LogFAQs > #889913883

Shogun2049 posted...

This was a shooting where the shooter was taken down by an actual citizen seeing the individual flee as opposed to getting away while someone called the police and waited a half hour for them to show up.

No, it wasn't. The guy shot himself while fleeing; the guy who confronted him with his own gun at best scared him off, after the damage had already been done.

Shogun2049 posted...

It should be legal to carry a gun openly just for this type of situation. If someone barged into a church with 30+ people who are all openly carrying a gun, they would turn back around instead of opening fire on the congregation.

Honestly, if this is your viewpoint, you're dramatically underselling it. You think a few handguns are going to scare a guy with an AR-15?

If you really want to stop someone coming into a church with a high powered weaponry, I'd recommend a perimeter of foxholes and machine gun nests, ringed by razorwire and crewed by at least one squadron of trained infantry. Each church should have heavy support in the form of either sea- or land-based artillery or - for those locations to remote for artillery to be practical - drone or air support. Parishioners should be instructed to come to worship dressed in full combat gear, including ballistic vests and helmets, and should be trained and drilled in acting under fire.

This will solve the issue, though I can't help but feel like it misses a bit of the point of the problem...

BeerOnTap posted...

The Bataclan ring a bell?

Also, take away guns and they just start plowing vehicles into populated areas instead. We've seen plenty of that in Europe lately.

The number of dead to deliberate vehicle attacks in the entirety of the developed world is dwarfed by the number of mass shooting deaths in America (to say nothing of the "garden variety" shootings and suicides that make up the vast majority of gun deaths).

The vehicle comparison, though, is an apt one, because vehicles kill about as many people a year as guns, though the overwhelming majority of vehicle deaths are unintentional. But look at how we treat vehicle safety compared to gun safety. Since recognizing that vehicles are responsible for a great deal of death and destruction, we have taken enormous steps in making them safer. Each vehicle must be registered with the government, with that registration renewed regularly, and its operators must be tested and licensed to prove that they are capable of operating it safely and are free from any physical or mental defects that would cause them to be a liability on the road. People who have proven, through their actions, to be a threat to others on the road can lose their right to drive altogether and may even have their vehicles seized.

Safety features are added and constantly improved - from seat belts to air bags to roll cages to crumple zones - in order to reduce the lethality of car crashes, and new designs - like lane departure detection or blind spot warnings - are constantly being added. When new threats to safety emerge, like texting and driving, laws are rapidly updated to deal with the issue. Every year the bar is raised on what constitutes "acceptably safe", and as a result vehicle deaths per miles traveled is perpetually decreasing and has done so for decades.

If guns followed this model, America would be a much better place. But no, whenever there's a mass shooting like this, the gun apologists just throw their hands up and say "Nope, there's no way this could have been prevented, even though everyone else somehow manages to do so."
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!