Oregon Community College Shooting - What law (if any) could have prevented it?

PureX

Well-known member
Then you might as well add automobile accidents to the statistics for gun violence, since driving a car makes a lot of things faster and easier to do.
C'mon, now, don't go flying off into looney land! Guns are designed to kill people, fast and easy. Cars are not. That makes them two very different machines with two very different reasons for existing. And making things faster and easier is pretty much always a positive regarding transporting us from place to place. It's rarely a positive when ending a human life.

I know you're not so stupid as to really think cars and guns are in any way equivalent.
Yes, which is why the NRA should change the wording of their gun safety rules and replace language like "cause injury" with "kill".
It's also why they should stop promoting the idea that "guns don't kill people, ...". Because the whole design and purpose of a gun, is to kill. And the gun cannot distinguish between animals and people, or good people and bad people. So, yes, guns do kill people. It's what they're for. And when we flood a human population with guns, more people will be killed than would have been killed without the guns. Because guns make killing people very quick, easy, and effective.

Trying to proclaim that this is not so is just flat out dishonest, and is willfully ignoring both reason and common sense. Yet this is what the gun lobby, paid for by gun manufacturers, have been endlessly proclaiming for decades. And it's why we will never be able to effectively mitigate the excessive gun violence in our society until we stop believing and spreading these lies.
 

Dan Emanuel

Active member
Comparing countries is a little like comparing apples to oranges. Countries have far more differences than simply the number of guns. Some have relatively weak central governments and massive organized crime problems. Organized crime means a few people with guns kill a lot of people, and that's generally what you see in your chart. Countries that have that problem have much higher gun deaths than the USA, ...
Your making my point for me. Organized crime was the reason for the 1st "gun control law," and organized crime is the reason that we even think about "gun control" at all. The wake of organized crimes terrorism against peaceful, law-abiding society has caused this phenomenon "gun control," and all its harmful effect's upon our population, warping our view's of firearm's as something mystical and black magical, rather than as just another type of dangerous tool (we think in term's of "weapon" a lot when we really mean "dangerous tool"), and putting thing's into our head's that wouldn't otherwise be their, and its because we've been terrorized by criminal's, and this terrorism has spawned other terrorism, unorganized lone wolve's like this most recent mass shooter. Organized crime is the problem, and we have "stuck to our gun's" in spite of the dreadful wake that organized crimes terrorism has caused and still cause's, wherever it still exist's.
...but that's hardly surprising...
Neither was the implication of the chart I posted, which is why I reiterate: End of thread.
...It's also telling that these graphs intentionally exclude suicide. Comparing states is a bit more apples to apples since the USA has relatively similar culture across states.

If we want to compare countries that are at least somewhat similar to the USA in terms of human development you get this:...

Spoiler
guns-and-death-rates.jpg
Show me the regression analysis and the R-square for these data, and then with this estimate of explained variance, we'll be able to talk about just how much "Gun related death's" is anything but trivially affected by "Gun's," and how much is from other factor's not in consideration here.

By eye, I'd put the R-square in the 0.5-0.8 range. I wouldn't be surprised if its more toward 0.5. That would mean that only 50% of the "Gun related death's" variance is explainable by "Gun's," leaving half of it explained by other factor's. Also, since it'd just be a simple regression, we would miss any autocorrelated factor's that are really an estimate of some other factor, that merely coincide's with "Gun's." This lower's the real R-square even more, since it'd be these other factor's that are really driving up the "Gun related death's," and not "Gun's" at all, except trivially. (E.g., you can't have "Gun related death's" with zero gun's.)
...If you're intent on excluding suicide from a debate like this, why? Are those lives less meaningful than anyone else's?
I'm not.
Spoiler
again not true, are you even paying attention to the chart that I posted, is your adherence to liberalism blinding you from the truth. suicides occur in far greater numbers in countries with a lot of gun control laws. If what you said were even remotely true, than countries that have a very high gun ownership rates would have visibly higher suicide rates. we don't see that from the chart below, therefore it is justified to remove suicides from gun death totals since these people would merely substitute their method of harming themselves for something else.

800px-Homicide_and_Suicide_Rate_by_Country.svg.png
End of thread.


DJ
2.3
 

Dan Emanuel

Active member
My proposal was to restore the Militia mentioned in the Second Amendment.
Right now, the Second Amendment is not being applied in the manner intended by the authors....
According to the author's, yes it is. The Supreme Court has recently ruled on two case's involving the Second Amendment, and they have determined that it guarantee's the individual right to keep and bear arm's, apart from whether or not your involved in any militia.


DJ
1.0
 

exminister

Well-known member
Well I'm with Charming Manc really except I see how impossible it would be to disarm America now.

That being the case then everybody needs to be armed...it does seem strange I know but I point out the fact that in the days of the wild west death by gunshot was more rare than people think.

At the moment these shooters go for soft targets, that in itself tells you that if the people were armed the shooters would be deterred.

Always remember this, it is a fact.

People who get a buzz out of inflicting pain and terror are themselves afraid of the same pain and terror they afflict on others.


