Pyrian on 19/5/2018 at 07:02
Quote Posted by Draxil
How does this affect your gun control arguments?
We should have laws on the books that would put the father in jail for failing to secure weapons that were used in a felony. This, and at least some other mass school shootings would not have occurred if the weapons were properly secured by their owners. It should be considered criminal negligence, and enforced as such until most gun owners actually start following all those gun safety rules that the NRA itself teaches.
(
https://www.facebook.com/Stonekettle/posts/1699816820053714)
Quote Posted by Draxil
...no semi-automatic weapons at all.
Revolvers being considered not semi-automatic despite one-pull one-shot capabilities is kind of a weird technicality, IMO. If I were writing a ban on semi-automatic weapons, I'd include them.
Quote Posted by Draxil
Technology not from the last century, but the century before...
I don't see how that's relevant. Bombs and cannons date back to something like the 12th century, but we don't make them legal. Heck, I can't carry a side-handle baton, nobody knows when those were invented.
Quote Posted by Draxil
You wonder why gun owners mistrust your intentions, and why the pro-gun crowd is so uncompromising?
Why would anyone wonder that? Many Republicans don't seem to know the meaning of the word compromise anymore, no matter the context. The Republican Congress has been routinely failing to compromise with itself when implementing its own priorities, nevermind Democrats. That rot is far deeper than gun issues.
Starker on 19/5/2018 at 11:16
Gun control doesn't mean a ban of all weapons. This is purely a fantasy of the gun lobby to scare gun owners.
The gun control argument is not to eliminate all gun deaths and injuries. It's to reduce them. Just like traffic laws and regulations on cars don't seek to eliminate all accidents.
heywood on 19/5/2018 at 13:45
Quote Posted by Pyrian
We should have laws on the books that would put the father in jail for failing to secure weapons that were used in a felony. This, and at least some other mass school shootings would not have occurred if the weapons were properly secured by their owners. It should be considered criminal negligence, and enforced as such until most gun owners actually start following all those gun safety rules that the NRA itself teaches.
This. Safe storage could have prevented the Sandy Hook school massacre as well.
Draxil on 19/5/2018 at 14:01
Quote Posted by Pyrian
We should have laws on the books that would put the father in jail for failing to secure weapons that were used in a felony. This, and at least some other mass school shootings would not have occurred if the weapons were properly secured by their owners. It should be considered criminal negligence, and enforced as such until most gun owners actually start following all those gun safety rules that the NRA itself teaches.
(
https://www.facebook.com/Stonekettle/posts/1699816820053714)
I don't know the situation with this kid, obviously, but it's very possible the father did have them locked up. He obviously had experience with guns, and it's not impossible or even unlikely that he knew the combination to the gun safe. I knew the combination to my father's gun safe, and had access (if I violated his rule) to high capacity magazine semiautomatic rifles from the age of 13 or 14. He didn't know I knew the combination, and it's not impossible that the same situation happened in this or other cases. Kids and teenagers are nosy, quiet, and absorb a lot of information that you think might go over their head. My 9 year old son unlocked my phone, recently. I never gave him the password--he just saw me do it, once, when I was unlocking it to show him something on youtube.
Quote:
Revolvers being considered not semi-automatic despite one-pull one-shot capabilities is kind of a weird technicality, IMO. If I were writing a ban on semi-automatic weapons, I'd include them.
So you'd ban everything but single shot weapons?
Quote:
I don't see how that's relevant. Bombs and cannons date back to something like the 12th century, but we don't make them legal. Heck, I can't carry a side-handle baton, nobody knows when those were invented.
Cannons are perfectly legal, and at least where I live so are (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonfa) tonfas. We haven't had a murder with either in my state, and neither is the criminal's weapon of choice. Do you live in the UK? Everything's illegal there. The UK police say on their website that the only legal self defense item you can use is a (
https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q589.htm) rape alarm. Good luck with that.
Quote:
Why would anyone wonder that? Many Republicans don't seem to know the meaning of the word compromise anymore, no matter the context. The Republican Congress has been routinely failing to compromise with itself when implementing its own priorities, nevermind Democrats. That rot is far deeper than gun issues.
I don't think you get to ding others on lack of compromise when you want to ban anything newer than a muzzle-loading rifle.
Draxil on 19/5/2018 at 14:07
Quote Posted by heywood
This. Safe storage could have prevented the Sandy Hook school massacre as well.
You don't know that. It would have prevented him from using that individual gun. He could easily have gotten another from somewhere else, or made a bomb, or waited till recess and run a car into a group of kids, or used a knife (K-4 school--I doubt they'd have offered much resistance) or... if you're committed to killing, you're likely going to find a way to do it.
Edit: quick research says that Lanza had been a sports-shooter from youth, with his mother. So he had a 15 year track record of responsible gun use, and had a gun safe in his own room. It wasn't unreasonable for his mother to trust him around firearms.
Gryzemuis on 19/5/2018 at 14:26
Quote Posted by Draxil
why the pro-gun crowd is so uncompromising?
