No one is immune, but over the past decade and a half America has had more mass shootings, and more deaths in them, than the next top 10 countries combined.*
That’s a problem.
But everybody else seems to be doing a lot better dealing with it, so maybe adapting some of what their doing isn’t a bad idea.
*source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/22/barack-obama/barack-obama-correct-mass-killings-dont-happen-oth/
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Given the general US attitude to mental health I think any such screening system would likely lead to more problems, not less! Medicate the problem and forget about it, analogous to performing brain surgery with a jack-hammer (we’re talking about a country that advertises on daytime TV anti-depression medications that cause suicidal thoughts!?!). In a lot of these cases the perps had already received psychiatric and/or psychological treatment, had already been medicated and forgotten about.
Speak for yourself. If your crazy is normal, you can be crazy normal. To me, normal is crazy and that’s my normal.
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To be fair, we did used to do something along those lines, but it was with an icepick.
To quote the venerable source of wisdom known as Princess Bride, regarding your use of ‘well regulated’, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”.
Oh yeah, and the other venerable source, the actual amendment:
I think training before you can be allowed to operate a firearm aka device-whose-sole-purpose-is-to-harm-life is the very least you can do, and it seems to fall in line with the founder’s intentions (which seems to somehow trump all modern logic).
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I suppose it’s good news that he turned out to only be a hatchetman since the gun was just an airsoft. Sad that he ended his life in this way. Glad nobody else was seriously hurt. I guess we learn that if a mentally unwell person attacks a theatre without a gun, the ending isn’t as tragic.
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So this report now says:
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This guy was crazy. Like committed crazy.
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Didn’t have a real gun. He had an airsoft pistol.
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Only deadly weapon he had was the ax/tomahawk and wounded a shoulder
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Had packs on him with hoax explosives.
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Sounds like a tragic case of suicide by cop.
Oddly - I heard a police spokesman say the first cop shot once, but later in the 2nd report there are over half a dozen shots heard. Though perhaps that was a second shooting by multiple officers.
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As noted above:
[quote=“newliminted, post:189, topic:63165”]
I guess we learn that if a mentally unwell person attacks a theatre without a gun, the ending isn’t as tragic.[/quote]
I wonder if it’s possible, or even conceivable, to extract some generally applicable rule of thumb from that … like … reducing access to firearms would reduce firearms related deaths, maybe?
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You keep your dirty science out of this, sir. This is a place for passion and politics!
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That is a good definition. I will link to it in the future. The point is “well regulated” means a militia that works well - both through training, and having good equipment (thus my example of the term used to describe a watch) - vs what many people think it means - regulated by laws or restricted. Your example is probably a better definition vs my clunky attempt at explaining the arcane usage.
The right isn’t dependent on being in a militia or having some sort of qualification.
Though I agree people who plan to use firearms should get training. Many people do. It really isn’t very hard to properly use one safely. While we do have accidents, it isn’t clear how many of those are from not knowing what they are doing (say a child finds it) vs someone who knows what they are doing and is either complacent in safety, decides to use it in an unsafe manner any way, or truly has the rare accident through no fault of their own.
I am all for education and encouraging people to properly store and use their fire arms. But even if you had a license scheme (which you can’t do as it is a “right” in the US), I drive with motorists ever day who are licensed yet lack either the knowledge or care to drive safely.
Of the ~32000 gun deaths a year, only ~800 are accidental. ~11-12000 are from crime, and the rest are willful actions of suicide.
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Yes. Of course. Outlaw pools and drowning deaths would decline. Outlaw booze and alcohol related accidents and drunk driving deaths would decline. Maybe. Theoretically, drug OD deaths would go up if coke and heroin were legal.
But you won’t eliminate it 100%. And in the mean time you punished the vast majority for the tiny minority who misuse guns. Ban TOR browsers, crpyto programs, VPNs, torrent services, and other computer technology because people are pirating media and trading child porn. Right?
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Find me a mass stabbing that is as near lethal as a mass shooting… it’s just not the same. People bent on killing don’t replace guns with knives.
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and what, pray tell, do we use to ensure training and maintenance is up to standard, wishful thinking? And what of those who fail to achieve or maintain their training standards, or look after their kit - what punitive actions do we take and how are they enforced?
Logic failure: see it here, live as it happens. 
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Because we’d have to resort to socialism in order to treat the socio-economic problems that leave people desperate, hopeless, and angry enough to do this sort of thing.
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Pfft. Amateurs. A few years ago I heard about a group of 8-12 dudes who used craft knives to kill ~3,000.
But, outliers are outliers. The data from the Politifacts link above indicates that the average mass killing over the last ~15 years killed roughly 4.5 and wounded roughly another 4.5, for a total of 9 per shooter. Average. Just looking at public mass killing events. The Kunming event you linked to - an extreme outlier, and which wouldn’t count in the Politifacts data even if they’d used firearms - has an average of 4 victims per stabber, or half the number you’d expect from a shooter.
Which just reinforces the point even more: yes, you can hurt someone, even lots of someones, with a knife. But you EXPECT to kill a lot more someones with a firearm. Which should be a stunningly obvious insight - armed forces transitioned from edged weapons to firearms for exactly that reason.
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You keep dragging other countries that are not on par with America into this. China and Mexico have their own issues. Sorry for not being specific. But congrats for finding at least one. Now are there 4.4 a year somewhere in thr western world?
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Again - the right isn’t dependent on being part of a militia. The militia requires a pool of armed citizens to pull from. That was the reason for the 2nd Amendment. In the US we didn’t have a large standing army for the longest time and pulled from the state militias when we went to war. This was put under the Federal Umbrella of the National Guard in the early 1900s. But the right extends to the people in general, not to militias only.
One could argue the Amendment isn’t needed today, especially after WWII when our defense budget exploded. But that is what it says and that is what it is for and it probably isn’t going anywhere.
But let us be honest. Do you HONESTLY think the problem with gun violence in the US is a LACK OF TRAINING? The criminals killing each other is because they aren’t trained properly? Hell many of them shouldn’t have guns in the first place as they are past felons, so even if there was a licensing scheme they would still be in violation of all the laws already in place.
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You? Want honesty?
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That’s because every other developed country has a social safety net. Our gun violence isn’t a problem, it’s a symptom of a deeper problem. People don’t do things like this until they’ve reached the breaking point- And we lead the world in pushing people to it.
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