As far as jamming, it rarely happens and they are easily cleared. I have had a sand fucked chamber and it still fired true.
By all counts the AR/M-16 is less reliable in combat conditions than an AK-47. It does have better range (in most cases) and is a much better weapon at a distance. The smaller, higher velocity round is designed to tumble once it hits a target, but realistically, it often goes straight through, especially at close range. Soot your enemy 3 times to be sure. In contrast, most AR rounds start tumbling almost right away, making them inaccurate at a distance, but (along with the larger round) giving them quite a bit more stopping power at short range. The whole thing is a trade off. The original post, however, made a quite a bit of sense as the original M-16 was really, really unreliable to the point that troops in the early days often abandoned them in favor of cheap, chinese made AK-47s captured from the enemy.
Glad you found it insulting, because that was sort of the point.
Ahh yes because insulting people by intentionally misrepresenting yourself is such an effective method of... I'm sorry were you trying to do anything other than the flamebait you just admitted?
But I personally think that someone who starts to blame the school for not allowing guns on campus only a few hours after the incident really is despicable...
Great, I think people who like the TV show friends are despicable. Why should I care what you think?
Here's a tip. Don't become a counselor. Heck, if someone is grieving, you might want to stay out of their way, lest you make them even more upset.
You mistake my intention. I don't give a rat's ass if I make them more upset. People are too concerned about their delicate, fragile feelings these days and not concerned enough about making a real difference in the world or thinking clearly.
First of all, I wasn't "latching on to whatever easy answer they can conceive of". Heck, I didn't conceive of any solution.
Feeling a bit defensive are we? I was responding to a comment that VT was blameless, a comment you did not initially make unless you have multiple userids.
I'm just saying that it's too damn early and insensitive to start turning this into a pro-gun debate, before the bodies are even cold, or we haven't found the shooter yet.
Screw that crap. I'm not here to be sensitive. I'm here to address the misguided comments made by others before they can persuade other addle-brained nitwits into making things worse. As an aside, the shooter was reported dead long before I commented.
You, however, are doing a wonderful job of making me pissed off at pro-gun supporters in general, if they tend to have the same moral compass (or lack thereof) that you do.
You're pissed off eh? And I suppose that changes the facts or logic of the situation, or do you just make irrational decisions based upon your emotional instability? As for my "moral compass" it does not figure into this. Morals are subjective and we were discussing the law. That is a matter of ethics, not morals. My personal feelings are irrelevant. The question was as to who held responsibility and that is, or course the people who claimed that responsibility. Since a combination of the law and the college rules claimed responsibility by making the decision of whether or not to carry a gun on behalf of all the students, then they are ethically responsible for the consequences of that decision. Would more people have been killed or less is one point, but what we're really discussing is who should be responsible for making that decision, the university or the individual students.
That said, yes there will be people personally involved (like myself) who are going to lash out and try to find something quick to blame. That's just a part of the grieving process. Of course it's not often going to be rational, which is why decisions shouldn't be made in the spur of the moment. As I've said before, there will be a time where some honest discussions can occur. Perhaps that time is now, a few days after the shootings have taken place. But just hours after?
I take it you haven't read much about the psychology of decision making. Most people reacting strongly and emotionally may form incorrect opinions and express them and others form opinions on the same basis. As emotion fades and time passes, people find themselves more and more invested in that opinion and the longer they hold it, the greater threat to their ego it is to change it, as it means admitting, even if only to themselves, that they were wrong. This is why it is important to immediately refute any such irrational assertions before others start to form their own opinions. Note, if no one had brought the subject up, I'd be happy to wait for emotions to calm before discussing
Doesn't anybody get how absurd it is for me to carry a gun and be ready for a crazy maniac 24/7?
It's called personal responsibility. Be ready for a maniac or don't but don't get in the way of others who want to make different choices and don't complain about it when your unpreparedness causes you grief.
That making sure the maniac does not get a gun is as effective as or more effective than giving me one.
Really? So you think if he could not get a gun legally he would have taken up knitting instead? You don't think he would have bought one illegally or built a bomb or poisoned the water supply?
How can someone about to be shot at ever be as ready as someone who's about to shoot?
This is an absurd question. You don't even specify who is who in this situation. If I heard a lot of gunshots then saw some kid with a gun walk into the room and shoot a classmate, what makes you think he'd have his gun up and aimed at me before I had mine aimed at him? Why would he be "more ready" than everyone else in the room who just saw his actions and were on the defensive?
I'd like to walk out there on the street and be sure I am safe.
Well boo-hoo, it ain't gonna happen. It is a dangerous world out there and you can never be sure of safety. You can be even less sure of your safety if gun bans are passed because statistically it increases the rates of violent crime and murder. If we could magically make all guns disappear, I would say it is better to use our magical power to simply stop violence. Both are about as likely to happen.
Except for law enforcement officials who know who to shoot, I don't want anyone to have guns. See how much that would simplify things?
Lots of people who are not police are trained. In fact, several students on campus that day were trained experts forbidden by the campus rules from having their weapons. Statistically speaking, police have a greater chance of shooting the wrong person than average citizens by more than twice as much, because average citizens are there and see the guy shooting others, while police arrive very late and are guessing who the psycho is. The police cannot protect you and it is not their job. In fact, SWAT teams responding often wait a period of time for the shooter to leave before moving in to reduce the chances they will be shot. Their job is to capture and punish criminals, not to protect you from the crime in the first place. That is your responsibility and if you shirk that responsibility the least you can do is not try to pass laws to stop other people fom being responsible.
And to someone wielding a knife, I might be able to run / defend myself long enough for the cops to reach me.
An illegal gun will shoot you just fine. Do try running away from the shrapnel thrown by a bomb. Your implication that if guns were banned somehow criminals would just have knives is idiotic.
In summary, I beleive making guns legal for anyone is as absurd...
That is because you want and expect someone else to take responsibility for your safety and you're afraid of giving normal people the freedom to do what they need to to protect themselves. It is also, probably, because you are considering the issue emotionally, instead of objectively looking at the relative levels of crime as it correlates to strict gun laws and places with carry permits.
and it kills me, they are doing the same thing, yet Microsft[sic] is "Evil" and when Google does the same thing they are shitting Sunshine?
You know both Charlie Manson and Charlie Chaplin inhaled air, but one is called "evil" and the other is considered a great actor.
oh the hipocracy[sic] that we call Slashdot...
Maybe you need to learn what hypocrisy is or maybe you need to learn to understand what it is that MS does that many consider wrong or detrimental and how what Google does differs from them. MS buys companies to kill the technology and make sure it does not undermine their monopoly. Google has no monopoly and when they buy a company they do so to bring that technology to market and continue to develop it. The latter is the free market in action. The former is a way to continue to prevent the free market from acting and stifle innovation in the industry.
Awesome, now I need my laptop to work, the projector to be in a good mood, _AND_ an internet connection... in a place i've probably never been until the presentation.
Not really. I'm sure like the other Google doc tools, nothing will prevent you from downloading a local copy in common and open standards. The difference in my opinion is that now when creating the presentation, it is easier to collaborate on it and instead of uploading it to the Web after the presentation, you just make it public/add access for people. Also, when you go into the meeting where you are presenting, and those four people logging in via teleconferencing can't see the presentation for some reason, you no longer have to e-mail it to them, just include the presentation URL in the invite to the meeting.
What about banning semi-automatic handguns? It seems that the ability for concealment, rapid reload, and large capacity magazines are main factors in what make attacks of this nature so deadly, ie. that there are so many victims.
As far as I know, most of these attacks take place using long guns, which are much, much more dangerous. Personally, if some nutcase was shooting at me, I'd prefer they had a semi-automatic handgun. It is much less accurate and deadly than the average long gun and a lot more likely to jam or misfire than a revolver. This applies much more so to the more common illegal uses of handguns in robberies and the like. Some nutcase might be an expert and take their time to aim for each shot and might maintain their weapons very well. The chances of that person being the one robbing the store you're in or doing the drive by shooting is slim to none though.
It is an idea with some merit, but really the last thing I'd want to happen is for some nutcase like the one in this incident to be thinking, "well I only have a revolver, what else can I use to kill a lot of people in a crowd," and putting a long rifle in a bag and setting up on the roof next to a crowd, or worse yet building a few bombs, or poisoning a water supply. Assuming some citizens are armed (which some students have now said they would have been if not for the campus ban) I don't think it matters if the shooter has a semi-auto handgun, as they will not have the leisure to aim and fire that many times before someone starts shooting back.
You're making some huge mistakes. First, the cost of office software is nothing for a corporation, compared to its other expenses (taxes, salaries, hardware, office bills and so on and so on).
