The Glade 4.0

replace the idea of purchasing a gun with speak in public or post on the internet. If you need to seek the approval of someone to exercise a right, then it ceases to be a right. I also think it trounces the idea of innocent until proven guilty. Buying a firearm would be equated to something of a mental illness, where you need to be proven "sane" since the assumption would be youre not fit until someone else says you are.

Short answer, screw that noise.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

I'm curious what your "solution" is for trying to prevent more mass shootings like we've had? It does seem like we have seen an inordinate number of them of late.

You can't prevent it. We never will be able to keep someone, some where, some time, some how, from killing a bunch of people for whatever reason they think is prudent. We could be free of all guns and still have somebody come up with a way to off a number of people. The absence of guns isn't going to change someones mind if they want to kill people.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/msnbc-guest- ... ch-uglier/




I swear, if MSNBC didn't have the race card and a president they need to run interference for, they wouldn't have anything to talk about. What a pathetic bunch of losers that company has.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

I'm not sure at what point there's an "inordinate" number of mass shootings as opposed to an acceptable number, but either way, we really should not get the idea into our heads that we can prevent them, especially not by assuming that potential mass shooters are going to accommodate us by purchasing weapons and going through whatever psychological rigamorale we impose on it. Worse, we'll discover that when that doesn't "prevent" mass shootings, that yet more burdens are needed! And then more!

The underlying presumption that preventing access of the mentally unstable to guns will prevent mass shootings is only good insofar as we can identify those people and our ability to do so is far from perfect. We should not be putting the burden of proof on the gun owner, we should be putting the burden of proof on the state to establish why a given person should not buy a gun, and even if we do that, and could do it nearly as well as people presume when they start suggesting "mental health screenings" the mentally unstable can still get firearms other ways.

Keeping guns out of the hands of people already identified as mentally unstable is as we can do, and even then sometimes they are going to get them. Sometimes things like this will happen. When it comes down to public policy, however, mass shootings are statistically meaningless as a source of crime. Neither the individual incidents nor the subjective appearance of their being an "inordinate" number of them calls for changes in basic policy. What we need to do is continue to improve means of response when they do happen and techniques for identifying people about to engage in them. What we absolutely cannot allow, however, is the fantasy that they can be prevented completely, nor the emotional impact of the individual events to create the idea that they've passed some arbitrary point where we need to make the population demonstrate it is fit to own arms on the off chance any given person might shoot someplace up.

We also could do well to stop trying to create "gun-free" zones. While I'm highly skeptical that armed citizens will stop a mass shooter in most cases, they might occasionally manage to do so, whereas gun-free zones do absolutely nothing to stop a deranged person bent on mayhem.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This.

Bystanders (by which I mean the general public) of horrific events like this are full of mixed emotions. But the one thing they hate the most, as human beings, is feeling like they have absolutely no control over a bad event or situation. Learning that you have absolutely zero control over something bad that happens is a feeling most people really don't like.

It's the reason why when there is bad turbulence in an airplane some passengers look outside the plane window to see if they determine the problem (and what if they did find something? they can't do crap about it, but still they look). It's the same reason why people turn to religion or rituals. As long people "feel" some sense of control, even if it's just a lie, they feel better.

The universe is full of chaos that is beyond our control and will always be beyond our control. Grabbing onto the "Oh ****" handlebar of life isn't going to magically stop it from careening off a cliff.

So what do they do? To ease their minds and pretend they have some measure of control, they come up with all sorts of "ideas" that would prevent tragedies from happening again. Just coming up with an idea, or voicing their opinion on said ideas, helps these humans feel that sense of control that they don't have. In some cases, these ideas might help. In others they likely won't.

Gun control won't help.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Very, very good post, Numbuk.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I never said anything about gun control.

So the answer from everyone is that bad things are impossible to stop so we shouldn't try anything.

Interesting.

I know I'm quoting a movie, but it's a sentiment I agree with.



It's not that you don't try anything. It's that nothing you try should ever even inconvenience the innocent people just trying to get on with their lives. Whether it's ineffective and obtrusive airport security, gun laws, draconian safety legislation or government agencies that put companies like Buckyballs out of business. We're trying to put all of society in a straightjacket and a room with padded walls so it can't hurt itself.

**** government. Leave our lives alone. Yes, bad things will happen. It's not government's job to prevent that.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You understand that is impossible right? There is a cost (inconvenience) to everything, even inaction.

No, that is not the answer from everyone:



No one said "don't do anything". We already are doing plenty of things.

The fact is that we can't stop bad tings from happening. We can only stop some bad things from happening. No one said we should not try to prevent them to the degree that we can, but what we do not need is "solutions" that impose major burdens on society in general, especially when those solutions are only tangenitally related to the problem, as the mental health screening to buy a gun so clearly is not. This guy didn't buy his guns.

In fact, this kind of "solution" is trying to sneak gun control under the radar, and reveals once again that gun control is its own end. No, you didn't directly mention it. However, RD did ask about the possibility of mental health screenings, which while not gun control per se, are gun control de facto because of the time and expense costs of the screening and the fact that any time someone engages in a shooting after that, the cry would go out again that ever stricter standards are needed. You then challenged Nitefox based on his disagreement with that idea, and did so in a manner that indicated that any solution that didn't involve some sort of additional controls couldn't be a solution at all (i.e. your quotation marks).

