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Federal authorities are responding to a shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a small community southeast of San Antonio.
In a press conference Sunday night, an official from the Texas Department of Public Safety described the scene: Around 11:20 am, the suspect, dressed in black, approached the church and began firing an assault rifle. He then entered the church and continued firing.
Gov. Greg Abbott confirmed that at least 26 people were killed. A Texas Department of Public Safety official said the ages of the victims ranged from 5 to 72 years old. The AP reports that the pastor's 14-year-old daughter is among the dead.
The Department of Public Safety confirmed to NPR that at least 20 others were wounded. A DPS official said in the press conference that the gunman was confronted by an armed civilian outside of the church.
The shooter, who was found dead in neighboring Guadalupe County, has been identified as Devin Kelley, 26, a former Air Force member.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:38AM (72 children)
This was a guy who'd gotten a court marshal and dishonorable discharge. He couldn't legally own a gun.
He was stopped by a law-abiding gun owner with a rifle.
So he was subject to gun control already, didn't give a damn, and wouldn't have been stopped if gun control applied more widely.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 06 2017, @02:50AM (39 children)
I'll take the bait:
If guns are outlawed, not only will law abiding citizens be unable to get guns, outlaws will also have a much harder time obtaining guns due to their greater scarcity. Citizens carrying guns would be more readily detained based solely on possession of the firearm, and broadscale weapons detection could be deployed anywhere since all citizens are presumed not carrying firearms all the time.
Like all politically charged issues, all the statistics collected and quoted are slanted to support one side of the argument or the other.
Since the oft-repeated argument is: "without the citizen's militia, a lone gunman could kill many more people before being stopped..." maybe the citizens' militia should be permitted to arm themselves with non-lethal force. 26 dead isn't making a very good case for the citizens militia's effectiveness, in my book.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @03:15AM (32 children)
Guns, trucks, bombs, aircraft, poison...
People kill. It is only natural. You will not succeed in disarming the evil, but you can disarm the good.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 06 2017, @03:32AM (18 children)
Unfortunately, this is correct. Today was the New York marathon. A guy driving a garbage truck full speed into a crowd of spectators could easily have killed this many people or more, like a guy killed a bunch of people on the west side bike path mere days ago. So what are they going to do, ban all trucks also?
A person intent on killing a lot of people will find a way. Could even be by flying a plane into the side of a building. Could be by placing explosives inside a pressure cooker.
Getting rid of guns is an appealing idea because it's simple. But it won't work.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @04:25AM
If they ban pressure cookers I am going to give someone botulism.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @04:27AM (8 children)
> ban trucks
In a way yes. Vehicular terrorism has only made it clearer that our cities need to be redesigned to serve and protect people, and not sacrifice more lives for slightly faster transport. The vehicle deaths from deliberate malicious acts (and terrorism in general) is dwarfed by the number of deaths we accept simple as part of our way of life. What should be the acceptable death toll? How are we so casual about so many deaths?
For starters traffic calming measures will force drivers to go slower and do more to block them from certain areas and larger vehicle will very likely be banned except at special deliver times. Vehicle licensing and vehicle hire will likely come under greater scrutiny too.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 06 2017, @04:37AM (1 child)
I would dearly love to see all that happen, but brother you gotta concede we're dreamers on that one. After, what, 100 years of indoctrination people are not going to give up fast moving traffic or their cars or home delivery because of vehicular attack. The sheer size of the infrastructure shift argues against it. It's not gonna happen in 4 lifetimes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @07:06AM
Why would they change their way of life in the name of safety? This is just stupid, and the same kind of thing supporters of nonsense like the Patriot Act say.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Monday November 06 2017, @04:54AM (5 children)
This wouldn't have helped in the situation where the perpetrator legally acquired a moving truck/van, took it to an area where the vehicle was banned, and proceeded to run people over.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:10AM (4 children)
took it to an area where the vehicle was banned
Don't just ban them; make it impossible to get the large powered vehicle where only bicycles|pedestrians are allowed to be.