I disagree. The cost of software for a company includes the cost of licensing, license management, maintenance, file transfer, the potential cost of license noncompliance, and support. Google docs mitigates more than just the flat license cost. These savings may not be considered significant and inefficient bureaucracies in large, american companies will probably resist the change for a long time, but that is not the same thing as the cost itself being nothing.
Now consider smaller companies that don't have well established license management schemes. The cost becomes more significant. Now subtract from the per seat cost a Windows license, which is no longer needed because Google docs runs fine on Linux. Now consider foreign companies that spend a fraction of the cost on labor and who may or may not be complying with the law, but many of whom are being pressured to do so. Does Google docs support chinese?
So far we're looking at a bunch of online toys trying to pretend they're Office.
Actually, they serve a different purposes. I use a google doc spreadsheet to track a competition I'm participating in along with a few friends. They all use it as well because while we only need basic spreadsheet capabilities, we do need the ability to collaborate easily and with Google docs that is much, much, much easier than setting up some sort of a server with versioning that we can all access. Google docs is for casual, home use and for collaborative use. That is how it is different from MS Office, which I think everyone in the competition has access to, but which does not allow easy ad hoc collaboration from different people in different companies.
Third, if a company is desperate to save from licensing costs, they can use OpenOffice. As much as OpenOffice lacks certain functionality, it's a desktop app, and ages ahead of Google's apps.
I'm all for OpenOffice, although it sucks pretty badly on the mac right now. What you might be missing is that this is not an either/or proposition. Google docs supports ODF so you can write something in OpenOffice and upload it to Google docs, or collaborate on something in Google docs with a bunch of friends, then download it an modify it in OpenOffice. Google docs targets a different segment. It is easier to e-mail a link to a Google docs file to my mother and let her edit it, than it is to e-mail her an OpenOffice created ODF file and instruct her in how to open it, save, it and attach it to another e-mail to send it back to me, even assuming I've installed OpenOffice on her machine in the past (which would run like a dog on her ancient 500Mhz box).
Don't confuse me with someone who doesn't believe in freedom of speech. I firmly believe in the right of anyone to act like an asshole and say the cruelest of things. But of course, I also have the right to tell that person to "shut up".
I'm glad you're a free speech supporter. I suppose what I most object to about your free speech is the fact that you insist on referring to people who express opinions that you don't seem to like as "lobbyists." That is both insulting and inaccurate, unless you consider every person in the US to be a lobbyist if they express a political opinion.
We all grieve and cope in different ways.
True, but I'm not particularly grieving here or emotionally involved in the situation. I'm simply responding to other people who are emotionally involved and whose method of coping is to try to solve the problem by reacting illogically and latching on to whatever easy answer they can conceive of, even if looking at it logically or rationally shows that the so called solution would actually make things worse. You and others can grieve and cope all you want, but when part of the coping process is a call for legal changes that likely will result in more violence and suffering, that is where I step in and refute those irrational pleas in the hope that I can help stop suffering in the future.
IMHO, it's as disgusting as what Jack Thompson tried to do.
Thompson is a political hack trying to use the issue to pressure politicians.
Personally, I see the gun debate as the same thing.
And this is where we strongly differ. If someone who was concerned about the incident commented that perhaps video games are the problem and we should ban them, as part of said coping process, you see that and see people responding to that comment as the same thing as what Mr. Thompson is doing. I see it as a discussion that helps people work through the issue and come up with ways to potentially prevent similar things in the future.
Great, now tell me how you can pass laws to prevent him from arming himself. Remember, this guy slowly went nuts and had time to plan this out. Also remember he was already banned from having guns, but he ignored that. How do you prevent him from buying an illegal gun? Can you ban guns everywhere in the US, including places you need them to live (rural farms, wilderness areas with lots of bears)? Can you stop them from being smuggled into the country or stolen from police and military? Assuming you can, do you think this guy would not have built a bomb or poisoned a bunch of people by contaminating the water supply?
the problem was the availability of guns to the assailant.
No the problem was that no one provided sufficient treatment for a student that was known to have mental problems and the rules at the school made sure none of the students could defend themselves and the police were insufficient to the task (as they almost always will be given practical constraints).
Also, it's premature to blame the law for the lack of guns in the possession of the students. Not only would the law have to be different, we would also need to know if there were any students present who would have been carrying a firearm themselves if it was legal to do so.
No we don't. Whether or not the students would have been carrying is something we have no way of ever finding out and it is irrelevant to the law. The question of the law is should they have been able to be carrying and take responsibility for their own protection?
Not all gun crime is the same.
Anyone who defines problems in terms of "gun crime" is already a lost cause. You might as well talk about red-headed crime or african american crime. The problem is with violent crime in general. If you could pass a law that would stop absolutely all gun crime, but as a side effect it resulted in a 1000% increase in beatings, stabbings, poisonings, bombings, and immolation, would that benefit society? Obviously not, which is why you have to look at the actual problem and not put on blinders. "Gun crime" is a term used to try to artificially divide the problem up in such a way as to deceive people. Every time I see a study that mentions "gun crime" I look at the violent crime statistics for the same topic and lo and behold they almost always show the opposite of what was being implied by the previous study.
So you can't solve the gun problem, you can just favor one kind of gun violence over another.
The "gun problem" is that people actually think in terms of "gun problems" instead of in terms of violence and murder.
I'm shocked by the number of people on here calling for more guns in schools. That's horrible!
That's the thing about emotionally based opinions... everyone has one. Allow me to present some other equally well argued and thought out opinions I've heard lately, "women are allowed to wear pants... that's horrible!" "Black men are allowed to have relations with white women... that's horrible" "the government can tax you and spend it on treating some guy's drug problem... that's horrible!"
If you feel it necessary to carry a lethal weapon in order to feel safe, something is very very wrong.
Interestingly I did carry a gun to feel safe for several years, and I did not think it was horrible at all. There were a lot of bears in those woods and I needed to get through about a quarter of a mile of them, often at night, to get to my car. Now if you're concerned about your safety from other humans and you feel the need to carry a gun to feel safe, either you're insecure, which is common enough, or the levels of violence are unacceptably high, which they are in many parts of the US (I lived just outside Detroit for a while too). Personally, however, I don't see gun ownership or people carrying them to be a problem at all, although I do find violence to be a problem. I think the US needs to take steps to reduce violence through legal reform of our country, but at the same time I don't think it likely that will stop a mentally disturbed person from going on a killing spree with a gun or bombs or poison gas. I fully support the right of students who have taken the training courses needed to get a permit, to carry concealed pistols and I think this tragedy could have been largely mitigated if not for the stupid university rules and the laws that let them enforce those rules.
Are you willing to let me determine if you're both a) responsible and b) well-trained before I let you carry a weapon? What if I merely require that you're "well regulated", as the 2nd Amendment does?
Of course not. The laws and courts need to impartially decide that, as they do now in most jurisdictions. The argument put forth is that by allowing the university to ban guns from campus the laws/courts set that bar far too high. Even a trained professional with a state concealed pistol permit and expert training in both the legal and tactical aspects of using it was banned from having one if they were a student on campus that day. We saw the results. That is what people are objecting to.
Seems to me that we've had all attempts at those three requirements resisted out of hand by pro-gun lobbyists.
You can argue that all you want, but it does not have anything to do with the issue at hand. It is as if someone was poisoned by tainted aspirin, and it was argued that we needed stricter testing by the FDA, and then you came back and argued that the FDA were the ones making certain drugs illegal and "drug lobbyists" had argued we need to stop the FDA from controlling those drugs. Stick to the issue at hand.
I think the grandparent poster is doing some basic statistical reckoning. How many school massacres have there been in NZ compared to the USA?
I'm all for some basic statistical reckoning. Two points are not enough to make up a data set, however. Take a look at gun control laws, ownership rates, violent crime, and murder statistics around the world. Notice the strong correlation? Gee, nobody else does either because there isn't one. The rate of violent crimes in general, and mass murders like the one described in particular does not actually correlate with gun ownership or laws to any discernible degree, well technically there is a negative correlation just slightly within the realm of statistical significance. Lott studied mass murders like this in particular and did find that concealed pistol permits was the only factor that reduced the number of people killed in these attacks, but his methodology was questionable and no one else I know of has managed to put together enough numbers to draw any significant conclusions.
Being as we're all supposedly intelligent people here, I'd ask why anyone would think that because the US and NZ have different rates of gun ownership and different rates of mass murders, why anyone would assume one was a causative factor for the other, especially when htere are so many other differences between the US and NZ that do tend to correlate very strongly with this sort of thing.
premeditated killers and organized crime, no. Your average infuriated and/or mentally unstable guy? Yes.
