Eh. I feel British gun law goes too far the other way. And don’t get me started on British knife laws.
And yea, that’s another issue with a codified constitution, afaik, how plain language can be twisted but it’s almost impossible to fix.
This is the flip side of social media activism. The same weapon that ousts racist NBA team owners can be used by a small minority of extremists to pressure someone halfway across the country about something you don’t agree with.
(FWIW, I think it will settle down in the long run. Kind of a crazy time right now though.)
Well, according to unbongwah’s link, this happened one time in 1982 (among the most deadly ones, obviously). Do you know of any other instances where this happened? Of all the ones that have happened in the last decade, I can’t think of a single one that ended that way.
I apologize for being unclear. When I said “halted a massacre” I was referring only to the portion where the shooter doesn’t kill themselves or escape, and I wasn’t considering being shot by the cops either. I guess I meant “most cases where civilians stopped the massacre in progress.”
Forgive me but this is good old fashioned death threats and calls to assassinate politicians. This is nothing like outing a horrible old racist or simply boycotting a business. On the one side you have effectively terrorist, criminal actions, on the other side you have peaceful social activism.
This whole thing is insane, and it’s never going to settle down, ever, until there is a serious crackdown on this kind of behaviour… which will undoubtedly be interpreted as “the government coming for your guns”, rather than a bunch of Timothy McVeighs being rounded up and thrown in the slammer.
It’s like this Clive Bundy dude; the government is being way to permissive, and libertarians everywhere should shocked, ashamed and embarrased at the him and the lunatic militiamen who came to “defend” him. Their attitudes are disgusting and reprehensible, and their proposed tactics effectively those of a terrorist organization. Time to label them as such.
Sarkus
3371
1999 reflects, I think, the author’s desire to spin the article in a certain direction, since that was before Bush became president. I’d agree that its an odd date to point to, especially as a lot of the stuff he notes seeing in the store wasn’t even legal back then - the Clinton-era “Assault Weapons Ban” law didn’t expire until late 2004. It’s mostly been since then that military style rifle sales have exploded, in part because there is a perception in the gun community that future similar laws are very possible, so people want to get them now before its too late.
Blaming the NRA for it is also a stretch, though certainly they play a part. But that ignores things like the general unease many people have felt since 9/11, the large number of veterans we have now because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (vets make up a big part of the gun community), and influences from things like the popularity of “modern military” shooters like CoD and Zombie Apocalypse media. All of those have created a greater interest in military style weaponry, which is then justified as being for self defense since few are willing to admit they are just “big boy toys.” The toy angle can’t be ignored - all you need to do is look at what the current air, paint, and bb rifles look like to see thats what the kids want.
Believe me, it’s very frustrating that every conservative or libertarian lightning rod who gets any air time (other than a few Eastern Establishment stiffs) turns out to be an ignorant bigot. But a lot of them will be dead soon at least.
olaf
3373
You may be getting warmer. Massacres taking place in gun free zones make it difficult for law abiding people to prevent them with their own guns…because their guns are not legal in these places. So they don’t have them…see?
But surely there would be some proportion of mass shooters who don’t think about this (not being the most clear-headed individuals) and get gunned down by these brave Charles Bronsons. So where are they? Or maybe it’s just that wherever a shooting happens to take place, the panic and confusion is likely to last long enough for the shooter to accomplish their deranged objective and kill themselves or surrender as they see fit. But what are the odds of that?
Yea, more shooters always make things better. Tell me, how do the police tell the difference in a split second again?
ShivaX
3376
Well there was the dude in that mall not long ago.
http://www.kgw.com/news/Clackamas-man-armed-confronts-mall-shooter-183593571.html
Generally they target places of no resistance and once resistance appears they kill themselves.
My recollection of that story is that there wasn’t any information on whether the shooter even saw the guy with the gun, much less that the rampage was stopped by the other guy having a gun.
On another note, it looks an “assault rifle” was used to kill to officers serving an arrest warrant in Alaska. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/alaska-teen-fired-shots-killed-troopers-police-article-1.1779291
Actually, they normally surrender. Suicide is actually a relatively uncommon outcome of mass shootings - that’s far more likely to happen in family slayings. However, it is true that someone who is just trying to create a body count would go to a place they feel it could be most easily accomplished.
In either case, I think it’s a red herring. As discussed in this thread, the downside of high rates of gun ownership are realized in the 99.9% of the time when there isn’t a mass shooting going on. Even if one accepts that having a “good guy with a gun” on-site during a mass shooting is great thing, the event is so rare that using it as a justification for ubiquitous guns is very suspect.
RichVR
3380
When an article suggests that properly checking if people are eligible on criminal record grounds to carry guns or not is a “compromise”, rather than something which should, you know, just be done properly? Uhm.
No time to read it, but how the heck do those Europeans have so many guns per capita?
A mixture of countries with strong hunting traditions (especially France and Germany, where they’re generally issued only for sport or target shooting), or simply a relaxed attitude to licensed gun ownership (Nordics, Czech Republic)
The most common civilian firearm in Europe is, with two exceptions, single-shot longarms. The exception is the Czech republic, where it’s pistols, and the UK where it’s shotguns (England/Wales/Scotland) and handguns (NI)
(Interesting, Poland and Romania, two of the most right-wing countries in the EU, have very strict gun control laws. Whereas the hard left Nordics have a very relaxed attitude to gun law. And of course, there’s the UK…where Northern Ireland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world - with self-defence being entirely valid as a reason to carry - versus very low (near-zero outside shotguns) in the rest of the UK!)
Yeah, he advocates Federal standards for firearm licensing which sound very sensible.
They just do. The idea that Europe is gun free is false, other than the UK there are plenty of shooters, as well as a vibrant black market from the east. In France it’s estimated that there are 4 illegal guns for every legal one.
It might derive from trying to reconcile the lower murder rates, most anti-gun folks have a blind spot when it comes to ownership=murders, they can’t accept or process information to the contrary. I’ve dug around recently and the best fit actually seems to be income inequality for explaining our high murder rate.
