Incorrect analogy -- Guns:Bullets:ressure Cookers:BBs/Nails/Etc. Bullets are made for guns, whereas the BBs/Nails/etc. aren't made for pressure cookers. Pressure cooker bombs definitively more difficult to wield and use as a weapon than a gun, for obvious reasons.
Trampling on the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment? This is 'Murkah. Move to Saudi Arabia, there's 28 million people there that agree with you.
My problem is knee-jerk law making, where political creeps use large scale tragedies to market new laws, whether or not there's any causal connection between the law and the tragedy. Draping themselves in families of victims. Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza, the VA Tech shooter - these were all massacres caused by murderers with mental health problems. Take the guns they used off the market, create a national registry, enact all sorts of wonderful stuff and the fundamental problem still exists: they were whack-jobs looking to make a statement with body count. There's a copycat element, for sure. I own guns in one of the more regulated states, as gun laws go. Unless there's some new national registry created - which appears to be the ultimate goal of most gun law proponents - I won't be regulated any more than I already am. I could be convinced to vote for new gun laws if I were in Congress, but I'd have to be first convinced that the "problem" is related to the law being proposed, rather than someone using tragedy for opportunity. "Making it more difficult" for a guy like Jared Loughner to get a gun isn't enough of a reason for me. Because there's no amount of making it difficult that could prevent him from getting a gun if he wanted, and it still wouldn't solve the underlying problem: Jared Loughner.
I agree with all of that. But for all the tragedy surrounding someone like Jared Loughner, there are quite a few smaller tragedies that were not pre-meditated. Let people keep firearms to defend themselves, sure. In fact, I'd rather relax the laws surrounding what people are "allowed" to own, and improve the tracking and enforcement. If someone wants an M-16, let 'em have it. But right now, there are so many loopholes and so little funding that of course gun control laws are basically worthless. They were designed to fail. Or maybe it's more accurate to say they were sabotaged to make them fail so people from the NRA could then say, "See? They don't work!"
Is gun violence really a major problem in America? I posted this in the other thread, but it may shed some light on why people blow gun violence out of proportion. US death statistics (per capita): Heart issues: 41% of all deaths Infectuous disease / parasites: 23% Cancers: 12% Stroke: 9% Accidents: 6% HIV/AIDS: 5% Violence crime / murder / suicide: 3% Violent crime makes up for less than 3% of all deaths in America each year. It isn't even close to being a major contributor to deaths in America. People just remember violent murders because they are shocking and the media covers them so closely. They don't consider the 11,000+ people who die from heat disease EACH WEEK, as bad as the 10-20 people dying from an individual publicized gun massacre (which are rare in all reality). In comparison around 575 people actually die each week from guns in the US. That's not good, but people see that 500 number and think it's a lot, but our country has over 300,000,000 people in it. Compared with the whole, it is less than .001%, and compared to all the deaths it is less than 3%.
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Haha, yeah. Heart disease. I wasn't saying the Miami Heat cause 11,000 deaths per week, but they just might if they get upset this year and fans get sad.
