Losing friends in divisive times.

[SeanM26]

No, no expectation for no shootings, just the expectation that the number of mass shootings could look more like every where else.
Is a gun without bullets an armament? If you have the right to carry arms - is it not implicit that it have bullets?

It could support a ban on certain guns - how can you produce, or sell bullets, for an illegal weapon?
In the end its just a furfy, another way of looking at the problem, seeing the solution and then avoiding it.

There are dudes in mud huts in the Middle East pumping out ammo to the tune of a couple thousand rounds a day. They have hammers, a fire pit, clay, and some times a drill.

And there are many different calibers of ammunition. If they ban a certain type of ammo to try and ban a certain type of gun, then you just re-chamber the gun to accept different ammo.

[Decourcy]

No, no expectation for no shootings, just the expectation that the number of mass shootings could look more like every where else.
Is a gun without bullets an armament? If you have the right to carry arms - is it not implicit that it have bullets?

It could support a ban on certain guns - how can you produce, or sell bullets, for an illegal weapon?
In the end its just a furfy, another way of looking at the problem, seeing the solution and then avoiding it.

Ammunition is a consumable. Guns really aren't. One, if production is stopped today, would cause a chokehold on use of some in a decade or so. The other, those guns, will be with us many many decades in the future. One has a hope if making a difference, one has none.

[Decourcy]

hmm. Link problem.

[Joe (SoCal)]

If a friend 'unfriended me' over gun control, I'd simply assume they were never really a good friend.

I never unfriend anyone - I do take a long time and think about who I choose to FRIEND. Once I do I take it pretty seriously.

[Decourcy]

Wright St Bikie murders	8 October 1999	Adelaide, Australia	3	2	Hell's Angels feud (mass shooting).[16]
Monash University shooting	21 October 2002	Melbourne, Victoria	2	5	Mass shooting attack by Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang.
Oakhampton Heights Shooting	20 March 2005	Hunter Valley, New South Wales	4		Mass shooting attack and familicide. Sally Winter uses a firearm to kill her husband, two children, and herself.[20]
2011 Hectorville siege	29 April 2011	Hectorville, South Australia	3	3	Siege attack where Anthony Carbo murdered three people a

Lockhart, New South Wales	5	0	A mass shooting and familicide by Geoff Hunt who killed his wife and three children before turning the gun on himself.
Wedderburn shooting	23 October 2014	Wedderburn, Victoria	3	0	A mass shooting and siegeby Ian Francis Jamieson who shot a husband and wife, after stabbing their son to death.
2014 Sydney hostage crisis	15 - 16 December 2014	Sydney, NSW	3	1	Siege. A lone gunman, Man Haron Monis, held hostage twenty customers and eight employees of a Lindt chocolate café located at Martin Place for 16 hours. The NSW Police Tactical Operations Unitshot Monis dead, after he executed a hostage. In the exchange, one person was hit by police bullet fragments, causing accidental death.
Osmington shooting	11 May 2018	Osmington, Western Australia	7	0	A murder-suicide, with three adults and four children killed. A grandfather shot his four grandchildren at their home, his daughter, his wife, and then himself.[28]
					.
June 2019 Darwin Shooting	June 4, 2019	Darwin, Northern Territory	4	1	Four people were killed and one person was critically injured in the leg in a mass shooting allegedly carried out with a prohibited pump-action (Category C) shotgun. The alleged shooter, 45-year-old Benjamin Glenn Hoffman, has been charged with four counts of murder. The alleged shooter had been released from prison on parole in January 2019 and was wearing a GPS-tracked electronic monitoring bracelet as a condition of his parole. [32]

[skuthorp]

Sean seems happy with the present situation, tell me Sean would you like more or less mass murders? Come on Sean, give us a number to work with………...

[bobbys]

Let's ban guns and then send armed government agents to seize them.

I dont see any problems with that.

.

Wait. Are you saying the government is not disarmed ?

[SeanM26]

I would prefer to see none.

Is it the gun that tempts a man to kill his brethren?

