American needs to fight against terror closer to home

[josil]

And focus their energy on teenage boys who seem to be causing terror frequently by shooting us schools. Supermarkets etc etc.

What never ceases to amaze me is somehow these shooters manage to escape the stereotypes that others ethnic groups find it impossible to shake off.

RIP to those dead ok the latest massacre in the US.

The US needs to fight against terror and start with those close to home.

It is as simple as that.

Stop allowing everyone to own guns when they don't need to.

Have a big push to get guns out of the hands of people who don't need them.

Or just keep making excuses and carry on watching 7 year olds - fucking SEVEN YEAR OLDS - getting murdered for no reason.

Toughie.

How would you deal with the insurrection this would inevitably cause?

Really!? I remember seeing a video of the gun amnesty in Australia and they collected something like half a million guns. Obviously, there are many times more in the US, but I don't think it's an impossible task at all.

It wouldn't.

It's been done in other places. The USA isn't special. Stop listening to the twats in the NRA.

Australia is culturally and historically very different to the US though.

Australia’s nationhood wasn’t born out of armed struggle against the British Empire.

I don’t think it helps when people get all hysterical about guns. Where I live in rural U.K. quite a lot people around here have guns and shoot rabbits, pigeons, pheasants etc - for food of course, not sport. I’ve never held a gun in my life but I think it’s great they do that. It’s the lax laws and rules and culture in America that is not good. Plus all the things that are rapidly expanding the percentage of young people who are growing up completely unbalanced and damaged with nothing positive in their lives.

You don't just ban guns. You introduce stricter licensing regimes and ban the sorts of guns that have no reasonable civilian function.

You do realise every country is different.

look up the ‘boogaloo boys’

Gun ownership is deeply ingrained - frontier spirit and individual rights under the Bill of Rights. I get all that. America is different to Europe and Australia. I get that too.

What I can't fathom is that this happens over and over, and still people are like "it's my right and freedom!" They will fight for the right to kill each other, basically.

All the people peddling "simple" actions like

Stop allowing everyone to own guns when they don't need to.
and
Have a big push to get guns out of the hands of people who don't need them.

Clearly have no idea of life and politics in the USA. Very large numbers of people in the USA seriously question to right of any government to tell them they don't "need" a gun. It's written into the constitution - but even if it wasn't, that's the prevalent view. Any attempt to come for their guns would be seen as precisely the form of tyranny that the constitution is supposed to prevent.

There is no point pretending that's not the case.

As other PPs have said - there would be very significant loss of life and civil unrest if these "simple" measures were enacted.

Pointing this out does not make someone a crazy gun-toting fool; of course we all wish it wasn't true, but it is one of many reasons I wouldn't wish to reside in the USA, and it's a fact.

If you think it's only "the twats in the NRA" you are very very wrong. Just have a think about it. If yours was a widely held view in the USA, things would have changed ages ago. The USA certainly believes it is special - look at history.

No one is getting "hysterical". No one is objecting to farmers owning shotguns, or banning rifles used for deerstalking. No, we're simply saying that there are no good reasons for military-grade weapons being so easily accessible by civilians.

Ironically, a lot of American gun owners describe NRA members as ‘fuds’ and think the organisation is too willing to compromise on gun rights.

Racism is not logical. There was a time when immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe were not considered white in the US. Some people still feel this way.

There are gun amnesty days in some states, trade your unlicensed gun for a bike/school supplies/etc.

The US government is not a parliamentary system. Minority interests have a massive hold on what legislation passes. The filibuster still exists.

The Supreme Court has also been happy to ignore precedent lately which means that common sense gun laws can be stuck down once a legal challenge is heard in the highest court.

It's a mess.

I think it's a mixture of cognitive dissonance (well I don't do school massacres with my gun) and the fact that there's no easy way to put the genie back in the bottle - even if they banned all guns tomorrow these school shootings would continue until all guns were out of circulation - something that will just never be accepted in the USA.

I know the USA "thinks" it's special.

It's not though. If there was the will to stop people buying guns and ammo from the local supermarket, it could. If it wanted to get existing guns out of the hands people who don't need them it coud.

If the USA wanted to sort out it's gun problems, it could.

It just doesn't want to, and so innocent kids and adults will keep getting shot because some backwards fuckwits think they need to be able to buy an assault rifle, and so people will keep dying, people will keep making excuses and nothing will ever change.

Agreed.

I woke up literally to the news telling me 19 children and 2 adults were dead. Which made me burst into tears.

It's not about me. And it likely never will be because I don't live in the USA. But my heart hurts.

This is the 17th mass shooting this year.

Sorry - it's worse

27th not 17th

Australia’s nationhood wasn’t born out of armed struggle against the British Empire

You could argue the USA wasn't born out of armed struggle against the 'British Empire' either. The idea that the American War of Independence was fought against a massive empire is the stuff of Hollywood legend. It could be said it was more like a civil war by proxy, between opposing British factions fighting for control of a colonial back water. Britain wasn't a large empire in the 1700s, that would come later.

They have days and festivals of memorials for a handful of people who were never murdered. Yet guns are the biggest killer of children and teens in the U.S (stats on R4 this morning)

When will they wake up to grim reality?

How would you propose taking guns from the hands of an armed, and often military trained, population who believe passionately that their right to own them ‘shall not be infringed’, without causing mass bloodshed?

Gun ownership is deeply ingrained - frontier spirit and individual rights under the Bill of Rights

You're absolutely right, and as they say in Texas, "We're America, only more so"
It's the state where I've seen a gun offered as a top prize in a family raffle, and you don't change attitudes like that overnight (or indeed at all)

In any case, as said, banning guns wouldn't remove them from gangs and odd loners who seem to be the most likely offenders, so I'm still waiting to see suggestions on what anyone would do about that

"If it wanted to get existing guns out of the hands people who don't need them it could"
How do you decide who doesn't need a gun, and how do you go about taking their guns from them if they don't want to give them up?

There really are no easy answers to this. A lot of Americans really do not like or trust the federal government, and there's only so much that can be done at state level, people will always be able to travel to the states with the most lax guns laws, buy guns and then go home again.

Now? America has been broken for a very, very long time.

How do you decide whether people need assault rifles?

"Are you in the military? No? Then you don't need an assault rifle".