School shooting Florida

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Thermal said:
Agreed, and I have been making that same argument for many posts. I live in one of the most strictly regulated states, and think regulation should be yet tighter. The post you responded to was a sidebar argument to the perceived easy transition of sportsman to murderer, which I disagree with.



I would take it a step further and ban all semi autos, maybe excepting the .22. Their main civilian use is convenience, weighed against the massive potential for abuse. And agreed, I think the majority want reasonable regulation. DC v Keller affirmed private ownership as well as rights to regulate. It needs to happen nationwide.
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Indeed. I *know* that posters have stated that semiautomatic rifles are good for shooting vermin, but as you say, that's convenience - I'm sure if a pack of ravening wolves were to attack a field of sheep, they'd run away if only one of the pack was shot.
 
This video has various interviews, or attempts at interviews at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It shows how many on the right claim the left want rid of all guns.

https://youtu.be/fPTq8p0rToo

Is there an actual organisation that wants to get rid of guns, or are those on the right lying, or at least misrepresenting the left?
 
jimbob said:
The problem isn't generally long guns - they're not that suitable for massacres (although it has happened before).
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In the very recent topic of this thread, for example.

The problem (by definition) isn't responsible gun owners. There is a question about who is responsible and who is likely to become irresponsible, but that's different.
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Not different- very much the same issue. Who should have which guns is the big dispute, I would think.

There are sufficient accidents to say that a sizeable minority of gun owners are irresponsible, if not downright dangerous.
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Fair enough. Also a great argument against concealed or open carry. I really don't like the idea of mistakes and accidents resulting from a random guy on the street being irresponsible, either.
 
Nessie said:
Is there an actual organisation that wants to get rid of guns, or are those on the right lying, or at least misrepresenting the left?
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I don't think any of the big gun-control groups advocate getting rid of guns. The Brady Center, Everytown for Gun Safety, Ceasefire, none of them do. Maybe someone can look into that more and prove me wrong, as far as the big organized groups go.

Then again, a lot of leftist activism is rooted in groups that like to be fairly leaderless - Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Occupy, and a bunch of others. There is a lot of inconsistency between policy positions of local chapters of those groups. You can probably find some that advocate full confiscation or something similar. They have little influence though - I've compared them to Flat Earthers or Birthers, both of which have more influence than people who advocate "getting rid of all the guns". (ETA: Not to say the BLM or Occupy have little influence - BLM especially does. But the portion of the BLM that might advocate for getting rid of guns (if that little portion even exists) seems to have no real influence).
 
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jimbob said:
Indeed. I *know* that posters have stated that semiautomatic rifles are good for shooting vermin, but as you say, that's convenience - I'm sure if a pack of ravening wolves were to attack a field of sheep, they'd run away if only one of the pack was shot.
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I imagine it would be quite hard to hit the wolf and miss the sheep. Then you have a dead sheep, a startled wolf and an empty rifle...
 
I’m on the “more sensible regulation please” side and agree that arguments like Ian’s are unhelpful. He’s got the important part right - a target shooting weapon is still deadly - but all this “no other purpose but killing people” stuff is ridiculous and insulting. I would have thought it was obvious that if skeet shooting has an ultimate purpose, it’s to be good at shooting birds for your supper.

And it’s also quite likely that walking was our most successful hunting adaptation; with walking we became endurance hunters and could follow prey till it was exhausted. The fact you can do other stuff with walking doesn’t change that it probably originally took off mainly because it proved useful for hunting.

There are lots of areas of knowledge and skill that confer the ability to kill people more effectively if you had to that aren’t for that. Doctors and pharmacologists for a start.
 
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3point14 said:
I imagine it would be quite hard to hit the wolf and miss the sheep. Then you have a dead sheep, a startled wolf and an empty rifle...
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Not for very long - I'm not advocating muzzle loaders, just not semiautomatic rifles.

I'd have thought that a bolt-action rifle would be plenty
 
Thermal said:
Agreed, and I think that a firearm ID should be renewed annually and tied to a database for mental health treatments and violent crimes. The NRA fights this, I gather because of how subjectively the definitions may be applied. I really don't think, however, that your average responsible and reasonable person suddenly transforms into a killer. I have been furiously angry at times, with a shotgun and shells easily accessible. Going on a shooting spree did not even occur to me. Homicidal rampages are not an option to a normal person, even in extreme circumstances. There is a very small percentage of people willing to kill humans, available weapons or not. Treating level-headed sportsmen like potential psychos perhaps fans the fires of the gun debate.



Oh, target shooters are well aware of the original purpose of guns, just as a teenage archer knows what a bow and arrow were originally used for. The analogy is exact here. When I used to shoot (haven't in 20 years), it was for hunting. I practiced with my shotgun to be safe and effective. It then became challenging to shoot with buddies, to see who was the most skilled, a fairly natural extension to target shooting. I think that progression is true for many sport shooters.

You seem to imply that going from responsible shooter to homicidal whack-job is a small jump. I would opine that it is a massive leap, more like a motor vehicle driver snapping and deciding to mow people down with their car (no strawman here, I think they are very comparable). A lot of responsible gun owners resent being characterized as potential murderers, and that fuels the increasing polarity on the issue.
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Re. the highlighted bits - No I don't think I have said that, or implied it. What I am saying about it is that there are millions of gun owners in the US, and apparently a lot of them say that they use their guns just for shooting targets and shooting wild animals. But with numbers that large, it's inevitable that every year hundreds (if not thousands) of those normally safe and sane people will become quite the opposite of safe and sane ... and because they keep loaded guns in their house that means they do then change from being merely target shooters to become amongst the hundreds or thousands of individuals who use those same home-owned guns to shoot other people every year.
 
crescent said:
I don't think any of the big gun-control groups advocate getting rid of guns. The Brady Center, Everytown for Gun Safety, Ceasefire, none of them do. Maybe someone can look into that more and prove me wrong, as far as the big organized groups go.

