The question is "what should be on the background check". Spousal abuse seems like an easy one, since that is a crime and seems to correlate to these attackers. Adding it to the process seems easy enough, as long as we get enough people to agree it should be a background check option.
Racism unfortunately has free-speech / 1st amendment right issues. It'd be a harder discussion point in general. But there needs to be a discussion about the rise in hate-speech and racism, especially since a lot of these mass-shootings are racially motivated.
> Are you subject to a court order, including a Military Protection Order issued by a military judge or magistrate, restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?
> Have you ever been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, or are you or have you ever been a member of the military and been convicted of a crime that included, as an element, the use of force against a person as identified in the instructions?
The information is verified by NICS[2], which will reject you if you've been convicted of domestic violence or are subject to a court order. Lying on this form is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison. The penalty applies even if the NICS check fails (meaning you never got possession of the firearm).
1. https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-trans...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Back...
Question 21.i on Form 4473
Here is the system:
https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/nics
If have been convicted or under indictment for a felony, dishonorably discharged, have a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction or a restraining order, you will be denied.
If this sounds expensive and cumbersome, that's the point. It should be expensive and cumbersome to get a gun. The fact that it's so easy to get a gun in the USA is the problem.
If I were Biden, I'd get Congress to pass a comprehensive gun ban. No guns or ammo of any type without a federal license. Assault weapons completely banned. Mags over seven rounds completely banned. Trafficking in ghost guns or information on the manufacture of ghost guns including CAD files for 3D printed guns -- banned. I would get the IRS and the BATFE to conduct enhanced audits and investigations of businesses who sold guns to ordinary schlubs including gun shops and gun and ammunition manufacturers. Yes, this will raise constitutional issues, but the lawsuits would take years to work their way through the courts, during which time I would binge-nominate Supreme Court justices who aligned with my views on the matter, bringing the total number of justices to 12 or 14 or so, and ensuring that effective defanging of the Second Amendment becomes national precedent when the cases do finally reach the Supremes.
There is no excuse for so many guns being on the streets of a civilized nation.
Excellent point. Everyone is born a potential mass murderer until proven otherwise by the totalitarian government surveillance apparatus whose reach must be expanded even further to investigate the dangerous thoughts and opinions of the citizens so that subversive ideas don't galvanize into armed revolt and insurrection, and if you were president of the USA you'd do everything in your power to further corrupt and erode yet another one of the very principles the nation was founded upon.
Gun licensure will probably affect suicides more than it does mass murders. That's still an enormous improvement.
That's exactly what you are saying.
> only that you should need a license to own a gun
> you need to subject yourself to deep government scrutiny
The USA was founded upon some very simple principles. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to bear arms. You won't be subjected to unwarranted government interference.
What you're advocating for violates all of those. You don't see free human beings whose innocence and right to be armed is presumed. You see suspects, potential mass shooters who have no business owning firearms until they prove to the government that they're innocent.
The right to bear arms is a symbol of a people's freedom and self-determination. You'd see them reduced to sheep in exchange for the illusion of safety.
> The fact that you inferred "everyone is born a mass murderer" from that says a lot about how sick America is compared to the rest of the world on the matter of guns.
I'm not american, I'm brazilian. I'm part of "the rest of the world".
Brazil is a country that actually held a referendum about gun control, discovered that over 60% of the population was against it and then effectively disarmed us all anyway. As a result, armed criminals invade our homes with the absolute certainty that we pose no threat to them. Even in formerly peaceful rural cities where some of my relatives live.
I suggest you think very carefully about what sort of future you want.
Imagine saying this about blogging, another adjacent human right.
I would never harm anyone unprovoked and attacking anyone in my state would be suicide as everyone here is packing. The ratio is something like 221:1 firearms to people, yet no mass shootings, yet. No idea why. There are virtually no ammo or suppressor restrictions. My state and a neighboring state have a 66% firearm ownership rate but I think that counts children.
The only thing that really comes to mind is that most folks here are religious, mostly Mormon. They are very family oriented and if a kid is getting picked on the parents will confront the other parents, likely in church. There is a bit of peer pressure to not be a bad person. But that could be entirely unrelated.
In other words, there is not enough data to draw any conclusions about whether WY is better off in this regard.
Waiting periods are never effective for anything aside from suicide, and they may technically be unconstitutional, that is being fought in the courts right now.
NICS checks are really only effective in dealing with criminal behavior. In this case we're talking about a psychopath who had been manifesting outwardly for a while. For the most part you can't legally background check someone's mental health. What would've worked in this case is "social surveillance" and having the people he interacted with every day report him.
