A firearm question for you LeftiesFollow

We already do.

No, he's just French, not gay.

I'm not sure I could support a king who uses the same fabric for his clothes as he does his furniture.

Edited, Jan 21st 2013 4:20pm by Allegory

Great post, gbaji. Great fucking post. You champion, you beast, you posting master. This will go down in history as your finest fucking work.

Not really since they could file suit even without silly "We're not gonna do it!" laws on the books.

When did a faculty member sprint to their car, get a gun, and stop a mass shooting? I find it difficult to just take your word on this one.

I'm going to have to say that the odds of this helping more than harming are slim to none. Not only do the stars have to align just so to have this hypothetical go off as planned, but I also would not feel terribly comfortable knowing that the creepy janitor at my kids school might be packing heat while my child is in attendance. Thinking back to my school days, I can think of maybe one or two faculty members that I might have trusted to handle a gun around the students. If your harebrained scheme were to be in any way effective, there would have to be mandatory gun training involved for all faculty, and if you're going to start expecting these faculty members to play Rambo, you definitely need to pay them at least double what they're making now.

Its just not a good idea on so many fronts, IMHO.

You okay there, Kavekk? Feeling ignored?

Irrelevant. It's a matter of who "they" are. An individual could sue claiming that a federal assault weapon ban (whatever that means) violates their 2nd amendment right. But a state could not. By passing a law which directly contradicts such a ban, it allows the states themselves to make a separate challenge (that pesky 10th amendment) on the issue. Doubly relevant given the restrictions (made/sold within the state). What right does the federal government have to limit non-interstate commerce of firearms? Clear 10th amendment issue, even leaving off the whole firearms aspect of it.

When a state and federal law directly contradict each other, it's also a lot faster/easier for said case to get to the Supreme Court level. Again, this is an indication of these legislatures having a good grasp of our our judicial system works. If they don't pass a law at the state level which contradicts the federal law, they can't make a claim that the federal law unfairly infringes on their state's right to pass their own laws. It's a standing issue.

Ended a shooting (again, "stop" can also mean "prevent", which is not what I'm talking about). Go look up the Pearl High School Shooting. Of course, unless you really look, you'll just read that the assistant principle stopped the shooter with his pistol as the shooter was attempting to leave the scene. What you wont read, unless you look for more detail, is that the reason he wasn't able to intervene earlier was because he had to run to his vehicle to retrieve his weapon:



and



How many fewer shots would the shooter have gotten off if he had only need to run to his office, or lounge to retrieve his gun instead of the federally mandated distance from the edge of the campus?



And yet, there are nearly as many stories of individual armed civilians intervening in a shooting (and potentially preventing it from becoming a mass shooting in the first place) as there are stories of mass shootings themselves. For every Aurora Theater Shooting, there's a New Destiny Church shooting (also in Aurora just 3 months prior) which never became a mass shooting because one person happened to be there with a concealed weapon and ended the shooting.

Remember that the odds of being in such a shooting in the first place are "slim to none", yet they do happen.



Most people who own firearms legally are capable users of them (yes, there are exceptions). Doubly so those who apply for and obtain concealed carry permits. Presumably triply those who are also employees at a school (and already have a whole bunch of requirements and responsibilities when it comes to the kids in their care). And my suggestion does not preclude a school deciding who can or can't carry weapons on their campus. If they decide that the janitor isn't sufficiently responsible or trusted, they can exclude janitorial staff if they wish. They can also require that anyone who wants to bring a weapon to work must pass a safety class (or place any other restriction they want). The point is that without removing the current federal and state laws regarding this, we can't allow *anyone* other than on duty police and security to legally have firearms on or near a school campus, whether the school, the district, or the parents would want them to or not.



Because it's unlikely to reduce the number of deaths when a shooting occurs? But "unlikely" is still greater odds than currently exist. And even under the current restrictions there have been rare cases where it's happened anyway. So higher probability of reducing the number of dead children isn't worth it? Why not?


