Real issue behind school shootings and gun control

Guns are no more evil than knives, hammers, cars, baseball bats, or anything else which can be misused to kill or injure people. Some PEOPLE are just No Damn Good. Others are seriously mentally deranged in a dangerous way. These are the people we have to deal with in some way, and there is no 100% effective way to do so. The world is a dangerous place; nobody gets out of here alive. There will always be some very low level of risk that your life will terminate unexpectedly, so live it fully in a way that you will have no regrets if it ends tomorrow, but don't obsess on the possibility that it will and lose today.

 

At about the same time as the Sandy Hook shooting, there was a school stabbing in China. Every child who was stabbed in China survived with minor injuries, while every child shot at Sandy Hook died.

I agree that people kill people, but the gun makes it exponentially easier.

 

Knives are used for cutting objects.
Hammers are used for hitting objects
Cars are used for transportation
Baseball bats are used to play a sport

All those objects are primarily something non-lethal or dangerous. They can be used for murder but so can anything if used correctly. Guns have no secondary purpose. They're meant to kill or harm other living creatures. There's no other reason for their existence.

 

It's not exactly impossible to build your own gun at home.

If someone wants to kill people, they're going to find methods how. It doesn't matter if guns are available or not. All it takes is typing in the proper search on google.

 

Of course there are plenty of other ways to kill people, but they're far harder. Gun control in Japan and Australia haven't given birth to massacre by hydrochloric acid. Murder rates almost always go down when gun control is introduced.

 

..I don't know about that.

 

Guns are impersonal. They remove that personal contact that is required for stabbing or bashing someone. Stabbing and strangulation are deeply person acts of extreme emotion, but pulling a trigger when someone is on the other side of a room is not.
You can kill someone with a gun in a single flash of irrational anger.
It takes a sustained state of rage to stab, strangle or beat someone to death - and in the process of doing so, many people realise what they are doing and snap out of it.

No such luck with guns. One shot can kill you instantly.
Over a single flash of anger.

 

Erm. No. If you hit someone in the head just right, you can kill them instantly.

 

You may have just contradicted a point you were trying to make. Yes, someone hit in the head just right has a chance of death, but someone shot in the head has a 95% chance at death.

 

Sure, but if you shoot someone in the head, regardless of where, you're probably going to kill them.
It's also still more personal to get up close to someone (risking injury and repercussions) and hit them in the head than it is to shoot them across the street.

 

Not quite. There's tons of stories on google of people getting shot in the head, impaled, or otherwise having a foreign object in their head and surviving.

Depends very heavily on where you hit them along with the caliber. My uncle attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. He's still, unfortunately, alive.

 

Anecdotes are not data.

 

But that leaves the question: would a person rather take their chances being bumped on the noggin or being shot in the head?

 

I don't think guns are the whole problem, per se, but I think it's the fact that the access to them it's so easy and available to everyone it makes them a big part of the problem. You can disagree with me here, but my opinion is that at least some form of gun control should be established, I'm not advocating for banning guns, but simply to have those who wish to own one pass a series of tests in order to prove they will use it maturely and as a measure of protection only. I don't live in the USA, but here in Europe where I come from, this is how things are, and the numbers of crime and murder by gun are significantly way lower.

Don't get me wrong, I wish to someday own a gun myself and that is why I am willing to go through every physical and psychological exam so that I can attest I will be a responsible gun owner. That's just the way I see things.

 

I don't think a big majority of gun control advocates actually propose banning all guns. 91% of Americans actually want those tougher background checks on people before they can buy firearms, but the 9% and the NRA basically profits off gun sales, and they honestly don't care what people do with their guns after they buy them. They're getting paid and that's all that matters to them.

I never want to take away gun from responsible gun owners. I want to just make it harder for people who shouldn't have guns to get them. And to use a talking point conservatives use to endorse government spying: "Why do you care if you have nothing to hide?"

 

Well, where's your data that being shot in the head is probably going to kill someone?

Given that that "bump" can result in brain damage, inter cranial bleeding, brain swelling, and a host of other issues, I'd rather be shot.

 

Method Name | Lethality (%) | Time (min) | Agony

Gunshot of head | 97.0% | 2.5 | 13

Source: Most lethal methods of suicide | Lost All Hope: The web's leading suicide resource

 

That pretty much sums up my point. Guns should be owned only by responsible people, if you are one of those, why are you getting yourself so rilled up? But then again, this is one of the best examples of capitalism at work: if it makes profit, who gives a shit?