You just answered your own question J.B.

Exactly, which is why your post is bullshit. There is no fundamental difference between them.

You'd be singing a different tune if it was black dudes doing the shooting.

White people can be crazy as fuck and no one will ever think ..."Maybe it's something about the white mind?" Brothers fuck up and suddenly its due to our innate violent nature.

I disagree on the Whitman thing. I don't know the exact details, but he did have a sizable brain tumor in an area that controls not whacking the family and bystanders. Neither of us, or anyone, really knows tho.

I will say that your thing about being worried about their next paycheck didn't seem to be a concern for the mass shooters of the last several years. Lanza's job was being nuts. Same with the Colorado shooter, altho I think he may have had a real job of some sort. Kleobold, Harris, the VT shooter were all students, altho I think Kliebold and Harris (or maybe just one of them...I honestly don't remember) had typical high school kid jobs. The guy who shot up the Amish school was an electrician...or something like that. The kids in Oregon and Arkansas that shot up their schools were all students. Going further back to when Post Office shooters were the big rage, all the ones who went postal worked for the Post Office. Government gig, impossible to get fired from. Not a comprehensive list, by any means, but more comprehensive than just throwing out fear of losing a job setting people on suicide missions.

I think suggesting that Pelosi will have people committed because they didn't vote for Obama brings nothing to the discussion. I do find it interesting that you assume the Fed should/ would be in charge of deciding who gets committed and who doesn't. It's very slippery slope when a crat 3000 miles away makes decisions like that. But that isn't how it was in the 50s and 60s. It was done at a local level. Make no mistake, I have no illusion that deciding someone needs to be committed is anything other than grim business. It should be grim. It's a really huge decision and should be taken seriously. I don't trust the Federal gov with that role, but I do trust the local health authorities, who live here, to it. At least to a point.

I understand that forcibly committing people might not be a subject you want to "talk about right now", but I'm not sure we have that luxury. Putting our heads in the sand over the details is what has led us to this point.

I'm with you about the mental health system being inadequate. The problem is that being schizophrenic isn't the same as having a cyst. It takes more than easier access to meds to treat someone with schizophrenia, or any other mental illness. Easier access to meds doesn't mean that people will take them. Through our jobs my girl and I both come into contact with a lot of mentally ill people. When they decide to take themselves off their meds, and they do, it's a pretty hard thing to watch.

As for socialized medicine across the board as a fix for the mental health system, is that really going to be effective? Punish everyone for the inadequacies of a small part of the health care system? Maybe it would be easier to improve the mental health system first rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Make it easier to qualify for disability because of mental illness. Let the protections, such as easier access to treatment, of a disability qualification kick in.

The bigger picture, at least for me, is how the mentally ill are treated in general. Beyond whackjobs shooting up schools. The way we allow the damaged around us suffer needlessly is a fucking crime. Especially in a society that deep down knows better.

Right. But tell that to LaPierre. That's another part of the problem, this insane "no prisoners" approach on both sides: With proper background checks, we should be able to expand the number of people who can safely, legally carry. Problem is, the background checks will piss off the NRA and the expanded number of permits will piss off the other side.

You gotta be a fucking asshole to own goats.

Have you read a word he wrote? Naked Lunch and Junkie aren't generally stocked in the walmart book rack next to harry potter and 50 shades of grey.

There are two problems with a universal background check requirement.

The first is that background checks cost money and require some infrastructure that private sellers are unlikely to have. Most private sales are one guy selling a used gun to another. Are they supposed to go to the police station for that?

The second is that background checks establish the framework of an infrastructure to register all gun ownership, which in turn presents the possibility of later confiscation. Do you really want the government to know where every gun is?

By the way, if you think the government ought to be taking action on those background checks, perhaps by arresting and prosecuting those who are caught lying on the forms, your Vice President has already dismissed that idea, saying "We haven't got time for that!" What's the point of all these background checks you want, then?

Seems to me that the objective is merely to harass and burden those of us who would pass the checks anyway.

The Connecticut Shooting thread has turned into a gun control thing. I'm usually up for a good thread derailment, but over the backdrop of those dead people is a little too skeevy for my taste.

I'm respectfully asking the group to not post Gun Control stuff, and the venom that comes with it, on the Conn. Shooting thread and to post it here.

I get that what happened in Conn. has been the catalyst for the new "debate", but I just think that we're talking two different stories at this point.

Do you really want the government to know where every gun is?

That is real gun control. The kind of gun control our Constitution demands.

Nah, that's what misguided gun control advocates demand. It's the "militia" that the 2nd Amendment says should be "well-regulated," which is then followed by the caveat "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Militias were formed by ordinary people who joined together to bear arms against the tyranny of the British Empire.

Gun control = infringement.

A well regulated militia made up of mentally unstable blind quadriplegics with dementia perhaps?

While we're at it, let's burst this gun nut wacko fantasy that militias during the time of our forefathers where just a bunch of guys who decided they had a few hours before the next TV show came on and so they wandered out of the bar, grabbed their gun, shot at a few redcoats, and then went back home and got in bed. Like they accepted anybody who had an hour to spare, some extra ammo, a gun, and they got to have fun camping out in the woods and go home when they got homesick and nobody cared how well they could shoot.