^That second link is a chart that shows life expectancy WITHOUT homicide factored in vs. the rate of homicide in 70+ neighborhoods and apparently what it concludes is that there is a very close link between a high mortality rate and willingness to be involved in a criminal subculture w/ gun violence.
its kind of a 'well duh' but i think its interesting to have the stats back it up ... its a much closer link than income/poverty, apparently.
I think 'day to day' gun violence in a community or criminal subculture, is completely different situation to a guy who's clearly mentally unwell, shooting several people. So 'the solution' would also be different.
To be fair, we don't really know that the guy was "clearly mentally unwell", he might have just been pissed off and murderous.
Fair enough. I would have consider that if you're willing to walking into a building and kill 30+ people, that you are not a ballanced person. No?
Besides my point being that, in this case, one dude being 'pissed off and murderous' does not relate in any way, to social break down and the voilence it causes.
I think 'day to day' gun violence in a community or criminal subculture, is completely different situation to a guy who's clearly mentally unwell, shooting several people. So 'the solution' would also be different.
well yeah but this is an aberration - if we're talking about gun control we shouldn't be basing our arguments off of the one time every couple years some dude flips out, we should be basing it on statistically common gun crimes
in actuality i think that this dude probably was in fact very similar to the mentality that goes on w/ someone who participates in 'high risk' criminal activity - they don't think they have a future to live for
^That second link is a chart that shows life expectancy WITHOUT homicide factored in vs. the rate of homicide in 70+ neighborhoods and apparently what it concludes is that there is a very close link between a high mortality rate and willingness to be involved in a criminal subculture w/ gun violence.
its kind of a 'well duh' but i think its interesting to have the stats back it up ... its a much closer link than income/poverty, apparently.
I think 'day to day' gun violence in a community or criminal subculture, is completely different situation to a guy who's clearly mentally unwell, shooting several people. So 'the solution' would also be different.
To be fair, we don't really know that the guy was "clearly mentally unwell", he might have just been pissed off and murderous.
Fair enough. I would have consider that if you're willing to walking into a building and kill 30+ people, that you are not a ballanced person. No?
Besides my point being that, in this case, one dude being 'pissed off and murderous' does not relate in any way, to social break down and the voilence it causes.
Every type of concealable handgun should be illegal.
do you honestly think that would solve the problem?
All the reports I've read say the guns this scumbag used were illegal and had the serial numbers removed.
i heard he had reciepts in his bag for them.
and as someone else from a country that doesn't have guns (except for armed response units that use them to murder terror 'suspects'), i think the US is beyond fucked for gun control so argue how you will but i'm glad the law is the way it is where i'm from.
maybe better 'gun control' in this country might help change the current gun culture in america, which is the big issue IMO. i just want guns less in the public eye and maybe kids wont grow up giving 2 shits about a gun. but this country was born of violence i guess.....(sorry to get all michael moore on yall)
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
gun control is not 'the solution' nor is freedom from gun control.
^That second link is a chart that shows life expectancy WITHOUT homicide factored in vs. the rate of homicide in 70+ neighborhoods and apparently what it concludes is that there is a very close link between a high mortality rate and willingness to be involved in a criminal subculture w/ gun violence.
its kind of a 'well duh' but i think its interesting to have the stats back it up ... its a much closer link than income/poverty, apparently.
On the BBC news this morning, there was a telephone interview with the editor of a US publication called "Gun Week". He made all the usual noises about "the constitutional right to bear arms", as you'd expect from someone with a commercial interest in restricting gun control legislation, but he also said that the issue wasn't to do with "law-abiding" gun-owners, but with "criminals", presumably including the shooter in this latter category. It struck me that the shooter only became a criminal when he decided to shoot 33 people. Before that, he was just a guy with a gun and, to all intents and purposes, would probably have at least appeared to be one of the "law-abiding" gun owners whose rights "Gun Week" dude is so keen to protect.
Gun crime has become a hot issue in the UK in recent months due to a spate of shootings involving teenagers, and there's definitely a far higher incidence of gun crime over here now than there was, say, fifteen or twenty years ago. Yet, in my lifetime, I can only recall two incidents where something similar has happened over here; Dunblane in 1996 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre - and Hungerford in 1987 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre. In both cases, the perpetrators were licensed gun owners, and the already-tight UK gun laws were tightened even further in the wake of the killings. These episodes aside, the use of guns over here is almost exclusively amongst career criminals and, as a general rule, incidences of regular citizens being shot by crims are few and far between. In the UK, it's more likely you'd get stabbed than shot by a mugger, for example. Also, it's quite commonplace for young British males to claim the need to carry a knife for protection, even though the ownership of knives and similar weapons is severely restricted here too.
