OT: parenting and the santa barbara shooter

[CA renter]

And there’s this:

“Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns.

The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929, when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s, staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names. Others point out that the mass murder rate fairly closely tracks the overall homicide rate. In the 2000s, for example, both the mass murder and the homicide rates dropped to their lowest levels since the 1960s.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/07/aurora_shooting_how_did_people_commit_mass_murder_before_automatic_weapons_.html

[livinincali]

[quote=Jazzman]
Democracy died the day gun control legislation failed. You can turn the other way, and accept that we live in democracy in ‘name only’, and tolerate the pervasive influence special interest groups enjoys over the democratic process.[/quote]

Did democracy die when Obamacare was passed? Our government is a constitution republic. If our government was purely a democracy same sex marriage would still be banned in California. Sometimes laws are passed or not passed even if the majority opinion is contrary to that.

If you want to change the second amendment there’s a mechanism to do that but we all know there’s not enough support on your side of the argument to make that happen.

The question that nobody knows the answer to, but would immediately end this debate is the following. Would those new gun control laws that didn’t pass have prevented this incident? My gut feeling says probably not, but I don’t know.

[scaredyclassic]

seen on facebook:

one failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all take our shoes off at the airport.

31 shootings at schools since columbine and no change in gun regulations.

kinda funny.

the gun advocate position is, basically, the deaths are worth it, unavoidable, just one of many means of killing, or not really of any concern on balance.

it might not work to regulate, so don’t do anything.

collateral damage in a rule that benefits the greater good.

also seen on facebook:

Guns don’t kill people, americans kill people…

personally, im taking a knife fighting course from shivworks soon. they also teach extreme cloe quarters combat training and handgun defense. if you read their materials, and these guys are pretty experienced fighting badasses, in a situation with a regulatr criminal, they don’t wait for you. things happen super fast.

odds are without a lot of training youre not going to have your gun in your hand when the shit his the fan.

knives….well…better shot at stabbing in a tussle….

im serious about shivworks and knife fighting… im intrigued by this p’kal style of fight. blade in and down…

perhaps america should train its students in hand to hand combat, gun and knife fighting so they are prepared for modern life. why leave this to chance? half the school days should probably be small arms training, knife fighting, grappling, escape routes, maybe a seminar on kicking and biting. this way we will be ready for overthrowing thr governemnt, repelling foreign invaders and kicking each others ass if one of us steps out of line and becoes a real danger toward the others.

the knife i like is the spyderko p’kal. they hahve a training model too.

[ocrenter]

I for one am glad the elephant in the room is finally being discussed.

I’ve been posts on this thread trying to figure out this guy and watching the typical cry about need for better mental health assessment and access and awareness in the media. But nobody seem to want to talk about how this guy managed to get 3 guns and 40000 rounds of ammo.

Here’s the bottom line. People LIE when they go in to see their doctors. They lie about how much they drink, they lie about how much they exercise, they lie about how much cookies they eat. So how many would be mass murderers will tell their doctor they have a bunch of guns and ammo in the car?

Knives kill people, we understand that. Just like in Taiwan last week, some crazed college kid decided to start knifing people in the crowded subway. 4 people lost their lives. My only question is if he had the type of guns and ammo this Santa Barbara character had in a crowded subway, what would the body count be?

American rate of death by gun (homocide and suicide) is at 10/100k, most of the OECD countries are below 1/100k.

You do the math on that one.

[scaredyclassic]

Pecking order: dude wrote in memoir of a 10 year old brown belt in his karate class who was smirking and maddogging him as an adult cause of his white belt.

That is textbook bottom pecking order perception.

[NotCranky]

Are psychiatry and pharmaceuticals good for young children?

The kind that aren’t born demons and the kind that are?

When a person pretty high on the pecking order takes his kid to a psychiatrist does the Dr. dare say hey…maybe he is lonely and not getting what he needs at home or rock the boat in anyway? Or does the whole bunch of them blame the kid, find out if insurance is good, and do more harm than good making the kids hell even more hellish and stunting him for life?

How much faith should we have in a system that works this way?

I think it’s a bad assumption to make that because psychiatry and drugs didn’t do the trick that the kid was a hopeless case. Possibly pretty primative view, however mainstream.

[livinincali]

[quote=ocrenter]I for one am glad the elephant in the room is finally being discussed.

I’ve been posts on this thread trying to figure out this guy and watching the typical cry about need for better mental health assessment and access and awareness in the media. But nobody seem to want to talk about how this guy managed to get 3 guns and 40000 rounds of ammo.

