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Originally Posted by Huck BB62
That's very well said, and I can't say I disagree.
I guess my concern comes from the disconnect link in their instacheck system. In my opinion, the mental institutions and courts should be on that database. When a nutjob is well documentented as this sackof**** was, his name should've been flagged, period. If we're going to be able to keep our guns, we need to be able to weed out these people. They're krappin' in the punchbowl. Gun registration is here to stay, it should be worth something more than a revenue generator and a way to hassle the law abiding gun owners. Since we have to do it, let's use it to our advantage and weed out the kooks and criminals and lend legitimacy to our cause. After thousands and thousands of gun laws haven't prevented this kind of thing from happening, perhaps there IS a solution already at hand and we aren't utilizing it? It's all very reminiscent of the 911 attack. People knew, it still happened. As in the 911 attack, the flight instructor schools copped out to "We did nothing against the law, neither did they", the shop that sold sackof**** the guns is saying basically the same thing.
Yeah, technically, nobody did anything wrong, but added up, it sure did add up to a whole hell of a lot of wrong.
Common sense. We're sorely lacking.
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I wish we could distinguish the truly dangerous types of nuts in advance from the non-dangerous ones, but I'm skeptical. Preventing 9-11 would probably be a lot easier because you had a number of people communicating and planning a group terrorist attack. The VT gunner was a nut, but he was a loner and probably didn't tell anyone he was going to commit mass murder. He just never talked to anybody. He wrote crazy stuff, but there's a lot of that going around. Major mass shootings here have been occuring every eight years in the U.S. I can't see people allowing the state or federal governments to round up the hundreds of thousand of wierdos in this 300,000,000-person country to prevent a mass shooting every eight years or so.
For example I heard Sean Hannity on the XM radio repeatedly express outrage that no one took serious action against the VT gunner, even though he weirdly didn't respond in the dorm to routine hello-type greetings. He just weirdly looked away. It's wierd I know, but a partner in my law firm does the same thing. I can't see them descending on his home, taking his computer, and seriously investigating him on that basis.
It would be open to serious abuse. According to our Surgeon General: "According to current epidemiological estimates, at least one in five people has a diagnosable mental disorder during the course of a year (i.e., 1-year prevalence)."
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/librar...r2/sec2_1.html
Are we going to have our government and gun stores identify and investigate 60,000,000 mentally ill people (30M/5) to prevent the next mass shooting? Even if appropriate, I don't think it's possible. We live in a free society. We enjoy great benefits from that. We also face some greater dangers.
Germany has the most absolute form of gun control, and that didn't prevent the Erfurt Massacre--a school shooting there in 2002 involving 16 fatalities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_massacre