I don't see how it is any different from getting a physical and immunizations prior to attending public school. It's a "Public Safety" issue and one of the few things that any type of government is actually supposed to be doing. In fact that is exactly what government is supposed to be for. So why do they disregard this when it comes to guns? No one is saying the government should take guns away. We're just saying that the government should help protect us by requiring people to prove that they are sane before handing them a potential mass killing machine. Will this prevent all mass shootings? Of course not because all it proves is that at the time of purchase the person was sane. But can't we at least do that?

Since many of the mass shooting end in suicide, how can you verify mental illness after the fact? It would have already needed to be documented somewhere along the way...

...of course if they were screened at the time of application...

What about random drug screenings by employers? Are you also opposed to that? After all, why should my boss care what I do in my off-time...

This... someone who thinks just like me.

A) Carrying a concealed weapon certainly doesn't preclude this option. If the altercation is merely someone holding me up with little physical threat or no safe way to draw, compliance would be the best option.
B) Killing someone is a terrible thing and I'm sure that even when the criminal "deserves" it, it should be a hard thing for most people to deal with.
C) Kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario here.
D) I would think most CCW permit holders have a greater fear of finding themselves in the situation to have to decide how and when to draw.

I don't remember interacting with you much before but I really enjoy reading your posts.

Forgive me, Alco, but I don't know if we live in the same country. In the US our government is restricted from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms. Now of course they do, but our primary governing document forbids it so it is fair to say that here, that is not what government is supposed to be for, it is the very opposite. It is also generally considered that at the very least we have an implied right to privacy.

Requiring people to prove anything in order to exercise a right seems to fly in the face of this.

Also, semi-automatic weapons of the sort that are widely available to the typical American are not mass killing machines.



Well, just like most domestic terrorist attacks, we seem to find everything out afterwards that makes the respective event even so much more tragic when all of the clues seemed to be there.

To go off on a tangent, there are always so many opportunities to have stopped so many of these people. Or to help them. I go go on a long rant about this. I think I'll move on.



Private versus public. Different animal. Perhaps we'll see more though as I'm sure stoners out west will bring legal cases against their employers.

Regarding point A, that's exactly the opposite of the point I was trying to make which was actually Option A versus Options [BCD].

Carrying a firearm has the natural effect over time to decrease the average gun-owner's Gamut of Compliance. Why comply and suffer humiliation and theft but little to no injury when you could avoid any pain or discomfort by simply drawing (even without firing) on someone so that they back down?
As evidenced by the article Alco linked, the extremes of only drawing your weapon in case of certain life or death very easily slips downslope into drawing your weapon if someone is harassing you verbally, or all the way down to shooting someone in an occupied cinema because they won't stop texting no matter how often you tell them to.
It creates an option which then demands to be utilized.

Someone should really tell the Marine Corps that semi-automatic fire with an M16 is not an effective way to kill people. It turns out they've been doing it wrong for the last 45 years or so.

Things like mental health screenings in background checks for firearms doesn't actually help anyone with mental health struggles, it just means that fewer people will have easy access to firearms but the same number of people still have few to no options or accessibility to mental health care and treatment.

It's not a question of "stopping" shootings, but figuring out ways to reduce the likelihood of them even being planned or begun.

For that matter, a lot of shootings involve the shooter borrowing or stealing a weapon from someone who bought it legally and who would have passed any mental health screening anyway.

When people call for more mental health screening - what exactly are you proposing?

Would you support some sort of universal mandatory mental health screening? Starting in childhood at school? Maybe something like every 5 years or lose access to certain privileges like driving, ect.

Because right now it seems public safety is reliant upon untrained professionals like friends and family to identify mental heath issues. But it also seems that with these recent acts of mass violence that parents are able to rationalize a wide range of behaviors in order to continue believing their children are normal and healthy.

Just curious where people would draw the line in privacy/freedom vs public safety.

You bring up a really excellent point.

In 2012 there were 34000 motor vehicle deaths in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year
Of those about a third were related to drunk driving:
http://www.madd.org/blog/2013/november/2012-drunk-driving-fatalities.html


Compare this to about 12000 firearm murders in 2012:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2008-2012.xls

So if you really want to help prevent needless deaths, we should start instituting strict mental health screening and background checks for anyone trying to buy alcohol, a car, or get a driver's license.

