champu

Agreed, a much bigger limiting factor is the ease with which a perpetrator can get their hands on the weapon that allows them to kill within their psychological make up/training. It's not clear to me that "Agreed..." was the correct way to start that sentence. I may not be parsing it correctly.

Therefore, it has already been made clear in this thread, that modern firearms make it easier to kill not only mechanically but also psychologically. I will certainly agree that the psychological challenge of killing can decrease with increasing range, making walking up to someone with a hammer and clubbing them to death "harder" than shooting someone on the street with a rifle out of a third story window. I think if you're in the five to ten yard range inside a building a crossbow and a firearm probably aren't all that different in that regard. (I can't speak from experience.) My statement was that given what I've read about this incident, I don't think a rifle for the crossbow would have changed the outcome much. I think people are assuming that automatically means I think Sandy Hook would have had the same result if Adam Lanza had a crossbow and that's not my argument at all, nor do I believe that. This incident reminds me of the guy at LAX a couple years ago who went in with a rifle (a scary black one with 30 round mags) to "kill pigs." He killed one TSA agent and injured a few other people before holing up in a corner. It is not as common as people assert for a weapon's efficiency to be the limiting factor in how many people get killed when something tragic like this happens.

I had the jets picking up one game in my bracket... D'oh!

Lol, no that's what you did with your original comment. How could I have possibly drifted away from the point of my original comment with my original comment? I've said nothing to the contrary. I'm done with your trolling nonsense in this thread. I don't think I need to add anything else to the point I've presented.

But with the training being equal... ...and the selling them on the idea of killing the people they're up against, you left off that part. That part is equally if not more important... It depends, really, but probably. In recent (and ongoing) conflicts in the middle east? Yeah. If you're in the woods for long periods and don't expect to encounter more than one or two "bad guys" at a time then a bow and quiver of arrows might be a better choice. It's quieter, lighter, and you can probably reuse the arrows several times. But you're intentionally drifting this exchange away from my point. When it comes to someone going on a shooting spree (not synonymous with "mass shooting" as the FBI defines it, mind you) you replace "mental preparation and being sold on the justice of taking the life of your enemy" with "profound mental illness." And it's this profound mental illness that is way more rare than firearm ownership, or even "assault weapon" ownership however broadly that term is defined. Without the profound mental illness, no weapon makes killing large numbers of people easy. Based on this Spanish kid's reaction to having killed one person I don't think the situation would have been much different if he had a firearm.

In that case, couldn't you guys save a lot of money by outfitting your military with bow and arrow in stead of guns? If we also don't train them physically and mentally (to the extent one can ever be trained mentally for combat) and sell them on the idea that the enemy they are up against is worth killing (if they aren't sold already) then, yeah... we may as well give them a bow and arrow.

Probably wouldn't have made any difference. The idea that a particular weapon "makes it easy" to kill a bunch of people presupposes that the mechanical act of causing enough damage to multiple human bodies such that they die is the most difficult part of of killing a bunch of people.

Leave the internet, take the cannoli.

This thread would be a lot more effective if everyone devoted themselves to a few Hofbräu Originals.

I think you're thinking of Jim Jefferies although it's also possible John Oliver did the same bit at some point. As an engineer I'll start by saying this is a terrible way to approach any problem or perceived problem. The, "I don't have an idea to make a situation or thing better, but I don't care, I know we have to change it anyway." is not defensible. Doing nothing is always in the trade space. In fact, it's the gold standard to which all proposed actions must be compared. That said, I've posted my thoughts about some things that might help, even if they wouldn't be perfect. I think holes in the background check process, basic safety education, and secure storage are things that can be improved, but we shouldn't ignore/shrug-off gun owners concerns about what most politicians actually propose... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4462390#4462390 http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4696191#4696191 http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4527208#4527208 http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4695095#4695095 I've also posted a more general opinion of types of firearms laws... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4482149;search_string=check;#4482149 ...and a template to evaluate some proposed measures/factors when an incident happens... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4446510#4446510

There are a couple quotes from the article that illustrate the problem with the way gun control advocates present their argument, and why people tend to react with statements like, "guns don't kill people, people kill people." It's no more a simpleton statement than is, "it (that is, one thing) is a problem no matter how you look at it." The numbers don't inform decision making. Nobody reviews a study of collective costs of guns, writes a piece of legislation, and then uses similar methodology to determine the value of their legislation. How the person doing the study arrives at the number, be it a dollar value or a death toll, goes right out the window when it comes time to write a law. For example: Mother jones likes to draw attention to suicides as every bit a problem as other gun violence and, based on the numbers in the article, a majority of the $230B they quote is losses of statistical life due to the 20,000 suicides. That's fine until they try to say that total cost can be divided up amongst all Americans, or they try to use this total cost to support their flagship legislation: bans on assault weapons or 10+ magazines. It is not significant. Gun owners, guns, gun deaths, the costs of gun deaths, and gun laws are not homogenous quantities and simply cannot be treated as such. You can very easily destroy 2000 guns in a buyback and cause exactly zero change in future deaths and injuries.

