"If it saves one life"

marina

Sun, Feb 18 2018, 11:51 pm

Quote:

They posed a 4th Amendment due process problem, and the ACLU and virtually every disability rights organization was stridently opposed.

I saw this 4th amendment quote in the reason article also and didn't understand it there either. Do you both mean the 14th Amendment? The 4th is search and seizure, not due process.

Also, it's not dispositive to me that the ACLU and disability rights organizations are opposed. It makes the issue more complicated, but blind people can't fly planes and maybe it's okay if incompetent people can't buy guns.

The issue is more how the competence is measured. If it is a government designation based on financial competence that is probably less likely to survive scrutiny than a governmental designation based on an actual relevant guns training test that the incompetent person failed.

Fox

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 12:28 am

Yeah, you're 100 percent right. Fourth Amendment makes no sense -- it's 14th.

ITA regarding competence. The argument is always made that it's never a good idea to allow the government to start counting and logging your possessions -- registering makes confiscation too easy.

But it makes complete sense to me to qualify people as firearm owners -- just like we do drivers. Safety, mental fitness, continuing education, target practice records . . . A FOID should be at least as demanding to obtain as a driver's license.

The 2A purists will howl, but I feel like it would be on much firmer Constitutional ground and more practical than banning every new gun or gadget that's introduced. I assume you can show the government has a compelling interest in making sure that people voted most likely to become mass shooters don't get the chance.

southernbubby

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 8:46 am

I was listening to Sue Klebold (mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold), on YouTube last night while on the treadmill and also while sewing.

There seems to be a common pattern that although the signs are there that the mass shooter has anti-social ideas, is possibly a loner or has a dysfunctional friendship with another anti-social person, has contemplated suicide or has tried to harm himself, is male, has possibly had run-ins with the law before, was possibly on a psychotropic medication that produces suicidal or homicidal thoughts, has ties with hate groups, and usually has family members who are in denial, naive, or indulgent.

Despite these commonalities, again and again, the signs are missed or ignored, even when people do notify the authorities.

Then there is the phenomenon of copy-cat attacks that come from the fact that anti-social people like all of the attention that the shooter is getting, either in court or posthumously. The media attention fuels more attacks because anti-social people get their jollies watching the carnage and seeing the power that they can have over those who they feel reject them.

When watching the Dylan Klebold story, what struck me was that he had access to a car and money enough for his arsenal that he put together with Eric Harris, who also had money and a car and was more of the brains of the outfit. Klebold's mother had stopped inspecting his room when he got to the age where she felt that his privacy (in her home) needed to be respected. She has no idea how he got to be so evil because he grew up in a nice home with attentive parents. My own take from listening to her story, is that she was a loving but indulgent and naive parent who was not a limit setter or disciplinarian, and she thought that she knew her son but really did not know that for 2 years prior to his murder suicide, he and Harris had been plotting, planning, stocking arms, practicing, journaling, and had actually planned to blow up the entire school . It is unfathomable to me how a parent could be missing something that was going on in her home, with her child, for that long but she viewed him as a good boy, despite the fact that he and Harris had committed theft and had to attend anger management classes.

The parent of one of the boys murdered by Klebold and Harris felt that had he put his son in a Xtian school, where the "survival of the fittest" evolution theory had not been taught at the expense of the Creationist theory, his child would still be alive. He felt that the Godlessness in a public school setting gave way to the 'might makes right' way of thinking that cause the death of the innocents.

33055

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 8:48 am

southernbubby wrote:

My take from your post is stop publishing the murders' names.

The media can do this.

southernbubby

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:19 am

Squishy wrote:

This is something like the metoo movement. It can be bad form to glorify a murderer of school children. This could go viral if one of the student survivors backed it. They can just identity him as the murderer of 17 school children in Florida.

There is the need to construct motives, especially to make sure that the shooter is not in kehutz with others who intend to attack elsewhere or who are providing weapons to future attackers. This construction of motives involves questioning everyone involved with the attacker or who witnessed the attack. Because people post everything, including what they are having for supper, on social media, the news media only needs to follow twitter or Facebook to get all the news that they need for the rest of us.

33055

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:22 am

southernbubby wrote:

Then I fear marches and weapons bans will have no effect on someone looking for glory. They will get the weapons regardless.

sushilover

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:26 am

dancingqueen wrote:

1. I can't get behind this one. There have been 208 school shootings since Columbine, and that's just school shootings. Why can't we have both drug/gang shootings, and mass shootings as major issues? Right now 17 children have just been killed and failed by our country, so lets focus on that. Im ein achshav, aimatai?

