Quote Originally Posted by Papewaio View Post
...Afghanistan (2001 to now) 2 months. In other words for every American soldier who has died on the battlefield, vehicle crash, IED : sixty Americans have been shot dead by a fellow American.
To be fair, you need to add in the suicides as well. Suicides by gun outnumber the killing of others greatly (FBI Crime Report Statistics note 11,101 homicides by gun and 19,766 suicides; 14,612 murders in 2011 [last year tabulated] of which 9,903 were murdered by gunfire; guns feature in 68% of all murders and 41% of all armed robberies). It is difficult to argue against the evidence that, with all the guns available to our citizens and residents, the number of deaths is enhanced. Absent guns, a sizeable percentage of the 9,903 murders would have been attacks with some other and less lethal method. Moreover, without ready access to firearms, a noteable percentage of those suicides would have likely not happened because there was no "easy" means of suicide readily available.

The problem, at its core, is that firearms are available on a scale unimaginable to many. That same FBI report estimates that the 314 millions then living in the USA had about 310 million firearms -- not including those possessed by the military. This is the core problem because it makes confiscation functionally impossible [a literal order of magnitude more difficult than deporting the estimated 30 million illegal immigrants]. And, despite all the best intentions of limited magazine capacity, on banning so-called assault weaponry, and performing background checks, it is only confiscation that could significantly reduce the number of firearms. Ain't gonna happen.

There you go, a totally non-2A comment on this issue.

Don:

Merry Christmas to you and your ladies.

Mental health funding etc. will be increasing significantly over the next couple of decades as we shift to nationalized health care. It is the underlying problem in almost all of these mass shootings -- violent depressive types are the most dangerous of all.