"A gun-control movement worthy of the name would insist that President Clinton move beyond his proposals for controls ... and immediately call on Congress to pass far-reaching industry regulation like the Firearms Safety and Consumer Protection Act ... [which] would give the Treasury Department health and safety authority over the gun industry, and any rational regulator with that authority would ban handguns."
- Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center

“If I had my way, sporting guns would be strictly regulated, the rest would be confiscated.”
– Nancy Pelosi, US Congresswoman

“US Senator, If I could have banned them all – ‘Mr. and Mrs. America turn in your guns’ – I would have!”
– Diane Feinstein, US Senator

"My view of guns is simple. I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned."
- Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Dean of Harvard School of Public Health

"I don't care if you want to hunt, I don't care if you think it's your right. I say 'Sorry.' it's 1999. We have had enough as a nation. You are not allowed to own a gun, and if you do own a gun I think you should go to prison."
- Rosie O'Donnell, Actress

“I don’t believe people should to be able to own guns.”
- Barack Obama (during conversation with economist and author John Lott Jr. at the University of Chicago Law School in the 1990s)

“We must get rid of all the guns.”
- Sarah Brady, Widow of James Brady

“I believe for example when Washington, D.C., passed a law that nobody could have a gun except law enforcement and it was struck down by the United States Supreme Court, that we should overrule the Supreme Court with a Constitutional amendment. I don’t believe that in our society that we should have guns.”
- Ed Koch, former NYC Mayor

“Confiscation could be an option…mandatory sale to the state could be an option.”
- Andrew Cuomo, NY Governor

“an assault weapons ban is just the beginning...a complete ban on handguns could be possible through state and local action.”
- Jan Schakowsky, llinois Congresswoman

“governments should start confiscating semi-automatic rifles and other firearms
- Dan Muhlbauer, Iowa state Rep.

Now, this was with a quick search on Google. I am sure there are more, but I just thought I would give a sample. Additionally, the really rabid activists have learned to rephrase statements to avoid the term ban. They aren't stupid, they know that they have to soften the phrasing to make it more palatable to the everyday citizen.

Yeah, you could say he's been keeping busy.

2016 Alice Through the Looking Glass (post-production)
2016 Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (post-production)
2015 Goosebumps (completed)
2015 Before I Wake (completed)
2015 Tulip Fever (completed)
2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron
2015 Fifty Shades of Grey
2015 The End of the Tour
2014 Tales from the Crypt (Short)
2014/I Big Eyes
2014 Mr. Peabody & Sherman (music by)
2013 American Hustle
2013 The Unknown Known (Documentary)
2013 Epic
2013 Oz the Great and Powerful
2013 Captain Sparky vs. The Flying Saucers (Short)
2012 Promised Land
2012 Hitchcock
2012 Frankenweenie
2012 Silver Linings Playbook
2012 Gun Test (Short)
2012 Men in Black 3
2012 Dark Shadows
2011 Real Steel
2011 A Conversation with Danny Elfman and Tim Burton (Documentary)
2011/I Restless
2010/III Do Not Disturb (music by)
2010 The Fight for the Last Cookie (Short)
2010 The Next Three Days
2010/I Alice in Wonderland
2010 Ooozetoons! (TV Movie)
2010 The Wolfman
2009 The Dollar (Short)
2009 Taking Woodstock
2009 Terminator Salvation
2009 Notorious
2008/I Milk
2008 Hellboy II: The Golden Army
2008 Wanted
2008 Standard Operating Procedure (Documentary)
2007 The Kingdom
2007 Meet the Robinsons
2007 Arkham Asylum Fan Film (Short) (score music)
2006 Charlotte's Web
2006 Nacho Libre
2006 Deep Sea (Documentary short)
2005 Shadows of the Bat: The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight - Dark Side of the Knight (Video documentary short)
2005 Corpse Bride
2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (music by)
2005 No Experience Needed (Short)
2004 Spider-Man 2 (music by)
2003 Big Fish
2003 Hulk (music by)
2002 Red Dragon
2002 Men in Black II (music by)
2002 Spider-Man (music by)
2001 Planet of the Apes
2001 Mazer World (Short)
2001 Spy Kids
2000 The Family Man
2000 Proof of Life
1999 Sleepy Hollow
1999 Anywhere But Here
1999 Instinct
1998 A Civil Action
1998 A Simple Plan
1997 Good Will Hunting
1997 Flubber
1997 Men in Black (music by)
1996 Mars Attacks!
1996 Extreme Measures
1996 The Frighteners
1996 Mission: Impossible (music by)
1996 Freeway
1995 Dead Presidents
1995 To Die For
1995 Dolores Claiborne
1994 Black Beauty
1993 The Nightmare Before Christmas (original score by)
1993 Sommersby
1992 Batman Returns
1992 Article 99
1990 Edward Scissorhands
1990 Darkman
1990 Dick Tracy
1990 Nightbreed
1989 Batman
1988 Scrooged (music score by)
1988 Face Like a Frog (Short)
1988 Hot to Trot
1988 Big Top Pee-wee
1988 Midnight Run
1988 Beetlejuice
1986-1987 Pee-wee's Playhouse (TV Series) (4 episodes)
1987 Summer School
1985-1987 Amazing Stories (TV Series) (2 episodes) )
1986 Wisdom
1986 Back to School
1986 Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV Series) (1 episode)
1985 Pee-wee's Big Adventure
1980 Forbidden Zone

