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Cont: Today's Mass Shooting (2)

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Stellafane said:
What should be done: For starters, guns designed for the sole purpose of killing lots of people in a short amount of time should be illegal. The only practical application they have is mass murder, which (call me a wild man) I'd like to discourage. Second, some sort of background check system.

What I expect to be done: Not a whole lot. Too many people see any form of gun control, even the most trivial and symbolic, as the first domino in a liberal chain reaction where they end up slaves to gay atheist baby-killing communist immigrants.
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Sadly, a very thoughtful but accurate post.

Sandy Hook didn’t result in change and neither will this event. What needs to happen? A hundred kids killed?
 
Lothian said:
If the majority want something done but sit there doing nothing but watch tumbleweed then they are part of the problem.
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The problem is what those Americans would need to do to get guns under control. As shown in other countries, gun control is achieved when only those suitable to have a gun, have one and it is very difficult for those not suitable to get one.

1 - find out who has a gun. That on its own is an impossible task, because so many will not cooperate and the laws required would never pass due to constant legal challenges and opposition.

2 - find out of those who have a gun, what gun or guns they have. Like 1 above, impossible to do due to a lack of cooperation and legal challenges.

3 - once 1 & 2 have been completed, determine who is suitable to keep their guns and who has to hand them over. That is an even harder task than 1 & 2, due to lack of cooperation and legal challenges.

1, 2 & 3 also fly against US culture, whereby the gun has such a huge role in US history and society, that is not found to anything like the same extent, in any other western country.

Then the US arms industry is massive and it will not cooperate in much of it going out of business.

The majority you speak of, who do nothing, can do nothing. You may as well criticise someone who has lost both their legs for not growing back two new ones. The only way forward is for Americans to learn to cope with mass shootings and reduce their impact.
 
  1. It's time for Biden to pack the Supreme Court. Without a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, nothing will ever get done.
  2. It's also time to make this a huge issue in the upcoming elections. Of course, the ******** will scream that you're politicizing dead children. So what? The alternative is to do nothing and let this keep happening. It's imperative to do well in the upcoming elections, and not just at the federal level, but at the state and local levels as well.

But I have little hope that either of these will happen. If Sandy Hook and Parkland didn't change things, nothing will.
 
Nessie said:
The problem is what those Americans would need to do to get guns under control. As shown in other countries, gun control is achieved when only those suitable to have a gun, have one and it is very difficult for those not suitable to get one.

1 - find out who has a gun. That on its own is an impossible task, because so many will not cooperate and the laws required would never pass due to constant legal challenges and opposition.

2 - find out of those who have a gun, what gun or guns they have. Like 1 above, impossible to do due to a lack of cooperation and legal challenges.

3 - once 1 & 2 have been completed, determine who is suitable to keep their guns and who has to hand them over. That is an even harder task than 1 & 2, due to lack of cooperation and legal challenges.

1, 2 & 3 also fly against US culture, whereby the gun has such a huge role in US history and society, that is not found to anything like the same extent, in any other western country.

Then the US arms industry is massive and it will not cooperate in much of it going out of business.

The majority you speak of, who do nothing, can do nothing. You may as well criticise someone who has lost both their legs for not growing back two new ones. The only way forward is for Americans to learn to cope with mass shootings and reduce their impact.
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Oh, this is already the case, yet there is no sign of reducing impact. As I said earlier if an 18 year old can purchase semi automatics with no specific reason and no checks, there is no way forward.
 
Nessie said:
The problem is what those Americans would need to do to get guns under control. As shown in other countries, gun control is achieved when only those suitable to have a gun, have one and it is very difficult for those not suitable to get one.

1 - find out who has a gun. That on its own is an impossible task, because so many will not cooperate and the laws required would never pass due to constant legal challenges and opposition.

2 - find out of those who have a gun, what gun or guns they have. Like 1 above, impossible to do due to a lack of cooperation and legal challenges.

3 - once 1 & 2 have been completed, determine who is suitable to keep their guns and who has to hand them over. That is an even harder task than 1 & 2, due to lack of cooperation and legal challenges.

1, 2 & 3 also fly against US culture, whereby the gun has such a huge role in US history and society, that is not found to anything like the same extent, in any other western country.

Then the US arms industry is massive and it will not cooperate in much of it going out of business.

The majority you speak of, who do nothing, can do nothing. You may as well criticise someone who has lost both their legs for not growing back two new ones. The only way forward is for Americans to learn to cope with mass shootings and reduce their impact.
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How did Australia do it?
 
lionking said:
Yes I agree it’s a huge effort, but in Australia we had massive semi automatic gun ownership in Australia, but after a number of well known massacres in Australia, culminating with Port Arthur, gun control happened. We haven’t had any since then.

Do gun deaths still happen here? Yes of course. But we don’t have pathetic loners tooling up and killing many people any more.
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Not asked argumentatively, but asked because I think you might know the answer: did Australia have the levels of gun violence prior to the ban that the US currently has?
 
lionking said:
Sadly, a very thoughtful but accurate post.

Sandy Hook didn’t result in change and neither will this event. What needs to happen? A hundred kids killed?
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Nothing will happen, at least not for a generation or two or three.

