School shooting Florida

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Belz... said:
See above. They didn't come in a vaccuum, and overall we live longer, happier, healthier lives.
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Steve said:
Proportionally to the current population I am not convinced that is true.
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Belz... said:
What does that even mean?
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I am not convinced:

Steve said:
That a higher percentage of people in the world today are living longer, happier, healthier lives, than was the case back in the days before guns were possible.
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Belz... said:
Isn't that a point against your wish?
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No.
 
tyr_13 said:
Sorry if it's already been asked in this thread, but I hear a lot of people saying that the FBI is to blame for not preventing this because they didn't take the tip seriously, and therefore we don't need more gun laws.

But, what if they had? He would have still been allowed to purchase the guns, correct? They surely can't assign people to keep surveillance up on every person who has made online threats.

EDIT: I see it's been asked by thaiboxerken and not answered.
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No. Without evidence that he committed a crime or was actively taking steps to commit a crime he could not have been arrested nor his gun(s) confiscated.
 
fuelair said:
I am a gun fan and I want guns out of lots of people's hands: criminals, the insane, the psychos, the very young, the not-competent-to use guns safely, related. And a number of still working police officers who should have been found guilty/arrested for unnecessary shootings/killings.
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Shhh! Don't you know you can't be a gun fan and be in favor of anything beyond a complete lack of firearm regulations? Either you are a sensible, rational member of the civilized world, or you are an intractable, insane monster with blood on your hands who puts your toys above the lives of children! Also you have a small penis. :rolleyes:
 
Nessie said:
Still no evidence, but at least you have dropped the suggestion the entire British Olympic team has to train abroad.
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I never suggested the entire Olympic team has to train abroad. Just the ones that want to use pistols. They are a banned item. They can't have them.

How would you start in the sport in the UK if you can't have a pistol?
If anyone that wanted to go target shooting with pistols was allowed to have a pistol to do it then the ban would be meaningless.
 
Polaris said:
Shhh! Don't you know you can't be a gun fan and be in favor of anything beyond a complete lack of firearm regulations? Either you are a sensible, rational member of the civilized world, or you are an intractable, insane monster with blood on your hands who puts your toys above the lives of children! Also you have a small penis. :rolleyes:
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Oddly enough, I find that whenever I suggest increased regulation of guns, I get accused of wanting to ban them. It's almost as if people on both sides of the argument refuse to listen.

If ordinary gun owners support increased regulation, that's great. But yes, I d o think that those who oppose regulation have blood on their hands. The status quo has proved as miserable failure.
 
Checkmite said:
No. Without evidence that he committed a crime or was actively taking steps to commit a crime he could not have been arrested nor his gun(s) confiscated.
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That's what I thought, and I've been looking into it, and that seems to be the case. Even if the tip had been taken seriously, and I don't want anyone to think I'm saying the FBI wasn't wrong here, there was no mechanism that would have plausibly stopped this shooting from that. There is the off chance that he would have been scared out of it just from being interviewed, but his other run ins with law didn't. It might have just made him step up his 'plan'.
 
crescent said:
Oddly enough, I find that whenever I suggest increased regulation of guns, I get accused of wanting to ban them. It's almost as if people on both sides of the argument refuse to listen.

If ordinary gun owners support increased regulation, that's great. But yes, I d o think that those who oppose regulation have blood on their hands. The status quo has proved as miserable failure.
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Thing is, what I wrote is less in jest and more out of frustration. These discussions always bog down into the same ****, every damn time, with barbs being thrown by both sides and nothing changes.

I remember saying once, here or somewhere else, that the pro-gun side is going to have to give a little sooner or later or the anti-gun side will reach critical mass and bulldoze them.* This should be a warning that there may not be many chances left to bend instead of break.

I want to be able to buy a SCAR or an FAL one day, when I can justify blowing that kind of money. I want to go to a range from time to time when I'm not reading a book, writing something, building a model, etc. I'm okay with going through more extensive background checks and paying a (not unreasonable) fee to cover that. Why? Because I've got nothing to hide, and I know I'm not going to ever use it to open fire on a crowd of strangers - the same way you (the royal "you") know you're not going to decide to drive your car into a crowd of kids waiting for a school bus.

*I admit I'm biased, but I don't see any chance of the anti-gun side compromising at all if they had the same level of power.
 
Polaris said:
Thing is, what I wrote is less in jest and more out of frustration. These discussions always bog down into the same ****, every damn time, with barbs being thrown by both sides and nothing changes.

I remember saying once, here or somewhere else, that the pro-gun side is going to have to give a little sooner or later or the anti-gun side will reach critical mass and bulldoze them.* This should be a warning that there may not be many chances left to bend instead of break.

I want to be able to buy a SCAR or an FAL one day, when I can justify blowing that kind of money. I want to go to a range from time to time when I'm not reading a book, writing something, building a model, etc. I'm okay with going through more extensive background checks and paying a (not unreasonable) fee to cover that. Why? Because I've got nothing to hide, and I know I'm not going to ever use it to open fire on a crowd of strangers - the same way you (the royal "you") know you're not going to decide to drive your car into a crowd of kids waiting for a school bus.

*I admit I'm biased, but I don't see any chance of the anti-gun side compromising at all if they had the same level of power.
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But if the pro gunners are right that those things do not work, it would be a delay rather than a victory. Anti gunners will catch on then come back.
 
Cain said:
One of the problems with gun advocates is that they rely on intuitively plausible arguments while shunning empiricism (so it's a smart move to prevent the CDC from investigating).

Take suicide for instance. When I discuss firearms with students, someone often brings up suicide prevention on the control side, so I'll ask them collectively, "Would gun restrictions really reduce the suicide rate?" You can almost see memes (in the Dawkins sense, not lolcats) ripple through the group as a tentative consensus emerges: No, people will just kill themselves in other ways. "Blaming" guns for suicide is like blaming spoons for obesity, or pencils for spelling errors.

Except here's the thing: Suicide is a surprisingly impulsive act. Women attempt it more frequently, but men pull it off more often, probably because the latter is less squeamish when it comes to gruesome methods. With guns the act can be done privately and without much thought -- you literally pull a trigger.

If you want to jump off a building, then you need to venture out into public. Ugh, that sounds like work. "I hafta get dressed... I'll do it after it stops raining." People are lazy. You might also appear distraught, so someone could ask if everything is all right, and then you lose your nerve and chicken out.

The best example that drives the point home came from a student in the back of a lecture hall last year. As it happens, he was a former libertarian. He pointed out that suicide-by-pill can be reduced with a change in packaging. The suicide rate declines when you take pills out of a bottle (which are easy to dump) and put them in a blister-pack. You pop out six or seven of those ****ers and probably figure "that's enough."

One side of the gun debate routinely refuses to allow human nature to inform their arguments. "Gun regulations won't work because if someone REALLY wanted to kill you they would just do... X, Y, Z." Except that's not how people behave in the real world. Criminals (especially) tend to be stupid, and people in general follow the path of least resistance. Also, technology alters behavior. Most obviously, a lot of people say things on the Internet that they would never say face-to-face. Remove the guns, how does this 120lb kid murder 17 people? He builds a bomb? He can barely work a microwave.

And would anyone be shocked if people using smaller spoons ate slightly less?
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QFT
 
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This is The End said:
That would be like hiding all the forks because you eat too much cake. Instead of, you know, actually dealing with the cake.

This "blame the guns" stuff is a nonsensical knee jerk reaction by people who have no clue exactly how these tragic situations play out.
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You mean, because if they couldn't get assault rifles, they would just use forks to kill people? Oh, wait. Sorry. Wrong talking point.


Well, it's a little bit like that. But guns aren't very much like forks, and killing people isn't very much like eating cake, and the differences are so huge that it makes the analogy worthless.
 
If there is something we can hope for, I think it's some additional checks and lists of people not allowed to have gun, and possibly better registration.
I kinda expect AR ban (I mean magazine capacity limit to 10 or so), but that would change so little, a piss so many.
 
Polaris said:
Shhh! Don't you know you can't be a gun fan and be in favor of anything beyond a complete lack of firearm regulations? Either you are a sensible, rational member of the civilized world, or you are an intractable, insane monster with blood on your hands who puts your toys above the lives of children! Also you have a small penis. :rolleyes:
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I get this all the time.

I own guns and I enjoy shooting them at the range, when I hunt and when I go duck-shooting. I live in a country which has pretty strict firearms regulations; effectively, this means

- no automatic weapons, no MSSA's, no handguns.
- guns must be stored in a gun safe separate from ammunition and the firing mechanism.
- carrying weapons in public is absolutely not permitted under any circumstances (even our beat cops do not carry sidearms)

But when I say that I am in favour of such firearms regulations, gun-nuts brand me a crazy-ass anti-gun fanatic.
 
Meadmaker said:
I was listening to the radio today and they were playing the "We call B. S." speech.

This time is different. These kids will make the difference. I don't know exactly how much different, but this time something is going to happen. Maybe not much, but something.
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I don't know if I was the first here to say that "This time feels different." But I am hearing it from several different quarters.

50 years ago -- 1968. Also a time of great change and protest.
 
A factor that isn't talked about by the "they will use any weapon to kill" crowd is the relative safety of killing with a gun vs killing with a knife or with hands. This difference in the risks could definitely play into a decision by a potential murderer as to whether they will actually do the deed. There are studies that show that the further away from a target a person is, the easier it is for a person to kill or make the decision to kill.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Agreed.

This debate would go a lot better if hyperbole like didn't get dropped into it so much.
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Agreed. And plain nonsense should be excluded as well.
The odds of dying by murder by gun are still... pretty low on the list of things Americans need to individually worry about happening to them on a statistical level ...

But over, again if this year is average, 1.3 million are gonna die in traffic accidents (incidentally our rate of 13 deaths per 100,000 cars on the road yearly is below Europe's rate of 19 deaths per 100,00 cars on the road yearly)
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Well "Eurostat" figures give a different picture.
The number of fatalities counted in road traffic accidents has fallen considerably over the last 20 years: EU fatalities fell by 43 % between 2005 and 2014. In 2014, however, the figure was roughly unchanged from 2013, at around 26 000, or around 51 fatal accidents per million inhabitants.​
and 250,000 are gonna die due to medical mistakes ...
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No wonder you want to abolish Obamacare, if those medical error figures are realistic.
Like a lot of dyiscussions I don't think people really care about the violence so much as see it as another go to have a jab at the backwater Americans.
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Believe me I care if more than a million Americans are killed in traffic accidents every year, but only 26,000 EU inhabitants. That's fifty times more. Your gun crime death figure is only around ten times more I believe. I think you desperately need to ban cars as well as guns.
 
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