Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Strife26]

... if by "never going to happen" you mean "has happened repeatedly", I guess? We've had plenty of mass shootings on military bases or near/at police stations and whatnot, and plenty of armed and trained individuals shot and killed. Doesn't budge the rhetoric one bit. Often even reinforces it, because clearly there weren't enough guns in the hands of enough people trained and ready to use them, otherwise it would have happened like the rhetoric insists it would, reality be damned.

You mean lots of trained and unarmed people shot and killed. You don't get to carry a weapon on post except for very limited exceptions.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It was surprisingly difficult to find this picture hosted at somewhere that wasn't a far right website. For whatever qualities we could call dailymail a good place.

But y'know stopping people from easily getting weapons is much more important than a curtailing a fundamental right. I'd compare that to idiots trying to ban large portions of free speech on questionable reasoning, but that's totally happening too.

[Frumple]

True, if we can just assume a can opener of lavish funding, many problems are easy to solve.

*shrugs* It being difficult to get the can opener doesn't make the problem itself more complex. Just makes getting the resources (be it fiscal, work hours, or public sentiment) to fix it more of a slog, and even that is usually pretty bloody simple, just frustrating and time consuming.

And @strife, I'm well aware of that. I've actually gone through, y'know, a concealed carry course, gun safety training, etc., and something like half my bloody family has seen some degree of either direct military service or contract work for supporting operations. You'd also do well to note the mass shootings on the noted sites and the armed and train folks getting gunned down were separate things. Still, if you have any idea of a better example than those, you're welcome to give it. You're pretty much guaranteed to still find people getting gunned down, probably at least a few times en masse. Armament and training only does so much (that is, basically nothing) to stop a gunner before they start killing people. Most of the time we actually see someone stopped before an attack, it's not by a bullet.

Also would be welcome to note that I didn't say a damn thing about cutting into gun ownership in that statement. Just noting that we do, in fact, have multiple examples of areas with multiple armed and trained individuals on site involved in mass shootings, and it does jack to effect the rhetoric involved. There are no counter examples to that crowd, just insufficiency and (notably rare) examples they crow as success stories.

[Playergamer]

alright, here's my token conservative comment: you are misinterpreting the logic behind "moar guns = safe"

at least at my level of conservatism, it's not a matter of "if somebody had a gun, he might have shot the guy." it's a matter of, thinking practically, shooters are likely to choose places that don't have guns. that's why a lot of shooters target schools, or movie theaters/bars. that's ignoring terrorists, of course. they are political, thus they choose political targets vs easy targets. that's why the charlie hebdo attack targeted a place they knew had security.

btw, terrorists are political. if it isn't a political motive, not terrorist.

thus fort hood and aurora were not terrorist attacks.

[Frumple]

Eh... thing with that is while you're thinking practically, you're also thinking what we've pretty decisively found to be incorrect, so far as I can recall. Shooters target those places not because people there aren't armed, but because they've either got some kind of attachment to the area (many school shooters, ferex) or because there's large groups of people there. The extent those crowds or areas are armed often don't even cross the mind of the people that commit these kinds of acts, or are dismissed as a concern, for whatever reason, if it does.

[PTTG??]

Whenever this conversation happens, it immediately breaks down like this:

Both: "This is sad and we shouldn't politicize it."
Republican: "And banning guns won't help."
Democrat: "There you go again, NRA shill..."

Clearly it's too easy for insane people to get guns. Since controlling guns is not a practical option (regardless of politics, there's too many out there. If we WANTED to take in all the guns, it wouldn't work), we need an alternative.

So let's go after the other side of the problem. The one we can actually change.

The United States has a mental health catastrophe. The current baseline approach to mental health in the united states is to throw people on the street. Our expenditures on mental health are clearly non-functional due to the extraordinary regulatory capture the pharmaceutical industry has achieved.

