but for example lowering unemployment, increasing education and providing better access to food and healthcare could have better results than just new law

Please provide a citation as to the poverty, lack of education, or lack of access to food and healthcare among the perpetrators of mass shootings.

To the best of my knowledge, the vast majority of mass shootings are carried out by those who are both relatively affluent and educated. I'll leave this here.

I think what's often lost in the debate/argument is that not all guns are equal. There's a massive difference between the uses and effects of a say a hunting rifle as opposed to a hand gun or an assault weapon.

Where-as I don't really care if a chronically drunk driver were to drive a moped, I have a big problem if he were allowed to drive a big-rig.

A hunting rifle for example is a terrible weapon for mass murder of people. They reload very slowly, they are terrible at close quarters, hitting an erratically moving target through a scope takes some serious skill, and there's no possibility of hiding the weapon. You're much better off just using a car or a knife. On the other hand assault weapons are designed to mow down people indiscriminately. They have no other use but to kill.

What exactly is a hunting rifle? What exactly is an assault weapon? The term assault weapon has been coined by progressives and has no clear definition. They started using it because they could no longer call the guns they were campaigning against "assault rifles" because that term does have a clear definition and it was inaccurate. As near as I can tell it is supposed to mean any gun which looks scary to someone who knows absolutely nothing about guns. No other use but to kill? Really? The AR-15 is probably the most popular rifle there is in this country and by far its most common use, overwhelmingly, is in recreational and competition shooting, not mowing down poor innocent people as the media would like you to believe. No offense but you sound like you have never even been in the same room as a gun much less ever used one before, which is most often the case with people who are vehemently anti-gun.

I own guns. Almost everyone I know has at least one in their home. I don't know anyone who has committed a violent crime of any kind, much less with a gun. I do know at least one person whose life was probably saved by the fact that he had his concealed carry weapon. I fail to see how gun ownership is an epidemic as the title of this thread suggests.

Mass shootings may be on the rise, but overall homicide has been declining for years and this is despite the federal "assault weapons" ban expiring back in 2004 and despite most states since adopting legal concealed carry. The number of guns is ever increasing, the number of restrictions have been decreasing, and yet somehow homicide is as low as it has been in decades and has a downward trend. Interesting.

[attachment=29282:US-Homicide-Rate-1855-2012.jpg]

One major problem is that mental health has a heavy stigma in the US. That needs to end. In real life people suffer emotional and mental traumas just as severe as broken bones (short term) or diabetes (long term). If you see someone with a broken bone, a huge white and red thing sticking through their deformed arm, you immediately take them to a hospital. Someone suffers a similar emotional damage and there is a major question, 'should I ask them about it? should they consider going to a mental health professional?'

If only it were that easy. Can you spot cancer as easily as a broken leg? Mental health is not simply a matter of someone visibly acting weird. Mental issues come in an incredibly wide variety. They can be latent, unknown to the person themselves, or intentionally kept private, and you wouldn't be able to spot them. And which ones cause people to go on rampages?

Treating an illness is a lot like fixing a bug in a program: You need to discover it, determine how to address it, have some way to know if you've resolved it, and be able to watch for regression. With a broken leg, doctors know what needs to be done and have accurate diagnostic tools. Do we know how to do this properly for mental health issues?

Then there are people who have "bad personalities". Are they mentally ill? Who forces them to seek treatment if they don't WANT treatment, and haven't yet committed any crimes? They might say, "there's nothing wrong with me!" If you force them into treatment, they might snap then and there. If someone doesn't put themselves under the microscope voluntarily or as a consequence of their actions, their condition may simply continue to fester. We aren't allowed to systematically monitor everyone to determine if they're becoming a threat, because that would be a violation of privacy.

Then there's Poe's law - if you're monitoring someone online via Facebook or something similar, it's difficult to tell if they're being serious with what they say or not. We could simply arrest anyone who makes any kind of threat online and force them into treatment, but that would be overkill. Are we violating their privacy somehow if we do this? People would also simply stop threatening each other publicly, and you'd get no warning signs at all.

There are also concerns about corruption in medical practice. What if the doctor doesn't care about your problem and just prescribes some drug and sends you on your way? What if the doctor decides you have an issue when you don't, so they can make money off of you? What if the doctor CAUSES a different issue to keep you coming back for your subscription? It sounds crackpot at first until you hear news claiming it actually happens. It's easy to know if your doctor is telling you the truth about fixing your broken leg (does it hurt? can you walk yet?), but it's not always easy to tell if they're lying to you about your cancer or mental issues.

