We have officially become inured to mass shootings.

[moondog-sparky]

Good thread from Eric Heiden on Facebook.

not 100% sure regarding the issue with the CDC and politicians tying their hands, but i believe it came down to this: once the CDC did their study the could claim that guns were "an extreme health epidemic", and with such a label, this would allow certain government bodies the ability to unilaterally enact gun restrictions based on this. possible even for executive action, etc. not saying i agree with it, but i believe that was the logic in shutting it down at the time.

[moondog-sparky]

It is a unique arrogance that you place your protection against what you would label tyranny over the the lives of 35k innocents... What gives you the right to make that decision? There are may different possible interpretations of tyranny at this particular moment in time. What makes you so sure you specific interpretation is the right one?

very true...i can't say with certainty that my interpretation is the right one at all times. but for me, at this time, i accept the balance of freedom vs the outcome.

i might turn it around on you - going back to my DUI statement, what gives you the right to allow for 10,000+ deaths/year? (i know, i know, not all are innocent - they make choices, but certainly innocent bystanders, family members, etc get killed as well). we have the tech to bring this to a near standstill by installing breathalyzers...but if you are against this for your personal freedom, isn't that tyranny over the lives of those taken each year? not trying to be glib or obtuse here...looking for a real response. a big part of my confusion on this gun issue is that i see many people get up in arms and emotionally distraught (which they should!), but have little or no opinion on how best to address equally horrific and highly preventable problems (DUI & speeding - the #'s between gun deaths auto are somewhat close). i think we can all agree that txting and driving is increasingly a societal problem, yet we could create cars that stop phones from working the minute they go over 5mph - but will we? no, we enact laws that make it illegal to txt (yahoo!) but they are lightly, if ever enforced.

i think i've said more here than necessary so i will bow out. probably doubled my post count in 1 day vs 11years...

[thollandpe]

not 100% sure regarding the issue with the CDC and politicians tying their hands, but i believe it came down to this: once the CDC did their study the could claim that guns were "an extreme health epidemic", and with such a label, this would allow certain government bodies the ability to unilaterally enact gun restrictions based on this. possible even for executive action, etc. not saying i agree with it, but i believe that was the logic in shutting it down at the time.

And what would be wrong with that?

As if the discovery of the health risks of asbestos, as one example, didn't have massive ripples throughout the legal, commercial, and legislative/regulatory realms? It was a critical public health issue and it happened.

[bigbill]

I did, you just don't like what I wrote.

Because you manipulate other's posts. Don't quote me if you're going to credit me with something I didn't say.

[theflashunc]

but... i'm not shooting you or anyone else. i'm law abiding. that's the point. i'm not taking your freedom away.

Adam Lanza was a model citizen until he walked into Sandy Hook elementary. Elliot Rodger was just an enthusiast going to the local range until he decided to kill co-eds at UCSB.

The hell of it is for a lot of spree shooters, they aren't "the bad guy" until they show up armed to the teeth as a one-man freedom removers.

[Colinmclelland]

But the right to carry weapons, not so much. Seems like it might've been important in the 1700's or 1800's, but now it's an anachronism that we seem incapable of curing.

I'm Australian. Well OK, I grew up in the UK. But I'm not American, that's the point.

As someone who is not American I've always found that "right to bear arms" to be a WTF thing. Never understood it, doubt I ever will. There was the Magna Carta when I lived in the UK and I couldn't give a shit about it. It was just another historical document, but for some reason the Constitution seems to matter to Americans. I don't get that. I doubt i ever will.

I'm from the school where you don't give guns to nutters. It's hard to tell who is or might become a nutter, so don't give guns to people.

As for defending your home...there is no way i would let my kids go to a sleep-over somewhere there was a gun in the house. No way. I wouldn't feel better thinking they were protected. I would be shit scared for them. That's another part of the WTF that i don't get about being American, and frankly I wouldn't care if guns could only fire once. As a non-American the whole gun issue just seams weird.

[vertical_doug]

I'm Australian. Well OK, I grew up in the UK. But I'm not American, that's the point.

As someone who is not American I've always found that "right to bear arms" to be a WTF thing. Never understood it, doubt I ever will. There was the Magna Carta when I lived in the UK and I couldn't give a shit about it. It was just another historical document, but for some reason the Constitution seems to matter to Americans. I don't get that. I doubt i ever will.

I'm from the school where you don't give guns to nutters. It's hard to tell who is or might become a nutter, so don't give guns to people.

As for defending your home...there is no way i would let my kids go to a sleep-over somewhere there was a gun in the house. No way. I wouldn't feel better thinking they were protected. I would be shit scared for them. That's another part of the WTF that i don't get about being American, and frankly I wouldn't care if guns could only fire once. As a non-American the whole gun issue just seams weird.

