VT shootings..why more people need guns?

Question

Tragic event with noone to blame but the psycho who did it, but where I live, there are many people who legally possess and carry concealed firearms. Citizens who are responsible and well trained in their use. Now even with a permit, it is illegal to carry a firearm in places such as schools, but generally speaking it is situations like this that make it more apparent to me that those of us who are responsible and feel the need to should consider carrying a firearm.

Well Nutson, if there were a handful of responsible, armed individuals in an area and a madman started opening fire on everyone, there might just be a pretty quick stop to that now wouldn't there?

taylor, anyone who has the training necessary to own a carry permit knows full well what to do in the presence of a law enforcement officer. In a situation like this you would approach an officer with your hands in the air and notify that person that you are legally in possession of a concealed firearm.

Dianne ...oh heavens!! everyone please keep your firearm at your side, do not attempt to stop this madman, you might hit someone in crossfire..are you SERIOUS? just let the man continue shooting, that's a better idea.

Answer 1

Surely the VT shooting are a reason why guns should be harder to get hold off. I agree that guns don't kill people but if the person didn't have the chance to pull the trigger he couldn't use it to kill people either. The only way to keep the both people happy would be to heavily tax bullets, watch the number of drive - bys drop if bullets were $50 each.

I understand that different arguments are going to be said on both sides of this gun law/armed people. I personally don't feel safe knowing that someone with a short temper or had a really bad day could be carrying a gun. A short fuse and it would be carnage, honestly on a bad day I could have shot someone with out even thinking about it. I really don't understand the argument that if everyone had a gun then the person would think twice as personally if i was going to go on a killing spree then I think it would make it easier. I believe that shooting someone who is begging for there life would be much harder than standing in a doorway and holding down a trigger of a semi-automatic. To be honest that's all I would do, shoot first and hit as much as possible instead of targeting individuals.

What I think would happen if most people in the university had guns is that the shooter would have walked in and to the room he was looking for, stood at the doorway and sprayed the room with bullets killing or wounding everyone in it. He would have then run a short distance away. Upon hearing the shots and as news got round people would have paniced, a few people would have pulled guns out to defend themselves, causing chaos. The few who had pull the guns would have increased the problem by defending themselves shot other people who them believed to be the killer. If the killer was found or wanted to make a large kill then the panic from the escaping students would allow him to fire in to them, probably receiving some shots back and people getting hit in the cross fire. Personally I think this would have caused more death and it would be harder to tell who was the main killer and who was just defending themselves.

To put it in a more common situation, if I was going to mug you and I thought you probably had a gun I would shoot you first then steal from you. If I thought you didn't have a gun I would threaten you and steal from you. I can't see how more people having guns would lower the murder rate or prevent this happening.

There is two sides to every research depending on who sponsers it. Anti-gun statistics show that the USA is the most dangerous place in the developed world for gun crime (Ornehult and Eriksson, 1987), (Patterson and Smith, 1987), (Morrow and Hudson, 1986) http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/GUNSTAT.html

The Nation Bureau of ecconomic research has several papers on this which state that "Fewer Guns Mean Fewer Gun Homicides - David R. Francis" and "More Guns, More Crime - Journal of Political Economy, 2001, v109"

Answer 2

If I have an automatic weapon and am in a crowded room, or if I have a club, which do you think would cause the most casualties? True, it takes the intentionality of a human to wield a gun, but it is sheer stupidity to argue just because it is a person's intention to kill that certain weapons are not more effective means of murder than others. A gun in the hands of a disturbed person will be far more dangerous than a rock or a stick. By failing to admit this common-sense notion, you are not doing much to bolster the rationality of pro-gun people. On the contrary, this line or argument, just makes them look like people who can't think. If this were really the case, the soliders in Iraq would be armed with sticks instead of guns.

Answer 3

Absolutely not!!!!! Let us assume the shooter had a legally acquired firearm and began his rampage (because such weapons are available to the public at large).

Can you imagine the enormity of the tragedy that could have occurred if others responded to the shootings by pulling out their own weapons? Just how many innocent people may have been injured in the crossfire?

Tighter gun controls and the disarming of people could have prevented this tragedy.

Answer 4

That is correct we should only blame the person responsible. There are alot of citizens who have carried guns and have never had to use them, but then you get all these liberals stating that we need to ban all guns because it will only cause more problems. The issues with guns is they do not fire by themselves it is the person behind the trigger. We do not need to ban guns - training is what people need.

Answer 5

Right so when the cops arrive they have not only the original shooter to deal with but all the yahoos that have pulled their piece and shot themselves or someone else innocent.

"Did you notice the shootings that kill many people always occur where the concealed handguns are NOT allowed. Why do you think that is.........Hmmmm."
Because in iraq they use machine guns?

