For every 'hero' with a gun, there are 100 dipshits who would accidentally kill innocent bystanders, have their weapon used by a child or robber, or go psycho and try to kill people.

It's a FACT that reducing firearm ownership reduces death by firearms.

*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, July 27th, 2014 9:53pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter Trancecoach.

Err.. no... because if there were DECENT GUN LAWS, psycho boy patient would NEVER HAVE HAD ACCESS TO A GUN...

Um.. no...

But... okay....

So how would you make the law more "decent?"

And what evidence do you have that the "decency" of the law (any law!) prevents "psycho boys" from doing whatever the law prohibits (but doesn't preclude the "heros" from saving lives in spite of it)? Hm?

"Following a mass shooting, Australia instigated GUN CONTROL AND IT WORKED. The result ? 0 Mass shootings since 1996."

Learn the difference between anecdote and data.

FTW!
(Unfortunately I doubt it would work the same here in the US where so many guns are unregistered, and so many people are self centered asshats that would keep their guns anyway)
Oh, and I note that Dr Gun didn't really stop the criminal, it was another Dr and assistant tackling him that stopped him after he shot Dr Gun in the head.
I would wonder where the other (up to) 31 bullets went. Interior hospital walls usually aren't that thick.

When I earned a doctorate, I co-taught several graduate level classes on research in the social sciences, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research design. What difference between anecdotes and data, specifically, are you referring to? What specific anecdote and what data specifically? How do you know?

A law concerning gun use that has an effect in Australia will not have the exact same effect in the U.S. because people in the U.S. will not react the exact same way to the law. For example, after Democrats began passing gun control legislation last year, gun manufacturers began refusing to sell guns to police departments in protest against the legislation. Democrats eventually backed down. This was a reaction to the law that was not observed in Australia; the effect of a law is defined by the reaction of those who are subject to it.

EDIT: You might also take into consideration why most of these mass shootings occur in places that are 'Gun Free' zones (e.g., schools, theaters, hospitals, shopping malls, etc.). By increasing the gun control laws, you are, in essence, increasing the number and amount of 'gun free' zones, but not reducing the number or amount of the mass shootings.

Further data points: Anders Breivik was unable to purchase weapons on the black market, and utilised legally obtainable weapons instead. If he was unable to obtain them legally, he might not have been able to obtain them at all.

Hungerford, 1987 (legally owned weapons)
Monkseaton, 1989 (legally owned gun stolen by family member)
Dunblane, 96 (legally owned)
Further tightening of gun control esp of handguns
Cumbria, 2010 (legally owned weapons)

Wow, you certainly don't write like it.
Because you seem to have trouble understanding him, I'll explain.
The anecdote is the singular story of an illegally armed man that actually didn't stop another man with a gun being used as 'proof' that more guns make us more safe.
The data of gun violence per capita vs percentage of gun ownership says the opposite.

And to your point about the 'gun free zones', they were created because mass murders had repeatedly already happened in these places, not before. EDIT: You seem to imply that they CAUSE mass murders...that's simply not true, they are BECAUSE of mass murders. If they enforced them, they would likely work, but you need a lot of metal detectors. I don't have the data of attacks in these places in a 'before the law vs after the law' form to verify 'gun free zones' work, but I would note any statistics about it MUST include the overall rate of increase in gun violence to have any meaning, as in 'a percentage of all shootings that happened in 'gun free zones' vs all those that happened everywhere', otherwise it's statistically completely meaningless.

Regardless of the kind of fodder a news story like this will be used for, it must really suck to be a doctor and have to shoot someone.

@newtboy has already explained the difference very well, so there's nothing for me to add other than I'm glad you weren't teaching any real science, otherwise we'd have a bunch of engineers building bridges or doctors curing patients on the basis of "this one guy did it this way before and it worked for him!"

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.)

"there is zero correlation to the number of legal gun ownerships with the number of homicides."

I can't bring myself to read the rest of your copy & paste NRA rant.

No guns = No gun homicides PERIOD

Are you joking or are you honestly comparing social science to engineering?
Really? Oh boy.

If you can't bring yourself to read statistics, then you've got more problems than me or the NRA to worry about.

Oh god no. Engineers can't just pull shit out of their ass.

anecdotal video is anecdotal.