Here's my plan:

1.) Establish a mental-health social service that works with the mentally ill and provides housing, observation, and treatment for the ill and whatever family caretakers are present.
2.) I didn't mention guns at all, did I?
3.) I don't care about your god-damned guns. KEEP your guns already.
4.) Now if conservatives have a better idea for a solution, then stop talking about the guns and actually propose how you want to stop mass shootings.

[mainiac]

the
Clearly it's too easy for insane people to get guns. Since controlling guns is not a practical option

http://www.theonion.com/article/no-way-prevent-says-only-nation-where-regularly-ha-51444

It's pretty simple.  People with mental health problems have easy access to guns.  Like with suicide, easy access to guns greatly increases the chance of mass shootings.  Eventually the US will realize what every other nation has realized and take the guns away.  Once this is done, everyone will forget that we let a lot of people die because we didn't want voters to have their feelings hurt.

[Frumple]

Heh. To be honest, I half think it'd be easier on the political side of things to implement meaningful gun control than better mental health services. We already have disability services and whatnot (covering mental health as well) in a lot of (all?) areas, they just tend to be pretty woefully equipped to do... anything, really, and often pretty hard to get into (Florida, ferex, basically requires something like two years of documented and crippling mental health issues before disability assistance services start kicking in, and it can be kinda' difficult to reach that point, nevermind the folks that are having substantial problems but aren't sufficiently disabled by it.). There's less extreme venues via social services as well, but again, insufficient resources, support, overstressed with what it does handle, etc., etc., etc.

And considering improving the mental health arena would by and large perforce include general health service reform, which is arguably even more of a loggerhead between the partisan sides of things than guns are...

Well. It's worth fighting for, obviously, I'd just be hard pressed to call improving the mental health side of things as something more likely to change than gun control, heh.

[Moghjubar]

We are never gonna get rid of guns.  Obviously the solution then is to make them mandatory, with gun classes in school right next to PE (or just scrap it, we don't need to get taught how to move around right?).   Then all the schools and young adults have access to firearms at all times everywhere, except in cases where we gotta take them away of course.

Scarily enough, I have no idea if this would just be amazing ignorance or better than the current course of action in some states somehow.

[Playergamer]

Worked back in the ol' days.

[mainiac]

Worked back in the ol' days.

No it didn't... gun violence used to be even higher.  Mass shootings might be on the rise (not a good historical record) but they've been around for as long as they've been possible:
http://news.discovery.com/history/mass-shootings-history-121220.htm

[Playergamer]

talking about the 50s/60s not the wild west, lol.

mass shootings back in the days of riflery classes were, you know, rare. not a weekly occurence.

might work.

[mainiac]

mass shootings back in the days of riflery classes were, you know, rare. not a weekly occurence.

Hard to know for sure but the impression I get is they were about as common on a per-capita basis.

[nenjin]

I think less important question is whether it's worse now than it used to be, or what it's like in the rest of the world. The real question is, do we still want to live in a country where we have to keep dealing with this on a monthly basis, or do we want to change both policy and social opinion about it? Because I'm really sick of the gun violence, yo. I long for the days when I could be anything but cynically jaded about tragedies like this.

[Reelya]

Actually, if you look at youth homicide rates in the USA back in 1960's they seem to be double what they are now.

Total American gun deaths right now are lower than any time in the last half-century. And possibly before that, but I don't have any figures to back that up. And the teens now are the least-murderous teens that perhaps America has ever had in it's history, at least, they're less murderous than any generation of the last century. Maybe it's a fact that modern social media means it's easier to be aware of all the regional killings than it used to be. Pre-internet, you would have only heard about the bigger ones. But there's no overall data to back up the idea that there's a murder epidemic that's specific to this time period.

So, while comparing the USA to other countries is of course the right thing to do, there is also counter-evidence to the "it's getting so much worse" argument. A simple bodycount dispells the myth.

[Egan_BW]

Everything always gets better everywhere. It's just that things get better in the US much slower.