Summations Only

I should have said "increased deterrence." That's what Cat Sci was proposing. I didn't mean to suggest we needed no deterrence at all. Yes! Yes! Yes! This is what I would have liked to have said.--Percy

More words of wisdom from the Internet on the subject of the Sandy Hook massacre. Can you guess what sort of weapon the author used to kill his fiancee, her brother, and himself?

and irony gun ...

Hi Percy, So how would you propose to get rid of all the guns?Then how would you get rid of the ability to build a gun. You can go to the local hardware store and buy enough material for less than $10 to build a single shot pistol, or shotgun.You could take the guns out of the hands of honest people but you would never get the guns out of the hands of people who want one to commit a crime.Thousands of guns go missing from armory's and police arms storage each year in the US and the UK. How would you propose to control that problem.You talked about there are people that are trained and keep their training up todate. Then you mentioned those who do not. I would be in favor of every gun owner having to go to training at least once per year.I raised 2 sons with loaded guns in the house. From the time they were 2 years old they were exposed to loaded weapons and viewed what they could do to animals. By the time they were 7 years old they had their own shotguns. My oldest son killed his first deer just before his 8th birthday. When people are trained to use weapons there will be no problems. The object is to know what you are shooting before you pull the trigger.But you are correct there are a lot of idiots that should not be allowed to own guns of any kind. They just buy a gun have no training and do not respect what a gun can do.Enough of my rant.God Bless,

I don't want to get rid of *all* guns. You mentioned hunting rifles, and most people concerned about gun deaths do not have a problem with hunting rifles.But the first step toward eliminating most handguns would be to build a consensus that there *is*a gun death problem. Too many people don't see a problem.--Percy

NRA calls for more heavily armed reporters"The National Rifle Association has claimed today’s tragic shooting of two reporters wouldn’t have happened if America’s reporters were better armed."ok.. it's satire.. but with the NRA's views on arming the nation, this could have been an actual response....

In this discussion it might help to realise that the US has one of the stricktest policies on what is arguably one of the most lethal of mankind's inventions. Yes, anyone can own one or more of them, but in federal law almost any eventuality with regard to the safety issues involved has been dealt with in extensive, one might even say exhaustive regulations. That's probably why in the US the death rate of people falling from ladders has seen a dramatic decrease eversince these regulations were put in place.O, but wait... this is about guns, isn't it? Sorry, wrong thread. No regulations worth mentioning about guns, I believe.But anyway, remember: ladders don't kill people, people fall off of them. (Very rarely.)Edited by Parasomnium, : Spelling.Edited by Parasomnium, : Spelling again...

From Investigators: Police went to wrong home, shot resident, dog and 'likely' shot fellow officer. It's short, here's the whole thing:

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ATLANTA — Investigators say police officers who arrived at the wrong metro Atlanta home for a report of suspicious activity shot the man who lives there and "likely" shot one of their own, leaving him seriously wounded.

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Georgia Bureau of Investigation officials said DeKalb County police received a report of a suspicious person Monday night in a southeast Atlanta neighborhood where many of the single-story homes look similar.

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They said police entered the back of a house, where two officers shot a dog and officers also shot the resident in the leg when he exited a room off the kitchen. That man, whose name was not released, returned home early Tuesday but declined to comment.

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A police officer was shot in the hip and listed in serious condition at Grady Memorial Hospital.

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If you give a guy a gun and send him into what he believes is a dangerous and threatening situation, you've just turned him into someone who is very dangerous to everyone around him, including those on his side. Even if he's a trained officer of the law. We need to take away people's guns.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Apparently shooting dogs on the way in is something close to standard procedure when you enter a place.There is not quite enough information to tell, but this sounds like another situation where the Supreme Court's modification of 'Knock and announce' to 'Knock unless you think the suspect might hear you' has had a tragic result.I'd also point out that the entire sequence of events seems quite questionable. Is a 'suspicious person' someone you need to be prepared to shoot until you find out that he is harmless? And apparently the other thing that raised suspicion was that the back door was unlocked. Not jimmied, over even ajar. Just left unlocked. Better bolt up.