Bollards1 [archive.li]
Bollards [archive.li]
Bollard3 [godawn.com]
A nearby city uses that last thing in multiples at intersection corners.
They're concrete; 4 feet tall and 2 feet across.
There's about 2 feet of space between them.
When CalTrans guys are doing roadwork, between the traffic and the workspace they will set up a series of temporary concrete barriers that are 4 feet tall and 20 feet long.
This stuff is not rocket surgery.
The fact that cities have designated places as restricted areas and haven't actually done anything to assure that that is what happens speaks to crappy governments and citizens not holding the politicians' feet to the fire.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 06 2017, @06:36AM (2 children)
Crappy governments which might not have the resources to put in all those bollards, let us note.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:50AM (1 child)
Oh, wow! Of course, they are more expensive than the wall! Can't afford them, but can afford a permanent militarized police. And prisons, lots of them.
Some priorities...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 06 2017, @07:20AM
Funny how you don't realize how true those words are. There's no end to the places that will need bollards (and beefier bollards). And of course, when they don't work perfectly, then you'll need the permanent militarized police and prisons to deal with the anti-bollard terrorists.
Back at you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:33PM
I believe the correct term you are looking for is "brain science."
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday November 06 2017, @04:31PM (5 children)
Will banning guns completely eliminate gun violence? No, but it would greatly reduce it.
The USA has nearly 10x the gun homicide rate when compared to Canada (and Canada doesn't have a gun ban, just restrictions):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Monday November 06 2017, @07:49PM (2 children)
I just pulled some numbers on this before reading your comment, I was curious about this too.
US / Canada / multipler
People: 323.1M / 36.29M / 8.9x
Firearm murders: 11k / 158 / 70x
Guns per 100 people: 101 / 30.8 / 3.28x
Total guns: 326M / 11,200 / 29.2x
Guns per murder: 29,700 / 70,700 / .419x
So there you have it. Canadians have a little more than twice as many guns per firearm-related murder. Maybe banning guns more will help, but it seems like dealing with societal and cultural issues will help more.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snow on Monday November 06 2017, @08:21PM (1 child)
Definitely. I'm not a gun owner, so I could be wrong, but I think that most Canadians look at a gun as a tool, where a lot of Americans look at them as penis extenders.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Crash on Monday November 06 2017, @11:04PM
Most guns in Atlantic Canada are hunting rifles. People don't walk around with them; they are rarely even loaded. In 35 years the only handguns I've seen (in person) were in use by the RCMP or City Police.
I've never even heard anyone in Canada even talk about "Canadian gun rights", beyond a brief kerfuffle (decades ago) when registration of all owned firearms was required - which was deemed to be more of a govt tax overreach than anything else.
The firearm phenomenon in the US is beyond most any other first world countries' reckoning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @10:40PM
>"The USA has nearly 10x the gun homicide rate when compared to Canada"
But what is the comparative rate of homicidal psychopaths? You can't draw a conclusion without that information.
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Tuesday November 07 2017, @12:28AM
Unless you think knife attacks or vehicular homicide are totally acceptable, you should probably be looking at OVERALL homicide rate. Less guns = less gun violence is practically a tautology. If it was your only goal you could probably reduce gun deaths greatly by freely distributing high explosives, but most people wouldn't consider that to be an improvement...
I'll also note that Canada also has things like universal healthcare and better social services in general, which tend to make people less desperate. Better mental health and less desperation means less suicide (which are the VAST majority of gun deaths) and also less crime in general. Maybe try comparing to China next time, in this context they *might* be more similar politically... :)
More seriously though...compare these three maps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country [wikipedia.org]
https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/1511B11-global-inequality-work-map-GINI.png [weforum.org]
None of them line up perfectly...but it looks to me like the GINI index is a better predictor of overall violent crime than rates of gun ownership.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by evilcam on Tuesday November 07 2017, @02:26AM
Except literally everywhere else it's been tried, where it did work.
You Yanks have had about 75% of a 9/11 so far this year in mass shootings - that's just the mass shootings (you have about 1 a day, btw). Include everyone else that was shot and killed this year and you've had over 13,000.