You make an implicit statement that the average mentally unstable guy who kills does not do so in a premeditated fashion. I don't think that assertion is supported by the facts of this incident or by statistics in general. You need to provide support for this claim if you want me to take it seriously.
There's no way you'd get even close to killing 32 people with a knife.
Really? I seem to remember something in the news a few years ago about a box cutter... I think it involved a plane.
Of course, at this point someone is going to point out the freak case where a 100 pound woman had time to unlock the gun locker, find the ammunition, load the gun, disable the safety and be ready as the furiously mad 300 pound ex-boyfriend manages to break in. Sure, great. The truth of the matter is that in almost any one on one conflict, whoever pulls the gun first is the winner, and the one pulling the gun is normally the agressor.
This isn't quick draw in the old west. Concealed carry laws save lives when people don't attack someone at all because they fear that person might have a gun. Also firearms are reported used defensively, without shooting anyone more often than they are used to attack an innocent victim. Several incidents of people going "beserk" with a gun have been stopped or mitigated by people who just happened to be there with a handgun, including one last year in Tennessee and a school shooting in Texas a few years back, just off the top of my head.
So that pissed off ex-employee who you had to fire is standing there, gun in hand, what do you do?
Go for cover, then draw my own firearm. Most people are really crappy shots and there have been incidences where even professionals have fired 8 rounds at distances of less than 15 feet and still missed with every shot. The person who takes there time and aims is usually the one who lives. If nothing else, one of my coworkers will hear the shots and pull their own firearm and be ready when he walks into their office.
Whoever is pulling these arguments that if everyone had guns, they'd just drop this guy after the first two-three people completely ignores that there'd be thousands of cases where one guy with a gun would get the drop on another guy (with a gun or not) with noone around to carry out any retaliation.
How does that make a difference? We're talking about mitigating mass shootings in crowds like this one. If, however, you want to open this up to consider all violent crime and murder in general, well take a look at the statistics for concealed carry versus strict controls or bans. It is a pretty open and shut case in the favor of letting people carry.
If I saw a shootout start I'd duck for the nearest cover I could find, and damned if I'd draw any fire to me unless I had to.
That's probably the right thing to do, but if they do happen to come for you, maybe you can save yourself and a few other people besides. The point is not to legally enforce that everyone is a victim.
The problem with the "if you make owning guns illegal, then only criminals will have guns" argument is that is that if owning guns were legal, the police (and the populace) would not know if a person who has a gun was carrying it legally or not. If owning guns were illegal, anyone who was packing without a uniform would be reported and there would be alarm over it.
People can and do legally carry guns in most of the states of the union and it doesn't seem to have been a problem yet. The police don't need to know who is legally carrying a gun. They just need to know who is shooting at people randomly. By the time the police show up to such an event, the murderer is long dead and everyone has put their guns away and is waiting for the cops to show up with the paperwork.
Whereas if guns are legal, there is a more lax attitude towards holders of DEADLY WEAPONS, and they might be allowed into situations where they would hurt many people.
Allowed in situations where they would hurt people? Guns don't just randomly start shooting people you know? There needs to be intent. If there is intent to do violence, then a gun can help make sure the majority wins the fight.
Many countries have banned guns and seen crime fatalities drop tremendously or be very low. UK and Japan are cases I can think of on top of my head.
You are 100% wrong. Statistically gun bans and restrictive gun laws correlate to a very slight increase in violent crime and murder. The UK, for example, claims it does not know if their crime went down because they coincidentally completely changed how they count and report violent crime right at the same time, and most studies seem to indicate that it has gone up.
To request allowing carrying weapons based on the tragedy here because someone with weapons might have stopped him is not a rational conclusion.
Why? What reasoned evidence do you have to support your opinion that increased gun ownership would not have resulted in a net decrease in murder in this instance?
If Cho was not allowed a gun in the first place, there would DEFINITELY have been far less fatalities
No, there would no have definitely have been fewer fatalities. First, he was breaking the law to have the gun on campus, so how would another law saying he couldn't own a gun on campus help? Second, what makes you think he couldn't buy one illegally if he was so determined? Third, assuming he could not get ahold of a gun for some reason, what makes you think he would not have constructed a bunch of bombs or concocted a poison that would have killed more people? The gun was the tool he used, but if he was this angry and messed up do you think he would have just thought, "well gee I'd like to kill people but it's such a bother without a gun, I guess I'll go volunteer at the hospital and help kids."
Your assertions are nearly indefensible and the facts you present are highly inaccurate. Please actually do a little research and learn what you're talking about before trying to persuade others.
That's just an abstract, so it's hard for me to draw any conclusions without being able to see the data itself.
Don't bother downloading it. Lott's methodology was awful and he has been generally discredited. There have been quite a few studies of the same topic since then, however that have more or less come to the same conclusions with regard to violent crime statistics in general, and robberies and assault in particular. For public mass shooting incidents, however, the number of data points makes it hard to come to a scientifically recognized conclusion. Ignore Lott, but do look into the real studies that happen to back up some of his conclusions.
I suck it up though because it saves lives and that is more important than my entertainment or any false sense of safety I could obtain through being armed.
Statistically speaking, gun bans in general result in a very slight increase in murder and violent crime, not a decrease. The situation in the UK is more than a little muddled due to the fact that the UK completely changed how it counted crime statistic relative to its own past methods and other countries, but to assert that crime decreased since the UK instituted strict gun control laws is not supported by any numbers in any credible study I've seen. Even the UK police in their official documents claim only ignorance, not evidence of a decrease.
Over in the USA you have a different situation - guns are widely available and would remain so even if tighter laws were introduced. Solution? God knows.
Yeah and in Sweden they have gun ownership rates and laws similar to that in the US, but have ten times lower violent crime rates than the UK. What does that imply about the causative relationship between guns and violent crime? The solution for decreasing violent crime in the US is to socialize heath care, redirect our socialism towards helping the poor instead of fat military contracts with no bidding, and decriminalize drugs. Of course all of that is hard and would result in politicians making a lot less money, so instead we'll see a bunch of media hype and useless or counter-productive gun bans with no one in the news mentioning that guns were already banned on that campus, possibly contributing to the body count.
Sure, MS uses all kinds of ethically suspect business practices. But if we were all to buy a mac today and continue to use proprietary formats for our data we'd have accomplished absolutely nothing.
Ahh, but who do you mean? You see there is no chance that everyone will switch to any other OS tomorrow. What we need to do, however, is break MS's monopoly. If 50% of the world switched to macs tomorrow, then regardless of whether or not our formats were proprietary we would have broken MS's ability to leverage their monopoly to control the entire computing landscape. That is accomplishing a lot. That is bringing competition back to the market so that both Apple and MS have to give customers what they want in order to make money.
I don't think which OS you use is nearly as important as what formats you use. If we could convince our friends and colleagues that closed formats were unacceptable, and collectively send that message to MS (and Apple, and...), then things would change.
I'm all in favor of open formats. I don't, however, delude myself into thinking the average person know about, cares about, or understands them... or ever will. People care about the end result of open formats. They care about the ability to access the same data with multiple programs without difficulty. They care about their data being accessible 10 years from now. I doubt end users will ever connect these things with open formats in any way or be able to judge what is and is not an open format (e.g. OpenXML).
If, however, MS's monopoly can be broken, this won;t matter nearly as much because people will switch to whatever works best for them, which includes the factors that are inherent in open formats. If, for example, Apple commits 100% to open formats and so do most developers and so does Linux, then so long as consumers make a choice about OS's that will factor in and the better, open formats will take over. The trick is re-introducing a choice to the market, which requires MS's monopoly to be broken or seriously weakened and that is why, in a somewhat circuitous way, the OS does matter to open formats (or at least MS's OS matters).
Closed formats are largely one more symptom of the unhealthy market. They are a lock-in largely enabled by the monster monopoly MS is using. Treat the monopoly problem and the format problem will solve itself.
It bothers me to hear such loose talk about "taking [the shooter] down"...do you really want to kill someone? Are you that confident that you could do that, when even trained police officers have trouble doing it? Wouldn't it better to stop them from killing without killing them?
These are matters of personal morality. It is important to remember that the relevant discussion is often that of ethics, which is to say, should the government or school be choosing whether or not a person should defend themselves with lethal force, or should the person defending themselves be given the freedom to arm themselves and use that weapon. Whose choice should it be?
What about allowing people to carry stun-guns? The kind that you can fire from a distance. Shooting the killer with these would have stopped him without killing him, and without the danger of killing any innocents. There also would be no fears of more indiscriminate killings that might happen if everyone were armed with firearms.
