After probably the bloodiest battle in American history.
Why don’t we lock up all of the neighbors of this fellow? Obviously they lived near this troubled young man for some time and did nothing to stop him. The neighbors should have had some clue that he was a ticking time bomb. After all, they lived right next to him! So arrest the neighbors! What say you, Controvert?
Nope - Criminals, by definition, do not care about the law - the only people that would be affected would be law abiding citizens that sought to comply with the law, and they would then be even more the targets of the criminal element. It’s one sided enough now - criminal/deranged folks always have the edge - but if there were even ‘fewer’ guns in the hands of legitamite owners, the problem gets worse, not better.
From one of the reports, the person in this incident got the ‘weapon’ from his parents house - likely not to thier knowledge (different debate) - he did not purchase it - therefore no laws that ‘could have’ prevented his purchase would have helped. The person that ‘knew’ he had the weapon, did not think the weapon was functional and therefore didn’t think anything of it.
Amen
:rolleyes: No dishonesty is intended, but thank you kindly for your charitable assumption about my character and my intent. (It’s a credit to you that, although all I have done is wonder if changes in gun laws might help, you think I feel the need to be dishonest.) When a guy is so fucked up and dumb as to think “my girlfriend broke up with me and I lost my shitty job, so I might as well go out in a blaze of murdering glory,” I think he’s proven he is immature enough to merit the label “kid.” At the very least I think we can say that this guy was prone to the same kinds of overreactions and selfishness that show prove he wasn’t an adult. Legally, yes, he’s an adult. That’s why I’ve never said anybody else was responsible for what he did or that anybody else should be punished for it. I could just as easily have called him a moron, and in fact, since he appears to have been a moron, I think I will. The guy was a moron, and in general I would prefer morons to be unarmed. (I’m not, of course, proposing an intelligence test; just stating a preference.)
Other high-profile mass shootings have occurred in high schools, and I think it’s also fair to call a high school student a kid.
Unfortunately, you just explained exactly why it’s national news: car accidents happen all the time, while shit like this is very unusual. If something is unusual, it’s that much more newsworthy.
Actually, I haven’t heard anyone calling for more gun laws in years. It’s pretty much a non-issue these days.
Go ahead and defend the definition-parsing if it makes you feel better. All it does is make you sound like a tax protestor claiming that some constitutional amendment doesn’t apply because someone forgot to cross a “t” somewhere.
At one time, not really that long ago, one could buy a gun through the mail. No background check, I.D. or anything. Try doing that at your Walmart.
Many law makers have called for new gun laws. Both on the state and federal level.
No need, I can do that at a gun show any day of the week.
Have you ever?
Gunshows are not unique in that light. You can go buy a gun from any other private seller whether they are at a gun show, a gas station, their home or a bar. The gun show moniker is just another attempt to add fuel to a fire, not unlike the terms “assault rifle” or “automatic” weapon.
You can buy a gun with no hassles from a private seller at a gun show. If you buy a gun from a licensed dealer at the same show, you will go through the same procedures were you at his brick and mortar store. The fact that he/she is selling at a gun show does not magically eliminate this requirement.
It seems that the gun was stolen from the asshole’s stepfather.
Now, I’m going to ask y’all to be honest here. Is there a single thing your parents own you could not steal if you were an asshole? Gun, car, television, whatever? It may be locked up, but you know where the key is, and you know the combination. If you don’t, you can figure out where they wrote it down.
So, what we have here is a crazy asshole stole an underpowered hunting rifle, wrapped it in his sweatshirt, went into a mall and shot people and himself. Five of them were workers.
Metal detectors, maybe. Better mall security, maybe. But I tell you, gun control is going to do jack and shit to the issue of stolen guns.
Lamar, I think you’re not understanding. This isn’t definition parsing.
He had a rifle. It isn’t parsing definitions to note that there’s a big difference between a fully automatic rifle and a semiautomatic rifle. He had a rifle, not a machine gun, not an assault rifle.
Do you honestly think that the particular model of semiautomatic rifle he had was particularly suited to shooting up malls? He could have done the exact same thing with pretty much any sort of rifle, unless we’re talking about a single shot museum piece. There’s no magical difference between a rifle designed for hunters to kill a deer and a rifle designed for soldiers to kill other soldiers, only marginal differences. And pretending that there really is such a big difference ignores reality, kind of like, oh, a tax protestor insisting that a minor punctuation error invalidates the 16th amendment.
