(yet another) mass shooting. This time in Oregon

[ManaMan]

From NBC News

This sucks. I'd like to think that I'd be brave enough to tackle the idiot if I was ever in the same situation but I doubt it.

And of course this is still relevant.

[Eric]

"Here we go again another school shooting. Gun Control morons sounding off about tighter gun laws in 3...2...1..."

Saw that less then 10 minutes after the news broke, pretty much there with Obama at this point, sick of it, but he's right, the country is numb to it, honestly if 20 Elementary school children being gunned down didn't change anything in this country what will?

Short of some psychos going out of their way to buy guns legally and then assassinating NRA leaders and politicians that support gun laws(Dark thinking on my part I know) nothing is going to change.

[Don]

I saw statistics show that in the last 10 years, there are 36 guys who died from terrorism in US domestically (and about 300ish worldwide US losses) while 310K guys died in USA due to gun related stuff.

I can see this Austin Power thing where they get a terrorist leader out of cyro freeze and he'd be like, "How about we just send in a guy to martyr and shoot children in the name of (whatever) to smite the infidels" and his associates will be like 'um, they already do that on their own every few months. No one would care if we did it too."

[Julius Seeker]

The craziest arguments I see are "No Don't control guns, give everyone a gun, then everyone will be afraid to shoot each other." Which equates to "No don't remove the tires from the Springfield tire fire, throw more tires on to smother the fire."

The fact of the matter is when gun controls are introduced in countries, murder rates always plummet.

I also don't see how there can't be more outrage against the NRA in the US when they say "Now is not the time to be talking about guns control."

Can you imagine the outrage that would have occurred if after the deaths and injuries related to lawn darts, if any kind of special interests group said "Now is not the time to be talking about banning lawn darts."

[Eric]

http://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm

[kali o.]

Mmm...I flip flop a bit on this issue but I doubt stricter gun laws will have much effect on gun violence. There was an assault weapon ban for years and I don't recall gun violence dropping (but correct me if I am wrong).

That said, I am perfectly ok with assault weapon bans, magazine limits, licensing, background checks and training to possess a firearm. But...I am not a US gun nut.

[Don]

Since you're probably not going to confiscate existing guns it'd obviously take some time for gun control laws to matter because people still have them stockpiled and it'd take time before the stuff falls apart from an inability to maintain them.

[Shrinweck]

Even if they let people who already have them keep them and just stopped selling to individuals who are, say, tagged unacceptable for whatever reason it would cause a drop in the murder rate.

Hell, there are programs in place that let FELONS GET GUNS LEGALLY. I shit you not, this is actually something that happens in (at the very least) Georgia. It was a front page story earlier this year in the paper but surprise surprise no one gives a shit about guns/the newspaper. Apparently not even when it includes convicted felons legally purchasing firearms.

This is THE issue the Democrats need to push. It isn't like gay rights which only just recently started tipping in their favor. Supposedly 80-90% of Americans agree that gun control needs to pushed in some fashion. This more than anything else that comes to mind is coming from a VERY vocal minority and a VERY powerful industry backing of lobbyists. Meanwhile you have people like Jeb Bush saying things like "there's always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do." It's exactly something like this which is why someone like him isn't right to be president, but is also backing Republicans into a corner on the issue.

[Don]

It'll help but people who would have problem getting guns would probably stockpile them just before the law gets passed. In fact every time they talked about stricter gun laws you see gun sales go up because people want to stock up in case it gets passed. Sure it'd still have an effect but it'd be delayed, though that's not a reason to not do it. Would also help if there's checks to stop people from buying 15 guns too. Probably should check out the guys buying body armor too, as there's really very little reason to need body armor for the commonly cited reasons of gun ownership.

[ManaMan]

So many people buy into the "good guy with a gun" fantasy. Who do they think the "good guy" is? (hint: it's them or someone who looks and thinks like they do). They think the solution to gun violence is vigilantism. AT BEST this fantasy neutralizes public shooting sprees quicker than waiting for the police to show up. In reality though, more guns = easier to kill someone or yourself = more murders and suicides.

The "good guy with a gun" fantasy also extends to political conspiracy theories. They think there will be a communist/facist takeover or a race war (these all blur together in the minds of right-wingers) and things will fall apart. Then THEY'LL be the one with the guns and people will finally take them seriously and they'll get to be in charge. This is also known as: "the Red Dawn fantasy".

[Shrinweck]

Yeah that's something that pops into my mind a lot when listening to people talk about guns. They view themselves as potential heroes not realizing that the chances are that they're almost entirely more likely to become victims or be the criminals themselves. Or a connected loved one takes the gun - case in point the 11 year old boy who shot an 8 year old girl dead today.

The last statistics I read had something like less than five percent of these shootings ending because of an armed individual (not including law enforcement intervention). Something like half of these (I want to say it has literally happened four times), so something amounting to twice, it has been because some heroic civilian saved the day. The other half is trained security guards.

