The American character is more prone to violent crime and your solution is more guns?
Unless you are immune to reason or literacy, you could not have failed to grasp my points. Sigh...one more time:
We don't need more guns per se', we need to tolerate law abiding citizens and public officials having practical access to firearms so as to provide equal means of self-defense. That should not be difficult to grasp, even for the most fevered gun hater in America. Unless you think "the American Character" is that EVERYONE is likely to be a violent criminal, your incredulity is specious.
Of course if every gun in America could be confiscated, and 100 percent border security were instituted, and illicit manufacture of firearms were impossible then there would be no need for self-defense using firearms. But for practical and political reasons that is not going to happen. Americans love their guns, we will always have access to guns, so get over it!
The usual ritualistic incredulity and scoffing is based on little more than someone's deep emotional antipathy to the very idea of most or all guns in society - as if it were practical (or morally acceptable) to eliminate most or all guns. Hence you get utterly stupid "no gun zones" that disarm the innocent, while those inclined to murder people don't give a shit and ignore it.
So the alternative is gun realism: to create those policies that tries to limit access to criminals and the mentally ill, and that provides law abiding citizens access to firearms for self-defense.
Mexico has more gun control than we have in the US. The problem is going the other way, the guns are being smuggled from the US with weak laws into Mexico. The Canadians share the same nightmare, guns coming from the US.
Do you have some indication that this shooting would have been prevented by better border security or are you just trying to politicize this horrible event as you have accused others of doing?
Of course there is smuggling from areas that have more access to guns to areas with less access. However, if guns were very difficult to own in the US and most were confiscated, rest assured that the intense demand would put Mexican (and perhaps Canadians) into the smuggling business. If you create a scarcity, and the demand creates sufficiently high profit, smuggling will arise.
There are plenty of drug laws in Mexico too - but it doesn't stop drug smuggling. "The Gringo" has money, and many would pay high prices for access to firearms...especially organized crime and heedless criminals.
I understood your points. I am not immune to reason nor am I illiterate. And I am choosing to ignore your bad manners in stating that I am either.
I didn't find much reasoning in your post, except for the original but largely irrelevant point about our porous borders, your other points have been repeated many times here. This why I concentrated on the porous borders point.
You started with a fact that is undeniable, that the US is a gun nation founded as a frontier society. But you didn't mention that we have not been a frontier society for more than five generations. That we are now an urban nation.
We were also founded to preserve slavery, (the British had just outlawed slavery, in 1774, in the home island, with the intent to eventually outlaw it in the colonies.) That doesn't mean that we should have slavery now.
So the expansion of concealed carry laws didn't result in more guns? It must be part of my specious incredulity that I imagined that the gun manufacturers rushed to produce whole new lines of pistols designed for concealed carry.
I was raised in the gun culture of the US. I have owned many firearms, mainly rifles and shotguns but also a few handguns. My family owned a farm where firearms were considered tools. I hunted doves and quail, occasionally deer. I taught on the rifle range at a boy scout summer camp and qualified as "sharpshooter." I was in the Navy and qualified on the ACP 45 pistol and later with the M16 rifle. I have had a concealed carry permit, in Michigan, a result of being in a serious labor dispute. I have routinely been armed on job sites in the Philippines and Columbia. I routinely was armed hiking in North Georgia and North Carolina because of the chance of coming across a marijuana growing patch or Eric Rudolph, a right wing bomb nut.
My shotgun, a Mossberg 500 JIC 12 gauge, and pistol, a 22 caliber Buck Mark target pistol, were taken away from me when I was diagnosed. ALS patients' number one cause of death is suicide.
In no way would I object to any of these background checks or gun registration. I don't however, feel that either would be very effective. Background checks might catch a few loons and keep them from buying guns. Gun registration, the only gun control option left to us by the current US Supreme Court, might in the long run start helping us solve crimes but won't do much to prevent them.
But as long as we have a widespread American mindset of violence, of authoritarianism, of mistrust of government, of tolerating poverty, of needing recreational drugs, of racism, of pining for a return to a so-called better past, in other words until we grow up we are not going to get out of this cycle of gun violence. Short of a outright ban on guns and confiscation of the existing ones and I don't see that happening.
I agree with this,
So the alternative is gun realism: to create those policies that tries to limit access to criminals and the mentally ill, and that provides law abiding citizens access to firearms for self-defense.
But I wouldn't encourage concealed carry. If you remember everyone walking around armed didn't work out very well on our frontier either.
I would treat guns as we do cars. Register them, require a license for them, require that the owner is responsible for the gun and can accept the liability for keeping the gun, i.e., keeping it out of the hands of children, from being stolen ) and kept away from potential suicides (like me!).
Our society is failing a huge number of people in this country. We need to reestablish an empathises on mental health. This guy had nowhere to turn, his own own mother failed him. Sexually frustrated, right wing gun nut loser, he fit one of the many profiles of unhinged walking talking time bombs we have in the country.
