Time to Un-Amend the US Constitution

Actor, Morgan Freeman's take on the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting :



"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.



It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single 'victim' of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

These are the people who gave their lives for YOUR right to keep and bear arms. Think about them before you go to sleep tonight. Think about them every time you pick up a gun for the rest of your life. Think about them and all the other children who have been gunned down in schools in the USA, schools where our children are supposed to be safe. Think about them and then go wash your hands, wash them well because there's blood all over them.

Victoria Soto , teacher was 27.

Allison Wyatt was six.

Benjamin Wheeler was six.

Avielle Richman was six.

Jessica Rekos was six.

Caroline Previdi was six.

Noah Pozner was six.

Jack Pinto was six.

Emilie Parker was six.

Grace McDonnell was seven.

James Mattioli was five.

Jesse Lewis was six.

Chase Kowalski was seven.

Catherine Hubbard was six.

Madeleine Hsu was six.

Dylan Hockley was six.

Ana Marquez-Greene was six.

Josephine Gay was seven.

Olivia Engel was six.

Daniel Barden was seven.

Charlotte Bacon was six.

Rachel Davino was 29.

Mary Sherlach, the school psychologist, was 56.

Anne Marie Murphy was 52.

Lauren Rousseau, a teacher, was 30.

Dawn Hochsprung, the principal, was 47.

Nancy Lanza, teacher and mother of shooter, was 52. She was killed in her home before the massacre at the school.

Four times as many people are killed EVERY YEAR in America by idiots with guns than US troops have been killed in Afghanistan since the start of the invasion.

A war zone is way safer than an elementary school in America.
Way out of order.

Whilst this is indeed a tragedy,it is not the guns as such that kill, but the person pulling the trigger.

What is needed is stronger laws governing the purchase of firearms, and banning of high power military type weapons.

The prospective purchaser should have to undergo a training course and a physcological test before even being allowed to buy a gun.

The gun lobby in USA has a very strong influence in politics and has been lobbying for many years to weaken the gun purchasing laws as this is a multi million dollar industry.

Any changes in the laws should be nationwide not just a state law change.

As for war zones being a safer place than the USA,from experience,I would have to disagree with that.

stumpy wrote:

As for war zones being a safer place than the USA,from experience,I would have to disagree with that.

Perhaps you can explain how 2,000 or so dead in eleven years makes the Afghanistan war zone more dangerous than over 8,000 dead per year from gun crime in the states where there is no war.

I seem to be having an off day as I can't work it out.

Please educate me.

Hello Stumpy,

The NRA is the largest and wealthiest political lobby group in the USA, not surprising that the government has always kowtowed to them. Even if it weren't a Constitutional issue, this alone would diminish any hope for sensible gun control laws. Even when the control is reasonable and necessary the NRA opposes it.

One of the very first measures that is necessary, since it is not the gun per se that kills, but the killer himself is to prohibit ownership of firearms to anyone who has a history of mental illness or anyone residing with him (and therefore would have access to the firearms) who has a history of mental illness. In order to purchase a firearm one should be required to first sign a declaration, under penalty of law, that he nor anyone who resides with him has any history of psychiatric problems. This should be accompanied by a list of all who reside with the potential gun owner and a limited authorization to check medical records to verify this.

The next most important issue is the kind of weapons themselves. I see no valid reason that assault rifles should be in civilian hands, certainly they were not intended for the purpose of hunting. They were invented for pure firepower and maximum number of rounds fired per second. The whole idea of hunting is to bring down your prey with a single clean shot, not turn it into hamburger in a hail of bullets. The type of weapon you are licensed to purchase should MATCH the stated purpose of ownership.

Also there must be some control over the number of firearms, where those firearms are kept and under what conditions they are stored. As it stands there is nothing preventing American citizens from leaving loaded firearms laying around all over their homes, absurd! This alone would save the lives of dozens if not hundreds of American children each year who die by preventable gun accidents. Nobody needs a virtual arsenal of dozens of weapons, nobody! There must be a legal obligation to keep weapons unloaded and with a trigger key lock in place or in a gun vault.

