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.)

Well a retard is a car crash of a human being.

My mother-in-law was involved in a serious car crash in which the results of her head injury is an occasional shaking of her hands. Sometimes it is minor, sometimes it impedes her ability to eat.

I am getting her this for Christmas. This is awesome.

Problem is this...

Every drug, used IN MODERATION so as to not be harmful, is [by definition] harmless.

You can't answer a "more/less harmful" question in absolute terms, because individual usage patterns will determine the specific 'harm/danger' posed by each substance.

There is no "standard dosage and regiment + standard metabolism + standard body weight" that you can use to compare substances.
You can pick such numbers, but you'd be pulling them out of your butt.

It's obvious she's giving the stock answer that aligns with her agency's official stance. But even if she were to give a "scientific" response, it would not be black and white.

The answer would be "it depends".
"How much Heroine? How much Coke? How regularly used? etc".

This isn't TV. Just like IRL car crashes rarely result in explosions, IRL drug use rarely results in tragedy.

The simplest example is prescription pain killers. Literally variations on heroine. People are given them for broken ribs, etc. They take them for a while, and then they're done. No harm done.
They could have taken heroine in stead, in the same effective dosage and frequency, and had literally the same experience.

-scheherazade

Sounds like someone wants to get into their first real car crash...

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Oh come on, sometimes people die in car crashes. It sucks, but it's way more plausible than the government taking remote control of the car and crashing it. Conspiracy theories need to be discarded (right or left wing), separate the noise from the signal.

Awesome, it's like a slow motion car crash...

In Russia, car crash videos hurt YOU.

It reminds me of my parents' car crashing into one, but not water went in the car though.

What's with your inappropriate sarcasm? It didn't add to the discussion.

It may be semantics in your opinion but it's not like there is any confusion between the word "design" and "use". It's engineering. A firearm is designed to do something - and that something is not killing. We designed it to propel a projectile at high speed. We use it for multiple purposes - but mostly we use it for punching holes in paper or shooting clay pigeons. Yes, it is fantastic at killing animals/humans. We use it for that too. Yes, when it was first designed that was its primary purpose of use. But that does not mean it does not have secondary purposes. I'd guess that more rounds are fired at paper targets and for hunting animals than at people each year in the USA (and probably by several orders of magnitude).

Knives are fantastic at killing. A sword (which is a long knife) does a lot more vascular damage than a 7.62 mm NATO round (i.e. it is better at killing). Knives were superseded because they are not a ranged weapon.

You are suggesting that the tens of millions of sporting firearm users in the USA do not constitute a legitimate use of firearms. That is short sighted.

We accept the premature deaths of car crashs because it is a convenience we are not willing to live without. The collateral damage of people dying in vehicles is a cost we are happy to accept to continue using this convenience (we don't need cars to get around - they just make travelling easier). You'll find that the huge amount of legislation surrounding vehicles is to reduce deaths and the cost that crashes impose on the economy (which is billions).

The same for knives (humankind's most used murder weapon). We aren't giving it up as a kitchen tool just because someone used it for murder.

The same should of course apply to firearms.

America should have better legislation surrounding firearms (something I fully support). That's a no brainer. A full registration scheme for all firearms should be enacted. Firearm safes should be mandatory. Criminal and mental health background checks should be mandatory. For ownership of semi-automatic/automatic military style weapons you should need to be in a firearms club. This would both legitimise its ownership and use - so you can't just own one for the hell of it but it doesn't stop you from owning it in total (preserving the 2nd amendment). It would also force social contact - so other club members will recognise if a person should not be a club member and therefore a non-owner of these firearm types.

America could also implement a nationwide free mental health system. It basically has none. This is probably the most important thing it could do.

What are your suggestions for legislation?

(btw I'm not American - but I've closely followed this topic for years).

Not quite a dupe, because of mthe slo-mo, but at least
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Is-the-the-Luckiest-Car-Crash-Ever

Is This The Luckiest Car Crash Ever? Probably The Scariest! has been added as a related post - related requested by mintbbb.

So true. It's car-crash comedy, in that David Brent vein of truth in profound ugliness. It's a crime there are only six episodes a season. >> ^EvilDeathBee:

Took me a while to get into Peep Show, but at the insistence of some of my friends I did manage it and it really is one of the best sitcoms around. Agonising to watch most of the time, but consistently fantastically hilarious

>> ^deathcow:

2 people WERE in that car


Other dude is in the trunk now.