Was the Oklahoma-city bombing a wake-up call for "explosives control"? Was the 2009 Chengdu bus-fire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Chengdu_bus_fire) a wake-up call for diesel control? Was the Osaka school massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre) a wake-up call for knife-control? Was the 2012 Toronto mall shooting a wake-up call for gun-control in Canada, which already has extremely stringent gun-laws?
It's all too easy to blame the gun in these situations, but guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives.
It's not the gun. It never was the gun. It's the person.
IIRC, the talk after the shooting in Toronto was for more countermeasures against illegal guns being smuggled in from the US.
This kind of zero sum game attitude is a problem in my opinion. yes, Guns are used by people and they don't shoot by themselves. But better controls must be put in place to at least try and keep it away from crazy people. I am saying try, make it harder. If you have a toddler in the house and he starts playing with knives, would you blame it on the toddler ? No, I would say that you need to ensure that the toddler does not get his hands on the knife. Is it possible that he could still do it ? Sure. But is it harder if u hide them? Sure.
The situation over here is a tragedy, because all school shootings were commited by sons of fathers who were members of a shooting clubs (and therefore had access to guns). Even though it was not politically possible to ban those clubs and weapons.
But the situation in the USA is even more a tragedy. The USA have shooting after shooting with so many dead kids, and still the political forces are not able to ban guns. Or even slightly control them. Sickening.
So what if it's the person? How can you find those people and stop them from getting guns? All the people who knew the shooter in the Oregon mall shooting a couple days ago said that he showed no signs of being anything other than a kind and friendly person. He showed only a marginal interest in guns. But that could describe hundreds of millions of Americans. You would never be able to find the ones that might do this and make sure they don't get guns.
It's not the gun.
Guns are tools, they aren't the problem. We need to be better at being able to detect these individuals who are likely to go on these rampages. But more than that we need to have a society that is better able to defend itself. If even 1 in 20 or fewer teachers at a school were people who were responsible and trained and carried guns for self-defense then these sorts of attacks would be far less common. Because the attacks would be ended sooner by armed citizens acting in defense. And because then schools and other places would no longer be defenseless. The reason why these crazy people go to schools to commit mayhem is because they know that they aren't going to be stopped. They know that it's just going to be unarmed teachers and defenseless children. If that stopped being the case, if there started to be more of a risk to the shooter in these situations then maybe these sorts of shootings would be less common.
We've spent the last half century in the developed world progressively making ourselves more and more defenseless and less and less empowered, on the premise that doing so also disempowers the bad guys. The rage killers, the school shooters, the terrorists, etc. But the exact opposite has come to pass. We've disempowered the individual and made ourselves defenseless and even more vulnerable to these monsters.
No, not everyone should own a gun, or be allowed to own a gun. But if we started to cultivate more of a culture of self-reliance and personal responsibility, and if we started increasingly empowering individuals to take care of their own self-defense by becoming more aware, more trained, more prepared, and to carry weapons if they so choose then maybe we'll actually end up with a safer society.
I've been shooting guns since I was 10 years old, and I've been carrying a pocket knife since middle school. I take these things vary seriously. I maintain my certifications and training in first-aid and CPR. I have well stocked first aid kits in my home, car, and backpack (when I ride the bus or bike), including things like hemostatic compounds. I also have a concealed carry permit (which means that my info and fingerprints are on file with local law enforcement) and own firearms. If you make a law which limits my capability to defend myself or others then you are not making society more safe. And almost any gun-control law is going to preferentially disempower good people like myself while having much less impact on the bad guys who don't care about living within the law.
Edit: the concentration on guns as an item which "enables violence" is no more sensible than the TSA's concentration on liquids or nail clippers. It's just another form of security theater.
this is such a bad argument. of course its true that the person is responsible, but that's not an argument against gun control.
we can't just lock up everyone that could possibly go on a shooting spree, but we sure can make it harder for a person to go on shooting sprees. make it harder for people to get guns!
> Guns exist, that can't be stopped any more than preventing alcohol from existing
great, but if access to guns was restricted, it would be harder for crazy people from going on shooting sprees.
nobody thinks that all access to guns can be eliminated, but its pretty reasonable to say that if it were hard to get guns, fewer shooting sprees would happen.
> guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives
this comparison is so clearly bad:
the tradeoffs for society are obvious in each of these cases. knives are pretty dangerous, but they don't really enable someone to rampage through an elementary school to kill 27 people. diesel fuel is pretty dangerous, but it's also really useful to society. i'm pretty sure we already have controls on who has access to explosives.
The best we can really do is tighten all of the bolts that we can see, and hope the leak slows down to an acceptable level. Improve gun ownership laws, improve our handling of the mentally ill, assist those experiencing crippling poverty, etc. Attack all the angles reasonably to get crime down to a reasonable level.
(And an acceptable level cannot be "no incidents". To accomplish that would require a police state. We must accept that once in a while horrific things will happen, and there was nothing that could reasonably be done to prevent it. i.e., shit happens.)
