Another major school shooting today ... Newtown, Conn

Are you also curious as to why president Obama doesn't seem
to be concerned with the high murder rate in Chicago?

Maybe because it's mostly just black folks killing each other.

it's too hard so don't bother

that may explain the problem in the U.S if that's how children are being raised

Poverty. We don't have a very good social safety net (by the standards of other western countries at least).

People with no hope turn to crime and drugs.

The murder rate in Australia spiked after the guns were taken from legal citizens.

Are you curious as to who was murdering the unarmed Australian citizens and what weapons were used to commit these murders?

On the mass murder side of the things it doesn't seem to be poor people doing the killing. A disproportionate number of young, white males from respectable middle/middlish class families (though the most recent arrest I've heard of, of a possible attempted mass murderer, was a young woman outside of Phoenix).

There has to be more to it.

I do agree generally that there is a range of problems resulting from the lack of a decent social safety net. Drugs and guns are certainly problems of poor rural communities in the U.S.

and then dropped off




http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html

It dropped off because the armed criminals had less innocent victims to murder you twit!

True. I'm not sure what drives mass murderers. But the vast majority of our murders are lone killings.

May they all rest in peace.

How do you to removed 300 millions guns plus from private hands?

Go from one home to another with search teams back by swats teams for example?

No matter what laws you are going to somehow get pass people are not going to hand over their weapons in mass nor are juries going to uphold any total seizer laws in the US.

An that is beside the little problem of our constitution.

No I can not see the day where our pistol team will need to leave the country to practice as the UK team needed to do.

That's a falsehood. The vast majority of your murders have come at the hands of the US military and proxies of various US governments.

Those would be all those law abiding Americans who scream loud and long for more prisons to contain all those criminals who break the law.

It's too hard to do anything, so don't bother continues to be your response.

As I noted earlier, that viewpoint does begin to explain the high U.S. murder rate.

and timely news ...

http://rt.com/usa/news/gun-car-fatalities-people-516/









I guess it's easy to get blase with so many people killing themselves and each other on a daily basis.


I wouldn't want to get that numb.

Mmm... The Berlin wall fell in 1989....

I feel pretty sure that hardly a soul here gives a damn about our pistol team. I bet not one in a thousand could name anybody in it or knows anything about it.

You are making a very obtuse point Bill. I'd bet that even the pistol team members prefer going abroad to practice to having your gun culture.

Gun-nut counter-reality worldview.

Im sure that wont fit in with Bill's personal philosophy. Guns for everybody seems to be a popular mantra in the US.

With a creeping reluctant crawl toward some gun control legislation looming, I really dont give our Congress any votes of courage that they will ever do the right thing without these horrible events to refresh their memories of why they are in Congress and who put them there.
When congress shows one tenth the bravery of the teacher and the principal who charged Lanza in order to protect their kiddies, then maybe our system of government will have shown us something for which we can be proud. As it stands, we have a government, bought and paid for by spcial interests and most all of them need to be voted OUT.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people.

What happens when propaganda runs head on into reality?

Which one comes out the winner?

True no doubt. But aren't you supposed to try to rub along with your fellow citizens, and not to slaughter them?

And to take the high rate of gun violence in this country so lightly.

Or to idiotically propose that the answer to gun violence is to have even more people carrying guns.

One you accept that lethal force is the most desirable and/or necessary way of dealing with things, why would you care about the murder rate? I think that's the answer to your question, ehbeth.

Not all Americans take the issue of murder or gun violence lightly. And many of us want the problem of gun violence addressed with better controls over the purchase and possession of firearms.

9/11 could not have taken place if our deplorable airport security had not made it ridiculously easy for small groups of men, armed with nothing more than box cutters, to simultaneously hijack 4 planes. And we had every reason to tighten airport security before 9/11, but we failed to do that, and we paid a horrible, horrible price for that failure to act.

Similarly, within the context of a society already saturated with gun violence, we have remained inactive despite the increasing frequency of mass murders by guns within the past several years--murders that have invaded every venue of our daily lives in which we congregate--our schools, universities, shopping malls, supermarkets, commuter trains, houses of worship, movie theaters, and now, even our kindergarten classrooms.

Just as we made it ridiculously easy for planes to be hijacked on 9/11, and to be used as weapons of mass destruction, we now make it ridiculously easy for people to obtain the guns which are used as weapons of mass destruction. And these guns are used as weapons of mass destruction, not just in the horrific sensational multiple murder shootings, but in all the other everyday instances of gun violence which contribute to the statistics reflecting damage to the masses in our country through gun deaths. The government recalls packages of bagged spinach that threaten to make a relatively few people ill, with possible fatal results, yet it has remained inactive in the face of the much much larger threat to public health and safety that our currently poorly regulated gun culture represents.

And, just as those 9/11 hijackers didn't want to use small, light-weight aircraft as their weapons of mass destruction, most of our mass murders aren't using weapons that slowly fire only bullet at a time with a limited capacity that requires reloading after only a few shots. And just as, after 9/11, we put in place much tighter controls to protect our most powerful, and potentially lethal, planes from being used as weapons of mass destruction, it's time that we applied these same sorts of stringent controls over the firearms which are being used as the weapons of our mass destruction.

Some types of weapons, just like some types of planes, are more lethal, and desirable, when the goal is to kill as many as possible, as rapidly as possible. And just as we now, rather belatedly, carefully scrutinize the passengers getting on those most biggest, and most potentially lethal, planes, and we limit what they can take aboard them, we've got to start carefully scrutinizing who is buying the firearms weapons, and ammunition, and putting regulations and restrictions in place, to help prevent their being used for mass destruction, just as we protect the general public by better protecting our planes.

Just as 9/11 was made possible by the careless security of our powerful commercial passenger planes, this latest school massacre was made possible by the lax or ineffective security of a stash of high powered firearms. And, just as we don't arm all passengers getting on planes, as our response to 9/11, better arming the general populace is not the most logical, or rational, solution to our societal problem with gun violence. On both an individual and governmental level we need better gun control.

We now scrutinize all those getting on our planes as carefully as if they were all potential terrorists--we don't assume they are all "law-abiding" or mentally stable enough not to do harm. It's time we started scrutinizing the buyers of these most potentially dangerous firearms, and the ammunition to power them, with that same degree of very strict scrutiny, and it's time we began placing some restrictions on everyone's ability to get their hands on those weapons, just as we now restrict the ability of all passengers to blow up or hijack our planes.