7fe8k8x4qde31.jpg

[Paul G.]

Pandora's box has already been opened. These guns are here. They are not going anywhere, no mattrr what rules or laws are passed.

If you think alienation of friends is the only way for you, then I hope it works. But it will not stop what is happening.

What a defeatist attitude, hey I know, how about do nothing? Actually not nothing T&P brother, T&P

[john welsford]

Heres a few issues as I see it:
- not many of those are registered. How do you get non registered out of circulation? Compliance rate in Canada for long gun registry was 20%. I have heard much the same for Auz, and expect NZ will achieve much the same. Even if the US achieves 50%, the number remaining is staggering. And then the remaining are all underground.
- how will the militias react? Yes, I do think that may be a real concern, fat and slow as they are. Particularly if they think that "now is the time".
- Who arrives at a criteria for what is acceptable?

Gathering in all those guns which are now illegal, will be a long game. But our government and our police will play that long game. Making it difficult to get semi auto and automatic guns here does two things, one is that every time a crim is raided his or her weapons get picked up, and the crims associates will find it much more difficult to replace them, and the new laws around gun security and the compulsory registration of every individual gun will make it easier to track them. That, with compulsory storage in approved, locked gun safes which will make it more difficult to steal them in casual petty burglaries makes that line of supply more difficult as well.
It worked in Australia, it will work here, it doesnt stop it completely, but it can much reduce the occurrence. But it takes time. We can do that.

John Welsford

[BrianW]

Getting desperate there Sean, bullets don't discriminate. Unless you are referring to the fact that the mass murderers have all been white?
You are a real piece of work.

Not white.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washin..._Yard_shooting

Palestinian (born in the US)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nidal_Hasan


But sure, most of them have been white.

Now if we want to go with use the definition where we've had a mass shooting everyday in 2019, then your statement is going to be very wrong. Sadly black-on-black crime leads all other variations. In real numbers, and per capita.

[The Bigfella]

I have never said do nothing. I have always said do something effective. So far the best method on offer is the ammunition controls.

How many shootings in Sydney so far this year?
My point is that Toronto is as close as you'll see to a US city with gun controls in place. If you expect no shootings, you're fooling yourself. If you think people won't and don't have illegal guns, you're fooling yourself.

Gun deaths were about 500 a year in Oz when we decided to do something about it. We introduced registration and safe storage, and got rid of assault weapons. Deaths now are around the 200 a year mark. It's not perfect... but it isn't the disgrace that exists in America.

[Robbie 2]

Didn't want to post but feel I must.
We constantly hear from NRA and pro-gun people that the 2nd amendment gives them the right to own their guns.
Also....it is too hard/can't be done to change the 2nd amendment.
Therefore, DON'T change the 2nd amendment. ENACT it.
CALL UP THE MILITIA.........have them report to whatever military base is closest on a given day.
Any gun owner who doesn't report is immediately illegal and commits a felony by holding onto their firearms.
The NRA/gun owners should have no complaint as the 2nd amendment requires them to be part of a well trained Militia.
When they realise that they have to report/train periodically and are
likely to be the 1st off the rank whenever needed for deployment to the USA's next military adventure,
the desire to hold onto their firearms will diminish very quickly.

[WX]

So hypothetically, we ban all semi-automatic rifles that fire medium caliber cartridges. How do we get the 5+ million out of circulation?

Many many ways, first you ban them making ownership illegal. Governments can then do a buy back or even offer something of equivalent value in exchange. It could be a new big screen tv, a mortgage payment or even a medical procedure.

[skuthorp]

#75. No one said the place was perfect Decourcy….
but what is it….249 in a bit over half a year?

[Hallam]

I would prefer to see none.

Is it the gun that tempts a man to kill his brethren?

7fe8k8x4qde31.jpg

......In depth analysis?

[WX]

......In depth analysis?

The herring is a fish therefore all fish are herring.

