74 School Shootings in 18 Months

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nausearockpig
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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#26 Post by nausearockpig » Thu Oct 01, 2015 5:14 pm

guysmiley wrote:I give up. I've lost of faith in people. I want to delete my facebook today. We live among idiots.

Don't feel too bad, it's not localised... Each year we have a public holiday to celebrate and honour the ANZACs that fought for this country. Should the day fall on a weekend the public holiday is moved to the Monday following but not this year.. nope. this year they can just get fucked.... But then one state decides to have a public holiday for an AFL (Australian Football League) grand final - the day before the game..... Soooooo... Footy is more important than those that fought and died for us - and ironically the game.... FFS...

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#27 Post by MYXYLPLYX » Fri Oct 02, 2015 12:33 pm

I think Joe the plumber summed up their sentiment succinctly - "Your dead kids don't trump my rights..."


:no:

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Hype
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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#28 Post by Hype » Fri Oct 02, 2015 12:57 pm

'Rights' are a problem in political theory because they're associated both with foundations of liberal democracy and with oppressed/moral movements. The problem with 'rights', though, is precisely that they are used as 'trumps', with no defense required once something is asserted to be, or established as, a 'right' in the requisite sense. Rights, however, clearly come into conflict, and there's no clear mechanism in the 'rights as trumps' arena to deal with this.

The worry that overriding an already-in-place constitutional amendment would set a bad precedent sounds silly, because people are dying now, and we all know that controlling access to guns, and other changes to the way guns are controlled, makes an actual difference (see: Australia, Canada, etc.) But the worry isn't a totally crazy one, because we have a system that is intended to be difficult to change at its foundations. All modern western-style constitutions basically build that in because without it, you get dictatorships really easily.

As someone who doesn't think anyone should own a gun, but also as someone who understands the foundations of liberal democracy (I work in that era of history/philosophy) I'm uneasy about all of this.

I suspect that at least part of the solution has to be insisting through reasoned argument that the second amendment right isn't violated by controlling the ways in which guns can be accessed. Otherwise, a constitutional amendment to repeal the second amendment would be ideal, but very difficult to pull off, if not impossible. There are probably other subtle legal ways to get around the second amendment by focusing on other aspects of what is being controlled. Careful policy-writing could solve this.

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#29 Post by kv » Fri Oct 02, 2015 2:50 pm

Again comparing Canada and Australia to the united states where there are probably as many guns as people is silly. Imho

Almost impossible in a free country to stop crazy people from going crazy...laws will not stop the lawless

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#30 Post by kv » Fri Oct 02, 2015 3:01 pm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sp ... hip/table/

If you at all interested in this subject please clue yourselves in by reading this

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#31 Post by Hype » Fri Oct 02, 2015 3:48 pm

kv wrote:Again comparing Canada and Australia to the united states where there are probably as many guns as people is silly. Imho

Almost impossible in a free country to stop crazy people from going crazy...laws will not stop the lawless
As a bald statement, this is false, dude. I think you're thinking of the obvious case where you have a law that says "Don't X, on penalty of Y." where people who don't care about Y will do X anyway. And yes, obviously this will happen. But it's simply not the case that "gun control" or "gun laws" mean that kind of law. Gun legislation, like much else, is way more complex than some 18th century Kantian view of the law as a deterrent against people freely choosing to disobey it. The reality is that if you make things harder to get or do, they happen less often. I'm not saying the way you do that needs to be exactly the same way as in Canada or Australia. But you're kind of missing the point by talking about how many guns there are and how hard it is to stop people from doing bad things. The question isn't all or nothing... it's not "How do we stop all crazies from going crazy with guns without taking away all the guns?!" It's "What reasonable measures could be taken to make things better?" And if what you said above is an answer to that question, then again, it's just false.

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#32 Post by kv » Fri Oct 02, 2015 4:14 pm

There are 100's of millions of guns in this country...they aren't going away (aside from war) and thinking Australian's did it is comparing apples to oranges...they had something like 700k turns in we have 300 million plus the guns that aren't legal..plus boarders to other countrys with worse gun homicide rates then ours....

Ps was just gonna delete my post as this round and round is pointless we both have polarizing views...but you responded too quickly

Good day

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#33 Post by Hype » Sat Oct 03, 2015 5:40 am

It's good that you left it. Those differences are important. But they don't justify nihilism about the problem of mass shootings. That's all I'm saying. It doesn't follow from the problem being considerably bigger and more complicated that changes for the better aren't possible.

