Politics Gun violence in CT

For the record, I don't hate guns or gun owners. I hate the fact that guns unnecessarily kill people who might have lived had the gun not been an aspect of the event. There's no earthly reason why, with all of our technology and advancements in data maintenance that law enforcement can't have access to who has guns, what those guns are, who is selling them, who they are being sold to, how much ammunition is being purchased for each gun, and what they're being used for (hunting, target practice, home protection, etc)

It's like some crazy fucking free for all out there. Anybody can get a gun because no one is keeping track of them. At a minimum, is this too much to ask? If you're a responsible gun owner, is the fact that law enforcement has details on your dangerous weapons that much of a hardship?

In my mind, there is only two reasons a gun owner would object to strict licensing and regulation of their firearms.

1) They intend on using it to commit a crime
2) They want to hide knowledge of their guns from law enforcement out of a belief that they will require them one day to protect themselves or their guns from law enforcement.

I don't need to understand guns or to own guns to make a judgment about what could and should be done to protect myself from those who can obtain them to do me or my family harm.

It's my right to demand this as much as it is a gun owner's right to own a gun. The compromise lies somewhere between and within those two rights.

I hate to harp on the NRA, but they have been making it very difficult for those of us with our own rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to compromise with those for whom the 2nd amendment is an equally important right. I don't see the same level of obstructionism from any organization on the other side.

 

I'll respect that Borla and will bow out as well.

One final thing though. Rather than being a political issue, I truly believe that the issue over guns is a social one. No different than the issue of mental illness. It's only become political because politicians have adopted it as a tool to manipulate voter loyalty. That's the shame of it.

Done.

 

I would like to see the FBI source data.

From this DoJ data, in 2005 -- 2,868 firearm homicides from other than handgun and 671 from blunt instrument.
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More recent data:

In 2009, 1,834 murders w/ firearm type not stated

So what do you think those other firearm types might be?

No disrespect to you, but your source cherry picks the rifle and shotgun data and ignores the other firearm types.
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Even more clarification:

FBI definition of rifle and shotgun:

RIFLE A weapon intended to be fired from the
shoulder that uses the energy of the explosive in
a fixed metallic cartridge to fire only a single
projectile through a rifled bore for each single
pull of the trigger.

SHOTGUN A weapon intended to be fired from the
shoulder that uses the energy of the explosive in
a fixed shotgun shell to fire through a smooth
bore either a number of ball shot or a single
projectile for each single pull of the trigger.

So, no, EVERY sort of rifle is not included in the number of rifle and shotgun homicides....suggesting that the gun rights crowd are manipulating the data in sources likes yours.

 

I disagree.

The proposals I have seen are targeting weapons that are not single shot weapons.

 

I think that, however you look at it, the number of gun deaths related to rifles and long guns (shotguns, etc) is pretty small when one looks at the overall number of gun deaths annually. Hand guns are more commonly used.

I suppose the question is about the objective of any legislation. In the wake of Newtown, which was the latest catalyst to draw our attention, it can be tempting to see the issue as "How can we stop that happening again?", where the thing we want to stop happening is very specific. If we do that, we narrow the focus significantly and I don't think that's a good thing.

What it leads to is questionable "solutions" to prevent mass murders in elementary schools with specific weapon types and conveniently ignores everything else. However, it has been around 24 years since there has been a shooting in an elementary school that resulted in more than one death - and the ones before that didn't necessarily involve "assault rifles.

So we get "answers" like:

* Ban assault rifles (simply a type of semi-automatic weapon that, other than its cosmetic appearance, is not significantly different from other semi-automatic weapons in this context. As it has a long barrel, it may be more accurate than a hand gun but we aren't talking about long-range shootings here)
* Ban "high-capacity" clips (well, maybe, but the gun is more likely to jam with them and it really doesn't take long to reload)
* Let's have armed guards or armed teachers in elementary schools ('cause Die Hard was real)
* Make the children pray (because the Pope doesn't travel behind bullet-proof glass, after all)

The advantage of these approaches is that they can give the impression of "doing something". Better still, given that this is a rare event, we can sit back in 5 years time (or 10, 15 years time) and congratulate ourselves that there hasn't been another Sandy Hook.

Sure, there may have been plenty of other mass shootings - but we fixed the elementary school problem, didn't we? Answer: not really.

