Lordy.
I didn't post this thread to get into another gun debate/flame war. More to lament another tragedy and talk about whatever it is about American culture that thinks these kinds of things are okay. Because as much as we say it bothers us, it obviously doesn't bother us enough or something would have been done. Anything. Just TRY something. You say tougher gun laws won't work? Let's try and find out. Because what we've been doing up to now obviously isn't working.
It depends on what you mean by "hasn't worked", since violent crime, and specifically violent crime with guns, has been going down for two decades. In 1993, there were 1,222,701 violent crimes with firearms, in 2011 there were 414,562. That's about 3 times less in 20 years, so, violent crime is falling. We had 24,530 murders in 1993, but only 14,249 in 2014, which is a 40% drop, nearly cut in half.
I'm not arguing do nothing, I've argued focus on psychological issues, medical health, focus on the person, even to arm and train the average person. The simple response is that my opinion is to focus on people, and to prepare for events. Rather than try to control the whole world to my liking, which isn't even possible to do, I will try to prepare myself and other for an event. In addition, I'll try to stop the problem at it's core.
Nothing stops a murderer from using alternative methods, such as explosives or knives, which at least I've hopefully demonstrated that bombing attacks can do more damage than all the mass shootings combined so, if someone gets it in their head to blow up the Chrysler building, the Twin towers, there's no way that removing a single tool, be it a crossbow, bow and arrow, knife, sword, axe, gun, bomb etc. will stop them. There's more than 1000 ways to die you know, in fact there's an infinite number of ways. We have to get at the core of what these people are thinking. Does that mean mandatory psychological checks for everyone in America? Does it mean mandatory EMT training so that way we can control the damage from potential attacks? Does it mean passing out guns and body armor, on top of training? It really depends.
The assault weapon's ban was already present in this country between 1994 and 2004, and it didn't lower murders or stop mass attacks at all.
We can't just do something and hope it works. Our response might do more damage than it helps, or it might consume huge resources without helping anyone. The idea that we should simply do "something" and not care what this is rather ridiculous. By that same token, we could argue legalizing machine guns or rocket launchers could be the solution, after all, we haven't tried doing that in the last 70 years. It's just a horrible idea to not think about what you're doing.
