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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
yeah, that didn't turn out right.
Probably the most correct statement of the day regarding whether a student would have been armed or not.
We, on another message board, predicted that something like this would happen after the VA legislature let a house bill die in subcomittee that would have let students and faculty carry concealed on campus.
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You know, the thing is that I wondered why VA Tech has been having so many issues lately...but what you just posted makes me wonder whether some nutjob actually perpetrated this to make a point...
...not that anti-control zealots are nutjobs on the face of it, but there are wacked people from all sectors sooo maybe the failure of a bill to allow students to carry gave rise to the belief that someone needed to demonstrate need for them to do so.
and I certainly hope your stat of 5% of 300 million people committing gun crimes is wrong--because that's still
15 million.
I personally think this topic has absolutely nothing to do with gun control, or lack thereof. Look, I know people who keep and enjoy handguns. Some of whom would keep them in their homes if they could (they can't, it's also illegal to keep a firearm in one's house if it's on school property, and even though none of us live in a dorm, we live in family housing that is zoned within the university). But they can't, and as far as I know, they're supportive of such restrictions.
But the fact of the matter is, even dk would have to wonder how many people would actively arm themselves? let's say 1,000 students, a number I think would be incredibly overly optomistic. That's neither here nor there, but it would be a stroke of luck, plain and simple, for *someone* armed legally to have stopped this. Not for some reason like the gun would get taken away or someone would shoot an innocent person, but simply due to the size of the campus, the population, school commitments, sleeping, partying, whatever...the point is that a legal gun carrier would only be in proximity to the shooter by pure coincidence.
If anyone wants to build policy from this singular incident, to ensure that a once in a lifetime opportunity might come up to save someone's life in a school shooting, I think that would be poorly devised and ultimately ineffectual on a pragmatic level (with deep symbolic effect).
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Originally Posted by mirevolver
And Switzerland has fully automatic assult rifles in 14% of homes, with a murder rate average of 1.2 per 100,000 over the years of 1999-2001 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_and_crime). What works in Iceland, works in Iceland and may not work anywhere else, the same goes for Switzerland. What works in one country is not the end all solution for every country. |
I think you're making abaya's point.
I thought she was making the point that gun violence is better attributed to something like "gun culture" rather than amount of guns. She used iceland that doesn't have any guns. You used Switzerland that does have guns. Both have little to no gun crime, which suggests that amount of guns is not the independent variable in gun crime...of course, neither allows indiscriminant gun carrying, so both fail to address the most prevelant US problem--handguns; in that sense, Switzerland doesn't even help your argument even if you don't believe that it supports abaya's.
Oh, and I forgot to mention why I think gun control is totally irrelevant. and I suspect that gun/violence culture theories are, as well. Because the thing is, we've had a gun culture since the beginning and various periods of lax gun control with strict gun control, but school shootings are a recent phenomenon. So I really think all these ideas are interesting but hold very little predictive value.