@dadx:
Not only that, but some states won’t report when people have been committed or declared mentally ill, case in point was the Korean guy who shot up virginia tech, 2 years before he had been declared mentally ill by a judge, yet he legally bought the gun he used to murder students.
And yes, in many states you don’t need to show you have any kind of knowledge of guns, there is no test, no licensing, no showing you have taken a gun safety course, no laws in many cases even governing things like gun safes and the like. If it weren’t for federal regulations, in most of those states you would be able to buy guns the way you do booze, show you are over the legal age,sign the register and promise to be a good boy or girl, and you could buy the weapons you wanted. Before the Brady act, many states had no background check whatsoever, they saw buying a gun like buying a pound of nails or whatnot…yet all 50 states require you get a driver’s license which requires a written and road test, and all require you register your cars if you wish to use them on the roads.
As far as other countries go, the pro gun folks love to point to that and say “see, see, banning assault weapons doesn’t work” or “why should we have laws that require owners to register their guns and also require accountability, look what happened there”. Yes, Australia has had shootings since they passed that law in 1996, but they have had a handful in those roughly 20 years. Meanwhile, Obama has been in office a little over 6 years, and in that time we have had 15 mass shootings like just happened in Oregon…and that is just the big incidents. The USA today article I posted in a prior post showed the real numbers, where 4 or more people were killed, and it is a lot, one stat said that this year there have been 279 days, and something like 245 shootings that meet this criteria (wasn’t in the USA today article, trying to remember where that came up).
There are a lot of problems with how guns are and are not registered in this country, with a mass shooting like this it is hard to say whether gun control laws would have prevented it, given that the kid in question had no red flags, and used handguns, not assault weapons in this shooting. However, I personally wonder if perhaps other countries, where they seem to take gun ownership a lot more seriously, means that people have it on their minds that guns are not toys or things to have to show you are macho.
For example, while Switzerland has had mass shootings, they also are an anomaly there, they don’t have the murder rate that we do in this country and certainly don’t have the rate of gun violence overall. Yet in Switzerland, guns are in most households, the requirements that all men are part of the militia mean that swiss men all are supposed to have guns in their house, and I believe that includes full bore military weapons with fully automatic firing capability.However, the Swiss also regulate that, those weapons are accounted for, they are checked, and the people with them all have training. More importantly, unlike this country where some yokel could probably brag to the local cops that they made a killing selling weapons in the black market, usually in places with restrictive gun laws and the local cops would probably high five them, Switzerland also has accountability. I don’t know if they changed the laws, but I remember reading a number of years ago that if someone showed behavior that indicated they were disturbed, that anyone who knew them were supposed to report in (talking men here) to the authorities, and this included family members are well, there was mandatory reporting if they thought the person was a threat (like I said, Switzerland takes protecting the country seriously, but they also take civilian safety seriously). Under that, if something like this happened, where the guy was showing signs of being off the rails (or like the late,unlamented Nancy Lanza), his mother could get into trouble for not reporting if her son was showing erratic behavior and had weapons at home like that. They have accountability, something that the gun lobby and many gun owners seem to want to fight.
There is also another element to this, one that I don’t understand. With both this incident, and the Lanza one, you have a young man who is obviously having problems, anti social, apparently prone to bursts of anger, living their lives online or playing video games, and yet the people living with them saw nothing odd, as with this recent case, to someone having 13 weapons, or with Lanza access to the weapons. It might seem harsh, but maybe we also need accountability, that other take some responsibility instead of sitting back and saying “I never thought he would do this”, then the kid showed signs of being off the rails.
There is another interesting factor in this story as well. A lot of gun ownership and the extreme views of it tend to be from poorer, more rural areas (like where this shooting happened) and they often see this in terms of based on local economics. The Sheriff, for example, said that if they instituted tougher gun control laws, that his office couldn’t/wouldn’t enforce them, because they didn’t have the budget, that they already were running without enough funds to do what they should be doing. Apparently in Oregon, I believe in that same county, there were so many cutbacks to law enforcement that things like robberies were skyrocketing, and people formed armed security patrols and the like to try and combat it. The problem is these same areas lack the kind of social services and mental health services that might identify the wackjobs and disturbed, so you have a combination where guns are part of the common culture, but there isn’t the kind of services that might help the wackjobs and/or make sure they don’t have access to guns. (And yes, the Lanza case stands out as an anomaly, in that money was not the issue there, personally I think it was because mom was off the deep edge, too).
The real problem is that we can’t even get a real handle on violence like this, among other things thanks to the gun lobby, the CDC is banned from giving out grants for or doing studies themselves on gun violence, the causes and possible solutions, which I suspect is because they are afraid those reports will come out and detail, with exact studies, how much gun violence goes on, and how much of it is caused by far too easy access to guns. Put it this way, if they didn’t deep down believe that this wasn’t true, they would welcome such studies, but the response tells me all I need to know, they fear that this kind of study will back those saying we need stronger gun laws.