Creating a mandatory 6-week waiting period between an application to buy a beer and being allowed to would almost certainly help.

Please explain to me how the U.S. government infringes on our right to bear arms. Not allowing private citizens to open-carry bazookas doesn't prevent them from keeping a rifle in their homes. Also, the U.S. Constitution isn't a holy book, the founders were fallible & often short-sighted (e.g. see slavery), & we can infringe the **** out of ourselves should we choose to ratify said document (we can scrap the whole ****ing thing if we wanted to). I suppose that I lean a bit towards Max Weber on the whole monopoly on violence thing, & think that this is precisely what it's supposed to be for.


So you agree that the political right has been purposely attempting to disenfranchise voters (primarily minorities & students) by forcing them to jump through hoops in order to vote? How will we know if they're American citizens or not without checking their identification? Mexicans.


Define "mass". I grew up shooting my dad's 9mm handgun, which holds 16 rounds. What would prevent a daycare worker from assassinating 16 babies in her care, in a world where we didn't want to "infringe" on her rights by first, not doing background checks when she applied for the job, & second, allowing her to purchase a firearm without said screening? Would you not agree that virtually any weapon, in the wrong hands, could be used to "mass" kill? Do you really want the American version of the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs to prove this to us? I'd hate to see what those guys could've done with a few bazookas & assault rifles (throw in a few Apache helicopters & missile silos while we're not bothering to infringe).

There's a certain type of person in America that loves the constitution more than anything but the bible. That person also likes to pick and choose which parts are important. Naturally, the 2nd amendment is always in the top tier, while we don't so much give a crap about due process or cruel and unusual punishment when we're suggesting we bring back firing squads or speed up the capital punishment process. Not that it's anything new for this sort of person to be that way, because they do the same thing with the bible.

The closest these people come to forming their own opinions on anything is cherry picking documents they don't understand for a justification of their absurdly backward behavior. The really comical part is that in doing so they often become the polar opposite of the ideal that both of those documents champion.

Not too long ago I enumerated the constitution by how recent governments have completely **** all over everything important except for the second amendment.

I'm really confused why people spit bile and venom at even the idea of curtailing a right which they imagine is rolled into the second amendment, but don't give even the slightest care about the routine and casual violations of the sixth amendment that practically define criminal prosecution in the United States today.

How about the states which pad out fines with administration fees, charge for a public defender, or the 41 states which charge jailed inmates rent despite being unable to work, or the practically universal use of sensory deprivation and isolation throughout American prisons, regarded as a form of torture by every civilized person on this planet, all in flagrant violation of the eighth amendment?

lol, the constitution is just a document.

MAH GUNS

FREE SPEECH ZONES FOR SOME

WATER CANNONS FOR OTHERS

hail satan

"And just because you have free speech doesn't mean you are, like, allowed to just express whatever political opinion you want in a public space, man." - Eric Holder.

I assume.

I mean, when a person's opinion about the constitution is creative enough that summary execution of american citizens is on the plate, there's a pretty good chance here.

but those are criminals they've waived their rights by committing crimes obviously

obviously. everybody who gets arrested is guilty, the trial is just an expensive and unnecessary formality.

if those people didn't want their rights taken away, they shouldn't have been arrested for resisting arrest, or for being easier to prosecute (read: blacker) than the guy who actually did it.

Up here in Canada you can get credit for time served before trial, usually 2-to-1 but as high as 3-to-1 for exceptional circumstances. It's partially because the conditions in remand facilities are so much worse than in actual prisons, but it's also to punish the state for ignoring our constitution (§11b - cf. US constitution 6th amendment right to a speedy trial). Naturally, the good, honest, hard-working conservative christian gun-lovers up here in Canada think our constitution is too soft on criminals and should be ignored, so our conservative government has spent the last few years fighting its own conservative Supreme Court appointees over whether or not judges should be allowed to exercise their own wisdom in punishing the state for malingering and incompetence.

Normally I'd say that I'd find it funny if I didn't live here, but pretty much everything bad you can say about what's happening in Canada or the United States is also true of every other country where neoliberalism is taken seriously.

