Shooting in California

[Napoléon]

But the topic is gun deaths, not violent crimes.

For what its worth, I'll take a punch in the face over a bullet to the gut any day.

Yeah, how do we know that the vast majority of these 'violent crimes' aren't just punch ups in a bar. Seen as, y'know, Britain has a bit of a drinking problem.

[Autumnlicious]

I hope you enjoy more Sandyhook incidents, Creed.

Because America is not going to solve the fundamental problems that enable crime and aggression towards everyone else. It is easy to regulate who purchases firearms and what they do with it and if they are of good character and history to own it.

It is difficult to force someone to pay people a living wage that ensures that they're not desperate or living in an area that continually encourages crime.

It is also difficult, as you have seen, to get health care into common access. If we had so much shit thrown over getting universal healthcare or a shitty approximation thereof, what makes you think that we could solve a whole collection of factors that enable violent crime?

Until then, changing one thing should reduce slightly this problem because we are all too fucking immature to solve a collection of root problems.

I would like to keep guns out of the hands of clearly unstable and immature tools.

I find it funny that you would prefer the opposite.

[Napoléon]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...a-U-S.html

Please, tell us more about how to be civilized.

Did nobody else bother to actually read this article?

But criminologists say crime figures can be affected by many factors, including different criminal justice systems and differences in how crime is reported and measured.
In Britain, an affray is considered a violent crime, while in other countries it will only be logged if a person is physically injured.
There are also degrees of violence. While the UK ranks above South Africa for all violent crime, South Africans suffer more than 20,000 murders each year - compared with Britain's 921 in 2007.

How do these figures have any weight in an argument about guns?

[Creed of Heresy]

Also, anyone notice that shortly after the deinstitutionalization bullshit, violent crime in this country started going up? Correlation doesn't equal causation but it's something worth mulling over.

"Treat them in the community!"

Yeah! Let's let schizophrenics, psychopaths, and people with obvious sociopathic tendencies wander around openly and freely society without treatment, close observation, evaluation, and/or intervention and expect that they'll just get help by themselves when most of the time they don't think there's anything wrong with what they're thinking! How's that working for us?

Ohh...

...Not great, huh?

But hey, at least they're living on their own and not costing the taxpayers their precious fucking pennies-a-year-per-person to keep them in a medical environment where their issues are managed, treated, or at the very least mitigated, right? Who cares that a huge percentage of untreated schizophrenics end up committing suicide, an even vaster percentage end up homeless, babbling to their hallucinatory voices with no connection to the real world left to even realize what kind of situation they're in, or that schizophrenics by and large tend to have higher likelihoods of violent episodes? As long as it's NIMBY and we can spend those pennies on the American past-time of dropping pennies on the ground to the fullest extent, it's all A-OK. Because hey; we don't wanna treat someone else's problem until it becomes our own! And oh so many times it becomes our own! And yet we still don't fucking learn.

Deputies went to this psychopath's apartment after his relatives alerted the police and he had been posting Youtube videos explicitly stating his desires and plans to kill others and himself. He only had to tell them it was a "misunderstanding," and ta-da! Psychopath kept his civil liberties! Granted, those civil liberties of his cost six innocent girls their lives, but hey! As long as we protect the rights of people who are fucked in the head, right?

This coming from a guy who has a laundry list of emotional and personality disorders. If institutionalization was a thing, and I had to be taken into an institution for a year to address and treat at least some of them, I'd be happy to get psychiatric and psychological treatment at no cost to me. It'd be the only way I could, in fact; I sure as fuck don't have the money to go through the years of outpatient treatment I'm gonna need to go through to deal with all my ghosts and demons.

Look, I'm just saying, the hands-off approach to mental illnesses is not fucking working, and this massacre is a fine fucking example. My schizo roomie is another prime example. He's barely in touch with reality and in the year and a half I've known him, I've only seen his mental state slowly declining further and his grip on reality is slipping steadily, and he refuses to get treatment on his own because of a myriad of delusional reasons that, were he, well, sane, he wouldn't actually believe. Three months inpatient care, voluntary or not, would help get his head at least somewhat straight and give him some kind of clarity and a grasp on reality and himself again. But no, no, we gotta respect his wishes to not get help, never mind that him not getting help may very well result in someone's death, be it his or someone else's, never mind that he needs treatment and doesn't actually know it, or believe it. He's a threat to himself but because "suicide" hasn't been mentioned yet, it's nobody's problem.

MAKES PERFECT FUCKING SENSE, RIGHT?

[Brian37]

Guns guns we need more guns.

[sven]

Oh please. The UK has a higher violent crime rate than both the US and South Africa.

The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.
It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.
It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offences than recorded in Germany and France.

The U.S. has a violence rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, Canada 935, Australia 92 and South Africa 1,609.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...a-U-S.html

Please, tell us more about how to be civilized.

Yay! Go Sweden! I'm goning out with my crowbar right now and I'm going to get us to the top!

[Creed of Heresy]

I hope you enjoy more Sandyhook incidents, Creed.

Because America is not going to solve the fundamental problems that enable crime and aggression towards everyone else. It is easy to regulate who purchases firearms and what they do with it and if they are of good character and history to own it.

It is difficult to force someone to pay people a living wage that ensures that they're not desperate or living in an area that continually encourages crime.

It is also difficult, as you have seen, to get health care into common access. If we had so much shit thrown over getting universal healthcare or a shitty approximation thereof, what makes you think that we could solve a whole collection of factors that enable violent crime?

Until then, changing one thing should reduce slightly this problem because we are all too fucking immature to solve a collection of root problems.

