Politics Gun violence in CT

there's no infringement on your "rights" if you have to keep a sports car-like automatic weapon system toy is at a shooting club locked down when you're not there and available for whenever you might want to take that baby for a little target shooting spin, right?

unless you serious believe that "the framers" meant by "well-regulated militia" the arbitrary bourgeois prerogative to never be inconvenienced in any way.

i am sure there's some hack conservative "scholar" who'd be willing for a price--delivered in some dignity-preserving way of course---able to assemble a collage of arbitrary quotations from suitably proximate documents to the constitutional convention that can be taken out of context and misinterpreted in order to show that the absolute right not to be inconvenienced in any way was paramount behind the scenes in the fashioning of the bill of rights.

 

i can see being put in an embarrasing situation if the arguments become: my personal convenience is more important than general measures designed to reduce overall levels of gun violence.

on the other hand, since i am thinking this out and not drawing up legislation, i can imagine locking provisions being written into the law in more rural places. the trade-off would likely be something on the order of the canadian system, which would be that police could--and would---check on whether the locks are in place and to standard etc. of course, i know how this would go in many places: there'd be a call made or information passed through social networks because no-one wants to run friends afoul of this sort of thing.

or i could imagine an overall federal mandate with basic requirements that is devolved onto localities to implement in its detail. of course, this would presuppose breaking the back politically of the fundamentalist 2nd amendment right.

but if that's the same demographic that's saying shit like this:

Roy Moore: Evolution and Gay Marriage Incompatible with the Constitution | Right Wing Watch

then that's not a bad thing.

 

forgive my laziness but unrestricted internet access is hard to come by in my life. did the point about the teachers in texas having the green light to take weapons to school already get brought up? perhaps some of you have already seen the image floating around on facebook of that one dude who tried to shoot up a school but got stopped when a teacher applied his USP .45

 

There's an issue with the argument that armed civilians would stop mass shooters, namely that history suggests just the opposite. After the shooting in Aurora, Mother Jones did an exhaustive search and came up with 62 incidents of mass shootings in the last 30 years in the Untied States. Not one of those 62 cases involves a civilian using a gun to actually stop the mass killing. Moreover, in the two cases where a civilian or civilians did attempt to intervene, the armed civilians were gravely wounded or killed. Put simply, not only is there no evidence to support the assertion that an armed populace would prevent these shootings, there's actually evidence that they only make things worse.

Further reading.

I think we, as a society, need to be far more measured and realistic about tragedies like this. Foremost must be a discussion about mental health services and reasonable measures to attempt to preventing arms from ending up in the hands of those suffering from mental illness linked to violent outbursts. Shouting matches about video games or the Second Amendment are an obstacle to preventing the next mass shooting.

 

I see no problem with this, though if I were living in the sprawling estate next door, I'd be leery if you had a 20 something son with a history of randomly smashing car windows or tormenting the neighborhood dogs with a taser.

Just sayin.'

 

What are the regulations for housing guns safely now - and how are they enforced?

I get the impression that there is no requirement.

 

well, video games and other such nonsense are easier to address than larger and equally obvious problems...consider for example the slow construction of a climate of fear and/or paranoia in the united states. personally, i link it to the unintentional consequences of john walsh's way of grieving over the loss of his child, which resulted in a tv show about missing children and america's most wanted, which resulted in the disembodied heads of missing children printed on the sides of milk cartons...the curious flipside of a regime that emphasized superficial optimism in its public pronouncements, a matter of circumstance i am sure that first thing every morning every family in the united states that did any kind of breakfast ritual, even coffee or tea, that involved milk had to look at the disembodied head of a missing child. i have the sense that this triggered a kind of pulling in of everyday life, a circumscribing of movements for kids and a hovering sense of paranoia because the way in which that tv show operated, for example, was to emphasize half of the reality of random actions like what killed john walsh's daughter---that it could happen to anyone---while eliminating the other--that the chances of it happening to any particular person was vanishingly small. so the disembodied heads on milk cartons functioned as much as a threat as a spreading of information about children already missing.

this is likely not the only trigger for paranoia, but it's the one that sticks in my mind from the period because it was at once so strange and intrusive.

