I'd rather society didn't help or incarcerate me on the basis of a guess at my intentions. Mind, that chap at the bus stop over there, he looks a bit shifty, he must have bad intentions; Take Him Away!

It does feel like that sometimes, if I wasn't leaving my son here I wouldn't waste any more time thinking about it.

Or, rather than putting all those energies into all those individuals, one could just say you don't need a gun so you can't have one.

There are many things in life that are "not allowed" - Driving while drunk; practicing surgery without being qualified; walking around naked; roller skating on the highway; taking certain drugs....

People will make a case for being free to indulge in such activities but other people's rights, sensibilities and the greater good overrides it. Why not with guns?

I have no problem with people walking around naked, though I'd rather most didn't. My rule of thumb is that unless something causes direct harm to people who have not chosen to participate there's no reason to ban it.

Thus, drug taking, fine, public smoking, sure. Guns, nah, they're all about causing direct harm to people who have not chosen to participate.

Alcohol and tobacco kill in excess of 500,000 people a year in the US. Start with banning them.

Homicide in the US kills between 10 and 20k a year, many involve firearms.

To put that in perspective, Asprin kills 7500 and google tells me that Sexual Fetishes kill 20000!


99.99+% of legal gun owners are no threat to anyone. The ones with illegal guns are already breaking the many existing laws. More laws wont change that.

There are millions of guns out there already, that horse has already bolted. Restricting guns is not going to magically uninvent all the weapons already out there.

A gun in a locked cabinet with a trigger lock on it is not going to kill anyone. A schizophrenic who lost his job and cant afford to stay on his meds and is getting no support from the community might.

So over in Isla Vista last weekend, the danger to those students from smoking or aspirin was greater than that of the gunman.

Right.

That's OK then.

Where are you on private ownership of other forms of ordnance; bazookas, flame throwers, hand grenades, martial arts devices?

What if it's not enough to kill that deer, what if I want to fry the ****er?

Yes- I think you should lock yourself in a dark gun free room and think long and hard about that one.

No its not. The guy was sick and the system failed.

Take the guns out of the equation and his options are:
1. Find and use an illegal weapon
2. Find a non firearm related way to go out in a blaze of glory
3. Not kill anyone

You can argue that if there were no guns it wouldnt have happened, but there is no way to know.

You can also argue that if there were no cars there would be no drunk drivers and we would have much better public transport.

America needs to WANT to fix this problem it has, and it needs to address the issue of why these attrocities keep happening. Its not the guns going out and shooting people, its american citizens. There should be better controls and checks, but banning guns is no more logical than banning cars. Its the people that abuse them.

The problem with the "psycho is going to kill by other means" argument is that it that it does not hold in aggregate. Some may find other means, but far more will be less inclined to kill or kill in lower numbers. The effectiveness of guns and the mental satisfaction in using them surely results in far higher death counts than other weapons. In reality, banning guns is much more logical than banning cars.

I cant speak for the US, but in Canada there are plenty of restrictions relating to types of weapon, magazine sizes etc etc. I cant say I get your point.

Not every gun owner is interested in even killing a deer, or even a racoon, never mind frying the ****er?

Fair point.

If a human being flips out and substitutes recycled paper targets for human beings they'll probably kill quite a few with their gun.

If they flip out with their fishing rod they may hurt one or two people but a lot more people will be able to run away or use more effective instruments to
curtail them.

Yes a deranged could spend months trying to learn about building nail bombs that may or may not go off reading dodgy crap that may be available on the internet. But they don't need to do that because the easy option of popping into the local walmart is there.

You surely cannot believe that with no guns we'd have the same amount of murders???

It's catch 22.

You'd have to be deranged to own a gun; but if your deranged you can't own a gun.

The rest of us just have to hope we are not in the crossfire of these lunatics and the children that they moved here for....

Your implication here is that there's something fundamentally different between Americans and the people of the rest of the people of the world. I don't think that holds. Canada has been exceptional in having a heavily armed populace, with easy access to ammunition and a relatively low rate of armed massacres. Other countries where the population is heavily armed, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia have rather a lot of shootings.

Canada's often lauded on this board as being twenty years behind the times and I think that's fair. The fashion for school shootings will come to Canada as the fashion for bell bottoms fades away.

It would be interesting to know what the UK gun murder statistics are pre/post Dunblane? Whether there is conclusive evidence that can be draw from the tightening of regulations then.

I agree on the nail bomb example. I do think that some of these deranged take a pleasure in being an active slaughter (as conditioned by the culture). It's the same kill-instinct that the hunters tap into, but obviously far more twisted by their mental state and circumstances.