The device you are describing is called a "taser." There are several issues with arming the students with them. First, being that they are non-lethal, the likelihood of abuse of them is much, much greater. Even trained police officers have a disturbing tendency to overuse these devices injuring and killing the elderly, children, and pregnant women, when that same officer would never have considered using a firearm against that same person.
While I find the above a considerable issue, I'm not opposed to legalizing the carrying of such devices on campus, but neither do I assume it would be useful in stopping a shooting like this one. Tasers have very limited range, are inaccurate, and take a considerable amount of time to reload. Moreover, they are extremely bulky, probably ten times the volume of a small pistol designed for everyday carry by a normal citizen. You might be able to put one in your bag or large purse, but I don't see it as a real option for an everyday, convenient defense.
I've been a 2nd amendment proponent for a long time, but I'm seriously rethinking my position. If we banned guns, but allowed law abiding citizens to carry effective, non-lethal weapons, I think we'd see much, much less killing.
What makes you think that? Banning guns does not mean criminals stop carrying them. It doesn't mean criminals do not carry a non-lethal device, but then kill their victim once they have been disabled by it. It may mean criminals assume there is no real danger to their lives if they do go out and commit violent crimes, removing a reason for them to not do so... fear.
People would still be able to protect themselves, even in the short term while the glut of illegal guns was being eliminated.
Illegal guns would never go away. In places with complete bans, career criminals still smuggle them in from other countries or buy/steal them from police and military. The most a ban does is drastically reduce availability. The problem is, when gun availability drops, criminals just turn to other weapons. Look at the UK. So called "gun crimes" are down since they instituted very strict controls, but stabbings, beatings, robberies, burglaries, etc. are way up resulting in a slight increase in overall crime and violence.
Is there a downside to this solution?
Yes. Statistically it will slightly increase murder and violent crime, not decrease it. Look, decreasing violent crime is not rocket science. There are certain societal factors that correlate very strongly with violent crime and the US manages to bring together a lot of them. If you want to decrease violent crime the most probable ways are:
Reduce wage disparity - this is the #1 correlation. Progressive taxes on the high end that reverse wealth condensation that has brought our country to its present state where a few percent of the population control the majority of all the wealth. With a society like this p
...all of the recent school shooting have ended in death, often at their own hands, of the attackers. Obviously fear of death isn't working.
Fear of death won't stop a suicidal person, like this shooter, but it does work against many people considering violence, especially those looking for profit. Aside from the fear of an armed defense, the actual defense works too, as in the case of the texas campus sniper who was held at bay by armed citizens until the police arrived, probably preventing the death toll from climbing as high as it did in this case.
You guys can count deaths by gun shoots by the thousends per year. Killing people is lifestyle choice in your country.
Would you feel better if deaths happened by poisoning or hatchet perhaps? The problem is violence and murder, not gun violence.
In the UK it is national news when somebody gets stabbed to death, even more so when guns are involved (they are banned in the UK). We only have a few dozens of incidents per year in the whole country, most of them gang violence.
The same is true for some parts of the US, and it's not like the UK has a lot of room to brag, compared to some places in Europe (like Sweden), including places with gun ownership rates similar to the US, the UK has extremely high levels of violent crime. In fact if you look at the whole world and compare rates of murder and violent crime you'll note something interesting. It correlates very strongly with some societal factors and very little with others. If there is any correlation between restrictive gun laws and violent crime, then statistics show that gun bans correlate with a slight increase in violent crime (barely within the range of significance).
The UK does have much lower rates of violent crime than the US. The UK also has socialized health care and drug treatment, which correlates very, very strongly with reduced violent crime. So logically, why would you assume gun laws had anything to do with it... or were you thinking logically?
About the issue of guns in school, sorry but if everyone bring their gun to class, and manage to kill the guy killing people, how is the police to know who is the gunman, since the gunman could have killed someone with a gun as well, it's stupid to ask to have guns in school.
If someone starts shooting and I shoot them dead, the first thing I do after making sure they still can't shoot me, is put my gun away. Then, I call the police and tell them what happened. They show up and ballistic evidence, eyewitnesses, etc. can prove who shot whom.
People are there to learn, not defend themselves, leave that to the security dept.
Neither campus security nor the police (if these are separate) has the capability of defending you. Nor, is it their responsibility. The police have no legal obligation to respond and stop crimes even when they have been notified of the crimes and told you they will respond. This was very dramatically demonstrated in the landmark case where several women were held prisoner and repeatedly raped and beaten and the police never came despite having been notified and telling the caller they would come. One of the women even managed to get access to the phone to call the police again, but still they did not bother to show up. The police don't have the manpower to defend you and if you expect them to do so, you're an idiot.
I was talking to a guy whose brother was on a SWAT team, just the other day. He mentioned that they specifically arrive at violent confrontations with their lights on, and then wait 10 minutes before entering the scene of a violent confrontation to allow the criminals time to leave, as a matter of policy. They do this to reduce the chances of injury to any responding officers. Their job is to hunt down and capture the criminals for punishment, not to defend you. Ask any cop if it is his job to protect you or if you should protect yourself. Also, take a look at the statistics on 911 responses. I think they arrive in time to actually stop a crime from happening less than 10% of the time.
Obviously there has to be a rethinking of how security is handled and a way to know what kind of weapons are being carried in bags or in pockets. I'm all for gun banning.
Guns were already banned there. Worked real well huh? For some reason the mass murderer did not obey the law, who would have thought that could happen? Laws apply only to the law abiding and passing them restricts only the law abiding. We cannot and should not turn the US into a police state. Gun bans, statistically, increase violent crime and murder. Proposing them as a solution is the worst kind of emotional crap. People search for some easy, simple answer that they can believe will solve the problem and so they can feel safe, so they support gun bans under the blind assumption that maybe it will help when it only hurts. I expect as much from the average citizen who has never taken a logic course and does not apply the scientific method to their own life, but I hoped for better on a forum full of supposed nerds.
I don't like the rest of the world thinking the US is a dangerous place to live in general, as it really is not. However, clearly violent crimes are more common in the US than most western countries (except perhaps Russia, which I understand is rather prone to person-to-person violence).
There are some pretty strong correlations between violent crime and other societal factors, correlations which make a reasonable person consider causation, especially after that causation has been observed in some locations. The thing is, strict gun control laws are not one of those correlations.
And anyone who commits a violent crime with a firearm should be punished extremely severely... as in decades, at the very least. However, I think the prisons are too full right now with people caught with pot or other drugs.
I agree with both of your statements, however, I don't think the increased punishments is likely to result in decreases of crime. Decriminalization of drugs, however, does correlate strongly with decreases in crime.
How would someone 'steal a gun' if no-one was permitted to carry a gun? Kinda self defeating argument there.
When you figure out how to magically make all the guns in the world disappear, let me know. In the mean time, in the real world, guns can be bought/stolen from police and military (and are in places with bans), or illegally smuggled in from other countries/locations. Now I know you're going to argue that making them harder to get will stop some shootings and you're right, sort of. Gun bans do reduce shootings. They increase beatings and stabbings and burnings and bomb attacks, but they decrease shootings. If guns were banned in all of the world, people would use other things and this kid would have made a bunch of bombs.
Seriously, if you want to stop violence, restricting access to things that can be used for violence is an impractical way to go about it. You need to attack the motivations for violence and look to mitigating violence when it happens. One mitigation that does work is an armed populace that can shoot back and the fear of death that generally works as a deterrent to violence.
Yeah, because obviously I'm a lobbyist. It's called "freedom of speech" and no I won't stop expressing my opinions.
There will be a time and a place to discuss the theoreticals of "would doing X have helped?" scenarios.
If you don't want to discuss the issues surrounding this incident the solution is really, really easy. Stop reading a discussion board about it.
Good god, this incident only happened a few hours ago. People (like myself) are still shocked, grieving, mourning for the loss of our fellow classmates, faculty, etc. To hear people, like yourself, using this incident to lobby their particular beliefs, is just sickening.
I'm replying to a comment someone made about this topic. What, do you think this entire discussion should be "gee I feel bad" repeated over and over again. If you're not ready to discuss the issue, turn off your computer and go to the park, or simply close this Web page, or even just don't open this particular discussion thread.
People without a significant criminal record, who do have access to legally held firearms and who then go and use them illegally. Anecodatlly it seems that a lot of the massacre type events involve the second category. That's what gun control laws/policies are aimed at addressing - they can't do much about the first category of people because they're unlikely to be deterred or prevented by a gun control law.
Are you serious? So you think if this shooter had not been legally allowed to have the firearms this shooting would not have occurred? Guess what, it is already illegal for students to have firearms on that campus. For some reason this guy did not stop at the edge of campus and go home because of that any more than anyone determined to kill people is stopped by gun control laws.
