Here's a starting point… good night.

http://news.yahoo.com/man-fires-50-shots-calif-mall-parking-lot-042034513.html

Why not let everyone have guns but control the ammunition or make it non-lethal i.e. it will hurt you but not kill you.
Would this not solve the self-defense question because I just don't believe the average American wants to defend themselves by killing potential assailants.
Or is it the case that the US public are OK with the odd massacre as long as it's not their children and as long as they can keep those beautiful guns.
When you make that personal decision that it might be a good idea to own a rifle, a couple of hand guns and loads of ammunition in your house how psychotic have you become already; if reports are correct these arms were legally registered to the mother who was a school teacher, did she not know there was something not quite right about her son? If she was such a good teacher why was her son such a nutter?
The answer will never be just legislation, I have children, will I ever teach them that in certain situations it might be a good idea to have a loaded handgun? Of course I won't, if I lived in a society or a neighbourhood where having a loaded gun handy seems like a good idea I'd move to somewhere safer.
Are American parents educating their children to use guns, if so therein lies your problem. Give an nutter a match they will start a fire, give them a knife someone will get stabbed, give them a gun .......
I say to all parents who share their apparent love of guns with their children, you must take the responsibility for the atrocities/massacres to come because you have a chance now to do something positive, to make a change and I'm sure you'll do absolutely nothing; In future it may be your child who is holding that gun but you were the one gave them the courage to pull the trigger.
How important is it to have a loaded weapon in your house, if the answer is very you are just perpetuating the problem.
It's not a nice thought but it the police released pictures of the blood slattered bodies of the dead 6 year olds would that be enough to make you think again, if not then maybe you are the problem.
There is nothing brave and macho about owning a loaded weapon, this is what criminals and murderers and rapists do and they are the scum of any society, once you have lowered yourself to that level take a look at yourself in the mirror, what have you become?
Education not legislation is the real answer but it bemuses me as to why any rational thinking human being might think buying a semi-automatic weapon and lots of ammo could be a lovely present for the family home ...... epic. fucking. fail

Do American citizens need to own loaded weapons more than your average Chinese, Russian, German, Indian or Brazilian citizen?
If not then it just comes down to cultural choice, I live in a nice middle-class neighbourhood but I just fancy having a gun or guns for no particular reason, it would be nice to have a gun for 'safety' ........ who's fooling who ??
Does the mass ownership of guns make society safer, most burglars break into your house when you're out, not when you're in.....

I don't have a lot of time but the ammo thing will work to a degree. Some people have reload equipment

There are three ways you can go on this: 1) blame access to guns, 2) blame the culture of violence in entertainment and secularism, or 3) blame the individual shooter.

All three have contributed, but #3 is the real responsible agent. It is appropriate to discuss the other factors, and make sure there is nothing society can fix, but only if we do so realistically and without exploiting a tragedy for political points.

Nigee i can easily get 89mm or 7.62 ammo without buying it, as long as I have the brass for it. I dont ever have to go to a shop to buy that stuff.

sorry, that was suppose to be 9mm

Dipplayer, I am seventeen years old, and throughout my life, my parents have told me stories about how they used to practice a drill in school called duck-and-cover, where they would hide under a desk that was supposed to protect them from nuclear bombs were the Russians to attack. The students laughed, the teachers giggled, probably mocking the insignificance of hiding under a desk in order to escape an explosive. They were comical.

Now, we have lockdowns. We lock the school doors, we send administrators running through the halls, we have "code words" so that a potential killer doesn't go berserk before we're prepared, we hide in dark rooms with curtains hanging over the doors, windows closed, stuffing ourselves into a tight corner where we can't be seen. Nobody laughs, nobody speaks. Teachers bark at us to get in our places. Between fire drills and lockdowns, fire drills are loudest, but lockdowns are the ones we take most seriously.

Why? Because these things happen now. We aren't in fear of a nuclear bomb. We're in fear of a random crazy person walking in with a semi-automatic AK-47 and blasting our heads off.

I'm a kid in this nation and more than anything else in school I often fear for my life because I hear of things like this happening. I am on the staff at my local religious school and we wrote up a lockdown plan two months ago. We are replacing the door handles next week to lock from the inside of the classroom rather than the outside. Good timing I guess.

It's a lot scarier to be forced to confront a cold reality that says we are in danger of being attacked. There was no such reality in duck-and-cover drills.

You say we should blame the individual shooter. Yeah, we should. We should blame him and spit on him and carve his body into 200 little pieces. We should take his bones and feed them to our dogs. Those families should set his body on fire and keep some of his ashes and flip it off every time they walk out their front door.

On the other hand, you could realize that people that made an attempt to restrain the shooter and tackle him could have managed to do so if he'd simply had a handgun rather than a semi-automatic assault rifle.

But he didn't. People died because he didn't.

