If people must have guns then the technology needs to change where the firearms can be regulated externally. They may be simple mechanic devices however if you had an electric charge igniting the primer instead of a hammer you could make the firearm able to be disabled externally.
None of those other items have killing as their primary/sole purpose. None of them are used to kill people at anything like the frequency of guns. Pretty much nobody here has guns, not even police, but kitchen knives, baseball bats, chainsaws and screwdrivers are available. None fills the role in our society that guns do in the US. You always get lunatics, but the less likely they are to come across a gun the less likely they are to use one. Even deranged killers here very rarely use guns to carry out their murders.
This is how gun control works in Japan http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/ But of course, they have less mental fukktards than we do.
Let me preface this with 2 statements and I know people will say my statement is whacked. 1) I do not own a gun, want to own a gun nor have I ever fired a gun. 2) I am an atheist. The problem with this country is not the guns it is the lack of a moral compass within our society as a whole. Our society is fucked up, plain and simple. One does not need to believe in god to have morals and values. I personally think the violent video games like Call of Duty etc. are a huge contributor. Guns, shooting and killing people is not a game and should not be trivialized in a video game. It desensitizes the public to violence and while your average Joe may not go on a killing spree, it glorifies the act to the fucked up mind. Guns have a purpose and are necessary - The stupid video games serve no useful purpose. I have no statistics or evidence to back my theory but gamers are usually young males and who generally commits these mass attacks - young males. The right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights is a principle that this country was founded on and should never be in jeopardy unless we are talking about a complete trashing of our constitution and government as we know it. People have been owning guns in the U.S. for the last 225 years yet these types of incidents are on the rise. I would say 50% of the boys in my high school (35 years ago) had their hunting rifles in their trucks everyday yet no one dreamed of breaking it out and shooting people.
You love your children they have everything they need to get through this. Your going to keep it together the best that you can and move forward. That's all you can do one day at a time.
i agree completely. But you can also add in that we live in a society that glorifies and televises the bombing of another country. Im sure plenty of kids died during shock and awe. I play those video games,i also listen to heavy metal music. But like the music in the 80s,some peopl cant handle it and it contibutes to their disorder.
I agree. Guns may be the easiest method at this time, but these lunatics will move on to the next easiest method, then the next... I recall one not long ago where a car was driven at high speed into a crowded market. Another where a car was driven into a gas station and ignited I believe. Many ways for a nut to kill if they are intent on doing so. The Columbine killers had both guns and explosives. Anything short of getting these people off the street is a feel good measure, nothing more. Sadly there is no way of getting them off the street unless we're willing to shred another part of the Constitution in the name of public safety.
What's your proposal? Take every disgruntled citizen and every teen who is acting out and every guy who is too quiet and withdrawn for the crowd's comfort and every person who says stuff in a fit of anger off the streets and lock them up somehow? I think you'd find that you needed about 150 million prison cells to do that. A better answer is a war on guns. Have the entire country become as tough on guns as the major urban areas have become over the last two decades. Lock up a few tough guys carrying guns who don't need to carry guns, after fair warning of course. The difference between Plaxico Burress and a tough guy carrying a gun in Texas is that Plaxico Burress lived in NYC and was breaking the law. Change the law elsewhere and the number of guns floating around would go down in a hurry.
There are rare cases like Coln Ferguson that snap out of nowhere,but there a re more likely cases like this of people with a social disability that goes un attended at a critical time. It's not so much getting these people off the street,because that would be a roundup. It's spending our tax dollars on grooming these kids as if they are different. That is a dwindling art,and is starting to become a problem. I also wonder what psychiatric drugs have to do with it. Anyone old enough to remember living on LI with the big 3,Kings park,CI and Pilgrim. When these drugs came along,they litterally shut these places down and the people were out in the street. How much mis diagnosing is going on? How much over or under prescribing? I have seen in a cvs,a grown woman was throwing a full blown fit on the floor because she couldnt cut ahead of the line to get her prozac. Are the drugs no good and damaging themselves?
if there was actually a way to make a gun control idea work,not prohibition,but control,i would support it. But the problem is that liek anything else,if you start to try to control it,the stockpiles add up. There are already too many on the street,and we have a corrupt black market. Look at something as irrelevant as Obama getting elected and look what happens to gun sales.