Of course, a gun control policy that only applies to a limited jurisdiction can't prevent someone who is already determined to carry out a shooting to enter the controlled area and fire away, but it can make it significantly harder for someone already in that jurisdiction from accessing firearms and then using them illegally.
Unless you can ban all guns worldwide, including police and military then you will always be considering a limited jurisdiction. If they are banned in Virginia, people will buy them in Pennsylvania. If they are banned in the US, people will buy them from Mexico and Canada. If they are banned in north america... well you get the point. Also, in places with strict gun control laws, it is common for people to buy weapons from corrupt police and underpaid military staff. Do you advocate removing guns from the US military as well?
Statistically, gun control does reduce availability of guns to people significantly. It also increases rates of murder and violent crime in general. Assuming the shooter here was unable to acquire firearms, what makes you think he would not have built a bomb or ten? So while your statement is perfectly accurate, I think it is a logical misstatement of the problem that is your mistake. If your goal is to reduce shootings, gun control makes sense. If your goal is to reduce stabbings, laws restricting knives and swords make sense. If your goal is to reduce clubbings, laws restricting ownership of baseball bats, crow bars, hammers, etc. make sense. If your goal is to reduce violent crime and murder, none of those make sense. All they do is change the types of weapons used in most attacks.
As near as I can tell, people in favor of increasing gun control are ignorant people who are emotively reacting to things and thinking "guns bad" and hoping there is some easy way to reduce violence and trying not to look to hard at the practicalities of the situation or the numbers which contradict their beliefs... well and, of course, the politicians who are happy to exploit those misguided beliefs to get votes.
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By all counts the AR/M-16 is less reliable in combat conditions than an AK-47. It does have better range (in most cases) and is a much better weapon at a distance. The smaller, higher velocity round is designed to tumble once it hits a target, but realistically, it often goes straight through, especially at close range. Soot your enemy 3 times to be sure. In contrast, most AR rounds start tumbling almost right away, making them inaccurate at a distance, but (along with the larger round) giving them quite a bit more stopping power at short range. The whole thing is a trade off. The original post, however, made a quite a bit of sense as the original M-16 was really, really unreliable to the point that troops in the early days often abandoned them in favor of cheap, chinese made AK-47s captured from the enemy.
Glad you found it insulting, because that was sort of the point.
Ahh yes because insulting people by intentionally misrepresenting yourself is such an effective method of... I'm sorry were you trying to do anything other than the flamebait you just admitted?
But I personally think that someone who starts to blame the school for not allowing guns on campus only a few hours after the incident really is despicable...
Great, I think people who like the TV show friends are despicable. Why should I care what you think?
Here's a tip. Don't become a counselor. Heck, if someone is grieving, you might want to stay out of their way, lest you make them even more upset.
You mistake my intention. I don't give a rat's ass if I make them more upset. People are too concerned about their delicate, fragile feelings these days and not concerned enough about making a real difference in the world or thinking clearly.
First of all, I wasn't "latching on to whatever easy answer they can conceive of". Heck, I didn't conceive of any solution.
Feeling a bit defensive are we? I was responding to a comment that VT was blameless, a comment you did not initially make unless you have multiple userids.
I'm just saying that it's too damn early and insensitive to start turning this into a pro-gun debate, before the bodies are even cold, or we haven't found the shooter yet.
Screw that crap. I'm not here to be sensitive. I'm here to address the misguided comments made by others before they can persuade other addle-brained nitwits into making things worse. As an aside, the shooter was reported dead long before I commented.
You, however, are doing a wonderful job of making me pissed off at pro-gun supporters in general, if they tend to have the same moral compass (or lack thereof) that you do.
You're pissed off eh? And I suppose that changes the facts or logic of the situation, or do you just make irrational decisions based upon your emotional instability? As for my "moral compass" it does not figure into this. Morals are subjective and we were discussing the law. That is a matter of ethics, not morals. My personal feelings are irrelevant. The question was as to who held responsibility and that is, or course the people who claimed that responsibility. Since a combination of the law and the college rules claimed responsibility by making the decision of whether or not to carry a gun on behalf of all the students, then they are ethically responsible for the consequences of that decision. Would more people have been killed or less is one point, but what we're really discussing is who should be responsible for making that decision, the university or the individual students.
That said, yes there will be people personally involved (like myself) who are going to lash out and try to find something quick to blame. That's just a part of the grieving process. Of course it's not often going to be rational, which is why decisions shouldn't be made in the spur of the moment. As I've said before, there will be a time where some honest discussions can occur. Perhaps that time is now, a few days after the shootings have taken place. But just hours after?
I take it you haven't read much about the psychology of decision making. Most people reacting strongly and emotionally may form incorrect opinions and express them and others form opinions on the same basis. As emotion fades and time passes, people find themselves more and more invested in that opinion and the longer they hold it, the greater threat to their ego it is to change it, as it means admitting, even if only to themselves, that they were wrong. This is why it is important to immediately refute any such irrational assertions before others start to form their own opinions. Note, if no one had brought the subject up, I'd be happy to wait for emotions to calm before discussing
It's called personal responsibility. Be ready for a maniac or don't but don't get in the way of others who want to make different choices and don't complain about it when your unpreparedness causes you grief.
That making sure the maniac does not get a gun is as effective as or more effective than giving me one.Really? So you think if he could not get a gun legally he would have taken up knitting instead? You don't think he would have bought one illegally or built a bomb or poisoned the water supply?
How can someone about to be shot at ever be as ready as someone who's about to shoot?This is an absurd question. You don't even specify who is who in this situation. If I heard a lot of gunshots then saw some kid with a gun walk into the room and shoot a classmate, what makes you think he'd have his gun up and aimed at me before I had mine aimed at him? Why would he be "more ready" than everyone else in the room who just saw his actions and were on the defensive?
I'd like to walk out there on the street and be sure I am safe.Well boo-hoo, it ain't gonna happen. It is a dangerous world out there and you can never be sure of safety. You can be even less sure of your safety if gun bans are passed because statistically it increases the rates of violent crime and murder. If we could magically make all guns disappear, I would say it is better to use our magical power to simply stop violence. Both are about as likely to happen.
Except for law enforcement officials who know who to shoot, I don't want anyone to have guns. See how much that would simplify things?Lots of people who are not police are trained. In fact, several students on campus that day were trained experts forbidden by the campus rules from having their weapons. Statistically speaking, police have a greater chance of shooting the wrong person than average citizens by more than twice as much, because average citizens are there and see the guy shooting others, while police arrive very late and are guessing who the psycho is. The police cannot protect you and it is not their job. In fact, SWAT teams responding often wait a period of time for the shooter to leave before moving in to reduce the chances they will be shot. Their job is to capture and punish criminals, not to protect you from the crime in the first place. That is your responsibility and if you shirk that responsibility the least you can do is not try to pass laws to stop other people fom being responsible.
And to someone wielding a knife, I might be able to run / defend myself long enough for the cops to reach me.An illegal gun will shoot you just fine. Do try running away from the shrapnel thrown by a bomb. Your implication that if guns were banned somehow criminals would just have knives is idiotic.
In summary, I beleive making guns legal for anyone is as absurd...That is because you want and expect someone else to take responsibility for your safety and you're afraid of giving normal people the freedom to do what they need to to protect themselves. It is also, probably, because you are considering the issue emotionally, instead of objectively looking at the relative levels of crime as it correlates to strict gun laws and places with carry permits.
You know both Charlie Manson and Charlie Chaplin inhaled air, but one is called "evil" and the other is considered a great actor.
oh the hipocracy[sic] that we call Slashdot...Maybe you need to learn what hypocrisy is or maybe you need to learn to understand what it is that MS does that many consider wrong or detrimental and how what Google does differs from them. MS buys companies to kill the technology and make sure it does not undermine their monopoly. Google has no monopoly and when they buy a company they do so to bring that technology to market and continue to develop it. The latter is the free market in action. The former is a way to continue to prevent the free market from acting and stifle innovation in the industry.
Not really. I'm sure like the other Google doc tools, nothing will prevent you from downloading a local copy in common and open standards. The difference in my opinion is that now when creating the presentation, it is easier to collaborate on it and instead of uploading it to the Web after the presentation, you just make it public/add access for people. Also, when you go into the meeting where you are presenting, and those four people logging in via teleconferencing can't see the presentation for some reason, you no longer have to e-mail it to them, just include the presentation URL in the invite to the meeting.
