Lots of suggestions have already been mentioned in this very thread.
A renewal of the assault weapons ban is certainly in order, as well as ironclad regulation of magazines that carry over, oh, I dunno, 5 rounds? You intend to hunt, or you intend on defending your home. That's legit. Why do you need more than that many rounds at a time?
Why are there still gun shows, where you can obtain most anything you want without a regulated restriction on quantity or calibre or mental health?
Why does Wal-Mart, one of the country's largest retail stores -open 24 hours- still sell weaponry at all, and sell ammunition without a required permit?
Why are civilians allowed access to rounds that would punch through multiple human bodies with ease?
Why are we allowed to order munitions online and through an individual dealer rather than a thoroughly monitored company that has more to lose than a mere permit should it lapse in protocol?
I get that access to mental health ought be augmented -as well as access to all healthcare, no, insurance lobbying is not enough- but it will not fix the sickness in our midst overnight. We are complex creatures that at best take years of therapy to "fix" in individuals at risk of harming only themselves, much less dozens of others in a calculated spree.
Nobody is saying we can directly address all of our problems of firearm-enabled homicide (to which individual homicide is by far the greatest threat, not these mass killings that seem to get everyone's attention), but a compounded response is in order, for a problem that is nowhere near as simple as making it hard to get a gun.
Sleightful
quote:
Originally posted by Intellekshual
Morgan Freeman’s take on what happened yesterday :
“You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here’s why.
It’s because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed
people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he’ll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
CNN’s article says that if the body count “holds up”, this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer’s face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer’s identity? None that I’ve seen yet. Because they don’t sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you’ve just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
You can help by forgetting you ever read this man’s name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news.”
I read all of that in his voice.
I agree with him completely. We give way too much attention to the individual(s) responsible for these events and then turn around and view the victims as just one faceless mass. The media inevitably places much more attention to the killers with the victims being relegated to a footnote within a few days of the tragedy. Unfortunately, there's much more of a demand to learn every possible detail about the killer, not the victims.
EddieZilker
quote:
Originally posted by DJ RANN
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quote:
Originally posted by tubularbills
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This is a topic I've spent a lot of time talking about with my girlfriend (who's even more pro-gun than I am) and think I need to clarify a point that I feel is being over-looked in the midst of the arguing for/against stricter gun laws. If you look at the motivations for gun purchasing, most of it has to do with fearfulness on some level. I've come to believe that American culture is at a crescendo in terms of the fear experienced by society at large and for a variety of reasons.
Some of them are absolute bull (Obama's gonna take away our guns!) and some of them have to do with the economic insecurity experienced by many Americans. Incidents like those concerning this thread's topic also contribute to the climate of fear. There are a lot of contributing factors to the proliferation of guns and gun violence that are clearly not being adequately addressed by the current level of debate. My personal position, in so far as wanting to own a firearm and what I think should be done concerning them has to do with pragmatism rather than idealism. Do I think TheChief's and RANN's position on this issue represents an ideal I can identify with? Yes. 100%, I whole-heartedly agree there is absolutely no reason for huge swathes of the population to own weapons with high capacity magazines, capable of sustaining high cyclic rates of fire; semi-automatic or otherwise. You're not going to kill a deer with that. You'll just ing annihilate it.
Is that ideal realistically obtained in the foreseeable future? Unfortunately, no. While I honestly believe there will come a point when high-capacity magazines are a thing of the past, I think society needs to evolve beyond its current economic and social issues.
(Note: I am skeptical with what this movie asserts regarding Columbine and am not sure it pertains to the particular shooting discussed in this thread, let alone a host of others, but I do agree with what it has to say about gun violence, in general. EDIT: I also want to be abundantly clear that I don't subscribe to any viewpoint that promotes a "forgiving" understanding of the perpetrators.)
Halcyon+On+On
quote:
Originally posted by Sleightful
We give way too much attention to the individual(s) responsible for these events and then turn around and view the victims as just one faceless mass.
It's ironic, because that's precisely what these killers do. Nobody "snaps", they always plan some elaborate revenge fantasy to exact upon what they perceive to be the greatest nerve they can rupture against the mass that is against them.
Perhaps it is politically-motivated, like Norway's Breivik, where he could stage his great decree against minorities in his country by killing youth.
Or Columbine where the downtrodden can exact revenge against their social superiors by targeting popular and athletic peers.
These people always believe some human force other than their own inertia is the cause of their failures, and after years of feeling themselves blamed, retaliate in the most monstrous way possible. I am simplifying it quite a bit, but projection is at the heart of each round ejected through the tissue of someone who had nothing to actually do with these people's problems.
Ah yes, the ACRU, because the rights and encoded interpretations of the status quo are to be considered foremost before the lobbying efforts of the adaptive concept of liberty.
If you read this article (to which I questioned if it was indeed an offshoot of The Onion, in all honesty), note its use of the word "murder", referring to convicted murders by use of guns. This is not the same as gun-relate homicides, to which the US is very much afflicted; almost 20,000 each year, though 150 of those are the victims of mass, public murders. In a nation of 300,000,000, this figure has in all actuality wavered little in the last few decades, to be candid. I am not saying that such tragedies are in any way acceptable though -for what many rightfully consider to be a foremost nation with a worthwhile constitution- nor am I excusing the mass murder of kindergartners as a mere statistic, but everyone ought keep in mind that things are by all counts not getting worse, merely more televised.
But Wal-Mart still shouldn't be allowed to sell lethal merchandise.
Lagrangian
Oh no you didn't...
WittyHandle
quote:
Originally posted by Sushipunk
People with connections will be able to find something, of course, but your normal Joe off the street won't, if/when he snaps.
The thing is that mass murderers don't just snap. They are usually planning for their events well in advance and they are well prepared.
Edit: I didn't read down far enough to see that Hal already mentioned that. Nvm.
Titanium
Way too young, innoncent to die.
RIP. America is a ed up country way too many wackos over there.
Psyshell
There's wackos everywhere, but there's no reason why a country can't have a few safeguards in place if someone attempts to buy something more able to kill people rapidly than either a car or a hunting rifle.
