Well, he kind of burned out the blaming Satan one.
It’s rather astonishing to read these boards and find people arguing that the sale of guns and ammunition should not be strictly controlled, despite the regular occurrence of gun massacres in the United States (and elsewhere). All of the false-equivalence arguments aside, automatic pistols and assault-style rifles are designed for one thing: to kill people. Of course if you make them widely and easily available, more people will be killed by them. It’s really that simple.
And yet you’re still more likely to die in a plane crash or be struck by lightning than to be shot by a spree shooter.
People have been going on shooting rampages pretty much since cartridge revolvers were invented in the 1860s. Semi-automatics have existed since the 1890s and the .45 ACP dates from 1911. Yet somehow people weren’t calling for abolishing the civil ownership of guns back then. I blame modern media. Before television one might read in a newspaper an account of a shooting in another state days or weeks after the fact, if at all. Now a shooting anywhere in the civilized world of billions of people gets televised in an hour or less.
If you completely abolished the private ownership of firearms, you would probably see some reduction in- not elimination of- shootings. Nuts and criminals who wanted guns badly enough would still get them. And this at the price of disarming the weak: women, the elderly, the outnumbered, who would go back to being helpless against people stronger than them or being ganged up on.
Thanks in no small part to relentless lobbying by the National Lightning Association.
He wasn’t saying anything about banning guns. Strict control of firearms would allow responsible people to have them (women, elderly, outnumbered ect) While diminishing the ability of people who associate with violent criminals to have them, and diminishing the ability of the mentally unstable to have them.
Argue against what most people actually propose not the extreme scenario you feel more comfortable talking about.
To review: since the invention of revolvers there have been shooting rampages. In the past, people paid less attention. Today people get the news faster in more detail and they’re horrified by the senseless violence committed with guns. Conclusion: guns fine, modern media bad. There’s no reason there can’t be some sensible, rational, effective gun control in the U.S., and there are some pretty good reasons to think that those things don’t exist right now.
cite?
I think we already covered lightning strikes in this thread, concluding you are more likely to be shot in a shooting spree.
I don’t think any Americans have been killed so far this year in plane crashes. Considering most Americans don’t even fly during any given year I find your claim dubious.
It’s not unheard of for people in the military to occasionally get drunk. I’m keeping the conjecture open that his discharge was for related anti-social behavior brought on by liquid courage.
If not a general ban on firearms, then just what strict control are you talking about? Ban convicted felons from owning guns? Done that. Ban people with a history of serious mental illness from owning guns? Done that. Ban anyone from carrying in public without a permit? Done that. Ban gun dealers from selling anyone a handgun without doing a background check? Done that. Ban the interstate shipment of firearms except to and from federally licensed firearms dealers? Yup, you guessed it, done that too. So what do you suggest?
Not really, from identifying people in need of treatment, including a lack of access to treatment, to reporting to the authorities who should not have access to guns for mental issues, the current system is a joke.
A couple DUIs will get you the boot IIRC
So then the question would need to be asked,
for an owner such as yourself, what sort of serious difficulty would a comprehensive set of gun registration and owner registration laws pose?
National database of gun owners with you name in it, serial number of a gun registered in your name, have to show that you have somewhere safe to keep it. Why would that be so bad?
Is it so very different to car ownership? Isn’t a car registered to an owner? Don’t you have to have a license to use it? If you use it unsafely you are subject to punishment?
How would registration have stopped either of the two most recent shootings? Both shooters were perfectly entitled to own the guns they did.
I don’t know, they both seem plausible to me. Where was it already covered that you are more likely to be shot in a shooting spree than struck by lighting? A quick search indicates that over 300 Americans are hit, on average, by lighting in any given year. How many are killed in a shooting spree, on average?
Plane crashes seem to vary wildly, and be dropping in recent years, but it seems to be between 500-800 deaths in the US due to play crashes per year (according to what I’m reading here there were none on commercial carriers in 2004, which is odd).
So, what are the average deaths due to shooting sprees in the US? I suppose it’s all in how you define it, but my WAG is that it’s a lot less than 300, on average in any given year. According to this it hovers around 100 (and, interestingly enough, has remained relatively constant since the 80’s…it would be interesting to see if that remains true from the 50’s to the 70’s as well).
