(June 28, 2018 at 8:06 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote:(June 28, 2018 at 7:24 pm)Brian37 Wrote: Really?
Holy fucking crap. We make firearms like candy and hand them out like candy.
I am tired of "motive". It does not fucking matter to me that it is mentally ill, workplace grudge, rejected lover, disturbed teen, religious, they all got access to firearms.
And these mass shootings that make national news are a FRACTION of firearm injuries and deaths. Most are suicide, second is domestic murder, and third is accidental.
That said, I should point out that there are about 72 million gun owners in America. Combined total of gun injuries and deaths in America in 2013: 107,141. This includes murders, suicides, accidents, and people who just got shot. This is a ratio of 1 incident per 672 gun owners (assuming that each incident is attributable to one person, fat chance of that being the case). This statistic implies that gun ownership is not, in and of itself, a factor. The talk about motives is actually necessary to factoring what causes this one gun owner to do what the other 671 don't do.
Make no mistake, easy access to guns is, at best, a factor that isn't helping the national climate of fear. Naturally, we'd have a lot fewer of these shootings if we made it harder for them to actually get the guns, but then, we'd have a lot of other factors that could potentially lead to other, different types of massacres. Potential terrorists have finally caught onto the fact that a car can be a perfect killing machine, even if you don't have spy movie gadgets or even armor modifying it. My own car weighs about a ton and a half and can reach 60 miles per hour in 8.4 seconds.
And the sad thing is I'm not even sure what else there is to do. To quote David Wong on the 2016 Munich shooting):
Quote:Well, Germany already has strict gun control laws which include mandatory psychological testing -- he got his gun illegally. No point in talking about getting tough on ISIS -- this had nothing to do with them. You can talk about stopping Muslim immigrants, and the irony is that Ali David Sonboly would apparently agree with you. You can talk about mental health, but he was already getting treatment.
You can say that the coverage of the 2011 Norway attack inspired this copycat, but what would you do differently, coverage-wise? Report the event and conspicuously leave out the guy's name, background, and motivation? That just makes him more mysterious and intriguing to people like Sonboly, and adds to the public's ignorance about what causes tragedies like this.
All this says to me is that there are 72 million people who don't have a reason to own a gun.
Take their guns away and what would happen? Nothing.
Take their cars away and what would happen? Nothing?
