This make no sense. Reducing the amount of guns will reduce the amount of gun owners at the margin, but by definition mass shooters are not marginal gun owners. Marginal gun owners would be hunters, or people who use them for home defense. If guns became alot harder to get hunters could switch to bows and home defenders could switch to baseball bats. However, perpetrators of mass shooting can only do them with guns so they are the least likely to be affected by making guns harder to get.
This is the problem, the number of people who would follow the gun laws but not follow the murder laws would seem to be quite small.
What **Richard Pearse **said. Amnesty on all illegal guns, and also give monetary compensation (however, be careful you don’t create a perverse incentive here: Someone might just start up their 3-D printer at home, manufacture ten thousand homemade guns, and then “sell” them all to the government this way; big profit.)
With 300 million guns in America, this buyback program won’t be cheap, either.
Finally, once the amnesty is done, you need to really crack down on illegal gun ownership. It needs to have heavy penalties.
And that is why we need to limit their access to them.
We need a “War On Guns” and a “Gun Czar”.
It works so well against drugs, after all.
Or to put another way, the number of people who would violate a murder law, but obey a gun law, is even smaller yet.
I’m reminded of a cartoon that showed two masked killers toting guns standing outside a school entrance that reads “No Guns Allowed.” The killers sigh in disappointment, “$%((@, guess we can’t carry out our shooting after all.”
I’m a liberal, and I have more guns than Stephen Paddock. (No explosives though, and I’ll bet my collection is a bit more varied than his, and I’m counting muzzle-loaders.) I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will gladly turn in my collection to the government if they pay me the current fair market value as stipulated in the 5th Amendment’s ‘Just Compensation’ clause in the U.S. Constitution.
What would it change? We won’t know until the research is conducted. But my understanding is that the gun lobby and its supporters won’t allow the CDC to conduct the research and that needs to change. More and better health care for mental health issues would help in general, not just in cases of gun violence.
Just earlier this year, the Republicans removed restrictions on gun sales to the mentally ill.
Yes, it’s that bad.
Criminals get their guns by stealing them from non-criminals and from gun stores that “lose” inventory all the time; they seldom make guns from scratch. Fewer legal guns mean fewer illegal guns. Both because there’s fewer guns for them to steal, and because there’s less reason to want one.
The problem is that the typical result of that kind of research is that the cause of gun violence is the availability of guns. People don’t want to hear that answer.
The problem with the second amendment as an absolute standard and protection of a gun owner, is that it protects them all the way up until their bullet enters someone else’s body. " the use he put it to is not protected by the Second Amendment. " is the defense laid out for the second amendment.
Then they are a criminal, and what’s the second amendment have to do with that?
In the other thread, it was brought up, what do we do about knives? Well, try killing dozens and injuring hundreds with a knife from the 30th story sometime, see how that works out. Baseball bats? Same thing. When one person manages to kill 58 people and wound 100s others with a baseball bat, we can look into the tradeoffs of having them around.
Cars? That’s a complicated one. But, a simple answer is that most outdoor venues like this have concrete planters, or less disguised concrete poles and barriers specifically to prevent cars from entering these areas. There is an effective protection against the threat that cars and even trucks pose to large crowds. Try killing people with a car from the 30th story.
Fertilizer bombs like we had in OKC? That’s an easy answer. We regulated the purchase of fertilizer that could be used to make bombs.
Comparisons were made to drunk drivers. Well, we don’t allow people to drive drunk. We don’t even let people have an open container in their car in most states(if not all, I can’t remember if texas ever actually passed that). If alcohol were the same as guns, we would say that they are just exercising their right to have and drink alcohol up until the moment that their car impacts another car, and at that point, they aren’t exercising their right to drink alcohol, they are involved in an automobile accident, which has nothing to do with alcohol.
But guns? No, guns we just have to accept the consequences. There is nothing that we can do to prevent these events from occurring again. Some guys 200 years ago decided that for reasons that made sense at the time, to make sure that we would be able to fill out a militia with armed men, and we live with that.
There are reasonable compromises to be made. We could make the types of guns that were using in this shooting, and guns like that, just a bit harder to get ahold of. We shouldn’t normalize open carry. It is entirely possible that there were other guests or staff that saw this guy bringing these guns up to his room, but didn’t say anything, for fear of being ridiculed by those who ridicule anyone who reports seeing people open carrying. They may have even called the police, telling the police that they saw someone carrying an arsenal into their room, but were brushed off as it is their second amendment right.
But, no. As long as that second amendment sits there, there is no compromise to be made. In fact, gun owners are sitting there, right now, complaining about the restrictions that they have on their toys. There is poster here who complains that a couple guns he has have now become problematic, and that some of the guns he’d like to buy cannot be purchased in his state. These are the concerns of the pro-gun people, not how to prevent further homicides, but how to get more restricted access to their toys.
