> Because someone has to be held accountable for the tragedy, and since we can't hold politicians, or the gun manufacturers accountable for it, you find the next person in line.
> The shooting appeared to be a random act involving individuals participating in the reckless discharge of firearms.
While the second amendment arms US citizens and for reason, simultaneously, the punishment should be 100x greater than it is today for any gun violence of any kind that isn't pure self defense. Whether it's this or school shooters, a serious public example needs to be made that is strong enough to send a chilling effect to stop this horrendous behavior.
> There are real people, coming from conservative think tanks, conservative politicians, etc., that put these ideas into the shooter's head and allow guns to be so available. Lay the blame there.
There are also real people, coming from progressive think tanks, progressive politicans, etc., that put ideas into the Antioch shooters head, the Waukesha drivers head, the NYC Subway shooters head.
So where does that get us as a society?
There is a deeper, tribal breakdown going on here and to fixate on the intermediate target is a half-measure.
> Had he not posed with an assault rifle in the first place two people would not be dead today, he is still morally responsible for that to me.
So basically Rittenhouse 'morally accountable' for not foreseeing the unforseeable. How silly.
Rittenhouse attended a protest while legally carrying a firearm. 2020 had seen tens of thousands of people do the same. How many people were forced to fire their guns in self-defense at a protest? I can't think of a single one. Any risk he was incurring would have been remote and purely hypothetical. For that you hold him morally responsible for these men's deaths?
What about the actions of those men who he killed? Unlike Rittenhouse's attendance at the protest, their decision to attack Kyle Rittenhouse was decidedly not legal. Unlike Rittenhouse's choice to attend the protest, which carried only hypothetical danger, his attackers would have had no doubt that attacking a man with a gun carried risks that were neither remote nor hypothetical.
Remember, when conflict seemed imminent, Rittenhouse ran away, attempting to avoid conflict. His attackers chased him down and forced the issue.
> So to stay in your image: When Remington sells me a shotgun knowing I will go and use it to kill my family (because it was clearly visible) they are complicit.
No, that's a very different metaphor.
The item being bought causes no harm. The problem is reckless spending. That puts the bar of responsibility in a very different place.
> We look the other way when people are doing things that seem bad, until they pick up a gun, then we blame the gun for the outcome, not the fact that government agencies looked the other way instead of intervention.
This always struck me as silly excuse. The gun nuts are pretty obsessed with personal liberty. Taking their guns is already beyond the pale, so I have a hard time believing they're going to accept being thrown in a sanitarium whenever they do something antisocial like show up at a school board meeting foaming at the mouth about vaccines...
>Kyle exercised an incredible measure of discipline in his restraint—not shooting wildly into a mob that was overtaking him, only firing on those who were attacking him.
He was an active shooter, and thus a threat to anybody around, and the people tried to defend themselves from that threat. Why those people got denied the right of self-defense and treated as attackers instead? I think it is a total miscarriage of justice that an active shooter successfully claimed self-defense. Not shooting wildly into a mob is really a pretty low, a new low i'd say, bar of responsible gun safety. You seeing laudable restraint and discipline in that is one of the best illustrations of the gun problem in the society.
> Getting a manslaughter charge when acting in self defense is what shouldn't make sense.
The instant someone pulls a gun trigger, they assume legal responsibility for the path of the bullet, and everything it does along that path.
If I fire a shot in justified self-defense but miss and kill someone else, I can (and should) be charged with manslaughter. That makes good legal sense, as far as I can tell.
> As a gun owner, sure there is. If your gun shows up in a crime, you get indicted as well. That would put a big dent in people being willing to buy guns for others.
So again, as many others have said, if your gun is stolen then what? You’re implying that if your gun showed up at a crime scene you’ve done something wrong, which is clearly not true in many cases.
All this will do is decrease gun ownership due to liability.
>Because guns are expressly designed to kill.
And whats wrong with that? There are always two sides to every situation, a party that is bend on taking away someone's assets (possibly life) and another party defending that.
> But this is not ChatGPT's fault, it's the other person's fault.
Yes, and “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. ChatGPT is a tool, and a major and frequent use of that tool is doing exactly what the OP mentioned. Yes, ChatGPT didn’t cause the problem on its own, but it potentiates and normalises it. The situation still sucks and shifting the blame to the individual does nothing to address it.
> Alternatively, we can continue to have mass killings, single killings, and lots of crime by guns bought by people that should have been blocked.
Sounds possible in theory, but not so much in practice. Let's say I live my whole life as a model citizen, then one day buy a gun with the intent to kill a bunch of people. No background check in the world would deny my purchase. What now?
> My opinion is that he had a gun he shouldn't have had, was in a place he shouldn't have been, causing trouble he shouldn't have been involved in, and killed two people who shouldn't have died.
He had a gun he had a right to have, in a place he had a right to be, at a protest that he had a right to be involved in as much as the protesters, and killed two people rightfully in self defense. What's the problem here? If people don't want to be killed, I would recommend they don't chase down an armed man and imminently threaten his life.
Suffice to say that gun owners still performed these shootings. I grew up as a marksman and got my hunting license before I could drive, but I'm never going to daily concealed carry. It's even more ridiculous to assume that more people carrying more weapons saves anything but your own skin.
I'm not going to turn this into a 'take away their guns' shtick (mostly because I don't believe in it), but firearm regulation is just getting started. The barriers to buying and legally carrying a firearm are comically low, and enables people with "malignant intentions" to be even more dangerous than they would otherwise. In an information age where mass shootings are felt so personally and frequently, it's hard to imagine concealed carry being more popular than gun reform.
What happened to holding the shooter responsible?
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