I know a lot of teachers. The idea of arming them is laughable. Most of them are scared of guns themselves.
I’m speaking only for myself. I’m not talking about a training program for teachers to defend the school.
I am speaking merely of repealing state laws that allow otherwise qualified adults: teachers, parents, administrators, and guests, who are lawfully on school grounds to be able to carry there just like they can carry at McDonalds at a birthday party where there are 30 children present.
I did say volunteers. And most people are scared of guns until they learn to use them. Having a deafening explosion go off six inches in front of your fingers is scary until you learn that it’s not going to blow your fingers off, it’s not going to jump out of your hand, it’s not going to spontaneously shoot unless you have your finger on the trigger. In that respect it’s no different from learning to handle a power saw or a nail gun.
The really paranoid gun-rightists are already presuming that the eevil King Obama the First is going to ban guns, and planning accordingly. There are thousands of people with basement machine shops out there that could crank out simplified WW2-era submachinegun designs like the Bren or the M3. Maybe not Smith & Wesson quality but not zip guns either. Or there are '60s-era radical pamphlets that are basically “how to ambush a cop and steal his gun”. And of course the people who supply cocaine and heroin will be able to supply guns if you can pay the markup.
This is true… but the thing is, if I found out that American planes crash a lot more often than, say, French planes, I would think we should do something to fix that. Even though plane crashes are rare.
Likewise, if people get killed by guns a lot more often in the U.S. than in other 1st world countries, I think we should try to fix that, too.
Is it as big a problem in terms of numbers as obesity or drunk driving? No, of course not, and I don’t think it should be a higher priority than those things. But I also don’t think this is some sort of zero sum game where any effort to address gun violence means that much less effort to stop drunk drivers or whatever.
A registered and tagged gun, bought with the help of a licensed intermediary, and fully insured, is just as capable of shooting up a school as it always was. That’s the fundamental problem. The reason people object to rules like those you suggest is that they make things needlessly difficult for law-abiding citizens without actually solving any problems. Criminals who use guns would use stolen and unregistered guns anyway, they’re fucking criminals. Law-abiding citizens would follow the law, pay the fees, deal with the bullshit - and a few of them will flip out and use their totally legally acquired guns to murder someone anyway, just like what happens today. Nothing would change.
William Saletan’s take on this.
Earlier I referred to automatic weapons, in a state of anger, and admittedly in ignorance of what exactly an “automatic” weapon is. Saletan says more accurately how I feel about this tragedy and gun ownership in this country.
There is something wrong with your link. But the quote is beyond stupid. The reason most of the top 25 mass shootings involved semiautomatic weapons is that essentially every modern commercially-available weapon is semiautomatic (I am including revolvers, since single-action revolvers are rare, and can be fired pretty rapidly with a little practice anyway).. This is like dramatically concluding that most car accidents involve 4-door sedans or SUVs. Yeah, no shit.
They fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. That’s the design. By and large, they’re all the same speed, not any faster or slower than any other. And semi-automatic weapons have a huge advantage for self-defense and police work - if you fire one shot and miss, you’re not left vulnerable fucking with your gun, you can immediately shoot again. He talks about “high-speed” and “rapid-fire” weapons as if there is some class of high-speed semi-automatic weapons that could be banned, without requiring everyone to switch to manual bolt action rifles or muzzle-loaders or something. There isn’t.
Indeed, in a slice of poetic justice, the lions share of that list of states should have been assigned 3/5 of a veto vote. We let them off the hook too easy.
There, you see?! You see how he says that like it’s a bad thing?! Kneejerk stigmatization . . . Watch for the moles, Czarcasm, watch for the moles . . .
Have you noticed how we go through this gun-control/gun-rights debate after every mass shooting? And it’s pretty much the same arguments every time.
By confronting the reality that this is not civil war era America and guns won’t keep tyranny from your doorsteps when its you, yourself, who has become the tyrannical.
Well, I can’t really reconcile any restrictions with my interpretation of the second amendment as it is written. But the second amendment is poorly written and doesn’t take into account needed restrictions, in my opinion. So, going more by what I feel is the ‘spirit’ of the second amendment rather than its actual wording, this would be my plan:
A person should perhaps need a license in order to own any firearms. The requirements can be something along the lines of:
Pass a mental health examination to obtain the license, and get a new one every time the license needs to be renewed (say, every 2 years seems reasonable).
