Expelled student armed with assault rifle slaughters 17 at Florida high school

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Commander Wallace

As you said, I don't think more rules or regs are going to help or be particularly effective. A far better approach would be to simply enforce the laws we have on the books. Many gun dealers have said the same thing. If the govt. can't enforce the regs it has in place, what chance does it have with new laws ?

We must have a great sense of humor here in the U.S as we elect so many jokes to elected office. On the other hand, jokes are funny and this situation and our elected officials are anything but funny.

Just darken your black sense of humour just a little bit more, and you can laugh yourself to death. Opportunities there are aplenty.

I agree, more laws will do nothing, and like I said before, I think it is a social, cultural, mass-psychological, mentality issue. If any changes short of just banning firearms shall have rewards, they must begin in reeducating a whole history, tradition, self-definition and culture. Adn that will cost time, probably generations, and holds its own risks, as we can see in Europe, where the home populations are increaisngly unable to consider force as a valid option to defend themselves. And thats makes them helpless against those who disagree on that taboo.

A wide mass-movement, much bigger than the students protesting now and the companies ending their cooperaiton with the NRA, however could maybe have an effect. Juzst that I find it difficult to prject what this effect will be like - if said protests would turn into a real big and long-lasting, enduring mass movement, big enough to bring down a government and threatening politician's careers by the dozens.

Or we will see that the pain and death toll simply is not high enough for America to change itself. Then people have to suffer what they must, and thats it. Stale routine in doing right that there is enough, bitter observers might have noticed by now. And like sex, funerals and stale speeches push TV quotas upwards. When "leaders" preach, many freeeze and stand at attention. Bravo. Nothing beats drill and routine.

[Commander Wallace]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Just darken your black sense of humour just a little bit more, and you can laugh yourself to death. Opportunities there are aplenty.

I agree, more laws will do nothing, and like I said before, I think it is a social, cultural, mass-psychological, mentality issue. If any changes short of just banning firearms shall have rewards, they must begin in reeducating a whole history, tradition, self-definition and culture. Adn that will cost time, probably generations, and holds its own risks, as we can see in Europe, where the home populations are increaisngly unable to consider force as a valid option to defend themselves. And thats makes them helpless against those who disagree on that taboo.

Sky, you are so way off as to defy description. Using our members as an example, we are all armed and hardly a threat to anyone, unless someone attempts to invade our homes or hurts someone we care about, then all bets are off. Our members represent a cross section of society as a whole. Most people like our subsim members employ the science of physics and ballistics with regards to grain weights and other factors to increase their accuracy.

You apparently have this image that we are all lunatics. We are the same people who work 40 hours a week, attend church regularly not to mention soccer, football, baseball practices and other activities for our kids after working 8-12 hours on a given day. We do that because our kids are everything to us as they are to other parents in other countries. We look out for our neighbors kids too and our neighborhood. They are the same people who take time off to help people they don't even know, thousands of miles away, to recover from natural disasters like hurricans and tornado's.

These are the same people who take their freedoms seriously and wouldn't think twice about taking up arms to protect that.

In my mind, people who do that aren't lunatics, they are everyday hero's and if need be, patriots. That's what our society is all about.

By the way, our history was written in the blood of others who defined the term patriots who gave everything, including their sons to build a nation. They are as revered today as they were then as are their words, actions, honor and integrity that they held most sacred.

[mapuc]

Nobody shall point fingers at anyone whether it's an American, a German or a third person

99.999999+ percentage of the Americans who have guns is ordinary people working and so on.

They are not a threat to other people.

I can't understand why these people should have removed their right to own (a) weapon(s)

I think Platapus signatur(if that is the correct word) can be used here

"abusus non tollit usum " The rest you know.

Markus

[Mr Quatro]

Well as long as we are just talking like we do on everything else ...

I think the next coming elections (is that this year in November I think) will prove to be someone's downfall, but the winner will promise the people against guns everything they want and if he or she wins they will have to deliver.

However they won't be able to deliver even if the politicians that the gun control people vote in due to the NRA being right or wrong, is stronger than all get out.

