2013 America (and Friends!) Gun Violence Thread No Plows Allowed!

[Sho]

Except it's already illegal to murder someone.

Is getting into a car difficult?

Is getting access to children difficult?


Laws are there to present people with a consequence, otherwise society would be different.

I believe that's exactly the point Quicklet was trying to make. Quick was posting as a response to Salodin's post that having some sort of tighter regulation to guns would have little effect for a "revenge killing". The problem with this manner of thinking is that it's often too extreme -- it creates something of a logical fallacy: "Well in the act of murder, if person cannot use <Weapon A> they will use <Weapon B> or <Method C> to enact the murder instead.". The problem with this is that people tend to forget just how easy and lethal it is to employ a gun vs almost any other method of execution. People can live from stab wounds, getting cracked over the head, or even getting hit by a car. Even so, it would take a bit more and circumstances changed to commit a murder in a different way than with a gun, plain and simple. Not saying that people cannot live from multiple gun shot wounds either, but in this circumstance, only a gun would have caused so much damage in such a short period of time, vs say, a bat or a machete. Any one of the three people could have quickly reacted to the guy if they attacked one of the others with said weapons, for example. There's really no way this guy would have been able to stab all three people to death, or have found them together in the perfect moment to run them all over with a car.

From there, strict gun laws will still be one of the best forms of deterrents around. No one goes into making a law thinking that it will be a catch all fix -- it's a rule that would be enforced through law enforcement, like everything else, with very harsh penalties levied on the person(s) who get caught breaking the law, which would include jail time. With all the crazy shit going on right now in America, which seems to be now at the frequency of every 2-3 weeks on national television, it's sorely needed.

[Quicklet]

The idea that we should do nothing because either we cannot prevent 100% of bad things from happening or we might not have prevented specific event X from happening strikes me as an odd argument and rather fatalistic. It's like saying "well we can't control when people get into car accidents, so there's no point in legislating seat belt requirements when riding in vehicles." Laws are generally designed to encourage/discourage behavior or to punish behaviors that are deemed harmful to society or others. If someone has a history of psychological or behavioral problems that suggest a tendency to anger or violence, shouldn't we as a society try to make it more difficult for these people to act out their wishes?

Everytime something like this happens, we always hear about how it's a mental illness problem, about how we need to do something about mentally ill people. First of all, mental illness (in the broad manner it gets applied here) does not preclude premeditation. Secondly, I see no contradiction between ensuring that responsible people have adequate access to guns and restricting access to guns for people who are statistically more predisposed to abuse that right because of documented issues like domestic violence incidents.

[Fhloston]

I thought the point blank shots and her running off seemed odd, but you get so used to shootings you see in the movies and forget that it usually differs a lot in real life. Seemed he was also a terrible shot, but she was probably running on pure adrenaline and fear. Still a damn shame it happened tho, and how it was all over social media. I really hope this doesn't become a trend.

[Gokku]

Until someone shoots up a national blonde white girl convention nothing is changing in America, if dead children can't get people to care then the only thing more shocking is dead pretty white girls *blonde to be exact*.

[Aksannyi]

It's not that people don't care, it's that people don't see a viable solution. Regulating who can get guns and making things tighter is all well and good, but it does nothing about the millions of guns already out there. Is the government going to come door to door, violating the fourth amendment, in order to then violate the second?

If guns are made more difficult to obtain then it's not going to immediately fix the problem. If the guns that are being sold through the illegal weapons trade can be removed from circulation by an FBI or ATF task force (which, by the way, would be incredibly difficult to manage), then maybe there's something that will change. But there is no simple solution. And it's not that I don't care that people are being gunned down, but I also care about the people who legally own guns for their own purposes (protection, hunting, sport) who are responsible owners - who are also the vast majority of gun owners.

[Eurell]

if dead children can't get people to care then the only thing more shocking is dead pretty white girls *blonde to be exact*.

????

[Ragnus]

That's a blonde white girl.

[Salodin]

>Concur that we need stronger regulations even though it wouldn't have changed this murder in any way
>Get responded as if I said don't take away my guns

No sane person agrees that we need zero new regulation on guns, but I wholeheartedly disagree if you think that agenda would have helped these poor people. The assailant was an overall decent guy, if a little paranoid that everyone was a racist. He used a pistol, not some heavy automatic weapon. He only attacked three people, but his target was one; two were targets of opportunity.

