Yet another needless mass shooting

[Jamiet99uk]

Presumably the answer is that nowhere near enough people in Chicago own assault rifles? That would make things much more peaceful and safe, right?

[Durga]

People shouldn't be owning these kinds of weapons with or without school shootings. The fact that not even the deaths of countless children year after year can prompt change in the US is incredibly depressing. Regardless of the cause of these events, the fix is obvious - and removing these guns from your diseased society should be a top priority. How many more children will die for your "gun rights"?

[Jamiet99uk]

Gun lovers don't care about innocent people dying as long as they can jerk off with their assault weapons.

[CAPT Brad]

Leftists don't care about innocent people dying as long as they can masterbate with their wacky views.

[CAPT Brad]

More people die from handguns in Chicago than in school shootings from 'assault rifles".

[CAPT Brad]

But why should anyone from Canada care. Their RCMP is more interested in rousting up indigenous peoples and abusing them.

[Durga]

But why should anyone from Canada care. Their RCMP is more interested in rousting up indigenous peoples and abusing them.

We have the capacity to care about multiple issues. And I agree, Canadian treatment of Indigenous people is disgusting. Just recently a jury decided that a white man who shot an Indigenous man in the head should be let off with no punishment. These things are not okay either, and I'm not ever saying Canada doesn't have it's own problems. We do, this just wasn't the space for me to address them.

[thamrick]

More people die from handguns in Chicago than in school shootings from 'assault rifles".

How is this an argument that we should have stricter gun control in the US? A school shooting is jarring because schools should be considered a safe space for adolescents, but any death by a gun is a problem.

[Jamiet99uk]

Classic whataboutery from Brad.

[Durga]

He doesn't know what he's talking about tham, lol - "Leftists don't care about innocent people dying as long as they can masterbate with their wacky views."

this is proof that he doesn't consider *why* people have views, because obviously liberals are just people who exist only to be contrary and anti-freedom

[Ogion]

Yeah, because having to have schools looks like prisons because of gun whackos is such great "freedom"

lol.

Right wingers are kind of obsessed with death. I honestly think Republicans love school shootings, because they can fundraise off them and they get kind of excited by all the blood. It's like a death cult.

[thamrick]

This shouldn't be a Republican/Democrat issue. It's a human issue. As a human race, we continually find ways to kill our fellow humans. Why shouldn't we want to find ways to lessen these deaths?

[Durga]

Yeah can we not stoop to partisanship rn, looking at you too Ogion.

[thamrick]

@Durga - what are Canada's gun laws like?

[President Eden]

Have you proved that, Major? The US population is around 12x the size of Australia, so naturally you have to scale the figures appropriately. In recent years guns have been less popular as a means of mass slaughter than they were, certainly, but I recall last year there was that car that ploughed through quite a few people, the gunman in that siege in Sydney, that chap who decided to shoot himself and his wife and kids, and a couple of really nasty arson attacks since 2010.

The dead are very much dead regardless of the method used to take them there. Australian gun controls may well have improved things, but let's not pretend they were a silver bullet that fixed everything.

Never mind that the policies in question also refer to confiscating guns on an island with an area two million square kilometers smaller than the US, instead of having to cover that much larger area and worry about not one but two land borders for smugglers of illegal arms.
Or refer to a country with a different culture regarding gun ownership which greatly affects the capacity of the government to enforce gun confiscation policies.

Baffling that people actually consider "It worked for X country, why not the US?" a reasonable argument without even evaluating any possible differences between the countries which might account for why not.

So, since there are differences, let's do nothing. As if gun traffic via the border is the largest source of guns in the US. How do you propose to lessen this evil? Could limiting access to guns not even help a little?

Don't put words in my mouth.

I don't know a solution that I believe to be (a) actionable and (b) effective at stopping these things.
What I want to do is end the absurd overprescription of antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs, and tear down all of our 24/7 news corporations for their role in feeding the frenzy. But while I think that would be very effective at stopping school shootings, I don't know whether the US could actually do it through the legal system.
The US has had widespread gun ownership since its founding and private ownership of several powerful rifles, like the one used in this shooting, for decades; yet this phenomenon of mass killings involving these guns is limited to the last 20 years, starting with Columbine. For 200 years the US public had access to powerful weapons, and no problem with them being routinely used as the tool of slaughter of dozens of innocent people.
This leads me to believe that while legally actionable, reducing access to guns via legislation is extremely unlikely to be effective. Only a wholesale gun grab will actually reduce access to any type of weapon which a school shooter could perpetrate. Perhaps limiting that weapon type to a handgun instead of a military-grade rifle will save lives by comparison, but what we're ultimately interested in here is stopping the incidents altogether.

This is by far my biggest problem with the gun-control angle on school shootings. Why do we even have people who want to kill others like this? As previously noted, for the vast majority of American history, these killings didn't happen, despite access to powerful enough weapons to enable them.
I will not presume, but the fact that the left continually jumps to gun control and only talks about gun control, while deriding people like me who are concerned for the bigger picture as "not wanting to do anything," honestly makes me think you don't actually care about the underlying issue and just want to push gun control on the country, efficacy in solving the problem be damned.

how can you be more likely to be murdered by someone than need a gun for non-recreational use? literally any circumstance in which you would be murdered is definitionally a circumstance in which you would need a gun for non-recreational use.

Because if someone premeditates that they're going to kill you they probably won't wait for you to get your gun. If someone doesn't premeditate but kills "in the moment," they're not going to wait for you to get your gun either. If you had a conceal and carry, you probably wouldn't have the wherewithal to draw on them before it's too late anyways.

I don't mean to say there shouldn't be conceal and carry, I'm just saying that most murderers, including mass shooters, kill before anyone is able to take them down.

