What has the US done to tackle gun shootings?

edward

We have probably reached a point of no return as far as any kind of laws restricting weapons. The large capacity magazines are more recent, but there is no way short of civil war that people would give them up.

The sheer number of weapons owned in this country makes it a matter of common sense that there we be no government agency coming around to take away weapons. The problem is too many people don't have the common sense to realize this. It is much easier to believe the many conspiracy theories floating around.

It is almost as if a certain portion of the population actually wants that civil war. It is mentioned constantly on gun forums.

It all boils down to the basic psychology that we all need an enemy. And it appears that we will indeed eventually follow the fear mongers into another civil war.


http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...iw=960&bih=414

The quote is from the second google link.

I have read through dozens of weapons forums and the most common enemy claimed appears to be President Obama. Especially according to the NRA.

So those who claim the man who can not accomplish anything is the same man who is going to have their weapons siezed?? Exactly what well organized militia do these people belong to?

While they are fighting supposed tyranny from within what is the U.S. military and national Guard going to be doing?

Shotgun firing dragon's breath shell for self defense ? do not fire in your home.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwhCygmhbCg

AR 15 with slide stock with 100 round magazine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U6tORrODJE

Slide stock shotgun with 20 round magazine. One of these started a wild fire that burned over 40,000 acres in AZ this spring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_W1pLT7xSA

Ok OK so you deserve to Have every weapon that is available to enlisted military. Wait a minute, they usually are assigned to carry one or two specific weapons, not all of them.

I won't go in to the phallic symbol theory.

Mech_Engineer

I'm just trying to keep the facts straight, maybe closer to the point is about 1 in 10 people in the U.S. are lawful gun owners.

Scaling doesn't provide a particurally useful reference since pretty much all guns are illegal in the UK.

On the contrary, I would argue it's pretty hard for a criminal to get a gun illegally. They can't be purchased from gun stores or at a gun show without a background check, and are illegal to own if you're a felon or have certain civil or criminal court penalties.

The only real way to get one is buy it from an illegal arms dealer, which is off the books and already out of the reach of the law (hence the moniker "illegal"). If guns were outlawed by a new law tomorrow who would be most affected by it, people legally purchasing weapons through stores with background checks, or ones being sold illegally on the black market?

CAC1001

The vast majority of gun violence in the United States occurs with handguns in the inner cities. Usually in the cities that have the most restrictive gun laws (which results in only the criminals having guns).

Remember that people can get guns illegally. Major Nidal Hasan used a hangun to kill all the people he did. In Norway (a country with a lot of gun control) last year, a man killed 90+ people. The other issue is that we, as a society, have also made another decision: that it is acceptable to have a lot of legitimately mentally unhealthy people walking around in order to not violate the rights of the few mentally healthy people who could accidentally be committed. This was due to a change in the civil rights laws back in the 1980s I think, where beforehand, people like a Jared Loughner, who everyone could see was nuts, would have been committed. The problem was if enough people thought you were nuts, and you really weren't, you could also be committed against your will. The modern law makes it where a person first must do something bad before they can be committed against their will.

Yes, but by the same token, that's why people should be allowed to be armed as well, so they can defend themselves. The problem with "reasonable gun laws" regarding mental health issues or crimes is that the people who are zealous about gun control would try to make such laws very unreasonable, where if you have so much as a traffic ticket in your background, you lose your gun rights. A determined criminal will always be able to harm people, whether getting the weapons illegally (like the guys in the 1997 North Hollywood shootout) or making bombs or whatnot.

CAC1001

"Large-capacity" magazine is an arbitrary term. To the gun control people, it means any magazine capable of holding more then ten rounds. A lot of people would disagree with that.

When Hurricane Katrina happened, the police went around and confiscated the guns of citizens (because of course the citizens who would willingly tell the police where their guns are so they could go and take them away are the ones who cannot be trusted to hold firearms). The result was a lot of people were left defenseless as there was a breakdown of civil order.

Don't know if they claim Obama can't do anything. People fear him seizing their weapons for reasons ranging from his anti-gun voting history as a Senator to his ability to change the structure of the SCOTUS to where it will be clearly anti-Second Amendment. The militia consists of every able-bodied male. There are also multiple state militias, some of which go all the way back to the revolution; they usually with work in with law enforcement and the military during times of crisis.

Bump-fire weapons that simulate automatic fire capability are a bad idea IMO, as automatic fire weapons are illegal with a few exceptions. Civilians are not allowed to own every weapon that is available to enlisted military, they are allowed to own handguns, semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns. Whether these are used by the military or not is really irrelevant. So long as they meet what is legally allowed, then it's fine. Many a hunting rifle can do far more damage then a military rifle. There's also a lot of crossover between the two. The hunting variant of the AR-15 (a rifle used by Holmes), for example, fires a larger-caliber of ammunition and has a longer barrel to shoot over a longer distance, with better accuracy. The Remington 870 pump-action shot gun that Holmes also had is used in everything from hunting to law enforcement to military.

