Perhaps we should have a separate topic for this kind of thing since the world seems to be going a little bit nuts.

As long as every bedlam person is able to buy a gun, the massacre like that will continue. We had different incidents with pupils running amok here. The people with shotguns killed up to 17 persons and the pupils without guns injured two or three.

It's just ridiculous that in 2012 we have people arguing in favor of allowing every idiot in the US to own a gun as one of their inalienable "rights".

The NRA has too much lobbying power and our representatives haven't the intestinal fortitude to stand up to them.

~spidey

And we worry about army guns that are now and again used for a murder or suicide. I don't think everyone should own a gun, I agree with demon17, pupils going amok with guns is far worse than those without guns, so if it's possible to keep at least one person from going amok with a gun it's already a success, not a big one ,but a success.

I hardly have anything more to say about any of this. On one hand, the responsible gun owners claim they can own, hunt, and shoot and nobody needs to die. On the other hand, we have so many arms in the country events such as this are unavoidable. On the third hand, if we didn't have any guns, any machinist worth his lathe could make a gun. They'd get in a lot of trouble if weapons were illegal, but I have to say that there would be far fewer mass killings if we didn't mass-produce weapons.

But we've said it all before. And now, it's hard to keep caring about this because we just can't do anything about it, and all I can do is try to avoid someone with a gun by never taking another class or going anywhere.

Rinse, repeat.

In a society with a violence problem, any society with a violence problem [not just ones with easy access to guns] isolating yourself isn't going to do much when there are many criminals willing & eager to go to you [maybe not with the intention of finding you, but to rob your residence]. Home invasions get talked about a lot in the gun debate but not all of those even here involve guns. It is also a problem in urban environments in disarmed European cities where young criminals will [if they decide to use a weapon] bring a knife or something to hit you with. Ideally the victims in these cases could defend themself, but in practice that doesn't work well when the victim is old or disabled. Many of our home invasions here seem to go for households where seniors live because they can't put up as much of a fight, are slower, and more likely to not hear or see you.

But aside from the whole gun issue, should we ask why our society is becoming more violent [assuming we believe it is]? Are we not creating a perfect storm for violence & crime by creating a justice system where 1 in 24 Americans ends up being sent to prison or jail every year? Where the SCOTUS believes that the police have every right to do whatever they feel is necessary to you in that process including what they said this week is legal strip & cavity searches for anyone who is ever arrested, including jaywalkers, protesters, drivers who had a broken taillight, presumably copyright infringers, etc. Justice Kennedy says that this is neccessary and actually a "good thing" because strip searches will act as a deterrent.

But: The story that prompted this Supreme Court rulling was of a guy riding as a passenger in a car his wife was driving. She gets pulled over for a minor traffic violation and they ask who he is, and their computers tell him he has an outstanding warrant for not paying something he was required to pay. So they take him in, and he does a week in prison during which time he is strip searched TWICE before the idiots realize they had the wrong person and this guy had a 100% clean record and had never gotten in trouble with the law [to this day]. Deterrent? You can't deter someone who is already doing what he should be. Unless the objective is to make him so disillusioned with the system as possible [which does much to work in the opposite direction of what is intended].

Then there's the whole urban youth problem, caused largely by parental apathy. We know from statistics that violent crime got much better after Roe v Wade because some of the otherwise unwanted children were now being aborted and there weren't as many kids suffering from parental apathy on the streets in the late 80s-90s. Having a child is easily as dangerous to society as having a gun is. Your child could become a major problem if it is not raised properly and is allowed to become a violent predator. While we all agree that guns need some level of regulation, it seems that very few in this country will even consider regulations of who can be parents and so society acts as if everyone who can biologically make one, should be able to make as many as they can pop out even if it has been definitively proven that they have zero parental abilities, are violently criminal, sexual predators, or a long list of other similarly nefarious things. Not only do we seem to believe that citizens can pop out as many kids as they physically can, but we seem to WANT that result from people who shouldn't reproduce and will even consider as part of mainstream politics this election cycle, revoking easy access to both abortions & contraceptives.