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It varies and there is no universally accepted definition, but in my personal opinion the definition from the proposed Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 is acceptable.
Not many of these shooters are actually insane though. There are a lot of good things about the US of course, but the disproportionate number of serial killers, mass killings and so on can't just be fobbed off as a problem with the individuals involved. The 'everyone's an individual' kind of thinking seems to be part of the problem. Gun owners who use their guns responsibly don't see why they should give them up because of what a small but pretty significant number did. And that's just one example of how people don't appear to recognise they are living in a society, a changing and developing society like any other. Hence all the appeals to a supposed golden age, when only certain groups in society bore the brunt of the violence. But mature societies don't operate like that. For a society to function the people living in it need to recognise they aren't special snowflakes, whose pet rights somehow trump everyone else's.
... Tom, you might need to actually present your documentation on this point. I'm kind of feeling that the latest slew of mass killings in the U.S. have been done by individuals with unstable mental states.
Unstable doesn’t mean insane, or diagnosable. What percentage of shootings are carried out by people who have an actual diagnosable condition that would come under the heading ‘insane’? Things like depression, anxiety and so on describe things experienced by a great many people, all over world, and the tendency for people with low-level diagnoses is to be less violent than the general population. The usual kind of ‘oh it’s just the odd crazy person’ just doesn’t come close to explaining it. I’ll find some interesting stuff to link to if you like, but not today, it’s late here and I have other stuff to do.
Government has no power without people supporting it.
No, because the weapons described in that definition are capable of killing a lot of people in a short amount of time. An AR-15 for example, with a forward grip and a detachable magazine allows a shooter to literally drill rounds accurately into a group of people and reload without giving anyone the opportunity to disarm them. The high muzzle velocity of an AR-15 combined with a light bullet causes catastrophic damage when it enters a human body. Banning these types of weapons wouldn't put an end to mass shootings, but it would reduce the number of casualties and the number of deaths that result from them.
I am actually not sure what do you think that rifles between people will do against tyrannical government, i.e. against full equipped army (tanks, jets, hellicopters...), police, secret services and at least the half of common population that pays taxes and allow the government to exist. It seems to me that the idea of armed citizens against their own government is really from the colonial times.
I think the opposite - Scripture is teaching that the kingdom of God will grow like yeast in a dough. And stats are supporting it - the world is better than ever before.
