While we are waiting

[para]

para - he was mentally ill - he was paranoid, heard voices, was delusional, and was being medicated for all of the above by the Veterans Administration. But in part due to misguided efforts to encourage people to seek treatment by avoiding "stigma", he was not legally judged mentally incompetent due to mental illness despite those symptoms. And if he were, present law again meant to avoid such stigma prevents such medical information from being shared with the FBI and its background check system. Only if a medical professional makes a judgment of "threat to self or others" and has a person institutionalized on that basis, would it have done anything.

As it was, we know he was paranoid, delusional, and medicated for it - but none of that stopped him from doing anything he did. Nor was any of it available either to the civilian contractors who did the background checks on him (because it was medically privileged) nor to the FBI background check system (since it does not share such medical data for the same reason).

And yes, all of that is evidence that he wasn't the only crazy person in this sad little picture...

Would you agree then that if some laws were brought in that made medical professionals pass that info onto those doing the checks (Feds). Then he may not have been able to stockpile his weapons. Then that goes back to the state knowing too much and civil liberties etc..which to be fair i would not have a problem with. If it made me a little safer

[Wodin]

[quote=para;1468872

I would kill to protect my family too my friend.

[para]

No video game will make someone go out and kill others. Unless they are mentally unwell and would kill anyway.

As for gun control. In the UK the criminals are armed and the law abiding are not. Makes no sense to me. With proper gun control i.e must have a medical and attend fire arms course plus every gun must be registered and even a bullet kept from the gun so it can be put into a database and any shootings etc the bullets marking after it being shot may match up. There are ways to sell guns and still be safe. Apparently Canada has loads of guns per head but hardly any gun crime\murders.

I suggest any one in the UK who is anti gun ownership should go live in a bad inner city area for a few years..where everyone live sin fear of the gangs..and know they have no power to use or stand up against them and the Gangs know damn well everyone is defenseless and to scared to do anything about them rule. As for the Police..they turn up AFTER a crime has happened..they also told me during my years of strife that they are powerless to really do anything anymore due to all the laws protecting the criminal, this was said to me by two policemen whilst i was taking a gang member to court. This same gang had been involved in 6 shootings over 6 months and also machetted a lad in daylight at the road where all the shops are. A fire engine stopped to help the lad..but the gang with machete in hands told them to get in the engine and f off..the firemen did as they where told. My number was up at some point...luckily after dealing with them for 8 years I managed to move. I'd felt so much safer in my own house if i had been armed..as they where. They could have burst into the house..raped my wife..robbed us and battered us and there would have been nothing I could have done that would have been effective.

Wodin where the hell did you live?

[para]

Pray tell how would you do that if two armed men broke into your house?

This is why the UK laws are to restrictive and only benefit the criminal.

We banned guns so some loon attacked kids in a school with a knife instead..if someone is going to kill they will do..and it isn't hard for them to buy a gun as I doubt they are going to be worried about breaking the law..

I do have knives you know. When was the last time someone broke into yours or your or neighbours house just too kill them? You are going down the same route of thinking guns stop killing they do not. They actually increase them in my opinion.

Have safe and peaceful nite all

[JasonC]

para - google is your friend, and we do not have to just make these things up, in the modern world.

World homicide rates - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Details on homicide in the US -

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

And your comments on the mental health subject, he didn't "stockpile" anything, he bought one $300 shotgun and $15 of ammo for it, within the last couple of weeks. Should he have been prosecuted for firing a gun at a neighbor's car, or through his ceiling into a neighbor's apartment? Sure. Should he have been institutionalized for paranoia? Quite possibly. For that matter, security at the building should have checked inside his bag, etc. The gun and the laws around it were not remotely the problem - everything else was.

[John Kettler]

No idea why this isn't in the GDF! That said, the link speaks directly to State of Florida intelligence analysis which shows most (79%) recent (2011-2013) mass shootings are tied to mental illness.

http://engineeringevil.com/2013/09/15/fusion-center-study-finds-79-of-recent-mass-shootings-attributable-to-history-of-mental-illness/

There's also this DOJ breakdown on guns, self-defense and crime side of the equation. There may be more recent data, but this is what I presently have.