For all the talk of the “Wild West,” the policymakers of 1880 Tombstone—and many other Western towns—were ardent supporters of gun control. When people now compare things to the “shootout at the OK Corral,” they mean vigilante violence by gunfire. But this is exactly what the Tombstone town council had been trying to avoid.

In late 1880, as regional violence ratcheted up, Tombstone strengthened its existing ban on concealed weapons to outlaw the carrying of any deadly weapons within the town limits. The Earps (who were Republicans) and Doc Holliday maintained that they were acting as law officers—not citizen vigilantes—when they shot their opponents. That is to say, they were sworn officers whose jobs included enforcement of Tombstone’s gun laws.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2011/01/even-tombstone-had-gun-laws-047366#ixzz3njT7FzxU
 

kmoney

New member
Hall of Fame
As far as limits I think it's reasonable to say as long as the second amendment is there, you shouldn't be able to ban all firearms in the USA. But you should be able to ban particular types or at least restrict them to people that have gone through considerable training.

That's what I would most like to see, people asked to go through a background check and some amount of training before owning handguns especially, but perhaps other weapons as well. Law abiding citizens should be willing to do that. We ask that drivers be trained, why not gun owners?

I generally agree with background checks and training, but I don't think it would do much to prevent incidents like this. In fact, the training might even make it worse because you are ensuring gun owners are more proficient with the weapon so if they choose to do something bad they will be more effective. :eek:

As far as background checks, I haven't seen all the details of this story yet. Is there anything in this killer's background that would have/should have reasonably come up in a background check?
 

kmoney

New member
Hall of Fame
A better analogy is this: We can't stop nations from getting nuclear weapons, therefore every nation should have nuclear weapons, and lots of them!

when was the last time a nuclear country bombed another nuclear country?
 

ok doser

lifeguard at the cement pond
Is there anything in this killer's background that would have/should have reasonably come up in a background check?

prolly not

when was the last time a nuclear country bombed another nuclear country?

india and pakistan go at it now and then, but they don't lob nukes

and china and the ussr used to squabble over border regions back in the 70's

not sure china had nukes then


and china and india squabble over borders too
 

genuineoriginal

New member
It's also why they should stop promoting the idea that "guns don't kill people, ...". Because the whole design and purpose of a gun, is to kill. And the gun cannot distinguish between animals and people, or good people and bad people. So, yes, guns do kill people. It's what they're for. And when we flood a human population with guns, more people will be killed than would have been killed without the guns. Because guns make killing people very quick, easy, and effective.
There is a difference between saying (truthfully) that guns make killing people very quick, easy, and effective and saying (deceitfully) that guns kill people.

According to the article 11 Years of Police Gunfire, in Painstaking Detail . The NYPD in 2006 had 36,000 officers who shot 540 bullets. They opened fire 60 times and fatally shot 13 people.

So, out of 36,000 guns only 13 people were killed.

We don't know how many lives were saved by those 36,000 policemen and their guns.

What we do know is that it is not the guns causing the violence.
 

PureX

Well-known member
I generally agree with background checks and training, but I don't think it would do much to prevent incidents like this. In fact, the training might even make it worse because you are ensuring gun owners are more proficient with the weapon so if they choose to do something bad they will be more effective.
I disagree. Training also involves testing, and I think part of the training process could easily include evaluating the mental/emotional stability of the student. Many of these mass shooters in the last 20 years were CLEARLY unstable, according to nearly everyone who had any prolonged contact with them. If they had been required to participate in weapons training, and then pass a test of their proficiency (understanding and practicing weapons safety, understanding the legalities of weapons ownership and use, of carrying and concealment, of accuracy, etc.) it is very unlikely that most of those people could have passed through and received their license to own assault weapons. And if we had real and effective laws prohibiting unlicensed people from obtaining those guns, they would not likely have ever gotten hold of any.
As far as background checks, I haven't seen all the details of this story yet. Is there anything in this killer's background that would have/should have reasonably come up in a background check?
The details don't really matters, as our current 'background checks' actually check on very little, and prohibit even less. They are little more than a useless formality meant to assuage the public while allowing nearly anyone who wants to buy a gun to do so.
 

kmoney

New member
Hall of Fame
I disagree. Training also involves testing, and I think part of the training process could easily include evaluating the mental/emotional stability of the student. Many of these mass shooters in the last 20 years were CLEARLY unstable, according to nearly everyone who had any prolonged contact with them. If they had been required to participate in weapons training, and then pass a test of their proficiency (understanding and practicing weapons safety, understanding the legalities of weapons ownership and use, of carrying and concealment, of accuracy, etc.) it is very unlikely that most of those people could have passed through and received their license to own assault weapons. And if we had real and effective laws prohibiting unlicensed people from obtaining those guns, they would not likely have ever gotten hold of any.
What would you change in the current laws to make them more effective?

Was this guy CLEARLY unstable?

The details don't really matters, as our current 'background checks' actually check on very little, and prohibit even less. They are little more than a useless formality meant to assuage the public while allowing nearly anyone who wants to buy a gun to do so.
OK, then what would you check for? And is there anything you've seen in this killer's background that would get caught in your test? Something that isn't just hindsight?
 
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