School Shooting Prompts Legislation To Study Violent Video Games 1168
New submitter seepho writes "Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has introduced a bill directing the National Academy of Sciences to lead an investigation to determine what impact violent video games have on children. Senator Rockefeller commented, 'Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better. These court decisions show we need to do more and explore ways Congress can lay additional groundwork on this issue. This report will be a critical resource in this process.'"
This legislation was prompted by reports that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza was a gamer. A draft of the bill is available online.
Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum. And that something, you know, I don’t know that going from communion to playing war games in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.
Huckabee [thinkprogress.org]:
We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability?
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
And they're still missing the real problem.
Adam was very clearly mentally ill. All this BS that they've got going about is just really trying to find something else to blame than the real truth of things.
Welcome to being a target (Score:5, Insightful)
...right along with gun owners, we are at the twilight of those two industries unless we put this to a stop. Logical people know video games and guns don't cause violence - crazy assholes do. But as long as we're willing to be vilified, we will be picked to pieces in the chaos.
When you have a culture that promotes (Score:5, Insightful)
But let's ignore the real problem: mental illness. Lets blame guns and video games.
How about money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Adam Lanza's mother received nearly $25,000 a month in alimony, maybe the should study the connection between receiving ludicrous amounts of money for no reason and violence in children as well.
Classic literature and Saturday morning cartoons (Score:5, Insightful)
"They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons."
Classic literature and Saturday morning cartoons are, in many cases, bloody as hell. And people have gotten plenty hysterical about them in the past.
Games are violent (Score:2, Insightful)
But hoarding guns and spending your time on a shooting range apparently isn't.
"Shit happened, we need to blame somebody." (Score:5, Insightful)
This looks more like a case of "shit happened, we need to blame somebody" than actually trying to solve anything. If a violent video game is going to turn someone violent it's more likely as a result of a preexisting condition.
what baffles me (Score:5, Insightful)
is how nobody understands that in roman times, medieval times, heck, even just 100 years ago, mankind was peaceful and loving
ever since these video games came out, murder has gone through the roof /sarcasm, for the sarcasm impaired
This again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Julius Caesar played violent video games? Ghenghis Khan? Al Capone?
Because nobody in Congress.... (Score:5, Insightful)
has anything better to do. Who cares about the fiscal cliff?
Preventing events like this is equivalent to trying to stop lightning strikes. In fact death by lightning is more common.
Re:Welcome to being a target (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed!
I'm not a big fan of Reagan, but this fits:
We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions. Ronald Reagan
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing the amount of hate spewed by the so call religious right lately, I have SERIOUS doubts that is the problem.
Just fucking stop, please. There's plenty of hate being spewed from the left, right and center. How about we all stop pointing fingers and shouting that it's "the other sides fault!" Then maybe we can all take some responsibility for the state of things and start to fix it.
How about looking at the source of the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why aren't we looking at keeping the crazy people themselves off the streets? As someone who has known someone that was mentally unstable and worked with their doctors to have them committed it's next to impossible to have an unstable person committed involuntarily. Typically the best you can do is 3 days, and beyond that nothing can be done unless they are an /immediate/ risk to themselves or others.
The standard needs to be changed to indeterminable risk to themselves or others, as this would make all the difference in the world in keeping unstable people off the streets and the rest of society safe. The standards are simply too stringent and by closing the institutions we have gotten rid of all of the economies of scale that allowed unstable people to have access to the physical and mental health care that they need. The result now is that the mentally unfit are homeless and society isn't protected from the unstable. The idea that this is somehow more 'humane' is ludicrous.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
And what help would that be? This country has time and time again shown that they don't want to help people with mental issues. It's treated like a dirty shame and the few people that try to help are under-funded and under-payed. In all likelihood they did try to get him help and were rebuffed at every corner. Unless you have money, no one wants to help.
videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the NRA shouldn't have a problem with people properly securing their firearms.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of theories to explain why our society is becoming more violent, including video games and lack of religion in schools. But they are all wrong for a very simple reason: our society is not becoming more violent. It is becoming significantly less violent.
So let's turn the question around: Why are we becoming less violent? One of the more plausible explanations that I have heard is ... video games. Teenage boys are staying home and playing video games instead of joining gangs and getting in trouble.