As far as I know, most of these attacks take place using long guns, which are much, much more dangerous. Personally, if some nutcase was shooting at me, I'd prefer they had a semi-automatic handgun. It is much less accurate and deadly than the average long gun and a lot more likely to jam or misfire than a revolver. This applies much more so to the more common illegal uses of handguns in robberies and the like. Some nutcase might be an expert and take their time to aim for each shot and might maintain their weapons very well. The chances of that person being the one robbing the store you're in or doing the drive by shooting is slim to none though.
It is an idea with some merit, but really the last thing I'd want to happen is for some nutcase like the one in this incident to be thinking, "well I only have a revolver, what else can I use to kill a lot of people in a crowd," and putting a long rifle in a bag and setting up on the roof next to a crowd, or worse yet building a few bombs, or poisoning a water supply. Assuming some citizens are armed (which some students have now said they would have been if not for the campus ban) I don't think it matters if the shooter has a semi-auto handgun, as they will not have the leisure to aim and fire that many times before someone starts shooting back.
I disagree. The cost of software for a company includes the cost of licensing, license management, maintenance, file transfer, the potential cost of license noncompliance, and support. Google docs mitigates more than just the flat license cost. These savings may not be considered significant and inefficient bureaucracies in large, american companies will probably resist the change for a long time, but that is not the same thing as the cost itself being nothing.
Now consider smaller companies that don't have well established license management schemes. The cost becomes more significant. Now subtract from the per seat cost a Windows license, which is no longer needed because Google docs runs fine on Linux. Now consider foreign companies that spend a fraction of the cost on labor and who may or may not be complying with the law, but many of whom are being pressured to do so. Does Google docs support chinese?
So far we're looking at a bunch of online toys trying to pretend they're Office.Actually, they serve a different purposes. I use a google doc spreadsheet to track a competition I'm participating in along with a few friends. They all use it as well because while we only need basic spreadsheet capabilities, we do need the ability to collaborate easily and with Google docs that is much, much, much easier than setting up some sort of a server with versioning that we can all access. Google docs is for casual, home use and for collaborative use. That is how it is different from MS Office, which I think everyone in the competition has access to, but which does not allow easy ad hoc collaboration from different people in different companies.
Third, if a company is desperate to save from licensing costs, they can use OpenOffice. As much as OpenOffice lacks certain functionality, it's a desktop app, and ages ahead of Google's apps.I'm all for OpenOffice, although it sucks pretty badly on the mac right now. What you might be missing is that this is not an either/or proposition. Google docs supports ODF so you can write something in OpenOffice and upload it to Google docs, or collaborate on something in Google docs with a bunch of friends, then download it an modify it in OpenOffice. Google docs targets a different segment. It is easier to e-mail a link to a Google docs file to my mother and let her edit it, than it is to e-mail her an OpenOffice created ODF file and instruct her in how to open it, save, it and attach it to another e-mail to send it back to me, even assuming I've installed OpenOffice on her machine in the past (which would run like a dog on her ancient 500Mhz box).
I'm glad you're a free speech supporter. I suppose what I most object to about your free speech is the fact that you insist on referring to people who express opinions that you don't seem to like as "lobbyists." That is both insulting and inaccurate, unless you consider every person in the US to be a lobbyist if they express a political opinion.
We all grieve and cope in different ways.True, but I'm not particularly grieving here or emotionally involved in the situation. I'm simply responding to other people who are emotionally involved and whose method of coping is to try to solve the problem by reacting illogically and latching on to whatever easy answer they can conceive of, even if looking at it logically or rationally shows that the so called solution would actually make things worse. You and others can grieve and cope all you want, but when part of the coping process is a call for legal changes that likely will result in more violence and suffering, that is where I step in and refute those irrational pleas in the hope that I can help stop suffering in the future.
IMHO, it's as disgusting as what Jack Thompson tried to do.Thompson is a political hack trying to use the issue to pressure politicians.
Personally, I see the gun debate as the same thing.And this is where we strongly differ. If someone who was concerned about the incident commented that perhaps video games are the problem and we should ban them, as part of said coping process, you see that and see people responding to that comment as the same thing as what Mr. Thompson is doing. I see it as a discussion that helps people work through the issue and come up with ways to potentially prevent similar things in the future.
Great, now tell me how you can pass laws to prevent him from arming himself. Remember, this guy slowly went nuts and had time to plan this out. Also remember he was already banned from having guns, but he ignored that. How do you prevent him from buying an illegal gun? Can you ban guns everywhere in the US, including places you need them to live (rural farms, wilderness areas with lots of bears)? Can you stop them from being smuggled into the country or stolen from police and military? Assuming you can, do you think this guy would not have built a bomb or poisoned a bunch of people by contaminating the water supply?
the problem was the availability of guns to the assailant.No the problem was that no one provided sufficient treatment for a student that was known to have mental problems and the rules at the school made sure none of the students could defend themselves and the police were insufficient to the task (as they almost always will be given practical constraints).
Also, it's premature to blame the law for the lack of guns in the possession of the students. Not only would the law have to be different, we would also need to know if there were any students present who would have been carrying a firearm themselves if it was legal to do so.No we don't. Whether or not the students would have been carrying is something we have no way of ever finding out and it is irrelevant to the law. The question of the law is should they have been able to be carrying and take responsibility for their own protection?
Not all gun crime is the same.Anyone who defines problems in terms of "gun crime" is already a lost cause. You might as well talk about red-headed crime or african american crime. The problem is with violent crime in general. If you could pass a law that would stop absolutely all gun crime, but as a side effect it resulted in a 1000% increase in beatings, stabbings, poisonings, bombings, and immolation, would that benefit society? Obviously not, which is why you have to look at the actual problem and not put on blinders. "Gun crime" is a term used to try to artificially divide the problem up in such a way as to deceive people. Every time I see a study that mentions "gun crime" I look at the violent crime statistics for the same topic and lo and behold they almost always show the opposite of what was being implied by the previous study.
So you can't solve the gun problem, you can just favor one kind of gun violence over another.The "gun problem" is that people actually think in terms of "gun problems" instead of in terms of violence and murder.
That's the thing about emotionally based opinions... everyone has one. Allow me to present some other equally well argued and thought out opinions I've heard lately, "women are allowed to wear pants... that's horrible!" "Black men are allowed to have relations with white women... that's horrible" "the government can tax you and spend it on treating some guy's drug problem... that's horrible!"
If you feel it necessary to carry a lethal weapon in order to feel safe, something is very very wrong.Interestingly I did carry a gun to feel safe for several years, and I did not think it was horrible at all. There were a lot of bears in those woods and I needed to get through about a quarter of a mile of them, often at night, to get to my car. Now if you're concerned about your safety from other humans and you feel the need to carry a gun to feel safe, either you're insecure, which is common enough, or the levels of violence are unacceptably high, which they are in many parts of the US (I lived just outside Detroit for a while too). Personally, however, I don't see gun ownership or people carrying them to be a problem at all, although I do find violence to be a problem. I think the US needs to take steps to reduce violence through legal reform of our country, but at the same time I don't think it likely that will stop a mentally disturbed person from going on a killing spree with a gun or bombs or poison gas. I fully support the right of students who have taken the training courses needed to get a permit, to carry concealed pistols and I think this tragedy could have been largely mitigated if not for the stupid university rules and the laws that let them enforce those rules.
Of course not. The laws and courts need to impartially decide that, as they do now in most jurisdictions. The argument put forth is that by allowing the university to ban guns from campus the laws/courts set that bar far too high. Even a trained professional with a state concealed pistol permit and expert training in both the legal and tactical aspects of using it was banned from having one if they were a student on campus that day. We saw the results. That is what people are objecting to.
Seems to me that we've had all attempts at those three requirements resisted out of hand by pro-gun lobbyists.You can argue that all you want, but it does not have anything to do with the issue at hand. It is as if someone was poisoned by tainted aspirin, and it was argued that we needed stricter testing by the FDA, and then you came back and argued that the FDA were the ones making certain drugs illegal and "drug lobbyists" had argued we need to stop the FDA from controlling those drugs. Stick to the issue at hand.
I'm all for some basic statistical reckoning. Two points are not enough to make up a data set, however. Take a look at gun control laws, ownership rates, violent crime, and murder statistics around the world. Notice the strong correlation? Gee, nobody else does either because there isn't one. The rate of violent crimes in general, and mass murders like the one described in particular does not actually correlate with gun ownership or laws to any discernible degree, well technically there is a negative correlation just slightly within the realm of statistical significance. Lott studied mass murders like this in particular and did find that concealed pistol permits was the only factor that reduced the number of people killed in these attacks, but his methodology was questionable and no one else I know of has managed to put together enough numbers to draw any significant conclusions.