The whole issue of owning a gun for purposes of protection is the big difference between the UK and the US here. Culturally and constitutionally, gun ownership is probably far too well established within the fabric of US society for any serious gun control legislation to have a hope of making an impact on it. And, bizarre as this will sound to many of the Americans on this board, I feel somehow safer knowing that the only people carrying guns illegally in this country are criminals. Reason being that, for most people, it's easier to avoid them than it is to avoid some random lunatic who decides to go on the rampage with a registered, legally-owned firearm for some unknown reason, despite having sat in class/lived/worked next to you for however long without ever giving you the slightest idea that they might be a potential mass murderer.
Every type of concealable handgun should be illegal.
do you honestly think that would solve the problem?
And please define "the problem".
i dont think there is a "problem" [/b]
That should be soooo funny. But it's not.
No, I think FirmeRola and I are both saying that there is not one, singular problem to solve. It's many things converging negatively to amplify a tragedy like this, and simply calling for the banning of all concealable handguns is just being reactionary.
There are restrictions on handguns in VA, and only the most die-hard NRA advocates would argue that there shouldn't be any. There IS undeniably a gun culture in the USA, but it is far from being a monolithic, one sided negative as many opponents would paint it. All these things are only tangentially related to what happened yesterday, however, and I still think people just want explanations for questions that they are never going to have answered to their satisfaction.
I just fear what happens when there is a mad stampede for mental safety blankets, that's the aftermath of this kind of tragedy that I find unnecessary and harmful. People want action. Well, in this case, against what exactly?
If this idiot had, like many people before him have, driven a car purposefully into a group of people killing 32 of them would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of motor vehicles??
Well of course not....because most of you actually own and use cars, correctly, as they are intended, and most of you don't own a gun(including me).
If this idiot had, like many people before him have, driven a car purposefully into a group of people killing 32 of them would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of motor vehicles??
Well of course not....because most of you actually own and use cars, correctly, as they are intended, and most of you don't own a gun(including me).
"If he had killed 32 people with a banana, would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of bananas??"
One of the more accepted sociological theories around rampage school shootings (which VT would certainly qualify as, esp. since the shooter was a student) is that there needs to be at least five "pre-conditions" that need to be met in order for a shooting of this magnitude to jump off. Note: these are not CAUSAL factors, in other words, just b/c you find the presence of these five factors, doesn't mean that shooting is imminent. The point is that all five of these have to be present or else it's unlikely that a shooting happens.
Keep in mind, this is a theory and therefore, is open to change and amendments. That said, I think most of this sounds reasonable.
They are:
1) Access to guns. Of the five factors, this is the only one that is truly "quantifiable" in terms of a simple - "no gun, no shooting" factor. Of course, it's not easy to control for because we live in a permissive gun culture in the U.S. that is unlikely to be radically transformed anytime soon, if ever.
2) The social marginalization of the shooter. In other words, the shooter (or shooters) have to feel that they lack any meaningful social ties to the community (campus or otherwise) they plan to strike out at. After all, if you have positive ties to people, you're less likely to want to kill them.
3) Magnification of marginalization. Call it some kind of "crisis" or "trigger" - some kind of mediating factor that increases the sense of marginalization. Could be a personal trauma (such as abuse) or experience of loss (passion killings would fall under this heading) or mental illness (such as a psychotic break). After all, a lot of people experience marginalization - very few people decide to kill over it.
4) Cultural script of violence (usually violent masculinity) Violence is seen as a corrective or solution to the feelings of marginalization or inadequacy that the shooter may feel. This is more commonly referred to as the 'culture of violence' thesis though I think the use of "script" here is very relevant: it's not simply a predisposition to violence but it's an understanding that violence is a problem-solving mechanism.
5) Failure of social support networks. This includes both friends/family/counselors/teachers/etc. who could have caught the warnings signs before the shooting happened. It can also include failures in public safety/security that could have also prevented something from happening.
The point? Gun control is only ONE of several factors that need to be considered. As noted, it's the most easy factor to physically control since a gun (vs. an idea or feeling) is a physical object, but socially speaking, it's also one of the most difficult to stem.
