Well, good news, soon they’ll become so commonplace that nobody will do them.
It doesn’t seem to matter, since violence happens in every country. Shootings are much more rare in other countries though.
OK, you’ve taken away the superpower to kill with a twitch of a finger.
How does the student get to school?
Are you trying to make a point that cars can be deadly? If so, then we don’t need guns. Guns serve no purpose, apparently, since it’s so easy to kill!
Or maybe we can talk like adults, and recognize that guns really do make it easier to kill (especially kill specific targets!), and different kinds of guns can be more or less effective in different circumstances. Which doesn’t necessarily mean we should ban them, but at least we can recognize that certain tools (like guns) are better at certain things (like killing the people in a school that a deranged person might hate), and it’s reasonable to talk about the availability of such deadly tools.
Walk, take the bus, take a cab, carpool, bike, skateboard…wait! Of course! I bet you are going to talk about the infamous Missoula Montana Mazda Massacre, where the lone student driver drove from room to room to room, running over 6 teachers and 17 students before being stopped by a spike strip in the third floor teacher’s lounge.
Well, that’s the thing - of course you can’t use a car to go from room to room and kill a bunch of people. (You can drive it into a crowd, though, which we have seen numerous times recently.) Yeah, cars account for only the tiniest percentage of malicious homicide, as compared to firearms. But they account for more deaths.
Are deaths from shootings a greater hardship on society than death from cars? It’s not a rhetorical question, I actually don’t know the answer. Maybe they generate more fear because they garner coverage in the media. But the widows and orphans are still widows and orphans.
We could probably cut driving deaths in half by requiring all drivers to use a manual car unless physically unable to do so. Having to control a clutch and a shifter makes it a hell of a lot less likely to be distracted on your phone, or to zone out and lose control. But “we’ve decided” that this is unfeasible, just like “we’ve decided” that banning guns is unfeasible.
No, I think the topic is more serious than your sarcasm indicates. I was going to point out that in a gun free city such as London people still murder each other. You forgot about the incident where 8 people were killed by being run over or stabbed.
The change in methodology didn’t alter the intent or the outcome of the London attack. What is relevant to point out is the tool that ended the attack was a gun.
So guns can be especially effective a killing people?
Compare the murder rate in England to the murder rate in the U.S.:
England-1.22 per 100,000.
United States-5.35 per 100,000.
they’re especially effective at defending people.
that might mean something if cars, knives and guns killed people. Since they don’t it’s a meaningless cite.
But not attacking? Oh no! Please tell our military. They’ll need to get rid of all their guns and get cars!
In all seriousness, is it really too much to ask you to agree that yes, guns are the easiest and most effective way to kill people in certain circumstances (like, say, desiring to kill the people you hate at your school)?
Easier than sitting in a comfortable seat and mowing them down? How many bodies to the gallon does the average family car get?
More to the point, if you take away all the guns in the world, ALL OF THEM, it doesn’t reduce the urge to kill by any amount. Columbine would have been a bus driven through a classroom or a fire bombing or some other form of murder.
Let people have all the urges they want. Semiautomatics just make it a lot easier for them to put their urges into lethal action with high efficiency.
Columbine was a bombing, in the sense that the killers brought bombs. It turns out their homemade explosives weren’t nearly as dangerous as their off-the-shelf firearms.
And in which of those situations would a gun have been:
Huh?
I haven’t suggested taking any guns away. If you’re just gonna make straw man arguments, and if you aren’t even able to admit obvious things like “guns can be the most effective way to kill people in certain circumstances”, then there’s no point in discussion.
Easier? Do you think theses shootings are about efficiency? These are fantasies played out. The guns are for their excitement and your benefit. thanks to powerful home computers it’s life imitating art.
Again, all of this was for their entertainment. If efficiency was their goal it would have been far worse but probably less entertaining. Take away the gun and something else would have been substituted to meet their needs.
Children have always had the capacity to kill. I carried a boy scout knife to school from the 3rd grade on. I made a foot long knife in shop class in high school. The rural schools had gun clubs. I learned to shoot at school (after hours).
I’m starting to feel like there’s a language barrier or a funhouse mirror between us - we’re talking about how guns uniquely enable most any random individuals to inflict a great deal of damage in a short period of time and you’re determined to talk about motive, or literally anything other than simple functional reality. You are aware of how guns work, right?
Magiver, you asked how things would be better if we could magically get rid of all guns in America. You got rid of all the hard stuff, like how the bad guys will still have guns. They don’t–we magically got rid of them.
So now a school shooting is impossible. There can be some other sort of killing, but none as efficient as using a gun. You created a hypothetical that causes you to lose. I do not know why you did this.
The real world issue is that you can’t actually make guns go away like magic. So therein lies the debate if some gun control is better than none. The problem is that every attempt at smaller things is treated like we’re taking away your right to bear arms.
Maybe it won’t work. But we could try. The pro-gun side doesn’t have anything to propose, and is actively weakening the laws that already exist (like background checks) that are designed to help. You don’t just support the status quo, but want to make it easier for everyone, including the bad guys, to get access to guns. It boggles our minds, and genuinely makes us think you don’t care.
Yes, I’m determined to talk about motive because people die from the intent to kill.
We carried knives to school when I was growing up. Guns were easily available. In other words, it was EASIER to kill each other when I went to school. You don’t seem to grasp this.
As long as the desire to kill is there then alternate methods will be used. If the Columbine murderers had used cars they could have killed far more children because the scene of the crime would have been in constant motion. The police would be driving from one pile of dead bodies to another chasing after them. The kids could have driven from place to place and stabbed the driver of their next assault vehicle to throw off the police. That took all of 5 seconds of planning. How long do you think they spent planning the school shooting?
So explain to me how you’re going to stop kids from killing who have less access to weapons than we had when I was a kid. You can legislate anything you’d like and we will discuss it as if it happens overnight. I’m not suggesting that removing all guns is a fantasy. That’s not the argument. The argument is that removing them will cause a shift in methodology.