Yeah, now another mass shooting, with 9 dead in Dayton Ohio.

It's hard to comprehend just how many people have to die for some kind of pragmatic change to happen.

It’s been normalised. If Sandy Hook wasn’t going to change things, then it ain’t ever going to change.

The perceived threat is the military in the grand scheme of things, NOT Joe Schmoe who became excessively upset his boyfriend/girllfriend, or even extremist group personnel. Is Joe a threat? Of course, but not as large as a threat as the government entity trying to care for me.

30 people can do massive damage to an area when the citizens do not have the same weapons and tactical knowledge when they themselves are highly trained and capable. — Obscuration

Actually, contrary to what you say, if the citizenry are unarmed, and the military is armed, the citizenry will be subdued with very little "damage". But if the citizenry is armed and decides to take on the military, that's when you'd have "massive damage".

Is Joe a threat? Of course, but not as large as a threat as the government entity trying to care for me. — Obscuration

You need guns to prevent your government introducing a decent health care system. Crazy. Raving bonkers.

the point is that the citizens should be able to fight the military if the need occur, not the mitigation of damage to life or infrastructure. I suppose the loss of freedom by force is the damage that I mean to be perceived.

the point is that the citizens should be able to fight the military if the need occur, — Obscuration

Thinking you will fight the military is what on the old left was called "infantile adventurism". No. IF we devolve to civil war between the army, navy, marines, and air force on the one hand, and citizens armed with whatever guns they can get their hands on (including assault rifles, the war will be nasty, brutish, and short--with the citizens getting the nasty, brutish, and short end of the stick.

The obvious idea, eliminate the 200,000,000+ guns owned by 100,000,000+ Americans isn't going to happen, so forget about that idea. In fact, the number of guns (200 million) in the hands of Americans is a sort of argument that "guns as objects" are not the problem. The number of homicides in the country, somewhere around 40,000 a year, includes a large share of those which are suicides.

Why do so many people kill themselves with guns?

A) it is a proven method and
B) it is a fast method, therefore:
C It is generally not revokable (like, say, poison or gassing which requires more preparation and gives one more time to abort)

The general pattern is that more people are killed in places where there are more guns. One has more guns "floating around" in socially unstable situations where gun controls are lax.

Most guns in the possession of Americans are not "floating around". They are in houses and that is generally where they stay. If the mere presence of guns in a county led to high rates of death, then the annual death total of homicides would be in the several hundreds of thousands. It isn't because most people are not homicidal. (Most people are not homicidal most of the time. The problem is that when someone gets in a homicidal mood, the time delay between feeling like killing somebody and having the means to do so is very, very short.

I am no friend of the NRA (God damn the NRA to hell), and I am not pro gun. I am anti-gun, really -- especially pistols.

More, next post

Mass murders are generally not carried out by people wielding shotguns that can fire 1 or two shots before reloading. Successful killers generally use guns (pistols on up) that one can fire off many bullets without reloading, and use magazines of bullets when they run out of firepower.



Charles Whitman kicked off the contemporary period of mass shootings in 1966. From the top of the University of Texas Main observation deck (200+ feet above ground), he fired at individuals for 96 minutes, killing 14 and injuring 31 more, plus his parents who he had murdered earlier in the day. Probably unlike most mass murderers -- but I don't know for sure -- Whitman had a brain tumor in the amygdala which may have been causing the increasingly intense violent urges he had been experiencing.

A lot of "casual" murders seem to occur because people have been prepared mentally to be ready to kill. This happens in gangs, certainly, but not just in gangs. Events happen which trigger the urge (or the social requirement) to kill; a gun is at hand, the offending victim is close by, and the killer has no "Superego" brake on their behavior.

Most people, gun owners or not, are not heading toward murder, they are not close to murdering anyone, and they won't murder anyone. But a few (numbered in the scores of thousands) ARE heading towards attempting murder. A few, I don't know how few--probably a few hundred--are mentally preparing themselves to kill a batch of people who fit sort of imagined category of enemy. Easy access to guns is what is absurdly dangerous for this two groups. They may be few, but if the doors to the gun mart are wide open, they will walk in and arm themselves.

