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Parkland, FL High School Shooting


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Well we can contact our congress people, hold their feet to the fire, and possibly, possibly push through some kind of assault weapon ban, or nice sounding quasi-restriction.

 

At that point, sales of assault weapons go through the roof, anticipating the ban, and everybody you don't want to have an assault rifle will still have an assault rifle, including a robust black market of the literally millions of assault rifles  already in circulation, and a gun culture that will happily ignore the law to procure them for any paying party for years to come. 

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2 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

Well we can contact our congress people, hold their feet to the fire, and possibly, possibly push through some kind of assault weapon ban, or nice sounding quasi-restriction.

 

At that point, sales of assault weapons go through the roof, anticipating the ban, and everybody you don't want to have an assault rifle will still have an assault rifle, including a robust black market of the literally millions of assault rifles  already in circulation, and a gun culture that will happily ignore the law to procure them for any paying party for years to come. 

are you saying it is pointless to try to control this?   

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1 hour ago, Branno said:

 

Why do people NEED assault rifles? Well... most (all?) don't. Just like people don't NEED cars that can go faster than the speed limit, trucks when they don't haul large items, or any ridiculous item that people might buy. They want them.

 

But, for some it's reasonable. I was in the Army for 12 years and was gifted an AR-15 from a family member so I could improve my weapons qualification scores. I needed it for work. Now it just sits waiting for the next time I have a friend from overseas say they want to go to the range and shoot a gun for the first time.

 

All that being said, the only difference between an AR-15 (or any so-called assault weapon) and any standard semi-automatic hunting rifle is that assault weapons are styled after military weapons and have some combination of pistol grip, flash suppressor, telescoping stock. There really is no difference between most hunting rifles and an AR-15... we've just decided one is more dangerous because of how it looks. Kind of silly if you ask me.

 

But! If it means we can see a reduction in the number of mass shootings, let's ban the black plastic. Make more boring guns. It worked in the past, then we can start to address the real problems with our society and try to figure out why so many white males are this violent.

 

I mostly agree with your general premise, but as far as the bold goes: those items are not designed to kill. So yes, the need for them, necessarily, isn't there, but it's a false equivalency to compare them to an AR-15 (or any firearm, for that matter). 

Edited by Cdog923
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4 minutes ago, Stumpy1 said:

Take away guns and people will still find ways to cause mass casualties.  Its not necessarily a gun issue but a mental issue IMO.  

 

Then I suppose we should allow civilians to be able to purchase frag grenades, rocket launchers, and WMD's as well, as long as they're not crazy.

 

Your argument makes no sense. Take away guns, less people will find less accessible ways to cause mass casualties. They'll still happen, but the goal isn't to eliminate entirely, it's to effect the issue to matter of degrees. 

 

 

Edited by Landlord
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4 minutes ago, Landlord said:

 

Then I suppose we should allow civilians to be able to purchase frag grenades, rocket launchers, and WMD's as well, as long as they're not crazy.

 

Your argument makes no sense. Take away guns, less people will find less accessible ways to cause mass casualties. They'll still happen, but the goal isn't to eliminate entirely, it's to effect the issue to matter of degrees. 

 

 

I see you are being dense but thats fine. 

 

If someone wants to cause mass casualties and dont have access to guns, they will find other ways of doing it.  Sure, guns make it easier but i imagine that it doesnt matter to someone who has the intent from the get-go.  

 

 

Edited by Stumpy1
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11 minutes ago, Stumpy1 said:

Take away guns and people will still find ways to cause mass casualties.  Its not necessarily a gun issue but a mental issue IMO.  

England, Australia, and other countries have implemented stricter gun bans. They have markedly lower occurrences such as this. Why? They must not have mental health issues there, lucky. 

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1 hour ago, Cdog923 said:

 

I mostly agree with your general premise, but as far as the bold goes: those items are not designed to kill. So yes, the need for them, necessarily, isn't there, but it's a false equivalency to compare them to an AR-15 (or any firearm, for that matter). 

 

 

I think you missed the point. An assault rifle is just a semi-automatic rifle that is styled to look like a weapon used by the military. All that is different from a semi-automatic hunting rifle and an AR-15 is how it looks (not how it works). The question you posed wasn't why do people NEED guns, you asked why do people NEED AR-15's. They don't. I then used fast cars as an analogy to explain why people WANT them. I don't need a car that can go 100 miles an hour (no one does, well except for professional racers), but maybe I want one. People that are buying a gun don't need an AR-15 but they want one. It's normally the same reasoning used in both cases. It's not equivocating the purchases, just explaining the psychology.

