Actually not a bad idea. I think electronically keyed would be a huge step forward. I also think it would breed a market for hacking them, but you can't solve every problem at the start. I say this as someone who has 5 guns that would be sunsetted.

When someone attempts to break into my home, endangering my family, how would I know the limits of their intent? What if they are in a drug fog and irrational? Why should I take that risk?

The fact is, I don't/won't. You can. Your choice.

I am not opposed to balanced "arms" control.

Does anyone know yet where this fellow obtained his AR-style rifle and the other items he used to carry out the shooting? And didn't he take an Uber to the school? Obviously, he'd planned the shooting and he, equally obviously, planned to escape, at least temporarily. (It's reported he mingled with other students as the fled the building, then went to a Subway and then to a McDonald's, where he was arrested without incident.)

To me, this seems far more a question of mental health issues -- and society's complete disregard for addressing mental health problems among the population, something that's been occurring since the deinstitutionalization movement of the very early 1970s -- than it is about the gun in particular. From all reports, this 19-year-old was a giant, blinking-red, sign that was announcing its intentions for quite some time. Yet no one did a single thing to intervene? That's very concerning.

All this talk about gun control and gun reform measures is nice, but there aren't going to be any real changes as a result. Maybe a few bans of such small items as bump stocks and the sort. Until we know how and where he obtained his weapon, and whether anything untoward occurred in regards to that action, we don't have a complete picture of the tragedy, in my opinion.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I read that when his mother died and he moved in with a friend of the mother an issue was made of the AR. It just boggles my mind that a 19 year old kid would move into someone's house and just bring along his AR. That would have set off all kinds of red flags for me, especially in conjunction with everyone saying how strange he was.

Break into our home while we're there? That would be a fatal mistake on the transgressor's part. There's nothing in the law of self-defense that requires you to ascertain the transgressor's intent, when he's kicking in your door or trying to come in through a window, before you open up on him. The law pretty much assumes your life is in danger at that point and that you have the right to use all measures to protect it, including use of lethal force.

Police will also tell you that they're not there to protect and save individual citizens (unless they're actually right there with the citizen when something bad happens). They're there to safeguard the flock. Members of the flock sometimes tragically lose their lives to the wolves, unfortunately. But the flock will endure.

By the way, I always recommend Andrew Branca's "The Law of Self Defense: The Indispensable Guide for the Armed Citizen" whenever someone decides he/she is going to own a gun and especially when they're going to open-carry or conceal-carry it.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

You are a fucking asshole. I really do hope the ban hammer falls on your feeble head you worthless piece of shit. Anywho.. #2 on the ignore post list.

Every student at that school who's been interviewed and who knew the shooter, even only casually, said that he was "off" or even just plain "crazy." I agree that the gun played a role in his being able to effectuate his evil deed, but there had to be numerous points along his path where an intervention of some sort -- either legally, socially or psychologically -- would have headed off this tragedy. Perhaps we'll learn more about his journey to infamy in the coming days. I'm certainly hoping so.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

https://www.usatoday.com/...ities-say/340606002/

It's not one or the other. It's mental health combined with how easy it is for someone to get a gun.

And the utter unwillingness of your country to make it more difficult for people in general but crazy people specifically to obtain guns.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

He turns 18 and immediately buys the rifle. Nothing too strange about that, but this stands out in the article:

"Melisa McNeill, his public defender, described Cruz in his initial court appearance Thursday as a "broken child" who suffered brain-development problems and depression."

As the article also notes, he in some ways is similar to the Virginia Tech shooter -- who killed dozens with two handguns. Mental health issues seem to have predominated in his life as well.

Was the Parkland shooter on any medications such as anti-depressants and the like?

Also, there's this from the article -- which supports what I said about there not being any change to Dan's cultural zeitgeist in the foreseeable future:

"Experts say national tragedies such as Wednesday’s rarely lead to changes in federal gun laws because people burrow further on their own side of the fence. States with tight gun restrictions squeeze tighter. States with loose laws open up more.

"In the wake of these shootings, reactions are polarized, and people tend to double down,” said Timothy Lytton, associate dean for research and faculty development at Georgia State’s School of Law.

"States are likely to do more of the same, while Congress is likely to be deadlocked on the issue of guns," he said. "

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

If we would do something down here about addressing the crazies (not meant pejoratively when it comes to people with mental health issues) there wouldn't have been this tragedy in the first place. But as I've pointed out previously, since deinstitutionalization in the early 1970s (when it really took off, though we've apparently been doing it since 1955) we as a society have become extremely reluctant to force people with mental health issues into treatment, against their will. I'm sure all of us down here have a story or two about this or that mentally disturbed person who wanders around town or the neighborhood and can be frightening in some cases.

To me, this fellow fit the classic pattern -- just based on public reporting -- of someone who never should have been allowed to purchase a firearm. But was he previously seen for mental health issues or did no one, including his late mother, want to do the hard things and get him seen by medical professionals? We don't know. At any rate, this portion of an article from the New York Times is illustrative of the shooter's life before he turned to ultimate evil:

"Before he was hauled into a jailhouse hearing room on Thursday, head bowed and shackled at the wrists and ankles, Nikolas Cruz had been causing trouble as long as anyone here could remember.

