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

Welp, someone finally posted the most disgusting thing I think I'll read today.

I can't "like" that, even though I know it wasn't you that said it. :(

Dan carling had an interesting podcast about guns and gun control after the shooting at the Mosque/temple in the US Midwest I think. I'm going to go download and listen to it again I think.

Some numbers from CDC
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf

The 2011 numbers are still projections.

In 2011 we had

• 606 accidental discharge deaths
• 19,392 suicides by firearm (a bit more than half of all suicides)
• 11,078 homicides (vs 5181 by other means)
• 412 "legal intervention" (death during arrest, etc--not necessarily by firearms) (apparently includes executions, also security guards as well as government law enforcement)
• 252 discharge of firearms of unknown intent

31672 injuries by firearms (all categories)

There were two school attacks today, one is headlining globally, the other is buried in the world news section. One in a society where firearms are hard to obtain, the other not.

23 injured in school attack.

Apparently the idea that Israel and Switzerland are gun-owning utopias is a myth. Not sure if someone's brought that little factoid up here or not; I know I've seen it bandied about today.

Best username/post combination of all time.

You're Not a Detective, but You Play One on the Internet

God, you hippy Commies make me SICK! All talking like you want guns to be well regulated or something, the Founding Fathers would be appalled!

On the other side of the spectrum is Japan, a country that has outlawed almost all gun ownership, and currently has gun violence rates that are practically nil.

Not sure if you saw my post, but I guess I didn't state that explicitly because as a human being that owns guns, I thought that was pretty fucking obvious.

Not sure if you saw his post but FUCK YOU OKAY BUDDY

No but guys, what if we reduce guns down to less than 4 for every man woman and child in America and implement a system that ensures people who own guns are responsible and knowledgeable and the rate of gun violence doesn't go down? What then? Everyone would only be able to get all the guns they want and only bring them to an ever expanding number of places! Think of that nightmare dystopia!!

This is a pointless argument, you might as well just copy and paste the last thread in here and call it a day. People can run for president on a platform of destroying the social safety net for the poor, the old, and the infirm but someone DARES to say that maybe random mass killings by guns should be looked into and holy shit the hammer comes down.

And remember, Unions are baaaaaaaaad! Collectivism is unAmerican!

Now let's see what the NRA and the lawmakers they buy have to say about this shooting.

I agree that today is not the day to talk about gun control. I value the Second Amendment. I also believe that every single protection in the Bill of Rights causes tragedy and death, but they also prevent the same, and increase freedom, which is the difference between lives lived servile and the feeling of self control and self reliance that enriches the human experience.

But the reason that today is not the day to talk about gun control is not because of the children who were murdered today, it is because children are murdered every day, and you do not bring the issue to the table every day. If you want to win this issue and keep these children safe, you need to understand that you are not up against a bunch of drunk rednecks, you are up against the United States Government, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, several hundred thousand lawyers and judges, and hundreds of millions of dollars. The only army that can beat those odds are one with the numbers to amend the Constitution. Speaking of odds, odds are, if you are pro-gun control, you are also pro-choice. The irony of the inconsistencies of either side of these issues is not lost on anyone. What does seem to be lost, however, is the lesson that pro-life activists teach you. There is no day for protest, there is no time for action. Every day you must protest, and tirelessly you must create action.

So talk about gun control today, but only if you are willing to talk about gun control tomorrow and the day after that. And do not stop talking about gun control to your congressmen, to your friends, to strangers on the street, until you get your way. Because if you really believe that children are dying for no reason, as the other side does when it comes to abortion, you owe it to yourselves and your democracy to agitate. Prohibition, slavery, Jim Crow, holding the States to the same standard as the Federal Government. These Amendments didn't happen overnight. They didn't happen by simple majority in a single session. No, the people who outlawed alcohol, the people who outlawed owning people, the people who stripped racism of its protections did so through relentless high profile confrontational politics.