That is because they are selfish cunts.
heywood on 21/5/2018 at 15:45
Quote Posted by Draxil
You don't know that. It would have prevented him from using that individual gun. He could easily have gotten another from somewhere else, or made a bomb, or waited till recess and run a car into a group of kids, or used a knife (K-4 school--I doubt they'd have offered much resistance) or... if you're committed to killing, you're likely going to find a way to do it.
Edit: quick research says that Lanza had been a sports-shooter from youth, with his mother. So he had a 15 year track record of responsible gun use, and had a gun safe in his own room. It wasn't unreasonable for his mother to trust him around firearms.
You need to refresh your memory on the kind of person Adam Lanza was. Read this:
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting#Developmental_and_mental_health_problems) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting#Developmental_and_mental_health_problems
Summary: history of developmental distorder since 3, diagnosed with Asperger's and OCD, suspected schizophrenia, cuts off contact with his own family, spending all of his time in a blacked out room that he won't let anybody into, not communicating with anybody except online, won't even talk to his mother except via email, not eating to the point of severe anorexia. He had also been overheard threatening to shoot up the same school 4 years earlier, which was reported to police but they didn't act on it. Now, if you think it's reasonable to trust somebody like that around firearms, I don't even know what to say.
The more fundamental point here is that even if Adam Lanza was the most normal person on Earth, his mother had a responsibility to safely store her firearms and ammunition.
If he didn't have access to guns, it's possible he would have found another way to kill, but it's somewhat unlikely considering how severely anti-social he was. He literally didn't go anywhere or talk to anyone. And the evidence found in his room and on his computer shows that he was obsessed with mass shootings. It was easy for him to go shoot up the school because his mother enabled it. Other means of killing would have been a lot harder for him, wouldn't have fulfilled his fantasy of being a mass shooter, and also wouldn't have killed so many people.
Renzatic on 21/5/2018 at 17:28
Quote Posted by Draxil
I don't know the situation with this kid, obviously, but it's very possible the father did have them locked up. He obviously had experience with guns, and it's not impossible or even unlikely that he knew the combination to the gun safe. I knew the combination to my father's gun safe, and had access (if I violated his rule) to high capacity magazine semiautomatic rifles from the age of 13 or 14. He didn't know I knew the combination, and it's not impossible that the same situation happened in this or other cases. Kids and teenagers are nosy, quiet, and absorb a lot of information that you think might go over their head. My 9 year old son unlocked my phone, recently. I never gave him the password--he just saw me do it, once, when I was unlocking it to show him something on youtube.
...which is a good example as to why all these proposed laws that would hold the parents responsible for their kids shooting up schools wouldn't amount to much of anything. Almost every case that'd be brought to court would present too much reasonable doubt to convict on.
heywood on 21/5/2018 at 18:57
Sorry, but that just sounds like "dog ate my homework" kind of excuse.
Protecting a combination is not hard. Most of us learned to do that when we got a bike lock as kids. If you can't keep your kid from peeking around the corner when you dial a combination, use a key lock. If you don't think you can safeguard a key, make it biometric then. Or use two-factor authentication. Preventing access is an easy technical problem to solve, and access controls are something most of us deal with routinely in life so I can't accept that it's a burden on gun owners.
The standard we need is that if you own the firearm, you're responsible for its use. There are way too many cases of kids taking their parents' guns from a nightstand drawer or closet shelf (i.e. unsecured so it will be "at the ready" for self-protection) and accidentally shooting their friends, siblings, or themselves.
Besides, in cases like Mrs. Lanza, who did not lock up her guns, and her son exhibited all the warning signs, what reasonable doubt would there be?
catbarf on 21/5/2018 at 20:00
Like I've said before, I am completely in favor of requiring safe storage, and mandating that anyone who leaves a firearm unsecured be held partially liable for crimes committed with that firearm. I recognize that this is assigning a level of liability with no current precedent in our laws, but I feel that it's necessary to get people to start being responsible with their guns.
To touch on that heywood said about a 'dog ate my homework' kind of excuse, stricter liability in this respect would also make it harder for criminals to distribute firearms. Straw purchase is virtually always performed by a clean accomplice, who has basically nothing to fear, since most states and the federal government refuse to prosecute straw purchase except in the most outrageously high-profile cases, partially on account of it being difficult to prove. This kind of change would make it easy to prosecute: You bought a gun and it wound up in the hands of your criminal sibling/friend/acquaintance? Unless there's a police record on file from when your safe must have been broken into, either you deliberately bought a gun for a felon, or you negligently allowed them to 'steal' it.
I read too many accounts of 'I left my truck gun in my truck and it got broken into and they stole my gun' to think that erring on the side of forgiveness is the best policy here. I don't think it's unreasonable that if someone wants to buy a gun that they implicitly assume the responsibility of safeguarding access to it. Maybe there ought to be some leeway in judicial review, like not sending a parent to jail if their kid manages to lift a set of fingerprints off a coffee mug and uses it to break into a biometric safe. But right now a parent can own unsecured guns around a teenager with known psychological issues, and face no repercussions when their kid goes on a killing spree. There's no expectation of responsibility, and IMO that needs to change.