Holmes and The unimbomber don’t fit the profile of people who are successful and mature over a long period of time. This guy worked a career to retirement. The former two were going off the rails pretty early on, and were troubled almost from day one.
I don’t think mcafee really fits in the group we are describing. That being said you have a good point. People do succeed despite being troubled or disturbed. I had been thinking that it’s hard to accomplish that level of success over a lifetime if you have the inclination to do these kind of things.
If it’s an impulse, you are disciplined enough to fight enough to fight it. If it’s something you are compelled to do than how on earth do you live a full relatively normal life, have a career and wait until you are retired to do it?
I don’t know whether to hope you’re right, or not. Because if we do hear from him - discover his diary, search his browser history, find a suicide note, whatever - if he does give his rationale, that will be a game-changer.
Because imagine the different reactions if he says any or all of the following-
[ul][li]Death to the infidels! Allahu-akbar [/ul][/li][ul][li]I shot them because country and western listeners voted for Trump [/ul][/li][ul][li]Make America Great Again [/ul][/li][ul][li]Death to the Zionist Occupation Government [/ul][/li][ul][li]Black Lives Matter [/ul][/li][ul][li]My neighbor’s dog made me do it [/ul][/li]
Yours in good health thru the purity of essence of our precious bodily fluids,
Shodan
I quoted David Frum on this earlier. Frum, incidentally, is one of those rare Republicans in favor of gun control. In the aftermath of Sandy Hook – which was particularly emotional because of the small children involved – the gun lobby felt under threat and redoubled its efforts. It was successful not only in promoting more gun proliferation, but in getting more states to support open carry and concealed carry. Perversely, even the most horrific gun violence results in more guns than ever, being carried around more than ever, helped along by the equally perverse delusion that the gun carrier is immune from this growing violence. As long as this state of affairs persists, no imaginable event is going to be a game changer.
This is not a complaint about the warning - I think my comment was a fair assessment of the poster’s intentions, but fine, I’ll be ‘civil’.
But if I may:
I hope it’s a touchy issue for a hell of a lot longer than ‘a while’. I hope it’s an UNCOMFORTABLE AS FUCK issue as long as 30,000 people are needlessly dying each year.
Any pro-gun folks want to chime in on the legality of bump-stocks (or cranks, or other semi-to-auto functionality mods)? Is it reasonable to consider re-evaluating this?
I suppose I could be considered pro-gun, but sure, why not? Keeping in mind that it will be nearly pointless - when was the last time someone got shot with a weapon with a bump stock?
It’s not mostly cosmetic or incoherent like the AWB, but it isn’t going to any more effective. But if we have to do something, that is no worse than anything else.
I suspect it would have a similar effect to high-capacity magazine bans: piling on more “proof” that Big Government is trying to erode the 2nd amendment and eventually Take Away All the Guns.
Sure, it’d be mostly symbolic, but it might make it a bit harder for the next guy to top this record in terms of body count, which would be a positive thing. But a symbol like it could be valuable in showing that not every gun control measure needs to be the end of the world.
I think you overstate it by saying it’d be “nearly pointless” – maybe bump-stocks and other mods weren’t well known enough that non-gun-hobbyists were aware of them, and IIRC, most mass shooters are not gun hobbyists. Now, anyone who wants to do a mass shooting will be aware of them.
Bump stocks make the weapon very similar to a prohibited machine gun under the NFA. As long as the NFA exists, then it is only imprecision of the legislation that prohibits machine guns but allows bump stocks. Since the NFA is still good law, then I think bump stocks should fall under its auspices. There’s no good way to do that though, because the law would need to be re-written. If SHARE passes, then perhaps inclusion of a prohibition of bump stocks can be added.
I don’t understand this. Several times in past years I’ve referred to an article in the Atlantic quite soon after 9/11, describing “low tech” approaches terrorists could take rather than attacking airplanes - or high security targets like nuclear plants. How much planning and how hard would it be to walk into a commuter station at rush hour - or any other target-dense area - with a couple of pistols? That we don’t see more incidents is a testament to humans not being QUITE as bad as I sometimes imagine.
In a perverse way, I sometimes see the election of Trump as a positive development, only because it casts aside the facadeof America and anything other than brutish, selfish, ignorant, lacking self control … How things go over the next few years may affect whether that aspect remains predominant, or whether more inclusive/tolerant/progressive voices will ascend.
