Weddingbee boards

Here's the deal.  This ISN'T a major problem.  It's a tragic problem and it's a highly visible problem and it's a problem that fuels emotions because it involved little loveable tiny human children and innocent victims.  But it's not actually a major problem.

When you add up all the people IN THE WORLD - kids AND adults - who, in the past 15 years have been killed by school or mass shootings it totals a couple hundred.  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777958.html

46 people EACH DAY are killed in drunk driving accidents.  That's about 16,000 per year or  251,850 over the same timespan.  THAT is a major problem in the US.

@joya_aspera  I'd like to see your statistics that countries with gun restrictions in place don't have nearly the same kind of shooting statistics as we have in the US.  All evidence I can find actually points to the contrary:

In an argument against gun control, the National Center for Policy Analysis, a non-profit conservative think tank, reported the following statistics:[175]

• New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later the murder rate was up 46% and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.
• In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh gun control measures and its murder rate tripled from a low of 2.4 per 100,000 in 1968 to 7.2 by 1977.
• In 1976, Washington, D.C. enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134% while the national murder rate has dropped 2%.

In addition:

• As of 2006, approximately 35% of American households have a gun in them. About 22% of Americans actually own a gun.[176]
• Among the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 have restrictive or very restrictive gun laws.[177]
• Twenty percent of U.S. homicides occur in four cities with just 6% of the population—New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and each has or, in the cases of Detroit (until 2001) and D.C. (2008) had, a requirement for a licence on private handguns or an effective outright ban (in the case of Chicago).[178]
• In England, Wales and Scotland, the private ownership of most handguns was banned in 1997 following a gun massacre at a school in Dunblane and an earlier gun massacre in Hungerford in which the combined deaths was 35 and injured 30. Gun ownership and gun crime was already at a low level, which made these slaughters particularly concerning. Only an estimated 57,000 people —0.1% of the population owned such weapons prior to the ban.[179] In the UK, only 8 per cent of all criminal homicides are committed with a firearm of any kind.[180] In 2005/6 the number of such deaths in England and Wales (population 53.3 million) was just 50, a reduction of 36 per cent on the year before and lower than at any time since 1998/9. The lowest rate of gun crime was in 2004/4 whilst the highest was in 1994.[citation needed] There was, however, a noticeable temporary increase in gun crime in the years immediately after the ban, though this has since fallen back. The reason for the increase has not been investigated thoroughly but it is thought that 3 factors may have raised the number of guns in circulation. These are, the reduction in gun crime in Northern Ireland (which led to guns coming from there to the criminal black market in England); guns (official issue or confiscated) acquired by military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan; and guns coming from Eastern Europe after the fall of the iron curtain.[citation needed] Firearm injuries in England and Wales also noticeably increased in this time.[181] In 2005-06, of 5,001 such injuries, 3,474 (69%) were defined as "slight," and a further 965 (19%) involved the "firearm" being used as a blunt instrument. Twenty-four percent of injuries were caused with air guns, and 32% with "imitation firearms" (including airsoft guns).[182] Since 1998, the number of fatal shootings has varied between 49 and 97, and was 50 in 2005. In Scotland the picture has been more varied with no pattern of rise or fall appearing.[citation needed]
• Violent crime accelerated in Jamaica after handguns were heavily restricted and a special Gun Court established.[183] However a high proportion of the illegal guns in Jamaica can be attributed to guns smuggled in from the United states where they are more freely available.[184]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics

Check out this post by MissMorganista--guns aren't the problem, people are.

http://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/22-chinese-children-slashed-in-knife-attack

OP, I was just thinking this. I am totally for the second ammendment, and I do not think gun control would have helped this situation very much. It is so easy to aquire a gun illegally. I think even if they were banned throughout the US it would still be easy to aquire one.

BUT, we live in a society with terrible attitudes towards mental health care. We allow severely mentally ill people to be let out of mental health wards because hospitals can't afford it. We send out actively psychotic homeless people into the streets after short stays because we don't want to have to spend the money, or the time, to figure out what else to do with them. I wonder how many times many of these shooters have sent out signals that they were so ill. I'm sure 95% of them were clearly having suicidal or homicidal thoughts, and yet, few people do anything about it. We allow kids to be raised in homes where they are raped, beaten, and abused, and then we condemn them for getting personality disorders and PTSD.

I have seen so many comments about how disgusting these people are, and honestly, those comments are just as disturbing to me as the action itself.

These shootings are a symptom of a problem in our society, not the problem itself.

ETA: I do believe in stricter gun control for people with mental illness, or at least better enforcement of laws which are already existing.

@Crabbabs:  I agree with you.  I don't know how many people have to die by gun violence in the U.S. before the american people wake up.  =(  It's SO SAD to me...

All of the most recent mass shootings were with guns obtained legally: the sikh temple, the Virginia tech shooting, the movie theater shooting....even Columbine was with the boys' legal guns.  

This is just heartbreaking to see, over and over.

@canadablue:  I'm not canadian, but I completely agree with you.

@DeathByDesign:  I don't know how much contact you have had with mentally ill people, but the amount of them are shocking. I didn't realize the number of people who were so ill until I worked with psych patients in the behavioral health ward. Many of these people suffer delusions go great that they believe God wants them to kill people. Some people believe that killing people is actually helping them. Some people believe they are dead (seriously). The list goes on and on, and they get very little actual help.

It's hard to believe that so many people could be that messed up, but in my limited experience it is very true. There are hundreds of them in metropolitan areas. Compare that with the amount of these crimes and the proportion is very low.

@DeathByDesign:  we don't know the shooter's mental background at this point.  How can you be sure he wasn't suffering from hallucinations, hearing voices, or having delusions of grandeur?  All/any of those are extremely common symptoms of paranoid schizophrenics....of which my sister is one.  And she hasn't been violent towards other people yet, but she has talked about wanting to "get protection" from the "people trying to hurt her".

What if this shooter was the same?  Legally, his parents couldn't have involuntarily committed him if he's an adult.  

There are a LOT of reasons this keeps happening in our society, and I don't think it's an either/or situation.  I think it's because we don't treat mental illnesses as we should, AND because we need much, much stricter gun control.  I don't think regular people should be able to own automatic assault weapons.