# 27 dead, 18 children **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [December 14, 2012, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050 "2012-12-14T18:38:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 12
**Author:** ![Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a587f6/32.png) [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lago_Ys-Transform)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/221 "2012-12-15T00:22:29Z")
> [@bashere](#): > > Um, actually, I think those are pretty good solutions. I’m not being facetious. But they’re still pretty low down the list. My **first five** solutions to drive down gun violence are: A.) Eliminate income inequality. This is the big one. The shit-stopper. B.) Revive affirmative action and make it much more aggressive than before. In decreasing order of priority, target gender, geography (rural esp.), and race. C.) Much more extensive mental health counciling and psychiatry. This necessitates having a health care program that’s even more comprehensive than the ACA. D.) If you can’t get rid of the War on Drugs entirely, make the drugs that have a high joy-to-harm ratio (like LSD, marijuana, mescaline) legal while making/keeping illegal the ones that have a low ratio (tobacco, cocaine, heroine) and put a large tax on alcohol. E.) Education, education, education. Specifically, the next social engineering campaign should specifically target bullying and exclusionism and. I have more than that, but America’s gun violence rate could be lower than **Sweden’s** in a generation without even touching gun ownership. On the flip-side, even if guns were magically poofed out of the country I sadly doubt that the murder rate would be all that lower. Like, maybe 10-25%. For one I doubt that any of the spree shootings in 2012 would have failed to have happened. ---
**Author:** ![woodstockbirdybird](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/woodstockbirdybird/32/7905_2.png) [@woodstockbirdybird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/woodstockbirdybird)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/222 "2012-12-15T00:25:53Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > It’s a liberal quality to focus on the negative and the bad and a conservative quality to focus on the good and the positive. In your case I think you’ve taken that liberal inclination way too far, and that’s why I said I think you’d be much happier if you were to become a conservative. 🙂 Stop the insanity. You be a moron. ---
**Author:** ![April\_R](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3da27b/32.png) [@April\_R](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/April_R)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/223 "2012-12-15T00:26:57Z")
> [@YogSosoth](#): > > According to the NRA, [1000 kids.](http://www.theonion.com/articles/nra-sets-1000-killed-in-school-shooting-as-amount,28352/) You do know that is an Onion article right? It’s a parody newspaper. It’s not a real story, they make stuff up for comedy and hyperbole. ---
**Author:** ![Giraffe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giraffe/32/129_2.png) [@Giraffe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giraffe)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/224 "2012-12-15T00:30:07Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > It’s a liberal quality to focus on the negative and the bad and a conservative quality to focus on the good and the positive. It’s so true. Unlike the nasty fearmongering liberals, conservatives have long been a unified voice telling people not to overreact or assume the worst of others. It really is their defining characteristic. ---
**Author:** ![Sateryn76](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e4f/32.png) [@Sateryn76](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sateryn76)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/225 "2012-12-15T00:32:56Z")
Yeah, I think I’m over the gun thing. Shooting can be an enjoyable activity, but those who indulge it have character flaws. Don’t even get me started on people who enjoy hunting - just weird, creepy power hungry fuckers. I’m not going to get political about it in real life, but I’m over it. ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/226 "2012-12-15T00:34:08Z")
> [@woodstockbirdybird](#): > > Quite possibly the single most retarded thing you’ve ever said. I’d be sad if I wasn’t so impressed. So you think that because one guy out of 300,000,000 in one country in a world of 6 billion committed this crime, and that it triggered a gun control debate amongst a handful of politically impassioned bozos on an internet message board, that **olives’** apparent suicidal feelings of hopelessness and despair over not only mankind and the world but herself are not only understandable but appropriate? And the good **Docta** calls _me_ an idiot? What a maroon! :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![The\_Dord](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3be4f8/32.png) [@The\_Dord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Dord)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/227 "2012-12-15T00:37:56Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > I really have to question the sort of mentality that regards a message intended to encourage focusing on the good things in life rather than the bad as “pissing all over the thread.” Maybe no one wants to convert to conservatism in a thread where **ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN** died? There’s other places to preach it. I hate for this thread to become a SA thread again (we’re going 3 for 3 so far). ---
