USA and gun control

Are you suggesting an amnesty?

gun%20amnesty%20poster

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/06/16/asia-pacific/crime-legal-asia-pacific/australia-fearing-extremist-attacks-hold-first-gun-amnesty-20-years/

Norm Legg, a project supervisor with a local security firm, holds up a rifle that was similar to the one used in the Port Arthur massacre and had been handed in for scrap in Melbourne during a nationwide gun amnesty program on Sept. 8, 1996. | AFP-JIJI

Thank you, ‘yyy’.
I should also add the last part:

“And what this mathematician has learned while using this system is something she really already knew: that everything—even love, even belonging—has a pattern to it. She finds the patterns, and through those lists she breaks the codes of disconnection. Then she gets lonely kids the help they need.”

While the public schools of Taiwan almost would never do this, because I know from my son’s experience that a student is assigned a seat based on student # and keeps that seat throughout the year…the many English teachers on this forum could perhaps think about what kind of results may come about when implementing this or something similar. Just :2cents:

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Of course it’s partly because one type of event is rarer and more dramatic than the other, but also, if you’re the lone victim of a shooting, it’s easy for people to dismiss you as someone who “probably hung out with the wrong crowd – why else would it happen? It’s not like people go around shooting total strangers all the time.”

Whereas if a whole building gets targeted, it’s harder to assign blame to the victims.

Why choose Switzerland when you could choose Australia or the UK or Canada as a comparison?

I also doubt that Switzerland is as permissive as the US when it comes to guns.

Hopeless debating on these forums with the cherry picking and entrenched repeating of memes .

However I have laid out the facts clearly. Assault rifles are military grade weapons designed to kill large numbers of people efficiently .
The bullet imparts a much higher force on impact and therefore has a far higher kill rate than handguns

Its very hard to justify civilians holding these military grade weapons for any purpose even hunting as many other alternatives are available.
You wouldn’t let people make bombs and leave them in their house in the case that they need to ‘defend their rights’ so I’m not sure why assault rifles get a waiver.

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I guess some people just enjoy being wilfully stupid.

I recon the solution is to issue everyone with their own personal little red button. Then we can sit back and wait for the terrible “mental health” to blow the world up.

Obviously the only way to fix that then would be a new system of seating plans in kindergartens, proactive, not reactive, genius!

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The problem with the more people die from drunk driving line is it also applies even more so to many other causes of death. An obvious example being terrorism. The ‘something else is much worse so why bother about this’ argument is logical in a pretty hard way, but not one I would wish to support.

Not sure who I’m responding to. Possibly several posters in different ways.

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Why is it that in conversations like this people resort to calling people stupid or "soft in the head ".

Like WTF is that? How does that help anything? Not just here but all over social media it seems. We all want the best for people (most of us at least) yet for some reason because people have different opinions that means it’s now more productive to shame them and call names… I don’t get how that helps. If people really cared about these issues wouldn’t they put ego aside for a second and realize that claiming superiority actually gets in the way of all this?

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Too right. People who call people stupid are idiots.

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because people suggest classroom seating plans as a proactive genius solution to gun violence?

As with so many modern issues the debate (?) has become completely polarised. A discussion about gun related violence has one side who refuse to discuss anything involving guns, while the other side refuse to discuss anything that doesn’t involve guns.

When a discussion (?) descends to the point of “guns don’t kill people” vs “only guns kill people” then either personal attacks or silence are the only options.

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I’m pretty sure that dealing with mass shooting needs to deal with guns.

They are, I suppose rare and common are relative. But if you take emotions out of it, they’re rare.

I guess so, to me they seem pretty frequent, but yea, its all relative. Relative to most other countries though they are very frequent in the US.

Just 1 is too frequent, I think we can both agree on that yes?

I don’t know if you’re American or are familiar enough with American gun culture outside of what you see on TV or hear. I grew up in Texas and lived in Virginia and Florida. All 3 states have a huge gun culture. You’d have to take the guns off their cold dead hands if you want to take them away. And it’s a democratic republic, so these people are voters, and have a political say. So you can’t just shove new guns laws down their throats and claim moral superiority as the reason and say they’re horrible people. Maybe they are but still doesn’t matter. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need gun, there would be no need for the military or the police either. But we don’t live in a perfect world. So we have to find solutions outside of moral absolutes to find solutions.

And I’m saying that although changing the current gun laws in the US would probably help, I do not think we solved the real issue. The number of gun deaths and mass shootings on paper might drop, even probably drop significantly. I can see the appeal and I can even get behind the removal of guns if it’s a possiblility. But living in the US, I don’t think unless you do something totalitarian about it, it’ll likely change so quickly and effectively. If anything, it gives the pro gun people more reasons the entrench into their position if you try and force new gun laws vs finding a Democratic solution.

But I do not think guns are the root of the problem, I think these mass shootings are a symptoms of a sick society. For example, 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Do you think guns are the root cause of suicides or is there a deeper issue involved? That’s all I’m saying. Read over what I have to say about people

I think we need to understand why it is happening. It’s clearly multi layer complex issue. Gun laws can be a start, i just think is not as simple as removing guns.

Nah, I don’t buy it. Embittered youth and adolescent mental health issues can be found anywhere. Why do you think only the US has such a high number of on-campus shootings? Could it be because of easy access to guns? (Don’t bother answering that, we all know the answer.)

Please guys, what don’t we get? What makes Americans so special they need so many guns? There’s nothing so unique about the country that I can see except a unique inability to see the wood for the trees.

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Of course. I think that there are also other factors that need dealing with.

With regards to your point about 2/3rds of suicides being by gun, supposedly there’s a 15 minute or so crisis period when people with suicidal thoughts actually commit to it. Obviously, access to a firearm makes that considerably easier.

Having said that, I’m not aware of US suicide rates being noticeably higher than most developed countries, so it seems to me that firearms are simply the most expedient method. Like charcoal burners in Taiwan or car exhaust in the UK.

EDIT: The suicide rate is quite high.

absolutely, and not changing anything to counter a repeating and disasterous trend is sort of depressing not to mention tragic.

Im Irish. I have US relatives. But yea my knowledge is not first hand

Sure, and it manifests itself in many ways.

So your solution is what? Remove all guns? The question is not whether Americans should have the right to have guns. That’s an entirely different conversation. It’s what we can do isn’t it?

What if there was an age limit on assault rifles? Youve got to be 30 years + to own one. If you’re younger and caught with one it’s 20 years in prison minimum.

It seems a lot of these shootings involve mentally ill which seems to be highly prevalent in young men in their 20s. This certainly wouldn’t fix everything (las Vegas shooter for example ) but maybe it could be a start? :confused: