Thanks Rander, a very good and reasonable response. It just seems there are far too many firearms floating around in America and I am definitely not one saying take them all away ~ I do agree ownership is a right and should be up to the individual. I did read a good article on this topic though and would like some opinions:
IN the harrowing aftermath of the school shooting in Connecticut, one thought wells in my mind: Why can’t we regulate guns as seriously as we do cars? Nicholas D. Kristof On the Ground
The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns. Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence.
So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.
American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000.
We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?
As one of my Facebook followers wrote after I posted about the shooting, “It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.”
Look, I grew up on an Oregon farm where guns were a part of life; and my dad gave me a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I understand: shooting is fun! But so is driving, and we accept that we must wear seat belts, use headlights at night, and fill out forms to buy a car. Why can’t we be equally adult about regulating guns?
And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually.
Likewise, don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns, they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped a mass shooting.
The tragedy isn’t one school shooting, it’s the unceasing toll across our country. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
So what can we do? A starting point would be to limit gun purchases to one a month, to curb gun traffickers. Likewise, we should restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines so that a shooter can’t kill as many people without reloading.
We should impose a universal background check for gun buyers, even with private sales. Let’s make serial numbers more difficult to erase, and back California in its effort to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each shell so that it can be traced back to a particular gun.
“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” President Obama noted in a tearful statement on television. He’s right, but the solution isn’t just to mourn the victims — it’s to change our policies. Let’s see leadership on this issue, not just moving speeches.
Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.
The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings. In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.
Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them.
For that matter, we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill people, drunks do.” Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced America’s traffic fatality rate per mile driven by nearly 90 percent since the 1950s.
Some of you are alive today because of those auto safety regulations. And if we don’t treat guns in the same serious way, some of you and some of your children will die because of our failure.
I believe it is safer for kids between the ages of 5-10 to sit in a classroom in an elementry school than be be in the womb of a mother who feels it isn't a convenient time in her life to be raising a baby. Where's the outcry to stop this slaughter that has been wrapped up in a nice little package with a bow and made easy for the public to digest? Now a gun owner is another package altogether, and the outcry is loud and clear today.
"According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), since 1973, roughly
50 million legal induced abortions have been performed in the United States."
A 2004 study by the Guttmacher Institute reported that women listed the following amongst their reasons for choosing to have an abortion:
74% Having a baby would dramatically change my life
73% Cannot afford a baby now
48% Do not want to be a single mother or having relationship problems
38% Have completed my childbearing
32% Not ready for a(nother) child
25% Do not want people to know I had sex or got pregnant
22% Do not feel mature enough to raise a(nother) child
14% Husband or partner wants me to have an abortion
13% Possible problems affecting the health of the fetus
12% Concerns about my health
6% Parents want me to have an abortion
1% Was a victim of rape
less than 0.5% Became pregnant as a result of incest
jon20013
You asked for some opinions, everyone has them but mine are always right,LoL
Let me get this straight
So because someone else decides to do something bad I am to pay?
Socialist's have been taking away my rights going on 60 years now, when will it stop? never mind I realized the answer about 20 years ago, when I die.
Let us be a bit intelligent here,
Guns don't kill
Cars don't kill
Drugs don't kill
It is the person attached to them with either the intent to do harm or has no intent on living.
Video games, movie industry, tv shows all are bad and probably are the biggest reasons for these mass murders, as they separate us and especially youngsters from reality, let's get rid of them, oh that won't happen.
Parenting is a thing of the past, single parents, children brought up by grandparents and now days the cry babies won't let you even punish a child when they are bad, they won't allow the teacher to discipline either, they just say give them a pill instead.
But if for one minute you think limiting the availability/ownership of a firearm from a law abiding citizen will change this senseless killing you are pondering to long. We should realize that if someone wants to off someone they will find a way.
But you can keep on thinking there is an easy way to take sin from the world if you want.
FYI
I conceal carry anytime I am out of the house or truck.
I have weapons placed throughout the house and truck where they are accessible to me if the need arise.
I don't have any fears just the knowledge that I am prepared for what ever these times have to offer.
You asked
Marshall
Laws only affect law-abiding citizens. We have enacted many laws governing driving and the use of alcohol. Below is just one statistic which equates to exactly one CT mass shooting per day, every day of the year. Where is the call to ban cars?
"Every day in America, another 27 people die as a result of drunk driving crashes."
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration FARS data, 2012. (From MADD website)
California (of which I am a resident), has waiting periods of 10 days and most shops will use an 11 day waiting period for liability reasons. That waiting period is fine to me personally.
They also currently limit the purchase of handguns to one per 30 day period. That's fine for me but Eric Holder (chief gun runner for the U.S.A) may not like that.
California requires bullet buttons and limits magazines to 10 rounds on certain firearms. That is ridiculous in my eyes.
Bottom line is that I follow these laws but many others do not and most of the criminals I am pretty sure.... do not. Imprinting ammunition with serial numbers is a whole other debate but its nothing a reloader couldn't get around.
