Thanks for that little spree you just went on. My pqueue's now down to one page and I can die a happy man.

Having established that a large amount of spree killings (seemingly most) are with legally acquired weapons, it stands to reason that reducing the availability of legally ownable weapons would reduce the frequency of spree killings. As well as this reasoning it also seems to be empirically supported.
Contrary to exactly your point, the legal status of guns does seem to have an impact on certain uses. For instance, few people in the UK use guns for self-defence, because its rarely legal to carry guns for that purpose, even most criminals avoid them.

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...

@harlequinn, you do realise that NZ actually has quite sensible gun laws? You can own semi-auto rifles and so on but to do so you need a firearms licence. This includes not only a police check, but the cops will actually come to your house and check that you have adequate storage provisions for your guns. On top of that

You will have difficulty being deemed 'fit and proper' to possess or use firearms if you have:

- a history of violence
- repeated involvement with drugs
- been irresponsible with alcohol
- a personal or social relationship with people deemed to be unsuitable to be given access to firearms
- indicated an intent to use a firearm for self-defence.

To me those are perfectly reasonable and sensible restrictions.

@scheherazade, ah yes, the libertarian argument. I want a gun and fuck everyone else.

Kids getting shot at school? Fuck 'em, not my problem.
Random nutjob mows down a bunch of people in California? Fuck 'em, not my problem.

The fact is that guns do cause harm. The "people kill people" argument is beyond infantile. Of course, people kill people.... with a gun. It's a lot harder to go on a mass killing spree armed with a stick.

Here are the indisputable facts:
- There are some sick people out there. Some are just fucked up, some are in need of help.
- Sometimes these people snap.
- Sometimes when they do, they get a gun and kill a bunch of other people.
- If they didn't have a gun, the harm would be less.
I'm assuming no-one disputes those facts.

Now there are two solutions to this:
- Pro-gun advocates take the position that citizens need guns to defend themselves from this kind of situation. They often argue that instead of taking guns away from everyone, we should focus on either helping the mentally unbalanced or stopping them by shooting them.
- Gun control advocates take the position that if the shooter didn't have access to a gun in the first place, then maybe the whole mess would be avoided or at the very least minimised.

To me, it's a simple matter of practicalities. Option 1 is simply not working. We're decades (possibly centuries) away from completely understanding mental illness, that's if we achieve that at all. Meanwhile, crazy/insane/evil people are still going on shooting rampages.
And stopping them after the fact? That's pretty cold comfort to the people that have already been killed.

I am genuinely perplexed as to how people don't understand this.
Gun control works. In every other developed country in the world, there are reasonable and sensible laws restricting firearm ownership, and there is nothing like the kind of insane shootings we see on a regular basis in the US.

No-one is arguing that all guns should be taken away. No-one is saying you can't hunt or target shoot or even defend your home if necessary (although again, in the civilised world, most of us have no need for that).

But jesus, maybe you don't need an AR-15 with a massive clip. And is it that unreasonable to check to see if someone is mental or criminal before selling them a gun?

Apparently, in the US, it is.

1) As I mentioned earlier, implementing border control for each state is never going to happen. As I also mentioned, border control has already been proven ineffective at stopping both drugs and illegal immigrants so why would guns be any different?

2) My drug analogy is perfectly valid. Drugs are banned yet they are still smuggled into the country. And no, people aren't growing cocaine or heroin in their backyard. And yes, smuggling a small packet of cocaine by hiding it in your ass is easier than smuggling a gun through the same means but guns don't have be smuggled intact. They can easily be disassembled and the individual parts smuggled separately. Many of these pieces would be small enough to hide in your ass. But this is all largely irrelevant because the bulk of drugs are not transported via anus.

3) The motivations of mass shooters is highly debatable. I'd argue that they want to feel empowered and the easiest way to do that is in schools which are undeniably the least likely places for people to be armed. If they tried to go on a shooting spree in a police station or military base or gun convention, they probably wouldn't get many kills. Instead, they'd be shot and killed by someone else and that's something no shooters seem to want (hence the reason why they always commit suicide after the spree instead of letting themselves be arrested or killed by the police). In fact, if you look at the history of school shootings in the U.S., many of the shooters were adults. The Sandy Hook shooter was 20 years old and he primarily targeted first-graders who obviously weren't his peers. When it comes to mass shootings, it's all about quantity and targeting people who can't defend themselves is the most effective way of achieving that.