The last thing I want to note is that despite appearances otherwise, these kinds of shootings are ABERRATIONS. School violence and murders on campuses are far lower now than they were 10-15 years ago and, in general, students are safer from violence being ON campus vs. being OFF it.
If this idiot had, like many people before him have, driven a car purposefully into a group of people killing 32 of them would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of motor vehicles??
Well of course not....because most of you actually own and use cars, correctly, as they are intended, and most of you don't own a gun(including me).
Uh Rock - a gun exists for one specific purpose: to kill people. A car, last time I checked, was not designed with that in mind.
More to the point, after an old man drove into a crowd at the Santa Monica farmer's market a few years back, killing around a dozen people, there were calls to ban the elderly from being able to get driver's licenses.
If this idiot had, like many people before him have, driven a car purposefully into a group of people killing 32 of them would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of motor vehicles??
Well of course not....because most of you actually own and use cars, correctly, as they are intended, and most of you don't own a gun(including me).
"If he had killed 32 people with a banana, would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of bananas??"
Never heard of murder by banana.......there are more instances of people using a motor vehicle as a murder weapon than there are school campus shootings.
^That second link is a chart that shows life expectancy WITHOUT homicide factored in vs. the rate of homicide in 70+ neighborhoods and apparently what it concludes is that there is a very close link between a high mortality rate and willingness to be involved in a criminal subculture w/ gun violence.
its kind of a 'well duh' but i think its interesting to have the stats back it up ... its a much closer link than income/poverty, apparently.
On the BBC news this morning, there was a telephone interview with the editor of a US publication called "Gun Week". He made all the usual noises about "the constitutional right to bear arms", as you'd expect from someone with a commercial interest in restricting gun control legislation, but he also said that the issue wasn't to do with "law-abiding" gun-owners, but with "criminals", presumably including the shooter in this latter category. It struck me that the shooter only became a criminal when he decided to shoot 33 people. Before that, he was just a guy with a gun and, to all intents and purposes, would probably have at least appeared to be one of the "law-abiding" gun owners whose rights "Gun Week" dude is so keen to protect.
Gun crime has become a hot issue in the UK in recent months due to a spate of shootings involving teenagers, and there's definitely a far higher incidence of gun crime over here now than there was, say, fifteen or twenty years ago. Yet, in my lifetime, I can only recall two incidents where something similar has happened over here; Dunblane in 1996 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre - and Hungerford in 1987 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre. In both cases, the perpetrators were licensed gun owners, and the already-tight UK gun laws were tightened even further in the wake of the killings. These episodes aside, the use of guns over here is almost exclusively amongst career criminals and, as a general rule, incidences of regular citizens being shot by crims are few and far between. In the UK, it's more likely you'd get stabbed than shot by a mugger, for example. Also, it's quite commonplace for young British males to claim the need to carry a knife for protection, even though the ownership of knives and similar weapons is severely restricted here too.
The whole issue of owning a gun for purposes of protection is the big difference between the UK and the US here. Culturally and constitutionally, gun ownership is probably far too well established within the fabric of US society for any serious gun control legislation to have a hope of making an impact on it. And, bizarre as this will sound to many of the Americans on this board, I feel somehow safer knowing that the only people carrying guns illegally in this country are criminals. Reason being that, for most people, it's easier to avoid them than it is to avoid some random lunatic who decides to go on the rampage with a registered, legally-owned firearm for some unknown reason, despite having sat in class/lived/worked next to you for however long without ever giving you the slightest idea that they might be a potential mass murderer.
If this idiot had, like many people before him have, driven a car purposefully into a group of people killing 32 of them would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of motor vehicles??
Well of course not....because most of you actually own and use cars, correctly, as they are intended, and most of you don't own a gun(including me).
"If he had killed 32 people with a banana, would anyone here be calling for the outlaw of bananas??"
Never heard of murder by banana.......there are more instances of people using a motor vehicle as a murder weapon than there are school campus shootings.
Your argument was almost flawless.
mine was supposed to be silly because i didnt think your argument was worth taking seriously, but o-dub's decided to engage you so maybe you can take some time w/ that
Hopefully this terrible event will help spark real conversation and examination about our country's culture of violence. At the very least we can get some real talk out there. It's a terrible situation.
Shit, look at what's happening in Philly right now. It's INSANE. Us, as Americans, need to face the deep dark truthful mirror, and fast.
Uh Rock - a gun exists for one specific purpose: to kill people. A car, last time I checked, was not designed with that in mind.