There's no evidence at this point that the shooter was under psychiatric care. I don't trust any of the info out there on the shooting at this point though, beyond the identity of the victims and the basic facts. The media has done a really terrible job reporting the facts around this crime. They continue to get things wrong even now days after the fact. Drugs didn't get people out of institutions, the lack of political will to fund their continued health care did. The mechanism used was exposes about the horrible conditions that many institutions presented in the 50's and 60's but it was the ability to stop paying for institutionalization that really drove the movement out of the big institutions. I worked around Pilgrim during the 90's as a visiting resource in a related program and by then it was only the catatonics and violent patients that were left. Every patient I interacted with had at least a 3-on-1 present for the interview. The other patients were all flat on their back 24/7.
You can make gun control work. It works in Europe. It would take a major generational effort on our part to make it work though. Here's an example: You make it a mandatory life sentence if you are caught with an unregistered gun. If you give up the person who sold you the gun your mandatory sentence is reduced to 10 years. If you participate in a sting to help the authorities find other sellers of blackmarket guns your mandatory sentence is at the discretion of the prosecutors and could theoretically be a suspended sentence with relocation in the Witness Protection Program and a fresh start. Put that dynamic into play and you would cut the number of illegal guns in circulation dramatically over a decade long period. Within a few decades the illegal guns would be the rarity not the norm, like they are in Europe. Then you begin to look at what the reasonable uses of a legal guns are. Target shooters do not need AK-47's to do that. They don't even need big high caliber weapons. They can shoot targets with specially modified guns that do not have the potential to become a mass-killing device. Hunters and ranchers have heavier requirements out of the rifles they need but they still don't need AK-47's. And so on. It's not hard to get to a situation where the people who must have guns can get them but reclusive paranoid people can't stockpile an armory to get shot with before their kids go shoot up a kindergarten.
You're still ignoring the "next easiest weapon" argument. I have several guns and I sometimes carry them, according to you and others here, I'm the biggest problem facing our country. My Constitutional rights are somehow less important than yours. Let's look a drunk driving. How many innocents are killed every year by this menace to society? Yet very little is done to stem this senseless act. We still allow bars that most people drive to. We have state liquor stores in every town on many federal interstates rest areas. Would not it make sense to close down these attractions in the name of saving lives? But no, we allow this because there is big money in it. I don't drink, I have no issue at all with ending any alcoholic beverages nation wide.
Yeah,but people like this kid didnt care what happened after. This kid didnt plan on walking back out of that school. Another problem is that imo,our black market is fueled by sources that are supposed to be upholding the law. Another problem is,cooperation from a 2 party political system. We can barely get cooperation on anyhting these days. But,as a citizen that cares,i agree something needs to be done. I am more on the side of fixing the individual so they dont have the urge to do these things,but i also dont think people need bushmaster etc. here in SC,we have a gun show roll around 3 times a year,and as always,it will be packed. Then the knocking off ofconvenience stores in the winter will happen. Then.i'm sure some idiots will try and top last years 65 robbed banks in our country.
This is something that works for the majority of the western world. We alone are having a huge issue with gun violence. I don't see Kings running rampant over societies that have effective gun control laws in place. Western Europe is much more secular than the United States. Religion has a much lesser hold there than it does here and yet the Western Europeans also have much lower homicide rates than the United States. I can name hundreds of rights that an American had in 1800 that they do not have now. It used to be legal to arrange to fight one of your adversaries in a duel to the death as an example. It used to be legal to bang the maid at will and she had no recourse to the courts to prevent that. There are lots of things that used to be legal but that became illegal as our society saw the damage that they caused to our society. Guns are on the edge of that curve now and the curve is bending hard. Why? Because guns are beginning to become too effective at killing people quickly and in large numbers. People are beginning to act out in ways with guns that would have been unthinkable decades ago. The argument that guns are necessary for protection from government has never been weaker. Government is stronger, period. If the authorities want you they're going to come and get you and no personal weapon is going to stop that. The argument that guns are necessary for personal protection from others has never been weaker either, because when you get shot the most likely gun that was used was one you own. In fact when you shoot somebody in your own home the odds are that that person was not a threat to you or attempting a crime in your residence. The odds are that he was a relative or friend that pissed you off and you lost your temper and shot him. The odds are that he was accidentally shot when your weapon discharged. The facts and statistics are there to see. Intruders shot are overwhelmingly a case of mistaken identity or a case of the intruder mistakenly entering the wrong residence. There just isn't a rational case for widespread gun ownership. It's a plague on the land right now.