I certainly hope that if this study gets funded, that they have the integrity to look at the issue with a broad scope, instead of trying to avoid an outcome that makes Senator Rockefeller look like an idiot.
Re:Hate (Score:5, Insightful)
Our recent politics on all sides have generated the idea that anyone who disagrees with the One True Viewpoint is either Evil or Stupid
A pox on all your houses.
The way to combat such stupid, ignorant hate is to stop doing it!
Re:The rest of the world plays the same video game (Score:5, Insightful)
But there is one big difference between us and the rest of the world. We have the mostest, biggest, baddest guns. (Baddestest?)
Switzerland issues fully automatic assault rifles (real assault rifles, not just "scary looking semi-autos") to every mentally competent male of military-eligible age. The type of weapons that are incredibly difficult to acquire in the US (for those of us not obscenely wealthy, anyway)
By your reasoning, Switzerland should be a madhouse of old-west style gunfights; I'll leave it to you to discover whether or not that is the case.
But there is one big difference between us and the rest of the world.
Indeed, and you already pointed it out:
the rest of the world may actually take care of their mentally ill.
There's the real issue at hand.
Invented Conenctions (Score:5, Insightful)
This really is getting ridiculous. I am getting really tired of all the politicians and lobby groups trying to spin this tragedy to their own agenda.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fairly confident that if they study video games, they're going to disregard the results showing video games to not be a cause (as hundreds of studies have shown) and blame video games anyway.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, it's just video games causing violence.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably as soon as atheists stop talking about people who choose to follow a religion as though they're stupid misguided children, or living under a delusion, or any of the other rhetoric that gets spouted by the most vocal atheists.
Diversion (Score:2, Insightful)
Canadians manage to watch movies and play video games without shooting each other. Regardless of the reason why someone picks up a gun, the problem is that they are still able to get one when they are not fit to have one. Issues about mental health and culture SHOULD be addressed, but I think the NRA and other pro-gun people are going to use those things as diversions to the real issue.......keeping automatic weapons away from most people.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:1, Insightful)
No, he wasn't clearly mentally ill. I'm all for publicly funding mental health, but the only mental issue Lanza had was very high functioning autism.
It's really only apparent anything at all was "wrong" was after he slaughtered 28 people. Given that he first killed his mother, then drove elsewhere with the organized intent of killing, it's safe to say he made a conscious decision of some kind to engage in murder.
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
It's 911 all over again, complete with horrified overreaction. I wonder how many children died in car accidents [slashdot.org] the day of that shooting? Their parents are grieving just as hard, but they're unsung. You never hear about it unless it happens in your home town. Auto accidents are the leading cause of death among children. You want fewer kids dying? Fix the roadways. Almost NO kids die in school, this horror notwithstanding. Most dead kids are peeled off of pavements.
Look, folks, your kids are safe in school, or at least, safer than they'd be anywhere else.
But you're right, his mother was an idiot to have those guns around him, considering his handicaps. I wouldn't be against a law that said if there's someone with certain disorders (bipolar, schitzoaffective, a few others) in the house you can't store a gun there.
ANY gun. This talk of assault rifles is stupid, half a dozen automatic pistols in his trenchcoat pockets would have resulted in as many deaths -- maybe more, since his rifle jammed.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
One day, he came to me while he was having an episode. He was convinced that his mother was a demon and needed to be destroyed, and that I was the only God powerful enough to destroy him. He was taken to a mental hospital yet again, after an overnight at the county jail. We have very little contact with him now, and the last I knew, he was living on his own, outside of a mental institution, but taking his medications.
The short story is, some people need serious help with their mental problems, and their families and friends won't know when it's time to intervene. Constant supervision is an absolute necessity for some individuals. Its a really awful thing to think about locking up family or friends in a rubber room. Its by far worse to let them be free to harm themselves AND others... I most likely wouldn't hold this opinion if I hadn't been so close to someone who could be capable of the same destructive force that these other mentally ill shooters.