More to the point, after an old man drove into a crowd at the Santa Monica farmer's market a few years back, killing around a dozen people, there were calls to ban the elderly from being able to get driver's licenses.
So yeah dude, shit like that DOES happen.
No, more guns are used each year to kill animals in the wild than people(just to keep your argument accurate)
I'm for giving people over 70 an annual driving test rather than ban all 'elderly" from driving because of what one irresponsible person does.
And as far as drunk driving.....I'm for staunchly enforcing all laws and punishing those who break them, whether they are drunk drivers or lunatics with guns.
Uh Rock - a gun exists for one specific purpose: to kill people. A car, last time I checked, was not designed with that in mind.
More to the point, after an old man drove into a crowd at the Santa Monica farmer's market a few years back, killing around a dozen people, there were calls to ban the elderly from being able to get driver's licenses.
So yeah dude, shit like that DOES happen.
No, more guns are used each year to kill animals in the wild than people(just to keep your argument accurate)
Hopefully this terrible event will help spark real conversation and examination about our country's culture of violence. At the very least we can get some real talk out there. It's a terrible situation.
Shit, look at what's happening in Philly right now. It's INSANE. Us, as Americans, need to face the deep dark truthful mirror, and fast.
its amazing how some of the pro-gun lobbyists think that students should be packing guns to go to uni and consequently could have dealt with the situation. some fucked up logic.
Let me tell you something. If I was one of those poor kids in one of those four classrooms with nowhere to go, starring down the barrel of that maniac's gun, I'd at least want to have a chance.
Encouraging students to pack would be a mistake. The vast majority of murders are not by random shooters. What happens when a student kills another student with with the gun they're carrying for "personal safety"? Or even if a learning atmosphere can be cultivated in a place where the student next to you might be carrying.
What might be a cheap & easy way to start is getting doors that lock. Call me crazy. Most of the info I've seen talk about how students had to barricade doors with their feet. How is VT going to "lock down" when the doors don't even lock?
Uh Rock - a gun exists for one specific purpose: to kill people. A car, last time I checked, was not designed with that in mind.
More to the point, after an old man drove into a crowd at the Santa Monica farmer's market a few years back, killing around a dozen people, there were calls to ban the elderly from being able to get driver's licenses.
So yeah dude, shit like that DOES happen.
No, more guns are used each year to kill animals in the wild than people(just to keep your argument accurate)
do you go hunting with handguns
Where do you see the word handgun in the above text??
Hopefully this terrible event will help spark real conversation and examination about our country's culture of violence. At the very least we can get some real talk out there. It's a terrible situation.
Shit, look at what's happening in Philly right now. It's INSANE. Us, as Americans, need to face the deep dark truthful mirror, and fast.
What's happening in Philly right now?
Record homicide rates. People getting killed almost every day. Gun violence is out of control. An article about it in the NY Times talks about it, but it's even deeper than you think. Kids in the streets are so fucking wild right now.
And lest we forget that someone got shot at a PEACE RALLY a few weeks ago.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Uh Rock - a gun exists for one specific purpose: to kill people. A car, last time I checked, was not designed with that in mind.
More to the point, after an old man drove into a crowd at the Santa Monica farmer's market a few years back, killing around a dozen people, there were calls to ban the elderly from being able to get driver's licenses.
So yeah dude, shit like that DOES happen.
No, more guns are used each year to kill animals in the wild than people(just to keep your argument accurate)
do you go hunting with handguns
A handgun is kept by hunters to put an animal down that has only been injured by a rifle shot.
And as far as drunk driving.....I'm for staunchly enforcing all laws and punishing those who break them, whether they are drunk drivers or lunatics with guns.
And what if it was not, in fact, illegal to drink and drive?
The point here Rock is that arguing for protecting gun ownership (or at least, concealed weapons laws) simply b/c it's legal is avoiding the question of whether or not you think it's healthy for a society to have as many guns in circulation as America does.
This said, I think the majority of gun violence is domestic, right? So concealed weapons, though potential contributing to the problem, isn't really the source of most gun murders.
The point here Rock is that arguing for protecting gun ownership (or at least, concealed weapons laws) simply b/c it's legal is avoiding the question of whether or not you think it's healthy for a society to have as many guns in circulation as America does.
Yes, I feel as though that is the question that really needs to be asked. And I say "NO."
And as far as drunk driving.....I'm for staunchly enforcing all laws and punishing those who break them, whether they are drunk drivers or lunatics with guns.
And what if it was not, in fact, illegal to drink and drive?
