They are required to take such classes and the Orlando shooter was a registered guard.
That was a bogus study.
But agin, it’s a Olympic sport.
Oh, I agree with you. Certainly there have been strides taken wrt drunk driving. But there is a lower limit to what a society can do wrt protecting people from themselves. By sanctioning alcohol we accept that, regardless of what we do, some folks are going to die. We can put in laws and regulations and lower that figure, but we can’t make it go away completely. I think there is stuff we could do along those same lines wrt guns as well, steps that would actually have an effect instead of just be fodder for the faithful on the anti-gun side (note, I didn’t say the gun CONTROL side).
I never said that because there are 400 million+ guns in the US that it was futile to do anything. I don’t think it’s futile, unless ones goal is the complete elimination of all guns from the hands of all citizens in the US…or even across the board bannings such as those proposed in this thread. THOSE are, IMHO, futile and basically detrimental, since all they do is rile up the pro-gun side even more and make them dig in their heels even more. I think that the real way to get to where we have substantially less guns in the hands of individual Americans hands is not to try to ban by fiat and reinterpretation, but to make most Americans not want to have guns in the first place. And, yeah, that’s going to be though and hard and all that jazz…but, to me at least, IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING. Less households have a gun than in the past, and the general trend is downward…except when the gun grabbers attempt to do their thing, which only riles folks up and makes them go out and get a gun they might not have gotten otherwise (and horde ammo so they can fight the gubbermint when Obama sends the troops out to grab them all :p).
In the interests of fairness and accuracy I have to correct a claim I made in my previous post, namely, I stated that in the entire history of Australia, prior to the Port Arthur massacre no other shooting spree had involved a semi automatic rifle and that all others involved hand guns. I was wrong, there was another, the Strathfield massacre of 1991 in a coffee shop in which 6 strangers were shot by a Chinese made SKS semi auto, and the shooter then took his own life.
Still, I believe my central point still stands. Holding up Australia as proof positive that gun control works, therefore the Australian model can be ported to the US is flawed logic. Australia’s rate of gun ownership dropped from 7% of adults (as at 1996) to 5% of adults (as at 2008), yet the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows our rate of homicide (as caused by firearm) has been falling steadily since the high water mark of 1968 (42% of homicides by firearm) down to 2013 (17% of homicides by firearm), despite the grouping anomaly of shooting sprees between 1987 and 1996. The key takeaway is this, if you use the metric known as “percentage of homicides by firearm”, the Port Arthur laws made no difference to the overall trend line in place for the past 50 years. Conversely, if you use the metric known as “public shooting sprees”, the Port Arthur laws seemingly made all the world of difference. The claim to success is determined by metric you’re choosing to use, and what your agenda is. Both metrics are valid, both metrics contradict each other.
The key issue in Australia is the culture which existed in the country prior to our 1996 gun laws. It is said only 3.6% of the adult population owned a semi automatic rifle (as at 1996). In a population of roughly 18.3 million (as at 1996) that’s a microscopically small number in comparison to the grand total number of semi automatic rifles in the United States. Plus, the Australian model incorporated compulsory buy backs of those weapons to remove them out of circulation. It was doable, in other words.
That’s the key issue here… if we’re willing to say the Australian model worked, we also have to be willing to admit it only worked because it was doable. Put another way, our culture down here made it doable, our cultural mindset towards gun homicide by firearm has been diminishing since 1968. The laws which exist today reflect that culture. To port the Australian gun control laws in the US also requires porting the cultre which exists down here, including 50 years of changing attitudes.
Total agreement. There has to be a change in the mind-set, in societal values, and in our willingness to set our guns to one side (not necessarily give them up entirely.) The law cannot work all by itself: the prohibition of alcohol demonstrates this.
Eventually, Americans will get sick of the murder sprees…or maybe we won’t.
Gun ownership advocates will work with honest stakeholders all day long if the definable metric is a reduction in shooting incidents and a reduction in the percentage of homicide by firearm. And the reason? It’s a metric which isn’t random. The 20 key zip codes in the USA where gun violence is off the dial have already been clearly identified.
Conversely, using murder sprees as the metric to measure against will be met with resistance. Murder sprees are random, they happen anywhere in any location, in any social demographic. The only TRUE way to reduce them is to completely remove firearms from society. We can skirt around the edges all day long on that one, but purely from a mathematics perspective, the law of probability states that if you cannot predict with any accuracy at all where an incident of positive affirmation will occur, the only way to reduce the number of positives is to completely remove the statistical field in which they’re occurring.
I’m going out on a limb and say that fewer rich people go on murder sprees than poor people, and fewer well-educated people than poorly-educated people.
I don’t believe it’s totally random, without any correlation to social status.
