Florida shooting ...

Legionreturns

http://newsthump.com/2018/02/15/national-rifle-association-calls-for-ban-on-schools/

cacophony

even if they banned all firearms today, there are so many millions of guns in U.S. society that it'd have no effect. and then what?. try to take them all off the armed citizens?, that'd end well...

when i was younger if i was given the chance, i would have moved to the states. now that i am older, and maybe just a little bit wiser?, not a chance.

Phil_aka_Pip

Legionreturns said:

 build a wall around the whole place and forget about them. They're lost. 

Trump's already started, bless him

VimFuego

Legionreturns said:

Every time this happens, the rest of the world shouts about it and we don't understand how America can tolerate it without at least the desire to change things. 

At what point does it just become us shouting at clouds? Just build a wall around the whole place and forget about them. They're lost. 

it became shouting at clouds years ago, the more the world condemns the US the more entrenched they become. They voted for Trump and are proud of it, a bunch of "liberal foreigners" lecturing them only reinforces their views. 

crunchman

cacophony said:

even if they banned all firearms today, there are so many millions of guns in U.S. society that it'd have no effect. and then what?. try to take them all off the armed citizens?, that'd end well...

when i was younger if i was given the chance, i would have moved to the states. now that i am older, and maybe just a little bit wiser?, not a chance.

You have to start somewhere.  If you do achieve something now, like banning assault rifles, then it would make a difference 20 years down the line.

VimFuego

crunchman said:

cacophony said:

even if they banned all firearms today, there are so many millions of guns in U.S. society that it'd have no effect. and then what?. try to take them all off the armed citizens?, that'd end well...

when i was younger if i was given the chance, i would have moved to the states. now that i am older, and maybe just a little bit wiser?, not a chance.

You have to start somewhere.  If you do achieve something now, like banning assault rifles, then it would make a difference 20 years down the line.

yup, while there are a lot of guns sloshing around, the longer you wait before restricting them, the bigger the problem. It's a huge challenge, but it won't get any easier the longer you wait. 

Legionreturns

Ban ammo. Once the current stocks are gone, they'll be hard pressed to go on mass shootings armed only with frozen peas

Ravenous

Darwinism in action.

crunchman

Legionreturns said:

Ban ammo. Once the current stocks are gone, they'll be hard pressed to go on mass shootings armed only with frozen peas

May not be practical.  I don't know enough about the ammo but it's possible it could be the same bullets for a hunting rifle.  Hunting is big in rural parts of the US.

In places in the US, there is a legitimate need for guns of some kind.  You have some very dangerous wild animals.  If I was out in the wilds somewhere I'd feel much happier having a gun if I happened across a grizzly bear.  Hopefully you could scare it away by firing over it's head.  On the other hand, a gun could lead to overconfidence.  A small handgun might not be enough to stop a grizzly in it's tracks.

Sassafras

Paranoia+guns= Shooting spree.

Haych

It's sickening to be honest, the smoke has barely cleared and US governors are already saying that it's not the time to talk about whether gun control could have prevented this from happening.  American's just want to bury their head in the sand with their fingers in their ears while la-la-la-laing.

Then the pro-gun lobby come out with statements like "you don't blame a car for drunk-drivers so why blame guns for violent people"?  The bigotry makes me indignant.

A gun has one purpose only, it's a weapon, designed to injure and kill.

The other argument I often hear is the one where "if everyone else had a gun on them it wouldn't have happened".  Possible but the other scenario is that it would be a bloody massacre instead.  

Trump said the exact same thing, near enough, about the nightclub shooting a couple of years ago.  I play out the scenario in my head and it doesn't make sense; mad gunman opens fire, kills a couple of people maybe in a split second.  Somebody else pulls a gun and shoots him dead.  By the time everyone else has taken notice of what's happening there's a couple of people dead, one of them a bad guy, and one good guy with a gun in his hand.

Now everyone else in the room with a gun is going to pull theirs and start shooting the good guy and within a couple of seconds it escalates into a blood-bath.

Sorry for the long-winded rant but it's something I'm quite passionate about.

Teetonetal

VimFuego said:

one of the things I've never got is why do they always have to shoot up schools? I mean, of all the places, why a school? 

Often it seems to be an attack by a former pupil / current pupil when it's a school. As in this case.

John_P

Very sad.
Profits ahead of lives is the American way for too many of the people in power.   

These figures explain why it isn’t going to change. 
http://www.lbc.co.uk/news/the-news-explained/a-list-of-senators-who-fight-gun-crime-nra/

sinbaadi

I think it would take two or three generations for a firearms ban in the USA to have a meaningful effect, and there is no way in that time that there wouldn't be a shooting "which could have been prevented had Mr. Massimo Shootingsville not been forced to surrender his weapon in 2018".  Every shooting would be one of those shootings.

The media are to blame for all this too.

America will never ban guns.  They should just accept the consequences of having so many.

Heartfeltdawn

ICBM said:

The really shocking thing about all this is that in 1979, school shootings were so rare and shocking that someone in another country wrote a (great) song about one.

But in 2018, they're so common that they only get reported internationally when they're far worse than the one Geldof was writing about... which was two dead, nine injured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(San_Diego)

Yes. The live broadcasts both online and on television here in the UK all stopped at midnight. An event like this used to shock. I remember Dunblane, Columbine, and the Hungerford shootings but this felt almost passe in a way. I don't know if that assessment is true or whether the networks have decided to restrain themselves a bit after the criticism of them after last year's London attacks. 

cacophony

the post about what would happen if certain factions in america got their wish, and everyone was armed is so true. the rate of deaths in the US by shooting would triple, quadruple , who knows?. look at the idiots who populate the 'real world'. the cretins who drive down closed roads, who follow satnavs and drive down a river,who electrocute themselves in the bath etc now imagine these same people with a firearm, untrained, maybe a little drunk, certainly with adrenalin pumping. also if the government announced a ban on assault rifles, how many hundred or thousand percent would sales rise before the ban was enforced and passed through the various state and national legislatures?

Bygone_Tones

crunchman said:

In places in the US, there is a legitimate need for guns of some kind.  You have some very dangerous wild animals.  If I was out in the wilds somewhere I'd feel much happier having a gun if I happened across a grizzly bear.  Hopefully you could scare it away by firing over it's head.  On the other hand, a gun could lead to overconfidence.  A small handgun might not be enough to stop a grizzly in it's tracks.

Sorry, but it's this attitude that has wiped out most of the "dangerous" animal species on this planet that are now extinct, and I do not agree with it.

As supposedly the "most intelligent" beings on this planet, we have a responsibilty to protect life, not wipe it out so that we can dominate the whole planet for ourselves, or just let the cute and cuddly animals survive with us.
 
Live somewhere else, build a fence, learn how to react when confronted, lure it with food, etc etc.  In other words, use your brain. Blast its head off is not the answer. 

BigMonka

Ravenous said:

Darwinism in action.

That's a seriously callous thing to say when all those dead are school kids rather than gun-totting maniacs.

randella

Interesting and relatively un-shouty read on the NRA and their influence in Washington and beyond:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/nra-gun-lobby-gun-control-congress

Ravenous

BigMonka said:

Ravenous said:

Darwinism in action.

That's a seriously callous thing to say when all those dead are school kids rather than gun-totting maniacs.

You know what, you're right. I apologise for the rule 1 violation.