Why spend money on drones when you've got a perfectly good militarized police force?

no meaningful gun control legislation will result from this shooting

the outcry is enough that maybe some little wave at regulating automatic weapons may pass...maybe...

but the public discussion is so polluted and wrongheaded and obfuscated, and the vested interests are so well funded, that nothing will change for a long time

@Paracelsus: Because they're cool, and you can't blow ALL of the NSA and seized drug cash on hookers and beer.

Alex Jones has said this about every mass shooting. Why does he fear the NWO so much? They're clearly the stupidest and most inefficient group in the world. They've been at this mass shooting racket for well over a decade and haven't taken away a single American gun.

The part these yahoos miss is that in 95% of these dictatorships, an armed populace is essential to the dictatorship, and not the last defence against one. The Basiji, the Brownshirts, the death squads - civilian tools of the dictator to kill their enemies and keep their hands clean and everyone else scared.

Tyranny wouldn't come to the US with tanks, it'd come when the yahoos from the GOP down start the campaign that the UN is about to invade, so you better deal with all those atheist commie sympathizers with your second amendment solution, starting with any liberals you know who have guns or power, and any police that you think isn't good and Christian.

"Jesus H, Alex. Try again when you realize that 20+ people in a Connecticut school were the victims, not you."

Stars for that.

The simplest, least infringing solution to mass shootings: turn the instant celebrity into 24/7 overtly mocking his pathetic life. Interview every girl he ever asked out to tell embarrassing humiliating stories of him on national TV. At no point try to "understand" him. Present every picture of him with a cartoon penis in his mouth.

They help with tps.

I use mine to open cereal boxes.

It is not very effective.

My only gun is a revolver.

Stars for Mongo. He made me laugh even after listening to this douchnozzle's rant.

They're fun toys. I don't think there's really much of a problem. I don't think we should be legislating based on dumb shit we saw on TV.

Do you know what the difference is between fictional television shows and the news is? At least some of the stuff that happens in fictional television shows actually happens.

Assault weapons kill a handful of people every year. Imagine for a moment, that there is a different class of gun even more dangerous. Imagine that shootings like this happen every day. Imagine it kills tens of thousands of people. You'd think that would make people care more, but that isn't the fucking case. When shootings happen several times a day, they stop being news. When they aren't in the news, people stop giving a shit about the victims. It's a hell of a lot more tragic, there are a hell of a lot more grieving families, but they grieve alone. We don't support them or give a shit about their loss.

We have a handgun problem. We should probably do something about that. We shouldn't be ignoring that problem in favor of the much smaller problem involving a class of guns that kills fewer people than Five Hour Energy.

Not to suggest that this guy isn't deplorable or that it's okay for people in the media to be as cavalier about this issue as I'm being on POE-TV.

Binro, you probably should have pretended to give a shit about this shooting enough to read an article about it to find out what kind of weapons were used.

Oh wait, unless you did mean semi-auto pistols. I don't know what you'd be trying to say with that, maybe that you prefer revolvers, or shotguns, or something?

@ Blue:

First of all, please never refer to portable killing machines as "fun toys".

And never EVER refer to news reports about children being gunned down as "dumb shit we saw on TV". Maybe you were talking about shows like "Law & Order" or "CSI", but try to think of the context we're discussing this topic in.

Also, the "Five-Hour-Energy-is-deadly" thing is extremely stupid shit seen on TV. It's trumped-up fear-mongering over something popular with "those damned young people these days".

Secondly, I know all guns make killing easy, but why should we make it easier for people to get guns that fire large numbers of bullets in short periods of time?

I return to my original question: What practical purpose does it serve to have guns that can fire between fifteen and thirty rounds in one second? Would more people have survived the recent mass shootings if the killers had to work with slower guns that had reduced capacity to hold ammunition?

@ Memedumpster:

I did read this article and others besides. He had two semi-auto pistols. He also had an AR-15, but recent reports are unsure if he used it or not.

