What do we do to prevent another Las Vegas?

[szechuan]

Everyone who uses a firearm to commit a crime has broken the laws we have. No amount of laws will stop those people except if you restrict good citizens from firearms, then evil will still have them and continue to slaughter good people. The majority of our firearm deaths are suicides, btw... and much of the other is gang related such as in Chicago where NO FIREARMS are allowed at all. Many of the shootings have also occurred in "no firearm zones" and there is no one there armed to stop the evil one!

Many people today call themselves Christians but aren't... they think because they aren't Jewish or muslim or atheist that they are automatically "Christian" perhaps... it takes the indwelling of the Spirit to truly change a person.

Yes, the USA is not the country it used to be... believers, not realizing how evil people can be, have allowed prayer and God to be removed from just about everywhere, and they have been taught by editted textbooks incorrect "history" and made to think we are evil for saving lives around the world. Those text books are being published and editted by muslims, by the way...who have also inserted their own history, false history, into America's past!

Anyone who thinks the shootings like Vegas are caused by firearms is sadly, dangerously misled. This is a battle of good versus evil, satan against God. I own firearms and not once has one of them jumped up and shot someone. It takes an evil person to do that. THEREIN is the problem, people need GOD.

poe's law

 

[Allandavid]

Everyone who uses a firearm to commit a crime has broken the laws we have. No amount of laws will stop those people except if you restrict good citizens from firearms, then evil will still have them and continue to slaughter good people.

And yet, such an approach has worked well in other, comparable, countries...

The majority of our firearm deaths are suicides, btw...

Yes, Stephen Paddock died by committing suicide...after he had killed 58 and injured nearly 500...!!

Many of the shootings have also occurred in "no firearm zones" and there is no one there armed to stop the evil one!

Where is your evidence that having more people armed will reduce the carnage? You already have virtually every American owning a gun and look at the horrendous situation before you...!

Anyone who thinks the shootings like Vegas are caused by firearms is sadly, dangerously misled.

That’s right...it’s those sneaky ray guns from the aliens who live on the dark side of the moon....right?!

 

[expos4ever]

Or Orlando? Or San Bernardino? Or Columbine? Or Newtown?

Political action? Legal action? Social action? Personal action?

Or should we even bother? Do we simply resign ourselves to going through these motions again in another 6 months or so? Or are we counting on these kinds of incidents to just go away?

Thoughts?

Ermmm......get rid of the guns, perhaps? (as if this weren't the obvious first step).

 

[expos4ever]

The weight of the evidence is clear: guns are a problem. A recent Scientific American article (I know, "fake", right?) gave a sweeping overview of the evidence. Yes, there is the odd bit of counter-evidence - the anecdote of the little old lady who blew away an attacker - but the overall picture leaves little room for doubt: America would be safer without all the guns.

Just like Denmark, France, Australia, Canada....... are safer than the USA.

This is not about the data, it is about tribalism: the human instinct to bond to a particular tribe and see other tribes as threats is deep and perhaps "unfixable". Like belief in creationism, rejection of human-caused global warming, and other stuff, a pro-gun stance has been adopted as a key marker of membership in the "right-of-center" tribe. So to suggest that a right to bear arms is a bad idea in 21st century America (it may have made sense 200 years ago) is to threaten the very identity of the members of this tribe.

And so we get irrational interretations of the data and silly arguments like "guns don't kill people, people kill people".

 

[wing2000]

What? These guys were intelligent and well educated. They knew that weapons had progressed from clubs and catapults to guns and cannons. You cannot possibly expect anyone to believe that they didn't know that man's ingenuity and creativity wouldn't lead to much more power weaponry.
By 1849, less than 65 yrs. from the signing of the Constitution, the first patents were given for repeating rifles in less than 100 yrs we had the first recoil machine gun. James Madison didn't die until 1836, but he couldn't have known? Benjamin Franklin, scientist/inventor couldn't have imagined?

They also knew that as the population grew it would lead to having a standing army just as it has from the earliest written history of the world and yet , they still wrote the Second Amendment into our Constitution. Indeed they wrote into the Constitution laws for a standing army, Article 1, Section 8.
In 1799, the first standing military units where formed, the US Calvary, by the Congress of the United States. 3,000 men and equipment ready in case of war. That Calvary was never disbanded and continues today as a branch of the US Army.

History doesn't in any way show that the men who wrote and signed the Constitution didn't mean the individual citizen or that they couldn't imagine the types of weapons that we would have.