(And before anyone comes in and pounces on this, no, I am not saying “Don’t sell guns to poor people.” Thank you for your forbearance.)
But if you apply that logic there isn’t a reason to expose rich people or well educated people to gun control, is there? In your own words the likelihood those two demographics will engage in a shooting spree is much lower, if existent at all.
If you then answer, yes there is! Those two demographics should also be exposed to gun control because they too could possibly do a shooting spree one day, well… that just proves how random it truly is. It confirms the problem straddles every demographic, every location.
Whereas the highest rates of gun violence and gun homicide, are clearly linked to 20 key zip codes in the country, that’s where the highest rates of incidence occur, year after year after year.
Ultimately it comes back to the metric you intend to use to justify the form of gun control you intend to apply. Reducing overall gun violence by targeting key zip codes, or trying to reduce mass shootings by targeting the entire nation?
I hate to play Devil’s Advocate, but the chap responsible for the Hoddle St Massacre (1986, 7 deaths) used a semi-auto M14 and a Ruger 10/22. Similarly, the perpetrator in the Queen St Massacre (1987, 9 deaths ) used an M1 Carbine.
Technically none of those guns are “Assault Rifles”, as they lack the pistol grips typically found on such guns, but they are semi-auto rifles.
Yes, the concept is simple. Putting it into practice where the gun will always be reliable, not so much.
And take into account millions of existing guns that simply will not be able to be retrofitted with this smart technology.
I’m a liberal that leans towards the middle. I own 10 guns. I didn’t buy a single one of them. I will probably start getting rid of some of them. But I am going to keep a few.
I have never had to use one for self defense, but that is the primary purpose for me now. I don’t carry (wouldn’t want to). I have used a weapon twice to scare bear from my property when banging pots and pans had no effect.
Some of us do live far from any type of police protection. Not that that really matters though. I do believe in the adage that when seconds count, help is minutes away (in my case more like a half hour).
Nowadays you can get stocks which include pistol grips for Ruger 10/22s (probably wasn’t true in 1986).
If you showed a 10/22 decked out with this stock to Feinstein, I have no doubt she’d think she was looking at a genuine assault weapon and want to ban it.
I agree that we will eventually have smart gun technology and as soon as the military and law enforcement adopt it so will the civilian gun community. That’s is generally how change enters the gun culture.
I don’t think chipping guns to one owner forever will work. people like to buy and sell their guns.
NOTHING would have prevented Orlando and other mass shootings like it. Blowing all your dry powder trying to stop those sort of fringe events that constitute less than 1% of all gun murders is a waste of time and political capital. Registration has the possibility of much more meaningful reductions in gun murder.
The ATF processed more than 360,000 firearms trace requests in 2014.
Licensing and registration is still probably constitutional.
I can’t be bothered to find a cite but I recall reading that handguns were the most common weapon used in mass shootings (defined as more than four deaths, its the metric the FBI uses to define mass murder).
I am pro-choice and pro-gun. I don’t think the pro-life folks have ever been deceptive about their ultimate goal of abolishing abortions entirely. I also find the pro-life crowd is also generally better informed about abortions than the gun control crowd is about guns because procreation and sex are things we all have some exposure to while a large chunk of the gun control crowd don’t know much about guns.
IMHO the pro-life crowd doesn’t want compromises and they are deliberately trying to put up hurdles and obstacles to subvert abortion rights. The gun control crowd mistakenly thinks that their laws are going to make some sort of meaningful difference in gun violence and subverting the rights of gun owners is just a form of civil rights collateral damage that they don’t really give a shit about.
This is why a compromise might be possible with gun control advocates while a compromise is NOT possible with the pro-life crowd.
There’s a lot of gun owners in the middle. They point and laugh at the gun control crowd for being stupid retarded and ignorant and they sort of back away slowly from the guys whoa re buying shipping containers to build fortresses out in the desert.
For example, many gun owners support universal background checks but realize that an assault weapons ban is stupid retarded and ineffective.
Just wanted to point out that a lot of that craziness was from the general doomsday prepping that surrounded the end of 2012 and was turbo charged by talks of banning stuff.
Yes, mass murders are only 1% of the murders in the USA. And only 11% of mass murders used a assault weapon.
So, we’re trying to ban something based upon a 1/1000 chance.
So even if we waved a magic wand, and all civilian"assault weapons" disappeared there’d be no significant or even see able difference at all.
**Completely useless ban. **
Mass shooters have been predominately white and almost exclusively male. We should put white males on the prohibited person list. That’s the ticket.
You realize that the Ruger 10/22 was one of the specifically listed firearms in her last assault weapons ban proposal, right? THAT’S how retarded she is.
I think universal background checks could be a good idea, depending on how they are administered.