I wouldn't know. I never had to take Driver's Ed (although that changed shortly after I got my license). Pretty sure the classes now don't teach you how to use a stick shift, though.

But, I dunno, maybe we need better gun training. My wife would say America definitely needs better driver's ed.

Oh I got another one!

Guys! Guys we HAVE to stamp out this "voter fraud" thing once and for all! There have been TEN CASES in the last hundred years of provable voter fraud! If a few thousand legitimate voters have to lose their voting rights then it's worth it to help stamp out this scourge!

Also let's all stop with this "gun control" nonsense! Christ this is AMERICA and it's not worth stopping even a single American from getting their Constitutional right to bear as many arms as possible just to prevent few thousand dead people a year!

You know it doesn't work like that. We can't talk about it today, it's too close to the tragedy, and we can't talk about it tomorrow because everything's fiiiiine :D. And we can't talk about it the next day because it's too close to the tragedy.

You know what today means in the long run? A few Senators and Congressman are gonna get some free stuff from the NRA and then nothing will change.

If only his mom had been armed...

Ok, and another thing. I'm sick of the gun nuts and their "U CANT TAKE AWAY MY FREEDOMS!" bullshit. Where have you been the past 11 years while shit like the Patriot Act was passed, expanded and extended? You don't mind that the government reads your fucking email, holds prisoners indefinitely, listens in on your phone calls without a warrant, or tortures innocents, but god forbid someone tries to have a meaningful discussion of gun violence in America. You let the government fondle your genitals at the airport to protect you from the terrorist boogeyman and you smile and take it.

"But but my guns is my only defense against the tyrant Obamaguvment!" you say. What the hell is your piece of shit AR-15 lookalike going to do when the government comes to your house in a Bradley with a 50 cal on top??

It helps a lot that they're an island nation and their culture is one that respects authority and not fears it.

Canada shares the longest unguarded border with the US and we do have our share of gun violence but not as frequently as our southern cousins. A lot of shootings involve criminals, armed with illegal firearms (stolen from legal gun owners or smuggled from the US), often killing each other. Mass shootings are rare here.

Canadians who want to apply for a PAL (Possession & Acquisition License, aka gun license), they will have to take a two-day long gun safety course and pass a written and practical exam (eg. finger on the trigger is an automatic fail). After passing the exam, they can apply for the PAL (there's also a RPAL for Restricted firearms) to the RCMP, who will do a criminal background check and call two references to see if the applicants have any history of mental illness (including depression), domestic violence, emotional outbursts, and/or substance abuse.

The more I think about it, the more I think the second amendment is a fucking crock. Or, rather, it's an artifact of its time, when technology was in a very different place and when nonviolence was not nearly so effective. Gandhi is the most successful single political figure at overcoming governmental oppression of the last century, and he did it without firing a shot. In fact, that's the WHOLE REASON his strategy worked so well -- though it also required a world with much better communications than existed when the Constitution was signed. Increased weapon lethality, and increased world communication, have both demolished the historical rationale for the second amendment, which has now become a pure tool of the long con.

I don't have the answer, I mean this isn't a formulaic science. We have to acknowledge that the cat is already out of the bag (this took years on the Other Forum so I understand if it takes that again here) because that acknowledgement leads to different solutions than most other countries have used. We can't just ban all guns and expect it to work because of American culture, history, and the existing supply; that's a solution that would take generations to roll out. There are certainly quicker reasonable steps that can and should be taken though to funnel things into a well-regulated system. I use that term specifically because most militia nutters ignore that their beloved 2nd Amendment called for a "well-regulated militia" and it doesn't matter how else you slice and dice framer's intent about what is a militia or did they mean bazookas or anything else, that shit is right there and up front.

