Colorado Shooting

I'm not going to get into the what if questions, I do that enough at work (police department, but that doesn't mean my off duty opinion is better than anyone else's here). Here's something to think about, though.

The need for any particular piece of equipment in a free society should not be the primary consideration when determining when law-abiding citizens have any right to own it. If enough people become convinced that driving a Prius is the only way to be on the road without endangering the public by spewing harmful toxic gasses into the atmosphere, or that cars should be legally required to have a restricted top speed of 60mph built in to the ECU, to keep innocents from being killed in high speed crashes, then eventually that could become the law of the land.

I would not use this argument to say civilians should have access to nuclear weapons or field artillery, any more than I should be allowed to commute to work in a Top Fuel dragster. Still, I already have to deal with people who give me a condescending attitude about why I would want to own a sports car when there's no reasonable need for it and no possible way to legally use it to its limits. These are the same people who want to close down the local tracks because they're too loud. And their numbers seem to be growing.
 
It seems clear that legislator gets their rifle knowledge from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, and has no interest in learning about a field he knows nothing about, aside from passing a quickie ban to ensure re-election.

They're describing a magazine-lock, which makes it impossible to 'drop' mags without fumbling around for 10-20 seconds, as "a modification that enables the magazine of a semi-automatic rifle to be removed quickly"

The Senator goes on to state rifles equipped with these devices can "can fire these magazines upon magazines without effort" - utterly clueless, and yet he's taking on the mantle of creating laws to enforce his ill-informed preconception. You would think he would take a 2-3 hour field trip to a gun range, prior to creating gun legislation addressing a piece of hardware.
 
At the end of the day, guns don't kill people, people using guns kill people.

People use cars to kill people.

People use knives to kill people.

People use poison to kill people.

People use train dogs to kill people.

etc.

Get the point?

This waste of a space POS decided he is cool by playing the joker while taking lives; for whatever logic he had, or not had, even if he is found to be insane, they should hang him in the public anyways. There is no point of keeping someone like that locked up for life while all of us, including the victims and their family have to feed him for the rest of his life.
 
At the end of the day, guns don't kill people, people

This waste of a space POS decided he is cool by playing the joker while taking lives; for whatever logic he had, or not had, even if he is found to be insane, they should hang him in the public anyways. There is no point of keeping someone like that locked up for life while all of us, including the victims and their family have to feed him for the rest of his life.

Hanged? c'mon lets not give him the easy way out. They should put him in the worst U.S. prison and let the general population in that prison have their way with him....he'll hang himself in 2 weeks.
 
This is not a "for" or "against" gun issue. This is a case of a clearly deranged person who had full intentions to hurt innocent people. He could have used a gun, or he could have padlocked all the doors and set the theater on fire. Or he could have plowed his car through a crowded farmers market. Or even parked a U-Haul truck full of explosives in front of the building and blew it up. The point is, this event does not bolster the case for or against gun control. It just points out that people with mental issues need to be identified sooner and treated (or controlled) before events like this can happen, if it is possible at all. And if it isn't then we'll just have to accept things like this will happen.

Sigh, as I said before here, this really isn't a pro or con gun issue.

However, since it seems people absolutely insist on making it a gun issue, let me break it down plain and simple.

The simple fact of the matter is that there will ALWAYS be a certain percentage of the population that will just have this urge to kill people for unexplainable reasons. There will always be the Jack the Rippers, the DC snipers, and the Virginia Tech shooters. That is a fact of life and has been the case since the dawn of man.

Crazy mass murders have always occurred in history. The difference is that as technology grows, the capability of that one person to inflict more and more damage in society has grown considerably. In the time before guns, if a madman went on a killing spree, he was limited to the weapons at his disposal at the time. It could have been a knife or blunt object. Just how many people could a person kill in one sitting with a knife or club? One, two, maybe three? That same person, now armed with an assault rifle and 500 rounds can now kill two dozen people in one sitting and injure three times that. Just how many people could the Virginia Tech killer have killed if he only had access to a knife?

People always say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. That is absolutely correct and as discussed above, there will always be a certain percentage of the population that will kill other people. However, the statement should be revised to say, while guns don't kill people, and people kill people, guns give the people who are willing to kill other people, the ability to kill a lot more people when they do decide to kill people. That is a fact.