**Author:** ![woodstockbirdybird](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/woodstockbirdybird/32/7905_2.png) [@woodstockbirdybird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/woodstockbirdybird)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/228 "2012-12-15T00:39:09Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > So you think that because one guy out of 300,000,000 in one country in a world of 6 billion committed this crime, and that it triggered a gun control debate amongst a handful of politically impassioned bozos on an internet message board, that **olives’** apparent suicidal feelings of hopelessness and despair over not only mankind and the world but herself are not only understandable but appropriate? > > And the good **Docta** calls _me_ an idiot? > > What a maroon! :rolleyes: No, your Tardship. I’ll try to make it as palin (that was a typo, but I’m leaving it in because I find it appropriate) as I can: Your assertion that seeing the good in life is a conservative mindset and seeing the bad a liberal one is laughably stupid. Laughably, I say! ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/229 "2012-12-15T00:39:45Z")
> [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](#): > > B.) Revive affirmative action and make it much more aggressive than before. In decreasing order of priority, target gender, geography (rural esp.), and race. May I ask which gender? Males commit most violent crimes after all. ---
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/230 "2012-12-15T00:42:15Z")
I think **Lago** meant women - I wasn’t sure about the logic myself, but I think it’s the same logic involving birth control and educating women in third world countries. ---
**Author:** ![Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a587f6/32.png) [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lago_Ys-Transform)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/231 "2012-12-15T00:43:28Z")
> [@Qin Shi Huangdi](#): > > May I ask which gender? Males commit most violent crimes after all. Given the power dynamics of gender in the United States, women. I think it’s pretty obvious that decreasing the gap in status between women and men reduces domestic violence, of which gun violence is a subset. ---
**Author:** ![bashere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/779978/32.png) [@bashere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bashere)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/232 "2012-12-15T00:46:47Z")
> [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](#): > > I’m not being facetious. But they’re still pretty low down the list. My **first five** solutions to drive down gun violence are: > > A.) Eliminate income inequality. This is the big one. The shit-stopper. > B.) Revive affirmative action and make it much more aggressive than before. In decreasing order of priority, target gender, geography (rural esp.), and race. > C.) Much more extensive mental health counciling and psychiatry. This necessitates having a health care program that’s even more comprehensive than the ACA. > D.) If you can’t get rid of the War on Drugs entirely, make the drugs that have a high joy-to-harm ratio (like LSD, marijuana, mescaline) legal while making/keeping illegal the ones that have a low ratio (tobacco, cocaine, heroine) and put a large tax on alcohol. > E.) Education, education, education. Specifically, the next social engineering campaign should specifically target bullying and exclusionism and. > > I have more than that, but America’s gun violence rate could be lower than **Sweden’s** in a generation without even touching gun ownership. > > On the flip-side, even if guns were magically poofed out of the country I sadly doubt that the murder rate would be all that lower. Like, maybe 10-25%. For one I doubt that any of the spree shootings in 2012 would have failed to have happened. I wasn’t being facetious, either. Your first two showed good insight into the problem that I think is missed in the gun control debate. As for the rest, when you run for office, let me know where to mail the campaign contribution to (still not being facetious). You’d lose, but it would be worth it. I do hope you don’t believe I am somehow disagreeing with you. Exactly the opposite. I think you’ve probably hit the real problems on the head, or at least started to (I’d include things like incarceration rates and times, rehabilitation for criminals, parenting classes targeted at fathers, &c, but you just stopped, so there’s no reason to believe you don’t). I may be watching the wrong media, but I don’t see anyone advocating addressing those things. ---
**Author:** ![Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a587f6/32.png) [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lago_Ys-Transform)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/233 "2012-12-15T00:57:54Z")
But bashere, all of our solutions are socialmalism. And darn it, banning all guns doesn’t require people to follow a causal chain of more than one link! Hell, even the bleeding heart liberals immediately flock to it. Also: socialmalism. ---