You may not give a shit about the historical documents, but you definitely give a shit about the fundamental rights the documents guarantee. Your freedom to own property, for inheritance, your freedom to worship, to avoid excessive taxation without representation, etc etc all start here.

As for the Right to bear arms, that's not even in the original constitution, it came in with the Bill of Rights which were the first 10 amendments to the constitution which were to give specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights while limiting the absolute power of the federal government.

The only reason you do not need to give a shit is you take these rights for granted.

There is nothing stopping congress and the states from amending the constitution except in practicality, you'd never get the necessary votes at the state level to pass the amendment.

In the english speaking world, there is a lot of common threads in the establishment of laws. Whether Australian, American or British, it's part of our shared legal heritage.

[Colinmclelland]

Yeah, i get that. But the world has moved on, things change. I care about things as they stand now, not something from a few centuries ago.

[Jeffrey Lee]

Yeah, i get that. But the world has moved on, things change. I care about things as they stand now, not something from a few centuries ago.

It is because of events that happened a few centuries ago that things stand as they do now. The freedoms that you enjoy didn't happen by accident.

[guido]

very true...i can't say with certainty that my interpretation is the right one at all times. but for me, at this time, i accept the balance of freedom vs the outcome.

i might turn it around on you - going back to my DUI statement, what gives you the right to allow for 10,000+ deaths/year? (i know, i know, not all are innocent - they make choices, but certainly innocent bystanders, family members, etc get killed as well). we have the tech to bring this to a near standstill by installing breathalyzers...but if you are against this for your personal freedom, isn't that tyranny over the lives of those taken each year? not trying to be glib or obtuse here...looking for a real response. a big part of my confusion on this gun issue is that i see many people get up in arms and emotionally distraught (which they should!), but have little or no opinion on how best to address equally horrific and highly preventable problems (DUI & speeding - the #'s between gun deaths auto are somewhat close). i think we can all agree that txting and driving is increasingly a societal problem, yet we could create cars that stop phones from working the minute they go over 5mph - but will we? no, we enact laws that make it illegal to txt (yahoo!) but they are lightly, if ever enforced.

i think i've said more here than necessary so i will bow out. probably doubled my post count in 1 day vs 11years...

I don't drink so I'm not part of that problem. But I'd be completely down with breathalyzer interlocks and technology to prevent cell phone use in a moving car.

[sk_tle]

but... i'm not shooting you or anyone else. i'm law abiding. that's the point. i'm not taking your freedom away.

What makes you certain you will never suffer from mental health issues, be suicidal, or just plain crazy at some point in your life ? What makes you certain all your fellow "currently law abiding" gun owners are also immune to that ?

[ABiCi]

It is impossible not to read this thread and come to the conclusion that you guys are just doomed to keep playing this out again and again.

[SeanEasley]

I've spent the week riding backroads in central vermont and imagining living semi-off-the-grid if you will, in a small place down some dirt road with a nice view. Close enough to a small town to get what you need, but far enough from the world as we know it to escape. Is it naive to think that might work?

[theflashunc]

You may not give a shit about the historical documents, but you definitely give a shit about the fundamental rights the documents guarantee. Your freedom to own property, for inheritance, your freedom to worship, to avoid excessive taxation without representation, etc etc all start here.

As for the Right to bear arms, that's not even in the original constitution, it came in with the Bill of Rights which were the first 10 amendments to the constitution which were to give specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights while limiting the absolute power of the federal government.

The only reason you do not need to give a shit is you take these rights for granted.

There is nothing stopping congress and the states from amending the constitution except in practicality, you'd never get the necessary votes at the state level to pass the amendment.

In the english speaking world, there is a lot of common threads in the establishment of laws. Whether Australian, American or British, it's part of our shared legal heritage.

The rub is the reading of the 2nd Amendment as some absolute right for individuals to own arms is a relatively new one. For the first couple hundred years of our country's history, the 2nd Amendment was viewed rather differently:

For about two hundred years, the meaning of the Second Amendment was clear and mostly undisputed, despite the gnarled syntax of the text itself: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Generations of Supreme Court and academic opinion held that the amendment did not confer on individuals a right “to keep and bear Arms” but, rather, referred only to the privileges belonging to state militias. This was not a controversial view. The late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said, in 1991, that the idea that the Second Amendment conferred a right for individuals to bear arms was “a fraud on the American public.” Burger was no liberal, and his view simply reflected the overwhelming consensus on the issue at the time.

