Time to change the gun laws in the USA?

[_Drifting]

I'm seeing yet another shooting incident, this time in Texas on a campus.

Given the number of these types of incidents is it time for a rethink on the right to bear arms?

[_MeDotOrg]

I'm sure someone will say that now, in the heat of the moment, is not the time to have a discussion about gun laws.

Of course, if we keep having multiple homicide shootings every week, it will never be the time.

It ISN'T all guns. But our culture has am almost fetishistic fascination with violence and guns. I don't think you put out a fire by putting more gasoline on it.

Americans and guns: Ask yourself, what sane person would look at our culture with respect to guns and violence and say "Yeah, I wish we were more like that."

From Jill Lepore's recent New Yorker Article:

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

In 2002, David Keene’s son (David Keene, President of the N.R.A. and former chairman of the American Conservative Union) David Michael Keene was driving on the George Washington Memorial Parkway when, in a road-rage incident, he fired a handgun at another motorist. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for “using, brandishing, and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence.” I asked Keene if this private tragedy had left him uncertain about what the N.R.A. had wrought. He said no: “You break the law, you pay the price.”

I asked Keene if any public atrocity had given him pause. He explained that it is the N.R.A.’s policy never to comment on a shooting.

I asked him how he would answer critics who charge that no single organization has done more to weaken Americans’ faith in government, or in one another, than the N.R.A.

“We live in a society now that’s Balkanized,” Keene said. “But that has nothing to do with guns.”

[_bcspace]

Given the number of these types of incidents is it time for a rethink on the right to bear arms?

Sure. It's time to make it easier to legally obtain and carry arms because we know that those areas which are relatively relaxed as far as gun control is concerned generally have lower rates of crime. Cuckoos like these would have to re-think their strategy knowing they could be taken out before they could cause much mayhem.

[_MeDotOrg]

Given the number of these types of incidents is it time for a rethink on the right to bear arms?

Sure. It's time to make it easier to legally obtain and carry arms because we know that those areas which are relatively relaxed as far as gun control is concerned generally have lower rates of crime. Cuckoos like these would have to re-think their strategy knowing they could be taken out before they could cause much mayhem.

A well-reasoned response. Those gun owners who are mentally unstable with paranoia will respond rationally to the belief that they are surrounded with people carrying guns who will shoot them.

A 2007 Study from the Violence Policy Center:

States with the Five Highest Gun Death Rates
Rank State % of Household Gun Ownership Number of Gun Death Rate per 100K

1. Louisiana 45.6 percent 19.87
2. Mississippi 54.3 18.32
3. Alaska 60.6 percent 17.62
4. Alabama 57.2 percent 17.55
5. Nevada 31.5 percent 16.21

States with the Five Lowest Gun Death Rates
Rank State % of Household Gun Ownership Number of Gun Death Rate per 100K

1. Hawaii 9.7 percent 2.82
2. Rhode Island 13.3 percent 3.51
3. Massachusetts 12.8 percent 3.63
4. Connecticut 16.2 percent 4.27
5. New York 18.1 percent 5.07

From the CDC:

In 1994, treatment of gunshot injuries in the United States was estimated at $2.3 billion in lifetime medical costs, of which $1.1 billion was paid by the federal government (8). These factors emphasize the importance of firearm-related injuries as a public health concern.

Foregoing for the moment what constitutes 'a well regulated militia', if the right to keep and bear arms is becoming not a right, but a necessity to keep and bear arms for my own protection, then I have to stop and ask: When does your right infringe upon my right NOT to carry a gun?

In other words, if more and more guns result in a society where people need to carry guns all the time for their self-defense, then the right to keep and bear arms has morphed into an imperative.

What other advanced industrialized country in the world functions like that?

[_Bond James Bond]

Anyone who carries a gun should also have to dress like a cowboy including spurs and a lasso.