One of my favorite Onion headlines "no way we could have stopped this from happening says only country where this regularly happens"

you're implying that social science makes shit up?

All BS aside. Its better to have a gun and not need it then to not have it when you are in need.

Given my sample size of one social scientist, yes, absolutely.

See how that works?

...aaaaand if wasn't for programmed, systemic societal dysfunction your attitudes towards a tool in a toolbox wouldn't be as remedial and absurd at face-value.

If you eat too much dirt you'll die, therefore, to keep crazies from eating dirt, we'll keep 'em away from dirt....Brilliant, son-You yourself ever been evaluated by a mental health professional??

Man, the guys' using scripted retorts and making huge leaps in his reasoning Trancecoach, he's obviously in the beat-them-all-into-plowshares camp, and you're wasting your finger joints with this cat-Compilation of irrelevant statistical mumbo-jumbo, citation of the most extreme cases of mental divergence, scripted, tiresome use of adjectives and accusatory phrases....Insects only have one function man, doing what they do best.

Oh and we love the whole, 'Works in Australia' broken-fucking-record...Yeah? Well dikes and levees alla Holland would work everywhere, too chappy-Sell that shit to Nawlins on your next visit....

Until the world is free of birds, there's gonna be bird-shit on your car.....The majority of the world uses Phillips-head screws in construction, no longer any need for framing hammers...Voila!

Sounds perfectly linear to me!

Citizens without firearms, in this paradigm, means fascism has won...period.
Enjoy your poisonous mosquitoes and avoidable skin cancer, Aussies! A shotgun in the hand of some back-a-Bourker is the least of your worries...

Sophistic, delusional clap-trap.

" 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.

Your "refutations" are, for the most part, self-defeating, so I will allow others to do their own research and come to their own conclusions rather than addressing each one. Suffice it to say that gun-control, in the U.S. at least, starts as an anti-minority measure (not unlike the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty") and spurs on a "dark economy" (or "underground economy"), not unlike what (eventually) felled the Soviet Union. It's not dissimilar to what's going on in Puerto Rico and, to some extent, the Bay Area (except NorCal doesn't have the feds all over them like Puerto Rico does, so violent crime is high in PR and low in Mendocino).

Is it purely a "coincidence" that Puerto Rico has a higher murder rate than almost anywhere else in the U.S, while citing as many as 50%+ of the people on "public assistance," is an epicenter on the "war on drugs" and has about the strictest gun control laws of anywhere in the U.S.?

But don't worry! Here's some good news!
"They found that a country like Luxembourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. . . . The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, conceded that the results they found in their report was not what they expected to find."

I guess they didn't account for the fact that outlaws don't really care about laws! The nerve of some people...

Videosift is a fascinating forum. Questions with which the greatest minds in human history have wrestled for millennia are easily disposed of in a sentence or two by the most supercilious sophomore -- and not in a nice way, either, but with a full measure of pseudo-intellectual condescension.

Sadly, videosift is no place in which to provide any effective special ed, but I hope you find the help you need.

Thank you for your concern. I might look at wherever you got your "doctorate"; clearly they have experience giving out degrees to any idiot...

D'oh!

Good luck getting in. I suggest hiring someone to tutor you on the entrance exams since you'll clearly need all the help you can get.

Thanks. I'll talk to my friends 3 year old daughter. Once I get my ABCs right, I'm sure I'll almost be up to your level.

It's largely a practical matter. Getting a gun into an building that doesn't allow guns is easy, if the surrounding country has it legal. It's quite a bit harder to get it from country to country. In countries where it is generally more difficult to get a gun, the crazy fruit cakes won't get one. A full on psycho can still obtainit ,like Breivik, but john q bullybutt will have issues shooting up his school.

Guns are not good. In the same way that we shouldn't be swinging swords around unless Ina controlled environment. I love that Americans are the only god damned people who honestly and vehemently defend guns when it's so painfully obvious that they're terrible. Same thing with pick up trucks, but that's a different rant.

Moving this video to Trancecoach's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Yikes, too much text to respond to specifically so here's an overall rebuttal to modulus:

Guns already exist. There are millions of guns out there. Guns last a long time and can be used repeatedly by many different people. Guns can easily be smuggled and distributed illegally. There will always be a demand for guns (for legal and illegal purposes) because they are very effective at what they do. The person holding the gun will always have power over the person holding nothing. Even if the U.S. banned all guns and the production of guns, gun makers would just continue manufacturing guns in other countries and guns would be smuggled into the country, just like narcotics.