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/hvfsdaft.txt

DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief

Guns and Crime: Handgun Victimization, Firearm Self-Defense, and

Firearm Theft

April 1994, NCJ-147003

Revised 9/24/02

There's the critique of a major study (Kleck--volleys of arguments and studies of the gun use studies)

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

Contradictions in the Kleck Study by the Virginia (Department) of Public Safety

http://vacps.org/public-policy/the-contradictions-of-kleck

These are but the tip of an enormous, fraught iceberg.

(Leaves, being careful to step on no mine, fall into a tiger trap or be impaled by a Malayan Gate)

Regards,

John Kettler

[para]

Whoa JasonC i didn't sag you made anything up. I know you are well read n would have stats to back your your argument up. So play nice i will hav readof that stuff. bloody mobile phone typing can't sde a thing

[mjkerner]

"could it be that the way the mentally instable/eerily frustrated are being treated, differs significantly?"

Why are you grasping at straws?

The murder rate in all of western, northern, and southern Europe, excluding Russia and eastern, is 1.0 to 1.5 per 100,000 people per year.

The murder rate in Africa other than northern, is 20-28 per year.

The murder rate in central and south America is also 20-30 per year.

1/4 of the population of the US is from those regions.

The US murder rate is 5 per 100,000 population. The murder rate of the US white population is the same as western Europe.

Murder is an activity of young men. It is practically unknown before sexual maturity. It is 10 times less common among women. It declines dramatically with age after 35 and by extreme amounts after age 50.

This pattern of physical aggression is seen in every social mammal - restricted to males and peaking soon after sexual maturity. The greatest levels of aggression are shown by a small minority of all populations in all cases.

We know precisely what causes human aggression because we can track its prevalence. It is a natural behavior of sexual competition. Young males compete for social dominance; they naturally resort to aggression against others, especially other young males, in that process.

We can socialize some of that away. We cannot socialize all of it away. Different cultures and human groups show very different levels of such aggression. Not 5% differences, differences of more than an order of magnitude. There is no mystery about it whatever.

All there is, is political ideology preventing people from facing those brute facts of human nature.

The reason the murder rate in the US is higher than it is in western Europe has nothing to do with your laws or ours, your weapons or ours, your medical systems or ours. It is purely a function of your people and ours. Different people, different outcomes. Entirely predictably. People of the same background in Europe and the US have the same patterns of aggression and criminality. People of the same background in Latin America and the US have the same patterns of aggression and criminality - actually, lower by half or more in the US, but from that baseline.

All there is to it, I am afraid.

Jason, you are really HAL 9000, aren't you? Or Albert Einstein's long lost grandson, maybe?

Your answers to any question/issue always impress me.

[Quintus Sertorius]

Two Harvard profs just completed an exhaustive, multi-year study of gun laws in the U.S. and Europe.

A link to a PDF of the actual study:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

A nice Breitbart article about it:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/27/Harvard-Study-Shows-No-Correlation-Between-Strict-Gun-Control-And-Less-Crime-Violence

One juicy quote from the study:

If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)

[mjkerner]

But it used to be different...in 1961, my older brother (14 years old at the time-I was 8) filled out a form in the back of Argosy magazine (a men's sport magazine, often with good warfare-related articles), stated that he was eighteen, sent it in with $50 from his paper route, and received in the mail about 8 weeks later a genuine WWII Luger with a box of 9mm ammo. He still has it. (We shot the ammo up within the first couple of days!)

[Battlefront.com]

Moving this. Sorry, it has no place in a game specific discussion area.

Steve

[John Kettler]

Steve,

And they say teleportation doesn't exist!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Stalins Organ]

Thanks God that i live in Russia and can buy SKS, Mosin, AK, RPK, PPSH, AR, etc, in semi-auto but i CAN! Your British law it's a nonsense.

Best poster about gun law))) -

Godwin's law - you lose.

and also wrong in fact, because in 1938 the German government relaxed the gun laws (as long as you weren't a Jew of course!)

[Buzz]

Thank you Steve. Sorry for the distraction.

para - I assume you mean well in your numerous questions while waiting for MG to arrive?

You will also have to wait for James Holmes current legal mental status (prior to purchases and now) to be revealed in court. That information is sealed.

As for James Holmes behaviors prior to his mass shooting in CO, it should be clear to any rationale man that Mr. Holmes was unsafe to himself and others.

I have witnessed 2 separate occasions where a FFL Dealer refused a sale even when the intended purchaser "passed" the NICS check. I have been informed of many more refusals as FFL dealers can refuse/shut down a transaction at any time for any reason they feel is valid... from unpleasant demeanor to blatent attempts at illegal activities.... to a guys with red "joker" hair looking / acting wonky asking to buy an AR.