When the Founders wrote the Second Amendment, they also meant military weapons. It wasn't put in there for hunting purposes. That said, being how modern weapons are different, weapons like bombs, machine guns, battle tanks, and all that, are not covered under the word "arms."

lisab

In your opinion. If it was clear what the founders meant when they wrote the Constitution, we wouldn't need a Supreme Court.

russ_watters

Neither of those is correct. For most of the Constitution, there is historical record about the intent of the founders, so we do generally know what "they" intended (note however, "they" is not one person, so "they" didn't always agree with each other and "they" isn't one voice). On the narrow issue you were commenting on, the amendment was indeed intended for the populace to be able to defend themselves against government tyranny and also to help the government defend the country against invasion. That's a historical fact, not an opinion. See discussion in the wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_...e_Constitution

The reasons we need the supreme court (for this issue, anyway) is that technology has made military weapons a lot more powerful, causing concern over whether individuals should be allowed to have military grade weapons. In addition, there are always grey edges to rights that require interpretation -- the first Amendment would seem to be clearer, but there has been no shortage of litigation about it, for example.

[edit] Also, while the USSC certainly does exist partly to bring clarity, they've already ruled on the issue multiple times, doing just that.

lisab

You've contradicted yourself a bit. Either the writers' intent is clear, or there is already precedent, or their intent is not clear. The very fact that they have ruled "several times" indicates the intent is not clear, or why would so many cases make it to the Supreme Court in the first place?

EEH4

It's fundamentally more complicated than any of the posts listed above.It has to do with the individual perpertrating the violence.Every thing counts mental health,genetics,the culture one was raised in,personal beliefs,erroneous information,personal experiences,and the lot.Anyone,under certain circumstances,is capable of such acts.How to fix this? I don't know.I'm confident people smarter than me could find many practical solutions.

rootX

That doesn't mean you should just let the unfit people get the guns legally. It's as irresponsible to let the unfit people own guns or other lethal objects as let the children own them. People who cannot be committed for their crimes, like a normal healthy adult, shouldn't be allowed to have same freedom as an normal adult has in the first place. If the legal system want to distinguish them in the court, I don't think it's unreasonable to distinguish them before they do something stupid and get into the court.
If a nut carries guns illegally assuming he is not allowed to carry lethal weapons because of mental-ill-being, he has done a bad thing to be committed for against his will.

AlephZero

I was simply scaling the UK numbers by US/RK populations, on the aossumption that not everybody on PF knows the population of the UK, and it gives a simple comparison with your US gun numbers.

If you are claiming that as a "fact", please give sme evidence. The number of legally held guns in the UK is almost 2 million, according to the police (who operate the gun licensing system, so they should know).

FWIW I don't care in the slightest how many US citizens shoot each other, so long as they do it in their own country and not in mine.

CAC1001

As Russ has said, the SCOTUS is mostly because of the way "arms" have advanced technologically (arms back then meant muskets and cannon and some handguns).

The term "military-grade weapons" is another one that can mislead people when it comes to firearms. Generally, a gun is a gun. They're meant to kill things. There is nothing special about a human that makes it where you need a special gun to kill a person as opposed to an animal. Humans are animals, biologically. We are high-functioning animals, but still animals. A hunting rifle can kill humans just as much as it can kill animals and vice-versa.

One would not necessarilly adopt hunting rifles for military use because they are not necessarilly manufactured to withstand the rigors of war, but the practice of adopting military rifles for hunting is something that has been being done since the revolution. The AR-15 and the Remington 870 pump-action shot gun (both used by James Holmes) are used for hunting. Now if by "military," one means automatic fire weapons, bombs, battle tanks, and all that, those are not construed as being covered by the Second Amendment.

Yes, but how does one go about determining just who is "unfit?" That's the problem. People can be committed for their crimes, the problem is you have to first commit a crime (such as shooting people) to show you're a nut.

russ_watters

Cases make it to the supreme court because we have a lot of lawyers who like to sue a lot and people like to argue. That doesn't implie one thing or another about what they are arguing over. Just because an issue is clear or already decided, doesn't mean it can't still be asked over and over again -- otherwise, there would be no such thing as "precedent"! (There'd never be a next case to ask the same question again, to need it.). But here's probably the prime piece of precedent on that issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller

Basically, it is saying that if you joined a militia, you'd typically be expected to provide your own, appropriate weapon.

