27 killed in another shooting

^ no it wouldn't. The illegal arms trade would step in and sell affordable bullets. The more guns you ban, the more power goes to criminals.

 

It is interesting that the emphasis here seem to be mainly the mental heath problems of the individuals perpetrating such shootings.

But are you saying that mentally unstable Americans are far more murderous than people in other countries or that the US social system cares less about such people and therefore they don’t get the help they might need before doing something bad?

I mean for the former someone seemed to suggest that if this person had not had such easy access to guns they would have still used something else to the same effect which I think is rather unrealistic. (As anyone that has used a bow will know it is a lot harder than it looks, while spray bullets is a lot more effective).

As to the latter, many pro-gunners (not all) seemed to be ambivalent even opposed to the kind of large scale spending on social programmes (and data retrieval) that would be needed to deal with every American with mental health issues (not to mention the civil rights issues involved with for example forcing people to take their medication).

 

The argument that “The more guns you ban, the more power goes to criminals” seems a bit of a copout, I’d instantly want to know why the guns are in the hands of the ‘criminals’ and what was being do to get them out of the hands of the ‘criminals’?

I mean according to the FBI most guns in criminal hands in the US were once purchased legally in the US and either passed on to criminals or stolen by them.

To try and alleviate that problem I have suggested a few ideas

Any gun kept at home or place of work (including businesses that involve guns) would have to be held in a secure (and approved) safe. People that didn’t have an approved safe would not be allowed to own a gun

If a person looses or has their gun stolen, and it is shown that they did not show due diligence in securing their weapon they would be subject to a heavy fine and banned from owning a gun.

Any guns would have to be presented for inspection 6 months after purchase then again one year after purchase and then every five years after that. Not presenting the gun would mean loosing the owner’s gun license and being banning from owning a gun.

 

Your first two suggestions seem reasonable, expecting the term 'due diligence' to be fully drawn out. Would you consider a gun lock to be a reasonable alternative to a safe?

The third I think is too much. Somewhere around 250,000 people would have to present their guns each day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I don't think that's being realistic.

 

yeah, that rule's in place over here, came in after a school shooting along with a whole busload of other ones. makes sense.

you also have to be able to prove that you have a legitimate reason for ownership

 

letlovin

How are you calculating that?

 

Googled how many people own guns in America. Found an article that said roughly 3 out of ten Americans own at least one gun. There's roughly 315M citizens, 30% of that is 94.5M, divided by 365 is almost 260,000.

Account for holidays and weekends this number gets bigger and bigger. Not to mention scheduling conflicts and work schedules.

 

letlovin

I agree I tried to work out the same thing and a lot of it has to be guess work, which seems a bit mad in itself.

Estimates seem to go from 30 million up to over 80 million

30m divided by 365 would be 82,191

I mean the NRA seems to estimates that between 70 and 80 million Americans own guns.

70m divided by 365 would be 191,780

Ok it also has to be remembered that this wouldn’t be in one place at one time it would be spread out across the whole US. And also that after the first year it would be only every five years.

Let’s put that in perspective - for example in the UK over 835,000 people visiting their GP practice or practice nurse per day.

I’d set up a public body that is paid for by a tax on gun makers and sellers which would only pass on problem cases to the police.

I think it would need to be in place to stop selling on.

 

But I'm not sure that it would really do any good. Do you think legal gun owners are selling their guns to criminals and not reporting it? Or that they don't report it when they are stolen?

Legal gun owners will never sell a gun without turning in the proper paperwork. Nor will they leave a stolen gun unreported. Otherwise they could be charge with whatever crime that may be committed with said gun.

What Benifit would result from every gun owner presenting their weapons to the government, and also justify spending that kind of money to do so?

Also, do you think that gun locks would be acceptable in place of a safe?

For an example, I know many gun owners, and most of them have the majority of their weapons locked in a safe, but have one or two stashed somewhere readily accessible in case things get hairy fast. If any gun stored outside of the safe had an appropriate gun lock would you find that acceptable?

 

Letlovin

According to the FBI virtually all guns in criminal hands were bought legally in the US by American citizens. They were either stolen from the legal owner or passed on to a criminal for favour or money. It would therefore seem prudent to try and limit those ways in which criminals obtain guns.

