A "common sense" proposal that will piss off both sides

[VikingsGuy]

Can you carry a nuke or a attack helicopter in your pocket?

Let's be clear, if I get to have a weapon of war, I want it to be a nuke sub. Would have been great to spend covid lockdown in the south pacific and launch a few nukes to defend Ukraine

 

[406dn]

Regardless of the circumstances of access to guns the "real cause" of mass shootings is that an individual chose to commit those acts. The solution should address that decision process not the means with which it was executed.

Good luck with that. As mentioned in the earlier post, we are not unique in our various societal ills. The obvious difference is, in Europe there is not ubiquitous ownership of high capacity semi-automatic center fire rifles.

A mass killer will pick the most lethal weapon available to them. Our country allows them access to a very lethal one.

 

[BuckRut]

What if access to those means is the key factor in the decision process?

I don't believe material objects can on their own provoke decisions. Without any context and previous notions about those objects there would be no understanding or desire from them.

 

[dgc1963]

Their are some good Ideas posted here and some silly thoughts
The 2nd is their for a reason and I support it
But their has to be a black hole in some ones heart so deep to go into a class of 8,9 and 10 year old kids and open fire with any gun I can and never will understand THAT maybe thats the problem or one of them we try to find a way to stop something that we just cant understand or even comprehend .

 

[elkduds]

MA has safe storage laws, transportation, trigger locks... bla bla bla lol everything you can image.

Presumably keeping guns out of peoples hands has the same effect both ways, killing each other and themselves.

Again not an endorsement of a law, just trying to answer the question objectively.

View attachment 223708

View attachment 223709

This takes us into the realm of mental health care access, which is higher in urban areas of the east. Thanks for graphing and being transparent about what the data indicates, @willm1313. You have no future in gov't employment or marketing.

 

[np307]

I don't believe material objects can on their own provoke decisions. Without any context and previous notions about those objects there would be no understanding or desire from them.

Okay, so then back to the post you first quoted of mine; how do you explain people making that decision in the US without making it in othe locations?

I think its a bit naive to believe that the object doesn't play a major role in the decision making process.

 

[Deleted member 28227]

So you stick by your comment that firearm deaths between MT and MA were comparable?
OK go with it, I disagree.
I think looking at homicides involving guns not suicide makes more sense.

Depends on what question someone is asking, if you’re looking at violence than I agree you should only look at homicide.

The 20 year average of MT is 1.8 to MA 1.48... CO is at 2.48.

Now a confounding variable to small states like MT are 1 off incidents, like if there is 1 mass shooting that rate goes off the chart. I believe... and I would have look this up, there was a murder suicide + kids that happened in WY? a while back and that 1 incident made WY always look like it had a crazy high rate, but it was literally 1 incident in a decade+

Ps and a non sequitur there is this meme/graph going around about deaths of kids... ~4,800 a year, but kids are defined as 0-19. So of that ~4,800 approx 1900 are 15-19 year old male homicides... and of those 25 are service member who died this year while on active duty...

 

[Nick87]

A mass killer will pick the most lethal weapon available to them. Our country allows them access to a very lethal one.

It also allows everyone else access to a very lethal one to stop someone who doesn't care whats legal or rational.

 

[Gulf of America]

This takes us into the realm of mental health care access, which is higher in urban areas of the east. Thanks for graphing and being transparent about what the data indicates, @willm1313. You have no future in gov't employment or marketing.

To further muddy the waters, I would guess that the rates of two-parent families and certainly people who claim to adhere to Christianity are higher in Montana than in the urban centers. I'm no wllm1313 so I lack the data to prove this or the ability to present it in any legible way if I did have it, but many would make the argument that those factors should make an rural "traditional values" state much safer than an urban one.

 

[BuckRut]

Okay, so then back to the post you first quoted of mine; how do you explain people making that decision in the US without making it in othe locations?

I think its a bit naive to believe that the object doesn't play a major role in the decision making process.

I'm not a psychologist so I am not sure of the exact reasons but I am fairly certain it isn't because these people are so overwhelmed by their access to guns that they can't help but shoot people. You can look at the vast majority of people who commit these crimes and they have a history of mental illness or other contributing factors long before they gain access to guns.

 

[np307]

I'm not a psychologist so I am not sure of the exact reasons but I am fairly certain it isn't because these people are so overwhelmed by their access to guns that they can't help but shoot people. You can look at the vast majority of people who commit these crimes and they have a history of mental illness or other contributing factors long before they gain access to guns.

Right and the premise of my point is that people with a long history of mental illness exist in other countries too. Why don't these events happen there?

 

[woods89]

To further muddy the waters, I would guess that the rates of two-parent families and certainly people who claim to adhere to Christianity are higher in Montana than in the urban centers. I'm no wllm1313 so I lack the data to prove this or the ability to present it in any legible way if I did have it, but many would make the argument that those factors should make an rural "traditional values" state much safer than an urban one.

To further muddy the waters.......

I don't live in Montana, but do live in Southern MO, which I suppose would be considered at least on the edge of the Bible Belt. We do have religious people here, in a traditional sense, and if you want to look selectively you can certainly find some dysfunction there. What complicates some of this is the dark underbelly of substance abuse that some of these rural communities deal with, that us usually, but not always, a separate culture from the religious people.I live in meth country, and that I'm sure has a major effect on MO gun violence numbers, both homicide and suicide.
Nothing, it seems, is simple....

 

[elkduds]

The suicide rates in Rocky Mountain states are highest in the nation.

