# Looks like another mass shooting
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [August 5, 2012, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529 "2012-08-05T17:11:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 6
### Author:  [@ExTank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ExTank)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/101 "2012-08-06T03:07:39Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#):
>
> It is unfortunate but most on the right also support the weakening efforts of the NRA regarding the enforcement of things like the national registry to prevent people with mental issues from getting guns.
I sure hope you have a cite for that little nugget.
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### Author:  [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/102 "2012-08-06T03:10:08Z")
> [@Lochdale](#):
>
> Yes because making something illegal makes it go away. Well done sir, you’ve solved all our problems.
>
> Let’s ban alcohol next. That will work too I’m sure.
Once again; banning guns can and has worked in other countries. Banning alcohol and drugs doesn’t. They are not the same.
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> The obsessive anti-gunners who see a story about the mass death of innocent people and get a boner because it means they can feast on the corpses with more squawking about their idiotic cause are morons.
Oh, please; one of the first comments I saw about this story were pro-gun people talking about how this didn’t mean that gun control was a good idea.
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> You are morons because there is not a shred of evidence backing the idea that gun possession is not an individual right, because there is not a shred of evidence correlating gun ownership rates with crime (lower in the US than in non-gun countries), violent crime (also lower), or murder (higher, at exactly the same rate as before the UK and Australia banned most guns…which supports the fucking null hypothesis).
Nonsense. Legal gun ownership means there is a higher rate of murder and suicide.
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> You are morons because this is a closed legal question as of the Heller and McDonald rulings, and you are morons because this is a closed political question as of Obama’s 2008 election showing that a brashly liberal-on-all-other-issues Democrat can win Virginia, North Carolina, and enough of the country to get elected so long as he doesn’t articulate the stupid fantasy of gun confiscation.
Most of us are well aware of that. The gun fanatics have won, they can keep fondling their chunks of metal and selling the rest of else out because of their persecution fantasies, and the tens of thousands of people who die for their toys and the rights we lose are the price the rest of us have to pay. We talk about it because there’s nothing else we can do, and because every time something like this hits the news they come out babbling about how it’s not the fault of guns, how guns are the solution to all the problems of life, and how guns are more important than anything else in the universe.
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> Do something about the ridiculous attitudes towards racial and religious minorities, not to mention our shit mental health system, if you want to bring down crimes like this or crime in general. Do something about the cycle of poverty. Fixing the public schools and getting birth control to teenagers will continue to be 10,000 times as effective at keeping violence down than gun laws.
The gun fanatics are one of the driving forces preventing anything being done about any of that, with their willingness to sell anything and everything else out for their guns.
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> Do you want to solve this problem or keep turning into monomaniacal single-issue obsessives long past the point of your own discrediting?
You are describing the gun fanatics, not the rest of us. They are the ones willing to sacrifice and betray everything and everyone else for guns.
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### Author:  [@Condescending\_Robot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Condescending_Robot)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/103 "2012-08-06T03:18:10Z")
And yet, enough of them are willing to support Democrats so long as they don’t try to bring up this ridiculous crusade against inanimate objects to deliver the Presidency to the Democratic Party by the margin of four solidly pro-gun swing states including two Southern ones. Why don’t YOU realize that if you think the way to address the other issues is to put Democrats in office and remove Republicans, the surest way to get enough swing voters and swing states to do this is to get over your phobia of guns? Obama understood it. Take the hint.
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### Author:  [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/104 "2012-08-06T03:25:21Z")
[It appears](http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/05/13130110-gunman-opens-fire-at-sikh-temple-in-wisconsin-7-dead?lite) that the gunman was an ex-Army white supremacist.
> [@](#):
>
> Officials told NBC News the suspect, who served in the U.S. Army, had many tattoos. The suspect had some kind of radical or white supremacist views but, as far as officials said they had heard, he was not in any kind of radical organization. His previous run-ins with law enforcement involved traffic offenses, they said.
