As a libertarian, I am contractually obliged to mumble something about “from my cold dead hands” (mainly because citizens need defence, in the last case, against the government rather than specifically for self-defence).

Pragmatically, I am aware that it would be quite foolish to re-legalise widespread gun ownership in the UK while actual gun ownership and use remains comparatively rare and even our police can do without them for the most part.

I would say, however, that one big problem with situations like Virginia Tech were the borderline ideological introductions of so-called “gun free” zones. Essentially, announcing that your students and staff will all be unarmed is a great way to become a target for someone who is interested in killing a lot more people before they are finally tackled.

As for teenage angst, I think our very notion of the education institution to which you are more or less compelled to attend in the UK and ACTUALLY compelled to attend in Germany may be playing a rather big role. I think we need a wider idea of what constitutes a good upbringing for individual children, and to reject the idea that we need to socialise them in institutions that are heavily controlled by the state.

Spree killings make up a statistically tiny number of gun killings compared with ‘ordinary’ shootings (if I can use such a term), accidental shootings and suicides so the idea that allowing students to carry their own guns on the off-chance that they might encounter a spree-killer is ludicrous.

Well, if people are allowed to carry them generally, it makes no sense to ban them from doing so in a specific zone. Or you could at least, in the case of universities especially, have qualified staff who are permitted to be armed.

Isn’t there low gun crime in Canada despite high ownership of guns?

And then there’s Switzerland where everyone has to have an assault rifle!

Ironically, last year I challenged Sunny to find a writer who would post a piece here in favour of gun ownership. Neither of us wished to write that article, but there’s room for guests and devil’s advocates. Sunny’s response was that few LC people would be interested. I trust that Sunny will accept my disclosure in good humour.

Returning to the original post: Has there ever been a “school shooter” who still lives? Did they all take their own lives or present themselves to be killed? Is there a difference in conscious state between an adult who murders immediate family in rage or a teenager who kills people at school? How do you monitor mental health of teenagers and adults?

Or perhaps, knowing that you will never get it right, you limit availability of mass killing weapons. It doesn’t solve the mental health problem but it keeps people alive.

BTW, newspapers have reported that the parents of the German school killer are being questioned about whether they kept their weapons secure.

Be careful of repeating American arguments about who has ‘low gun crime’. Both Switzerland and Canada have murder rates noticably higher than the UK.

http://www.data360.org/dataset.aspx?Data_Set_Id=1934

http://www.data360.org/dataset.aspx?Data_Set_Id=1936

http://www.data360.org/dataset.aspx?Data_Set_Id=1933

Of course, to compare like for like, you want to compare cities, not countries with different levels of urbanisation. According to:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/153799.stm

Geneva has double the murder rate of any UK city listed.

Has there ever been a “school shooter” who still lives?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Andrew_Williams

What do you make of Mark Ames’ thesis in ‘Going Postal’ and encapsulated in his latest blogpost, “Alabama Murder Mystery Solved: The Shocking Story Of How A Chicken-Slaughtering Billionaire Plundered Rural America“?

What is peculiar about gun crime in this country is that it has remained relatively low, regardless of gun control laws. It was low when we had no gun control and it has been low since. I think I’m right in saying that it has risen since Dunblane though.

You are wrong about not having constitutional protections of gun ownership, since the right to bear arms formed part of the Bill of Rights of 1689 (which remains in force).

Who needs guns, when you’ve got green custard?

Bishop: Thanks for that, did wonder if I’d be proved wrong on that score. Point remains though that we never fully embraced that right; have to wonder if that’s more to do with our general bizarre relationship to rights than anything else.

Richard: True, but Canada has also had school shootings, while Switzerland had the Zug parliament massacre in 2001. Making international comparisons is incredibly problematic, but this Wikipedia page provides UN figures, which seems to show that we make up for our low gun homicide rate with homicide by other means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence

charlieman: Another wikipedia link, but this seems to show the vast majority either commit suicide, are killed by police, or later commit suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_murderers_and_spree_killers_by_number_of_victims#School_massacres

Also intriguing is that there have been no school shootings by women or teenage girls, as far as I can tell. Angst and alienation tend to cut both ways, but girls tend to talk about their feelings far more openly than the opposite sex does. Also worth bearing in mind is that female serial killers in general are incredibly rare, but you’d still expect there to be some correlation if depression/mental illness is one of the major contributory factors.

Septicisle

The right to bear arms provision of the Bill of Rights is an interesting one. It was accepted for hundreds of years that it did exactly what it said on the tin and that there was a right to bear arms – see for example this (relatively) recent judgement of the High Court where it was stated that “It is not in dispute that the Bill of Rights gave the citizen the right to hold arms.” It was only in the twentieth century that gun control was brought in. So we did fully embrace the right, but it was salami sliced away from us over the years, with the provision of the BoR apparently repealed by implication.

There are some rather interesting legal issues around the position of the BoR, because the court in the Metric Martyrs case held that constitutional acts like the BoR can not be repealed by implication. Quite where this leaves gun control is unclear, and one rather gets the impression that the powers that be would rather the whole question was swept under the table.

The implications for the current civil liberties debate though are important. Given that we live under a constitution where entrenched legislation is not possible it may be that the most we can hope for is a new BoR which exists as a constitutional act, which can only be repealed explicitly.

