Time to revisit the 2nd Amendment?

[ChiSox_Sonix]

But by doing that you're restricting the right of 99.9% of people for the sake of .01%. We don't do this with any other issue where death is an unfortunate result and we know it'll happen. It's all based on people like Balta who fear they'll just be randomly shot by vigilantes in the streets. I'd imagine your odds are better at winning the lottery than being a victim of a stray bullet or intentional gun crime like Newton.

 

Well that's not true.

 

But your odds are better of being killed by a drunk driver, however.

[witesoxfan]

If people have good ways to suggest laws that would reduce the incidence of drunk driving, I'd be totally game for those also.

 

I think city-funded tipsy-tow programs or free drivers or something like that, the type of thing that happens on expensive nights, would be a great thing to have in areas with multiple bars. I'd think of it as effectively an expense that the city imposes upon those facilities.

 

1 DUI, license suspended for a year; 2 DUI, license suspended indefinitely until re-approved by said power; 3 DUI, never, ever, ever get your license back

[LittleHurt05]

That's a pretty general statement. You're telling me Modern Combat is only sold in the states?

 

Is that a video game? Obviously, violent games & movies are available in other parts of the world. But nowhere else are they glorified in the media as they are here and IMO that definitely has an effect on the violence in this country.

[Balta1701]

Why stop at guns? Shouldn't we attempt to make laws to make sure anything which can harm someone else be kept out of the hands of people who might misuse them, whether maliciously or otherwise?

To some extent...yes. There's a cost-benefit calculation in all of them, I'll grant...it doesn't make sense to bankrupt your country by doing salmonella inspections...but we do that with a lot of things. Toys (CPSC, which shoudl be stronger and better funded), Drugs/Food products (USDA/FDA), automobiles (go buy a new car without an airbag), Cigarettes (have your 14 year old buy you a pack), etc.

 

We can do better with some of these, I'll admit. Some of them are deliberately set up to fail because the industry doesn't want them to succeed since it would cost money. But typically, outside of a small group, you don't hear people screaming it's unconstitutional when you want to do a better job inspecting fruit for e coli contamination, and you don't have people fantasizing about e coli giving them super powers necessary to resist some sort of scenario that almost never happens.

[ChiSox_Sonix]

Is that a video game? Obviously, violent games & movies are available in other parts of the world. But nowhere else are they glorified in the media as they are here and IMO that definitely has an effect on the violence in this country.

 

Those video games are much more popular in the East Asian countries, so I'm not so sure you can make a strong correlation there.

[Balta1701]

1 DUI, license suspended for a year; 2 DUI, license suspended indefinitely until re-approved by said power; 3 DUI, never, ever, ever get your license back

Obvious problem with that setup is that you haven't prevented the person with no license from owning a car, and you might well have transformed them into a person who drives without a license. It might work for some people but not for others. If it reduces the incidence, it's a decent regulation, but it still leaves a "gun show used car purchase" loophole to fix.

[StrangeSox]

See, this is the disconnect for me in this discussion. There are people who have guns, who have grown up with guns and don't live on top of someone else because they have land and space. They DO use guns on the weekends for kicks. I grew up with land and I would routinely go out and shoot at cans or clay pigeons or whatever. I wasn't killing anything. I wasn't shooting someone because I needed to wait for a pizza, I shot at a plastic or tin object because it was FUN to do.

 

Surprisingly i'm not some deranged individual that might shoot someone at any moment! Shocking!

 

Unfortunately, you can't routinely and accurately predict if/when someone might 'snap' or act irrationally with a weapon. It's not deranged people that are shooting their children accidentally at home when they're sneaking in late. I don't think Zimmerman or Dunn were deranged or clinically mentally disturbed.