I personally went to see a doctor about my hay fever, after my uncle told me about immunotherapy curing his allergies. I went through the five year process but I still have allergies. The doctors claim "it doesn't work for some people", but I have no way to distinguish between "it didn't work for me" and "we charged you a few thousand dollars for a placebo and brown food coloring".

Alright, so, it's has been 274 days since January 1st 2015 ( today is October 2nd 2015). And there has been 296 mass shooting this year in the U.S.A. (Mass Shooting. > 4 people total killed/injured).

Averages out to 1.08 mass shootings in the US per day (296 / 274 = 1.08)

In my source, it claims the longest gap was 8 days between mass shootings

Guns are totally not the problem

Source:

http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Mass_Shootings_in_2015

I don't understand how people can keep blaming mental health,every living thing kills something else, the only difference us that humans have mastered the art of doing it. Any argument is pointless though, there are more guns in the United States than people, any degree of regulation would be pointless.

I am against guns since it is my belief that guns kill people and whoever says something different is lying (no, people don't kill people, not nearly as easily).

However, cynical as it is, I am about to get a hunting license. Which costs about 2 grand, takes 20 days of education, and requires a 100% clean police record. Not even a psychological examination (which I deem pretty useless anyway, but it's scary that it isn't even needed).

The reason why I'm getting a license is that is that anti-gun laws such as we have in Europe (with the exception of Switzerland) are a the typical unrealistical socialist rubbish as human rights and child protection laws.

That socialist stuff works well in theory. Their assumption is that everybody is a brainless prolete and that the law therefore must dictate everything, and of course everybody follows the law.

But in practice, the assumptions fail miserably. Human rights are great when you have them and everybody respects them. They're not nearly that great when some people don't respect them and these people are in your street. Child protection laws are great for protecting the children in the few cases where it's really necessary, Except, in practice, the authorities fail to react in some of the most scary cases when it would be obvious that something needs to be done even without a law (there was this case not long ago where authorities watched for years, until that child was dead), and the average mother is criminalized for shouting at her child, which is just ridiculous.

Similarly, anti-gun laws are great in theory. And yes, a world where nobody has a gun is the world that I would like to live in. But in reality, criminals don't care about the law (by definition), and thus they all have guns, and they use them, too. Only you aren't allowed to have one (technically, the criminals aren't allowed either of course, but they just give a fuck). Police will do nothing to protect you. They're too busy writing parking tickets, anyway.

Jurisdiction doesn't do anything, either. Whether a criminal has a gun or not, or whether someone kills someone (or a dozen people) makes nearly no difference in penalty. Some of the most vicious people (Degowski, who took hostages and shot some of them without "need", or Zlof who kidnapped and tortured Oetker would be examples of this, or the former RAF terrorists) walk free after a couple of years in prison. Because, according to the SPD, it is inhuman to keep someone in prison for longer than 15 years, and the prisoner no longer understands the reason for his penalty after that time. Heck, I don't fucking care whether they understand. I don't fucking care whether it's a punishment for them to be in prison (or even whether it's humane). They need to be locked away because they're dangerous.

Alas, that doesn't happen.

A hunting rifle for example is a terrible weapon for mass murder of people. They reload very slowly, they are terrible at close quarters, hitting an erratically moving target through a scope takes some serious skill, and there's no possibility of hiding the weapon. You're much better off just using a car or a knife

Not so. Hunting rifles (what's usually called "hunting rifle", strictly there is no such thing) come as semi-automatic rifles if you want that, and allow you to hit at 150-200 meters distance with little skill, doing a single-hit-kill. With a precision rifle and good skill, you can hit at 800 meters (some people claim 1,500 meters, but I'm doubtful about that).Hitting within the tens of kilojoules at 200 meters is entirely sufficient even if the target is a bison or is wearing a vest or behind a tree (and way better than using a knife). However, you can use the same rifle at shorter distances and without looking through the lens, too. Yep, it won't be as accurate, obviously... but at short range that isn't so much of an issue, and given the energy, as long as you hit anything, it will be a kill.

Besides, anyone allowed to own a hunting rifle is also allowed to own a shotgun and two handguns (more if you can make believe a need). No restrictions except none of them may be fully automatic. So, if you really want close quarter, there you go.

What exactly is a hunting rifle? What exactly is an assault weapon? The term assault weapon has been coined by progressives and has no clear definition. They started using it because they could no longer call the guns they were campaigning against "assault rifles" because that term does have a clear definition and it was inaccurate. As near as I can tell it is supposed to mean any gun which looks scary to someone who knows absolutely nothing about guns. No other use but to kill? Really? The AR-15 is probably the most popular rifle there is in this country and by far its most common use, overwhelmingly, is in recreational and competition shooting, not mowing down poor innocent people as the media would like you to believe. No offense but you sound like you have never even been in the same room as a gun much less ever used one before, which is most often the case with people who are vehemently anti-gun.

