I'm actually going to answer this stupid old argument: Because Gun Violence is not something that "tempting" or a kid could jump into thinking nothing bad would likely happen. Sex however is something any kid can do, and the chances of it destroying their lives is relatively low from their limit perspective. The chance that the kid will decide to have risky sex at a young age is well above 50% and the impact of viewing porn on that would be rather significant.
The chance that a kid is going to kill someone is probably less than 1 in 100,000 and the affect violent videogames or images have on this is almost negligible.
You let your kid watch 4hrs of porn a day, and I'll let mine play halflife. Lets see who ends up in prison first.
Looks like, yet again, we need to wait for google to step in with Android TV or whatever and save us all. How can companies be so blind to the obvious when all the world knows what will work? 10 to 20 years from now you'll hear Sony and everyone else bitching that Google and Valve rule everything they do... how dare they take over the entire market by giving the customers what they want?
There is no evidence that the Chinese have done this... although it is likely. There is, however, concrete proof that the US government is definitely doing it. In the Windows environment and Cisco equipment at least... probably a lot of others. All Chinas government can do to you is spy... the US government can arrest you, put you in jail, send you to secret prisons in other countries to be tortured or even put you to death.
I'll take my Chinese backdoor over your US government backdoor any day.
Not to mention train tickets are usually the same, if not higher, than a plane ticket... There's no food on the train. If you're not used to riding the train, it's pretty confusing. You're basically left to your own devices to figure out which train you need to get on, where to get off, and then navigate the tourist trap they call a train station. Not that the airports much better, but the few times I've taken the train I've not been impressed at all. It'd been cheaper, faster and more comfortable to drive a hummer to some downtown metropolitan area than it would be to take a train. They have a long way to go before they start attracting new customers.
That's funny... I've never had gmail lock up... or tell me I had too much mail and I couldn't send until I deleted some... Outlook is a dinosaur and it's time for it to die.
nobody is going to make The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars in their basement.
15 years ago my band laughed at me when I suggested we record an album by renting a single, very expensive, microphone, and then recording with my computer and layering each track individually saving us nearly 10k. Now, any decent band has their own recording studio that pretty much revolves around a single PC. The recording industry exists at this point for the sole purpose of promotion and that will be gone soon as well. 15 years ago recording a studio quality album in your basement was laughable, and now it's how things are done. The same will happen with video, and as much as the movie industry will kick and scream... they will die. This is the free market, old, inefficient methods of productions, with all it's corporate leaches and middlemen always get traded for more direct methods of production. Eventually the people with the ideas can produce their product directly, and no longer need help. There is no such thing as "Big art", music producers were nothing more than financiers, loaning musicians money with horrendous terms. The same goes for movies and eventually it will be so cheap to produce a movie that the anal rape that movie producers have to go through to get their movie made will be a thing of the past.
There are literally THOUSANDS of games out there that do this with even greater lag than that. They are usually focused around people that only have time to make a few moves per day. So you get a certain number of moves that you can make at any time during the day until you run out of movement points. You regenerate so many points per day. As a result you usually log in once a day or less to make your moves, and then wait for everyone else. Any of these would work just fine from anywhere inside the solar system and hour or more delays. http://www.travian.com/ http://www.urbandead.com/ http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl
I don't like our government very much right now... but you do not understand the history of war. In the past, even 30 years ago, most countries would have carpet bombed large sections of Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. The bloodshed would have been far far worse. Prior to Arial bombing, in the WW1 era they would have used mortars with chemical weapons. Prior to that, they would have just shelled major cities with artillery. Go back further to the civil war era and they'd have stormed the city with calvary and burnt it to the ground. During the middle ages they'd have taken the cities, raped the women, killed the men... then you have the roman era in which they'd do all of the above, and then also salt the fields of the enemy so their crops wouldn't grow for years. Prior to that, they'd again, do all of the above, and also enslave the populace.
War sucks. It sucks less now... but now it's all on video for you to see so it's more in your face.
I've heard talk, from a few different Execs at a few different ISPs in private meetings that the new thing they are getting ready to test is data caps that only count up during prime time. Kind of like how cellphones has "unlimited nights and weekends" but it would be more the opposite... you'd get unlimited from 12am to 4pm or so... Then have strict caps during prime time.
