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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (212000)	12/17/2012 9:30:48 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541102

It would be useful to show the $ spent trying to reduce your list, vs the $ spent trying to reduce (oops, increase) guns. Slight difference in outlook.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (212000)	12/18/2012 1:15:35 AM
From: cnyndwllr	3 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541102

Cosmic, with 24 hour a day coverage of the beautiful children that were killed and with accounts coming out of seemingly thin air concerning the actions of the adults in the crisis, this has become intimately personal to millions of Americans. That's fine, and it's a good thing if we can take what few actions are available to reduce the risk of, or the severity of, the next such event. Feinstein's newly suggested assault weapons ban and magazine limit legislation make sense and should pass. Also, as we've discussed on this thread, mental health screening and better mental health tools to identify and treat or institutionalize people who are substantial threats is another avenue that we could explore. The "need" to address this problem, however, does not mean that we should expect to remedy it, or that we should prioritize it above more pressing, widespread problems that we can address more efficiently and that will create more public good. So, as you have written, there are opportunity costs to devoting too much of our political energy to this issue. And in the interim, I have to shake my head at the disdain with which some of the more progressive commentators dismiss what I consider potentially rational arguments. I just listened to the Ed show and a little of Rachael Maddow and they were very dismissive of the assertion that it was too bad the principal of the school hadn't been armed. Why is that? We put armed people on airplanes after 9/11 because we thought they would help to prevent another hijacking and many large-crowd venues we attend have armed private security guards which seems to give most of us a sense of security. Why wouldn't an armed, trained, competent adult in a school situation be useful if someone came on the school grounds and started popping off shots? My son is an administrator in a school and I know my son. If someone came onto the school grounds and began shooting his kids my son would be the first on on the scene, running in and charging the shooter with a club or with his fists if that's all he had. I'd rather he have a rifle and I'm sure that if the commentators' kids were in that school, they'd want that too. But still you hear that idea dismissed out of hand as, "just another excuse to sell more guns." It would be nice if we could make all guns disappear from the hands of those who'd misuse them. As most of us have acknowledged, however, in this gun culture nation the guns aren't going anywhere and neither are the nuts who'd misuse them. So why not have a gun available in that dire strait where it might be the only way of stopping a slaughter? The thing that keeps ringing through my head is that if I'd been at that school with even a one-round rifle, that shooter would almost certainly have been dead a split second after I'd gotten sight of him. We can talk about the dangers of having a protective weapon on a school site and we can talk about whether teachers or administrators could be expected to have the expertise and willingness to shoot a shooter but I think I'm in tune with a lot of very serious hunters and ex military guys who know what they could do, and have done, and who have a rational argument that one of the last ditch ways to address this problem is to have the means on site to counter the threat. Ed