“Keeping in mind that it will be nearly pointless - when was the last time someone got shot with a weapon with a bump stock?”
It turns a legal weapon into a virtual automatic machine gun, with a legally purchased stock, and you are saying “nothing to see here”? Really?
Because it hasn’t happened much, that we can cite?
Why do you think he used it? Is it possible he was using the devices to kill as many people as he could in the time he took? Do you think he’s a unique figure in human history? That guy?
Oh yeah. He was rich and white. Sorry I forgot myself for a second.
I think a lot of the problem is that people who advocate for gun control often don’t know a lot about guns, the people who use them and why, and want people want in a gun.
So, somebody uses an automatic weapon in a bad way, and they propose a ban on an automatic weapon. The ban goes through and automatic weapons are defined as a weapon that fires more than so many rounds with a trigger pull. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Two intentional consequences have occurred. First is that automatic weapons have been banned because they are badass and really cool. Everybody wants one because of how cools they are, how rare and because you can’t have one. It’s like Pappy Van Winkle is to whiskey. Or a rare card in magic the gathering, or the upside down stamp. An Automatic is now a grail type purchase for a collection. The second thing you’ve done is create a fun and highly profitable engineering contest. Seeing as an automatic is the unattainable rage that everyone wants, if you can figure out a way to design or modify a gun to give it the functionality of an automatic while technically not being an automatic, you are going to sell a lot of product and get rich.
What a bump stock does is to turn a non automatic into a functional automatic. An automatic is defined by how many bullets are fired with a pull of the trigger. A bump stock simply pulls the trigger for you really fast. The end result bullets are fired at a comparable rate to an automatic. The net result of the legislation is that you’ve made everybody want an automatic and now a functional automatic is easier to have than it was before your legislation.
This same thing happened with switchblades. Some people saw West Side Story and it made them sad and they didn’t want that to happen with their kids and they banned switchblades. Never mind that switchblades weren’t that popular or prevalent and were generally poorly made. Now they were cool. Everyone wanted one. The manufactures figure out all kinds of different ways to give the functional of a switchblade without the technicality of a switchblade, assisted openers, flippers, Bali Songs, gravity knives etc. the end result today is that there are tons of pocket knives available and almost any decent one is functionally a switchblade in terms of ease of deployment.
My argument is that you don’t outlaw features of guns, you outlaw lethality. I consider a handgun or a rifle to be roughly equivalent to a car in terms of their lethality. Deliberately abused under good circumstances the over and under of people you can kill with a car is, say, 12. Society has accepted the risks of cars and that level of lethality. An assault rifle though is enough to let you kill everybody in a crowded room or concert. The lethality is much higher, like a handgrenade or a land mine. You restrict weapons based on their lethality. Police and military only. Do that and you take away the cool factor of banned technology and you sidestep the arm race that occurs to replace whatever feature you’ve banned.
OP: You couldn’t be more wrong. Did you write this in the minutes after the spree?
Two things are very obvious:
He shot many many more rounds into the crowd because of Bump stocks, which are a legally purchased way to make your gun into an illegal device; If you want to believe he didn’t kill more people because of this, you are into the irrational.
His failure to obtain silencing for his guns prevented the shooting from going on for more time. Every second might represent a dozen lives. The fact that he didn’t have a silencer is the reason some people are alive. Of course trump jr is a huge promoter of the proposed regs allowing silencers. “It’s a health issue for me.”
And you think gun control regs don’t address any of these things? What do you think they do?
Silencers are another example of what I think about as a bad gun reg, promoted by people who don’t really know what they should know.
I think the fear against silencers is that somebody is going to kill a whole bunch of people because it’s going to be so quiet that they won’t know somebody nearby is shooting people.
This is pretty ridiculous. Guns are really really really loud. Silencers just make them loud. If somebody is up to no good with a silenced weapon near you you are going to get the gist of it pretty quickly.
A shrouded gun is nice, the same way a muffler is nice on a motorcycle. You shouldn’t have to have to wear hearing protection or damage your hearing to fire a gun.
The perception is that gun control advocates want to make it as obnoxious and unpleasant as possible to fire a gun just because they are being dicks. Not saying that’s true but that’s how a lot of gun people feel.