Mass shooting on campus in Oregon

Gotta eat an elephant one bight at a time.

 

Who cares? The point is that Australia's reform clearly worked. Indeed, it (at least thus far) appears to have ended this sort of mass shooting problem entirely. In the decade prior to the 96 reform Australia saw more than 100 people die in these massacres, but in the two decades since ZERO have, as there hasn't been a single mass shooting since. Moreover, the overall risk of dying by gunshot in Australia fell by more than 50%, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 80%, in the following decade. By any rational measure, Australia's reform was a smashing success in terms of meeting and exceeding its intended goals.

Yet you're gonna make an issue of the fact that they didn't succeed in removing every single gun? So what? It still worked. Still saved lives. Still made the country a safer place than it was in the decades prior. That's all that really matters.

 

There's definitely a Lanza vibe to the shooter, complete with, according to one story, him and Mom carrying around rifle cases together. Okay, so maybe we have to give up on the idea of any laws ever helping. So I guess we can at least ask the nation's parents to, perhaps, not purchase weapons for themselves or anyone in the house when everyone who knows your child describes them as extraordinarily strange and possibly dangerous.

 

[

Compared to who?

 

We don't just "want the right to have guns to defend ourselves."

We worship the goddamn things. We're aroused by them. As in posting Facebook photos of arsenals of hundreds of them, complete with 97 "likes". We are a sick nation.

 

John Paul Stevens writes that the historical background of the Second Amendment makes clear that this is what it SHOULD say: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment

When I joined the court in 1975, that holding was generally understood as limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to uses of arms that were related to military activities. During the years when Warren Burger was chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge or justice expressed any doubt about the limited coverage of the amendment, and I cannot recall any judge suggesting that the amendment might place any limit on state authority to do anything.

Organizations such as the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and mounted a vigorous campaign claiming that federal regulation of the use of firearms severely curtailed Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Five years after his retirement, during a 1991 appearance on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Burger himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

 

Chris Mintz, 30, had just started his first week at UCC after a decade-long career in the military when he heard shots fired in the campus' Snyder Hall. According to his aunt, the combat veteran immediately rushed the scene of the single classroom where the shooting took place in an attempt to get between the gunman and his fellow students. Mintz reportedly tried to block the door and to prevent the shooter from entering.

"Tries to block the door to keep the gunman from coming in gets shot three times hits the floor looks up at gunman and says its my son's birthday today gets shot two more times," Wanda Mintz told Q13Fox. Wanda Mintz said her nephew relayed the story to her while on his way to surgery.

This Is the Real Hero of the Oregon School Shooting — And Everyone Should Know His Name

 

I think think it would be reasonable to make every gun purchaser pass a rigorous background check that may take a month.

I think it would be reasonable to limit weapons to those than can hold a certain amount of rounds in a clip/chamber before being reloaded. Maybe 8-10 max.

I think it would be reasonable to limit sales of ammo to the public to .50 caliber or below.

Barring that, I think it would be reasonable to lock Wayne LaPierre in a room with a couple dozen heavily armed mental ill people off their meds and see how much of a Second Amendment champion he really is.

 

Bullshit.
There are plenty of people, including many on this board, who have expressed as much. The only reason they're not more forceful about it is because they're either somewhat realistic about the logistical realities of such an undertaking, or in the case of politicians realize it would be politically unpopular -- especially once it's pointed out that "right-wing gun nuts" would hardly be the only ones affected by this, or even the ones most affected by it.

 

Tom Junod's story from last year remains best thing I've read about mass shooters and how to stop them.

Why Mass Shootings Keep Happening

 

In his very fine speech this morning, full of sorrow and frustration, President Obama made a mistake: Australia is not like the United States. We decided not to be.

We decided to grow up instead and become a more reasonable, rational society that explicitly values human life and prefers to think the best of people, rather than the worst.

The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns. It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way. Read The New Yorker's account of the Rodricus Crawford case and see a state that thinks taking a life is a no big deal. It's a country that values property more than life.

Unlike the US, we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind. Inherent scepticism about church and state turns out to be not such a bad thing.

Unlike Australia, the US is at war with itself, strongly divided on racial, religious, political and social lines. We have our problems, significantly worse in some places than others, but overall our gaps are bridgeable. The US seems to prefer to use its societal chasms as moats and defend their borders.

President Obama was wrong: Australia is not like the US

 

Well, for one thing, it assumes, without confirmation, all the students killed were Christians.

For another thing, if all the victims weren't Christians, they just disrespected the non-Christian victims.