Now, there may be other issues with "assault rifles" but I don't believe they are "THE PROBLEM". For example, I don't like the idea of anyone using them to hunt deer - a bolt-action rifle should be fine for that - because, if you miss with the first shot, continuing to shoot at a moving deer when you can't be sure what is behind it is a horrible idea. However, that is not the focus and is a side-track, in my opinion.

Surely, a better problem to look at is that, given that there are enough guns in the USA to hand one out to every man, woman and child, it is too easy for irresponsible and/or malevolent people to access them and kill themselves or others.

The good news is that there are a lot of responsible gun owners out there as well. How do we make sure that as many guns as possible are properly stored, handled and controlled and that as few as possible fall into the hands of those who will abuse them?

It's not an easy issue and I distrust easy answers that give the impression of "action" but that will do little to reduce the number of gun deaths.

 

I dont think it is a knee jerk reaction to put on the table for discussion the "ban" of semi-automatic weapons (referring to greater than .22-caliber with detachable magazines) or high capacity clips or magazines -- perhaps not the most frequent, but certainly the combination being the most deadly killers in recent years.

Or even simply to require gun shops to report multiple sales of these type weapons within a 5 day period, which is already required for hand guns.

Or to close the loophole that allows as much as 40% of gun sales to occur w/o a background check.

Or federal minimum training requirements for CCW or other such issues resulting from the patchwork of state laws.

What I have seen to-date from much of the gun crowd, including responsible gun owners, is a knee jerk reaction to misrepresent these or simply dismiss them out of hand.

I have yet to see where they are ready to come to the table with anything that might limit access to firearms by those with evil intent.

 

Some of those would be very helpful, I agree.

Also, conviction for a violent misdemeanor should prevent anyone from acquiring a gun in all States (or result in confiscation if one is owned prior to conviction). I think the same should be true for substance abuse convictions (including DUI).

Of course, for some of these things to work, an accurate register is a prerequisite.

I'd also welcome serious input from the pro-gun community and was disappointed with the NRA (blaming the media and a lack of guns was a failure to engage with the issue seriously, in my opinion).

 

The last federal gun legislation signed into law was by Bush with the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 (after Va Tech).

In order to get the NRA sign-off, two concessions had to be made - state reporting of persons w/mental illness had to continue to be voluntary (with financial incentives) not mandatory and it had to exclude anyone considered mentally ill by the Veterans Admin (even the worst cases of PTSD) as well as a procedure for mentally ill to seek other waivers.

This is a place to start.....mandatory reporting of mental health information to NICS balanced with individual rights of medical privacy.

 

I have said the same thing in every gun discussion.

But how to convince the right (including the gun rights crowd), many of who believe income inequality, poverty, access to quality education/health care are socialism in disguise and pandering to the "47%" lazy bums who just want to live on government handouts.

 

Can't disagree with any of that. There appears to be a very strong correlation at the very least.

Access to healthcare (especially mental healthcare) is also an issue.

Some things take longer to achieve and are more difficult to implement but shouldn't be excluded from the response because of that, in my opinion.

Which is not to say that action around gun ownership is unnecessary, and I don't think that is what you guys are suggesting.

 

Again, with no disrespect to Bora, the "real unbiased facts" that hammers kill more people than rifles (ignoring the 1,000+ deaths from guns of unkown types) is spreading like wildfire across the right wing talking heads and gun rights sites.



Hardly helpful to an honest discussion.

 

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX):

"I refuse to play the game of 'assault weapon.' That’s any weapon. It’s a hammer. It’s the machetes. In Rwanda that killed 800,000 people, an article that came out this week, the massive number that are killed with hammers."​

 

I have stayed out of this for the most part, mainly because I find it a bit creepy that people pounce on tragedies as the jump-off point for grinding their own political axes. But it's been a bit of time now since the shootings at Newtown, and I think the passions might have cooled a bit. My take on this is somewhat different from that of many people here.

I don't own a gun. I have no particular desire to own a gun. I haven't shot one in well over ten years, and before that I went almost 25 years without shooting one. (All three times I ever shot a gun have been at a range.) I have never applied for any kind of gun permit or even looked up the requirements for getting one (I live in NY, which has pretty strict gun laws). I don't "get" hunting, and I don't "get" people who love their guns. I'm willing to accept that just because I don't get something, it doesn't mean I think other people can't get it and love it (some other things I feel that way about: tattoos, NASCAR, body piercings, college football, hip-hop -- I don't "get" them, but hey, if other people like them, god bless 'em).