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#34 Post by kv » Sat Oct 03, 2015 12:03 pm

Lets say they stop selling guns tomorrow....still 300 million here...i don't think it help as much as more people being allowed conceal carry permits...these nut jobs are picking soft ie safe targets...why not have school security armed? I bet that would be more impactful then banning guns...but that's just my view

Just got to wondering how many of these shootings in Arizona since they have more carry rights...there was one in 2002...

I know nobody else here will agree with my view...and that's fine. As long as I'm allowed them

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#35 Post by Hype » Sat Oct 03, 2015 6:22 pm

Why do you think conceal and carry + armed security guards would make things better? Do you think it would deter potential shooters, so that the number of recorded shootings would actually go down, or do you think we can't do anything about the actual number of shootings (which has increased in recent years for ... unclear reasons), so this is just the best worst option? In either case, it's unclear how it would help. If it doesn't deter shooters, would it somehow translate into less deaths? How does that work? If a school has some finite number of security guards, and a shooter simply tries to avoid them... how have they helped? After the first time a shooter kills the security guards first and then massacres more people, what do we argue then? More security guards with more weapons and more body armor?

I'm just not sure why you suggest this as the solution to the problem, which as you say, is partly that there are just way more guns in America than anywhere else.

Why don't you think there could be some other kinds of measures put into place that might reduce the actual number of shootings?

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#36 Post by Bandit72 » Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:42 pm

Isn't Obama flogging a dead horse? If he read the Bill of Rights, he'd have known what he was getting into.
2nd amendment. Rights to bear arms shall not be infringed. Surely he can't do anything about it, nor congress?

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#37 Post by nausearockpig » Sun Oct 04, 2015 1:52 pm

Bandit72 wrote:Isn't Obama flogging a dead horse? If he read the Bill of Rights, he'd have known what he was getting into.
2nd amendment. Rights to bear arms shall not be infringed. Surely he can't do anything about it, nor congress?
Can the amendment not be amended further? Perhaps to protect lives, rather than a centuries old ideal about being a well organised militia to overthrow a government which is no longer serving its people (my understanding may be incorrect there - feel free to correct me)... And anyway, surely if the govt is behaving in a manner that the people need to rise against 1) there's a better way to do that than to try to fight against the army - which I assume would end in a massacre of said militia anyway and b) wouldn't the govt do things like sever all communications methods possible so the militia could not form or communicate effectively rendering it useless?

Clearly not being a USAian I don't "get" the right, but it seems unnecessary to me. Surely healthcare and feeding and housing the homeless is more important than your silly guns?

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#38 Post by Hype » Sun Oct 04, 2015 3:02 pm

A partial antidote to KV's cynicism/nihilism about legislative solutions to gun violence in America:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/gov ... -this-law/
In the early ’90s, gang shootings gripped Connecticut. Bystanders, including a 7-year-old girl, were getting gunned down in drive-bys. “The state is becoming a shooting gallery, and the public wants action,” an editorial in the Hartford Courant said at the time.

So in the summer of 1994, lawmakers hustled through a gun control bill in a special session. They hoped to curb shootings by requiring people to get a purchasing license before buying a handgun. The state would issue these permits to people who passed a background check and a gun safety training course.

At the time, private citizens could freely buy and sell guns secondhand, even to those with criminal records. Connecticut’s law sought to regulate that market. Even private handgun sales would have to be reported to the state, and buyers would need to have a permit.

Critics scoffed at the plan. They argued that a permit system would hassle lawful citizens, while crooks would still get guns on the black market. If the problem was criminals with guns, why not clean up crime instead of restricting guns?

“This will not take one gun out of the hands of a single criminal,” State Rep. Richard Belden complained to the New York Times in 1994.

Even some supporters of the law, which took effect in 1995, called it a “small step” — a gesture to placate residents alarmed at the gun violence.

Now, two decades later, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, say that Connecticut’s “permit-to-purchase” law was actually a huge success for public safety.

In a study released Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, they estimate that the law reduced gun homicides by 40 percent between 1996 and 2005. That’s 296 lives saved in 10 years.

How they analyzed the data

Of course, there’s no way to measure the true impact of Connecticut’s “permit-to-purchase” law. We can’t access the alternate universe where Connecticut’s law never existed. But we can compare Connecticut against the 39 states that didn’t have similar legislation at the time.

