Bugsy.

standing offer of $25 for a ticket

Yes, it is. You are wrong, and wrong in a way that makes you a bad person.

Ben Butler You don't know me and i don't care if you think im a terrible person.

once again im opposed to to using these tragedies as justification for criminalizing rural people and others who's lifestyle and politics you disagree with (but who aren't mass murderers). i cant stand it when right wingers engage in this but bleeding hearts who engage in this are no better.

i think a constitutional ban on weapons is impractical and unenforceable ( do you mean to ban all weapons or just guns? how do you prevent people from making their own weapons?) and would have all kinds of unintended consequences. i dont think you can have any meaningful discussion on gun safety in the US with out having these NRA types on side (no matter how much you despise them and their politics) there is estimated to be 190 million firearms in circulation in the US there is no easy way to make these disappear overnight

as horrible and tragic as this shooting has been amending the constitution as a kneejerk reaction is not likely to make anyone safer or prevent a similar tragedy. it will most likely have negative unintended consequences and set a precedent where by christian fundamentalists pro lifers and others will also seek to amend the constitution in ways they feel are morally justified.

the biggest killer of children is car accidents and drowning by far. As the constitution was written before the invention of the car shouldn't there be an amendment that will prevent these deaths?

it's easy to throw off lines about ''controlling access to guns'' but if the history of attempts to control peoples access to drugs is anything to go by it probably wont achieve much but make gun violence worse and push the gun trade underground where it will be much harder to detect and prevent dangerous people from getting them. Is that what you would like a war on guns?

ocelotl said 17 hours ago: Good article about the gun-lovin' South. When a large part of the gun-ownership mentality is about protecting yourself from the potential tyranny of your own elected government, gun control legislation is always going to be a nightmare, never more so than with a black Muslim communist President in office. So it's a false distinction to say it's not the gun laws, it's the culture - the former is embedded in the latter. And a mental health system that hovers over all, screening for instability and sweeping the dangerous ones into treatment? Holy shit Bubba, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

i might point out that the two most recent shootings occurred in the north. And your advocating for people (just in the south or do you mean the entire population?) to be screened for ''instability'' and then be ''swept'' off into treatment if deemed dangerous by the state. sting bono was suggesting that parents who display non- mainstream political views should be subject to extra surveillance and control by the state ...you might like the idea of rednecks being sent off to PC reeducation camps but it probably prevent any shootings.

many of these shooters have been described as goths...maybe we should ban goth culture too

i find it kind of offensive this idea that the culture is somehow to blame. you may despise it but i dont think its anymore to blame than violent movie culture, violent game culture or gangsta rap culture.

Gordon said 15 hours ago: Bugsy, I know you didn't say it, but you linked to it. This most recent is the 13th mass shooting in the US this year The article constantly used stats to play down the impact of guns in these tragedies. The author had an agenda - ''my area of expertise is where we should be finding the solution not gun control''. The population of the world was aproximately 2,500,000,000 only 200,000 were killed from atomic bombs. That's a fraction of a percent. It's not about nuclear disarmament it's the behaviour leading up to it by the people who dropped the bombs. Let's control them, let's just enable everyone to have one just in case.

the article presented the statistical reality of these kinds of crimes. do you have statistics that say otherwise? so you say say that we shouldn't rationally analyse the circumstances surrounding these crimes, i guess hysterical kneejerk reactions are more satisfying.

Mo said 17 hours ago: i might be dumb or missing something, but how can people not see a connection to access to guns and people dying as a result of guns?

i'll be polite and say that your missing something mo

holyrattlesnakes said 17 hours ago: in all seriousness though, the NRA and more radical libertarian groups have reshaped how guns are spoken about in the US since the 1980s to such a degree that suggesting gun control is tantamount to treason for many (you're trying to change/undermine/rip up the constitution!). also, as the right has become more radical and suspicious of civic authority, guns have become totemic in how individual freedoms are discussed and experienced for some Americans (having easy access to guns is insurance that Obama doesn't raise taxes to ensure single mothers get medical treatment or turn the country into a communist hell-hole or whatever fevered paranoiac delusion you can care to insert here). from being incidental to the maintenance of a militia in colonial times, to something hunters and farmers used for land management and something reservists or the national guard would keep on hand just in case in possible moments of crisis, gun ownership and the concept of a spontaneous Minutemen-style citizen's army are now for many fundamental to the upkeep of the nation.

really the whole debate is just more left - right, republican - democrat, city - rural culture wars and identity politics which i find tiresome and moronic its an opportunity for left types to engage in the same kind of reactionary, ignorant kneejerk political granstanding they often accuse the right of. these second amendment - NRA arguments are kinda absurd if you consider that most of the right wing NRA gun nuts you all despise are mostly former government employees (military, police prison guards etc)

> Gordon said 17 hours ago: Please remind me what happened world wide after this incident? Yes we should round up all members of the NRA and send them to guantanamo bay then we'll be rid of the scourge of gun violence forever! Anger outrage and emotion are not arguments for or against anything. Yeah because that's what I was talking about not about airport security. You're hanging on to a 200 year old law change that is being protected because of when the law was made not because it's better for the people of a nation.

yes and the patriot act, Guantanamo bay, a decades long war in Afghanistan, iraq, racial profiling of muslims and other pointless overkill and kneejerk reactions which didn't prevent terrorist attacks.

Bollocks! It's plain to see you are pro gun by the arguments you are presenting.

exactly what pro gun arguments have i made Gordon?

holyrattlesnakes said 17 hours ago: im neither pro or anti gun but as a US citizen im definitely against re writing the constitution. I'm also assuming you don't observe the legitimacy of the 27 amendments to said constitution, you know, the bits where they rewrote it. oh wait, part of the rewriting was defining the right to bear arms! so, what 'rewrites' are okay, and which aren't exactly?

