Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Obviously, everyone is disgusted and saddened by what happened in Colorado. This was clearly a disturbed individual who decided to massacre defenseless people for as-of-yet unknown reasons.
There is an antagonism between gun proponents (GPs) (full-disclosure, I would consider myself one) and those who are in favor of gun-control, or outright bans (GCs).
GPs are threatened about a rachet-effect that would eventually end in guns being effectively banned. Each law is viewed as an incremental step, so it is opposed. GPs don't want massacres like this to happen, but don't want some deranged persons actions taking away rights from the law-abiding.
GCs don't want fights in the streets escalating into funerals. GCs don't want massacres like this to happen, and think that the laws should be constructed in such a way to keep guns out of the hands of nuts like this shooter.
As each side of the gun debate entrenches, I have a few good-faith questions.
My questions to GCs:
- If someone in the audience had a gun, could this have been prevented? Could one life have been saved? A distraction for or some sort of intimidation towards the shooter?
- Should body-armor have similar purchase restrictions as guns?
- If he had no history of mental illness and therefore no reason to be denied purchase of a gun, why should he be denied purchase of a gun?
- If the current gun control laws didn't stop this, is it possible that some are ineffective? Can they be taken away as a goodwill gesture towards GPs?
My questions to GPs:
- Should there be a federal database of gun purchases, including internet sales?
- Should body-armor have similar purchase restrictions as guns?
- Are there some styles of guns that are currently legal that should be outlawed? (Machetes v knives)
- Should there be a limit to how many guns can be purchased in a period of time?
I expect that my ignorance will show, and that my assertions/questions will be eviscerated in the comments.
I know that if someone I cared about was in that theater, I would have wanted him to be armed.
Please school me on where I'm wrong.
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Comments:
Jun '10
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Q: Should there be a federal database of gun purchases, including internet sales?
Only if the goal is to provide the government a handy collection list for when they decide to outlaw private ownership. That's what a list is most likely to be used for. Most guns they find at crime scenes won't have a nice neat database record to check.
Jun '10
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
How would any of that stopped this particular case? The shooter seemed pretty clean in all that I have heard previous to this blow out. To make the safety net fine enough to catch this guy, it would have to filter out me, I think.
The adage, Hard cases make bad laws, rings true here.
Dec '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
1. An audience member with a gun may have stopped it sooner if his aim was true, but otherwise it might have exacerbated the situation. A dozen with guns could have gone bad very quickly. In the end, GCs and GPs will imagine this situation to play out in accordance to their own positions.
2. I have no problem with people owning body armor, but who the heck would wear body armor to a movie?
3. I don't know any guns that are legally obtainable that couldn't have been used to carry out some similar attack. The only way to potentially stop it woud be to ban all firearms, and hope he doesn't have access to an illegal dealer,or attack people with home brewed bombs.
4. I don't see how the cops knowing that he had a gun and where he bought it would have stopped him from shooting up the theater at midnight. A gun registry may make it easier to catch someone after a crime, but it would never stop something like this.
5. No matter how many guns he owned, he could only fire one at a time.
Mar '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Bombs are illegal in Bulgaria.
That fact doesn't seem to have helped much.
The idea that laws prevent lawbreaking is one of those things about statism that don't square up with reality. The idiot who was once Mayor of Chicago wanted to establish a no-fly zone over the city in the wake of the 9/11 attacks because anyone determined to fly a plane into a building downtown would surely be deterred by a purple box on an FAA sectional chart.
May '12
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
I am a GP:
Great post, it is always important to ask tough questions, takes courage.
I answer No to all 4.
I concur with Mister D. That an armed person(s) in the theatre may have stopped this sooner, but not prevented it.
The thing that bothers me most is the tear gas. I did the gas chamber in the Navy and it is not fun. I often carry a gun, but I don't think I would be very effective using it in a dark theatre filling up with tear gas. At that point I think the only thing I could've done is try to charge toward the gun fire, but may end up doing as much harm as good.
Apr '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Fundamentally, I don't think gun-ownership is a Second Amendment right: I think it is a God-given right. There were, IIRC, sword-carrying privileges in medieval times, with only nobles allowed to pack.
Who was the WaPo columnist, 30 years ago, big gun-control guy, who shot an intruder by his swimming pool?
(Don't mean to hijack the conversation.)
Apr '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
I read that there were some Navy guys in the theater. Suppose they were armed?
Also, I've heard lefties dismissing pro-gun arguments by saying "Oh, well he had body armor! Nothing could be done!"
But doesn't the fact that he went to the trouble to wear body armor show that he actually considered the possibility of armed resistance?
Dec '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
GP:
No, No, No, No
Sep '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Years ago I rented some office space from a fellow with a machinery business. I rented the top floor of the building--he kept an amazing collection of machine tools on the ground floor.
So one day, walking through his shop, I saw what looked like part of a pistol. I sort of stared, and Doug stopped what he was doing. "Recognize that?"
I sort of blinked.
"Yup--it's a Colt revolver. It's an easy test of the accuracy of a machine--and any machinist knows how to make one."
Any machinist?
"Absolutely. Don't know about today, but when the [local] high school had the machinist program, before they created the Vo-Tech [school], you had to be able to produce a working--firing--Colt revolver to graduate."
