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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?
"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
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.
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Feel free to live in a city/county with strict gun laws with a high violent crime rate while the rest of us with guns live in one with a low violent crime rate.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/05/14/disarming-realities-as-gun-sales-soar-gun-crimes-plummet/
But no amount of facts will convince you I'm sure, since you want to "believe" guns are bad.
"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
Why do you only want to give criminals the right to carry guns?
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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.
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Schools today treat the kids like goats staked out for lions to kill and eat. If I want to cause mayhem and kill, where do I go? A "gun free zone"!
Hey, everyone, come here and perpetrate your crimes, no guns here to worry about!
Yeah, that's why schools all around the world are, basically, the biggest crime zones with huge death tolls...
Oh, wait, nope, school shootings are mostly the proud US tradition, with shooting incidents from all over Eurasia for all time counting less than US shootings just in past decade.
"Solution to shootings? More guns for everyone!"
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.
"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
I suggest that people with your attitude just GROW UP. I submit that people are dangerous. Almost all people have the capacity to kill, given the proper motivation. The people who are made infamous by these school shootings have found that motivation. A lot of the victims of these shooters have found the motivation as well, but they were denied the tools by society, and by people like you.
You act as if guns are the only tools which might be used by a mass murderer. This is slashdot - why don't we submit a survey, to find out how many people know the basics for making a bomb? It's not terribly complex, after all. A novice can collect a few pounds of explosive material, and design a simple time delay fuse, or even an impact fuse. A novice in junior high school can find the basic instructions on line, and begin to refine those instructions into a plan. I'm wondering how many elementary school fifth and sixth grade kids could do it, given strong enough motivation.
Then, we have gases. If guns are hard to get, gassing a school may become a more inviting method of mass murder. Or poison.
I've got a better idea. Instead of pointing fingers at the NRA, take a good look at Hollyweird. 24 hours a day, movies are playing that make teen idols of people shooting up shopping malls, residential areas, downtown areas, office buildings - you name it. I submit that the MPAA has invested untold billions of dollars, brainwashing the less stable elements of society to use firearms as a solution to their problems.
Of course, you can come to my house to confiscate my weapons.
Oh, what's that? You're not going to do that? You're going to send some other mother's children to do the confiscating? Yeah, that's what I thought. All mouth, and no action. You want to give money, and give guns, to young men who desire power and authority so that THEY can come bust my doors down, and take MY weapons.
If and when you and yours have achieved this Utopian police state that you dream of, I hope you enjoy it. I can see it now, Chicago Land all across the United States.
"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
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.
Ok, I'll call your bullshit. Do you realize the data you're pointing to does NOT validate your argument?
If you want to say that more guns = more safety, then compare more relevant data, like the number of homicides by fireweapon in countries with diferent approaches to gun control.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has some interesting statistics. The latest data shows there's over 3 homicides by fireweapon per 100k population in the US per year. In Canada, Australia, and every single country in Europe, that figure is way below 1.
The very definition of violent crime is so different between countries that direct comparisons are not possible. The FBI defines violent crime as one of four offences (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault), while the British Home Office defines it as a crime "where the victim is intentionally stabbed, punched, kicked, pushed, jostled, etc. or threatened with violence whether or not there is any injury".
I would expect a country that treats a threat of violence (even without actual violence) as a violent crime to be safer, but that's just speculation on my part. Feel free to disprove me, but with relevant data, please.
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
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
Most countries that regulate guns also regulate sales of ammonium nitrate fertilizers which is by far the next most popular tool for mass murder.
The US does not regulate ammonium nitrate particularly well which is why that factory in Texas was located next to two schools and the likely perpetrator could not even be prosecuted for the murders despite having made two pipe bombs.
Very few firearms deaths are caused by career criminals. The vast majority are suicides and accidental shootings. Making guns illegal would practically eliminate those causes of death. Only criminals would have guns to leave round the house for the kids to use.
The UK does not have idiotic mandatory sentences for low level drug possession or peddling. But carry a firearm during a crime and you get ten years almost automatically. Fire the gun and its fifteen. Anyone involved in the crime kills someone and its a whole life sentence.
Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right to cause 50,000 deaths a year for your hobby. Moreover I don't think the general public is impressed by the NRA attempting to save their hobby at all costs by attempting to persuade the politicians to ban video games instead.