Being as we're all supposedly intelligent people here, I'd ask why anyone would think that because the US and NZ have different rates of gun ownership and different rates of mass murders, why anyone would assume one was a causative factor for the other, especially when htere are so many other differences between the US and NZ that do tend to correlate very strongly with this sort of thing.
You make an implicit statement that the average mentally unstable guy who kills does not do so in a premeditated fashion. I don't think that assertion is supported by the facts of this incident or by statistics in general. You need to provide support for this claim if you want me to take it seriously.
There's no way you'd get even close to killing 32 people with a knife.Really? I seem to remember something in the news a few years ago about a box cutter... I think it involved a plane.
Of course, at this point someone is going to point out the freak case where a 100 pound woman had time to unlock the gun locker, find the ammunition, load the gun, disable the safety and be ready as the furiously mad 300 pound ex-boyfriend manages to break in. Sure, great. The truth of the matter is that in almost any one on one conflict, whoever pulls the gun first is the winner, and the one pulling the gun is normally the agressor.This isn't quick draw in the old west. Concealed carry laws save lives when people don't attack someone at all because they fear that person might have a gun. Also firearms are reported used defensively, without shooting anyone more often than they are used to attack an innocent victim. Several incidents of people going "beserk" with a gun have been stopped or mitigated by people who just happened to be there with a handgun, including one last year in Tennessee and a school shooting in Texas a few years back, just off the top of my head.
So that pissed off ex-employee who you had to fire is standing there, gun in hand, what do you do?Go for cover, then draw my own firearm. Most people are really crappy shots and there have been incidences where even professionals have fired 8 rounds at distances of less than 15 feet and still missed with every shot. The person who takes there time and aims is usually the one who lives. If nothing else, one of my coworkers will hear the shots and pull their own firearm and be ready when he walks into their office.
Whoever is pulling these arguments that if everyone had guns, they'd just drop this guy after the first two-three people completely ignores that there'd be thousands of cases where one guy with a gun would get the drop on another guy (with a gun or not) with noone around to carry out any retaliation.How does that make a difference? We're talking about mitigating mass shootings in crowds like this one. If, however, you want to open this up to consider all violent crime and murder in general, well take a look at the statistics for concealed carry versus strict controls or bans. It is a pretty open and shut case in the favor of letting people carry.
If I saw a shootout start I'd duck for the nearest cover I could find, and damned if I'd draw any fire to me unless I had to.That's probably the right thing to do, but if they do happen to come for you, maybe you can save yourself and a few other people besides. The point is not to legally enforce that everyone is a victim.
People can and do legally carry guns in most of the states of the union and it doesn't seem to have been a problem yet. The police don't need to know who is legally carrying a gun. They just need to know who is shooting at people randomly. By the time the police show up to such an event, the murderer is long dead and everyone has put their guns away and is waiting for the cops to show up with the paperwork.
Whereas if guns are legal, there is a more lax attitude towards holders of DEADLY WEAPONS, and they might be allowed into situations where they would hurt many people.Allowed in situations where they would hurt people? Guns don't just randomly start shooting people you know? There needs to be intent. If there is intent to do violence, then a gun can help make sure the majority wins the fight.
Many countries have banned guns and seen crime fatalities drop tremendously or be very low. UK and Japan are cases I can think of on top of my head.You are 100% wrong. Statistically gun bans and restrictive gun laws correlate to a very slight increase in violent crime and murder. The UK, for example, claims it does not know if their crime went down because they coincidentally completely changed how they count and report violent crime right at the same time, and most studies seem to indicate that it has gone up.
To request allowing carrying weapons based on the tragedy here because someone with weapons might have stopped him is not a rational conclusion.Why? What reasoned evidence do you have to support your opinion that increased gun ownership would not have resulted in a net decrease in murder in this instance?
If Cho was not allowed a gun in the first place, there would DEFINITELY have been far less fatalitiesNo, there would no have definitely have been fewer fatalities. First, he was breaking the law to have the gun on campus, so how would another law saying he couldn't own a gun on campus help? Second, what makes you think he couldn't buy one illegally if he was so determined? Third, assuming he could not get ahold of a gun for some reason, what makes you think he would not have constructed a bunch of bombs or concocted a poison that would have killed more people? The gun was the tool he used, but if he was this angry and messed up do you think he would have just thought, "well gee I'd like to kill people but it's such a bother without a gun, I guess I'll go volunteer at the hospital and help kids."
Your assertions are nearly indefensible and the facts you present are highly inaccurate. Please actually do a little research and learn what you're talking about before trying to persuade others.
Don't bother downloading it. Lott's methodology was awful and he has been generally discredited. There have been quite a few studies of the same topic since then, however that have more or less come to the same conclusions with regard to violent crime statistics in general, and robberies and assault in particular. For public mass shooting incidents, however, the number of data points makes it hard to come to a scientifically recognized conclusion. Ignore Lott, but do look into the real studies that happen to back up some of his conclusions.
Statistically speaking, gun bans in general result in a very slight increase in murder and violent crime, not a decrease. The situation in the UK is more than a little muddled due to the fact that the UK completely changed how it counted crime statistic relative to its own past methods and other countries, but to assert that crime decreased since the UK instituted strict gun control laws is not supported by any numbers in any credible study I've seen. Even the UK police in their official documents claim only ignorance, not evidence of a decrease.
Over in the USA you have a different situation - guns are widely available and would remain so even if tighter laws were introduced. Solution? God knows.Yeah and in Sweden they have gun ownership rates and laws similar to that in the US, but have ten times lower violent crime rates than the UK. What does that imply about the causative relationship between guns and violent crime? The solution for decreasing violent crime in the US is to socialize heath care, redirect our socialism towards helping the poor instead of fat military contracts with no bidding, and decriminalize drugs. Of course all of that is hard and would result in politicians making a lot less money, so instead we'll see a bunch of media hype and useless or counter-productive gun bans with no one in the news mentioning that guns were already banned on that campus, possibly contributing to the body count.
Ahh, but who do you mean? You see there is no chance that everyone will switch to any other OS tomorrow. What we need to do, however, is break MS's monopoly. If 50% of the world switched to macs tomorrow, then regardless of whether or not our formats were proprietary we would have broken MS's ability to leverage their monopoly to control the entire computing landscape. That is accomplishing a lot. That is bringing competition back to the market so that both Apple and MS have to give customers what they want in order to make money.
I don't think which OS you use is nearly as important as what formats you use. If we could convince our friends and colleagues that closed formats were unacceptable, and collectively send that message to MS (and Apple, andI'm all in favor of open formats. I don't, however, delude myself into thinking the average person know about, cares about, or understands them... or ever will. People care about the end result of open formats. They care about the ability to access the same data with multiple programs without difficulty. They care about their data being accessible 10 years from now. I doubt end users will ever connect these things with open formats in any way or be able to judge what is and is not an open format (e.g. OpenXML).
If, however, MS's monopoly can be broken, this won;t matter nearly as much because people will switch to whatever works best for them, which includes the factors that are inherent in open formats. If, for example, Apple commits 100% to open formats and so do most developers and so does Linux, then so long as consumers make a choice about OS's that will factor in and the better, open formats will take over. The trick is re-introducing a choice to the market, which requires MS's monopoly to be broken or seriously weakened and that is why, in a somewhat circuitous way, the OS does matter to open formats (or at least MS's OS matters).
Closed formats are largely one more symptom of the unhealthy market. They are a lock-in largely enabled by the monster monopoly MS is using. Treat the monopoly problem and the format problem will solve itself.
It bothers me to hear such loose talk about "taking [the shooter] down"...do you really want to kill someone? Are you that confident that you could do that, when even trained police officers have trouble doing it? Wouldn't it better to stop them from killing without killing them?
These are matters of personal morality. It is important to remember that the relevant discussion is often that of ethics, which is to say, should the government or school be choosing whether or not a person should defend themselves with lethal force, or should the person defending themselves be given the freedom to arm themselves and use that weapon. Whose choice should it be?
What about allowing people to carry stun-guns? The kind that you can fire from a distance. Shooting the killer with these would have stopped him without killing him, and without the danger of killing any innocents. There also would be no fears of more indiscriminate killings that might happen if everyone were armed with firearms.
The device you are describing is called a "taser." There are several issues with arming the students with them. First, being that they are non-lethal, the likelihood of abuse of them is much, much greater. Even trained police officers have a disturbing tendency to overuse these devices injuring and killing the elderly, children, and pregnant women, when that same officer would never have considered using a firearm against that same person.
While I find the above a considerable issue, I'm not opposed to legalizing the carrying of such devices on campus, but neither do I assume it would be useful in stopping a shooting like this one. Tasers have very limited range, are inaccurate, and take a considerable amount of time to reload. Moreover, they are extremely bulky, probably ten times the volume of a small pistol designed for everyday carry by a normal citizen. You might be able to put one in your bag or large purse, but I don't see it as a real option for an everyday, convenient defense.
