IMO The fact that 'A determined person will always be able to find a way to obtain a firearm and kill people'...... is a poor reason to not bother to attempt to restrict the purchase of reasonable firearms to people of sound mind for a legitimate purpose .......forget about criminality for a minute.......enough people are killed accidentally in the US with firearms to merit a more restrictive approach. I am all for personal freedom in most areas but when it comes to lethal weapons we need to be sure....example....most civilised societies allow people to drive motor vehicles after they have reached a certain age and after they have passed a written and practical test.......they then remove this personal freedom if you drive impaired or drive so poorly as to tot up loads of points....and yes some people do drive whilst disqualified but that is no reason to stop disqualifying them in the first place.

Agree completely, a lot can be done to mitigate the risk, it wont eliminate it, but action can be taken and I hope Obama does this, whether he will be successful is unfortunately another issue.

I was just thinking about something...........

Here in Canada I have access to guns and if pushed know how to use them effectively.

So I have 2 scenarios.

1) Hubby works away - I live rurally - a good 15 mins from an instant detachtment of a police officer should anything bad happen. So lets say someone breaks into my home and threatens me - or tries worse - I would call the cops and then without a shadow of a doubt, use one of the guns and maybe suffer the consequeces down the road.

2) If the same situation happened in the UK, (ie rural / intruder etc) but I didn't have access to a gun, what would happen???? I'd probably call the police and have to deal with whatever situation arose in the interim whilst waiting for them to arrive

So does having access to a gun make it easy to shoot people - you bet it does. But in one situation I might be unharmed - and in the other I might be dead.

understand what you are saying completely, this is a much wider issue than gun control it is also about health system support for people with mental health issues that needs to be identified and addressed either for their own well being or those in society.

Exactly, there will most likely be issues that come out in time about how the murderer had mental problems but most likely was unable to get help. We wait with baited breath.

I feel sick to the stomach today my 3 boys are aged 4, 8 and 9 i dread to even start to think what those poor families of all those killed are going through.
It's sick full stop those poor kids who watched it all happen are going to remember this forever.
Guns in my personal view should be banned and I'm not going to argue with anyone on this point today is really not the day.
My heart goes out to everyone affected by this.

Obama's the President, not the King of America. He can't cause gun control to happen.

If you were living rurally in the UK you'd likely have a shotgun. While the legal formality is that you can't have the weapon for defence (as in Canada) if you shot burglars you'd likely only end up prison if they were clearly running away.

I just watched piers arguing with US gun control guys on TV. He was quite good, told them they need more rules.

What I did not know, as I been work most of day, is one of the guns was a AK47 like semi automatic weapon. Now I see why people want a hand gun to defend them selves, i not 100% behind it but they do, but does a middle age school teacher really need AK 47?

Look at some of the countries in the top 10 of gun ownership per capita. Cyprus, Switzerland, Finland, Serbia etc, non of these are countries that suffer from an almost annual killing spree as the US does.
I would argue that gun ownership in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century was much less controlled than it is today in the US but I have never heard of some deranged arsehole trying to slaughter as many kids as possible in the 1920s, 30s or 40s. Something has changed in the mentality of the US. Maybe the change is connected to the media (TV, cinema etc), maybe its connected to the US debacle of Vietnam or the spread of recreational drug use. Who knows, I don't .

"Every country has its psychopaths. In America, they have guns" - Richard Dawkins

I don't normally listen to Dawkins because he's frankly as fundamentalist as any fundamental Christian, but here I think he's spot-on. I don't think population size comes into it, it only took 5 people to do Virginia Tech, Jonesboro, Aurora and now this one where so many people died. The fact is that it is so bloody easy to get hold of a gun in the US, including those with mental illness; just vastly different from Canada (yes!) and Britain.

God, those poor parents and children. Even the survivors. Imagine losing all innocence at the age of five? Desperately upsetting.

I wonder if any analysis has been done on the medication histories of these young shooters. Perhaps they've been brought up being 'medically coshed' by Prozac and Ritalin.

America - The Land of the Free (access to pharmaceuticals and weaponry)

Quite a telling image

carrying-a-gun-increases-risk-of-getting-shot-and-killed.html


there's stats somewhere that show a high percentage are killed with theor own gun too.

Yes and this is particularly the case with law enforcement and a good reason for the UK police to remain largely unarmed. In North America a startling number of police officers are killed with their own weapon although having seen the way they carry their weapons here I'm not surprised.