That is a racist argument. Gun rights are just as important to my black and latino friends. Not that the new reality matters to you.
America had less gun control 40 years ago and had less mass shootings. Let’s not pretend legislation of any form will be a panacea.
That’s cute you have friends. No one in GD would trade a bucket of warm piss for anecdotes to prove a point. Care to provide a link showing the NRA (the most powerful gun lobby in the US) has even proportional numbers of non Caucasian members?
Care to point out how nonwhite folks don’t also support gun rights?
Right. This needs repeated. In the 1920s a person just released from prison could legally buy a Thompson sub machine gun out of a catalog. Very few mass shootings against the innocent public.
This suggest that the availability of guns is not the cause of mass shootings and as such stricter gun laws would not solve the problem.
What metric would you propose? How many nonwhite friends do I have to ask?
All shootings? Any shootings? This particular (very weird and horrific) type of shooting? No, I don’t think anything can be done about all shootings in the US. More gun control within the realistic limits of what that could or would mean politically in the US wouldn’t do a damned thing about 2 (or 3) people (man and a woman as of the last report with another guy who may or may not have been involved) who dressed up in ‘assault gear’ (by which I guess they mean body armor and other scary bits patched on), brought ‘assault rifles’ (semi-automatic AK-47s or knock offs…still to early to know the actual details), pistols and explosives to an event like this. Gun control didn’t help the French avoid something similar, after all, even if this was home grown American crazies (still to early to tell but that’s what it looks like from the evidence so far).
Is it a problem? Well, I guess that depends. ‘Mass shootings’, despite being in the news all the time are actually not all that common. People die of a hell of a lot of other things more often than in ‘mass shootings’, even in the blood soaked and barbarous US filled with crazy gun toting nuts shooting it out in the street every day and twice on Sunday. Even if we count all gun deaths in the US (which, last time I looked, were actually down from the peak in the '70’s and have continued to fall with a few slight rises since then…despite the larger population and more guns than people in the US) it’s still pretty minor. However, people are really bad at judging relative risk, so I guess from the perspective of whether people THINK it’s a problem I’d go with ‘yes’…many people think it’s a huge problem.
As to what can be done about it, I don’t know. More gun control within the realm of reality wrt how the US actually works, how the people think and how our political system works wouldn’t stop events like this. It might have a slight effect (over the already downward slant in gun violence in the US that’s been happening anyway, despite lessening the amount of gun control overall in the US) on total deaths, but it’s not going to be massive, especially considering that, all in all, we are only talking about 30-40k deaths a year total, which SOUNDS like a lot until you look at it in perspective to other things.
I can’t think of anything to stop bizarre one off shootings like this. Like I said, these happen even in countries with much higher gun control. I don’t think that more gun control would lower the number of suicides either, considering that this makes up a large percentage of the overall gun deaths per year in the US (as unflashy and non-newsworthy as that is). I don’t believe confiscation or fiat banning is realistic, but that would probably be the only thing that could be done to really make any difference at all, if one doesn’t want to just let the situation be, let the number of gun deaths/violence continue to fall at a slow rate, let the number of households with guns continue their trend to fall. Basically, IMHO, the best thing gun control folks could do is to back off and just let things change on their own. I think (again, IMHO) that the gun banners have done more harm than good, and essentially gotten the gun rights folks backs up and noses completely out of joint…someone trying to take a gun or anything else from your hand is going to make most folks reflexively grasp it tighter, whereas if they give it up voluntarily then that won’t happen. Of course, at this point it might be moot, since the gun rights guys kind of noticed the grabbing and attempts at fiat bans and their backs ARE up.
Well yeah. I don’t care if you live in the most violent barrio out there, where gangs fight every day for control of the hookers and drugs, your odds of being shot or killed in a gun violence incident are ridiculously small. Again, this has to do with people being unable to judge or gauge relative risk. Your odds of dying from that double cheese burger, fries and diet coke diet every day are about triple your odds of dying from a gun if you live in the most violent barrio in the country.
As for the last part, societies make choices and those choices nearly always mean some non-zero number of people will be harmed or killed. Change the speed limit upward, folks will die. Allow alcohol, tobacco, drugs, whatever, and folks will die. Don’t allow those things and folks will die. Hell, allow people to eat at McDonald’s and folks will die. This is true in every country, in every society. Thus far, the price of allowing free citizens in the US to keep and own personal firearms has been deemed to be a price we, as Americans overall, are and have been willing to pay. That might change, and certainly every time some crazy fuckheads such as these sorry motherfuckers do this sort of loopy shit it erodes that, such that eventually there may be a tipping point and a sea change in attitudes towards this. But not this time. Probably not next time either. Or the time after that. But eventually? Yeah, could happen. If it does, it won’t be by fiat, however, or because the Europeans or Asians or whatever think it’s bad for use do what we do, it will be because a majority of Americans WANT it to change.
