The NRA and its running dog apologists in Congress and the media will spend a lot of time today asking “Why”. “Why” is a useless and totally bogus question. At Columbine, we asked “Why”. At Red Lake, “Why”. And the shootings continue.
“Why” is bogus because each shooter is different, and each is the same. Each has a grievance, and each is similar to other kids their own age who do not go wack and kill people. “Why” is an ENDLESS DIVERSION FROM THE REAL QUESTION. We will NEVER know WHY for certain, because WHY is a question of rationality, and the act of killing 30+ is INSANE. Thus, there is no RATIONAL ANSWER TO WHY.
The correct question is “How”. “How” did this guy, a 23-year old Korean legal resident, get off 50-70 rounds, killing 30+ and himself? Hey, I can answer that. “How” is MULTI-ROUND MAGAZINES. How is multiple magazines which could be snapped in without reloading. How is easy gun access. How is gun shows with no ID check. How is GUN WACKISM, the true religion of the US.
We need the BAN on multi-round magazines REINSTATED. These were banned under the Assault Weapons Ban. The Assault Weapons Ban was allowed to lapse under the Repukeliscum, the handmaidens of the NRA.
Call your senator TODAY. Tell him/her to REINSTATE the MULTI-ROUND MAGAZINE BAN.
Remind them that the 2nd Amendment says NOTHING WHATSOEVER about MULTI-ROUND MAGAZINES. These are not protected in any way by this part of the constitution.
do you have a link on this?
I’ve got this one
Does anyone else feel that this shooter may have had professional training?
no — point blank range in small classrooms. Any idiot could do this
There was a report of one guy walking into a hallway. The shooter left a classroom, entered the hallway, and shot at the guy, but the guy was able to run away without getting hit.
I’m still wondering if the shooter used hollow point bullets or not. There have been no reports about this for some reason. The only indication I’ve seen in this regard is that when he initially bought his 9 mm Glock, the shooter bought a box of 50 bullets, which suggests they were full metal jacket.
doesn’t make a whit of difference what sort of ammo is in use. Plain old lead slug is more than sufficient.
At three shots a piece, you are probably right, although there have been plenty of people to survive being shot with with three full metal jacketed 9mm bullets, given that no vital organs or arteries were hit and that the victim could be brought to an emergency room sufficiently quickly. A plain old lead slug is more like a hollow point than a full metal jacketed bullet to the best of my knowledge, in terms of what it does to flesh.
We don’t know how many rounds the killer actually fired, and probably will never be told. So the idea that the average victim was shot three times should be treated as anecdotal at this point.
But assuming that the “average” victim was indeed shot three times, given that about as many people shot survived as those that died, I would guess that the shooter was not using hollow point bullets. Initially I thought he was, but the reports about people being shot three times made me change my mind.
The reason I bring all this up is that civilians having access to hollow point bullets should be controversial. They are banned in Germany, for example. So the news media should report what kind of bullet the shooter was using.
they will report the type of ammo. the gun shop has been identified. the number of shots fired will be known as the details are revealed. Americans love their gory minutia.
“metal jackets” implies a lead slug with a harder metal jacket to improve penetration in my understanding. Telfon coatings were the pinnacle in order to penetrate protection vests hence the term “cop killers”. The typical bullet I grew up using was just a lead slug that was soft enough to deform quickly and deliver the entire force to the animal (no through and through).
Anyone crazy enough to plan to kill 30 people could easily take a hand drill and make regular slugs into hollow points. but agree that there is no point in selling them except maybe for 22 rimfire for very small game (rats, squirrels etc).
FWIW I haven’t owned a gun in 25+ years so could be very out of date.
Wikipedia has a good entry on full metal jacket bullets. The point is not just to improve penetration. The Hague Convention of 1899 prohibits the use of expanding bullets by the military. My recollection is that the main force behind the ban was Alexander III of Russia, who thought that the use of hollow points in war was inhumane, since they don’t give wounded soldiers much of a chance of surviving.
The most popular cartridge for pistols today is the 9mm Parabellum, and that was full metal jacket from the very start (1902), because it was designed together with the pistol of the same name (also known as the Luger), which was a military weapon.