 

Look, personally, I like the mechanical aspects of guns from the engineering perspective. I'm sure I would enjoy target shooting. I don't think I'd enjoy hunting myself, but I don't have a moral problem with it. Yet, at the same time, I recognize that the wide-spread presence of guns in our society is causing real pain and suffering. I don't want to take away someone's perfectly benign hobby but, at the same time, you can't know when the tool of that hobby will become a tool of violence--nobody is purely evil and many people are law-abiding, responsible gun owners right up until they aren't. It's not that I think you, personally, or ptact etc. will be going around shooting people up or even that your personal guns that will fall into the wrong hands. It's that the ease with which you can legally get a gun, even in Illinois, means that it's much easier for anyone to get a gun. Then we get into a circle of violence that eats itself, where the prevalence of guns and gun crimes is used to justify more people with more guns in more places. Then we get stories where people who are otherwise perfectly normal, sane human beings make stupid snap decisions (Dunn, Zimmerman, pizza guy) and someone else ends up dead or injured. Or we get easy, untraced straw purchases funneling guns into communities trying their best to keep these weapons that have caused so much devastation and grief out. Or we get kids accidentally killing themselves or others when they get a hold of a gun. Or, most tragically, we have someone's own weapons taken, used against them and then used to slaughter 26 more people.

 

If we had some way of knowing beforehand who's deranged, who might accidentally or carelessly or naively allow access to someone who is deranged, who may funnel these guns to criminals, or who may make a very bad decision in a heated moment, it would be a different situation. But we don't, and we can't. The person making that bad decision could easily be you or I, and it could result in some innocent person being dead and you spending the rest of your life in jail or worse. When I look at it that way, and I look at how just about every other country in the world handles gun control and I look at our own successes in this country, I have to believe that there's a valid public policy response that can reduce gun violence in this country. To say that there's simply nothing we can do, that we just have to live with these awful incidents again and again and again, on a daily basis in many communities, is a defeatist attitude that I simply cannot and will not accept.

[witesoxfan]

Obvious problem with that setup is that you haven't prevented the person with no license from owning a car, and you might well have transformed them into a person who drives without a license. It might work for some people but not for others. If it reduces the incidence, it's a decent regulation, but it still leaves a "gun show used car purchase" loophole to fix.

 

You are looking at the same problems with gun control as well. There is no perfect solution.

[StrangeSox]

Those video games are much more popular in the East Asian countries, so I'm not so sure you can make a strong correlation there.

 

It was the #1 selling game of all-time in the UK according to wiki.

[Balta1701]

You are looking at the same problems with gun control as well. There is no perfect solution.

I could live with that if we even pretended to make an effort at trying in the first place.

[ChiSox_Sonix]

Obvious problem with that setup is that you haven't prevented the person with no license from owning a car, and you might well have transformed them into a person who drives without a license. It might work for some people but not for others. If it reduces the incidence, it's a decent regulation, but it still leaves a "gun show used car purchase" loophole to fix.

 

Well if they get caught operating a vehicle without a license due to an alcohol related suspension, send them to jail. That would hopefully help to deter it.

[LittleHurt05]

Those video games are much more popular in the East Asian countries, so I'm not so sure you can make a strong correlation there.

 

And all of the violence shown on TV in America?

[ChiSox_Sonix]

And all of the violence shown on TV in America?

 

I really think you're overestimating how "different" it is here as opposed to frequently compared countries like Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, UK, France etc...

[Jenksismyhero]

And all of the violence shown on TV in America?

 

I don't see how violent movies or tv shows play into this. If anything, the people that perform these acts are seeking attention, so it's the non-stop coverage of these tragedies that they're going for. We learn what's right or wrong at an early age, violence is no different than cheating or lying. Do we blame movies for Wall Street being a bunch of greedy whores? When certain coaches and administrators at school cheat at sports, do we blame "win at all costs" sports movies? Nope.

 

[StrangeSox]

I don't see how violent movies or tv shows play into this. If anything, the people that perform these acts are seeking attention, so it's the non-stop coverage of these tragedies that they're going for. We learn what's right or wrong at an early age, violence is no different than cheating or lying. Do we blame movies for Wall Street being a bunch of greedy whores? When certain coaches and administrators at school cheat at sports, do we blame "win at all costs" sports movies? Nope.