He would have been able to procure a weapon regardless of any new laws in place (using examples you guys thought were good), with out even using the loophole that is a gun show, and he would have been successful in murdering his ex regardless. The extra two attempts at murder were just bonus points for him. Your new gun laws would have been wasted and gun advocates nationwide would have come out in force using this exact case for why stricter gun regulation does nothing.

This whole thing is an unfortunate situation that can't be regulated away. Sans making gun ownership illegal, no regulation would have stopped this man from doing this. So he went through a background check (and passed since we have no reason to believe otherwise) and he waited two months (and used those two months to plan because maybe the max his clip can hold is 6 bullets now), and he can still repeat this exact scenario.

Like I said before, small premeditated murders like this won't change with regulations. It's the mass shootings where kindergarteners are at stake where it will help. If clips hold half the ammo, then the assailant not only has to reload more often, letting more people escape, but he only has so many pockets to hold extra clips as well. Ban assault weapons with out special permits, and make those permits hard as shit to get (yes, even for law enforcement or military). Those are reasonable changes that will occasionally help us lose less life when these things happen. Notice I didn't say prevent from happening, because no matter what you can't regulate the murderer out of some one like some people seem to think when they start talking about gun regulation.

Instead of focusing only on the guns, why not focus on the people? What pushed him to do this? Why was he so distraught over the church shooting and his ex that he wanted to do this? Why are we blind to people who are in so much pain or harbor so much hate that we can't notice that maybe they're going to crack?

[Byrthnoth]

I agree.

Really the only way to minimize damages from an attack like this would be to make gun ownership illegal. If he had used a knife, he probably would have killed one person at most.

[Churchill]

I wouldn't say at most. This scenario is extremely easy to prosecute all targets and knives are extremely deadly if you do a small amount of research.

A scenario where a shooter enters multiple rooms and wounds/kills many, or does so from long distances is curbed by tighter control on firearms. Those same scenarios would still end up with casualties and fatalities though.

What you don't want to happen is to have no guns available and have these people start getting proficient with Tomahawks, one-hit KO's are bullshit.

[Salodin]

You know what's even scarier? A mass murderer that doesn't use guns. He uses a knife. And he calmly waits until they're alone at home or a restroom and murders one person at a time, over a long period of time. That's more seriel killer than this scenario, but like I said before you can't regulate the murderer out of some one.

[kuronosan]

Bad example is bad.

[Salodin]

No, you.

[Quicklet]

Instead of focusing only on the guns, why not focus on the people?

Because after every time this happens, nobody wants to focus on the guns, yet it keeps happening at an alarmingly frequent rate. Every reasonable statistic studied on this issue suggests at least a correlation between higher gun ownership rates and higher gun violence. Maybe we could start by, I don't know, funding some new studies to look at whether additional gun control measures would be more effective and to look at the health impacts of gun violence in the US.

[thetruepandagod]

Because after every time this happens, nobody wants to focus on the guns, yet it keeps happening at an alarmingly frequent rate. Every reasonable statistic studied on this issue suggests at least a correlation between higher gun ownership rates and higher gun violence. Maybe we could start by, I don't know, funding some new studies to look at whether additional gun control measures would be more effective and to look at the health impacts of gun violence in the US.

Uh what? Every high profile homicide involving guns generally leads to a fairly vigorous debate on gun control. Only one I can think of that wasn't was Dylan roof because the racism component was just so amazingly prominent that it overshadowed gun discussion in the media as far as I could tell.

[Quicklet]

I wouldn't call anything since Sandy Hook meaningful debate on gun control. If 20 dead children isn't enough to keep lawmakers from being bought off by the gun lobby, almost nothing is.

[Xajii]

Really the only way to minimize damages from an attack like this would be to make gun ownership illegal.

1. Given the current weapons landscape of the country, making guns illegal would do relatively little to curb gun crime. They are prevalent, many of those used tokill are illegally obtained anyway, and we have ample evidence in drug law that banning things doesn't make them go away.

2. There is a middle ground between "free gunz 4 everyone" and "ban all guns". BG may not have the best and brightest on the subject, but that's kind of what we're discussing here.

Instead of focusing only on the guns, why not focus on the people? What pushed him to do this? Why was he so distraught over the church shooting and his ex that he wanted to do this? Why are we blind to people who are in so much pain or harbor so much hate that we can't notice that maybe they're going to crack?

I've already touched on this subject in this thread but man do I hate this line of thinking.