So although I am a gun owner and advocate, I will be the first to agree that eliminating guns would reduce the number of gun related deaths. Period. If people did not have access to guns, people could not kill with guns. However, people argue that you can't eliminate guns, that is completely false. If someone wanted to go on a killing spree, don't you think they could have been a lot more effective and killed a lot more people with a multi-shot grenade launcher or military grade flamethrower. Why are there not mass murders going on with people equipped with grenade launchers? Answer: Because they are illegal and extremely hard to get. That's why. If guns were illegal and made extremely hard to get, then there would be a lot less gun murders, just like there aren't a lot of people getting killed by grenades. However, more importantly, if guns are outlawed and are nearly impossible to get, then it eliminates the psyche of it even being an option to kill with. Why do mass murders use guns so frequently to kill and not C4 explosives? Because C4 is so inaccessible, it doesn't even cross the mind of a murder to even consider using. Rather they choose something very accessible such as guns. If guns were made as in accessible as C4 explosive, then the psyche of the murder would be quicker to dismiss the use of a gun.

So:

FACT, a certain percentage of people will kill other people. Always.
FACT, the accessibility of guns, means those people will have the ability to kill more and more people than if they did not have access to guns.
FACT, drastically reducing the availability of guns would drastically reduce the number of deaths due to guns.
FACT, gun accessibility can be controlled. It has been done so with fully automatic weapons, grenade launchers, plastic explosives, rocket launchers etc.

So gun control advocates are right and the simple answer is to eliminate guns right? Yes, except that it's WRONG. There is one major problem that keeps that from being accurate. The issue is the proliferation of firearms. The simple fact of the matter is that it is too late to control the accessibility of guns. They are ubiquitous. There are more guns than man, women and child in the US. The fact is, guns are accessible and there is nothing that can be done to change that now at this point. The cows have been let out of the barn and there is no way in getting them back in.

So if we know that guns are accessible and we know that a certain percentage of people are going to use them to kill, then what is the solution? If we try to restrict gun ownership, that will do nothing to affect the accessibility of guns for those who are going to kill. However, it give the madman with the gun, more power to kill more people because nobody can defend themselves.

Take a room of ten people and 1 of them is a crazy nut job. Say they are all unarmed and the crazy guy decided he wanted to kill everyone in the room. How many people could he kill with his bare hands? Possibly none, because everyone would jump him the second he tried to attack one person. Now let's say the crazy person got their hands on a gun. And as I pointed out, due to the proliferation of guns, there is almost no way to stop that crazy person from getting one. Now how many people could he kill. Chances are high that he could kill the remaining 9 people in that room. As long as the 9 other people are restricted from owning a gun, the one crazy person with a gun has the ability to kill everyone. Finally, let's say you give every single person in that room a gun. How many people could the crazy guy with a gun kill? One, maybe two, before the remaining 7 or 8 people all collectively shoot him. The point is, the only way to combat a person who is going to kill is to give everyone else the equal level of power that the person is wielding.

Say it was a law that every single man and women over the age of 21, by law, had to carry a handgun and be proficient with it at all times (like a drivers license). Everyone, all the time. How many people could a crazy person kill then? If everyone in that theater had a gun on them, by law, and were proficient with it, by law, then the number of deaths and murders would have been significantly reduced, possibly eliminated. After all, if you were a murder and you knew that every single person was carrying a gun with them at all times and could use it proficiently, would you even bother trying to shoot up a movie theater, restaurant or any public place?

But one could argue, but if everyone is carrying a gun, would everyone just shoot each other? What about arguments, road rage, bar fights? Well what's to keep people from killing people now? First off, there are laws and consequences for killing. At any time you could grab a kitchen knife and stab someone in the neck. But people don't because they know they would go to jail for that and ruin their life. Plus, most people are not murders. We have instruments of death at our disposal every single day. Everyone has the ability to plow their car into someone else at any time. Grab a knife and stab someone. Push them in front of subway train. People carry concealed guns with them every day, as I said before, there are more guns in circulation today than there are people, yet they aren't shooting each other every 5 minutes. Not to mention, how likely are you to shoot at someone if you knew they had the ability to shoot back. Here's the thing, go to any standard warehouse. Nearly everyone in that warehouse will most likely be carrying a blade or knife on them. Dozens of people carrying knives, sometimes getting into arguments and fights. Yet how many warehouse stabbings have you heard of? It's almost non-existent. Yet it wouldn't be that much different than a society where everyone was carrying a gun.