Neighbors said patrol cars were regularly in his mother’s driveway. More recently, Mr. Cruz, 19, had been expelled from his high school. He posted pictures of weapons and dead animals on social media.

Almost immediately after Mr. Cruz turned up at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Wednesday and, the authorities said, killed 17 people with a semiautomatic rifle, the disconnected shards of a difficult life began to come together. Students and neighbors traded stories of their experiences with him and wondered if anything could have been done.

Some of the stories fell within the bands of typical teenage mischief-making. But others — including a comment on YouTube Mr. Cruz may have posted last year saying he wished to be “a professional school shooter” — were considerably more troubling. The comment, left under the name “nikolas cruz,” was reported to the F.B.I. by someone who did not know Mr. Cruz, and the agency said on Thursday that it had been unable to determine who had posted it."

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

We’d have to change the current definition of being mentally ill - and this new definition would include a lot more people. Anyone who’s ever committed domestic abuse, or beaten a child - as examples.

Yeah I made a similar point above. I'm not sure very many of these school shooters rise to the level of any sort of mental illness that would get you institutionalized, perhaps not even diagnosed with anything at all.

We have a real problem in this country with how we deal with the mentally ill, starting with a lack of resources to even address their needs. This has grown acute as we've pushed deinstitutionalization to its limits over the decades, it seems to me.

There's also this to consider when it comes to the issue of school shootings, and I firmly believe it: The increase in school shootings is due more to the absence of a civilizing culture these days than to any supposed absence of laws to deal with guns.

As Steve Hawley and I have observed, there were plenty of guns around when we were growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, and plenty of violence on TV as TV westerns and cop shows amply demonstrated. There were even shooting clubs in schools. Yet no one was picking up a gun and shooting up those same schools.

What's changed since those days? That's a question we need to be asking of ourselves, because it sure seems to me that we've greatly loosened or even eliminated the civilizing bonds that once used to serve to prevent these tragedies.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

When we look at the states with great safety records for violent crime, the top 8 look like this:

1. Vermont
2. Maine
3. Virginia
4. New Hampshire
5. Idaho
6. Conneticut
7. Kentucky
8. Wyoming

Rhode Island and New Jersey sort of mess up the top 10 as they are ranked in the top 10 for overall low crime, but outside of the top 10 for violent crime. IOW, they have more violent crime than they should given the rest of their crime.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/crime-and-corrections/public-safety

It would make sense, if higher gun ownership was linked to higher violent crime, then those should be 8 of the lower gun ownership states, right?

But that is not the case. In terms of percentage of households posessing guns (rank of those states in US), it looks like this
1. Wyoming
8. Idaho
11. Kentucky
14. Vermont
24. Maine
31. Virginia
39. New Hampshire
46. Connecticut


Hardly a 1:1 relationship.

If we compare a similar region, in Vermont or Maine we see more than twice as high of a percentage of households owning guns compared to Connecticut, yet they have less violent crime. Maybe that's a NYC effect, I'd buy that. But then compare the same two states to New Hampshire, where there is a 30% difference in gun ownership rates (approx 30% to approx 40%) yet New Hampshire has more violent crime than either Maine or Vermont.


I live in the most heavily armed state in the nation, by far, yet violent crime is quite low. It would be even lower (much) if we eliminated the effects of the reservation, where, ironically, there doesn't seem to be much gun violence despite an incredibly high rate of violent crime. The reservation seems to be a blade culture, lots and lots of stabbings.


It almost seems that the more important factors in determining likelihood of violent crime have to do with race,population density, economic status, and education more than whether guns are possessed at a higher or lower rate.


I'm also curious about the chicken/egg part of this question. I think it's fairly likely that people who feel that they live in dangerous areas are more likely to see owning a gun as a necessary and reasonable part of their lives, which would drive up the gun ownership percentage in that area... Does the gun ownership drive the violent crime, or does the violent crime drive the gun ownership. I would think the latter.

You better believe that's the case here in the metro Detroit area (especially in Detroit proper). I help my father with the landlord-type duties he has with rental homes we jointly own in the city. I'm not joking when I say that we NEVER go anywhere in Detroit without either a concealed-carry handgun or an open-carry handgun, depending on where we're at when conducting business. There are many, many instances of defensive gun use that occur regularly in Detroit, too, and I'm sure that many city residents have guns in their homes, for good reason.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I don't think I had articulated my point very well in that I feel that the presence of guns DOES deter violent crimes, despite the fact that areas with more violent crime, are also likely to contain more guns. I believe it's an effect rather than a cause.

Similarly, areas where people own bear spray are also the areas where bear attacks/conflict occurrs. Does the presence of the spray cause an increase in bear conflicts? I don't think many people would try to make that argument.

The problem with absolute statements is that they seldom hold up. I recall 1966, Charles Whitman killing over a dozen and wounding several dozen from the Univ of Texas tower.