1. Mental illness or "pain" isn't justification, and we have about a human history's worth of experience to say that no matter what advancements we make in mental health treatment/support, suffering will still exist, and crazy people will still be crazy and do crazy things. Yes, we need to have a discussion about mental health and how we support those who suffer in this country. No, this is not where the discussion stops, and no, this is NOT the appropriate response to gun violence every time.

2. How do you have such a nihilistic view of what gun control changes might do to impact situations like these but turn around and imply that if we just pay attention to peoples' woes and "notice" something, that things might be different?

[Sho]

It's not that people don't care, it's that people don't see a viable solution. Regulating who can get guns and making things tighter is all well and good, but it does nothing about the millions of guns already out there. Is the government going to come door to door, violating the fourth amendment, in order to then violate the second?

If guns are made more difficult to obtain then it's not going to immediately fix the problem. If the guns that are being sold through the illegal weapons trade can be removed from circulation by an FBI or ATF task force (which, by the way, would be incredibly difficult to manage), then maybe there's something that will change. But there is no simple solution. And it's not that I don't care that people are being gunned down, but I also care about the people who legally own guns for their own purposes (protection, hunting, sport) who are responsible owners - who are also the vast majority of gun owners.

Then what is a viable solution? If you think about it, there really is none that no one can come up with. It must go the way of stricter gun control for people interested in obtaining a gun, and place numerous checks on those who have guns already, even if it's retroactively.

First off, the obvious must be controlled -- that of banning assault and military grade weapons as well as high capacity magazines. This alone is a process that would take numerous years, but the sooner it's begun the sooner it will be that much more effective. The ban also cannot be a shitty one like the one we enacted in 1994, one which had 600 exemptions and was allowed to expire in 2004 due to a sunset provision. It has to be permanent, and have teeth. Example would be Australia's 1996 ban on assault weapons -- a straight up ban with a provision for a mandatory buy-back system for the newly banned weapons. This was done in a response to a mass shooting that happened that same year. Since then, there hasn't been any mass shootings in Australia, and the homicide rate caused by firearms fell 59% over the next two decades. Would this translate to a 0% rate of mass shootings over time? Of course not, but it would be largely effective because the idea of having an assault rifle to commit mass murder would be taken out of the equation completely. No one civilian in the US needs a high capacity assault rifle.

The next should be creating laws and regulations which would establish gun safety in America, much like Melena said earlier -- one that would require people to become certified (and re-certified) to be allowed to carry and keep guns, as well as constant, yearly (or bi-yearly) gun safety and gun storage classes that people must attend and pass in some manner, similar to a driver's license. If people violate the laws, a permanent revocation of the license to carry. These types of laws have a double and parallel effect of not only helping to prevent children from accessing firearms, but also making it that much more difficult for firearm theft to even happen.

Finally, there should be far stricter background and mental health checks than what we currently have in place.

It's not infringing on people's rights to own a weapon, but tightening up on lax and permissive laws that allow people easy access to a firearm and compounding the problem we currently have. There's no simple solution to attacking the mental health issue, as it goes far back in time, and is affected by multiple society issues, such as on going violence, popular culture (video games, movies, music), poor life culture, racism, and more. It's much more simple to restrict access across the board. The people who are responsible owners will continue to be responsible, and would even go out of their to maintain this relationship, if enacted (like Melena).

[kuronosan]

Yea, Mental Health is not the problem. It's clearly only the access to guns.

Look, assholes are going to snap on bad days and hurt people. Sure. It takes less people getting hurt to stop a person with a knife than a person with a gun. It's a terrible fucking fallacy to say things like "HERP DERP IF DEY HAVE KNIFE DEY KILL PEOPLZ BAN KNIVES".

Tell me the last time a single person found it more difficult to disarm a person with a knife than a person with a gun. Unless the person is Hawkeye and is a master knife thrower, you're going to find it easier to escape.

[Thunder]

How can people be so sure when they say that banning guns and stricter gun control laws cannot help curb the problem of gun violence over time?

Look at what it's done to australia, a country that had a similar problem with gun violence
+Look at all the countries in europe with no/little guns. A bit different than the US, but still

How can people be so sure that it CANNOT work in the US? It reminds me of the #psyop people a few pages back who are so arrogant and stupid they think they've sherlock holmes'd a conspiracy layered on by the most powerful country in the world.

@Aks, is your whole post about how it cannot be solved immediately and that's a good reason for not taking steps to eventually curb the problem? Even the most strictest of gun ban enthusiasts don't think it can happen immediately, but you've got to be crazy to think some provisions wouldn't get certain guns off the streets in a timeline of years. You seem to be thinking on the wrong timeline here