If we had a clear solution to these things, we would have found it by now. We haven’t for at least three reasons. Because there is no way of predicting with any confidence which extremely rare young man will do a shooting like this versus the much more common young man who merely looks anti-social, threatening and bad; because we know that no solution or set of solutions will work to completely eliminate these episodes (and hence that we're going to get more of them regardless of what we do); and because any of the possible solutions entails very unappetizing tradeoffs and costs, costs that one large segment of the electorate or the other fears and resents, and believes are merely the camel's nose of yet more and even worse costs its opponents not-so-secretly have in mind.
Bill, we already have background checks. One cannot by a gun from a dealer without it and not one of the school shooters that I know of got their gun through the supposed “gun show loophole.”
There are roughly 350 homicides per year from rifles of any kind, not just AR 15s. 6,000-7,000 by handguns. I’m ok with sound gun control laws if they are effective and do not violate my rights. I’ve yet to hear one proposed that would stop these.
I disagree about weapons. Anything more than the most cursory attention to weapons leads you down the rabbit hole currently being explored by the UK, with government controls on kitchen cutlery.
I am also not entirely convinced that doing nothing, particularly in the area of weapons, is "grim". We tolerate how many highway deaths a year in the name of mobility? If we are not prepared to give up our cars to potentially save them, why in the name of all that is held holy would we give up something as vital to actual life and freedom as self-defense...?
Bill, we already have background checks. One cannot by a gun from a dealer without it and not one of the school shooters that I know of got their gun through the supposed “gun show loophole.”
There are roughly 350 homicides per year from rifles of any kind, not just AR 15s. 6,000-7,000 by handguns. I’m ok with sound gun control laws if they are effective and do not violate my rights. I’ve yet to hear one proposed that would stop these.
I disagree about weapons. Anything more than the most cursory attention to weapons leads you down the rabbit hole currently being explored by the UK, with government controls on kitchen cutlery.
I am also not entirely convinced that doing nothing, particularly in the area of weapons, is "grim". We tolerate how many highway deaths a year in the name of mobility? If we are not prepared to give up our cars to potentially save them, why in the name of all that is held holy would we give up something as vital to actual life and freedom as self-defense...?