Like I don't care if you don't want to change your laws, but stop pretending that there isn't a relationship between number of guns and number of people killed by guns because you just sound like a fool.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:23AM
Nothing will solve it altogether, but handguns are basically good for killing and intimidation, and intimidation doesn't really work (in the big picture.) Sure, some nut flew his Cessna into the IRS building in Tampa, I don't think he actually killed anyone besides himself. The IRA has been demonstrating urban bombing for decades, but they're usually pretty limited - Oklahoma city was impressive, but that level of commitment doesn't seem to repeat nearly as often.
And, besides, 26 at a whack makes national news, but handguns kill 26 people every 5.5 hours 24-7-365 in the USA. Intentional killing with bombs, planes, cars, etc. happens, but at a much lower rate.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Monday November 06 2017, @09:42AM (11 children)
To quote a Colin Mochrie tweet:
Guns don't kill people. People kill people. So stop giving people guns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:44PM (10 children)
You are never going to get rid of the guns. If you try the only ones who will give them up are the honest law-abiding citizens, leaving just the criminals to have them. In this latest attack the attacker targeted what until recently was a gun-free zone, a church. Somewhere where he knew there was little chance anyone there would be able to defend themselves. He killed 27 people, then when fleeing was engaged outside (not a gun-free zone) by a legal gun owning citizen, who very much likely stopped him from taking more lives.
While guns are not specifically banned outright in churches anymore in Texas unless a 30.06/30.07 sign is posted, it's not generally known that this law changed recently, so it's highly unlikely many would have known they could carry in a church anyway. It's not clear if any sign was posted or not.
So in this situation, in a place where guns are unlikely to be held by citizens, 27 died. Once the bad guy moved to a place where you can legally carry and there are plenty of citizens who do, he was stopped without taking more lives.
This doesn't even consider the fact that this guy was dishonorably discharged from the military and could not legally purchase a gun in the first place. He was already under the restrictions of gun control so committed fraud to obtain it. So what what he did was already illegal, which was even before he committed murder, which is also already illegal. Gun control didn't stop him. The law didn't stop him. He didn't care. Further gun control is only going to affect those that care about the law. So why are we trying to ban guns again?
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Monday November 06 2017, @03:27PM (9 children)
That's more people than have been killed by guns than in the whole of the UK this year. In one incident.
Stop your bullshit "if only EVERYONE had had a gun" justification because, as with the counter-argument "if nobody had a gun, everyone would have died", it doesn't hold water when you look at any statistic. Not one of those people with a gun "stopped" the 27 deaths, which is some 20-something more than other countries have experienced in a single gun-related incident this year (or even in recent memory).
Literally, the US has a multiple-homicide-by-gun incident for every day of the year. In other countries, such things are news items they are so rare.
The key is "restrict easy access to guns". And when you do that, spotting the people buying guns, carrying guns, selling guns, etc. is made much easier as they can't sell them on / be stolen by people, or obtained legitimately. Not one idiot on the planet suggests you'll be crime-free overnight, what we're suggesting is that you'll start feeling the difference almost instantly and it will continue to serve you well.
As a counter-argument, the PREVIOUS incident (only a few weeks ago?) with the guy in the hotel? The guy bought all his guns legitimately and not one person in a crowd of thousands, nor a team of hotel security, nor any hotel guests, nor any member of the SWAT teams etc. was able to fire a single shot back in reply. But if the gun-vendor had been able to say "What the hell do you want all these for?" and refuse custom, he wouldn't have had anything to shoot.
Sure, he "could have" gone to the black market. But that very act is illegal and arrestable, and therefore much more risky to try and plan in advance, before you even start. He could be arrested for even TRYING to obtain weapons that way, even with your current laws. However, he didn't even need to. He could walk into a shop and buy them and ship them around the country without any hindrance whatsoever.
