Do we need more laws, or just better enforcement?

[OKTexas]

We're focusing on the wrong things if we are hoping to reduce gun violence.

We're focusing on the gun when we ought to be focusing on the violence.

But if you think that gun control is going to make waves, imagine writing laws that prevent those who are not suited to gun ownership from having them.

What that would require is that we psychologically test gun owners.

Two problems

1. We don't have a true test that would tell us who is dangerous, but even if we did?;

2. We'd discover that a whole lot of people -- people without criminal or psychiatric histories of violence -- ought NOT be allowed to own guns.

You seem to be overlooking the fact that unstable people commit a very small percentage of gun crimes. Also the LA cop had passed all the available psyc evals so that kind of shoots you down, no such evaluation is fool proof.

 

[Spoonman]

Do you ever notice when we talk about these brutal mass shootings everyone wants to put an end to, we have to go back a decade to even come up with a handful of them. if we were really interested in saving lives there are a hundred other better causes we could and should be devoting our efforts too. the laws in place regulating guns are more than adequate. in fact, in many states they already go way overboard. regulating guns is not the issue. managing people is

 

[editec]

Anyone convicted of a gun crime should get life in prison without parole.

Let's see how fast that works.

Well that certainly would swell the population in prison fast enough.

But it seems to me that in most cases of SPREE KILLING, the perps seldom have any history of using a gun illegally UNTIL they go nuts.

So that law, probably wouldn't help much as it related to spree killings like the 30+ school shootings that have happened in our lifetimes..

Random acts of violence are by definition nearly impossible to predict and therefore prevent.

Well generally speaking the events themselves are not random because in order for them to BE random, that would mean that anyone of us could become a spree killer. Spree killers are not themselves victims of anything we know of that is truly random.

The victims of these nuts are sometimes their random victims, though.

Serial killers kill many people before they are caught but we don't seem to be all hopped up about preventing those types of murders. Random mass shootings are no different.

Serial killers are an entirely different breed of monster than spree killers, amigo.

The problem the REAL problem is that we have no way of identifying potential SPREE KILLERS before they act on that impulse.

But like I have been saying all along, gun control laws (short of a total ban and disarming of all guns in ALL hands--maybe even cops included) simply will NOT stop spree killings

It is NOT the gun, nor the clip size, nor the rate of fire that makes people go out there and start blasting.

That motive is inside their heads.