Understood. Won’t happen again. Also, nothing personal against Kobal2, I don’t want any bad blood between us and I understand now that you weren’t accusing me of racism.
All good.
Also note, very very few crimes are committed with semi-auto rifles, so all you seem to be concerned with is school shootings, which even there arent all semi-autos?
Yes, I am fully aware that automatic weapons are banned now. If it was up to me, I would ensure that they would remain banned forever. But this discussion is a digression from my original contention, which is that repealing the second amendment is not equivalent to banning all guns, which you contended.
Your second statement here intrigues me. What part of 2A would allow semi-automatic weapons to be banned? And if that’s the case, could other types of firearms be banned within its purview?
No, it wouldn’t, but that seems to be the aim of those who want to repeal it.
Well, you can’t ban all handguns. But you can ban “assault weapons”. So perhaps you could ban semi autos. Altho including .22s would be stupid.
Actually, yes, or at least the courts have recognized the right to privacy as implicit in certain amendments. Beyond that, disclosing a student’s personal information is a violation of the Federal Education Right to Privacy Act (FERPA).
But I don’t think you got my point. The fact is, schools DO reach out to students. You’re right that they can’t do it 100%, but it’s already in place.
So the question now is “What other steps should we ALSO take?”
But you said that there were hardly any school shootings. Given that, why would you add lots of guns to schools.
LEOs practice all the time with guns and are better trained than any teacher is going to be. They aren’t very accurate. They make mistakes. Teachers would be 100 x worse. And that is just in a crisis - count in guns in drawers accidentally left unlocked and you can have a real problem. Far bigger than the one you’re trying to solve.
And who is in the way of common sense gun laws? Maybe the NRA and their bought politicians?
They are the ones saying that registering guns will automatically lead to gun confiscation. They are the ones who want to keep waiting periods so short (if they exist at all) that it is impossible to do a real check.
They are the ones dead set against fingerprint locks, which could have stopped the Santa Fe shooter and would make stealing guns not worth it.
You also mention getting kids help. If a church-going football player with a two parent family is among those who need help, it is going to cost a lot of money. Want to give up the tax cut for it? Want ATF agents to monitor Facebook etc. to find kids who might be prone to violence?
In other words, do you want us to turn into China to avoid gun regulation?
If our homicide rate dropped to that of European countries I’d be happy. And they got that low without banning guns. I trust you are aware that England and France, for instance, are hardly monocultural these days.
Not quite correct. Most police receive all the training they ever get at the academy. After that, they are required to qualify once a year in most agencies. Qualificatiion is done pass/fail. Officers who fail are typically just run through it again and again til they manage a passing score. I can’t recall any agencies that mandate officers practicing. Do you know of any? I know a good many people who aren’t cops but who are better trained than your typical flatfoot. They sought out instruction on their own at places like Gunsite or attended workshops run by people like Larry Vickers. They practice a lot because they enjoy practicing. You’d have done better just to criticize the notion of arming untrained people. Bringing LE into the picture was a mistake, given LE’s own history of trampling their own peckers lately.
Ban bump stocks, raise the buying age to 21, restrict large capacity magazines. Fund a federal program to help troubled students.
I didnt say I liked the idea, just that with proper training and only those who volunteered- it might work.
Only one guy I knew who was in a SWAT unit*, otherwise just as you say- yearly qualifications, which are pretty easy.
Gun registration is a stupid idea. None of the guns used in school shootings were bought illegally, iirc. And, criminals do not have to register their guns.
You can do the background check in a matter of minutes.
Fingerprint locks dont work.
But to use your own arguments, none of these would have prevented the past few school shootings, right? I’m not following your logic when you argue against other proposals for that reason.
Nto so- in one recent school shooting- Stoneman Douglas High School - the 19yo boy bought his own guns, thus if the age was 21, he would not have been able to. That’s the big one this year.
And they would have really cut down the deaths in the Las Vegas shooting.
Maybe, sure. But that would still leave 300 million guns without them.
You are correct. My bad. I was thinking about the most recent one.
Indeed. But I thought we were talking about school shootings.
And I believe the Vegas shooter used semi-automatic weapons.
The Vegas shooter’s guns were bought legally also. Having a record of someone buying a lot of guns in a short time could be useful in preventing killings in advance.
Plus, tracing back guns could be useful, especially in convincing people to lock them up better.
Not effective ones.
And won’t until gun companies put resources into them - which won’t happen until the NRA threatens any company that implements them. If you can do them on a cellphone, you can do them on a gun.
I’m sure Sheriff Andy didn’t practice a lot, but the LEO who spoke to my wife’s group did. And I’m also sure that there are plenty of people out there who are better shots and shoot more often than LEOs. I bet not many are teachers. I know lots of teachers, and the only people who’d be more worried than me about them bringing guns to school would be them.
I did say that LE has screwed up a lot lately. But not as much as a bunch of teachers would.
Given the very few instances of school attacks and the many, many teacher days with a small probability of a gun accident for an armed teacher, the teachers will almost certainly hurt more people than they save.
That last one might help somewhat, as there are families who can’t afford therapy. But make sure that federal program is well-funded. There’s a nationwide shortage. 77% of US. counties have** severe** shortages of mental health professionals. Nationwide, just 17% of calls for a psych appointment are successful. In some areas (Chicago is one.), a potential shooter would have to wait a year for an appointment.
Cite.
They have those records, the ATF has a record of every gun bought from a dealer.
No, the LEOs and investigations I have seen, tracking back has never got anywhere. Criminals do not buy their guns at gun stores.
Yep. It takes minutes to run a FBI background check. I have done so myself.
Is there any reason why you think 50 states makes the US more fragmented than 50 provinces or 100 departments? Please note that Spanish provinces may or may not form part of a multi-province region, and that each of those provinces and of our neighbor’s departments has different demographics and politics. In our case they may also have different official languages, different tax structures, different major religions…
I mean, other than the fact that you know what those 50 states are but wouldn’t be able to name a single Spanish province or French department.