[epoxyboy]

Heres a few issues as I see it:
- not many of those are registered. How do you get non registered out of circulation? Compliance rate in Canada for long gun registry was 20%. I have heard much the same for Auz, and expect NZ will achieve much the same. Even if the US achieves 50%, the number remaining is staggering. And then the remaining are all underground.
- how will the militias react? Yes, I do think that may be a real concern, fat and slow as they are. Particularly if they think that "now is the time".
- Who arrives at a criteria for what is acceptable?

None of that matters. If you don't start, you'll never finish. Ever. If you do start, don't expect to finish for decades, and dont expect that bad things will immediately stop happening - of course, all that will need sustained bipartisan support, and in the case of th US, defanging the NRA - start by calling lobbying the bribery it really is.
Or just accept that there is a higher probability than any other civilised country on the planet, that somebody you love might never come home, because it was too easy for some idiot to bear arms.
I'm wondering what scale of massacre it is going to take, to make the status quo unacceptable. What happens if more than a couple of these guys actually get their collective chit together, and you get a body count in the hundreds. Would that do it?

Oh, and regarding your nice pie chart, what is it that enables mass shooters? Assault weapons and high capacity magazines, made easily available in large part due to the activities of the NRA and what seems to be a dollar driven interpretation of the second amendment. Your chart is correct in identifying that Islam has nothing to do with the problem.

Pete

[David W Pratt]

Perhaps a way to finesse the possible/impossible debate is to step back and examine the traits of the shooters, and of the gun owners who do not shoot anyone. Certainly there s no constitutional prohibition on such an investigation. Many of the current crop of mass shooters seem to be severely disaffected young men who gave a variety of red flag warnings in advance.
Many f the members here own guns and we seem to be able to resist the temptation to shoot each other

[C. Ross]

When I was a kid, a guy who smoked was cool.

I shudder to think what kind of woman thinks Butt Gun Bubba is hot, but I suppose she’s out there somewhere.

Someday gun fetishism will be seen as ridiculous as it really is, and like smoking it’ll turn from how to get laid to why you’re not getting laid. Won’t happen in my lifetime, but I have hopes that in most places being a gun nut will be seen as being, well, a nut.

[Garret]

What are you saying?
It's too hard so don't do it?

Or - maybe he's saying "Don't underestimate the size of the problem"?

The #'s are absolutely huge - both in # of guns owned and ammo closeted away. There are many people out there who've stockpiled 100's of thousands of rounds. Back in the Obama era, everyone "knew" he was gonna take away everyone's guns, so gun sales went through the roof, as did ammo sales. There were several years where the mfr's literally could not make enough.

Anyway - anyone who expects an immediate answer to the issue will be disappointed. Steps can be begun however - but many different things have to be done: get politicians in-line with the citizens is key, then courts that aren't also in the NRA camp, then we might be able to have some law changes that will actually make sense.

The balance of allowing weapons for hunting & recreation without having weapons of war available to the general public is a tough one to figure out. IMO, a start would be a ban on large magazines. Vermont's very first non-hunting gun law was just that - though not as small as many wanted (max 10 for rifle, 15 for pistol).

[S.V. Airlie]

Pandora's box has already been opened. These guns are here. They are not going anywhere, no mattrr what rules or laws are passed.

If you think alienation of friends is the only way for you, then I hope it works. But it will not stop what is happening.

So you're happy to just sit on your butt and not even try. Got it.
Women didn't think there was ever a chance to gain the vote, it took almost 100 years to get it and getting it was not sitting on their butts or giving up.

[Kevin T]

Well, except for the fact the government would be seriously out-gunned.

Outgunned? Not really, an ammosexual could be sitting on 10,000 guns but can only shoot two at most at one time. If 20 officers show up at his house, now what?

[Jim Mahan]

An armed society is a polite society.

Bull****.

Bull****.

Bull****.

An armed society kills it's members with craven regularity. An armed society is sick. An armed society is a primitive society. An armed society is evil.

So in case you still don't get it, a civilized society doesn't coddle and serve murderers or enablers of murderers.

An actual polite society doesn't kill so many people so pointlessly. And a polite society doesn't promote military and police fetish through common entertainment for the profit and financial benefit of the entrenched evil powerbrokers and their gilt git.