Then we would have a lot more innocent dead people than we do now.
Do you believe that making guns(or handguns) totally illegal tomorrow would have an effect on the murder rate?? And if so, how long would it take?
Comments
Fair enough. I would have consider that if you're willing to walking into a building and kill 30+ people, that you are not a ballanced person. No?
Besides my point being that, in this case, one dude being 'pissed off and murderous' does not relate in any way, to social break down and the voilence it causes.
well yeah but this is an aberration - if we're talking about gun control we shouldn't be basing our arguments off of the one time every couple years some dude flips out, we should be basing it on statistically common gun crimes
in actuality i think that this dude probably was in fact very similar to the mentality that goes on w/ someone who participates in 'high risk' criminal activity - they don't think they have a future to live for
That's correct.
There are only two reasons people commit murder.
Insanity
and
Temporary Insanity
i heard he had reciepts in his bag for them.
and as someone else from a country that doesn't have guns (except for armed response units that use them to murder terror 'suspects'), i think the US is beyond fucked for gun control so argue how you will but i'm glad the law is the way it is where i'm from.
That should be soooo funny. But it's not.
On the BBC news this morning, there was a telephone interview with the editor of a US publication called "Gun Week". He made all the usual noises about "the constitutional right to bear arms", as you'd expect from someone with a commercial interest in restricting gun control legislation, but he also said that the issue wasn't to do with "law-abiding" gun-owners, but with "criminals", presumably including the shooter in this latter category. It struck me that the shooter only became a criminal when he decided to shoot 33 people. Before that, he was just a guy with a gun and, to all intents and purposes, would probably have at least appeared to be one of the "law-abiding" gun owners whose rights "Gun Week" dude is so keen to protect.
Gun crime has become a hot issue in the UK in recent months due to a spate of shootings involving teenagers, and there's definitely a far higher incidence of gun crime over here now than there was, say, fifteen or twenty years ago. Yet, in my lifetime, I can only recall two incidents where something similar has happened over here; Dunblane in 1996 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre - and Hungerford in 1987 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre. In both cases, the perpetrators were licensed gun owners, and the already-tight UK gun laws were tightened even further in the wake of the killings. These episodes aside, the use of guns over here is almost exclusively amongst career criminals and, as a general rule, incidences of regular citizens being shot by crims are few and far between. In the UK, it's more likely you'd get stabbed than shot by a mugger, for example. Also, it's quite commonplace for young British males to claim the need to carry a knife for protection, even though the ownership of knives and similar weapons is severely restricted here too.
The whole issue of owning a gun for purposes of protection is the big difference between the UK and the US here. Culturally and constitutionally, gun ownership is probably far too well established within the fabric of US society for any serious gun control legislation to have a hope of making an impact on it. And, bizarre as this will sound to many of the Americans on this board, I feel somehow safer knowing that the only people carrying guns illegally in this country are criminals. Reason being that, for most people, it's easier to avoid them than it is to avoid some random lunatic who decides to go on the rampage with a registered, legally-owned firearm for some unknown reason, despite having sat in class/lived/worked next to you for however long without ever giving you the slightest idea that they might be a potential mass murderer.
No, I think FirmeRola and I are both saying that there is not one, singular problem to solve. It's many things converging negatively to amplify a tragedy like this, and simply calling for the banning of all concealable handguns is just being reactionary.
There are restrictions on handguns in VA, and only the most die-hard NRA advocates would argue that there shouldn't be any. There IS undeniably a gun culture in the USA, but it is far from being a monolithic, one sided negative as many opponents would paint it. All these things are only tangentially related to what happened yesterday, however, and I still think people just want explanations for questions that they are never going to have answered to their satisfaction.
I just fear what happens when there is a mad stampede for mental safety blankets, that's the aftermath of this kind of tragedy that I find unnecessary and harmful. People want action. Well, in this case, against what exactly?
Well of course not....because most of you actually own and use cars, correctly, as they are intended, and most of you don't own a gun(including me).
One of the more accepted sociological theories around rampage school shootings (which VT would certainly qualify as, esp. since the shooter was a student) is that there needs to be at least five "pre-conditions" that need to be met in order for a shooting of this magnitude to jump off. Note: these are not CAUSAL factors, in other words, just b/c you find the presence of these five factors, doesn't mean that shooting is imminent. The point is that all five of these have to be present or else it's unlikely that a shooting happens.
Keep in mind, this is a theory and therefore, is open to change and amendments. That said, I think most of this sounds reasonable.
