Yes it can help convict the person but is not required to be proved. None of which has anything to do with the public outcry for a motive. plus, in these mass murder situations there's no question about what their intent was when they turned a semiautomatic rifle onto a group of people. there isn't any doubt about who did it either because they want you to know they did it

Yes, they all say that, not. Burglars knowing that people may have guns still break into houses--I wonder why that is It only takes one person with a gun to stop them--here the guy did it knowing there were cops patrolling the garlic fair--gee I guess he thought the cops were unarmed. Maybe he just wanted to see how many he could kill before they got him. But you don't care about that huh? Were the little kids that got killed supposed to have guns too? Amazing.

What about the Boston Marathon bombing? And wouldn’t a Molotov cocktail be even more deadly than a firearm in some cases?

Something like 33 people died in Japan in an arson attack... We don't hear about it because no guns were used.

@WilliamFleming Your question does not address anything about mass shootings. It is simply a deflection that is irrelevant.

@wordywalt Your answer does not address the questions. It is you who are deflecting.

@WilliamFleming Your do not play games very well. Your attempt to divert is too obvious.

Another reason why motive doesn't matter. We regulated against machine guns and people still made money.

@lerlo I was referring to the NRA buying off politicians

We enforce a lot of gun control. I have been denied in the past for having a PO box on my driver's license.

The times when the law isn't enforced is when two individuals make a sale. Think for a minute what level of government overreach would be necessary to prevent that. Hell, think about that level of overreach being controlled by the current administration.

It's like DRM with software. If you make doing something legally too difficult, people who don't really consider themselves criminals will go the illegal route just to have a product that works. You can't cut off access, all you can do is make the illegal route more attractive

@Rudy1962 ok but I think they will still do that even if such weapons are regulated.

Sounds nice but how many times, like this recent one, do all the neighbors say "oh he was a really nice kid, never thought he'd do anything like this."

@lerlo The overwhelming majority of people are not trained to psychoanalyze people. The way this would best be implemented is to have trained professionals do the investigating.

I mean, do your neighbors really know you? If I wanted to know about someone without interacting with them, "neighbors" would be fairly far down the list. I would place it right bellow garbage man and right above your boss.

@Happy_Killbot and the only way some psycho would be stopped is if they went to their psychiatrist or "trained professional" before they killed somebody. And then only if they told somebody they were going to kill

@lerlo No, by then it is already to late. The only way to stop this is through preventative action. If they are over the age of 25, they are essentially a lost cause because the brain stops developing.

The signs of sociopathy and psychopathy manifest in children in ways that can be observed and predicted. They idea would be to get them help as soon as symptoms were recognized. Every school should be assigned a therapist. In the long run this could save us billions of dollars a year on law enforcement and prisons.

I haven't heard or seen of any attempts at prevention based on anyone's motive of yet. However it did occur to me that there has been a push to stop bullying, so there is that.

Wouldn’t the murderers simply employ some other method, as did the Boston Marathon bombers? A simple Molotov cocktail thrown in a theater might be more deadly than a firearm.

@WilliamFleming Let's focus on the things we CAN do something about. You can't solve everything at once. We have to start somewhere and gun control seems like a pretty good way to start. 32,000 gun incidents in the U.S. this year. 8400 deaths. How many were killed by Molotov Cocktails this year?
[gunviolencearchive.org]

@WilliamFleming sorry, " people will murder anyway" is not an excuse for doing nothing. We don't need to find new medications because people will die anyway. We don't need education because stupid people will still exist. Leaving assault weapons alone means you're okay with multiple innocent people getting killed or shot within a minute.

@TheoryNumber3 That’s 0.003 percent of the US population, statistically equal to zero. If the object is to keep people alive there are many other causes that would be more fruitful.

@WilliamFleming I'm not going to dismiss people's lives as statistically insignificant. It's pretty significant to their loved ones.

@TheoryNumber3 In allocating resources it is important to think with our intellects rather than with our emotions.

@WilliamFleming My intellect tells me that guns in the hands of crazy people isn't such a great idea.

@TheoryNumber3 With that I agree.

Nice deflection. We need a multitude of things and one of them is a stop to people being able to hurt multiple people in seconds. Regulating silencers didn't keep people from making money. Clamping down on opiates hasn't stopped drug companies for making money. Campaign finance reform won't make politicians work together like they used to.

It will keep politicians from literally making money off of dead kids though. So long as it isn't their family dying, they have zero incentive to even view it as a problem

It sure doesn't help if we have politicians like Trump and "news" stations like Fox stirring up the crazies with their racist rhetoric. “Right-wing extremists were linked to at least 50 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2018, making them responsible for more deaths than in any year since 1995,” the Anti-Defamation League noted in January. Even the Trump Administration’s own report, “National Strategy for Counterterrorism,” which was published last year, acknowledged that “domestic terrorism in the United States is on the rise,” and it cited “racially motivated extremism” as one of the causes.
[newyorker.com]

@TheoryNumber3 Absolutely. You are spot on with this. When you deal with mob mentality all the rules of social engagement are gone.

