What can be done to stop gun violence

  • Thread starter Thread starter JoeShlabotnik
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Jimbo, I believe we are on the same track. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Ban assault type weapons.
Work on the root causes for hate type crimes. Find help for those who are mentally disturbed. Help law enforcement officials to better do there jobs. Set up a hot line to warn the authorities of a co-worker or someone else who has been acting weirdly.
 
One thing I heard once, that would be opposed by the gun people, was basically a form of registration in which the guns ballistics are mapped. So we know, and could track, any bullet that came out of that gun.

Then you make the gun owner responsible for any bullet that comes out of that gun. So if the gun owners has a guns stolen and doesn’t report it, He or she is partly culpable for any crime committed with it.

If they sell it, then responsibility passes to the person who purchased it; unless the sale was done illegally.

There’s alot to work out; and it might not work, but it allows the ownership of guns while bringing culpability down to a more personal level. Kind of a subsidiarity of gun responsibility. Just an idea.

One thing I was very frustrated with was Beto’s ‘I’m coming for your guns’ bit. That helped absolutely nothing, and frankly just poisoned the well.

We have to be hard on murder, yet respectful for peoples rights.
 
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Other countries, like ours (democracies), don’t have nearly the gun violence we have. Why? Much fewer guns out there.
There need to be some restrictions.
Gun ownership should be legal. But owning a gun specifically designed to kill people (assault type weapons) should be outlawed.
People who want to kill others will find a way.
But why make it easier for them by allowing these max-kill guns to be available to them.
 
Each year, many people are killed with their own guns. Some family members are killed with those guns.
We have the technology to make guns that allow only the owner of the gun to discharge them.
 
I had heard of something like that and to me that’s the kind of thinking that gets real results. Like you said, there’s a lot to work out. We’re not claiming to have perfect answers. And I think most people in the overall gun debate want real, honest solutions. But all we hear are the loud simplistic voices the media chooses to give air time to, on one side yelling “Boo, guns bad!” and on the other “Yay, guns good!” Like every large scale debate, it’s gotten dumbed down and packaged for consumers until the election, then start the process over.

I also think a larger issue is giving our boys their manhood earlier and making them responsible for it. “Adolescence” has been stretched out into young mens’ 20’s and even 30’s, and even applauded by our commercial culture. But I believe most boys want to grow up to be real men. I believe it would raise interest in high-school age young men to ditch some of the classes about writing haikus and learning about all the 52 different “genders” and having a course or two in self-defense, firearms training, even basic survival skills. Bring in some military veterans, special forces, SWAT, etc to offer some seminars. That would have held my own youthful interest longer than The Great Gatsby 🙂
 
And maybe that is a way to split the baby. We disagree on ‘guns designed to kill people’, but an AR that can only be shot by its owner may well reduce access and accomplish the distributive gun responsibility I’d thought of before.

In the meantime, we really need to study root causes and address those. And, as state before, as Catholics we need to try to change the culture.

One way in which I will deliberately compare abortion and gun violence is that they are both crimes linked to a dis-respect of life. If we can change the culture, we can reduce that.
 
LOL, I wasn’t a fan of Gatsby but I could respect it.

That said, I know my son got very frustrated at school when they wouldn’t allow him to throw snowballs because ‘someone could get seriously injured!!!’ My interest in school very closely tracked going to an all boys school where we had alot of more sports/discipline/ (healthy) aggressive outlets.

That’s an entirely different conversation though.
 
JoeShlabotnik said:
Gun ownership should be legal. But owning a gun specifically designed to kill people (assault type weapons) should be outlawed.
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Not necessarily. They should be allowed, but they would fall under different and stricter regulations.

To use an example from aviation, a private pilot certificate enables one to fly a single engine plane. To fly a tailwheel plane requires additional training and an endorsement certifying the passage of that training. To fly a plane with two engines and a retractable landing gear and variable pitch prop requires further training and flight tests. And to fly a plane with a jet engine requires specific training for that skill.

So I would not outlaw AR-15s for everyone. But I would make the requirements for owning an AR-15 so stringent that they would be much less common. I am told, however, by a rancher, that weapons like the AR-15 are very appropriate for use against predators in protecting a herd of cattle. So there is an example of a use case that might be justified. But since the use is in a commercial business, one would expect the user to verify the proper training and use conditions that someone purchasing a shotgun for hunting would not be expected to pass.
 
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I might even suggest required self-defense training with non-lethal weapons like tasers or pepper spray. I also wonder about things like tranquilizer darts. It might not stop a mass shooter as quickly as a firearm, but it would stop him. And I would think more people would be comfortable carrying a tranquilizer pistol, which, if they miss, is less likely to hurt someone permanently.