Unfortunately, not uncommon in the slightest. I've done two jobs like this (at a previous employer and at my current job when we tore down the server room to install proper heat tunnels as our 1990's vintage air con wasn't keeping our server room under 35 deg cel).

People don't fix lazy patches (and it's not really advisable to pull cables during production because wackiness ensues), so eventually you end up with an awful mess. When someone does decide to clean it up, you have so many systems (and associated downtime) that management baulks at committing, reasoning that "if it's working, don't fuck with it". Then you reach the inevitable disaster point where you lose a vital system and cannot fix it because you lost a cable in the mess.

Longer patches get used to go around the monstrous mess created and eventually get buried as more and more are added, or repatching is done. Or it's the only cable they had on hand. Or they can't be bothered getting a more sensibly sized patch. ; )

It also looks like they were fixing up the fibre channel patches at the same time.

@ CharlieM, 3 days according to the white time stamp in the top left corner ; ).

Nope. I have been a big Star Wars fan since I was a young kid (not quite old enough to have seen ANH or ESB in theaters, but I did see RotJ on the big screen, plus of course watching them all on TV many many times growing up) but somehow I missed out on those games.

Quick google shows Wing Commander 1 as 1990, Wing Commander 3 at 1994, TIE Fighter also in 1994, and X-Wing Alliance in 1999. I played those Wing Commander games (and others), and played a lot of Star Wars games during that span, including stuff like Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Squadron for N64. But somehow the X-Wing and TIE Fighter stuff stayed off my radar at the time.

Should I check GOG?

Tags for this video have been changed from '1990s, Ariana Savales, Postmodern Jukebox' to '1990s, Ariana Savalas, Postmodern Jukebox, Blackstreet, Love way you Work It' - edited by Zawash

Hmm. Zombies. So Novel for 1990.

No, I didn't watch the video. No need, because: zombies. Please move on entertainment industry, because it was pathetic 10+ years ago, and today there isn't even a word in the english language that can describe the fail that is adding to this already "dead" genre. (har har)

Your PDF source:
- I cannot find the list of 'climate models' constantly referred to, without a clear identification of what models he's referring to, any argument relating to those models is completely besides the point. How can i fact check that? This should be VERY clearly covered early on, it's the most basic of introduction to your work.
- Top of page 3, unscientific jab at a previous scientist's contribution. Can we stick to scientific arguments please?
- What, no uncertainties? Am i in pre-school? How do i know he hasn't taken the top uncertainty of every model and the bottom uncertainty of every real measurement? These graphs are absolute dog shit.
- Figure 3 - no decent scientist would put an arrow pointing to "subsequent reality" in contrast to the models. That arrow points to the lowest point of a highly variant series of data points, and statistically speaking is fucking worthless (technical term). Plot a trend of the data, this is basic stuff.
- Figure 4 - see previous point, by eye the trend of the data would sit nicely near the conservative estimate made in 1990. If i could see the uncertainties (see previous point) i would know how reasonable this lower estimate was. Without it, i only have the arrow pointing to the lowest point of a highly variant series of data points, which distractingly exaggerates the difference.
- Figure 5 - again referencing "all climate models" which are not specified. Even if i assume this person is telling the truth, how can i check it?

