If
Trump said if there had been “extreme vetting” of the guy who slaughtered all those people in Texas, “you would have had hundreds more dead.” You can watch him close his eyes while he pretends to think. You can see him end triumphantly with his cherished cliché “the great state of” Texas.
Also, if there had been extreme heat, hundreds more would freeze to death…
And if there were extreme redistribution of the world’s wealth, we’ve have hundreds more poor people…
Cosmic idiocy + transcendent ignorance + historic insecurity. This is the present recipe for most of the executive branch and GOP.
Regulations will only help. They won’t prevent the majority of people from owning guns.
One thing prevents mass shootings. An absence of guns. Worldwide the research is unequivocal on that point.
Incidentally, I read a statement from the Police today, saying that the shooter was active for four minutes before the Police arrived. These things can be a bit elastic in timing, so lets say that it was really more like six minutes. An earlier report says he fired over 450 rounds. Roughly 75 a minute.
I own a small hunting rifle used for rabbits etc. It’s bolt action and by law the biggest magazine I can own is 10 shots. It’s likely that when shooting, moving and changing pre-loaded magazines I could average 20 rounds/minute. A better trained and practised civilian might manage 30 rounds per minute. Frankly I think keeping up even my 20 rpm for that long would be a big ask.
This is a rather ghoulish way of saying that while restricting gun ownership to just ‘ordinary’ hunting weapons would not prevent a horrific event from occurring, it would seriously reduce the lethality and provide enhanced opportunity for intervention from those in the room.
Restrictions on weapon type, combined with vetting of owners is proven to be very effective. NZ has approximately 33,000 registered military style weapons. Of those only 25% are semi-automatic. You need a special category of licence, you are police vetted and police visit you on average once every 12-months to make sure that the reason you need such a weapon continues, that storage is appropriate and that your general disposition doesn’t cause any red flags to raise. Even today, I’ve heard owners of such weapons saying that we should be tightening our criteria…
Rob,
All of your facts and data are well and good, but answer me this: if I can’t have guns that are powerful enough to mow down dozens of people in minutes, then how will everyone know how large my penis is?
Oh well, that’s easy! You just, ummm. Well, you see, you need to…
Sigh. I guess you’ll either have to walk around naked, or drive an obscenely huge car or truck in an aggressive manner, drink lots, be aggressive generally, manspread, treat women and weaker or quieter people like shit, wear camo when walking down the street or fly a confederate/nazi flag.
Behaving like a decent person and just letting people speculate about the bulge in your pants might be too subtle.
I was just informed by someone who must know (because he’s a 25 year old guy who’s never been any further out of Nebraska than Oklahoma) that as good as all these things work in other developed countries, they could never work here. Because the other developed countries are (or used to be until refugees, at least he said) homogeneous.
Huh?
Iknklast. Feel free to quote this to him…
As one white guy to another, you’re an ignorant fuckhead who seriously needs to learn about the world past the haystack you sleep in.
I’m assuming the assumption that he’s white is pretty safe.