You would be very wrong.

If you don't know the difference between a hunting rifle and an assault rifle; well here's a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun#Types. Here's some more good examples of hunting rifles: http://www.outdoorlife.com/photos/gallery/guns/2011/05/best-hunting-rifles-decade/?image=50, clearly a different type of gun than an assault rifle. An assault weapon (as opposed to an assault rifle) can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#Assault_rifles_vs._assault_weapons.

You said assault rifle, I said assault weapon, but for the purpose of my original point, its the same thing. A hunting rifle is a tool, and though dangerous, is by design difficult to abuse. They are just not very effective at killing people. Assault weapons/rifles are a military/police weapon, designed for the sole purpose of killing people, and are exceptionally effective at it. Treating these two types of guns as 'the same' is just silly, and what I feel is lost in the discussion.

I own guns. Almost everyone I know has at least one in their home. I don't know anyone who has committed a violent crime of any kind, much less with a gun. I do know at least one person whose life was probably saved by the fact that he had his concealed carry weapon. I fail to see how gun ownership is an epidemic as the title of this thread suggests.

So clearly your opinion isn't in the slightest bit biased.

Mass shootings may be on the rise, but overall homicide has been declining for years and this is despite the federal "assault weapons" ban expiring back in 2004 and despite most states since adopting legal concealed carry. The number of guns is ever increasing, the number of restrictions have been decreasing, and yet somehow homicide is as low as it has been in decades and has a downward trend. Interesting.

Thats simply because the medical system has gotten better at treating gunshot wounds. Its not that less people are being shot, but that more shot people are surviving.

My take -- and I'm on the side of gun ownership -- is this:

We have a lot of gun violence in America. We have a lot of violence in America. Yet, when I say "In America" what I really mean is that we have geographic pockets where a relatively high amount of violence is sustained, we have relatively low levels of violence spread throughout the remainder of the country, and we have sporadic events of mass violence like we saw yesterday. While those mass events are tragic, the numbers of people killed in such events are statistical chaff -- not to minimize the human costs of those deaths in any way -- but it does not do any good to pretend that making sweeping changes to law guided by and in response to those horrific events will have any effect on the rest of it, much less on the underlying social, criminal, economic, and mental-health problems that cause it to exist in the first place.

The statistics and sound bytes you hear on the news often do not offer a clear view -- When the newsman cites the oft-quoted number of American gun deaths, he never seems to remember to mention that suicide and gang violence make up something like 2/3rds of the figure. He doesn't tell you that the likelihood of a person being killed in a mass shooting, accidentally, or otherwise minding their own business is vanishingly small. The pundits for gun control or banishment, making the argument that defensive use of guns is rare enough to not weigh in the discussion, won't remind you that the FBI statistics for defensive gun uses are only recorded when the aggressor dies as a result of his victim shooting him -- that when the aggressor is shot and neutralized or just runs away, this isn't recorded as a defensive gun use. They won't point out that they're pandering every time they simplify the issue as a result of an out-of-touch NRA in the pocket of gun lobbyists. Pundits for total laissez faire gun ownership are often no better -- while I do not think that more guns makes things any worse in and of itself, I don't especially share in the common oppionion that more guns everywhere make things better, either.

The thing is, regardless of the side their on, both sides actually do want to reduce the amount of gun violence. And not just because its a good thing -- from a purely selfish point of view, gun rights supporters (including their organizations) want fewer gun deaths because it would mean they face less misplaced scrutiny. I firmly believe that if both sides came together and started a fresh dialog, that we could come up with ways to reduce gun violence without undue burden on the lawful gun owner. Unfortunately, there's a long history of mistrust, posturing and frankly, pandering, on both sides that makes that difficult. Gun owners and supporters knee-jerk because they know they're good people who would never harm another person with their firearms, but they know they're about to be painted with the same brush as criminals, psychopaths and mass-murderers every time a mass shooting occurs. Gun control advocates rarely disappoint them in this, nor fail to take advantage of big-news-but-statistically-irrelevent events.