Why do they think that things could get so hairy that hey would need the use of a lethal weapon? Are they living in a war zone?

 

You ban gun sales it'll oniy mean that the DEA will have more American biz and won't have to deal with the Cartels as much.....

 

If that's the case then the most efficient way of dealing with this issue would be to require all gun purchasers to go through the approval process, not just ones who buy through authorized dealers. In my state you can personally sell your gun to anyone legally as long as you fill out the right paperwork. Maybe we should take a look at that instead.

No, but some live in neighborhoods where breakins are a regular occurance. One person runs an auto salvage company in a small town. He also does a lot of repo work. There has been several instances of people taking their frustrations out on him for takin their property. His family has been threatened and so he chooses to have guns available for protection.

Most handguns are owned for the purpose of self defense. If you are sleeping and someone breaks into your house, things are officially hairy. In that case I would want my gun to be nearby and accessible, not locked up in another room.

 

Like a lot of Americans, I spent most of the weekend watching the coverage on TV, alternating between intense sadness and anger. I’m emotionally spent.

Now I’m getting to the point where I can start to think more rationally about the situation. But I’m still angry. There is blood on the hands of the gun rights fanatics. It’s time for every rational, caring person to stand up to them.

Not to take anything away from this story, but I keep reminding myself that more than 30 people die in this country from gun violence on an average day. Some of them are small children too. Where is their mountain of flowers and teddy bears? Who is showing their pictures on TV 24 hours a day? What important person is making a speech for them? Who is lowering a flag to half mast for them? Nobody. And they are just as dead as this group of 26 in Connecticut. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, we are acting as if it is somehow better when an equal number of people get murdered one at a time, instead of as a group. It isn’t better.

I hope the message will finally sink in, in this country, that we are having the equivalent of a mass shooting every day, and it has to stop. It’s like having a mid-sized commercial jet crash every week of the year, with no survivors. This is madness.

And it isn’t just a school problem. Shooters now go anywhere there is a crowd. People of all ages are at risk. Adults don’t look cute in news media pictures like little kids, but we have the same basic right to life.

When I was young, there was a big, similar controversy about drunk driving. They used to show pictures on TV of the victims, especially young children. America eventually got serious about this, and drunk driving fatalities declined dramatically. Maybe we can do something similar with guns now.

Have you noticed that all of these recent mass murderers are white guys? What the hell is wrong with white people these days? Blacks and Hispanics don't do this shit.

I do think Obama is going to be able to make some overdue changes to gun laws. The public is so pissed off that not even the NRA is going to be able to derail the momentum for change. Hopefully, the top two priorities will be closing the gun show loophole (more about that shortly) and specific bans on the most lethal weapons that have no real value to sportsmen and the self defense crowd. Who needs a semi-automatic weapon that can shoot 25 times without reloading? Only those who are up to no good.

We also need to make changes in the way we handle mental health issues. Ronald Reagan closed too many public mental health facilities, which is why we have so many nuts roaming around. He wanted to save money by treating nearly all of them as outpatients, but that hasn’t worked.

Well...it’s another day in America, so at least 30 more people have died from gunshot wounds since this time yesterday, on top of the 30+ that died the day before. I hope some people will think about them today, and realize that the loss their families have suffered is just as great in some cases as what the families are going through in Connecticut. Tomorrow will bring another round of violence. And the next day, and the next.

We don’t have to go on like this. No other civilized country does.

It doesn't seem to work that way in Europe or the Far East, but we tend to ignore the experiences and wisdom of other countries, even when what we are doing isn't working. We think we know more than everybody about everything.

The big loophole is gun shows. These are just big rooms full of tables of stuff for sale by small-scale dealers and amateurs, usually held once or twice a year. You can go to a gun show and buy any number of guns without going through a criminal background check, or mental health check.

That's the standard thinking, anyway. The reality is quite different. A gun at home is much more likely to be used to shoot a family member, either by accident or on purpose. But...Americans don't understand or believe statistics. We think we are going to be the exception; one of the rare people who use a gun for self defense and everything turns out the way we want it to. We tend to combine paranoia and optimism in very strange ways.