Not so great for Netflix users... but those are the real problem for the ISPs. File sharing users could schedule their downloads outside of those hours and free up a lot of bandwidth, and they'd not be losing file sharing customers to other, un-regulated, but slower services.
First, the electronic identification methods that only allow the owner to fire the gun are hugely error prone. The "idea" is great, and police departments especially would love to have them. I'd buy one. But in reality they fail to recognize the owner far too often. And when the owner pulls the trigger, that gun needs to fire. Period. Any failure at all and the owner is likely going to die (as he's likely being attacked.)
Second, most of the other safety features mentioned ARE on guns. They all seem to be specific to handguns, as grip safeties and such are not something you'd put on a rifle. But if you go into any gun shop the vast majority, if not all pistols in the store are going to have these features. They are just not required by law and the majority of gun owners want them because they are improvements over old safety mechanisms. My pistol has them and what they basically add up to is you can't fire the fun unless you're holding it correctly, and pointing it away from you. They prevent you from firing the gun while it's on the bench by mistake, or catching the trigger on your finger while you're drawing it from the holster. Then you have the "There's a bullet in the chamber" indicator... which my pistol has but is pretty much useless. You always treat the gun like there's a bullet in the chamber. Always. My pistols never been pointed at a human being, loaded or unloaded, and hopefully never will.
I think this is one of those "You'll know if you're breaking the law."
Does HBO really need to do anything about this law? No... you just pop up a window "Are you over the age of 13? y/n" and yes goes to the content, and no drops you somewhere not on your site cause you dont even want to deal with them. HBO isn't in the business of profiting off of pre-teens.
If you're nickelodeon? Well then I guess you'd shut down your behavior tracking, add targeting MMO design teems because society has decided that what you're doing is bullshit.
You see, this is where we need to have the discussion. Because you completely do not understand this type of mental illness. I don't think the majority of the country does. I knew a guy like this. He was very smart. For some reason, this kind of illness seems to affect those that are highly intelligent. He was likely a lot smarter than you or I. The guy I knew, and likely this kid too, were very high functioning. Their metal failures involve human interaction and empathy... they are not at all hindered in their ability to plan, create, build... When this kid went bat shit crazy, he still was able to plan and murder his mother, collect ammunition, drive to the school, figure out a way in through a locked door... execute the principle... and on and on. A 20min trip to walmart could have gotten him all the material he needed to blow the entire school up. The infos out on the nets if you care to look it up. The fact of the mater is, if you're not concerned with "Getting away with it" killing large numbers of people is very easy. Just look at Palestine. Practically everything is illegal there... they can't even import concrete for gods sakes and they still manage to launch 700 rockets a month into Israel along with regular bombings in the streets.
Secondly you fail to understand what the 2nd amendments about. Guns are not for hunting. They are not for self defense. This is all nonsense. The 2nd amendment is there to protect our right to kill. It is there to protect our ability to violently overthrow the government. It's the constitutional right to anarchy if need be. You may not think this is something that's relevant in the modern age... and that's exactly why it's our 2nd most important constitutional right. Because they knew, one day we would forget. The people always do. We all want peace... and we all want a benevolent government. While we have both, we often forget why we have the rights that protect us from the despotic and authoritarian rule whose chains we threw off so long ago. But those that would chain us never go away. We can never trust that we've finally made it... that we'll never be enslaved again... because it will happen. You'd trade your fear for golden chains. Our forefathers decided for you, long ago, that you could never make that choice again. Better 100 children die in a tragedy while free, that 100,000 be enslaved by a tyrant for their entire lives.
Good point. I based my stat on the entire population rather than the population of children. My math error... sorry. But, It's still fucking ridiculous and easy to fix.
To your first point, fire buckshot at something... anything... thats within the distance of the size of an average sized room. Rifles are good at killing 1 thing... shotguns are good at crowds. The military doesn't use them because they use grenades for that sort of thing.
To your second, He used a hammer because it's what he had. I didn't understand what was going on inside of his head before he was a homicidal maniac, much less after. Guns being illegal wouldn't have stopped him.
I disagree. The best (most deadly) marksman put one round at a time in their guns. Large clips lead to Rambo style shooting which is far far less effective. If large clips and automatic fire is so deadly, why do US troops use 3round burst and 20 round clips? You, at best get effectively 6 shots off. The 3 round burst is not there for killing 3 people at once. It makes the shot more accurate. It's basically a rifled shotgun. The larger drum clips make the gun heavier and the shooter less conservative with his shots.
