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Something must be done!

The gunman who allegedly killed at least 17 people at a Florida high school on Wednesday was a former student who posted disturbing material on social media and was “crazy about guns”.

Police identified the suspect as Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old who had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, about 45 miles (72 km) north of Miami.

The suspect was wearing a gas mask and carrying smoke grenades, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida told CNN.

OK, what?

Any bright ideas on how to disarm a nation of 300 million guns? Even if all ignore that legal bit and the Second Amendment?

50 thoughts on “Something must be done!”

  1. @aaa – because banning things works so well with drugs, underage drinking, etc… Maybe they just need to get better at detecting people with mental problems and helping them?

    And, no, I’m not a fan of guns personally

  2. Disarmament not required, except for the crazy people, which he undoubtedly was, and which no-one it seemed (including the school) did anything about.

    The cry always goes up “Gun control, NOW!”. It should be “Nutter control, NOW!”.

  3. So Much For Subtlety

    JuliaM +1

    It is interesting how Facebook can track down and ban anyone who says something rude about the Ghostbusters film but can’t stop a lunatic making repeated physical threats.

  4. It’s physically impossible. You could ban guns and a lot of people would hand them in, but a lot wouldn’t and they would include all the gangsters and lunatics. It’s a pickle all right.

  5. Diogenes: Send for Spud!

    Yes, that should do it. Only “Spud” will sound more like a dog than an action hero in a country awash with Superman, Spiderman, Batman and the pantheon that is The Justice League of America.

    And thus is Captain Potato¹ born.

    ___
    1) To rhyme with Tomato, reflecting his British antecedents.

  6. Piss on all gun control.

    Another killing in a gun free zone. More guns–lots more–not less.

    And everybody –including the anti-gun freak scum –has gone and remains –very quiet about Las Vegas.

    Odd that.

  7. So Much For Subtlety

    BraveFart – “The only solution really is soma for the masses and a brave new world”

    Don’t give people ideas. There is one town in the US with a reasonable number of non-Whites and a low murder rate. It happens to have naturally high levels of lithium in the water.

    How long do you think it will take people to notice and then add something to go with the fluoride?

  8. Mr. Worstall, it’s not very fair of you to frame the problem in practical terms of how the hell they could deal with 300 million guns. Don’t you know that this problem is for posturing. Scream about ‘assault weapons’ and Facebook and gun control. Talk about ‘tackling the problem’ don’t even try to understand it’s unfixable in a democracy.

  9. As usual, Mr Ecks gets it.

    The problem is the state disarms the people at schools, leaving them wide open for attack. Inviting attack.

    “The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

  10. “Any bright ideas on how to disarm a nation of 300 million guns?” Yeah, salt the ammo supply with lots of fake bullets that will explode in the breech and kill the shooter. Easy peasy.

  11. I recall reading a comment from a gun owner along the lines of: –
    “If they want to take my guns they have to take my ammo too. By the way, all ammunition leaves my possession at 2100 feet per second.”

  12. Make gun ownership a capital offence punishable summarily. Introduce the policy gradually state by state and watch as gun ownership dwindles to the levels found in the rest of the world.

  13. Also stop giving a circus for the cunts who don’t even have the balls to die on site. The headlines should say “Cowardly Cunt Caught: Soy Boy Nancy to blubber in court”. No more media capers–no more Pseudo-Sleb status.

  14. Alex- Cockrot.

    More than enough Yanks will be handing out death penalties of their own against any scum trying that.

    The suggestion does you no credit either. May you end up in a situation where you and yours desperately need the salvation that a firearm can offer–and not have one because of overweening political scum.

    At least political scum will say nice things over your ruined corpse–as they always do. While their various gun-handlers fidget in the background.

  15. @aaa & @Bloke in Cornwall

    aaa is correct although i also agree with better detection. The difference is guns, drugs and drinks are relative easy to make (look up the Luty BSP). Reliable clean safe accurate mass produced ammunition and explosives are not. Guns become a lot less fun if you have to fill in a form explaining why you need ammunition for every dozen rounds as opposed to buying it at walmart… and a very good way of better detection of all sorts of issues.

    Ammunition control works very well in places with large amounts of firearms.

  16. Whats the betting the shooter was on mood altering meds?

    The US has always had guns, but its only in the last few decades that the whole ‘teenage shooter rampage’ thing has become a reality, and it coincides with the desire to medicate every single teenager who shows any signs of not being ‘happy’.

    Get rid of the happy pills (at very least for anyone under the age of 25) and see this problem disappear.

  17. Actually, the main reason for the spiral of such incidents is, rather ironically, probably “social media”. if there were no outlets for these head cases to parade their sick minds before a ghoulish group of cyber friends, the number of incidents would drop dramatically IMO.

