i am not really sure what needs to happen before authorities act on the public ownership of guns. maybe when a whole town is massacred? but i guess, more than the banning, our society needs a moral surgery. it is so sad that everywhere now, moral degradation is rampant. sigh...

it is really important to stop the private ownership of those guns and also for people to have moral values. well i think if they don't have real faith in God then they will not have those values.

You can have values without God, but if your mind is as messed up as most criminals, it won't matter. One of the things about the Columbine things is that their mental depression prevented them from having any feelings of remorse or anything for killing a bunch of innocent students. My point is that taking people's guns away won't solve the problem. If you are going to massacre a whole town, you probably got your gun illegally. A person like that would have trouble getting a permit.

Banning guns is pretty stupid, any way you look at it. First of all, that would allow the government to more easily instate military control.

Secondly, the media sucks, and school shootings are nothing. Wanna know how many actually happen each year? Maybe five, but you hear about those five for months on all channels, so people think that it is a big deal, and then schools spend billions of dollars on stupid precautions while sacrificing the students' education. My school can't even afford paper, but they are talking about putting in new "security locked" doors to save us from the "predators" that might come into our school. In all seriousness, more kids die from heart attacks because of the crappy cafeteria food that they serve.

Yeah, the shootings that happen are bad, but what the media does to is worse. Oh yeah, and 25000 people are dying of hunger each day... but we don't hear about that...

Best post in this thread right there, jol. Like that Tool song, Vicarious, which a lot of you might have heard, since it got good radio time when it first came out, people love to hear about death. The worse, the better. We don't necessarily relish it, and we think it's horrible, but we love to hear about it and the media loves to cover it. The media also likes to blame minor influences when the real problem is the kids themselves and their minds.

Right now the Supreme Court is discussing the Second Amendment for the first time in 70 years. A ruling is coming in June.

Granted, we don't really need guns, but we also don't need television or radio or computers or pretty much anything but warmth, food, water, and shelter. Guns can be dangerous. So can cars. People who are for the banning of guns think that it will...what? Get rid of gang shootouts? They won't just be able to walk into a gun store with that permit they got and murder someone? They'll just come up with different means of remotely killing someone or else they'll get a gun illegally, like a lot of criminals do anyway.

Don't deprive our rights and our freedoms so that someone who just likes to collect or recreationally use guns can't have them and SOME criminals might have to become a little more creative. Surely the Supreme Court realizes more about the gun situation than a 15 year old, but where that will take the decision is up in the air. Maybe most shootings could have been prevented if the criminals could not have legal access to guns. They would just give up on their plans to kill people and devote their lives to making our economy stable or something.

I believe it is Switzerland that they actually made guns mandatory. They have 0% gun crime.

Close but not quite true. I hate using wikipedia as a source but it's close enough for this.

Gun politics in Switzerland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carrying Guns-
To carry firearms in public or outdoors (and for an individual who is a member of the militia carrying a firearm other than his Army-issue personal weapons off-duty), a person must have a Waffentragschein (weapon carrying permit), which in most cases is issued only to private citizens working in occupations such as security though some cantons issue the permits very liberally.

Gun crime-
Police statistics for the year 2006[10] records 34 killings or attempted killings involving firearms, compared to 69 cases involving bladed weapons and 16 cases of unarmed assault. Cases of assault resulting in bodily harm numbered 89 (firearms) and 526 (bladed weapons). This represents a decline of aggravated assaults involving firearms since the early 1990s. Some 300 deaths per year are due to legally held army ordinance weapons, the large majority of these being suicides. The majority of gun crimes involving domestic violence are perpetrated with army ordinance weapons, while the majority of gun crime outside the domestic sphere involves illegally held firearms.

Who wants to try to shoot someone who also has a gun? Better to sneak up on them and stab them.