If you watch that video from the North Hollywood shootout, the guys had AK47s with giant banana clips and backpacks full of ammo... yet not a single person (other than the robbers) were killed. Over 2000 rounds were fired. They had so much ammo, and were firing is so willy-nilly they weren't even aiming anymore. Had they handguns and 2 clips each... I bet you would have seen more deaths as crazy as it seems.
Look up the stats on how many people get killed by gun every day in US and you won't be disappointed.
Of course it will be high... too high. Death shouldn't happen at all. But Gun deaths, without a gun, do not equal no death. Lets assume you make guns entirely illegal... lets say you have a device that makes them no longer work... so you can't even bring them in the country. This kid was bat shit crazy... he wanted to do what he did, and he could have gone in there with a baseball bat and still accomplished his goal. Or a bomb, or knife.... whatever. Murders murder with whatever tool is easiest. Make them illegal and they'll still commit their crime.
Where gun laws would make a difference is accidental deaths. But this could be more easily addressed and more effective with training programs. Do you support training programs? Address issues you can actually have an impact on. You want to spend your day arguing about abortion with a pro-lifer? Have fun wasting your time, I have better things to do. We can agree on solving some of this worlds problem, but instead we argue about the problems we can't agree on. For fucks sake, lets get something done for a change.
I think you're going overboard. It's not that gun control is a non-issue. It's just that it's not a solvable issue. If we were trapped in a sinking boat, and there was water coming in via a clear hole in the side of the boat... would it make sense to be arguing about who gets the last sandwich and who starves to death? We can all agree on some rather clear issues and do something about them... so lets do that. We can worry about the sandwich when all the easy to solve life threatening problems are out of the way.
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children of every age from 2 to 14 years old In the United States, an average of 6 children 0-14 years old were killed and 694 were injured every day in motor vehicle crashes during 2003. Source: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809762.pdf
And fact: You're not going to make any meaningful reform to gun laws... at all. period. No matter how bad you want it, no matter how many times you yell "It's for the children!" it's not going to happen. How much energy do you want to expend on a hopeless cause when you could be doing something about those 560 deaths that we can all agree on and all do something about? You are a liberal, clearly... you will never convince a gun rights person to agree with you on guns and they make up 50% of the population. Not only that, but gun violence is an order of magnitude less deadly to children than cars. And if you propose automobile safety laws that would actually address those deaths, those same gun rights advocates would be marching with you. Fix what you can fix... leave the impossible for last.
Please explain how the so-called "fiscal cliff," related to taxes and spending, has anything to do with school security, gun violence, or mental health care.
Because last week you were probably arguing with your friends about what we should do about the economy. And now you're not... why is that? Why did we forget about the biggest story of the modern era? The story that will probably save or kill more children via it's effect on the economy and poverty than anything in modern history? Because a school shooting happened... and the politicians all pointed to it, and pushed the fiscal problem behind a curtain. And now you're falling for it. They're using those kids deaths, to bring up issues, like gun control, that they know will not go anywhere, but will distract you from the real issues in the world.
I had a friend that lost his mind about 20yrs ago and killed a dude with a hammer. He spent years with psychological issues but there was really no recourse for him. We tried to help him, but mental health issues are shunned. Try walking into a hospital and telling them you're losing your mind. They lock you in a county psyc ward for 3days and then let you out. I've seen it happen. To that guy... and he still killed some one. It was a tragedy for everyone involved including him. Given the correct treatment he could have lead a normal life and the dude that he killed would still be alive today.
You can make guns totally illegal and it still wont solve the problem. Keep in mind what's going on here. More children died that day in car accidents than in the shooting. 9 kids died in this country from malnutrition (taken from the US yearly average of 1 in 100,000 deaths per year) that day. While this shooting is a tragedy, it's just media glamorizing it that's making headlines. There are far more dangerous and devistating problems facing the children of this country and you are being distracted by decades old intractable issues... you are being played.
