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Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
I'm telling you man, if it happens... there's gonna be A-LOT of bloodshed. Gun nuts and rednecks have been looking for an excuse for years. Tie religious beliefs and God given prophecies in to it... suddenly you're doing it for what you believe in, which always trumps the law. Obama would have more dead kids on the ground that would make Newport combined with Waco look chicken shit.
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
I think Obama has been pretty well briefed on the militia's and extremists groups who are just looking (for any excuse) to carry out terrorist attacks if he did anything drastic and he's taking everything into consideration with every word he uses. The paranoia runs deep...
I think reinstating the AW ban will probably happen again. Gun and bullet taxes should also be considered, along with huge penalties if your gun is used in a crime, even if it's stolen.
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
Unless the SS officers want your guns too of course.
They can't get you to hand them over, but they can surely take them if they really want to. That wouldn't mean guns would disappear from the market, far from, but it would ensure that law abiding citizens won't have them. Which is obviously what the government wants at some point, cattle without horns.
Which is why it will never happen. I never realized until I moved to the south how much people love their guns.
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
http://news.yahoo.com/around-world-mass … 45195.html
DUNBLANE, Scotland (AP) — If there's anywhere that understands the pain of Newtown, it's Dunblane, the town whose grief became a catalyst for changes to Britain's gun laws.
In March 1996, a 43-year-old man named Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in this central Scotland town of 8,000 people and shot to death 16 kindergarten-age children and their teacher with four legally held handguns. In the weeks that followed, people in the town formed the Snowdrop campaign — named for the first flower of spring — to press for a ban on handguns. Within weeks, it had collected 750,000 signatures. By the next year, the ban had become law.
It is a familiar pattern around the world — from Britain to Australia, grief at mass shootings has been followed by swift political action to tighten gun laws.
Many in the United States are calling for that to happen there, too, after the shooting of 20 children as young as six at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. Many other Americans are adamant the laws should not change.
In Dunblane, residents have been gathering at the town's massacre memorial to sign a book of condolence — but are loath to advise grieving Americans what to do.
"It is not for us to tell the U.S. about gun control. That is for the people there," said Terence O'Brien, a member of the Dunblane community council. "What happened here was similar in many respects, but the wider culture is different."
When it comes to guns, the United States is exceptional. The U.S. has the highest civilian gun ownership rate in the world, with 89 guns per 100 people, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey.
Gun advocates, including the powerful lobby group the National Rifle Association, have blocked attempts to toughen American gun laws in the wake of previous mass shootings. Gun supporters say that the right to bear arms, enshrined in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, makes firearms ownership a civil rights issue, rather than simply an issue of public safety.
Supporters of gun control often cite Australia's dramatic response to a 1996 shooting spree in the southern state of Tasmania that killed 35 people.
The slaughter sparked outrage across the country and within 12 days federal and state governments had agreed to impose strict new gun laws, including a ban on semi-automatic rifles like the Colt AR-15 used by the Tasmania killer. The Connecticut killer used a similar, rapid-firing weapon.
Gun ownership was restricted to people with genuine need or sporting shooters with gun club membership. Some 700,000 guns were bought back and destroyed by the federal government from owners who no longer qualified to possess them.
The changes were unpopular with politicians from rural areas with high numbers of hunters and farmers. But, as in Britain after Dunblane, the strength of public opinion swayed politicians from both government and opposition parties.
Gun laws also were strengthened in Canada after the 1989 slaying of 14 female engineering students in Montreal by a woman-hating gunman, and in Germany after a 19-year-old expelled student killed 16 people, including 12 teachers, in Erfurt in 2002.
Even gun-loving Finland — with 45 firearms for every 100 people — tightened its laws after two school shootings in 2007 and 2008, raising the minimum age for firearms ownership and giving police greater powers to make background checks on individuals applying for a gun license.
Did it work? In Australia's case, the change appears dramatic. There were a dozen mass shootings with at least five deaths in the country between 1981 and the Tasmania massacre; there have been none in the 16 years since.