That’s what the researchers did, using records on gun killings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the control states, homicide rates tumbled in the mid ’90s — but in Connecticut, the gun homicide rate fell faster and farther, even after controlling for demographic changes, incomes and policing levels. This is a sign that Connecticut’s gun policy was having an effect.

To arrive at a more precise estimate, the researchers tried to predict what Connecticut would have looked like without its “permit-to-purchase” law. Taking data from statistically similar states, they made a “synthetic” Connecticut — a Frankensteinian creation that is mostly Rhode Island, with some Maryland, and traces of California, Nevada and New Hampshire.

Synthetic Connecticut and real Connecticut look the same before 1996. But they diverge soon after Connecticut’s law kicks in. In the end, there is a 40 percent gap between synthetic Connecticut and real Connecticut — between the expected number of gun-related homicides and the actual number of gun-related homicides.


The researchers give credit for that difference — 296 lives — to the protective effect of Connecticut’s permit-to-purchase law.

In contrast, Connecticut’s law did not seem to have any effect on non-gun homicides. Synthetic Connecticut and actual Connecticut look the same before and after 1996 — which makes sense, because gun control laws should only affect gun-related killings. This helps rule out alternate explanations. The peculiar decline in Connecticut’s gun homicide rate wasn’t the side effect of some overall decrease in murders after 1996:


How do permit-to-purchase laws work?

Federal law requires gun dealers to run background checks before selling to anyone. But it doesn’t require background checks for gun sales between private citizens. This is called the “private sale” or “gun show” loophole.

In other words, most states will let you buy a gun off a stranger on Craigslist, no background check needed.

Permit-to-purchase laws, which are on the books in 10 states, pose one way to tame the secondhand market. These laws require people to get pre-cleared by state or local authorities, who issue them a permit allowing them to buy a gun. Connecticut, for instance, requires permit applicants to pass a background check as well as a gun safety training course.

Permit-to-purchase laws make it a crime for anyone to sell or give a gun to someone without a permit. They discourage people from selling guns to criminals, who wouldn’t clear the background check for a permit.

Critics of these laws say they won’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals, because, well, criminals won’t follow the law.

That’s flawed thinking, says Daniel Webster, one of the authors on the study and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.


Connecticut’s gun permit law made it harder for guns to enter the black market. Lower supply means higher prices. A motivated crook could still get her hands on a gun, but it would take more time and resources. Perhaps she would have to travel to a different state, or ask a friend with a clean record to illegally obtain a gun for her.

“People assume incorrectly that criminals will do anything and everything in terms of cost and risk to get their hands on a gun,” he said. “But that simply is not what the data tells us.” Connecticut’s law didn’t stop criminals from acquiring guns, but it deterred enough of them that the gun homicide rate dropped.

Last year, Webster and some colleagues documented the mirror-opposite effect in Missouri, which repealed its permit-to-purchase law in 2007. Soon after, police in Missouri, Illinois and Iowa were coming across more Missouri guns at crime scenes. The gun-related homicide rate in Missouri also went up. In a paper published in the Journal of Urban Health, the researchers argue that the repeal of the law was responsible for 50 additional gun deaths in Missouri per year, a 23 percent increase.

Together, these two reports offer compelling (if somewhat indirect) evidence that permit-to-purchase laws help save lives, probably by keeping guns off the black market.

An overwhelming number of Americans say that they favor universal background checks — that is, they want anyone who obtains a gun to pass a background check first. Gun-rights activists retort that these restrictions only impede the lawful ownership of guns. But that’s clearly an exaggeration. When laws make it harder for people to sell guns to criminals, well, criminals will have a harder time finding guns.

Here is the classic tradeoff between liberty and safety. Private citizens are giving up the freedom to sell a gun to whomever they want. They are also giving up the convenience of buying a gun without a lot of waiting and paperwork. Are these annoyances worth it? That depends on how many lives you think are saved by keeping guns out of criminal hands.

It’s a number we can only guess at. So far, the best estimate seems to be: a lot.

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#39 Post by erotic cheeses » Sun Oct 04, 2015 3:08 pm

Shame on you America you are a terrible example to the world

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#40 Post by Romeo » Mon Oct 05, 2015 1:13 pm

Image

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#41 Post by Bandit72 » Mon Oct 05, 2015 2:45 pm

Romeo wrote:Image
Which is really weird as the constitution was laid out after the Angel Gabriel flew down to tell Mohammed how Allah wanted everyone to live.

