Mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut

There's absolutely no way to prevent people from losing it, so the focus should be on minimizing the damage and finding a good process for dealing with the aftermath.

Politicians don't want to touch it because of votes. There are idiots who vote solely for whoever is against guns, or for them, or against abortion, or for it. That's what really drives every election, very select issues that they abuse to extremes. The media doesn't look for the truth any longer, because why do something new when you can just repeat the same pattern every cycle and milk the shit out of it. When a politician takes a stand, and tries to discuss something real, they are sidelined and derided by their own people. They don't want an honest debate because then they'd have nothing to pretend to argue about.

Guns aren't going anywhere, ever... Any attempt at additional control would only lead to violence. Abortion isn't going anywhere, ever... Not even the supposed anti-abortion politicians have any intent of changing those laws. People need to realize this.

The answer is probably more guns, not less. Any number of armed school personnel could have lessened this nightmare. If you're tasked with protecting children, shouldn't you be prepared for a gun fight?

By the same token, it's harder to kill a dozen people with a knife, if that's all you have to work with.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/12/justice/oregon-mall-shooting/i...

The sad reality is that most people barely heard about it, because "only" two people died.

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/14/shooting-reported-at-co...

Here's a semiauto rifle with the same calibre:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Min...

Would that one be more acceptable because it has a wood stock?

As a nation, we've decided that we don't want to restrict the rights of hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens merely because a few people misuse those rights. This is why politicians have generally decided not to push for more gun control - it's an election losing issue.

Incidentally, I'm confused by the point of that tweet. Here are some other .223 rifles:

http://s845.beta.photobucket.com/user/OldColdWarrior2009/med...

http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/9380/10373165_1.jpg?v=8C...

http://molot.biz/product-e/vepr223-super.jpg

For most calibers, you can find guns with many different form factors that accept bullets of that caliber. So what?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/1aCHK.jpg

However, the idiocy of the tweet, designed only to spread FUD, the mindless retweets and ignorant comments, really piss me off. A few people have pointed out that .223 is a calibur, or 'shell size', and one of the mindless retweeters said she thinks shell size is gun specific.

i mean WTF... such epic ignorance...

Foreign and imaginary.

Getting legal access to high-performance rifles similar to military weapons is pretty trivial. Easily concealable weapons like pistols usually are more difficult to get a hold of legally.

The legal environment doesn't always translate into reality. I live in a small upstate NY city where we unfortunately have lots of shootings, mostly between poor high school kids. The local drug gangs make "community guns" available in public places like parks.

I would never want to own one, but for someone like me to own a handgun for target practice, there's an onerous process. I'd be required to get training, get background checked and go through a permit application process. After that's done, it's up to a county court judge's discretion, and in this county, the answer is usually "No."

A mass of civilians aren't going to be able to stand up to a column of tanks easily, but just a hundred civilians armed with AR-15s are going to be able to stand up even to massed police forces. And if an insurgency is supported by the public at large then life is not going to be easy for the police and the military. This is the way that all guerrilla wars go, and there are many examples of successful insurgencies when they have widespread popular support, even against very well armed government forces.

Pardon me, but I grew up in a country where 'oppressive regime' was not far off at all, and where brutal murders happened in my neighborhood all the time. I knew my Dad didn't own a gun and it scared me to death. So how dare you belittle my beliefs in the need for armed civilians. Disagree with them, by all means, but do you really think I'm arguing children should be murdered en masse?

What you're proposing is, in my opinion, that same thing as arguing that the government should regulate or perhaps even ban internet access because of all the child pornography. Screw civil liberties, think of the children!

edit: Also, I would argue that confiscating laptops at airports will save as many lives as trying to ban guns in the US at this point.

A classic anti-technology strawman. It is like saying "Computers only use numbers, you can't do graphics or text with them".

At the very lowest level computers are entirely logical, but you can program one to deal with uncertainties and probabilities.

In fact that argument isn't quite relevant, unless you are arguing against the computers making the policy decisions, which I think was never under consideration.

Computers/technology can certainly be a strong tool to assist gun control.

One idea completely off the top of my head would be to data-mine as much info as possible about past shooting/shooters and then use this to help guide granting (or not) of gun licenses. With Bayesian this-and-that, the computer could give a number "estimated 0.000001% chance of serial killing" and refer the application to the appropriate person (e.g. a detailed analysis for people "at risk" (large probability), or a quicker check for "safer" people).

I agree, using technology to understand brain chemistry and further mental health research is a step forward.

Modern society seems to be good at creating situations where people feel powerless or like lashing out. The offender obviously makes an awful choice, but maybe we should think about how to make things so that society isn't so brutal?

I say that gun control is the "easy" answer because it is a response to a specific event. That doesn't mean that I think that gun control is "bad". I'm just saying that the underlying issue that leads people to do awful things has other negative (but not as horrific) effects too.