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#):
>
> And yet, enough of them are willing to support Democrats so long as they don’t try to bring up this ridiculous crusade against inanimate objects to deliver the Presidency to the Democratic Party by the margin of four solidly pro-gun swing states including two Southern ones. Why don’t YOU realize that if you think the way to address the other issues is to put Democrats in office and remove Republicans, the surest way to get enough swing voters and swing states to do this is to get over your phobia of guns? Obama understood it. Take the hint.
More nonsense; the gun fanatics opposed Obama and hate him, and have persecution fantasies about how he’s going to come and take their guns any time now. On this very forum people talked about how they disagreed with the Republicans on most everything, but voted for McCain because they were sure Obama was going to take their guns. An example of how utterly without principle they are, how willing they are to betray everyone and everything, to drag the whole country down in the name of guns.
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### Author:  [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/105 "2012-08-06T03:31:02Z")
> [@ExTank](#):
>
> I sure hope you have a cite for that little nugget.
Well, this is one of the times when the march of time has showed how sometimes the change one group claims is doing fails when it is time to enforce the rules.
After the Virginia University killings even the NRA supported new rules to deal with the issue of the inadequate system we had to identify and register the people that had mental issues and should not had access to guns, as time has passed it is becoming clear that what I thought then was accurate, the NRA knew it was not going to be enforced much, AFAIK states with conservative governors do not make much of an effort to enforce or report to the registry as the new rules are mostly voluntary. I do not remember the NRA complaining to those governors that they should be doing more. Nor I remember groups like the NRA demanding their representatives to fund the law properly.
> **[Virginia Tech Families Call On Congress To Fix Gun Background Checks](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/virginia-tech-families-gun-background-checks_n_809395)**
>
> Virginia Tech Families Call On Congress To Fix Gun Background Checks
> [@](#):
>
> “What is frightening to us is that over and over, you have these mass tragedies because our elected officials are failing to act to fix the broken system,” Haas told HuffPost. “When mentally ill people get their hands on a gun, something is wrong with the system.”
>
> Since 2007, Congress has provided only a small amount of the funds it promised states to improve documentation in the background-check system. Of the $375 million authorized in the bill, only $20 million has been allocated so far.
>
> “They made a promise the the Virginia Tech family members and they haven’t followed through with it,” said Arkadi Gerney, a special advisor to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who works with the Mayors Against Illegal Guns coalition.
>
> Due to the difficulty and cost of rounding up the proper documentation, most states have been slow to enter mental health and other records into the system. Ten states have entered no mental health records, and 18 others have entered less than 100. That means thousands of records are lost from the background-check system: For comparison, Virginia has entered about 139,000 mental health records in the past three years.
>
> In Arizona, the situation is improving, but slowly. The state had entered no mental health records into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System as of the end of 2006, but now has submitted 5,036.
>
> Still, better funding would not fully resolve the issue of guns being sold to criminals and the mentally ill, due to a loophole that allows private gun vendors, including gun shows, to sell without background checks. “You know criminals go to these gun shows,” Haas said.
And if this message board is an indication of what many responsible gun owners are supposed to be, I’m disappointed, I do remember that after the Virginia and Gifford’s incidents several gun right posters made the point that even that enforcement of the new rules to help identify and register the people with issues was opposed, mostly because they fear that the federal government would mark too many of them as unable to get guns because the federal government could abuse that power. Yeah, a ridiculous point to make in a country that still has to depend on private doctors to make that decision.
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### Author:  [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/106 "2012-08-06T04:13:59Z")
> [@elucidator](#):
>
> “And in breaking news, the first recorded drive-by drowning. Police are baffled…”
That one was solved – it was an honour killing of the three daughters and the first wife by the husband, the second wife, and the brother. The family were Muslims from Afghanistan. [http://www.globalnews.ca/timeline+shafia+murder+trial/6442509727/story.html](http://www.globalnews.ca/timeline+shafia+murder+trial/6442509727/story.html)
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### Author:  [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/107 "2012-08-06T04:24:14Z")
gunnergoz had it in one – all y’all down there have guns as a religion.