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/234 "2012-12-15T00:58:31Z")
> [@bucketybuck](#): > > In America, you give drugs to the crazies and then let them buy guns. > > What a country. Latest news reports say they were his mom’s guns, but fuck if they’ve gotten anything else about this story right on the first try today. ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/235 "2012-12-15T01:00:01Z")
> [@The\_Dord](#): > > Maybe no one wants to convert to conservatism in a thread where **ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN** died? There’s other places to preach it. I hate for this thread to become a SA thread again (we’re going 3 for 3 so far). And maybe this conservative kind of likes **olives** and sees her showing signs of depression and suicidal ideation because of the way people in this thread are acting and he figures it’s more important for her to see that the world and the people in it aren’t as bad as she thinks, and that perhaps if she turned away from the type of political mindset that dwells almost exclusively on what’s wrong with the world she might benefit accordingly. I told her I wasn’t kidding and I wasn’t. And give me a break on the 3 for 3 shit. I hardly post in any threads around here anymore. You should have been around five or six years ago. 😃 And at any rate, I’m but a poor, lonely voice crying out in the wilderness around here compared to all the anti-conservative crap and insults that get slogged around in this place. You must be pretty thin-skinned. (Oh, yeah, you know another thing conservatives as whole don’t do? They don’t fire off PMs telling people off while at the same time informing them not to bother writing back because they’ve cowardly blocked responses. :rolleyes:) ---
**Author:** ![Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a587f6/32.png) [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lago_Ys-Transform)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/236 "2012-12-15T01:00:34Z")
Personally, my favorite explanations as to why violent crime’s long-term trend for going down is [the decrease in lead in the environment](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/less-lead-less-crime). Obama toughening standards on mercury is probably going to do more to drive down crime than the Brady Bill. And liberals won’t even notice it. Sigh. ---
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/237 "2012-12-15T01:02:38Z")
> [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](#): > > And liberals won’t even notice it. Sigh. Ya, those liberals are all about ignoring facts and data. They hate statistics too. And they were probably against environmental standards on lead and mercury in the first place. Those stupid liberals! ---
**Author:** ![woodstockbirdybird](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/woodstockbirdybird/32/7905_2.png) [@woodstockbirdybird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/woodstockbirdybird)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/238 "2012-12-15T01:07:06Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > (Oh, yeah, you know another thing conservatives as whole don’t do? They don’t fire off PMs telling people off while at the same time informing them not to bother writing back because they’ve cowardly blocked responses. :rolleyes:) I would agree that’s cowardly. Your claim that conservatives as a whole won’t do it, however, has no evidence to back it up. Or maybe you’ve never argued with anyone on Free Republic. ---
**Author:** ![Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a587f6/32.png) [@Lago\_Ys-Transform](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lago_Ys-Transform)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/239 "2012-12-15T01:09:52Z")
> [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > Ya, those liberals are all about ignoring facts and data. They hate statistics too. And they were probably against environmental standards on lead and mercury in the first place. > > Those stupid liberals! Maybe I’m still a little butthurt from awhile back when the EPA released tough new standards for mercury and the average liberal reaction I got was ‘who gives a care?! XL KEYSTONE PIPELINE KEYSTONE PIPELINE KEYSTONE PIPELINE’. I mean, I don’t see Obama as a saint or anything, but it seems as though fellow liberals can’t see major victories even when it bites them in the throat. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Dord](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3be4f8/32.png) [@The\_Dord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Dord)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050/240 "2012-12-15T01:11:07Z")
> [@woodstockbirdybird](#): > > I would agree that’s cowardly. Your claim that conservatives as a whole won’t do it, however, has no evidence to back it up. Or maybe you’ve never argued with anyone on Free Republic. So what if what I did was cowardly? I made a statement to him that I told him bluntly that I put him on ignore. I don’t care about Conservatives or Liberals one way or another, it’s just his attitude that pisses me off. Would it be more cowardly to lie about my feelings? No, it isn’t. And I guess he did “troll” me and he is winning " _facepalm_ _threadjack off_ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050.md?page=11) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/27-dead-18-children/644050.md?page=13)