As an unrelated illustration, the 14 year old inner city kid walking around with a gun or knife feels miserable and powerless. The weapon makes him feel empowered, but in a negative way -- if he grows up that way, that's going to leave him vulnerable to substance abuse and that mindset will be passed on to his kids and his social circle too.

It's not the gun.

Guns are tools, they aren't the problem. We need to be better at being able to detect these individuals who are likely to go on these rampages. But more than that we need to have a society that is better able to defend itself. If even 1 in 20 or fewer teachers at a school were people who were responsible and trained and carried guns for self-defense then these sorts of attacks would be far less common. Because the attacks would be ended sooner by armed citizens acting in defense. And because then schools and other places would no longer be defenseless. The reason why these crazy people go to schools to commit mayhem is because they know that they aren't going to be stopped. They know that it's just going to be unarmed teachers and defenseless children. If that stopped being the case, if there started to be more of a risk to the shooter in these situations then maybe these sorts of shootings would be less common.

We've spent the last half century in the developed world progressively making ourselves more and more defenseless and less and less empowered, on the premise that doing so also disempowers the bad guys. The rage killers, the school shooters, the terrorists, etc. But the exact opposite has come to pass. We've disempowered the individual and made ourselves defenseless and even more vulnerable to these monsters.

No, not everyone should own a gun, or be allowed to own a gun. But if we started to cultivate more of a culture of self-reliance and personal responsibility, and if we started increasingly empowering individuals to take care of their own self-defense by becoming more aware, more trained, more prepared, and to carry weapons if they so choose then maybe we'll actually end up with a safer society.

I've been shooting guns since I was 10 years old, and I've been carrying a pocket knife since middle school. I take these things vary seriously. I maintain my certifications and training in first-aid and CPR. I have well stocked first aid kits in my home, car, and backpack (when I ride the bus or bike), including things like hemostatic compounds. I also have a concealed carry permit (which means that my info and fingerprints are on file with local law enforcement) and own firearms. If you make a law which limits my capability to defend myself or others then you are not making society more safe. And almost any gun-control law is going to preferentially disempower good people like myself while having much less impact on the bad guys who don't care about living within the law.

Edit: the concentration on guns as an item which "enables violence" is no more sensible than the TSA's concentration on liquids or nail clippers. It's just another form of security theater.

The best we can really do is tighten all of the bolts that we can see, and hope the leak slows down to an acceptable level. Improve gun ownership laws, improve our handling of the mentally ill, assist those experiencing crippling poverty, etc. Attack all the angles reasonably to get crime down to a reasonable level.

(And an acceptable level cannot be "no incidents". To accomplish that would require a police state. We must accept that once in a while horrific things will happen, and there was nothing that could reasonably be done to prevent it. i.e., shit happens.)

Ultimately it's impossible to be knowledgeable of the bad intentions of every single warped individual on the planet. And some of those folks will have the capability of harming people, perhaps many people. Look at 9/11 as an example of how a handful of well trained and highly motivated individuals armed with only box cutters were able to take control of jumbo jets and ram them into buildings and kill thousands. That's an extreme example but it's worth remembering, because there are many, many examples of similar situations. Look at the unabomber, for example. A brilliant loner who was able to fashion bombs from household materials in a shack in the middle of nowhere and kill several people. Or look at all of the other bombers throughout history. You can't legislate away the ability to build bombs, they're already illegal, but anyone with enough knowledge and a little money can make them and kill people. The same goes for arson, which kills hundreds of people every year.

In my view the solution is not to try to disempower the entire populace by taking away guns and hoping that this disempowers the bad guys enough to make it that much harder for them to kill. I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others. I think it's also worth concentrating on social and cultural changes which make our society more accepting and hopefully make the creation of these violent individuals less common, but that's a much harder problem to tackle.

I live in a country(Lebanon) that went through a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Guns are a fact of life here, they are very easy to get and lots of people have them. And yet nobody has ever gone into a school and shot children and parents that I know of.

We've had bombings, assassinations, terrorism, and even a war now and then. If it's violent, we've had it. But not this. Are Lebanese people better people? Hell no. But our societies tend to be more closely knit and more traditional. That has many many drawbacks but it also means that people very rarely get to such extremes in terms of mental well-being(to the point where they could do something like this) without being noticed.

I'm not saying traditional societies are the answer, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, it's not just a choice between "bad people" or "too many guns". Reality is much more nuanced than that.

Overwhelmingly guns are owned and used by peaceful, law-abiding civilians. That they can be misused does not mean we should punish those who have done no wrong.

And the idea that we can live in a simple world where we can divorce ourselves from violence, death, responsibility, and from tools of lethal force is simply naive. Pacifism is a luxury of those who have never experienced the threat of violence. In the real world there are violent men with bad intentions and being able to forestall such men by using lethal force can save lives, your own life and the lives of others. You can either turn away from that truth or foist it off on the responsibility of others or you can face it directly. But you can't make it simply go away.

