The war against individual freedoms

[_Jersey Girl]

Grenade launchers/grenades are illegal in the US aren't they?

[_Amore]

Kevin,
You make a good point about availability, though there are other, less risky & messy ways many have chosen to commit suicide. My uncle hung himself, yet they had guns around. Personally, I am huge on fire safety because my cousin accidentally got shot and killed by a friend playing with a gun. But that was several years ago and I’ve noticed generally much more care given around guns now.

The shooters have been quite determined & have not only obtained all the weapons they wanted - despite their mental illnesses - but accomplished their goal of killing. Unfortunately their determination was proven.

JerseyGirl,
No (but I had to look it up).

[_Jersey Girl]

Welp, shows you what the heck I know.

[_subgenius]

when there are more guns around, a depressed person is more likely to kill himself. This is a statistical fact.

Notwithstanding the hilarity found in the term "statistical fact" - CFR on this whole assertion.

[_subgenius]

2 common factors among shooters are prescription mind-altering drug use & fatherlessness.

I bet you watch a lot of Fox News.

does not make his point invalid...try having your posts focus on substance instead of style.

[_subgenius]

...snip...It's a nuanced piece of legislation and it was written as a compromise for their time.

- Doc

while you offer a reasonable conclusion here, I find it difficult to dumb-down our founding fathers to a position that assumes they had no inclination to see out nation evolving...i do not believe they assumed we would be a nation of settlers in a bear infested wilderness.

[_subgenius]

The Second Amendment originally referred entirely and exclusively to the right of states to organize militias. ...snip...

Nope, clearly the language of the 2nd makes a clear and obvious distinction between "regulated militia" as being a right of the State and then uses "The People" with regards to "keep arms". The 2nd does not specify "Only the people in the militia".
Besides, your posts waffle back and forth from claiming the 2nd as being an out-date useless right to the 2nd as being only applicable to a different sort of right....all the while assuming the founding father as being unable to imagine a world with something more than a cannon or musket. All of that makes for an inconsistent position with a wobbly foundation, a.k.a. unconvincing.

[_Xenophon]

when there are more guns around, a depressed person is more likely to kill himself. This is a statistical fact.

Notwithstanding the hilarity found in the term "statistical fact" - CFR on this whole assertion.

I'd probably start with this well put together document from the Brady Center (PDF warning). Although the group's goal is obviously biased against guns and gun violence I think you will find they offer a lot of data on the subject, including more sources than you or I will get through in this lifetime.

There is overwhelming evidence linking firearm availability and suicide risk. More than a dozen U.S. case control studies, performed over the last 25 years, have examined this relationship. All of them reached the same conclusion: firearms in the home are associated with significantly higher rates of suicide. Researchers retrospectively compared the presence of a firearm in the homes of suicide victims with that of demographically similar controls (individuals who did not die by suicide). They found that people who live in a home with a gun are much more likely to die by suicide than those without access. A recent meta-analysis combined the results from 14 national and international studies, finding that access to firearms increases the risk of suicide more than three times. An earlier review of the literature found that suicide risk increases between two- and tenfold for gunowning households, depending on age and storage practices.

The stats on gun ownership and suicide are staggering. And frankly it is a bigger and better reason to consider restricting access to guns than mass shootings, if for no other reason than just the sheer number of lives lost.

[_Fence Sitter]

The stats on gun ownership and suicide are staggering. And frankly it is a bigger and better reason to consider restricting access to guns than mass shootings, if for no other reason than just the sheer number of lives lost.

In 2015 a little over 400 people died in the US as a result of mass shootings. Defined as an event in which 4 or more people died. In the same year over 13,000 died from guns and 26,000 were injured and these numbers do not include suicide.

This concept that we can prevent mass shootings by focusing on the mental health of an individual or if his dad was around or if he used drugs, is missing the much much greater problem and damage that our out of control gun society here in the US has. We only focus on gun control here when there is a mass shooting, but on a nightly basis in most of our large inner cities we loose many more lives than what happened in Florida, but no one cares what is happening there. "Hey they are poor, a different race and killing each other".

And we haven't even got into the problem with gun ownership and suicide.

If you are comfortable with how many lives are lost each year to guns here in the US and see that as an evil necessity of our absurd right to own as many guns as we want, that's fine, but lets stop pretending that the amount of guns we own is not the number one factor in how many deaths there are from those guns.

[_Xenophon]

If you are comfortable with how many lives are lost each year to guns here in the US and see that as an evil necessity of our absurd right to own as many guns as we want, that's fine, but lets stop pretending that the amount of guns we own is not the number one factor in how many deaths there are from those guns.

+1000