Poll: Is there a solution to mass shootings?

[ElPatron]

They were in Aurora.

One single occasion.

After Columbine the restrictions on Assault Weapons had no effect on gun crime, trying to change legislation based on individual events is pure kneejerking.

Assault weapons are only used in about 1% of gun crime.

Mass shootings aren't a combat situation. Murderers don't need to reload behind cover because generally there isn't anyone shooting back.

You keep thinking that way. There is no chance cops will show up, and absolutely no chance there will be a civilian carrying his personal firearm.

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

Besides, if there is nobody shooting back, you stay on the spot. There is no point in moving while reloading, you're only making both walking and reloading more awkward.

Also, just because people are unarmed doesn't mean it's not a combat situation.

Anyone who'd be willing to extend a magazine, illegally, without asking questions. I'm sure there's people like that out there, but finding them would be a risk for any prospective shooter.

I'm not sure there is any law against extending magazines, and I am not sure about how would that qualify as possession of illegal items.

In California (10 rds restriction) it was possible to buy the BX-25 magazines (capacity of 25rds) for the 10/22 because those were also sold in a kit the customer could assemble.

I'm not sure if it can still be bought in Cali.

Plus anyone who really wants to weld can do it.

Clearing a jam is an even better opportunity to stop a killer.

New York Reload.
Tap, Rack, Bang.
Remove magazine and clear weapon before inserting new one.

Or just learn how to reload, but I still think that clearing a jam isn't a big of a deal. People train for it every day.

And hell, someone at work was telling me how to make homemade land mines yesterday. that doesn't mean it's feasible for most people to build them, nor does it mean there shouldn't be legal restrictions on land mine ownership.

Yes, because guns have no legit purpose besides blowing legs off and "destructive devices" are totally a good analogy for firearms.

And I couldn't care less about what people do in their private land. I don't mind people derping around with low powered explosives as long as it's not my taxes paying for the stitches where their hands were supposed to be. As long as they are not illegally booby-trapping their land or manufacturing military weapons grade stuff I don't give a fudge.

 

[A Distant Star]

Is there a solution?I voted yes, but that belies the real complexity of the situation, what do you consider a solution? Stopping all mass shootings ever always? If that is what you mean then my answer would be no, probably not. But if you look at the global climate, there's a reason why it's such a rare occurrence in say Norway, but not in the US, and it's down right common place in Somalia. These events do stem from a root cause, and that cause is not video games. It's a complex problem with no simple solution. Really it points to the very bedrock of what a society is founded on. There will always be crazy people who do crazy things, but a society with a deeper and better understanding of mental illness and how to care for it can undercut there effect. A society that takes care of it's poor and less fortunate can prevent many at risk youth from resorting to crime, though some always will.

 

[Stripes]

Stop selling people guns. If you cannot legally own a gun then they become rare, if they are rare then not only will many less people have them but you can easily tell the people who will misuse them as people will only break the law if they intend to commit a greater crime. If people need to protect them selves then give them handguns with small magazines and a short range, no one has ever protected themselves domestically with a bazooka or a heavy machine gun or a sniper rifle (all of which you can buy in stores around the USA). In the UK we only allow access to a few guns and there is a heavy vetting process, we are talking double barrelled shotguns for clay pigeon shooting here. We do not have nearly as much gun crime or murder or gangs or gang violence as the USA, by percentage. Make of that what you will.

Edit: no I do not think there is a 'solution' but there are certainly ways of reducing mass murders and crime overall.

 

[V da Mighty Taco]

Not without wiping out the human race. If there's one thing humans are good at, it's killing each other.

 

[dagens24]

There's no 100% solving the issue, but the harder you make it to aquire the materials involved the less it will happen.

 

[Helmholtz Watson]

Not as such, however there has got to be cultural influences which make them more likely, and those should be looked into.

My thoughts exactly, changing the culture could (IMO) do more to help stop massive shooting than gun control laws ever could.

 

[Ravinoff]

You can prevent mass shootings by magically removing all guns from existence. It won't stop people from being killed by crazies who want to kill as many people as they can though.

Do you have any concept of how easy it is to build a rudimentary gun out of sheet metal and plumbing parts? A single-shot can be put together in a few minutes using nothing but a section of pipe and a spring. Irish paramilitaries were famous for being able to build a functioning submachine gun out of stamped steel and tubing. Hell, you want to get a bit more complex, the famous Russian PPsH-41 was made from cutoff Mosin-Nagant barrels and stampings.