If you make things THAT easy, you've got to live with the consequences. Which are that a random stranger might gun down one gunman (you hope, how do you know it was actually the gunman anyway, if you're just a vigilante?) for every 27 / 50 / 100 / 1000 innocents gunned down. Those odds aren't in your favour. Make it more difficult for them to get assault rifles (COMPLETELY illegal in my country, so it's like trying to buy a rocket launcher or a working tank on the black market). And then you limit the damage they can do, and arouse suspicions over EVERY preparatory action, and have them set through any number of honeytraps, etc. before they do things.
But that a normal guy can just walk into a shop and pop back later for a military assault rifle with a thousand rounds? That's just insane. Seriously, go look at the countries that you can do that in. Warzones, anarchist states, and America. That's it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @04:00PM (4 children)
"But that very act is illegal and arrestable"
Murder isn't? Also, this guy was already not allowed to purchase a weapon and only did so by fraud. That's not illegal and arrestable?
He was already breaking the law long before he stepped into the church. Making it double illegal wouldn't have stopped that.
And using the UK as a comparison: Lets say we do find an unlikely way to get rid of that many guns. The UK has higher violent crime rates than the US, despite the lower number of guns. You just tried to focus on gun violence, which is ignoring the bigger picture. The criminals there just started preferring knives. They started cracking down on knives and they started throwing acid on people.
Come on, people are the real problem, not the guns. We need better mental health care, not taking away the rights and safety of people who have done nothing wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @04:57PM (3 children)
Somehow, I'm not feeling any safer with all the guns in our communities. I guess YMMV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:23PM (1 child)
Perhaps you should take responsibility for your own safety? Maybe go buy one and take a class on how to store, practise, and use it safely?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday November 06 2017, @08:18PM
You call buying more guns "taking responsibility"??
Do you know how many people are accidentally injured or killed by their own firearms? Like, that Idaho mother who was killed by her own gun when her toddler reached into her purse and accidentally fired it? How about the gun instructor who was accidentally killed by a 9 year old girl who couldn't handle the recoil from the automatic weapon he was trying to teach her to use? Yeah, a gun instructor, someone who ought to know better than that, if he wasn't such a gun nut that he thought children should be taught the use of such weapons. That's like putting a kid who's hasn't driven anything beyond a tricycle behind the wheel of a 18 wheeler.
If you want the world to be a safer place, you keep dangerous tools out of easy reach. And you tone it down. There is no need to murder someone when disabling them is enough to stop a problem. Nor are guns much use for many scenarios. No gun at that Las Vegas concert could have shot back at the mass murderer. Would've needed a sniper rifle just to get bullets anywhere near the murderer. What if a car goes out of control and heads for a crowd of people? For all you know, the car could be out of control because the driver just had a heart attack and died. Or it could be a mechanical problem. Obviously in those cases, shooting the driver will do nothing to stop the car. Shooting the car is very unlikely to stop it, even if you do manage to hit the tires. If you're especially unlucky, you could make things worse, say by hitting the gas tank and starting a fire. Or, suppose a terrorist plants a bomb hours beforehand? There's no one around to shoot when that bomb goes off. Or, suppose two people are having a heated argument that looks like it's about to get physical. Do you pull out your gun, and what? Threaten to shoot both of them? Tell them to back away slowly? By pulling the gun, you've make the situation much more dangerous. If the police show up about then, they might shoot you first because you're the one waving a gun around. What guns are great at is the cowardly, lethal surprise attack. None of these murderers offered a duel. No take ten paces, turn and shoot kind of stuff. No, they quietly got close, then, surprise! That's not a defensive weapon, that's the perfect tool to commit an impulsive murder. Without guns, it's a whole lot harder for an attacker to do serious damage to lots of people.
I rely on the society and law and order to deter murders. Yeah, anyone can be murdered in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, but the murderer is going to have an impossible time getting away with it. If they were hell bent on murder-suicide, nothing, not guns nor the law, was going to stop it anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:33PM
I didn't either, so I left the community.
Now I live in a very rural area of Canada. There's a (usually loaded) gun in the backseat of nearly every (usually unlocked) pickup or other vehicle. ...and nobody is dropping dead of bullet-related injuries.