We didn't impose controls on the casual purchase of jet fuel and fertilizer to prevent thousands of people from stuffing vans full of the stuff and blowing up Oklahoma court houses. We imposed controls to prevent a handful of lunatics, terrorists, and the like from getting their hands on powerful bomb making material and blowing up god knows what next.

Similarly, we need tight controls on guns (damn the NRA to the hottest pits of hell) to keep them out of the hands of a small number of people, where it is a matter of life and death.

Let me close by citing the case of a school board member who blew up a school (children inside) because he was irked off about property taxes.



On May 18 1927 "A school board member named Andrew Kehoe, upset over a burdensome property tax, wired the Bath, Michigan school building with dynamite and set it off in the morning of May 18. Kehoe’s actions killed 45 people, 38 of whom were children."

Crazy.

i would call it infantile to think all military personnel would continue to follow all orders from those appointed over them if they were given an op order to assault and detain innocent civilians (which is an unlawful order... most of the time). Short though it may be, many people would rather die than lose their freedom, and their right to do so shouldn’t be infringed upon.

Your politicians are not going to kill you. That would deprive them of the opportunity to continue to make fools of you. In any case, this hysterical fear is probably best dealt with by mental health professionals. No-one here is going to be able to help you.

Well done.

Look out for this guy. He sounds dangerous.

You are quite right that the armed forces might not obey orders to suppress mass civilian uprising. It's just that even if some of them did obey, given their overwhelming superiority in arms on the land, air, and sea civilians resistance would be crushed.

In the case of mass civilian uprising, there probably would be civil war--some civilians opposed to other civilians, and some units of the armed services siding with one group or another.

Subversives have plans to infiltrate the armed services, and propagandists plan on targeting the military with messages urging them to join the revolution.

But rest assured, you and your inexperienced buddies who have no training on how to fight a civil war are not going to just grab your hunting rifles (or assault weapons you bought) and march down the freeway and capture many objectives. One tank could eliminate the lot of you. A few strafing runs by the airfare would cut your "troop strength" in short order.

Depending on which side you are on, I might throw Molotov cocktails at you.

Gee, thank you!

Your knowledge of combat and tactics seems pretty diverse. My buddies and I watched a couple men with nothing more than man robes, sandals, an AK, an rpg, and a cell phone take out a good sized convoy, and engaged close air support successfully. This happened to American and joint forces operating all across Afghanistan. Two to six men with no training annihilating companies worth of Marines and soldiers. And of course let’s not forget our squid Corpsman brethren.

Underestimating the perceived enemy is as deadly as not perceiving an enemy at all.

The good thing about the citizens at large is that most combat arms Marines get out of active service after 4-8 years and carry a wealth of knowledge on techniques, tactics, and procedures.

So you’re right in saying my buddies and I aren’t going to get our good ol’ reliable hunting rifles to make contact head on with an Abrams. Mostly because no one is that silly.

Will victory still be a tangible goal? More likely than your perception of how war works will seem to allow.

Ah the good old fantasy threat of governement over the real, tens of thousands death count that has actually happened, and continues to be happening. What could happen over what has and is happening. They should all fucking die for that fantasy, it's worth it.

Also, they should just ban white men from owning guns. That'd solve a lot I think.

And the 2nd amendment was written for the formation of a militia to defend our country before there was ever an organized military. It was never meant to apply to the citizenry taking up arms against their own government. Thank the right wing justices for completely bastardizing the intent of that amendment. And thank the Neo-Nazis for spreading the upcoming race war propaganda.

You all ought to burn that constitution too. It's an awful, anti-democratic document.

You all ought to burn that constitution too. It's an awful document. — StreetlightX

It would be okay if it would be interpreted by the judiciary to account for a changing world. “Original intent” is bullshit. The problem is the right wing judiciary. What exactly about the Constitution do you find fault with? I think the interpretation is the problem. Conservatives are always crying foul over “activist judges,” but conservative judges are the most activist of all.