Because mass shootings, despite how horrifying each one is, is not actually a major problem in our country. Drug/ gang shootings are a serious problem. I do think it is constantly overshadowed by the media's obsession with mass shootings. The only time the media seems to care about gang shootings is when they use the numbers to convince us that we need to ban semi-automatic rifles like AR-15.
You wrote about the 208 school shootings. As far as I am aware, a whopping 180 of those have not been fatal, thank G-d. Of course, even one is one too many. But when making policies, we must look at the numbers and the numbers do not reveal a major problem compared to the rest of the world.

dancingqueen wrote:

2-4. Mental illness is part of the issue, sure. And I am all for making it harder for people with violent backgrounds and mental illness to get guns. And lets get rid of the gun show loophole. But Trump despite his recent rhetoric is cutting funding for mental illness through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration by $665 million and the National Institute of Mental Health would see a 30 percent reduction in funding. Plus, he repealed Obama's legislation to prevent gun sales to the mentally ill.

But mental illness is not the whole story here. It's just too d@mn easy to get multiple powerful guns here. And becoming a mass shooter has a kind of dark glory in our culture, in our era of fame-seekers.

5. I agree!

As for the rest, I'm ok with us agreeing to disagree. As long as we realize that this debate does not have easy answers. We want to help mental health issues, but we don't want to increase the deficit. We don't approve of some of the wasteful spendings by the Institute of Mental Health, but we agree that they have done great work in other areas. etc...

The point is that people who think the issue is easy, really have no idea what they are talking about. "Get rid of the NRA!", "No more guns!", "No more assault weapons!" (a totally made up term) All of these are difficult, tricky issues, with long ranging impacts and affecting the rights of us all, even if we are not gun owners ourselves.

There are answers that will help some kinds of gun deaths and not others. No one size fits all. https://www.washingtonpost.com.....6bb0f

southernbubby

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:33 am

Squishy wrote:

Then I fear marches and weapons bans will have no effect on someone looking for glory. They will get the weapons regardless.

Everything has a role to play in reducing gun violence from having more armed security, to better mental health, to more vigilance regarding people who are possible shooters, to more restrictions on who can buy guns. There is no one magic formula.

If the young people who are tomorrow's adults are anti-gun, then they will elect officials who will back what they want. It might take a century for the guns to dry up but some future generation might grow up with less gun violence. It is the same as saying if we control carbon emissions now, our great great grandchildren will benefit from a more stable climate. We ourselves won't see the difference because it takes time for the environment to respond.

Even with all of that, there will still be gun violence but just like the warnings not to serve minors alcohol on Purim, most will not heed the warnings but it will be impossible to calculate the lives saved by the few that actually heed the warnings. We cannot assume positively that minors who are not served alcohol survived Purim as a result because we don't know that they would have died from being served alcohol. It is only a possibility that the youth who was denied alcohol survived as a result.

This is the same story with guns. The gun store who turns away a potential customer because they see him as unstable may or may not have saved lives but we can assume that they possibly have saved lives.

SixOfWands

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:37 am

Fox wrote:

Please list every item that is registered with the government that has been confiscated.

I register my car with the government. I'm not worried about anyone coming for it.

Every time I purchase Sudafed, its registered with the government. No one has broken down my door.

The NRA has people convinced that registration leads to confiscation, but that's just a boogeyman scare tactic.

The only way to control straw purchases and to start limiting the flow of weapons to criminals is to require registration and periodic inspection of every weapon.

southernbubby

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:39 am

sushilover wrote:

I posted in the spinoff thread that the NRA is not as powerful as has been presented. Less than 20% of gun owners are members of the NRA. About 30% of Americans own a firearm which includes hunters, those who inherited grandpa's gun, and those who keep a handgun in the nightstand in case of intruders but who don't regard their gun with any sense of enthusiasm.

Probably some gun ownership also interfaces with the heroin addiction crisis which involves mental health but is without a quick fix.

Of course, schools need to be safe now, which probably means armed security, metal detectors, cameras, drills, and taking it seriously when students report strange or anti-social behavior of a classmate.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/1......html

southernbubby

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:51 am

I just read the Washington Post link and disagree with one thing.

It is not hard to extend the age for when a person can legally buy guns. Cruz was 18 years and 4 days old when he bought his AR-15.

If he would have had to wait until age 21, maybe he would have outgrown his obsession with mowing down the school.

Also, it should not be so hard to draft a data base so that anyone who is expelled from school or the military for disciplinary purposes should be banned from buying weapons for a period of maybe 5 or 10 years.

dancingqueen

Mon, Feb 19 2018, 9:44 pm

southernbubby wrote:

The way that the NRA is powerful is that they have a Political Action Committee (PAC), to channel funds to legislators and they are one of the most powerful special interest lobby groups in the US, with a substantial budget to influence members of Congress on gun policy. NRA spends about $250m per year, far more than all the country's gun control advocacy groups put together.
From https://www.google.com/amp/s/w.....61394

They donated 30 million to elect Trump. Marco Rubio has been the recipient of over 3 million. Neither has spoken up for gun control of any kind following the Florida shooting. The control they exert over elected officials and the voting public is significant indeed.
Read more: https://www.google.com/amp/www.....e=amp

Sushi lover, we can agree to disagree on policies etc. but to say that America has no mass shootings problem in light of the past few months especially is honestly concerning to me.