Do you really think any meaningful gun control or video game standards will come out of this? At most, they'll re-instate the assault weapons ban... which was completely worthless and ineffectual. So what if my clip can only hold 10 rounds if clips cost $5 and I can carry 5 clips on me? So what if the gun manufacturer can't call my gun an "Assault rifle"? If that guy had taken the 12gauge into that school instead of the gun he thought looked "Cool" he'd have done a hell of a lot more damage. Any laws in regards to video games will be struck down by the supreme court almost immediately.
Just like abortion or any other of the non-sensical, unsolvable issues they bring up constantly, these are issues that CANNOT be solved by our government. They are using this tragedy to distract YOU from the real problems they could solve but are not.
They could easily garner by-partisan support for funding to help support the mentally ill.
They could pass laws governing the security of schools. Glass doors should be out... windows higher off the ground... Panic buttons in classrooms with deadbolts on the doors. Cheap fixes. When I was a kid in the rural south all the doors and windows at our school had bars to keep thieves out.
They could change the laws governing how we get the mentally ill committed. It is a VERY difficult thing to do now. In most cases the person in question just has to avoid all the appointments and court appearances and there's nothing you can do about it.
Personally I think they are using this tragedy to distract us from all the crap they are not addressing in the upcoming fiscal bill. It's disgusting, but that's what our leaders do.
She had 2 handguns, completely reasonable for self defense. A standard.223 carbine... standard rifle you can get at walmart, fun to shoot and then a shotgun, pretty typical for hunting small game.
The problem here was this guy went nutz, and there was no way for him to get help. He wanted the world to know about his rage and the media gives him a relatively easy way to get the world to hear about it as long as he does something worse than the last guy. If there's any industry to blame here it's the news media for sensationalizing this and the medical industry for not providing the help he needs.
If you want to kill a lot of people, making guns illegal isn't going to stop you. They are simply the most accessible means right now. Make them less accessible and he would have picked up a truckload of fertilizer and diesel fuel... and probably taken out the whole school. An Ammonium nitrate is REALLY easy to get.
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I'm actually going to answer this stupid old argument: Because Gun Violence is not something that "tempting" or a kid could jump into thinking nothing bad would likely happen. Sex however is something any kid can do, and the chances of it destroying their lives is relatively low from their limit perspective. The chance that the kid will decide to have risky sex at a young age is well above 50% and the impact of viewing porn on that would be rather significant.
The chance that a kid is going to kill someone is probably less than 1 in 100,000 and the affect violent videogames or images have on this is almost negligible.
You let your kid watch 4hrs of porn a day, and I'll let mine play halflife. Lets see who ends up in prison first.
Tesla was always about crack pottery. The myth of his genius drives me crazy.
Looks like, yet again, we need to wait for google to step in with Android TV or whatever and save us all. How can companies be so blind to the obvious when all the world knows what will work? 10 to 20 years from now you'll hear Sony and everyone else bitching that Google and Valve rule everything they do... how dare they take over the entire market by giving the customers what they want?
There is no evidence that the Chinese have done this... although it is likely. There is, however, concrete proof that the US government is definitely doing it. In the Windows environment and Cisco equipment at least... probably a lot of others. All Chinas government can do to you is spy... the US government can arrest you, put you in jail, send you to secret prisons in other countries to be tortured or even put you to death.
I'll take my Chinese backdoor over your US government backdoor any day.
Not to mention train tickets are usually the same, if not higher, than a plane ticket... There's no food on the train. If you're not used to riding the train, it's pretty confusing. You're basically left to your own devices to figure out which train you need to get on, where to get off, and then navigate the tourist trap they call a train station. Not that the airports much better, but the few times I've taken the train I've not been impressed at all. It'd been cheaper, faster and more comfortable to drive a hummer to some downtown metropolitan area than it would be to take a train. They have a long way to go before they start attracting new customers.
That's funny... I've never had gmail lock up... or tell me I had too much mail and I couldn't send until I deleted some... Outlook is a dinosaur and it's time for it to die.
nobody is going to make The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars in their basement.
15 years ago my band laughed at me when I suggested we record an album by renting a single, very expensive, microphone, and then recording with my computer and layering each track individually saving us nearly 10k. Now, any decent band has their own recording studio that pretty much revolves around a single PC. The recording industry exists at this point for the sole purpose of promotion and that will be gone soon as well. 15 years ago recording a studio quality album in your basement was laughable, and now it's how things are done. The same will happen with video, and as much as the movie industry will kick and scream... they will die. This is the free market, old, inefficient methods of productions, with all it's corporate leaches and middlemen always get traded for more direct methods of production. Eventually the people with the ideas can produce their product directly, and no longer need help. There is no such thing as "Big art", music producers were nothing more than financiers, loaning musicians money with horrendous terms. The same goes for movies and eventually it will be so cheap to produce a movie that the anal rape that movie producers have to go through to get their movie made will be a thing of the past.