And that's not even to begin talking about how easy currently illegal parts are to make. Full-auto, suppressors, any number of things can be made with rudimentary knowledge of machining.

 

[Madman123456]

The human Brain is a ridiculously complicated thing. We have Areas in there theemingly benefit from being electrically insulated from each other but they anrn't and somehow we aren't frying our Brains. Well, most of the time anyways.

Our Brains are circuitboard the size of a Football field, with a million seemingly bad connections and shortcircuits. It all looks like a Mess that has been randomly cobbled together in some Areas and yet it still works. And it keeps working even if some seemingly important Areas suddenly stop working.
All the while the whole thing is constantly swimming in a Cocktail of several psychoactive Drugs.

Psychologically, every single one of us has some things happening in the Brainpan that we decide is against this Construct we call "Ethics". So we suppress certain Impulses and thoughts. All the time.

Considering the inner workings of our Brains, we should be very happy that so few People can't manage to fit themselves into what we call normal and eventually snap.

Considering what little we know about our Brains, i don't see any Solution to Problems such as this.

And considering that so very few People actually go bonkers like that Guy, we may want to focus more Efforts on the Cancer Research.

 

[kortin]

Yes, there is a way:
Kill everyone.

Oh, you mean a legitimate, real world way? No. There isn't. And there never will be.

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Kill everyone. That'd do it.

I have a similiar theory on how to end animal cruelty. Simple logic is good logic!

Sadly there's no fool-proof solution for creating an environment of uniformly good mental health. The human mind seems to have endless potential to be warped and/or destructive.

At least we're interesting.

 

[Pyro Paul]

It is actually easier to reload an AR. The mag well is larger and not as deep.

it is acctually harder to reload an AR then a pistol.

The mag well is larger and slightly infront of your firing hand. This means that magazines can catch a lot more easily and guiding a magazine to the well can be more difficult because you're hands are not directly aligned to it nor are you directly looking at it.

Also when you take into consideration that most riflemen will compromize their firing position or target attention during a mag reload, the chance to shoot at targets deminishes.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

If we eliminate every gun through magic: They'll use explosives
If we eliminate every chemical that can create explosives: They'll use knifes
If we eliminate every sharp object: They'll beat people with thick objects
If we eliminate every thick object: They'll bite and scratch

But his question is can we stop mass shootings, not if we can stop people mass killing each other. So option part one is all you need.

Japan has less then a dozen gun deaths a year, and thats due to good gun control, and you don't see them resulting in explosives, so your argument is invalid.

Which is a completely irrelevant statistic even if you can somehow equate two separate societies and cultures to each other(you can't.) Because the point of reducing gun violence isn't to reduce gun violence, it's to reduce violence across the board. Australia showed an obvious decrease in gun violence after the gun ban, but homicides went up for several years and have remained essentially awash since that point ranging above and below the per capita rate they were at before. Reducing and controlling guns means nothing if the actual murder rate remains the same.

 

[Ryotknife]

So anyone who says that amount of gun restriction wouldn't work is insane, it would of stopped this white collar kid on a heart beat.

And if you say thats too much gun control because we need to be able to defend yourselves and stop the government if needed, well thats fine a dandy for the 1800's, but that not feasible for today world, small arms won't stop an army, and chances are if the government becomes so bad that we need to fight our army and the government it's likely the army would already be on our side.

im sorry...WHAT?

the kid had BOMBS

mother $#$%ing BOMBS. Even if every gun in the entire world disappeared the night before, he would have just blown up the entire theater killing many MANY more people instead and he might have gotten away with it.

Rather have crazies using guns than bombs. At least you can stop them (or run away) if they are using a gun.

you are clinically insane if you think any kind of gun control would have stopped him. The guy was smart, patient, methodical, and probably does not care about his life too much. A person like that would be a serious threat to the President who is surrounded by some of the strictest and best security in the WORLD.

 

[Aprilgold]

No, you can not "solve" mass shootings. The best you can hope for is to lower the incidence rate.

There you go. Even if you put security guards in every theater, pat down every person in the theater and take a photo ID of them before and after they leave there is no way to solve it. Sure you could lower it but someone will find a way around and we end up back here.

no, you can't "solve" murder. what you can do is reduce the number of people that you can feasibly murder at once, by restricting magazine sizes and the kinds of weapons that are made available to civilians.

