with shooter situations is having a better emergency procedures? What about all the hidden surveillance and monitoring and CCTVs and metal detectors and RFID tags? What did they do to help?
1) Ban guns or at least implement proper gun control.
"school shooters typically continue firing until confronted by law enforcement."
Right. Because Sister Mary Elephant yelling "young man, put that thing down" just wont work. So maybe it's time to have armed guards and metal detectors as part of a larger strategy to help stop these incidents.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
how many to add to that 1.3 minutes the shooter could have been executing anyone they ran into ??
Again no teachers are allowed the ability to defend their students (and themselves) with their own guns ??
The tards who do this KNOW that nobody will oppose them for at least several minutes and even a manually cocked gun can kill dozens in that number of thime.
Time for all gun grabbing advocates to have THEIR police disarmed and their towns simply declared 'gun free' to get to experience themseves what they force on others.
Schools are only gun free to the extent that there are no guns brought in from outside.
Europe has roughly the same population as the US and the murder rate is actually identical - if you exclude firearms deaths. The number of Americans murdered with knives etc. is pretty much the same as the number of Europeans.
The higher US murder rate is entirely due to the NRA and the politicians who are to weak in the spine to stand up to them.
The UK gun murder rate is essentially zero because it is almost impossible for a criminal to get a gun.
We need a war on guns. Make drugs legal and guns illegal. Shut down the manufacturers and the death merchants. It won't take every gun off the street but it will eliminate most of them within a few years.
Its only a matter of time before this happens.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
From the summary,
The goal is to proceed and neutralize the shooter. Columbine really revolutionized the way law enforcement responds to active shooters.
Do we require further evidence that public schools are turning into medium-security prisons? Lock-down the inmates...I mean students. Send in the shock troops...I mean the police with their military assault rifles and other weapons of war. Neutralize the shooter indeed. Maybe if teachers, administrators and most importantly parents took the time to be human and exercise humanity towards other persons including their own children, these shooting gallery incidents wouldn't happen at all.
"Every country is unique, but Australia is more similar to the US than is, say, Japan or England. We have a frontier history and a strong gun culture. Each state and territory has its own gun laws, and in 1996 these varied widely between the jurisdictions. At that time Australia's firearm mortality rate per population was 2.6/100,000 -- about one-quarter the US rate, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the US Center for Disease Control. Today the rate is under 1/100,000 -- less than one-tenth the US rate. Those figures refer to all gun deaths -- homicide, suicide and unintentional. If we focus on gun homicide rates, the US outstrips Australia 30-fold.
The 1996 reforms made gun laws stronger and uniform across Australia. Semi-automatic rifles were prohibited (with narrow exceptions), and the world's biggest buyback saw nearly 700,000 guns removed from circulation and destroyed. The licensing and registration systems of all states and territories were harmonised and linked, so that a person barred from owning guns in one state can no longer acquire them in another. All gun sales are subject to screening (universal background checks), which means you cannot buy a gun over the internet or at a garage sale.
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Australia didn't ban guns. Hunting and shooting are still thriving. But by adopting laws that give priority to public safety, we have saved thousands of lives."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/14/america-mass-murder-australia-gun-control-saves-lives
Shotguns are Vice President Joe Biden's preferred weapon. Less evil that all other guns and apparently politically correct.
I would, however, discard his advice on shooting through a door. That will most certainly land you in jail.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Actually Europe has a much higher population than the US. The population of the EU countries is now over 500 million. If Europe is more unified politically, it will be the single biggest geopolitical force in the world.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
The lesson we keep ignoring is that the root of the overwhelming vast majority of these cases is the same: mental health. Our country continues to completely ignore the elephant in the room. Until we improve access to mental health care, and de-stigmatize the pursuit of mental health treatment, we will continue to have unstable individuals in our society who will do this to us. We don't necessarily need to lock them all up, many can be treated; but they all need access to help.
Our current health care system fails miserably at this. The Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 (aka "affordable care act", aka "Obamacare") does almost nothing for this problem.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
What was the European murder rate in the 20th century vs US? Please count millions murdered by the various Gov'ts.
Being alive is a sign that you have a mental illness.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Make sure everyone get basic gun safety
How dare you be so against people exercising their rights under the Second Amendment!!!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
"But it shouldn’t require another Sandy Hook to make us realize something has to change. The school shooters are committing a grandiose form of suicide. Media, traditionally, doesn’t cover suicides, and is very careful when it does. It’s a long-standing custom, borne out of numerous studies from groups like the Suicide Prevention Resource Center and the National Institute of Mental Health.
“More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals,” the NIMH concluded. “The magnitude of the increase is related to the amount, duration and prominence of coverage.”
Gently reply
Yes, and if North America was politically united it would even be larger than a united Europe.
Not to mention that China and India are already united, and larger than a united Europe would be.
Wrong. You ignore the elephant in the room. Take away the crimes of two inner city subcultures from the statistics and then the murder and violent crime rates are the same as Europe. You are focusing on a minute sliver of the pie of gun crime, and ignoring the real problem. Based on your myopic view, you would take away guns from people who have the right and ability to own properly own and use them.
You don't earn any credibility by comparing the UK to North Korea. It shows that you know little to nothing about North Korea, the UK, or both.
And calling the entire population "100% dead as human beings"? What does that even mean? The most favorable interpretation makes you look like a loon.
I think the bigger story is that there appears to be a mental illness epidemic, but all the resources are going into militarization of communities. At some point we are going to have to wake up and start to work on the hard problem of mental illness.
Oh, but you MUST be wrong! Hitler and Stalin, among others, made possession of potential murder weapons illegal! No one in Europe could have been murdered while they were in power! /sarcasm
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That the issue is about availability of people killing machines to the mentally unstable and criminals in the USA - not some European superiority bullshit.
As for the '40s in Germany, from what I recall, the issue was more about organized arming of the civilians.
As for, "had everyone been armed Nazis would never get into power" and similar nonsense, look up Warsaw Uprising.
Also, Hungarian Revolution of 1956 if that's not enough.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The UK gun murder rate is essentially zero because the UK police are drastically underreporting crime by a factor of 1/3 by conservative estimates. They have an investment in underreporting or failing to report violent crime.
Oh and BTW the schools are 'gun free zones'
The schools *should* be gun free zones. Obviously, they aren't.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Make drugs legal and guns illegal.
It's interesting you defends banning of all firearms while also defending the legalization of all drugs.
