Careless drivers cause motoring accidents careless gun owners cause shooting accidents. It can never be eradicated.

BTW when would an ordinary person use an assault rifle ? If they are used for hunting it seems a bit unsporting and unskilful.

+1

Like the armed guard who stopped the Columbine shooting?

The NRA lied to you and you sat there and clapped your hands. What other conclusion is there to draw? Your love of toys appears to be the most important political issue for you. It trumps taxes, civil liberties, and a host of other issues that are in play here.

Oh, so you want to cut other parts of school budgets so that a single armed guard(pretty much worthless) can walk the halls every one of the ~100,000 schools in this country. You expect some 50k a year (no way in hell it only costs 50k a year) to be vigilant for this stuff at all times? You're going to need multiple guards at most schools. Since they are open for more than 40 hours a week. There are also large schools that would require more than one guard at a time.

Seriously, volunteers? Parents do not want volunteer people policing their schools. Do you understand how illogical you sound?

All of this does not take into account the one main problem of all of these public shootings. These people are planning on getting killed. Sweet, there is a guard there to potentially shoot the killer. That's what they want. The only viable solution is to help the mentally ill, you don't want to do that, and reduce the number of guns in this country, again you don't want to do that.

I've been giving a lot of thought to Australia, because if there's a case to be made for the effectiveness of severe gun control for avoiding mass shootings, it's based on Australia.

Politics is the art of the possible, though, and there are some major differences between the U.S. and Australia. When Australia implemented their gun control measures, some 85% of the people supported the reforms. And although I'm not finding the stats at the moment, I recall that the rate of firearm ownership was much lower than in the United States. Around 630k firearms were turned in during the 1996 buyback program, in a country of 20 million people. By comparison, the United States is supposed to have almost 1 gun per person, with around 270 million guns.

This is all just to say that Australia-style gun control is a much taller order here. It would also probably require a constitutional amendment to repeal the 2nd amendment. You can argue that that would be preferable, but we all know it's not happening any time soon. Even if it did happen, then if we follow Australia's lead, we will have a massive buyback program for all of the illegal weapons. 270 million weapons at market value (let's be super cheap and say it's $200 per weapon on average) is still $54 billion. I just don't see this happening.

So the question becomes, what can be done that is actually politically possible? I don't see what's insane about taking an approach to school safety that is similar to what we've done with airlines, by allowing some personnel at a school to carry concealed weapons.

Also, one minor point; the popular narrative is that there have been no mass shootings in Australia since the 1996 reforms, but it would be more accurate to say that there have been no fully successful mass shootings, as there was an incident in 2002 in which a shooter with six guns killed two people and wounded five others.

who is this sommerset guy and why is he using every single fallacy in the book to make his case look stupid?

We do not need to repeal the 2nd amendment. Look at it. It is not that hard to appoint justices who are willing to say that congress can regulate who can and cannot be in a milita. It's a ****ty sentence that is very much open to interpretation.

Oh boy, the fallacy police. These guys always know what they mean when they use that word

Totally agreed but it can be limited with training as it is with driving. I'm also focusing on Mass Shooting and stopping those since that seems to be what most people are upset over.

Unsporting and unskillful? Do you know anything about guns and hunting?

Rifles kill 350 people a year out of 12-14 thousand murders. Why such a focus on Assault Rifles? They're scary looking? The fact that you think it's so much different than their hunting rifles shows you don't know much about guns and its strictly on the looks of them.

The main uses of AR-15 by "ordinary" people are target shooting and hunting. You seem to think the AR-15 is a machine gun if you think hunting with it is "unsporting." It's not. It's the same as hunting using a "traditional" hunting rifle.

And I disagree with that. States that want to ban guns outright should have the ability to. I don't think that people who want to live in an area with no guns should be denied that opportunity in America.

So let's be ridiculously generous to the NRA:

125,000 schools
1 full-time officer needed per school (way too low, but whatever)
$100,000 per year cost, salary + benefits (also probably too low on average)

Total deaths prevented: 30 per year (way too high based on past performance, plus this doesn't account for the facts that: a) some deaths will occur and/or b) the shooter will go somewhere easier)

Cost: $12,500,000,000
Cost per life saved: $416,700,000

Actual cost, if you place a sufficient number of officers to adequately secure each building, probably over a billion per life.

That seems a tad inefficient, doesn't it?

I assume that the taxpayers will get stuck with the bill? Isn't this proposal coming from primarily the same cohort of people who don't want to raise taxes for any reason ever?

Or is it the case that the NRA and the gun manufacturers are rolling in so much dough that they can spring for all of it? Seems unlikely to me.

Well, you've moved quite a bit from repeal mcvc so we don't have guns in schools.

I thought it was "high capacity" and could shoot many times quickly. No I don't know about rifles.

It's funny how people in different countries react to these killings. We had a similar school massacre in the UK a while back.

"The Dunblane school massacre occurred at Dunblane Primary School in the Scottish town of Dunblane on 13 March 1996. The gunman, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton (b. 10 May 1952), entered the school armed with four handguns, shooting and killing sixteen children and one adult before committing suicide"

The response was

"Public debate subsequent to these events centred on gun-control laws, including public petitions calling for a ban on private ownership of handguns and an official enquiry, the Cullen Report. In response to this debate, the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 and the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997 were enacted, which effectively made private ownership of handguns illegal in the United Kingdom."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_school_massacre

These seem more like arguments against guns rather than guns in schools.

Most gun control people claim they just want to limit gun accessibility but then the true intent comes out.

I agree with that gun culture differs from state to state (and even between rural and urban areas of the same state in some cases), but I'm curious if you have any suggestions for ways to prevent the states with lax gun laws from becoming conduits for black market sales into the states with more restrictive laws?

As I understand it, one of the big ways that "illegal" guns make their way into places like DC, and Philly, and Newark, and NYC is that someone purchases a bunch of them legally in Virginia or the Carolinas and then drives up the I-95 corridor to supply the folks in areas where they can't legally purchase weapons as easily as they can in the South. And it's not like we have border guards at the state line checking to make sure that someone driving from Virginia to New Haven isn't carrying contraband.

I guess my concern is, since background checks and limitations on the type and amount of guns purchased are usually enforced at the point of sale, if we were to regulate on a state by state basis, what's the best way to make sure that the less restrictive states don't end up setting the defacto standard for gun acquisition for the rest of the country?

How so? We are talking about children always being in relatively close proximity when these things occur.

Also zimm if you don't like Illinois gun policy why repeal mdvc? Illinois had a complete handgun ban

Just curious as to how him saying that states who want to do something should have the right to has anything to do with the position of wanting to limit gun accessibility?

Yeah, they want to TAKE AWAY YOUR GUNS. And then what will you have, Hendricks? What will Hendricks have without his guns?

P.S. Who are we blaming this on? Ze Jews? The UN? Why do gun control people want your guns so badly that they are willing to lie about their true intentions?

Hunting with most AR-15's is going to be a little "unsporting," in a different sense, because they're significantly less powerful than many hunting rifles. In some states, it isn't even legal to hunt with the typical AR-15, because the gun isn't powerful enough to ensure a clean kill.

Now Wayne LaPierre, he's pretty clear that it's the UN. But opinions do vary.

P.P.S. Tsao, Wayne, bros... What's with your sudden affection for cops? Aren't they sociopathic jack booted thugs?

Well since this forum and thread have more than a couple "no one is coming for your guns" posts, this post is standardly craptastic.

It will always be a risk, just like it is with fireworks in many states currently.

I think overall, that states that ban gun sales and possession will still be safer. If you make the laws on possession strict, then that takes away the incentive for a lot of people to procure guns.