The only thing my "portable killing machines" kill is pieces of paper, down at my local gun range, and that's true for the overwhelming majority of such weapons in the US.

We have a mental health care problem, not a gun problem.

The problem is mentally ill people have access to high-power weapons.

If all you do with your guns is shoot them at the range, why do you need to own the guns and keep them in your home? Couldn't the range just have guns and let you pay to use them for shooting targets?

Why do you even need to shoot paper with real bullets? Air rifles shoot paper just as well.

I've been anti-gun since junior high school.

I had a classmate named Arthur.

Arthur and his brother were out shooting at cans with a gun.

Arthur died.







And no, cans don't kill people.

Why do you need a car? Can't you just take the bus or walk?

Why do you need a computer? Can't you just use the ones in the library?

The bottom line is that what I do with my property, provided I am breaking no laws, is none of your business.

Cars are made to carry people from point A to point B.

Computers are made to entertain and educate.

Most guns are made for the express purpose of killing people.

Allowing dangerous mentally ill people easy access to such weapons is very much my business.

Please dont be an unthinking anti-gun advocate. You have to be seriously retarded to think _legal_ availability of guns has ANYTHING AT FUCKING ALL WITH WHETHER OR NOT THESE ASSHOLES WOKE UP IN THE MORNING WANTING TO MURDER CHILDREN.

Newsflash: THEY WOULD STILL HAVE WANTED TO MURDER CHILDREN IF THE GUN THEY PURCHASED WAS FROM A GUN SHOW OR BLACK MARKET SOURCE.

Not very fucking hard to understand, binro. You think they wouldnt have just found the gun they wanted some other way? Are you that dumb?

Gun control people, every last one of them, are people who fit into two categories:

(1)people stigmatized by gun violence (understandable but not a valid argument to take away guns period across the board)

(2)people that havent actually sat down and thought about how all the illegal guns are bought and sold in this country

And both are not valid in their arguments to strip others of their ability to safely and responsibly enjoy a day at the range with your aging father. Fuck you, guns will always be available to criminals, you stupid shit.

My guns have never killed a person, and hopefully they never will.

The "purpose" of a thing is irrelevant. What is more important is what one does with it. The overwhelming majority of guns in this country never harm another person.

"What practical purpose does it serve to have guns that can fire between fifteen and thirty rounds in one second? Would more people have survived the recent mass shootings if the killers had to work with slower guns that had reduced capacity to hold ammunition?"

I think Binro is correct on this, and no it wasn't designed to be a toy. I don't think guns should be outlawed. I do think that no one needs a gun with a clip bigger then five bullets. No one is G.I. Joe, the cowboys at tombstone, being chased by a terminator, or ever going to see thirty deer standing around a sign that sex "shoot us".

Five for evil, fuck Alex Jones.

Damn auto correct, making sex out of my ironic sez

Outlawing guns would be like outlawing alcohol.

People will always find a way to get them...

Okay, so what's the logic, here?

Mass murderers will find a way to get guns, so we should keep it as easy as possible for them to get guns?

@gmork

if purchasing assault rifles was illegal their market would be something that law enforcement / feds would be monitoring.

No, that doesn't prevent people from getting them, but it does make it illegal and subject to law enforcement and it certainly makes it less likely that one of these weapons would fall into the hands of a homicidal aspie than if its sitting on the rack at Walmart.

Buying a less efficient weapon would be simpler for people like this and now we have a lunatic with a carbine or handgun which sure makes things more complicated for him.

Outlawing guns would be like locking your door. People will always find a way to get in ...

What Binro is talking about trying to ban, and I say he's right, are guns and ammo whose intended purpose is to kill great numbers of people. No, outlawing certain classes of weapons, or ammunition for them, won't stop someone who really, really wants to get their hands on them and is able to find a seller via whatever illegal channels. But it would make it that much more difficult, and would keep them from being readily at hand when an opportunity to use them for their intended purpose happens to present itself.

