The right to kill the president is constitutional?

Killing the last one should've been.

So if guns kill people, then technically,
Spoons make people fat,
Pencils misspell words,
And paper tears itself.
Yeah, I don’t think so.

Just stating facts my dude

just stating the stupid.

lol I’m not sure if that’s a typo cause it looks like you meant to say staring at stupid

Lol you’re a funny guy I like you

Nowhere in the Constitution is the "right" to take the life of another human being mentioned, so no...the 2nd Amendment was not responsible for this.

Remember; if a tool makes you a monster, you were a monster already to begin with. If guns made people killers then the vast majority of Americans would be mass killers. Since that has not happened, we are left with the reasonable conclusion that guns do not in fact cause people to kill; people with serious issues kill. Cure the issues and you stop the killing.

"if a tool makes you a monster, you were a monster already to begin with."

Show me a monster before they kill someone. Because every gunman is a law-abiding citizen until they pull the trigger. Show me a monster like the ones we hear about, the ones without mental health issues or violent histories. Show me how you can tell those people apart.

So you're saying everyone who committed a mass shooting was perfectly normal until they bought a gun? That their minds were corrupted and they were overtaken by a desire to kill just because they bought a gun?

No. Everyone who kills does so for a reason. Up until recently the close-out rate of murders used to be almost 90% because almost all murderers were targeting people close to them (loved ones, etc). Emotions, not firearms, caused them to kill. Nowadays the close-out rate is closer to 60% due to a proliferation of factors (gang violence, extremism spreading over the internet), but the basic truth that people are killing BECAUSE they were radicalized in some way by something still holds water.

Again, owning an SUV doesn't suddenly make you want to T- bone someone in an intersection. Buying an axe to go camping doesn't suddenly make you want to decapitate the folks in the next site. Owning a firearm doesn't make you want to suddenly go kill someone. Extreme emotional and mental issues make you kill someone. You cannot prove this wrong.

There was a meme in politics that received dozens of upvotes saying that every law abiding citizen is a law abiding citizen until they shoot someone. I'm just parroting the message.

Then that was a dumb meme. It's simply untrue. People using inanimate objects are the problem, not the objects themselves. Therefore it's a problem we fix at the level of people (better and more comprehensive background checks, ending loopholes around said checks, etc) and not at the level of the objects themselves.

Take the hype over high-capacity magazines for example; Firstly, the notion that having ten rounds in your magazine is somehow better than twenty is idiotic. Ten dead people is still ten too many, and a freak who is killing people can always carry another magazine. So instead of banning those magazines*, why not focus on better sweeps of the internet to flag dangerous posts that could foreshadow a shooting, or the aforementioned closing of loopholes around checks?

*As someone who is so fastidious about laws he has never intentionally sped (lame, right?) I can tell you right now that going to a range and dumping twenty rounds from a semiautomatic AR-15 into a target is some of the most fun you can have. Doing that doesn't make me want to go slaughter a crowd...it's just a really fun way to burn a lot of money, especially these days. lol

I agree. I enjoy shooting ranges, I enjoy hitting bullseye targets. What's most satisfying for me is bullseying spent shotgun shells when they just vanish from kinetic force.. Euphoria.

Even so. There a point in which high capacity magazines would strain credulity on your intentions. There's a man who could empty a revolver, reload it and empty it again hitting all his targets with an unbelievable amount of time. That said, he's an exception. I don't think most gunmen (I wouldn't know, never met one) are as practiced as some of these people I think that adding more encumberance by requiring them to carry more carrying cartridges for their firearms is a deterrant, meant to slow them down and weigh them down. It is by no means a "fix-all" answer. But it's *something.* I can understand and get behind that since we're not seeing any other suggestions in legislation from the right wing. They're actually more vocal on giving reasons why we shouldn't address this issue, or make it worse by arming more people.

Just wanna take a moment and commend you for not resorting to the Mental Illness scape goat.

Being a fan of shooting guns myself, I would suggest that we make only manual-action firearms available. Lever-action, bolt-action, pump-action, etc. Sure, rifles can be modified so that isn't a thing anymore. The whole point is to make it harder for would-be criminals to get them.

Right now, we have a running freight train of problems. We're not going to find one answer that stops this train in its tracks, we have to work on finding more and more things to put in its path to slow it down until it isn't a problem anymore..

That sounds like fun! I'll have to try it.

