How do we prevent these mass shootings?

reading comprehension isn't one of you strong points is it

I said Violent crime rates you know stuff like rapes, muggings, assaults you know violence that can be stopped and discouraged by a gun

 

I'm very glad you started this thread and look forward to reading more responses.

IMO, this is an issue that needs the entire country to solve. We have to be our brother's keeper, so to speak. We need to educate people: "Here are ways you can help." We need to run public service announcements, get the NFL to wear some color to draw awareness, etc, telling people what behaviors to pay attention to, where to get more information, who to contact. It might prod someone to take notice and get them help. It's surely not a panacea, but we're not even encouraging people to … if you see something, say something.

In every one of the most recent mass murders, the shooter exhibited behaviors that should have been a red flag, had anyone bothered to notice. There is a progression of behaviors that predictably occur in those that have committed mass murder, but investigators have only noticed them in hindsight. That needs to be reverse engineered, so that people can get help before they commit mass murder.

As others have said, we simply have to monitor those that take medicines that have known violent side effects, and we need to develop others that do the same job without those bad effects. On the professional side, our governmental officials must be held more accountable for keeping the data up-to-date and accurate. More than one shooter was allowed to legally purchase a gun because the background check data was inaccurate.

and.. lots more, but that's all I have tonight.

 

Proof?

Of course NOT!! http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/18/gun-ownership-gun-deaths-study

 

And schools are increasingly hostile because the teachers and administration have no power to punish students and end up with horrible students in classes disrupting the learning of others. They can't expel, hardly suspend, etc. It's almost embarrassing how little power our schools have over children to make them behave, and the level of disrespect toward teachers and administrators has never been worse. How do we fix it in a society where everyone gets a trophy and nobody is held accountable, and we surely can't offend anyone.

 

yes, we need to watch out for each other, suggest our friends and relatives get help if they show bad signs, and report them to the police if we think they may be a danger to themselves or others and won't get help.

but I'll tell you one thing: MORE guns is not the answer. It cannot be the answer.

 

This is the same phenomena that had 18th century people believing that if a pregnant woman saw a disabled person she would have a disabled child. People ALWAYS remember oddities AFTER the fact but never pick up beforehand

 

If "expanded access to mental health professionals" translates to getting more "drugs that seem to link so many shooters", then I submit that "MORE access to mental health professionals is not the answer. It cannot be the answer."

 

Even if you report them to the police - do the police have the ability to remove guns from the people showing these signs?

 

if the police feel that the person may be a danger to themselves or others, they can be placed under medical observation for 3 days so they can be evaluated by mental health professionals.

 

Again - no proof and there never will be

That is because what is considered a "violent crime" in England may not be considered a violent crime in America

Many countries kissing someone against their will is considered assault and each individual kiss is a DIFFERENT charge so a rape case here could end up being 1 count of rape and 10 counts of assault

 

we're talking about mass-murder here, bro.

not hitting someone with your foot.

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MOD EDIT - Rule 5/reply to Deleted

 

Yes - how to NOT shoot each other

How to live without guns

How to cook decent food................

Oh! And brew a decent beer - THAT definitely would be a favourite

 

the way to prevent mass-shootings is NOT more guns and an armed society.

we need to keep these folks from getting their hands on a gun, and we need to get these folks the mental help they need.

 

Eloquently stated! I agree.

 

Government control freak gun haters are pathological liars on the topic - from President Obama on down. They tell the same lies incessantly and the Democrat media presents those lies as facts. Here are the facts:


* Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day. [1] This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. [2]

* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.[3]

* As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.[4]

* Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense. According to the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense every year. The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of "Guns in America" -- a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.[5]

(Citizens are safer with usage than are police)

* Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).[6] And readers of Newsweek learned that "only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error rate' for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high."[7]

* Handguns are the weapon of choice for self-defense. Citizens use handguns to protect themselves over 1.9 million times a year. [8] Many of these self-defense handguns could be labeled as "Saturday Night Specials."

* Nationwide: one-half million self-defense uses. Every year, as many as one-half million citizens defend themselves with a firearm away from home. [9] * Concealed carry laws are dropping crime rates across the country. A comprehensive national study determined in 1996 that violent crime fell after states made it legal to carry concealed firearms. The results of the study showed:

* States which passed concealed carry laws reduced their murder rate by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7% and robbery by 3%; [10] and * If those states not having concealed carry laws had adopted such laws in 1992, then approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults and over 11,000 robberies would have been avoided yearly.[11]

* Vermont: one of the safest five states in the country. In Vermont, citizens can carry a firearm without getting permission... without paying a fee... or without going through any kind of government-imposed waiting period. And yet for ten years in a row, Vermont has remained one of the top-five, safest states in the union -- having three times received the "Safest State Award."[12]

* Florida: concealed carry helps slash the murder rates in the state. In the fifteen years following the passage of Florida's concealed carry law in 1987, over 800,000 permits to carry firearms were issued to people in the state. [13] FBI reports show that the homicide rate in Florida, which in 1987 was much higher than the national average, fell 52% during that 15-year period -- thus putting the Florida rate below the national average. [14]

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[1] Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):164. Dr. Kleck is a professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He has researched extensively and published several essays on the gun control issue. His book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, has become a widely cited source in the gun control debate. In fact, this book earned Dr. Kleck the prestigious American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang award for 1993. This award is given for the book published in the past two to three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to criminology. Even those who don't like the conclusions Dr. Kleck reaches, cannot argue with his impeccable research and methodology. In "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," Marvin E. Wolfgang writes that, "What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator.... I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence." Wolfgang, "A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed," The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, at 188.