When people use the word ‘kid’ in the same breath as the word ‘guns’, it’s damn good odds that it’s an attempt to evoke a ‘Won’t somebody think of the children!’ emotional response.
The fact of the matter is, this guy was an adult. There are 12 year-olds who wouldn’t be as selfish and prone to over reacting, and there are 50 year-olds who would be just as liable to do it. Or would you call the NASA contractor who took other NASA employees hostage, shot one and killed himself a ‘kid’ as well?
Your roll-eyes about my characterization of calling a 20 year-old mass murderer a ‘kid’ notwithstanding, I doubt that such a label would’ve been used had this particular criminal nutjob been 40 or 50 years old, and is only possible because of his age. It seems highly unlikely to be based solely on his ‘selfishness’ and ‘overreactions’.
That doesn’t really make it newsworthy. Fifty years ago, it wouldn’t be endlessly talked about on one of the dozen or so 24-hour-a-day cable news channels. It’s only newsworthy because something has to fill up those news channels.
Then I suppose the Philadelphia politicians who attempted to pass a bill in my own state of Pennsylvania just this year requiring a 10$ application fee per firearm for a license to possess that firearm, even for those already lawfully owned by the residents of the commonwealth, does not count as ‘more gun laws’.
You didn’t hear anyone after the VT shooting or the one that just happened suggest heavier restrictions on the legality of firearms, or even banning them, at all?
I find this very, very hard to believe.
See, to most people, this is a big difference from a deer rifle. It doesn’t matter to most people that this gun doesn’t fit your definition of “assault” or “automatic”, it seems to be something designed to cause as much damage as quickly as possible.
Personally, I don’t care. You can bring out the argument that it was neither an assault rifle nor an automatic. I don’t care. You win the rhetorical point. What the hell difference does it make?
Most people wouldn’t know their ass from an SKS.
Nothing stops the feast of blood though. Any time there’s a tragedy there’s a million people with candles ready to eat at the banquet of a survivor’s grief to show how damn compassionate they are.
The thing that makes me sick is that every one of those survivors has now become a pawn in the American public’s need to show just how empathetic they are.
I don’t care what kind of gun this guy used. I don’t care that he used a gun at all. What I care about is that this just another example of how sick society has become that we demand reporters to be shoving cameras and microphones in the survivors’ faces.
I care that I caused some of it by even being in this thread and thinking I have any right to these people’s private hell for my political ends. Time to do the decent thing and leave it alone.
So is that what you think I was doing, or are you just generalizing about the word?
Ok, you’re right. It wouldn’t have come to mind if he was 50. Of course, I already said to pkbites that
“He was 19 and acted like an immature idiot, hence my use of the word. But I was speaking more generally of school shooters, like the Columbine kids, hence my word choice.”
The Columbine shooters were 17 and 18.
So it’s based on a combination of relative youth, selfishness and overreactions. So: am I trying to deflect blame, or pull the “please think of the children” thing? Clue me in; I hadn’t noticed I was doing either one.
I take your point, but newsworthy is very much in the eye of the beholder. The fact that a bunch of people die every day doesn’t mean all deaths are equally newsworthy or not newsworthy. The coverage itself is ridiculous and I’m not disputing that. I have the same feeling every time I hear about a small plane going down. I can never figure out why that’s national news.
No all problems can (or should) be solved. It’s part of the price you pay for living in a free society.
They did not have automatic weapons.
As Martin indicated, the guns were purchased legally by a second party, then transferred illegally to the Columbine shooters.
Sure. But at some point short of total ban, there will be people legally able to purchase such weapons. And there will be a subset of that group who is willing, for whatever reason, to then sell/transfer those weapons illegally to another party, typically someone who cannot obtain such firearms legally.
So, what’s your solution, short of a total ban, and sweeping, door-to-door searches-and-siezures?
Someone grab the nails and cross. We got us a Free Thinker here.
Here it is again. What point do you think you are making with this defense?
ETA: It is not a defense; it is a statement of fact, made to correct an incorrect statement.
What point do you think is being made, what truth is being served, when incorrect statements are presented as fact?