Magiver doesn’t appear to be willing to admit that guns make it easier to kill people, or that certain guns are more effective at various things than others. Maybe that’s a “world view” issue, but it makes discussion much harder.
And it’s also plainly dishonest.
The racial element is irrelevant, the fact is that what he’s talking about is street crime and it does bring the homicide rate way up compared to other countries like Canada. And it is socioeconomic, not racial. But yeah, it’s true that America’s murder rate is driven up by these crimes.
That’s separate from school shootings and mass shootings though. The fact of the matter is that we do have mass shootings at an alarming rate. It seems as if there’s one every week, or close to it. Maybe not all of them have a high death toll; they still usually wind up injuring other people, and they’re also frequently hate crimes targeted at minorities. They dominate the news cycle, they collectively bring down the country’s morale and contribute to people feeling less safe.
What’s the solution? I don’t know. Many people would say that it’s to ban guns, and unlike some of the posters who have argued that mass murder would still be committed with weapons other than guns, I doubt it would be anywhere near the same rate. So banning guns WOULD in my opinion be one possible solution. I just don’t think that solution is politically very feasible at the current time, and I also think there may be other things that can be done in the absence of it, to address the shootings.
My reason for thinking so, is that the America of the 70s, 80s, and 90s had the same guns, but nowhere NEAR the level of mass shootings that occurs today. Something has changed, but it doesn’t seem to be the guns. Yeah, “assault weapons” are more common but pistols have been around forever and they’re used in these mass shootings also. Shotguns have also been around forever and they could do horrific damage to a crowded room at close range, but nobody was using them to commit spree shootings decades ago. Something cultural has changed…related to the internet, most likely, the notion of instant fame and notoriety, and the fact that it’s more enduring because it’s documented online instead of becoming TV-news ephemera. More wayward boys who, instead of being involved in group activities like sports or clubs, spend most of their time alone, could be another cause of it. (It’s far easier to spend time alone on the internet, today, than it was before it existed, I’m guessing?)
I disagree. You talk about Canada as if it is culturally the same as the US. It is not. You make assumptions that demographics are insulated in the US. They are not.
You don’t seem to be willing to understand that it was easier to kill someone when I was going to school. We could carry knives to school. We had gun clubs.
Yet you attribute the desire to murder to the gun and not the person. You’re missing the cause of the event and blaming the tool. It’s important to understand this because removing the gun doesn’t remove the cause of the event and a gun is a replaceable tool.
There are over 132,000 public schools in the K-12 range in the U.S. So your co-worker’s solution would involve between 500,000 and 1,000,000 armed guards. Certainly a nation as rich as this one can afford to pay that many armed guards; the trouble is finding that many with sufficient stability and patience that they don’t wind up turning their guns on the 50th student who sasses them.
I would add that this was the POV of a parent. The reason why people of my persuasion aren’t going to eventually ‘throw up our hands and say what’s the point’ is that a generation of students has had to undergo being terrrorized by periodic active-shooter drills. And they’re asking why it’s so important to preserve gun rights that it’s worth the cost of having had to routinely bring them face-to-face with the possibility that a shooter might be loose in their school and that they might be on the receiving end of a bullet.
They’re still going to be asking this as they move into the age range where they become reliable voters. You’re making this shit real to them, whether their school ever has an active shooter or not.
None of this actually respond to anything I’ve said. More straw men. Sad, really. I think I’m writing pretty clearly, but you’re just sliding in whatever you want to argue against, which has nothing to do with what I actually said.
When I was going to school, assault rifles weren’t a thing. People had handguns and hunting rifles, but the sorts of guns that are suitable for killing a shitload of people in just a few minutes were a rarity.
It’s always been pretty easy to kill one or two people you knew, or random people, if you really wanted to do it. The difference between then and now is how easy it is to kill large numbers of people in a short time.
Wrong on the second question. On separate occasions, three different cops and a security expert told me the aim of almost all school shooters is a high kill count. While it’s possible for a shooter to destroy the lock, it takes time, which means fewer victims, so shooters would almost certainly move on. I kept my classroom door locked at all times for that reason.
Maybe the aspects of your culture that are different from Canada’s are exactly what makes you unable to responsibly use your guns. So if you care about reducing violence, change your culture or lose your guns, obviously.
Or just shrug at the violence level, send “thoughts and prayers” or something comparably useless and carry on.
Unless you’re pushing 100 years old or so, your anecdote really doesn’t hold a lot of water in the bigger US picture. There was a time in the US where unfettered access to true assault rifles, not the neutered semi auto rifles available today, was commonplace. Check this scene from the movie The Highwaymen to see what depression era gun shops looked like. Full auto guns, short barreled shotguns, all sorts of mayhem causing items, available to the general public without forms, background checks, waiting periods, etc. Yet, school shootings did not exist and only “gangsters” and the like caused problems.
Today’s semi auto rifles and pistols haven’t really changed much in quite some time. Detachable magazines, collapsible stocks, all that nonsense has been commercially available for a couple of generations. It’s only in the last 30 years or so has the concept of school shootings become a thing. My point is, it certainly is not the firearms that are driving the trend. They have always been here in one shape or another. The pro gun side tries to make this distinction, but the other side has shown time and time again, that they really don’t give a shit. Not singling you out or anything.
At this point, armed security guards in schools are not a bad idea at all. Schools in my area already have that in place. Often, there are police officers on duty during school hours. Their cars are parked in plain view to serve as a warning to would be school shooters.
I’m for much stricter restrictions on gun ownership and I don’t disagree with your co-worker because this is what it’s come to. Schools have now become policed areas precisely because access to guns is so readily available to the average individual living in the US.
