Teen Fires AK-47 in School

SH89 said:

The amendment granting the right to own a gun was written when the most advanced gun only had a rate of rife of 2 shots per minute(3 with a skilled shooter). THe ak-47 has a rate of fire of 600 per minute. . . .

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Automatic weapons are illegal to own.

The second amendment was written to allow private citizens to defend themselves against the tyranny of a good government gone bad.
Your argument is based on a false premise. Rate of fire had absolutely nothing to do with the second amendment.

It's a moot point anyway, since automatic weapons are forbidden by law. It's also highly illegal to take a semi-automatic weapon and modify it so that it can shoot full auto.

StromRider said:

And an effective range of what, 100m on a good day? Of course everyone knows the writers of the 2nd amendment meant from everyone to have modern rifles. After all everything the founders said and did was wonderful and infallible - ie, slavery

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The writers of the second amenment intended it to allow private citizens to defend themselves against governmental tyranny, just like they had to do.
Civilians cannot defend themselves against government troops if all you're going to allow them are breech loaders.

We have hundreds of documents in which the founders discuss their reasoning. We don't have to rely on sola scriptura with the Bill of Rights.

StromRider said:

No, but chances are more likely there will be shootings with how easy it is to obtain weapons in this country. (I live in south Florida - the amount of shootings here and elsewhere in this country is mind boggling)

As long as people keep putting their 'right' to obtain lethal weapons over societies right to be safe then these shootings will continue and the US will remain the most violent first world nation by far.

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I live in south florida as well. Felons(and military dishonrable discharges, people with mental disability) are not allowed to purchase firearms. They are flat out turned down should they walk into a pawnshop/gunshop/sporting goods store to buy a gun.

Criminals that do have them, have obtained them ILLEGALLY. Remember, a criminal by definition does not obey the law. If guns were made hard(or impossible) to obtain, they would only effect people like me who obey the law. Because I obey the law, I would have to turn my guns in. But do you think a drug dealer/serial rapist/mugger would do the same? I dont think so.

But even ignoring that, crime in Florida is on an overall down trend. Also, with the enactment of the "Stand your ground law" which was enacted over a year ago in Florida, people were predicting that it would turn into the wild-west. The law made it so that if you legally shoot someone commiting a forcible felony on you or your family, you are protected from prosectution/civil suit. However, Florida has not become the wild west. Nothing has changed. A year has come and gone without problem. I also remember reading that florida has the highest population of concealed weapons permit owners(I being one of them), with over a million been issued. Reality indicates that law abiding citizens can own firearms, without shooting their neighbors, or commiting a mass murder.

Firearms don't cause crime, criminals do.

StromRider said:

No, but chances are more likely there will be shootings with how easy it is to obtain weapons in this country.

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A few decades ago, Americans could buy firearms from department stores or via mail order.
Yet the number of crimes which involved firearms was much, much lower than it is today.
The guns don't cause the crime. We are living in a culture of violence and death, from abortion and euthanasia to school shootings. Our culture is sick, and the solution is not to be found in removing the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves against violent crime.
Has anyone ever threatened your life? The life of your wife and children? It has happened to me, and the threat was credible coming from a violent felon. This monster had already been busted for unlawful possession of a firearm, but the compassionate justice system didn't penalize him for it.
We already have over 2,000 laws on the books regarding firearms. More laws is not the solution - let's try enforcing existing laws first.

Does banning firearms really drop the rate of violent crime? Well, Britain and Australia have tried it and what happened?

The BBC says:

A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned. The research, commissioned by the Countryside Alliance's Campaign for Shooting, has concluded that existing laws are targeting legitimate users of firearms rather than criminals.

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Here's an exerpt from a good article in Reason:

Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of north London. And on New Year’s Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone. London police are now looking to New York City police for advice. None of this was supposed to happen in the country whose stringent gun laws and 1997 ban on handguns have been hailed as the "gold standard" of gun control.

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This site is good.
And here's a site with some good info.

Thank you for those links Domi Adsum. I had heard about some of those stats before but didn't have any links for them.

I love the AK-47 emphasis. As if the student wouldn't have fired a shot had he only had access to a .22 cal pistol or other gun not considered to be an "assault weapon".