You know what they say about assumptions holyrattlesnakes?

juicenewton* said 16 hours ago: What can be said analytically is that banning guns is trying to manipulate a variable that is a very weak predictor of mass homicides. It is not a predictor - what it is is the single greatest factor is turning a possible violent attack by a single person from the death of a couple of people into a mass homicide. You simply choose to be blind to the fact that a knife cannot cause the same damage in the same time and bombs etc..take methodical planning, MUCH more planning than picking up a gun. Why is it so difficult to separate motive from method??? You cannot stop a person from going on a rampage- what you can do is curtail their ability to maim and kill by lessoning the prevalence of rapid fire firearms within their immediate grasp.

Your Wrong investigation and analysis of these shootings would suggest that they are carefully and meticulously planned. not cases where people just snap and go on a rampage. this is also false reasoning..there is no Hierarchy of crime where it is some how preferable to be maimed or murdered by knife as opposed to gun or explosive. arguing that ''if only he had a knife instead of a gun is the same as saying lucky he only had a rifle instead of an explosive'' it 's not really an argument for or against anything....

Watch out Magic pants there are plenty of christian fundamentalists, pro lifers and other conservatives who'd love make few constitutional amendments too!

Please remind me what happened world wide after this incident? Yes we should round up all members of the NRA and send them to guantanamo bay then we'll be rid of the scourge of gun violence forever! Anger outrage and emotion are not arguments for or against anything.

assault rifles were outlawed under Clinton - Bush II allowed that to lapse in 2004.

we can always blame George bush for something!

Assault rifles do not exist as a distinct and seperate category of weapons. Proper military issue large caliber automatic weapons have been illegal in the US for 20 years or longer. and it is a myth that these kind of weapons were ever freely and easily available. what everyone here calls an assault riffle is a small caliber semi automatic hunting rifle that has a military appearance. the ban on assault rifles was allowed to expire because it was farcical and ineffective law that banned certain firearms due to cosmetic appearance alone.

Juicenewton the argument is perfectly valid..well just as valid as the ''if he could only have got hold of a knife instead of a gun argument''

news coverage is unsurprisingly fetishistic/bloodthirsty... front page says gunman ''slays'' children, cos it's a gorier choice of word than ''shot''. the media are cynical tragedy milkers who've created a phenomenon where shooting a bunch of kids will guarantee a warped loner international superstardom. a situation that can only be good if you sell newspapers, and it's not your kids. fuckarses the lot of em. (the media.)

THIS^^^

anyway here is good article free of politics and hysteria on the sociological and psychological aspects of these shootings i found

What can the micro-sociology of violence contribute to understanding the mass killings in Aurora, Colorado, and similar incidents? In the immediate shock of public attention, there is an imperative to give policy answers. I could join the chorus advocating a ban on weapons in the USA. This is a hope; it is not a guarantee. Mass shootings are very rare events. There are about 15,000 homicides per year in the USA; the great majority are single-victim killings. Less than 1% are mass killings (4 or more victims in the same incident). Spectacular mass shootings, where many persons are killed or wounded, have been happening at a rate of about 1 or 2 per year, in the 30 years since 1980, for the most common type, school shootings; shootings in other venues, apparently imitating school shootings, are rarer but on the rise. It is their rarity that attracts so much attention, and their out-of-the-blue, seemingly random relationship between killer and victims, that makes them so dramatically alarming.

This rarity means that very distinctive circumstances are needed to explain mass killings, and that widely available conditions cannot be very accurate predictors. There are approximately 190 million firearms in the civilian population in America, in a population of 310 million. The vast majority of these guns are not used to kill people. Even if we focus on the total number of yearly homicides by gun (about 12,000), the percentage of guns that kill someone is about 12,000 / 190,000,000, or 1 in 16,000. Another way to put it: of approximately 44 million gun owners in the US, 99.97% of them do not murder anyone. It is not surprising that their owners resist being accused of abetting murder.

My aim here is not to enter the political controversy over banning guns. Many people who own guns are gun-cultists, for whom guns are symbolic objects, connected with their identity and lifestyle (analyzed in Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains). The political argument over banning or retaining guns has strong emotional overtones on both sides. Anti-gun-cultists dislike not only guns but the lifestyle and the values of the people who have them; this is evident in the case of anti-hunting movements, including the recently successful anti-foxhunting movement in England. (US surveys indicate the favorite TV shows of liberal Democrats are comedians satirizing conservatives; conservatives' favorites are college football. Experian, 2012) Both sides blur the gun issue with symbolic politics. What can be said analytically is that banning guns is trying to manipulate a variable that is a very weak predictor of mass homicides. It resembles TSA procedures of searching everyone who enters an airport gate area; airplane terrorists are also extremely rare, and thus the vast majority of the persons who are searched are innocent. ....

rest of article is here

yes and whats to stop them from ammeding the parts they dont like (but you do)

Rupert is wrong automatic firearms as used by the military have been illegal in the US for quite few years. A few high profile shootings not withstanding violent crime and murder rates in the US are at 40 year lows. what new police powers powers should people accept in order to rid the US of the 190 million firearms that are in circulation. bearing in mind how successful the war on drugs has been at criminalizing large sections of the population and reducing the availability and access to drugs (minimal to none)

its also worth remembering that timothy McVeigh leveled an office building and killed 200 people with a ute filled with fertilizer and petrol or that the sept 11 hijackers killed over 3000 people armed with nothing more than box cutters

im neither pro or anti gun but as a US citizen im definitely against re writing the constitution. if you want to rewrite the constitution to remove the parts you feel are politically incorrect whats to stop them from rewriting the constitution and changing the parts they feel are wrong( abortion, separation of chuch and state etc etc) you cannot legislate against insanity.