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Comments
Switzerland, for one. One of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, as personal ownership is part of military obligation. And about 2/3 our gun death rate.
Personally, I'd actually be happy if the rest of the country had Connecticut's more stringent checks and safety courses before getting a gun. They're a pretty happy medium as far as I'm concerned, and this incident aside, one of the lowest rates of gun crime in the country by a long shot.
>So yeah, I feel pretty comfortable saying guns themselves are not part of the problem and we're wasting time scapegoating an object in lieu of looking at the social circumstances that made one (actually, the child of one) out of 50 million owners flip out
It's not one child. This is an act that's bordering on trendy. Columbine, the dark knight shooting, shit like this happens. Were they people with problems? Yes. But they were people with problem who had access to guns, plain and simple. The idea that their access to guns didn't lead to this is plain delusion at best and malignant at worst. The two things we never talk about in these issues is treating mental health and restricting gun access.
^Fals dichotomy. Assuming that laws working in a very different country with a very different government have the same effect. Cultures don't change overnight and our government needs to work in accordance with our culture.
Well yeah, the biggest factor is local culture -- that's what I'm trying to say. I mean hell, California's got gun laws nearly as strict as Connecticut, but something like four times the gun homicide rate.
The Aurora shooting was with illicitly obtained weapons and gear, and not even relevant to laws about legitimate sale. Columbine was like 13 years ago, which does feel weird to think of it that way, so I'm not sure it would fall into a current trend.
This is a pretty good overview of things. The last few years are indeed unusual, even for the US -- my guess is that it correlates more with economic depression (note the unusually high gun violence during the 1980's). Which makes sense -- in extreme economic lows, you get more clinical depression, rougher and more detached home life while overstressed parents work overtime, and basically all the circumstances that would lead up to someone snapping.
Switzerland proves that you can have easy gun access and low gun crime, but that's kind of like saying you can smoke cigarettes and not get lung cancer. I mean, yeah, sure, lots of people lots of people smoke and don't suffer any apparent side effects at all...but that doesn't mean smoking's not unhealthy.
The culture surrounding it is completely different. Switzerland has high gun ownership as a caveat of compulsory military service, which is a good deal more rigidly disciplined than random yahoos.
What it does tell me is that having guns is totally doable when you at least start making sure the people who have them aren't jackasses.
Sure, and apparently that works out okay for them.
My point though was that saying easy gun access doesn't always lead to mass murder isn't really an argument in favour.
>Which makes sense -- in extreme economic lows, you get more clinical depression, rougher and more detached home life while overstressed parents work overtime, and basically all the circumstances that would lead up to someone snapping.
So it's okay that a bunch of people started shooting up places because things got bad? And we can totally predict when things get bad?
>What it does tell me is that having guns is totally doable when you at least start making sure the people who have them aren't jackasses
Yeah, but that's not America. Military service isn't compulsory and the nation at large would be against that. We need to work our laws around what is, not what could be.
It's never okay, but yes, we generally have a good idea of when things will get worse than usual. Actually, most of the scholars tracking crime rates are surprised the general crime rate isn't worse given current poverty statistics.
And the article I linked showed a drastic majority of Americans are in favor of tighter registration and checks, so there's that at least.
Well it seems what's being said about Switzerland is that it's associated a lot with discipline and training, and while I don't know about what sorts of stuff background checks and mandatory firearms training (if any) address in the U.S., there's definitely a cultural difference in the "meaning" of guns, at least among those people who are really into opposing gun control. You hear a lot of them talking about how firearms, to them, are a tool of self-defense and self-preservation, as well as a tool for resisting tyranny (in the form of excessive government encroachment on their rights). The narrative for people who say these things is a much more rugged-individualist, anti-establishmentarian, stock-up-for-the-apocalypse thing (and is closely related to survivalism, I think). This is different from, say, the way cars are viewed, which is that people untrained or inexperienced in driving are considered unfit to drive, which is a much greater reverence for a societal institution than there seems to be for guns in the United States.
TL;DR: In the U.S., guns are (for some people) an anti-establishment symbol, rather than a symbol of protective order.
Sidenote: I've never understood the "I'm going to defend myself from the government by buying guns" set. You may have guns. You may even have a lot of guns. But the government is going to have way more guns. As well as tanks, planes, and other things that would realistically speaking prevent you from ever coming within shouting distance of "beating" the government.
Also there are some pretty big differences between Switzerland and the United States.
Much of what I've read and heard about Switzerland actually paints it as a pretty restrictive place to live.
>In the U.S., guns are (for some people) an anti-establishment symbol, rather than a symbol of protective order.
They're also images of power and masculinity.
See, the reason I don't believe in gun rights is the same reason I don't believe in car rights or flamethrower rights. You don't have a right to these things. At the very least you need to prove you are mentally and physically capable of handling them.