The thing is that people on both sides of the divide do want change. They just support opposing paths of change. The right will propose:

1: Arming the teachers and other school staff.

2: Bullet/shooter resistant schools. No ground floor windows, no interior windows, no trees or other barriers outside the school that a shooter could use to conceal themselves and fire from cover, interior walls made from bullet resistant standards, auto-locking classroom doors triggered by central alarm system, all that. There are design proposals out there for that. Very expensive design proposals which are used mainly as a distraction because gun lovers tend to lean libertarian and are never going to want to actually pay for these designs they think we need.

3: More church, more God, more Jesus. No psychiatry - God is all we need.

4: Ban abortion - yes, they really will make that connection. They think allowing abortion signals that killing humans is okay and therefore encourages murder of adults. Yes, many conservative Christian movers and shakers really believe or claim to believe that.

5: Just more dumbazz conspiracy theories. That has the beauty of being very profitable. Alex Jones rode the blood of Sandy Hook to fame and fortune, and many other Conspiracy Theorists will do the same with this shooting.

See! They totally want things to change!

The left will propose a host of gun control laws. Background checks, red flag laws, waiting periods, time/purchase limitations (can only buy one gun a week, something like that), magazine capacity limits. This gets more complicated because they'll focus on magazine-fed semi-auto long guns, which are often used in mass shootings - but mass shootings, no matter how horrific, only make up a small fraction of overall gun deaths in America.
 
What I find interesting is that a very conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who I otherwise hated, brought gun control to Australia. He even wore bullet proof vests when standing up to gun owners at rallies.

So called progressive Biden will do nothing.
 
lionking said:
What I find interesting is that a very conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who I otherwise hated, brought gun control to Australia. He even wore bullet proof vests when standing up to gun owners at rallies.

So called progressive Biden will do nothing.
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So called by who?

Politicians like Biden, who are quite powerful within the party, run explicitly on being moderates who vigorously reject calls for bold action. They brag about how not progressive they are.
 
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It's the human cost. I remember when news of Dunblane was still coming out, one of my main hopes was that no family had lost an only child, or at least if one had, that they would be able to have more children and become a family again. But of course the worst had happened. A widower whose wife had died of breast cancer a couple of years previously lost their only child, a five-year-old girl. He spoke movingly of exactly that, going from being a family, a father of a child, to the status of single man, cut off from the community of "families" that congregates round school and youth activities and so on. It was devastating to him.

It's inevitable that similar tragic stories are waiting to come out of this one too. They're all tragic stories of course, but some of them get to you more than others. I don't know if it was the shock value, because "these things don't happen here!", but the effect of what happened at Dunblane on people in general has been quite profound. Witness what I said about the emotional reaction of a group of us to the realisation that a particular artwork was actually a memorial to the victims of the massacre, Fifteen years after it happened.

Is America too big for people to empathise in the same way? Does empathy only extend to the local area? After being through Dunblane (as a mercifully uninvolved person) I feel the same way about any of these incidents. But did it take one which was local to me to sensitise me to the subject? I don't know.
 
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Thermal said:
Not asked argumentatively, but asked because I think you might know the answer: did Australia have the levels of gun violence prior to the ban that the US currently has?
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By our standards yes. Hoddle St, Queen St, Strathfield and Port Arthur were terrible, with 35 dead at Port Arthur, including someone I knew.

Yes gun deaths still occur, but mainly, and still tragically, within families. But spree killings have disappeared.
 
Things in the US will not change while it is loners or others on the fringes of this group or that committing these mass shootings. When teachers, CEOs, doctors, professors, politicians, specialists of all fields start going around shooting people up and dead with the latest high-powered weapons, only then will an actual effort be made to put the brakes on mass shootings.
 
Nothing will happen. And in a sense, why now ?
Gun control is much more important for other reasons, than mass shooting. Sure it's scary. But those are very rare.
Cars kill 100 times more people. Suicides by guns kill 100 times more people. Murders by gun kill 50 times more people. Probably more toddlers kill themselves with guns than there is school shootings victims. And don't even compare it to Covid.
US clearly doesn't care, and current political system is impotent even if they did care.
 
lionking said:
By our standards yes. Hoddle St, Queen St, Strathfield and Port Arthur were terrible, with 35 dead at Port Arthur, including someone I knew.

Yes gun deaths still occur, but mainly, and still tragically, within families. But spree killings have disappeared.
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I'm sorry to hear that one of those hit close to home.

Yeah, getting rid of the spree kill specialty weapons is my favorite option, along with no carry. Not just 'assault' style, but all mag fed semis. And I like guns, for sport purposes, but I'd like it more if it took a little longer to sport shoot at the expense of not having loser teens arm themselves like freaking soldiers and rack up a pile of bodies. With Australia as a real-time model, I don't see why the States can't collectively get behind something so conceptually simple.
 
Rolfe said:
How did Australia do it?
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By already having a register of ownership and the backing of the vast majority of the population and legislators.
Same as in the UK after Hungerford for assault weapons and and Dunblane for handguns
 
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