Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
we should be looking at policies that address those killings.
Like making it harder to get a gun? Great idea! I'm all for gun ownership if you can pass a competency test (regular and weapon related) to legally own one.
How hard do we make this though? It has to be easy enough so as to not violate the 2nd amendment (meaning a reasonably competent person should be able to qualify for one). Someone dedicated and committed to some kind of mass spree shooting is going to likely be able to *** the test. And then what? Nothing.
And this is ignoring cases where someone simply steals weapons from someone else, right? The Sandyhook shooter just took his mom's weapons, right?
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There are a number of things in this country that are regulated for the general good (auto and truck licenses being an obvious example). There is no reason not to include guns on the list of things of "you can have/use one when you prove you can do it properly".
Yeah, because the legal equivalent of driving without a license is at all a deterrent to someone planning on committing mass murder. And the need to obtain a license has ever been an effective means of preventing road rage, or use of a vehicle as a deadly weapon.
This is the kind of idea that sounds great until you actually start thinking about it beyond a very surface level. Then it just falls apart. At the end of the day, someone who's planning something like this isn't going to be deterred by these sorts of things. They will either already have qualified for the weapons, and own them, spend the time qualifying and buying them, or just steal/borrow them. Most people doing this don't plan on living through the event.
You're going to deter millions of otherwise law abiding potential gun owners long before you deter a guy planning on a mass shooting. Which, if your objective for proposing this is to just reduce the total amount of gun ownership in the country, as part of your "I hate guns and think anyone who owns them is stupid/crazy/whatever" agenda, makes it an ideal "solution". If your objective is to actually reduce the rate of mass shootings like this? Not much at all. I have no doubt at all that a good percentage of the anti-gun folks care more about getting rid of guns from the hands of law abiding citizens than they really care about protecting kids from being killed while at school. Sad, I know, but that certainly appears to be the case.
Edited, Feb 22nd 2018 4:29pm by gbaji