Now i'm going to single this one out, because i'm particularly annoyed by this:

- Figure 6 - DOES NOT EVEN HAVE A KEY TO SHOW WHAT THE COLOURS MEAN - there is no explanation whatsoever, merely a talk of hotspots and how there isn't one...... and furthermore the source of what he calls the 'real data' links to nothing, and unless i'm mistaken, he blames the scarcity of the source on the government.

Trance.......... you are not applying the correct critical review process. This is absolute hogwash, and is totally unprofessional, and i am not surprised it is not published - i checked for you, btw.

I was referencing the ensemble models the IPCC used in their latest report. I'm largely assuming it includes the latest knowledge on the subject. To me the more encouraging thing is direct measurement of energy imbalance being available to measure models against. The truest measure of the overall greenhouse effect is just this. With it, so long as models accurately track and predict trends in the energy imbalance we can be confident they more or less have things right. That said, the IPCC notes there has been no trend in instrumental data since 2000. Models have been universally projecting a modest upward trend. This again gives hope and reason to believe the lower end projections are the more likely to be accurate. This correlates well with how the original 1990 projections have mapped to actual temp over the last 25 years too. All that is to say that scientifically those saying we should panic need as much slapping into place as those insisting nothing is happening at all.

I think it's very important to recognize that there is more than 1 camp in this that has completely abandoned science. Sure there are plenty denying that things are warming, or that our activity contributes to warming. Don't spend so much time decrying them that you miss the people demanding the science clearly indicates impending catastrophic disaster that only emission reductions can save us from.

Also take note that we are just beginning to move into the measuring the 'real' part of the issue now by satellite for the last few decades. Previously temperature was the only proxy measure for showing increasing energy trapped in the atmosphere. With satellite records though we have been able to directly measure radiation coming in and going out and observe the real trends. The IPCC that shared Al Gore's nobel prize on climate change has this to say on the satellite measured energy budget:
Satellite records of top of the atmosphere radiation fluxes have
been substantially extended since AR4, and it is unlikely that
significant trends exist in global and tropical radiation budgets
since 2000.

It's important to read that closely and correctly. There has been an overall net influx of radiation, as in more energy coming in than going out. The RATE of that increase is the flux they are referring to. The IPCC is stating that since 2000, it is unlikely that the rate of energy being trapped in our atmosphere has been changing.

All that means is that it's not time to panic. If you look at the latest IPCC temperature projections you'll similarly see that the projections are much less scary for 2100 than the first IPCC projections from 1990. Better news still for us, the instrumental record thus far looks to be tracking the lowend of the IPCC projections.

All that is to say that science is agreed things are warming. It is agreed we are contributing. It also agreed that the severity isn't some doom and gloom we are all gonna die in 2050 scenario either.

It's officially known as a report on the "Measurement of the Duration of a Trendless Subsample in a Global Climate Time Series." In lay-speak, it's a study of just how long the current pause in global warming has lasted. And the results are profound:

According to Canadian Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental economics who wrote the paper for the Open Journal of Statistics, "I make the duration out to be 19 years at the surface and 16 to 26 years in the lower troposphere depending on the data set used."

In still plainer English, McKitrick has crunched the numbers from all the major weather organizations in the world and has found that there has been no overall warming at the Earth's surface since 1995 - that's 19 years in all.

During the past two decades, there have been hotter years and colder years, but on the whole the world's temperatures have not been rising. Despite a 13 per cent rise in carbon dioxide levels over the period, the average global temperature is the same today as it was almost 20 years ago.

In the lower atmosphere, there has been no warming for somewhere between 16 and 26 years, depending on which weather organization's records are used.

Not a single one of the world's major meteorological organizations - including the ones the United Nations relies on for its hysterical, the-skies-are-on-fire predictions of environmental apocalypse - shows atmospheric warming for at least the last 16 years. And some show no warming for the past quarter century.

This might be less significant if some of the major temperature records showed warming and some did not. But they all show no warming.

Even the records maintained by devoted eco-alarmists, such as the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre, show no appreciable warming since the mid-1990s.

Despite continued cymbal-crashing propaganda from environmentalists and politicians who insist humankind is approaching a critical climate-change tipping point, there is no real evidence this is true.

There are no more hurricanes than usual, no more typhoons or tornadoes, floods or droughts. What there is, is more media coverage more often.