Then again, a lot of leftist activism is rooted in groups that like to be fairly leaderless - Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Occupy, and a bunch of others. There is a lot of inconsistency between policy positions of local chapters of those groups. You can probably find some that advocate full confiscation or something similar. They have little influence though - I've compared them to Flat Earthers or Birthers, both of which have more influence than people who advocate "getting rid of all the guns". (ETA: Not to say the BLM or Occupy have little influence - BLM especially does. But the portion of the BLM that might advocate for getting rid of guns (if that little portion even exists) seems to have no real influence).
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As suspected, there is no call to ban guns from any significant group. It is a strawman argument from those on the right at the CPAC.
 
Lithrael said:
I’m on the “more sensible regulation please” side and agree that arguments like Ian’s are unhelpful. He’s got the important part right - a target shooting weapon is still deadly - but all this “no other purpose but killing people” stuff is ridiculous and insulting. I would have thought it was obvious that if skeet shooting has an ultimate purpose, it’s to be good at shooting birds for your supper.
And it’s also quite likely that walking was our most successful hunting adaptation; with walking we became endurance hunters and could follow prey till it was exhausted. The fact you can do other stuff with walking doesn’t change that it probably originally took off mainly because it proved useful for hunting.

There are lots of areas of knowledge and skill that confer the ability to kill people more effectively if you had to that aren’t for that. Doctors and pharmacologists for a start.
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Is that an actual quote from my posts to say that guns have “no other purpose but killing people” ? If that's what I said then that's a mistake by me, because I did not mean to claim that you cannot use a gun for the purpose of killing game animals/birds or indeed just for shooting paper targets or clay skeets ... obviously you can use a gun for those purposes. But the point I was making (and what I thought I very clearly said, several times) is that those same guns can, and actually do, become the self-same guns that are also used to kill many thousands of people every year in the US ...

... please see my above reply to Thermal to see why I say that seems to me to quite obvious and in fact unarguably true - the people who are using those guns to shoot targets today, will over the next few years include all the same people who for reasons of mental or emotional instability, or for all sorts of reasons of anger and irrational beliefs and grudges etc., turn into the shooters who end up in the news for having shot all sorts of people.
 
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Thermal said:
Just wanna throw this out there: I have been around gun owners (myself included) most of my life. In my experience, owners are almost obsessively cautious with the safe storage and use of firearms. Long guns in particular are not laying around loaded. Ever. And this is important- owners tend to be responsible people, not crackpots who are ready to kill at the drop of a hat. In a country with hundreds of millions of firearms, there are about 33,000 +/- gun deaths, most suicides by handgun and a good chunk involving gang violence/street crimes. The massively overwhelming majority of owners commit no gun crimes of any kind. The problem really is keeping the firearms out of the hands of the loose cannons; the vast majority of owners enjoy their sports safely.

And I get that you don't want to beat this to death, but my daughter enjoyed archery in school. She was not training to kill anything and never has. Olympic biathalon athletes are also not training to become snow-snipers and assassins. Target shooting of any kind can really be a stand-alone sport.
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The reason I took up archery (and fencing) was so that when I fell through that wormhole into middle earth I could kill the orcs. Now you might argue my fantasy life was probably a bit too dominant but I had no doubt I was practicing to kill - orcs.
 
IanS said:
Re. the highlighted bits - No I don't think I have said that, or implied it.
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My apologies, then, I misinterpreted.

What I am saying about it is that there are millions of gun owners in the US, and apparently a lot of them say that they use their guns just for shooting targets and shooting wild animals. But with numbers that large, it's inevitable that every year hundreds (if not thousands) of those normally safe and sane people will become quite the opposite of safe and sane ... and because they keep loaded guns in their house that means they do then change from being merely target shooters to become amongst the hundreds or thousands of individuals who use those same home-owned guns to shoot other people every year.
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Are you proposing that the solution to mitigate this potential is to prohibit home storage of guns and ammo? I think that would be too extreme a stance to fly in the USA. Home protection and all (not that I think home shootouts are in any way a sane scenario, but many do). Annual licensing, tied into a criminal/mental health database is the most likely mitigating measure, I would think. The occasional crime of passion would remain a very real threat, as it is now.
 
Planigale said:
The reason I took up archery (and fencing) was so that when I fell through that wormhole into middle earth I could kill the orcs. Now you might argue my fantasy life was probably a bit too dominant but I had no doubt I was practicing to kill - orcs.
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I suspect my daughter may have harbored Hunger Games fantasies,which I sincerely hope had nothing to do with shooting her father if she got hungry enough. This was a potential threat when she was younger.
 
Some interesting statistics in this article, which notes that mass shootings have declined:

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.
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Fox said, however, some policy changes aimed at decreasing school shootings and gun violence in general certainly have merit. Banning bump stocks and raising the age of purchase for assault rifles from 18 to 21 are good ideas, and may lead to a decrease in overall gun violence, he said. But he doesn’t believe these measures will prevent school shootings. “The thing to remember is that these are extremely rare events, and no matter what you can come up with to prevent it, the shooter will have a workaround,” Fox said, adding that over the past 35 years, there have been only five cases in which someone ages 18 to 20 used an assault rifle in a mass shooting.
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He also points out that the notion of arming teachers is pretty silly, and I agree.
 
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