A polite society would have fewer guns and fewer gun deaths, like none. If it were up to me, if I were King of the World, there would be NO more hunting with firearms. NO hobby owernship, NO target practive, NO ranges, No gun stores and NO gun manufacturers making a profit in the United States.

No guns, no gun deaths.

If you own and use guns and claim it's a valued heritage and tradition, you are complicit in every gun death in America.

When you want to honorably and heritagely and traditionally poke holes in Bambi or even to responsibly reduce the unhealthy size of a herd of targets, you enable the murders and the tragic accidents. Your special trip to the remote mountains to take down a tagged wild ruminant trophy, even if you eat it all and let none of it go to waste, with special time-honored blood sport rituals, isn't innocent. If you pull a trigger for any reason, and go buy more bullets to do it again and again—you are helping directly to maintain the MIC, and you are complicit and enabling the murders and tragic accidents.

Killing people is universally considered bad, immoral, a sin, and illegal. Keeping the tools handy and just hoping and praying for innocents to stay safe amid the daily carnage is stupid and craven and primitive and in no way is it polite.

Stop it.

Or admit that you like killing in spite of what Jesus says.

I'm sure all the hunters and farmers and wildland stewards have really good legitimate reasons for needing guns, long rifles, single shot, responsible firearms, tools for honorable work and—BULL****!

If you are a gun owner, you are complicit in murder and serial murder, aggravated murder, and tragic accidents.

Oh, oops, sorry, I was just thinking and praying out loud to see if it was as absurd and stupid and craven as it seems.

Amen.

In that fabled polite society, a person getting raped should just lie back and enjoy it. That's polite. In that polite society, women at work should just stop making such a fuss, right? Don't object, we've all been doing this for centuries and our DNA makes it impossible for us to overcome our baser instincts, so it's all good as long as we are polite and traditional.

Signed,

Way too fed up to stay polite about it. And thank you, mister asterisk, for the tempering auto-edit.

[TomF]

Yeah. If the government really is finally gonna come and get your guns, this is how they will be pushed to that previously unintended step.

Anyone else see Biden's long interview with Anderson Cooper, and the bit where he talked about his conversations with his Delaware hunter constituents in the lead up to the assault rifle ban he co-sponsored in the 90s? Where the guys said "you gonna take my rifle, my shotguns? And Biden showed them a picture of the guns he wanted banned? Biden said "you need a magazine with 20, 30, 100 bullets to hunt deer? Man, you shouldn't be hunting!". And those guys agreed. They got it. There is no actual purpose for those 100 round rotary magazines except pretty much what we saw happen last weekend. 42 rounds fired in half a minute, at people.

There is no legit reason on earth that any civilian needs to own that. Yeah, take 'em away. Stop selling new ones. Institute a mandatory buy-back program, and prosecute people who, when they are discovered in the course of other police work, kept them. It won't get them all out of private hand in the least, but it will reduce the number out there substantially. And eliminate the continued increase in them.

[Garret]

Many states limit the capacity while hunting. Vermont (for example) only allows a 5 round clip/mag while hunting. Of course it's not the easiest thing to enforce - pretty much only happens if a game warden sees you.

[Rigadog]

I'd ban assault rifles, then give owners 6 months to bring in their guns for cash. After that it would be a crime to possess one, a $10,000 fine attached and weapons would be handed over.

[Jim Mahan]