People are the problem, sure, but the population density, along with the socioeconomic factors of those people has got to be a huge contributing factor. There are simply too many of us, shoved in too small a space. Even small cities aren't fit to live in.
Doing what I did isn't an option for everyone. It won't be too many more years before it's not an option for anyone. A world like The Caves of Steel [wikipedia.org] is not a world I'm interested in living in.
I don't have an answer to the problem, but I can recognize that it's there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 06 2017, @06:48PM (3 children)
While you're busy rollling around all your favorite gun statistics - why don't you cite the statistics for those US cities with the strictest gun control laws.
Oh - they're pretty much all liberal/democrat cities, aren't they?
There you go - the laws are ineffective.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Monday November 06 2017, @07:22PM (2 children)
Totally baffled, mostly because I'm English so have no idea what your political grouping has to do with a city. London's a fucking big city, though, so thinking it's either of the two major political parties on its own is just... well... ridiculous. And I have absolutely no political interest whatsoever, thanks. Certainly not split down an US-centric geo-political lines, that's for sure.
However, I don't need to cite statistics for US cities with the strictest gun control laws.
Because they ALL pale in comparison to countries where they are gun control laws. All of them.
However, if you like stats: Highest gun deaths per capita:
Honduras
Venezuela
El Salvador
Swaziland
Guatemala
Jamaica
Colombia
Brazil
Panama
Uruguay
United States
...
Some great company you're keeping there.
The UK is some pages and pages of countries later, 7th from the bottom.
Gun-related deaths per 100k population:
US 10.54
UK 0.23
That's some 40 times more gun-related deaths per person.
The UK has 0.06 guns per person on average.
The US actually has more than one gun per person on average (112 per 100 people).
If you think this isn't correlated, if this is somehow irrelevant, if this is just coincidence, I implore you to think for literally 2.5 seconds about it.
Because EVERY COUNTRY that has strict gun control laws has less gun-related deaths, lower murder rates, etc.
You literally have a multi-person gun killing every day of the year. Every single day. And your population is barely 5 times our population that has... almost none.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @08:11PM (1 child)
In the USA, cities: are run by democrats, are full of violent crime, have strict gun control
In the USA, non-city areas: are run by republicans, have very little crime, and have very little gun control
Based on this, you might suspect that there could be cause-and-effect relationships. Perhaps gun control causes violence, at least in the USA.
Also, if you ignore the cities, the USA is really non-violent. We're similar to the best parts of Europe.
Maybe the solution isn't gun control. Maybe the solution is democrat control, or some sort of city control. You could also look at the sorts of people who live in cities, and then decide to not let more of them into the USA.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @11:55PM
nah you just need your second amendment repealed. the sense of entitlement regarding owning firearms is the root of the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:45PM
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/human-violence-evolution-animals-nature-science/ [nationalgeographic.com]
Basically, we are a violent family (primates), but lately, we have become much less violent.
Overall, despite all the news you are hearing, these are pretty peaceful times we are living in. That is why we always hear about violence from far flung places, it is rare (and thus news) and so we have to go further away to find it. Yes, sometimes it happens close, but most of the violence you hear about is in a difference state, or different nation. This is because to get news of violence, they have to go that far. If we were really in a violent time, the news would either be talking about all the killings in your state/city that day, or ignoring it completely as it wasn't "news" anymore.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @03:22AM (4 children)
Some folks in Paris might agree with you, but they are dead.
But I'm with you, if the police and military give up their guns first. Then I will be 100% behind banning all guns.
(Score: -1, Touché) by jmorris on Monday November 06 2017, @03:41AM (3 children)
Not even then. Because we would need our guns even more to drive out the invaders who would decide to bust a move. And the gangs.