4) Do you have any statistics to support your claim? I seriously doubt suicide rates plummeted in countries or states where guns were banned. Japan and South Korea both have extremely strict gun laws yet they also have some of the highest suicide rates in the world (South Korea is #3, Japan is #8, the U.S. is #33). If you weren't serious about killing yourself and just wanted attention, you wouldn't use a gun in the first place. You'd stand on the ledge of a building and wait for the news vans to appear. Like you said, guns are the quickest way to kill yourself so you wouldn't use them if you had any doubts or hesitations.

Sometimes you just can't say no to the spawn killing spree.

But it sure does suck when you are on the short end of the stick.

As far as I understand the psychological reasoning behind this, it is the same as a well known effect in the area of suicides which in Germany we call Werther Effect after a novel be Wolfgang Goethe (published 1774), which caused a number of "copycat suicides".

It seems to me that a potential spree killer is desperately trying to be noticed by society either out of personal, religious or political reasons.

If you show such persons that they will get noticed, that they will get there 15 minutes of fame, it might push them a closer to the realization that committing mass murder is a way to be "noticed".

Vermont and New Hampshire have been on a spree lately. Today I live in Massachusetts, but I am thinking to move there any day now because of their recent legislation.

I don't see what the deal is quite honestly. We don't wait for due process if a citizen takes a bunch of hostages or goes on a killing spree. If we see the opportunity to end the threat, we end the threat

If it is reasonable to attempt a capture this american actively working with Al Queda, then cool, but I'm guessing that it isn't a realistic plan so I just don't see what the issue is here.

I don't think they'll let the U.S. default now, nor do I think they will not raise the debt ceiling (But, again, who knows?). If they do, however, raise the ceiling, it will be another indication that there is no more capping the debt, it will grow and grow until the country has no choice but to default.

Interesting to remember, back at the beginning of the Reagan years, fiscal conservatives were "crying" about the debt being $1 trillion. That's nothing compared to what it is today. And it was Reagan (by way of his "Reaganomics") who decided that there was no problem with increasing the debt.
Writes Murray Rothbard (in 1981), in an article about how the U.S. should just default on the debt:

"Perhaps the most absurd argument of Reaganomists was that we should not worry about growing public debt because it is being matched on the federal balance sheet by an expansion of public 'assets'."

(I wonder what he would make of today's $16 trillion+ in U.S. debt?)

Predictably, as soon as Reagan went on a spending spree, fiscal "conservatives" stopped being so (not unlike the 'leftists' who stopped being anti-war as soon as Obama was elected).

It should also serve us to remember that it was the Democratic party that first considered itself the party of fiscal responsibility, at least with regards to Jefferson, Jackson, and Van Buren who all had a conscious plan to defund government but eventually failed for various historical reasons.

"It is for all these reasons that the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians (who, contrary to the myths of historians, were extraordinarily knowledgeable in economic and monetary theory) hated and reviled the public debt. Indeed, the national debt was paid off twice in American history, the first time by Thomas Jefferson and the second, and undoubtedly the last time, by Andrew Jackson."

Your comment(s) certainly got my attention, as well as many others, judging from the 1,000 + profile views you've already had. Usually people lurk for a while before leaving a comment or posting a video. It's really cool when someone new starts with a bang!

That's the thing with sites like youtube...trolls aren't afraid to go on a downvoting spree because they have no fear of being caught. That doesn't happen here...not with the videos or the comments. It's a bannable offense. When something is downvoted, it is most likely because they truly did not like it.

For the curious, @cdimetry has been temp-banned for two weeks for abuse of Sift guidelines.

In a misguided gesture toward @pumkinandstorm for being so nice to him, he created a second account and went on an up-voting spree in her favor.

That account will be banned and all its votes removed.

I'm just worried about the next kid that wants to get on the cover of Rolling Stone while expressing his grievances in a heinous way.

Attention doesn't motivate all terrorists, but it motivates many of them. Consider the unabomber, who explicitly demanded attention (forcing major newspapers to print his manifesto) in order to stop his attack spree.

Ah, the infamous drunk buying spree.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'drugs, butt, dial, 911, fresno, crime, spree' to 'drugs, buttdial, 911, fresno, crime, spree' - edited by calvados