i'll always support the right to have a gun in the home. I agree with the fact that gun make a crime much easier also,but all in all you can't just eliminate the means,and not the root cause. People are the problem,guns are just a object. Our society is deteriorating. there is no way around that,and if you take away one way,our inventive nature will just find another way. It's like a car. We are supposed to be trusted not to drive drunk and use it as a weapon. Some people still do. often with results that take away innocent lives. Besides,how can we even have any kind of solution without first infringing on states rights? I don;t mean to sound like a flip flopper,but i really see good points on both sides of the argument. I guess gun control is a realistic approach,if we can get certain nut job organizations to realize we are not saying prohibition. Maybe a few more other questions than "have you even been in trouble" should be in order to purchase. And i am all for getting military type guns off the street. But like i said,there is too much crookedness out the back door in this country also,another clear problem. When someone purchases a gun,you are responcible for how its kept and who can get their hands on it.
Even with the drinking argument, you're making it a black and white issue - either there should be none or there should be absolutely no limits on it. I don't understand why rational gun owners can't recognize the difference between sensible restrictions on things like ease of access and magazine capacity, and an all-out "OMG THEY'RE COMING FOR MY HANDGUN!!!!!" The purists' argument for any arms, of any size and type, to anyone of any stripe regardless of past history or responsibility is what makes the argument look more and more insane. Again I'll use the "then why can't I own a nuke under the second amendment?" argument, which gun purists immediately say is just a way to make their position look extreme. But according to their stance on the issue, THEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO OWN NUKES!!!! Sensible regulations on magazine size and assault-style weapons are not too much to ask from a civilized modern society who is not fighting against a tyrannical invader (and if you were you would get your ass kicked anyway). I am not for the banning of guns across the board, but I'm not for the banning of intelligent thought on the subject either.
I'm not for getting rid of all guns. The problem we now have in our country is we no longer have a draft, we have a volunteer army. Unlike Israel where everyone who owns guns is trained how to use them in the military the US has stores that are advanced armories selling weapons to people whose training may be no-existent or worse come from video games. This woman, a gun enthusiast with a mentally disturbed child had her guns, all semi-automatic, very deadly guns readily available to her mentally disturbed child. He was able to act out on a whim because the reality is most Americans haven't been trained how to use guns, lock them up properly and aren't responsible gun owners. They are the fat, dumb asses we encounter every day in the street armed to the teeth driving cars while texting, tattooed to look like circus freaks going to job interviews dressed like pirates. The frequency of these killings is going to go up if we don't do something about it. I suggest a mandatory draft for everyone might be a first good step. 6 months of basic training that included responsible use and maintenance of guns and personal fitness and mental discipline might be a start. Until then we ought to regulate how much deadly force our dumbed down, fat, lazy society should be able to carry and own. The Constitution gives you a right to bear arms, it doesn’t mean we can't or shouldn't regulate what those arms are. There is no specific right to a semi-automatic or automatic weapon right to carry or own in the Constitution.
Iran, Iraq, N. Korea, Pakistan, China... All these countries use force and intimidation to keep their populations in check. The Western European countries have decided to lay down and accept the nanny state provided to them. None of those countries is what I would call the guiding light of freedom. Your wrong about protection from the Government as well. The Government can not "come and get you" without reason and a warrant. Unless you are willing to give up the Right of Search and Seizure as well. One person against the government is a non starter, but a well armed militia... Many other gun "facts" are skewed, as many successful home defenses are not reported for several reasons. As I stated above, Alcohol is a huge factor in many of these "gun" incidents, yet alcohol is ignored as the cause, it's always the gun.