Forty years ago when a tropical storm wiped out villages on a South Pacific Island there might have been pictures in the newspaper days or weeks later, then nothing more. Now there is live television coverage hours after the fact and for weeks afterwards.

That creates the impression storms are worse than they used to be, even though statistically they are not.

While the UN's official climate-scare mouthpiece, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has acknowledged the lack of warming over the past two decades, it has done so very quietly. What's more, it has not permitted the facts to get in the way of its continued insistence that the world is going to hell in a hand basket soon unless modern economies are crippled and more decision-making power is turned over to the UN and to national bureaucrats and environmental activists.

Later this month in New York, the UN will hold a climate summit including many of the world's leaders. So frantic are UN bureaucrats to keep the climate scare alive they have begun a worldwide search for what they themselves call a climate-change "Malala."

That's a reference to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban after demanding an education. Her wounding sparked a renewed, worldwide concern for women's rights.

The new climate spokeswoman must be a female under 30, come from a poor country and have been the victim of a natural disaster.

If the facts surrounding climate-disaster predictions weren't falling apart, the UN wouldn't such need a sympathetic new face of fear.

I think you mean to say:
"Cocaine is a hellava drug!"

Also: Stretch-Armstrong with jiggling-disco action?

Also, also: I didn't know the vertical video phenomenon was alive in 1990!

Where the did this take place?!

Yes it's a coincidence. That's the most likely outcome from trying to draw conclusions from the position of a single data point. I'm not sure if you think that the culture of a Spanish speaking Caribbean colony a thousand miles from the mainland is representative of the US as a whole, but that seems a strange position to take.

In any event, you have shifted the discussion from spree killers to killers in general. The video here is about a guy who might have stopped a spree killer (but almost certainly didn't), and did shoot a mentally ill person. You raise European comparisons, so let's do that. Let's look at Europe's recent spree killers (from wiki)
Borel, Eric, 1995, legal weapons stolen from family
Leibacher, Friedrich Heinz, 2001, legal weapons
Bogdanovič, Ljubiša, 2013, legal I believe
Izquierdo, 1990, legal I think
Radosavljević, Nikola, 2007, legal
Zavistonovičius, Leonardas, 1998, legal
Durn, Richard, 2002, legal
Harman, Ľubomír, 2010, legal
There's the top 8 by deaths (excl. the UK ones already mentioned). All using legally held weapons. There may be a pattern emerging here...

" At present, a little more than half of all Americans own the sum total of about 320 million guns, 36% of which are handguns, but fewer than 100,000 of these guns are used in violent crimes."

Per year. You don't cite your source, but this is looks to me to be an underestimate. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey there are half about half a million people claiming to be victim of a gun related crime over the course of a year. I remember being a victim of a gun crime in America (the perp was an British-born and educated woman) where the police said that they weren't going to follow things up because they were too busy with more serious crimes and they weren't confident of successful prosecution, they didn't even bother to look at the bullets or interview the perpetrator. I'd be surprised if it was even officially reported for crime statistic purposes.

"So gun ownership tends increase where violence is the least."

You didn't discuss the confounding variables.

But nevertheless, nobody is saying that owning guns makes you intrinsically more criminal. The argument here seems to be that criminals or those with criminal intent will find it much easier to acquire firearms when there are hundreds of millions of them distributed in various degrees of security across the US.

And those that have firearms, who are basically normal and moral people, may find themselves in a situation where their firearm is used, even in error, and causes harm - a situation obviously avoided in the absence of firearms and something that isn't necessarily included in crime statistics.

"In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of home burglaries occur when people are in the home"

Yes, but here's a fun fact. I've been burgled a few times, all but one of those times I was at home when it happened. You know what the burglar was armed with? Nothing. Do you know what happened when I confronted him with a wooden weapon? He pretended he knew someone that lived there and when that fell through he ran away. When the police apprehended him, there wasn't any consideration that he might be armed with a gun and the police merely put handcuffs on him and he walked to the police car. He swore and made some idle and non-specific threats, according to the police, but that's it. In any event, this isn't extraordinary. There are still too many burglaries that do involve violence, of course.
Many burglaries in Britain are actually vehicle crimes, with opportunity thrown in. That is: The primary purpose of the burglary is to acquire car keys (this is often the easiest way to steal modern vehicles), but they may grab whatever else is valuable and easy too.