It seems to me the problem isn’t gun fetishists, it’s a lust for violence. And rage. SO much rage these days.
I’m sure I’m wrong and just don’t see my wrongness, but everyone seems so angry and impatient these days.
Thanks for the thoughtful response XT.
Unfortunate if this cannot be discussed w/o folk bringing up Hitler and racism as quickly as was done in this thread. Or maybe I’m dense in that I fail to appreciate some intended subtlety.
On one hand, I’m not convinced that the sheer number of guns is a primary driver of US gun violence. From a different tack, given the number out there, I doubt that any attempted reduction in numbers would achieve a meaningful impact.
Hell, look on the bright side. I suspect I am less likely to get shot than to die in a car accident. So I’ve got THAT going for me! 
I just came from another website that I think I’m gonna take a break from for a while because they’re painting Muslims with that same broad brush.
This is true. The reason mass shootings are frequently discussed is that, well, they’re news, and second, because in a gun policy context they’re a very visible and highly relevant symbol of the gun problem in America. They’re an important symbol because most people find it hard to get their mind around the awful, staggering numbers that represent gun deaths in America. One can talk about thousands of gun deaths with a kind of detachment; the fact that the gun deaths that number in the many thousands in the US may be just single digits in other countries is just a statistic devoid of emotion. The mass shootings viscerally exemplify the tragedy. Just ask any of the first responders who arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary.
The answer to the OP is threefold. Should anything be done about US shootings? Obviously, yes.
Can anything be done? Yes, and all other countries have done it.
And finally, and most tragically, will anything be done? No.
There were several potential watershed moments when significant changes could have been made. Sandy Hook was the most recent. There’s unlikely to be any single event compelling enough to change the zeitgeist that’s been so well entrenched by the gun lobby. All that will happen is that if a thread like this goes on long enough – and it won’t have to be very long – somebody will be able to post, “and here’s another one that just happened today.”
If the mass shooting of those kids in the CT school didn’t rally folks around reform, it’s hard to imagine that anything will. More guns = more killings. Without reducing the number of guns I don’t see how you reduce the number of killings. There just isn’t the political will to make a major change, and I think we’re stuck with the status quo. At least the total number of gun deaths is on the decline, but that could be just do to an aging population. Us geezers don’t regularly go around shooting people.
Maybe the will would gain a little more traction without the relentless bribery of the political class by the NRA.
As the AFA shows, it is possible to separate an issue from been so tightly wrapped in the flag you thought things would never change. And I’m aware that sentence makes no sense but it is very very early.
I tend to agree; if dead elementary school children don’t prick your conscience, you don’t have one.
That said, there may be an effect if the pace of “newsworthy” shooting incidents keeps up. What dead children may fail to do, fear might be able to achieve.
Everything I see says there are more guns than people in the US. A LOT more. And neither my wife nor I own one, so someone has ours! 
So what could possibly be done to reduce the number of guns such that anyone who wanted one couldn’t get one? If we confiscated a third of all guns, there’d still be well over 200 million of them out there. And I haven’t heard ANY suggestions that we eliminate anywhere near that many. Or meaningfully reduce the number of new ones being made/imported.
And there IS the issue of the 2d amendment. Even if you think it ought to be rewritten, or interpreted differently, how do you accomplish that?
What if this current story unfolds as radicalized American Muslim legally buys guns due to lax gun laws and hits soft target? I think the support the NRA enjoys falls a bit as the men wielding the guns get less “American” (white). I can see even NRA members pushing for more stringent background checks if the perpetrators look more foreign.
Maybe I’m just looking for silver linings that aren’t there.
Best I can see from the news suggests this is a disgruntled employee/client type thing. May be unfortunate that at least one named potential suspect has an “Arab-sounding” (to this clueless American) name.
I think protests and mass shootings are two sides of the same coin. When people are powerless, voiceless and desperate, they take to the streets. Some obtain that desired power back through numbers, demonstrations and chanting. Some obtain power through guns and armor and murder. I think improving the lives of marginalized people (yes, even young white male loners) is the only solution. You can’t ban guns any more than you can criminalize speech and assembly. So let’s start figuring out how to make people’s lives less shitty in general.
“Terrorism suspected.”
Is that word now code for brown shooters? If this was Billie Joe Bob from Arkansas catfish country and he shot up a disabled clinic to punish the gub’mint for letting gays marry why wouldn’t that be terrorism?
Most of these shooters did not have shitty lives. Columbine? Sandy Hook? Virginia Tech guy? James Holmes?
These guys had it pretty good.