It isn't like they are handing out free guns in high school. The assertion was that mental healthcare is less available than guns. This is patently untrue. You can get as much of either as you can afford, but with some restrictions on guns.
It's truly shocking how America clings on to this law. The arguments are so childish too. It's nothing like a spoon or pencil. There are alternatives for a spoon, there are no viable alternatives to firearms. Why are you so damn likely to get shot in a developed country like the US? That's what it boils down to. Those who want to cling on to these laws will undoubtedly argue that it's simply nnot being managed properly, and that's a valid argument. But with something so dangerous, and with something so precious as human life, you start with the least amount of risk and then take on additional risk as the management of it improves. Really there are only two ways to approach this problem. A temporary ban or an outright ban. At this point, given the political situation in the US, a mass shooting spree would not be shocking. It's just so uncivilized to have this law in place. There is actual scientific research that shows it's a bad idea. If people speak up, then politicians will be more willing to push this agenda. But as long as they fear political suicide, nothing's going to happen, and this is going to cause more and more problems. To put it simply, more people are dying as a result of this law, while it is still more effective to call 911. If you want to have the right to bear arms, put a temporary suspension on it, tighten up the system, and then bring it back. As of now, it's a giant mess I think. If you ban spoons, people will eat with a fork. If you ban firearms, this guy was not going to get on stage and choke the congresswoman with his bare hands. As for pencils, that's a great example of something that is immensely losing popularity due to better electronic editing capabilities - in the same way, get rid of your gun, and get a better security system for your house. /end rant from unaffected non-American.
I appreciate a non-American view, but America was created in conjunction with firearm rights (unlike other countries), - in fact we have a bill of rights - take away the rights of citizens and you take away the essence of this country...While there are some even in this country who would explore infringement or complete eradication of the 2nd admendment, you can't pick and choose the bill of rights...Anyone could argue/justify there is a upside and downside to every bill of right, and if you start with the 2nd admendment, who is to say that it wouldn't stop there...Next could be the 1st, or the 5th...then what's next?
Sure you can get as much of either as you can afford. But I bet it's a lot cheaper for a crazy person to get one gun (which can do a lot of damage) than to get all the help he needs to not pose a danger to anyone. Not to mention the fact that there's no stigma attached to getting a gun. There is certainly a horrible attitude in this country towards people who need psychological help.
Who cares? It's easy to tell where it stops. When it's causing more harm than good, you change it. When it's causing more good then harm, you don't. Why does this bill of rights have to hold such a high status? When it was first made, it was the best bill of rights given the available information at the time. Now the information is pointing to a different answer. Why does the essence of the country mean? I would say the essence of the country is to give people the maximum amount of freedom until their well-being is affected. If it becomes a choice between keeping the bill of rights or having less homicide, which one do you choose? What do you think the creators of the bill of rights would choose?
How is it more effective to call 911? Waiting up to 10 minutes for police to show up is more effective for what? He might not have choked people but he might have drove his car over all of them. Or parked his car full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer near the gathering and blown everyone up.