Its blatantly obvious to me that guns, religion, games, tv, music, etc... are not the issue. All it would take, would be for him to stop taking his medications out of his own free will, and this could all be happening again.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
Gingrich and Huckabee would have more credibility on this if they belonged to a pacifist Christian sect like the Quakers or Amish. They don't. Unless I am confusing these men with someone else, they are both historically pro-death-penalty, pro-gun-rights, and pro-imperialism in foreign policy.
So I question whether the religion they seek to insert back into government institution (namely public schools) will serve the purpose of discouraging violence. I don't even think that is their real agenda when they suggest it.
Re:Hate (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not American, but I've worked there for a while. And back home I keep up with the news about the US.
I fail to see that hate-spreading-left you talk about. All I see is crazy people from the Republican Party spreading hate and intolerance, promoting ignorance, forcing their warped puritan religious views on others, but promoting extreme selfishness, against the very basis of the religion they claim to love so much.
Most of those people would be considered mentally ill where I live.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:2, Insightful)
Lots of people say things, but which of those groups wants to deprive people of civil rights?
Which of those groups is involved with making homosexuality a death penalty offense in Uganda?
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
My country has a state-provided, secular education system. Like most of Europe, by the way.
I wonder why we aren't all shooting at each other, then.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably as soon as atheists stop talking about people who choose to follow a religion as though they're stupid misguided children, or living under a delusion, or any of the other rhetoric that gets spouted by the most vocal atheists.
If you think it's okay to treat all atheists like shit because of what the most extreme atheists do, surely you must by the same standard think it's okay to treat all christians as shit for what Westboro Baptist Church does.
Anyhow, the non-believers have nothing to prove. They're not the ones making fantastic claims.
The onus is on those who do make fantastic claims to show that they are [i]not[/i] delusional. Whether it's belief in a teapot floating in space, homeopathy, the tooth fairy, god(s), a perpetum mobile or other fantastic sounding tales, it's up to the one telling them to back up their claims. Otherwise, derision and ridicule seems rather apposite.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:5, Insightful)
Name one far left politician in America.
One that actually has had a decent chance at winning a federal office. Remember you said far left, so don't go naming any center right folks.
I will wait.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I read a report yesterday - not sure how accurate - they all seem to reference a report from Fox News, which quotes a "friend of the family," Joshua Flashman - that his mother was applying for conservatorship of him, so she could have him committed to a psychiatric facility, and when he found that out, that might have triggered his killing spree.
I'll be very interested to see if that report turns out to be true - if so, there probably was more going on with him than a high-functioning Autism Spectrum disorder. I'd say that the simple evidence of what he did is proof that there was a HELL of a lot more wrong with him than Asperger's.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not clear at all. He had autism spectrum disorder, which is a developmental, not mental, issue. There is no evidence, statistical or otherwise, which links autism to violence. Certainly, people look for answers as to why someone would do these sorts of things, and "he was nuts" is an obvious, knee-jerk, reaction. That doesn't make it so.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Shit happened, we need to blame somebody." (Score:4, Insightful)
This looks more like a case of "shit happened, we need to blame somebody
I suggest then they look at the dismal state of the mental healthcare system. It's piss poor in the US, just like it is in Canada. People who should be in supervisory care, aren't. People who should be institutionalized aren't. And people who shouldn't be in the care of family when they can't care for them, are. I could go on, and on, and on with stories from friends who are EMT's, EMS, Police and Fire, on both sides of the border about how they deal with this shit every freaking day, week after week.
It's right down terrible where I live(Southern Ontario), being that London is near the St. Thomas mental health centre. And it's simply a revolving door. These are supposed to be committed individuals, with some cases a temporary day leave. Who walk out of the facility. End up in London, and end up endangering themselves or the public. They end up at Victoria under police escort--sometimes with the EMS being treated for serious injuries too, go right back in, two weeks later it's rinse and repeat. And my friends down south relate the same things.
Doesn't help of course that they've gutted the mental healthcare system. 400k+ in care and custody even 30 years ago, it's 40k now. People aren't less crazy, they're simply being dumped out with the public.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Classic literature and Saturday morning cartoon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:1, Insightful)
There are crazy people all over the world. They don't go around shooting up classrooms and theaters. Because they CAN'T GET AN ASSAULT RIFLE EASILY.
