Shooting at CT elementary school leaves at least 27 dead, 18 of them children

[useful idiot]

This is horrible. And will happen again, and again, and again, and again. Because certain people say we can't do anything about it.

But what exactly do you propose we do about it? I'm reading posts, and hearing things on tv, that seem to suggest that the answer is so simple and as a society we're just too stupid to do the obvious, but perhaps I could be enlightened as to what the obvious is.

The weapons used today were two 9mm handguns; he had a 223 hunting rifle he didn't use. These were not "assault weapons." Are we going to ban all handguns? Is the government going to go into the homes of 45 million Americans to take their legally purchased handguns away? Surely the government isn't going to go into the homes of 80 million people that own a shotgun or rifle.

Assuming that this guy bought these guns in CT or NJ, he did so in one of the two most restrictive states for buying guns. NJ requires you to undergo a background check, file for two permits, get fingerprinted, and has a waiting period. CT requires you to file for and obtain a permit to purchase a handgun, with a waiting period. Lets see what the Brady campaign has to say about NJ: "New Jersey has strong gun laws that help combat the illegal gun market, prevent the sale of most guns without background checks and reduce risks to children according to the Brady Campaign. In the organization’s 2011 state scorecards released for all 50 states, New Jersey has the second strongest gun laws in the country earning 72 points out of a total of 100." The Brady campaign ranked CT as having the 5th "strongest" gun laws in the country.

Any national legislation that could get passed would NEVER ban handguns, and its hard to imagine any piece of legislation going beyond the state regulations CT and NJ already have in place, let alone what they have in CA.

Let's say we just banned gun ownership by civilians outright, which I don't think even most European countries do. How good of a job do you think the U.S. will do in enforcing that? See what sort of job they do at enforcing a ban on illicit drugs, or controlling their flow? The guns are already out there for people to buy on the black market. Hell, people can make their own guns, it's actually not hard at all. This is a gun:



How hard do you think it would be for people to make that, which is the firing mechanism on a Sig Sauer P250 (he used a Sig), stick it in a piece of plastic, and sell it on the street? Regardless, if this guy was so committed to killing a bunch of kids, how hard do you think it would be for him to make a pipe bomb and toss it into a classroom?

It's easy to say there's a simple fix to this, but unless someone can come up with a workable solution to the problem, I'd really like to see the MSNBC crowd stop their pontificating.


Addendum: Apparently I've been out of the loop as it's Ryan Lanza's brother, Adam, who was apparently the shooter. He's 20, which means it would have been illegal for him to have a handgun anyway...

[useful idiot]

Require gun owners to keep their guns locked up.  Enact severe penalties for letting someone else without a permit handle/possess/use the gun, including confiscation of all guns and revocation of all permits and a lengthy period of being barred from gun ownership.

As such, if weapons are stolen and the robbery is not reported immediately to police (say, within 48 hours of finding that it is missing), the owner of the gun becomes partially criminally responsible for any crimes committed with the gun by the person who stole it.

Tie a mental health flag to background checks.  Just as a doctor can forcibly have you hospitalized for a psych evaluation if you are suicidal, they should also be able to put a red flag in your record that would come up on background checks that you are mentally unstable/unfit to own a weapon pending proper medical treatment of the mental issue.

Put conceal/carry under higher scrutiny.  Make handgun owners prove mental stability at regular intervals with their permit renewal, and make the owners of the guns keep them safely locked up when the gun is not on their person.  Require registration of all guns in a national database.

The Slippery Slope argument need not apply.  These are common sense ways to help prevent these tragedies from happening.  By making hunting-rifle ownership relatively easy and red-tape free, you will satisfy a lot of gun owners.  

With owning a gun comes great responsibility.  If you cannot properly ensure that the gun stays in your possession, you should not be allowed to own them.  Period.

If you have a history of mental illness where owning a firearm would greatly increase the danger to others... you are then treading on the right of others to live peacefully without the fear of being shot by a maniac... and you should not own guns.

That said, I think non-violent felons should be able to own guns like anybody else.  Unless your crime involved a weapon... such a broad ban on owning guns is nothing but reactionary bullsh**t.

Those aren't the worst suggestions I've heard, but would any of those regulations have prevented this? If this guy was 20, then the guns were either a) stolen from someone he knew or b) bought on the black market, and hence none of those regulations apply here. The gun lock measure has absolutely no way of being enforced to any real degree, and if you know the person, you probably have access to their key. Criminals aren't worried about following the law to keep a lock on their pistol anyway. Being punished for letting others use your gun is something that can only be enforced after the fact. Lanza couldn't have gotten a concealed carry permit because he wasn't the owner, so that's a moot point. Concealed carry isn't the problem anyway, because you're unlikely to make sure you get a permit in order to transport your gun to the scene of a crime you plan on committing.

California has the most stringent gun laws in the country. Are we going to try to force something beyond California's laws onto a country in which the majority of the states wouldn't even accept CA-style measures? Good luck with that. I actually wouldn't mind CA-style laws if it meant these things could be prevented, but the problem is that there's no evidence, looking at CA, that they would. Banning or severely limiting the production of guns for the civilian market is the only thing the U.S. can do to limit the number of guns in people's hands, and even then, there are already hundreds of millions of the things floating around. That would only prevent people from buying them legally, which most criminals don't do, and Adam Lanza didn't do.