“There are some rather interesting legal issues around the position of the BoR, because the court in the Metric Martyrs case held that constitutional acts like the BoR can not be repealed by implication. Quite where this leaves gun control is unclear, and one rather gets the impression that the powers that be would rather the whole question was swept under the table.”

Interesting. Of course, it did take a recent test case in the US supreme court to actually reinforce the individual right to bear arms against state law. In fact, I think I met one of the appealing defendants. Perhaps someone could sue for the right in this country and have it upheld! Sean Gabb had a fascinating discussion on the constitutional implications of the metric martyrs case and he was also very hopeful: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc063.htm

There was a whole battery of scholarship that supported the individual right argument of the second amendment. It’s an entirely different situation here, of course. The courts argue that the BoR has been repealed as far as the right to bear arms goes. It may be that the metric martyrs case is not as significant as it might appear – I think there is an argument that even if the repeal is not explicit, it is still valid if there is no other reasonable explanation for the wording of the subsequent Act.

Even then there is an argument that the BoR can still not be repealed because it merely brought onto the statute books an agreement between the people and William of Orange – he got the throne and they got guarantees of good behaviour from the executive. That being the case, and repeal of the provisions of the BoR would mean the unravelling of the constitution.

It’s a funny old thing, the British constitution. We keep having revolutions and forcing the monarch to promise to behave (Magna Carta, Glorious Revolution) and the moment our backs are turned they say they can’t be bound and they can jolly well do as they like. It should really be up to the courts to enforce the promises made by monarchs.

Perhaps what we should be doing is asking the courts to enforce the Declaration of Rights to which the monarchy agreed rather than ruling on the Bill of Rights.

Septicisle (11): girls tend to turn their violence inward (e.g. eating disorders and other forms of self harm) rather than outwards onto other people.

From an Australian perspective, I am old enough to recall the easy days of the 60s when I first owned a firearm. In those days, a landowner could apply for, and obtain, a pistol license with no obstacles put in his way. Longarms were allowed in all calibres from the age of 16 and no licensing or regisration was required. An airgun was a rite of passage at 14. There was no great degree of violence!
Since it’s inception a decade ago, gun control in Australia has been a nightmare, as petty beaurocrats wield power and many citizens put their guns underground. We have not had a school shooting in this country, thank god, but we do have escalating violence in our public school system. IMHO the blame for this can be laid at the feet of our “entertainment” media. Back in the “innocent” days ( yes,I do concede that we,in other ways, are richer in our experiences than back then) our entertainment was family friendly – I love Lucy, My Three Sons, etc. Even our police shows were not as violent as they are now, Now much of our entertainment has obligatory graphic vioence- people are not nice to each other, I would go as far as to say that dysfunctional families are the staple of soapies.
With all this thrown in our faces, is it any wonder that the susceptible are lapping it all up and emulating, in their fancies, what they see? Gun control is akin to puttng a bandage over a festering sore without attending to it’s conditiopn first.

I lost a close family member to a gun in Kenya. The things should all be chucked off the edge of the moon. I hate them.

@Soru (6): Thanks for the stats, but they are data rather than intelligence. If we are talking about whether guns are bad, homicide statistics per capita, even when comparing similarly developed nations, don’t really illuminate. The numbers I want are homicides, deliberate injuries and threats perpetrated by gun bearing strangers in those environments.

Family murder by gun is partially incidental to restrictions on gun ownership — and I hate any glibness in that statement. Killers who murder their family by gun, in rage or madness, would use another weapon instead, hopefully with diminished consequences.

I’m afraid the narrative is all wrong here. Gun ownership in Britain was widespread throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century, especially in rural areas. It was only after the abolition of the death penalty that gun crime became more rampant. The consequence of this was heavy gun control after Hungerford and Dunblane.

This is a perfect unintended consequences example. Whatever you may think of capital punishment, it kept gun violence in check. After it went, gun crime rose. Today, many police officers are routinely armed, particularly in ghettoised areas.

The myth of Britain as a pleasant gun-free land is just that, a myth. There are thousands of guns here – they just belong to criminals and the police rather than law-abiding citizens.

As far as the teen angst is concerned, I find myself rolling my eyes. I grew up in the United States, going to public schools. Life is not always easy as a teenager, although as I find myself in my mid twenties I think it was a walk in the park. Regardless, the concept of men bottling their feelings and women being more expressive does not change my general rule where the inner workings of some people’s brains’ is concerned. YOU CANNOT FIX CRAZY. Everyone walks around in the bubble…. “If they hadn’t had access to guns, it wouldn’t have happened” GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE DO! “The pain the shooter must have gone through being ridiculed daily” MAYBE IF THEY HADN’T ACTED LIKE OUTCASTS, THEY WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN TREATED LIKE ONE!
I am so overwhelmingly OVER this whole political correct nonsense. Whatever happened to people having backbones, and dealing with the stressors in life instead of brandishing a firearm in hopeless attempt to regain power (even if it only lasts 30 seconds)? People need to stop pointing fingers and deal with the problems at hand. Parents need to interact with their children. Idiots need to stop breeding. People need to be able to deal with the fact that not everyone is going to accept or approve of them, AND THEY DONT HAVE TO!
Ugh, I’m exhausted!

Research shows guns appeal most to people with low intelligence.

I agree. Give a gun to an idiot and he will kill anyone who scares him. Unfortunately America is full of idiots. Everyone who is against gun control shares responsibility for school massacres.