Can we please just admit that maybe gun control is a good idea finally?

O hai, I was wondering if this thread was gonna come up today or not. Woo.

Personally, I want to find out how the shooter got into the school. AFAIK guns are generally banned at all public schools, except for police officers carrying openly, and at that particular school, it's locked up completely during classroom hours. It sounds like they had decent security in place to keep strangers from getting in, so how the hell did this happen?

Also, ditto to the fuck you's to parents letting kids get interviewed and to the media outlets interviewing them.

Finally, re: medical/mental screenings for gun ownership, what's the likelihood that people will be more averse to seeking care or treatment if it means there's a possibility that they will not be able to obtain firearms? (Or maybe get what firearms they already own taken away?) I'm just thinking of one of those "unintended consequences" type scenarios, though I imagine the number of people this would happen to would be relatively low, given the right social programs.

Fuck you, Men have Rights, too!

*storms off and writes a comic*

When cocks are outlawed only outlaws will have cocks.

NY Times reporting that the shooter killed his mother first (a teacher at the school) before proceeding. So infuriating.

I'm going to take a wild stab here from my years of security audits in IT:

He walked up to the door, someone let him in. It's the hardest problem to solve in secure buildings because no matter how often you say DO NOT DO THAT, it's socially considered dickish behavior to slam the door behind you or confront the person trying to walk in behind you. The only solution I've ever seen work that wasn't in some top secret facility where people have broken that social norm is letting everyone in the door, but having mass transit style turnstiles monitored by security guards.

Hm, so my take may be wrong. He may have murdered someone and taken their access card.

In the mess of rumor, telephone-game-information, and hysterical babbling that currently comprises the news coverage, I've read that shooter's mom was a teacher at the school, and the first person he shot. I'm guessing he just said he was there to drop off his mom's lunch or something.

Says Fox news.
It was amazing when Costas made his statement how every show on the network had their turn at bashing him.
It's almost like it was a scripted agenda.

Wait guys, what if the solution isn't more gun control?

There, does that help soothe your sense of moral outrage over a discussion topic posted on an internet message board? Or do you need some more nice, content-free platitudes to help it go down better?

Yeah, that seems like a fairly plausible scenario. I saw some theories circulating earlier (and by theories I mean "awful stereotypes") that it was a jilted dad who was angry at his baby mama and killed his girlfriend and then went to the school to kill his kid. I could see how a parent could get in pretty easily too, but I wouldn't be surprised if visitors were required from this point on to say in a waiting-room type area that was locked and doesn't let visitors into the rest of the building.

For some kids, school is the only safe place, and this kind of tragedy shatters that for them.

Yeah, this thread was surely started to talk seriously about poor policy.

You're right, the title of the thread should have been "Can we please just admit that maybe more mental health care is a good idea finally?"

And sweet, thanks for choosing my opinion for me, you're a good man, and a patriot for insulting my reading comprehension level based on an opinion I never stated.

Yeah I'll do that when I feel like it.

If you want to keep posting them under the guise of being content-filled, be my guest.

How is it up there on your cross?

...and your reason for being here is what?

Pogo, seriously dude, I don't even know what the fuck you think you're doing at this point.

Gun owners should be leading the fucking charge on making guns a responsible, safe, accepted part of society. And yet all I ever hear from them are NOT MAH GUNS instead "hey, let's be more responsible about my favorite hobby." One of those two I can get behind. The other is a fucking toolbag.

So fuck them, and fuck you, up and until I hear a gun owner say "I own a gun and this awful. We need to do something."

Irresponsible media update!

The shooter's name is now being reported as Adam Lanza, and Ryan Lanzas everywhere are picking up their phones to call their lawyers.

Most of the ones I know do think it's awful and we need to do something. It's a minority that are fucking bat shit crazy people.

The sad thing is that a number of them also thing that something is "more people with guns". These are usually the people who have never seen combat or been in an actual firefight (meaning both sides of the altercation were armed and discharged firearms), so they're possibly still under the Hollywood idea of what a gunfight is. Ex military people I know basically think it's a terrible idea to give every random douchebag a gun in order to make us safer.

