The way I see it, weapons are tools, and different tools are appropriate for different jobs. Citizens have the right to shoot for sport or to defend themselves, and therefore the government should not be taking away the tools necessary for those jobs. But there are plenty of guns on the civilian market that are not necessary for those jobs, and there are plenty of measures the government could be taking to regulate guns that would not keep appropriate tools out of the hands of those who need them. The Clinton-era assault weapons ban, for instance, kept high-capacity guns and weapons with military-style accessories off the civilian market, but it didn't keep hunters from hunting or average gun owners from carrying a self-defense weapon around. And things like licensing and registration aren't a problem for anyone who isn't paranoid about needing to keep secrets from the government.
It is often the argument of gun enthusiasts that gun laws don't affect gun crime because criminals generally aren't using guns gotten off the legal civilian market. There's a lot of truth to this argument, but these kinds of massacres are a special case: they are almost always committed with weapons either legally acquired by the shooter or taken from legal owners by the shooter. This means that these kinds of massacres could very well be affected by gun laws.
On a side note, it's time for schools to change the way they design their buildings and procedures. Schools are built out of inflaofftopicble materials, they have sprinklers in every room, and their students and staff spend large chunks of time every semester practicing fire emergency procedures. And yet no student has died in a school fire in over 50 years. It's time every school had heavy metal doors that are kept locked whenever students are in the building and barred first-story windows, so that no intruder can just kick or shoot his way in, and procedures for dealing with an armed intruder that are practiced as often as their fire drills (Note that I am NOT advocating armed school staff--there's too much danger of students getting their hands on guns IMHO). These things could have saved a lot of lives at Sandy Hook.
However, a gun into the hands of a mentally disturbed person, is not the gun, it was the previous owner who did not take the responsibility to make arrangemnts for extra security.
Simply, if you have a disturbed person in your household and you own guns, it is best to secure-vault those guns, or take them to a secure-place off premise.
I have a uncle with a son (cousin) currently having disturbing behavior. My uncle removed all guns from the home and secured them in another place off premise.
That said, you can't stop crazy. Drunk drivers may have their license taken away, but they still get alcohol and get behind the wheel.
Good for him. I wish more people acted this way. Many lives could be saved. It's clear the mother of this boy knew he was into bad stuff, but she didn't get her guns away from him.
Cars and alcohol are both heavily regulated by law in the US. Guns should be as well.
You don't know that for squat. Where is your evidence that drink driving laws didn't decrease drink driving? I suppose seat belt laws didn't lower driving related deaths either?
I'm going to have to demand you provide a source to back up this assertion. Drink driving laws give police the power to do something about drunk drivers.
According to NHTSA statistics, approximately 1 out of every 10 arrests made in the US is for driving under the influence. Those are pretty significant. As far as its rates, like everything else in the States they are going down. They only began compiling DUI statistics in 1982, and the first DUI laws first began emerging in the early 1900s so it's virtually impossible to say whether or not the laws did minimize it. I think the combination of our lowering crime rate and the funds being poured into it did lower the DUI rates, but it's still a very significant problem.
I can say with certainty that my home state of Wisconsin has both the laxest drunk driving laws in the Midwest and the worst drunk driving problem in the Midwest. I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that laws do affect drunk driving.
I think laws can affect gun crime, too, if they're done the right way.
Don't know if anyone else has already said it, but that is nonsense. The same day as the Connecticut shootings there was an attack on a Chinese primary school by a deranged man with knives at the start of school, when the front gates were crowded with children. The man stabbed 22 people, only 1 adult. No one died. No one suffered life threatening injuries aside from the adult.
Assault rifles are not tools, they are weapons of war.
I'm an adult, and I understand that other adults have differing opinions, but surely we can all get together on the assault rifles with bullets specifically designed to cause massive injuries to the victim, as were used in Connecticut.
I live in Australia, and in 96 we had a horrific shooting here, by a fairly deranged man using an AR-10 assault rifle. After this shooting, within 3 months the conservative government had pushed through gun reform banning semi-auto and automatic weapons, and heavily restricting gun ownership to those with valid reasons (farmers, sport shooters etc). Gun crime rates plummeted, without a corresponding rise in other violent crimes. In other words the pathetic platitude "guns don't kill people" is rubbish.
Yeah, we've all heard the argument before: "If the psychos didn't have guns, they'd just use something else." Sure they would, something else that doesn't kill as quickly or as easily as semiautomatic firearms.
I will admit, though, that Australia doesn't have the gun culture or the illegal gun market that the US does. It would be much harder for legislation to curtail gun crime overall in the US than in Australia, but, as I said before, massacres like these could definitely be hampered by legislation.
Unless they use bombs. Which, as shown by the Bath School Massacre (America's worst school massacre), Oklahoma City (America's worst mass-murder besides 9/11), 2002 Bali bombings, 2004 Madrid train bombings, 2005 London bombings, countless IRA attacks over the decades, countless suicide bombings during the Second Intifada, and near-daily car bombings in Iraq and Pakistan, are actually substantially more deadly than firearms.
Except bombs are harder to acquire and implement and require some knowledge on the part of the attacker, which is why successful bomb attacks are much, much less common than shootings.
The use of which, and in many situations the manufacture of which, is already illegal... We watch people who buy Ammonium Nitrate in large quantities, we watch people who spread how to manufacture a bomb. If we controlled guns as tightly as we control bomb ingredients I'd say you had a point, but we (or at least the Americans) don't.
America doesn't even control guns as tightly as it does Sudafed...
Bombs are not that harder to acquire nor is the information to construct one. Although, bombs do take more time/thought to produce.
That said, it isn't the guns that were the problem, it is the owners' lack of responsibility to secure them.
Many slayings in the 50's-70's did not involved "assault style firearms"
That said, I am for some new NFA, as long as people do not have to give up any of their guns already owned
The old-current NFA was written for certain classes of firearms, etc., and thus those class of firearms are harder to obtain, unless one has finances and time to put forth the effort and paper work
An assault rifle wasn't used in Connecticut, it was found in the car of the assailant but it wasn't used in the crime.
Ok so I took my rifle out set it on the bench and insulted it, hit it, and pissed on it, if ever a gun had the right to kill someone it was right at that very moment...but it didn't happen.
"Police said Lanza used the Bushmaster rifle against most of the victims." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting#Investigation
Wikipedia says you're wrong. A shotgun was found in the car, the .223 Bushmaster XM-15 was used against most of the victims. The Bushmaster is an assault-style semi-automatic rifle which had been loaded with hollow point bullets, designed to open "like a flower" to cause massive damage. - www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ct-school-shooter-made-combat-weapon-article-1.1220431