Just once I'd like an austerity neoliberal to acknowledge that when they talk about "small government" they aren't talking about trimming the bureaucracy or government expense, they're talking about cutting down the checks and balances. Because they've never done the former, and they've certainly tried to do a lot of the latter.

Grover Norquist said "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

i.e. a single person.

I'm just hitting all of the bases here since apparently this is a dumping ground for all political grievances and even all of our whining about fat people who don't help themselves get in shape.

It's not that simple. NPR did an interview with a mental health professional a few months ago, and he said that it was essentially impossible for anyone in his field to predict with any degree of certainty who is a "high risk" for this kind of behavior. It's easy to see that someone is deranged in retrospect, but a thirty minutes screening isn't going to help anything. You might be able to flag people who make clear threats, but most of these guys just aren't that obvious. Restricting people's social privileges on such a vague basis just isn't going to fly. You are just going to end up making it much harder for mental health professionals to do their job.

And don't get me started on NY's idiotic law that requires mental health professionals to violate doctor patient confidentiality. What a bunch of pandering, willfully ignorant *******s.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/01/17/169529792/mental-health-gun-laws-unlikely-to-reduce-shootings

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Yet, sometimes it is. For instance, if someone had some sort of mental breakdown in the past that actualy involved a firearm. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I'm going to guess that these sorts of people could be considered high-risk, since they may have already risked their own lives & the lives of others at least once. We're OK with violating the rights of sex offenders, why not high-risk gun-owners? I know a veteran from a recent war that was diagnosed with PTSD who for awhile used to wake up in the middle of the night, grab his legally obtained rifle, & check the "perimeter" of his home. Riiight. I know another guy whose son was threatened by a neighbor, he forced his own family to stay with relatives, baracaded himself in his own home with alcohol, marijuana, & firearms, & eventually the SWAT team had to get involved, he went into a mental hospital (he's now released though I'm fairly certain he's still seeing a psychiatrist & is on medication to this day). That guy also has enough legally obtained firearms to take down a church or school. He's also a right-wing Christian who thinks that the end is near, he stock-piled for Y2K & is certain that there's going to be a race war in the near future. However, I certainly agree with you that most people will likely slip through the cracks. This is precisely why we need to ban firearms, with a few exceptions (e.g. hunting, sports, etc.). If people are going to hide behind a ****ty interpretation of the 2nd amendment, then it's time we tear that Constitution up & write a new one that's relevant for our generation & for those in the future. Too bad we're likely destined for extinction before that happens...

Are you serious? You're just messing with me right?

First of all, the 2nd amendment does NOT apply to individuals but instead to well-regulated state militias:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-secondamendment.htm

Secondly, not requiring someone to prove they are capable of upholding a certain level of ethical obligation flies if the face of common sense. When you turned 16, did the DMV just hand you your driver's license or did you have to pass a test? Also, the Supreme Court has upheld that the mentally ill are excluded from the 2nd amendment!

Just for you wookie06, you have the right to bear arms...

Your article's out of date and, consequently, wrong. See D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago. These cases established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to firearm ownership and that that right is enforceable against state governments as well as the federal government.

Obviously this doesn't foreclose the possibility of reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the individual firearm ownership right, any more than the existence of an individual right to free speech forecloses the possibility of having defamation laws. But it's certainly not right to say that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to individuals, and frankly, the cases that writer cites don't offer very strong support for the idea that it ever was​ right to say so.

Is the solution to add a karyotyping to any firearm application? Or just make it mandatory at birth so that those with atypical chromosomes can be monitored and restricted from the get-go.

It makes me so hot when you do this.

When people start advocating gun control in the US, it always reeks massively of white privilege, much as I hate that term.

Please, do tell. Why do you hate the term "white privilege"? I am on the edge of my seat.

when people remind me how awesome my life is it makes me feel sad

The word privilege reeks of the ACL Union.

OK, I'll concede that with the caveat that both of these cases still upheld the prohibition for the mentally ill...

"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. Pp. 54–56."

...which was my point to Wookie06. If they already do background checks to verify that you're not a felon, then why not also do a mental health screening to ensure you're not mentally ill? OK, sure they might not be able to do a thorough screening and catch everyone that is mentally ill. But if it only stops one mentally ill individual, isn't it worth it?

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Eugenics?

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Please don't think I was serious.

I'm not a bad man.

Honest.