I don't think gun control is currently politically feasible at a national level, and state efforts are constrained (although not prevented) by the U.S. Constitution. Amending the Second Amendment is simply out of reach; amendments have to have a very high level of support to through. As a Californian (where we amend our Constitution at every election) I prefer the federal system, although it might be set a bit high.

Although this is a horrible, horrible thing (I've been crying off and on since hearing about it), it is not typical and not a particularly good example of why we need gun control. No single incident is a good example of why we need gun control. There will always be a way to say "if only someone else had been armed," "if only the parent had properly locked up the weapon," "if only the police had taken the restraining order seriously," "if only we had good mental health care," etc.

People say gun violence is an "epidemic" and that is more true than they know. Gun violence/accidents should be treated like we treat tuberculosis: prevention on a large scale requires vaccination and proper sanitary conditions. I'd say mental health care and gun control appear to be the prevention methods here, but other suggestions or refinements to those suggestions, would be useful.

At a minimum requiring gun purchasers to pass tests analogous to the tests required for driving seems reasonable to me.

Because the title of this thread and its placement in the Sanctum was a siren call for someone to come in and get others mad at them.

I think you're overplaying the idiots on national media. I wish I could get numbers, but from talking to ancillary people about guns, either at gun ranges or friends of friends, training and responsibility is an absolute requirement for owning guns.

About half my office is armed (which is a bit odd in MA, but hey), and the stories they tell about their gun safety classes. No trigger discipline, staring down the barrel, talking with their hands while holding said gun, etc. These people pass.

The gun owners I know all take training and responsibility seriously. Deadly serious fuckers when it comes to weapon safety. But the thing is, they're not the only type of person with a gun. That dude in the parking lot that always pulls out facing the wrong direction for where they want to go? That dude can also have a gun, because our gun control laws are crazy lax when it comes to safety education. We concentrate heavily on how many rounds you can have loaded at a time, not "do you actually know how to use this?"

edit: I went and looked it up. MA requires 15 hours of classroom education to get a firearm permit (not counting that the sheriff can simply deny you for any reason after that), the majority of the class is not actually at a range learning the weapon, but chatting about safety.

For reference, our learner's permit program for first time drivers (teens) is 30 hours classroom, 12 hours driving with an instructor, and 40 hours documented with an adult outside the class over the course of six months. I'm pretty sure people fudge the last bit, but it's useful to just note that to get a firearm permit, you require about a third as much education as to drive a car in this state. I find that a bit.. silly. The mechanical aspects of both are relatively simple. It's all safety and repetition.

It's not like the 2nd Amendment guarantees firearms... Or ammunition, for that matter.

Let people keep their guns and instead regulate the shit out of ammunition? That's the only feasible baby step I could see in the near future. Plus then we can compare ourselves to Switzerland, which gun nuts seem to love because "OMG ERRYBODAY GOTS GUNZ DERE."

I do like the mandatory training requirements mentioned upthread, though. Also something that the Swiss do (and they require it every year even after getting a gun).

An odd critique, in light of your purported ability to divine the motives of every single poster in this thread.

Oh, now I see! Your posts in this thread weren't merely the insipid nonsense that they appeared to be on their face, but rather an artful and cunning attempt to get us mad at you (see: trolling). Well played old chap, well played!

Counterpoint: the US has something like 400 million people, and there are maybe forty people in Switzerland.

Just wanted to say that while it's comforting to tell ourselves that mental health care is part of the answer because the people who do this sort of thing are mentally ill, that is not always the case. Sometimes they are just bad people; sometimes they are just really really pissed off.

Fuck the federal government -- let them sit there. Fuck the states with gun nut majorities -- let them kill each other up. Better gun control laws at the state level are the only tractable way forward. And look, they work:



Preventing unprovoked violence may be impossible, but reducing the frequency of successful mass murder -- by making guns more difficult to get -- is entirely possible.