I would just grab my cell phone and climb out the window beside my bed. I can call 911 from my neighbor's front yard, behind the bushes. The police get paid to get shot at by criminals. I don't. And I don't want my husband playing amateur cowboy gunslinger either. Guess what a lot of criminals do when a gun gets pulled on them. They shoot first! And he might just be a good shot.

 

1/2 hour north of my new home here in Norwalk - -fuvking heatbreaking-- -
l

NRA NRA How many kids will ya kill today !- Ban assualt weapons now

 

This morning there was a clip from the Governor of Texas on the radio. Regarding gun control he said something like, "One of the things I hope we don't see from our Federal Government is this knee jerk reaction from Washington, DC. When there is an event that occurs they come in and think they know the answer."

I was sort of hoping Texas would pursue its threat of secession. I think both sides would be happier.

 

Letlovin

I think that should be done but it is not just about knowing that the gun is still owned but also about changing circumstances. If peoples eyesight goes they are not allowed to drive for example the five year check would be also about screening to see if people should be able to continue to own such a lethal weapon(s). I mean just because someone was mentally stable at the time of purchasing a gun doesn’t mean they will be five, ten, twenty years down the line.

*

Why do they think that things could get so hairy that hey would need the use of a lethal weapon? Are they living in a war zone?

In the UK thieves the vast majority of breakin happen during the day when people are at work, they shy away from occupied houses because of the risk of getting caught.

I’ve lived in what were statistically high risk areas and only got burgled once, during the day while I was out and the police thought it was kids.

The reason why I think that safes are needed is because in such an event, the robbers would then have a gun.

We have similar people over here but they don’t have guns. And the police would caution and prosecute people that made such threats. I know from experience that they take such threats very seriously.

With easy access to guns then the attacker is likely to be armed with a gun also and in any attack the advantage is with the attacker. Unless you are the type to shoot first and ask questions later in which case I pity the teenager son or daughter creeping in from a late night party.

Why are they so frightened of the society they live in that they feel they need such a lethal weapon for ‘self defence’? I mean are you so frightened that you feel you need to have your gun ‘nearby and accessible’. Wouldn’t it be better to live in a society where you didn’t feel so afraid and threatened that you felt you had to have a gun to protect yourself?

As I said above in the UK thieves break in mainly during the day when people are at work, they shy away from occupied houses because of the risk of getting caught. It is mainly businesses that robbed at night when the premises are empty.

As the police will tell you over here a house if precautions are made is rather difficult to get into. For example you need a sledge hammer to break double glazing. Then there are burglar alarms, cctv, motion sensitive lights etc etc. And of course in I could ring the police in the UK the response time for such a incidence is 15 minutes in urban areas and 20 for rural, in urban areas it is usually less than 15 minutes. I think a robber confronted with an alarm going off and been told the police were on there way would prefer to leave than get ‘hairy’. We have nutters but as pointed out it’s not always possible to counter them and at least ours don’t have so easy access to guns.

I’m not so frightened of the place I live in or the society I’m a part of that I feel I need a loaded gun always ready because I fear I’m going to be attacked at any moment.

 

Is it hell yet? Will things be any different if ten or twelve school shootings happen in one day? Maybe a hundred innocent little kids being slaughtered will change something. Na, this is the tribulation. It's just normal daily life. Look at all the hellish events lately. Sandy Hook, Sandy storm, Oregon mall shooting, Seik temple shooting, Aurora theater shooting, Afghan war, Iraq war, Japan earthquake, Japan tsunami, BP oil spill in the gulf, south Pacific tsunami, earthquakes in Peru, Guatemala, Chile, New Zealand, and Haiti, hurricane in New Orleans, and on and on. The fiscal cliff may make a lot more live in hell.

But some, like the gun lobby seem to enjoy making people live in hell. Assault weapons are made for killing large numbers of people. Mission accomplished.

 

The second amendment is the last vestige of our old republic. Every other right has been basically taken away. The powers that be want total control no resistance to their new world order. We must resist this.

 

Try reading - Can guns save you from suppression?
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=253937

Again a lot of the impetus behind pro-gunner thinking seems motivated by fear and paranoia.

 

liberalism is really the root cause of the decay of america.