Two more school shootings today :/

[Everlong]

One at Northern Arizona University where at least one is dead and several more shot, another at Texas Southern University where I think right now two are shot and possibly dead, but the story is only just breaking.

Ridiculous.

[The Legend]

To be clear, at Northern Arizona, it was a fight between a few guys in a parking lot, where one person died and three were injured, not because of a mass shooting, but because two testosterone-filled dudes decided to whip it out and see who was bigger in some egomaniacal test of stupidity. And the Texas Southern University incident, happened off-campus at an apartment in either a break-in or some sort of domestic dispute or something.

Neither of today's incidents qualify as mass school shooting or anything of the sort. They are exactly the type of deaths that no gun control laws would likely prevent, because they were personal matters where someone got it in their mind to kill specific individuals because of some personal beef they had. If it wasn't a gun, it would have been a knife or a baseball bat or something else.

Tougher gun control laws could possibly prevent mass shootings of a martyrdom type of behavior or a psychopath targeting groups of people, but that wasn't what happened today.

[Hanley!]

^^ I see what you're saying, but it's a lot easier to kill people with guns than any other weapon. I never respond to the argument that people would find a way to kill their intended target some other way if they had no access to guns, because studies have proven that this just isn't true a large percentage of the time.

- It's harder to maintain emotional distance from what you're doing, if you're using a knife/bat.
- You're less capable of attacking someone else without also endangering yourself if you're using a knife/bat
- You're less likely to actually kill someone with a knife/bat, even if you go through with the attack.

It's just not the same thing. Not even close.

Which isn't to say that gun control is going to wipe out 100% of these deaths, but it would bring the numbers way down, and frankly if it brought down the numbers by just one, I'd think it was 100% worthwhile.

[DBSoT]

^ You should also add that it would be very difficult to kill multiple people with a non-firearm weapon. There is no doubt that killings would not end in this country, but they would be severely altered by some form of gun control. The difficult part of this debate is that if firearms were banned, you are going to have dangerous people with guns. It is just an inevitability. A person who is committed to a mass shooting is not someone who cares about how they obtain the weapons. Those people would still try to find a way to get access to firearms.

With that all said, I agree with @TheLegend on this one. These two cases are isolated incidences and personal spats, not mass shootings aimed at random citizens.

[EmperorWu]

Nothing to do with this really, but the one thing that annoys the hell out of me is people always posting shit on Facebook saying something to the effect of "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Yes guns do kill people! They're instruments of murder, that is their intended purpose, to kill things. I own many guns by the way, so don't anyone try to dismiss me as an anti-gun "liberal". I just don't like to bullshit myself...

[UTK]

^ You should also add that it would be very difficult to kill multiple people with a non-firearm weapon. There is no doubt that killings would not end in this country, but they would be severely altered by some form of gun control. The difficult part of this debate is that if firearms were banned, you are going to have dangerous people with guns. It is just an inevitability. A person who is committed to a mass shooting is not someone who cares about how they obtain the weapons. Those people would still try to find a way to get access to firearms.

Alright, first of all, maybe, like, two people in the U.S. advocate the complete ban of firearms. Gun control does not equal the banning of firearms. Gun control is any sort of legislation that limits accessibility to guns, including laws for nationalized, in-depth background checks, which should have been implemented after Sandy Hook, but unfortunately were not. I'm not sure if Hanley meant the banning of all firearms in which case I sound like a dick, but I just wanted to get that point out there.

But even if the government somehow banned guns, do you think everyone has a "Black Market Gun Dealer" contact in their phone? Do you really think that anybody who wants a gun can just get a gun? In impoverished, gang-ridden areas, sure. But these stupid-ass socially inept white boys who snap and shoot up their school? Yeah, something tells me they'd have a lot of difficulty obtaining an assault rifle if they couldn't break into their daddy's gun safe to get one. Not to mention that if the federal government banned guns, you know for a fact they'd enforce the ever-loving shit out of this rule. Congress wouldn't pass the law and then step back and say, "Okay, all the guns currently in the streets can stay there. Have fun, law-abiding citizens!" No, it'd be the War on Drugs multiplied by a thousand (so, actually effective.) The length of the government's arm is massive. I don't think the government would have a problem regulating it. I mean, I'm sure at least two-thirds of the country would be livid about the law passing, but that's not what I mean. I mean the government literally has the power to enforce it. The whole "if we ban guns only criminals will have guns and we'll all die because we can't use our guns to protect ourselves" argument is just bad.

Now, like I said, I don't support the banning of guns in the U.S. Anyone with any sort of knowledge of gun culture in America knows that'd be an awful idea. But forms of gun control? Yes, absolutely necessary. No doubt.