Summations Only

Huh?I was just trying to say to put that shit in quotes and supply the website you copied it from.We're here to discuss with other people, not to throw cut-n-pastes around.

Hello Tempe Chicken.
I do not reload. But it there was a ban on ammo I would. It is a pain in the ass to do. It is much easier to slap some money on the counter and walk off with a brick of ammo. The folks that seem to be perpetuating these heinous crimes are neck bearded punks imo. If they are mad at mommy and want to kill the world then they will have to find a means to do it. And yes they will. But I'd rather Junior use a hammer or ax than find a blackgun and high capacity glock to do the job. That kind of fire power can give a person a feeling of invincibility. Hence a ban on the ammo and High capacity weapons could keep some idiot gun nut from keeping his toys within reach of a psycopath. Some people are just plain stupid.Most folks I know who reload are gun nuts. They want to customize the ammo they use. Some target shooters do it to save money since brass can be reused. But again you have to know what you are doing or you risk injury and blindness if one blows on you or gets lodged in the barrel, stove pipes or whatever. Now think about one of these numbnuts sitting in some room reloading for hours on end to get enough rounds to do the job. Chances are good they will screw up. Ok yes there will always be someone willing to do it for them for a price. But that extra step in the process may be a pertinent one.
Bottom line is if the gun industry wants to protect law abiding gun toters and discourage psychopaths we need to make it harder for everyone. Only the truly passionate will be successful, rather than every idiot with a beef. Just my opinionEdited by 1.61803, : typo

And I was just saying that these facts and Stats dont need a rreference unless someone questions their validity.But a simple google on the subject of Single Mothers will bring tons of information like this to you attention.
i.e.; its sorta common knowledge now.

Not if you typed them yourself... but if you copy and paste them into the text box then you need to put quotes on it and include your source.That's according to the rules that you agreed to when you signed up:

quote:

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6. Avoid lengthy cut-n-pastes. Introduce the point in your own words and provide a link to your source as a reference. If your source is not on-line you may contact the Site Administrator to have it made available on-line.

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That settles it. No need to continue this off topic stuff here.

I still think a teacher or two from each school should have a gun. Certainly the Principal who died trying to stop the Connecticut shooter would have been well served to have one. And shopkeepers in malls and someone in every business and every home. \
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BUT schools could at least hire security guards. That's not too outlandish an idea, no need to deprive the millions of law-abiding citizens of their guns, just a little common sense here.

I'd be more comfortable with police rather than security guards, but a cop (or rent-a-cop) or two armed in every school sounds like a decent way to limit the carnage of school shootings.Unfortunately, that doesn't address the problem of gun violence in general. School shootings (business shootings, home shootings...) are only a small number of total gun-related deaths. A bunch of kids getting shot is perhaps the most emotive example, but it's certainly not remotely the most substantial part of the problem.

I don't know Rahvin. You said yourself that school shootings are extremely rare. For the price of a cop or two in each school, we could make significant educational advances by hiring an equal amount of teachers. Perhaps the added education would offset more shootings?So far, the one idea I liked in this forum is adding the legal obligation of keeping guns in a locked safe. If the guns used in the massacres are mostly illegally obtained from authorized gun owners, as was the connecticut shooter, then they need to be kept out of the reach of the mentally ill at all costs.Lastly, the one thing we really haven't discussed in this thread is mental health. What can be done? It has been said america needs to do better with helping/financing mentally ill patients. How about closing a few dozen military bases overseas and using the money for them? Can psychologists label gun ownership as a mental disorder that is harmful to society? It sometimes alarmed me the way some people can go on and on about specific guns and their technical specs. Yikes. What's up with that? I've read erotic stories from Hustler magazine with less passion.Edited by dronester, : sloppy, "illegally obtained from authorized gun owners"