[QUOTE=Marley23]
To review: since the invention of revolvers there have been shooting rampages. In the past, people paid less attention. Today people get the news faster in more detail and they’re horrified by the senseless violence committed with guns. Conclusion: guns fine, modern media bad. There’s no reason there can’t be some sensible, rational, effective gun control in the U.S., and there are some pretty good reasons to think that those things don’t exist right now.
[/QUOTE]
We HAVE ‘sensible, rational, effective gun control in the U.S.’ already, so I guess my question here is why we need more? What problem are we trying to fix? Has the murder rate been increasing in the US due to personal fire arm possession? Has the rate of these mass murdering shooting sprees gone up and new regulation the only way to keep it under control? Skimming through Google I’d say that in both cases the answer is no…the murder rate in the US is actually going down slightly in recent years, and the number of these spectacular mass murders using guns has remained relatively constant over the past 30 years…so, again, my question is why do we need more regulation? Why aren’t the current regulations working or enough?
I’m not convinced that’s the case, and certainly just asserting it doesn’t change my mind. I’m well aware of how rare these kinds of shootings are, and I’m suggesting they illustrate a problem with gun regulation as well as problems with the mental health system. I’m not proposing I have a specific answer on how to do that while respecting the Second Amendment, but I don’t take it as a given that gun laws are in good shape.
What metric are you using, then, to determine that our current controls aren’t effective? To me, I think it shows that regulation of firearms isn’t the only factor here, since we’ve had a changing regulatory environment while the rates of firearm crimes (especially these spectacular ones) has remained fairly constant over time, or even dropped.
I don’t think that gun laws are in good shape (I think that the current regulation environment wrt gun control is a mess, with much of it being of the knee jerk variety that doesn’t make much sense), but I guess I’m not seeing the problem we would be trying to fix with more (knee jerk IMHO) controls. Unless you could eliminate all privately held guns, something I frankly think is impossible in the US (at least on any sort of timescale that isn’t generational), I’d say that things are about as good as they are likely to get. It’s like alcohol…if you could ban it all, then you could save some lives every year. That’s a given. However, since you can’t ban it completely, society simply has to accept that this means some folks are going to die…sometimes tragically, and heart breakingly when it’s the innocent killed by some idiot.
For the record, I’m not automatically against all gun laws. But too many things being proposed in the wake of the recent shootings are essentially security theater: they give the impression of increased safety while being unlikely to meaningfully improve the situation. The sad ugly truth is that once someone says “Fuck it! I’m going to go kill a bunch of people”, they’re beyond prohibition; there is next to nothing that can prevent it. Beyond the generalization that there are people willing to commit mass murder and that they will often use guns to do so, spree shootings are essentially a Black Swan Event.
The last straw was apparently when he showed up for duty drunk.
I’m not sure Sicks Ate wants to press this point, but we now have plenty of additional details about the shooter and the military thing doesn’t jump out all that much or look like a smear on veterans or something. The shooter was from Colorado, worked in missile system repair before becoming a psychological operations specialist, and was demoted and later discharged after being drunk on duty and going AWOL. He seems to have become active in white power music after that. He worked as a truck driver for about four years and was fired in 2010 after he received a drunk driving citation. So there’s at least one small way his military service is relevant- that’s two different jobs he lost for showing up drunk. Not to anyone’s great shock, this guy sounds like a completely useless excuse for a person.
Sorry, your “facts” aren’t accurate. US gun laws are a patchwork. In Arizona for example Jared Lee Loughner bought a Glock with an “instant background check”, and in Arizona you are allowed to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. Cite: http://www.npr.org/2011/01/10/132801364/arizona-gun-laws-among-most-lenient-in-u-s
The issue is not that there are NO regulations. The issue is that dangerous firearms (like automatic pistols and assault-style weapons) are too easy to acquire generally. So if you’ve been fired from your job, or if you’re angry at your ex-wife, or you’re drunk or on drugs, or if you are mentally unbalanced, you can now do a hell of a lot of damage before anyone can stop you. And I don’t believe that the remedy is to ensure widespread ownership of firearms so old ladies and bystanders can shoot back. This is reality, not the movies.
So question for you: do you believe that the answer is to ensure that every law-abiding citizen is packing an assault weapon? I think Somalia tells you how that worked out.