I'm not one to ban guns. I got taught to use a rifle and a handgun in Boy Scouts - don't blame them, it is truly a survival method - and I will get my license once I'm of the age to carry one. Nobody could take away ALL guns and honestly nobody could ever get any legislation passed that would do so. You can't take all guns away, you can't take all contraceptives away, you can't take all taxes away, etcetera blah blah blah. You can't go to those extremes.

All I want taken away are the semi-automatic guns. We took care of full assault weapons in 1994. Now let's take care of semi-automatic guns and we can call this debate quits.

bo_sox
When you're leading your own scout group will you train them to shoot to kill, because to be fair we don't shoot to maim, you don't train people to shoot people in the bum or arm, you are training young children to use lethal force, scouts in the USA are being trained to kill, is that considered normal, does anyone you know think this is crazy. My boy goes to scouts, if they taught my boy to use a gun it would be mental.
If you trained people to smoke or over-eat you would be vilified as a danger to the public or to common decency, you train them to kill and you're an upstanding member of the community.
Children and young people like you in the States are living in fear due to a threat that will probably never happen, how many millions/billions will be wasted now beefing up school security, home security, all security because some nutter borrowed a legally owned gun from his mum and thought a great way to end it all is to shoot up a bunch of 6-year-olds.

I think the answer and responsibility lies here with you and your generation, you are 17 now, in years to come if you have children of your own will you teach them to 'handle a gun' because if you do what you are telling them is 'guns are good, I like guns and I want you to like them too'. Will you buy them a gun, will you encourage gun ownership.
You can make a difference, some of the old gits on this forum are too old, to closed in their thinking to change now. I really hope people like you say 'enough is enough' otherwise the children of America will have to wait another generation, are you brave enough to tell the adults and lawmakers of tomorrow that guns are no good.
It's not the Law that needs changing, it's attitudes, culture, mentality.
Guns aren't a 'little bit good' or 'alright sometimes'. They are more dangerous than alcohol, than drugs, than lying or hurting someones feelings or cheating in exams or voting for medical cover for the poor or disabled or under-privileged.
Guns kill, that is what they have been designed to do. If not you then maybe your children or your childrens children will finally understand this and have the guts to stand against the powerful gun lobby in your country.
What would it take for you to 'Just Say NO'.

10 replies....sad....see, it's so much more fun to derail OTHER threads than be confined to the topical thread.

And bo_sox, you whiny hypocritical bitch...if I recall correctly YOU seem to have NO PROBLEM trying to hijack other threads for your own personal bullshit by posting off-topic shit. Were you not one of the obsessed deranged asshole with the "Man Up" posts...which were a complete failure, and which I totally pwnd you in?

I will now derail the shit out of this thread.

he only had hand guns bo sox The only AR he had was still in the car.

but Nigee, all those other things kill a lot more people than Guns do, so how can you say they are not 'more dangerous'? that seems a bit confusing, since the deaths from all of them are far and above gun related deaths.

As I said in another thread, a highly significant aspect of these mass shooting that isn't being discussed much, if at all, is the prevalence of the shooters being on SSRI drugs.

I would be totally SHOCKED to find out that this latest shooter wasn't on an SSRI drug. It creates ticking time bombs that explode with dire consequences, yet we're told that it's the tool that they use that is the issue, not the catalyst for their murderous behavior.

Bo_sox, how wasteful you are, honouring the victims does nothing. It is too late for them.

Your pathetic attempt to distract the argument isn't going to help stressed lines' 6year old. Someone who could be killed in a gun shooting. It is a terrible thing which has happened. And if you don't want it to happen AGAIN you must consider how best to respond.

You don't have to agree with my stance, but you can stop hiding. You were not personally hurt by this crime, the effect of a thread for the 'victims' is mostly to make you feel better - you feel better by thinking you've honoured the victims.

Well if they still exist somewhere then they're not going to be impressed by your self-serving thread. In an attempt to honour them while failing to act.

You have failed to act for decades coming up to this attrocity. The years before these 6/7 year olds were born. You did nothing.

You should feel guilty. You shouhld feel shit that you let them down.

You should not think that mentioning their names one a webdip thread will make up for this contining failure.

You disgust me.

Get your facts straight stressed

In regards to?

Drunk drivers kill far more people than guns. Alcohol.

See, alcohol and cars have purposes other than violence, guns don't.

Ummmm....I can use a gun without commiting violence against humans, moron. That is such a stupid, ignorant argument.

I have many family members who own small arsenals...and <GASP!!!> have never killed anyone or gone on a shooting rampage. But, they *do* have many tropheys on their mantel for winning the shooting competitions that they enjoy. Guns are also used for hunting, and a properly weilded gun can be used to *prevent* crime and violence.

It is only the fucked up asshole and EVIL humans that abuse guns for the purpose of violence.

JUST LIKE ALCOHOL AND CARS. They kill when they are USED IMPROPERLY.

No, they kill when they are used properly. They were created as war machines and are sometimes used now in nonviolent circumstances when naturally violent people need an analog for war.