Collectors who wish to place weapons on display should be required to either fill or block the barrel of the firearm and remove it's firing pin to render it permanently inoperable or be forced by law to use a replica meeting those requirements.

There should be only three categories permitted for personal firearms ownership; hunting, self-protection or collecting. The firearms permitted for each category should be strictly regulated and clearly defined. Nobody needs an assault rifle to hunt deer or bear, nobody needs a Uzi machine pistol for self protection and private collectors do not need hundreds of operative weapons on display.

I would also recommend taking the same approach as Canada did, when they added a section to the Criminal Code which makes the use of a firearm during the commission of an offense a separate crime which is an automatic charge with a manditory add-on sentence which may not run concurrent with any other sentence.

I doubt highly that we will see any of these measures adopted in the United States since they've always been a nation of excesses and overkill, sad to say.

Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog

I agree wholeheartedly with Morgan Freeman's comment. I believe that it has been proven time and time again that the main motivating factor in these mass shooting incidents, especially in schools, is the notoriety that the perpetrators receive following their unspeakable acts.

I believe that the media is largely to blame for this, in reporting every last detail of the lives of the killers. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States which deals with freedom of the press is not absolute. It does not prevent prohibiting publication of the name of offenders for various reasons and it is quite common. I think this would be an easier approach to at least a partial resolution than any other.

I think one of the first steps to take in order to address this very serious problem would be to enact a Federal law which would prohibit reporting the NAME (or any other information that would identify them with certainty)of any of these wackos, permitting them to be referred to in the media only as JOHN DOE or JANE DOE as the case may be. This is common practice with juvenile offenders so it is clearly both legal and constitutional.

This would serve two very important purposes. Firstly, it would rob the offenders of the main thing that they hope to accomplish - gain instant fame. Secondly, it would reduce the unnecessary suffering of the offender's family who are in no way responsible for their family member's insane and brutal actions.

Certainly the media has both the right and responsibility to report accurately on the events, nobody is arguing that point at all. The courts have held many times that this right does not necessarily extend to publishing names. We, the public, don't really gain anything from knowing the name of the individual offenders, who for the most part are already dead. The media can sensationalize all they want in gruesome detail, giving all kinds of torrid information about the life and childhood of the offenders. Publishing their names serves no useful purpose and is ultimately desirable if the end result is that a twisted NOBODY knows that no matter what he/she does they will continue to be a NOBODY long after the fact. This would probably prevent the vast majority of these crimes even without gun control.

Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog Team

Money talks, politicians are bribed, and many brainwashed individuals are afraid that the government is going to take their guns away.

While I don't advocate an absolute ban on firearms, it would be far better even if the government did take them away completely than sit on their collective butts as they are right now and do absolutely nothing about this growing problem that started way back in the early 1900s and began to escalate in 1970 with the Kent State University Shootings.

The country graduated to a series of US Postal Service massacres in which which claimed dozens and dozens of lives and even added the term "going postal" to the English vocabulary in North America.

The American people should have learned and the US government should have taken action following the Columbine massacre in 1999. Even by then it was common knowledge that the problem had reached epic proportions and was out of control. Again the US government bowed down to their almighty masters, the gun manufacturers and the NRA and did absolutely nothing.

If you want some idea how effective strict gun regulation is just think about this:

In all of Canada (the whole freaking country) there have been exactly 11 school shooting incidents since 1902. In all those years only 28 people were killed. That's the same number of deaths as in Sandy Hook Elementary School, if you count the shooter. 28 school shooting deaths in the whole country since 1902.

Now look at the Wikipedia list of school shootings in the USA. Go back to the year 1902 and just try to count the number of incidents, not to mention the victim count. I defy anyone to count the number of shootings. It staggers the mind! Just look folks! And you Americans still fight gun control????

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sc … ted_States

New York Mayor Michael Bloomburg has all but demanded that President Obama act quickly and decisively on gun control. He stated that in the next year 48 THOUSAND more people will die by shooting in the USA if nothing is done. Shocking figure.

Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog Team

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