Maybe it is just my color-blindness or the size of the map but I am having a hard time seeing a strong correlation there, other than the 3 worst states not having those laws.

I always wanted to see Scalia outlaw any firearm that is not a musket, using the same logic he used to say that the 14th amendment doesn't apply to women. When written, women didn't count so the writers wouldn't have intended them to be covered. By the same logic when the 2nd was written only firearms in existence would have counted, so nothing made after 1791 would qualify.

This is entirely just me thinking it would be a hilarious ruling though, more than actually solving any problems.

So you are brettmcd now. The circle is complete.

The reload time would've given the children a chance to dogpile him after the first shot while the teacher whips out her concealed musket to defend them. Problem solved.

(Yeah that would be hilarious to see Scalia make that sort of ruling. At least then we could call him consistent.)

How much of "just being bad people" is an actual mental illness though? Maybe this is just something I can't empathize with enough to understand.. but it takes either a high stress situation or a whole mess of broken in order to go "I'm going to kill that person" or in my mind even "I'm going to seriously harm that person"

This may just be something that's beyond my comprehension though. I have issues with understanding certain viewpoints.

It seems that way to someone who can't contemplate killing another person, but I don't think it's necessarily the case. I'm not certain, but I don't think it was ever determined that the Columbine killers were mentally ill, for example.

You called it Pogo, this thread was created specifically so that people could dog pile on you. Time to climb into the Mystery Machine and solve the next caper.

And Jezebel is right fucking on.

This fucker on Facebook has it all figured out. PEOPLE ARE JUST DOING THIS FOR ATTENTION SO LET'S IGNORE IT OKAY

What? I swear to God that I am not making this up, but I own three guns that aren't for killing anything but paper and soda cans. Or I guess worms or something that live in the backstop. So maybe that counts?

Sorry, that bit of silliness got to me. I know it was hyperbolic. I see far too many gun owners that seem to have a raging hard-on for someday getting the possibility to legally shoot someone, preferably with brown or black skin, so I completely understand the sentiment. Otherwise, I have no idea what the answer might be in this case, and I really hate that nothing meaningful could even get passed in near or probably even long term. I am absolutely 1000% in favor of stricter requirements for gun ownership especially in terms of mandatory annual training with extremely strict standards for passage. I am sick as shit of getting swept by some jizz-maggot with his (ALWAYS MALE) finger on the trigger. That, however, I'm not sure would prevent much more than accidental gun deaths.

We change our minds all the time what constitutes enough of a deviation from the norm of human behavior to be a mental illness, and which things are actually harmful or not, etc. This very quickly gets us into philisophical areas about good and evil and whether those concepts are absolute or relative and where consensus is essentially impossible. It isn't a good angle to take when trying to determine public policy, IMO; it's a much simpler bit of logic to go through to simply determine what society's interest is in controlling these kinds of incidents versus the costs of doing so. I know that sounds cold and socialist of me, but you know, I'm a cold socialist. I don't see a very strong case that the costs of limiting access to firearms in a societal sense are very high - loss of a form of entertainment, loss of the security blanket feeling of being able to take up arms against an oppressive government, some amount of loss of jobs in the arms industry, and the dollar cost of enforcement. The offsetting benefits seem pretty large to me - first and foremost lives saved, and connected to saved lives a much larger amount of saved negative ripple effects through families and other social groups related to those deaths, etc.

Those aren't guns, those are toys shaped like guns.

This person doesn't seem to understand that dead people don't want things. This is one of the reasons people don't like to be dead.

Media fuckup update #3!

It looks like the Ryan Lanza widely reported as the shooter, is actually the shooter's brother, and furthermore that it is pretty likely that his first inkling that his brother had gone on a killing spree that included killing his mom, was a flood of social media death threats accusing him of doing it, thanks to his picture and name being slathered across the front page of Fox News et. al. Just ... wow.

I called him out on that shit and he called me a retard, so we're dealing with the Einstein of gun ownership here.

We're never going to get anywhere if we allow emotion to control our decision making and not facts.