We can teach our children the value of all life and especially human life. We can connect them back with nature by harvesting animals once in awhile so they dont think they magically appear in styrofoam and plastic wrap and that the animal had a life before it was taken to provide support for us. They can learn that taking a life is not pleasant and is a real fact of life. We can slow down some of the outrageous movie violence that liberal Hollywood profits from, and explain to our kids that there are real consequences to violence. Instead of waging the PC war on religion and posting billboards up mocking Christians and Jesus, we can let people believe what they need to especially if it promotes loving thy neighbor over believing we are just byproducts of primordial slime and have nothing to work for or look to after this physical life is over. We can pay attention to our kids, talk with them, and get them outside and away from the innerwebs, you tube, facebook, television, etc.
We've got established religions, societal norms (cultures), laws on the books that all say killing is wrong and yet it continues to go on day after day all around the world in countries with strict laws and those with no laws. Australia has seen a very slight decrease in firearm related homicide however that trend started in 1969, well before any gun bans were in effect and they have also seen an increase in homicides where sharp objects (knives,swords) have been used and are now the most commonly used weapon in murders, robberies, and attempted murders. (Australian Institute of Criminology) . A quick search will bring up several instance of knives being used in China as the tool to commit mass attacks and killings of schoolchildren also.
There are bigger issues than gun control here and better ways to reduce violence than well intended but misguided legislation.
You miss the point entirely jon. 40,000 people per year are killed in drunk driving incidences. Should we ban all cars? 300,000 people die from obesity related diseases per year. Should we ban spoons and forks? Already illegal drugs are killing 38,000 people per year. The laws didn't do a lot for them. 5,000 teens below the age of 18 died of alcohol poisoning last year, yet it's illegal for them to buy it. Five children die every day from abuse in America every day with 3.6 million reports a year. In the time since the shooting, a greater number have died at the hands of abusers without the use of a gun.
We can banty about stats until hell freezes over, but at the end of the day, banning objects of any kind won't change a thing. We can throw every gun in America in a smelting pit including the militarys; we can even include every form of object intended to cut, maime or kill of any kind to that smelter, and within 3 months, the cartels will have rearmed, the criminals would be armed within 6 months as well.
This is a fact. cocaine is illegal, PCP is illegal, driving drunk is illegal, underage drinking is illegal, child abuse is illegal, most of my list above is illegal already, but it doesn't change anything.
Society has to change to fix it. Society has to look at who is doing the crime and why. It doesn't matter if they hopped a curb in a truck in NYC and mowed down 50 people, or bombed a building killing 183, or shot 27. Dead is dead. What about society is broken that is causing it? Banning this, restricting that, isn't going to do any good other than disarm law abiding citizens and make them prey for the criminals who by definition, do not care about the law.
You speak of other nations, last I checked, the only thing that changed was the method of killing. Instead of guns, it's bombs, planes, cars, gas, you name it. In many of those places, such as mumbai it was already illegal, not a year and a half ago in Russia, there was a school attack that killed 350. In China on the same day as the ct killings, 22 children were stabbed by one pyscho. People intent on killing are going to kill and there is not a thing you or I can do about it other than prevent someone from stopping that person by disarming law abiding citizens.
It's the society, it's the people, not the object, be it a gun, a knife, a car, a plane, a sledge hammer and every other inanimate object used by a deranged person to kill.
Some of your points are very well taken Jon...
so precisely that I say thus:
When the government gets serious about eliminating auto deaths by banning alcohol and drugs (instead of legalizing drugs in more and more states), when they get serious about ending deaths from stupid acts with a car with things like speeding, aggression, selfish drivers, OH LET'S JUST BAN CARS, when they get serious about ending deaths by abortion (I agree wholeheartedly with John, it is MURDER. Less than 2% are done for the main reason it is supposedly legal.), when they get serious about .....etc.
YOU can't do it. It is not the government's job to protect people from injury and/or death. But unless they want to create a level playing field, don't single out guns and/or any other tool that could be considered a weapon (knife, pitchfork, shovel, axe, table fork, razor, etc) because you are right... "Where does it end"?
And just because someone dies from a gun attack does not mean we have failed by not passing more laws.
Have a Great Day, Brent
Here is a BASIC Idea of WHY Outlawing Guns will NOT work. Making Drugs Illegal certainly helped the problem. Seems to me that making Guns Illegal will have the same effect.
It's not against the law to conceal carry with a permit somewhere where there is a sign that says no guns. The college where I work has a sign on the door with a picture of a gun and a line drawn through it that says "no guns beyond this point". I cannot be arrested for walking past that sign, I can only be asked to leave or to go put my pistol back in the truck. 
Same thing with a bank and other establisments. Well, this is in Missouri anyway. Laws in other states may be written slightly different. Missouri is weird like that. We can open carry in some counties, but not in others which is difficult as all get out to keep track of so CC is the way to go.
I personally would rather have tazers for protection because I always get a kick out of perp's flopping around the floor uncontrollably like a fish out of water!