The biggest mass school murder in US history involved explosives diverted from legitimate and legal farm use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster. The biggest terrorist attack in US history was carried out with box cutters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11 The largest domestic terrorist attack was carried out with heating oil and common fertilizer and a rented van, not unlike the one CaseyH is so proud of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_Bombing When the UK outlawed handguns, the murder rate actually went up. They have since decided to outlaw a large number of long knives, with no effect on the murder rate. I'm pretty sure that soon, everybody in the UK will be cutting their food with butter knives, all sharp corners will have rubber bumpers to protect people, and the murder rate will remain unaffected. from an article in the Yale Law Review: [rquoter] There is one further problem of no small import: if one does accept the plausibility of any of the arguments on behalf of a strong reading of the Second Amendment, but, nevertheless, rejects them in the name of social prudence and the present-day consequences produced by finicky adherence to earlier understandings, why do we not apply such consequentialist criteria to each and every part of the Bill of Rights? As Ronald Dworkin has argued, what it means to take rights seriously is that one will honor them even when there is significant social cost in doing so. If protecting freedom of speech, the rights of criminal defendants, or any other part of the Bill of Rights were always (or even most of the time) clearly costless to the society as a whole, it would truly be impossible to understand why they would be as controversial as they are. The very fact that there are often significant costs--criminals going free, oppressed groups having to hear viciously racist speech and so on--helps to account for the observed fact that those who view themselves as defenders of the Bill of Rights are generally antagonistic to prudential arguments. Most often, one finds them embracing versions of textual, historical, or doctrinal argument that dismiss as almost crass and vulgar any insistence that times might have changed and made too "expensive" the continued adherence to a given view. "Cost-benefit" analysis, rightly or wrongly, has come to be viewed as a "conservative" weapon to attack liberal rights. Yet one finds that the tables are strikingly turned when the Second Amendment comes into play. Here it is "conservatives" who argue in effect that social costs are irrelevant and "liberals" who argue for a notion of the "living Constitution" and "changed circumstances" that would have the practical consequence of removing any real bite from the Second Amendment. As Fred Donaldson of Austin, Texas wrote, commenting on those who defended the Supreme Court's decision upholding flag-burning as compelled by a proper (and decidedly non-prudential) understanding of the First Amendment, "t seems inconsistent for [defenders of the decision] to scream so loudly" at the prospect of limiting the protection given expression "while you smile complacently at the Second torn and bleeding. If the Second Amendment is not worth the paper it is written on, what price the First?" [/rquoter]
Actually it isn't known that box cutters alone that carried out the 9/11 attacks. It is known that someone was stabbed or shot (could be guns). We know that someone was disabled by a chemical spray. One of the flights there is no information at all about the weapons that were used. So to say that it was box cutters that carried out 9/11 isn't totally accurate.
If you can find me any empirical evidence at all that any gun was used in the attacks of 9/11, I would be very interested in seeing it. But what I get from your point is that we don't have absolute proof that a gun wasn't used, therefore we should assume one was. I am aware of no legitimate source that claims use of firearms at any point.
Yet he chose to use a gun with an extended magazine. Building a bomb isn't an easy thing, consider the attempted Times Square bombing. Ramming a car into people on a sidewalk isn't that guarenteed to cause as much damage as he has to drive it up through the parking lot with other cars and up and over a curb and by code store entrances should have bollards to prevent cars from ramming into them, mostly due to accidents not deliberate. Also note that there are more legal restrictions towards driving, than there are towards getting a gun. Its true that guns don't kill people, people do but guns make it a lot easier.
If we define "legal restrictions" in terms of the number of people who are restricted from that action, I'm not sure that that is entirely true. Felons are prevented by law from owning guns, and I'm going to bet there are a whole lot more felons in the USA than there are people prevented from owning a driver's license, given our fondness for imprisoning people.
