Another major school shooting today ... Newtown, Conn

It was just a straightforward statement of facts. The Constitution never conferred any "right" to own slaves. And it never conferred on men any "right" to be the gender that chose the government.

I am curious oralloy as to when I called for a ban on harmless cosmetic features.

Is this just your latest strawman because you can't argue the issue of high capacity magazines?

By the way. Unless you can find an instance of me calling for banning pistol grips, your claiming I said so is the basis of your strawman.

gun control is a half-assed bandage attempt which is often used as a means to ignore the major underlying problem. major reform of our mental health system would be much more productive than are these constant useless arguments about gun access...

Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself. In the National Institute of Mental Health’s E.C.A. study, for example, people with no mental disorder who abused alcohol or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to commit violent acts.

It’s possible that preventing people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses from getting guns might decrease the risk of mass killings. Even the Supreme Court, which in 2008 strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms, at the same time endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill.”

But mass killings are very rare events, and because people with mentally illness contribute so little to overall violence, these measures would have little impact on everyday firearm-related killings. Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness.

Perhaps more significant, we are not very good at predicting who is likely to be dangerous in the future. According to Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an expert on mass murderers, “Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.”

Even though we know from large-scale epidemiologic studies like the E.C.A. study that a young psychotic male who is intoxicated with alcohol and has a history of involuntary commitment is at a high risk of violence, most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.

Jeffery Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University and a leading expert in the epidemiology of violence, said in an e-mail, “Can we reliably predict violence? ‘No’ is the short answer. Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.”

It would be even harder to predict a mass shooting, Dr. Swanson said, “You can profile the perpetrators after the fact and you’ll get a description of troubled young men, which also matches the description of thousands of other troubled young men who would never do something like this.”

Even if clinicians could predict violence perfectly, keeping guns from people with mental illness is easier said than done. Nearly five years after Congress enacted the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, only about half of the states have submitted more than a tiny proportion of their mental health records.

How effective are laws that prohibit people with mental illness from obtaining guns? According to Dr. Swanson’s recent research, these measures may prevent some violent crime. But, he added, “there are a lot of people who are undeterred by these laws.”

Adam Lanza was prohibited from purchasing a gun, because he was too young. Yet he managed to get his hands on guns — his mother’s — anyway. If we really want to stop young men like him from becoming mass murderers, and prevent the small amount of violence attributable to mental illness, we should invest our resources in better screening for, and treatment of, psychiatric illness in young people.

All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/health/a-misguided-focus-on-mental-illness-in-gun-control-debate.html?ref=health?src=dayp

However figures I saw on TV last night show that Britain has 1/300 th of the gun crime of America. A figure I thought would be lower. But we're working on it.

the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly

Sorry, but when you confuse your opinion with truth you really do tread heavily on the hyperbole side.

Seems to me that gun enthusiasts as well as the US legislators are re-thinking their approach.

Let's take this one item at a time:

oralloy wrote:

It was just a straightforward statement of facts. The Constitution never conferred any "right" to own slaves. And it never conferred on men any "right" to be the gender that chose the government.

Why then do you suppose the constitution had to be amended in order for women to participate in the vote

...and for an Emancipation Declaration to be issue to free some of the slaves?

Why are you sticking to this, Oralloy?

You do so every time you support a ban on assault weapons.

Quote:

Frank Apisa wrote:
Let's take this one item at a time:
oralloy wrote:
It was just a straightforward statement of facts. The Constitution never conferred any "right" to own slaves. And it never conferred on men any "right" to be the gender that chose the government.


Why then do you suppose the constitution had to be amended in order for women to participate in the vote

It didn't. It could have been done by having the states change their laws.

The amendment was required to overrule the states who were refusing to change their laws.

Quote:

You do so every time you support a ban on assault weapons.

When did I do that? Oh.. wait.. that's your strawman showing up again. You seem to leave straw everywhere you go oralloy.

Gun rights have been modified several times to allow for ethical civilized justice and social order.

I see this current issue of banning automatic weapons as a logical progression.

The same legislation that banned duels should give the courts precedence to also ban assault weapons

where citizens are once again taking the law into their own hands...

Bill O'Reilly didn't seem to think that last night oralloy.

Ragman wrote:

Seems to me that gun enthusiasts as well as the US legislators are re-thinking their approach.

No. We are all set to pounce all over the Democrats