Here’s the bottom line. People LIE when they go in to see their doctors. They lie about how much they drink, they lie about how much they exercise, they lie about how much cookies they eat. So how many would be mass murderers will tell their doctor they have a bunch of guns and ammo in the car?
[/quote]

If what you say is true and that people lie, what recently discussed gun control laws would have prevented this situation from happening? What background check enhancements, what assault riffle ban, etc. prevents this situation from happening again? Are we doing something that actually will make a difference and prevent these scenarios from happening or are we doing something just to make ourselves feel better that we did something.

The democratic majority in this country isn’t going to change the second amendment right now. We can eliminate gun related mass murders but it requires a police state that most of us aren’t willing to trade in exchange for never having another gun death.

[Jazzman]

[quote=CA renter]
So, how in the world can anybody say, with a straight face, that if you got rid of guns, you’d stop murderous rampages?[/quote]

Is anyone saying that? How can anyone say with a straight face that there is no relationship between high rates of gun ownership and high rates of homicides? I don’t think these mass slayers would get very far by trying to strangle all their victims. The debate has moved on from there, despite attempts by the non-gun control advocates to drag it back.

[Jazzman]

[quote=livinincali][quote=Jazzman]
Democracy died the day gun control legislation failed. You can turn the other way, and accept that we live in democracy in ‘name only’, and tolerate the pervasive influence special interest groups enjoys over the democratic process.[/quote]

Did democracy die when Obamacare was passed? Our government is a constitution republic. If our government was purely a democracy same sex marriage would still be banned in California. Sometimes laws are passed or not passed even if the majority opinion is contrary to that.

Democracy came alive with Obamacare. I’m not clear what you mean by “purely a democracy”, but if left to my interpretation I take it to mean powerful lobbyist are fundamental to American democracy. Indeed they are!

If you want to change the second amendment there’s a mechanism to do that but we all know there’s not enough support on your side of the argument to make that happen.

There is no “my side” to the argument my friend. I remain a detached, but compassionate observer. This is not about the 2nd Amendment.

The question that nobody knows the answer to, but would immediately end this debate is the following. Would those new gun control laws that didn’t pass have prevented this incident? My gut feeling says probably not, but I don’t know.

Well I’m glad you have conceded that “[you] don’t know”. I would hold that thought, and resist the temptation to allow your gut feeling to surface.

[/quote]

[livinincali]

[quote=Jazzman]
Democracy came alive with Obamacare. I’m not clear what you mean by “purely a democracy”, but if left to my interpretation I take it to mean powerful lobbyist are fundamental to American democracy. Indeed they are!
[/quote]

Pure democracy is often refereed to as a system where 2 wolves and a sheep vote on which one is for dinner. Pure democracy doesn’t protect minority rights. It lets the majority decide without any checks or balances. I.e. The ban on same sex marriage in CA wouldn’t have been able to be constitutionally challenged.

Suppose for a moment the the majority opinion on gun control is to put a massive tax on guns. Make them too expensive for the common man and basically have the effect of banning them. That type of law would be challenged to the supreme court on the basis that it violates the second amendment. In this case the minority who believes in the ability to own guns might win because that right is protected by the 2nd amendment of the constitution.

You say this isn’t about the 2nd amendment yet make proposals about laws that attempt to further restrict gun ownership through various means. Hoping to find a clever way of greatly restricting gun ownership without violating the principals of the 2nd amendment.

[livinincali]

[quote=ocrenter]
American rate of death by gun (homocide and suicide) is at 10/100k, most of the OECD countries are below 1/100k.

You do the math on that one.[/quote]

Here’s a recent study with graphs. If do some cherry picking you can arrive at a conclusion that more guns = more deaths. Of course we can always cherry pick data to suit our agenda.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/03/guns-neither-increase-nor-decrease-crime-rate.html

[Jazzman]

[quote=CA renter]And there’s this:

“Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns.

The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929, when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s, staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names. Others point out that the mass murder rate fairly closely tracks the overall homicide rate. In the 2000s, for example, both the mass murder and the homicide rates dropped to their lowest levels since the 1960s.”

Oh, come one CAR. You can’t be serious. I love all your other posts because they are balanced and well reasoned, but you’re clutching at straws over this one. The US has, by a long stretch, the highest rate of per capita gun ownership in the world. Second place goes to war-torn Yemen. Excluding Mexico, the US has the highest murder rate using firearms. Japan, which has the strictest gun laws has a minuscule amount of gun related deaths. Yes, there are other factors involved so it’s not that straight forward, but to deny this very fundamental truth is damaging to everyone.

