<p>I am ok with people doing studies. I am sure one belongs with FBI, the current DHS or some agency. </p>
<p>CDC doing one sounds like a sheer waste of taxpayer money.</p>
<p>Center for Disease Control - assumes people have a disease if they keep a gun at home?</p>
<p>Not only that^, but focussing on total gun bans is a waste of time. It will not happen.</p>
<p>“Not only that^, but focussing on total gun bans is a waste of time. It will not happen.”</p>
<p>Yeah, why do something that might actually work. <em>rolling eyes</em></p>
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Any reduction over a time span so large can’t be attributed to a single item like a gun ban. There have been huge economic changes in DC over that time span and with economic changes one gets a whole societal change. It’s silly to conclude all positive results are attributed to just a gun ban (or whether the gun ban had any impact at all).</p>
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<p>What do you mean? That banning all guns will work to reduce gun deaths? I think that falls into the big “Duh” category. Are you proposing that we work towards amending the US Constitution in order to get there?</p>
<p>“What do you mean? That banning all guns will work to reduce gun deaths? I think that falls into the big “Duh” category. Are you proposing that we work towards amending the US Constitution in order to get there?”</p>
<p>Yes, banning all guns will reduce gun deaths. Do you think it would not? </p>
<p>Personally, I have no problem with amending the Constitution re the 2nd, but since that is unlikely, I can only hope that eventually Heller will be reversed and the interpretation of the 2nd will revert back to what it was under Miller.</p>
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<p>Ok. In the meantime, what do we do? That is the issue. Guns are here and they are plentiful and hoping for a reversal of a US Supreme Ct case is a very distant prospect that doesn’t do anything to address the problem now.</p>
<p>^ We put in as many restrictions as possible, including another ban on assault type weapons. </p>
<p>I would also tax the **** out of bullets and require every gun owner to carry liability insurance. </p>
<p>"This has been widely described as a landmark decision.[151][152][153][154][155] To clarify that its ruling does not invalidate a broad range of existing firearm laws, the majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, said:[156]</p>
<p>" Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.[157]"</p>
<p>To make my point clear, there is no way to address the problem. I’m disgusted by the idiocy and paranoia of gun extremists. But there is no way to solve the problem. I’ll explain what I mean.</p>
<p>Second, I mentioned that guards are a sign of societal breakdown. Airports were mentioned in what I assume is a rebuttal. Airports have been attacked by foreign enemies. The issue of public slaughters in movie theaters, schools, etc. is of Americans being attacked by Americans. My point in that regard is twofold. First, it is nonsense to believe that more guns makes people safe because that is just not the experience of any country with lots of armed guards. More on that below. Second, we need to recognize that some people should be kept from having guns. Some of these are the ones screaming the loudest about their “right” to own guns of any kind with any capacity imaginable and some are those with documented violence and mental issues. I for one was appalled that the NRA successfuly pushed to set up a process by which many thousands of veterans could obtain gun rights after being determined mentally incompetent to have them. As a society, we should not have people suffering from mental illness owning weapons. </p>
<p>As to the experience of other countries, we need to take out places like Israel. They have armed guards everywhere because they need to protect themselves against attacks from enemies. The guards have proven useful because they represent a social response to a state of war - whatever one thinks about that particular conflict. That is not what we face in the US outside of places like airports. All other places that have guards in schools and on buses, etc. suffer from high levels of violence. One can at best argue these guards reduce the amount of violence that would otherwise occur. If you want to say that then you need to recognize you really mean you accept violence - and a pretty high degree of it - and that you prefer palliative measures rather than a cure. The cure is much stricter gun control because that is demonstrated to reduce violence dramatically. My point is that people are dishonest - perhaps with themselves, certainly with others - when they talk about guns as a solution. They aren’t a solution. They are a means of institutionalizing and containing violence to a degree. They in no way guarantee stability, either social or political.</p>
<p>That is the reality. There is no solution. None. Because the solution is off the table. We need to stop idealizing guns as some sort of cure. They aren’t. They reflect violence. They may contain some degree of it and they seem to enable other forms - like slaughters by nutcases. </p>
<p>If I were hired to consult to the US, I’d say the main thing is to stop lying to yourselves. You are violent. You refuse to stop being violent. You like to talk about solutions because that enables you to speak in idealistic terms about the potential effects of more weapons or because it enables you to condemn other behavior - like video games - that you don’t like. You like to talk nonsense to yourself. I’d say your reality, if you could see it is this: you are committed to maintaining a relatively violent society. You can’t stop so you make up stories to fit.</p>
<p>“what I assume is a rebuttal.”</p>
<p>I dont care to rebut. I am asserting we are are already in a broken situation if DHS has to have armed guards at bus stations, train stations and rally meetings.</p>
<p>It is the violence and threat of violence by citizens of other countries that has contributed to our need for protection; it is not just some innate idiocy and paranoia of the American people. We value human life very highly (although pro-lifers may disagree), so it makes sense that we will do whatever we can to make our citizens safe, including hiring armed guards in schools.</p>
<p>“It is the violence and threat of violence by citizens of other countries that has contributed to our need for protection.”</p>