You are just ignoring that drugs are, easy, the biggest motivator for crime at these same time you completely ignores that guns, on the right hands, also saves lives.
It's strange that every single defender of the firearms ban justs ignores the Swiss status quo.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
The liberal answer is to resort to name-calling (teabagger, really?), and then to make a ridiculous statement and attribute it to an opposition leader.
First - you're absolutely right - give all kids weapons.
Second, teach them proper care and use.
Stop teaching only when the child is fully familiar with the rules for handling a firearm, acceptable uses, consequences for misusing a firearm, empathy, and equally important - a sense of mortality.
By the time they've earned unrestricted access to a firearm, the firearm will be less of a weapon and more of a tool. The mystery and taboo will be gone.
That's how we do it in rural Texas
"Lame" - Galaxar
Sad how this subject brings out a level of belligerence that is really unedifying for a site populated by supposedly intelligent people.
Case in point, the upvotes for this poorly spelt ("we now no what gun bans do") and even more poorly argued post.
As a UK citizen, the argument put forward here is utterly risible, namely that violent crime doubled when guns were made illegal (or when we were "disarmed" as the post puts it, sugesting that police came into our houses en masse and took away our guns which, erm, pretty much nobody had anyway). Implying that we were all walking round tooled up with firearms before 1992 and this kept the crime rate down is so far off what this country actually is like that it's laughable.
Stop teaching only when the child is fully familiar with the rules for handling a firearm, acceptable uses, consequences for misusing a firearm, empathy, and equally important - a sense of mortality.
NOWHERE in the SECOND AMENDMENT does it say ANYTHING about gun education. NOWHERE! Take your fascist views to another country, Commie!
I don't respond to AC's.
"At Buell Elementary School, 6-year-old Dedrick Owens, the youngest-ever school shooter, shot and killed classmate Kayla Rolland" - dat crook!
"Elizabeth Catherine Bush, 14, wounded student Kimberly Marchese in the cafeteria of Bishop Neumann High School; she was depressed and frequently teased" - damn crook!
"eighth-grade student James Sheets entered Red Lion Area Junior High School armed with his stepfather's pistols and subsequently killed the school's principal, Eugene Segro, before killing himself" - what a hardened criminal!
"a fight broke between two 15-year-old boys in the gymnasium. One of the boys took out a .25-caliber pistol and shot the other one in the leg. A police officer on duty at the school arrested the gunman." - should've been shot by a teacher right there, once he took out that pistol!
"Kenneth Bartley, aged 15, brandished a firearm and said "Yes, it's real. I'll show you. I never liked you anyway", and shot the school principal, Gary Seale. He then shot assistant principals Ken Bruce and Jim Pierce. Bruce later died from his gunshot wound" - what a crook!
Etc, etc, etc...
Again with the name calling.
Take your fascist views to another country, Commie!
fascist - I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Commie - I do not think that word means what you think it means.
NOWHERE in the SECOND AMENDMENT does it say ANYTHING about gun education
Nor does the parenting handbook - because their is no parenting handbook. I feel it is my responsibility to raise fully functional, non-sociopath, productive children. Incidentally, I also teach them that name-calling is a sign of weakness.
"Lame" - Galaxar
I can understand wanting to try SOMETHING. Banning guns has already been tried. The question iswhether disarming law-abiding citizens will increase victimization, or if violent criminals will turn in their weaponswhen they are outlawed. After the near total ban in UK, that debate can now be answered by looking at what the results actually were. Official crime rate information from the Home Office (2002, 2013) indicatesthat in the five years prior to the ban, 1.2 million violent crimes were reported. After the ban took affect, there were over 5 million violent crimes in the following five years. Home Office data shows that rape went from 27,000 to nearly 47,000 when potential attackers were assured there was no risk thatalaw-abiding woman might defend herself with a firearm. Other serious crimes show the same pattern. Total sex offenses increased from 158,000 to over 245,00.
So sure you want to try SOMETHING. Is satisfying that urge worth doing something that will cause another 20,000 women to be raped? That's what does in fact happen when you ban guns.
You wouldn't expect the violent crime to drop off instantly unless they had a large gun recovery program to get them out of the hands of criminals. The guns were already out there. Looking a bit farther than 5 years (there was a large spike in crime 5 years after), the crime rate dropped to a 40 year low.
In all of the fervor over the kid's possession of a shotgun, no one seems to note that this kid had that machete and several molotov cocktails.
Citizens of Colorado: be GRATEFUL this kid had a shotgun. If he wasn't able to commit suicide with it, this could have been far, far uglier. Can you imagine what the media would have made over this if he'd walked into a classroom full of first graders and hacked away for the 20 minutes it took for the police to arrive?
The problem is NOT that this kid was able to buy a gun. The problem is this kid was an undetected PSYCHOPATH.
How do you under report murders?
Wanted : A Signature.
I work with mentally ill patients, and I was an active SWAT officer when Columbine happened. It changed how we did everything.
After Columbine, we got our floor-plans on ALL of our local schools, and spent hours and hours during the nights assaulting those locations, and gaming-out active shooter scenarios. We had other officers play the OPFOR, and hunted them through the hallways. What we discovered was that as fast as we were, we weren't fast enough. By the time a police response arrives at a school, the gunman can have already killed several dozen (as happened at Virginia Tech).
The answer to a "man with a gun" is another man with a gun, and the School Resource Officer is critical against a homicidal maniac. The faster you can get that man on-scene and putting rounds on-target, the better.
And our mental health system is badly broken. Look into the eyes of Lanza, Holmes, Loughner... it doesn't take a board-certified psychiatrist to tell you they've lost touch with reality. Unfortunately, there are very few resources out there to address people like that. Until that changes, people like that (though they throw up red flags to every person who knows them) are going to continue to fall through the cracks.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Most obvious way: Don't count them unless the person is dead on the spot. If they die in the hospital they're not counted.
There are many ways. Murder count does not equal body count.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Anyone who would argue that drugs should be legal must certainly recognize that making them illegal has had little effect on their availability. So why would making guns illegal be any different?"
It's a very sensible question and one that deserves to think of it.
There's an obvious difference, tough: drugs produce ill people that *need* more of it, guns are not the same.
Another one is the very different industries needed to fill the streets with drugs and guns: it's much easier for the former than the later -while this could change if 3d printing stands after its promises.
"If anything, we could expect it to fuel a black market"
Quite true and a difficult issue to deal with in a (modern state) representative democracy with politicians only interested in next campaign.