Do you think the founders imagined a society where individuals would use a weapon on fellow citizens gathered for a music festival?

 

[wing2000]

//

 

[expos4ever]

I lost hope we'd ever address this problem after kids were shot and killed in their classroom in Newtown.

Much like the women who have to live with rape as "the new normal" in Europe, I guess we just have to live with mass shootings here in America.

I understand your frustration and seeming resignation, but I think there are reasons to be hopeful. I believe (would have to confirm) that evidence shows that older white men are wildly over-represented in the pro-gun camp. If true, time may indeed heal this wound as the guns are, somewhat ironically pried from cold, dead hands not to be taken up again by a younger generation more open to seeing the wisdom of dispensing with the weaponry and living like the rest of the free world.

 

[wing2000]

....a violent society, where, according to data gathered by NBC News:

More Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history.

Since 1968, more than 1.5 million Americans have died in gun-related incidents, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, approximately 1.2 million service members have been killed in every war in U.S. history, according to estimates from the Department of Veterans Affairs and iCasualties.org, a website that maintains an ongoing database of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 1968, guns have killed more Americans than all U.S. wars combined

 

[Hank77]

Do you think the founders imagined a society where individuals would use a weapon on fellow citizens gathered for a music festival?

I think they were well aware of how men have always used weapons to kill innocent people wherever they may be, in whatever numbers they could if they were so inclined. All they had to do was look at the history of the world from before their time and during their time.

 

[SolomonVII]

Well I'm young and I don't think I'm disillusioned.

Well, actually, that comment was lifted from the post I was commenting on.
And I was agreeing with it.
But, certainly you do not have any reason to take it personally. I don't even know you Zoii. How could I be talking about you personally?
And I am not talking about everybody or even most. I am talking about trends.

You think it was a safer world back 50 yrs ago in the USA...

Oh no, I didn't say that. I said just the opposite. America is a safer place now. Violent crime is down, almost by orders of magnitude. I was not talking about violent crime in general. I was talking about mass shootings, and considering why that that trend is up. Why does anyone think that it is a fine thing to do to indiscriminately shoot into a crowd of people? That is something that was not common 50 years ago.

Maybe that's because you weren't black and could go to school and vote.....

You are hyperventilating now. No need to comment on hysterical comments with no basis in facts.

Maybe you think organised crime didn't exist then, or kids weren't being raped by their priests...

Maybe you ought to comment on what I really said, rather than making me out to be some indifferent ogre.
Of course if I was that indifferent ogre, and that is what society is like, then it would be a moral imperative to do something about it, woudn't it? I mean if the world is filled with such racist people anyway, Catholics who like to have their children raped by priests, then get rid of that evil, right?

Maybe you weren't aware of the cocaine wars or the level of deaths associated with domestic violence that was all neatly hidden. And 50 years ago unprecedented numbers of young people marched the streets burning the US flag In protest of the Vietnam war and the chemical warfare unleashed on it and Cambodia.

It was about 50 years ago that the Maoist began burning the American flag. This is true.
And now they have become the professors.

So.... Now I'm the young person. I believe we are more sensitive to our world than previous generations

Oh yes, I can tell that you are very sensitive. Feelings rule your thought, and that is why you can make such presumptions about me, without even worry about the facts in evidence.

. It was your generation who got nuclear weapons up, built up these ridiculous weapon stocks, and to top it off got us into this mess of climate change. It's my generation that has to deal with it.

LOL.
You are making my case for me.
Yo sound very disillusioned with the world that the previous generation of ogres left you actually, and on the very points I touched upon.
One thing I noticed about young people in North America, they leave the same carbon footprints as the people that procreated them
How does that make you feel about yourself, and those around you?

Oh well, at least you are not a Catholic racist, raping children. At least you got that going for you.

 

[SolomonVII]

Do you think the founders imagined a society where individuals would use a weapon on fellow citizens gathered for a music festival?

Nihilism was not a thing yet. People still believed that life was a good thing and had real purpose back then. They could not imagine that the world would devolve down that path.
Nietzsche was the first person to prophesy that kind of world, and he was generations after the Founding Fathers.
They probably could not even contemplate a world where totalitarian regimes like USSR and NAZI Germany would be rounding people up by the millions and working and starving them to death. Britain was just not that oppressive.
What they could image was a self-reliant people who would chose freedom and chose to take care of themselves, and that is why they recognized that the right to adequate self defense was something worth putting into the constitution.
Imagine that.