I'm all for changing society's attitude toward alcohol. But then in tue US at least some people think you can have a good time without alcohol being involved (at least from what i've heard) where-as the drinking culture over here is a problem.

Still it is intention which makes us spend more on anti-terror than we spend on anti-car deaths.

Guns are intended to kill, cars incidentally kill.

Orathaic, was that post to me or someone else?

As far as I can see the moral in every US movie is that " if you hurt me or my family, I may hurt or kill you by all means". All movies end like that. So if the industry changes it's moral, maybe the rest of the trigger happy Americans will too.

Doubt that, F4… movies aren't that influential unless there's something seriously up with your brain. Don't blame them for creating serial killers and spree killers.

Nigee, I am not about to advocate for access to weapons of any kind. My point is that I can use a knife and shoot a gun, but that doesn't mean I am a spree killer and I wish that extremists would stop painting it that way.

You need to approach this moderately if you're going to do a thing about it. It's like the fiscal cliff… they'll either compromise or nothing will happen. The weapons that will do the *most* damage without a chance to be stopped are assault semi-automatics, and for the sake of getting things done, people need to adjust their arguments to make them reasonable each way. Banning semi-automatics doesn't drastically change gun ownership regulations or the ability of a licensed gun user to get themselves a gun. It does regulate the ability to go on sprees like this one. It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot more perfect than it ever will be.

So, Nigee, crawl back into your cave and feel free to criticize me for agreeing with you there. I'm simply more rational about it. You can't get it all done tomorrow so you might as well realize that and get what you can get done tomorrow.

You are sure about this Bo? Even if movies have age recommendations, you still have kids watching them without proper guidance. If you do not know any better and you see others taking stuff by force you will do the same. Putting the movies aside, it could be a separate topic, society is the root cause of the problem today. Everyone lives on his own island, mine, mine, mine...consuming goods like hamsters. Take a simple DVD player, 20 years ago you had to save up mony to buy a VHS recorder, nowadays you can buy a DVD player for less than 50 dollars. If you need to put effort in things people are happy...you nearly can get a smartphone by only buying a pack of washing powder. We are just not satisfied anymore, and living on our own island.

It's too late to ban guns in the US. There are already tens of millions of them out there and US citizens have a constitutional right to bare arms as part of an organised regional militia.

And just so you know where I'm coming from, if I ever move to the 'States I'd buy a gun - I'm ex-forces and used to be a member of a gun club. But that was before Hungerford and Dunblane. [Hungerford: 17 dead, 15 injured, private ownership of repeat firing rifles banned in the UK. Dunblane: 18 dead (inc. 16 children), 15 injured, private ownership of handguns becomes illegal in the UK.]

Because every firearm *and* owner was (supposed to be) licensed, collecting the guns after the law change was easy.

Today, in the UK, you're only allowed a shotgun or, exceptionally, a rifle - but you need a very good reason for the latter.

As I understand it, in the US, private trades of firearms aren't even registered, so the government doesn't even know who owns a firearm or exactly how many there are in private hands. There's no way they'd all be handed in even if the law was changed. I remember an NRA slogan "From my cold dead hands!". You'll never get people to give them up.

So, what to do instead? well I'm with whoever wrote the article purporting to be by Morgan Freeman - these psychos want publicity. Killing kids gives them more than just killing adults or simply topping themselves. Change the law so that it is illegal to give out their names and the number of news-flash-worthy*** killings would reduce. Getting such a change in the law during Obama's term in office should be doable, certainly a lot more doable than banning even the most deadly firearms.

***-there were more than 3000 gun murders in the US last year, most of these were *not* mass-murder but simply the result of anger and the ready availability of a firearm. Most didn't even make the national news.

Actually I'd be thrilled to live on my own island in an entirely different sense…

Society is the root of a ton of problems we have. That's because we are society. Your argument is too broad to think about without dragging off on tangents, such as the price of DVD players. I don't care about the price of DVD players. I never have and probably never will.

If people strive to be so independent from society as you say, how can you also blame the whole of society for a problem independent of 99.999999% of us? I don't follow that.

"So, what to do instead? well I'm with whoever wrote the article purporting to be by Morgan Freeman - these psychos want publicity. Killing kids gives them more than just killing adults or simply topping themselves. Change the law so that it is illegal to give out their names and the number of news-flash-worthy*** killings would reduce. Getting such a change in the law during Obama's term in office should be doable, certainly a lot more doable than banning even the most deadly firearms."

That's an argument I can follow and agree upon.

And, of all the mass killings in the US, I'm pretty sure (check me on this, I don't recall where I saw it) that 80% or so of them were committed by people who legally owned their weapon. Sure, the process behind legally getting their weapon can be debated, but that part is pretty well enforced.

http://i.imgur.com/Q3Oya.jpg
Banning guns won't help. But regulating them will help. Also, I've played ME trilogy, CoDs, BF etc. so am I a serial killer? Media in US says so.
We are smart induviduals but our thoughts will be in vain when we go out where people go with the flow.