They are:
1) Access to guns.
Of the five factors, this is the only one that is truly "quantifiable" in terms of a simple - "no gun, no shooting" factor. Of course, it's not easy to control for because we live in a permissive gun culture in the U.S. that is unlikely to be radically transformed anytime soon, if ever.
2) The social marginalization of the shooter.
In other words, the shooter (or shooters) have to feel that they lack any meaningful social ties to the community (campus or otherwise) they plan to strike out at. After all, if you have positive ties to people, you're less likely to want to kill them.
3) Magnification of marginalization.
Call it some kind of "crisis" or "trigger" - some kind of mediating factor that increases the sense of marginalization. Could be a personal trauma (such as abuse) or experience of loss (passion killings would fall under this heading) or mental illness (such as a psychotic break). After all, a lot of people experience marginalization - very few people decide to kill over it.
4) Cultural script of violence (usually violent masculinity)
Violence is seen as a corrective or solution to the feelings of marginalization or inadequacy that the shooter may feel. This is more commonly referred to as the 'culture of violence' thesis though I think the use of "script" here is very relevant: it's not simply a predisposition to violence but it's an understanding that violence is a problem-solving mechanism.
5) Failure of social support networks.
This includes both friends/family/counselors/teachers/etc. who could have caught the warnings signs before the shooting happened. It can also include failures in public safety/security that could have also prevented something from happening.
The point? Gun control is only ONE of several factors that need to be considered. As noted, it's the most easy factor to physically control since a gun (vs. an idea or feeling) is a physical object, but socially speaking, it's also one of the most difficult to stem.
The last thing I want to note is that despite appearances otherwise, these kinds of shootings are ABERRATIONS. School violence and murders on campuses are far lower now than they were 10-15 years ago and, in general, students are safer from violence being ON campus vs. being OFF it.
Uh Rock - a gun exists for one specific purpose: to kill people. A car, last time I checked, was not designed with that in mind.
More to the point, after an old man drove into a crowd at the Santa Monica farmer's market a few years back, killing around a dozen people, there were calls to ban the elderly from being able to get driver's licenses.
So yeah dude, shit like that DOES happen.
Never heard of murder by banana.......there are more instances of people using a motor vehicle as a murder weapon than there are school campus shootings.
Your argument was almost flawless.
On point as always, P.
Shit, look at what's happening in Philly right now. It's INSANE. Us, as Americans, need to face the deep dark truthful mirror, and fast.
No, more guns are used each year to kill animals in the wild than people(just to keep your argument accurate)
I'm for giving people over 70 an annual driving test rather than ban all 'elderly" from driving because of what one irresponsible person does.
And as far as drunk driving.....I'm for staunchly enforcing all laws and punishing those who break them, whether they are drunk drivers or lunatics with guns.
What's happening in Philly right now?
Encouraging students to pack would be a mistake. The vast majority of murders are not by random shooters. What happens when a student kills another student with with the gun they're carrying for "personal safety"? Or even if a learning atmosphere can be cultivated in a place where the student next to you might be carrying.
What might be a cheap & easy way to start is getting doors that lock. Call me crazy. Most of the info I've seen talk about how students had to barricade doors with their feet. How is VT going to "lock down" when the doors don't even lock?
Where do you see the word handgun in the above text??
Record homicide rates. People getting killed almost every day. Gun violence is out of control. An article about it in the NY Times talks about it, but it's even deeper than you think. Kids in the streets are so fucking wild right now.
And lest we forget that someone got shot at a PEACE RALLY a few weeks ago.
A handgun is kept by hunters to put an animal down that has only been injured by a rifle shot.
Regardless of my opinion, I understand the reality of how many exist and how literally impossible it would be to get rid of them all.
The argument to ban handguns, at this point, is moot.
Drugs are "banned" in this country and we see how well that works.
And what if it was not, in fact, illegal to drink and drive?
The point here Rock is that arguing for protecting gun ownership (or at least, concealed weapons laws) simply b/c it's legal is avoiding the question of whether or not you think it's healthy for a society to have as many guns in circulation as America does.
This said, I think the majority of gun violence is domestic, right? So concealed weapons, though potential contributing to the problem, isn't really the source of most gun murders.
Yes, I feel as though that is the question that really needs to be asked. And I say "NO."
Then we would have a lot more innocent dead people than we do now.
Do you believe that making guns(or handguns) totally illegal tomorrow would have an effect on the murder rate?? And if so, how long would it take?
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