Guess what, another school shooting

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Uhuh. Difference being that a firearm's sole purpose is to injure people.
You are also a lot less likely to die from a nuclear blast than get killed by a member of your own family. Maybe we should ban parenting and never let siblings see each other. See the difference?

Wait you're comparing these shooters with muggers? We're not talking about some hardboiled thieves here, the school shooters are normal people without criminal past. They don't have mob connections to get that gun.
Normal people are also the ones who accidentally shoot their wife or best friend when they're drunk.

 

No the school shooters(for the most part) are individuals with serious issues that have never(or very rarely) been adequately treated. What part of that makes them normal?
A firearms sole purpose is to fire a bullet, not to injure a person. If YOU choose to do so that is YOUR choice, not the firearms.
Personal Responsibilty, look it up.

 

I wonder what a bullet's sole purpose is.

 

I'll just let the quote speak for itself.
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
"By calling attention to the a "well regulated militia", the 'security' of the nation,& the right of each citizen to 'keep & bear arms', our founding fathers recognised the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fears of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the 2nd amendment, will ever be a major danger to our nation, the Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships, in which every citizan must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe that the 2nd Amendment will always be important."
-- John F. Kennedy

 

Yeah. US constitution doesn't apply in other countries. We don't need to protect ourself from the English, nor have the delusion that firearms actually offer protection.
And I have nothing against hunting rifles and the like, only handguns and automatic weapons.

Please learn to read. What I'm saying is that they're not criminals with three prison sentences. They're just a little crazy. The point I was making is that they don't have connections to get that weapon.
They could try walking in some dark alley and yell "I need to purchase a weapon". But that doesn't seem to work.

DR's post. Look it up.

 

1)Why would i give a crap what the laws are in other countries?

2)As far as the "delusion" of firearms offering protection just asked anyone who has used one for that express purpose.
I personally know several(including my better half). As far as "thats what the police are for", the courts have consistently ruled that the police do NOT have an obligation to protect individuals.
In Warren vs District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Dept 444 A.2d 1(D.C. 1981) the court stated "courts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes only a duty to the public at large and NOT to individual members of the community"
Thats why you can't sue the police because you got raped & they weren't there to stop it.
In the usa there is 1 officer on duty for roughly every 1,500 people, kinda hard to be evrywhere at once.

3)Also you were the one to compare them to "muggers" & "hardboiled thieves" not I.

4)My opinions on DR are very well known, thank you very much.

 

No one posting here as advocated banning guns.

I repeat my self: If I really wanted to kill someone I would figure out a way to do it but why make it easy for me?

Again I repeat myself and others: School shooters or office shooters are not people with a history of criminal activity of any type. In fact they usually don't have a history of behavior that would indicate that they are a danger to themselves or to others.

As far as laws go why bother to make any obviously they don't work. Speeders speed, thieves steal, mothers kill their own children, sex abusers abuse, politicians lie, embezzlers embezzle.

Let's just do away with all laws and make it every man for himself.

 

Ok, can we PLEASE stop talking about gun laws. No one here is proposing banning guns, and even those proposing stricter gun regulation have to admit this guy had absolutely no flags for anything. Unless you want the gun permit process to include a full psychological workup, it's moot, and even then it's iffy. If this were the Virginia Tech shooting, I'd agree we need more background checks on gun purchasers, and more enforcement of the existing laws, but that's not the case here.

 

Why do I even bother.

Because I was under the impression that this is a thread about a school shooting in Finland?

Really? Let's see:

Now read and understand everything. Again. I know it's not in your nature, but just try, please.

Wrong. I'm proposing banning handguns. And I repeat two things, not rifles/shotguns because people really use them for hunting and such, and second, in Finland.
There's just no use for them here. Handguns are only used here to kill people and normal families don't have guns in their house to "protect" them. It's not like in the US.
And for exactly the reason you stated, there's just no way to know who's mentally fine and who isn't.

 

What I see the problem as being is that it is difficult for a society to know when it is a good time to step in and intervene, and when it is a good time to stay out of a situation and not interfere because we respect individual rights. I've known a lot of kids who I could tell quite easily that they needed intervention, but without any hard evidence or requests from the kid or his parents, we just have to stay out of it because we don't want to be an overbearing society.

As for the gun issue, the problem I have with some sorts of laws or restrictions is as follows:

Bob commits a crime with a gun. So some well-meaning people say "hey, we don't want THAT to happen again, so lets take Pete's gun away!"

Pete has no relation in any way shape or form to Bob. Punishing or limiting him because of Bob's actions is unjust. Pete should not have his freedoms curtailed because of Bob's actions. Bob needs to be punished and kept seperate from society and never permitted to have a gun again, not tossed into a jail (where he eats better than many of the non-criminals outside the jail) for a few months, told it's all his mothers fault, and then released back onto the street. At most he deserves death -- at the very least he needs rehabilitation, support, and constant supervision even if he is released to ensure that HE never has the opportunity to commit such a crime again.

 

The problem here being that this is not an action of individual criminals, but a heavily scripted mode of behaviour.

These guys follow a script. They're so into the idea of the thing that it's almost as good as brainwashed or programmed.

They make sure by themselves that they will not do the same thing again. By killing themselves. It's part of the script.