I think the solution is widespread training. Few people today have ever been in a violent situation where they’ve feared for their life or serious injury. We like to pretend it doesn’t happen, then when it does we have nothing to rely on. I think facing the reality that there are people out there who want to harm the innocent is the first step. The next is equipping them with some capacity to defend themselves and their families.

Ultimately, the values of integrity and individual responsibility need to be promoted and celebrated in our culture. I think whatever side of the gun-control debate we’re on, we can all agree that these values have been suppressed by powerful people who see us citizens not as ends in ourselves but as pawns in their social-engineering agenda.
 
Jimbo said:
My interest in school very closely tracked going to an all boys school where we had alot of more sports/discipline/ (healthy) aggressive outlets.

That’s an entirely different conversation though.
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I don’t know that it is a different conversation. I believe a lot of gun crime is committed by young men with little paternal influence. There’s no specific rite of passage to manhood for many boys growing up, and the culture and media even seem to me to be engaged in a war with the Y chromosome and “the patriarchy”. Then someone puts gun in a boy’s hand and encourages him to act out all his suppressed aggression and frustrations, and we call it “senseless” violence.

But we’re talking about a huge cultural shift. This is why I think trying it on a community or county or state level and mapping the results would be best.
 
That is something I can get too. I believe gun ownership is a right. Much like free speech. Both can’t be infringed but they can be regulated. So I don’t see ‘no problem purchase the AR’ being tied to ‘and here is your sign up sheet’ being a bad thing.

That said, if we did this 100% tomorrow I really don’t see it meaningfully impacting mass shootings or gun crimes.

A great study would be to see:

A) How many shootings are done by illegally obtained firearms
B) What is the demographic of people doing this (rich? Poor? Urban? Rural?)
C) Are there correlations between poverty and gun violence?
D) Are there correlations between other crimes and gun crime?

etc.

What seems utterly silly to me is adding a law to the books that will be obeyed by my neighbors and co-workers who carry, and who have no criminal record at all. You’ll spend a ton of time, effort, money, and political capital on passing a law that won’t help.
 
Fair point. I can see that.

I chuckle at my son’s experience. He had a class at a Montessori with a lovely young lady as his teacher. She became pregnant and all of the sudden the entire classroom was practically bubble wrapped. ‘DON’T THROW SNOW!’ ‘DON’T WRESTLE!’ ‘DON’T PLAY FOOTBALL! OR SOCCER! OR BASEBALL’

I don’t blame her. I’ve never been pregnant and it was her first baby. I was nuts around my daughter when she came home. But man it drove my son nuts.

Later that year we went to a summer camp as a father/son trip where they had a giant capture the flag game where the contestants were allowed to carry pool noodle swords, whatever cardboard armor they could come up with, and plastic snow sled shields. He was in heaven.
 
No doubt what you are saying is correct.
But until we can change the culture, we can make it harder for people to acquire assault-type weaponry.
As I said before, people who are obsessed with killing, will find a way. But assault weapons make it easier for them. Let’s make it harder.
As Catholics, we need to preach the two big commandments – Love God with all your being, and love one another as brothers and sisters.
 
AR-15s and AK-47s should be outlawed. But with a grace period for those who want to sell them to the authorities.
 
Yes that was my point. Guns are not the problem. If they were then that region would be the most violent in the country.
 
Guns are the problem. Guns, in the hands of those who hate, are an even bigger problem.
 
Fuerza said:
Yes that was my point. Guns are not the problem. If they were then that region would be the most violent in the country.
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Wrong. 😉 Those states would be the most violent (murderous) in the whole world, not just in the US. Instead that region is among the safest places on earth, as measured /quantified by murder rate.

Not only, are guns not the problem (nor “easy access” to them, since VT, NH, and ME have among the easiest access to assault weapons on earth), but they can coexist with good, with peace and safety.

We should have easier access to them, and we should carry them around with us publicly without police penalty. We have the right to defend ourselves, and to defend other innocent ppl around us too. Carrying guns is literally bearing arms.
 
JoeShlabotnik said:
Guns are the problem. Guns, in the hands of those who hate, are an even bigger problem.
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Anybody who commits the crime of menacing, threatening, intimidating, by saying they will commit massacre, everybody needs to know they have a duty /obligation to call the police and report this crime. We have the right know whenever a person commits this crime, and nobody has the right to not report this crime to the police; there is no right to remain silent here. We have the duty as individuals to report this crime to the police, because we have the right as the People to know whenever a person commits this crime.
 
John10 said:
I do not think other things will do much, when we “skip” the giant white elephant of the room, easy access to guns and so many guns in civilians hands.
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The giant white elephant in the room is culture, not guns.


“Murders in US very concentrated: 54% of US counties in 2014 had zero murders, 2% of counties have 51% of the murders”

How does restricting gun ownership in the 54% of counties that have zero murders reduce violence in the 2% that have more than half of the murders?
 
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