As i see it, there is no grey area here, and you are deluding yourselves with such a claim. No Civilians should have guns whatsoever. Now i've made my stance clear i'll defend it as eloquently as i can without letting emotions cloud my logic.
Guns. Facilitate. Mass. Killings. I've never heard of 20 kids being massacred in hand to hand combat, and there was a case in China where a man attacked over 20 children with only a knife at a school in Henan, number of fatalities? Zero!
Rick you've put forward a few points i'd like to respectfully take issue with.
First you put forward the valid point that many of these incidents & others like it were executed with illegally obtained fire-arms ie: stolen from family members, seems to be the only example that comes up.
You say that they would get their hands on guns regardless of legislation & that laws do nothing to prevent this from happening.
I'll answer that by asking you a question in response.
How would these individuals get their hands on a gun if their parents never had guns? and everyone they know and had access to didn't have a gun? and, like here in the UK, there'd be no avenues for obtaining a firearm that wasn't both extremely difficult/dangerous/expensive for the individual, and wasn't also extremely isolated & rare in possibility?
If you can give me one irrefutable piece of evidence that suggests that removing guns from civilians & law enforcement alike, would not put a massive dent into these sort of statistics, that doesn't include the words 'It's in our constitution' or 'some people like collecting them', then i will HAPPILY and WILLINGLY concede to your superior logic.
Now i'll tersely address the issue of the Second Amendment. First of all, the word amendment gets lost on some Americans these days, as it openly states that they were added to the Constitution at a latter date when the fallible guys (Yes these guys were not perfect & did not have all the answers believe it or not) who wrote it realized some new ideas that might be in the best interest of the American people. So logic dictates that you should be able to 'amend' your 'amendments'.
Also, these amendments were enacted in 1791, your country was not even 15 years old (we all know how inconsistent 15 year olds can be, haha) and over 220 years have passed since then. The world and peoples values have changed dramatically since then, not to mention Slavery being abolished 50 years AFTER this declaration. Which means we have to embrace the fact that nostalgia & tradition hold no place in a world of reason & logic, and therefore your laws should reflect the reality of present society, because as a species, we evolve, so should our laws, otherwise they hold us back in the dark ages when we still hadn't worked out that Black people are human aswell.
I also have to ask why Americans are so enamored by firearms, to the point of actually collecting them. They are instruments of death, made with the express purpose of piercing the flesh of an antagonist at such a rate that it either completely disables them or robs them of all consciousness that life gave them. I question the values & sanity of anyone who anglicizes such things, find another hobby, one that doesn't indirectly encourage usage of them that eventually leads to someone's child being killed.
You also mention that these incidents have decreased over the past 20 years.
Here you are likening these atrocities to some form of epidemic, with so many incidents that we can accurately ascertain whether the numbers have went down in such a small time frame. When the number of such incidents is so low within a given time frame, we don't have enough data to suggest their increase or decline in occurence, as the cases are subjective to circumstance. So come back with that argument in 50 years when there's been mabye 1000 other examples for us to extrapolate such findings.
Also, EVEN if your argument made sense, and that the cases were more infrequent, wouldn't that be because society has changed since the past, and that we take better care of our Psychopaths now than we did 20 years ago? At NO point would that even suggest anything to do with Gun legislation. So your 'It must be a social thing' argument is only your own speculative opinion and you've not shown evidence that cannot be refuted.
In order to prevent anyone coming back at me with some half-researched rebuttals filled with flawed 'facts', i'll fire some statistics at you, that are easily found and you can look them up further yourselves.
The USA's domestic homicide rate is 3.5 times higher than that of the UK, which makes it a higher homicide rate than that of Palestine, India, Iran, Libya, and over twice that of Israel and Iraq.
60% of those homicides found in the USA, are caused by guns.
I encourage you to Research that yourselves. Try saying it's a social thing now, And the point you made about it being seasonally correlated and possibly caused by 'Holiday angst' is laughable, Psychopathic mindsets kind of speak for themselves in that they are aggravated by things not associated with normal causes of stress. Once again you put forward merely speculation, no evidence.
And this idea you had of comparing these statistics to those of Israel & Switzerland??? Very different cultures & people with different values and issues. Comparing the Apples of the passive nation of Switzerland and the religiously aggravated Oranges of the nation of Israel does not translate into sound logic. I politely ask you to reassess what you deem to be 'cold logic' Rick, as this is a weighty issue and demands care in it's responses illicited from the likes of us.
It's simple, if no-one has guns, then you don't need one to 'protect yourself' from people who won't be armed. And to the deluded people that think criminals will get guns regardless of laws, please come over to Scotland and wait for the very rare case that someone has a thief enter their property, they NEVER have firearms, and on the rare cases that firearms turn up in this country, there is such shock and action regarding it that they take up the headlines because they are so few & far between, I myself have never seen or know anyone else who has been presented with a real gun. We don't get movie theaters being massacred, not because we don't have our own Psychopaths (every country does), but because the chances of them getting at least a handgun over here are extremely rare, and, being Psychotic, they never have the means or resources to get them.
I will wrap up by saying that i feel it's a moral no-brainer that guns should be outlawed and removed from the hands of civilians & the public interface portion of law enforcement, whose weapons are not deterrents but more likely aggressors that fuel the public's unsubstantiated claims to 'bear arms' for 'home protection'.
The sad thing is that I'm confident this will not be the case anytime soon, as to even mention 'Gun control' is political suicide, because 89% of Americans are against Gun control of any kind, never mind total firearm abolishment. Obama was probably crying in his speech because he knows he has to address this hot topic, although now i mention it, I saw no tears, but that's irrelevant.
Everyone's quick to offer prayers but not many offer action or support to causes that can prevent someone else's children (including your own) being needlessly killed by someone who has easy access to guns.
I put forward all my points & arguments in a non-obtrusive spirit & hope people do not misinterpret what i have said
Frazer
Me playing Joe's actual Ibanez Tubescreamer pedal -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76jk58_vl2s