Summations Only

Strange how that line goes down over time.You're the only one who insists that a gun ban is supposed to create immediate results.But your own stats show that homicides declined over time after banning firearms. 350 homicides in 1996...roughly 250 in 2010.That's a success if I've ever seen one.

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'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.

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."

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.

Personally, I think even the death of the shooter is a tragedy - I'd much rather see nobody at all die. If the shooter was mentally ill, he belongs in the care of a skilled psychiatrist, possibly restricted to an institution, not dead.(I absolutely agree that, once he starts shooting, shooting him is a perfectly acceptable form of defense to stop worse loss of life - but in the best of all possible worlds, there was no shooting and no dying at all)"More people with guns" sometimes ends well, and sometimes doesn't...but generally, people who don't have guns cannot fire them. I think of recent anecdotes of the "stand your ground" laws, like one in which a man told some kids in a car to turn down the volume, thought he saw one reach for a shotgun, and emptied his pistol into a car full of actually unarmed teens killing one of them. If we allow ourselves as a society to escalate firearms posession by private citizens, we need to be ready to accept the consequences.Even in a gun rights supporter's ideal world...guns kill people. They might be used to kill the aggressor, but we still have people being shot to death. If the aggressor never had a gun to begin with, there's no reason for the defender to escalate to using a firearm himself.I don't distinguish significantly between a criminal and a victim killed by a gun. Yes, self-defense is perfectly valid - but I still see both as merely symptomatic of the disease of violent escalation. I think if we could find a way to de-escalate, whether that takes the form of a gun ban or something else, human lives can only be saved.

While I appreciate the general "WTF" reaction to such an abhorrent event......let us not make the same mistake as crash in disproportionately assigning weight to anecdotes over statistics. Just as individual school shootings are statistical anomalies rather than a solid basis for policy making, that single event can only ever be a single event and is not itself a trend.It is possible (though I think improbable and counterproductive in any case) that possession of firearms by the general public can be more frequently used to prevent deaths than to cause them via the threat of lethal resistance. Just as I assign very low weight to crashfrog's example of a robbery foiled by a man with a gun, he would be absolutely justified in assigning low weight to my own anecdote. This is why we use statistics, after all.ABEI'd just prefer there to be fewer guns so that fewer people could be shot, and so that we wouldn't need every cop to be prepared for urban warfare. I don't want to shoot a thief, and neither do I wish to be shot by one. He can have the goddamned TV, and we can catch him to stand trial later.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

I agree with you. I just don't want to give crash (when he returns) a reason to continue to argue by anecdote. The fact that these incidents happen at all says something rather negative about firearms kept for defense, but I'd rather try to focus the debate on statistically lowering the number of people who needlessly die every year, particularly in gun-related incidents, rather than the "oh yeah, what about that one time..." back and forth.

...of course they do.Hell, two people with guns (the assailant and the armed bystander) shooting at each other is the very definition of a gunfight! You can't have your armed bystander take out the assailant without getting into a gunfight!And police get into gunfights with some regularity, despite being among the most trained gun owners around.The point, of course, is that if you add more people shooting into the mix, all of the potential victims are caught in the crossfire. Can you imagine the actual result if the Joker shooter had been shot at from the crowd? Everyone between him and the armed bystander would have been caught in the crossfire. That's a very bad place to be. In a school...all the kids had better have an object thick enough to stop bullets between them and everyone with a gun, because a stray round or a ricochet is enough to kill.It's amazing that you don;t even think about things like this.

Since we have reported stats from multiple sources all pointing to the same conclusion, it would appear very strongly that you consider "evidence I can trust" to simply mean "evidence that supports my pre-existing conclusion."That doesn't say anything good about your willingness to consider evidence in a debate.