I'm not sure I can properly calculate the relative utility of additional teachers providing additional education vs police officers providing protection. I'd have to think about this for a while to establish my actual position...but I don;t think it's worthwhile to consider, since I;ve already established that my preferred solution is to ban all firearms and ammunition from private ownership (with possible additional programs like a "buyback" to assist in lowering the number of privately owned firearms), as this solution addresses gun violence in general, and not the tiny but emotive problem of school-located gun violence. This does not address the fact that "legally acquired" is, in the US, a meaningless condition. Anyone can buy a gun with trivial ease. The restrictions are so light, the requirements for "tracking" and "registration" are so trivial, that they might as well not exist at all. With the exception of weapons that are actually banned on a national level (you don't see private ownership of RPGs, for example), there are no obstacles other than possibly time and distance to the nearest gun show preventing one from acquiring a weapon.Examples in this thread have been posted aplenty of the weaknesses in firearms restrictions. A form need only be filled out, and the seller need only attest that identification was seen, and the form need only be kept for a few years with no backups. If you can pass a background check, you can get a gun...and there is nothing at all preventing you from using an assumed name. The problem is not merely one of finance. It's a problem of basic tactics and goals. Mental health treatment in the US is targeted toward treatment with medication primarily; this is often ineffective and always extremely expensive, particularly in a nation with no nationalized healthcare system. Identification of the mentally ill is based on self-reporting - you feel like you have a problem, so you go to the doctor. There is no proactive approach. "Institutions" are short term - long term mental health issues typically result in disability or prison. We could take entire threads devoted to discussing this one problem...and gun violence, even school-located gun violence, is not solely an act perpetrated by the mentally ill in the clinical sense.I'd prefer solutions that address the whole of gun violence, not simply the subsets of gun violence at schools or gun violence perpetrated by the mentally ill. You're adding too many specifics to the solution. First determine what you want to use the money for, and how much. Form the solution completely, then figure out where you can get the money from. Only if you generalize the entire "fanboy" phenomenon into a mental illness. Some people just like to have knowledge. Plenty of people obsess over the capabilities and specs of fighter planes or X-Wing fighters without owning one; plenty of "gun nuts" have never and will never fire on another human being.I'm disdainful of private ownership of firearms myself, dronester, but trying to say that your opposition is "insane," even barely-subtly, is just an ad hominem attack and does nothing to suggest what should be done about gun violence, mental illness, or anything else.

quote:

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CONCLUSION
This Article has reviewed a significant amount of evidence
from a wide variety of international sources. Each individual
portion of evidence is subject to cavilat the very least the
general objection that the persuasiveness of social scientific
evidence cannot remotely approach the persuasiveness of
conclusions in the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the burden
of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal
more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially
since they argue public policy ought to be based on
that mantra.149 To bear that burden would at the very least
require showing that a large number of nations with more
guns have more death and that nations that have imposed
stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions
in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are
not observed when a large number of nations are compared
across the world.

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http://www.law.harvard.edu/...ol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdfI gotta go do some work in the lab and will be away from my desk for the rest of the day. I didn't get a chance to read this yet, but I wanted to throw it in here for future reference.

I'll need some time to look at that article, but from just the snippet you posted, I'd argue that gun control is not intended to reduce suicide or criminal violence, but is intended to reduce deaths due to gunfire, or most broadly, to reduce the murder rate.I'd want to see how they measured "criminal violence" in each nation given that each nation has differing laws and crime classifications, and I'd also like to see how they measured relative "gun controls."

Rahvin,This last shooting has, paradoxically, left me numb and angry. I am hoping that I can make some sense of all of this. I would find comfort in reason, IF there is any here.Something in my core says education would help. But I couldn't quantify that now. That is the reason for me exploring more teachers or maybe counselors in school versus just more security. Also, my disdain for more public displays of guns in the form of police/security prompts this. I think the display may be seen as a glorification of weapons by some . . . I have recently been lucky enough to be selected as a grand juror. The court building is sometimes protected by security in full weapon/swat gear. I can't believe this is the society we are building for ourselves. I know. It seems we are a mentally sick society for wanting this status quo. I am ignorant of gun permits, so I ask, is there something that triggers a flag if a mentally ill person has a history of medication for mental issues? Is there a database of all poeple who take medications for mental illness that is checked when a permit is applied? Should there be? Can there be? I know it won't prevent all gun deaths, but surely it can prevent some? I don't know why even members of the NRA would fight this, don't they have friends and family they care about? Agreed. Again, I am only considering those with a history of mental illness. I am familiar with a specific case of an insurance company not wanting to spend the ongoing money on a mentally ill person. So after one month of treatment, the person is declared healthy by the bean counters, the person is released from supervision, and the downward cycle begins again. This is crazy. Agree. But, there may not be one practical solution solution to this whole madness. I concede, my suggestion would only deal with the mentally ill. Maybe not even a significant percentage in this gun violence problem. I think the problem is that the "opposition" doesn't seem to think there is a problem. It would be long term, but if the idea that gun ownership is at odds with the rest of the civilized world, maybe we can slowly reclaim sanity?Sorry, my words in this thread are more questions than debate.

