Obama addressing the nation after today’s Oregon massacre. He is ticked off now. Frustrated.
Me, too. I’m glad he’s speaking up although what good it will do I don’t know.
Found myself wondering if we could go a million person march on Washington of people who have lost a loved one or friend to gun violence. Public area shootings, suicide, criminal shootings, accidents… I bet there are more than a million of us out here by now. 
If it were up to me, I would ban every single firearm and change the constitution.
By the way I live < 5 miles from Sandy Hook
@DocT, I am with you on that.
He’s not the only one.
Such a sad and frustrating situation. What will it take for us to come together as a country and DO SOMETHING!
Both of my senators and my representative are on the “right” side (that is, my side) of the issue. So I don’t know what I can do to get the federal laws changed.
And my state – Connecticut, like DocT – has passed some wonderful laws, especially since Newtown.
I’ve given a small amount of money to Moms Against Gun Violence, but it has to happen in the legislatures.
Think of what this country did for Ebola - we mobilized, we actually held by force people who had merely been in an affected country. We talked about diverting flights or sanitizing entire aircraft. And Ebola was stopped cold. How many people died from contracting the disease here in the US? Not one.
Thousands of people die each year from murders and accidental shootings. Thousands, many of them toddlers. More mothers have died in grocery stores by toddlers getting into their purses and finding guns, than died from US-contracted Ebola. And what do we do? Nothing. Not a damned thing.
In reality, serious gun control – or elimination, if that is even possible – requires a Constitutional Amendment. Anything else is minor tweaking of current laws. Perhaps feel good, but meaningless.
Even if Congress passed an Amendment, the odds of 35 states approving…
We just had youth hunting day in North Carolina, the 4th Saturday in September. What is “youth hunting day?” you may ask. Well, it is… here, let me quote:
I was very saddened when I realized that Sandy Hook would not be the tipping point that got this country to finally restrict gun sales and licensing. Innocent children in a school, for goodness sake!! This simply doesn’t happen anywhere else–where getting a gun is a serious matter, not an impulse buy at a gun show. It’s tougher to get a driver’s license than it is to get a gun. And I have no beef with hunters–nobody’s shooting up schools, malls, theaters, etc, with their Remington shotguns.
That’s crazy. How is that even legal?
Honestly, I had to step away after after 20 first graders being killed only resulted in more loosening of gun restrictions.
When it comes to this topic, I feel so out of step - and full of rage - that I’ve stopped engaging on it,.
Its really sad.
Really? There are a number of prohibitions for purchasing a gun that I don’t think apply to Motor Vehicle Operators licenses.
60 - 100 hours of in car practice with a licensed driver? Necessity for insurance? These are the opposite of what potential gun buyers face.
One guy tries to bomb a plane with his shoes, and we all have to take our shoes off. Dozens of people dying in mass shootings every year? Little or nothing is done.
What I truly don’t understand is the irrational fear that guns will somehow disappear and won’t be available for purchase by reasonable people in the future. Did people have this fear 50 years ago? It seems that the more of these mass shootings we have, the more likely it is that there will be a knee jerk anti-government spree of gun buying by the paranoid defenders of the 2nd amendment.
It’s a sad day indeed. As a nation, we must do better than this. For those who say nothing can be done, I don’t believe it. We must gather our collective will to push for change. We liberated ourselves from Britain in order to give our citizens the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and yet here we are, cowering at the feat of the gun lobby.
During my lifetime I’ve shot guns (22 caliber rifles at targets as a member of the rifle team in junior high), though I don’t choose to own one now. I don’t believe that responsible Americans need access to assault weapons in order to consider themselves truly free. In the wake of a mass shooting Australia changes it’s laws to great effect. Clearly we are a much different (and larger nation) but at the moment, we are a very broken one. We must figure out a way to effect change.
Day after day Congress yammers on about terrorism and billions has been spent in the name of fighting terror (overseas) yet day after day, week after week, gun violence kills thousands. Perhaps TSA should set up on every street corner? Before we worry about outside threats we had better start looking inward to examine the cancer that is eating our very core.
Like President Obama I am sick of the “thoughts and prayers” response to ongoing carnage. Surely the solution(s) to this quell this epidemic are not simple, but we must start to act. As parents on this forum we obsess about how to give our children every possible advantage in school and in life. Well, in my humble opinion, providing them a safe society in which to thrive is the most important thing we can do for them.
These young people died in school, others die on their way to school or in their living rooms. Enough…speak out and demand change.
@southernhope:
The Sheriff who is involved in this case actively lobbied, unlike many police organizations, that gun laws not be tightened up, arguing that in the light of tragedies like this we can’t restrict the right of law abiding citizens to own weapons with certain characteristics or magazine sizes. I have to be honest, I don’t know how someone can see what cops do in terms of gun use, fellow officers killed, mass shootings like this, and advocate that gun sales should be relatively unlimited, it takes a very thick skin and an even thicker heart to look at carnage like this and not even blink like that IMO.