"We need to ban guns"

NOT A GOOD TIME. You are a sick motherfucker if you think that this is a good time to push a political point.

If we're going to ban anything, why not ban mental illness? No sane person has ever gone on a shooting spree.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/11/07/michigan-shooting-spree-suspect-identified-to-appear-in-court-to-face-charges/

That guy looks sane to me.

Let's do it, Gun. You and me, buddy, ban mental illness… Dorothea Dix can rot in her grave.

Before Draug comes around and starts going on a drunken rant about how "EPIC. FUCKING. FAIL" those statements are, I am being completely sarcastic.

Tell me how many massacres are needed before we can finally act.

Yes, we must take away the guns from people who have never misused them!

Don't let a crisis go to waste, eh?

I have some things to say.

Allow me first and foremost to express my deepest condolences to anyone on this site who has friends and/or family that suffered from the tragic shooting in Connecticut. Let me also express my condolences to anyone on this site who has friends and/or family that suffered from the knifing in Chenpeng, China, at a primary school the same day, on which I will get back later.

In the Netherlands, there are very few gun-related deaths per capita (and of course also in absolute terms) compared to the US and after the last particularly tragic one, in Alphen a/d Rijn, the *first and most urgent point of national debate were topics such as legal and illegal gun ownership, types of guns allowed, membership of a gun club in relationship to gun ownership etc. etc.*. We didn't wait a single second to debate that.

I'm absolutely shocked to hear people say that "NOW IS NOT THE TIME" in capital letters, as if people who bring up gun ownerships are doing something morally irresponsible. They don't. What if a mother loses her child to leukemia and she says possibly the heavy pollution in her area was a cause to that? What are you going to tell her? That NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO DEBATE POLLUTION? I find that *shockingly inhumane*, the first response of any normal human being is to ask himself these kinds of questions and Putin has every fucking right to ask them here, I think it's his *duty* to ask them here. Plus ******* one.

Yesterday, at about the same local time as the shooting in America, was a similar incident in China, with a knife.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_School_stabbing

People were injured. Knifes evidently don't kill people, guns kill people. So there you have it. This is the truth. If any of you consider yourself Christians ask yourself if it's a coincidence that these events occurred on the exact same day and if they didn't occur to get your bloody brains to think about this particular distinction.

Then, let's all agree to do the same thing. Let's make a list of all television stations who had the audacity to demonstrate a picture of the *alledged* killer (which turned out to be a different guy) *willingly putting the life of an innocent man at risk just to report something new.* Let me say that again: *they willingly took the risk of putting out a picture of the wrong man just to have something new to report.*

That's your definition of evil right there. And with that list in hand, I say don't watch any of their shows for a month. Let people lose their jobs over this. If you report an event of this magnitude, you can't screw up. It's not entertainment. You're not supposed to want to watch.

Last point. Isn't the 2nd amendment about "an organized militia"? This whole thing didn't sound very organized militia to me.

If we're talking about gun control, I just want to point out the irony that the same people who think banning guns would work are the ones who think the ban on drugs has failed.

Also, before you guys even get started, this thread says "shocking and distressing" followed by the reporting of the shooting by a foreign news agency. It's not a condolence register so we can debate here on the politics of this event.

There's no irony fasces, those two are different commodities with different consumption patterns. For starters, people won't be robbing 7-Eleven to get their daily fix of S&W. Unless you think gun ownership is also an addiction, it's quite clear that price elasticity of guns is much higher than price elasticity of drugs. By this virtue alone, the banning of guns will dissuade more people from trying to get them than a ban on drugs. So yes, the effectiveness of the ban is on a different level between those two.

Please clarify, Fasces

I would disagree ulytau, legally the price elasticity of guns is high, but there is a kinked component to the demand of guns as there are few goods which, if made illegal, people would still buy heavily on the black market.

In terms of black market, guns, despite being legal in some countries, still outsells weed.

The irony is simple, the #1 reason people say the war on drugs doesn't work is because they claims laws don't dissuade people from buying them, yet they think criminals are going to be deterred from buying guns if it is made illegal

Bad things happen when good men do nothing.

Guns are not the problem. Indifrence from society is most often the problem.

I have been shot and it was by 18 year old who got a gun for his birthday and was bored. Took pot shots at people.
Who knew, if only he got a motor bike.

@Fasces,
If you're referring to, for example, myself and Putin33, we're both against drug legalization (generalizing our respective positions), because people do bad things when they use drugs, and we're also against gun ownership for the exact same reason. Like I said, please clarify *who* you're talking about and *what* the irony is.

We have had guns in this country forever and a day. There was never such things happening before. There is a change in society yhat is driving this. The guns are a tool. Tim mcveigh used no guns and killed plenty. If a person wants to kill lots people its going to happen.

In china a man kills/wounds 22 students with a knife.

Again.knee jerk reactions.

Why were people not doing these massacres in 1950? I had a gun with a 20 round clip at the age of 10. As did almost everyone else Iknew.

Our violent society may be the problem and the guns are how people act out

'Guns are not the problem. Indifrence from society is most often the problem.'

Are people indifferent? News stations love to have an interesting story to blair 24/7; and the 'people' lap it up. Everyone pays attention, get involved in what amounts to 'normal' human behaviour - ie: watch from a safe distance to learn and avoid similar incidents.

@Stressed,

He didn't kill/wound 22 students. He *wounded* 22 children/teachers. Although some are hospitalized, none of them died at this point.

Let me spell it out for you:
Frustrated man, China, 14 december '12, knife attack on primary school: 0 dead.
Frustrated man, US, 14 december '12, gun attack on primary school: 28 dead.

It's not rocket science.