There are literally THOUSANDS of games out there that do this with even greater lag than that. They are usually focused around people that only have time to make a few moves per day. So you get a certain number of moves that you can make at any time during the day until you run out of movement points. You regenerate so many points per day. As a result you usually log in once a day or less to make your moves, and then wait for everyone else. Any of these would work just fine from anywhere inside the solar system and hour or more delays.
http://www.travian.com/
http://www.urbandead.com/
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl
etc... etc...
I don't like our government very much right now... but you do not understand the history of war. In the past, even 30 years ago, most countries would have carpet bombed large sections of Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. The bloodshed would have been far far worse. Prior to Arial bombing, in the WW1 era they would have used mortars with chemical weapons. Prior to that, they would have just shelled major cities with artillery. Go back further to the civil war era and they'd have stormed the city with calvary and burnt it to the ground. During the middle ages they'd have taken the cities, raped the women, killed the men... then you have the roman era in which they'd do all of the above, and then also salt the fields of the enemy so their crops wouldn't grow for years. Prior to that, they'd again, do all of the above, and also enslave the populace.
War sucks. It sucks less now... but now it's all on video for you to see so it's more in your face.
I've heard talk, from a few different Execs at a few different ISPs in private meetings that the new thing they are getting ready to test is data caps that only count up during prime time. Kind of like how cellphones has "unlimited nights and weekends" but it would be more the opposite... you'd get unlimited from 12am to 4pm or so... Then have strict caps during prime time.
Not so great for Netflix users... but those are the real problem for the ISPs. File sharing users could schedule their downloads outside of those hours and free up a lot of bandwidth, and they'd not be losing file sharing customers to other, un-regulated, but slower services.
This article is totally misleading.
First, the electronic identification methods that only allow the owner to fire the gun are hugely error prone. The "idea" is great, and police departments especially would love to have them. I'd buy one. But in reality they fail to recognize the owner far too often. And when the owner pulls the trigger, that gun needs to fire. Period. Any failure at all and the owner is likely going to die (as he's likely being attacked.)
Second, most of the other safety features mentioned ARE on guns. They all seem to be specific to handguns, as grip safeties and such are not something you'd put on a rifle. But if you go into any gun shop the vast majority, if not all pistols in the store are going to have these features. They are just not required by law and the majority of gun owners want them because they are improvements over old safety mechanisms. My pistol has them and what they basically add up to is you can't fire the fun unless you're holding it correctly, and pointing it away from you. They prevent you from firing the gun while it's on the bench by mistake, or catching the trigger on your finger while you're drawing it from the holster. Then you have the "There's a bullet in the chamber" indicator... which my pistol has but is pretty much useless. You always treat the gun like there's a bullet in the chamber. Always. My pistols never been pointed at a human being, loaded or unloaded, and hopefully never will.
I think this is one of those "You'll know if you're breaking the law."
Does HBO really need to do anything about this law? No... you just pop up a window "Are you over the age of 13? y/n" and yes goes to the content, and no drops you somewhere not on your site cause you dont even want to deal with them. HBO isn't in the business of profiting off of pre-teens.
If you're nickelodeon? Well then I guess you'd shut down your behavior tracking, add targeting MMO design teems because society has decided that what you're doing is bullshit.
You see, this is where we need to have the discussion. Because you completely do not understand this type of mental illness. I don't think the majority of the country does. I knew a guy like this. He was very smart. For some reason, this kind of illness seems to affect those that are highly intelligent. He was likely a lot smarter than you or I. The guy I knew, and likely this kid too, were very high functioning. Their metal failures involve human interaction and empathy... they are not at all hindered in their ability to plan, create, build... When this kid went bat shit crazy, he still was able to plan and murder his mother, collect ammunition, drive to the school, figure out a way in through a locked door... execute the principle... and on and on. A 20min trip to walmart could have gotten him all the material he needed to blow the entire school up. The infos out on the nets if you care to look it up. The fact of the mater is, if you're not concerned with "Getting away with it" killing large numbers of people is very easy. Just look at Palestine. Practically everything is illegal there... they can't even import concrete for gods sakes and they still manage to launch 700 rockets a month into Israel along with regular bombings in the streets.