Answer 6

Perhaps teachers should be armed.
Also, a person who has been licensed to carry a concealed weapon, should be allowed to carry it on campus.
School massacres are rare, but I think we need to put more thought into being able to defend ourselves. Don't forget we have been attacked once on US soil by terrorists; our enemies are not going stop, and the global conflict is likely to grow. Maybe we ought to start thinking about the "well regulated militia" mentioned in the Constitution.

Answer 7

It would be sort of wierd to allow students to carry guns to schools. However colleges are not like high schools in that they are huge, almost like small towns, so they cannot keep out every single criminal who wants to shoot somebody.. It's sort of a dilemma.

Answer 8

Everyone 21 and older should be required to carry a pistol, unless they have been convicted of a violent felony.

Answer 9

Did you notice the shootings that kill many people always occur where the concealed handguns are NOT allowed. Why do you think that is.........Hmmmm.

Answer 10

While I don't believe that guns are necessarily a panecea, I'll point out a few statistics in a paper I wrote a few years ago:

-Nationally, good citizens use guns about seven to ten times as frequently as the police to repel crime and apprehend criminals and they do it with a better safety record than the police. [3] About 11% of police shootings kill an innocent person - about 2% of shootings by citizens kill an innocent person. The odds of a defensive gun user killing an innocent person are less than 1 in 26,000.[27] Citizens intervening in crime are less likely to be wounded than the police.

Kleck G. Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. 1991.


-According to the National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists in 1994, the rate of Defensive Gun Uses can be projected nationwide to
approximately 2.5 million per year -- one Defensive Gun Use every 13 seconds.

-Among 15.7% of gun defenders interviewed nationwide during The National Self Defense Survey, the defender believed that someone "almost certainly" would have died had the gun not been used for protection -- a life saved by a privately held gun about once every 1.3 minutes. (In another 14.2% cases, the defender believed someone "probably" would have died if the gun hadn't been used in defense.)


-In 83.5% of these successful gun defenses, the attacker either threatened or used force first -- disproving the myth that having a gun available for defense wouldn't make any difference.

-In 91.7% of these incidents the defensive use of a gun did not wound or kill the criminal attacker (and the gun defense wouldn't be called "newsworthy" by newspaper or TV news editors).

-In 64.2% of these gun-defense cases, the police learned of the defense, which means that the media could also find out and report on them if they chose to.

-In 73.4% of these gun-defense incidents, the attacker was a stranger to the intended victim. (Defenses against a family member or intimate were rare -- well under 10%.) This disproves the myth that a gun kept for defense will most likely be used against a family member or someone you love.

-In over half of these gun defense incidents, the defender was facing two or more attackers -- and three or more attackers in over a quarter of these cases. (No means of defense other than a firearm -- martial arts, pepper spray, or stun guns -- gives a potential victim a decent chance of getting away uninjured when facing multiple attackers.)

-In 79.7% of these gun defenses, the defender used a concealable handgun. A quarter of the gun defenses occured in places away from the defender's home.

Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995

-A fatal accident involving a firearm occurs in the United States only about once every 6 hours. For victims age 14 or under, it's fewer than one a day -- but still enough for the news media to have a case to tell you about in every day's edition.

Source: National Safety Council

-A criminal homicide involving a firearm occurs in the United States about once every half hour -- but two-thirds of the fatalities are not completely innocent victims but themselves have criminal records.

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports and Murder Analysis by the Chicago Police Department

-The rate of criminal misuse of firearms by the hundreds of thousands of persons licensed to carry concealed firearms in Florida is so low as to be statistically zero. In fact, homicide, assault, rape, and robbery are dramatically lower in areas of the United States where the public is allowed easy access to carrying concealed firearms in public.

Sources: Florida Department of State, Concealed Weapons/ Firearms License Statistical Report and "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns," by John R. Lott, Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School and David B. Mustard, graduate student, Department of Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, January 1997.

Banning guns only creates pandemonium, leaving guns soley in the hands of the criminals and police officers- and an opportunity for attack from not only other governments, but also our own. Crooked cops will take advantage of the situation if we were to be left vulnerable. The sad reality, is that violence has and always will be part of our lives in some way. I'd rather be armed and ready to fight if it were to come to any type of attack on my home, than to just sit back and let criminals have the advantage.

Banning guns would also create a black-market, which is much more dangerous than the system we use now.

"Both Australia and England have already banned personal ownership of guns, but violent crime is not down in either country. In fact, Poe reports, in Australia violent crime is up in every category. From 1997 to 1999, murders were up 6.5%, and attempted murders rose by 12.5%. Increases were also reported in assaults, kidnappings and armed robberies.

Things are not much better in the mother country, which ranked second on a list of violent crime "among industrialized nations." No. 1 on the list is Australia. Meanwhile, the United States, assumed by many to be the most violent of all nations--and a nation in which gun ownership is still possible--isn't even among the top 10."

So people need to do a little research before voting into such extremes. Guns are definately not a solution, but it is what it is and we must deal with reality, not some ideal, utopian society than can be created with such a "quick-fix."