Mass Shootings And Gun Violence

I may not be American but I've been affected by "shootings" in the USA. 

The first one: a homicide of someone "accidentally discharging a weapon in their own face" and that was after threatening to shoot a former friend dead in her bed and their two kids were next door in another bedroom and could easily have spooked their father if he'd shot her and then maybe the next day I would have heard of a murder/suicide and not just of a homicide... Had the SAME rules about not owning weapons, introduced after the Dunblane School shooting in Scotland been introduced in Texas where they live there would have been NO WEAPONS in the house and he might still be alive today. Two boys lost their father unnecessarily because people want to own guns unnecessarily.

The second one: a friend was in Las Vegas with her husband in 2017. She was like a hundred metres from where the shooting happened (out of its range). They'd stopped to take a break instead of walking on. Suddenly there were crowds running past them to the direction they'd just arrived from. Being told there was a shooter they ran away too. They were within six minutes of potentially being shot at. That's how she explained it on Facebook a day after. They'd been living in the city up to that moment and moved to a small town where fewer people, apparently, walk around with guns.

I mention Dunblane School shooting here as since that happened there have been few if any mass murder events in Britain, and none with a gun of any sort. I'd read up on this incident and then demand legislators follow the example in Britain.

Also, NO military weapons should ever be in civilian hands. They should only ever exist within the confines of the military. However as WAR is an outdated mode of conflict resolution, as is holding onto the "wild, wild west mentality" within the second amendment though personally I think this amendment always has been misinterpreted. What I mean is that like the government cannot make laws in respect to the first amendment (freedom of speech or religion) they can also NOT turn their military against the civilians of the nation, and no soldier (militia) can own a weapon that's used in any other way than keeping the nation safe and not be used to fight against the civilians. If you look at the second amendment this way it's not about civilians owning and keeping guns BUT about militia not owning and using their guns against YOU. As an example of this, which was in a way why I came to this conclusion, when Trump went for his "show off with bible in hand" he got the protestors (CIVILIANS!!!) removed forcefully by... THE MILITIA!!! He was breaking the second amendment (as interpreted above). As another example, when J6 happened civilians attacked the government. There is was okay for the militia to defend itself and the government they were defending as in THEY WERE KEEPING THE NATION SAFE!!!! I'm NOT an form of legal expert but I do have a logical mind and analytical skill and figured out this is potentially an answer to this situation. In effect, the people in the USA should adopt Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as their second amendment, and move the current second amendment as a sub-clause that states that the government cannot raise military actions against them nor threaten them with the same (so a senator saying that more guns are needed WOULD constitute as them threatening the civilians on the nation as weapons never make any place safer).

And before you say, "you're not in the USA, you've never experienced gun violence." to which I say YES, I have as a point blank shooting happened about 150 yards from where I used to live in England, and I'd just been to put rubbish into the bins outside and saw the group of men around a car. Then just as I arrived at my front door I heard a man's voice, asking them to be less noisy, and then seconds after I heard the shot and the flash of the gun shot was so bright it lit up the whole street. My ex-husband who'd opened the door for me pulled me into the house so that, as he had put it at the time "they don't notice that you saw them and saw them shoot." My witness statement got them jailed and it will be in 2027 they would have been eligible for possible parole...

The argument "you don't live in America" is so tired and irrelevent. As if you must be at a particular place to understand how it feels to be near a shooting, a flood, a bushfire, a riot, whatever. Dunblane happened in the same year as the Port Arthur massacre in Australia, and both countries immediately enacted tough gun laws. Of course crims get hold of illegal weapons, and shootings do occur, but a few cases a year, not a week. And neither country has had a major shooting incident since then, in 1996. yet gun fanatics STILL defend their right to keep guns to defend themselves - presumably against each other.