Police use hollow points so that the rounds they fire do not exit whom they were shooting to enter someone else.
re-read that wiki article. It basically supports everything I said if you read it all. You are focusing on military applications when over-the-counter weapons/ammo are designed for hunter/sportsman/target shooters. FMJ is for military purposes; plain lead slugs and hollow points are for hunting where you want things to die ASAP and not have slugs penetrate without much deformation and therefore risk through and through penetrations and collateral damage.
and this really is a pointless discussion which was my original contention. If someone is prepared to shoot 100 bullets at people trapped in small classrooms — fish in a barrel — it doesn’t matter a rats ass what sort of ammo is in play.
Moreover, any crazy person can turn ordinary ammo into a hollow point with a hand drill. Jacketed slugs are almost as bad as hollow points for civilian use. You don’t want a slug punching a hole through several walls before they stop giving us the drive by collateral deaths of people cowering in their houses while the homies shoot it out in the street. Guns are dangerous. People owning them should be licensed same as auto drivers with a similar schedule for re-proving their competence. Rules should be tougher for hand guns and psuedo-military rifles than long guns designed for real hunting purposes. We have to convince Joe-Bob Gunrack it’s in his best interest to help the rest of us avoid crime.
I’ve watched my teenager play violent video games for a long time now. In most of them, you enter a building and go from room to room shooting at anything that moves.
That’s the sort of training I suspect yesterday’s shooter had.
Note: I am not arguing that violent video games “cause” massacres. But even the military uses similar video games for training purposes, or so I have heard.
Don’t know…one of the students who survived the attack said that the shooter was very fluid and fast when changing clips. That doesn’t necessarily mean training, but it does mean practice.
Yeah, these games do not cause the behavior. But they 1) desensitive the player from the action 2) teach the player to objectify the targets 3) often involve multiple shots to finish off the target
The military uses these games to turn normal human beings into good infantry. So, I don’t discount at all your idea. If it were me, I would check what games are on his computer.
The same thought occurred to me, and we turn out to be right. I read in a news story that fellow Koreans from the killer’s high school said he liked to play that kind of video game.
I wouldn’t have anything against that kind of video game being banned. If they were banned in enough rich countries, it would be interesting to see if an illegal market would emerge.
I agreed with you yesterday about this on another thread, but I’ve changed my mind. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban should of course be reinstated, but limiting the capacity of magazines (aside from requiring them to be contained within the pistol grip) goes to far in my opinion, and amounts to interfering in design, analogously to requiring computer hardware to have Digital Rights Management provisions.
The ban you want reinstated limited magazines to 10 rounds. The magazine of the 9 mm pistol the shooter used, apparently a Glock 17, holds 17 rounds (unless it is bought in Massachusetts, California, or the few other states which ban high capacity magazines). That suggests to me that if the ban were still in effect, the most effect it would have had is that the killer would only have been able to kill 20 people, say, instead of 32.
(I don’t know why you speak of banning “multi round magazines”. Magazines holding up to ten rounds, which were not banned, are multi-round.)
Banning high capacity magazines strikes me as the wrong approach, analogous to the war on drugs, going after supply rather than demand, so to speak. Since their last big massacre by a nut with a gun, the Brits have essentially completely banned handguns. Germany takes a middle road between Britain and the United States, and I think their approach is the best model.
International Perspectives on Gun Control
Note that in Germany, unlike in Britain, if you want to own a handgun you can own one, but you have to be able to convince the authorities that your owning one would not pose a significant risk to society. A civilian can own a 9mm pistol, even though 9mm is considered a “military” caliber and is banned for civilians in some European countries.
Germany’s firearm regulations are described here. (This is a report written by the US Commerce Department. The Canadian government put it on the Web; if you want to get it from the US government, you have to sign up for a $200/year subscription. Typical.) The list of forbidden weapons is here. Neither place says anything about a limit on how many cartridges a pistol magazine can contain. So apparently high capacity magazines for pistols are not banned in Germany, which I find somewhat surprising. Hollow point bullets are banned, however. This report mentions that Spain ban “semi-automatic weapons whose capacity of charge is in excess of five cartridges” but does not mention such a ban for Germany. The report has a table for the regulations of most countries, and capacity limits are indicated only for Armenia, Bangladesh, and Spain.