When I was stationed in Korea in the seventies, when I was a kid and hadn't given any thought at all, I'm sure to this issue, and still enjoyed target shooting, South Korea's law was that the peasant rice farmers could own and use shotguns to keep the wildlife from eating the rice. All other gun ownership was illegal. About halfway through my tour, I discovered that the US military, in the status of forces treaty, had a provision whereby the ranking commanding officer of U.S. forces in the Pacific could have a Korean gun owner's license, for shotguns. Which allowed the base to provide a club run by American expat civilans, on base, with a facility for shooting trap and skeet, out past the end of the east-west runway, overlooking the wetlands and the Sea of Japan, Red Chna across the gulf. For five bucks, you could rent a twelve guage auto, and shoot trap or skeet all day, the box of twenty-five shells also cost about five bucks. Because of the near waterways and wetlands the gulf, and I suppose the gun laws and local agriculture, the geese, ducks and pheasants were abundant. Every shift, we'd load up a dozen guys in the step van to ride up the hill to the secure compound, and the road leading to that end of the base paralleled that same runway, and it was common to have the van paced by some flight of game birds flying low over the grassy area between the road and the runway. We even had the van drive, a South Korean marine, stop the van one dawn as we came off a mid, so we could run after and throw rocks at the dozen or so fat pheasants flocked in the tall grass. We scared hell out of the birds and entertained our driver for sure. And then, as it was summer and already eighty degrees, we'd play beer softball, still in uniform and dragging after the mid, until ...

I used to shoot. I gave it up for a variety of personal reasons before I was thirty. I sold my twenty-two and twelve guage and model ninety-four when I became a dad at eighteen. I have fond memories of all that. It makes me sick that the situation is what it has become. The only adult and civilized thing to do in the dire urgent national situation is act like adults and put away the toys, the things of our youth.

Or the evening news and the thoughts and prayers and that transparent sickening mockery of it by Trump.

I am sick unto death by the 'America strong' meme. We come together in our communities after a mass shooting has saturated the news again and because some of us are now dead that shouldn't be, we, the other victims agree to somberly nod and mourn and grieve and bring floral displays and whatever the name of the place, it is now strong and the billboard at the edge of town and the sign board at the church tells us so, too.

Bull asterisk.

[Chris Coose]

I've unfriended this ****hole country.

[Canoez]

If you can't talk to your friends openly about your opinion without them judging you, are they really your friends?

We've got a problem in this country with guns and it is eating us alive, for lack of a better expression. Right now we've been on the path of, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." We're getting the same results - we need to do something different to change this country's relationship with firearms. What we're doing doesn't work.

Other countries have gotten guns out of the hands of the public in large numbers. It has happened in the UK, Australia, and now New Zealand. None of those countries has suddenly had an issue with repressing their population because they're not an armed populace.

Get the background checks system working.
Make training, licensing, firearms registration, and safe storage the law of the land.
Licensing should not be pro-forma. If you cannot show that you can handle a firearm properly during training you don't pass - just like a driver's test.
Make penalties for firearms violations progressive for low level "oops" violations, and extreme for extreme violations.
Ok, so you want to own a firearm - jump through the hoops. Fill out the paperwork. Get the training. Learn something. Maybe there will be a visit to your house. Tough. If there needs to be a home visit to assure safe storage, suck it up.
I'm in favor of making handguns and large capacity/high cyclic rate firearms difficult to get the way fully automatic firearms are today - either show need or get something like an FFL.

I'm not in favor of taking all the guns away from the public. However, the longer this crap goes on, the more I'm in favor of more extreme measures. I am a firearm owner and user, so it would change things for me, but I'll accept that to make others safer.

[Art Haberland]

So hypothetically, we ban all semi-automatic rifles that fire medium caliber cartridges. How do we get the 5+ million out of circulation?

Some would be turned in, some would be lost to crime and arrest of the owner, and many will sit quietly in some small collection doing nothing. Eventually they will turn into the equivalent of a civil war rifle, still deadly, but not worth the effort to clean up and use

[Flying Orca]

So hypothetically, we ban all semi-automatic rifles that fire medium caliber cartridges. How do we get the 5+ million out of circulation?

Gradually, while taking other measures such as permitted ownership, background checks, safe storage and transportation laws, and tight restrictions on handguns.

It's called harm reduction for a reason. Perfection is the next door down.

Oh, wait, there is no next door down.

[SeanM26]

I'm not a defeatist on the issue, I just don't believe you people see the severity of the issue.