:hs:

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#42 Post by mockbee » Fri Oct 09, 2015 3:38 pm

Image
Some residents lined up in front of the airport in Roseburg, Ore., to protest President Obama’s visit to the town on Friday. Others had signs proclaiming, “Welcome Obama.”
What's wrong with these people....? :scared: :no:

There is something truly messed up in America. I was making my way through Oregon this week and numerous occasions I saw citizens with handguns openly displayed on their person. WTF is wrong with these people? Maybe I should take Ben Carson's advice and tackle them before they do anyone harm. How do I know what their intentions are.......? :noclue:

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#43 Post by nausearockpig » Fri Oct 09, 2015 3:49 pm

I'm paraphrasing but I like a quote I read somewhere that says "your children's lives are worth less than the money involved with guns". You're all fucked. You're NEVER going to give up or reconsider the necessity for your "right to bear arms" and as such your children and other loved ones will continue to die in these (mostly) avoidable and completely senseless massacres.

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#44 Post by Hype » Fri Oct 09, 2015 4:03 pm

nausearockpig wrote:I'm paraphrasing but I like a quote I read somewhere that says "your children's lives are worth less than the money involved with guns". You're all fucked. You're NEVER going to give up or reconsider the necessity for your "right to bear arms" and as such your children and other loved ones will continue to die in these (mostly) avoidable and completely senseless massacres.
You say that like the United States won't cease to exist at some point like every country ever.

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#45 Post by mockbee » Fri Oct 09, 2015 4:34 pm

Hype wrote:
nausearockpig wrote:I'm paraphrasing but I like a quote I read somewhere that says "your children's lives are worth less than the money involved with guns". You're all fucked. You're NEVER going to give up or reconsider the necessity for your "right to bear arms" and as such your children and other loved ones will continue to die in these (mostly) avoidable and completely senseless massacres.
You say that like the United States won't cease to exist at some point like every country ever.
That's actually the more concerning point.

Yes, these are senseless massacres and something must be done about it, but they affect such a minuscule percentage of the population. In the US there are about 11,500 homicides and accidental deaths each year using guns, and about 20,000 suicides. Vehicles are far, far more dangerous for people not intending to die, over 35,000 deaths each year.

My concern is with these morons who don't seem to understand that a society requires a government with laws that advocate a shared responsibility to function properly, and we can't just pretend we live in the wild west anymore.

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#46 Post by nausearockpig » Fri Oct 09, 2015 5:08 pm

I see a couple more unrelated and separate shootings over the past few days resulting in deaths from one of them..

Yeah gun lobbyists, you're right.... no reforms are required at all....

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#47 Post by mockbee » Fri Oct 09, 2015 5:20 pm

We need much, much more than reforms. We need a new ethos.

Who are we, what are we trying to do and what are we really afraid of?

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#48 Post by creep » Fri Oct 09, 2015 5:24 pm

nausearockpig wrote:I see a couple more unrelated and separate shootings over the past few days resulting in deaths from one of them..

Yeah gun lobbyists, you're right.... no reforms are required at all....

well the focus is on them now since it's all over the news.

a couple days ago one of the guys that stopped that paris train attack was stabbed multiple times here where i live. at least they didn't have guns i guess. :noclue:

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#49 Post by Hype » Fri Oct 09, 2015 5:25 pm

I think it makes way more sense to just be realistic. You can approach these problems from all angles. Teach kids differently (this requires curriculum change), change existing regulations to require, among other things, more safety training and licensing (this is called "gun control" but it's perfectly feasible), change the way guns can be bought and sold, change the way they can be marketed, change the way they are portrayed in media (this may not require legislation, but the prior two probably do).

People get old and die. Why replace them with people who have the same stupidities if we can figure out how not to?

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Re: 74 School Shootings in 18 Months

#50 Post by guysmiley » Sat Oct 10, 2015 9:43 am

My grandparents and aunt live in Roseburg. I can tell you, there is a lot of poverty, poor education and rednecks there. I haven't met too many people who made it out of that city not pregnant at 17, or on meth. The place makes me sad when I visit. When I was a kid I enjoyed it. But, just to see my grandparents.

None of these reactions surprise me. Sad, probably the first president to ever visit that town and they're afraid of him taking their guns. I doubt anyone wants anything to do with it. The guns there are mostly from hunters anyways. The drugs dealers there are scary maybe.

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