Comparing two communities wih different gun laws as to their crime rates is not a valid method in itself. Those communities probably have a lot of differences aside from gun laws. Selecting only two factors out of many can not lead to a cause and effect conclusion.

What if the high crime community with gun control also has a higher drug problem rate? What if the gun owner community with low crime rates consists of the Amish?
Careful there. This is not an easy, straightforward problem.

In the meantime, there are common sense questions to ask.
-Just what kind of weapons does one need for self-protection or to hunt?

-Apparently in Vrginia, you can buy a gun every 30 days. Why would an ordinary person need to buy 12 guns a year?

In any crowd, the more guns there are, the more chance there is for an inappropriate shooting. How do you distinguish, at the point of sale, between a responsible and irresponsible customer?

-Those whining that their liberty to carry arms is being threatened should consider how their liberty impacts on other people’s liberty. What about those folks not wishing to live in the Wild West-what about their liberty to not be surrounded by gun toting cowboys?

-A crowded city street is an entirely different environment from an isolated farm. Shouldn’t we be looking at what works where?

And so on.

By Swaraaj Chauhan

I think Swaraaj means to say that we should augment our Constitution and relinquish our rights based on the actions of mentally unbalanced individuals like Cho.

In any case , I’l pass .

Question: at what point do you ban (or regulate heavily) a product which CAN be used in a bad way? At what point do you deny society as a whole the ability to use a product because some will use that product improperly? And at what point do you refuse to associate with a product because someone somewhere might use it improperly?

kid was reported for stalking, suicidal ideation and even volutarilly committed himself to an institution

add to that he is still not a united states citizen

basically, as long as one gets psych help voluntarily, and never gets convicted of a crime, one can get a gun

and let me add…how the heck does a college student without a job, get a credit card

its not guns that kill…its credit card companies

OK, let’s run with this impractical strawman…….

The manufactruing of guns is outlawed is the US…..result, 4.9M less guns per year.

OK, 250,000,000 guns left to go.

Guns are outlawed in the US……..law abiding citizens turn in their weapons.

OK, let’s guess generously at 50M turned in.

OK, that leaves 200,000,000 out there with an average useful life of 50 years.

What’s your next move?

Again and again we see how money corrupts government. But in Washington, it seems to be only an argument about which party gets the campaign money, not about good governance.

And if it’s not the fault of the gun shop owner, why should he have trouble sleeping? And as far as your sleeping at night, I hope you have the luxury of working in a field where nobody can ever take what you sell (or market or whatever) and use it in a way that results in death, injury or harm to another person.

“I think that something pushed him over the edge. He did not buy that gun to do what he did,” he said. “This was not pre-meditated five weeks ago … You don’t plan something [like this] five weeks in advance.”

Oh and why the hell not, because it’ll make you feel better to know that when you handed over that gun, he wasn’t already envisioning the massacre that he would perpetrate? Y’know, I’d say that this rationalization was an attempt to deflect any responsibility for the deaths, but I rather think that a person who owns a gun store simply does not make the connection that things they sell WILL be used to kill people and that if the people who bought their guns didn’t buy those guns, the very likely wouldn’t be able to kill people. This store sells thousands of guns a year, you’d need the innocence of a five year-old to imagine that none of those will ever be used to kill someone, or that those killed will all be criminals.

Is the killing the fault of the gun shop owner? Naturally, no. However, he does deal in death, whether he recognizes it or not. He sells weapons whose mission it is to terminate lives. Personally, in my case, “if I don’t sell them they’d just get them elsewhere” or “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” wouldn’t be enough to let me sleep at night.