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“More than 11,000 Americans were killed by gun violence in 2013 alone — 11,000. If Congress had passed some common-sense gun safety reforms after Newtown, after a group of children had been gunned down in their own classroom — reforms that 90 percent of the American people supported – we wouldn’t have prevented every act of violence, or even most,” the president continued. “We don’t know if it would have prevented what happened in Charleston. No reform can guarantee the elimination of violence. But we might still have some more Americans with us.”
“We might have stopped one shooter,”
“You don’t see murder on this kind of scale, with this kind of frequency, in any other advanced nation on Earth,” Obama continued. “Every country has violent, hateful, or mentally unstable people. What’s different is not every country is awash with easily accessible guns.
• The US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world - an average of 88 per 100 people. That puts it first in the world for gun ownership - and even the number two country, Yemen, has significantly fewer - 54.8 per 100 people
• But the US does not have the worst firearm murder rate - that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the US is number 28, with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people
• Puerto Rico tops the world's table for firearms murders as a percentage of all homicides - 94.8%. It's followed by Sierra Leone in Africa and Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean
Roof was charged with felony possession in February, 2015:
According to South Carolina court documents exclusively obtained by Radar, Roof, 21, was arrested in Lexington County on felony charges of possession of coc aine, methamphetamine and '___' on February 28, 2015.
This alone disqualified him from legal carry and purchase of a firearm. In South Carolina, you only have to be charged with a felony to lose your 2A right. Roof would have failed a background check to purchase a firearm.
So how did Roof obtain the gun used in the mass homicide at the church? Not legally. Loesch notes:
It was reported that his father purchased him a handgun for his 21st birthday. Roof's birthday is listed as April 4, 1994. His 21st birthday was this past April. Two months after he's charged with a felony his father buys him a gun? This means if his father purchased a gun for his birthday it was a straw purchase, a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
originally posted by: Ultralight
a reply to: KawRider9
You may want to live in a country where your government takes your firearms and stomps all over the 2nd amendment, but I don't. And I have never owned or used a firearm. But I want to keep my right to own one.
More they take, the less you have. So give yours away freely. As for MY rights. I am keeping them, thank you.
originally posted by: Shamrock6
Didn't even make it one response before the rhetoric started.
Amazing.
Yes, it is time. It has been time for a while. The problem is large swaths of people on both sides of the issue CAN'T stop resorting to rhetoric and hyperbole.
One side sees "better background checks" as "ohmigod they want to take all my guns and put me in a FEMA camp!" while the other side sees it as "ohmigod he wants to buy a suppressor for his 155mm howitzer to kill children!"
And until people change that particular default setting, it's not going to get anywhere.
originally posted by: KawRider9
The United States has hundreds of laws currently on the books for firearm related crimes. Yet, despite all of our laws, deranged people do not adhere to our laws. Also of note, the very vast majority of firearm related crimes are committed by repeat criminals, or folks that shouldn't have firearms in the first place.
A seven-year-old boy is reportedly among the three people killed in Austria by a man who ploughed his car into crowds in the country’s second-largest city and then reportedly started stabbing people. A witness told the Wiener Zeitung newspaper that dead bodies were left lying face down in the street after the vehicle sped through streets near the the historical Herrengasse in Graz. More than 30 pedestrians, including three children, were hurt during the rampage and 10 victims were in hospital with serious injuries. One patient was in a critical condition on Saturday afternoon.