Responsible Gun Owners Thrad

[ImGod]

Originally Posted by The Man

List of school shootings in America since Sandy Hook

It's utterly depressing how many there are on this list :<

It makes sense when you look at the Cause of Death by Age Group.

From 15-24 there is a marked jump in the Homicide and Suicide numbers. 25-34 they are still up there, then they drop off after 35.

So the age group in question is violent. School is just a place they are at for long periods of the day. But it's not hard to realize that the majority of homicides for this age group occur off campus. If the latest school shooting gunman had shot the other kid at his house, it wouldn't have made it to CNN or the list.

Most of the teens who die in my city, die outside a night club at 1 or 2 in the morning or in front of their house. We had one school shooting several years back. The kid's dad was a policeman so he used his dad's service pistol to shoot the assistant principle that had suspended him and himself.

[Crumb]

Back when the licenses were still a new thing and the required instructional classes weren't a joke, my dad's class was run through a host of scenarios: You're broken down on a dirt road in the middle of the night. A black dude in a Cutty pulls up behind you, gets out, comes out with a tire-iron. What do you do? Half my dad's class said to shoot the black man.

Surprise, surprise, surprise...

[Dingfod]

That explains the comments I've heard about President Obama. Ooh, scary black man with a large tool...

[The Man]

Priest killed, another one injured at Catholic church in Phoenix - CNN.com

[MonCapitan2002]

Originally Posted by The Man

In other news, some shithead left a loaded gun in plain sight on a toy aisle in a Target store in Myrtle Beach, SC:

More details on loaded gun found in Target toy aisle

Thankfully, an adult found it and removed it before any kids found it.

Gun control advocates are calling for Target to ban firearms in their stores in response. Ammosexuals are saying it was planted by an anti-gun operative trying to discredit them and force gun control, because they are asshat conspiracy theorists. I think they need to shut the fuck up and focus on the fact that a fucking moron left a loaded gun where a kid could find it.

I am adding that term to my vocabulary. I think ammosexual describes the more rabid gun fetishists succinctly. It is a beautiful word. Thank you for donating it to my vocabulary.

[The Man]

No one could have predicted that Georgia's lax gun laws would lead to trouble.

Georgia Waffle House worker fatally shoots customer who refused to leave

This is the second fatal shooting at an Atlanta-area Waffle House in as many weeks.

Could also have gone in the Georgia thrad, obviously, but I'm putting it here.

[MonCapitan2002]

What a fucktard. If we didn't have gun insanity in the US, this guy would probably still be alive.

[The Man]

Illinois man shoots ex-wife, her boyfriend in head as 100 people watch at high school reunion

[Stephen Maturin]

Having a bullet come rocketing through your bedroom wall in the middle of the night is a minuscule price to pay for accommodating your neighbor's Second Amendment right to watch A-15 trigger porn on YouTube, fall asleep with a loaded rifle in his lap during the video, and discharge the loaded weapon while sleeping. It goes without saying -- or at least should -- that the pending prosecution for aggravated assault, discharging a firearm into an occupied structure, and reckless endangerment is completely unconstitutional.

[MonCapitan2002]

What a fucking moron! What if the round fired had struck a gas line or something?

[Dingfod]

That should be in the morons with guns thrad.

[California Tanker]

Originally Posted by The Man

List of school shootings in America since Sandy Hook

It's utterly depressing how many there are on this list :<

After using that list for a few days, CNN took a closer look at it.

A closer look: How many school shootings since Newtown? - CNN.com

Down from 74 to 15. Still, a fair amount, but another case of check your source.

Incidentally, evidently the "good guy with a gun" was a trained police officer, even. If a trained police officer can't stop shooters like this then average folks don't have a fscking chance

They do have a chance, just less of one. And sometimes the trained police officer with a gun does well, witness the Salt Lake City Mall shooting. But reliance on disengagement need not prove successful either. If there was an instance of 'herding' going on, for example, the 'less of a chance' would still be a better chance than being beaten towards the firing line. Once the shooting starts, everyone's life is effectively forfeit until the shooting stops.

Originally Posted by The Man

That story also disproves one of the NRA's favourite talking points about magazine size. If magazine size didn't matter, the dude wouldn't have had to reload and the other dude wouldn't have had time to tackle him.

That's a rather unreliable statement. Witness the Thurston High School shooting, where the shooter was similarly tackled during the reload process. Except he was using a 50-round magazine (and had time to transition to a sidearm and get a shot off when being tackled). And of course the lad in Tuscon, who was tackled during a reload, but that was because he had an unreliable extended-capacity magazine and had suffered a failure to feed. When you encounter the shooter, you don't know if he's fired one round out of a ten-round limited-capacity magazine and has 9 left, or 29 out of a 30-round standard magazine and only has one left.