Difficult, but not impossible: Europe is (comparatively speaking) free of handguns but that was not the case after WWII, which means it is doable.
"I just get sick of this paternalistic notion that government is somehow obliged and/or has the ability to keep us all safe from each other."
You also have a point on this. But your flaw, I'd say is considering government is something different to citezenship. It should be not that government is there to protect each other but that each other empower ourselves through government to have the kind of society we want to live in. And I certainly, while not at any cost, want to live in a society where I don't need to be worried to be killed by a handgun.
So, no guns on school property, and doping stations throughout the school, to supplicate any students who are unhappy.
Also, no child should go to sleep at night hungry.
Flowers, and I'm not talking about unattractive flowers, should spring up on all free patches of earth outside.
Universal Love should take hold, and the birds should sing.
Yes, you're right, Germany's population is only about a quarter of the US, but they had less than a 20th of the number of murders committed in the US.
Or in terms that normal (no pun intended) people use:
Germany's murder rate is 0.8/100k compared to 4.7/100k
It appears that the timeline is:
Shooter enters school and shoots 1 student.
Shooter kills himself.
Police respond.
Police claim credit.
Unless I'm missing something here, it doesn't look like the police response accomplished anything. They arrived after the crime was over and done with.
It works quite well over here - the UK murder rate is about a quarter of the US murder rate.
Switzerland is one of the most socialist countries on earth. I don't think you'd like it.
"You are just ignoring that drugs are, easy, the biggest motivator for crime at these same time you completely ignores that guns, on the right hands, also saves lives." if you legalised drugs, you'd take away the biggest motivator for crime.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Yeah, because Connecticut is the heart of gun nut country, and totally not endless suburbs with a couple cities tossed in. Someone needs a refresher on geography.
They ignore every other right granted by it so why not?
[Citation needed]
My understanding is that whilst obtaining a gun in the UK is certainly possible with enough effort (but it's much harder than in the USA where they're lying about everywhere), the real issue is ammo. Last I heard gangs in parts of the UK were trying to make their own ammo at home and the result was of a much lower quality that killed far less frequently than professionally manufactured ammo.
Being an island, gun control in the UK is extremely feasible. Unfortunately I don't know if that has many implications for the USA. The problem is that even if some states wanted to try it, the borders are so porous that there's no real way to stop guns coming in from other states. The USA will remain the source of routine mass shootings for the forseeable future, unless there's a massive and radical culture shift that stops assocating guns with freedom.
Until you take away the crimes of the inner city subcultures from Europe then they go up again. You think Europe doesn't have ultra-violent ghettoes and a drugs problem? You need to get out more.
Swiss culture doesn't have much in common with US culture. For one, the people are nowhere near as politically divided or generally so extreme. For another it has a working health system that's capable of handling mental illness. And for another, the gun culture is really not the same no matter what the NRA might claim. In the US you have cases of people walking into bars and restaurants with loaded guns, even in urban areas. The only time I see guns in public in Switzerland is when army reservists are moving around, or when someone is going to a gun club. People don't carry them around as part of normal everyday life.
In the UK, a few behaviors have been publicized in recent years.
1) Report multiple-victim crimes as a single crime. I.e. if 3 people die, only one is counted officially.
2) Report murder as a lesser crime such as manslaughter.
3) Fail to report the use of a firearm.
There are other serious issues with crime reporting in the UK, but those are the most pertinent and egregious ones I can remember.
I suggest you do a little googling. There are quite a number of news articles on the topic over the years. If you are actually curious, I'd be happy to point you in the right direction but I suspect strongly you are merely another time-wasting internet troll.
or put him down before he snaps as a preventative measure?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
turn on your sarcasm detector to DogDude's comment ......
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
aaahh so you are one of those little boys who need a gun as a penis extension
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
More like the systematic 5-crime-per-person cap that the BCS uses to arbitrarily limit the number of crimes that are counted.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6239864.stm
Since the number of violent crimes has not jumped 84 percent since then, I can only conclude that the practice continues.
Fuck off.
By classifying the affected as "pining for the fjords"?
The "Teabagger" name isn't used by the people it's meant to represent. Conservatives that I know don't use such terms. That combined with DogDudes further comments lead me to believe it wasn't sarcasm.
Furthermore, the comment about the second amendment can be considered an attack, as it attempts to point out a weakness in the law - that it has no training requirement. This is a bogus attack, as none of the bill of rights has a training requirement. Maybe the bill of rights could use an accompanying bill of responsibilities.
"Lame" - Galaxar
There is certainly no arguing that strictly enforced gun control is the immediate way to stop this problem. However this is really just like giving aspirin to lower a fever: it's addressing the symptoms not the underlying cause. While it may bring the US some immediate relief from these horrendous crimes in the long term it is not a solution and if the underlying cause is not addressed my guess is that given time someone will start to commit the same sort of crimes using weapons constructed from things which are a lot harder to control e.g. explosives, poison gas etc. made from commonly available and useful chemicals.
I still dream about the Lahti I shot.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In the US you have cases of people walking into bars and restaurants with loaded guns, even in urban areas.
I think this would be news, unless you really talk about "cases" as in "federal court cases" since it's is illegal under federal law to carry a firearm into any establishment that serves alcohol. If you think people would do so openly, think again. They'd be arrested in short order.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Last I heard gangs in parts of the UK were trying to make their own ammo at home and the result was of a much lower quality that killed far less frequently than professionally manufactured ammo.
They must be idiots, then, since at-home reloading is very common in the U.S., you have many catalogs and sites selling reloading supplies. I've yet to hear that the reloads are somehow fundamentally inferior.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You may find this article interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/12/gun_ownership_causes_higher_suicide_rates_study_shows.html
Yes, less guns means less suicides, as everybody who has ever talked to anyone whose suicide attempt failed will understand.
I'm curious as to what subcultures you're referring to?
You seem to be operating under the assumption that psychiatry is a science. Stop that.
Also realize the history of psychiatry being used as a mechanism for police states.
Make shrinks available for parents and kids to call on. Leave it at that. I know crazy parents are part of the problem.
Repeal laws that more or less require patients to lie to their doctors. e.g. unexplained loss of consciousness, automatic six month drivers license suspension. Result: nobody reports unexplained loss of consciousness to doctors.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Cities tend toward voting democrat as people believe the infrastructure works well for quality of life. Gun violence tends towards concentrations of people, otherwise known as cities.
Save your BS propaganda for facebook. It's not welcome here.