"Fine" is too strong a term. You're speaking in absolutes. When we talk about crime, death, and violence, what we're mostly talking about is trying to find the least bad option.Crime will never go away. Violence will never be completely eliminated. Murders will always happen to some degree or another.The purpose of the entire criminal justice system, and in fact the reason self-defense is a justification for homicide, is that some scenarios are ethically and socially preferable to others.The absolute best case fantasy-world scenario is one in which nobody ever gets shot, nobody ever gets robbed, raped, beat up, etc.We can never quite get there, but I think you and I would both agree that we could go some distance toward that goal beyond where we lie today. We just disagree on how far and how to do it.Every person who becomes a killer is a person, a human being with hopes and dreams who feels pain and pleasure and has family and friends and loved ones just like the rest of us. Some of those people are mentally ill; others are not necessarily mentally ill but otherwise choose to take other human lives. The best possible world would be one where those people never became killers in the first place - this is the driving force behind the suggestion that better mental health care can reduce the number of violent criminals, including killers, by making sure they get help before they turn into killers.But even when prevention is impossible, when someone slips through the cracks of mental health care or someone just snaps, it would be preferable if that person's ability to kill were reduced. The hypothesis is that guns allow for more efficient killing than just about anything else - explosives require more foresight, planning, and access to the target area without being caught, and more destructive weapons are solely in the hands of the military (tanks, RPGs, bombers, cruise missiles, etc). If we could reduce the availability of firearms, a given person who turns killer would need to use a less effective weapon - you don't tend to see 30 people stabbed to death by a single person, for example.Your hypothesis is that armed law-abiding citizens can kill a killer before he racks up a high body count. There are instances of this happening - the police use lethal force on occasion for this very reason. It's not an invalid argument, not completely.But if you think about how the police, the trained professionals, handle the use of lethal force, you'll note that they don't just go "Rambo" and charge in, guns blazing. They do sometimes wind up in a shootout with an armed suspect, and innocent people do wind up getting hurt. They even mistakenly shoot innocent, unarmed individuals thinking they are armed - toy guns in the US are sold with a bright orange cap nowadays because there were multiple instances of police officers thinking that a child was waving a gun at them, and opening fire, because there was no way for them to tell the difference. Even among the most well trained handlers of lethal force, accidents, mistakes, and collateral damage happens.Many of the mass-shooting perpetrators are not actually afraid to die - in fact, death is their intention. They just want to kill a bunch of people, first. Guns aren't a particularly effective deterrent against someone who intends to shoot himself anyway.In the case of mass shootings and hostage situations, you'll note that, when the police arrive before the shooting is done, they still do not just charge in and try to "take out" the assailant.If the trained police, including SWAT, don't think simply opening fire is the best idea, what makes you think it's a good idea for gun-wielding civilians to do so? That's trivially false, Faith. Jaywalking is a crime, but it's not murder. Embezzlement is a crime, but it's not murder. Perjury is a crime, but it's not murder.Let's be honest here - if you actually had to make a binary choice - to have your car stolen, or to be shot dead, with absolutely no other choices - which would you choose? I'd choose to have my car stolen, every single time. Crime is not universally equivalent - that only happens in your Bible. And while your deity might judge a white-collar criminal to be just as sinful as the perpetrator of a mass shooting, human justice systems do not. That's why we have different sentences for different crimes, from a simple fine to imprisonment (we can have the death penalty discussion elsewhere). The founders were not gods, Faith. They were reasonably smart men, but they weren't infallible. After all, the founders said that slavery was just fine. And in their time, your average citizen could be as well-armed as your average soldier with no problems. There were no tanks, barely any artillery, no planes, no RPGs, no armored vehicles. Threats both foreign and domestic took completely different forms in the 18th century, and while an armed militia could fight off the British (by endlessly retreating and dying until the Brits didn't want to play any more, not by winning battles) back then, an armed militia today would stand about as much a chance against a modern military as...well, look at Iraq and Afghanistan. The Second Amendment did provide protection against government tyranny in the 18th century. Today, it does not. Not even a little. An armed populace still has no defense against tanks. If our government and military institute martial law, there is nothing in terms of violent resistance that you could do with your guns to effectively win. Nothing at all. The age of the armed revolution died when the age of the tank began. If you want to prevent or resist tyranny, today we do so through words and political action, not with bullets.The Second Amendment is worthless today for its original stated purpose. It might make you feel better...but your handgun doesn't do any good when an unmanned drone fires a Hellfire missile into your house, effectively ending your resistance.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Again - look at Iraq and Afghanistan. "Terrorists" are essentially identical to "armed citizen militias." The difference is primarily in the tactics each is willing to ethically embrace, and the political position of the person applying the label.The armed resistance did nothing of significance. The remaining populace is still alive. One can put down a resistance without nuking the population in its entirety. Why would those "subtle ways" not work against an armed populace? If the "subtle ways" would work regardless, and the tyrannical government desires a living subservient population, why not just stick with the "subtle ways" in the first place?

Where by "criminals" you are partially talking about "Native American raids on an outlying farm where law enforcement doesn't exist."Again, the world is a different place than it was in the 18th century. Today, a criminal invading your home is encouraged to take a gun of his own in case the homeowner is armed - it's a simple escalation.Or, of course, the "invader" could be your own child sneaking into our out of the house late at night, as recently happened in this case.Are you prepared to accept the possible consequences of your favored position? That includes accidental gun deaths that would not have occurred if guns were not present.That's a really, really short response to an extremely long post. Should I take it that you concede on all other points?ABE

quote:

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NEW FAIRFIELD, Conn. -- A man fatally shot a masked teenager in self-defense outside his neighbor's house during what appeared to be an attempted late-night burglary and then discovered it was his son, state police said.

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Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Its an example of an armed citizen militia trying to resist a modern military.It didn't work out so well for them. Effectively, yes. America-supported governments now control both nations. The resistance did not put Al Qaeda or the Taliban into power, nor did they stop the US from doing whatever it wanted. You dont have to kill them all to make their threat minimal - and that's what they are. A minimal threat. They can plant some bombs and shoot some people, but they cannot achieve any sort of political change...meaning their armed resistance did nothing except contribute to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani dead, and add a few thousand American deaths. Provide an example of a "subtle way" to prosecute"tyranny" that would be successful against an unarmed populace, but which could be effectively prevented with an armed populace.

No, it didn't. Al Qaeda was not in charge of Iraq; Saddam Hussein was - a secular dictator. The Taliban was a government friendly to Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda had nothing to fear from them.But as soon as the terrorist groups were faced with a modern military...their acts of resistance amounted to little more than throwing away lives, both their own and their neighbors, to make a pittance of casualties (relatively speaking) for the US and its allies.Again - the point is that a citizen militia can do little to nothing to prevent a government backed by a modern military from enforcing its desires, tyrannical or otherwise. Whether the military is foreign or domestic makes no difference at all except in whether the people choose to resist in the first place.If the US government would not do that to its own people, why do we need guns to prevent it? How, precisely, would guns prevent that? You think you can hold off a SWAT team with your pistols and rifles? If the Powers That Be decide to search your home, it will be searched. Your only defense against such a thing is through political action, words and debate and voting; your guns mean nothing. If some day the Fourth Amendment were abolished and the police wanted to search every home in your city, they could just send SWAT door-to-door, and your guns would do nothing except get you killed.Oddly enough, the reason your guns would not prevent such a form of tyranny is the same reason that legitimate search warrants can be carried out. The threat of force and the option for illegal resistance is always there. For some reason, even when they encounter armed resistance...the police still get to conduct a search. Whether the resident is alive and uninjured is the only questionable factor.