Wikipedia gives me the Kongsberg Attack, which was only 5 people killed + 3 injured. This is much much smaller than the 18 people killed in this elementary school, + the grandmother of the suspect (who was probably shot before the whole event started).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
Las Vegas shooting was 50+ people killed.
Orlando Nightclub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting
49 people killed.
It seems like dropping down to knife/sword fights would cut deaths significantly, unless you can show me some mass-stabbing numbers close to these 50-ish sized crowds.
Then there are mass murders using vehicles, like it happened in Europe several times in the past 15 years, or mass destruction with vehicle, like the "Killdozer" in USA itself.
I'm arguing that in the USA, mass-murder events have 15 to 50 deaths involved. In other countries, the number is just 5 to 20.
Weapons of choice matter. Guns kill more people more reliably than a knife, or even a car.
If we're playing argument by anecdote though, the perpetrator of the Nice attack killed 86 people and wounded 458 with a truck: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
Violent dangerous people find a way.
The scale is irrelevant to the actual problem.
I agree. Mass killers will find a way. But if the way they find is a gun, we are looking at 20 to 50 deaths.
If they find a knife or sword instead, it will probably be less than 10 deaths.
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Now we have video camera showing that the guy shot the police officer at the school before going on a rampage. Do you think the guy would have been able to attack the police officer (who almost certainly had a handgun) with just a knife?
The real question is that of motive - why innocent children in the first place? USA has more than an epidemic of mass shootings, it has an epidemic of school shootings. Where does the urge to do such an evil thing come from?
The literal argument, from 3 posts ago, was that they'd find a knife.
Now that I've destroyed the "knife" argument, people are making newer arguments... unironically moving goalposts back. In any case, cars and truck attacks can't kill people inside of elementary schools. The school would block the bulk of the damage. Or you put concrete barriers to protect the school from the road (which is needed for accidents / vehicles that lost control anyway)
> Were does the urge to do such an evil thing come from?
Why are you changing the argument? The evil is innate to us and worldwide.
Why should that evil be equipped with a gun in this country? Other countries, they're forced to make due with weaker weapons, such as cars, trucks, or knives.
If we cannot stop the evil, then we mitigate it.
My overall point: "They'll find a knife" is a bad counterargument. "They'll find a knife" is the very point of gun-restrictions, we cut back upon the worst damage they these mass killers can do.
> The evil is innate to us and worldwide.
Prevailance of school shootings in US show that this kind of evil is indeed not innate worldwide. It is strongly rooted in United States. Nowehere else in the world people with access to firearams choose to end innocent children's lives at such scale. This is what troubles me.
Availability of guns is not unique to USA but using those guns to kill innocent children at super-unproportional scale is. Why?
If you don't have the answer to that question, the obvious solution is to remove the gun from the equation until you can answer the question.
Motive is an interesting question, but I think it's worthwhile to consider means as well.
If that’s true it would still be a big win.
There are also a lot of people who believe people have the right to end their own lives.
Cutting yourself with a knife results in your pain overriding your own brain. The innate will to live in our bodies causes us to back off of that kind of pain.
Pills / Poison take a significant amount of time, time that someone can find you and rush you to the hospital and save you.
Guns are often the most reliable suicide. Either shooting yourself, or death-by-cop (attacking a cop, and having them shoot you).
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Yes, suicidal people will find other ways. But we should cut and minimize the "reliable" suicide methodologies. Suicide-by-cop is more successful if you have a gun( without a gun, the cops are more likely to use non-lethal force and bring you in. With a gun, you're absolutely going to die on the street as they light you up).
Which ignores the fact that its a lot harder to kill 18-children + 1 teacher with a sword, than it is to kill the same number with a gun.
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There's also the discussion point where "background checks won't have any effect", except we know that this person legally purchased a gun just days before deciding to shoot his grandma (and continued the shooting-spree into this school).
Just giving that person maybe 2-weeks of break between buying the gun, and having the gun, could have been the time needed for that person to calm down internally and find himself. As long as people can walk into a gunstore, pickup a gun the same day, they can execute these power-fantasy moves.
I'm not sure if a background check would work in this case. But any kind of "innate delay" to the gun buying process, to give any would-be mass shooter some time to think it over, would almost certainly reduce the amount of gun violence. Almost all major mass shootings in the USA for the past decade seemed to be with a very, very, very recently bought gun (within a week or two).
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The "background-check" argument seems to point out the issues of spouse-abuse as a high correlation to mass gun shootings. It'd probably work in other cases, but not this most recent shooting.
The "background check" against racism might work, since just a few days ago there was a racially motivated mass shooting.
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In any case, there's a lot of bad talking points on this subject, pretty much espoused by everybody? I'm not entirely sure how to move forward with discussion.