Suicide Rates by State | Suicide Prevention | CDC

Suicide rates by states and by year in the U.S., 2014-2021.

www.cdc.gov

Mass shootings in the U.S. by state 1982-2022 | Statista

As of May 2022, California had the most mass shootings in the United States, with 23 total shootings since 1982.

www.statista.com

 

[406dn]

I'm not a psychologist so I am not sure of the exact reasons but I am fairly certain it isn't because these people are so overwhelmed by their access to guns that they can't help but shoot people. You can look at the vast majority of people who commit these crimes and they have a history of mental illness or other contributing factors long before they gain access to guns.

You need to complete your thought. The mentally ill person living in a country that makes the ownership of high capacity semi- automatic center fire weapons difficult or impossible never gains access to the weapon that makes killing a large number of people quickly possible.

They may well stab people on a train or in a night club, but they won't kill nearly as many people on their rampage.

 

[OntarioHunter]

I'm not a psychologist so I am not sure of the exact reasons but I am fairly certain it isn't because these people are so overwhelmed by their access to guns that they can't help but shoot people. You can look at the vast majority of people who commit these crimes and they have a history of mental illness or other contributing factors long before they gain access to guns.

I'm not so sure "vast majority" is accurate. The Vegas shooter was supposedly sane enough. The Nova Scotia denturist who dressed up as a Mountie and then went on a shooting spree with ARs smuggled from US had no history of acting crazy (he did not have a license for restricted weapons either ... not sure why). Did McVey have any record of mental illness before bombing Oklahoma City? It seems the serious whackos are usually more interested in serial killing than mass killing.

 

[406dn]

It also allows everyone else access to a very lethal one to stop someone who doesn't care whats legal or rational.

Consider in some of the recent shootings, law enforcement officers have been slow to actually enter the building the shooter is in.

Both of these most recent mass murders involved shooters that wore some sort of body armor that made stopping them much more difficult.

What sort of society would it be if most everyone walked around with an AR and body armor?

 

[Irrelevant]

since I broke my silence earlier...
I'll just add that I can't support #1 on VG's original list without more exemptions for use with the owner of the firearm (as in I can't lend my new SxS to a buddy for a hunt, while we both follow a bird dog through some likely covert), and inheritance.
Also, and I've maintained this for a while, I pessimistically believe there will always be X number of people in our society wanted to commit these types of crimes. Would we prefer suicide bombers to mass shooters? Because I tend to think that's more the direction we'd head than simply making it so difficult that they won't try to commit the crimes at all.

 

[A207X2]

It also allows everyone else access to a very lethal one to stop someone who doesn't care whats legal or rational.

Well, close but not completely true. It does not allow everyone; and in fact in quite a few of the cases we learned that they didn't acquire them legally.

We've now had a great day of discussion about this topic. Here's what common sense tells us:

1. The toothpaste is out of the tube with regards to guns in the USA. You are simply not going to confiscate all of them and take them all off the street. You're not going to make criminals out of 33 million people overnight. Besides, you're not going to be able to do it at the Federal level as it would be unenforceable. And you can't do it at the State level due to the 14th Amendment (Equal Protection Clause). So forget the idea.
2. There are existing laws in place that - if enforced - would diminish the amount of gun violence. The problem is that we don't have the judicial backbone to go after the criminals with the guns. It would require police sweeps that would most likely be illegal themselves. As much as we want to defend the 2nd Amendment, we must equally defend the 4th Amendment.
3. You can't simply declare "Gun Free Zones" and expect them to work. If it did, we'd have "Hurricane Free Zones" here in Florida. We see that they don't work, and in fact create a horrible sense of false security.
4. Someone mentioned that placing police in schools is great, but we couldn't afford it. So what's the next best option? We have to harden the schools. Controlled access. Metal detectors. Random searches of backpacks. Minimize access points into the facility. I am reading today that the police wouldn't enter the school despite parent's pleas. This is horrible. This happened with the Parkland School shooting here in Florida. The police officer wouldn't go into the school to engage the shooter. In these cases I don't know how motivated the officers were to jump into it. I know I read that one police officer lost a daughter in the shooting. This was a case of where seconds counted, the police were minutes (or in this case an hour) away. There's got to be another way. If arming teachers isn't the way, then vet and train some of the parents and let them do their turn in the school. 3 or 4 parents in a school will have much more skin in the game than some security guard. It really comes down to a question of "How good do you want to feel?". We can do anything - just send money.
5. When (if) a child displays traits that are troubling, get the parents involved. Get the child's medical doctor involved. There have been plenty of the so-called "red flags" in most of these cases. We need to drill down into why no action was taken with apriori knowledge. I think this is a key point.

There are no doubt other points to consider but these are my Top 5. None of them involve changing the 2nd Amendment; it's not the problem here.

 

[Handlebar]

You didn't answer my question...

I live in an extremely small town of 56, closest town over 1000 is 90 miles away, in a county the bigger than Rhode Island with less than 1200 people. The idea that rural children are isolated from people outside their family is wrong.

 

[Handlebar]

Because any gun regulation seems out of the question, how about this. Create secure, staged entry for every primary school in US and hire a full time security guard. Let's estimate the cost. Google says (Google is your friend), 131,000 primary schools in US. Let's guesstimate it costs $200,000 for each school to create this dual-stage entry with intercoms and cameras and safety class, etc. Probably low, but it will work for this purpos and some newer schools already have them. At about 115m US households, that is a one-time tax of about $230. The security guard is a variable cost and depends a lot on locale. But let's say $80,000? Fair? that is an annual tax of $90.

Can we agree on that? Who is in?

I am in, that half of what was just voted on to send to Ukraine.