Ultimately it's impossible to be knowledgeable of the bad intentions of every single warped individual on the planet. And some of those folks will have the capability of harming people, perhaps many people. Look at 9/11 as an example of how a handful of well trained and highly motivated individuals armed with only box cutters were able to take control of jumbo jets and ram them into buildings and kill thousands. That's an extreme example but it's worth remembering, because there are many, many examples of similar situations. Look at the unabomber, for example. A brilliant loner who was able to fashion bombs from household materials in a shack in the middle of nowhere and kill several people. Or look at all of the other bombers throughout history. You can't legislate away the ability to build bombs, they're already illegal, but anyone with enough knowledge and a little money can make them and kill people. The same goes for arson, which kills hundreds of people every year.
In my view the solution is not to try to disempower the entire populace by taking away guns and hoping that this disempowers the bad guys enough to make it that much harder for them to kill. I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others. I think it's also worth concentrating on social and cultural changes which make our society more accepting and hopefully make the creation of these violent individuals less common, but that's a much harder problem to tackle.
Actually, I see 9/11 as an example of TLAs refusing to share information when doing that could have easily stopped the hijackers long before they could do anything. I also see it as something the US brought upon itself with its dependence on oil and constant meddling in the Middle East. So I don't think it's a very good analogy for mass shootings by (usually insane, or at least disturbed) white US citizens.
And just because you can't stop all crime doesn't mean you shouldn't stop any crime. There are simple steps that can be taken. For example, the sales of guns at gun shows needs to be stopped immediately. Ex-felons should not be able to get guns. There are a lot of holes in gun control law that could be easily closed if it weren't for people like you making it political suicide for any politician to even suggest that we need stricter gun control laws.
> I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others.
How would you propose to "empower" elementary school children? How about people in a mall or movie theater were the possession of firearms is not allowed?
Then we just have an order of magnitude more of that kind of person than Western Europe. If it's not the guns, then Americans are just worse people, statistically speaking, than our more civilized neighbors around the world.
I call BS on this. In such a situation there's a lot of confusion and panic about what is exactly happening. It's not like everyone knows how many shooters there are and how they look like. Someone pulling out a gun can easily mistaken to be an attacher and could be attacked himself by someone else trying to be good samaritan while himself being mistook for an attacker by the original good samaritan resulting in chaos. This is not like the movies where everyone knows who the bad and good guys are.
The problem is how we treat mental illness. It's so stigmatized that people feel extreme shame and a sense that they just have to want to be better.
Every single person should be able to walk into a doctor's office, be screened and treated for their illness without the stigma that we attach to it. "Why should I have to pay for it?" This is one, among many, of the reasons. Will it eliminate these incidents? Nope but the result will still be a better society.
But yes, I agree that guns are only a tool, and that the underlying cause is psychological and/or cultural. No matter what we do with guns, it won't prevent future incidences; I just don't see how people can view a situation like this and think "oh, if the teachers had guns, everything would be all right."
(EDIT: listening to CNN in the background, Dr. Drew Pinsky said something along the lines of what we have here.)
As far as arming teachers, it's not a perfect solution, nor is it going to "make everything alright". When you have people like this who end up being so bent on destruction and violence things are not going to be alright, it's a matter of degrees. However, there have been several incidents of teachers and civilians putting a stop to mass shootings, likely saving many lives. These often don't get as much news coverage precisely because the body count is lower and thus the events are less newsworthy. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting
Note that I am not advocating getting rid of all guns. But we need to have an honest discussion about them, and that starts with being truthful with ourselves about their very nature.
Overwhelmingly guns are owned and used by peaceful, law-abiding civilians. That they can be misused does not mean we should punish those who have done no wrong.
And the idea that we can live in a simple world where we can divorce ourselves from violence, death, responsibility, and from tools of lethal force is simply naive. Pacifism is a luxury of those who have never experienced the threat of violence. In the real world there are violent men with bad intentions and being able to forestall such men by using lethal force can save lives, your own life and the lives of others. You can either turn away from that truth or foist it off on the responsibility of others or you can face it directly. But you can't make it simply go away.
I live in a country(Lebanon) that went through a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Guns are a fact of life here, they are very easy to get and lots of people have them. And yet nobody has ever gone into a school and shot children and parents that I know of.
We've had bombings, assassinations, terrorism, and even a war now and then. If it's violent, we've had it. But not this. Are Lebanese people better people? Hell no. But our societies tend to be more closely knit and more traditional. That has many many drawbacks but it also means that people very rarely get to such extremes in terms of mental well-being(to the point where they could do something like this) without being noticed.
I'm not saying traditional societies are the answer, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, it's not just a choice between "bad people" or "too many guns". Reality is much more nuanced than that.
The point is the efficiency. The magnification of force is so great with guns compared to other weapons as to render the comparison moot. If I had a weapon that could instantly vaporize a person of choice with the push of a button, this tool would rightly be condemned far and wide. Yet the same tool could be used in a purely defensive manner. We all subconsciously understand the importance of considering the magnitude of force magnification.
I completely agree with your second paragraph. I am far from a pacifist. The point is that these conversations seriously lack nuance, each side takes points to the absolute extreme as a tactic to validate their side. There is much nuance in the middle that needs to be considered. Acknowledging the nature of guns is a starting point.