There are shops in Afghanistan that make AK 74s using nothing but hammers and hand saws and rattail files.

Right, and the ammunition is made by grinding charcoal and some minerals?

Right.

But if the gun(s) are automatic multi round weapons of mass destruction the owner should face some penalty. Owners of Pit Bulls and other dogs who have gotten loose and injured or killed people are held responsible.

People should be prepared for the ramifications of owning military type weapons and the consequences should they get into the wrong hands.

This discussion would be a lot more civil if you would consider my basic premise. Whether you agree or disagree you don’t have to get so defensive.

I think that in the end, this is probably the right answer. This, and how many semi-automatic casualness weapons those people who are not being taken care of have access to.

I am arguing against the original notion that gun owners should necessarily and uniformly be punished if their guns are stolen and used in the commission of a crime.  Does that make sense?

This discussion would be a lot more intelligent if you would answer the propositions put forth, not something I didn’t write.

1) That safes and locks are often unreliable;

2) As such, penalizing gun owners who have their guns stolen (provided they actually have it locked up) and used in a crime is ridiculous.

In the UK, there are much higher population density and alcohol issues than the US. The most common murder method is stabbing.

You would expect, then, that with the presence of a better weapon, namely guns, and with less of a binge-drinking culture, and lower population density, that stabbings would be less frequent, per capita, in the US.

But it’s not. Fatal stabbings are more common in the US per capita. Shootings with non-handguns are about the same level as stabbings, and shootings with handguns four times higher than those.

So what is it that makes Americans want to kill each other so much more often than other cultures?

In all honestly, that sounds like a fucking great idea with no drawbacks.

I think the idea that the press should have free reign to do whatever the hell they want to has been tried extensively and been shown conclusively to be disastrously harmful to basically everyone, and I would fully support the censorship or even outright ban of profit-making news media, the vile shitbags.

But when things settled down the consensus is very much that one boy was a sociopathic monster and the other was a vulnerable depressive who was bullied and manipulated into going Thelma and Louise with him.

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had trouble with medication, and I’m glad to hear you have good lines of communication with your doctor, but I kind of feel like this is a “what does this have to do with the price of tea in china?” moment.

Depression is not spree killing.

Regardless, I wouldn’t want teachers carrying guns at school because inevitably either some dumb kid is going to steal one to show off, or we’ll have one of those “idiot saftey demo” moments, and having either in a room of 20-30 kids and surrounded by many more rooms with same is a very high density population for being hit by an accidental discharge.

There’s far more teachers in school every day over the nation than spree killers. The statistical probability of bad results from armed staff make my head ache.

But it takes so much more work to kill people with other weapons that people on a rampage can be stopped before major damage is done, because victims can improvise defensive weapons that are just nearly as good as the attackers and level out the imbalance of force. Or failing that, have two or three people tackle them – charge 30 feet down an open hallway at someone with a gun aimed and a commitment to killing, that’s not going to end well for anyone without a miracle. Charge 30 feet down an open hallway at someone with a knife and a commitment to killing, that’s a different thing altogether, and odds are good that it ends with your two or three heroes being interviewed on TV from hospital or from home, not their widows.

Amok, berserk, “shooting-spree”, this sort of mass-killing suicide isn’t new; what’s new is that the murderers are more successful with guns because guns are more dangerous than knifes, swords, maces, axes, picks, the grand panapoly of pole-arms, and so forth.

Would every violent death be done away with? No. Would more people get shot and killed because we have fewer guns? Also no. Would people who enjoy hunting and target shooting be inconvenienced? I don’t fucking care.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/enact-immediate-federal-excise-tax-smokeless-gun-powder-200/BvLkM83t?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

Percentage of guns likely to be turned in: 10? 20?