 

do we know this for sure or is this mainly 'conventional wisdom'?

[Reddy]

But by doing that you're restricting the right of 99.9% of people for the sake of .01%. We don't do this with any other issue where death is an unfortunate result and we know it'll happen. It's all based on people like Balta who fear they'll just be randomly shot by vigilantes in the streets. I'd imagine your odds are better at winning the lottery than being a victim of a stray bullet or intentional gun crime like Newton.

30,000 people.

[Jenksismyhero]

30,000 people.

 

But cut that number in half, at least, for the people who deliberately kill other people because they're gang members and criminals.

 

And also ignore the amount of people that die from other random acts of violence, from DUI's, from cigarettes, from whatever else we as society accept because it's an acceptable loss to allow us to do X.

[Jenksismyhero]

do we know this for sure or is this mainly 'conventional wisdom'?

 

Conventional wisdom I suppose, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that these people are looking for attention and what better way than a mass tragedy. Why would this 20 year old have done what he did if not for attention? He was pissed at his mom, so he killed her. Why go to the school too?

[StrangeSox]

But cut that number in half, at least, for the people who deliberately kill other people because they're gang members and criminals.

 

And also ignore the amount of people that die from other random acts of violence, from DUI's, from cigarettes, from whatever else we as society accept because it's an acceptable loss to allow us to do X.

 

I'm sorry, I care about reducing gang violence as well.

[StrangeSox]

Conventional wisdom I suppose, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that these people are looking for attention and what better way than a mass tragedy. Why would this 20 year old have done what he did if not for attention? He was pissed at his mom, so he killed her. Why go to the school too?

 

Not being a psychologist or sociologist or having read much (if anything) on the topic, I don't feel I can give any sort of an informed answer. But it seems like the lazy media-explanation to me and doesn't seem quite right or universally applicable.

[Reddy]

But cut that number in half, at least, for the people who deliberately kill other people because they're gang members and criminals.

 

And also ignore the amount of people that die from other random acts of violence, from DUI's, from cigarettes, from whatever else we as society accept because it's an acceptable loss to allow us to do X.

 

and guess what? we legislated DUI's AND cigarettes! Guess it's time we do it with guns too!

[LittleHurt05]

I don't see how violent movies or tv shows play into this. If anything, the people that perform these acts are seeking attention, so it's the non-stop coverage of these tragedies that they're going for. We learn what's right or wrong at an early age, violence is no different than cheating or lying. Do we blame movies for Wall Street being a bunch of greedy whores? When certain coaches and administrators at school cheat at sports, do we blame "win at all costs" sports movies? Nope.

 

 

My concern is that it desensitizies children to the violence. They know it's "wrong", but it seems normal and it's not that big of a deal.

[bmags]

I think this is one topic we don't really need analogies for to understand, it's just convoluting the argument. I have no doubt that is the aim of a few posters right now.

 

From a couple of pages to go, Jenks was arguing against that Heller was making it easier to restrict guns because there was no slippery slope. I tend to agree with him, however, I do believe it still left quite a bit of area for regulations on guns, especially concerning sales.

 

I'd prefer we really dive into the new assault rifle ban so it doesn't repeat the same mistakes. I'd like a hard magazine size restriction. I'd like Colorado's law to be encouraged federally by providing matching grants. I'd like gun shows to be shut down, or force any gun show seller to get a license and be forced to follow new regulations.

[Jenksismyhero]

and guess what? we legislated DUI's AND cigarettes! Guess it's time we do it with guns too!

 

Please point me to the legislation on the books that outright bans your ability to have alcohol, cigarettes and a vehicle, no matter the situation.

[Reddy]

Please point me to the legislation on the books that outright bans your ability to have alcohol, cigarettes and a vehicle, no matter the situation.

did ANY of us suggest that with guns? i sure didn't.