Gun control advocates say they want "sensible measures" but their actions don't follow through in actually attacking the problem where it exists. Repeatedly, they go after scary-looking "assault weapons" (a term they coined themselves, by the way, back in the 80s) like the AR-15. The AR-15, by the way, is the most popular firearm in the nation, with over 3 million of them in the hands of citizens (that's almost 1 for every hundred people), and yet they are used in fewer than 0.5% of crimes -- long guns of any type (rifles, shotguns, anything you would hold to your shoulder) and used in fewer than 2-3% of all crimes and make up the majority of all legally-owned guns owned in the nation. So why is that particular firearm, and other 'assault weapons' are always first to be targeted and villianized -- well, if you consistently use terms like 'assault weapon' to describe them, and you point out how much they look like military weapons (despite being functionally identical to many hunting rifles), its easy to convince a public who doesn't know any better that there's no good reason the average person should be able to own military hardware.

If we were to honestly address gun violence in this country, we wouldn't start with guns at all -- not of any sort. We'd start with crime, and criminals, and mental health, and gang violence, and with the endemic socio-ecomonic disadvantages faced by places and populations where most gun violence actually occurs. We'd start with greater emergency services and support for those considering suicide, or considering lashing out. We'd make sure that people who committed crimes using guns (that is, fired or brandished -- not simply in possession of, or forgotten in their getaway car) went away for a long time, and were never able to possess guns again under strict penalty (think lifetime parole condition). We'd crack down on *illegal* gun sales, while leaving legitimate sales (including person-to-person sales) alone. In short, we'd start by attacking the problems, rather than using the tragedy of it all to achieve political agendas. For the most part, the mainstream gun owner doesn't object to a reasonable and expedient background check, and the NICS system works pretty well -- if you buy a gun at retail, its a good certainly that you haven't lost the right to do so -- making this more-stringent wouldn't actually have much effect on illegal guns, because this isn't where illegal guns (nor guns used in crimes) come from. But this isn't what gun control advocates put forward -- they wan't to take away your scary guns, they want to impose manufacturers to include sometimes-expensive safety features that could hinder legitimate defensive gun use, they want to impose a size limit on magazines, they want the FBI and BATF to know every time you purchase a firearm, or ammunition, or any 'functional' firearm accessory from slings to pistol-grips. In California, they've succeeded as pushing such non-nonsensical measures as outlawing rifled barrels in pistols -- they deemed it safer to have the very same guns allowed, just less accurate -- by some misguided assumption that this somehow saves lives, presumably.

I could go on -- I haven't even touched upon the constitution or founders, or on the philosophical difficulty of entrusting a monopoly on the use of force to government bodies (moreso than it already is).

I'll leave with a personal experience though, which should illustrate why its not so cut and dried for the urban population of the states to enforce their views nationwide. When I was 4, my mother broke up with a boyfriend who showed up at our door, drunk, threating to kill her and the three of us kids -- specifically, he swore we would choke us all to death. This was in a rural town of 1200 people, and a country seat (having the county courthouse, jail, and sheriff's department). We lived in an apartment no more than half a mile from the Sheriff's station -- a straight shot down the highway that passed through town. My mother called the police, gave them the information, and was assured help would arrive shortly. She called my grandfather next. From 8 miles outside town, my grandfather and one uncle woke themselves up, threw on clothes and still arrived in half the time of the first uniformed officer. That we lived inside town and still experienced this delay of response was only half-fluke -- there were only so many officers to spread across the county, and it was nighttime, so some delay was to be expected, but often at least one officer would be nearby the larger of the small towns dotted around; but what I've taken away from that experience is that is entirely the norm for people who live rurally, and that even people in smaller towns experience similar delays. We didn't have a gun in the house -- luckily we didn't have an angry drunk intent on killing us, with help 15 minutes away, either.

Looking at reasons behind mass shootings is a bit of a red herring. While these incidents are indeed terrible, the number of deaths caused by mass shootings is only a small percentage of firearm related homicides.

I am against guns since it is my belief that guns kill people and whoever says something different is lying (no, people don't kill people, not nearly as easily).

You and those that believe like you hear that statement (Guns don't kill people. People kill people.) and totally miss the point. No, it isn't a lie. The point, which is always missed, is that a loaded gun lying in a gun cabinet will not kill anyone. It only kills someone when a person picks it up, points it at themselves or someone else and pulls the trigger, accidental discharges aside. The person did the killing; the gun was the tool. If this isn't the case, why prosecute anyone for murder? The person chose to use the gun to kill someone.

If I am intent on murder, do you really think that my inability to access a gun will stop me from committing murder? All it will do is preclude me from considering using a gun. This is why this matter is a people problem and not a gun problem. The question doesn't lie in why we love guns so much in this country, but why we are so willing to use them. Why is life worth so little to people? When did it stop being precious?

We will not solve anything by banning a tool.