Studies have tracked a reduction in gun deaths in Australia since the 1996 reforms, particularly in suicides. The journal Injury Prevention reported in 2006 that the risk of dying by gunshot had halved in Australia in a decade.
In 2010 in Australia, there were 0.1 gun murders per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, less than half the rate of a decade earlier. In the United States the murder rate was more than 30 times higher, at 3.2 per 100,000.
The connection looks simple — countries with tighter gun laws and fewer guns have lower levels of gun crime.
But experts say it is not quite so straightforward.
"The irony in the U.K. is that in the four years from 1998 when handguns were fully banned, gun crime continued to rise," said Peter Squires, a professor of criminology at the University of Brighton. "We were in a phase in the 1990s when street gangs were becoming the new urban disorder ... and we were hit by a whole new problem of converted and replica and reactivated guns."
In the long run Squire thinks the change in law did make a difference. Gun crime in Britain has been falling since its peak in 2002 — a decline also seen in other Western countries — and there are now only a few dozen firearms homicides each year.
But, he said, "for the first four years it played into the classic NRA script that gun control has failed."
The U.S. gun lobby sometimes cites peaceful, alpine Switzerland as an example of a country that has many privately owned guns and little violent crime.
Like the United States, it has a strong gun culture and with plentiful shooting clubs — but also a mass citizen militia. Members of the part-time militia, in which most men serve, are allowed to keep their weapons at home, and the country of less than 8 million people owns at least 2.3 million weapons, many stashed under beds and in cupboards.
But while Swiss homes contain guns, but little ammunition, which is largely kept under lock and key at local military depots. Most adult gun users have military training.
And Switzerland went through its own soul-searching after a man named Friedrich Leibacher went on the rampage in the regional parliament in the wealthy northern Swiss city of Zug in September 2001. He killed 14 people and himself, apparently over a grudge against a local official.
The massacre, along with a campaign to reduce Switzerland's high level of gun suicide, led to a referendum last year. It proposed that military-issued firearms must be locked in secure army depots and would have banned the sale of fully automatic weapons and pump-action rifles.
Voters decisively rejected it.
Those who believe tighter gun laws are necessary acknowledge they are no panacea. Norway has strict gun controls, but Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 people dead in July 2011 with a pistol and a rifle he acquired legally by joining a shooting club and taking a hunting course.
But gun control advocates say the alternative is worse.
"There is no act of Parliament, no act of Congress, that can guarantee there'll never be a massacre," former British Cabinet minister Jack Straw, who as home secretary brought in the country's handgun ban in 1997, said Sunday. "However, the more you tighten the law, the more you reduce the risk."
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
"There is no act of Parliament, no act of Congress, that can guarantee there'll never be a massacre," former British Cabinet minister Jack Straw, who as home secretary brought in the country's handgun ban in 1997, said Sunday. "However, the more you tighten the law, the more you reduce the risk."
Again, this is totally correct if there aren't already guns everywhere or people actually turn them in as happened in Australia. People won't turn them in here...nowhere near at the rate it happened in Aus. As the 10 year assault weapon ban proved, nothing changes here in the US. It's too engrained in our culture whether we like it or not.
This is coming from someone who doesn't own a gun or have any interest in owning a gun. There are a lot of things in this culture that aren't for me, but I accept as part of living here. I don't do drugs either, but if people choose to, as long as they aren't harming me or my family and/or putting us at risk, I don't care what people choose to do to themselves. That's pretty much my philosophy on everything.
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
"There is no act of Parliament, no act of Congress, that can guarantee there'll never be a massacre," former British Cabinet minister Jack Straw, who as home secretary brought in the country's handgun ban in 1997, said Sunday. "However, the more you tighten the law, the more you reduce the risk."
Again, this is totally correct if there aren't already guns everywhere or people actually turn them in as happened in Australia. People won't turn them in here...nowhere near at the rate it happened in Aus. As the 10 year assault weapon ban proved, nothing changes here in the US. It's too engrained in our culture whether we like it or not.