Gun control is a stupid concept. We need Democrat control. Discounting the foreign invaders Democrats invite in, look how many of these mass murder incidents are Democrats vs Independents or Republicans. This is low grade civil war. So far my side is generally keeping their powder dry, let us all pray Trump DOJ / FBI can drop a hammer on this situation before this goes hot.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:33AM (2 children)
So stupid that the entire civilized world practices it.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @07:10AM (1 child)
Most of those same "civilized" countries punishment people for things such as hate speech. The mere fact that many/all of so-called "civilized" countries do something does not mean that something is okay. Now, with that said, the US is also an authoritarian country, just in different ways.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @04:58PM
No, it doesn't. But it does give us something to compare results against to decide whether a policy change would make sense. A couple examples:
* In the case of gun control, those countries that have greater gun control have far, far less gun deaths. Maybe worth looking at?
* Universal Healtcare, the vast majority of 1st world countries that have this, have cheaper and more effective healthcare. Maybe worth considering, heh?
I'm sure we can find examples where current US policy look positive as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @07:08PM
no, you would have a civil war the likes of which the world has never seen before.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @03:55AM (13 children)
We don't know anything about this individual yet. Though he probably is a legal gun owner we really have no idea yet.
He didn't give a damn, but if background checks were required for private sales and gun shows we as a society may have prevented him from obtaining the semiautomatic riles he used.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @05:20AM (12 children)
This argument is getting increasingly silly. It's getting to the point that you can fabricate weapons from 3D printing devices. And you can literally make a shotgun out of little more than two pipes. Seriously..
And all that will happen is people will create new, perhaps even deadlier, ways of killing each other. Poison, explosives, vehicles, sabotage, etc.
I'm not really a gun person, but the situation in the EU has made me very averse to gun control. The EU has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. And the only result there is that the 'bad guys' are free to kill people without any real concern of retaliation. If it wasn't for the armed 'good guy' in this story it's entirely possible this guy could have murdered every individual in this building and perhaps even expanded his rampage outward. And I imagine that was his plan. He was probably banking on the fact that a town of 600 is unlikely to have a top notch swat team on call. What he didn't count on was an armed citizen that saved one can only imagine how many lives. It's just a shame more people in the church weren't armed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday November 06 2017, @06:39AM (11 children)
Really? Please feel free to link some statistics showing that EU is less safe a place to live than US, I'm sure the info will shut the mouth of those pesky Europeans. An easy job, I trust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @07:13AM (1 child)
They are entirely different cultures, so even showing a lower murder rate in European countries would not be sufficient evidence to prove that gun control is all that effective. The US is fighting a very large-scale war on drugs, for example, so there are too many factors involved here.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 06 2017, @08:20AM
If that is what you imply, I will agree with your assertion that, in the eye of a differently cultured European, the USians look like... well.. a bit on the savage side.
But the question is: will such a statistic show that the AC to which I was replying actually need a gun to feel safer in Europe than in US?
Refreshing the context, here's what AC was saying;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Monday November 06 2017, @07:29AM (6 children)
Actually, the places in Europe that are less violent are only the ones where there is a far higher concentration of people of the same race and culture. The more diverse it gets, the higher the incidence of acid and knife attacks and the like. This seems to be a very strong correlation, but I know you're not a racist, so there must be some other factor at play, here, right? What do you surmise it could be?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday November 06 2017, @07:48AM (1 child)
Culture. There is nothing about being of Arab extraction per se that predisposes someone to being an acid attacker. There is everything about being a Muslim that does. Yes, i know, Islam is a religion, but it's very tightly integrated with aspects of life most people would refer to as culture.
Nice try, Link.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Monday November 06 2017, @06:55PM
I actually used the word culture in my comment, but said nothing about muslims.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 06 2017, @08:25AM (3 children)
Coming from a guy with the 'linkdude64', I was sorta expecting to have at least one link supporting his assertion.
Really, is an explicit [Citation needed] necessary?
(bluntly speaking: do you expect me to accept you assertion without a shred of evidence? Because, lacking it, your invitation into surmising is an exercise in futility)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @05:54PM
Yes he does, cause his preconceptions and personal beliefs are NOT TO BE QUESTIONED!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by linkdude64 on Monday November 06 2017, @06:57PM (1 child)
Do you require a citation that the sky is blue?
