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Originally posted by Strangerous
Isn't there some sense in harmonising the laws between the various states?
From what I've read on here some states are close to the UK's requirements on storage / security and prohibiting some types of weapons while other states have an almost 'free for all / pick 'em up at Wal Mart' regime. As people can easily drive from state to state this does seem very silly.
I doubt you'll follow us down the road where you have to prove a need (not a want) for anything but a shotty but surely some increase in licencing and storage requirements has to be, at least, debated after so many tragic deaths?
Originally posted by darkhero
Originally posted by Zaphod58
As someone in the original thread pointed out, guns are tools. You can kill someone with a screwdriver, should we take those away too? I grew up playing Doom, and Duke Nukem, and all those other first person shooters, but have NEVER thought about picking up a gun and killing someone. You can't blame games and tv for something like this happening.
From initial reports he was looking for his girlfriend, and probably had a "If I can't have her, then no one can, and I can't live without her" mentality.
You can't kill 32 people with screwdrivers, and also people can run, can fight.
You can control yourself, but not everybody can, especially those teenagers. When they get mad, they may want to kill other people.
posted by Strangerous
Isn't there some sense in harmonizing the laws between the various states? From what I've read on here some states are close to the UK's requirements on storage security and prohibiting some types of weapons while other states have an almost 'free for all pick 'em up at Wal Mart regime. As people can easily drive from state to state this does seem very silly.
I doubt you'll follow us down the road where you have to prove a need (not a want) for anything but a shotgun but surely some increase in licencing and storage requirements has to be, at least, debated after so many tragic deaths? [Edited by Don W]
Most news reports pointed out that the situation ended when several students "confronted," "tackled," or "intervened." However, Tracy Bridges, Ted Besen, Todd Ross, and Mikael Gross did not merely "confront" Odighizuwa. Bridges and Gross separately ran to their cars to get their handguns once the shooting began. Bridges approached Odighizuwa with Besen's and Ross' aid. Gross was close behind. According to Bridges, "I aimed my gun at him, and Peter tossed his gun down.
...
Unfortunately, the media did not point out that the "intervening" students were armed.
Originally posted by Realtruth
What if this person or any person for that matter decided to mix up a batch of poison and put it in the cafeteria food he would have got the same death results or worse. And they may never have caught him or knew who it was.
The gun in this situation was only a tool of his madness and rage.
This person made a choice,
We need to really focus on what, how, and why he snapped?
posted by Realtruth
When it comes to guns, it's all about the multi-billion dollar gun industry. Hand guns are made to kill people. [Gun makers]T have one thing in common, control, greed, power and the ability to create chaos. Guns will never be banned in the USA to much money is being made. [Edited by Don W]
* Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.2
* Of the 2.5 million self-defense cases, as many as 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse.3
* Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).4 And readers of Newsweek learned in 1993 that "only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high."5
* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.6
* Handguns are the weapon of choice for self-defense. Citizens use handguns to protect themselves over 1.9 million times a year.7 Many of these self-defense handguns could be labeled as "Saturday Night Specials."
* Florida. In the ten years following the passage of Florida's concealed carry law in 1987, there were 478,248 people who received permits to carry firearms.9 FBI reports show that the homicide rate in Florida, which in 1987 was much higher than the national average, fell 39% during that 10-year period. The Florida rate is now far below the national average.10
* Do firearms carry laws result in chaos? No. Consider the case of Florida. A citizen in the Sunshine State is almost twice as likely to be attacked by an alligator than to be assaulted by a concealed carry holder. During the first ten years that the Florida law was in effect, alligator attacks outpaced the number of crimes committed by carry holders by a 146 to 88 margin.11
* States which passed concealed carry laws reduced their murder rate by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7% and robbery by 3%;12 and
* If those states not having concealed carry laws had adopted such laws in 1992, then approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults and over 11,000 robberies would have been avoided yearly.13
* Kennesaw, GA. In 1982, this suburb of Atlanta passed a law requiring heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. The residential burglary rate subsequently dropped 89% in Kennesaw, compared to the modest 10.4% drop in Georgia as a whole.15
* Ten years later (1991), the residential burglary rate in Kennesaw was still 72% lower than it had been in 1981, before the law was passed.16
* Nationwide. In 1979, the Carter Justice Department found that of more than 32,000 attempted rapes, 32% were actually committed. But when a woman was armed with a gun or knife, only 3% of the attempted rapes were actually successful.19
Justice Department study:
* 3/5 of felons polled agreed that "a criminal is not going to mess around with a victim he knows is armed with a gun."20
* 74% of felons polled agreed that "one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot during the crime."21
* 57% of felons polled agreed that "criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police."22
* The courts have consistently ruled that the police do not have an obligation to protect individuals, only the public in general. For example, in Warren v. D.C. the court stated "courts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community."23
* Currently, there are about 150,000 police officers on duty at any one time to protect a population of more than 250 million Americans -- or almost 1,700 citizens per officer.26
* Washington, D.C. has, perhaps, the most restrictive gun control laws in the country, and yet it has one of the highest murder rates in the nation.
* Objection: Critics claim criminals merely get their guns in Virginia where the laws are more relaxed. This, they argue, is why the D.C. gun ban is not working.
* Answer: Perhaps criminals do get their guns in Virginia, but this overlooks one point: If the availability of guns in Virginia is the root of D.C.'s problems, why does Virginia not have the same murder and crime rate as the District? Virginia is awash in guns and yet the murder rate is much, much lower. This holds true even for Virginia's urban areas.
The murder rates are:
City
1997 Murder rate
Washington, DC 56.9 per 100,00027
Arlington, VA 1.6 per 100,00028
(Arlington is just across the river from D.C.)
Total VA metropolitan area 7.9 per 100,000
Guns are not the problem. On the contrary, lax criminal penalties and laws that disarm the law-abiding are responsible for giving criminals a safer working environment.
www.gunowners.org...
We need to really focus on what, how, and why he snapped?
BLACKSBURG, Va. - The gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre was a sullen loner who alarmed professors and classmates with his twisted, violence-drenched creative writing and left a rambling note in his dorm room raging against women and rich kids. A chilling picture emerged Tuesday of Cho Seung-Hui — a 23-year-old senior majoring in English — a day after the bloodbath that left 33 people dead, including Cho, who killed himself as police closed in. .....
....."He was a loner......
......A student who attended Virginia Tech last fall provided obscenity- and violence-laced screenplays that he said Cho wrote as part of a playwriting class they both took. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. Another was about students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.....
On the sign-in sheet where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. "Is your name, `Question mark?'" classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.
§ 44-1. Composition of militia. The militia of the Commonwealth of Virginia shall consist of all able-bodied citizens of this Commonwealth and all other able-bodied persons resident in this Commonwealth who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States, who are at least sixteen years of age and, except as hereinafter provided, not more than fifty-five years of age. The militia shall be divided into four classes, the National Guard, which includes the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard, the Virginia State Defense Force, the naval militia, and the unorganized militia.
leg1.state.va.us...
posted by Imperium Americana
§ 44-1. Composition of militia. The militia of the Commonwealth of Virginia shall consist of all able-bodied citizens of this Commonwealth . .
" . . if you take the line the 2nd Amendment only applies to militias . . Grover and I are in the militia . . [Edited by Don W]
posted by Benevolent Heretic
The 2nd Amendment doesn't say that the militia can have guns. It says a militia is necessary to the security of a free state. It says the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. NOT the militia: [Edited by Don W]