Elementary school shooting

http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/12/17/nra-endorsed-sen-joe-manchin-calls-for-assault-weapons-ban/

That is probably something which will be the result of this shooting - no magazines with more than 10 bullets will be allowed in US.

And why it happens ? Maybe it is because of much higher use of various anti-depressants and other chemicals ? Hell, Prozac and its variants is linked to suicide attempts. Combine that with the Asperger's this kid had, the divorce 3 years ago, gun-loving mom, maybe an argument with her and you could end up with a dangerous mix of emotions, suicidality, easy gun access and rage which blinded his mind.

 

Can you not miss quote me or completely ignore a point I made.

A car wouldn't be as effective as a gun either in a normal pedestrian street or a tightly packed area of standing people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUX6LABCEA
We're never going to see eye to eye on the fact that in any given situation it would be possible to do more damage to a large group of people with a gun and hence when there freely available for people who might decide to go crazy they're capable of doing far greater damage.

 

Depending on the shooter, the gun and the crowd of people you can have much different results.

 

We (psychologists) already know. We've known for the last 60 years or so. Only nobody ever asks us, and they certainly don't listen when we tell them.

 

That's a completely different argument.
Yes the fact citizen can have guns may mean every year some crimes a thwarted due to this means of defence.
However in the UK not even the police need guns as the risk posed by criminals is (fairly) low.
Compare these
http://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty

 

Ah well.. let me add my two cents here.

There was a 20yr old who took their parents legally owned guns (which in that moment became illegal, but that's not that important right now), took them to school and shot ~27 people.

How can you prevent this?

You can ban guns. Yes. This would probably solve this particular problem, but he could take a car and try to ram as many people as possible. Not very effective, yes. But plausible (there is one example I know of, woman called Olga Hepnarova). Also, from what I've heard, he was quite good student and making a small bomb is a thing you can do during one or two afternoons and the supplies are easily obtainable. If he has been bullied and simply could not go on any further and decided it is time for a revenge, nothing would stop him, but yes, if he could not get to a gun, the death toll would be probably lower.

On the other hand - what would you do when the guns were banned and you could only pray that the police would come fast enough?

Example - a psychopath buys illegal guns (let's not kid ourselves - getting an illegal gun is and will be a) cheap and b) simple) and then looks for a place where he can shoot as many people as possible. Then commits suicide (many mass shooters do this.. shoot innocent people and then point the gun on yourself or wait while the police kills you.. cant wrap my head around this one, but this is how they think 1 time out of 2) Imagine you were that person. For that matter, you don't even have to be a psychopath - let's call you Anders Breivik - someone who plans his attack very well (Norway shooting on Utoya island, ~70 dead).

Now you have an illegal gun and are looking for a place to kill. Which one of these three would you pick?
-Military base / Police Station
-Crowded street
-School/Cinema/Shopping mall with a big sticker GUN FREE ZONE

Go to the Police station, shoot one cop, maybe two.. Then you will look like a fan grill, so many holes.
Start shooting on a crowded street. In a nation, where many civilians carry guns, you could shoot few people, before somebody will duck behind a trash can, carefully point the business end of his gun at your head and squeeze the trigger.
In a nation, where the guns are banned, you can keep shooting while the police turns up. We are talking about double digits easily.
Start shooting in a gun free zone. ABSOLUTELY NO RESISTANCE, except for the local security - in some places there is a guard, in some not, in some the guard has only non lethal weapons - bat/spray/taser. We are talking about double digits SURELY.

You can probably see where this is going.. If not, let me continue:
Linky: http://forums.gunbroker.com/topic.asp?whichpage=1&TOPIC_ID=571173&
Text by a man who took the reports, crunched some numbers and here are the results:
With 14 incidents stopped by police with a total of 200 dead that’s an average of about 14.3 deaths per shooting.
With 15 incidents stopped by civilians and 35 dead that’s an average of 2.3 deaths per shooting.

Now to this recent case: What would happen, if there was a loaded gun in a wall safe in every room of the school? I really doubt, that he would kill 27 people. One of the teachers was found dead laying on the children. She was bravely protecting them. If you were in her place and heard shots, would you grab the gun and wait/go looking for the attacker? I would. Sadly, many teachers are bent towards the left/socialist end of the political spectrum and would probably burst into flames when touched a gun :/ The rest are, fortunately, not.

The US police started to train 40,000 officers to be able to respond to this threat asap - go in, locate the threat, neutralize. Many gun positive civilians are able to this too and go through the similar training.


Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter.
Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene. In February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.

25th of May 2008, Ernesto Fuentes Villagomez walked into a bar in Winnemucca, Nevada and began shooting at two other Winnemucca residents, whom he seems to have had a past history with, injured two other (apparently uninvolved with either himself or the two other victims) folks, before proceeding to reload his pistol. That's when an unidentified 48-year-old visitor from Reno, Nevada with a Concealed Carry permit and a pistol of his own hauled off and drilled the critter through the brisket.


I have more of these, but don't see a point in spamming here. Also, afaik, the 'criminal rates' in UK have gone significantly up after the gun ban in 1997, didn't it? I don't have exact data on hand, but could search for them if this discussion evolved and asked for them.

And finally, I am not looking for a flame war - simply explaining my opinion, that I would feel much safer, if I knew, that every third or fifth person on the street is carrying a legal gun, as opposed to a situation, where the guns are banned and only police, army and criminals have them.