Pass a safety examination. This one can be re-checked every 5-10 years instead of every 2, since it’s not a condition that is likely to change based on stresses in a person’s life and such.
Have no criminal record for violent crime. If they have ever been convicted of a violent crime, they have forfeited their right to bear arms.
Have no convictions for felonies for the last…say, 5, perhaps 10, years, of any kind, whether violent or otherwise.
In addition to that, each firearm can have an individual title, tracked, registered, and renewed in a consistent manner through a national database or some such (technically it would really wind up tracking the key parts of the gun, not the entire thing, but for most people this would be the same thing). The gun title should list individuals authorized to use the weapon, and if anyone not on that list uses it for any (non-emergency) reason, both the user and the owner can be prosecuted if caught. It should also be an absolute requirement to report theft of a firearm as soon as possible; if an owner fails to report a theft and it can be reasonably proven that they knew, but didn’t bother to report it, they should be able to be severely prosecuted for failure to report the theft.
Owning any specific firearm should also come along with a use examination; you need to show you can effectively use the weapon, that you have reasonable control over it in a variety of situations. This is separate (but connected) to safety; it’s more directly connected to a person’s physical ability to use the weapon without losing control of it due to kickback or other factors.
After these requirements are met, other things could even have restrictions lowered. The gun license could be considered an all-encompassing license: once you’re licensed, you can carry, open carry, concealed carry…whatever you like. Assuming the safety examination is rigorous and the mental health examination checks you out, there’s no reason to restrict you from doing whatever you like with your firearm. It doesn’t restrict people from owning guns if they can show they’re responsibly owned. An important facet of this is that these requirements should come at very minimal cost; registration and licensing, as well as mental health testing, should be as near to free as is reasonably feasible, so as to not impose an undue financial burden on people who want to own guns; the **cost **of licensing shouldn’t be a barrier if you want to own guns.
I think that people on both sides of the argument - the pro-gun people who insist that there should be no restrictions, and the anti-gun people who want to insist that there should be no guns ever, do a disservice to the actual point of getting a safer, more effective policy in place that reduces the access criminals and nuts have to guns, while preserving the rights of normal, sane people to own weapons if they feel either the need or the desire.
Mnemosyne, I don’t believe that what you suggest would have prevented Columbine; the guns used in that attack were legally purchased by the students’ parents and I’m comfortable assuming that if they parents qualified before your rules were put in place, they’d qualify for them afterward. All that your changes would do is make the parents significantly more liable for what happened, and that’s not the goal, really.
This is not true. The Columbine weapons were purchased by a friend of Harris and Klebold, and given to them.
And that purchase and transfer was illegal, as neither Harris nor Klebold was legally eligible to own the eapons (and the purchaser knew it).
Not a bad plan overall, MnemNosyne, although I’m not sure just how you’d design a suitable mental health examination. I’m not opposed to all firearms regulations, only poorly thought out ones (like trying to ban “assault weapons”).
What the fuck is a “safety examination”? I’ve handled guns for 40 years. There is no reason I need to demonstrate my skills/knowledge to any agent of the state to keep any weapons I may have.
Who pays for this “mental examination”? Doctors don’t work for free and my taxes are too high already. What protections are there to ensure the examiner gives a fair examination rather than arbitrarily disqualifying everyone he sees to advance an anti-gun agenda? Peer Review? Appeal? Who pays for that?
In my state, currently any felony conviction disqualifies a person from possessing a gun forever, unless they manage to get their rights restored through a convoluted process that is rarely successful. I’d keep it that way.
If you want to actually say something and offer an argument (as you did in a later post), do that. This kind of post contributes nothing to the thread and in the future you should dispense with it.
OK. After a lengthy discussion on Facebook with an old friend of mine we came up with an idea that could help in lot of these situations. Hold parents criminally negligent if they don’t do everything they can to discourage and prevent violent behavior. If it turns out that this kid showed signs of mental instability and can be proven in a court of law, then the parent(s) are held responsible. This coupled with Mnemnosyne’s ideas sounds like a good plan. This can also be extended to the licensed gun holders. SO basically, if you are licensed to a gun and someone steals said gun, assuming it was stored/controlled properly, they can be held liable to any or all consequences. This would also require some sort of legislation dictating a storage/safety standard for gun owners at a national level, not state.
This kind of thinking is typical kneejerk stupidity. Adam Lanza was 20 years old. No longer a child in most states. And one of the victims was his mother. How long would you like to incarcerate her corpse?