How many truck, acid, and knife attacks did you hear about weekly in Europe before the refugee migration? Or were you born yesterday, and so you haven't ever known a Europe that was free of terrorist bombings and the like?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @10:07PM
why have high school kids in europe been arrested for riding their bikes up to people they dont like and throwing acid on them and pedaling away? in regards to gangs and girl problems?
One 15 year old kid even said it is a lot easier and less stressful than actually knifing or fighting, just throw a cup of acid and run away. they won't be able to chase you. the only real fear is to get caught.
they arent even trying to get guns
you may be correct in that this was an imported behavior, but like all culture, people appropriate what works for them. and this helps them cause harm more effectively than the old way, of getting in a fight and possibly getting hurt during it as well as arrested. throwing acid has proven to be very effective in causing the most harm to a specific target--and being able to get away with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @03:07PM
The EU was for quite some time mostly homogenous. I used to shudder at that 'homogeneity' which I thought was mostly lazy logic for racists since it mostly just relied on circular logic that assumed itself. However, the rapid and widespread migration within the EU has actually created a solid experiment. And the reality is that as countries like the UK have become more 'diverse', their crime rates have skyrocketed. Through the end of 2015 [telegraph.co.uk] in England/Wales sexual offenses were up 36%, violent crime up 27%, homicide up 14%, etc, etc.. Sweden saw [www.bra.se] overall crime victimization increase 19.5% with sexual offenses skyrocketing up 70% in a single year. The increases in crime seem to be bidirectionally linked to increases in 'diversity.' In other words countries less 'diversity' mapped to less crime as more diversity also mapped to higher crime.
It's still quite evident that most of anywhere in the EU is safer than most of anywhere in the US, at least in aggregates. But on the other hand that's setting the bar quite low. America, again as an aggregate, is literally the most unsafe place in the developed world. It's like comparing your economic status to the guy under the bridge. By the time that's not an entirely ridiculous comparison, you're long since in some serious trouble.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 06 2017, @04:14PM
https://soylentnews.org/~Runaway1956/journal/1674 [soylentnews.org]
You can start with that. Factor in that the Home Office has changed definitions, and changed the way they do accounting to hide many murders from the statisticians. Also factor in that the UK is one of the better parts of the EU. Or, rather, Europe. There are hell holes in Europe, just as there are Chicagos in the US. As good or as bad as our own illegal aliens may be, those in Europe are much worse. Most of the US is indeed safer to live in than many parts of Europe. You've been buffaloed if you believe differently.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @04:02AM (1 child)
And I am lacking toast and intolerant. This sets a very bad president. Time to put a new leash on life. I did not even know that they had Marshals in the Air Force.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 06 2017, @04:16PM
Didn't Bush create an entire division of Air Marshals? *grin*
(Score: 3, Interesting) by julian on Monday November 06 2017, @04:36AM (6 children)
So what you're saying is, even with our current gun regulations he was still able to get a deadly weapon and we need to make these restrictions even tighter.
Thanks for signing off on gun control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @05:35AM
Thanks to drug control, we have no drug abusers. Tight restrictions saved the day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @05:36AM (2 children)
Yeah, like we did with drugs! I mean we some brutal drug laws and have even sentenced nonviolent offenders to life imprisonment, have spent trillions of dollars tacking them down, and also have the largest per capita imprisonment rate in the entire world almost entirely due to nonviolent drug offense. All that's kind of bad.. but the drugs are gone, right.. right? ....
Yeah, drugs aren't guns. It's harder to ban a weed than a weapon (though many of the drugs consumed today require extensive expertise and chemical knowledge to prepare) but ultimately you're unlikely to ever be able to ban guns in the US. There are already more guns than people. If you somehow magically managed to confiscate all of them they still regularly funnel in from our borders. And even if you managed to stop that it's increasingly simple to literally build a gun. And then even if you decide to ban all 3D printing, all access to knowledge of metalsmithing, and so on (because these are totally reasonable things to do...) then people would just jump in a car and kill people that way. Or blow them up with explosives. Or poison them. Or any of a million different possibilities.