Try looking at how the rest of the developed world manages to have much lower gun death rates, and then get off your fat Bubba-Bob assess and start to deal with your gun fetish.
You are not exceptional. You just don’t have the moral inegrity to face down your gun religion
Kudos to the Americans who are ethical enough to try to deal with the problem. As far as you gun nuts go, you have thousands of deaths on your hands.
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### Author:  [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/108 "2012-08-06T04:30:17Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#):
>
> More nonsense; the gun fanatics opposed Obama and hate him, and have persecution fantasies about how he’s going to come and take their guns any time now.
You’re confusing gun owners with paranoid conspiracy theorists. Simply put Obama couldn’t have been elected without winning a large portion of the votes of gun owners.
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### Author:  [@Condescending\_Robot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Condescending_Robot)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/109 "2012-08-06T04:40:46Z")
> [@Muffin](#):
>
> Try looking at how the rest of the developed world manages to have much lower gun death rates
The rest of the world had the same murder differential to the US before the other countries restricted guns, which obviously suggests that the causative factor lies elsewhere.
The rest of the world has higher rates of overall crime and violent crime, as it does lower murder and gun crime, rates than the US. Would you ever think this indicates that higher gun ownership lowers crime? Of course not (and you’re probably right). Statistics is a harsh mistress that destroys the false correlations of all sides.
Why do we breed people who have such a hatred for Sikhs (of all groups!) that they want to literally murder them? Why does someone get to the point where they go on a killing spree without anyone intervening? Narratives of the “that devilish gun/theory of evolution/Insane Clown Posse album just MADE him do it!” school and murder as an entry-level crime are what people blinded by ideology go for, but they are uniformly false. There’s no way the perpetrator of this act didn’t have a million warning bells about his psychotic, violent behavior up until this point. Focus on him and his upbringing and the mental health system, not the tool he happened to use, that in 99.9999% of cases isn’t used to kill anyone, if you really want to solve this.
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### Author:  [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/110 "2012-08-06T04:45:27Z")
> [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#):
>
> You’re confusing gun owners with paranoid conspiracy theorists.
[looks up, sees many posters that use a huge brush and their accusations of people that only mention gun control to be actually gun ban people]
I’m beginning to wonder what is the difference, but even so I’m on the record of supporting the 2nd amendment.
> [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#):
>
> Simply put Obama couldn’t have been elected without winning a large portion of the votes of gun owners.
Indeed, anyone proposing a gun ban is a dead man, politically speaking, however I do see that there is a lot that can be done regarding enforcement of the rules to prevent people with mental issues from accessing guns and on the access to mental health care.
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### Author:  [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/111 "2012-08-06T05:56:14Z")
[http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/shooter-described-as-white-army-vet-in-his-40s-ai6ck9q-165092276.html](http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/shooter-described-as-white-army-vet-in-his-40s-ai6ck9q-165092276.html)
Some bits and pieces on the suspect. Rather ironic that he lived on E. _Holmes_ Ave.
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### Author:  [@Autolycus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Autolycus)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/112 "2012-08-06T06:14:46Z")
What if we passed a law that required all guns for civilians to be installed with a computerized sight that could recognize human forms and prevent the gun from firing if aimed at a human target? Disabling or tampering with the device would be a crime, and even attempting to disable it would communicate such an attempt to the local authorities.
It’s probably a stupid idea, and it certainly wouldn’t magically fix everything, but hey, fuck it.
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### Author:  [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/113 "2012-08-06T06:53:16Z")
> [@Autolycus](#):
>
> It’s probably a stupid idea…
It is.