This is coming from someone who doesn't own a gun or have any interest in owning a gun. There are a lot of things in this culture that aren't for me, but I accept as part of living here. I don't do drugs either, but if people choose to, as long as they aren't harming me or my family and/or putting us at risk, I don't care what people choose to do to themselves. That's pretty much my philosophy on everything.
I agree with you, but I still don't think the answer is "do nothing". Changes have to be made. What those changes are, I have no idea. I know it won't be easy, and I know things won't change overnight. But "do nothing" is not the answer I'm looking for.
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
I agree with you, but I still don't think the answer is "do nothing". Changes have to be made. What those changes are, I have no idea. I know it won't be easy, and I know things won't change overnight. But "do nothing" is not the answer I'm looking for.
You've hit the problem on the head. Everybody knows the answer isn't do nothing, but when the something to do isn't even remotely clear or obvious, do nothing is going to be the result. There are consequences to whatever is done too, and those may end up being worse than one shooting at a school. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true.
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
I think Obama has been pretty well briefed on the militia's and extremists groups who are just looking (for any excuse) to carry out terrorist attacks if he did anything drastic and he's taking everything into consideration with every word he uses. The paranoia runs deep...
I think reinstating the AW ban will probably happen again. Gun and bullet taxes should also be considered, along with huge penalties if your gun is used in a crime, even if it's stolen.
I'm not opposed to that at all. As a gun owner, i'd sign off on that. Doesn't seem unreasonable.
- monkeychow
- Rep: 661
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
Buzz you say we can't have an intelligent discussion because the guns already exist.
In my opinion it's more unintelligent to declare the situation an unsolvable nightmare just because the guns already exist.
Right now there is a culture of gun acceptance and a lot of guns in circulation. RIGHT NOW.
These are factors that could change culturally over time.
There are many things that could be implemented slowly - gun buy backs, Stop selling new guns, stop selling ammunition, incentives for people to surrender weapons, strict consequences for continuing to own weapons and so on.
I agree we shouldn't have knee Jerk reactions.
But that's just it - this isn't - it's another episode in a statistically provable and avoidable cultural phenomenon.
Re: Elementary School Shooting in US
faldor wrote:I agree with you, but I still don't think the answer is "do nothing". Changes have to be made. What those changes are, I have no idea. I know it won't be easy, and I know things won't change overnight. But "do nothing" is not the answer I'm looking for.
You've hit the problem on the head. Everybody knows the answer isn't do nothing, but when the something to do isn't even remotely clear or obvious, do nothing is going to be the result. There are consequences to whatever is done too, and those may end up being worse than one shooting at a school. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true.
Well I'd start with a ban on assault weapons for one. I know people have said here that they tried that once before and it didn't make a difference, yet I don't remember 20 children getting taken out in a 1st grade classroom before, with or without a ban on assault weapons. So I think that might be a good place to start. As others have mentioned, I don't really see the need for them in society. If the guy only had access to a handgun, the damage probably would've been a lot less.
The school itself actually had a pretty good security system, with all guests having to be buzzed in. Unfortunately it wasn't setup to withstand a gunman shooting his way into the school. So however you can prevent that, so be it.
Again, no set of rules is going to erase the possibility of any of these senseless acts ever taking place again. Crazy people will always find ways to do crazy things. Even if you can somehow make schools as close to 100% safe as possible, can you do that for malls, post offices, movie theaters, clubs, etc.? I'd say no. But some small steps need to be taken. I'll leave it up to the experts to decide what those steps may be.
And not to dismiss misterID's point about taking a closer look at the mentally ill. Obviously that's an issue that needs to be looked into as well. Again, I don't know how you pinpoint who the crazy people are, so that's obviously not an easy fix either. Let's not forget, this guy was denied buying a gun earlier, so that part of the system worked. Unfortunately he was able to get guns elsewhere, right from his own home.