So, what’s the public reaction going to end up being? Is the public going to just sit back and accept being a target as part of the price they pay for you to have your toys? There are already many on social media saying that they are never going to go to a concert or a game, or anywhere that is in public, as they are afraid of being targeted by someone like this. In order to protect ourselves, we have to restrict our freedoms. No more concerts, no more sports games, no more orgies, it’s too dangerous.
The public will get tired of having to hide, and avoid open spaces or crowded venues. They are going to eventually say, “Enough is enough”, and then they will strip away that so sacred second amendment from you. Yeah, it’s hard, and yeah, it takes alot of support, but you guys are making it easy. By saying, “As long as we have the second amendment, there is nothing that you can do to stop these things from occurring. Haha!” You are turning the public against you.
If you are willing to compromise now on sensible regulations, then we can meet in the middle. If you continue to shove 2A in our face like it’s is a divine protection to your gun, it will be stripped away. Then where will you be? If you turn the public against your gun hobby enough to strip away the only thing protecting it, then you will have no gun rights other than those explicitly allowed by your legislature.
The public sill not stand for this, so you have two options. Work with the anti-gun violence people to find ways of keeping weapons like this out of the hands of people who will use them for these activities, or fight compromise, until the only thing that is left is to simply take your toys away, as you have made it clear that you cannot use them responsibly.
Not impossible though and not quick, it would take years.
Let’s say $250 on average (lots of grandpa’s rusty shotguns and the like). So, $75 billion over 5 years. We just saved the first $15 billion by cancelling the children’s healthcare program. (If $250 turns out too low, adjust a bit on other Federal spending so we don’t blowup the deficit)
I think you might be missing what I’m saying. If there are less guns in existence, it’s harder to get them. If I want to go on a shooting rampage at a mall, but physically can’t get my hands on a gun, I can’t do it.
America has more than 1 gun per citizen. The UK and Austrailia (places often cited in these conversations) have about 6 and 30 guns per 100 people respectively.
If a kid wants to shoot up a school, it’s the difference between them having one in the house or knowing which friends house they’re in vs probably not considering it an option.
The statistics are hard to argue with. You can look at wiki’s page of mass shootings my country and note that for United States it links to a separate page where they break it down by year. 15 last year, 14 so far this year.
Europe lists 11 going back to 1987.
Australia has a small handful. The UK, 2.
FTR, this all depends on what you count as a mass shooting, but no matter how you look at it, it’s amazing how much higher the US is. I’m not sure how one can argue that less guns in the country wouldn’t eventually correlate to less mass shootings.
No, it wouldn’t happen overnight, but wouldn’t it happen over time. Plenty of other countries have shown it to work. One thing that would have to happen, however, is that the gun culture would have to trickle out. That may very well take a few generations.
It’s this kind of shoulder shrugging that’s so infuriating. The failure of your compelling cartoon counter example is that they already have guns. Under a rational system, they would not be able to get them.
And I know you’re already yelling at your screen that I must live in some fairy land where bad guys who don’t care about murder will care about gun laws, but it’s not like nobody has done this. It’s more like EVERYBODY HAS DONE THIS.
Japan, Canada, Australia, Germany and on and on and on.
We just had an angry man try to harm as many people as possible in Edmonton. He used a car and a knife and KILLED NO ONE.
It just takes determination and patience. In a country that has so many amazing people and ideas, it really seems crazy that you guys can’t have the vision to see how the world could be, especially when there are so many examples out there.
Why can’t we pay for a hypothetical gun buyback program and continue to provide healthcare to children? If the budget needs to be cut to pay for a hypothetical gun buyback, surely there’s enough fat in the DoD budget to allow for it.
Buy back the guns, and give them to the military. Two birds. 
They’re all intended for use in a well-regulated militia, right? Then let the gun owners report for drill. Complete with military discipline, of course.
Thanks. And yeah, I find that wild speculation about breaking news runs rampant.
This article mischaracterizes the issue and should feel bad. “incapable of managing their financial affairs” is not mentally ill. These are mostly old people, who don’t typically commit crimes, present guy notwithstanding.
This is not thinking on the margin. Most mass killers die in the commission of the act. That they are willing to die to achieve their goal would seem that making it slightly harder to obtain the tools would not be much of a deterrent. If someone really wants a gun to kill alot of people they can get one. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US. In order to reduce the number of guns so that even motivated would be killers can not get one would mean reducing the amount of guns by at least 95% which is literally impossible.
There has been no country in the world that has had a problem with mass shootings and then solved that problem by gun control.
To what do you owe the generally low gun crime stats in the developed world?
I ascribe it to the general difficulty of getting guns. Genuinely interested in your thoughts.