Since you can't stop criminals from getting guns, the obvious answer is to make sure more non-criminals are trained and armed. What you want is impossible, arming and teaching teachers how to use guns is by comparison at least possible.
Or did you wholly miss the part where shootings continue until the shooters faced an armed response? There's no reason that cannot be teachers instead of police.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're going to fight hard to keep cops outside of the buildings where their members are murdering people.
wat
What percentage of the UK population is stepped in ghetto thug culture?
Because that correlates pretty tightly in the US with gun grime rates.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The problem with your alarmist approach is that in that exact same period two other things happened - firstly sexual crimes were given much more prominence in policing policy, and secondly the same government that banned hand guns in the UK also dramatically changed the way sexual crimes were recorded and reported in statistics.
There is no actual evidence that rapes increased at all, but there is plenty of evidence that backs the idea that the difference in approach to sexual crime has dramatically changed the number of people reporting it, which alone will affect your figures.
Actually Europe has a much higher population than the US. The population of the EU countries is now over 500 million. If Europe is more unified politically, it will be the single biggest geopolitical force in the world.
And might start paying for its own defense?
The first rule should be to not give easy access to firearms to the general public in the first place.
A better rule would be not to give them to governments since governments and their armies kill more people than the general public could ever hope to.
How did they take it down to European levels in spite of every man having an assault rifle at home, courtesy of Swiss army? They forbade owning ammunition and mandated that gun itself is stored in completely disassembled state. They also forbade taking gun out of the house without special permit, which is difficult to get.
If you have no ammunition it's a little hard to see what the point of issuing an M16 to each household might be. The point of having a rifle in each house is to create a de-facto militia. Without ammunition however you have a militia effectively armed with doorstops. Unless they have some implausibly efficient ammunition distribution system they have very efficiently de-fanged the vaunted Swiss militia at a fairly significant cost. They could have saved a lot of money by not issuing the M16s in the first place.
On the other hand I've always thought that gun control measures were somewhat misplaced. Guns without ammo are useless so what gun control advocates really ought to be focused on is ammo control. Heck, one could even exert market forces by making ammunition very expensive.
It would take well over 100 years for existing guns to start to dry up. I have an antique that works perfectly from 1896. It has not even begun to wear out at all. It is one of the first Ivers Johnson pistols ever made. The availability of guns simply is not the problem. We live in a nation that pressurizes people and is short on both morality and mercy. The predictable consequence is violence.
Just because there are no guns in the UK doesn't mean people aren't murdered.
You say it was caused by "sexual crimes were given much more prominence in policing policy". The thing is, ROBBERY doubled. That's not a sex crime. Your theory was perfectly reasonable, it just turned out to be wrong. There's no shame in that, my predictions are often wrong. Now, knowing what effects the policy actually had, you can revisit your prediction or you can choose to be wrong on purpose.
Even if we love punishing the innocent to stop criminals, we'll have to amend the constitution before we can ban firearms or do anything similar.
Not really. All it requires is a creative interpretation by the Supreme Court. The Second Amendment reads "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." There are numerous ways to get around it. (Not saying any of these things are likely to happen or even that they should necessarily happen, just that it could be done)
First and most common argument is that the right to keep and bear arms is based upon the need for a Militia. Just rule that unless someone is in a militia they can't have a firearm. Anti-gun advocates commonly argue that the justification of the need for a militia is no longer relevant and thus the second amendment is effectively moot. (The courts so far have not agreed with this interpretation.
Second way around it would be to define "arms" in a restrictive manner. We don't allow people to keep nuclear weapons so clearly there is a line drawn regarding what is permissible and what isn't so we really are just arguing about where the line is. This line can be moved to restrict firearms more (or less) than they currently are.
Third way around it is to define what is meant by "infringed". It could easily be argued that people are allowed to own arms in a manner much more restrictive than they are currently by a court ruling that their rights are not infringed by doing so. Much like argument two above we don't allow anyone to own any kind of weapon (good luck buying a F22 fighter even if you are a billionaire) so there is some interpretation going on regarding what is infringing and what is not. This could easily be redefined.
Having gathered enough experience with school shootings to know how to handle them is not a good thing.
That's like praising the textbook nuclear fallout response plan you've managed to come up with based on a hundred nuclear reactors melting down.
True, but every generation or two Germany makes up for that by killing a whole lot of people.
-- Will program for bandwidth
So, around 10,000 homicides by gun EVERY YEAR, plus around 20,000 suicides by gun EVERY YEAR.
A tragedy to be sure though it's a bit more nuanced than that. A HUGE percentage of those homicides are gang and drug related.
How in the world do Americans become accustomed to such carnage?
There were 35,000 deaths in automobile accidents last year but we're not about to take cars off the road. I'm in more danger from dying every time I get behind the wheel than I ever am from firearms, particularly if I stay out of certain gang infested areas and don't get involved in the drug trade. In fact statistically speaking I'm at more risk in a car than I am from suicide by gun. If we are talking about drug related deaths there were 40,000 deaths from poisoning and medical use of legal and illegal drugs. None of these causes of death hold a candle to the biggies like heart disease and cancer.
I guess it's true; we suck at putting things in perspective.
I would say so. Things that are more likely to kill me in the US than a gun: cars, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, stroke, accidents, influenza and pneumonia. Homicides aren't even in the top 15 causes of death. That's not to say it isn't a tragedy but we're talking about perspective here. Comparatively speaking it is a minor risk which becomes extremely minor if you stay away from certain areas and activities.
The problem with a war on guns is that the opposition has guns.
Why do you think 80% would be turned in?
I appreciate your take on this...the last thing I want to do is read /.'ers debate gun control, so thnx.
So, about Columbine...
Anyone remember the "1 Bleeding to Death" sign? The teacher who bled to death...
TFA summary mentions a "revolutionary" change in police, to actually go try to do policework in an emergency instead of sitting around outside, but I just don't remember Columbine that way at all.
I watched it on TV like many of you, and I remember seeing the sign, and seeing the cops sitting there doing nothing...Why?
I think the police were staying out of the Columbine building on orders...I honestly don't believe that honest cops would just sit for hours knowing people were dying.
I'm not trying to start a discussion about **why** they didn't go in at Columbine, just saying that overall, this narrative of "what happened at Columbine" and any interpretations of how it affected the country are serverly off-kilter
Thank you Dave Raggett
I stopped the school bus bully with my clarinet case back in Jr. High School. It broke the handle on the case, but the fucker quit bullying.
So are clarinet cases to be prohibited?
