Let’s assume a regular citizen no longer had or could get a gun. How will that stop school massacres? Plenty of ways for psycho kids to commit mass murder without guns.
Eeevil Looking Guns are just the “cool” way for these wackos to do it now. Take away guns and you will see “really cool” ways for these fucked up kids to murder people in large numbers.
In Michigan, 38 kids, second to sixth graders, were murdered by a maniac, and not one bullet hit one square inch of flesh. If the worst you can imagine is drive-by pool drownings, I envy your innocence of mind.
1927? You had to reach back pretty far for that one. How many firearm related school massacres have occurred in the nearly 100 years since?
Since those days dynamite has become pretty difficult for the average citizen to obtain. If it weren’t controlled and regulated like it is we might see as many school bombings today as we do school gun massacres though, so you’re right about that.
Most use whatever is at hand. The point I am making is that if guns are not available, other tools can and will and HAVE been used to carry out murderous impulses.
Not at the same rate, however. Widely available guns make it easier. I have no illusion that we can eliminate tragedies like this. But we can reduce the occurence by making it harder for potential shooters to get guns. Force them to work harder to find a suitable weapon, and some of them will give up. Plus, some of them are just gun fetishists; other weapons simply don’t give them the same pleasure as shooting a gun.
Because if there isn’t a massive supply of legal weapons and ammo out there, there won’t be an illegal one either. Criminals aren’t running their own private arms industry after all; they just steal what they want, or buy it at some gun show by the crateful.
shrug OK, it would be a wonderful thing if we could dry up the supply of illegal stuff by outlawing it. I agree. I’m just trying to envision a model where that works. The nearest thing I can think of is the “War on Drugs” and its predecessor, alcohol prohibition. Have those efforts generally been successful in limiting people from getting access to harmful things? If you feel it’s succeeded, is it enough success to justify the cost? If you feel it’s failed, why do you think gun prohibition would go any better?
It’s not that we haven’t tried these approaches. A generation ago someone looked at drugs and said “I have no idea if it will work…but we have to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING!” Sounds very familiar.
It worked for the Dutch and we hired them to help us with the Fenlands too. Alternatively, you could just spend your lives up to your ass in alligators and cry when someone gets eaten.
I heard on the radio the other day that Detroit had their x murder that day and had already broken last year’s number, which was one of the highest in the nation. But overall in the US, violent crimes were trending downward.
Because it isn’t the same. If people hide out of sight and use their drugs or alcohol, then prohibition has failed; if they hide their guns, then a gun ban has worked. Unlike drugs and alcohol, you have to go out and find an unwilling victim; shootings aren’t “victimless crimes” where both people involved are cooperating to avoid the law. And hidden guns are much harder for criminals to steal as well.
And because restrictions and bans on guns have worked all over the world in all sorts of places; we know it can be done. Restrictions on weapons in general work much better than restrictions on drugs; if the silly “outlawing guns means only outlaws will have guns” claim actually held true then criminals would be annihilating the cops with everything from rocket launchers to heavy machine guns. Guns = drugs is a false analogy.
Just like Starving Artist said! You just gotta look at all the good in the world, like him and his fellow conservatives.
I swear, SA sees the world in shades of Norman Rockwell, and can never look beyond the cover of his proverbial Saturday Evening Post.
The liberals or hippies didn’t piss on and ruin your quaint world, SA. It was always a veneer—a fantasy. Reality is and always has been like what you see in the photo linked above.
Times weren’t really all that better then. Evil and depravity were just hiding and manifesting in different ways; as they’ll continue to do.
In addition to dynamite becoming more difficult to obtain, nitrogen fertilizer, since the 1970’s and the Oklahoma City bombing, has become more regulated.
We don’t seem afraid of regulating those things, but not guns. Why?
I blame the money gun manufacturers have put into the NRA and anti-gun regulation politics.
“The Constitution is not a suicide pact”. Originally said in relation to limiting 4th and 5th amendment rights of terror suspects, but should apply equally to the 2nd amendment to help limit mass killings.
Your mighty logic has changed my mind. I thought there were no other ways to kill people than guns. Now that I know there are, I think we should sell guns in vending machines.
In other news, I just found out that seat belts don’t stop all deaths from car accidents so I just removed mine.