The NRA is a marketing arm for gun manufacturers, so of course it argues for whatever will sell the most guns regardless of how incompatible they are with peaceable society. Their arguments are more than a little suspect.

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns
away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."

William S. Burroughs

That's the logic here.

The only beneficiaries from any new gun laws are the NRA & all the Gun Store owners.

"Criminals will always get guns."

Hey, people will always commit murder, rape, robbery, and assault, so why have laws against those? I mean, that's the same complete lack of logic, so great!

Just in case anyone decides to bring up the usual "cars kill people, too" argument, if cars are such effective killers, why aren't they used rather than guns with this kind of thing?

The laws in our country are almost designed by the NRA and its lobbyists to be ineffective. It'd be nice if law enforcement could consult a database of gun sales when trying to track down a weapon, but noooo, the NRA made it so you have to use fax machines, written forms, and ledgers because if computers were involved, it'd be game over for some reason.

I don't think we can ever ban guns, but I find it very hard to believe the current system can be labeled as rational, where it's harder to get a car and a driver's license is more difficult than getting a device designed to kill things (unless you think it's a long-distance hole punch).

The greatest trick the American gun lobby ever pulled was to convince the public that more citizen gun ownership = fewer successful homicides.

Well boys, the numbers are in and surprise surprise, it's the opposite.

The Harvard School of Public Health webpage is a great place to start looking for more information.

I'll sum up what they've found for you.

Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide. Across US states, more guns = more homicide. Across U.S. regions, more guns = more suicide. Guns in the home are used more often to intimidate intimates than to thwart crime.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/g uns-and-death/index.html

Louis Armstrong: According to the National Institute of Justice, magazine capacity limitations have no measurable impact on gun violence.

Should we pass a law that has no impact just because it makes you feel better?

I'm going to have to call bullshit on that one.

Maybe it wouldn't reduce incidences of gun violence, but I'll bet it would reduce the number of people killed per incident.

Gun ownership is at historic lows in America and the vast majority of gun owners aren't killing anything but beer bottles, TVs and woodland creatures. What would have a more measurable impact would be single payer healthcare and free mental care to anyone that needed it. That and ensuring those people don't get guns.

Israel and Switzerland have very lax gun laws but they also have universal healthcare and far less mass homicides, other than rocket attacks of course.

I read this until Meercat's post and now all I can think about is The Jerk.

Sorry.

If people really want laser tanks, they'll get their hands on laser tanks, so give everyone laser tanks because hey why not I'm too lazy to stop them.

Guns are for nerds.

"[The study] found no statistically significant evidence that either the assault weapons ban or the ban on magazines holding more than 10 bullets had reduced gun murders."

Christopher S. Koper, Daniel J. Woods, and Jeffrey A. Roth, "An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003," Report to the National Institute of Justice, United States Department of Justice, June 2004

Binro and Stanley and countless others are obviously missing the entire point: You're arguing for gun laws that only affect PEOPLE WHO BUY FROM LEGAL SOURCES YOU STUPID FUCKS.

Anti-gun people all have one thing in common - little to no comprehension of the existence of black markets and the key element in these crimes being motivation to do evil, NOT availability of things to "tempt" people into doing evil. Are you shitting me? Do you think it was a fucking SALE that got him thinking "Wow I could finally pull off my mass murder schtick for a FRACTION OF THE PRICE!"

God I fucking hate how dumb you are.

For the record, semi-automatics can be just as scary in the hands of someone motivated and batshit crazy enough. "As fast as you can pull the trigger" can be pretty fast, and they're quick to reload. You think assault weapons are the only game in town for mass murderers? Then you're dumb.

Whoa whoa calm down Gmonk, don't shoot anybody.

Hey Gmork and Glasseye, apparently the Aussie's, with their down under logic are right along with our backwards logic. And correct.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/brothers-in-arms-yes -but-the-us-needs-to-get-rid-of-its-guns-20120731-23ct7.html

Fuck your logic. Fuck your need for something that you claim is a toy. If it was a toy it would have a plastic orange tip at the end, because that's a government law.

