How far gone are we when there are how many mass shootings in a month(!), a MONTH, and there is nobody who will support gun control. I support it. More easily obtainable guns just equals more mass shootings.

I've had a similar conversation. And I think the best you can do is be supportive, point them in the right direction, and try to mitigate isolating effects.

Those emails, for instance, would be enough for a restraining order against someone you'd never have seen. In fact, there doesn't need to be any actual evidence the person has any plans to carry out threats, merely exclamations carry great weight because they're written. The spoken word is given no such weight.

And maybe that's how it should be... But I don't understand why it's so easy to ratchet up the tension, but so difficult to get help, even if you're right next door.

This is not the entering edge of any wedge, or the first step down a slippery slope.

Agreed. Since NY requires gun licences, and the guy had a gun licence, then the issue there is why did he have one. (A secondary issue is whether or not this sort of thing is actually preventable. A certain small percentage of the population is always going to be losing it.)

I just think that there should be some process, with safeguards and due process to guard against abuse, that makes it possible to prevent someone who from getting a gun when there is clear evidence that that person is homicidal.

Agreed. The part where it gets really confused involves felonies. Why would someone who kited some checks be prevented from having a gun when someone else with severe mental issues can la de dah their way to the gun store?

max
['Per Chrissa, why is it easier to get a restraining order? Its very easy to hit someone with a bogus RO in a custody case, but if the person filing for the bogus RO is a genuine nut, it is difficult to prevent them from getting a gun or kidnapping their own child.']

p.s. The suspicion here is, is that 'felon' in gun control terms is a proxy for 'black' just like when we're talking about voting.

What a terrible tragedy. Gun control legislation to address this issue isn't likely. Since the initiation of the Mental Health Act during the Kennedy adminsitration, little has been done is educating the public about mental illness, mostly due to stigma and lack of funding. An excellent organization for consumers and their supporters is the National Association For The Mentally Ill (NAMI). They heroically inform and support those in distress and guide family and friends of the mentally ill, so that they can negotiate the maze of mental health services in this country.

The untouchable right of one individual to own a gun trumps the rights of 13 people to live -- and how many others the right to have a mother, father, spouse, sister, brother, cousin, friend, classmate... This is one fucking sick society.

Demonstrably homicidal? That's terrible, but it's not a bug, it's a feature. A handgun especially has one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill human beings. Why would being homicidal disqualify you from buying something who's sole real purpose is homicide? Why do we maintain this fiction that people buy handguns but have no intention of using them for their designated purpose?

I don't have a problem with sane, responsible, and adequately trained citizens being armed.

Where I part ways with 99% of so-called gun advocates is how narrowly I define sane, responsible, and adequately trained.

Furthermore, in order to police this (eg, make sure that your homicidal neighbor doesn't own a gun), I fully advocate that gun registration lists be publicly available. This is of course something that the likes of the NRA violently fight against.

Yet another senseless massacre patterned on the violence glorified in countless television shows every week on basic cable, expounded upon in premium channels, and worshiped like a god in the box office.

Most people know nothing of guns from first hand experience these days outside of a falling number of Boy Scouts. Hunting of almost all types is on the decline. Most people who buy a gun for defensive purposes never shoot up the first box of bullets they have, and almost never commit crimes.

So where are the psychopaths being formed?

In their living rooms in front of the TV. On Hulu. At the movie theater.

The irony is that the violence is being taught to us by the very same Hollywood actors who speak out about wingnut violence while filming dark fantasies and rampages.

It wasn't Ted Nugent glorifying losing it in "Falling Down" but Joel Schumacher and Michael Douglas. Heath Ledger's final masterpiece was the role of a senseless psychopath, and we reveled in it. War fantasists turned "Red Dawn into a cult classic, but it took a cavalcade of Hollywood actors to make it, progressives all.

We find it so easy to blame things on redneck gun owners when these things happens, but it's only because we're so bad at projecting.

We coach this. We create this with a constant onslaught of "culture" glorifying mindless slaughter and cynical, bloody anti-heros. Can we honestly blame generations of hunters and gun owners for the reaction we created?

Yes, we can. But it's only to hide our own shame.

We created this.

And we're too chickenshit to own up to horrors we continue to create.