You will forgive me for saying so, but 'waiting 'till he runs out of ammo, and hoping he's not fast on the reload' is not what I would like to have as Plan A. It basically relies on the incompetence of the shooter. If a tactical reload is carried out correctly, one man should not be able to charge the shooter as he reloads, as the weapon is never empty and in a state where it can not fire at least one round.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by California Tanker

Down from 74 to 15. Still, a fair amount, but another case of check your source.

Indeed... except CNN reduced the number to 15 by redefining school shooting as "newtown style." The source does a pretty good job of citing its data to get to 74.

Originally Posted by California Tanker

They do have a chance, just less of one.

So far, 'dude with pepperspray' seems to be matching random civilian with a gun in chances. Except that with pepperspray it wouldn't have been possible for him to add to the death toll.

Originally Posted by California Tanker

If there was an instance of 'herding' going on, for example, the 'less of a chance' would still be a better chance than being beaten towards the firing line. Once the shooting starts, everyone's life is effectively forfeit until the shooting stops.

And *if* they had multiple explosives setup to a deadman's switch it would be pointless... as is guessing at extremely unlikely senarios.
If everyone's life is forfeit till the shooting stops, why bother risking officers at all, just hellfire missile the building.

Originally Posted by California Tanker

You will forgive me for saying so, but 'waiting 'till he runs out of ammo, and hoping he's not fast on the reload' is not what I would like to have as Plan A.

You're right there. Plan A is run away and take as many people with you as you can. It turns out guns aren't that effective at killing with no targets.
Yes they could try and prevent escape, but so far only one person has been reasonably successful in that, and it required an island.

Originally Posted by California Tanker

It basically relies on the incompetence of the shooter. If a tactical reload is carried out correctly...

Except that shooter incompetence and poor understanding of tactical situations is exactly what have saved lives in real events in the past, such as a 50rnd magazine jamming. It shouldn't be counted upon, but it shouldn't be dismissed as if all shooters were trained Seals.

Speculation can be useful but unfortunately most speculation makes way to many assumptions about what is ultimately a rare and chaotic event. Sure they might be effective if a school/mall was attacked by a military following proper tactics, but that's not the case in the US.

I've said it before but I'm waiting for one of those 'good guys with a gun' to get taken down by police because in an active shooter situation often all that's reliably reported is "someone with a gun is shooting people" and there's no glowing friend or foe indicators in civilian life. And if you think 'they're the police, they can tell' just remember this is the same group that shot into a wrongly colored truck without looking because it was reported the fugitive was in a truck.

[Hermit]

Originally Posted by California Tanker

After using that list for a few days, CNN took a closer look at it.

A closer look: How many school shootings since Newtown? - CNN.com

Down from 74 to 15. Still, a fair amount, but another case of check your source.

Apples and oranges. The link The Man cited does not purport to list shootings that were similar to the violence in Newtown or Oregon. It listed media reports of firearms being discharged within school or campus grounds, and it cited 74 of them. Do you have any idea at all how utterly shocking and disgusting those statistics are to inhabitants that do not possess your gun culture?

Just about nobody in the country where I live carries a firearm unless they go hunting, target shooting, are criminals (who mainly restrict themselves to shooting at each other), soldiers, members of the police services or security staff accompanying those little armoured trucks used to refill ATMs.

I cannot recall a single incident where a gun has been discharged within school, college or university grounds in the past several decades, let alone in the past 18 months. There are many good - even admirable - aspects of the country you live in, but your gun culture is the prime reason for which I will never set foot on US soil. The USA may as well be located on another planet as far as I am concerned.

[ImGod]

Originally Posted by Hermit

...
Just about nobody in the country where I live carries a firearm unless they go hunting, target shooting, are criminals (who mainly restrict themselves to shooting at each other), soldiers, members of the police services or security staff accompanying those little armoured trucks used to refill ATMs.

...

This is the same in my state here in the US. Criminals and cops are the ones who carry guns. A large percentage of the people who are shot in the city have been shot before and/or have a long arrest record.

I can get a CCW permit if I take a class, pay some fees, etc. I think 0.5 percent of gun owners have a CCW permit. I'd get one if I did business in the high crime area of our city. But I'd rather not do either.

I haul my guns unloaded and locked in a case when I take them out to the farm to shoot or hunt.

I'll be interested to see if this was a coincidence or if it continues to hold.
Denver Murder Rate Cut in Half After Marijuana Legalization. Coincidence?

It would be a good argument beyond medical reasons for ending the Drug War.

[lisarea]

Yeah, I can see where it'd seem otherwise, but I have never seen a regular citizen in a business or walking down a street openly carrying a gun, and if I did, I would probably be as sketched out as you would be. And if I knew that someone was carrying a concealed weapon in normal situations like that, I'd probably avoid them too.

It would be very much not normal behavior. That's the reason people call 911 whenever there's one of those stupid protests where people walk around armed, and why you read about it in the news. I'm sure there are areas where that happens more regularly, but it's certainly not the default.