We have several orders of magnitude more firearms than Australia, AND a constitutional amendment enshrining our right to own them. This makes it politically and practically impossible to disarm the entire country as Australia has. Not to mention the outcry from the majority of Americans who do not support getting rid of firearms.

And we know, as posted above, that limitations of "scary" features like magazine size or "assault weapons" do nothing to limit gun violence. Laws like those which require trigger locks or safe storage do have a small but measurable impact on accidents, and are a good thing.

Fuck your emotion-driven attempt to take away our rights, Louis. Use your brain.

So much of the speech around guns is reductive, oversimplified into meaningless slogans and talking points.

Fuck, gun nuts think the second amendment magically guarantees the right of individuals to own guns, and you don't get more oversimplified and reductive than that.

Not just that, they think it magically gives them the right to own any gun ever invented because, you know, private citizens must be able to match the firepower of the police and military.

@ Binro

"No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

-- Thomas Jefferson

(Jefferson Papers, 334,[C.J.Boyd, Ed., 1950])

That's actually the whole point of the 2nd amendment. To defend ourselves from a possible dictatorship.

In Jefferson's day, guns fired three rounds per minute and had to be reloaded after each shot.

"That's actually the whole point of the 2nd amendment. To defend ourselves from a possible dictatorship."

Oh horseshit. Taking up arms against the government is treason, which is the only crime identified in the Constitution (as is the penalty for said crime: death).

The Second Amendment also has the distinction of being the only part of the Bill of Rights where they tell you what the right exists for ("a well-trained militia"). You don't find that they spell out why freedom of the press is important, or freedom of religion is guaranteed, or even why a person should never be forced to testify against himself. Yet they are careful to specify the purpose behind the Second Amendment -- and even so, people still come up with their fantasy reasons of what they should be allowed to do with their guns.

@ Binro, yep they're more technologically advanced & there's 270+ million firearms floating around. I don't know how we're to scrap them all.

@ Bort, the English didn't leave because we asked them real nice. Cannons & other forms of gunfire were needed to persuade them to leave.

America is a free country because the founding fathers were willing to shed their own blood & everyone elses.

I cannot imagine any meaningful gun control laws being passed with the NRA & their single issue zealots having soo much lobbying power.

@Bort: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government...”

It's not treason, its the foundation of our country and our right if authoritarianism does come. It's not here but we're allowed to and should fight it if it ever does come. And having guns would make that fight much easier, as outmatched as we'd be by the half of the military that didn't defect to defend their families.

Whatever the Founding Fathers said and thought when they were under British rule, they changed their tune when they took power. It's inevitable: you can't rule by the philosophies that won you freedom.

So whatever principles governed the Declaration of Independence, they're not quite the same as the principles that governed the Constitution. Instead, the Constitution offered a system of elections plus the ability to pass amendments, as the way to address change within the system.

But the Constitution doesn't have a self-destruct switch; treason is still a crime, and a capital crime at that, per the Constitution. If you feel that any of the Amendments supersede that, please make a case other than "well Jefferson once said ...". Jefferson once said a whole bunch of things, and additionally, Jefferson wasn't the main author of the Constitution; James Madison was.

He consistently tops his garbage pile with toxic waste?

That keeps things new and revolting.

hello Gmork.

America has an obvious problem and unhealthy attitude towards guns and should sell and manufacture less of them.

// a european

incidentally, I live in Sweden which has a very low rate of gun crime but which is fifth in the world when it comes to exporting weapons to militaristic regimes. so I'm not trying to sound superior, just giving an outside view.

I see guns the same way I see cars. Ideally, we shouldn't let just any dipshit have access to them, but we do so anyway.

As a result, the US has among highest firearm and vehicle death rates in the First World.