Pretty straightforward. Yes, let's try to do something about mental illness. But the solution is staring us in the face.
BAN ASSAULT RIFLES NOW.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet countries that ban ownership of assault rifles and handguns by the average person don't have these crimes. They just don't.
We need to be MORE like these countries, not less. We need to ban all assault rifles, and severely restrict the ownership of handguns. One per person, that's it, no more.
Re:Restrict military grade weapons. (Score:5, Insightful)
Banning "assault weapons" to help reduce crime is like banning red cars to reduce speeding.
The gun used in the Sandy Hook Shooting was a
These guns aren't fully automatic, they are semi-automatic, the same types that many hunters use. You pull the trigger once and it fires once. You can't hold down the trigger and spray bullets everywhere, to get those you have go to through a LOT of paperwork and they are quite expensive and because of that very, very, very few civilians own fully-automatic firearms.
These guns have detachable magazines, much like any hunting rifle, either bolt-action or semi-automatic. The magazine capacity doesn't matter all that much when we are dealing with unarmed people in a school, the 5 seconds it takes to change in a magazine doesn't make a difference in a massacre like that.
The only other things that separate an "assault weapon" from an ordinary hunting weapon is the use of bayonet mounts and some other stylistic differences, none of which make a difference when it comes to the Sandy Hook Shooting.
The idea that the gun used in the Sandy Hook Shooting is somehow more dangerous than your grandpa's
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no it wasn't. His mother new something was wrong, but mental health program had been shut down. I read she took him to a psychiatrist, but that was only second hand and it didn't talk about what was said.
He exhibited classic symptoms that something was very wrong.
"it's safe to say he made a conscious decision of some kind to engage in murder."
no, it isn't. People like you are why we can't have a good mental health discussion.
You use thing yu think are obvious to dismiss any mental health issues.
You have no idea about mental health. You thing someone can't snap and still do things?
Fuck you, and fuck everyone like you. I am sick of you people and your 1940's view of how people act. You are a fucktwad and a poor excuse for a limp wristed cum stain.
Same goes for the people who modded you 'insightful'. -1 ignorant loud mouth would be more accurate.
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:2, Insightful)
There are crazy people all over the world. They don't go around shooting up classrooms and theaters. Because they CAN'T GET AN ASSAULT RIFLE EASILY.
I think the reason is more complex than that. One thing I think is a huge influence is growing up in a society or family that glorifies violence but abhors sex. I.e. moral repression and distorted values.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:4, Insightful)
At first I thought this was irrelevant, at best a distraction from the serious topics that need to be addressed, such as freedom vs security, the importance of the second amendment, how we as a society treat the mentally ill.
Then I considered his words and I did some research and it turns out he was on the right track he just didn't take the idea far enough. Allow me to sum up firearm history. Around the third century the Roman Empire adopted Christianity. A few centuries later the Chinese invent the first firearms. Since then firearm deaths have increased roughly 2.9 billion percent!
The only rational conclusion is that our rejection of European polytheistic religions and religious philosophy caused this tragic event. To prevent future gun violence we as a nation must return to worshiping the Polytheistic gods of our ancestors. Obviously not all of them, that would be chaos. I'd recommend the Celtic gods but I'm obviously biased since I'm of English/Irish descent. A strong case can be made for the Norse gods since their movies tend to gross higher in the box office.
Re:The rest of the world plays the same video game (Score:4, Insightful)
Media, as in news media is the problem. Every time a fucked up nutcase goes out on a killing spree, there is non stop media coverage. News media glorifies the murderers yet no one remembers one of the victims. So the next nutcase sitting at home watching this is probably thinking: Man, I could do the same thing and the world will remember me!
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:4, Insightful)
I was specifically referring to this event, which backs up my claim:
"On 14 December 2012, a 36 year-old villager in the village of Chenpeng, Henan Province, stabbed 23 children and an elderly woman at the village's primary school as children were arriving for classes.[23] The attacker was restrained at the school, and later arrested.[24] All of the victims survived and were treated at three hospitals, though some were reportedly seriously injured, with fingers or ears cut off, and had to be transferred to larger hospitals for specialized care.[25]"
The point is, those sorts of attacks usually end up with not as many people killed, and are very rare, and take place in a nation of more than 1 billion people.
