There Have Been 5 Major Shootings in the U.S. in the Past Week Alone

Other countries use this thing called "Public Transportation." Road fatalities happen less when people aren't driving as much.

That, and US laws to regulate reckless driving.

 

Problem with most Americans being insecure about their safety. Stop being so scared about being unable to protect yourself from criminals. This isn't a movie. Only thing preventing America to move forward are these stubborn citizens who think they need their guns. I will live my life in entirety with no gun nor fear of what might happen to me and I will live just fine.

 

The problem is the mental health of the NRA and the nuts supporting unregulated gun sales and ownership. Most Americans support universal background checks and preventing crazy people from buying guns. The NRA is the reason we don't have that.

So next week or next month or whenever there'll be another massacre by a law abiding citizen and nothing will be done about it. We'll hear all the stupid slogans about good guys with guns, all the BS data about how crime drops when there are more CHL holders, more empty rhetoric about mental health and enforcing the laws on the books, and how criminals have their guns already and the only answer is more guns for the rest us and you just come and try to take our guns because my constitutional rights Wild West yeeeeeha bull crap and oh but cars, what about the cars.

 

Road fatalities per 100,000 vehicles
UK 6
USA 13.7

Which skews the data because more families share cars in the UK.


I agree on punishment but the main problem is any moron can get a license and they are never retested. Traffic citations are revenue collection. We have pushed automotive companies very far on safety and they have produced much safer cars. Now it is time to push some responsibility on drivers. 5 year retests.

The political pushback might even be less than guns. It just isn't sexy and doesn't get the cometswin of the world excited.

 

I don't see eye to eye with Cometswin on Christianity but man, he is spot on with his argument in this thread. Crazy yee haw haw Murricans and their "need" to have a gun.

 

You realize he's not advocating a full gun ban like you are, right?
Just more gun regulation.

Like it or not this is the society we live in right now. You can't ban guns, that is childishly unrealistic. The best thing you can do is prevent crazies and blatant criminals from getting guns too easily, something that baffles me is how people could possibly be against that.

The problem is we have this same discussion over and over again and both sides stonewall and nothing gets done while the shootings rampage on.

 

I'll see your sarcasm and raise it.


ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this,36131/

 

This. The biggest problem is the damn country's OBSESSION with guns. People like treeman who have convinced themselves that the only way they or anybody could ever be safe is to be packing heat. That the only thing protecting us, as a country, is this asinine and antiquated notion that you're some sort of hero if you carry a firearm. That it's those damn "urban ghetto kids", not the rural white man with an arsenal of guns "exercising" his second amendment rights that's the problem.

That's the problem with this damn country.

 

My bipartisan solution (as mentioned before) - remove lethal guns and replace them with non-lethals.

I think one of the most common responses was that you need to have lethal intent at times to stop people. What about the criminal? If I know people are potentially packing heat and I am bent on doing this crime, won't I escalate to above water level and bring something with equal or more lethal intent? I didn't hear a single good response to this.

The statistics are clear, people who travel to other developed countries with no right to bear arms feel the difference, and it's an escalating circle of fear mongering. Don't bring up car deaths as a strawman. The US should deal with BOTH. Seriously antiquated and primitive mindset by a steadily narrowing group of people.

 

Oh and this was from before when I dug up stats and noted that gun homicides comprise the majority of total homicides and that only 15% of homicides involve strangers.

Think about that. Guns aren't being used to protect people you know. The majority of gun-related homicides are to kill people you know. The convenience of a gun nearby helps predicate lethal intent and lethal results, not on strangers but on acquaintances, friends, and family. The convenience of a gun is primarily being used to predicate lethal intent and lethal results on to people you know. The convenience of a gun nearby is helping premeditated lethal intent and lethal results on people who aren't strangers.

Do I need to say it again? How do you defend that?

 

Road fatalities are generally called accidents. Murders aren't accidents.

Your car is registered, your car has to pass an inspection every year, your car has all kinds of safety equipment, you have to pass an exam to get a driver's license, you need insurance to legally drive your car, and you have fines for breaking driving rules and police to enforce those rules. If you and the NRA would like to replace car with gun in the sentence above to deter crazies from owning guns then let's get that done.

 

there are 797 cars per capita in the US compared to 519 cars per capita in the UK (wiki). After being to America, it amazes me how many cars there are and how little public transport there is. That's probably why road fatalities are higher to begin with. Also that ghetto culture argument, you think that kind of culture doesn't exist anywhere else? Really?

and not being from the US, yeah America should ban guns. It's insane how such an advanced country feels the constant need to arm themselves with incredibly dangerous weapons.

 

No, law abiding citizens wouldn't have their rights restricted at all with expanded background checks. If they are truly law abiding, then a background check would find and report that fact and wouldn't restrict their ability to buy at all.

Perhaps mental illness screening as a part of the background check process?

 

How many cops in England carry a gun everywhere they go?

 

Very few people are talking about "banning guns," we are talking about finding restrictions that would help keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people who would actually carry their guns into a school and start shooting.

 

Huge supporter of the Second Amendment but the media and some in our government want them severely restricted... Many, many younger people agree as well.. Call them the youth raised on Obama or whatever you like, but they will be voting in numbers soon... I see serious restrictions on guns in 10 years.

 

If we had ten more in a couple of weeks, do you think we could do an Australia and haves strict gun law which practically eliminated these mass shootings? After a string of shocking mass shootings they did just that a few years ago.

Of course, they are not hamstrung by an antiquated constitutional system and don't have five guys on their s.ct. subverting democracy by allowing the wealthy so blatantly to buy elections.

 

School shootings are not related to so called "ghetto culture" and honestly, banning guns would probably stop those as most of them are caused by white middle class kids who had easy access to weapons. They aren't buying them on the black market.

However, most gun violence in this country does not have the above story. The majority of American gun violence is tied to drugs and gangs. Making guns illegal would not impact this just like making drugs illegal hasn't impacted it.

If you don't do drugs your chance of being involved in gun violence is incredibly small, but, that's not much consolation to a parent who loses their child to a deranged white middle class kid who got his mommy or daddy's guns and went on a rampage.

 

Great. I can build my own car to whatever specs I choose, with whatever parts I want and then ride in it on private and public land. To build a gun you need to ask permission, no matter the configuration and you are greatly regulated in what you can build. Even if it never leaves your home.


Automobile ownership is far less regulated than firearms. Use of cars on public roadways has regulation all over it. The government greatly changes the design of cars, the design of roads, they train and license the drivers. Massive failure by the US government.

 

So, about that "map"...

A closer look: How many school shootings since Newtown?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/11/us/school-shootings-cnn-number/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Short story: CNN looked at each listed instance and found that only 15 of the 74 incidences were in the same vein as the shooting in Oregon. It's almost like Bloomberg's group is trying to sensationalize the issue through deceptive means? Nah, they would never do something like that.