First off, don't move the goalposts. I asked you a specific question: how can you be more likely to be murdered someone than need a gun for non-recreational use? You have established already that these are situations where the need for a gun is present. Why did you make this absurdly hyperbolic statement?

Secondly, how do you know any of these things? You are just blindly presuming that a would-be shooter is always going to beat anyone to the punch, will always be aware of every potential counterattacker, and is never going to miss, have a gun jam, run out of ammo or need to reload before the counterattacker comes along... you have no basis for any of these assumptions.

But you need groceries. Hardly anyone needs a gun when driving through the city.

Depends on the city. In chicago, you need an armored vehicle.

And why has your society, and your government, allowed Chicago to get so fucked up?

Why are you still acting like you actually want to engage when you are very obviously just preaching from your high horse and completely uninterested in the reasoning for why Chicago is in such dire straits or what can be done about it besides the solution you are intractably ideologically biased toward proposing?

This shouldn't be a Republican/Democrat issue. It's a human issue. As a human race, we continually find ways to kill our fellow humans. Why shouldn't we want to find ways to lessen these deaths?

Why do you presume that people who disagree with you are uninterested in solving the problem, and don't simply think you have the facts wrong?

[Durga]

@Durga - what are Canada's gun laws like?

From what I've heard it's just much harder to get one/we might have more restrictions on what type of guns you can get but I'm not entirely sure. I don't know anyone that actually owns a gun, but like - I'm from Toronto not from the farmland in the prairies.

[thamrick]

This is by far my biggest problem with the gun-control angle on school shootings. Why do we even have people who want to kill others like this? As previously noted, for the vast majority of American history, these killings didn't happen, despite access to powerful enough weapons to enable them.
I will not presume, but the fact that the left continually jumps to gun control and only talks about gun control, while deriding people like me who are concerned for the bigger picture as "not wanting to do anything," honestly makes me think you don't actually care about the underlying issue and just want to push gun control on the country, efficacy in solving the problem be damned.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but can you give me an example of why you feel that way (like you are being derided)? I think your stance is completely reasonable and a valuable discussion to have. I don't think that your view and the pro-gun control view are at odds either.

This shouldn't be a Republican/Democrat issue. It's a human issue. As a human race, we continually find ways to kill our fellow humans. Why shouldn't we want to find ways to lessen these deaths?

Why do you presume that people who disagree with you are uninterested in solving the problem, and don't simply think you have the facts wrong?

What about my statement said anything about my stance on gun control? I admit, I am pro gun control, but my statement was about preventing deaths. I didn't say there was one end-all-be-all way to do that. I am very open to hearing alternative solutions, but the stance I do not accept is that the problem does not need addressed.

[Condescension]

From what I understand, we don't allow bullpup rifles and require licenses for guns. We have way more guns per capita (I think absolutely as well) than the US, and *zero* school shootings. We also have a media that isn't sick as fuck.

Seriously, just go watch some Canadian coverage of this school shooting and compare it to CNN. It's night and day. The major networks are 100% trying to drum up fear in middle-aged parents to get them glued to the TV and get the entire nation hooked on mass murder.

[President Eden]

I can't believe I forgot to mention the FBI's role in this too. Shame on me.

The FBI received multiple tips showing that this guy was a high-risk for a school shooting and sat on them without doing anything. The FBI routinely seems to ignore or otherwise not act upon these tips in a number of these mass killings. They allegedly knew about Adam Lanza, the Tsarnaev brothers, the San Bernardino killers and now it's come out they received tips on this guy too. No action taken to stop any of them.

Something is rotten in the state of federal law enforcement.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but can you give me an example of why you feel that way (like you are being derided)? I think your stance is completely reasonable and a valuable discussion to have. I don't think that your view and the pro-gun control view are at odds either.

My post criticizing the copy-paste application of Australia's gun control legislation to the United States as "So, you don't want to do anything?" by ksako is a great example of what I mean. It is the constant go-to from not all, but entirely too many, gun control advocates, that opposing gun control as a reasonable solution means you don't think there's a problem or don't want to solve it. Jamie and Ogion just did it on this very page of the thread.

I admit I misinterpreted your post and apologize for that though.

I think you will find that my view is fundamentally at odds with gun control, because I think gun control would be an enormous disaster for the US, but I do also think we will be able to find other angles of attacking the specific school-shooting problem that gave rise to this conversation in an effective way.

[thamrick]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but can you give me an example of why you feel that way (like you are being derided)? I think your stance is completely reasonable and a valuable discussion to have. I don't think that your view and the pro-gun control view are at odds either.

My post criticizing the copy-paste application of Australia's gun control legislation to the United States as "So, you don't want to do anything?" by ksako is a great example of what I mean. It is the constant go-to from not all, but entirely too many, gun control advocates, that opposing gun control as a reasonable solution means you don't think there's a problem or don't want to solve it. Jamie and Ogion just did it on this very page of the thread.

I admit I misinterpreted your post and apologize for that though.

I think you will find that my view is fundamentally at odds with gun control, because I think gun control would be an enormous disaster for the US, but I do also think we will be able to find other angles of attacking the specific school-shooting problem that gave rise to this conversation in an effective way.

A fair point, but I would also classify your response to the initial idea of proposing similar gun control to that of Australia's as derisive. I'm not talking about the content of the arguments, but rather the tone.

Regardless, I think it's an overgeneralization and hope that you don't remain jaded by the actions of the few. The same is true for the other side. Differing ideas doesn't mean we need to be uncivil.

Why is your view at odds with gun control? Correct me if I'm missing something, but your view is that there is a mentality issue in glorifying mass murders and not addressing mental health. Why can we not address these issues in conjunction with limiting access to guns?