I don’t know about that, JustOneDad. You can get a gun if you’re blind, mentally ill, and have a restraining order by your ex girl friend. In my state, two of those can get you denied for a driver’s license.
By the way, the sheriff of Roseberg was an activist working for abolition of all kinds of gun control.
Did you know that the number of gun deaths has surpassed the number of motor vehicle deaths? As of 2013 it was 10.6 and 10.3 respectively, per 100,000 people. 2015 might break this even further apart.
I have a friend who works at the CDC and he said their hands are tied regarding doing research about gun violence. At least other countries can do it for us:
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states
They give Oregon a D+ for their gun laws but I don’t know how much that matters since Connecticut gets an A-.
@justonedad:
It is more appropriate to compare owning and operating a car to what gun ownership is in many places.
1)In all states, cars have to be registered, and in all you also have to prove you have insurance, at the very least liability insurance. With Guns, it is all over the place, but many states don’t require you to register your guns, and as far as I know no state requires gun owners to have insurance. Maloney from NY tried introducing a measure requiring owners have 10k in liability insurance before they can buy a gun, but obviously that is not going anywhere.
The pro gun website I read denouncing the law outright lied, it said there was no law requiring drivers have liability insurance when all 50 states have minimum requirements, and it also said that the drop in auto fatalities was due to consumer demand for safety, not government regulation (really? Most of the major safety innovations common in cars, airbags, crumple zones, three point seatbelt (including mandatory seatbelt laws), side impact panels, were put in via government safety regulations, likewise ABS was put in, not because of government regulation, but rather in anticipation of being mandated by the government). It argued that this favored the rich, but meanwhile the poor if they want a car have to have insurance, so why are guns special in this regards?
2)If your car is stolen or is sold to someone else and you don’t report it, if the car is used in a crime you will be held liable, with the assumption you were part of it. In many states, you can buy a bunch of guns, sell them in the black market, and if they are traced back to you, you can see “gee, must of gotten stolen, or I must have lost it”, and that is that, no mandatory reporting.
3)In many states you can buy a gun without any kind of safety training. To buy a car and register it, you have to prove you know how to drive it, when you register a car you have to show you have a driver’s license, which is indicating you are capable of driving, that you have passed a test including rules of the road and safety. On the other hand, in a lot of places, you can buy a gun without any kind of training, you can buy a rifle capable of shooting a number of rounds a second without having to know how to shoot, how to safely use the gun.
The restrictions on buying a gun depend on the state, but generally it is a background check, to make sure you aren’t a criminal, and that you have enough money to buy the weapon. Other than some specific bans, like teflon ammunition, or fully automatic weapons, or some limits on how much you can purchase in x period of time, that is pretty much it. In more than a few places, you don’t have to register the gun, or renew the registration, and don’t have to report if the gun is sold, lost or stolen, so where are the limits on buying guns that don’t apply to cars? By the way, with cars there may be more restrictions than guns, there are plenty of regulations around cars, in some states you can’t have the windows blacked out, there are regulations on how bright the headlights can be, there are obviously the pollution laws, cars have to meet collision requirements (ask Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who bought Porsche 959 cars that they weren’t allowed to drive, because they hadn’t been crash tested). With cars, outside of some extreme libertarians, few argue that the restrictions on cars don’t make sense, that isn’t true about guns, they are probably in many ways and places in this country, one of the least regulated yet potentially dangerous things people are allowed to own.
Whether any of this is relevant to the shooting, or whether it would have prevented it, I don’t know, but cars are definitely safer because they are regulated, the marvel that is modern cars, the fact that a corvette has 450 HP and can do 25 MPG and put out 1000 times less pollution than a Corvette of 40 years ago (and would smoke the older car, would outhandle and brake it, to boot), leave someone a lot more likely to survive a crash than the pieces of tin 40 years ago, is directly attributable to government regulation.
It was surprising to actually hear the president speak with genuine emotion. That is rare.
A post I saw today:
If ISIS came over here and massacred 20 Americans every couple of months, we’d nuke Syria sideways. But when we do it to ourselves everybody just shrugs.
Ugh, I actually looked at the 4chan thread that the threats were on. We don’t need ISIS to kill us, we are doing it ourselves!
Really? How would that person pass the NICS check?
@musicprnt Please note that it was @MADad who made the vehicle/gun comparison.
And what would banning do? Banning prostitution & narcotics hasn’t made them go away.
Amen, @DocT #3.
Wrong. States with tighter gun control laws have significantly fewer gun deaths.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/53345/states-with-most-gun-laws-see-fewest-gun-related-deaths
In response to the million person march: count me in.
I’ve lost them all: suicide, random gun violence (semi-random, he was caught by a “stray” bullet during a drug deal gone bad that he wasn’t involved with in any way), murder, accidental shooting (young child shot a sibling), and every woman I know (except one) through the IPV shelter who died at the hands of her partner died of a bullet.
I am glad the president is furious. He should be. I doubt it will do a darn thing though.
This seems like the more appropriate place to put this. The onion article related to this: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”
http://www.theonion.com/article/no-way-prevent-says-only-nation-where-regularly-ha-51444
I would go on that march, too.
“Obama addressing the nation after today’s Oregon massacre. He is ticked off now. Frustrated.”
^^^Not sure what that means.
One Presidency, way too many responses to mass shootings - video of mass shooting responses from Obama.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there is no price too high for us to pay for the “right” to have a gun crazy society. If 20 slaughtered first-graders wasn’t enough then nothing is.
Based on the title of this thread, how long before FoxNew does another Obama is an Angry Black Man story?
I noticed that Connecticut and NJ were on the list and CT was where there was a school shooting… and wasn’t the gun used in the CT school shooting acquired in NJ? hmmmm
I also noticed that Washington. D.C. was conspicuously missing from the chart, LasMa. Sure, not a state, but it does have the most restrictive gun laws in the nation and it has the highest death rates by far, at 25 deaths/1,000.
What about Chicago which allows murders by guns every day? (Since the Supremes threw out some of DC’s gun control laws as a violation of the Constitution, Chicago likely holds the title of most restrictive gun laws.)
Do you really believe that if Springfield adopted Chicago’s laws statewide that folks couldn’t drive across the street to Gary and purchase guns there?
Even if all 50 states adopted Chicago’s stringent laws, law abiding citizens would still be able to purchase a gun. When their homes get robbed, the bad guys will obtain the weapons and make it easy to sell in the underground.
The ONLY solution is a constitutional amendment, IMO. The rest is tweaking/tightening – all of which is a good thing, but will be ineffective.
Incidentally, suicide is the leading cause of gun death per the CDC. Making it more difficult to acquire a gun that reduces suicide is a good thing, but let’s not kid ourselves into believing that gun control will stop the bad guys and evil doers.
I never heard about a NJ connection with the CT shooting.
I also know that all signs pointed to the gun provider, the mother, being off her rocker, possibly being sent there because she wanted to insist her son was fine when he clearly was not fine.
I am not a fan of guns, but I am not a fan of throwing the baby out with the bathwater either. Either we get over this “HIPAA wins over people’s lives” mentality or we will continue to have mentally ill people kill others.
To be honest, if it were a crime NOT to report a close family member with a significant mental issue, perhaps there would be fewer deaths from mass shootings.
As for the Onion: “The onion article related to this: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens””, that’s true about Western nations. But there are many many MANY massacres that are covered up, but the news media wants to focus on the US being “sick” and ignore atrocities in other countries.