continuing proofs America is wacko

I think we know the why Halfwise- we just dont like the answer.
Its a numbers game.
Humans are animals, and each one of us is the product of a fair bit of randomness. You get enough people you get more at all points on the 'human animal' scale.
In a big population like America odds are you will get just as many who are gentically predisposed to mental illenss -whether that manifets as depressions, manias, or violence- as those who are predisposed to heart attacks, or strokes or liver failure, or who are diabetic.
Short of direct population control this will remain the case whilst individuals are free to breed as they please.
And under such circumstances making guns freely available does not seem the best policy.

There's never going to be a single explanation for why some people kill others but if you want to look at broad trends, well, forensic psychiatrists have been giving this advice for a long time (courtesy Charlie Brooker):



Incidentally, the news media has been even worse than normal in their coverage of this story. They began reporting the shooter's name after it was leaked by a police officer but before official confirmation was given; now they're that it was actually the original guy's brother who was the shooter. Or maybe not, because, y'know, the police haven't announced anything and the media is just jacking off and trying to fill their 24/7 cycle. Then they started broadcasting the killer's Facebook profile on every major cable news network (and many local networks and online sources) ... except it wasn't the fucking guy. It was some other dude who happened to have the same name and hometown. This went on for a few hours before they backed down, but not before the Facebook guy was bombarded with thousands of hate mail messages and deleted his profile.

None of this is new, and of course the real tragedy here is the deaths of 27 people, but the monumental fuck-up by both mainstream and online media in covering the story just adds an extra layer of disgusting to the whole thing.

Im a big Brooker fan, but I dont think you can solely attribute these acts to the media-no matter how poorly or voyueristically they act.

I saw Obamas press conference- man looked genuinely shattered by the news.
It will be interesting to see what he eventually chooses to do in the wake of this.

Do folk in America have to have a licence (involving getting a psyche screening first), and a lockable gun cabinet with ammunition locked separate? I mean, is their any sense at all that firearms should be managed with a view to thinking they may be dangerous in the wrong hands?

Pettytyrant101 wrote:I saw Obamas press conference- man looked genuinely shattered by the news.

I could not help thinking he looked a Reasonable Man pondering over Ridiculous Gun Laws.

well if this doesnt change things, nothing will.

Orwell wrote:Do folk in America have to have a licence (involving getting a psyche screening first), and a lockable gun cabinet with ammunition locked separate? I mean, is their any sense at all that firearms should be managed with a view to thinking they may be dangerous in the wrong hands?

There's federal law that requires background checks and many other bits of paperwork. Also there used to be a federal law that restricted assault weapons and large magazines to licensed collectors, but the law "expired" under Bush. Most other laws are state by state, as it should be in my opinion. The needs of urban, rural and wilderness areas are just so much different!

Unfortunately the pro gun lobbies have become such a force that states and cities that want to have greater restrictions end up tiptoeing around the extremists so they don't end up spending millions being challenged in court. To me it seems obvious that any area where the majority of the voters feel that there should be stronger rules for the general safety should have the freedom to do that, but so far nobody is stepping up to bat!

Yeah, I just read up on that. Even more sweeping was the Supreme Court ruling in the Chicago case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._Chicago

Constitutional law is pretty arcane stuff and I scratch my head sometimes, but it looks like following this ruling it will pretty hard for a city or state to entirely ban handguns within people's homes.

If instead of effectively a complete ban they'd continued to issue licenses but made them increasingly restrictive, watching popular opinion as they went, the law probably would have stood. Both DC and Chicago seem to have tried for too much regulation all at once, and it backfired when they lost popular support.

I have to admit that out here most people don't care what regulations are implemented in the cities, except to the extent that the NRA and FOX stir people up about hidden agendas to take everybody's guns. But it gets scary if sweeping ordinances are imposed by authority without some sort of initiative process to demonstrate popular support. We really do still need guns out here in the country, if only for dealing with animals. And although I've never used a gun for self-defense, and hopefully never will, I do see the value of the argument.

I don't know if people realize how little formal law enforcement there is in most rural areas. There are only a couple deputies here to handle the whole county so, just as we have volunteer firefighters and ambulance corps, we mostly self-police. The county sheriff and courts encourage this.

That works fine as long as the community is stable, but whenever there is any kind of 'get-tough' policy in the nearby cities, all the criminal activity moves into the country where they know there are no detectives and almost no budget to put people in jail. At these times we'll get a sudden flood of people cruising around looking for cheap houses to cook meth in, and no authorities to call.

The one thing we've got going for us at times like these is that everybody in the city thinks we're inbred, crazy, and armed to the teeth.
Who am I to argue?

The US attitude just confuses me I have to say. Particualry the idea that people have a 'right' to own a gun.
There are rights that seem worth while, and worth fighing for- the right to be free, not enslaved, the right not to be tortured, the right not be incarcarated without a fair trial- the right to have a lethal device doesnt seem to me to stand alongside other rights, and in fact every time I hear an Amercan say it is their right to have a gun it belittles all those other rights in my view.

