Originally posted by Phil1 We have an awful lot of very bad people here, the jails are full, rampant drug problems with laws, laws and more laws. Unfortunatly those that have the inclination don't follow laws. If you could magically eliminate all civilian guns here, in very short order the people you don't want to have guns will have all they want. Just like drugs, illegal immigration and all the rest. As you may be aware Detroit has strong gun laws and has an insane murder rate. Legislate away.........
When the legislation does not work, then what?
I'm not going to comment on whether the ease with which a 24 year old man obtained AK47s and a huge ammo dump contributed to the scale of this tragedy. It does strike me as shocking that such weapons are available so casually, but on the other hand, these mass shooters are special 'forward planning' kinds of people who will obtain a weapon and a way of inflicting maximum destruction somehow no matter how strict the gun laws are.
But it does annoy me in these discussions when deprived urban areas are cited as examples of gun laws not working, usually accompanied by statistics from predominantly rural states with lax or no gun laws where the murder rate is far lower. You never hear about New York, with stringent gun control laws and relatively good crime statistics. Not to suggest that the stringent gun laws are the
only or even
main factor in reducing crime overall - that would be as silly as suggesting that lax gun laws directly reduce crime.
I think shootings like this one are outside the 'gun control debate' and although I am pro gun control, I think that the knee jerk response is probably missing the point. I think we should be focussing on
why the shooter did what he did, rather than the tools he employed. I just wrote some waffle on this, but I have deleted it and will just say that a common thread with a lot of these shootings seems to be an interaction with our society / culture, and psychologically weak individuals.
Last edited by ihasa; 07-21-2012 at 01:22 AM.