LDS Teenager Murdered at her High School in Parkland

[_Markk]

Sure Markk. But they don't, do they?

Give me one example of a mass shooting with an M1 carbine. How many perps do you know of that have armed themselves with three 45 autos and a bunch of magazines and gone on a shooting rampage? I can name none.

How many have done it with AR-15 style weapons? I can name at least half a dozen off the top or my head. If you have been paying attention - you could as well.

When I go down to my local gun store, I don't see M1 carbines or Marlin semi-automatic .22s on prominent display for sale to the public. I see AR-15 style rifles, by any number of manufacturers. Many have Picatinny rails for "tactical" accessories, suppressors, large capacity magazines, etc. The video ads for these weapons show camo-clad men with shooting glasses and ear protection in various tactical poses firing at human shaped targets.

And everyone knows that these weapons can be modified for full-auto by a gunsmith or fitted with a bump stock in one's basement.

Let's start with the AR-15s.

Your argument is like saying bars shouldn't serve 101 Wild Turkey, but is okay to sell 90 proof Wild Turkey?

It ignores the root issue and reason.

Here is a list I found real quick...note the AR is not always the only weapon...

Here is a list of mass shootings in the U.S. that featured AR-15-style rifles during the last 35 years, courtesy of the Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries and USA TODAY research:

Feb. 24, 1984: Tyrone Mitchell, 28, used an AR-15, a Stoeger 12-gauge shotgun and a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun to kill two and wound 12 at 49th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles before killing himself.
Oct. 7, 2007: Tyler Peterson, 20, used an AR-15 to kill six and injure one at an apartment in Crandon, Wis., before killing himself.
June 20, 2012: James Eagan Holmes, 24, used an AR-15-style .223-caliber Smith and Wesson rifle with a 100-round magazine, a 12-gauge Remington shotgun and two .40-caliber Glock semi-automatic pistols to kill 12 and injure 58 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.
Dec. 14, 2012: Adam Lanza, 20, used an AR-15-style rifle, a .223-caliber Bushmaster, to kill 27 people — his mother, 20 students and six teachers — in Newtown, Conn., before killing himself.
June 7, 2013: John Zawahri, 23, used an AR-15-style .223-caliber rifle and a .44-caliber Remington revolver to kill five and injure three at a home in Santa Monica, Calif., before he was killed.
March 19, 2015: Justin Fowler, 24, used an AR-15 to kill one and injure two on a street in Little Water, N.M., before he was killed.
May 31, 2015: Jeffrey Scott Pitts, 36, used an AR-15 and .45-caliber handgun to kill two and injure two at a store in Conyers, Ga., before he was killed.
Oct. 31, 2015: Noah Jacob Harpham, 33, used an AR-15, a .357-caliber revolver and a 9mm semi-automatic pistol to kill three on a street in Colorado Springs, Colo., before he was killed.
Dec. 2, 2015: Syed Rizwyan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, 28 and 27, used two AR-15-style, .223-caliber Remington rifles and two 9 mm handguns to kill 14 and injure 21 at his workplace in San Bernardino, Calif., before they were killed.
June 12, 2016: Omar Mateen, 29, used an AR-15 style rifle (a Sig Sauer MCX), and a 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol to kill 49 people and injure 50 at an Orlando nightclub before he was killed.
Oct. 1, 2017: Stephen Paddock, 64, used a stockpile of guns including an AR-15 to kill 58 people and injure hundreds at a music festival in Las Vegas before he killed himself.
Nov. 5, 2017: Devin Kelley, 26, used an AR-15 style Ruger rifle to kill at least 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, before he was killed.

I would wager over 90% of people that want to outlaw the assault weapon, have no idea that a weapon like the mini 14, which are not officially an "assault weapon" are just as deadly and efficient, while those idiots that shoot people in most cases would understand it.

[_Darth J]

So Markk, what you're saying is that the AR-15 is not the only kind of gun that should be banned.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

That about sums up their position. Half the adults in this country are cool with poor people shooting each other, teenagers getting shot by 4Chan types, depressed people blowing their brains out, and unnecessarily paying hundreds of billions in associated costs because 'muh freedumbs'.

Sure, wildly give up 'muh freedumbs' in hopes that will cause the sickness to subside.

I'm not sure what you think the sickness is, but since it's not going to subside, whatever that means, I don't believe arming the infirm with guns is probably the wisest course action.

- Doc

[_RockSlider]

I'm not sure what you think the sickness is, but since it's not going to subside, whatever that means, I don't believe arming the infirm with guns is probably the wisest course action.

- Doc

I fully agree with this statement. I'm not suggesting nothing be done, I'm suggesting that AR's alone are not the problem, and legislating them will not legislate away the problem.

I think the Vegas hotel shooting of the concert goers is an outlier compared to the likes of the Dude walking into the Church and killing everyone, or this kid. In these cases there was no surprise that the individual cracked. It was expected.

I have no clue what the answers might be, but I doubt laws about AR's will deter disturbed individuals from cracking and doing mass damage.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Then there is something really seriously wrong with him...