The way it works here is simple- guns are illegal, no one has a right to them, but you can have one under license if you need one- farmers, game keepers, deer cullers and obviosly police armed response ect all are allowed to own guns under strict usage conditions. But they dont have a right, just a genuine need.
Treated as working tools guns are fine- treated as a right for all- well you get disasters and tradegies like this it seems to me.

I agree Petty. Even seeing a policeman with a gun makes me uneasy.

Whilst I agee the media plays its negatve role in all this its still ignoring the problem as far as I am concerend.
In a large population you will have a percent of people who are mentally unstable and prone to violence- if you have freely available guns in such a society then events like this are inevitable.
You can never stamp out nuters like this completely- as has been shown both here in Scotland and more recently in Norway.
But you can mke it more difficult with proper gun laws. And not insiting everyone has a 'right' to a gun.
They dont- especially not those who are mentally ill.

apart from people who use guns as part of work, no one has the 'right' to use a deadly weapon, its not a right its a tool. Its a hang over from when life was tough hundreds of years ago. Nobody 'needs' a gun in their house now, and the more guns there are the more chance for accidents to happen or moments of anger, or mistakes to happen. Humans dont deserve to have deadly weapons unless they are fighting for survival in a war. We are far too unstable, selfish, angry and weird to have guns, we are also too clumsy and just plain stoopid. Only farmers and those who work with animals and other practical jobs like that 'need' guns, the rest of us dont, and should not be let within yards of one. until we are more evolved, and then we wont need them.

I agree that there ought to be more restrictions on the availability of guns. They're dangerous in the wrong hands, though some would argue no greater than cars or cell phones (aside from the tens of thousands of people killed in accidents, both have been used in murders) . I also understand that the UK has a policing system that works amazingly well and makes everybody feel quite safe. In fact it's a model for the world!

But you have to admit you have a certain advantage being a small island nation. Imagine the complexities if you had to police everything over to Iran and Kazakhstan. I think that's about the right area and population to be comparable to the US. Now imagine that for every 10 citizens (including children!) there are 9 guns! Now further imagine that it's been this way for 200 years and that all the police procedures are based on the assumption that most people are armed.

By that I mean that if I were to call the police because an armed man had entered my house, all I would get was phone advice and possibly a follow-up visit the next day. This is where the feeling of a right comes from. Shouldn't a citizen have some right to defend themselves within their home if the police is consistently unable to provide that protection? That's the question that the court was asked to decide, and it's not an easy one.

Personally I think it's entirely reasonable that owning a handgun, or any gun for that matter, should require at least the level of training and licensing required to drive a car. (By the way, mentally ill people probably shouldn't have cars either, but then we've either got to provide better public transportation or institutionalize them. It's a very closely related issue.)

But this is all really a tangent to the real issue which Eldo and Norc have pointed out. Gun ownership has been this high for the entire history of the US, but it wasn't till deregulation of the TV news by the FCC in the 70's that we got the media circus we see now, and mass murder suicides have been increasing dramatically ever since. The connection is hard to deny.

Really.

When was a kid there was a neighbor down the road who was a farmer but also a deputy sheriff on the side. When there was a problem in our end of the county his wife would get him out of the field, he'd run into the house, put on the uniform, stick the suction cup flashing light on the top of his farm truck and go sort things out.

Then new laws required more training and unions required more pay, so he was let go and additional full-time deputies were hired. The only trouble was that we're 30 miles from the county seat on a road that isn't always good, so you wanted to plan on 1-2 hour response.

Then additional regulations required more manning at the jail, often meaning that there would be 3 people on staff 24-7 to watch one or two minimum security prisoners. Then they added additional manning requirements for the 911 call center, all well-intentioned regulations that make sense in larger populations with larger tax base.

But for our county that meant that it was often a challenge to keep 2 deputies on duty for the whole county, and they tried to station then near the 2 population centers. Now if I call for assistance in the night one of those deputies has to drive all the way up here, sort things out, drive back and write a report, blowing most of his shift. As I understand it, when this happens the off-duty officers will be called from their beds to stand by while this is going on, and are rightly paid overtime for this.

So you see why when you call 911 they ask something like, "Is anybody hurt? Can you handle the situation yourself?" (With a strong hint that you should.)

dial-up. 64k phone modem but it's nowhere near that fast.

Seems to me looking in from outside there are two seperate issues here- there is budegting and coverage of emergency services in different counties and states, and then there is the constitutional right to be armed.
Given the near religous manner in which the US treats the consitution Id imagine changing the local laws is much easier than changing the constitution to be more sensible.
And when the constitution was written I am sure they did not envision anything like automatic weapons spraying hundreds of bullets in a second and if they had they mght have worded that bit differently.