"The federal ban on assault weapons from '94-'04 did not impact amount and severity of school shootings."

What impact did it have on gun prevalence? Not really enough to stop the sentence 'guns are prevalent in the US' from being true....

" So, it's likely that gun-related crimes will increase if the general population is unarmed."

I missed the part where you provided the reasoning that connects your evidence to this conclusion.

"Note retail gun sales is the only area that gun control legislation can affect, since existing laws have failed to control for illegal activity. "

This is silly. Guns don't get manufactured and then 32% of them get stolen from the manufacturers warehouse. They get bought and some get subsequently stolen. If there were less guns made and sold there would be less guns available for felons to acquire them privately, less places to steal them or buy stolen ones on the black market, less opportunity for renting or purchasing from a retailer. Thus - less felons with guns.

If times got tough, and I thought robbing a convenience store was a way out of a situation I was in - I would not be able to acquire a firearm without putting myself in considerable danger that outweighs the benefits to the degree that pretending to have a gun is a better strategy. I have 'black market contacts' so I might be able to work my way to someone with a gun, but I really don't want to get into business with someone that deals guns because they are near universally bad news.

" states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate."

Almost all States have such laws, making the comparison pretty meaningless.

"In fact, it's {number of mass shootings} declined from 42 incidents in 1990 to 26 from 2000-2012. Until recently, the worst school shootings took place in the UK or Germany. "

I think 'most dead in one incident' is a poor measure. I think total dead over a reasonable time period is probably better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers:_School_massacres
The UK appears once. It is approx. 1/5 the population of the US. The US manages to have five incidents in the top 10.

Statistics can be fun, though, huh?

" In any case, do we have any evidence to believe that the regulators (presumably the police in this instance) will be competent, honest, righteous, just, and moral enough to take away the guns from private citizens"

You've done a lot of hard work to show that most gun owners are law-abiding and non-violent. As such, the police won't go door to door, citizens will go to the police.

"How will you enforce the regulation and/or remove the guns from those who resist turning over their guns?"

The same way they remove contraband from other recalcitrants. I expect most of them will ask, demand, threaten and then use force - but as usual there will be examples where it won't be pretty.

"Do the police not need guns to get those with the guns to turn over their guns?"

That's how it typically goes down here in the UK, yes.

"Does this then not presume that "gun control" is essentially an aim for only the government (i.e., the centralized political elite and their minions) to have guns at the exclusion of everyone else?"

The military has had access to weapons the citizenry is not permitted to for some considerable time. Banning most handguns etc., would just be adding to the list.

"Is the government so reliable, honest, moral, virtuous, and forward thinking as to ensure that the intentions of gun control legislation go exactly as planned?"

No, but on the other hand, can the same unreliable, dishonest, immoral and unvirtuous government ensure that allowing general access to firearms will go exactly as planned?

You see, you talk the talk of sociological examination, but you seem to have neglected any form of critical reflection.

"From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary

"From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary"

On the other hand, I've been mugged erm, 6 times? I've been violently assaulted without attempts to rob another half dozen or so. I don't tend to hang around in the sorts of places middle class WASPs would loiter, shall we say. I'm glad most of the people that cross my path are not armed, and have little to no idea how to get a gun.

You don't source this assertion as far as I saw - but you'll have to do better than 'it's interesting' in your analysis, I'm afraid.

No formatting, because too much typing already.

Not entirely cut and dry.
+ Gun suicide fell
+ Mass shootings fell.
- Gun homicide in general didn't fall

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#Measuring_the_effects_of_firearms_laws_in_Australia

"Some researchers have found a significant change in the rate of firearm suicides after the legislative changes. For example, Ozanne-Smith et al. (2004)[33] in the journal Injury Prevention found a reduction in firearm suicides in Victoria, however this study did not consider non-firearm suicide rates. Others have argued that alternative methods of suicide have been substituted. De Leo, Dwyer, Firman & Neulinger,[34] studied suicide methods in men from 1979 to 1998 and found a rise in hanging suicides that started slightly before the fall in gun suicides. As hanging suicides rose at about the same rate as gun suicides fell, it is possible that there was some substitution of suicide methods. It has been noted that drawing strong conclusions about possible impacts of gun laws on suicides is challenging, because a number of suicide prevention programs were implemented from the mid-1990s onwards, and non-firearm suicides also began falling.[35]