 

So they'll just carry more magazines. It only takes a second, sometimes less to drop a magazine and have new one in with one in the chamber.

 

€gr€s, you make a few reasoning errors there. Most school or mall shooters are not psychopaths of the cold and calculating Brevik kind. They acquire theirs opportunistically --dad's gun locker, legal gun shops, or perhaps soon the teachers' weapons locker-- not through the illegal gun trade on the mean streets of the bad part of town.

Research also shows that making cheap guns legally unavailable also makes them illegally unavailable.

It's great if a capable, armed citizen can take the shooter out, but that kind of depends on identifying the right target in a panicking crowd and plugging him without killing anyone else in the crossfire. Let's hope he trained for that. And let's hope he didn't plug another concerned citizen who had just pulled his gun.

 

Well if he can make a bomb anyway, why not make them legal? In many instances, and probably this one, the atack was not pre planned - you can't make a bomb in a day, but you ccan get a gun.

Yes - but you are much less likely to be in that position in the first place.

We could go all day listing real and hypothetical examples, but it's pointless - the majority of studies and statistics show that looser gun controls and more hguns leads to more gun killings.

Let's imagine you are the president and had complete power over the law. Knowing the facts teh almost all statistics show that if you impose gun controls, there will be less deaths from guns.
If you pass the gun control laws - there is therefore a high chance less people will die, and a much smaller chance more people would die.
If you do not impose gun controls, statistics suggest more people will die as a result. But people would be free to have guns and many will be happy.

What would you do. Statistics are facts, so lets deal with facts not anecdotes and theories.

 

I do agree with this. Most of those are of the "i am f***ing fed up, going to shoot everything that moves" (and then probably kill himself when they find out what they have done and that will spend the rest of the life in jail) kind.

So it is true, that if they did not get the gun in an easy way, they would probably resort to another means of 'revenge', or what shall we call it.

But if we did ban the guns, the criminals would still get them and you would lose a very nice way to defend yourself.

About the identifying the right target and maybe taking out another citizen - I do believe that the citizen going for the threat would behave very differently to the attacker. And concerned citizen trying to save the school would not open fire on anything that moves. Find video about the robbers in US internet cafe. Older man observes the situation, when the robbers are not looking pulls out is gun and starts firing. If you own a legal gun, you dont turn off the brain while using it.

There was also one point I forgot to mention - the psychological/psychosocial aspect. I know that you work in this area. And I very strongly agree with your statement:
"We (psychologists) already know. We've known for the last 60 years or so. Only nobody ever asks us, and they certainly don't listen when we tell them."
So why treat the symptoms - psychopaths or seemingly 'regular' people, that just got fed up, got red vision and ended their lives taking more people with them. And the treatment is reactional banning firearms? What if someone storms a school with a sword/knife, hand made bomb - will we ban swords, knives, simple everyday products because you could make a bomb out of them?
We (the authorities) should listen more to you, definitely. I believe many of those cases originated in bullying that became so intensive, that the bullied person entered the 'killing spree' mode. But please, do not disarm the capable, concerned citizens.

 

looks like theres a great risk posed by ceilings lol

 

Your underestimating just how hard it is to get hold of a gun in for example the UK. The US would have the problem that criminals may stockpile them but ammunition would quickly become scarce.

The idea is that you may not have a gun to defend yourself but equally the bad guys don't have guns to shoot you with (or far far fewer at least) and the net result based on statistics is fewer deaths.



and ceilings?

 

Can someone please explain to me how automatic firearms are any more effective at killing large numbers of people than semi-automatic ones?

Automatic weapons are used in the military to put down a large volume of fire on a target generally for supression (as far as I can gather). Fully automatic fire on a bunch of unarmed citizens at close range is just a waste of ammunition.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty

 

They won't learn ever. Virginia Tech, Dallas, Colombine etc etc there is a incident like this every trimester.

 

There not. Even the military fire in short burst with machine guns and standard infantry rifles are single shot with a burst but not a full auto option, at least with the L85's I've used.

That's why you need UK style constraint with small magazines and bolt action or alternatively a sub .22 calibre for semi automatics.

Ceilings do seem to be rather dangerous.

 

In the Netherlands guns are outlawed. Unarmed citizens are not slaughtered like helpless lambs by armed criminals. In the UK, not even beat officers have guns. Again, the UK has far less gun crime than the US.

 

The thing I find interesting about this paragraph is that, accepting the premise that most of these guns are obtained through legal sources (parents/stores etc.), the notion is going to "shoot" everything that moves which can only come from an ingrained acceptance of firearms as part of their cultural environment. If guns are a normal and accepted part of life then it's likely to be the weapon of choice.

Ever heard the term familiarity breeds contempt?

 

Why not allow the people to have a firearm but make them pass a proficiency exam that must be updated from time to time? Like it is done with cars.

 

If I wanted a gun - all I know is a few farmers/gamekeepers who have shotguns. And I have no idea how I would get one besides breaking into their houses, which would be extremely difficult, and then they would be in a locked case. If I didnt live in the country - I doubt I would know anyone with a gun.

In the USA it's easy to get hold of illegal guns, that's BECAUSE they are legal in most cases.

Frankly, gun advocates are either selfish or stupid. It's pretty obvious less guns= less deaths. Either you're too dumb to understand or don't care because you like you're man toys.