What's strange is that we can say with some degree of certainty that the statistical number of deaths from such shootings will be greater over time with those laws in place than with them not. So by keeping them in place we are killing school children. We don't know which ones, or how many, but we are increasing the total number who will be (and have been) killed over any given period of time by keeping those laws in place. So you're basically supporting a course of action which will result in more dead kids purely because.... why? A knee jerk assumption that guns are bad and should be banned wherever we can? I just don't get it. I'm sure for the hard core long term anti-gun crowd increased deaths among students is a price worth paying for the goal of more gun control, but is this something more "normal" people agree with? If you could pass a law that would ensure that 10 more children were killed in gun violence each year, but that by doing so you'd increase awareness of gun violence and increase the odds of passing some kind of sweeping gun control, would you do it? Would the end goal of gun control be worth a statistically increased number of deaths of children?


To me, that's what we're looking at here. It's a law that seems designed to make schools nice fat targets for potential mass shooters. It's designed to maximize the number of kids who will die when such shootings do occur. Now maybe that's just unintended side effects of a well meaning law, or maybe it's a sinister plot to intentionally create as many helpless child victims of guns as possible as part of a longer term gun control push. I can't say for sure, but in either case, shouldn't any rational person oppose the law? I think so. Unless you want more kids to die in these kinds of shootings, that is.

Edited, Jan 21st 2013 5:46pm by gbaji

First, nice opinion editorial link. I went ahead and looked up the story itself instead of the dong-gobbling your link provided. You're welcome. Considering he was stopped while leaving the school meaning the shooting was already stopped, to answer your question I'd go with none. He specifically targeted his ex-girlfriend so she'd be dead regardless, the other girl was in the vicinity so she'd be dead too, and I'm not finding further details but I kind of doubt he just wandered around to injure the seven other people so I imagine they were in the same range as the two dead girls as well. If he saw the rifle while Luke was entering the school (Luke was wearing a trench coat, but all indications say he wasn't trying too hard to hide the 30-30) he'd still have to go to where the gun was stored, unlock it, and hope he ran to the right place to stop those shootings. I'd say that'd take at least thirty seconds depending on the lock and distance to and from the incident and stored weapon, as opposed to the minute plus to get to his truck (Spoilerand we're assuming the truck was at the legal distance, and he didn't just have the gun illegally stored. Nothing in any story I've read said the truck was legally 1,320ft away from the school grounds. World record quarter mile is 45s, and I don't think you'll argue that the VP of a high school was also an Olympic runner.) and get lucky Luke was leaving anyway.

Now, maybe if the VP's office happened to overlook the main entrance that Luke came through, and if he was paying close enough attention to a student walking in through the door and saw the rifle, and if the gun was stored in the Joe's office anyway, and if Luke didn't decide to start shooting anyway after seeing Joe's gun then Joe could have prevented the whole thing and you'd be right. However, and this is a big however, this is just playing the "if" game until all the details of your hypothetical line up perfectly to suit you. The problem is that the actual details of what happened don't make the odds all that much favorable for having the gun in the school in the hands of any Pep Streebek wannabe.

Adorable that you think this was anything more than a *****-stroking sop to the NRA "Obama is a Fascist Monster!!!" set.

Is any mention of him
So, do you have a link for your quarter mile statement or will you just gloss over that? Because you said there have been cases.

Gun control won't end crime, obviously. We have gun control, but organized criminals still run around with them. Organized criminals are less likely to go shoot up a school, though. School shootings seem to be a spur of the moment thing by troubled kids, enabled by the kids' easy access to guns.

Gun control would have prevented the assistant principal from getting his gun in the truck, yes, but it likely also would have prevented the 16-year-old gunman from getting a rifle. It's kind of silly to argue that easy access to guns prevents crimes enabled by easy access to guns.

Now, if the assistant principal had stopped organized criminals (say, terrorists) from carrying out organized crime, that would have been a better argument.