We haven't put the money into brain research to figure out if there is a test we could do. Checkpoints are the easy part. Look at all the places we test for drugs (employment, school sports). If we figured out the mythical dipstick that tells if your brain chemistry is broken, I would imagine it would come up in a lot places that drug testing does now and probably be part of peoples regular checkups. We just don't have a clue and no amount of dealing with the how will fix the problem, we need to get the courage to look at the why.

You can't ensure that every single person that has a mental disability gets treatment, but as a society we do not support easy access to mental health treatment. Mental health services, like physical health services, are pay to play and that provides a huge barrier for people with mental disability, esp. since some amount of those people will have a very hard time affording such treatment and/or medication. Consider also that folks with mental disability tend to have less robust support networks of family of friends and that mental health care has stigma attached to it for most of the US population.

The best option is to reduce the difficult of getting mental health care treatment as much as possible: universal health care, public awareness campaigns to fight against social stigma, and more robust social services.

But when it comes down to it, if a crazy person can easily get a hold of a gun, then there will be more shootings. There are two requirements for shooting sprees, 1. Crazy person, 2. Easy access of guns. Try to limit both.

Even so, this represents, very optimistically, a dozen or two hours of interaction with others a week. It cannot hold a candle to the interaction children going to schools experience.

I can only speak for my family, but we spend lots of time with other families and children. Church, Boy Scouts, Soccer, etc.

Ask yourself, have you ever been in public and recognized a home schooler because of the way they act?

The inverse is true too, how many socially awkward people do you remember from your public schooling? I sure remember a lot.

From my personal experience, I don't see a relationship between home/public schooling and social relationships.

A few days ago someone posted a web site called http://www.banthecar.com where they laid out detailed arguments for banning all cars, because of all the problems they cause, including accidental deaths. Obviously banning cars is not reasonable or realistic.

We have a process for who is and is not allowed to drive a car, and we are fairly comfortable with it, even though it still fails to prevent thousands of deaths. The process of firearm ownership could use some adjustments, but ultimately we cannot prevent all deaths. The best we can do is prevent those who are obviously unsuitable(1) from owning firearms, and ensuring we have a system to remove the rights of those who abuse them.

(1) this is very dangerous due to the history of gun control being used to enable racism and genocide. The criteria must be objective, not subjective.

The problem is that he had access to guns when he was mentally ill. Thats the problem. You cannot isolate the two.

Look at example 2.5 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Structure

By reducing the argument to one extreme vs. another extreme, these are strawmen arguments... very few support either extreme, so the commenter can then knock down the arguments and look reasonable saying pretty much anything.

Do they get to plead insanity in court? Should they be sent to mental hospitals or prisons?

I'm not being facetious, I'm asking seriously, what definition of sanity are we running on here?

Serial killers in general are perfectly aware of what they are doing, they just don't care about the judgement imposed by society on such actions and at the same time the personal payoff is too great to ignore.

From that, a huge majority supports some new restrictions on gun ownership (background checks, no guns for felons or the mentally ill, require gun registration) but almost nobody supports "no guns, period".

(source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/n...).

Uh, we're talking about people who are frequently suicidal and are mentally ill enough to shoot up a kindergarten. I suspect they're not weighing odds in a logical manner, somehow.

http://www.policemag.com/list/tag/friendly-fire.aspx

(Do note that many of the incidents there involve an officer intentionally firing on other officers. But there are accidents there.)

1) The way our prison system works. It makes people worse. It makes them better criminals. It removes much of their opportunity to get better (try getting a decent job as a felon). It creates desperation. 2) the way we treat mental illness. By that I mean it is demonized and ignored. Does health insurance even cover mental health exams or treatments? Probably not basic coverage 3) Disparity of wealth. In the town I live in there are people living in absolute poverty and people driving around in lamborghinis and million dollar churches. The cost of that car could feed 50 people for a year.

In thiscase there is no telling what the root cause was yet. I suspect a case of someone just losing it.

http://www.murderuk.com/mass_murderers.html

Other attacks have occurred at schools without guns including this one with a machete that resulted in injuries but no deaths: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/8/news....

I would suggest that perhaps there is also a societal issue in the US compared to Britain causing these things (in addition to the affect of the larger population) but the most important aspect may be the greater availability of firearms that gives opportunity to people that may not carry out the act if they need time and preparation AND it greatly increases the lethality of attacks that do take place.

Note this excludes terrorism where numerous incidents have had a bigger death toll but those planned coordinated attacks and I think a different category from the sort of incident today.

The Clackamas shooting was a perfect example of an incident that gun control likely would've prevented. It was not premeditated, it was a bad kid on a very bad day that found a gun easily. If he didn't find it, I think it's safe to wager he wouldn't have done it.