Summations Only

See any news source.--Percy

Grrrrrr. I would sure like to see it as a standard, prominent bit of news reporting - and I guess it's getting there - whether guns used in this sort of senseless stuff are legally obtained or not.

The existence of legal firearms only makes it easier to acquire firearms - legally or illegally.Besides, current gun control laws have loopholes you could drive the Death Star through - like the gun show exception.Does it really matter if they were acquired legally? In the case of school shootings, most times the guns are legally owned by a parent and stolen by the kid who shoots up the school. Is that "legally" or "illegally" acquisition?If the guns had never been legal in the first place, the parent wouldn't have the guns to steal. The gun shows wouldn't have the guns to sell. Only criminals would own guns...but there would be fewer guns, and school shootings aren't generally perpetrated by the same people who participate in gang violence or other centers of illegal firearm possession.

Well, this is true. For instance, this is how Japan maintains such a low rate of gun homicide - they didn't have any guns to begin with, and they prevented people from getting any more of them.In the US, though, even if you banned guns tomorrow there'd still be 80 guns per every 100 people, or more than 2.5 million firearms. If you want to reduce the number of guns, you're talking about a program to confiscate guns, primarily from people who have not ever used them to any harmful purpose. Even in a country with no Second Amendment, we'd still have the Fourth Amendment, so how could such a program be legal?

When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn.........Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

"Make guns illegal" is a one-line simplification, not an overarching policy. Of course simply making firearms illegal wouldn't magically remove guns already in existence...and there are many, many guns already in the US.But it would limit the ability to move guns. You couldn't just go to a gun show and buy one. Ammunition would no longer be legal. Spare parts would no longer be as easy to get. The basic ban of firearms would be a step, and possibly the largest step, but it wouldn't finish the job. We'd still almost certainly have mass gun violence in the short-medium term. Over long enough periods of time, gun possession would decrease on its own.But why use confiscation? Use a gun-buyback program. Allow gun owners to voluntarily surrender firearms and ammunition and be compensated at least partially for their value. Combined with the threat of steep fees or even jail time for being caught owning guns (without the necessity of a door-to-door search), such an incentive would cause at least some percentage of gun owners to follow the new law.Again - not a total solution. Just an acceleration of the reduction in firearm availability. And it bypasses any issues with the Fourth Amendment.You don't need a police state and door-to-door warrantless searches to ban something.

Rahvin,No matter how many tragedies happen in america, there will continue to be too many people fighting for the right to own guns.I believe this shows that too many americans simply don't mind living in a violent, hateful society. (Perhaps the remainder actually like it.)Can you elsewise explain this?

I happen to own quite a few guns, yet I have not used them in a violent manner.I am always armed, yet I have never hard to use a gun in a violent manner.

Does this recent tragedy move you to do something to prevent the next tragedy?

You can't now "just go to a gun show and buy one." Gun vendors at gun shows have to follow the same laws at the gun show that they have to follow anywhere - they can't sell to you without running you through the FBI's criminal database, which requires ID, which is a requirement both of Federal law and of owning a Federal Firearms Dealer's license. That's great, for people who want money more than guns. But the reason that people have guns in the first place is because they wanted the gun more than they wanted the money. You can certainly get some guns off the street like this - people at the margins who have a short-term need to liquidize their firearm "asset" - but the very fact that people buy guns proves that you'd have to spend absurd amounts of money to make any dent in gun ownership.That's not to mention the distorting effect of a gun buyback on the local gun market; gun buybacks actually increase ownership of guns in an area because you're basically paying people to exchange their nonfunctional or inferior guns for better ones. Gun buybacks don't reduce the amount of guns; they actually make it more valuable to own a gun, so people get more guns. How are you going to "catch" people owning guns without a door to door search? You're proposing a "war on guns" almost topologically identical to the "war on drugs." How well has the war on drugs worked in terms of getting rid of drugs? How have our civil liberties fared under the war on drugs? Haven't we, in fact, already almost arrived at "police state" as a result of criminalizing possession of drugs?

My point is really very limited: I'd just like to feel fully justified in telling all my NRA-member co-workers to STFU about theie Sacred Constitutional Rights.

I think we'd all love to do something to prevent the next tragedy. But you have to prove that what you want to do is something that would prevent the next tragedy without itself being a tragedy.For instance, why are we proposing legislation around the circumstances that cause less than 1% of gun deaths? Why not legislate on the basis of 99% of gun deaths? Or for that matter, why don't we legislate on the leading cause of death in the United States instead of drafting Federal policy on the basis of which events grab headlines?

The phrase "in denial" springs to mind.

Unfortunately I agree. The gun lobby is extremely strong. It would be a stretch just to close the gun show loophole - a big stretch. Gun control threads are always an intellectual exercise in wishful thinking. I believe that, as jar demonstrates, nonviolent people who own guns prioritize their own "rights" over solutions that would have a real effect. I believe that Constitution-worshipers refuse to alter what they consider an important part of that document regardless of the reasons. I believe that it's extremely easy to rationalize reasons to keep guns, like "protection against the government," even though those reasons also fall to pieces under even slight scrutiny.I think that even great tragedies like school shootings are always "someone else's problem" because they happen to strangers for the vast majority of us, and it's difficult for a person to give up a certain extant right to lower the possibility of a potential future tragedy.There are a lot of reasons, dronester. I think the "violent, hateful society" bit is essentially hyperbole. It makes for a neat soundbyte, but it offends more than it convinces.I don't think most people are hateful, I think they're apathetic. Most people simply don't notice an ethical problem until it's directly pointed out to them, that's simply an unfortunate fact of the human mind.

No.