300+ teens attack pedestrians on Chicago's Magnificent mile. 28 arrested

[krispos42]

197. "assault weapon" is an arbitrary term.

In 1993 it meant one thing. In 2013 it means something else.

The Cumstain that shot up Newtown did not use an "assault weapon"; Connecticut has had a definition of and a ban on "assault weapons" since 1994, either under federal or state law.

Connecticut is now re-defining "assault weapon" to make Cumstain's rifle an assault weapon ex post facto.


The real problem is this:

There are 133,000 K-12 schools in the country, public and private. They are occupied for 6½ hours a day, 180 days a year, by children and teachers. The children and teachers are, by and large, essentially helpless against an armed intruder hell-bent on suicidal mass slaughter.

Once in a while, a lone wolf bent on non-rational, non-political rage, will enter one of those schools, without warning, with a gun or two, and start shooting a shitload of people before committing suicide.

There is no real response to this. We don't have the bunker mentality to put serious armed security at all 133,000 schools; we don't want our kids to be in an armed camp and we aren't willing to pay the taxes to do so.

Because it's a lone wolf scenario, there isn't an organization to penetrate or keep taps on, there's not really anything to go on. And if the cops tried to investigate every moody teenager, they'd get nothing else done.


So our solution is to ban future sales of rifles with pistol grips, and future sales of magazines larger than 10 rounds, in the hope that a) somehow not having a pistol grip will save lives, and b) making the spree shooter change magazines more often (assuming he doesn't simply buy older magazines) will some how enable teachers to tackle the shooter during a reload.


If we are able to proceed with our liberal agenda on social security, universal single-payer health care, universal secondary education, quality primary education, legalizing drugs, and socializing our prisons and shrinking our prison population, all violence rates will fall, and by extension gun violence.

I don't think it's best for society for our people to be held helpless by the health-insurance companies, tied to soulless corporations for benefits, having to take out the dollar equivalent of a mortgage to get a college education, and locked up for a decade for smoking pot or snorting cocaine, just as long as the gun-violence rate drops slightly.