"August 2010
On 4 August 2010, 26-year-old Fang Jiantang () slashed more than 20 children and staff with a 60 cm knife, killing 3 children and 1 teacher, at a kindergarten in Zibo, Shandong province. Of the injured, 3 other children and 4 teachers were taken to the hospital. After being caught Fang confessed to the crime; his motive is not yet known.[16]"
He slashed 20 and killed 3.
Adam Lanza, however, killed every single person in the kindergarten class he targeted.
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a friend that lost his mind about 20yrs ago and killed a dude with a hammer. He spent years with psychological issues but there was really no recourse for him. We tried to help him, but mental health issues are shunned. Try walking into a hospital and telling them you're losing your mind. They lock you in a county psyc ward for 3days and then let you out. I've seen it happen. To that guy... and he still killed some one. It was a tragedy for everyone involved including him. Given the correct treatment he could have lead a normal life and the dude that he killed would still be alive today.
You can make guns totally illegal and it still wont solve the problem. Keep in mind what's going on here. More children died that day in car accidents than in the shooting. 9 kids died in this country from malnutrition (taken from the US yearly average of 1 in 100,000 deaths per year) that day. While this shooting is a tragedy, it's just media glamorizing it that's making headlines. There are far more dangerous and devistating problems facing the children of this country and you are being distracted by decades old intractable issues... you are being played.
Do you really think any meaningful gun control or video game standards will come out of this? At most, they'll re-instate the assault weapons ban... which was completely worthless and ineffectual. So what if my clip can only hold 10 rounds if clips cost $5 and I can carry 5 clips on me? So what if the gun manufacturer can't call my gun an "Assault rifle"? If that guy had taken the 12gauge into that school instead of the gun he thought looked "Cool" he'd have done a hell of a lot more damage. Any laws in regards to video games will be struck down by the supreme court almost immediately.
Just like abortion or any other of the non-sensical, unsolvable issues they bring up constantly, these are issues that CANNOT be solved by our government. They are using this tragedy to distract YOU from the real problems they could solve but are not.
They could easily garner by-partisan support for funding to help support the mentally ill.
They could pass laws governing the security of schools. Glass doors should be out... windows higher off the ground... Panic buttons in classrooms with deadbolts on the doors. Cheap fixes. When I was a kid in the rural south all the doors and windows at our school had bars to keep thieves out.
They could change the laws governing how we get the mentally ill committed. It is a VERY difficult thing to do now. In most cases the person in question just has to avoid all the appointments and court appearances and there's nothing you can do about it.
Personally I think they are using this tragedy to distract us from all the crap they are not addressing in the upcoming fiscal bill. It's disgusting, but that's what our leaders do.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok so lets see how much sense would an "assault" (an actual assault gun is full-auto, which is already banned, but whatever) gun ban make.
- The largest number of deaths by gun by far are suicides - ban makes no difference
- Second larges are guns used illegally by felons - ban makes no difference
- Third largest are guns used by police or citizens in legitimate self-defense - ban makes no difference
- The number of cases of legally held guns being used in committing a murder is relatively small. However, even the then the gun used in over 99.9% of the cases is not an "assault" gun, usually its a handgun - assault weapon ban makes no difference
- The actual shootings by an "assault" gun are extremely rare. But even then, the actually proposed return to Clinton's restrictions on magazine capacity and some other features of those guns would have made NO DIFFERENCE. He could have changed the mag slightly more often, or he could have used a handgun.
So the answer, obvious from the beginning, is that a lot of time and money will be spent in passing an extremely complex piece of legislation that will throw the US gun industry into a tailspin and cause loses of millions of dollars and many jobs, while making ZERO DIFFERENCE in making anybody safer.
Will this stop Obama from proceeding? Of course not. It is not about safety, it is about polls.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:2, Insightful)
Except you're wrong...Sweden does not restrict gun ownership...31 guns per 100 people and no killing sprees.
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:4, Insightful)
Even the NRA shouldn't have a problem with people properly securing their firearms.