I would like to keep guns out of the hands of clearly unstable and immature tools.

I find it funny that you would prefer the opposite.

Dammit, Moros, stop trumping me at realism.

*sighs*

The sad fact of it is, you are right. We both are. This apathetic bloody [no pun intended] country is, as you said, too fucking immature.

Maybe we're just fucked. Maybe these problems I'm talking about...the root analogy I keep using, I'll use it again. Maybe the roots have sunk too deep. And I agree that it's a good idea to cut the stem to at least slow the damn thing down. But all the same, nobody on either side of the aisle in the gun control bitchfest tries to look at the root of the damn problem. If you put controllers and lobbyists together and started the debate not with "Are guns bad?" and instead with "What is causing people to utilize guns to commit these atrocities?" there'd be much more intelligent and productive discourse than what currently exists.

In the meantime I maintain my stance on firearm control; make it harder to obtain firearms, don't let unstable individuals purchase them, and get the ATF to do their fucking jobs in persecuting the illegal firearms trade.

[Faith No More]

---

Huh. Looks banning guns didn't do shit for England's violent crime situation... But then, I've always known that, and everyone on this forum conveniently forgets that when another school gets shot up.

I'm very tired of repeating myself, but hey, once more with spirit, huh?

Guns. Are. Not. The. Cause. Of. The. Problems.

It is a pipe dream to think you can get rid of all guns in the US. It is a pipe dream to think you could somehow repossess or otherwise get rid of even a fraction of the firearms in circulation in the US today. It is a pipe dream to think that banning guns outright would ever stop anyone from getting a hold of one for the purpose of murder. It is a pipe dream to believe that the gun lobbyists will ever lose their influence. It is a pipe dream to think that we can stop school shootings completely or even mostly by banning guns or putting more controls on them.

Why is it when this happens the first words out of anybody's mouth on this forum "LOOKS LIKE WE DON'T HAVE A GUN PROBLEM LOL SARCASM"? Really? That's the focus.

Sooo...we don't want to discuss why this happened at its root. We wanna look at the weed, and think about how to cut it, instead of plucking the weed, studying it, and determining a way to kill the rest of its species with science, reason, and logic? We want to harp on about guns AGAIN instead of asking the very important question of "why and how the fuck are our students being driven to homicidal tendencies against their classmates?" and finding an answer so that we can kill the weed at its root?

Put some of the lobbying for more and more gun control into lobbying for active, mandatory psychological evaluations and therapy sessions for social misfits in schools. You know, something that'll work and maybe even help address the growing pandemic of mental and emotional health issues plaguing this schizophrenic society of ours? Maybe catch the warning signs and address them directly, instead of focusing our energy on this pithy, ineffective, counterproductive, stupidly divisive, and frankly obnoxious gun control "debate" that we and the nation at large keep supposedly having. All those pipe dreams suddenly are no longer idle fantasies if you kill the problem at its root. All the guns in the world aren't going to be very dangerous if everyone who possesses one lacks the inclination to use it to instigate violence against another human being.

Someone mentioned that USians [I like that title by the way] seem to love killing each other. Given how the baby boomers were largely raised by veterans of war who had seen absolute hell and all suffered from never-treated PTSD, it's not surprising that a bunch of behaviors that tend to translate into a casual, flippant demeanor towards violence were imparted onto that generation, which passed on to the next, and to the next, and then the next through behavioral familiarity being imparted. Like father like son. England doesn't seem to be much better, and in fact they seem to be even worse than we are when it comes to the whole "I wanna kill another human being today" thing.

There's probably many, many, many other factors and causes, but sitting here with our thumbs up our asses going "Durrr guns are bad" and "hurrr I like my shotty" sure isn't doing a fucking thing to improve the situation, and we are simply a microcosm of the nation at large.

School shooting happens, and everyone starts bitching about guns. Nobody bitches about the environment kids are growing up in where murderous tendencies are sparked and allowed to ignite into an inferno that burns everyone it touches. Nobody. I seriously feel like I'm the only fucking person on this forum who ever wants to point that out.

Get the fuck off the gun debate. Everyone. I don't wanna fucking hear it anymore. Every time I do, I start grinding my teeth because I know everyone's about to start getting super defensive or super soap-box-y, nobody's gonna change their minds, everyone's just gonna run around in circles, accomplishing nothing of any intellectual merit or discourse. Let's talk about this shit like intellectuals and look at the real causes of the problem and not like a bunch of political stereotypes whining about their respective stance on firearms. Let's address the disease and not the fucking symptoms.

Fuck's sake, people. Seriously.

---

This might sound weird coming from an atheist, but amen, brother.

It's as if we're lemmings, all following each other and there's a fire in our path, but everyone just keeps bitching about abolishing fire rather than talking about taking a different route. Until systematic changes that address the psychological issues at hand are implemented in our culture as a whole, banning guns will do fuck all.

[Faith No More]

The solution is not to just address psychological issues in favor of letting every wing-nut have a gun. We need to have a two-pronged attack that addresses both issues.

I think part of the problem, however, is that we have substantial outcry about guns but never about the cultural issues. That is why I think Creed does have a valid point.

[paulpablo]

It's crazy this guy couldn't get a girlfriend, what the fuck. He was young, pretty good lookin, drives a BMW and comes from a rich family in a nice area of america.
He should have just got on internet dating or something. And hopefully his conversation skills were more persuasive than his youtube videos. "I don't understand why you don't find me attractive when I'm magnificent" Doesn't go down very well with girls or anyone for that matter.