And there's no reason to own assault weapons.
^^Admittedly that's the ridiculous fringe, but there's a famous paranoia of the government, all the while not acknowledging how you depend on them.
Streets don't clean themselves y'all.
Well yeah. Switzerland has a pretty unique political history (such as having a confederacy in the Middle Ages, for instance) and a particular kind of military culture. In the USA, the gun is an externalised force of political and social power; that is, the gun is thought about in such a way that it contains power in and of itself. In Switzerland, where the Swiss Guard continue to have two weeks of halberd training per soldier (of all things!), there's a greater understanding of the internalisation of martial prowess. I suspect this halberd training continues to exist not just for cultural and historical reasons, but to give soldiers a greater understanding of how to apply their internal strengths, given that the halberd is technologically primitive by our standards.
I think this creates a culture where one is more likely to reflect on the application of violence to begin with, and more clearly see how it would empower them -- or, more importantly, to see how it won't empower them. But the USA is a nation founded on the generally-applicable nature of the gun, where there's a conceptual undercurrent of the weapon defining the role. That is, many people would characterise a soldier by their gun moreso than anything else, and so having a gun brings one closer in tune with that archetype.
tl;dr the USA probably sees firearms as containers of power; Switzerland probably sees them as results of applied internal power.
What i want to know is, what U.S. Supreme Court decision or whatever declared that "firearms" were a guaranteed type of "arms" as specified in the 2nd Amendment...which does not actually explicitly mention firearms.
There's a shitload of debate. Some say it's only a right to a well-armed militia which is already provided in the national guard.
Obviously, that's an extreme opinion, but still.
It's there because our existing as a country was contingent on us having guns. Regardless of one's feelings on the matter or how it applies today, there's not gonna be a lot of objective argument that they were indeed talking about guns with the specific intent of using them to throw off corrupt government.
I mean not even legalese is that pedantic.
To me it always seemed clear that the point was that it gives the right to own weapons for the purposes of serving in the militia.
^^ Well, the idea behind it is generally agreed to be that there's a legal panic button in place in case shit ever goes completely bonkers and the government tries to become a tyranny.
Except an unintended consequence is that there are now people who insist that the government is currently trying to become a tyranny and they should be hitting the panic button now (or even worse, hitting the panic button all the damn time), with little regard for the fact that we have a highly adversarial system of checks and balances which almost completely ensures that that won't happen (and goes way far in the opposite direction to boot).
And then there are politicians who enjoy catering to these views, helping to validate and popularize them.
There are quite a lot of people who seem to believe that that's still what that clause means.
I know several personally, including someone who is currently a marine.
and our shotguns and pistols will totally throw off the government's armies, tanks, and snipers.
Well, the tanks can be totally damaged with a grenade an a saber.
A saber? Really?
Not a lightsaber/beamsabre/micsaber.
Wrath could do it Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Why can't you do it?
Is a thread about a school shooting really the most appropriate place for anime jokes?
I agree in principle but this seems to have turned into a gun control thread, which is a perfectly reasonable place for anime jokes.
^^ Obviously not, although how specifically offensive one might find it is up for debate.
I'm almost entirely sure that members here have more to say on this matter, so I doubt the thread here on out is going to be dominated by anime jokes. The joke is harmless at worst.
^ Or that.
The topic itself of the school shooting has already being exhausted, we are no formal psychologists, criminologists, lawmakers, etc. and in the case one of us really is one then he or she isn't acting in those capacities at all; that only leaves "god that's awful" "my conlodences to the families and friends of everyone involved" and "may that perp rot in hell". It has already been covered pretty nice by the previous page.
That mentality is basically a relic from the 19th century, when military technology was much less advanced.
And, believe it or not, despite the Right crying about "socialist" gun control, one of the main proponents of this idea was Karl Marx.
This raises another interesting question about the legitimacy of the government's monopoly of force, but it should be left out of this thread. I'll just finish by saying that guns aren't a good way to uphold a socialist revolution and fight the government's monopoly of force.
In what way? (curious question)
Basically, they reported the killer as Ryan Lanza, when it actually was his brother Adam. This caused many people to flood his facebook page with "child murderer rot in hell" and the like.
This reaction reminded me of a case that happened here in Spain (I remember it foggily and for some reason I can't find anything on the Internet about it).
Basically two kids died, with several bruises found on their bodies. Their stepfather was arrested as a suspect. The media and public reacted in the worst possible way, jumping to the conclussion that he was the murderer, rounding out his house to shout at and insult him, the police officers showing him the photos of the kid's corpses and telling him he would rot in prison and other horrible stuff.
When the autopsy results came in, it turned out the kid's deaths were accidental, by falling down the stairs. The man ended up severily traumatized (he really loved the kids) and got practically no compensation.
I don't know why I am telling this, I guess I just wanted to rant