So one example is shutting the "gun show loopholes" by which someone can purchase any kind of gun from a gun show without background checks and so on. I think another good example is limitations on high-capacity magazines and clips. I think there should be technology developed to prevent unsafe discharge of firearms (the geek in me loves the idea of some kind of fingerprint thing to engage the firing pin on a handgun which has hella other uses as well like for police weapons). I think the Constitution establishes clear precedent for guns to be regulated by the Fed rather than by the states and so background checking and databases and all that should be integrated into a single federal platform to help shut information holes and perhaps even unifying laws among the states individually.

As with the War on Drugs though, you are going to have negative actual outcomes if you throw all your enforcement at the supply-side without dropping the demand curve. So I think ongoing education of various stripes to include hunter safety courses and other things acceptable in American culture would lower both the taboo side of having a gun as well as drop the accident side of kids fucking around at home. Likewise general social improvement both on mental health, unemployment, and so on have the same trends that you pointed out in lowering crime in general. Hell if I get to really dream a dream, I'd say ending the war of drugs would dramatically drop the demand curve of gun ownership, both for criminals and for scared white people.

I keep forgetting that this is the Santorum, so I can hold your previously demonstrated idiocy-soon-followed-by-backing-off against you and call you out for yet another in a long list of dumbass starting positions plus double-downs. Or I can keep trying to engage you productively and see if you'll be a man about it. I'll try the latter because usually I respect you. You said that a gun's only purpose is killing and that anyone who claims owning a gun for any other reason is, quite simply, a liar. Those two statements are false according to the examples I gave, and you're already attempting to move the goalposts with your implied "yeah well (ahem ahem) it can still be used for (ahem ahem) that really ugly emotionally engaging killing thing (ahem ahem) so it's really about balancing risk (ahem ahem)." [note those quote marks indicate my paraphrased summary not a direct quote]

So did you simply misspeak in an understandable moment of heated emotion and perhaps not everyone who owns a gun is a lying maniac who enjoys lording the ability to kill over others? Or is backing down on the internet only for cowards and jack-a-napes who don't know the SCIENCE? Are you never wrong or can you see the point and maybe there is some middle ground you've thought about? Honest question now.

This is definitely a key point that doesn't get addressed much except in hyperbole: does this mean I can bring a bazooka to school!!!!! No asshole it doesn't. But on the other hand, the government has taken things clearly not "arms" in any colloquial and labelled them as such, such as encryption algorithms. So we have to be less collectively fucking dumb on both sides of this issue if there's any hope of dealing with it. I mean, for a government that has banned fingernail clippers from carry-on luggage but is willing to funnel all kinds of money to foreign genocidal dictators, we can't exactly rely on them to be reasonable about protecting us from ourselves either.

And all this does make me never want to buy toy guns for my kids. Hell, I'm not even feeling much like playing shooters anymore :-\

As a Canadian gun owner, I'm surprised that a lot of Americans demand their right to bear arms but not the right to universal health care (which includes mental health).

I love my guns but I respect them for their power. I never treat them as toys. They stay in my safe unless I take them out to go to the range or clean. I'm aghast when I hear kids accidentally shot by their parents' firearms because they were left unlocked and/or loaded. The first rule of gun safety is "Assume all firearms are loaded" and yet people keep handling loaded firearms thinking they're not loaded.

I've been following this thread closely, and wanted to offer up this piece of work I found on FB. For the record, the OP is my brother, who is an officer in the US Air Force.
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I'm not going to respond, because I feel myself being sucked into a horrible troll vortex. Personally, I just can't wrap my head around the idea that in his perfect world, the Second Amendment means he should have enough firepower to protect himself against the full brunt of the country's military should it decide to turn against him. What does that mean exactly? A tank? A collection of missiles? Also he thinks kindergarten teachers should have guns.

What do you all make of this?

I don't see a middle ground. If your guns are a sentimental item that you value because they're heirlooms - weld the barrels, trash the firing pin, make them keepsakes if they're nothing more than that. If not, then you value them because they shoot things. Sure, you might only use them to shoot bottles and targets. I'm sure some people might want to grow cocaine plants because they look nice in the garden - but that is not what they are for.

