Why the fuck are there so many crazy people?

[roxybisquaint]

I don't even know what else to say because without the answer to that question, we have no hope of reversing what seems to be an upward trend of crazy fuckers comitting nightmarish acts of violent. Yeah, this is because of that school shooting-that horrible, awful, straight-out-of-the-depths-of-hell kind of evil that can only be comitted by a

Comments

[intrepid01]

As an Australian I observe America’s gun culture with a mixture of awe and incredibility, and the televised reactions to these types of tragedies almost as an act of insanity that usually goes like this; First there is the stunned denial that something so bad can happen, then there is the moment of introspection where maybe better gun control should be considered, this is followed by the stampede to the local store to buy more guns because if we were better armed we could protect ourselves from the nut-jobs who go out and kill innocent people

[roxybisquaint]

Guns are an easy target because they're designed to be lethal weapons. But they're far from the only way to kill. Bombs, cars, knives, swords, poisons, crossbows... any of those things could be used for mass killing if someone was bent on doing it. In fact the deadliest school attack in the US was in 1927, when a guy killed 38 elementary school kids (and injured dozens more) using explosives. What if the next rampage killer plows a car into kids waiting at a school bus stop?

I don't think the goal should be to shape society around the mentally defective, it should be to stop the crazies-remove them from society before they succeed in harming anyone. The idea that we can stop killers by banning or reducing the existence of whatever tool they use for murder is an exercise in knee-jerk futility. It would be chasing after a problem instead of getting to the root of a problem and solving it.

[intrepid01]

I like guns, I like shooting them its fun, but I’m also a realist which is why after the Port Arthur massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australia) I supported my government when it brought in gun controls which reduced the firearms in the community by about ¾ of a million

[roxybisquaint]

No, all that proves is that your gun control laws worked for your country. Switzerland has TONS of guns and almost no gun crime. In the US, we have lots of crime and lots of guns, but our crime rate has been declining. I read recently that despite there being more guns in the US than there were a few decades ago, fewer households have guns. So that could be a factor: Maybe fewer bad guys have guns while good guys have more guns.

I'm pretty satisfied with our gun laws as-is. I think they do a good job of preventing known criminals and crazies from buying guns. The problem, of course, is there's no way to set up a system that can weed out people who will commit their first violent crime in the future. So we accept the fact a tiny percentage of people who legally own guns will one day murder someone with it. And we also know that cops can't catch every illegal gun sale

[intrepid01]

I agree that comparing Australia and America is apples and oranges and there would be no way what worked here would work there but I’m more trying to say it’s still the same basic principle at work, you have too many guns especially types that should never be in the hands of civilians because they are not meant for anything but killing people and “just” people, and personally I would find the prospect of people openly carrying horrifying, I would be a nervous wreck

[roxybisquaint]

"I wonder though about that often pointed out amendment wasn’t just a requirement of a young country making sure that it had a citizen army at the ready in case of need and your founding fathers never imagined that new country would be a nuclear armed super power with a large well equipped military or that the then muskets would evolve to be guns of such firepower."No, i don't think our founding fathers could imagine the kinds of weapons we have today, but that doesn't change the nature of our Constitutional right to bear arms. They knew swords were no match for muskets just as we know muskets are no match for a semi-automatic rifle. If weapons advance and citizens can't have them, the right itself becomes useless

None of the guns used were "military grade".

[tackdriver56]

What the talking heads and Nanny-statists are calling "assault weapons" are NOT. They are one bullet-per-trigger-pull civilian versions. The military used fully automatic machine guns, that merely LOOK the same, and all the readily convertible receivers were BANNED.

Re: None of the guns used were "military grade".

[roxybisquaint]

I found a video that does an excellent job of demonstrating the difference between an automatic assault rifle and a similar-looking semi-automatic rifle. The guy in the video also takes a classic ranch rifle and swaps the stock to make it look like a scary assault rifle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjM9fcEzSJ0