People won't be committing crimes to obtain money for guns - yet they are committing crimes all the time to fuel their addiction. That's because in the hierarchy of human needs, having a gun in a country with functioning police is pretty damn high compared to securing your next fix.

And you don't understand the problem if you speak about criminals obtaining illegal guns. Criminals are obtaining illegal guns already - if shooting a gun is part of your occupation you sure as hell don't want cops to know it was your gun. If you're a smuggler, you sure as hell don't care if the it's illegal to cross the borders, since you're breaking the law anyway. No, it's not about proffesionals, it's about deterring ordinary people from owning guns. Those are the ones that shoot their whole family in a moment of mental breakdown and they sure as hell won't go out looking for a dealer to buy a gun to shoot their family with. No, they will either use bare hands or something like a knife which is not only less deadly and easier to defend from, it also requires much more commitment to follow through with your rampage in the first place.

Still, the main problem is in the Americans themselves. For some, guns are fetishized symbols of their personal liberties. The gun culture is pervasive and it's demonstration in people showing off their guns is more resembling countries during Arab Spring than an OECD country. This leads to absurdly high levels of gun crime, especially in comparison to those liberal European countries which have only marginally stricter gun control (usually in the form of no full-autos without a government permission) but a gun culture, where guns are not a public issue, just like religion should be. As a result, I do not need a gun lobby to push for a law to carry guns into pubs in the Czech Republic - it's a part of the right to carry guns in the first place. And guess what, there is no anti-gun political platform in the Czech Republic, because every other retard isn't shoving his CZ 75 into our faces while thinking he's all cool and 100% Czech.

@Redhouse: I'm referring to the progressives.

re china: The last 2 shootings in canada left 15+ people wounded and only 1 death (1 death for one of them, 0 for the other).

in anycase there was another knife attack in august in china, 9 people died in that one:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jI-ZlYoOyH6_3LiU7Pgy5o48eM7g?docId=CNG.9a3b132f11893ca20b522fb446b69f9b.2b1

So not all gun rampages kill hundreds of people and not all knife deaths leave 0 peopledead. Its just a pure coincidence that these happened on the same day, I seriouslly doubt the kills communicated and agreed to kill on the same day.

If you really think a guy with a knife is as dangerous as a guy with a gun, then where does the self-defense argument fits in? Knife will serve you as well as a gun in that case.

@Ulytau: doesn't that give good reason to legalize guns. If criminals are going to by them illegally anyway (except for in rampages like these where they both expect and in some case want to be caught) then should legalizing them mean it would actually be safer because then law abiding citizens could have guns?

Again. We have always had guns. What has changed? Nobody is answering this. Theguns were always there. Another variable has changed

@ Stressedlines

"Why were people not doing these massacres in 1950? I had a gun with a 20 round clip at the age of 10. As did almost everyone else Iknew."


May 18, 1927: School board member Andrew Kehoe set up a series of explosions in the Bath elementary school. 45 dead, 58 injured

October 2, 1953: 14-year-old Patrick Colletta is shot to death by 14-year-old Bernice Turner in a classroom of Kelly High School in Chicago. 1 dead

September 15, 1959: The morning that Paul Orgeron's second-grade son is denied enrollment, he detonates an explosive on the school playground during recess. 6 dead, 19 injured

Just a few incidents to show this sort of thing is nothing new. School murders in the US go back to the 1700s, although the larger events traditionally used explosives over guns.

No. 3.incidents in 30 years is nothing like what we are seeing now. Please stop

1 of your incidents used a bomb and the other looks like a grudge kill. Apples and oranges

We are discussing something that can plunge this country into literal civil war.

Guns have always been there. The rate of there events is faster and faster. Why? Don't say guns. Guns are not making this happen at this rate. Something else is

Octavius. I think there is something wrong with our culture/society that is being ignored. Maybe its our moral compass is wrong (and Idont mean religion). Our values have changed a lot in 30 years. what is important now and what was important then is not the same

" I think there is something wrong with our culture/society that is being ignored. "

-Such as the fact that you were armed before you knew your multiplication tables by hard?

*heart

And? I'm not going around killing people. I am a combat vet. I was also putting food on the table with that gun. Try again. Redhouse.you are european so think carefully. Any knee jerk reaction on guns can very well bring this country into a civil war. You got no skin in this fight so its easy for you to have an opinion on it because you won't suffer the consequences

@Stressedlines

How is it apples and oranges, exactly? A human snaps and kills a load of people with a weapon. A slightly different variety of apple, perhaps, but they all very much apples. Also the reason I mentioned just three incidents is because I couldn't be bothered to write down all of them. There haves been plenty of such incidents on a regular basis around the world for well over a hundred years.

Also... civil war? Let's stick to reality here.

Values don't change that much. A few fringe values tend to vary over the years, but the core remains the same. Shooting kids is more evil now than it ever was. Go back not so many years and people were used to kids dying. The death of a child was still a tragedy, but like the death of a grandparent it was part of life.

Octavious. Let me tell you a story from this morning at a cafe in a small town in tennessee. Everyone is watching cnn.and feeling the same pain as we all are. 20 or so people.

Then comes a congresswoman from new york talking about 'gun grab' the mood changed 100% exactly from pain and suffering to anger.

A gun grab would in reality start something ugly. Are you even american? Even the libs who are american on this site know what would happen and be hard pressed to disagree.

Reality is we take these rights seriously. I think you are british so Idont expect you to understand and if you are american you need to get out more

I have lived in boston,philly appalachia and the deep south. Their attitudes on this could not be further apart

And all your examples did was show the weapons of choice are not going to stop the mad men.

Mentally ill people in the United States have easy access to guns because they're everywhere. Americans are also indoctrinated with the idea that THEY ALONE have the constitutional right to kill people who make them nervous. By and large, Americans are sick fucks.