Originally Posted by Rocketmedic
In response to Warp:
On the books? None. By all accounts, many of these school shooters have clean records, and those that had sought help were not processed appropriately- in James Holmes's case, at least, there was clear evidence that danger was imminent. But that didn't matter. They had the guns, and worse for the frothing-mad 2nd Amendment crowd, they were legally obtained. Even in the case of Adam Landza, the weapons were legally obtained by his mother, and placed in a residence with an unstable young man. The fault here lay with the users, of course, but the current system allowed them to legally acquire their weapons. Worse, the current system would not necessarily have prevented them from acquiring their weapons even if they were undergoing treatment for mental illness (after all, they could have simply bought a firearm face-to-face). Would they be in violation of the law? Yes. Would they have been caught and prosecuted? Highly unlikely.
Every response here that yells that our current firearms law "would be effective if applied" is ignoring that it was applied and allowed every single one of these shooters to arm themselves, directly or indirectly. These crimes were not committed with Chinese AKs and IEDs as primary devices (yes, Holmes did build many explosives, but his resources and background made that a near-unstoppable incident once he decided to kill). They were committed with the same AR-15s, Glocks, and other high-capacity pistols that most of us have in our own homes. These sick people are not using illegally-obtained firearms. Notice that I used the liberal buzzword "high-capacity". There haven't been very many high-casualty school shootings in my lifetime with revolvers. (Yes, there's been far too many shootings, even school shootings, with revolvers in the last 24 years, but Columbine, VT, and Sandy Hook were notably not revolver-using crimes).
I, as a gun owner, realize that this massacre of children should change our attitudes towards firearms to prevent this from occurring again. Tracing every American with mental illness, their treatment and their eligibility to own firearms predicates the existence of a police state that would dwarf the one existent. Frankly, controlling every potential psychopath is impossible with any semblance of freedom. The fact remains that high-capacity legal firearms are misused far more catastrophically than low-capacity firearms. We cannot prevent school shootings without the wholesale ban of firearms. However, we can mitigate them with restrictions on available firearms, ammunition capacities and stricter ownership requirements. "Oh, but people will just buy them illegally/make bombs/drive trucks into crowds". Guess what. It's far easier to survive a truck ramming a classroom then it is to survive an active shooter. It's far more complex than most people understand to make an effective explosive (once again, James Holmes is an exception. The majority of these shooters used off-the-shelf high-capacity magazines in unaltered firearms). No, they won't go buy higher-capacity magazines- they'll use the biggest ones available. I'd rather that be 10 than 30. "But it's the media." Lame excuse of an argument. You're telling me that you're going to go before the parents of Newport and tell them that it's MSNBC's fault that a psycopath with hundreds of bullets murdered their child? Good luck.
Frankly, THR, I'm tired of hearing the standard right-wing squabbling that so many of you hoist high. I don't particularly care that y'all shoot Three-Gun and just can't adjust the rules to accomodate ten or fifteen-round magazines, bullet buttons or stripper clips. I don't particularly care that your rifle must have a cyclic rated to dump a pound of lead downrange in less than ten seconds. I don't particularly care that your CCW pistol needs to have enough rounds on-tap to kill a fire team with no reloads. Guess what? People have misused guns, specifically high-capacity ones, and it's time that we adjust our attitudes and clean house before it's cleaned for us.
My proposal stands as before, with one addition. Biometrics/RFID. Every gun sold will come with a trigger disconnect and a wireless connection to a pendant or card or something you would wear/carry while shooting it. If it's in range of your tag, it will function. If it's not in range of your tag, it won't. You could program housewide tags off of a WiFi modem for home-defense or range, or paradoxically could make gun-free school zones practical with override signals. Guns without this technology will be grandfathered in, but all new firearms will have them...and to encourage people to convert, guns that could be converted would have subsidized conversions to the biometric trigger.
I am not claiming that gun control is a panacea. I am not claiming that it will prevent gun crime, it will not. I am not saying the gun grabbers are right, because they are just as wrong as our extremists are. I'd rather have prohibitively-expensive 30-round magazines, commonly-available ten-round or less pistols, universal CCW and a clear, unambiguous Constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms with far fewer and lower-casualty mass shootings than I would the status quo.
The side effects of better shooters, less ammo-wasting posers, and a more responsible and arms-conscious public are also net positives.
