• alapseofsanity
    +3

    Personally, I'd like to see the issue of mental health care be a part of this discussion too.

    That being said, is there anyone who can provide some more insight into some of the claims the author made here?

    • cheezoncrack (edited 8 years ago)
      +6

      The day democrats on the hill start supporting mental healthcare as a way to stop mass shootings will be a day to look forward to.

      But on to the authors claims. After sandy hook, gun-control advocates wanted three things: A ban on assault weapons, large capacity mags, and universal background checks in the private market.

      An assault weapons is traditionally a fully automatic rifle/hand gun, anyone that says otherwise is a little stupid. In the case of Charleston, it was a .45 semi-auto hand gun; a ban on assault weapons wouldn't gave applied to it.

      After sandy hook people wanted bans on high capacity mags, in sandy hooks case the 30 round 5.56 mags used in Adams AR-15, and thusly the 30 mag became the poster boy for the ban. Legislation introduced before would have cut mag sizes down to 10. In Charleston, the hand gun in this case was a .45 as already stated, and held no more than 9 rounds. Reports say the shooter reloaded up to 5 times. Previous mag limits wouldn't have touched this case because it was only 9 round mags.

      Thirdly, people wanted universal background checks so guns could be kept out the hands of bad people. It usually works like when you buy a gun at a gun store, they'll run a background check on you to make sure you aren't a super villain or something like that. People want this universally in the private market. Only issue in Charleston is that the gun was given to the shooter by his father as a gift; background checks wouldn't and can't really be applied here at all.

      The authors claims was that Obama and other gun-control advocates past ideas wouldn't have stopped this recent shooting. He backed that claim up in the article, and I expanded on it a little bit.

      At the end of the day, if you take guns away, you're still left with a bunch of lunatics on the streets who will find ways to kill people. Its best to get to the larger issue and help those people so they dont explode in the first place.

    • beren
      +5

      The article is very clear, it outlines the main points of what has been pushed as "common sense gun control" and how none of the proposed "solutions" would have helped in this case.

      • alapseofsanity
        +2

        It was clear, it was that the article is clearly an editorial. I want to know if there's information he's not including here. I'm curious because I don't know enough about the subject.

        • beren
          +3

          I also don't care for editorials, or statistics from either side, but the facts are clear just like cheezoncrack graciously explained above:

          1. Gun control advocates have been pushing for an assault weapons ban - the killer used a handgun

          2. Gun control advocates have pushed for magazine limitations - the killer reloaded several times

          3. Gun control advocates have pushed for "universal" background checks (that exclude gifts from family members) - the killer was gifted the gun from a family member.

          Weather or not the rest of the article sounds like opinion, the facts are simple, all of the "common sense" gun control measures proposed do nothing to stop the high profile tragedies that are continuously capitalized on to push these measures.