Ultimately the increase in apparent violence in the US is not being driven by anything other than a breakdown of mental health and increasing radicalism on all sides. The one thing that's true is that the main way a major act of violence is ended is a 'good guy' putting a bullet in the 'bad guy.' If we had even harsher gun control it's entirely possible this rampage could have been much much worse. He had ballistic armor and was carrying out this massacre in a town of 600. Had it not been for the armed civilian, it's entirely possible he could have entirely wiped out every individual in that church and then continued outward before special forces finally arrived.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @06:33AM
If total gun control on the federal level (possibly by Constitutional Amendment) passed Congress, you would see another 50 million guns sold before it became law.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:22PM
Yeah the USA is so serious about the drug war that nobody went to jail for this: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213 [rollingstone.com]
Or this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs [theguardian.com]
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35914759/ns/business-world_business/t/wachovia-settle-drug-money-laundering-case/ [nbcnews.com]
They're not serious about it. They want the prices up, they want their cut AND they want their leverage.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Monday November 06 2017, @05:36AM
Has drug prohibition, or the earlier prohibition of alcohol taught you nothing? The more you attempt to control goods with the law, the more you promote the growth of black markets and illegal activity. I'm a felon, if I wanted to go buy a gun, it would be very easy to do so illegally, and that WILL NOT CHANGE NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. As long as guns (or weapons in general) are made in the world, there will a market for them and people willing to pay any price to get them. Moreover, at this point in time, with the advent of cheap CNC machines, controlling the manufacture and distribution of firearms is impossible. If you want people to stop shooting people, keep wishing, it will never happen. Society, culture, and instinct promote violence, whether the motives are social, political, racial, gang, money, control, etc. We certainly could do better though. Stop promoting violence as a solution, stop promoting the capacity to inflict violence as a necessity, stop basing the construction of society upon violence, teach people to be self-aware and recognize and control their animal urges. This will never happen though.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday November 06 2017, @09:42AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday November 06 2017, @11:10AM (4 children)
But he really wasn't. It was only after the attack that he was killed by a citizen (presumably), so can we at least agree that gun ownership doesn't prevent mass shootings?
BTW, he took the term 'mass' shooting pretty literal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @03:05PM (3 children)
Hard to say in this case because until last year it was illegal to carry in a church at all in Texas. Now it's only restricted if a 30.06/30.07 sign is posted, and I would argue still unknown and/or highly discouraged. There is a reason curches, schools, military bases and government buildings are targeted often as they are all soft targets. If it was commonplace to carry in a church I would argue that they wouldn't be targeted nearly as often.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Tuesday November 07 2017, @12:15PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @10:41PM (1 child)
Your ignorant bias is showing... Everyone has to feel, live and believe exactly as you do. Is that it?
Also, most of the people I've met who are so anti-gun have never been around one, fired one, or learned about it. I've taught at least three how to shoot. None of them switched completely (or admitted to me at least) in their opinion, but they all did soften their rhetoric quite a bit.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Wednesday November 08 2017, @07:59AM
Of course, you're free to believe whatever you like. Living however you like is already constrained by law and in my opinion 'not being allowed to own a gun' should be one of the constraints. Except maybe in a few cases, like hunting and sports (with extensive background checks and licenses and mandatory membership of a shooting range and so on). But that's just my opinion.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday November 06 2017, @11:47AM (1 child)
So you're saying the system worked as intended? There's no need to fix the system - is that what you're saying?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:34PM
He is. And he's right.
In The Netherlands, gun ownership is illegal (except for exemptions from the law by the police, to enable antique collectors/hunters/etc).
Just on today's evening news: a person getting shot in the head at close range AND another person getting permanently paralyzed.
Of course, when talking about this church shooting, the news tactfully fails to mention the guy's court martial and lack of legal route to obtain firearms (if I am to believe fellow Soylentils)
So: If gun control worked, how come my country still gets a shooting about once every 2 weeks on the average?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 06 2017, @03:12PM (1 child)
Trooooollllll!!!!!
Would he have been stopped if gun control had applied more *effectively*?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @07:43PM
you're an idiot and a fat ass. way to go!