    So let’s start fining Zuckerberg billions of greenbacks every time a shooter runs amok.

    Full disclosure, I don’t use facebook instagram of any of that old wank

  18. Growing up in logging country of the northwest, everyone hunted, but as I recall a lot of hunters regarded with disdain the use of semiautomatics. This was lever and bolt action country, even though there was no shortage of WW2 & Korean vets in the woods well familiar with semiautos. However, there was a lot of pride in taking a deer with one shot. I remember as a teenager firing a 22 at a target and using the first bullet hole in the white paper as the target for subsequent shots (had pretty good eyes back then).

    These shootings are horrific and a deranged person can wreak a lot of havoc with a semiautomatic with high capacity magazines. There have been too many and the time will come when semiautomatics are banned. Certainly there will be howls and people who refuse to comply, but at this stage there are records as to whom owns these firearms. Many will not be that difficult to locate. Of course, many others will be.

    I know some will cite the second amendment here, but there are, in fact, many restrictions on firearms in the US. Machine guns are not generally available. There are restrictions on calibers and magazine capacity on hunting rifles and shotguns. In most states, for example, you can’t use an AR-15 in 223 calibre for hunting deer or larger game (though I believe you can in California where the deer are small).

    It seems a bit ironic, but murder rates are well down from their early 1990s peak, and the US is about as safe today as it was in the 1950s (though there are some very rough places), but these sorts of shootings on a regular basis do not happen so often in other countries, not even in those with fairly high levels of gun ownership.

  19. No, there is no good way to disarm a nation of 320 million, nor is there any legitimate Constitutional authority for anyone to do so. It doesn’t matter, as this is a chance for a million virtue-signaling Americans to tweet that “We’ve got to do something,” such as make illegal use of firearms…I don’t know, MORE illegal.

    Meanwhile, across town, the US Senate ponders how to reward 2 million people who criminally violated the nation’s immigration system, based on the “Dreamers” slogan. Who thinks such fuzzy thinkers will stumble on a solution to anything?

  20. Mr Ecks – Exactly. The killing venue was a zone in which any shooter was guaranteed that no one would be shooting back. There is a city in Georgia in which able-bodied heads of households are REQUIRED to own a gun, and the stats are striking. No lawn-care disputes resolved with gunplay, but every potential crook is unsure whether his victim might be armed.

  21. JuliaM – I disagree with you today. There is no way to identify “nutters” with a rulebook and impose prior restraint, without millions of false positives inhibiting the rights of the Merely Eccentric. To anticipate the Republican weak echo on “mental health”: A brian may be diseased but a “mind” cannot.

  22. Tommydog–Yeah good plan. Kiss the state’s arse and make sure they have all the top weapons –if not all the weapons.

    Considering that a massacre would have to happen every day for thousands of years to equal the numbers murdered by socialism in the past 100 years, it really makes loads of sense to disarm ordinary people while ensuring the scum of the Earth have most if not all of the guns.

  23. I’ve no objection to bolt and lever actions. I have a few, a couple of which I’ve had for over 50 years.

    I’ll raise another point. I began hunting in the woods when I was 12 and shot my first deer when I was 14. While I’ve largely lost interest in it now, I still remember the fun and excitement (and I’ll happily accept a few venison steaks if offered). The attraction of hunting and shooting is not lost on me. However, fewer and fewer Americans grow up as I did (and possibly you did too) in rural areas wandering the woods with gun in hand.

    As the country becomes more urban and minority there just won’t be many people who remember their youths in this way, and their interest in firearms is often either minimal or scary. Gun owners are enthusiastic defenders of their passion, but they will lose big one day when the urban public finally has had enough.

    I’m afraid I just don’t imagine myself one day fighting in the hills against the state, though I’m pretty conservative politically and have no use for socialism.

  24. Ask everyone to hand their gun over for inspection by the nicest gun of the year contest judges. Winners get a pretty rosette. Sadly the testing regime is entirely destructive…….

    Might work. As long as nobody has a second more battered but still functioning gun they don’t enter.

  25. Tommydog – To your follow-on point: If a teenager were planning to hunt after school, he would bring the weapon to school and it would be unremarkable. The change between then and now does not have to do with a nation becoming more “urban and minority” but with a centralized curriculum that works in terms of taboos, driven by a Marxist teachers’ union, driven by one particular political party.

  26. I truly hope the proposed “solutions” I’m reading here were made tongue-in-cheek.

    -Crazy People Control: It’s wrong to deny someone’s right to defend themselves even if they’ve never done anything wrong. The net would likely be far too wide considering there are already forms of mental incapacitation that disqualify you from defending yourself with a firearm.

