ID:29706
 
Call me kooky, but I find psychopaths with semiautomatic or even automatic weapons to be a greater threat to my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than even this government is... I would feel perfectly secure if, in the event of jackbooted stormtroopers, only those sons of libety who had planned in advance were able to take up arms against oppression if it meant we had better controls in place.

The VA-Tech shooter was not supposed to be able to buy guns, because he had been previously committed to a mental institution as a threat to himself and others. However, because he did not choose to reveal this on the form, he was allowed to take a gun home with him.

I suppose if he had been stymied in his attempt to buy a gun through legal means, he could have got ahold of one or contrived a different means of killing people... but each additional barrier to be overcome means less times you'll turn on the news and see something like this.
The problem is you're a huge country that's too well stocked up on guns.
I see a lot of American's asking for tighter gun control laws but I don't see many who actually offer any sort of game plan for doing it.

I think to get rid of guns in America you'd need to start by doing what we did after the Port Aurther Massacre and ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
There really is no reason for a civilian to own a gun that can fire off that many bullets that quickly. This is where you'll get a lot of protests from the gun friendly groups. They know this is just a stepping stone to disarming the public and completely removing the right to bare arms.
You make it so that it's mandatory to either sell your gun to the government or (if the owner can justify it) have it disabled for free. You allow people to trade in any class of gun.
It's also important to make sure that you'll buy any form of illegal firearm without arresting the seller. Most of the tough on crime people wont like this at all but it really has to be done. If you're not going to convince criminals to hand over their guns it's pointless.
DarkView wrote:
I think to get rid of guns in America you'd need to start by doing what we did after the Port Aurther Massacre and ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons. [...] This is where you'll get a lot of protests from the gun friendly groups.

Which is why I reckon this will never happen in the US. The gun lobby is too strong.
It's also important to make sure that you'll buy any form of illegal firearm without arresting the seller.

"Amnesty" is the longest four letter word in American English. :P
The campus was supposed to be a "gun-free zone." I don't understand how this could have happened.
Did you know that if you mix equal parts orange juice and gasoline you have napalm?
If you mix gasoline in to kitty litter until it's thick, and add sawdust, you have yourself a nice plastic explosive. Lots of explosives can be made with simple household items.
Did you know the largest shootings in America involved guns not explosives?

The Second Amendment is not absolute. No freedom is. Just like you cannot yell," Fire", in a crowded theater without consequence, you cannot expect the 2nd Amendment to be an absolute shield. Otherwise, one should support prisoners being able to obtain firearms!

What is really laughable is that some are calling for *looser* gun laws. Yeah, let's make even bigger holes in the system. Then this will never happen again, because only law abiding people who want to avoid violence will buy guns. Especially fully automatic ones!
I know people will call for greater gun control. But what we truly need is enforcement of rules in place. As you said, current laws should have prevented his acquisition. But due to lax enforcement they did not. So is the solution to make more poorly enforced rules?
Did you know that major movie studios don't actually give you real working explosive recipes in major theatrical releases? If you mix gasoline and orange juice, you get... gasoline and orange juice.

You need something to act as a stabilizer to make napalm... pulpy beverages don't count. :p
The problem is that the rules are largely being enforced... as written. Greater enforcement would require more strictly worded laws... but try proposing them and you get shouted down with "Let's not add more rules, let's enforce the ones we have."
I've heard that soap mixed with gasoline forms a napalm-like jelly. I never thought to try it out, though.
I haven't read the comments, but the real problem with the system is that everyone has a right to have there medical records and mental health records kept private.
Balancing privacy and availability of needed information is tricky, tricky business.
Speaking honestly, I do know how to make real napalm -- a certain type of plastic is dissolved in gasoline -- but I'd prefer not to share the specific type for obvious reasons. =P

As for the VA-Tech shooting, what this reminds me of is the fact that a lot of people in Canada -- at least the people I know -- are pressing for looser gun control laws up here. I can't even begin to fathom why. What the government wants to impose is mandatory registration on all firearms; it seems logical to me, but everyone keeps saying "crime doesn't register". Perhaps they're forgetting that organised crime is the tiniest subset of the population and that most shooting deaths occur on civilian properties as a result of civilian disagreements.


[edit]You know, I'm just thinking... aside from a military surplus store on Shaughnessy St. in Port Coquitlam, I don't know of any place in the whole Lower Mainland where I could actually buy a rifle...
On the matter of making things explode:

Chlorine + Alcohol and shake it up!
It's fun!

In reply to Gughunter:
I doubt he walked on campus waving his two weapons about or making it obvious he was wearing an ammo-rig. Even if he wasn't wearing anything over the vest people probably would have still ignored him.
Guy was, of course, being tongue-in-cheek. ;-)
Thorg: Try mixing bleach with ammonia. You can get all kinds of neat things like chlorine gas, nitrogen trichloride (poisonous AND explosive!), or even hydrazine (a rocket fuel component; of interest because the thermal reaction is likely to cause explosion). Of course it is likely to result in severe injury/death....

JT: Gasoline and styrofoam is pretty well known. Less well known is that it can be frozen for storage and transport ;-)

All of that stuff is pretty small time though. Scarier stuff (TATP, for example which was used in the attack on the Dolphinarium nightclub in Jerusalem in 2001, which killed 21) can be rigged up from commonly availible components. And still more effort than just buying a high rate of fire firearm.
Jmurph wrote:
Thorg: Try mixing bleach with ammonia. You can get all kinds of neat things like chlorine gas, nitrogen trichloride (poisonous AND explosive!), or even hydrazine (a rocket fuel component; of interest because the thermal reaction is likely to cause explosion). Of course it is likely to result in severe injury/death....

I once hatched a plan involving chlorine, ammonia, and a sheild made of ice to get force the people at the bar next to my house to turn down their damned music. Alas, it was two in the morning and I was too tired to do much more than come up with ideas on how to kill them all.

<_<
I don't see the privacy concern as that complex. If you want to own a machine that shoots a bunch of little bits of dense matter at hypersonic speeds, your mental health has just become a matter of public interest.

Not that individual gun store owners need be trusted with such things... but they should not be able to let somebody walk out the door with a gun who hasn't been vetted by something more comprehensive than a multiple choice test.

And yeah, styrofoam and gasoline is the real recipe that (blanking on the author's name) was alluding to with the orange juice and gasoline one. The fact is, you can make much more dangerous explosived with other household chemicals, though, as others have suggested... and I'd like to thank each and every one of you for putting my blog on a government watch list. :P
Jmurph wrote:
And still more effort than just buying a high rate of fire firearm.

In the states, that's true, but thankfully we have bans on fully-automatics (including full-automatics rechambered for semi-automatic fire), and police-permit and wilderness-carry-permit restrictions on handguns (and full bans on machine pistols and submachineguns, of course).

Most people can't take advantage of the wilderness carry permit because they have to prove that their line of work puts them in the back country where there is a clear threat of attack by grizzlies, moose or elks in mating season, etc. The permit doesn't give permission for open-carry (and certainly not concealed-carry) in civilian habitations or communities, so whenever your day of work ends, you put the pistol in a lockbox and then drive into down.
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