Actually, it isn’t.
Hinckley could have taken out way more if he wanted to but was only aiming at one person (yet killed one, and severely injured 2 others).
The problem with this argument is that the SS did not use their guns at all do neutralize the threat. They simply tackled him. Being armed made no difference at all. In fact, had they fired they could easily have killed innocent people (even expert marksmen miss, or their bullets travel through bodies and come out again).
Churches are gun free zones in South Carolina. The argument that this would absolutely had been stopped had this not been a gun free zone is a bit silly, but had this not been a gun free zone at least there would have been a possibility for the churchgoers to defend themselves. There’s nothing that can be done to stop this, gun control just doesn’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but to me, considering that this was unpreventable, people being theoretically able to defend themselves is preferred to a guarantee that people cannot defend themselves.
I’ll just add, the statistics are very clear, as we’ve removed restrictions on gun ownership over the past couple decades, we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in violent crime. This is undeniable.
We’ve also removed lead from paint and are not in the midst of a crack epidemic.
@Vladenschlutte - You don’t see something profoundly wrong with that picture? That we are drowning in guns to such a degree that people need to carry firearms in the house of God?
Something I suspect The Secret Service has analyzed and studied exhaustively, is the psychology and statistical probability of any number of active shooter scenarios, which is exactly why they chose to tackle Hinckley instead of shooting him.
The more guns being fired in an active shooter situation, the more opportunities for stray bullets to meet unintended targets. On it’s face, the idea that armed law-abiding citizens could quickly deescalate a situation and take out the bad guy sounds logical. But any situation like this would be inherently chaotic, with panic setting in immediately, and people running willy-nilly, so it’s not as cut and dried as one might imagine. Take aim at the shooter, and someone trying to get away could enter the your bullet’s path and shield him. Perhaps the person you just shot, might have gotten to safety, had you not taken him out first. Perhaps there are multiple concealed carry guns on the scene, and all of their owners are now trying to defend themselves against this threat that has just emerged. They look around, and only see others with guns. Suddenly, they have to decide who is a threat and who isn’t, but there’s not much time to think, so they just start firing and hope for the best. Fear is a potent thing, and human reaction to fear is not often reasoned. In fantasy, all outcomes unfold as planned within the confines of the imagination, a place where real, visceral fear has conveniently taken a powder. Anyone who has witnessed his/her best laid plans fall prey to unanticipated circumstances in real life, knows that life can be messy, but nothing is as messy as chaos.
Most people that go to church don’t get shot. This was a tragedy and was very unfortunate, but at least it’s rare. I simply find it objectionable that people can’t carry firearms into churches by law. I don’t see any reason why it would be bad for people to carry in churches.
It’s just so odd to me, the idea that the problem is that there are too few guns in this country.
I don’t know if you attend church or not. I do, and I can tell you that it would severely disrupt my worship experience to know that there were deadly weapons scattered around the sanctuary.
“It’s just so odd to me, the idea that the problem is that there are too few guns in this country.”
Only in BizarroWorld do people think there are too few guns in the US.
What sort of additional controls could stop these kinds of crimes? Since they seem to involve young men, then perhaps the legal age of purchase could be raised, but I don’t know whether that would fly on Constitutional grounds. Even if it did, these young men didn’t buy their own guns in every case, so those incidents would not be prevented, but perhaps the ones who did buy guns would have found it impossible to get their hands on one, and the tragedy averted, but maybe not if they were hellbent on making it happen. It’s impossible to know.
The one commonality in ALL the massacres is that the lone perp was male. Why aren’t lone perps ever female?
Here’s what I was almost going to post in the reopened thread before I remembered that the gun discussion has been restricted to this one: I don’t think our problem in this country is so much guns as gun culture; Our deep seated affection for our guns, the glorification of guns as symbols of our might, the lore and legend of them, the almost visceral fear in a significant portion of the population that, without them, we would be powerless in the face of abusive government, and an almost religious fervor for the 2nd amendment right to possess them.
All these things combine to make decreasing gun violence in America a tall order.
Wait…let me rethink some of this…
In actuality, all the above things have always been true of America and its guns, but I don’t recall the use of guns in wanton disregard for human life always being what it is today. Certainly at one time, young people didn’t carry out gun massacres of their classmates, and even against small children. Workplace massacres did occur, starting sometime in the seventies (and oddly, seemed to center around postal worker disaffection, which is where that term, “going postal” came from), but the seemingly random slaughter of innocents in theaters and other crowded places use to be unheard of. Gun violence in the inner cities has always been unacceptably high, but is it my imagination that gang violence is worst than ever? I mean, drive-bys use to be almost solely carried out by organized crime syndicates, right?
I keep having to ask myself, what’s changed? Is there actually more gun violence than ever, or are the instances that occur more grisley in scope due to the increased availability of high ammo capacity killing machines?
I don’t think it’s gun culture so much as culture itself - the fracturing of our culture, the alienation and polarization of America into different groups all at odds with each other, the antipathy towards spirituality and the elevation of material wants.
The answer is because killing with a gun is easy and any joe/jane doe with half a pulse can own one.
I’m not convinced that we as a nation are anymore fractured and polarized than at many other times in our history. I sometimes think back on the sixties, and all the social and political unrest surrounding that era, and marvel that we emerged intact. I’m also not convinced that we’re “less spiritual”. We are likely less homogenously Christian, but I don’t subscribe to the belief that Christianity (or any other religion) owns a monopoly on spirituality, and certainly not on morality.
It’s hatred and desperation that kills. Murder uses any weapon. If there were no guns, something else would’ve been used.
That goes without saying rubberfall (even though it has indeed been said here a number of times concerning this and other incidences 
). But, murder driven by hatred and desperation are facilitated by few things as efficiently as guns (that’s been pointed out more than a few times as well).
I will follow up on Bays question.
What new gun control regulation would have stopped this crime?
This is true, sorry, admit I didn’t read through the thread before posting. But you can’t stop the haters when they’re this delusional. If guns were controlled, it might deter, but it would not stop these heinous crimes. The criminally minded don’t care about the law, they’ll find what they need to fulfill their psychopathic needs.
So is killing with a carpentry hammer, a kitchen knife, a car, a…
Exactly. It’s this type of bizarre belief that has people in other developed countries completely baffled by the U.S.