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"Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right to cause 50,000 deaths a year for your hobby"
Change 'hobby' to 'social drinking'. How about we take this logic and apply it to alcohol (as it relates to deaths due to drunk driving)? Any takers? If not, why not?
The fact is that US school shootings prior to the last couple of decades were... unheard of. It's a very recent phenomena.
Actually that's not really true - the earliest listed on Wikipedia was in 1764. It is, unfortunately, not a new problem, although I'm certain it has received much more sensational news coverage in recent decades.
Sadly, it's not so recent as you think, just the media hype is more recent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Who exactly is shouting for disarmament of the police and where, trollboy?
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
OMFG, what a delucion you have! You have low violent crime rates? Bwahaha, give me a break.
And yes, I feel perfectly happy - and safe - living here in Finland where we have much stricter gun laws and much smaller violent crime rates, thank you.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
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.
"The vast majority are suicides and accidental shootings. Making guns illegal would practically eliminate those causes of death."
This is naive and illogical. I suppose you think the first suicide came after the invention of the firearm? There are many ways to commit suicide, and many, many dangerous items with which one can kill oneself accidentally as well.
Suicide is an act of hopelessness. If you want to prevent it, you should act to give hope to the hopeless, not to take what little they do have away from them. And accidental deaths are best addressed with safe handling training. People that handle firearms carefully and correctly are not the problem there.
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Do you even read this stuff and try the laugh test before you post it?
Local tribesmen raided a school. Not someone at the school going off shooting, wild 'indians' raided it. Not the same thing at all.
And then the next item is a guy that shot a headmaster so abusive that the jury acquitted him. Sounds like an interesting case but barely relevant here.
That list doesnt actually get going until much more recent years.
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Change 'hobby' to 'social drinking'. How about we take this logic and apply it to alcohol (as it relates to deaths due to drunk driving)?
In 2010 there were 32,885 vehicle fatalities. 10,228 were listed as alcohol related. And those statistics are even skewed since if anyone involved, whether they were the cause of the collision or not, had any level of alcohol it's marked as alcohol related. The problem isn't drunk drivers. The problem is irresponsible drivers drunk or sober. If you're going to look at traffic fatalities address the real issue rather than the neo-prohibitionist agenda of certain groups. If you fix the maniacal driving problem and make people responsible for their actions when driving drunk driving won't be an issue.
Who is John Galt?
The problem with your statistics is that the gun culture in the UK was drastically different to the US before the ban anyway, as basically no one could ever be expected to be carrying a firearm on their person, and the increase in reported crimes comes hand in hand with a change in how crimes are recorded and reported, and increased immigration due to EU law changes.
Before the ban in the UK, firearms were still highly regulated and controlled - the police would visit your home to ensure you had a gun safe, and check to see you were correctly reporting your ammunition counts etc, and if they saw a problem then you had your license revoked. There never was a culture of people carrying guns around in their purses or coat pockets, so nothing changed there in potential threats to attackers. Concealed carry licenses are still available today, exactly the same as they were prior to the ban - you can still apply for one, and the rules haven't changed on whether you would get one or not.
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'
What do you mean? Are you saying you combine all the US states but only consider EU members states individually so none of them get into the hundred plus million? Or do you really have no idea how many people live in Europe?
Here's the population of some of the larger countries. Slashdot won't let me post them all because of the spam filter. Total population in the EU is over 500 million.
Germany: 80,640,000
United Kingdom: 64,231,000
France: 63,820,000
Italy: 59,789,000
Spain: 46,958,000
Poland: 38,548,000
Romania: 19,858,000
Netherlands: 16,795,000
Belgium: 11,162,000
Greece: 10,758,000
Portugal: 10,609,000
Czech Republic: 10,519,000
Ok, so we let you cherry pick - you can remove the two regions with the highest murder rate - DC and Louisiana (whose rates are 150% of the 3rd highest state - you get a rate of 4.11/100k
In fact, you have to remove the top 12 states before you get below the European level of 3.5/100k. But wait, if you get to remove your outliers, so do we, so I remove our top two - Greenland and Russia (Europe has really expanded since I left school) - which gives us 2.5/100k. The US would have to remove *half* of the states as "outliers" to get to that level.