Having said that, I find the current clamor for gun restrictions distinctly odd. The massacre in Newtown, the massacre in Aurora, the attack on Gabby Giffords, the WV Tech shooting -- all of these were done by people with severe mental illness. To my recollection, most of the horrific gun crimes were done by people with a sickness of some kind. I would understand a call for restrictions if the restrictions people were calling for were along the lines of making sure that people with mental illness (a) don't get their hands on dangerous weapons of any kind, including but not limited to guns, and (b) were identified better and got better access to treatment. But that's not what people are talking about here.

There is some huge number of guns in this country, and a huge number of gun owners. The overwhelming majority of those gun owners (and I'm talking in the neighborhood of 99%, probably more) are sane, law-abiding people who don't go on killing sprees. The number of dangerous people with access to legal guns who use them for mass shootings is smaller than minuscule. This means that the restrictionists are trying to limit the liberties and freedoms of millions (probably over 100 or 200 million) law-abiding, non-dangerous people, based on a tiny, tiny minority of abusers. Even if you add up all the accidental shootings in the country, you're still talking about tiny numbers relative to the number of guns and gun owners. So most of the calls for new legislation are somewhat akin to shooting a gnat with a howitzer. Virtually any tool can be misused by sick people -- pick up any tabloid and you'll find all kinds of horrifying stuff that people do to one another, and especially to helpless children. But no one calls for limits on pinking sheers or gas ovens or turkey fryers or lawn mowers with rotating blades or kitchen knives or SUVs or gasoline cans, even if someone uses them to kill kids with, or even large numbers of kids. I'm really amazed at the readiness of some people to use events that are statistically beyond infrequent as an excuse to limit other people's freedom. Why are some people so ready to limit what other people can do? I just don't get it.

The flip side, of course, is that whatever infrastructure we have to take care of the mentally ill has huge gaping holes in it. It's a lot easier politically to just pass a law banning stuff than it is to actually deal with the mentally ill. It's harder for the govt to admit that it has failed on mental health, and much easier to point the blame at something else. It's almost a superstition - identify the bad object and banish it. I just don't understand it.

 

All of the recent mass killings involved weapons with clips/magazines that enabled shooters to take multiple lives in a matter of seconds.

But the larger issue that these tragedies bring to light is the 11,000+ firearm homicides/year...soon to be the number one non-medical killer.

Nearly half of those deaths were children and teens....one child or teen every three hours.

Teens like Trevon Martin, whose death may have been prevented if FL had stricter CCW laws.
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I see the frequent reference to "Second Amendment" rights brought up...which the courts have said is not absolute.

But I still have yet to see any rational reason presented in this discussion as to why closing the loophole that results in as much as 40% of gun sales or banning the sale of high capacity clips not needed for sporting/hunting/home protection or stricter or more uniform CCW laws should not be part of the broad discussion.

 

redux, there is not a single constitutional right that is absolute. The closest is the first amendment, and even that one doesnt give you the right to say just anything at any time in any way you choose. Saying the 2nd isnt absolute tells you nothing about what the line is, and the courts haven't figured it out yet because the law on that is still developing. But it's clear to me from what you wrote that you didn't understand what I was saying. Similar sorts of horrible statistics can be put together about just about any potentially dangerous instrumentality. We're not talking here about magical items - these are tools used by (and in some cases, for reasons I don't understand) treasured by, human beings. If you want to tell millions and millions of people that even though they are responsible adults and not the least bit of a risk to others, nonetheless you're going to take stuff away from them because some statistically tiny minority misused similar tools, well, that's not a very compelling argument. Apply it to dangerous drivers - you won't ban cars because of that, right? Or people who don't ground their electric tools and cause fires. Or let boiling oil splash from a turkey fryer and cause a fire. Or don't cover their swimming pools so that kids wander in and drown. In those cases, do you deal with the bad behavior or the object? I don't know about you, but I don't want to ban an object, or even regulate it, merely because some cretin misuses it. I would rather deal with the bad behavior, and let the sane rational people continue to have and use what they want.

And that's besides the fact that, if you're going to get the govt deciding who gets to have guns, you're going to see some politically motivated decisionmaking - wired people will have guns and plain joes and janes won't. We have enough of that sort of thing already in other contexts, and we certainly don't need yet more of it.

 

No other dangerous instrument is on the verge of becoming the number one non-medical killer...not tools or turkey friers or swimming pools.

And the one it is soon to surpass (auto deaths) is one in which the user in more regulated and the instrument's industry is more committed to safety.