[Don]

Well even everyone is armed, the aggressor obviously gets the jump on everyone and that's a huge advantage. I think people somehow imagine everyone has a red/green/yellow tag along their name like a MMROPG so you can tell the bad guy is the guy with the red name. Of course in reality if everyone had a gun then to you, everyone with a gun is a guy with a red name because there you can't just check the health bar of the guy to confirm whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. Unless the bad guy is holding 10 guns and wearing armor, it'd be pretty hard to tell if another guy (or more than one guy) with a gun is the good guy or the bad guy, and if the bad guy is wearing armor you're going to have a pretty hard time taking him out when that bad guy also has the jump on you.

I started looking at this and I notice people always treat the Constitution or the Founding Fathers as something sacred. You might as well replace Constitution with "The Bible" and Founding Fathers with "Jesus", and at least if Jesus said the right to bear arm is an unalienable right, who are we to argue against the wisdom of Jesus? I saw this article pointed out that Obama was saying in one of his address how he's doing what the Founding Fathers wanted, and it's like one thing you can be pretty sure that the Founding Fathers didn't want was a black man being the president of the United States, but of course you're not doing the will of the Founding Fathers in the US political system you must be some kind of freak that wants to destroy the Constitution. It's pretty interesting because you don't hear the British say 'what would Churchhill do' or "what does the Magna Carta say", or French saying 'what would Napoleon do' and these countries have a longer history than the USA so if we're talking about mythology you'd think pretty much every country but the USA ought to have these 'what would soandso do'. Never mind that the Founding Fathers couldn't really agree on much of anything and that a lot of today's world would be utterly incomprehensible to the Constitution framers. Gun control would be one but even take an issue like privacy, no way the guys writing about the Constitution can imagine the government basically being able to find out anything about anybody now. It's basically like saying 'what would Newton say about relativity?' Well Newton was a great guy but I'm sure he wouldn't really get relativity because that was something way beyond his time and even if he somehow figures it out, it's not like we really care what Newton has to say about relativity just because he discovered gravity.

Another interesting thing I always see in the Second Amendment is that it's supposed to be a way to overthrow the government, because if Emperor Obama declared himself dictator for life he totally wouldn't check if the military is with him on his plan first, and it's not like the USA military that can pretty much blow everything in the world up to pieces could possibly defeat a lot of guys with guns. I got the feeling if Obama did declare himself dictator for life and say the rebels are holed up in Los Angeles, the gun guys would still expect the government to provide services like the Internet so they can talk about how they're totally going to hold off the tanks coming to LA downtown. Of course then you got all the Internet heroes who could take out an army with a sword, or make a bomb from some YouTube video he saw that's totally going to stop the USA military.

[Julius Seeker]

Two kid on kid cases just in the last day.
First in Ohio: an 11 year old boy picked up one of three guns sitting on a picnic table, shot and killed his 12 year old brother.
Second in Tennessee, an 8 year old girl was shot and killed after having an argument with another child over a puppy. This isn't a rare occurrence in the US either, she is the 559th child under 11 killed by a gun in the US so far in 2015.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34450841

Rates per hundred thousand (the US is the big red line - http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk ... elieve-it/):


The big difference here is that the US does not have proper gun enforcement.

[Shrinweck]

One of the sad things about the child-on-child murders is that the common sense gun control that may actually get passed at some point by the democrats probably won't have an effect on it. It's a symptom of handguns being common as dirt as opposed to the mentally ill reaching their tipping point.

The Daily Show made a good point about this and the connected "pro-life" issue



The other hypocrisy is more in line with the death penalty but you can only cover so much in 9 minutes.

[ManaMan]

Presidential candidate Ben Carson recently said something that was sort of victim blamey about the incident:

"I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, 'Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can't get us all.'"

However, it's come to light recently that Carson's had a gun pointed at him at least once. Did he tackle his would-be assailant?

I have had a gun held on me when I was in a Popeyes [in Baltimore]. … A guy comes in, puts the gun in my ribs, and I just said, "I believe that you want the guy behind the counter." … He said, "Oh, okay."

Whoops! I guess no one knows how he would react in a life-or-death situation. Maybe we shouldn't judge.

[Don]

I seem to recall a statistics showing that USA has more people accidentally shooting themselves and dying than deaths due to violent crimes in most industrialized nations.

Another statistics I remember seeing is that American policeman are about 10 times as likely to die compared to their British counterparts, and the British policeman do not usually carry guns. There's always the myth of 'if you outlaw guns only the bad guys will have guns'. Bomb making material is generally illegal to get and you don't see the bad guys in America make their own bombs, because a bomb isn't something you just look up on the Internet and make successfully, not to mention all the material used in bombmaking is tightly controlled. Sure, it's probably slightly easier to make your own gun compared to a bomb, but if the psychos have to make their own guns they'd likely do a lot less damage because it's not like you can just make a good gun from stuff you find in your own garage.