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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: 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.