A friend and sometime employee, who does some gunsmithing, assures me that you can download CNC machine tool programs that will do all the work for you--no particular skill required.
Revolvers are 19th century technology. Maintaining absolute chain-of-control on guns from licensed manufacturers would still not take guns off the street.
Sep '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
After posting #9 above, I decided to do a bit of research. I did some searching with Google, and quickly found several sites offering plans for a wide range of guns (from pistols through WWII-era machine guns, plus an 18 lb. cannon) in the AutoCAD DXF format, suitable for use with CNC machine tools.
So--no. A federal firearms database of gun purchases would be about as useful in making America secure as, well, federal agents fondling four-year-olds at the airport.
May '10
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
All laws are applied after the fact. They are instruments of punishment, not deterrence.
If one attempted to outlaw everything that could kill another person the only thing you could legally sell would be Nerf foam toys... except that you could probably smother someone with them.
Mar '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Glenn the Iconoclast:
Who was the WaPo columnist, 30 years ago, big gun-control guy, who shot an intruder by his swimming pool?
William Raspberry, who died four days ago.
EDIT: Looks like Ferguson is right. I thought it was Raspberry.
Edited on July 21, 2012 at 8:50pmApr '12
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Looking at this wrong-- we GPs are letting the GCs force this into being a gun issue.
The guy didn't kill people because he had guns; he was clearly able to make bombs and noxious agents, and if he got into the theater with all that getup he could get in with bombs. Gas bombs, chemical bombs or nail bombs.
I have heard that he was a very popular kid, class clown and all, and only recently had a huge change in behavior; when his parents were contacted, his mom's response was "you've got the right person."
I know from a family friend that there is nothing you can do when someone is clearly going insane until after they are found guilty of something dire. Sometimes not even that. (Poor psychotic is a few years older than I am. Saw a lot.)
The question is: do we want to set up a system that looks at mental health, where at best the "holes" would mean sane people are treated as insane, or keep the current system where the insane are generally left on the streets and problems are fixed when there's a body count?
Apr '12
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
On an aside-- if it seems like I've spent way too much time thinking about ways to cause damage without guns, it's because I have. One of the exercises we did on my ship, especially when we were in the Gulf for months at end. I'm shocked it took this long for someone to pick an obvious target like a movie theater on the night of the big premiere; it's a fannish movie, so people dressed strange wouldn't be that odd. It's late at night, so people aren't as alert, and it's dark outside.
Also, I have family members with mental issues. (For some reason, my male relatives love to marry them-- I'm not being snarky, either; not counting depression.)
Apr '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Carl Rowan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rowan I hadn't heard about that one, but I'm not a bit surprised.
There were similar laws in Japan for a long time, with only Samurais and other select people allowed to carry swords.
Glenn the Iconoclast: Fundamentally, I don't think gun-ownership is a Second Amendment right: I think it is a God-given right. There were, IIRC, sword-carryingprivileges in medieval times, with only nobles allowed to pack.
Who was the WaPo columnist, 30 years ago, big gun-control guy, who shot an intruder by his swimming pool?
(Don't mean to hijack the conversation.) · 5 hours ago
Jul '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Lone gunman massacres such as what happened at the Batman movie, Tucson, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and Columbine are great tragedies and cause great sorrow. They happen infrequently and involve a relatively small number of people. On the other hand a list of governments and organizations that are / have killed large groups of people is quite long, done with more frequency and because of its size causes much greater sorrow. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to give the populace a chance to defend themselves; be that against a lone gunman, against governments both domestic and abroad, and against anarchy. It does not guarantee that we the people can defend ourselves, it only gives us the chance.
May '12
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Apologies for changing the subject, but we always seem to have insightful folks on these threads:
Why all the body armor if he just planned on giving up to the police? I recall years ago three bank robbers in California (I think around LA) that were covered with mostly home made body armor that shot it out with the police for hours.
2nd question - where does one go to buy tear gas? Can it be homemade?
Apr '12
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
BrentB67:
2nd question - where does one go to buy tear gas? Can it be homemade? · 5 hours ago
Depends on the type; if we're speaking rather generically, it's anything that makes you tear up more than, oh, normal smoke; also means defense sprays. The nasty crud the Navy uses in the confidence chamber is from burning a couple of little pellets on a tiny burner, sort of like incense that feels like rubbing hot chili in your eyes.
There are a huge number that he might have concocted; heck, you can buy the stuff that makes hot peppers hot in health food stores, so that would be pretty easy. Far easier would be to just use bug-bombs, and I don't know anybody that's immune to those, while I know of several that weren't bothered by pepper based stuff, including one that took military grade stuff to the eyes several times without it working.
Aug '11
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Restricting the ownership and use of firearms only disarms the law-abiding and empowers the lawless. When the lawful are disarmed, the armed lawless are overwhelmingly powerful. And the lawless are attracted to those who are weakest.
Jun '12
Re: Good-faith Gun Control Questions After a Massacre
Washington DC has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation.
Washington DC has the highest rate of firearms deaths per 100,000 citizens.
With those two facts, how can any person who's able to determine which shoe goes on which foot in less than 30 minutes each morning argue that gun control laws make people safer?