I would argue the problem is much deeper than weapons and bullets being made available, because there is something fundamentally wrong with these people that drives them to do what they do. We should strive to create a society where people don't kill because they don't have a reason to, instead of attacking the symptoms.

The overwhelming majority of gun owners are law abiding citizens. Meanwhile, millions of people die every year at the hands of drunk or distracted drivers, 2 orders of magnitude more than die due to gun violence, but no one recommends banning vehicles.

Why have a double standard?

you could reduce traffic accidents and help limit the spread of greenhouse gasses. But because the Washington post is owned by Jeff Bezos who relies on that transportation network for Amazon to work, you will never hear about it there.

Could you agree that most traffic fatalities are caused by accidents - not someone taking their car out and saying "I think I'll kill someone today". Yes agreed that many, most gun owners are very responsible people but then there are those who are not but still get weapons. I need to take a test to get a driver's license, in my state I must carry insurance on my car and also have it inspected every year. If I would drive drunk I would probably lose my ability to drive. I do not think there is a comparison here.

@AmelieMatisse Are you responding to my choice of the word "drive"? If so then replace it with "motivate". If not then I have no idea what your are talking about. I agree completely with your analogy of cars and guns.

@jlynn37 I was responding to @Happy_Killbot but for whatever reason it put my response under your comment.

@AmelieMatisse Vehicle ramming attacks happen quite frequently, and they are on the rise.

True vehicle accidents, that is to say, one that could not have been avoided through regulation or personnel action are few and far between. If someone looks away from the road to read a text they are making a deliberate decision to disregard the law and place their own life and the lives of others at risk. Just because an accident doesn't happen every time someone does this, doesn't mean it is okay.

Most states require you to get a permit to own and carry a gun, and a separate one for concealed carry. Then the gun must be unloaded at all times and you must have physical control over it at all times, and inform any police officer who approaches you if you have a gun. The guns also must be registered to the owner for tractability. The laws vary from state to state. If you violate any of these laws, you lose your permit, and if you hurt someone you go to jail, or possibly get shot yourself by the cops or other citizens.

It would seem to me that there is a direct analog here between guns and motor vehicles, with motor vehicles being 100x as lethal but receiving a fraction of the press.

@Happy_Killbot we disagree and that's OK. Can you explain then the statistic that 30,000 women per year in the world are killed by either current or former domestic partners - more than half are by guns. Or that 52 women per month in the US are shot and killed by intimate partners (with guns) and most of these men own their guns legally. Before you decide to disagree with these statistics they are readily available through legitimate sites, one being NCADV. Gun enthusiasts will never admit to a problem and would rather blame cars, knives, overly hot salsa sauce, for violence or deaths, or try to put in the same category someone buying ammunition for their weapon with the premeditated idea of killing one or more persons and someone being a douche bag and texting while driving and causing an accident. So you go to your corner and I'll go to mine and we can both agree that neither of us will ever change the mind of the other.

@AmelieMatisse 30,000? That happens to be about the same as the number of infants killed by their own parents each year, with the overwhelming majority of cases being caused by the mother.

I'm not trying to change your mind, that's not how debate works. I try to change other people's minds.

Also, here is a link to the global causes of death for comparison, which should shead some light on where our priorities should be.

[ourworldindata.org]

Guns isn't on the list, however 67% of homicide victims were killed by firearms, so of the 0.72% of global deaths due to homicide, 0.48% were due to firearms, meaning it ranks just above nutritional deficiencies and bellow meningitis as a cause of death.

I mean, drowning is higher. As long as we are banning guns lets make swimming illegal while we are at it.

@Happy_Killbot actually I worked in this field for 10 years. FBI reports that approximately 480 children are killed in this country each year by a parent. 57.4 % of the time it is by the father. World wide your number is correct but another study says that 95,000 children are murdered each year with about 50% being filicides ( murder by parents) and almost half of this number is caused by mother murdering a child. So there you go but seriously this was not what the original post or comments was about. So if we just want to talk about mass murders you do or do not agree that they are almost always carried out by men who most likely should not have had weapons?

@AmelieMatisse I looked up the statistics on filicides, and most of the numbers only start to even off between mother or father being the perpetrator when the child is older.

[ncjrs.gov]

Apparently, 80% of all murder committed by women is a family member or intimate partner.

[forensicmag.com]

Alright, getting back on topic.

No I do not think we should ban all knives, swimming pools, cars, any and all heavy tools, rope, wire, belts, candlesticks, or firearms.

The problem here isn't the fact that people can acquire weapons, it is the fact that some people are legitimately dangerous, and predictably so. We have all the technology and capability to nearly completely eliminate violent tenancies, but we chose not to. We could determine who was likely to be an offender before they graduated middle school, get them the help they need and let them enjoy the rest of their lives. But that won't happen if we keep fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.