School Shootings

[Jason76]

What should be done about it? Well, the school shooter is another type - often derided by macho types, who are saying "Get over it!", "The world doesn't owe you anything!", "Quit being a girl!".

Anyway, this type, of course, doesn't have God's resilient spirit, probably they had terrible parents, possibly the environment was also horrible,in general.

 

[Lamb]

School shootings seem to be the result of angry people so we need to help them control those angry thoughts. Gun control isn't the solution, it's helping the people who need it that's the solution.

 

[psalms 91]

In order to help that would mean you can control bullies, make sure that all have a sense of worth, and that help is available to all

 

[NewCreation435]

I don't know that there is one thing in particular that would solve all of them, but it would help if our mental health system in America was fully functioning. As it is it seems to not get to the ones who need it the most sometimes

 

[Forgiven1]

Better recognition of mental health issues. Better recognition that someone is being bullied. Along with those is better access to mental health care. Get rid of gun free zones.

 

[tango]

What should be done about it? Well, the school shooter is another type - often derided by macho types, who are saying "Get over it!", "The world doesn't owe you anything!", "Quit being a girl!".

Anyway, this type, of course, doesn't have God's resilient spirit, probably they had terrible parents, possibly the environment was also horrible,in general.

It's often said that the most dangerous person is the one with nothing left to lose. What we need to do is figure out how people get to the place where the only way out they can see is suicide and go from there. Not every suicide wants to take out a load of other people with them but given how many mass shooters end up dead it's not as if it's a surprise when they don't make it out alive.

Sadly the rhetoric these days seems to be little more than "criminals aren't obeying the laws so we need more laws".

 

[JRT]

Certainly gun control is not "the solution" but it is certainly part of the solution. We need to find a way to prevent people with criminal histories, with mental problems with histories of association with extremist views from easy access to guns. We also need to rethink what sort of weapons should be legal. Certainly military style weapons ---- automatic or semi automatic with large magazines are not in any way needed in a free and democratic nation.

 

[Jason76]

Certainly gun control is not "the solution" but it is certainly part of the solution. We need to find a way to prevent people with criminal histories, with mental problems with histories of association with extremist views from easy access to guns. We also need to rethink what sort of weapons should be legal. Certainly military style weapons ---- automatic or semi automatic with large magazines are not in any way needed in a free and democratic nation.

It's tough to say what extremist views are - as the lines are very mixed nowadays. I mean, will the traditional left get tough on blacks calling on white genocide (as in actually killing whites)? Will Trump supporters distinguish themselves from prison gangs?

 

[tango]

Certainly gun control is not "the solution" but it is certainly part of the solution. We need to find a way to prevent people with criminal histories, with mental problems with histories of association with extremist views from easy access to guns. We also need to rethink what sort of weapons should be legal. Certainly military style weapons ---- automatic or semi automatic with large magazines are not in any way needed in a free and democratic nation.

There are many problems here. To some on the left the desire to own a gun all but counts as an "extremist view". It's such a vague term it basically means whatever the government of the day wants it to mean, and therefore can't be used as the basis for sound law.

Automatic weapons are already illegal unless you have a license that takes a long time to process and even then the only weapons you can lawfully acquire are very rare and hugely expensive. I loosely know a guy who has such a license and owns a submachine gun and a regular machine gun - both have fully automatic modes and both are worth five figures because of their rarity. For comparison you can pick up a semiautomatic AR-15 or similar for a few hundred.

Another problem is this concept of a "large magazine". Many semiautomatic handguns have standard capacity magazines that hold 15-20 rounds. This isn't a large magazine, it's a standard magazine. In any event it doesn't take much practise to be able to change your magazine fast enough that even assuming criminals obey the law (hint:they don't) they'd be able to cycle a magazine fast enough that this theoretical notion of being able to charge them while they reloaded is little more than a sick joke. We've all seen how fast the heroes in the movies can change a magazine - it's really not difficult to match or exceed that speed in real life.

As to whether or not something is needed, that misses the point entirely. The 2nd Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights. Note the name - it's not the Bill of Wants or the Bill of Needs. It acknowledges the right to keep and bear arms, period. Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a firearm any more than they need to justify why they "need" a big V8-powered pickup.

 

[psalms 91]

There is no excuse not to regulate the type of firearm people can own. I am appaled that after all these mass shootings in a very short period of time that AR-15's and other weapons like them have not been banned or restricted in their rate of fire. The incident in California with three dead and 13 injured was accomplished in less than a minute, the amount of time it took law enforcement to engage the shooter.