 

It's why I always roll my eyes when people want to ban assault weapons. It's a made up term to refer to any semi-automatic weapon that looks a certain way (it's definitely not based on how it functions, other than requiring it has a removable magazine). Take a look at the Federal Assault Weapons Ban text some time; it's hilarious that we passed a law to prevent violence based on what a gun looks like and not how it functions.

 

The fact that we saw reduced gun violence is amazing, the effectiveness of weapons didn't decrease but people apparently didn't buy guns that weren't their weapon of choice.

 

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9 minutes ago, Stumpy1 said:

I see you are being dense but thats fine. 

 

If someone wants to cause mass casualties and dont have access to guns, they will find other ways of doing it.  Sure, guns make it easier but i imagine that it doesnt matter to someone who has the intent from the get-go.  

 

 

 

 

Intent isn't an on/off switch. 

 

Let's say 100 people want to build a bookshelf.

 

Some already owned all the materials and tools, but most don't, and out of that 100 people, 6 of them weren't determined enough to go to the work of acquiring the resources. Down to 94.

 

Of the 94, 12 don't live within a realistic distance of a hardware store to get everything they need, so the bookshelves don't get built. Down to 82.

 

Of the 82, 16 don't have enough money for all the supplies they'll need, so the bookshelves don't get built. Down to 66.

 

Of the 66, we live in a dystopian future where hammers are highly regulated and controlled, and 15 don't pass background checks. Down to 51.

 

Of the 51, 24 are on record in a national database as having a history of mental illness and are denied access to the hammers. They all try to find them illegally, but only 6 of the 24 know a contact or method of even finding illegal hammers, so 18 more bookshelves never built.

 

Only 33 of the original 100 people end up building their bookshelves because of ease of access, effort of acquirement, knowledge of what's needed, mental health, so on and so forth.

 

Every step of the way is a filter which catches and stops some scenarios. The more sensical filters you add, the more you weed out the wrong intentions or the ill-equipped. You don't cure the problem, but you do help make the situation better. This isn't hard to understand.

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The one thing I see continuously get brought up in this thread is that there is an assumption people want to ban guns or just simply assault weapons completely. While in my opinion, I think banning these types of weapons would help tremendously as evidence by countries all over the world, that is not what most are arguing. We have to start somewhere with this issue because it is one that is too hard to ignore anymore, and quite frankly should have been a long time ago.

 

Is it really that outlandish to start requiring more background checks to obtain these types of weapons? Is that too much of a hassle for law-abiding citizens to take part in? Sure, the people with intentions to carry out these acts will more times than not find a way to still obtain the weapons. But if it can even stop one of these tragedies or even save just one life is it not worth it? People get too focused on the idea that people are coming to take their guns, and that just isn't the case at all. Most people just simply want tighter restrictions and common sense laws that can help to START combating these issues. Nothing will change overnight but we have to start moving forward with ways to stop these unbelievable tragedies. When each one becomes less and less shocking, there is a major problem. Sorry for the rant........

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9 minutes ago, QMany said:

England, Australia, and other countries have implemented stricter gun bans. They have markedly lower occurrences such as this. Why? They must not have mental health issues there, lucky. 

 

France has pretty strict gun control and they have fairly regular mass shootings. The Swiss have tons of guns and almost no mass shootings (at least none that I've heard of).

 

I know you're being sarcastic to try to make a point, but every culture is different. We still see violent attacks in the UK (bombings, vehicle attacks, acid attacks, etc), but little gun violence. In the US we've seen a reduction in overall violence but a large increase in gun violence.

 

Sure, if we get stricter gun control we'll probably see a reduction in gun violence (like we did during the Assault Weapon Ban days), but it'll be really interesting to see what our overall intentional homicide rate stays at. I'm just worried that we're so focused on the tool used to commit violence that we aren't looking at the cause of the violence.

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8 minutes ago, Branno said:

France has pretty strict gun control and they have fairly regular mass shootings.

 

 

France has an average of just under 3 gun deaths per 100,000 people per year. The United States has an average of almost 11. France has an average of 2.16 gun suicides per 100,000 people, compared to 6.3 gun suicides in America. God, I'd love to have France's problem.

 

Edit: The numbers on my source might be off, but according to this link, I was being generous to the United States. Original numbers came from this Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

 

 

636425641505158901-100117-GunHomicides.p

Edited by Landlord
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