it's not hard to connect this to the consequences of neo-liberal ideology implemented--the increasing sense of precariousness, the truncating of futures for vast segments of the population as a function of the processes of dismantling the american manufacturing sector, demolishing the political position of trade unions, substituting for a high-wage high-consumption economy a low-wage debt peonage economy...all of which accelerated under clinton.

add to that the effects of a nascent neo-fascist movement which capitalized on this ambient sense of isolation and paranoia.

add to that the consequences of this nitwit "war on terror"

add to that the consequences of an acceleration of a fundamental reorganization of the american economy in an ideological context that focused exclusively on shareholder returns and didnt acknowledge in any meaningful way what that meant for regular people.

and the consequences of the financial meltdown and accompanying sudden recognition of much of what has been followed from neo-liberal economic thinking implemented. the failure of the ethical justifications for it to deliver. the failure of all boats floated. the consequences of an ideological monocropping across this whole period such that many people have no conception of alternatives, only a recognition of their total powerlessness.

this may seem quite remote from what might account for why people snap and decide to mow others down in public spaces.

in the early 20th century, emile durkheim wondered how it is that a society can tell if it has slipped into a pathological phase. the problem is that people operate within shared frames of reference and those frames of reference tend to move along with their contexts. he didn't say this, but they move in the general interest of information reduction, which is the main thing that we, as human organisms, do---organize information in order to limit compexity. think about how you'd walk down a city sidewalk if you couldn't limit complexity for example. think about the adjustment period that follows your entry into a city that you've not been to before. or think about the opposite, how it seems when you go from a city to a rural environment that there is no sound at all. it's all disorienting. anyway, durkheim assumed that, because people's frames of reference are tied to the movement of their overall contexts, that they would have a problem seeing if things had become fucked up because they would tend to process what's in front of them as normal. durkheim pointed to suicide rates. each of these massacres has also been a suicide. maybe that's something to think about.

 

Definitely.

 

Two recent examples of another side of preventable gun violence.......stand your ground laws.

Lets call it what it is....vigilantism.

 

no lets call it what it is: aggravated battery with a weapon and shooting within a building, and murder and attempted murder. that's what they were charged with just like if there was no stand your ground law.

 

The result is two innocent victims of gun violence resulting from a law that gives an untrained person with a concealed carry permit some sense of self-righteousness and a belief that he has the right to protect himself from a perceived threat that did not exist.

And, IMO, why Stand Your Ground laws and CCW permit requirements need further review as part of the comprehensive solution.

 

the stand your ground law didn't cause this violence. they are simply trying to justify what they did after the fact which sounds very flimsy case in my opinion and likely to a jury as well. i dont' see a problem here.

 

c'mon man. We're mostly on the same page here but a sports car is quite a bit different than an assault rifle. I'm getting ready to purchase an Audi S8...but it's nowhere near capable of racking up a body count like an AR-15. Again, I like assault weapons, I've used them...they're awesome, but there are few people that I personally know that should own one. Then again, I see so much stupidity at the ranges that most of those morons shouldn't own any firearms so maybe it's a moot point.

That being said, if people start fuckin' around with our CCW permits I won't be a happy camper at all. It's hard enough to get one as it is.

I know these laws won't stop the violence, I've said it many times in here. I've also said that I believe mental issues are the biggest factor in my mind, but for me, I think that if we somehow combine stricter laws regarding assault weapons and make mental health a key issue and make it easier to receive the proper help that doesn't just come from a script pad, perhaps we've done some good and kept one or two people from obtaining a weapon that racks up these type of body counts. Sure, they can get them via other means, but sometimes that bit of time and frustration may lead to them being caught before they do it, or they just give up. :shrug: It's hard being on the fence with this issue, but I'm gonna sit here a while longer if you don't mind.

 

Is it any harder for one of those morons who shouldnt own any firearms to get a CCW permit than a responsible gun owner like yourself?

 

who's to say someone shouldn't own a gun if they have no past crimminal or mental health record?

 

What you do in your own home is for you to say and is as close to a unrestricted constitutional right as may exist.

What is done in public schools, theaters, malls, and anywhere involving public safety is for WE the PEOPLE to say and not an unrestricted constitutional right.

 

Of course not. The problem there lies in the fact that some people get a gun in their hands and turn stupid. This is the case with just about anything. With some people it's a drivers license, with some people it's booze, with others it's guns.

There's no accurate way of preventing stupid.