Off hand, what's changed. Probably the proliferation of semi-automatic, high capacity weapons. I don't recall the gun Whitman used, but probably a hunting rifle.

<<From all reports, this 19-year-old was a giant, blinking-red, sign that was announcing its intentions for quite some time. Yet no one did a single thing to intervene? That's very concerning.>>

Reports I've read are that his mother called the police multiple times to have them come out to try to talk him down out of various emotional states. He also posted a comment on a YouTube channel saying that he wanted to be "a professional school shooter" and the person operating the channel contacted the FBI, who went and talked to the kid. Some people did things, and law enforcement had contact (though not arrests) with him, based off his stated propensity for violence.

I don't know that it would be easy for either side to prove a cause/effect thesis in this regard. I was born and raised in Detroit, for instance. It wasn't always the way it's depicted these days, believe me. Did those neighborhoods become more violent as a result of guns, or did more guns show up as a result of the increase in violence?

I had three uncles on the Detroit police force (and have two cousins, including a female one -- who's a supervising sergeant -- today), one of whom was a gang squad member. He says that in the 1980s, they noted a serious uptick in gang violence, with gang members being vastly more up-gunned, meaning they were carrying weapons (long rifles) far more capable than the revolvers and shotguns most police patrols were equipped with in the day. At the same time, drugs (especially crack cocaine) were devastating a number of Motown's neighborhoods. You could see the rot in those neighborhoods take hold almost immediately after. It's sad.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Charles Whitman used hunting-type rifles, though not all of them were of such design. He also appears to have had mental issues that helped propel him to madness and infamy. Additionally, Whitman apparently had a malignant brain tumor that may or may not have played a role in his murder spree, according to this source.

The term "semi-automatic, high capacity weapons" is often bandied about by the gun control lobby, by the way. But semi-automatic weapons have been around and in common use for more than a century now. And some school shooters -- including the Virginia Tech villain (who also had mental health issues) -- have used semi-auto handguns of standard capacities. They just managed to kill a great many because of the violence effect (overwhelm vulnerable groups with sudden, bloody violence and many will curl up and await their fates, rather than flee, hide or fight, sadly).

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

3 percent of americans own 50 percent of america's guns. i think a lot of your crazies are going to be found in that cohort. it's not the ownership of a dozen semi-auto long guns with bump stocks (paddock), it's the culture that causes him to want to own them.

have you ever thought that a culture that deifies guns is what animates and energizes the crazies you want to address?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I think it has simply become a cultural meme in the U.S. that largely started with Whitman that when you're pissed off at society or your work, etc. and want to get back at them that getting a gun and taking them out is one option.

Once it's out there, I don't think anyone knows how you stop it. It's the U.S. version of running amok.

I pointed out last night that the percentage of gun ownership has greatly declined over the past 35 years but that guns are concentrated in the hands of fewer people. Ceteris parabus, it seems that it's a wash when it comes to this particular aspect.

You made my point about culture for me, though, perhaps without realizing it. (Or, in my opinion, the lack of a civilizing culture complete with the institutions that used to enforce such civilizing influences.)

What's really changed over the last last half-century, or at least since the mid-1970s? It seems to me that it's the lack of bonds and boundaries within our culture that used to act to head-off, preempt or otherwise prevent such mindless gun violence, especially when it comes to school shootings. For one, we won't address the serious failings in our mental health system, including a lack of resources targeted at the issue in the first place.

For another, we also won't tell folks what to do or how to behave when in "polite society." Parental authority -- or simply even adult authority -- is almost nonexistent, from the looks of things. When I was a boy in the 1960s and early 1970s, you listened to and obeyed the directives you were given by adults, including teachers , neighbors and so forth, or you faced clear consequences, starting with those dealt out by a father and/or mother. Which brings me to the disintegration of the so-called "nuclear family."

Adam Lanza (the Sandy Hook) shooter? Mother and no father or other adult male influence. He shot his mother first before going on his kill spree.

This shooter? Father died years ago, mother on her own. No adult male influence in the family unit. Mother died not long ago.

What's the rate of single-parent households in this country these days? Probably greater than it was in the 1960s, is my initial guess (I promise to research that further and report back any findings).

It seems to me that we as a society used to preach, and enforce, self-control rather than gun control. Do we even do so nowadays? Hard to tell, if you ask me.

So, instead of acting as stewards of a collective culture, we abrogate our responsibilities when it comes to kids and instead institute a multiplicity of gun laws an increasingly depraved citizenry -- which lacks the cultural governor switches we used to instill in each person -- won't obey. And, as I've said, short of complete and total confiscation of privately owned guns (not happening anytime in the foreseeable future, sir), what we're left with is pretty much the status quo. Lots of talk, little action and absolutely no desire to address what seems to be the true issues causing the rot that's leading to these school shootings.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

The use of semi-automatic weapons is the primary shift over the past decade, even though they have existed for a long time. More states (blue only) will ban them. SCOTUS let stand Maryland's law.