Gun nuts love to cite places like Switzerland where personal gun ownership is high, yet gun-related crimes are low. What these people fail to realize is that gun regulations are very strict in Switzerland. Even though gun ownership is compulsory for military-age males, you have to go through so many loops, so many safety training courses, before you can finally get your hands on one (then there's a required safety training course every year after that).

Switzerland is like Valhalla to American gun-lovers, but they would shit their pants if they had to go through even half of the red tape that the Swiss have to.

@ bongoprophet,

The only law that has never been broken is the law of supply & demand. Guns would only get smuggled across borders.

FWIW, here's my only 'shot fired in anger' story. Last year, a probably rabid raccoon mauled a feral kitten on my backporch. One shot from a .38 ended that problem. In the BFN town I live in, one simply doesn't have to time to wait for the authorities to handle vermin of the 2 or 4 legged variety.

Dear Gmork:

(1) was all horseshit. A good sign that you're saying horseshit is when you feel like saying something like "Period." (2), meanwhile, is bullshit. WE ARE ONLY TALKING ABOUT GUNS BECAUSE FUCKING ALEX JONES BROUGHT IT UP.

Oh, well you said "period" so that's really all the information I need to know that you're 100% correct. Makes total sense.

(1) was most assuredly not horseshit. you cant even explain why it's horseshit so that tells me something.

I'm sorry you have a problem with basic human motivations/tendencies. This is not hard to figure out if you actually remove your own bias for about five seconds and think logically about why people do what they do.

Five seconds of taking your head out of your ass, that's all i'm asking.

OH NO YOU POINTED OUT THAT I USED THE LITERARY DEVICE OF SPELLING OUT "PERIOD" TO EMPHASIZE A POINT I FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT! :(

I didn't expand upon it because I don't have any desire to talk to you about it. People that say things like, "if you actually remove your own bias for about five seconds and think logically" aren't worth the effort, I've found.

Bongo if your proposal could realistically have any affect on whether or not this kind of tragedy could still occur, I might consider your advice.

As reality stands, it just couldn't. I'm all-ears for other proposals though.

Anakin sighed contentedly as he stroked Obi-Wan's thighs. He could see on his apprentice's face that he had wanted this for a very long time. Betrayal couldn't even begin to describe what he felt. This changed everything between them. If he had known of the attraction before he would have spoken to Anakin about it, stopped it before it went too far, but it was too late now to think about that though. All he could do was to try to repair some of the damage, to salvage something of their Master/Padawan relationship. He had to be the rational one here.

Anakin's smooth cheek was pressed to Obi-Wan's thigh, and he was practically purring. His tongue laved at Obi-Wan's hip and traveled to his navel. He rubbed his face over Obi-Wan's stomach, kissing and nibbling his way up, lapping at the thin layer of sweat that covered his Master's body.

"Obi-Wan, you are so incredible. I'm drunk on the taste of you," Anakin said, dragging his lips and tongue over Obi-Wan's body.

He slid up beside him, snuggling against his side, like a child frightened by a nightmare, and they both remained silent for several minutes, Obi-Wan trying to grasp the gravity of the situation, and Anakin luxuriating in the feel of his Master's skin next to his.

Anakin idly stroked his Master's chest and stomach, and Obi-Wan could not deny that it was an enjoyable experience. He could also feel Anakin's erection pressing into the side of his thigh. It reminded him that for the moment things were calm, but he sensed that his apprentice's frenzied passion could resurface without warning.

"Anakin?" Obi-Wan was surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded as it shattered the heavy silence that blanketed the room. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because I love you, Obi-wan," Anakin replied simply.

"And I love you as well, Anakin." He felt a slight jolt from the warm body next to him, but he continued. "But you are my apprentice, and this is forbidden."

And did you notice in that knife attack that no one died?

Hrm. Funny. Slipped your mind I guess.

Is that by Arco?

Oh wait... not insane or bloody enough.

The Chinese are just terrible at using knives. Period.

Don't be stupid, dude. The proletariat can't use knives to rise up against their masters.