In the past, you’ve explained that personal experiences have shaped your views. I respect that and would probably feel the same way, but sometimes you need to step back and accept that others, who may have suffered worse experiences, arrive at a very different conclusion. I saw the only real outpouring of emotions from the father of one of the Isla Vista victims. It wan’t the usual staged, weepy, emotionally restrained, official press-type announcement. It was raw, highly charged, and very condemnatory of the fact that nothing is being done to prevent these incidences. The man had all but fallen to pieces. Watching this poor man in utter despair was gut wrenching.

Whatever your beliefs about gun-ownership and mass slayings, don’t we owe it to him to do something. Nothing is being done, and I find it despairing that people aren’t on the street demanding change. From the outside it appears as bordering on extreme selfishness.

[Jazzman]

[quote=livinincali][quote=ocrenter]
American rate of death by gun (homocide and suicide) is at 10/100k, most of the OECD countries are below 1/100k.

You do the math on that one.[/quote]

Here’s a recent study with graphs. If do some cherry picking you can arrive at a conclusion that more guns = more deaths. Of course we can always cherry pick data to suit our agenda.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/03/guns-neither-increase-nor-decrease-crime-rate.html%5B/quote%5D
Cherry picking is one thing, but when supported by reason it is another.

[livinincali]

[quote=Jazzman]I saw the only real outpouring of emotions from the father of one of the Isla Vista victims. It wan’t the usual staged, weepy, emotionally restrained, official press-type announcement. It was raw, highly charged, and very condemnatory of the fact that nothing is being done to prevent these incidences. The man had all but fallen to pieces. Watching this poor man in utter despair was gut wrenching.

Whatever your beliefs about gun-ownership and mass slayings, don’t we owe it to him to do something. Nothing is being done, and I find it despairing that people aren’t on the street demanding change. From the outside it appears as bordering on extreme selfishness.[/quote]

This is exactly the problem. We have this strong emotional desire to do something to keep this terrible thing from happening again and don’t use any logic to figure out if what we do is going to be effective. We need to use logic and research to determine if something is going to be effective, and I haven’t seen much evidence that attempting to further restrict gun access will lead to the desired outcome. It would be nice if it was that simple. It’s complex problem that requires a complex solution. We’ve been going down the path of more and more gun control and yet it doesn’t seem to be working as advertised.

Chicago has incredibly strict gun control laws, bordering on being in violation of the 2nd amendment yet still have one of the highest homicide rates in the country. CA has pretty strict gun control laws and yet this incident happened here. We’ve been increasing gun control laws over the years and yet it’s not producing the desired result of fewer homicides. When do we consider that might not be the correct solution.

[Jazzman]

[quote=livinincali][quote=Jazzman]
Democracy came alive with Obamacare. I’m not clear what you mean by “purely a democracy”, but if left to my interpretation I take it to mean powerful lobbyist are fundamental to American democracy. Indeed they are!
[/quote]

Pure democracy is often refereed to as a system where 2 wolves and a sheep vote on which one is for dinner. Pure democracy doesn’t protect minority rights. It lets the majority decide without any checks or balances. I.e. The ban on same sex marriage in CA wouldn’t have been able to be constitutionally challenged.

I don’t see what bearing this has on what the vast majority of Americans, who is their infinite wisdom seem to want, or how either constitutional democracy or animals eating each other is helpful in this debate. Issues regarding same sex marriage and mass murder exist in completely different realms, and a comparison is therefore inappropriate. There is no allowance for constitutional pontificating.

Suppose for a moment the the majority opinion on gun control is to put a massive tax on guns. Make them too expensive for the common man and basically have the effect of banning them. That type of law would be challenged to the supreme court on the basis that it violates the second amendment. In this case the minority who believes in the ability to own guns might win because that right is protected by the 2nd amendment of the constitution.

Yes, we know that and it is part of the problem. Merely stating it doesn’t somehow magically forgive it.

You say this isn’t about the 2nd amendment yet make proposals about laws that attempt to further restrict gun ownership through various means. Hoping to find a clever way of greatly restricting gun ownership without violating the principals of the 2nd amendment.

Tell me what is there to violate? An anachronistic right that is irrelevant to contemporary society, or the sanctity of life? It would be a Knave of Hearts Trial. If the founding fathers were alive to ask, there is little room for doubt as to how they would reply. You either speak for humanity, or your speak for the pro-gun industry. Choose at your peril.
[/quote]

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