In 2005 the head of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn,[36] noted that the level of legal gun ownership in New South Wales increased in recent years, and that the 1996 legislation had had little to no effect on violence. Professor Simon Chapman, former co-convenor of the Coalition for Gun Control, complained that his words "will henceforth be cited by every gun-lusting lobby group throughout the world in their perverse efforts to stall reforms that could save thousands of lives".[37] Weatherburn responded, "The fact is that the introduction of those laws did not result in any acceleration of the downward trend in gun homicide. They may have reduced the risk of mass shootings but we cannot be sure because no one has done the rigorous statistical work required to verify this possibility. It is always unpleasant to acknowledge facts that are inconsistent with your own point of view. But I thought that was what distinguished science from popular prejudice."[38]"

-scheherazade

You seem to think that eliminating guns will somehow eliminate mass shootings. However, there is zero correlation to the number of legal gun ownerships with the number of homicides. In fact, here are some statistics for you:

At present, a little more than half of all Americans own the sum total of about 320 million guns, 36% of which are handguns, but fewer than 100,000 of these guns are used in violent crimes. And, as it happens, where gun ownership per capita increases, violent crime is known to decrease. In other words, Caucasians tend to own more guns than African Americans, middle aged folks own more guns than young people, wealthy people own more guns than poor people, rural families own more guns than urbanites --> But the exact opposite is true for violent behavior (i.e., African Americans tend to be more violent than Caucasians, young people more violent than middle aged people, poor people more violent than wealthy people, and urbanites more violent than rural people). So gun ownership tends increase where violence is the least. This is, in large part, due to the cultural divide in the U.S. around gun ownership whereby most gun owners own guns for recreational sports (including the Southern Caucasian rural hunting culture, the likes of which aren't found in Australia or the UK or Europe, etc.); and about half of gun owners own guns for self-defense (usually as the result of living in a dangerous environment). Most of the widespread gun ownership in the U.S. predates any gun control legislation and gun ownership tends to generally rise as a response to an increase in violent crime (not the other way around).

There were about 350,000 crimes in 2009 in which a gun was present (but may not have been used), 24% of robberies, 5% of assaults, and about 66% of homicides. By contrast, guns are used as self-defense as many as 2 and a half million times every year (according to criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University), thereby decreasing the potential loss of life or property (i.e., those with guns are less likely to be injured in a violent crime than those who use another defensive strategy or simply comply).

Interestingly, violent crimes tend to decrease in those areas where there have been highly publicized instances of victims arming themselves or defending themselves against violent criminals. (In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of home burglaries occur when people are in the home, whereas only 9% of home burglaries in the U.S. occur when people are in the home, presumably as a result of criminals' fear of being shot by the homeowner.) In short, gun ownership reduces the likelihood of harm.

So, for example, Boston has the strictest gun control and the most school shootings. The federal ban on assault weapons from '94-'04 did not impact amount and severity of school shootings. The worst mass homicide in a school in the U.S. took place in Michigan in 1927, killing 38 children. The perpetrator used (illegal) bombs, not guns in this case.

1/3 of legal gun owners obtain their guns (a total of about 200,000 guns) privately, outside the reach of government regulation. So, it's likely that gun-related crimes will increase if the general population is unarmed.

Out of a sample of 943 felon handgun owners, 44% had obtained the gun privately, 32% stole it, 9% rented/borrowed it, and 16% bought it from a retailer. (Note retail gun sales is the only area that gun control legislation can affect, since existing laws have failed to control for illegal activity. Stricter legislation would likely therefore change the statistics of how felon handgun owners obtain the gun towards less legal, more violent ways.) Less than 3% obtain guns on the 'black market' (probably due, in part, to how many legal guns are already easily obtained).

600,000 guns are stolen every year and millions of guns circulate among criminals (outside the reach of the regulators), so the elimination of all new handgun purchases/sales, the guns would still be in the hands of the criminals (and few others).

The common gun controls have been shown to have no effect on the reduction of violent crime, however, according to the Dept. of Justice, states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate. A 2003 CDC report found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws reduced gun violence. This conclusion was echoed in an exhaustive National Academy of Sciences study a year later.

General gun ownership has no net positive effect on total violence rates.

Of almost 200,000 CCP holders in Florida, only 8 were revoked as a result of a crime.