Your enjoyment of target shooting with your guns should not be more important than the world being a safer place if you did not have them. I don't think you'd ever shoot someone - hell, I don't think you could. But you're not the only person who's ever going to have access to that weapon.

I never said everyone - that's why I used the word "most". I think gun owners like you, like Houngan, like Frank Austin - you guys are minorities among the crowd. You're reasonable and willing to accept alternate viewpoints. You've never advocated violence just because someone wants to take away an object that you do not need.

I respect the right to own a gun, because it is the law. I do not respect the desire to own a gun, because I do not recognize any valid reason to.

"Because I want it" is not a valid reason to own a gun when the world is better off if you don't.

Toy guns are forbidden in my house. Well, except for the ones that Nute told me I have. But I feel very strongly about gun safety and intend for my daughter to also take it very seriously.

In my view your binary thinking is a big part of the problem with this issue as with most political issues in our divided system these days. Us or them, my way or the highway. It's indefensible and unreasonable.

"A gun kills things. That is its purpose, that is what it does, that is the entire reason it exists. Anyone who claims they have a gun for any other reason is, quite simply, a liar."

You can understand why I missed the single qualifying word "most" occurring before the above summarizing conclusion.

What does "valid" mean in these sentences. I hate that word because it's so full of shit 90% of the time. Isn't it "valid" to enjoy target shooting? Isn't it "valid" to hunt game according to government-managed standards for doing so?

As long as you have ethical people in charge, it's all good. Also: since they are toys I guess no one can get hurt so let 'em loose!

Why don't these people understand that weapons are generally not permitted in schools AT ALL by anyone other than law enforcement? (Like a deputy coming in to do DARE lessons for kids, for example, and has a weapon as part of the uniform.)

Yeah, let's put more weapons near children. As if accidental injuries and deaths from children tampering with firearms isn't high enough. As if being a teacher automatically makes that person qualified to carry a firearm.

Stricter security measures at the school could have prevented ALL deaths, save for his mother's and his own, even if you want to argue that stricter gun controls would have meant that he would just have acquired illegal weapons.

"He could just as easily killed them all with an axe."

Killing children with an axe: just as easy as pulling a trigger.

I'd like to take this time, if I may, to heartily and with all my might, tell Mike Huckabee to go fuck himself.

Probably easier! I mean axes don't potentially jam up and you don't have to reload them. I mean, no axe murderer ever said "whoa hang on folks, I need to reload a fresh clip!"

I've been talking to other parents who have children going to my school all day and I can't read any more righteous indignation found here. I was sick after the first page and I'm sure it just gets even more political, trite and even more bitching about the media. I just pray that it never happens to my daughters or any of your children since there is no way that we can close all the avenues of this potentially happening.

Yeah, let's TSA up this hizzy! That'll totally work and not be a total waste of money and completely fail to address the core of this problem!

It must have absolutely SHOCKED you to find that this thread was about the shooting! My stars and garters I myself thought it was A PLACE TO EXCHANGE HOME CANNING RECIPES.

Not letting visitors past a secure point is totally the same as shooting radioactive waves at everyone, totally.

Asking them to actually enforce their policy of not letting people in during school hours who clearly have no reason to go beyond the main office is as horrible as asking everyone to strip down and empty their bags!

I'm just saying there'd probably be two dead security guards on top of everything else. Unless you want armed guards at every school, and then we're starting to enter police state territory.

I'd much rather throw money at the mental health and medical establishment and work on creating a society where people don't snap and decide that mass murder is copacetic.

Somehow I think if a dude is coming at a school with a gun, that security measure isn't going to do shit to stop him.

Ugh, I just got something similar from a FB acquaintance who I shall soon be removing:

God is such a pussy. After I die I'm gonna go up to his throne and just push him the hell over and take over all of Heaven.

I'll try to maintain my composure as he creates passive aggressive t-shirts at me.