Secondly you fail to understand what the 2nd amendments about. Guns are not for hunting. They are not for self defense. This is all nonsense. The 2nd amendment is there to protect our right to kill. It is there to protect our ability to violently overthrow the government. It's the constitutional right to anarchy if need be. You may not think this is something that's relevant in the modern age... and that's exactly why it's our 2nd most important constitutional right. Because they knew, one day we would forget. The people always do. We all want peace... and we all want a benevolent government. While we have both, we often forget why we have the rights that protect us from the despotic and authoritarian rule whose chains we threw off so long ago. But those that would chain us never go away. We can never trust that we've finally made it... that we'll never be enslaved again... because it will happen. You'd trade your fear for golden chains. Our forefathers decided for you, long ago, that you could never make that choice again. Better 100 children die in a tragedy while free, that 100,000 be enslaved by a tyrant for their entire lives.
unless it's security glass... which most schools and government buildings already have and is lined with steel wire so you can't break it out.
Good point. I based my stat on the entire population rather than the population of children. My math error... sorry. But, It's still fucking ridiculous and easy to fix.
To your first point, fire buckshot at something... anything... thats within the distance of the size of an average sized room. Rifles are good at killing 1 thing... shotguns are good at crowds. The military doesn't use them because they use grenades for that sort of thing.
To your second, He used a hammer because it's what he had. I didn't understand what was going on inside of his head before he was a homicidal maniac, much less after. Guns being illegal wouldn't have stopped him.
I disagree. The best (most deadly) marksman put one round at a time in their guns. Large clips lead to Rambo style shooting which is far far less effective. If large clips and automatic fire is so deadly, why do US troops use 3round burst and 20 round clips? You, at best get effectively 6 shots off. The 3 round burst is not there for killing 3 people at once. It makes the shot more accurate. It's basically a rifled shotgun. The larger drum clips make the gun heavier and the shooter less conservative with his shots.
If you watch that video from the North Hollywood shootout, the guys had AK47s with giant banana clips and backpacks full of ammo... yet not a single person (other than the robbers) were killed. Over 2000 rounds were fired. They had so much ammo, and were firing is so willy-nilly they weren't even aiming anymore. Had they handguns and 2 clips each... I bet you would have seen more deaths as crazy as it seems.
Look up the stats on how many people get killed by gun every day in US and you won't be disappointed.
Of course it will be high... too high. Death shouldn't happen at all. But Gun deaths, without a gun, do not equal no death. Lets assume you make guns entirely illegal... lets say you have a device that makes them no longer work... so you can't even bring them in the country. This kid was bat shit crazy... he wanted to do what he did, and he could have gone in there with a baseball bat and still accomplished his goal. Or a bomb, or knife.... whatever. Murders murder with whatever tool is easiest. Make them illegal and they'll still commit their crime.
Where gun laws would make a difference is accidental deaths. But this could be more easily addressed and more effective with training programs. Do you support training programs? Address issues you can actually have an impact on. You want to spend your day arguing about abortion with a pro-lifer? Have fun wasting your time, I have better things to do. We can agree on solving some of this worlds problem, but instead we argue about the problems we can't agree on. For fucks sake, lets get something done for a change.
I think you're going overboard. It's not that gun control is a non-issue. It's just that it's not a solvable issue. If we were trapped in a sinking boat, and there was water coming in via a clear hole in the side of the boat... would it make sense to be arguing about who gets the last sandwich and who starves to death? We can all agree on some rather clear issues and do something about them... so lets do that. We can worry about the sandwich when all the easy to solve life threatening problems are out of the way.
Because kids also die in car accidents and from hunger, we shouldn't be bothered to do anything about gun violence? That is illogical.
No. Your wrong. Because of facts:
Death to children in 2005:
Unintentional Motor Vehicle Traffic 560
Homicide Firearm 44
Source: http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/injury/facts.htm
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children of every age
from 2 to 14 years old
In the United States, an average of 6 children 0-14 years old were killed and 694
were injured every day in motor vehicle crashes during 2003.