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You're right. It is impossible. So is total prevention of tragedies.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The answer is to stop ignoring mental health problems and start paying attention to those who suffer from them. The great majority of the shooters should not have been left to do whatever they wanted, they should have been in treatment. Not everyone with a mental health problem is going to shoot up a school, but every one of them needs help.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I'd just like to point out the irony of the two elementary school tragedies in this forum...

While I understand it is hard to control guns in the US due to geological implications... it just takes so much more effort to kill someone with a knife (if you're untrained).

I have no doubt that if the guy from China wanted to kill the kindergarteners with his knife that he could have. Pretty much an able-bodied adult male could (physically) do that, trained or not. Only thing that makes sense is that he didn't want to kill them. I know there was someone in China a few years ago that killed 8 kids with a knife.

I don't think there are any implications of a geological nature.

As for the knife thing..yes, it takes more effort but that does not make knife attacks impossible, and it also takes a lot less effort to kill a bunch of people with a bomb and hommade bombs are easily and cheaply made.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, the worst school massacre in U.S. history is the Bath School massacre in 1927, in which 38 kids and several adults were killed. That was with a bomb.

I wasn't saying nothing should be done either. I'm saying the primary goal of any type of security or such needs to be avoiding inconveniencing the innocent.

A perfect example is airport security. North American airport security is a bad joke, in every respect. I'm not picking on the USA, Canada seems to follow the same pathetic rules. We come up with a bunch of arbitrary, pointless rules about electronic devices, liquids on a plane, no-fly lists, and random invasive searches. Meanwhile, the failure rate at detecting weapons has been tested to be horrendous. The whole thing reeks of "make-busy work" security, appearing to be doing something, and making air travel a colossal pain in the arse at the same time.

Then compare it to Israel. Israel's security checkpoints are barely noticeable in airports. And their success rate and efficiency is incredible.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/artic ... tle-bother

In North America, we go with knee-jerk, reflexive gut responses to everything that happens, because we feel the need to do something. Numbuk put it very well -- we want to be in control.

The thing is, knee-jerk reactions never work. You can't slap a bandaid on a broken bone, or simply prescribe antibiotics at every runny nose.

The same is true for school shootings like these. Even this "mental screening before buying a gun." Understand, I don't own a gun. I have no desire to own a gun. I don't want crazy people running around with guns either, but none of that matters. The shooter used his mother's guns. And yet, someone's first thought somewhere was, "We need to find a way to keep people like this from buying guns." He didn't buy guns. Your proposed measure is irrelevant. It's a knee-jerk response that has absolutely no bearing on the case at hand. It's human nature, as numbuk said, we want to do something to control these events, so we pick something easy and without any real thought behind it and next thing you know, we are throwing away freedoms one small step at a time.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I heard an interesting analysis on the radio yesterday -- it's no coincidence that these mass shootings happen at schools. The perpetrators are smart, and plan carefully. As such, we paint targets on our schools by designating them gun-free zones. To think otherwise would be to willfully blind ourselves to the forethought and planning that has gone into each of these crimes. Their motivation is to make a spectacle, and to rack up a bodycount. Very simply, a target with children and no legal carry allowed is, logistically speaking, the safest bet for what they consider the best outcome.

This isn't even trotting out the "concealed carry makes it risky for the armed perp who doesn't know if his victim is carrying" argument -- these guys are frequently planning on killing themselves anyways, so the threat of death isn't an issue.

However, being stopped before they top the last guy's bodycount? That *is* a threat to them. And it's one we deny our kids. It's a matter of cost-benefit analysis to these guys, and our gun free zones are, frankly, doing more to keep schools on the short list than they do to hinder the gunmen.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I wasn't posting to anyone specific here. The internets is chock full of morons touting all kinds of ideas to help them feel less helpless. The big one I see most often is gun control. I was more venting than replying to anyone specific.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Actually I beg to differ.

Gun control here would have helped. Gun control on the part of the OWNER of the gun. We don't have all the facts yet, but there has been a suspicion that she purchased a gun because she was afraid of her son. Seems to me that had she done a better job of making sure that unauthorized use of her weapon couldn't happen she would have at least made it more difficult for him to get a hold of a gun for this crime. Why wasn't her firearm in a locked safe, or stored with a trigger lock? Even if she wanted it ready in an emergency there are plenty of fast opening safe options.

maybe it was and he took the keys after he offed her in a different manner, or she had the gun to use on him, hesitated and he powered him. She's a victim here too last I heard.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Yeah. This is all true. She screwed up. Humans are good at that. It's not a very useful observation to help prevent this sort of thing in the future, though. Saying "She might not have died if she'd done things differently," is kinda like saying "All those people might not have died if the shooter hadn't shot at them." And while I wouldn't be surprised to find out she was a screwed up mother, or she made all sorts of poor choices, she's dead along with her class, at the hands of her son. I'm not inclined to blame her, I'd rather blame the shooter (who's also dead.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This is the problem. Everyone wants a solution. Well, there is no way to prevent people in a free society from doing harm to each other.

Everything that kid did is already against the law. None of them prevented him from shooting all of those kids.

If it hadn't been a gun, it might have been poison, or a knife, or an improvised explosive...

So let's ignore the fact that she was sloppy with security? I don't see why this isn't a useful observation. It seems to me that increased visibility into the proper way to safely store a firearm isn't a bad thing.

To be clear, I'm not expecting nor do I believe it's possible to have some silver bullet fix to this or any other problem that society has. However, I think the more we look at the realities of what happened and see where we could bolster some protections, the more likely that things like this in the future will be more rare.