<p>Hogwash. No one is arming themselves, walking around with guns at the ready, or wanting armed guards and armed teachers in our schools because they are afraid of violence by citizens of other countries.</p>
<p>I’m really not rebutting anything. I’m asking why schools are different and do you have ANY idea of how many weapons have been sold since this conversation started???</p>
<p>So many people who never even thought to buy a weapon have bought one. Over christmas gun sales were astronomical. the sales were soooo high that economists believe they skewed the holiday sales numbers.</p>
<p>I’m really asking what the actual solution is. I like the liability insurance. I like charging involuntary manslaughter for anyone whose weapon is used in a murder. I like the idea of taxing and heavily charged annual licenses for the guns. I like the idea of it being illegal to sell the gun to anybody but dealers who are licensed and I like the idea of the profits in weapons being just slashed through vice tax. I like there being a very, very heavy fine if you get your gun lost or stolen. Etc…</p>
<p>I said “contributed,” emilybee. I don’t like Lergnom’s assertion that “we” are all violent for no good reason. I don’t buy it. He doesn’t speak for the majority of Americans. DHS’s actions are the result of foreign threats, not twenty-something school shooters.</p>
<p>As for waiting around for an amendment to the Constitution. I guess everyone recalls that the Equal Rights Amendment did not pass even though more than 1/2 the country was female and everyone had a mother at one time.</p>
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<p>They aren’t. If I had to guess a lot of this hand wringing is socioeconomical. If the person grew up upper middle class and attended a school without armed security and has lived in an upper middle class area raising their children, it’s “innocence lost.”</p>
<p>Take some time and google the attacks on schools in China usually with knives and machetes (not very many guns floating around). The attacks are mostly by middle aged folks who are threatened by the education process since it is resulting in a new social structure where the kids can move away from the parents to get 21st century jobs so there is no longer a safety net (your kids) as you age in China.</p>
<p>Responding to poetgrl pointing out the increased gun sales . . .
BINGO!!! Fire arms are a business and that business has a lobbying arm called the NRA. When there is hype and fear about total bans on all guns people run out and buy more. If the NRA accepted that most people are interested in “reasonable controls” rather than any kind of outright ban the panic buying might dry up. My DH works and fishes with people who run out an buy more every time it looks like the GOP won’t win an election and after every major shooting crisis. They do it becuase they can and because they are on mailing lists that tell them constantly that certain parties are coming to take their guns or limit their “freedoms” at any moment. It generates business and it IS a business.</p>
<p>One of the interviews that I saw recently with an NRA person in TX regarding the second amendment was that people had to arm themselves in case of an attack by the federal gov’t. Really??? Isn’t that a farfetched scenario? When the second amendment was written, citizens were asked to maintain a musket in their homes in order to raise a militia.
Might the NRA support an exchange of assault weapons for musketry?</p>
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Well, isn’t that what many people on this thread, certain people currently in charge of the White House, and a particular political party advocating and trying to do? Read the headlines from many sources (or listen to the words of the current administration), not just what the NRA is saying, and it’s understandable that people might want to purchase a gun now while they can rather than later when it’s possible they might not be able to or when it might be more expensive to.</p>
<p>Regarding my home invasion last year… this was purely a crime of opportunity. It was a Sunday night about 8 PM, the house is on a corner with a streetlight, there was a car in the driveway and one in front of the house, lights were on in several rooms, the TV was on. The front door was open for a few minutes and the person, perhaps an addict in need of cash for a quick fix… perhaps a criminal in training supervised by an older criminal, perhaps a peeping tom who admired my Banana Republic dark green handbag? When the police canvassed the area, my across the street neighbor said she heard her doorknob making a noise but she thought it was the wind.
My cousin, a retired homicide detective in Nassau County never discharged her weapon once in her entire career in law enforcement and if a criminal ever entered her house while she was off-duty she would have to climb into the rafters of her attic to retrieve her weapon where it was secured while home… not in a dresser drawer where any of her children or their friends might have stumbled on it.
I have no problem with armed security guards in large high schools, but I do have strong reservations about arming teachers or asking or perhaps requiring teachers to take on those responsibilities. More guns lead to more gun accidents.
There is so much that needs to be addressed with this issue. Let’s start by addressing the current loopholes in the law and let’s all admit that:
a). we have serious problems with gun violence and the entire culture of violence and a media that glorifies violence
b). there is no justification for anyone owning a personal assault weapon or high capacity ammunition- read Joe Nocera’s op-ed piece in today’s NYTIMES
c) online sales of guns and ammunition should be illegal</p>
<p>“DHS’s actions are the result of foreign threats, not twenty-something school shooters.”</p>
<p>DHS’s actions are the result of one horrific attack. The terrorists probably exceeded all their wildest expectations of enacting changes in the behavior of a whole society. They won. 
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<p>We are incredibly violent. People get ****ed off about the littlest things and whip out their guns and shoot. And the person they kill is usually their spouse or another family member, after which they kill themselves. </p>
<p>As for the increase in gun sales. All that will stem from that is more people flying off the handle at the drop of a hat and being able to kill whoever they are ***<em>ed at because of easy access to a gun. Brilliant. *rolling eyes</em></p>