Nobody yet? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQkz_sGmQZ4

We should regulate cheetahs more. You could try putting up a sign that shows a parent holding their child out over the guard rail with a big red line through it. I was thinking the same thing about the horse in that other police chase incident.

But what is Han Solo? Han is Chewbacca's elk.

For the same reason we need "assault weapons" and "high capacity magazines" and "unsafe handguns", because if you wait through enough iterations of the laws, just about everything will be an unsafe high capacity armor piercing assault weapon. There's a .22lr target pistol (M&P 22c) my dad wanted to get me for my birthday but he can't because it's an "assault weapon" by California's standards. Regarding the other train of thought in this thread, Obama should not really be at the center of gun control debate unless you're talking about appointing judges. SCOTUS decisions on gun control cases (if and when they grant cert) are likely to be 5-4 decisions down "appointment party lines", and that's really where all these debates end.

Patrick Kane's season isn't over! Let's go Hawks!

I was going to say... the answer is either "Down." or "Up some really sketchy stairs."

Display models at gun shows, gun stores, and conventions like this have the firing pins removed and/or zip-ties through the action as a backup safety measure. People are likely to be handling firearms they are less familiar with (who would go to a gun show to look at guns they already own?) and, while the rules of gun safety should be followed to prevent accidents even with unfamiliar firearms, this serves as just one more backstop. It's similar to the practice of using chamber flags at a range when you're not shooting a particular firearm. It's there to prevent honest (however arguably stupid) mistakes. As others have pointed out, this rule doesn't apply to personally owned firearms being carried in accordance with all applicable laws. This policy does not emulate gun free zone policies. Gun free zones are not about preventing honest (however arguably stupid) mistakes.

Thanks, that's very helpful Jeanne.

I honestly doubt the officer's thought process was, "Nobody runs away from child support... If I don't gun him down, justice is never going to be served.... ... Alright, now to tie a bow on this with a taser next to him..." In all likelihood his thought process was, "Crap, he's not just agreeing to get in the police car so I can take him to the stat- " And then everything he said after the fact is just self-preservation, not an actual belief that he didn't do anything wrong. Still the same unacceptable outcome, but I just think him going "AFF Level-1" is a more likely explanation than him going "Judge Dredd." In any event, if I were a LEO these days I'd be barking up the chain of command to get body cameras post-haste. I'd hate for this scenario to take over people's imaginations for lack of video evidence if something went pear-shaped during a contact I was involved in.

In a different state than the gunshop is doing business in. Indeed! That's how stupid the NJ law is.

This wasn't the result of regulations. This was a business deciding to carry a gun with an additional safety measure. The fear was that bringing attention to such a product might lead to legislation therefor it had to be opposed immediately. This almost put the gun store out of business. The result is that the market for any type of safety improvement to guns is effectively zero. Gun purchasers set the market. There was no "might lead to legislation" the legislation was already there. The legislation was written as a time bomb to go off as soon as the gun went on sale. California did a similar thing with microstamping only they wrote that time bomb to go off as soon as the technology was no longer encumbered by patents (nobody even makes such a gun but any new gun is already required to have it.) Since that whole ordeal, the NJAG made a press release stating the firearm in question was not restrictive / user-selective enough (it's actually not biometric as you stated, btw) to trigger the law. Consequently, people generally don't care about the thing anymore. Again, though, just because I don't agree with politicians writing laws mandating technology that doesn't exist (it's pretty clear they are doing it because it doesn't exist and not for safety reasons) doesn't prove the non-existence of regulations that I agree with.

Just because gun owners tend to oppose regulations as brought forward by gun control groups, it does not prove the non-existence of regulations/measures that gun rights advocates would be okay with. The problem is that gun control groups and the politicians they are behind don't take steps backwards to re-evaluate what they're doing, they just double-down. If we're lucky, we can get a veto from the governor or have it overturned by the feds, but democratic-controlled legislatures are a fire hose. The national democratic platform isn't "to reduce gun violence to blah blah levels" or "to reduce the number of crime guns in circulations by x% over y years" or any such emergent goal that would promote discourse, it's to get all firearms registered and to ban things. I have no problem with being held liable if a child got their hands on one of my firearms. I don't need that law to take measures to prevent it from happening but, hey, maybe some people will shape up. I don't take kindly to laws that say all firearms have to be locked up three times, unloaded, and encased in a block of concrete, subject to law enforcement verification even in my own home.

For some reason I'm reminded of this video of a guy shooting flashlights as projectiles from a shotgun. (no, this guy is not actually serious in any of his videos.)

Finally.