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http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-church-scene-shooting-sunday-report/story?id=50945596

The Vegas shooting, the truck and now this. Oh, and 2 hurricanes.

Info's out about the shooter. 26~ year old caucasian male. Married, allegedly took 6 spent 6 years in high school and was dishonorably discharged from the airforce.

The alt-right is trying to make this guy look like AntiFa.
No evidence suggests he ever was.

Not even Churches are safe from shootings anymore. What's going on in this country?

Yeah. I'm not surprised in the slightest.

Fuck facts, if you get your story out there first, even if its a lie, its the one people will remember.

.Did you forget the Charleston church shooting

I remember the Charleston shooting, but I was just exclaiming my dismay.

But yeah. I asked the same question to my friends and one of them said that people in this country are losing respect; no morales or mentality what so ever. Where did we go so wrong to make some of us to stoop so low?

Its really hard not to be cynical about these things anymore. I saw the news this morning on twitter and just went (Oh, another one) entirely self aware at how shitty and dehumanizing that thought is.

But really at this point its like I can see the Matrix code

Mass shooting happens → Thoughts and prayers → We need a gun debate → People debate about debating → Something else happens in the news → Everyone forgets and moves on a week later → repeat from the top

The same thing over and over and over again since the mid 2000s

>TFW so many mass shootings happen in a decade that you can't even keep track of them all

Every attempt to try addressing the issues (outdated background checks, domestic abuse, mental health) have been impeded by gun rights activists and gun manufacturing lobbies.

Its like im living in a fucking cartoon.

Please cancel the show already

A lot of folks in the "pro-gun" side would love it if we got stuff like Standardized Gun Laws, improved resources to help domestic abuse victims, reforms to how we handle mental health, and better run social programs to help improvised families without getting them solely reliant on government money to survive while discouraging them from intergratting more into society and rising our of poverty.

But whenever people do bring these up, the response is always "Well that's fine but a pipe dream so iust ban the guns" and we end up back at square one.

Good lord not again, its more and more frequent this things right now, with a very polarized society now and only put more fire on some controversial discusions (like the gun law), this is a very vicious cycle that repeats over and over again to the point that this never ENDS.
My condolence for the families of the victims.

Another normal day for american citizens.

Oh, banning weapons, you say? Nah, they are good for the economy, who cares.

Nah, it's not like there is a nigh impossible to remove law baked into the constitution that prevents such a thing, nope, must be because economics.

Don't blame the system just yet. The Air Force just admit their own scrutiny on overlooking their paperwork to keep the blaggard from purchasing firearms.

What always supposed to happen is that a dishonorable discharge is an equivalent to felony conviction, meaning the ex-service member has lost all civil rights. Including the ability to buy guns. This guy especially considering he beat both his wife and child. Resulting in a domestic violence that always results in revoking the assailant's 2nd amendment rights permanently. But it didn't happen in this case; paperwork went missing and this shit happens.

"only nation where this regulalry happens"

Are we forgetting like, the massive amounts of shootings that britan & france had the past few years?.

Literally hours after this happened people were trying to use the event for their political agendas. what the fuck is wrong with people.

Hey, guess what? America has a completely unique situation when it comes to guns, who would have thought?

Frankly, I'm not surprised anymore.

Also people are stating that he basically shouldn't have been able to buy those guns, but a fuckup on the military's part is what allowed him to.

Basically, the laws we have now likely would've stopped him but they weren't being enforced properly.

We can talk all we want about banning guns or not banning them but the fact of the matter is that neither extreme is something we should be discussing because they don't address the real issue. That is, insane people gaining access to weapons and killing people.

After the Port Arthur massacre, everyone and their mother in Australia wanted better gun control and we got it. So far we've only had 1 major shooting and 1 hostage crisis that were around 14 years apart. I'm not saying that if the USA is going to become a safe utopia if they pass similar gun laws such as banning certain firearms, banning people with mental health problems and people with criminal activities from buying guns but I also feel like the US also needs better firearm education and a nationwide guns for cash program would help matters.

@Ryumaru Borike
This is why the constitution needs to be updated once in awhile. Back when the constitution was being written the only gun that you could bear ( as in support or carry) was something like a musket and don't bring up the pickle gun as those things were heavy as shit and needed to be assembled.

@yummines
Are you saying that we should keep the same people that always cause these massacres in the first place from purchasing guns?

We did that when we tightened up our gun laws but those fuckin' insane rednecks aren't going to let that happen in America.

Ditto, but ours was the Aramoana Massacre. We had a half dozen mass shootings in a few years while we we're changing the laws, and then they stopped.

If 3 people counts as a mass shooting, its been over 20 years, after a 6 in 5 years in the 80's/90s.