A fucking shrink needing to meet his boat payment is a sign that you have a mental illness.
Sorry for being a little blunt.
"Newtown took place in the heart of gun-nut country, not the inner cities."
And that was 28 deaths, right? Add that total to all of Conn for 2012 and what do you have?
What was Chicago? Over 500? That's a Newtown every two weeks, isn't it?
You can pick an anomaly and base your reactions off it and the passions they invoke -- and not solve the problem. Or you can look at the over all stats and WHERE the problems are and have a simpler smaller target to address. Then MAYBE you can reduce those numbers dramatically.
There isn't a day that goes by that I don't hate my mother for being born in a country that was responsible for the holocaust. I suppose I'm also responsible for killing British soldiers as I was born in the Republic of Ireland in the 1980s, as are many Bostonians.
My friends tell me to live in the present not to believe in collective guilt, but it's to bloody difficult not to feel responsible for something I had no control over.
The only time I see guns in public in Switzerland is when army reservists are moving around, or when someone is going to a gun club. People don't carry them around as part of normal everyday life.
But guns used in killing sprees are not the same guns that are "carried around as part of normal everyday life". They are the same ones that Swiss reservists keep at home.
Guns kill people but drugs don't?
Leesburg Restaurant Gives Discount to Gun-Toting Customers
From the article:
Home reloading is easy because the materials are all available, unlike in the UK
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
Ever asked the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima what they think of US history?
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
Take away the crimes of two inner city subcultures from the statistics and then the murder and violent crime rates are the same as Europe.
Actually we're lower even without that. It turns out there's a BIG difference in how crimes are reported - especially vs. Great Britain. For instance:
In the US we count a murder when there's a body and suspicious circumstances. In Great Britain they count a murder when they have a CONVICTION.
In the US, if a gang robs an apartment house it's one robbery per unit. In GB it's one robbery.
In the US if daddy comes home and shoots his wife, three kids, and himself, it's four murders and one suicide. In Japan it's five suicides.
This kind of stuff goes on and on...
One thing that's not in question:
- People of European ancestry have a lower vicitmization rate in the US than in Europe.
- People of African ancestry have a lower victimization rate in the US than in Africa.
- People of Asian ancestry have a lower victimization rate in the US than in Asia.
And so on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I mostly agree with you, but then there's this point:
We need a war on guns.
Politely, I think we're all a bit 'war-on-things' weary. If anything, it appears that publicly-proclaimed wars on things serve only to exacerbate whatever they seek to suppress.
What you resist, persists.
Unfortunately I cannot offer a solution but I do recall that the first suggested course of action to take when finding oneself in a hole is to stop digging.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
The first point is: The main source of information about this school shooting and many prior crimes is a police department or district attorney (DA). The DA has a built in agenda of convicting every person accused. This results in a rhetorical climate where killing the perpetrator is not a matter of much importance because the alleged shooter should be convicted of the most extreme possible crime anyway. The DA's professional business is to make criminals.
So I argue to you, the news report has viewpoint bias. Except for the bare facts, this news is only supposed to build public acceptance of an immediate armed gun response as the best solution to the ongoing school shooting activity.
I propose that what we need to do is develop a high school level course in "self knowledge" and care for oneself and others when one goes through the emotional and intellectual ups and downs of youth and young adulthood. Now bear with me on this: The thing that is malfunctioning in some of these extremely antisocial events is the pace of time. The resolution of inner issues changes in pace from "take a bath and go for a walk" to "do something extreme and final."
The point I am making is bad things happen when a person's inner clock or sense of pace slips. The use of lead pellets moving at 5000 feet per second is resolving an inner grief or distress too fast. Compare, one could also do a comparable motor skill activity using the arms and fingers and aiming ability by throwing a basketball at 50 feet per second. An afternoon struggling to shoot baskets would equally resolve the inner problem with much less damage.
In this context, a food ad saying "Grab one and go...Do it!" Really is the wrong thing. The point I am making is: Some kinds of antisocial behavior are toxic variations of normal behavior needed by relatively normal people that are made toxic by a slipping or loss of timing or pace.
The underlying neural mechanism is during the toddler years a child explored the world and built up a basic set of neural images and another set of motor skills.
Somewhere at the exit point from high school, we develop multiple sets of alternate motor skills for solving problems. "Take a warm bath." and "Go shoot up the elementary school." are alternate behavior models.
So the thing I propose we should try and teach in high school is an introduction to self knowledge. The specific self knowledge I see is young adults have well developed motor skills but they aren't able to distinguish the griefs and pains of isolated solitary usually lonely young adult life in America.
A fellow Youshock who took a chainsaw and pipe bombs to a high school was sentenced to mental hospital confinment to be followed by a long prison sentence. The psychologists will probably write a thorough analysis of his views and his parents will grieve at his loss. It would have been so much better if he could have understood his personal young adult pains and switched to other problem solving activities.
That's neither possible nor beneficial. There is no inherent problem with firearm ownership, and taking them away from the general public would cause more issues than it'd solve. The real problems causing gun crime, gang violence and the inept state of mental health treatment, should be the target of federal action if anything.
You are just ignoring that drugs are, easy, the biggest motivator for crime
Drug prohibition . Legalise or nationalise drug production and sale and the motivation (and profits) of the drug criminals goes away. As does much of the drug-related crime.
at these same time you completely ignores that guns, on the right hands, also saves lives.
The question is whether the number of "right hands" with guns outweighs the number of "wrong hands" with guns. National murder stats comparing the US and other western countries suggests not. And stats comparing homes with guns versus homes without guns within just the US also suggests not. Therefore by your own argument, the net effect is negative, and the justification for firearms failed.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Are you trolling or just woefully uninformed?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Shut up and take your soma.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Are powder or primers prohibited in the UK?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I understand that Wikipedia should not be taken as definitive source of information for anything, but this doesn't means it should be dismissed.
So:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
If only there was some way of allowing for that by using mathematical equations and stuff, then we'd be able to make valid comparisons between countries.
Come on, you eggheads! Get your slide rules clicking and solve it for us!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yup. Because the problem has *nothing* to do with guns!
Compare social services and you'll see why the USA has such high rates of crime and homicide. Most gun deaths aren't random mass shootings. The VAST majority are related to gangs. Which are a result of drug prohibition and a lack of social services -- the impoverished see a lot of money to be made in drugs, and no means of subsistence anywhere else. So they turn to the black market and the violence that goes with it.
The typical gun murder is of a family member.