What you said is precisely why I included examples of the effect of shootings in the USA. I agree with you that the things that happen in the world affect everyone somehow. The war in Ukraine affects ALL the world even if it affects the Ukrainians the most for obvious reason, then it also affects the people who don't agree with Putin in Russia. It affects Europe as a whole too which is generally less safe. A shooting on one side of the USA impacts all of the USA, and also the rest of the world. They speak of "six degrees of separation" which applies wholly to every negative event in the world as there is very small amounts of space in a shrinking world (in terms of connectivity) that separates someone in a disaster from someone who wasn't there. 

The cost of any disaster, and a shooting one too, impacts all of us too. The person shot might be a future inventor of a new technology that doesn't happen anymore, it could have been the next president of the USA, the scientist who finds the cure of cancer, the person solves hunger problems or any number of other things, or an artist, author, architect or software developer. That's how I view it. I would urge every parent to ask their children what their goals as an adult, and keep records of their answers. If disaster happens you can report them not just as "such and such who was a certain age" but also say "he/she/they wanted to be a scientist or whatever career" and maybe if we looked at the situation as current or future LOST career paths where you know how much the career might be worth (from study to a an average of 30-45 years of career) that might make people sit up more. It always seems that the value in dollars is what makes people pay attention. So in a perhaps cynical assessment what was the "net worth" of the 600 people who died. What were they earning? What were they studying? What were their skills? And other such questions. Maybe if we started to look more at what society LOOSES because someone got shot dead people might look closer at it and care a bit more. 

For example, in the three examples I listed in my first post, the first was a father with his own business he ran with the wife and he ended up with mental health problems and was on a break to recover. The family lost over 85% of their income overnight even if it was modest. The second one is an independent book cover designer that I know of because of my connections in this industry. When she told us about what had happened I recall over four hundred messages of concerns from current and past clients, and at the time counted at least sixty people who'd worried whether would have had covers for books if she wasn't able to design anymore. One person dying would have impacted hundreds of authors. The last one which I witnessed was a man who was a prominent employee at a business in the town I lived in whose death cost the business hundreds of thousands of pound sterling in lost income because suddenly he wasn't there anymore. And that's what I mean... who is ever looking deeply enough at the cost of the people who aren't there anymore whose disappearance from the equation. There have been something like 500,000 deaths since about 1960 in the USA (as I read in a BBC article a few years ago). That's a lot of lost skill, knowledge and business income. Same with the million dead in the USA alone from COVID. Maybe if we started to see the person as a valuable person with skills and knowledge we'd care more about them staying alive. I certainly care about that in addition to the fact that I don't want people ever dying unnecessarily...

Parents feared school shooting more than CRT (which are not taught in schools), and that was the main issue that the GOP ignored, to their detriment, at the midterms.  And they’ll continue to do so.

Corruption and inaction leads us to where we are now

Yeah it sucks. I try to avoid places with a lot of people in them. So far so good. I limit my time in public.  Everyone can't do that. What a crazy state of affairs when you have to put up with such a situation and half the politicians aren't willing to do what's necessary to end this siege of terror that is unique to the American experience.

The problem is there's no training on how to be a social animal in this cultural context. Perhaps if it were formalized, with classes, exams and suchlike, people will be better equipped to deal with conflict effectively without resorting to violence. It could also help them understand situations well enough to obviate violence in the first place.

The 2nd Amendment does not mean the everyone can own a gun no matter what. Owning the gun is the same as owning a car, only the responsible can own one. Here in the US, you have to pass all these tests to see if you are allowed to drive, therefore allowed to own a car. No such thing for owning guns, no background checks or anything of the sort. You are allowed a gun no matter what, even if you have murderous intent.Regulating guns is not taking away guns, it's keeping them out of the hands of people with murderous intent.

It should also be mentioned that the gun industry is still shielded from lawsuits (courtesy of President Dubya), making it the ONLY industry in the US that has this kind of legal protection. Other industries have to worry about getting sued if they release a dangerous product to the public; in contrast, the gun industry cranks out dangerous products all the time and doesn't have to worry about a damn thing.

Well Americans do keep saying their the greatest country and top of everything, and given their unnatural love and adoration of guns and weapons of mass destruction, pretty sure those people will see that number as one to beat this year. Unfortunately I also think that the US government won't act unless one of them is killed by gun wielding maniacs, or their close family is targeted and killed. Unfortunately, it seems that its the small minority and big money that is ruling your country

FOLLOW THE MONEY!  There was a time when the National Rifle Association was all about gun safety and education,  They even favored some form of registration.  But not for a long time.  The NRA is now this screaming thing whose response to absolutely any issue is to wave the flag and howl that WE NEED MORE GUNS!!!!

Why Consider.  Private gun ownership in the USA is an industry making billions of dollars annually.  More than the entire defense budgets of many other countries, comes to that.  It should be no surprise that a lot of that money in the USA does not go to charming little Mom&Pop businesses, but to great big corporations.

So, putting this as nicely as possible, big corporations have a habit of actively safeguarding their bottom line.  For those who are interested, I recommend Googling 'Tobacco Institute; and 'United Fruit Company', amongst others, as examples of what has been done before. 

 It is my assertion that the NRA and various allegedly 'patriotic' groups are now little more than shills for those corporations in the gun industry, all under the respectable guise of patriotism.  This is a huge industry, and that it would use money to .... 'protect its interests' should be no surprise to anyone.  Think about it.

Australia never had the gun culture of the USA, and we have never equated civil liberties with personal artillery..  The big move we took on gun control wasn't simple, but we did it, and the vast majority of the population favored it, and continues to do so.  Has perfection been achieved?  Of course not.  Plenty of American gun crazies will gleefully point out that we STILL have some gun crime.  Check the statistics, losers.  One of the many things Australia does extremely well is statistics. As an aside, I would also rank Australia's civil liberties and quality of life over the USA's any day of the week.

When Australia started the ban, there were some Americans convinced we then had an explosion in knife crimes - like every gun-deprived psycho and criminal out there all bought steak knives and began stabbing to keep the murder rate up.  That Did Not Happen.  Period.  I wonder who in the USA might have spread that particular story around? Finally, check out Aussie comedian Jim Jeffries piece on Gun Control (in two parts).  It emphasizes comedic effect, naturally, but I do not believe there is a single argument or point he makes that is invalid.

Across the entirety of Europe, since 1987 there has been a total of 16 mass shootings.

Since the 1990's, after a 2nd mass shooting in the UK in a decade, the entirety of the EU  clamped down entirely on all forms of weapons . Handguns are simply not allowed, long guns are owned by a literal handful for professional reasons. 

Most firearms held are shotguns, but they are strictly controlled and licensed ... Ergo, hardly anyone has a gun and those rules are constantly being looked at to be stiffened. Our children do not have to do  'mass shooter drill', we are not afraid to go shopping. Sort yourselves out America.

Assault style weapons and high capacity magazines shouldn't be sold AT ALL TO PRIVATE CITIZENS! Only law enforcement organizations or the military! That's who the gun manufacturers made them for in the FIRST PLACE!

This is kind of really awkward of that kind of subject American sage republicans don't want to make things serious and the others are doing it they are so screwed heartless nobody's they don't wanna meet things so serious it is so hard they cannot make things stronger themselves they are still be rejected anyway from other countries there are big cities so serious about gun violence they don't do it

The GOP has the perfect solution to the gun problem.  Offer thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims, then promote the sale of more guns.

In Australia we have real gun control, we had a mass shooting in Tasmania back in the mid '90s and there was such a national public outcry that the then ultra conservative government was forced to act. We now have some of the strongest gun laws in the world but I can still purchase and use one if find I need to, but like the majority of the population here I don't want one, I got rid of the one I had in disgust immediately following the aforementioned mass shooting. Grow up America, real gun control is something to be welcomed and not feared by those that abide by the law.

Remember the movie "The Bug's Life". The Grasshoppers are those idiots touting the second amendment. We are the ants who think they are the majority because they are so loud. Fun fact, we (who want common sense measures) outnumber them 9:1.