Australia and NZ have pretty high gun ownership by world standards (20th and 22nd). But the US is number 1 with 4 times as many per person as either Aus or NZ. Plus we are less urban and most of the guns are shotguns and rifles for farm use, with virtually no handgun ownership before the laws changed. (We had two, dad decided he didn't need them anymore and sold them back)

The US is metaphorically flooded with firearms, and they have a very different role in their culture than here. To us, they were mostly a tool for pest control. Home defence was never really a reason people got them for the most part, and certainly not for personal defence by actually carrying them.(for the most part)

So yeah, what worked for us, likely won't work for them.

DaRedGuy said:

So far we’ve only had 1 major shooting and 1 hostage crisis that were around 14 years apart.

And your murder rate went up following the ban's enaction. It wasn't til '03 that it finally dropped below the low prior to the ban. If the goal was to stop flashy headlines and hundreds of talking heads, it was a brilliant success, but if it was to actually stop Australians from murdering each other, it failed.

Australia's actually a really good example of the problems with standard gun control. It doesn't actually solve the issue (violent crime) by targeting its cause (mental health, poor education and income, etc.) but targets its effect (gun homicides) while the cause simply adjusts to a different effect.

Also, the ban itself really had a negligible statistical impact.

Gun homicides were already on the decline and it doesn't appear to have accelerated that decline--it just kept going down at about the same rate it already was.

…better firearm education…

I, along with I'm sure most gun rights supporters, are all for additional education, even an optional safety class in school to teach children/teens about guns, their uses, and safe handling and operation. Somehow, I don't think the gun control folks would be too keen on that, though. Even though it could potentially cut down on accidental shootings by a large margin.

…nationwide guns for cash program…

Gun trade-in programs have had very limited success so far and I doubt a national one would do any better--especially since someone could just trade-in their beaten up ones that aren't worth anything, get the money and put it toward a brand new one.

Back when the constitution was being written…

Of all the 2nd Amendment arguments out there, this is the one I've never understand. The Internet and bloggers didn't exist and was incomprehensible to them (unlike guns capable of firing multiple times between reloads), should the First Amendment be altered? The surveillance abilities of the government are unparalleled now, should the Fourth Amendment be altered?

Why is the Second Amendment the only one that needs changing since the founders were so incapable of seeing the radical shifts in society and technology that would occur?

Are you saying that we should keep the same people that always cause these massacres in the first place from purchasing guns?

He was barred from purchasing a firearm (a dishonorable discharge from the military is the equivalent of a felony conviction with regards to firearms). The Air Force's bureaucracy fucked up and didn't put him on the NICS (similar to what happened with the Charleston shooter), so he cleared the background check when he went to buy his gun. (The military apparently has an abysmal record of reporting things to the NICS like they're supposed to.)

It gets a little frustrating to hear people want more laws when the government can't even get it's own people to enforce the laws currently on the book.

That graph at the top is really misleading, as you are saying it is the murder rate, when it is the total murders committed, while the population was going up.

The original source for that data is here. http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html

Note the first line on that page "Over the past 18 years (1 July 1989 to 30 June 2007), the rate* of homicide incidents decreased from 1.9 in 1990-91 and 1992-93 to the second-lowest recorded rate, of 1.3, in 2006-07. *rate per 100,000 population." . That rate is now 0.98. It's halved since the 90's.

For contrast the US rate is 4.88

Also, things like weapon restrictions take time to implement. You don't just say "gun laws changed" and then all the guns come out of circulation over night. It takes years for them to come out, which is why the drop offs are gradual. And, even in the pre-port arthur era, there simply were not the same number of firearms in Australia,

The explanation for the gradual decline that had started was that there had been a gradual reduction in firearm ownership as the population became more urbanized, because most Australian guns were mostly on farms, not in the cities.

Also of interest,
http://www.aic.gov.au/about_aic/research_programs/nmp/0001.html

Plenty of actual primary data there, that hasn't been "interpreted" by a lobby page first.

"Gun trade-in programs have had very limited success so far and I doubt a national one would do any better--especially since someone could just trade-in their beaten up ones that aren’t worth anything, get the money and put it toward a brand new one."

The point of a gun trade in programme is that you can't buy them afterwards. Zero point doing one if you can just walk down the road and get a replacement. They only work to remove restricted weapons from circulation. That's it.

We ran one here, people surrendered a fair few weapons. Oddly, one of the most common items was service weapons from WWII that had been kept and handed down through family. But with the new handgun licences most people couldn't be bothered keeping them.

Our family surrendered 3 weapons. An old rifle and a small caliber pistol of my grand fathers, and my dad's 9mm pistol. He had gotten that when he was a police officer and working as the liaison officer with local gangs to keep at home (death threats were a daily hazard), but as he had moved on from that job he didn't feel the need for it anymore (His new job only had occasional death threats).