I empathize with the frustration that nothing is being done, or at least the perception that nothing is being done (gotta give the FBI credit where they've earned it for hunting down plenty of freaks over the years).

Thanks for the compliment. Mental illness is certainly a factor, but not nearly to the extent some would claim. If anything it's more of a broken family issue.

I'd question the real effectiveness of limiting firearms to manual-action though...you could still drop a lot of people quickly with a lever action rifle. Heck, you could take out several with a bolt action rifle, and that's the problem; a single death is one too many. So I'd take a different track and suggest something to the extent of, "PROVE that you're a decent human being and then we'll stay out of your hair."

Maybe it takes the form of having to pass a psych eval (not a full scale all-day test, but at least a decently thorough questionnaire) when obtaining or renewing whatever ID form your state requires to pass a background check. Make it say, 200 questions long and gear it so experts can tell if the person is inclined to commit extremist acts of any sort, for a myriad of reasons (emotional, mental, religious, monetary, etc). Not only would that provide an interesting mental health picture of the U.S at large, but if your results were concerning then you could be referred to a more thorough institution if some local authority (sheriff, or local health officer, perhaps?) considered them problematic. If you're normal, then great! You can own whatever the heck you want so long as you pass your background checks.

I have no clue if this could be even considered for legal or privacy reasons, but it seems reasonable to me. If you can prove you're not an extremist nutcase, then at that point it seems unreasonable to try and regulate your life further. It'd satisfy the left in that it (if it works as intended) prevents nutcases from coming close to a firearm and the right in that once you pass you don't need to regulate/register the actual weapons. I'm sure you'll hear the annoying, "He who gives up a little freedom for a little security blah blah blah" quote at least once or a million times, but I personally would rather leave my baggage at the door then have it all weighed and tagged 24/7, if that analogy makes sense.

And now it's 3:10 A.M and I need to be up in two hours...FML

My wife has a Master's in Psychology and I've taken enough psychology tests (had therapy since I was 8) to know that passing any psychology test for the desired result is easy if you've done it enough times. I'm pretty sure you could do it if you knew what to look for if you've never taken a test before...

Clarification: I'm not mentally insane. If anything, I'm more a danger to myself than others (if I am a danger at all, which I'm not.) I suffer a mental malady that 1:100 Americans suffer. What's worse, is that it isn't accurately diagnosed until after a mean of 3.5 diagnoses have been attempted.

It's the misdiagnosed/untreated individuals that you should worry about. Kinda like the bomb you know about is not the bomb you should worry about. The bomb you know about has been disarmed. Know what I mean?

As I was saying, my wife tells me often how hard people work to "work the system." Some work very had and do it well and portray a flawless visage, others make blatant missteps. Like people pretending to be schizo** will be asked to shake their alter-personalities hand... They'll be dumb enough to try it.

**"Schizophrenia" is not multiple personalities, not in the classic sense. That's actually called dissociative identity disorder; stems from extreme scenarios of trauma/abuse typically in childhood where you take yourself out of the experience and pretend it's happening to someone else. This defense becomes normal and that "someone else" becomes manifest as a defense system.

See I have no experience in psychology whatsoever, so this is illuminating. Purely for the sake of discussion, if you were tasked with devising a system that was as good at weeding out freaks as humanly possible, with the goal of allowing those who passed to own whatever firearms and accessories they chose, how would you go about it?

That's the goal I want, but a decent process to do so still eludes me, unless we're willing to accept that there will be those who slip through the cracks (which will probably be the reality no matter what is done.)

On that point, I'd like to circle back to my argument in favor of manual-action, and smaller magazines - deterrents. We'll never stop people from doing what they plan to do, but we can make it more difficult.

And I severely disagree with the notion that we should so directly limit the many to stop the few, but I recognize that we probably won't get any further with this and respect your position. Thanks for keeping it civil.

Remember that meme I told you about? I found it....

imgflip.com/i/52gd5g
By calronmoonflower

Having seen the format, I'm pretty confidently that his meaning was that no gun owner who abides by the law has ever committed a crime while retaining the status of abiding by the law.

Now, if he'd said, "No law-abiding gun owners will ever commit crimes." then that'd be a bit shakier ground, because we all know criminals are law-abiding citizens...until they aren't.

But I see what he was trying to say with that meme.

So if the issue is mental health, we should take money from the legal system and put it into the mental health system. Its a lot harder to stab someone than to shoot them you know, both physically and mentally.

Mental health is a scapegoat. Trust me on that.