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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

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ORIGINAL: LadyPact

Do you mind if I trim a bit? I only want to address certain parts.

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ORIGINAL: joether
Sooner or later, there will be so great a moment of death and destruction by one or more individuals with firearms, that the nation will get behind better and tougher laws.

Honestly, I see that working about as well as prohibition. You're going to have a lot of unsavory people making a heck of a lot of money because as soon as the market is created, somebody is going to cash in on it. How do you think all of the cocaine got here?

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Given that most people, still reeling from the sight and sensation of the destruction will be opting for 'ban 'em all'.

I don't see this happening. If it didn't happen post Sandy Hook, I sincerely doubt it's going to. Gun control people jumped on that even before the families got a chance for the victims to be put in the ground. (Something I find distasteful, and I didn't exactly refrain either, so I'm just as bad as anybody else.) I don't have a clue what tragedy people would consider "big enough".

On the evidence to date it would appear that no incident of gun violence will be so shocking that it will create the public will to do something serious about gun violence in the USA. I would take some convincing that even an event of 9/11 proportions would be "big enough" to persuade the NRA et al to drop their blanket opposition to sane gun control laws.

Here in Australia we had two incidences of mass shootings before we reached the point where it was considered necessary to bring in tough gun control laws to prevent any more mass shootings occurring. To date those laws have been successful inasmuch as there have been no other mass shootings of the kind we see so often in the USA. But in the USA they seem to be so common that as your President noted they are the new 'normal'.

It is worth noting that all the 'doom'n'gloom' arguments advanced here by the pro-gun people against gun control were also advanced by the gun lobby here. None of their claims or predictions happened or turned out to be true. There was no significant rise in crime (crime rates have fallen here), and anyone who wants to get a firearm for legitimate purposes can get a firearm (though certain classes of firearms are banned,) provided they have no criminal record and a bona fide reason for wanting the firearm.

dcnovice's sad but incisive observation that if it were as easy to obtain treatment for mental health issues as it is to obtain a gun, the thousands of Americans who die annually due to gun violence might live instead of pointlessly dying a violent death seems to me to capture perfectly the impotence of US society to come to terms with its lethal addiction to gun violence .

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: joether

If you have to defend yourself against someone trying to kill you; chances are good you will not live through the encounter. Sadly, the chance of you hurting or eliminating your opposition is even less.

You're making shit up again.

Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was "used" by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck, 1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck, 2004).

Source: Institute of Medicine and National Research Council of the National Academies

K.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: BamaD

Actually I think that his anger and grief over knowing a victim clouds his judgement so he only accepts sources like the Brady Bunch.

Yeah, only if you believe him. But I'll commend your generous sentiments.

K.