However, I disagree with the gun control advocates - removing guns won't reduce your murder rate by much - you'd just find a different way to kill each other.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
It simply means the problem is extremely concentrated and has very simple and obvious solutions. It is not endemic to the US nor is it a problem of overall violence. It is specific, highly-localized violence with solutions that are clear, scientific, and easily attainable.
Hint: the solutions do not have anything to do with guns.
Are you really questioning whether European countries are more homogenous? Really? Good lord.
Depends which European countries you're talking about since there are many and there has been a great deal of mass immigration to the richer countries in the last 60 years. The problem of violent crime in Europe is fairly well concentrated in the bad areas too so your argument falls down. I tell you what let's pretend that the US has no crime then you can say that Europe is more violent than the US.
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 problem with your statistics is that the gun culture in the UK was drastically different to the US before the ban anyway
I'd go even further. The overall culture in the U.S. is very different than in Europe. It can be best observed in the unfortunately very popular gospel of prosperity approach to life here. Some "churches" (I'd call them money congregations) in the U.S. would be subject of wide ridicule elsewhere in the world, and especially in Europe. So there's something very fundamentally different about the way people here "think".
I'd say that there's a much lower level difference in cultures between the U.S. and the rest of the world, a difference that is somehow very fundamental to the way of life here. It's only my gut feeling at the moment, but somehow I think this is the make-or-break when it comes to the resulting social differences that end up in school shootings.
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.
"if there ever was a fascist takeover of the US"
You obviously haven't been paying attention. Are you and your jackbooted thugs going to come take our guns away? Are you going to use guns to do it? I bet those state gun registry databases that were "accidentally" shared with the feds will be useful. Not to mention, it will be pretty hard to communicate and plan resistance with the complete monitoring of our communications.
What don't we just say what you guys are tiptoeing around. Gun violence has to do with race. It is by and large a racial phenomenon.
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.
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'
Most armed teacher proposals i have seen include a gun safe which the weapon is stored in until needed. In fact, probably just instally the gun safes with no armed teachers and jyst the suggestion of them could likely have the same deterent effect. However, the knocked out and gun taken problem can happen with the police also. It is not unique to teachers who would be trained. Cops often enter the schools with their side arm to deal with students who are seriously unrully. It would be the same as a teacher with a conceal carry when they are surprise attacked.
I guess the big difference between teachers and cops would be the amount of time between knowing something is happening and being able to do something about it. 9/11 tapes of sandy hook show that an armed staffer could have ended the shooting before any student was ever harmed. The janitor talked with operators the entire time Lanza was using his gun to try and open the door to get in. They told him to hide- to seek safety which i think was reasonable since there likely would have been nothing he could do unarmed outside of trying to notify others of the impending danger which he already was doing. It must really suck comming out of something like that knowing how helpless you really are in a situation that ended so horrifically.
Poverty has to do with race, because the US has a highly racially-stratified class structure that condemns large portions of the populace to live their lives under a prior assumption that they are lazy and criminal on account of skin color. Gun violence "has to do" with race (by way of poverty and denial of opportunity), but not with race as a causal factor the way right-wing racist bigots would have you believe. There's little deterrent to crime if you're going to be ground into poverty and processed through the prison pipeline regardless of actual personal behavior, ethics, and ideals (but on account of skin color and location).
This!! This!! I'm not a gun nut, but I do believe that fair is fair, so if the 2nd amendment only applies to items extant at that time, so does the whole EFFING constitution and the amendments thereof. So no more internet free speech or right to assemble (bye bye Yahoo Groups, no one will miss you), no more keeping your phone private - the police may take it at any time. For that matter, your car may be stopped at any time and searched as cars didn't exist back then, so clearly they're not covered.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
It is a cultural sickness, a culture that glorifies violence, that disparages the peacemaker and worships the killer.
The guns are just a tool. Without them we would have fewer gunshot wounds and more stabbings, more people with their heads caved in, etc.
But as long as we can blame it on the guns, and on law-abiding gun owners who never hurt anyone, we can keep distracting ourselves from the national illness and keep pretending we are fine. It's just those nasty guns, and these silly hicks that dont want to give theirs up. No need to re-examine our values and way of life, no need to think hard questions. Just outlaw the guns. That'll do it.