 

[tango]

There is no excuse not to regulate the type of firearm people can own. I am appaled that after all these mass shootings in a very short period of time that AR-15's and other weapons like them have not been banned or restricted in their rate of fire. The incident in California with three dead and 13 injured was accomplished in less than a minute, the amount of time it took law enforcement to engage the shooter.

So what do you think would happen if AR-15 style firearms were banned? Unless you want to ban anything semiautomatic you won't achieve anything at all. And for the purposes of self-defense anything that isn't semiautomatic might as well be a club.

The simple reality is that bad people do bad things. If you take away one tool they simply use another tool. The UK is a prime example of this - handguns were banned and now criminals use knives. Then the law got tightened and tightened and tightened to the point it's ridiculous but London is still suffering what is widely called a knife crime epidemic. Elsewhere bad people have used other tools to do bad things - a pressure cooker in Boston, a truck in Nice, a van in London and so on.

Instead of endlessly focusing on things that might be dangerous it makes more sense to figure out better ways to identify the bad people and stop them before they can do too many bad things. Sadly that's the part that all the existing systems fail at doing - it seems to be a depressingly recurring theme that after the fact it transpires how many red flags were raised but not acted upon.

 

[psalms 91]

And as we talk about this yet once again it is exactly these type of arguments that keep anything meaningful from being donwe. I am tired of children being killed because we must protect the right to own guns whose sole purpose is to kill as many as possible in the shortest amount of time. I am all for the 2nd amendment but that doesnt mean that guns cant be regulated. If you really believe what you are saying then lets legalize hand grenades and fully auto machine guns, same principle but I think you see why that isnt done.

 

[tango]

And as we talk about this yet once again it is exactly these type of arguments that keep anything meaningful from being donwe. I am tired of children being killed because we must protect the right to own guns whose sole purpose is to kill as many as possible in the shortest amount of time. I am all for the 2nd amendment but that doesnt mean that guns cant be regulated. If you really believe what you are saying then lets legalize hand grenades and fully auto machine guns, same principle but I think you see why that isnt done.

The trouble here, still, is that the argument you are presenting favors "doing something" over doing the right thing.

The purpose of guns isn't just to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible. Most guns never actually kill anyone at all (even ignoring the observation that it's the person pulling the trigger that kills).

The thing is that if you were to give 1,000,000 law-abiding citizens a fully automatic machine gun and as much ammunition as they could dream of, the murder rate would not go up one iota. Why? Because of that little kicker in the phrase, "law-abiding citizens". You could give a law-abiding citizen a thermonuclear warhead and not have to worry about them destroying a city. On the other hand, in the hands of a bad person all sorts of things become dangerous weapons. A baseball bat, a kitchen knife, a brick, a length of barbed wire, a screwdriver, even a pencil can become a stabbing weapon at a push. And therein lies the problem - the focus is always coming back to ways to rein in the law-abiding (which offers minimal benefit) rather than ways to stop the bad people from doing what they want.

Although the classic NRA line "the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" is arguably a little tired the simple reality is that bad people do bad things and, since an open and free society is always vulnerable to the bad people within it, the focus has to be on stopping them as fast as possible. If the bad guy is on a rampage, whether with an AR-15, a meat cleaver, a bag full of pipe bombs or whatever else, they aren't going to be stopped by a concerned citizen armed with a stick.

 

[psalms 91]

The trouble here, still, is that the argument you are presenting favors "doing something" over doing the right thing.

The purpose of guns isn't just to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible. Most guns never actually kill anyone at all (even ignoring the observation that it's the person pulling the trigger that kills).

The thing is that if you were to give 1,000,000 law-abiding citizens a fully automatic machine gun and as much ammunition as they could dream of, the murder rate would not go up one iota. Why? Because of that little kicker in the phrase, "law-abiding citizens". You could give a law-abiding citizen a thermonuclear warhead and not have to worry about them destroying a city. On the other hand, in the hands of a bad person all sorts of things become dangerous weapons. A baseball bat, a kitchen knife, a brick, a length of barbed wire, a screwdriver, even a pencil can become a stabbing weapon at a push. And therein lies the problem - the focus is always coming back to ways to rein in the law-abiding (which offers minimal benefit) rather than ways to stop the bad people from doing what they want.

Although the classic NRA line "the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" is arguably a little tired the simple reality is that bad people do bad things and, since an open and free society is always vulnerable to the bad people within it, the focus has to be on stopping them as fast as possible. If the bad guy is on a rampage, whether with an AR-15, a meat cleaver, a bag full of pipe bombs or whatever else, they aren't going to be stopped by a concerned citizen armed with a stick.