    -Exploding Bullets: I’m 99% sure this was a joke, because otherwise you’re legitimately evil.

    -Bolt Actions Only: “You can defend yourself and have a bit of sport, but only the way I prefer thanks.”

    -Capital Punishment: Also hoping this is a joke. Because if not you’re advocating the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocents in the attempt to save dozens.

    This might be lost of many people, but do try to remember that MURDERING PEOPLE is already illegal and quite the social taboo to boot. Someone determined to take innocent lives while willing to overlook a (at best) life sentence in a shitty federal prison while being known as a mass murderer and committing the ultimate faux pas of ignoring the NO GUNS ALLOWED sign is not someone who gets to determine my rights. They are someone to be eliminated from the gene pool forthwith.

    I’m frankly exhausted winning arguments with gun grabbers so I’ll skip to the inevitable end of the debate when I tell all of you to go ahead and try to take my gun – I dare you.

  27. Spike. I can remember going shooting with the school principal, but not many people grow up that way now. I’m rather glad I did. But if you spend much time with people in the city now, especially with immigrants and their first generation children, I’m often surprised how many express fear of going into rural areas. A Deliverance or Easy Rider syndrome I suppose. In fact, the rural areas are often safer even for people who aren’t white rednecks. The culture is changing and the urban areas and their populations are what’s growing. And I’ll admit, I never really liked semiautos much, even back then.

  28. Tommydog, Clinton tried your way with an assault weapons ban. It made NO FUCKING DIFFERENCE in crime, and was allowed to sunset after ten years.

    Let me say it another way: your stupid idea has been tried, and it failed.

  29. @Tommydog

    I know a lot of bright, young, educated, professionally-successful people in London who will jet off all over the world “travelling” but absolutely refuse to hop an hour on a train into England’s green and leafy countryside because for reasons I cannot get my head round, they are absolutely petrified of it. Despite coming one of the most violent crime-ridden parts of the country, and regardless of how much statistically safer the rural areas are.

    “I went out to Norfolk once and the locals gave me funny looks.”

    “I had to go for a conference outside London once and there were 30 people in the room but only me and two other people weren’t white!”

    “There are animals!” (I’ve heard many variations of this, but the one that struck me as funniest was “There are worms!”)

    That kinda thing. The second complaint struck me as pretty odd, like the urbane, massively overqualified globe-trotter hadn’t bothered checking wikipedia to see what the ethnic breakdown statistics are for the country she’d lived in the last couple of decades (at least, when she wasn’t taking yet another gap year out to “different cultures” because doing so was somehow really enlightening).

    The way it works in the UK is that rural issues generally get decided based on what city- and town-dwellers think about the countryside in their limited experience. That’s just the way the votes add up. In the very long game, I think you’re right, though I suspect Americans will put up more of a fight than their British counterparts did.

  30. Mr Ears
    Once when working abroad we were all frustrated with some government officials we had to deal with. They were dumb as posts. At some point however, one of the locals said something to the effect of “well, they must know what they’re doing otherwise they wouldn’t have that job”.

    I have never, ever heard an American express a similar sentiment, though I’ve heard it abroad a few times. We just take it for granted that government workers aren’t too swift and politicians are corrupt. As is apparent from a few of the other posters here, we are a bit on the cantankerous side.

  31. @Sam. Actually 13,000 Americans die from guns every year and 28,000 are wounded by guns, so a few extra deaths to stop the killing for ever is a fair trade-off.

  32. Spike: “There is no way to identify “nutters” with a rulebook and impose prior restraint, without millions of false positives inhibiting the rights of the Merely Eccentric.”

    Well, certainly there isn’t if, when alerted, the FBI (THE MOTHER****ING FBI!) say, in effect, ‘Sorry dude, but since he didn’t leave his name and address in that scary YouTube comment you’re reporting, we just can’t find him…’

  33. Alex: ok, you’re not joking – got it. I’m not going to get into a utilitarian back-and-forth with a sociopath, especially one who thinks they’re signalling “virtue”. Anyone willing* to slaughter innocents in pursuit of a political goal is not someone worth engaging.

    *Not personally willing, of course, but willing to let *uniformed* men with *bigger* guns do the dirty work.

  34. @sam; I live in a country with 0.25 gun deaths per 10,000 people. You are happy to live in a country with 50 times the rate of gun deaths per capita. And you think I am a sociopath. Over 1.5 million Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years, and you are happy for that to continue?

  35. @Gamecock; “They die from people. Guns are just a tool.”

    They die from people with guns
    Take away the guns and people wouldn’t be half as lethal.

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