WHY THE FUCK IS THIS COUNTRY BEHIND OWNING GUNS. The loose gun control laws have fucked our nation. Fuck everyone who denies it. as someone said about Canada. Tell me if this shit happens there. Pathetic joke...People in washington will never listen, not until they have to deal with a major tragedy
As a parent of a 5 year old I am absolutely sick to my stomach, my first impulse was to go to school and pick him up even though I'm 2500 miles away. It's very sad and disturbing when as a parent you can't feel safe leaving your children at a school, mall, movie theater, what's next on the list? Disneyland? I heard an entire kindergarten class is unaccounted for... that's 18-20 5 year old kids who had no chance. These kids should be worried about what is going to be under their Xmas tree and instead their parents will now have to bury them. I'm going to hold off on voicing my views on gun laws as they are pretty well documented in previous threads. There is a time and a place for this debate and right now there are parents who still don't know if their children are among the dad. My views on the issue are trivial compared to what many parents our ages are dealing with right now.
These things have nothing to do with gun control. Someone who wants to do something like this will get a gun regardless of if there are laws. These things have more to do with the degradation of society and morality in the US... Our country has more than double the school shootings than the rest of the world combined since Columbine. That's a horrible statistic.
The problem with the gun control argument is there should be a middle ground on it. You don't need a clip in a gun like that with more than 15 rounds to go deer hunting. You don't even need that much to shoot and kill someone like the killer here. Outlawing large clips seems to me a fair middle ground. I don't know if that sort of capability was a factor here, but it has been in similar events, such as the Gabby Giffords case. Gun lovers would have more cred if they showed flexibility on an aspect like this.
You don't have to tell me about this. My nephews all have very realistic looking pellet guns. They all play Call of Duty endlessly. So do all their friends. It's part of the militarization of our culture that has happened since 9/11. The way you fight that is to actively oppose it. There's no reason on earth that 99% of citizens need to have a gun. For the ones where there is a reason you make exceptions. You don't do it all at once you work into it and you disarm the authorities alongside the citizenry, just a bit more carefully. Most police officers in Europe do not carry firearms. They don't need them in a circumstance where most citizens (and crooks) don't have them either.
I'm not really sure on the specific laws but I do know that you are only allowed to own certain types of guns, no fully automatic rifles for example. There are also a lot of rules surrounding types of handguns, modifications to weapons, ammunition and magazine size. Mostly here people just own hunting rifles (real ones, not the fully automatic take out an army guns that are sold as "hunting rifles") and shotguns (again, I don't think they are fully automatic). More than anything, as someone said, it's a culture thing, IMO. America has a gun culture, Canada doesn't. I know one person who owns a gun. One. Think about that. He has it for hunting and even then he typically uses a crossbow. I had never even held/fired a gun until like three months ago...I'm 28 years old...and that was in in the country in the middle of nowhere...in Ireland. It's definitely true that if a psychopath wants a gun they are going to get it, through legal means or otherwise and you can't stop that. But you can make it infinitely more difficult for them, which may not eliminate them but will drastically reduce the numbers of psychos shooting up the place. The thing is up here the crazy person probably doesn't already have a fully automatic rifle with boxes and boxes of ammo laying around his house. In America he probably does. He can snap at 8am and be locked and loaded by 8:05am with no time to cool down and gather his thoughts or whatever. Even if they are plotting weeks in advance to do something, which happens, I think it's a lot more likely someone is going to do so if they've been around guns their whole life than someone who hasn't ever held one. I dunno, that's just my two cents.
Every time there is a shooting like this that gets a lot of attention, people will come out of the woodwork and say "See, this is why we need stricter gun control". And at times like this, it sounds pretty arrogant and insensitive to argue any other point of view. The fact is, however, that between this shooting and the Aurora, CO shooting in July, there have almost certainly been thousands of instances where law abiding citizens used firearms to defend themselves from home invasions, rapes, muggings, domestic violence, etc. Those incidents just aren't as newsworthy as a school shooting where 27 people die. Second amendment supporters do have a rational point of view, and it isn't just about prioritizing guns over children's lives.
So you're telling me there's no correlation between how many guns we have and how readily available they are... and that we have way more school shootings. We also have double the guns per capita than any civilized country*. 14 times the number of guns per person as the UK. *except for Switzerland, which has conscription and you are issued a gun as part of your military training.
Yeah, they are saying that this Lanza guy's brother has been arrested and that his mother was a teacher at the school and is one of the people who were killed. I guess we'll learn what's real and what's just speculation shortly. There's always a rush by the media to publish stuff first, accuracy takes a backseat to speed.
Per CNN: [Updated at 3:22 p.m. ET] It appears that another member of the alleged shooter's family is dead. A senior law enforcement official familiar with the investigation says a brother of the alleged shooter was found dead in a home searched in Hoboken, New Jersey. We already knew Ryan Lanza's mother was found dead in the elementary school.
The reports are that the shooter killed his father in Hoboken and then went to the school in CT where his mother was a kindergarten teacher and killed her and some students. As to the guns, there are 300,000,000 million guns in the United States. You can buy a gun on line. You can buy a gun from the trunk of someone's car. Of course it doesn't matter if one state has strict gun laws. A person just goes to another state and buys the gun. I am not talking about banning guns, but we need to take reasonable steps to deal with these mass shootings. We need to ban automatic weapons and certain magazines to start. We need to close all the gun show loopholes. We need licensing and registration requirements to buy a gun, not these 15 second checks that are erased immediately afterwards. As for the 2nd Amendment, it is no longer 1789. Guns are not needed to protect the citizenry against the government nor would they be effective. Let's look at this issue through the prism of 2012 America, and not through the eyes of 18th century America.
to that point, I think a crazy nut in China went on a stabbing spree in a school yesterday. Stabbed over 20 kids, no one died!!!