Just as the ban on drugs has proven woefully ineffective, a ban on guns wouldn't accomplish anything either. D.C. has very strict gun laws and the lowest gun ownership (legal ownership, at least) in the country and yet their gun-related crime rate is by far the highest. I'm talking more than double the rate of the next highest state. Conversely, Vermont has very lax gun laws and more than ten times the gun ownership of D.C. yet it has the lowest gun crime rate in the country. Wyoming has the highest gun ownership in the country and extremely lax gun laws yet it has among the lowest gun crime rates. In fact, if you look at the states with the lowest crime rates, you'll notice that the vast majority of them have minimal gun control laws.

Finally, you say you've been robbed, mugged and assaulted on numerous occasions. Do you think that would have happened if you were clearly armed? When given a choice between robbing someone who's armed and someone who isn't, do you honestly think criminals would ever choose the armed candidate? When you ban guns, you're just letting criminals know that they can do what they want with minimal risk. Your personal experiences only convince me that guns are a more effective deterrent than being unarmed.

Not quite. If you haven't learned basic grammar by the age of 36, I've little faith in your ability to grasp something as advanced as logic, but keep at it. The world needs folks like you.

Cross posted from my other video: "If the majority of Americans were anti-gun ownership, then the 2nd amendment would have already been disposed of (as has happened with most of the other amendments on the Bill of Rights).

So folks here can complain all they want, but there's never going to be any progress on the (out-of-touch) anti-gun effort in the United States. That's where most Americans seem to draw the line: "The state can do whatever (e.g., surveil its people, drone foreigners indiscriminately, devastate the dollar, etc.), but don't touch the guns." In this, it's the anti-gun contingency that remains in the minority in the U.S. Even Joe Biden campaigned on his gun ownership.

Alas, most of the (conservative, rural state and Southern state liberals, inner city minorities, or NRA-supporting, and anti-NRA) gun-owners are not among the "progressive" (pseudo-)intellectuals on Videosift."

Yeah, it's almost like I'm dumb enough to think that someone was seriously suggesting genocide.

Seriously, though... grammar nazism?

I know that wit, originality, intelligence, decency, understanding, honesty, modesty, acumen, empathy, humour, logic, hygiene, taste, insight, imagination, integrity, courage, resourcefulness and self-awareness are not on your list of positive attributes, but you could at least try to come up with something vaguely approaching a decent comeback.

People have deluded themselves into thinking guns are good and needed, when they're not. The 2nd amendment will likely never get removed, because the majority of Americans are stubborn and scared.

The problem with gun control is again a practical one, because even if the liberal dream happened and guns were outright outlawed tomorrow, then the problem would obviously still exist, because they've been legal for so long. So there's no other way than to gradually step them down and make it slightly harder to get a hold of until eventually you land at an acceptable level of gun ownership.

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...

My point exactly. The legal status of the gun has little to no bearing on the people's use of them.

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.

However in the United States, the exact opposite is true, because, as I said above, the effect of a law is defined by the reaction of those who are subject to it. Not all people respond the same to laws everywhere around the world and, as we see, time and time and time again, in the United States, legislation does effect the amount of guns in circulation nor does it effect people's use of them.

Comparing gun control in other countries to gun control in the United States is about as fruitful as comparing comparing drug policies in Colombia with drug policies in the U.S.

But alas, this common sense notion continues to evade most people. Which is why this and every other debate on the subject has had and will continue to have exactly zero effect on gun control policies in the United States.

But, you can waste your time... nobody's trying to pass a law to stop you from doing that (yet)!

In the United States there is still a high prevalence of firearms, even in areas with some slightly more stringent restrictions. France is not the US is not Germany is not Spain is not Norway. They are more different from one another than Florida and Colorado are. Nevertheless it is possible to compare the countries. Comparing US drug policy with Columbia on its own may be foolish, but when you compare it to all the countries of Europe you are getting a better idea of what works and what doesn't. If decriminalization works in every European country it would be unusual if America was so different it would make things worse. On the other hand, you have been trying to compare Spanish speaking Caribbean islands with mainland USA, so I think you are hoist on your own petard there, I'm afraid.