No, the typical gun murder is a gang shooting. 80% according to the CDC.
http://usconservatives.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/a/Putting-Gun-Death-Statistics-In-Perspective.htm
It's not about the guns, it's about the lack of social services, and the crime and poverty that breeds. We may have the laxest gun laws, but we're also the ONLY industrialized nation without public healthcare for example. If your options are buying a gun and selling drugs vs. working two jobs and still starving, which one would YOU pick?
Take a look at the murder rate by state and you will find that the lowest rate state is New Hampshire.
Strange how New Hampshire has some of the loosest gun laws in the nation. No permits, open carry, etc.
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
As there's so many firearms in the USA banning them would be shutting the stable door - there's enough sloshing around that it will be a long time before they go out of circulation. Stopping selling new ones and ammo would help though. And really, if the gubmnt wanted to fuck you over a few pop guns aren't going to help - that bit of the constitution is so irrelevant to today's military that it's like it was written 200 years ago or something.
OK, leaving the gun debate aside for a minute...this is an argument I hear all the time, and I don't quite understand it.
What exactly do you think would happen were there to be an armed uprising in the USA, or any other modern nation? What advanced weaponry is going to stop it? What does our government have that's so much better?
What, nukes? Yeah, we both know how absurd that is, moving on...
Drones? Well, did you catch the story recently about the drone that hacks any other drones nearby and takes control of them? RF jamming isn't all THAT hard either, plus there's the numerous IR "invisibility" or blinding technologies.
Tanks? We've got armor-piercing rounds. Beyond that, we can certainly put together an IED just as well as the guys in Iraq...
And that's really an important comparison I think. All our military might and we still had a hell of a time against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, I'm not sure my fellow Americans would be as skilled or experienced (I know I wouldn't!) but you also have to balance the willingness of the military. It's one thing when you're fighting foreigners a few thousand miles away; but how many soldiers do you think would willingly turn their guns on their own citizens? Look at what happened in Egypt. Look at how many members of the armed forces were out supporting Occupy a few years ago. Some would be against us...others would be with us...and the majority I suspect would say 'screw this!' and walk away.
The challenge won't be the military. By the time they'd be deployed domestically (which is very highly illegal in the USA) we will have already won. The thing to be concerned about is how many lives will be taken first by our highly militarized police forces. But as bad as they are, generally their worst weapon is a single armored hum-vee. We can handle that at least.
Maybe they should have thought about that before invading Poland twice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Swiss culture doesn't have much in common with US culture. For one, the people are nowhere near as politically divided or generally so extreme. For another it has a working health system that's capable of handling mental illness. And for another, the gun culture is really not the same no matter what the NRA might claim. In the US you have cases of people walking into bars and restaurants with loaded guns, even in urban areas. The only time I see guns in public in Switzerland is when army reservists are moving around, or when someone is going to a gun club. People don't carry them around as part of normal everyday life.
Do you live in the US? Because you make it sound like seeing people walking around carrying guns is an everyday occurrence here. In my 23 years here -- including 18 in rural western PA, the kind of place where the first day of hunting season they cancel school -- the only times I've actually seen a gun in person was on a couple trips in college to the shooting range with the College Libertarians. Certainly never heard of someone bringing one to a bar or just walking down the street with one. I know it happens sometimes, but it's hardly common.
Remember that the USA has 40x the population of Switzerland too, so if it's reported once a month here, you'd expect it to be reported less than once every three years there even if the actual rates were identical.
You also have a point on this. But your flaw, I'd say is considering government is something different to citezenship. It should be not that government is there to protect each other but that each other empower ourselves through government to have the kind of society we want to live in. And I certainly, while not at any cost, want to live in a society where I don't need to be worried to be killed by a handgun.
Right, in a democratic state the government is *supposed* to be "of, by, and for" the people. And supposedly "nobody is above the law". Which means any guns the government can have, the people must be permitted to possess as well. After all, they are the same entity, and the laws must be applied equally!
According to Wikipedia alcohol is one of the most addictive drugs, yet most people who use it are not addicted. And of course if the main drive in drug sales was dependence, the market would dry off soon enough. What drives drug market is people's psychological needs for fun and transcendence. And in the USA, guns are assigned cultural significance which causes similar effects - it gives the owner a feeling of being safe and in control of his own destiny, rather than at the mercy of muggers and the government.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Comparing a modern firearm to something from 1896 doesn't exactly seem fair. Less moving parts to wear out. Higher manufacturing tolerances. And does that thing even use pre-manufactured ammunition? Even if the gun still works, how hard is it to get ammo? I mean I know you certainly can, and you could produce your own even for the oldest of guns (in fact, those would be easier)...but it's not going to be useful for a mass shooting spree. And spraying dozens of rounds all over the place means something very different if you have to produce each bullet by hand.
Not that I disagree with your overall stance here; I agree that getting rid of the existing guns would be near impossible and definitely not solve the root problem (hell, this is the country where people have made guns out of rubber bands and steel tubing, they'd find a way) -- but pretending a 100 year old antique would be just as effective as a brand new modern firearm? I don't see that happening...
The vast majority of gun deaths are suicides. But ALL drug deaths are essentially suicides.
Notice how nobody ever brings up those suicides when discussing gun deaths -- instead they bring up the extremely rare and relatively low body count mass shootings instead. That's what the concern is. Nobody cares if you wanna kill yourself -- whether you use a gun or a needle. They only care if you might kill *them*.
Not many people bring up gangs either -- at least not when proposing *banning* guns. That's like the idiots who die from drugs cut with various poisons. Nobody cares about them either, because they're drug addicts.
Basically, when gun control advocates talk about bodies, they mean *rich, white, suburban* bodies.
Yet you expect me to feel guilty for the actions of those in an entirely foreign culture, just because they live in the same nation as me.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't have young children. Why should I be forced to belong to a club to prevent something that's never going to happen in any case? Even if I had kids, why would I not educate them on proper gun safety - that's assuming I would leave my guns accessible, unlocked, and loaded (or with ammunition in easy reach)?
And let's take a look at your figures. Assume roughly 300m guns in the US. 80% of that leaves 60m, and 80% of /that/ leaves 12m guns still in circulation - that's assuming you can convince those 80% to give up their guns willingly, and then that 48m guns would be used in a crime subsequent to the ban. That's a lot of gun crime in those months - crime that would be unopposed because 240m people have willingly ceded their personal defence to their government.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
I don't have young children...
