Going to echo @chenille, stay on topic. Cheers.
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Not even then, I fear.
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The topic at hand being stopping someone wanting to commit a murder/suicide on campus?
Nothing.
That’s right, nothing. Any attempt to legislate a solution is bound to be inept and cause more harm than good like the drug laws, the TSA, etc.
If someone wants to kill someone and then themselves, unless they telegraph their intentions or just happened to be stopped by chance - there is nothing you can do. You might be able to fight back, but assuming you know this person and don’t suspect their actions, they are probably going to get the jump on you.
Murder/Suicides can happen anywhere, including the sleepy little town I grew in a few years ago which has a near non-existent crime rate.
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It’s also my understanding that the Swiss have much tighter regulations on the availability of ammunition when compared to the US.
Not enough likes to give for that nugget of insight.
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This is quite true; the idea of ‘safety’ is merely an illusion that we concoct for ourselves so that we can function from day to day without going crazy.
(Some things can be made safer certainly, but as you pointed out above, nothing is 100% fool-proof.)
So, I’ve already established that I have no viable solutions to this ever growing problem; as someone on the opposite side of the proverbial aisle, do you have any plausible ideas?
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Just a reminder to anyone considering moving North to escape a Clinton and/or Trump presidency:
Y’all are welcome. The guns ain’t.
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As long as the Trump presidency doesn’t make my house value tank I will have no choice if I want to stay married to MrsTobinL. (even then I will probably have no choice in that matter)
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Sadly, I don’t think they’re for real.
I scanned the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, and it seemed more boilerplate for a promotional site than for a social networking/dating site.
That’s not to say that they can’t update it before “launch,” but if I were them, I’d base my policies off of, say, Match.com from the start rather than update them at launch.
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I was joking… mostly.
Unfortunately, the weather in Canada is far too chilly for my tastes, too much of the time.
We aren’t Hoth.
Vancouver’s weather is barely distinguishable from Seattle’s.
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Seattle = still too damn cold, too much of the time.
Basically anyplace where the average is less than 70 degrees on any given day is too cold for my personal tastes.
The further away from the equator it is, the less likely you are to find me there.
But back on topic, though:
This most recent tragedy is horrible, but not nearly so horrible as what passes for the “silver lining”; at least ‘only’ two people died.
It could have been more.
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It’s too soon to politicize the shooting.
Unless you’re against gun control, then it’s fine.
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That’s part of the problem here. We can’t really talk about shootings in terms of situations like this, where one off events occur without much predication. And really is not the bulk of who gets shot by guns in the larger picture. So solutions tailored to these more high profiled situations are completely not suited for handling other gun crimes and gun deaths.
Like my minimum desire for regulation now is to find a way to stop dumb gun deaths. Anyone accidentally being shot, being shot by a kid, or people bringing guns out for any situation other than hunting or self defense.
There can be reduced gun deaths and gun issues if it were ever possible to completely get rid of all guns, but the sheer proliferation over the course of American history makes even a concentrated effort essentially unfeasible to complete. And as long as people hold out this incongruous logic of guns/no-guns leaves us with our current situation and problems.
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canada ranks #12 on guns owned per capita. you have plenty of guns of your own.
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But weighed much more heavily toward hunting rifles than handguns.
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People from places with restrictive gun laws but terrible gun violence problems seem to frequently believe that the easy availability of guns in neighboring states is their problem. I understand the reasoning behind the argument, but if the root problem was really guns, then the places with loose restrictions on gun ownership would have a similar or worse gun violence problems. But there are plenty of places with lots of guns, plenty of poverty, and very little gun violence. It is easier to just believe that everyone in high crime areas would instantly become nonviolent, honest citizens if there were more laws against them having guns than it is to see the problems as complex as they really are.
One of the best illustrations of the principle is an imaginary school. A couple of the students at the school take knives from the cafeteria and stab some other kids. I agree that it might then be prudent to look at the knife situation in the cafeteria. But then, the same kids bring knives from home and do some more stabbing. The answer at that point is not to collect all the knives from local homes and shops, and restrict mail order knife sales. The answer is to do something about the frigging psychos who are doing the stabbing. because they can make a knife, or use a shard of glass or a pointed stick.
It is not a perfect analogy. But a gun is not significantly more difficult to make than is a batch of meth, and no harder to smuggle in than a load of drugs or whatever. As long as we have a portion of our population with murderous intent, we are going to continue to have a problem. Just my opinion.
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Actually guns are quite easy to legally obtain in California (compared to most developed countries, anyway). But even if they weren’t, the patchwork nature of regional laws across the country would make them easy to obtain illegally.
Could you name some, just for a basis of comparison? I’m unaware of any place on earth that has “plenty of poverty,” handgun ownership on par with the U.S., but very little gun violence.
Respectfully, I’d rather we address the non-imaginary scenarios. Outside the realm of imagination, for example, very few people use knives to rack up huge body counts on spree killings.
I don’t subscribe to the “homemade guns would simply fill the demand if we restricted legal sales” argument, mostly because it hasn’t been born out in practice. If that was a likely outcome we’d have seen a huge spike in homemade handguns used to commit crimes in other countries by now.
Regarding the meth analogy, anyone who has the chemistry skills to set up a meth lab could probably also make bootleg explosives—but we still license and regulate dangerous explosives. Because they’re flippin’ dangerous.
It will always be possible for a dedicated violent person to get their hands on dangerous things. But we needn’t make it trivial.
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We have about 1/4 as many guns per capita that the States do.
If 1% of Americans fled across the border with their guns (assuming that they have an average per-capita gun rate), it would be a 33% increase in the number of guns in Canada.
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