The hat was a dead giveaway huh.

high quality image upload

- Doc

[_Blixa]

The hat was a dead giveaway huh.

high quality image upload

- Doc

You know that's not him, right?

You also know that that t-shirt is a jokey "communist party" Threadless t-shirt right?

[_Gadianton]

Stem,

I think Prof J's analysis has been right on. However, I also think you really do believe you're saying something meaningful, and when he restates the possibilities, it doesn't sound right to you, even if it's what you're actually saying.

What I think, and it's not totally your fault given how many apologists you've been around online, is you're taking a stab at the tried-and-true argument from ignorance. "Who's to say what science will reveal in the future about horses in America? It's very possible the Book of Mormon will be vindicated on horses. Science has been wrong so many times in the past and almost certainly, the present theories are wrong and will give way to better ones."

A guy like Darth goes for sentence two, and offers the possible interpretations minus the rhetorical flourish of sentence 1 and fallacious justification of sentence 3. The reasoning of the three sentences together feels right to you because it's a very familiar kind of expression you've seen from others, but it's totally illogical. The two cases are: 1) bare nomological possibility such as a teapot out in space somewhere, and not worth mentioning 2) a contending fact, with some kind of case to present.

If I come to your aid and say this to Darth J, will you feel like someone understands what you're getting at?

Darth J,

The problem is there are so many variables. How in the heck do we know what tweaking any one of those will do in this complicated, Rube-Goldberg whole? How do we know that doing some mental health check won't have some unpredicted side effect that just accelerates the problem? And more restrictions on guns? Have you seen what happens with bacteria with all our antibiotics to fight them? they just get stronger to the point they're impossible to kill! How do you know it won't be the same with gun restrictions and those who really want to do the crime just won't compensate and be all that more impossible to stop? You just don't know what's going to happen when you've got a chaotic, explosive situation on your hands. People try to make things better by playing the hero all the time and it backfires. This may very well be one of those kinds of cases, we don't know that it isn't.

[_Kevin Graham]

That actually looks like a young Ted Cruz.

[Guest]

That actually looks like a young Ted Cruz.

Ah. It was originally linked to Cruz's everipedia page:

https://everipedia.org/wiki/nicholas-cruz/

It looks like it's been removed. That's where I got the image from.

But you're right. It's this guy:



- Doc

[_EAllusion]

The legislative rule rescinded by Congress relied on preventing people who have a mental illness that disables them to the point of requiring assistance with SS benefits from getting a gun. Here's five important points that should be understood about that:

First, that group of people is statistically less likely than the average American to commit violent crimes. I think it's dubious to single out a group of people for denying rights others enjoy based on their belonging to a socially undesirable, stigmatized class, but even if you don't think that, there isn't good reason to think that will reduce violent gun crime.

Second, this group of people does not capture mental illness as a cohort at all. In the case of this shooter, the information about him in the media shows all the signs of being on the conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, anti-social personality disorder track, but that's not going to be captured by people on SSDI who need assistance managing their finances. The vast majority of mentally ill people don't have that kind of disability.

Third, the the DSM aims for 70% diagnostic agreement. That is to say, if clinicians look at the same patient, ideally they should agree about that patient's diagnosis 70% of the time. But even that rather modest goal isn't necessarily met. People's medical records when it comes to mental health diagnosis is a free for all. Doctors see people for 15 minutes, read a little case notes, and take a stab in the dark. That happens all the time. When I assess people for mental health services, it is unusual for their diagnostic history not to be a chaotic mess. The accuracy of the mental health diagnoses the public has at any given point in time is quite dodgy. It seems rather questionable to be denying rights based on the flawed judgement of some doctor who met you for a few minutes.

Fourth, mental health is fluid. Just because you meet the criteria for a mental health disorder today doesn't mean you will meet that criteria tomorrow. But once it is on your medical record, it is there forever. If you are ever diagnosed with major depressive disorder, you will always have "major depressive disorder" listed in your diagnoses. It seems equally questionable to deny rights based on being mentally ill at one time even if that might not be true now.

Fifth, mental illness is actually extremely common. While they may not be diagnosed as such, a very large % of the population has mental illness at one time or another. While we think nothing of the idea of people occasionally being physically sick, but getting better, mental illness has such a stigma that people often try to avoid being considered ever mentally ill if they can. But every credible attempt to gauge the incidence of mental illness in the population suggests most people - the majority - are or will be mentally ill at some point in their life. It's only a subset that get diagnosed as such and any policy aimed at discriminating against the mentally ill is going to end up proxy discriminating against people who find themselves in front of people who will diagnose them. For instance, if it is the case that children in the school to prison pipeline are more likely to get slapped with mental health labels than children who go to good schools, then your policy is going to inevitably discriminate against children who by happenstance find themselves in the school to prison pipeline. There is a long, sordid history of psychiatric labels being used against politically vulnerable people and groups to strip them of rights. This kind of policy is a wide-open door to that problem walking right through.