I've been a 2nd amendment proponent for a long time, but I'm seriously rethinking my position. If we banned guns, but allowed law abiding citizens to carry effective, non-lethal weapons, I think we'd see much, much less killing.
What makes you think that? Banning guns does not mean criminals stop carrying them. It doesn't mean criminals do not carry a non-lethal device, but then kill their victim once they have been disabled by it. It may mean criminals assume there is no real danger to their lives if they do go out and commit violent crimes, removing a reason for them to not do so... fear.
People would still be able to protect themselves, even in the short term while the glut of illegal guns was being eliminated.
Illegal guns would never go away. In places with complete bans, career criminals still smuggle them in from other countries or buy/steal them from police and military. The most a ban does is drastically reduce availability. The problem is, when gun availability drops, criminals just turn to other weapons. Look at the UK. So called "gun crimes" are down since they instituted very strict controls, but stabbings, beatings, robberies, burglaries, etc. are way up resulting in a slight increase in overall crime and violence.
Is there a downside to this solution?
Yes. Statistically it will slightly increase murder and violent crime, not decrease it. Look, decreasing violent crime is not rocket science. There are certain societal factors that correlate very strongly with violent crime and the US manages to bring together a lot of them. If you want to decrease violent crime the most probable ways are:
...all of the recent school shooting have ended in death, often at their own hands, of the attackers. Obviously fear of death isn't working.Fear of death won't stop a suicidal person, like this shooter, but it does work against many people considering violence, especially those looking for profit. Aside from the fear of an armed defense, the actual defense works too, as in the case of the texas campus sniper who was held at bay by armed citizens until the police arrived, probably preventing the death toll from climbing as high as it did in this case.
Would you feel better if deaths happened by poisoning or hatchet perhaps? The problem is violence and murder, not gun violence.
In the UK it is national news when somebody gets stabbed to death, even more so when guns are involved (they are banned in the UK). We only have a few dozens of incidents per year in the whole country, most of them gang violence.The same is true for some parts of the US, and it's not like the UK has a lot of room to brag, compared to some places in Europe (like Sweden), including places with gun ownership rates similar to the US, the UK has extremely high levels of violent crime. In fact if you look at the whole world and compare rates of murder and violent crime you'll note something interesting. It correlates very strongly with some societal factors and very little with others. If there is any correlation between restrictive gun laws and violent crime, then statistics show that gun bans correlate with a slight increase in violent crime (barely within the range of significance).
The UK does have much lower rates of violent crime than the US. The UK also has socialized health care and drug treatment, which correlates very, very strongly with reduced violent crime. So logically, why would you assume gun laws had anything to do with it... or were you thinking logically?
If someone starts shooting and I shoot them dead, the first thing I do after making sure they still can't shoot me, is put my gun away. Then, I call the police and tell them what happened. They show up and ballistic evidence, eyewitnesses, etc. can prove who shot whom.
People are there to learn, not defend themselves, leave that to the security dept.Neither campus security nor the police (if these are separate) has the capability of defending you. Nor, is it their responsibility. The police have no legal obligation to respond and stop crimes even when they have been notified of the crimes and told you they will respond. This was very dramatically demonstrated in the landmark case where several women were held prisoner and repeatedly raped and beaten and the police never came despite having been notified and telling the caller they would come. One of the women even managed to get access to the phone to call the police again, but still they did not bother to show up. The police don't have the manpower to defend you and if you expect them to do so, you're an idiot.
I was talking to a guy whose brother was on a SWAT team, just the other day. He mentioned that they specifically arrive at violent confrontations with their lights on, and then wait 10 minutes before entering the scene of a violent confrontation to allow the criminals time to leave, as a matter of policy. They do this to reduce the chances of injury to any responding officers. Their job is to hunt down and capture the criminals for punishment, not to defend you. Ask any cop if it is his job to protect you or if you should protect yourself. Also, take a look at the statistics on 911 responses. I think they arrive in time to actually stop a crime from happening less than 10% of the time.
Obviously there has to be a rethinking of how security is handled and a way to know what kind of weapons are being carried in bags or in pockets. I'm all for gun banning.Guns were already banned there. Worked real well huh? For some reason the mass murderer did not obey the law, who would have thought that could happen? Laws apply only to the law abiding and passing them restricts only the law abiding. We cannot and should not turn the US into a police state. Gun bans, statistically, increase violent crime and murder. Proposing them as a solution is the worst kind of emotional crap. People search for some easy, simple answer that they can believe will solve the problem and so they can feel safe, so they support gun bans under the blind assumption that maybe it will help when it only hurts. I expect as much from the average citizen who has never taken a logic course and does not apply the scientific method to their own life, but I hoped for better on a forum full of supposed nerds.
There are some pretty strong correlations between violent crime and other societal factors, correlations which make a reasonable person consider causation, especially after that causation has been observed in some locations. The thing is, strict gun control laws are not one of those correlations.
And anyone who commits a violent crime with a firearm should be punished extremely severely... as in decades, at the very least. However, I think the prisons are too full right now with people caught with pot or other drugs.I agree with both of your statements, however, I don't think the increased punishments is likely to result in decreases of crime. Decriminalization of drugs, however, does correlate strongly with decreases in crime.
When you figure out how to magically make all the guns in the world disappear, let me know. In the mean time, in the real world, guns can be bought/stolen from police and military (and are in places with bans), or illegally smuggled in from other countries/locations. Now I know you're going to argue that making them harder to get will stop some shootings and you're right, sort of. Gun bans do reduce shootings. They increase beatings and stabbings and burnings and bomb attacks, but they decrease shootings. If guns were banned in all of the world, people would use other things and this kid would have made a bunch of bombs.
Seriously, if you want to stop violence, restricting access to things that can be used for violence is an impractical way to go about it. You need to attack the motivations for violence and look to mitigating violence when it happens. One mitigation that does work is an armed populace that can shoot back and the fear of death that generally works as a deterrent to violence.
Yeah, because obviously I'm a lobbyist. It's called "freedom of speech" and no I won't stop expressing my opinions.
There will be a time and a place to discuss the theoreticals of "would doing X have helped?" scenarios.If you don't want to discuss the issues surrounding this incident the solution is really, really easy. Stop reading a discussion board about it.
Good god, this incident only happened a few hours ago. People (like myself) are still shocked, grieving, mourning for the loss of our fellow classmates, faculty, etc. To hear people, like yourself, using this incident to lobby their particular beliefs, is just sickening.I'm replying to a comment someone made about this topic. What, do you think this entire discussion should be "gee I feel bad" repeated over and over again. If you're not ready to discuss the issue, turn off your computer and go to the park, or simply close this Web page, or even just don't open this particular discussion thread.
Are you serious? So you think if this shooter had not been legally allowed to have the firearms this shooting would not have occurred? Guess what, it is already illegal for students to have firearms on that campus. For some reason this guy did not stop at the edge of campus and go home because of that any more than anyone determined to kill people is stopped by gun control laws.
Of course, a gun control policy that only applies to a limited jurisdiction can't prevent someone who is already determined to carry out a shooting to enter the controlled area and fire away, but it can make it significantly harder for someone already in that jurisdiction from accessing firearms and then using them illegally.Unless you can ban all guns worldwide, including police and military then you will always be considering a limited jurisdiction. If they are banned in Virginia, people will buy them in Pennsylvania. If they are banned in the US, people will buy them from Mexico and Canada. If they are banned in north america... well you get the point. Also, in places with strict gun control laws, it is common for people to buy weapons from corrupt police and underpaid military staff. Do you advocate removing guns from the US military as well?
Statistically, gun control does reduce availability of guns to people significantly. It also increases rates of murder and violent crime in general. Assuming the shooter here was unable to acquire firearms, what makes you think he would not have built a bomb or ten? So while your statement is perfectly accurate, I think it is a logical misstatement of the problem that is your mistake. If your goal is to reduce shootings, gun control makes sense. If your goal is to reduce stabbings, laws restricting knives and swords make sense. If your goal is to reduce clubbings, laws restricting ownership of baseball bats, crow bars, hammers, etc. make sense. If your goal is to reduce violent crime and murder, none of those make sense. All they do is change the types of weapons used in most attacks.
As near as I can tell, people in favor of increasing gun control are ignorant people who are emotively reacting to things and thinking "guns bad" and hoping there is some easy way to reduce violence and trying not to look to hard at the practicalities of the situation or the numbers which contradict their beliefs... well and, of course, the politicians who are happy to exploit those misguided beliefs to get votes.