Regarding the Second Amendment the Heller ruling clarified that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to personal firearm ownership but it doesn't mean that the type and nature of those firearms can be regulated. Even Robert Levy who argued the case for Heller agrees that regulations are Constitutionally allowed and make sense. http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_new...gh-capacity-magazine-restrictions-makes-sense Gun-rights advocate: High-capacity magazine restrictions 'makes sense'From NBC's Michael Isikoff A leading gun-rights advocate says there is no constitutional barrier to restricting the sale of high capacity gun magazines such as the one used by accused Tucson shooter Jared Loughner and that such proposals are justified to prevent "looney tunes" from committing more gun massacres. Robert A. Levy, who served as co-counsel in the landmark Supreme Court case that established a Second Amendment right to bear arms, said there was no reason the court's decision in that case should apply to the purchase of high-capacity gun magazines. "I don't see any constitutional bar to regulating high-capacity magazines," Levy said in an interview with NBC. "Justice [Antonin] Scalia made it quite clear some regulations are permitted. The Second Amendment is not absolute." The comments by Levy, chairman of the board of the libertarian Cato Institute, come as Democratic Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York is preparing to circulate a bill tomorrow that would ban the sale or transfer of high-capacity magazines. Supporters took Levy's comments as a sign that at least some gun-rights advocates might be open to the idea. "For somebody like him to say this is significant," said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Project, a leading gun control group. (Levy was one of the lead lawyers for gun rights in D.C. v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court case that overturned Washington D.C.'s ban on handgun ownership and affirmed that the Second Amendment encompassed an individual right to own firearms.) There is little doubt that any gun-control proposal will face tough sledding in the Congress. A spokesman said today House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is against the idea. One leading gun-rights group, Gun Owners of America, posted a statement on its Web site this week denouncing "liberal politicians flocking like vultures" to gain political advantage from the Tucson tragedy by proposing new gun control measures. But gun-control groups argue that measures like the one being proposed by McCarthy in the House (and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who is sponsoring a similar bill in the Senate) are so modest and reasonable that they could gain traction. Law-enforcement officials have noted that Loughner's high-capacity round magazine substantially increased the lethality of his rampage; he was able to get off at least 31 shots without reloading and was only wrestled to the ground when he tried to reload with another high-capacity magazine. The manufacture of such magazines were prohibited under the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, but that law lapsed in 2004 and gun experts say the sale of such magazines have since proliferated. President Obama, during his 2008 campaign, had supported reinstating the assault weapons ban, but soon abandoned the idea as politically impractical after taking office. This week, the White House has declined to respond to requests for comment on whether the president would support a restriction on high-capacity magazines. Although he is strongly opposed to most gun-control measures, Levy said in this case, "as a policy matter," restricting access to high-capacity magazines such as the 33-round ones used by Loughner makes sense. "It may stop a few of these looney tunes," Levy said. While saying that he saw it as a "close call, he said that that a restriction of "10 to 15 rounds makes sense."
That's a great selection. But do you know how the US fares against other developed economies in the world when compared? Do you really think this kid would do what he set out to do as easily without a firearm? Do you think the congresswoman would be as injured if he didn't have a firearm?
Ref I own three guns myself. I have no issue with gun control laws or restrictions of certain types of weapons. This whole idea that gun control cannot even be addressed or discussed in America is a radical idea. That's right, I said radical! The NRA dominates the debate so much that one can't even do any serious research on the internet on gun control. Go ahead and try! It can't be done. Because the NRA has shouted down anyone who even broaches the subject. That's ridiculous. Pro gun control advocates aren’t the radicals in this discussion.
This probably varies from state to state but in general it seems like there are more restrictions for getting a driver's license, such as eyesight, than to get a gun. THe fact you have to pass a driving test to get a driver's license whereas I am not aware that you have to pass a gun safety test to get a gun, shows that the restrictions are higher. I have no statistics but I strongly doubt there are more felons in the US than those prevented from getting a drivers' license. There are a lot of felons but there are lots of people with sight impairments and people for whatever reason can't pass the drivers' test. Also depending on the felony, DUI, vehicular manslaughter and etc.. in most states also takes away your drivers' license.
YOu were the one who brought up he could've driven. I am just pointing out that there are more legal restrictions towards driving than getting a gun. If you think it is moot why did you bring up driving in the first place?
Do you remember when Katrina hit the USA, and all the snooty people from the developed economies said, "It looks like a third-world nation!" Lumping the USA into the same category as Finland or Sweden as "developed countries" is useful for your argument, but it isn't comparing apples to oranges. It ignores the obscene social problems that occur, and the ghettoization and marginalization of inner cities. In terms of top-to-bottom disparity of social structure, the USA more closely resembles India than Finland. Certainly, we do a whole lot better than Russia, which has outlawed guns, and a whole lot worse than Switzerland, which requires every adult male to keep a loaded assault rifle in his home. Well, if he used fuel oil and fertilizer, we'd still be picking up little pieces of charred meat and testing DNA to see who it belonged to, so yeah. If explosives weren't so effective we wouldn't be reading about car bombings or suicide bombings all over the ME.