And the reason why original intent is bullshit is exactly because the world is ever-changing.

The Afghanistan fighters are practicing "asymmetric" warfare techniques, aren't they? (Whatever it is called -- guerrilla fighting vs. typical military.). It works, obviously. Worked for the Viet Cong and others. [The auto-speller hadn't heard of the Viet Cong -- apparently.]

The American rebels will be able to use asymmetric, guerrilla methods too, but they will have to learn and build up expertise. That's somewhat hard to do around here since the police, highway departments, the government, and the public-at-large take a dim view of blowing up our nice highways, what with citizens getting blown up on their way to work, etc. Same for blowing up big buildings, leveling blocks of the city, etc. They just don't like it one bit.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, so I am told by some old students that were around then, a certain kind of chemistry majors would concoct explosives and see how well they worked--out in the country. That's harder to do these days. Maybe the labs at the universities are watched a bit more closely.

How about building surface to surface or surface to air missiles? It used to be OK to experiment with rockets, back in the Sputnik days. Homeland Security would track you down, now. Drones, of course... one should stock up before they are clamped down on.

This is all purely theoretical, of course. As a long-standing pacifist I don't have any experience blowing things and people up, but (like many pacifists) the idea certainly crosses my mind every now and then, and I wonder... Just how could that be done???

Were you in the armed services, regarding your reference to Afghanistan?

Were we to figuratively burn the constitution, we would be obligated to call a constitutional convention to draft another one. Most sensible people are nauseated at the thought of what we would get what with all the lunatics on the far right running around.

By the way, the Second Amendment became important only quite recently relative to the founding fathers' ideas. One of the Supremes described the claim that Amendment II means everyone has a right to own a gun as "Stupidity".

1. Don't vote for abusive, authoritarian people that want to oppress you and you won't have to defend against the government. Basically, you don't trust that "the greatest democracy in the world" is a democracy.

2. How on earth did Gandhi manage without guns and all those other unarmed revolutionaries? The idea that the ability to do violence is what keeps you safe is rather naive. It has always been the ability to galvanise a large majority behind a single cause.

hat exactly about the Constitution do you find fault with? — Noah Te Stroete

It is unrepresentative swill. But a specific discussion is beyond this thread.

But a specific discussion is beyond this thread. — StreetlightX

Right. I suppose someone might be interested in starting a new thread on the subject, but not me. I am trying my hardest to be a good American. You could only guess what I’ve been through.

One of the Supremes described the claim that Amendment II means everyone has a right to own a gun as "Stupidity". — Bitter Crank

Diana Ross? "Stop in the name of love." I think you are right about dicking-around with the constitution, although I can see dubious benefits being proposed by Leftist do-gooders as well as ultra Right nut-jobs. Its not the right to bear arms that is the problem so much as contemporary fire-power. The framers of the law did not envisage cheap, readily available, high velocity automatic weapons and unlimited ammunition in a society with a burgeoning element of mobile, post-industrial paranoids.

They were priviliged white men with no clue as to how the world worked, hence, their constitution doesn't work either because they have no understanding about the human condition other than whatever constituted their days of lounging on their plantations.

I agree with statement one. Your second statement doesn’t take into account the bloody history of the United States. Wars have been fought for millennia, and we have gotten pretty damn good at it. I’d much rather be skilled in the art of violence so that I can protect myself and loved ones than allow our lives to be turned upside down or lost begging for peace.

The bloody history of the USA doesn't stretch voor millenia I'm afraid. It seems, in any case, a silly way of reconciling differences. While you think you're protecting your loved ones, so is the other guy who just happens to have a different assessment of what's right or wrong. From my point of view, outside the USA, either your or his death would be tragic and could probably be avoided.

They were priviliged white men with no clue as to how the world worked, — Benkei

Organised the successful overthrow the British colonial establishment and convinced the population it was necessary, while not knowing how the world worked. Well, at least you have someone to blame. That's always nice.