Wolfgang says there is no "contrary evidence." Indeed, there are more than a dozen national polls -- one of which was conducted by The Los Angeles Times -- that have found figures comparable to the Kleck-Gertz study. Even the Clinton Justice Department (through the National Institute of Justice) found there were as many as 1.5 million defensive users of firearms every year. See National Institute of Justice, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," Research in Brief (May 1997).

As for Dr. Kleck, readers of his materials may be interested to know that he is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause. He is not and has never been a member of or contributor to any advocacy group on either side of the gun control debate.

[2] According to the National Safety Council, the total number of gun deaths (by accidents, suicides and homicides) account for less than 30,000 deaths per year. See Injury Facts, published yearly by the National Safety Council, Itasca, Illinois.

[3] Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 173, 185.

[4]Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime," at 185.

[5]Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997); available at http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt on the internet. The finding of 1.5 million yearly self-defense cases did not sit well with the anti-gun bias of the study's authors, who attempted to explain why there could not possibly be one and a half million cases of self-defense every year. Nevertheless, the 1.5 million figure is consistent with a mountain of independent surveys showing similar figures. The sponsors of these studies -- nearly a dozen -- are quite varied, and include anti-gun organizations, news media organizations, governments and commercial polling firms. See also Kleck and Gertz, supra note 1, pp. 182-183.

[6]Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.

[7]George F. Will, "Are We 'a Nation of Cowards'?," Newsweek (15 November 1993):93.

[8]Id. at 164, 185.

[9]Dr. Gary Kleck, interview with J. Neil Schulman, "Q and A: Guns, crime and self-defense," The Orange County Register (19 September 1993). In the interview with Schulman, Dr. Kleck reports on findings from a national survey which he and Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993 -- a survey which findings were reported in Kleck and Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime."

[10]One of the authors of the University of Chicago study reported on the study's findings in John R. Lott, Jr., "More Guns, Less Violent Crime," The Wall Street Journal (28 August 1996). See also John R. Lott, Jr. and David B. Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns," University of Chicago (15 August 1996); and Lott, More Guns, Less Crime (1998, 2000).

[11]Lott and Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns."

[12]Kathleen O'Leary Morgan, Scott Morgan and Neal Quitno, "Rankings of States in Most Dangerous/Safest State Awards 1994 to 2003," Morgan Quitno Press (2004) at http://www.statestats.com/dang9403.htm. Morgan Quitno Press is an independent private research and publishing company which was founded in 1989. The company specializes in reference books and monthly reports that compare states and cities in several different subject areas. In the first 10 years in which they published their Safest State Award, Vermont has consistently remained one of the top five safest states.

[13]Memo by Jim Smith, Secretary of State, Florida Department of State, Division of Licensing, Concealed Weapons/Firearms License Statistical Report (October 1, 2002).
14Florida's murder rate was 11.4 per 100,000 in 1987, but only 5.5 in 2002. Compare Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Crime in the United States," Uniform Crime Reports, (198: 7, 53; and FBI, (2003):19, 79.

 

^ What those statistics show is that government control freak gun haters absolutely do not care about victims. They don't care if women are raped, if people are assaulted or if people are murdered. They believe people have a duty to allow themselves to be raped, robbed, beaten, crippled and murdered by criminals as citizen's duty. In fact, the more people they can get raped, robbed and murdered the more they will advocate further disarming people to prevent they're defending themselves.

Rich liberals hire people to carry guns for them to defend them. They are afraid of ordinary people and hide from them. They want ordinary people disarmed feeling they are safer with their armed guards if other people are not armed.

 

Interesting point, and I can certainly see how it naturally happens that way. We've used educational awareness of things like breast cancer to get people to go to screenings. It's saved lives. A program to help the mentally ill might do something similar, but people would have to know what to look for, rather than seeing it in hindsight.

 

So, rather than acknowledge the rather obvious connection between mass shootings and the drugs prescribed by the "mental health professionals", you just want to double down on the actual cause of the problem? As long as these doctors are just going to give them more crazy pills, "mental health care" is the last thing you want.

 

Trouble is - what one person sees as an indication of mental illness another sees as normal behaviour

Take irritability - I can become bloody irritable when stressed - does that mean I will shoot people? Yet I can almost guarantee that most of those lists of behaviours will have irritability listed

 

So, why is Australia not seeing more criminal activity?

 

You can't.

 

You will never keep weapons out of the hands of those who wish to possess them. To wit, the best defense is a good offense.

 

You've obviously never been to Switzerland.

 

mor gunz

 

Won't ever discuss a disarming of any kind. My Government provided thousands of guns to drug cartels in the U.S. with Fast and Furious I and II. My country already has millions of unknown to the government guns, some safe with collectors and many in the hands of criminals. Disarming the legal owners of their right to self defense is not an option.

Mental health checks are extremely subjective and not reliable.

Crime record background checks are just right. Not offending legitimate responsible people and preventing the dregs from getting new guns. But you can never stop those kind of people from obtaining guns illegally. So it is only a Band-Aid.