Is it the gun nut time

Question

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080801/ap_on_re_us/wisconsin_shooting

Midwest and west, lots of guns, many assault weapons, angry people shooting into groups of people. Fine time to be a proud american.

Do you support the universal right to gun ownership, or should we be sure that only psychos who want to kill groups of people have them.

Spare me your second amendment. I support that. But I have to wonder about the assault weapons and where they are coming from... and all these angry righties.

Answer 1

First define what you call an assault rifle.

Second, people are capable of killing eachother with other means besides guns take for example this article, http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080718/ts_...

Look at that, 7 people died and he dident even have a fully automatic machine gun...

Third, nutcases should be "screened" anyways under our laws and thrown into fluffy white rooms with pillows.  

fourth, dont tread on my freedoms, because I did not commit those crimes.  

Eventually regulation tends to see no bounds, you obviously cannot stop determination, so 'tools' seem to be the target.  It starts with alleged assault rifles and works itself down to ridiculous things such as cookware. All regulation does is create a black market.

Answer 2

Ironic but statistically, all the gun crimes seem to occur in the liberal, anti-gun areas of the country...  So, let's play a little game of 'you might be a redneck.'

If a criminal knows that you are unarmed and can't defend yourself...  

Then you might be a victim of a gun crime...  

That's why schools, libraries and even churches get attacked by criminals...  You think by taking guns from law abiding citizens will somehow miraculously remove them from criminal's hands?  Who is the nut?

Wow, I am funny!

Answer 3

The problem is that there are numerous gun laws on the books already that have no teeth in them.  I am for gun ownership and pro-second amendment, but for background checks.  Good background checks will, theoretically, eliminate psychos from owning guns.  But stuff still happens.

What I am very against, is the media and uninformed people calling weapons assault weapons when they are not.  Check out the link below.

Answer 4

I support the Bill of Rights!

Answer 5

maybe we should look at the problem and not a biproduct of it.

why do these people feel the need to kill innocent people? why are more and more school shootings happening than ever?

guns aren't the problem, the force that drives people to kill others is.

Answer 6

Stuff happens. But you have to remember that the media's job is to stir you up. Like the prime time documentary "news" magazines intended to get you afraid/mad about things that rarely happen. It's like shark attacks. Once one gets into the national news, the local sources figure they are all hot news, and it looks like all of a sudden the International Association of Sharks voted to eat everyone at the beach, when you just didn't hear about them before reporting it became popular. People imagine there were no serial killers before it became a hot topic, but there's never been a time when it wasn't happening. It may be that one well publicized incident become one factor in another's impulse. Airliner hijackings appeared to be a new phenomenon in the 1960's, but the first one was in 1930. Of course, it did become a popular stunt in the 60's and didn't even prompt much in the way of security changes.

It's hard to say what all is involved in one or another sort of thing becoming more common. There was a period in the 19th century when terror bombings were popular. It died out for a long time. It wasn't because bomb-making materials became hard to find. And it's never really caught back on in the U.S.

You're getting excited about guns. In 1980 in Reno, the weapon was an Lincoln Continental. The woman who intentionally drove into the crowd was hoping to kill 75. (In one study, there actually is a correlaton between car ownership and gun violence.) She had to settle for five. She was a "spree killer," no different but for weapon from any of the shooters from Whitman to this new guy. Just the U.S.?  How about Anatoly "The Terminator" Onoprienko in Russia in 1990? Australia? Jimmy and Joe Governor in 1900.

It's not so simple as guns. Homicide rates don't fluctuate with gun availability. Murder rates dropped in the U.S. in the 1870's and beyond, a time when there was a huge number of guns following the war, great advances in rapid-fire guns, rapid expansion into unpoliced areas, and absolutely no regulation of gun ownership. When you look at periods of increases in availability of guns everywhere, what you find is that sometimes gun violence increases as guns become more common, and sometimes it decreases as they become more common. There are other things at work.

One of them that might well work for these public spree killers is saturation news coverage. He can get national and international renown. It's only been relatively recently that some so twisted that he felt the need to be widely notorious could accomplish it by anything short of assassination of a famous figure. And in a case like this last guy, he gets off on the terror of "mad sniper on the loose" headlines.