Commitment criteria in most instances is "homicidal, suicidal gravely disabled" and multiple reports indicate James Holmes behaviors with mental health professionals could have and should have him committed, IMO.

para you seem to misunderstand the nature of weapon laws, transactions and real world gun violence... at least in the USA. You are very focused on mass shootings and we in the USA keep trying to impart to you the facts. As horrific as mass shootings are they are the rare outlier. Regular old run of the mill handgun homicide is THE major gun violence in our country. This is where a gun violence intervention will make the most impact, save the most lives.

Our current government is not going to resolve gun violence by making more restrictive laws. Our government does not even prosecute most NICS failure applications now.

I hope this situation will change para but more restrictive gun laws .... to what some extreme anti gun good Senators suggest.... "..an outright ban, picking up every one of them -- Mr. and Mrs. America turn 'em all in ...." is not the answer.

[Stalins Organ]

Two Harvard profs just completed an exhaustive, multi-year study of gun laws in the U.S. and Europe.

.....

From which one can conclude that it is not guns that kill people, it is Americans with guns that kill people.

[Ithikial_AU]

What we really need is more Chuck Norris!

Very true!

From the outside looking in the answer is painfully obvious. And yes Mass Shootings happen all over the developed world but the difference is it's an isolated event (Australia's last mass shooting was in 1996) not something that happens every few months.

Also deaths by guns in the developed world...

http://thecomixverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/21_12_12_gun_statistics_BBC.jpg

The argument that you need guns because you can't trust the government just means you have no faith in the democratic process.

Let the Pixeltruppen take the bullets, not real people.

My two cents.

[Buzz]

Yes it was different back then. I remember those days as well

Para, you may find this link of interest. podcast is easy to do while working out.

Straight Shot: Guns in America

http://backstoryradio.org/shows/straight-shot-guns-in-america-2/

Published: November 16, 2012

The US has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. How did this come to be? Was America’s “gun culture” present from the very beginning?

On this episode, the History Guys look at who has had access to guns in the U.S., and what those guns have meant to the people who have owned them. They also consider the importance of guns at the time the Second Amendment was drafted, and explore the central role government has played in the dissemination of firearms to citizens. And they pay a visit to a 21st century version of the armories of the past: a gun show.

[Wodin]

Wodin where the hell did you live?

Anfield Liverpool. Until you live somewhere like that you've no idea how bad it is in the UK inner city..

[Spinoza]

Meh ,these pathethic arguments again. 'God given freedom' 'self-defence' . God made us so we can kill each other with automated weapons.

One six years old and his stuffed tiger have more brains

Constitutional Fallacies Part II: The Myth of an Unlimited Right

[JasonC]

And Mexicans. And Venezuelans. And Russians. And Rwandans. And Congolese. And Burmese. And...

Enough, the conceit that America is uniquely violent is simply a lie and a bit of parlor anti-Americanism for the ungrateful and brain dead. Most of whom would be wallowing in concentration camps of one kind or another if a gun happy American hadn't saved their sorry behind at some time or other, within living memory.

[Mord]

Mutilation, genocide, and death squads don't count! Stay focused Jason, America is inherently evil, any thinking person knows that!

And for anyone that cares, I argue that Pol Pot was a people person...he just had a hard time expressing it. He was one interpretive dance class credit away from a Nobel Peace Prize.

Mord.

[agusto]

God made us so we can kill each other with automated weapons.

"God has a hard on for Marines, because we kill everything we see. He plays His games, we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much power, we keep heaven packed with fresh souls." - Gunnery Seargent Hartman

[agusto]

Enough, the conceit that America is uniquely violent is simply a lie and a bit of parlor anti-Americanism for the ungrateful and brain dead.

But you just said it yourself:

The murder rate in all of western, northern, and southern Europe, excluding Russia and eastern, is 1.0 to 1.5 per 100,000 people per year.

The US murder rate is 5 per 100,000 population.

Among the countries with compareable wealth & social structure, the US have an extraordinarily high murder rate.

[Wodin]

I do have knives you know. When was the last time someone broke into yours or your or neighbours house just too kill them? You are going down the same route of thinking guns stop killing they do not. They actually increase them in my opinion.

