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If you have some common sense gun control that doesn't already exist in California feel free to trot it out. I am pretty sure that, once that whack job stabbed his roommates, he was there after subject to automatic gun confiscation under California law, yet, for some reason, he felt no need to report to the nearest police station and demand they arrest him.
In other words, the laws don't seem to work the way you think they do.
....
Connecticut is another state that leaves me free to challenge you on what sort of common sense gun laws would have prevented what happened. In fact, I remember doing so right after Sandy Hook, and watching you sputter like an incoherent gerbil.
Hey, crazy person, I usually ignore you because you are like, nuts.
Hmmm.
What kind of laws would have prevented these things?
How about- a background check that encompasses the entire home, including mental health issues. If someone in your house is crazy, there's no gun going to that house.
How about a national gun registry. When those cops went to Rodger's house, it might have been helpful if they had known he had purchased three guns in the last few weeks.
Point is, we have a gun culture that is lax about these things, mostly because we treat someone's right to own a gun like his right to go to the church of his choice.
Your "whole house" idea is worthless. In this case, the actual crazy person bought the guns. And he went thru, not one, not two, but
three background checks. None of them showed anything. Why? Because his mental health providers failed in their duty to report him.
Do you think the national gun registry would help? Do you think the cops would have checked the registry and waited for an answer? There was no sign that they treated him as a serious threat.
I'm coming in a bit late and this is a heated thread. I actually posted earlier in response to the OP, but the discussion as morphed since then.
Let me start by saying Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Isla Vista, all these big name shootings are tragedies. Horrible, just horrible tragedies.
I feel compelled to remind everyone that these tragedies are but a fraction of homicides in these United States. These suburbanite shooting sprees seem to dominate the debate on gun violence.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Joe's plan works in at least reducing the frequency of these suburbanite shooting sprees. What evidence is there that this will translate into a significant decrease in the murder rates in Detroit and New Orleans and Los Angeles?
Should not the direction of this discussion be on reducing the actual national murder rate? How would more stringent background checks or a national registry reduce the national murder rate? Quite frankly, the people committing these murders (not the aberrant suburbanite prick with a gun and a manifesto but rather the gangster) usually acquire their firearms through less than official channels.
An estimated 500,000 guns are stolen each year, becoming available to prohibited users. During the ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative (YCGII), which involved expanded tracing of firearms recovered by law enforcement agencies, only 18% of guns used criminally that were recovered in 1998 were in possession of the original owner. Guns recovered by police during criminal investigations were often sold by legitimate retail sales outlets to legal owners, and then diverted to criminal use over relatively short times ranging from a few months to a few years, which makes them relatively new compared with firearms in general circulation.
Gun violence in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So even if you are successful at stopping the next douchebag with a small prick and a manifesto in crayon from picking up a gun at the local gunstore, that does nothing to prevent people from purchasing the firearms and then reselling them such that these firearms wind up in the hands of impoverished youth, gangs and outright hardened criminals.
Isn't firearm resale through secondary markets the real issue to reduce gun violence in the United States? And how about that "500,000" guns stolen a year? Okay, I'll ask, how many were actually stolen and how many "fell off the truck"?
To my mind, these are the questions that will lead us to a constructive dialogue on reducing gun violence in our country.
Thanks for reading.