Even if I had kids, why would I not educate them on proper gun safety
I think your belief that you could educate kids and thus guarantee they would net play with guns given the chance derives from the fact that you don't have any.
Try telling the typical gun owning right winger (like me) that searching your house and confiscating all your guns is necessary to preserve your freedoms. How will we have any means to fight when the government decides that other freedoms are a problem , such as free speech, right to assemble, and need to be eliminated also?
Do away with drug prohibitions and bring jobs back to America to lower unemployment. The FBI was created to fight organized crime that became rampant with Prohibition during the Great Depression.
"You are just ignoring that drugs are, easy, the biggest motivator for crime"
No he isn't. He is fully aware of what you aren't: *Illegal* drugs are the biggest motivator for crime.
Well, following your logic, legal drugs are not a problem, right?
What do you have to say about... Alcohol? This is a legal one - are you proposing that all that deaths directly and indirectly caused by alcohol abuse are statistical fraud?
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
if you legalised drugs, you'd take away the biggest motivator for crime.
Alcohol is legal. And yet, crime is declining in areas where it's forbidden to sell alcohol after 10:00 PM here in São Paulo.
I'm sorry, but you statement is just plain wrong.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
The question is whether the number of "right hands" with guns outweighs the number of "wrong hands" with guns. National murder stats comparing the US and other western countries suggests not. And stats comparing homes with guns versus homes without guns within just the US also suggests not. Therefore by your own argument, the net effect is negative, and the justification for firearms failed.
Under no circumstances I implied that *anyone* should carry a firearm. I defends that *anyone* has the right to possess a firearm, if its proven he/she can do it properly. The same way we do with... automobiles, by God's sake! Only a small fraction of the population will manage to do it? No problem. Even if only 1 in each 10 are considered able to carry firearms, it's already enough to any criminal be forced to think twice before attacking someone - 1 in each 10 of every people around the action is a threat now.
Your logic is twisted. You're still ignoring the huge public healthcare problem that is dealing with drugs addicts. Hell, we can't even manage correctly the already legalized drugs, as alcohol.
It's not impossible (while my believes are in the opposite direction) that not enough people can be safely allowed to carry firearms, and then your argument that the net effect is negative. But by the same logic, the already legalized drugs are already a huge problem, and legalizing even more drugs will just worse the "net effect" on public healthcare - the exact same argument you happily used on firearms.
Only a twisted, fallacious mind would dismiss my (or even yours) arguments as failed, because no one here (including me) provided any hard evidences of what we're arguing. We're exchanging opinions, and debating them with logic.
But less and less people around here appears to care about logic nowadays.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I don't think guilt is the right word - concern would be better. Much in the same way, if someone were to highlight that the rate of something undesirable* was several times higher than that in similar countries, feeling guilty would be useless. Thinking "what the hell, what can be done to improve this" would be a better option.
Take obesity for example, UK & Ireland are twice that of Scandinavia, so what can we take from those countries to improve this.
* I was going to use rape as an example, but the rates (per 100k) are almost the opposite of what I expected - UK: 28, Ireland: 11, Albania: 0.7, Sweden: 64, and I thought that maybe that's because some countries have broader definitions (Sweden) and reported rates will vary based on the stigma.
The BCS is not the police. Now fuck off.
The problem is that you seem to be creating a scenario in your head which doesn't actually exist (some imagined system where only "responsible" people are allowed to have firearms), then claiming that scenario is better than, say, an Australian style regulation of firearms, and using that to oppose people who suggest gun control.
But any system that restricted firearms to "responsible" people would be highly restrictive, and heavily opposed by people like you. Even simple restrictions like those on cars (registration and training; which hardly restricts driving to only "responsible" people) would drastically increase US gun laws, and is deeply opposed by gun advocates like the NRA.
What people in these threads are doing is comparing the actual system in the US with actual systems elsewhere; not imaginary systems with imaginary outcomes. The US system does not deter crime, it does not protect families, it does not help. The actual net result is negative. Therefore the actual system fails to perform as advertised.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
A little more google searching will show that the police have strong incentives to underreport and misreport crimes, and the steady tick of news reports continues apace. It is whitewashed with typically British class, yet the troublesome misrepresentation of UK crime rates continues.
News reports like this http://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/347592/The-guns-and-grenades-of-gangland-Britain and this http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/aug/30/ukcrime1 do not jibe with your pretty little idea of a peaceful Europe.
At least criminals here in the US are not using grenades.
And every Slashdot post should be logical, rational, unbiased and constructive. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Teabaggers are called that by me because it reminds us how out of touch they are. They were jokingly referred to as such early on, then adopted it, as it was more succinct than "Tea Party Members". Later, they managed to hire an intern to look on the Internet, and someone told them of the connotations. Since then, they've been trying to re-write history to indicate they never referred to them as such. No such Truthiness will infect me, as I saw it at the time. I was there. I heard it with my own eyes, and saw it with my own ears. They called themselves teabaggers. I just chose to use their self-selected moniker past the due date because it's such a good reminder that they are out of touch. Like when Bush went into a supermarket in the '90s and was amazed to find lasers, 15 years after they were common, because he hasn't been in a "common man's" store for 20+ years.
Learn to love Alaska
Stopping ammunition sales would turn most guns rapidly into expensive cludgels.
But that won't happen either. Because Americans are committed to being able commit mass murder on demand.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
You've missed the point. In Britain it is very hard to get hold of any ammunition. You have to present your gun license ; you're severely limited in the amount that you can buy in one go, and the sales are recorded to your license and reported to the police - every shell or cartridge, and the police do keep track of your usage. Possession of ammunition without a gun is an offence in and of itself - which routinely sees people who stash ammunition for criminals doing jail time. You need to have a gun license to legally posses ammunition, even if you don't own a gun itself (e.g. you're part of a target shooting club, which owns and stores some guns at the range ; a friend was in this situation and is my source).
As for reloading equipment : I've never heard of anyone even attempting such, and I suspect that the possession and importation of such equipment would really get the attention of the police. "Attention" in the sense of 20 policemen smashing through your doors and windows at 3 in the morning.
Criminals in the UK often have to find a machine shop with sufficiently skilled staff to manufacture cartridge casings from sheet brass. And I'd bet that suppliers of such brass sheet are under orders to keep a detailed record of their buyers.
Then they have to get loading equipment manufactured, and propellant supplies. There's no legitimate market for such. None, zip, zilch, nada. So maybe you'd have to make your own cordite. And then you discover what happens if you try to order fuming nitric acid from a chemical supply company to make your own cordite.