You restrict magazine sizes, people learn how to reload faster.


With all respect to this guy's skills, that wasn't even one of that fastest reloads around. Just check those I


I know it looks like he has an empty hand, but if you check his magazine pouch you can see he is actually pulling a mag from his belt.

I'm not sure how the "World's Fastest Reload" is at all relevant when we're mainly talking about disturbed college students and disgruntled office workers, not a military-trained champion marksman. Reloading quickly is a skill that requires practice. It's exceptionally difficult when you're actually aiming at moving people, instead of a stationary target 15 feet away. Not everybody is going to be able to do it, and that window is an opportunity to stop the shooter and save lives.

also, those are all handguns. how fast can you reload an AR-15?

Well the question how fast you can reload a AR-15 doesn't have to be answered because you just said that it doesn't matter how fast you can reload a gun since these are people who would not have training.

Which, in my opinion, is a sweeping generalization, they very well could get training and be a master shot if they spend enough time on the range. Restricting their clip does nothing if they have ten of them.

 

[bobmd13]

I am sorry but the right to bear arms was misconceived.

It was the right to bear Bear arms. (family guy btw)

But seriously, a country which supports the sale of Firearms without stringent checks is asking for trouble.

I mean look at the statistics, the UK, 51 gun deaths in 2010.

That's it 51, the UK has 60 million people so lets multiple that by a factor of 5.1 so the USA should have a gun death level of 260 people a year if they had the same gun control laws as the UK.

But hey for 2010, the USA had by Time magazine a death toll of 31,224 people who died from being shot.

Yes, we have our massacres, Dunblane and Norway spring to mind, but and its a big but, both done by people with perceived grudges against the state.

Dunblane,a perceived slight against him by the people of Dunblane ( a totally wrong assumption btw)

Noway: A totally different scenario, a killer driven by ideology or so he claims.

Even with these exceptions added to their countries gun murder rates they do not come anywhere near the level of death that the American public deems acceptable for gun deaths.

It is time the Americans woke up and realized that their gun laws are a farce and need changed.

But they have as much chance of that as the CIA admitting that they assassinated Salvador Allende.

 

[bobmd13]

Sorry Ryto,

But without his ability to have 2 pistols and a military grade rifle,would he have caused as much fear.

Also may I point out in Europe the purchase of explosives is highly controlled, unlike the USA it seems.

Even during the height of the troubles Military explosives were rare and that was with US backing.

Before you shout about explosives as a defense,look at your own laws on buying it.

POOR AND SHODDY.

 

[xDarc]

I am so sick of people from the UK bashing America for having guns.

You have cameras everywhere, you have unemployed youth and street crime everywhere, you have no free speech, your internet is censored. The way shit is going in your country, let me know how great it is to be a largely gun free society as the government gets deeper and deeper in your defenseless ass.

I have family in europe and it's nice place to visit, but you couldn't pay me to live there it's so fucked up.

America is no picnic, it's a sick society full of mental patients. Which is why we're so kill happy compared to Canada, which has high gun ownership and low homicide rate... but at least here we still have some freedom, and god help whoever tries to take the last of it away.

 

[killcannon71]

Ban crowds. It's obvious that large crowds cause mass shootings.

 

[Ryotknife]

Sorry Ryto,

But without his ability to have 2 pistols and a military grade rifle,would he have caused as much fear.

Also may I point out in Europe the purchase of explosives is highly controlled, unlike the USA it seems.

Even during the height of the troubles Military explosives were rare and that was with US backing.

Before you shout about explosives as a defense,look at your own laws on buying it.

POOR AND SHODDY.

you are assuming he used military grade explosives. I dont know exactly what he used, but i highly doubt it is military grade, more likely home made. You are probably more likely to get a .50 cal machine gun than C4. other than stealing from an armory or having friends in VERY high places (like near the top of certain alphabet agencies) I dont even know how obtaining military grade explosives is possible other than smuggling some russian or chinese stuff.

We dont fuck around with bombs, they scare us. Look at afghan or iraq.

and no, a bomber who was still at large would cause a hell of a lot more fear than a group of 10 gunmen who have been immediately caught by police.

Not to mention it is easy to make a bomb with regular civilian items.

i should also mention that some european countries riot a hell of a lot more than we do. We riot over racial or cultural issues, some of you guys riot over freakin soccer (sorry football). Point being, you are most likely not as special in this particular subject as you may think.