Like I said the same tired lines and in the meantime our children are gunned down in schoools, on the street, at festivals, at concerts. When does it reach the point where enough is enough

 

[Andrew]

Certainly gun control is not "the solution" but it is certainly part of the solution. We need to find a way to prevent people with criminal histories, with mental problems with histories of association with extremist views from easy access to guns. We also need to rethink what sort of weapons should be legal. Certainly military style weapons ---- automatic or semi automatic with large magazines are not in any way needed in a free and democratic nation.

I agree 100%, why in the world would anyone own semi automatic military weapons?

 

[tango]

Like I said the same tired lines and in the meantime our children are gunned down in schoools, on the street, at festivals, at concerts. When does it reach the point where enough is enough

And responded to with the same tired lines. It's all well and good to look at benefits of a proposed action but you also have to look at the downsides, as well as complications with definitions. You know, it's very easy to talk about banning "assault weapons" but unless you can define just what counts as an "assault weapon" and what does not it's just blowing in the wind. And then comes the whining about "large capacity magazines", which are usually known by their normal term of "standard capacity magazines".

To top it all off, it is already illegal to take a firearm into a school. It is already illegal to kill people without just cause. It is abundanly clear that the people doing this don't obey the law. What makes anyone think that adding a new law would rein them in any more? As experience in the UK has proven, if bad people can't get one weapon they just use something else. If they can't get that they use something else. Hence we see pressure cookers, trucks, baseball bats etc turned into weapons. It simply isn't possible to ban everything that might be used as a weapon because you never know how inventive people with intent to harm will become. You can make some lethal poisons from household ingredients if you know what you're doing. If you start down the path of banning anything dangerous that path leads to lunacy.

The simple fact remains that most of us don't go round killing people because we lack the desire rather than because we lack the means. If someone gave you a machine gun would you suddenly feel the urge to go on a shooting rampage? I'm going to hazard a guess (please correct me if I'm wrong here) that the answer to that question is that you would not. You're probably like me - you don't kill because you don't have the desire to kill. If you had the desire to kill someone and didn't care about legal consequences you'd find a way to kill them. If you couldn't shoot them you'd stab them, or run them over, or poison their food, or hit them with a baseball bat, or buy a vicious dog and set the dog on them. One way or another you'd find a way.

The answer is to address the desire to harm, not this tool or that tool.

 

[tango]

I agree 100%, why in the world would anyone own semi automatic military weapons?

I guess it depends on what you consider to be a "military weapon". Guns are used for all sorts of legitimate purposes, from hunting to target shooting to self defence. I've personally shot targets with everything from a .22 revolver to a .44 Magnum to a fully automatic M-16. The licensing that is required to own the fully automatic machine gun (not mine, it belongs to a guy I know) is intense.

 

[psalms 91]

I guess it depends on what you consider to be a "military weapon". Guns are used for all sorts of legitimate purposes, from hunting to target shooting to self defence. I've personally shot targets with everything from a .22 revolver to a .44 Magnum to a fully automatic M-16. The licensing that is required to own the fully automatic machine gun (not mine, it belongs to a guy I know) is intense.

Why? If I follow your logic it should be easy to get and own just as assault rifles are. This is where your argument falls apart because there has already been some common sense rules placed on these weapons but yet not on the one that kills the most. All I cna say is I hope and pray that it isnt one of your children that is gunned down by one of these weapons because if it would happen I think you would change your staance mighty quickly.

 

[tango]

Why? If I follow your logic it should be easy to get and own just as assault rifles are. This is where your argument falls apart because there has already been some common sense rules placed on these weapons but yet not on the one that kills the most. All I cna say is I hope and pray that it isnt one of your children that is gunned down by one of these weapons because if it would happen I think you would change your staance mighty quickly.

My argument doesn't fall apart at all. You're using an appeal to something you agree with as if it were common sense when you've continued to avoid the crucial underlying issue. You complain about me rolling out the same tired lines, while using the same tired lines from the other side as if they were valid counters.

Let me rephrase as a direct question. If someone gave you a machine gun, would you feel more inclined to go out and kill people than you currently do?

 

[psalms 91]

My argument doesn't fall apart at all. You're using an appeal to something you agree with as if it were common sense when you've continued to avoid the crucial underlying issue. You complain about me rolling out the same tired lines, while using the same tired lines from the other side as if they were valid counters.

Let me rephrase as a direct question. If someone gave you a machine gun, would you feel more inclined to go out and kill people than you currently do?

No I wouldnt but I would still think it wrong. I am not advocating doing away with the second amendment whhich I do support I just want some common sense laws that will protect people. I am tired of reading of these mass shootings and the same weapon is being used and yet all we can do is talk