 

[Hank77]

....a violent society, where, according to data gathered by NBC News:

More Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history.

Since 1968, more than 1.5 million Americans have died in gun-related incidents, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, approximately 1.2 million service members have been killed in every war in U.S. history, according to estimates from the Department of Veterans Affairs and iCasualties.org, a website that maintains an ongoing database of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 1968, guns have killed more Americans than all U.S. wars combined

I fail to see the correlation. Why do they only include service members killed? Why don't they include others that were killed by service members weapons? Don't those lives count as being killed by weapons?
They include the Indian Wars but not the victims of the Indian Wars.

Not only that they don't include % of population at the time of each war and the % of gun deaths compared to populations since 1968.
For instance, in WW1 .13% of the total population of the US was killed, in WW2 it was .32%. In 2014, .00025% of the US population were killed by gun users.

You might say that the victims of military use is in self-defense by the military and that's fine. But if you do you cannot include deaths caused by people defending themselves. You cannot include self-inflicted deaths.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Or Orlando? Or San Bernardino? Or Columbine? Or Newtown?

Political action? Legal action? Social action? Personal action?

Or should we even bother? Do we simply resign ourselves to going through these motions again in another 6 months or so? Or are we counting on these kinds of incidents to just go away?

Thoughts?

First, raising awareness about having it so easy to get monster weapons.

I was watching the news the other day and there was this interview with some guy who owns a gun shop in the US. My mouth literally fell open. Just about 90% of things I saw there, I could only call army equipment. And there was this family at the shop with a bunch of 8-year old kids or something.

It's a sight I can never get used to.
This is one of the problems in US culture. Having such guns is like "totally normal". In certain parts, they even look at you funny when you do NOT have such weapons at home.

Over here, it's the other way round. Like 180°. Like, total opposite.
If words gets out here that some common civilian has a gun in his house, it's like a big deal.

And we're talking a silly small handgun or whatever.

And then in the US sights like these are rather common:

Look at the cute girl with the pink gun... auw, how cute ha?
I look at that and I am horrified.

It seems as if citizens of the US have become completely immune to such sights. Guns are waaaaaaaay to "normal" in your culture.

What baffles me most, is not just hunting guns (I guess, don't know much about guns) like in that pick or small handguns... But even weapons such as those below are not only normal, they are also widely available

The caption of that google pick, btw, read the following:

The "under 500$" part, I also find quite disturbing.

You want to know what needs to be done? Well, easy. Easy said anyway. That simply has to change. It needs to stop being "normal" that guns are statistically easer to get in the US then a cup of hot coffee from Starbucks.

It needs to stop being "normal" that people have a garage full of guns and ammo.
It needs to stop being "normal" that children get pink guns for their birthday.
It needs to stop being "normal" that you can get what-I-can-only-call military weaponry like displayed above as a civilian for no other reason then wanting to have it.

It all needs to stop being normal.
Not only does it need to stop, it also needs to become abnormal.

When you see a picture like of that family above, you need to stop thinking "auw, how cute" and to start screaming "WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE????".


That's what needs to be done.

It's also what I think will never happen.
Until perhaps if one day, it really hits the fan.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Nope, never. That's why our laws concerning firearms and other weapons haven't changed in over 200 years. /s

Don't you think it might perhaps be time for a small update, so that it is more in line with 21st century reality, instead of the 19th?

 

[TLK Valentine]

Ermmm......get rid of the guns, perhaps? (as if this weren't the obvious first step).

Not feasible. Once the contents of Pandora's Box are released, they never go back in... and 200 years ago, Pandora's Box turned out to be a gun safe.

 

[szechuan]

Don't you think it might perhaps be time for a small update, so that it is more in line with 21st century reality, instead of the 19th?

same for our electoral college.

 

[Rion]

Don't you think it might perhaps be time for a small update, so that it is more in line with 21st century reality, instead of the 19th?

/s denotes sarcasm. We update our laws. Hence why you can't buy automatics.

 

[szechuan]

/s denotes sarcasm. We update our laws. Hence why you can't buy automatics.

You can in some states.

 

[Rion]

You can in some states.

You can only buy ones that were created before the ban. They are carefully monitored.

 

[super animator]

Not feasible. Once the contents of Pandora's Box are released, they never go back in... and 200 years ago, Pandora's Box turned out to be a gun safe.

It not like the us is the only country that have a gun culture. Look czeh republic for example.