The high-water mark of mass killings in the U.S. was back in 1929, and has not increased since then. In fact, it's declined from 42 incidents in 1990 to 26 from 2000-2012. Until recently, the worst school shootings took place in the UK or Germany. The murder rate and violent crime in the U.S. is less than half of what it was in the late 1980s (the reason for which is most certainly multimodal and multifaceted).

Regarding Gun-Free Zones, many mass shooters select their venues because there are signs there explicitly banning concealed handguns (i.e., where the likelihood is higher that interference will be minimal). "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns," says John Lott.

In any case, do we have any evidence to believe that the regulators (presumably the police in this instance) will be competent, honest, righteous, just, and moral enough to take away the guns from private citizens, when a study has shown that private owners are convicted of firearms violations at the same rate as police officers? How will you enforce the regulation and/or remove the guns from those who resist turning over their guns? Do the police not need guns to get those with the guns to turn over their guns? Does this then not presume that "gun control" is essentially an aim for only the government (i.e., the centralized political elite and their minions) to have guns at the exclusion of everyone else? Is the government so reliable, honest, moral, virtuous, and forward thinking as to ensure that the intentions of gun control legislation go exactly as planned?

From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary. Do they really want to deprive those who are culturally acclimatized to gun-ownership, who may be less fortunate than they are, to have the means to protect themselves (e.g., women who carry guns to protect themselves from assault or rape)? Sounds more like a lack of empathy and understanding of those realities to me.

There are many generational issues worth mentioning here. For example, the rise in gun ownership coincided with the war on drugs and the war on poverty. There are also nearly 24 million combat veterans living in the U.S. and they constitute a significant proportion of the U.S.' prison population as a result of sex offenses or violent crime. Male combat veterans are four times as likely to engage violent crime as non-veteran men; and are 4.4 times more likely to have abused a spouse/partner, and 6.4 times more likely to suffer from PTSD, and 2-3 times more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, unemployment, divorce/separation. Vietnam veterans with PTSD tend to have higher rates of childhood abuse (26%) than Vietnam veterans without PTSD (7%). Iraq/Afghanistan vets are 75% more likely to die in car crashes. Sex crimes by active duty soldiers have tripled since 2003. In 2007, 700,000 U.S. children had at least one parent in a warzone. In a July 2010 report, child abuse in Army families was 3 times higher if a parent was deployed in combat. From 2001 - 2011, alcohol use associated with domestic violence in Army families increased by 54%, and child abuse increased by 40%. What effect do you think that's going to have, regardless of "gun controls?"
("The War Comes Home" or as William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies said, "A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.")

In addition, families in the U.S. continue to break down. Single parent households have a high correlation to violence among children. In 1965, 93% of all American births were to married women. Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women (a rate that rises to 53% for women under the age of 30). By age 30, 1/3 of American women have spent time as a single mother (a rate that is halved in European countries like France, Sweden, & Germany). Less than 9% of married couples are in poverty, but more than 40% of single-parent families are in poverty. Much of child poverty would be ameliorated if parents were marrying at 1970s rates. 85% of incarcerated youth grew up without fathers.

Since the implementation of the war on drugs, there's a drug arrest in the U.S. every 19 seconds, 82% of which were for possession alone (destroying homes and families in the process). The Dept. of Justice says that illegal drug market in the U.S. is dominated by 900,000 criminally active gang members affiliated with 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities, many of which have direct ties to Mexican drug cartels in at least 230 American cities. The drug control spending, however, has grown by 69.7% over the past 9 years. The criminal justice system is so overburdened as a result that nearly four out of every ten murders, and six out of every ten rapes, and nine out of ten burglaries go unsolved (and 90% of the "solved" cases are the result of plea-bargains, resulting in non-definitive guilt). Only 8.5% of federal prisoners have committed violent offenses. 75% of Detroit's state budget can be traced back to the war on drugs.

Point being, a government program is unlikely to solve any issues with regards to guns and the whole notion of gun control legislation is severely misguided in light of all that I've pointed out above. In fact, a lot of the violence is the direct or indirect result of government programs (war on drugs and the war on poverty).

(And, you'll note, I made no mention of the recent spike in the polypharmacy medicating of a significant proportion of American children -- including most of the "school shooters" -- the combinations of which have not been studied, but have -- at least in part -- been correlated to homicidal and/or suicidal behaviors.)