Originally Posted by tater
(Post 1994094)
Almost all mass shootings in recent decades have happened in areas where guns are expressly forbidden, even in the hands of employees, like schools, most theaters, etc. If a teacher wanted a CCW, it would not be allowed to take the weapon to school, for example. Of course if a teacher was already a homicidal nut, he/she would just bring the gun (or knife, etc) anyway. Allowing them to be armed would result in zero increase in school attacks, and might, just might, lower a death toll. That said I don't agree with guards in schools, or metal detectors, etc. It's wasteful for something so rare (yes, it's rare). Letting teachers, etc arm themselves voluntarily seems perfectly reasonable to me. Bottom line is you cannot prevent a crazy from arming themselves with some kind of weapon, and if you are a 100 lb teacher in a room of 6 year olds and a nut comes in, you need a tool, and the only tool that will do is a firearm.
The cultural issue is NOT the culture of the insane that do these mass shootings. That is a mental health problem and has exactly nothing to do with culture.
The current (mid 2000s are the best the DOJ has) rate for victims by race have the rate for blacks at 6X that for whites (they are 7X more likely to murder with guns, whites, OTOH, commit around 80% of the murders by poison). The majority of killers using guns are black. A majority, which is a lot considering they are ~12% of the population (and most are mean, dropping them to just 6% of the population committing 50.9% of gun murders).
The "white" rate of homicide is around 3 per 100,000. This is by all attackers, and includes many cultures within the US that are nominally labeled "white" by the US government. Not really far from a few places in Europe like Liechtenstein (2.8:100,000), or Luxembourg (2.5). Are their high (for europe) rates because of their culture, or perhaps an invasive culture?
While these terrible mass shootings get a lot of press, but more kids are killed in the inner cities almost daily. In 2012, something like 60 children were murdered, the vast majority black kids by other blacks.
What perhaps the non-gun people out there (at SS, and the world at large) don't "get," is that the vast, overwhelming majority of us with guns can state with certainty that we would NEVER use them criminally. As a result, the idea of armed people doesn't scare us. Guns don't make people violent. I've had guns for decades, and been VERY angry on numerous occasions, and it never even crossed my mind that a gun was a useful tool for my anger. This is true of 90-something % of gun owners, I'd wager. The ones it is not true of... already do crimes with guns, or think about it.
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