And yes, I am incredulous that gun rights advocates can’t/don’t/won’t see the obvious problem. So who exactly is being unreasonable?
Yes, I’m aware that there was an era where fully automatic weapons were available. Not sure of your point.
Maybe all that shit was available, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t a thing.
Tell me, how many of those things were sold back in, say, 1966 when Charles Whitman went on his (sniper rifle) rampage, versus how many have been sold annually over the past 15 years since the assault rifle ban ended?
My bold. Looking at gun laws in the US, what do you think has changed in the last 30-40 years? At the Federal level, the purchase process has remained more or less the same since the Gun Control Act of 1968. This established the FFL dealer system, the form 4473, multiple bans on “non sporting” firearms and many other restrictions that are still in place.
Since then, additional import bans have been implemented, mandatory NICS background checks from FFL dealers were added, more firearms were either banned outright or moved from the ability to be purchased by the general public.
Your assertion is that guns are more readily available now. Mine is that if anything, guns were far more easy to obtain with little to no Federal or State interference when school shootings simply did not happen. In your opinion what is the obvious problem that I, as a gun rights advocate, am missing?
To be specific, looking at the incident that inspired this thread, the shooters obtained three handguns and a rifle. They were stolen from the locked case of the older of the two shooter’s parents. Details are still a bit sketchy but lets go with that.
To do so, multiple state and Federal laws were broken including illegal possession, illegal concealment as they hid the guns in a guitar case, and of course multiple incidents of attempted murder, etc. There were plenty of laws and restrictions in place to stop exactly what happened yet two individuals flaunted those laws and proceeded to kill one and wound another 7 or 8. You are all for tighter restrictions on gun ownership, but these shooters had absolutely NO rights to own, possess or use the firearms that they employed. The obvious problem that I see is that these two waived a middle finger to the laws on the books and decided to cause mayhem regardless of the cost to the victims. Again, what am I missing?
Exactly. All of that hardware with little or no restrictions for possession or ownership but it wasn’t a thing. Why is that? What changed? I simply don’t know.
Due to the National Firearms Act of 1934, the true assault rifle sales were significantly curtailed, and in many states essentially banned. Whitman used a couple semi auto rifles one of which would be considered an assault weapon today by some, along with another .22 semi auto, a hunting rifle and a shotgun.
Regarding assault rifles, a ban never existed nor did it expire. In 1986 any new sales of NFA assault rifles were banned for civilians and a registry was created for civilian ownership that tracks the transfers or destruction of the firearms that have been registered.
If you want to talk about the assault “weapon” (AW) ban that was implemented in 1994, it is impossible to tell because unless you think there is a material difference in a semi auto rifle equipped with a flash hider that makes it an AW and that same weapon without a flash hider does not make it an AW nothing was ever banned, no production or sales ever stopped other than for specific cosmetic configurations.
During the ban years (94-2004) I was able to buy any semi auto rifle I wanted as long as it met a few non functional limits imposed by the legislation or if it was built prior to 1994. As the ban expired in 2004, those cosmetic restrictions were removed and production and sales continued as had been for the previous 10 years.
Regarding sales since 2004? It’s hard to say. I’ve read that there are 15-20 million semi auto guns in circulation today that would qualify as AWs. And for the record, all shotguns and rifles combined, not just the semi auto rifles that could qualify under any number of definition of an AW, are used in less than 700 deaths annually on average.
This is a ridiculously specious argument. In order for tragic gun violence to happen, two factors are required. One is the ready availability of guns. The other is the human factor: societal stresses, anger, hate, fear, jealousy, the quest for revenge, and so on. The sort of thing that is, always has been, and always will be part of the human condition, though the degree of it varies from person to person and from one historical time period to another. As Rebecca Peters, a former Johns Hopkins University fellow specializing in gun violence, once said: “If you have a country saturated with guns – available to people when they are intoxicated, angry or depressed – it’s not unusual guns will be used more often. This has to be treated as a public health emergency.”
As a society we do what we can about the human factor, but much of it is essentially impossible to predict and manage. Whereas gun control is a well-bounded and manageable objective, and as all other civilized nations have discovered, an extremely important one. This fact should be self-evident to everyone, but the pro-gun side has shown time and time again that they really don’t give a shit.
You’re missing the fact that, unlike other nations, the US is totally awash in guns. They’re everywhere. They’re so incredibly ubiquitous that people are leaving them lying around, forgetting them and even losing them. Kids are finding them and shooting each other. The US has a goddam gun epidemic. In such a situation, it’s hardly surprising that anybody and his dog can get a gun whether they’re allowed to have one or not.
And, not to get all nitpicky or anything, but they didn’t “flaunt” laws, they flouted them. And they didn’t “waive” their middle finger at the laws, they may have “waved” it.
The Constitution sez otherwise.
And in fact, since the shooter apparently broke into a locked gun safe to get the guns, pretty much no gun law proposed in the USA would have prevented this.
According to several studies, the cause in the rise of school shootings is media attention. If we muzzled the media that would cut down drastically on school shootings.
I don’t think it’s too much to think that expanded background checks, a ban if you have an EPO within the last five years, and another assault weapons ban (waived upon approval from local law enforcement) aren’t too much to ask for.
Of course, we’ll get none of those, because the gun-worshipers are somehow convinced that they NEED access to military surplus-grade weapons to feel better about themselves and their precious little psyches. They seem to think that something called an “amendment” can’t be altered, despite the name of it literally meaning to change or edit.
Not a single Democratic candidate is even suggesting the level of Gun control that would have prevented this shooting.