It is difficult. Deliberately. People who understand how to do these things have put regulations and laws in place in order to make it difficult.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Yes.
What legitimate use do they have? None.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Making a suicide belt isn't exactly easy, even if you can get the explosives.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I just chose to use
There you have it. Marc Whinery chooses to use the name of a deviant sexual behavior to refer to a group of people based on their political beliefs.
Didn't your parents teach you that name-calling is a sign of weakness?
"Lame" - Galaxar
I choose to use the name they self-selected. They asked to be called it, so I comply. Plus, it's funny to expose their ignorance and elitism through reflecting their ignorance of a common slang term.
It's not name calling if they asked to be called it.
Learn to love Alaska
Actually Europe has a much higher population than the US. The population of the EU countries is now over 500 million. If Europe is more unified politically, it will be the single biggest geopolitical force in the world.
What is the combined economic and military power? Is that also larger than the US? China has way more people than the US but way less political power.
You may choose to degrade yourself by calling people such names, but I won't.
A friends daughter insisted on being called "Tuna" when she was 10 years old. Her parents, and parents friends (including myself) refused to call her Tuna - and tried to convey that she wouldn't want that nickname when she got older - but she insisted. When she turned 16, she was still trying to get her schoolmates to stop calling her Tuna.
The people who knew better, the ones who knew why it was wrong, held themselves to a higher standard.
Apparently you don't know any better and don't hold yourself to a higher standard.
"Lame" - Galaxar
I respect the 10 year old enough to call her what she wishes. If she comes back and says "I made a mistake, please stop calling me that" I will. The Teabagger's problem is that they did nothing but lie about it. "We never said that" "that wasn't a true Teabagger that said that, we've always asked to be Tea Party Members". If they owned up to an error, I'd be happy to adjust. When they claim is didn't happen and don't ask people to call them something different, then I'm still following the last given request. Wikipedia has references for teabaggers who called themselves teabaggers. So I even have proof it happened. Have you seen a press release from the Teabaggers asking to be called something else? I've not seen it. I just found the members who called themselves teabaggers in the results for the search I did.
Did you tell little Tuna what her favorite color should be as well?
Learn to love Alaska
So, you'd act against a child's best interests - in defiance of the parent's wishes?
Tea Party Members are individuals. There isn't an actual political party with leaders who speak for the entire group, there is no official press release because there is no official. It's a bunch of individuals with similar goals and complaints. The people saying "we never said that" - probably didn't. The first time I heard it was from a news reporter who could barely stop giggling long enough to say it.
Regarding "Tuna" - I told her that she wouldn't want that name if she knew what it meant, and that she should talk to her mom to get the explanation.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Yes.
What legitimate use do they have? None.
Creating your own ammo, for whatever reason.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Tea Party Members are individuals. There isn't an actual political party with leaders who speak for the entire group, there is no official press release because there is no official.
Hence I act in the wishes of some of the members, and the group can't complain because there is no official voice to object. It's all so confusing, I'll call the Teabaggers, as per their request, until told otherwise, and they haven't said otherwise.
Learn to love Alaska
Yes, I'm creating a scenario in my head which doesn't exist, and I'm claiming this scenario is better than the current one.
I'm proud to say I'm not the only one. Lincoln, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and many more also did it. I'm hugely far from even being comparable with these guys, but at least I'm on the right side. :-)
(Of course I can be wrong, but one must convince me I'm wrong with solid arguments, not fallacies).
Restricting firearms to "responsible people" should not be a problem. We already "restrict" automobiles to "responsible people", and nobody is bitching about.
I could agree with you if you counter-argument by pointing up that besides all that "automobile access restrictions", a lot of people are still dying in outrageously avoidable car accidents caused by human negligence and imprudence and the same would happen on firearms, but I don't accept any of your current arguments. They aren't even logical, as you rush up into conclusions without even caring about any cause-effect relationship.
At very least, give some contemporary examples about what you're defending.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
It's all so confusing,
Not really, but if that's your excuse - who am I to suggest you be a better person.
"Lame" - Galaxar
I'm the best person possible. I treat people as they ask to be treated. You know better than they do, and look down on everyone else. I show the Teabaggers more respect than that.
Learn to love Alaska
When I next get to see my competition shooter friend ... oh, I forget, there's another who was in the Olympic biathlon team ... I'll ask one or the other of them if they've ever heard of anyone "rolling their own" ammo. I wouldn't be surprised if it's simply not allowed at competition, so there is no point in practising with it.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Those magazines and such probably don't exist, combined with import controls. The high-quality gunpowder could be difficult to reliably reproduce if you couldn't just go down the street and buy it. Not sure how many people could accurately make a "ether-alcohol colloid of nitrocellulose" smokeless gunpowder that would work in modern guns. It's not just the chemistry but all the proper amounts too depending on the ammo itself...putting homemade black powder into a modern gun is just a quick trip to the hospital.
The moment you said "spraying", you lost the argument. The only people who say spraying, as if guns were garden hoses, are those who have never fired a gun.
Old antique weapons are surprisingly deadly. I have a cousin who regularly shoots a replica black power pistol, and similar weapons killed many people in the old west.
I have. They said that they regretted the atomic bombing, it was a sad and terrible thing, and regretted how their city had to pay the price for the country's militarism.
They were also quite proud of the city's post WW2 peace influences, wished that nobody would have to go through that again, and hoped to influence the United States to reduce and eventually eliminate its nuclear weapons.
The only people who say spraying, as if guns were garden hoses, are those who have never fired a gun.
Oh hey look, it's me, and what's that in my hand...?
https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/8916_141224576484_3554876_n.jpg
Seriously, you get the point I'm making, but you're going to dispute it based on a single word chosen? Sure, a replica black powder pistol still works and can still shoot someone, but you think you'd get more than a couple shots off before being stopped? If you start shooting people with a freakin original Springfield rifle in the middle of a shopping mall, the moment you pull out that ramrod you're going down! How many shots until you have to reload? How long is it gonna take to do that? How many people own and fire such guns today, compared to when they were first produced? How expensive is the ammo? How long would it take to produce *by hand*?
Point is, OF COURSE the guns will still be around; OF COURSE they'll still be lethal; but it'd make them a hell of a lot less likely to be used in mass shootings.
Of course, this all assumes you could somehow cease global production of new firearms or halt any and all smuggling. Which we all know is absurd.
FWIW, it's allowed in many (most?) competitions in the US. No idea what IOC rules are
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon