Mass shooting at Umpqua Community College - 10 dead

@comicstooge: Pop bottle suppressor, easy-peasy no loud BANG BANG.....problem solved.

@comicstooge: Lol right?

I have no faith in these politicians.

I would not formally "endorse" the idea because I'd need to give it longer consideration and hear some people voice their complaints on it, but at a first glance, I could get on board with that. It seems reasonable.

In many ways, it's actually very close to the way the nation was originally founded. The federal government could do nothing to infringe on the right to bear arms, and almost all states had mandatory militias where male citizens were given a loose kind of military training and were required to own firearms. Since guns were proportionately more expensive back in the day because guns were personally crafted rather than mass produced, the state governments actually had trouble trying to keep citizens armed since so many citizens felt unthreatened and found the high cost of owning a long gun prohibitive.

I think the training would largely take care of itself if we could just dispel the myths about the dangers of gun. We have half the country who has been so indoctrinated to think that guns are scary killing machines which will automatically bring death to anyone who owns one that they are afraid to touch them, and even people who do own guns often don't carry them largely because its too much of a hassle to carry them. If you open carry, you deal with flack all the time from gun haters. If you concealed carry, you have to get a license which takes money and time. Even if you do own one, you can't carry it many places. I spend most of my time in public at work, and I'm banned from carrying my gun there as an employee. If you try to carry in places like NYC, you have a heap of regulations that make it darn near impossible.

To too many people, guns = bad guy. If that were to change, people would want to be armed and want to know how to use their weapons.

@batwatch: @lunacyde

This training idea is basically good thinking, but there's no way that it'd ever be instituted. From a foreigner/ outsider's perspective I can already see the outcry if it came into effect tomorrow (by virtue of magic wand)

"I'm not going to listen to some pencil-neck govt. paper-pusher tell me how to use a gun"

"I grew up around guns, don't tell me how to shoot"

"The dinosaur people will implant you with a microchip when you go in for 'training'"

The last one is because I'm tired, but still the whacko brigade will still ignore anything even in the community's interests.

@batwatch as you said, to a lot of people guns are inherently evil, which is stupid. But on the other side of the coin to a lot of people guns aren't serious items. As an example, I read yesterday about the guy shooting down his neighbour's drone because he thought it was a "CIA surveillance device". Putting aside the loony part, this guy had put a number of holes in his neighbours house because he didn't care what happened to the bullets that missed. Even when shooting at his neighbor's property was mentioned to him, he didn't care.

Honestly I don't see any solution, the genie is too far out of the bottle over there...