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Derek Perez told The Associated Press that he reported the suspicious person. He said he was walking his dog when he saw a man knock on a neighbor's door and then just stand in the yard. He said he then heard a loud noise, a dog barking and didn't see the man anymore. There had been break-ins in the neighborhood recently, so he called 911, he said.

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Just as he was about to go into his house, he heard the gunshots, but they didn't come from the house where he had reported the suspicious person.

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I know the lesson here is supposed to be guns are bad. But this is surely some kind of f-ed up policing. We both know that we are never going to get rid of guns. But we still have to fix this stuff. I mean, seriously, what are the odds that when the police enter someone's home that they are going to encounter the home owner of all people?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I'm very sad to hear that. Cats, too? Seems rather drastic and more likely to create problems than solve them. If there are multiple officers in different places in a house and one of them shoots a pet, the other officers, hearing the shot and not knowing precisely what happened, will experience themselves as being in greater danger and become more likely to discharge their own firearms. I hadn't heard about this ruling, but approaching the scene of a break-in with residents possibly present feels somewhat similar to approaching a pulled over motor vehicle. I'm worried that for too many police the answer is yes. I think that when we select among solutions to the problem of needless gun deaths that our decisions should be informed by acknowledgement of the imperfections of human beings. If police were untrained then obviously training is a viable answer, but police are not untrained. I'm not at this time proposing that we disarm police, but examples such as this one tell us that if even trained police can bollix things this badly, untrained civilians can only do worse.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

The police so often burst into the wrong home--and shoot people, terrorize naked or nightgowned women (apparently a fetish of SWAT cops), shatter your children's peace of mind and destroy property--that it's practically a news subgenre.These home invasions are based on tips from drug addict snitches, so I guess it's not surprising. Sometimes they make up the snitches, something that comes out more often when they shoot the wrong citizen.Imagine: It only takes one addict's word to send the SWAT team shooting and screaming into your house. And the police sometimes lie about even that.Steel doors won't help. They'll come in with an armored tactical vehicle and charge you with criminal fortification.I have a 1st Gulf War vet friend who built a solid oak beam door. He has many guns. He says, they break in here, they'll regret it. I used to laugh.

I'm just guessing, but shooting the dog seems to be reported fairly often. It probably would be considered wuss-like to shoot a cat or a goldfish. Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586 (2006). A civilian would have to be a complete idiot to put himself in a similar position. If this represents police training given to the force in a large metropolitan, high crime area, then the training is nothing short of abysmal in my opinion. The police were not even at the right house. The chance that a good result would have come from this interaction was exactly zero. Even if the police were in the right house, the odds of encountering a perfectly innocent civilian were extremely high. Yes, there is some risk involved here, but why is it acceptable that the homeowners have to bear the majority of the risk.And then there is this incident:

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In 2006, Atlanta police officers killed a 92-year-old woman during a botched drug raid at her house. After getting an incorrect tip from a drug dealer, police used a no-knock warrant to enter Kathryn Johnston's home. As the police officers tried getting inside, Johnston fired a single shot through the door with a rusty revolver. Police fired back 39 times, killing Johnston.

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Officers then tried covering up their mistake by planting bags of marijuana at the house. Three of the officers were sent to prison. The city paid a $4.9 million settlement to the slain woman's family.

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Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

True, but the similarity I had in mind was more along the lines of civilians with a gun who feel scared or threatened, for instance when they hear a noise in the house, not civilians blindly entering someone's house like the police in this case. The quality of the graduates of any training program will fall under a bell shaped curve, as will the quality of the training programs themselves across the country. Somewhere in the country will always exist the worst graduates of the worst training program. In my view it isn't at all acceptable. To me it's as unacceptable as motorists bearing the majority of risk at a traffic stop.--Percy

Its doesn't even have to be an addict. Jerks have been setting up disliked acquaintances to be raided by the police for a while now. Its called Swatting.

More than ever I'm glad that in my country handguns are not as commonplace. While I won't discuss police tactics, storming into people's homes is not something we do - just about at all. (swatting is not an issue either because of that)Can you imagine that last year police used gun less than 40 times and that includes threatening with it!! In 2014 police fired a gun SIX times altogether.Edited by saab93f, : Clarification