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### Author:  [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 7:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/114 "2012-08-06T07:04:54Z")
> [@Muffin](#):
>
> That one was solved – it was an honour killing of the three daughters and the first wife by the husband, the second wife, and the brother. The family were Muslims from Afghanistan. [http://www.globalnews.ca/timeline+shafia+murder+trial/6442509727/story.html](http://www.globalnews.ca/timeline+shafia+murder+trial/6442509727/story.html)
…and it happened in Ontario, not the US. …And it was a canal, not a swimming pool.
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### Author:  [@Autolycus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Autolycus)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 7:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/115 "2012-08-06T07:42:45Z")
> [@Grumman](#):
>
> It is.
Phew, I’m glad I had my big-boy pants on for this one.
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### Author:  [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/116 "2012-08-06T08:13:13Z")
Two points. Firstly, murder and suicide happen even in the Socialist European Utopia I live in, they just don’t usually involve guns. The rates of both aren’t greatly different, and there are European countries with significantly higher suicide rates than either the UK or the US. Also, if I wanted a gun, and could afford it, I could get one. They’re illegal, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Secondly, the way to minimise spree killings is proper mental health treatment. You’ll never prevent them, and removing access to guns will simply mean that other methods will be used. I could make a lethal bomb with stuff I could buy in any hardware store. I don’t, not because it’s too difficult, but because it’s not insane.
All that said, I’m quite content to live somewhere that guns are rare. Just don’t kid yourselves that banning guns, or regulating them to the point ordinary people can’t own them, will magically prevent murder or suicide, or even significantly reduce them.
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### Author:  [@PrettyVacant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PrettyVacant)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 8:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/117 "2012-08-06T08:47:42Z")
This was posted coincidentally by Juan Cole:
> [@](#):
>
> Updated
>
> Number of Murders, United States, 2010: 12,996
>
> Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2010: 8,775
>
> Number of Murders, Britain, 2011\*: 638
> (Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,095 US murders)
>
> Number of Murders by firearms, Britain, 2011\*: 58 (equivalent to 290 US murders)
> **[58 Murders by firearms a year in Britain, 8,775 in US (Oak Creek Reprint Edn.)](https://www.juancole.com/2012/08/58-murders-by-firearms-a-year-in-britain-8775-in-us-oak-creek-reprint-edn.html)**
>
> Updated Number of Murders, United States, 2010: 12,996 Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2010: 8,775 Number of Murders, Britain, 2011\*: 638 (Since Britain's population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,095 US murders) Number of Murders by...
But I guess that’s the price we pay for not having a civilian militia to resist the evildoers who thrust stuff like the NHS on us.
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### Author:  [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 9:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/118 "2012-08-06T09:06:04Z")
> [@PrettyVacant](#):
>
> This was posted coincidentally by Juan Cole:
>
> [58 Murders by firearms a year in Britain, 8,775 in US (Oak Creek Reprint Edn.)](http://www.juancole.com/2012/08/58-murders-by-firearms-a-year-in-britain-8775-in-us-oak-creek-reprint-edn.html)
>
> But I guess that’s the price we pay for not having a civilian militia to resist the evildoers who thrust stuff like the NHS on us.
Huh. I’ve just looked some more stats and it seems that the murder rate has halved in the UK in the last ten years. I should probably check the information more often…
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### Author:  [@PrettyVacant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PrettyVacant)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/119 "2012-08-06T09:18:36Z")
> [@Steophan](#):
>
> Huh. I’ve just looked some more stats and it seems that the murder rate has halved in the UK in the last ten years. I should probably check the information more often…
That data is about firearms only. basically one death a week by shooting in the UK. It does mean people have to be more creative about their murdering …
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### Author:  [@nogravity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nogravity)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2012, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looks-like-another-mass-shooting/630529/120 "2012-08-06T11:42:06Z")
> [@PrettyVacant](#):
>
> That data is about firearms only. basically one death a week by shooting in the UK. It does mean people have to be more creative about their murdering …
Candlestick, rope, knife, wrench, lead pipe.
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