This kind of approach does not conflict with the Second Amendment, even under the “liberal” interpretation that it grants the right to bear arms to individuals, not militias.
Banning high capacity magazines strikes me as the wrong approach, analogous to the war on drugs, going after supply rather than demand, so to speak. Since their last big massacre by a nut with a gun, the Brits have essentially completely banned handguns. Germany takes a middle road between Britain and the United States, and I think their approach is the best model.
I disagree, entirely. Magazines are not covered by the 2nd Amendment. Thus, the restriction on magazines moves the argument away from the idiotic GUNS ARE WONDERFUL/EVIL to a much simpler one.
In addition, magazines which are allowed can be restructured to make them harder and slower to load.
The problem is that making magazines hold 10 rounds instead of 17 wouldn’t accomplish all that much: a shooter just needs to reload a little more often. (And the shooter at Virginia Tech had two guns, so he could always keep one loaded.) The result is a dumbing down of technology without getting a tangible benefit. Spain requires magazines to hold no more than five cartridges. That makes more sense: the difference between having 17 and 5 rounds is substantial.
The 2nd Amendment doesn’t prohibit the regulation, as opposed to the the banning, of firearms. Making it much harder to obtain them would have much more of an impact than what you propose.
The question about “the right to bear arms” is at the heart of this.
Was the issue about the need for frontiersmen to be able to shoot squirrel & bear? No.
Was it about the need for states to form “militias” (armies)? To what purpose? To war against neighboring states? I would say “No” again – IMHO, it was to provide the people with a means to rise up against their government, should it become overbearing.
Yes, there is a price that comes with this right – and we paid it yet again this week, but that does not mean that we should surrender the right.
Did you bother to read the diary? I suspect not.
I don’t give a crap about the RTBA. What the diary was about is the RTHAHCM – the “right to have a high capacity magazine”. There is no such right.
By banning magazines holding more than 5 rounds, we slow down the mass murders without impeding legitimate use of weapons, which I do not oppose.
Please try to follow more closely without venturing into wingnuttery.
If the right to bear arms means “the right to bear single-shot muzzle loading muskets” then it is a toothless tiger indeed.
I maintain that the reason this right exists is to give the people a resource for insurrection against oppressive government. That implies that the people have the right to bear arms which are fully equivalent to anything the people’s military might bear.
So, yes, I did read the article – and I maintain that this terrible price is one we pay to maintain our right to protect ourselves against our government.
I don’t know if it’s really a right, but in any case, I wasn’t proposing surrendering it. I own a Glock 17. I bought it because I thought it was ridiculously easy to obtain in the state I currently reside in, Pennsylvania, but once I had it for a while, I got used to it, and I certainly wouldn’t want to give it up now. (I must admit that before I got my gun, I was pretty much in favor of the British approach of a complete ban on handguns, except for people who can make a strong case that they need one for self-defense, like private detectives or public figures. This is the only issue I can think of that I have ever moved to the right on.)
As a a poster on a 2nd Amendment thread at BT noted, NRA types “do not distinguish between regulation and banning”. I don’t see how being required to take some kind of course on how to handle guns and giving the police discretion as to whether you are a person who can be trusted with a gun, so that you need their approval in order to get one, undermines this “right” in any way. Legitimate gun owners could keep their guns, while cooks like the Virginia Tech killer wouldn’t be able to get their hands on one. I think that’s the right balance. (I don’t like hunting—that’s one reason I bought a handgun—but hunting is so popular in this country that I wouldn’t advocate anything near as much regulation of long guns here as exists in Germany.)
I think that people should be allowed to own guns not because it is a “right”, but for conservative reasons. Gun ownership wasn’t prohibited in the past, so I don’t see any reason why it should be prohibited today. The same goes for drugs like marijuana, cocaine, or opiods. The state has a legitimate interest to regulate them, but not to ban them.