It won't matter if "Assault-rifles" and standard capacity magazines are outlawed. The government has no idea how many there are or where they are. Only a couple states have registration laws. The tge large capacity magazine ban lapsed for one week this year in California. In that one week nearly 100,000 thirty, forty, and sixty round magazines were sold in the state.

The US Consitution is a living document. It can be changed. Since its ratification in 1789 it has been successfully amended 27 times. The first 10 are known as the Bill of Rights. The 11th regarded suits against the state and the 12th is about electing a president and vice-president.

Then we get to 1861 and the start of a protracted civil war that killed over 600,000 US citizens. This started because of a proposed amendment to abolish slavery.

The Supreme Court stated in the DC vs Heller case that the 2nd Amendment protected an INDIVIDUALS right to bear arms. This completely undermines all the arguments I hear about needing to be a part of a militia. The SCOTUS has said that we are all the militia, not just those in the National Guard.

The only time an amendment was repealed was in 1933 when prohibition was abolished. In 1919 there was an amendment passed outlawing alcohol. It did nothing. Anyone who has read a modicum of US history will know the Roaring 20's name was well deserved because people completely disregarded the law.

Everything I posted above, except for my estimation, is verifiable fact. Below are my opinions.

Banning assault rifles will never work. There are too many of them. There are more being bought and built every day. Every time a tragedy happens and emotions get strong there is a huge surge in buying.

If bans are placed, and confiscation is ordered, there will be bloodshed. The police are also citizens and members of the communities they serve. Do you honestly believe that all of them will follow orders to go against friends and family? I do not.

An attempted repeal of the 2nd Amendment will lead to another civil war. It is a widespread belief that the purpose of the 2nd is to protect citizens from an over-reaching government. If the government tries to remove that protection, then there will be million who believe the government no longer serves them and it is time to replace it. These millions are heavily, HEAVILY, armed. Along with those arms, you have thousands of retired law enforcement and military. There will he leaders among them who know warfare and tactics. The mighty US Army had been at war in the Middle East for nearly two decades. If those sheep herders with limited leadership can put up such a strong resistance, what do you think will happen here?

I am raising a son. I have two choices: 1. Raise him to succeed in a world I wish existed or 2. Raise him to succeed in the world that actually exists. I chose option 2, yet at the same time I am actually trying to leave him a better world. But I am only one man with one vote.

[moTthediesel]

I am sick to death of the second amendment being treated as some kind of holy writ, passed down from the very hand of God. The fact is that it is an ill-considered and self-contradictory piece of drivel, the only virtue of which is it's brevity. How in the world can something be both "well regulated" and "not infringed" at the same time? Aren't all regulations, by definition, also infringements?

Then there's this notion, popular among the gun fetishists, that the second amendment was written as a way to give the "people" a means to rise up against a oppressive government, that's nonsense. If that's so, than again, why "well regulated"? Is the oppressive government then to be given the power to regulate a militia intended to overthrow it? This is just silliness. People, both in the legal world and without, seem to see in those few poor words all kinds of meaning and intent that are just not there on the parchment, but are in fact only in the prejudices of the reader. I'm no lawyer, but that strikes me as bad legal writing.

Far from scripture, the second amendment has the feel of something that was dashed off quickly, by someone in a hurry to be somewhere else. Was it Friday afternoon, did James Madison have a hot date lined up? Perhaps he had a few bad oysters for lunch and it was just a case of diarrhea of the bowels leading to constipation of the brain. Whatever the reason, as it is, it's useless, and it needs to be fixed. Would that be hard? Of course, and it would take a long time, but it needs to be done. The question is, who has the guts to even try?

[Jim Mahan]

Another tiny bit to add to this somewhat cynically, on craigslist, in the tools by owner section of for sale items, just the other day I saw an ad for part of a reciever (?) for some AK type gun. Three-D printed by the seller apparently. Apparently, like distilling your own booze, if you do it at home for your own use, you don't need a license or need to pay any fees or taxes.So now we have, another whole new category of human-killer tech, and it's DIY, because, why not?

We're not gonna end up with Skynet, we're gonna end up with DIY AI. Hell is gonna be chock full of shall not be infringed types.