[Hermit]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Yeah, I can see where it'd seem otherwise, but I have never seen a regular citizen in a business or walking down a street openly carrying a gun, and if I did, I would probably be as sketched out as you would be.

It's not about how many people you see carrying arms. It's about how many people carry arms. 74 reported cases of gunfire in school grounds and campuses in the past 18 months. And those incidents make me wonder how many other people walk around students and teachers with guns "just in case". Don't you see the utter madness of US gun culture at all? A gun culture that has more and more people spouting slogans like "The solution to gun problems is more guns." and "More guns, less crime."? You see no absurdity in any of this at all?

[lisarea]

Oh, of course I do. I'm not talking about that. That sure does exist, and it's batshit. I mean, one of my son's friends was going to Columbine when that happened, and he and his friends all spent the day after the Aurora theater shooting checking up on each other. The horror and absurdity of it all is not lost on me.

But I think there's a sort of common perception that Americans are much more acclimated and supportive of gun culture than we are, for the most part. It's a small but very vocal minority who supports those ideas. A small majority of Americans support stricter gun controls according to polls, and it seems like the numbers trend up as they ask about specific gun control measures. And I suspect that those numbers are skewed toward gun culture simply because that's what people think they should say.

It's right in our Constitution, which we learn about as children, and we've all heard the arguments for it, and maybe got graded in school for providing the right answers. So it's almost as though we have an academic lean toward citizens being armed.

But when we are actually confronted in real life with some random person just walking down the street carrying a gun, we run away and/or call the cops like normal people. So I think that, the more specific and personal gun culture gets, the more the veneer of support starts to peel away. Which is why those protests are probably having the opposite effect of what they intend.

The hardcore gun nuts--the 'armed society is a polite society' types who imagine themselves getting into gunfights in grocery stores and stuff--are probably a much smaller minority than most people here or elsewhere would imagine.

IOW, I'm just saying that a lot of us, and probably most of us, are at least as uncomfortable with our gun culture as you are.

[Hermit]

Yes, your society seems to be afflicted with increasingly severe bouts of sanity. My hope is that they'll get worse, but with the combination of the Second Amendment (absurdly misinterpreted) and the incredibly powerful gun lobby the path is arduous, long and slow.

[ImGod]

We are a strange group. The western, action, and Disney movies have gotten us to the point where we expect people to die as part of our entertainment cycle. Even many people against guns have no problem with outrageous gun violence activities in movies and TV. Problem solving with a gun. Killing as many faceless bad guys as needed to get to the main bad guy.

The hero can blow that guy's head off with a shotgun to solve the complex problem in black and white land. He may get a suspension or may drive off in his car with the girl. But don't show a booby because, children, downfall of society, moral decay. BOOOBIES!

In the last decade I've noticed the US lightening up on the nudity prudity part. Now girls with boobies blow people's heads off with shotguns to solve their problems.

[Ari]

A big problem is just how outdated the second amendment is combined with the sacredness of the constitution.
Sure it made sense when the rugged unexplored west meant anything past the Mississippi, the country was in constant fear of being taken back by the king's army and guns fired a single shot before needing a complex reloading sequence.

I wonder how many would still carry guns if open carry meant only a flintlock or cap and ball rifle.

[ImGod]

The same argument could be made about free speech and the internet. Would they have written it the same way if instead of a printing press all any dumb ass needed to be heard around the country was a keyboard? Does technology changing, change a right?

[Ari]

The thing I find fascinating with the sacred constitution is how the first amendment, which is pretty clear, has been chipped away at over the years by the courts, while the second amendment, which is pretty ambiguous has been strengthened or left ambiguous.

[BrotherMan]

When my roommate and I are talking about it, I always mention how violable the right to vote is. If people would campaign half as hard about the right to vote as they do about the right to own firearms, well, you get the idea.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Ari

The thing I find fascinating with the sacred constitution is how the first amendment, which is pretty clear, has been chipped away at over the years by the courts, while the second amendment, which is pretty ambiguous has been strengthened or left ambiguous.

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

When my roommate and I are talking about it, I always mention how violable the right to vote is. If people would campaign half as hard about the right to vote as they do about the right to own firearms, well, you get the idea.

There's no inconsistency here.
Able-bodied, straight, right-wing, adult, Christian, American white males don't have their free speech curtailed (although they may be paranoid about losing it). Some other groups may benefit if they don't cause any trouble.
Able-bodied, straight, right-wing, adult, Christian, American white males don't have any significant constraints on gun ownership (although they may be paranoid about controls). Some other groups may benefit if they don't cause any trouble.
Able-bodied, straight, right-wing, adult, Christian, American white males don't have any restrictions on their right to vote (although they may be paranoid about the results). Some other groups may benefit if they don't cause any trouble.