aljdewey
Ideal_Rock
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2002
- Messages
- 9,170
justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:I truly don't understand this fixation on mental instability because ALL murderers are mentally unstable.
Right, but not all legal gun owners are murderers. There are millions of lawful gun owners who've never killed a soul. They aren't the problem. Multitudes of people own guns lawfully and never murder anyone with them, and implementing legislation that affects those people (who are not part of the problem) doesn't make sense to me. I can see that you don't understand it, and if you don't, it's ok. You do not have to agree with my viewpoint, but I will still feel free to express it. If it doesn't make sense to you, please feel free to skip over it.
justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:You cannot base legislation on the current mental health of someone obtaining a gun legally, because these people who kill while mentally imbalanced were once perfectly sane and responsible. People have rip roaring fights with spouses, parents, neighbours, whoever, and then they snap. They grab their very legally obtained gun and take care of the problem at hand. This is the problem with isolating gun violence to mental fitness - mental and emotional stability are fluid. How can we ensure that a responsible community member one day is not a mass public shooter next year?
justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:First of all, let's establish that there is no way to ensure *anything* 100%. People have been killing long before guns existing, and people find ways to kill others in societies where guns are not allowed.
While I know it may seem to make sense to argue about crimes of passion in the same breath as mass shooters, they are very different things to me and don't warrant being lumped together. Someone who has a rip-roaring fight and snaps in a heat of passion as you describe isn't the same to me as someone who plans a massacre event days, weeks or months in advance and legally obtains firearms to carry out those plans or someone who spirals into the despondency that results in suicide.) Because I think these are very different, I personally believe they would require different plans of action to resolve.
My comments were very targeted by design - to address something that I think can have a substantive impact in reducing gun-related deaths perpetrated by people who are mentally unstable. This would potentially greatly reduce more than half of gun-related deaths (by helping those who are suicidal) and those unstable people who plan massacres. Will this eradicate all gun-deaths? No, and I didn't suggest it would. Do I think it would go a long way to reducing gun fatalities that I think are preventable. Yes, I emphatically do. I am not aiming for total utopia; I am aiming for what I think is an achievable way to reduce gun-related fatalities.
I agree that mental and emotional stability is fluid, but I do not believe that it's an on/off switch for most (again, I'm not talking about crimes of passion here - beyond the scope of what I'm addressing.). I don't profess to have any inside insight into the events of Newtown, the Navy Yard, the Isla Vista shooting or others beyond what has been widely published, but in all of those events, people close to the perpetrators observed a decline in their mental or emotional wellness over days/weeks/months. It would seem there is an opportunity there to strengthen the ability of law enforcement to act on those types of tips, check registries for firearms ownership, and revoke firearms permits/confiscate those firearms until mental/emotional fitness can be reestablished. I've not given a ton of thought to how this would work, and I'm equally sure that nothing will work 100% of the time regardless of actions taken, but it would seem an opportunity for improvement and better prevention exists here.
justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:And no one has been discussing banning gunsjustginger|1401582578|3684063 said:justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:Yes, some have indeed suggested it; while they may not be part of 'the majority' you're referring to, it has indeed been suggested. But again, that is not my focus. I am focused on how to limit access to firearms to those who aren't fit to have them without imposing undue limitations on those who pose no risk and are fit. To me, that is very much the same as what your 'majority' is proposing - making it harder to get guns and having to demonstrate more fitness to have them. I don't see why you don't see that?
justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:The 'criminals operating outside the law' argument is ever-present. Why do our gangs of bikers beat or stab each other to death; why do they not still have guns? Is it the land link to Central/South America that makes you think they can never be removed from the criminal element? We are surrounded by water here, but still receive illegal items and people via boat from Indonesia constantly - with thousands of miles of unoccupied coast and a tiny Coast Guard, it is nearly the equivalency of a completely unguarded border. And yet the criminals still have no guns.justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:justginger|1401582578|3684063 said:I've never lived or visited Australia, so I can't offer any insight as to how or why your criminals have what they do or don't.....but I will say I'd find it extremely difficult to believe that no criminals have guns there.
But even if I were to take that as fact at your word (which I don't), accessing your thousands of miles of unguarded shore requires at least a boat, no? And access to a boat? I don't imagine there are many people just swimming up to your unmanned border with guns? It would be much harder to do that than to walk up and scale a fence in the dead of night. The US shares 1,933 miles of border with Mexico (a nation of 120 million people, the overwhelming majority of which lives in very poor conditions), and the rampant undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. is a testament to the challenge of securing that border.
Of course, there's more than just the above ground border for us to worry about here, since drug/gun tunnels can be dug virtually anywhere along those 1,933 miles. I'd imagine submarines are even harder to come by than boats for AUS to worry about undercover breaches.
I'm happy for you that you've found a country that makes you feel safe and aligns with the way you think things should be. For my part, I think there are enough substantive differences between US/AUS to make it considerably less than an apples-to-apples comparision. That's not to say each country doesn't have practices the other could benefit from at all, but I think considerably more is required than having the U.S. (with over 300 million people and vastly different conditions) simply mimic AUS' practices.