Source: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809762.pdf
And fact: You're not going to make any meaningful reform to gun laws... at all. period. No matter how bad you want it, no matter how many times you yell "It's for the children!" it's not going to happen. How much energy do you want to expend on a hopeless cause when you could be doing something about those 560 deaths that we can all agree on and all do something about? You are a liberal, clearly... you will never convince a gun rights person to agree with you on guns and they make up 50% of the population. Not only that, but gun violence is an order of magnitude less deadly to children than cars. And if you propose automobile safety laws that would actually address those deaths, those same gun rights advocates would be marching with you. Fix what you can fix... leave the impossible for last.
Please explain how the so-called "fiscal cliff," related to taxes and spending, has anything to do with school security, gun violence, or mental health care.
Because last week you were probably arguing with your friends about what we should do about the economy. And now you're not... why is that? Why did we forget about the biggest story of the modern era? The story that will probably save or kill more children via it's effect on the economy and poverty than anything in modern history? Because a school shooting happened... and the politicians all pointed to it, and pushed the fiscal problem behind a curtain. And now you're falling for it. They're using those kids deaths, to bring up issues, like gun control, that they know will not go anywhere, but will distract you from the real issues in the world.
Yes, because "out only" locks are something totally beyond our technological grasp.
I had a friend that lost his mind about 20yrs ago and killed a dude with a hammer. He spent years with psychological issues but there was really no recourse for him. We tried to help him, but mental health issues are shunned. Try walking into a hospital and telling them you're losing your mind. They lock you in a county psyc ward for 3days and then let you out. I've seen it happen. To that guy... and he still killed some one. It was a tragedy for everyone involved including him. Given the correct treatment he could have lead a normal life and the dude that he killed would still be alive today.
You can make guns totally illegal and it still wont solve the problem. Keep in mind what's going on here. More children died that day in car accidents than in the shooting. 9 kids died in this country from malnutrition (taken from the US yearly average of 1 in 100,000 deaths per year) that day. While this shooting is a tragedy, it's just media glamorizing it that's making headlines. There are far more dangerous and devistating problems facing the children of this country and you are being distracted by decades old intractable issues... you are being played.
Do you really think any meaningful gun control or video game standards will come out of this? At most, they'll re-instate the assault weapons ban... which was completely worthless and ineffectual. So what if my clip can only hold 10 rounds if clips cost $5 and I can carry 5 clips on me? So what if the gun manufacturer can't call my gun an "Assault rifle"? If that guy had taken the 12gauge into that school instead of the gun he thought looked "Cool" he'd have done a hell of a lot more damage. Any laws in regards to video games will be struck down by the supreme court almost immediately.
Just like abortion or any other of the non-sensical, unsolvable issues they bring up constantly, these are issues that CANNOT be solved by our government. They are using this tragedy to distract YOU from the real problems they could solve but are not.
They could easily garner by-partisan support for funding to help support the mentally ill.
They could pass laws governing the security of schools. Glass doors should be out... windows higher off the ground... Panic buttons in classrooms with deadbolts on the doors. Cheap fixes. When I was a kid in the rural south all the doors and windows at our school had bars to keep thieves out.
They could change the laws governing how we get the mentally ill committed. It is a VERY difficult thing to do now. In most cases the person in question just has to avoid all the appointments and court appearances and there's nothing you can do about it.
Personally I think they are using this tragedy to distract us from all the crap they are not addressing in the upcoming fiscal bill. It's disgusting, but that's what our leaders do.
I'm sure there are things about your country that I'd find completely insane as well.
oh... I dunno... maybe her psychopath son?
She had 2 handguns, completely reasonable for self defense. A standard .223 carbine... standard rifle you can get at walmart, fun to shoot and then a shotgun, pretty typical for hunting small game.
The problem here was this guy went nutz, and there was no way for him to get help. He wanted the world to know about his rage and the media gives him a relatively easy way to get the world to hear about it as long as he does something worse than the last guy. If there's any industry to blame here it's the news media for sensationalizing this and the medical industry for not providing the help he needs.
If you want to kill a lot of people, making guns illegal isn't going to stop you. They are simply the most accessible means right now. Make them less accessible and he would have picked up a truckload of fertilizer and diesel fuel... and probably taken out the whole school. An Ammonium nitrate is REALLY easy to get.