Journal #8053

I don't understand what's wrong with those people. Now they are attacking kids? I am horrified.

fuck me not again.. kiss goodbye your gun rights US citizens..

Anti 2nd Amendment in 3... 2... 1...

USA, where mental illness is a cool thing.

This is terrible.

USA is in a shit situation since it "grew up" with guns. Too late to ban them. Taking them away would cause chaos, and leaving them doesn't do any good either.
So I'm not saying that guns should be banned, but guns should be banned.

Mentally unstable people should be banned, not the guns used by them.

You can't ban guns because they are already everywhere. As much as I believe it was a fucking atrocious idea to put in place to begin with ( because they were paranoid THE EMPIRE ( me ) would invade again ), they've now let it congregate into a shitheap of murder and accidental shootings.

It might help if they restricted the forms of weapons available a bit better. You can't get a semi-auto SPAS-12 in the US, but it seems like it's easy to get a full-auto AR-15.
There'd still be black market shit, but it would still decrease the amount of crazy people running around with assault weapons.

Getting help for the mentally ill would be really nice too.

Fucking terrible that this keeps happening, that's the 3rd big US shooting in under 6 months.

What was with this shooter? I didn't see any profiling of him in the article.

Anyway guns are a huge part of American culture, like alcohol. Banning alcohol simply didn't work at all in the US because ppl sold it over the counter anyway. Banning guns won't work because when the mentally disturbed individuals want to go on a rampage, They will go on a rampage. You can't stop them because you won't know when, how, or why they do it. I mean, in America, some guy not getting a job is enough reason to shoot the president, so there's really no way to detect or prevent any person from doing something strange like that.

Based on so many recent sprees, I have been on wikipedia to try and understand why these rampage killers do these things. I'm sorry, there is no understanding their way of thinking. There was this guy who has killed tens of ppl and havent got caught, then one day while driving he just suddenly decides to get off his car, in broad daylight, to shoot this elderly guy mowing his lawn. There were many witnesses and he was caught very quickly. This stuff NEVER makes sense.

Okay, new information means my post is partially incorrect. The shooter does not appear to have used an automatic weapon, but multiple pistols. And this is the 3rd big, widely reported US shooting in under 6 months. There have been others that didn't get so much coverage.

"Mentally unstable people should be banned, not the guns used by them"
One is easier than the other, but as I said, it's too late now. But the US could at least as Jeff pointed out restrict the buying of military grade weapons. No civilian needs an automatic rifle.

We rarely have any shootings in Sweden, because if you want guns you're going to have to get it illegally, which makes it harder, which OBVIOUSLY makes shootings more rare.

The "crazy people will find a way argument" doesn't make any sense. Sure they might, but why help them when you at least could make them work for it, lessening their chance of success?

Mental disorders un-rightfully carry a huge, huge stigma in the US, and that discourages treatment by people who have them. Healing becomes something shameful, and that is disgusting to me.

Nothing can be done about the 350,000,000 guns in the country. There are more guns than people, and if you think you can make them fucking vanish into thin air because we decide they should be illegal, you need to think again. Roughly half of them are unregistered and unaccounted for, and we can't confiscate things if we don't know who has them and where. It's as simple as that.

Every time something like this happens, the tired and repeated brain-dead gun control debate completely overshadows and buries the very fixable and real problem regarding mental illness.

The person that committed this was severely depressed. Depression kills, and very rarely, as in the tragedy that happened today, very severe depression takes out a group of innocent people with it. Mental disorders are real, they are normal, and they should not be stigmatized.

If this man was in a therapeutic home under watch of doctors, as he clearly should have been, this would not have happened. That's that.

I do agree with most of Blitz's post. But do we have official confirmation he was depressed as opposed to having some other condition?
I dunno, I just find it hard to comprehend that someone depressed to the point where they would take their life would go out of their way to bring a bunch of people down with them.

The issue isn't, "Crazy people will always find a medium for massacre," as so many people seem to want to say (not seeing that here, though). It's, "In a nation where guns have a history of being accessible, how do we avoid enabling massacres by people who would normally not pose a threat?"

That's a really, really tough question.
And, as some of you have said, that's a real challenge for a country that has quite literally grown up with access to firearms being a federally acknowledged right--not a privilege.

Mental health checks as a proposed solution have been the topic of discussion everywhere today, but even that is problematic when we consider what's fair and unfair.

You have to keep in mind that gun rights in America have also brought about very, very popular sports and past times that have absolutely nothing to do with self defense. Skeet shooting and game hunting are two big ones that come to mind.
I can't emphasize enough that activities like these are a part of American tradition, and it isn't reasonable to expect them to just disappear.

JeffMOD we have confirmation that he was mentally unhealthy, diagnosed, and was being treated with medication. Depression was the only confirmation so far. That's all we know. Given that he killed both his parents, children, then himself, depression was clearly not his only problem. Depressed people tend to just kill themselves.

"In a nation where guns have a history of being accessible, how do we avoid enabling massacres by people who would normally not pose a threat?"

Well put Soup