The ways of dealing with these guys would be:

a) to know and facilitate an effective way to break the script
b) to make sure that all the requirements are not met, and the requirement which is easiest to remove is not limit their access to firearms.
c) Change the way that people act towards each other in workplaces and in schools. Is this an easy project, or likely to happen in the near future? No.
d) limit the access to information about this type of behaviour. This is a werther syndrome of the modern days in which copycats spring out whenever the information and the stories about this type of behaviour appears and spreads. Limit the information, limit the incidents. Will this happen? Not bloody likely.

Further suggestions?

Of the options above in an european, western country of around only 5 million people, the gun control is the most likely to happen. Putting things into perspective, how many cities is there around the western countries which have this amount of people and in how many of those have had school-shootings or mass-murders of this scale that have happened within such a short period of time?

What would you think that the city officials would do if it would happen in a city with the same amount of population that Finland has? Just putting things a little up to scale...

 

Perhaps because those other countries, including Finland, "don't give a c***" about the American constitution, whether the question is about guns or something else.

Which courts have consistently ruled those? American courts? Again, not really relevant in our discussion. Of course, I get what you mean by saying that you can't sue the police because they didn't save you.

On the other hand, you can probably sue the police if you've called them before the crime and they didn't arrive in time due to negligence.

Such laws are significantly about resources and money. The police won't provide two policemen to protect your house if some unknown person threatened you (assuming you're a simple citizen, and not a special case), but they will take seriously your report to them about the threat. That is, saying that the police isn't meant to protect individuals in justified cases isn't really reasonable. Depending on the degree of threat and on the possibilities of the police, it does deal with individuals too.

While I generally don't agree with the banning of guns, I would also like to emphasize that it's a specific question for each country/state, depending on more factors (traditions, state of public security, precedents etc.). So as a citizien of Finland, you probably have more insight to these things than e.g. myself.

As others have said, we aren't talking about murderers, maffia, etc. They get their weapons, no matter what restrictions are in effect (many of their weapons are illegal even now anyway, as possessing automatic firearms is usually prohibited for civilians everywhere).

On the other hand, "normal" civilians shouldn't be able to get guns easily, without a psychological test etc.

On a side note, since I'm also a participant in this discussion, I would just like to mention that I'm against legalizing drugs.

 

I don't own a gun and I'm not planning on getting a gun requiring a permit in Finland.
I think that talking about banning guns in this issue is sidestepping the real issue.

I don't do drugs and I'm for selective legalization & taxation of drugs. I don't want to see legal heroin or cocaine on the streets no matter what, but there are aplenty of less dangerous banned substances.

Quit it with the ad hominem eh?

 

Tal,It's just that there are already over 21,000 gun laws on the books(city, county, state & federal)that don't get enforced. What makes you think that 1 more is going to be any different?
Now, do i have a problem with a basic firearm safety course being required before your first gun permit? No It would just be a slightly different version of the hunter safety course already required before getting your hunting license.

Nakia, i think you missed the point i was attempting to make(i may not have been clear enough), we already have a law against car theft, will passing ANOTHER law make it any more likely that car thefts will decline because the criminals will now be breaking 2 laws?

 

Since this is a thread in AoDA, there's now another thread about gun-control laws and the politics concerning them in AoLS. Feel free to continue the politics of gun control in there.

The Big Gun Control Rant

 

Sorry, Baronius, but I just want to point out to everyone that numerous studies have found this to be a false assumption. There are far more home invasion type crimes (robbery, rape, etc.) prevented with privately owned guns than there are accidental or domestic violence related gun deaths in the US every year. The numbers of the nation as a whole are fairly representative of every specific region the studies have looked at (i.e. the City of Chesapeake), even ones with low crime rates. I just wanted to point that out because I hear this rationalization offered frequently.

The other thing you all have to remember (and I think Nakia and a few others understand this just fine) is that, as I said before, school or work shooters generally don't suffer from any kind of mental disease or disorder other than severe depression. They aren't mentally unhinged, they aren't psychotic, they aren't schizophrenic, they aren't 'prone to violent outbursts' (meaning no history of such), and they generally have no history of any kind of trouble at all. Short of a total ban of all private guns, you can't pass laws to keep guns out of their hands, because these look and act just like the people that are perfectly safe with guns.

I would also like to repeat my encouragement for the return of swift and substantial punishment in schools, corporal if possible. School shootings are a relatively recent phenomenon, while guns, and even ready access to guns, isn't. This would seem to indicate that something else has changed recently to cause this. I would like to possit that this change is the removal of swift and severe punishment of severe infractions in schools. Without an imediate and severe punishment, there's no practical reason for the bullies to stop bullying. 70 years ago, they would have been strapped by the teacher and then likely strapped by one or more parents at home. Only those bullies with serious issues (anger issues, probably) would continue to pick on little kids then. Those we could deal with. With no serious consequences, though, anyone who likes the feel of power (and who doesn't) has a reason to become a bully and no reason not to. Regardless of the modern propoganda, children are not innocent little cherubs before they are corrupted by modern society. Mounting psychological evidence and most religions tell us that humans have an inherrant evil aspect to them that must be contained and curtailed by laws and structure.

 

In Finland bullying is a crime. Detention for small things still exists, but anything bigger and it's a police case. Severe enough for you?