Have safe and peaceful nite all

A knife? They have a gun..your dead mate. A knife means having to get in close..which could lead to close quarter fighting..two on one..your dead mate. Honestly the streets in the inner city are ruled by the gangs, and prey i doesn't start to spread out to the suburbs.

As for people breaking in..no they might not set otu to kill but they may decide to rape soemone and then thats bound to lead to a death. Well I can recount several families having petrol pured through the letter box because they went to the police, this over a period of a few years. A taxi driver was hit with a carving knife and attacked..he was 60 and then died of a heart attack..no one was caught. A girl with learning difficulties was strangled in her own home by two smackheads they managed to get £6.07. A young lad age 17 was stabbed through the heart and died because he owed someone £5! I then could carry on about all the things that happened just in a small area of Anfield..but it would take to long and any way you get the point

When I go to see my Mum and Dad in Exeter it's like a different world, the people there have no idea how bad it is in the poor areas in the major cities. Though where I live in Liverpool now is loads better than Anfield.

I'd agree with your point of view IF the gangs didn't have guns, but they do..so all it means is the law abiding can't protect themselves, their family or their belongings.

[db_zero]

As someone who lived in Europe, been to Asia and Canada I find that in those countries I get the impression the citizens are happy with strict gun control. I felt very safe in Asia and Canada as well as Europe-even in the urban areas. Gun control seems to work well in Europe, Canada and Asia.

However as an American who lived over 20 years in one of the most violent American cities and faced gun violence first hand up close and personal on a few occasions as well as other violent incidents that did not involve guns I firmly believe that gun control is unworkable and unrealistic in America. Much of that is cultural, but there are also practical realities that also make gun control unworkable and unrealistic in America.

I live in a state that has very strict gun control and the city I lived in has very strict gun control laws and many gun free zones. Yet the murder rate has sky rocketed and gun crime is rampant. Law abiding citizens who obey the strict gun control laws are the victims of those who simply ignore the laws and don't care.

Another big problem is the loudest anti-gun control politicians who constantly whine about guns have been issued concealed carry permits despite the fact the districts they represent almost never issue them to ordinary citizens. That right there destroys their credibility. Most politicians really don't understand what really is happening in the districts they represent as they spend most of their time in Washington, not in the districts they represent.

There is also a heavily element of dependency on the government for assistance in may urban areas which these politicians give out heavy government assistance in return for votes. The side effect is institutionalized racism, a breakdown of the family, a lack of drive and initiative, no sense of individual responsibility and generations that have been raised on government welfare and the expectation that they are entitled to endless government support. Its little surprise that these very areas are the ones with the highest levels of gun violence, while at the same time have the strictest gun control laws. It’s hardly surprising that the same liberal politicians are voted into office, while there is absolutely no conservatives who have held office for decades, yet the liberal politicians blame conservatives and guns for their problems. Many Americans including myself simply don't buy this excuse.

It’s hardly surprising that every time there is a mass shooting these politicians from the urban areas blame guns and try to fire up the public to enact more gun control laws. First off the gun violence that plagues their urban areas is usually tied to gangs and the drug trade. Many of their failed liberal policies have contributed to this.

The mass shootings that make for the spectacular headlines are a different type of gun violence. Even more troubling is the media cover up of the fact that all of these mass shooters were on SSRI drugs which is known to cause suicidal and psychotic behavior in a percentage of those who take them. Unfortunately the pharmaceutical industry is a huge multi billion dollar industry with plenty of money and lobbyists to influence politicians and the media.

So guns get the blame.

I will say this. Living in a liberal heavy handed gun control urban area for 20 years, I was always weary and cognizant of potential trouble lurking everywhere and the possibility of gun violence. I could hear gunshots at night quite often. Once I left the urban areas for the more rural areas you have a different type of gun culture where the local law enforcement issued CCW's, most of the people carried and owned guns, yet there is far less gun violence and I felt less leery and ironically safer.

So yes I can agree that in Europe, Asia and Canada gun control works, but America is a different case. We have the 2nd amendment and in the rural areas the gun culture is very strong. Many suburban areas also has a strong gun culture.

The coastal and some urban areas tend to be more anti-gun. Many voters including myself tend to be 1 issue voters. I’m independent and have voted for both parties in the past. However the gun issue is something I feel very passionately about and will not vote for any politician who favors gun control.

If the recall in Colorado is any indication, many politicians who voted for gun control are going to get a rude awakening next election. I have no problem crossing party lines when it comes to guns.