From the Forum Guidelines:

7. Never include material not your own without attribution to the original source.

The first word of that rule, "never," is kind of unambiguous.

My interpretation of rule 7 (which I wrote) is that it doesn't matter whether he typed it verbatim himself or cut-n-pasted it - plagiarism is plagiarism. Making minor changes to evade the rule is equally unacceptable.

One of the cruel facts of the Universe is that understanding an event does not negate its effect. Comprehending the motives and reasons for a shooting will not bring the kids back to life. Comprehension is, in cases like this, hollow. Even when it helps us determine future preventive policies. In this case you're using the term "education" as a placeholder. You "core" suggests that additional comprehension or empathy might somehow "help," but you have no idea how, or what form such "education" would take. The word "education," like its cousin "awareness," is often thrown around as a solution or a benefit, but often they're just buzzwords. I'm not at all a fan of the continual arms race between criminals and police. Escalation seems to me to result in more people shot and killed. I'm of the opinion that the entire human species is by default insane and requires significant training of a sort not currently offered in schools to become otherwise. But that's a broader topic. No.In fact, you don't need a permit to own a gun, unless you intend to legally carry the firearm. In California, a Concealed Carry permit requires the completion of a class, a criminal background check, and an interview with a representative of the local police. Simply owning a gun requires nothing.Purchasing a gun from a licensed vendor requires filling out a form, showing ID, and a criminal background check. A fake ID from a person with no record circumvents the problem easily. The form is not checked, requires no backup, the ID is not required to be photocopied or scanned, etc. It is not registered in any database outside of whatever the vendor individually puts it in for his own record keeping.Purchasing a gun from a private owner requires nothing at all. This would violate HIPAA. Medical records are strictly confidential, including mental health records. You can no more easily determine whether an individual has bipolar disorder than you could HIV or diabetes.Not all mental illness is the same...and most mentally ill people are not violent. Even the suicidally depressed are a minority among the depressed. There's a LOT more to mental illness than simply labeling them all "crazy" and restricting their rights specifically for a medical diagnosis. A paranoid schizophrenic can appear perfectly normal when on medication, and even when off of it, he usually won't hurt anyone. I don't think it would be particularly effective, and it involves the restriction of rights based on a medical diagnosis, which legally is a pretty nasty slippery slope.It's terribly easy to identify the mentally ill as the "other" and to keep "them" away from kids and guns, but it's extremely important to resist that mental flinching and remember the ethical basis of equal treatment and a rational basis for state interest. One could argue that the mentally ill individual is not crazy, being merely afflicted with a mental illness, while the system is absolutely crazy, being utterly ineffective at achieving its supposed goal of promoting mental health. I wouldn;t be so myopic. The "other side," the gun lobby, see that there is a problem. They simply flinch away from proposed solutions that would require them to give up their guns. Remember, if you own a gun for "protection," you legitimately believe that your gun makes you, personally more safe, along with your family. It's perfectly reasonable for such a person to feel afraid and defensive when someone suggests taking away their "safety."And when fighting the trivially wrong arguments like "guns enable us to fight tyranny," rational perspectives like "your Magnum and shotgun will not protect you against a modern army and tanks; in the Revolutionary War, militias had armaments on the same level as professional armies for the most part, and by all historical accounts the Americans won by running away and dying until the British didn't think it was worth it any more, not by superior strategy or force of arms, and that simply won't work today" are more complicated and scary than the wrongheaded emotive position. People like Faith would rather believe that private gun owners could somehow avoid being"taken" by "the government" with their small arms than acknowledge that the existence of tanks and helicopters make resistance utterly futile. A handgun against a totalitarian regime is simply a suicide weapon.It's a form of insanity, sure, but human decision-making is usually insane. There's nothing special about this particular case. We're rather insane regarding the relative threat of terrorism vs cigarette smoke or heart disease, too. One can hope.

Arming individuals in these circumstances is a bad idea, IMHO. This particular massacre happened so fast - how quickly could someone get to a locked up gun & confront this kid who was obviously hellbent to take out as many victims as possible? As quickly as the first responders were there, who's to say someone armed to protect wouldn't be mistaken for a threat? The initial reports in this case mentioned 2 shooters.http://usnews.nbcnews.com/...arly-moments-of-newtown-tragedyI just don't buy the idea that more armed (civilian) people = more safety in public places. It's easy to Monday-morning-quarterback and say the principal or the other adults would've stopped this kid if only they'd had guns, on that particular day, within reach to grab when surprised with violence at work. Whew, that's a lot of connecting dots.