Why can’t America ban automatic weapons?

[MaryPoppinsPenguins]

I don’t get it. I honestly don’t. After Sandy Hook that should have been enough... statistics speak for themselves.

Why? What don’t I get?

EveningShadows

Your illiteracy is astounding.
I said "If banning guns stopped murder then why do so many people get murdered in the UK?"

I was talking about the overall murder rate in the UK or do you only consider it murder if a gun is used instead of a knife?

I feel this whole thread is in bad taste. Every time there is a shooting tragedy in my home country everyone and their mother wants to use it as an excuse to push their anti gun agenda.

Gosh, pardon us for not wanting our children to continue to be murdered.

But that’s exactly what happened here after Dunblane, Emma. And it has made our country a safer place. Now is exactly the time for pushing for safer gun laws!

It’s not difficult - although it appears to be challenging to do many of your fellow Americans

Baffling how people can call for a change in the gun laws after an event like this. Utterly baffling.

Of course people will push for gun control after something like this. You would, surely, have to be actually missing some logical function not to?

Purely because the majority don't want to

A majority do want gun laws tightened up.

I'm not sure that a majority would actually be willing to give up their handguns, or go through the licensing process someone in the UK goes through.

NotAnotherEmma - do you think gun laws have no effect?

Don’t be so obtuse - our murder rate is a fraction of yours. Of course banning guns reduces the murder rate - it’s not going to stop it though is it.

You a either pretending to be stupid or you are stupid. Can’t decide which is more worrying.

You all can't really be so bloody thick that you can't see how much violence takes place in the UK without guns?

Here's the thing.

When I lived in the UK I sent my children to school without worrying that they might get murdered.

Now I'm in the US, they have to practice lockdown drills in case someone with a gun comes in a shoots at them.

You must be really bloody thick if you can't see the difference.

How long have you lived here?? This is not a violent country in any way shape or form!

Ironically, while the shooting in Florida was happening (before it hit the news) I was wondering what it would be like if I knew my children were in a school with an active shooter.

Living here in the US that's an actual real possibility that as parents we have to consider.

Never even crossed my mind in the UK.

There's a deep cultural problem entrenched in the US that's responsible for the mass violence. The guns are merely the means and the knee jerk reaction of the sheep is ban guns, but that's not going to fix the real problem.

America has a murder culture, but that's a lot harder to resolve so people just want to take the easy route rather then tackle the real problem.

The US murder rate is 5 times the UK murder rate (per 100,000 people).

If you can’t see that easy access to guns is a factor in that and you think that the US anti gun lobby is purely political then I don’t think you will find anybody sympathetic to your views here.

Hang on, a minute ago you said there were no more murders in the US than in the UK?

Now the problem is the murder culture?

Anyway, people of Mumsnet, NotAnotherEmma is beautifully illustrating why Americans will continue to love their guns more than their children.

You can’t carry out a mass killing with a knife, you’d be over powered in minutes.

This stuff isn’t tricky to understand - it worries me that you think it is.

Tighter gun controls would mean that people who are angry, unpredictable, unstable, dangerous, etc wouldn't have access to a murder weapon capable of doing extreme damage to multiple people in a short space of time.

Do you know about Dunblane Emma? Look it up. You’ll learn something.

It is frankly a fraudulent claim from the USA gun lobby that it is distasteful to discuss gun reform after a shooting. With shootings daily It’s always too soon to talk about it... apart from when it’s too late.

However, gun control would be impossible to bring in and then manage in the USA. Simply unfeasible politically or practically

So how would a teenager be able to kill 17 other teenagers if he didnt have a gun? He couldnt.

Homicide rates are higher in the US than the UK, so I fail too see how liberal gun laws help emma

On the other hand, in NZ, where I live, gun ownership is high, and yet the homicide rate is even lower.. You can own handguns here too.

The difference is the weird OK Corrall gun culture that seems to exist in the US.

UK overall homicides in the twelve months to June 2017: 692. Not a great figure, but it's still a fraction of the rate for gun-related homicides alone in the US over the same period.

Overall homicide rates are in the region of 0.95 per 100,000 in the UK, whilst in the US it is around 5 per 100,000.

And that is, of course, before you start looking at accidental gun deaths. A frightening number of Americans are killed and seriously injured by toddlers and small children getting hold of guns.

No-one has ever suggested that banning guns stops murders overall, NotAnotherEmma, but really those figures do speak for themselves.

And the murder rate per capita excluding guns is highly comparable (that means similar, Emma) between USA and uk so actually USA has a gun problem not a murder problem

I was about to say the same thing EveningShadows. Knives are slower so you can then as many people within the same time frame, inflict less trauma than bullets (in relative terms) so a higher chance of surviving the initial injury and then medical treatment being successful, and you have together in close to use it so attackers are more likely to be overpowered and stopped and potential victims are able to easily run out of range of the knife.

Terrorists still manage mass killings here. Except briefly after September 11th I never lived in fear of stepping into a large city for fear I'd be killed in a terrorist attack, like I do here.

I didn't say the US was less violent then the UK, I said the UK was violent without guns.

You all are too fond of twisting words into complete fabrications to even be fun to argue with. The AIBU section just proves to me daily that the stupid have far outbred the intelligent.

NotAnotherEmma, what is wrong with taking the "easy route" if it saves lives? Experience in Europe and other countries that ban guns demonstrates that it certainly does.