All this talk and nothing will get done and by this time next year nothing will have been done and the people in office will simply throw up their hands and say, "Our hands are tied" they won't let us change anything.

The real problem is copy cats shooting up the next school ... who are you going to blame? Mental health, the gun laws, back ground checks, sheriff's standing outside the classroom door with gun drawn, the politicians, the innocent students that are still being buried?

Nothing is going to get done ... that will stop the next shooter. You can't solve mental illness in a permissive society that thrives on gun violence in the movies and in video games. Three hundred and thirty (330) million people are not going to give up their rights to bear arms

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Commander Wallace

Sky, you are so way off as to defy description. Using our members as an example, we are all armed and hardly a threat to anyone, unless someone attempts to invade our homes or hurts someone we care about, then all bets are off. Our members represent a cross section of society as a whole. Most people like our subsim members employ the science of physics and ballistics with regards to grain weights and other factors to increase their accuracy.

You apparently have this image that we are all lunatics. We are the same people who work 40 hours a week, attend church regularly not to mention soccer, football, baseball practices and other activities for our kids after working 8-12 hours on a given day. We do that because our kids are everything to us as they are to other parents in other countries. We look out for our neighbors kids too and our neighborhood. They are the same people who take time off to help people they don't even know, thousands of miles away, to recover from natural disasters like hurricans and tornado's.

These are the same people who take their freedoms seriously and wouldn't think twice about taking up arms to protect that.

In my mind, people who do that aren't lunatics, they are everyday hero's and if need be, patriots. That's what our society is all about.

By the way, our history was written in the blood of others who defined the term patriots who gave everything, including their sons to build a nation. They are as revered today as they were then as are their words, actions, honor and integrity that they held most sacred.

Honestly said, I do not feel as if that reply is meant for me.

BTW, my father held a pistol license until last year, he did shooting as a sports, small callibre pistol. I probably would own a firearm myself if in Germany you would not have so intense regulations and quite voluminous theory tests and obligations to constantly report and document organised competition participation which all is meant to discourage people from trying to gain licenses.

Try to correctly understand what I actually said and mean. I admit that I think Michael Moore did a good job in illustrating what I meant with "cultural thing" and "mentality" when he did Bowling for Columbine. Im not a fan of him in general, but that film was damn good. He really hit the right nerve there.

By German standards, I am an extremist and probably a right-winged danger to society due to my "lenient" ideas on private gun ownership. For many Americans, I am an extremist for not being lenient enough. Well, so be it.

[Buddahaid]

Really I suppose because I grew up in the US decades ago, I look at firearm ownership in a much more loose manner. It was never an OMG moment to have them and it never raised any eyebrows, it was normal.

[Skybird]

To some degree I would go with those saying the weapon itself is not so much the problem, but the mind commanding it. And there you are at it: culture, mentality, focus on violence. The question is why are there so many people being fixiated on firearms, military grade weapons, why are the so many flipped-out minds absuing the opportunity to cause a mess with them? There is a correlation by trend between firearms in private possession, and sucide rates amongst males, in Switzerland for exmaple this rate is also above the average in Western states, due to their militia system many households have assault rifles at home. But why is the suicide rate in which these get used still I think six times lower than in the US? Why are there so many loose mind and so many gun-linked incidents in the US? Why are school-incidents almost always (or even always?) carried out by whites, never by blacks or others?

The answers will not be found by writing new laws. But by looking at the culture, and the living environment it creates. A lobby organisation like the NRA makes a profit by forming and sharpening certain traits that result form said culture, to extremes, preventing chnage by polarising the debate until there is just black and white left, absolute, total extremes.

Why a hunter thinks that he must hunt a deer with military-grade semiautomatic rifles, is beyond me, and always will be. And self-defence against crminals imo does not mean to maintain an arsenal that is big enough to survive the zombie apocalypse, is paranoid. Every household not just a pistol or hunting rifle, but enough arms to arm its own private army? Hilarious. Fetishism I call it.

Obviously there are quite some extreme tensions amongst the civilised surface of this culture. And quite some souls break up under these tensions. Every society has its hidden demons.