I don't know about NRA the organization - I don't think they've articulated any coherent position on that point so far - but, personally, as an NRA member, I don't have a problem with that.
In fact, I think we should have laws for responsible keeping of firearms. Pretty simple stuff: if someone takes your gun and commits a crime with it, and it can be shown that you were negligent in securing it (e.g. it was your kid, and you didn't keep in in a gun safe), then you're liable. If we do it for cars already [nashville-...orneys.com], we should definitely do it for guns.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet countries that ban ownership of assault rifles and handguns by the average person don't have these crimes. They just don't.
Those countries are different in many other ways than gun regulation, though. Are you confident that this single factor is indeed the cause?
As well, there are countries which don't ban handguns, and give civilians ready access to assault rifles (the real, fully automatic ones, not a semi-auto AR which is not actually an assault rifle) - and they still don't have these crimes. See Switzerland, Czech Republic, Baltic countries etc.
We need to be MORE like these countries, not less. We need to ban all assault rifles, and severely restrict the ownership of handguns. One per person, that's it, no more.
Assault rifles, while not banned federally (but they are banned by some states), are already heavily regulated to the point that in the entire history of the USA, there was exactly one spree committed with such a weapon. Of course, an assault rifle, by definition, is a full auto weapon, so vast majority of AKs and ARs in civilian hands today are not assault rifles (as they're semi-auto).
Banning semi-auto "assault rifles" is rather pointless, since they're not functionally any different from any other semi-auto weapon - hunting rifles, sporting rifles etc. There seems to be this fixation on external visual features such as pistol grip or bayonet lug, which make the weapon "scary" (those two were explicitly in the 1994 AWB), but which in reality don't make it any more or less effective in a killing spree. A Mini-14 is not a gun that people think of as an "assault rifle", even misguidedly - but it's every bit as efficient as an AR.
Restricting handguns to one per person is completely pointless. What's the difference between having one, and having ten? If you go crazy, either way, you have a gun.
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the percentage of car crashes that result in child fatalities vs. the number of cars on the road?
vs
What's the percentage of guns used by pshychopaths that result in child fatalities vs. the number of legally owned guns in the US?
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:4, Insightful)
Reps blame lack of God....Dems blame weapons...and both seem to be targeting video games.
Geez, I wish this story would blow over here already, and let us get back to normal life. I"m fucking tired of this stupid story. Sad? Yes. Tragic? Yes. almost 2 weeks of constant coverage enough? Yes.
Risk of new, unneeded, badly thought out, reduction in sane, healthy, law abiding citizens' rights? Geez, I hope not...but worried.
The last thing we need to have the pols doing in Washington is rushing new shit through.
Actually it is allmost fortunate that they HAVE to deal with the fiscal cliff stuff, and Christmas is upon us with holidays, etc.
I'm hoping that this story will fade quickly, they'll be busy...and nothing stupid gets pushed through quickly.
Remember how we got stuck with the Patriot Act??
Re:Gingrich & Huckabee Weigh In (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to be MORE like these countries, not less.
Why? As I said previously, even if the TSA was effective, I would reject it in its entirely due to the fact that it infringes upon people's freedoms. I would do the same for any legislation seeking to ban guns.
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I have loaded guns hidden in all sorts of places around my house, so that I'm never far from one if I need one.
I hope all your neighbours no not to let their kids into your house.
Re:videogames are like #3 or lower on that list (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly, they don't...
Bullshit. Mostly, they do. The NRA, and their paid lackeys in the House and Senate, have a long history of opposing any and all legislation that would tighten up the availability of guns. Selling guns is the reason for the NRA's existence. Anything that makes it harder to buy guns is bad for business. That the occasional loser who shouldn't be trusted with anything more dangerous than a pointed stick is able to buy as much as he wants is ample proof that we have a problem. Jezuz H. Christ, folks. You need a license and insurance to drive a car. Is it asking so much to demand that gun owners demonstrate similar proficiency and responsibility? Oh, and before you label me as someone from "the far left", keep in mind that I own multiple firearms and have been an active shooter since I was five years old. I oppose most forms of "gun control". I embrace those forms that ensure that fewer people who should not have guns don't get guns. The NRA and their Republican lackeys do not.