I suppose that gun control structures being state controlled mean that there is a lot of variation from one state to another, but around here guns are not registered (you need a permit to carry concealed). Assuming that you tried, I am surprised that a call to the police department of the town or city in which your friend lived produced no results. Again using our state as an example, writings such as you describe are more than the evidence usually used to start the process by which weapons are removed by our police.

my son is bipolar. He is also a libertarian who passionately disbelieves in government intervention, including, at one time, gun control. For a while there, he wanted to learn how to hunt using a rifle with the idea that he was going to lead as self-sufficient a life as possible out in the woods. Well, he had a meltdown and blackout in which he engaged in some very serious self-destructive behavior and made violent threats to a friend that he would have carried out had he not been restrained. When he learned what he had done, the first thing he said was, "Somebody like me should never be let anywhere near a gun. I guess hunting's out."

I think it's self-evident that anyone with a documented history of psychological instability that includes violence and/or repeated violent threats should not be given a gun license and/or should have guns/permits/licenses revoked.

It never stops... from the NYT Saturday afternoon"

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A man opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call Saturday morning, killing three of them, a police official said. Friends said he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

Witnesses reported hearing hundreds of shots.

Better than increased gun controls
would, I think, be getting the economy back on its feet and people relieved of their usurious, fraud-based mortgages, able to get medical care, and employed.

I must respectfully disagree with Northzax who writes "A handgun especially has one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill human beings."

There are literally millions of Americans who have bought and enjoyed handguns, without one thought or desire to "kill human beings" with them. Target shooting is an Olympic sport. They don't use - or practice on - human beings or even pictures of human beings.

Guns were clearly designed to kill, but relatively few people in this country, outside the military and police, actually use them for this purpose.

"Why do we maintain this fiction that people buy handguns but have no intention of using them for their designated purpose?"

What fiction? I know dozens of people who own handguns that have never shot anyone. Not once. Is this libel on the vast majority of handgun owners supposed to count as an argument?

"The untouchable right of one individual to own a gun trumps the rights of 13 people to live"

Yes. It does.
It's the price of living in a free society. Much in the same way that scaling back the assaults on civil liberties that the Bush administration instituted may possibly make us a little less safe, but is also the PRICE OF LIVING IN A FREE SOCIETY.

If a few people contract salmonella from peanuts, there is a massive recall of peanuts and peanut products. If a person with explosives strapped to their belt blows him/herself up in a market and kills one other person, that's terrorism and we call out the troops. If one angry, deranged person after another kills 3 people, 12 schoolchildren, 13 immigrants....that's a few minutes' tragedy that apparently requires no logical response - such as making an unnecessary killing machine illegal to own. As someone commented above, one idiot's "right" to own a gun trumps 13 people's right to live, watch their children grow up, enjoy a future... I am completely disgusted with our collective acceptance of this recurrent violence.

I disagree that the second amendment trumps the lives of those people and I am very pro gun. Such thinking is lunacy. Your rights stop where they violate anothers. Here's a good quote.

Your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins.

Your right to a gun does not entitle you to end the life of another unless they threaten your life themselves.
I have carried a handgun every day for three years. I've never had to draw it once. Even though I support gun ownership I support common sense restrictions like the background check and mandatory training to use a handgun. Even though my state doesn't require it.

"The untouchable right of one individual to own a gun trumps the rights of 13 people to live"

Yes. It does. It's the price of living in a free society."

You seem to overlook the fact that those 13 people are not living in a free society. They're dead.

[i]"I just think that there should be some process, with safeguards and due process to guard against abuse, that makes it possible to prevent someone who from getting a gun when there is clear evidence that that person is homicidal."[/i]

In fact there is. On Form 4473, the form one must fill out when purchasing a firearm, question 12b asks, "Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective (which includes having been adjudicated incompetent to manage your own affairs) or have you ever been committed to a mental institution?" If you cannot truthfully answer that question no, you cannot purchase a firearm.

If your friend was indeed as homicidal as you state, you should have informed the authorities and had him committed as he was a danger to others. If you had done so, he would have been barred from purchasing a firearm.

Granted it should be possible to prevent someone from getting a gun when they are homicidal, but you'll never convince the NRA or the other gun nuts of that. They, many of whom are demonstrably homicidal, will not give up their means of personal validation without a strong fight. They need their weapons to show that they are important and powerful, similar to people who drive Hummers or own Rottweilers in a small apartment.

TX Aggie points out the ironic truth about 2nd Amendment advocates -- those who most strenuously insist on their rights to own the means to efficiently kill other human beings are invariably those least qualified to do so.