But, starting in the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. undertook a patient and extensive effort to change the public, and eventually the judicial, understanding of the Second Amendment. As David Cole recounts in his book “Engines of Liberty,” the N.R.A. recognized that its path was blocked by binding precedents in the federal courts, so it turned to a state-by-state approach. Embracing and passing gun-rights legislation in the states, Cole writes, “fostered a legal culture in which the right to bear arms enjoyed a privileged place.” At the same time, the N.R.A. sponsored academic research that purported to show that the traditional understanding of the Second Amendment was incorrect. The movement reached its climax in 2008, when the Supreme Court, in Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, rewrote its understanding of the Second Amendment, and concluded that the Framers of the Constitution had, after all, intended the Amendment to confer an individual right to bear arms. (As Adam Gopnik recently observed, Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent had the better argument, but Scalia’s opinion had the five votes.)

Politics Changed the Reading of the Second Amendment—and Can Change It Again | The New Yorker

[lumpy]

I've spent the week riding backroads in central vermont and imagining living semi-off-the-grid if you will, in a small place down some dirt road with a nice view. Close enough to a small town to get what you need, but far enough from the world as we know it to escape. Is it naive to think that might work?

That's where I live in Western Mass., but in a valley with less of a view. When my neighbor is ticked off he fires his rifle for stress relief. Perfectly legal but it makes a whole lot of noise.

[zachateseverything]

A perfect case in point.

It's fun when people put those dumb rednecks down for being too stupid to see the light, but then say something really intelligent like "popular vote winner." You can't "win" a contest that isn't being held. In 2016 it was 270 to win, and Hillary failed. Due, in part, to being so smart that she thought it was a good idea to stand in rural Ohio and proclaim her intent to put a bunch of coal miners out of work.

If that's smart, I sure am glad I'm stupid.

You've taken a quote out of context and run with it. Good job.

"Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let's reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.

So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

So whether it's coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the '90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.

Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work."

[zachateseverything]

Civilians can't buy automatic weapons without a costly and difficult to obtain license. None of the mass shootings in the US in the past decades have used a machine gun which is what an automatic weapon is. Most of the guns in circulation are semi-automatic, they fire one round for each pull of the trigger. The type of weapon used is what was available. Make semi-automatic weapons illegal, then they'll use revolvers or pump action rifles/shotguns. But we've never been able to convince mass shooters to obey the law anyway, murder is always illegal, so how do we convince those folks to use a weapon with a slightly slower rate of fire?

semi-automatic weapons with replaceable and high capacity magazines should be more difficult to obtain than just walking into a typical sporting goods store.

we won't prevent all mass shootings with increased controls like background checks, limits on weapon types, etc. but we can sure as hell reduce the incidence rate and the total number of fatalities.

[zachateseverything]

I think there's a lot of bluster from folks who want change. IMO, the only way to make the change is to do a root cause analysis on the changes in our culture in the past several decades. We've had AR type rifles since the late 50's, they've been available but only in the past decades have they been used in mass shootings. What changed in our society? It wasn't the introduction of the AR style guns. What made people think it was a solution to kill many people? Is it the media coverage and the brief fame of being a mass murderer? Would different news coverage discourage the shooters? Would prosecution of family members who knew of a shooter's mental condition and possession of a gun make a difference. Accessories to murder charges? We want our news and every network wants to be first because they're advertising dollars depend on it. Is the 24 hour news cycle partially to blame?

It's not the gun that changed, it's our society. We've always had guns.

It would be easier to take this post seriously if the gun lobby hadn't been successful in preventing government agencies like the CDC into doing real research into gun violence and gun deaths.

[gregl]

I've been hesitant to wade into this thread, but since it's been pretty polite and respectful... Background: I come from a rural Republican background. Everyone in my family had firearms. Hunting and shooting were a part of life. With that said, I can't for the life of me figure out modern America's resistance to lessening gun deaths and injuries. You can have both the Second Amendment and better firearm control. The two are not mutually exclusive. One of my neighbors is a firearms enthusiast who works as an ATF agent. We respectfully talk firearms issues all the time while walking our dogs. His perspective has resonated with me: gun violence crosses state lines and is a national problem. It should be regulated at a national level. Appropriate background checks for ALL firearms transactions (including transfers within families), common electronic databases for tracking weapons, and limits on certain types of firearms. I'll end with the advice of an uncle who was a former Marine, expert marksman, skilled hunter, and master gunsmith. As a teenager, I asked him what he thought about military-type rifles available to the general public (e.g., the AR15). His response was that they had no place in the world of hunters and shooting sports. If he couldn't take down game with one or two shots, or hit a target accurately with one shot, why have a weapon with a large magazine anyway?

Greg

[monadnocky]

I'm having some problems with terminology here, as I think it confuses those who don't understand firearm actions. A Ruger 10/22 plinker is a semi-automatic, so is an AR-15 or an AK. The destructive difference between the two is orders of magnitude (of course, ignoring extended magazines, bump stocks, other accessories, what have you). Referring to destructive power of a firearm by action only is really missing the boat.
All "semi-automatics" are not military-style tools of killing.
FWIW, I'm a firearms owner who is 100% in favor of MUCH stricter gun laws.