BF2S Forums Official Mass Shooting & Suicide Bomber thread

We Need an Accurate National Conversation About Guns Thank you, Washington Post, for stepping up to the plate and correcting a widely-cited and shared piece of misinformation in the aftermath of the Florida shooting. There have not been 18 school shootings in the United States so far this year.

The figure originated with Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, that works to prevent gun violence and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings…

It is a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.

Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.

Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when at 1 a.m. a man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting.

We keep hearing, “we need to have a national conversation about guns,” and then we keep hearing statements from those same voices that are simply not true. If we’re going to have that national conversation, I want the other side to do its homework first.

I don’t want to hear CNN lamenting that Florida doesn’t require a concealed carry permit for an AR-15 or shotgun. (They are too large to conceal.) I don’t want to hear people referring to the AR-15 as an “automatic assault weapon” and I want them to learn the difference between automatic and semiautomatic, and which kind is already illegal. I don’t want to hear about “the gun show loophole” unless the shooter purchased his gun at a gun show. (To the best of my knowledge, not a single mass-shooter has done so.) I want former presidents to stop asserting that it’s easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than buy a computer or a book.

If someone wants to ban AR-15s, I want them to say so. I also want to know what they want to do about the 5 million to 10 million AR-15s already in private hands. I want them to realize that if they don’t grandfather in the already-owned ones, they will instantly turn millions of law-abiding Americans, who have never fired a shot in anger, into criminals. If a gun control advocate proposes a buyback program like Australia’s, I want that person to recognize that the compliance rate down under was about 20 percent and it created a violent black market for guns. If a gun control advocate calls for law enforcement to confiscate AR-15s from private homes, I want that person to realize that they’re calling for violent chaos. And I want them to know that as long as groups advocate ideas like this, the line “no one wants to take away your guns” is a disingenuous lie.

Jay wrote:

Well, it's because there is a rather big divide between the people having the discussions. On the one hand you have people who grew up with guns, feel comfortable around guns, and just don't see the big deal. On the other hand you have people who have never touched one and are terrified of them to the point that if they ever saw one they would probably break down and cry or run away. There's no common ground there.

I shot my first gun at eight. My dad took me up to his friends property in the Pocono Mountains and I shot a paper target with a rifle. My five year old brother shot a pistol. The next time I fired a weapon was when I was nineteen in basic training. I qualified expert. These days I own a shotgun for trap shooting and home defense.

I tell you all this because even though I am familiar, and a gun owner, my trust levels are low and I am afraid of other gun owners and their intentions. I've probably watched too many movies with drive-by shootings in them, or maybe it was my time in Iraq when driving was a deadly occupation, but I still get a twinge of fear when someone pulls up next to me in their car. Completely irrational. I get the desire to have a law written and to magically make all guns disappear. It's one of the things that would make me truly happy if it could happen. But it's like wishing away war or bullying or poverty or famine.

Anyway, if you want any sort of gun control you need the gun owners to buy in. You need them to agree and accept it as the proper course of action. Dictating to them, or lecturing them, or condescending towards them will just piss them off and make them hate you and double down even harder. It requires building trust. Up until now, the gun control advocates have done everything in their power to destroy any and all trust. They have hate in their heart, not understanding or compassion, and so they are denied. You can't overcome fear, because it is fear that drives the arms race, without establishing that trust. Be open and honest with your intentions. Be open to debate. Don't try to ram through ill-thought-out legislation after every tragedy.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I hate the discussion about mental health care and how "if only we helped this guy sooner we wouldn't have this tragedy". Such bullshit. There are many people who have much worse issues that don't go around killing innocent people (they troll video game forums instead). Same with the black high school kids I used to teach. All the black teachers always talked about how ghetto culture is unique and these kids can't be expected to learn like white kids. Also bullshit excuses. People go through worse every in life and aren't rude little animals for it.

uziq wrote:

Jay wrote:

DesertFox- wrote:

You say my math is terrible, but you're the one literally accepting thousands of preventable deaths because it's arbitrarily not big enough for you to want to change anything.

Heart disease: 633,842
Cancer: 595,930
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 155,041
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 146,571
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 140,323
Alzheimer’s disease: 110,561
Diabetes: 79,535
Influenza and Pneumonia: 57,062
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 49,959
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 44,193
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

We've spent approximately $1,000,000,000,000 on the war on drugs since 1971. Approximately 55,000 people die from drug overdoses each year, which puts it below flu deaths. Do you think it would've been better to spend that money on say, the leading cause of death, heart disease, or maybe the second leading cause of death, cancer, rather than putting millions of people in jail? Drugs are illegal. People still do drugs. It's a conscious decision that they've made. Wouldn't it make more sense to stop fighting reality and maybe instead make it safer for people to do what they want? If people actually knew the quality of the product they were using you'd see a more dramatic drop in overdose deaths than you would by doubling down on the drug war like you seem to want to.

what does the war on drugs have to do with the US being flooded with totally legal, massively abusable prescription drugs? kids are being over-prescribed strong opiates and painkillers, leading to an addiction problem. the war on drugs' aims and rhetoric have nothing to do with this problem. you're like conflating two issues and claiming that the expenditure of funding narco wars in colombia proves that trying to combat teenagers taking xannies is a lost cause. lol.

Last edited by Jay (2018-02-18 05:08:05)

Jay wrote:

I'm in favor of a ban on semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines, personally.

Edit - however, the counter argument will always be that you would be putting law abiding citizens at a disadvantage against people who flout the law. It also wouldn't prevent someone bent on mass murder from just carrying multiple disposable weapons. There's no easy fix

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2018-02-19 02:44:17)

AussieReaper wrote:

Dilbert I think what you wrote is too reasonable to be accepted.

They did nothing after Sandy Hook. Nothing after Vegas.

The only way this could be different is if the NRA stop buying off politicians.