In any case, the objection you raised isn't really a critical piece of the caselaw about the 2nd amendment. Most cases focus on if the right is individual or tied to a militia or the issue of incorporation. I don't see why you would bother arguing about it.

russ_watters

It isn't as simple as you imply, unless you favor a "Minority Report" world where people are declared criminals based on a prediction that they will commit a crime. A country that values rights can't work that way. Can we improve detection of people with emerging issues? Probably. Can we ever prevent all freshly blooming nuts from getting guns? No chance. It is a popular cliche/platitude to say that human life is priceless, but it isn't and even people who say it is don't actually treat it that way -- it isn't possible to be a functional human being and try to seriously apply that view. Life is an endless stream of compromises of safety; we face death on a continuous basis and are constantly making compromises in the face of it. Just this weekend, I went to the beach, choosing to face a possible death by car accident, shark attack, skin cancer, concussion, bungee-ball slingshot accident and drowning, in addition to the daily dangers of bathing and walking downstairs. Oh, and I also recently bought a car that doesn't have lane exit notification, adaptive cruise control or blind spot monitoring. The added safety wasn't worth the extra money to me.

So the question really is how far are you willing to compromise on the issue of life versus freedom. Early Americans said "give me liberty or give me death" and soldiers today still buy-in to that. Civilians don't tend to think in those terms, but virtually all engage in risky actions. Sure, the scales are generally tipped far toward life, but not all the way. We still lean them a little toward liberty and happiness too.

You're also exaggerating to imply that innocent lives are purposely being compromised in favor of giving neo-nazis and psychos unlimited freedom.

Pkruse

This is an interesting thread, but I've seen all this before. Many places.

But to give non US people an idea of how many guns people have here, I talked with a number of my friends, two dozen in all. Most are professional people over 50 years old. A few welders and machinists. One an eight year old boy with 8 eight of them under his bed and access to more than a hundred more in the house. I confirmed that with his grandma who said he has become an excellent marksman and has used all of them, including the very old black powder and flint lock weapons. During the family's last hunting trip he was the only one who shot anything and he filled the family's freezers for the year.

I do not pretend that this poll is in any way scientific, but everyone I talked to had at least 2 or 3 guns. Several had that many either in their car or on their person. Three of the older ones had more than 200. One told at 78 told me he has carried a gun every day of his life since he was 12 years old, but never had to fire one at anyone.

None of these people have ever been arrested. They are all just normal law abiding people that you might see on the street.

As for me personally, I have two in storage somewhere. I'd have to hunt for them to find them. Haven't fired them in years.

Mech_Engineer

The point is the UK's gun laws are much more restrictive than the US, so obviously there are less firearms. You can probably help with a better summary of UK firearms laws than I can, but according to what I've read the only guns legal to own in the UK (with licensing certificate, more on that lengthy process below) are single-action hunting rifles, single or double barrel shotguns, and black powder (antique) firearms. This is very restrictive when compared to US law; from what I understand UK gun law is among the most restrictive in the world.

According to Wikipedia's summary of UK gun laws:

Mech_Engineer

Around 33,000 people in the US die in car accidents each year, of which 17,000 die in alcohol-related vehicle accidents. It seems to me this is a worse scourge than "mass shootings," and in the same order of magnitude as total homicides (far higher than "mass shootings") by firearm in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_d...tes#Statistics

For reference, gun related deaths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_vio..._United_States

And also in reply to the original poster's question as to what's being done to prevent it, a quick summary:

rootX

I never said declaring people criminals based on a prediction. Rather, all I said that taking guns from hands of people who shouldn't have them. The people who are unhealthy can unlikely use them for their protection or for any other intent that American founders had.

If these people can escape their punishments for being schizophrenia[1] why they should be given lethal weapons that can be used to harm innocent lives. It's similar to letting a blind person drive a car.

Yes, it will never be possible to prevent all freshly blooming nuts (looking at all past incidents however none of them was freshly bloomed when they went on rage) from getting guns. But at least, the mental health should be given a consideration when legally handing person a gun.

I don't understand why freedom of a nut is more valuable than innocent lives. Reason I said innocent lives are priceless because they are more way more valuable than these nuts freedom or lives from my personal opinion as you already said "the scales are generally tipped far toward life".

Yes I might have been exaggerating because of the anger. Seeing these shootings one after another and yet complete inaction from the government, why wouldn't you be angry? Government inaction was the main reason I started this thread. I feel occurrence of the same cause behind these incidents is bit too much to be ignored. You likely will have different ways to dealing with the issue but yet you and others seem to be ignoring that there is an issue.