For me, I'd much rather live in a society where guns were completely inaccessible, illegal and banned. However, since that ship has already left dock and there is no way that kind of society can be established here in the US, then I want a society where more people carried guns and the laws did not prohibit my ability to own one. The situation we have now, somewhere in between, where criminals have access to guns and upstanding citizens either don't want to or have a hard time of carrying one themselves is a very poor combination that will only lead to more unnecessary deaths of innocent people.
 
I think the saying goes "I'd rather be judged by 12..."

Quote:
Originally Posted by docl
my wife doesn't like it that i always have a firearm on me, but if i had to protect her in a situation like this, and take a bullet myself, i would do so in a heartbeat. I'd rather be carried by six than judged by 12.
+1.
 
I work in a super max prison. It's a semi-controlled population without Guns. They kill and stab each other all the time. They make weapons from can lids to garbage bags. Point is violent people will always be violent regardless of what you put in their hand. No Law rule will change that. If we removed everything that can be made into a weapon they would still be violent and find a way to do harm. We need to find a better way of weeding these scum out of society.
 
I work in a super max prison. It's a semi-controlled population without Guns. They kill and stab each other all the time. They make weapons from can lids to garbage bags. Point is violent people will always be violent regardless of what you put in their hand. No Law rule will change that. If we removed everything that can be made into a weapon they would still be violent and find a way to do harm. We need to find a better way of weeding these scum out of society.

The difference is when the violent person kills with a can lid, he kills one person. If the same person had a semi-automatic assault rifle with a 100 round drum he could kill 2 dozen+ people. Violent people will always kill. The difference is how many people he can kill is controlled by what kind of weapon he can get his hands on.
 
The difference is when the violent person kills with a can lid, he kills one person. If the same person had a semi-automatic assault rifle with a 100 round drum he could kill 2 dozen+ people. Violent people will always kill. The difference is how many people he can kill is controlled by what kind of weapon he can get his hands on.

Vegas - It almost sounds like you're debating yourself..
 
I think the saying goes "I'd rather be judged by 12..."

Quote:
Originally Posted by docl
my wife doesn't like it that i always have a firearm on me, but if i had to protect her in a situation like this, and take a bullet myself, i would do so in a heartbeat. I'd rather be carried by six than judged by 12.
+1.

Another instance of my fingers typing ahead of my brain. Thanks.
 
Vegas - It almost sounds like you're debating yourself..

Lol! :smile:

Probably because I am. Both gun naysayers and gun advocates have very legitimate postulates as to support their positions.

Great post Vegas. I love reading your posts as they're always insightful, rational, and well thought out regardless of the topic.


Awww, well thanks guys. For a while I disappeared, but it's comments like these that make it completely impossible to not stay involved in this kick ass community. :smile: And I could easily same the same in return. :smile:
 
The difference is when the violent person kills with a can lid, he kills one person. If the same person had a semi-automatic assault rifle with a 100 round drum he could kill 2 dozen+ people. Violent people will always kill. The difference is how many people he can kill is controlled by what kind of weapon he can get his hands on.

This is definitely one of those cases where it has to be one extreme or another. Anything in between would just make it a mess.

On the extreme of everyone carrying and being proficient with a weapon, I see anti-gun folk saying there would be more cases of gun violence (since probability has increased now that everyone has one).

Of course, on the flip-side, there might be more gun violence, but a huge possibility of way fewer casualties.

I like the way you presented this. Very thought provoking indeed.
 
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Why use guns when you can use fertilizer and fuel to kill close to 200 people? See Oklahoma City. No matter what you take away, determined criminals/crazy people will find a way to inflict mass casualties.

My 2 cents.
 
Why use guns when you can use fertilizer and fuel to kill close to 200 people? See Oklahoma City. No matter what you take away, determined criminals/crazy people will find a way to inflict mass casualties.

My 2 cents.

Good point. I was there for that. I'll never forget it.
 
What I'm wondering is why did the gunman tell the cops that his house was booby trapped? Did he suddenly have a moment of conscience?

My guess is that he asked the police how many officers he killed at his apartment and that's how they knew it was boobytrapped.
 
How many of these rampage shooters have siblings or children of their own? Seems like a common denominator to me? Maybe a more thorough check when loners make guy purchases? Not saying all people without brothers, sisters or children are going to be whack jobs but it just seems to be a much better environment for empathy to be missing? There are more common denominators here than just 'gun'
 
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