Posted on 10/02/2017 10:30:27 AM PDT by upchuck
After the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas, the impulse of politicians will be to lower flags, offer moments of silence, and lead a national mourning. Yet what we need most of all isnt mourning, but action to lower the toll of guns in America.
We dont need to simply acquiesce to this kind of slaughter. When Australia suffered a mass shooting in 1996, the country united behind tougher laws on firearms. As a result, the gun homicide rate was almost halved, and the gun suicide rate dropped by half, according to the Journal of Public Health Policy.
Skeptics will say that there are no magic wands and that laws cant make the carnage go away. To some extent, theyre right. Some criminals will always be able to obtain guns, especially in a country like America that is awash with 300 million firearms. We are always likely to have higher gun death rates than Europe.
But the scale is staggering. Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (including suicides, murders and accidents) than the sum total of all the Americans who died in all the wars in American history, back to the American Revolution. Every day, some 92 Americans die from guns, and American kids are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway of Harvard.
So while theres no magic wand available, here are some steps we could take that would, collectively, make a difference.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What we really need to do is import 300 million fully armed Chinese to follow each American 24/7 and shoot them should they look dangerous.
One can only imagine the EOs that would have been issued this morning if Shrillary had won the White House.
Who knew guns could jump right up and kill people? Like I said in reply #1, same old, same old.
32,752 a year? BS!
Well the stats are correct but most of it is suicides. And only about 250 deaths per year or less from black rifles.
I wonder how leftists can be FOR asssisted suicide, but also happy when gun control makes it hard for people to kill themselves.
A mass shooting in Scotland was the premise for strict gun control in Great Britain and it was a massacre in Tasmania that took away all the guns from the Australians.
We the People of the United States reject such stupidity.
No, the massacre in Tasmania did not do that. A government composed of swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood did that. Same as in UK. Look to the communists in the US demonicRAT Party to take inspiration from them.
well, Las Vegas has gun control and we are informed that the location was a “gun free Zone” too
so... more and more unconstitutional restrictions on firearms is NOT the answer to anything
How can the liberals tell us they hope all the victims in Las Vegas were Trump supporters and then expect us to give up our firearms? Do they think we’re suicidal?
Shooter violated gun control.
Concert was in a gun free zone.
Sitting ducks, just like the Democrats designed them to be.
As I always like to point out, it would take hundreds of centuries for American and Canadian criminals (including the few nutcases like Gamil Gharbi and Adam Lanza and this guy in Las Vegas) to equal the number that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot murdered within just one century and that these men achieved that toll with governments that disarmed the citizenry.
I'll just pull out the tried and true response...Come get some!
Well, the shooter is dead. So we have to find someone to blame. Hey NRA, yeah you. Come over here for a minute. Wanna use you.
Killary says we should stand up to the NRA. Oh, and pay nine prices for her new book.
NYT still has it bass ackwards. If the proper use care, grooming and feeding of side arms were to be taught with the same fervor as sex education or driver training, at the high school level, it would both demystify guns themselves, and help to weed out and identify those who are prone to use them for bad purposes.
But NOOOO, the reaction is right away, “guns are BAD”, an evil in and of themselves, and must be abolished, because some minority of the population is so irrational, self-centered, or filled with such hatred of fellow human beings that taking of random lives stirs their consciences not at all.
If there were a way to manage the irrational, self-centered, or hatred-filled individuals with homicidal tendencies, that would be perhaps as effective as any thing we could do otherwise.
But “gun control” alone cannot achieve this objective.
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