Not.
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That is so true. The gun control nuts think that crime is directly related to firearms. It is more related to culture and economics. There are countries in europe that have far more homes with guns in them as a percentage of population with a lower overal crime rate and even lower murder rates than the US and the rest of Europe countries. I'm thinking of the swiss but i think there are others that keep or at one time did keep military weapons in the homes of citizens as part of their military service obligations and defense strategy built out of the cold war. The countries also have different social-economic realities and culture.
Hoo-ah. I agree wholeheartedly with sumdumass.
Simply banning guns outright will not do it imo. I agree that guns need to be controlled (registered, liscenced, users trained and inspected from time to time), but banning them outright just sends them to the extremes. People I know who have not being exposed to weapons will, when shown a gun either go "OHMAIGODAGUNWEALLGOINGTODIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE" or "OOoooo cooool! A gun!!" (mostly the latter). Those people who I know have been exposed to weapons (mostly military or ex-military around these parts) will generally go "oh great, a gun?".
Exposing people to weapons is not a bad thing imo. Granting unrestricted access however, generally is
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.
An ass, perhaps. But a troll? Nope
"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.
"Gun control" in this country has always been about race. The first laws were just to prohibit coloured men from exercising their rights. As time went on that kind of discrimination became less acceptable, so they had to rewrite the laws. So the next wave was to outlaw inexpensive firearms, "saturday night specials," because those were the kind the coloured man was likely to be able to afford.
You know the nazi gun laws in California? Guess how they got pushed through the legislature? A bunch of coloured folk called themselves "Black Panthers" got real uppity, reading the Constitution and trying to exercise their rights under it, and the people that were supposed to defend the Constitution were so pathetically frightened of black skin that they shredded it themselves.
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Take a look at the earlier posted list of school shootings on Wikipedia. Something stands out from that to me - the number of "they upset me so I am going back to the school with a gun" shootings - so many petty things which in no way justify the death of someone let along a violent reprisal. Stupid things like unrequited love interests, failing grades or being told to get off school property.
The availability of guns means someone the quick answer to a short temper is to take out a weapon and hurt someone. A gun makes this incredibly easy as opposed to having to stab or "cave someone's head in" because at least in those situations the person has a chance to fight off the attacker, instead of having to dodge (if their are aware of it) a subsonic piece of lead being sprayed at them.
Every gun owner is a law abiding gun owner until they decide not to be, or lose their temper, or have a breakdown, or an have an event of an undiagnosed mental condition. The fact is a gun makes it simple to inflict violence at range rapidly far more than any other weapon. If someone is inclined to do such a thing, the gun is the enabler. Take the guns out of the picture and you still have these problems, but the consequences are far more controllable and less severe.
The argument of having guns to stop guns is nonsense - sure, people might like to think they are John McClane and will stand up to be the hero - but how often does that actually happen? How many times has the would be hero shot someone they mistook for a possible bad guy, or shot a family member mistaken for a prowler. The more guns that are out there, the greater the chance the weapon is the in the hand of someone who will not use it for defence.
I don't blame the guns - I blame the idea that they need to be used for personal defence.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
I think the NRA is smart enough to realize that, when you spend decades fighting in support of independent firearm ownership, suddenly turning on that population would be a Very Bad Idea.
You are assuming those in power had not subverted the NRA into some form of brown shirts, which is what the original poster implied. You don't think a sufficiently riled up and suitably lied to section of NRA members would not take part in such a thing? The brown shirts were originally just pissed off ex military who wanted a fair go - see what it become with the wrong leadership.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right
I think you will find that, legally speaking, we DO have the right.
Having the ability and means to protect your household from others is a pretty fundamental thing, and its scary that so many people are prepared to trivialize it. As has been pointed out so many times, the premise that you can just cede all of your rights to the government and trust them to do the right thing has turned out to be wrong a million times over.
What, do you suppose the second amendment was written to allow people to hunt as a hobby?
Why not just shoot all the kids before they get the idea of coming into school with a gun to kill. it'll solve the problem. or just get law enforcement to kill everyone that illegally or legally has a gun as being proactive instead of reactive
Having taught in a high school for a (very) short time, I must say that I'm intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon