MSNBC:

"The shooting apparently happened as President Bush was leaving Omaha, where he attended a fundraiser for Republican Senate candidate Mike Johanns."

I suppose Omaha should feel lucky that an airstrike wasn't called in, just in case.

I suppose Omaha should feel lucky that an airstrike wasn't called in, just in case.

With SAC right there, too!

Why is it important to take cover when someone unknown calls your name? I'm not familiar enough with this sort of situation to figure it out.

Diatryma @ #3:

It could be that disgruntled guy in accounting you don't know, but thinks you're the bane of his existence. That is, just because you don't know them, does mean they don't know you--and are gunning for you.

Erring on the side of paranoia in a situation like the one described above seems entirely reasonable to me.

And since suicide-by-riot-squad looks like a growth industry these days, train kids old enough to be away from their parents in all of the above. Including how to spot a "safe" adult during and after an attack.

Because "don't talk to strangers" could end up being deadly.

Think of it as a new sort of "fire" drill.

They're saying now as many as nine dead, including the shooter.

Thanks, Alberto; that was what I was thinking, but I wasn't sure. Paranoia is certainly reasonable.

It's a hideous tactical situation. You don't know anything. The person shooting could be trying to make a ruckus and get killed (suicide by cop), in which case he'll be more likely to shoot at random than aiming carefully at people; or he could be trying to kill as many people as possible, in which case he'll shoot anybody he sees; or he could be after one or a few specific people, in which case he'll shoot them plus probably anybody who seems like a threat.

In addition to specific aimed shots, there's the question of where the random shots and the misses go.

"Cover" is always best, since it protects you in both cases. "Concealment" generally prevents his aiming shots at you, but does nothing against the random shots and misses.

Standing behind a pillar can be better than lying on the floor, in that less of you is visible especially from medium to far distances.

Looking out from your cover obviously renders your eye (and hence much of your head) vulnerable, plus it's movement (which draws the eye). Not knowing what's going on can be fatal. As I say, it's a really horrid tactical situation.

Getting out has a lot to recommend it.

Remember, if you encounter police officers, that they don't instantly know that you're not the shooter. If you are a carry-permit holder and are armed, of course this is about 500 times more critical (I hope your carry permit training covered this sort of issue).

Jim,
how does the advice that "the kill zone is narrow, so get out of it" (paraphrased) fit?

Thats a paraphrase of what you said about bombing type situations, yes?

If you encounter police during the above situation, keep your hands in plain sight, and move slowly.

If you encounter police during the above situation, keep your hands in plain sight, and move slowly.

The kill zone is narrow.

If you're in it ... get out of it. If it's a bomb or gas situation, going to ground isn't an option. If it's an armed assault, going to ground will be an option. Keep your head.

The words about making oneself one with the pavement come as a direct quote from a Navy SEAL of my acquaintance. See me in person for more on this.

as jim said, car doors count as concealment.
if you were thinking they might count as cover, a trip to the box o' truth will correct that. (google it).
they did a segment on cars--handgun rounds all went through a car door with ease, and rifle rounds went through both sides of the car.
when you see people crouching behind car doors in a fire-fight? they may have a good reason, but cover ain't it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/05/AR2007120501868.html?nav=rss_email/components

Washington Post is reporting the shooter was a 20 year old named Robert Hawkins (not Mohammed), and that he left a suicide note. Eyewitnesses describe him as having a military style haircut, a black backpack and a camouflage vest.

Fingers will be pointed at rock music and video games in 3...2...1...

The kill zone is narrow, deep; and fluid.

Narrow, because a single shooter has a limited field of view.

Deep, because so long as he has ammo, it persists.

Fluid because he can move.

Jim's SEAL friend is right, dirt is better than not, prone is (as a rule) better than not. If you are thinking of making a break for it... prone is less useful. Crouched behind a planter is better there, vertical behind a pillar is not to be sneered at.

In all sorts of things like this being as aware as possible of what's going on is paramount. If the shooter is coming toward you... how is he coming toward you. The shooter at Lyubi's (Texas, 20 years ago) walked through the place shooting people as they lay on the floor trying to hide. If that's happening, the sooner you make your move the better.

Look for cover/concealment and make a break for it. Crossing movement is better than straight away. Short is better than far. Better to run a ways, and flop, than to go balls out for the door.

I could go on, but that's probably too much for now.

The fact that car doors are not cover is made obvious by the practice of pouring concrete into them (something a friend's moonshiner relatives did). This is not to make the car heavier, I assure you!

Of course, any time you spend worrying about being killed in one of these guy-goes-mad-and-kills-everybody sprees, would be better spent leaping out of your chair and running in place until you're out of breath. You are somewhere around a million times as likely to die of a heart attack than in a massacre, and the exercise does some good.

I do three to six miles per day.

Also: time spent being aware of your surroundings is never wasted.

mjfgates: Yep. Mass shootings and terrorist attacks are several orders of magnitude less likely to get you than drunk drivers and heart attacks. This is the problem with pretty much all proposed solutions to these attacks--they're so rare that almost anything you do will have much bigger costs than it ever does good.

mjfgates @17: Yes, it makes sense to deal with your higher risks first. I already wear a seatbelt when I travel by automobile or airplane (subways don't have seatbelts), and have never smoked a cigarette in my life. That doesn't mean I shouldn't think about other possible health or safety issues during those boring sessions on the exercise bike, which I only convince myself to do by having something to read and giving myself a reward afterwards. The reward is that I get to play on the weight machines.

Also: time spent being aware of your surroundings is never wasted.

Unless you're in Charlotte, North Carolina. </bitter>

mjfgates: Respectfully, I disagree.

There is no way, in the US to avoid news, of such things; and handwringingly stupid news at that, which tells you (for days) all about it and makes it seem as though it might happen at any moment, in any place (which is true, but trivial).

Yes, the odds of such a thing happening are small. The odds of lots of things happening are small. Being aware of what one can do, in the odd, and very-off, chance it happens to you is a good thing.

It reduces the uncertainty. And, God forbid one happened to be in that mall in Omaha, one has some semblance of preparation, which reduces the odds of freezing up, or worse, just blindly panicking.

Is it likely? No.

Is a huge earthquake, in my lifetime likely? No.

What about a tsunami rushing 2 miles inland? No.

But being ready for it, and the aftermath (in such ways as one can be ready) isn't foolish.

If you have to move under fire, it's up, three running steps, and drop to the next good cover. You're not going deep for a pass into the endzone. Three is the magic number. Four is pushing it. Five is straight out. If you're up and someone's shooting towards your vicinity (but not waiting for you to jack in the box into your next move), by the count of three, you'll drop and hear bullets whiz over your head. You might make four if your lucky. Five voids all warranties.

Oh, and before you get up, figure out where you're going to go to next. Then start running and start counting.

The cadence in your head will be: up, one, two, three, drop. ... up, one, two, three, drop. If you get into a groove, you'll start looking ahead to the second point of cover while you're up and running to your first.

How awful. It seems like a certain percentage of suicides feel the need to take other people with them. Imagine if instead of having another national freakout over guns, violent videogames, or mall security, we put that energy into seriously studying the problem of suicide, and finding a solution.

I don't mean to imply I'm not for gun control, because I am. I just wonder if that issue is obscuring something deeper.

mjfgates, #17: This falls under my rubric of "expect the normal, but be prepared for the weird". There are dozens of more-or-less unlikely scenarios for which I have a Basic Plan in my head that I review from time to time. I don't expect any of them to happen, but I'm sure the people in that mall weren't expecting what happened to them either. If you wind up on the short end of the odds, having thought about it is MUCH better than not having thought about it.

The US Census website says there were 47,835 malls and shopping centers in the US in 2005 ("increased by approximately 10,000 since 1990").

Say that one in twenty (guess) of those is a "real" enclosed mall rather than a strip mall or smaller. That's still well over 2000.

There have been what, fewer than a dozen mall mass shooting incidents[1]? I can't imagine there have been 20, making it less than 1% chance that any given mall has had one.

(The scary part about this stat is that two of them are in malls I've spent significant time in: the Tacoma Mall and Salt Lake City's Trolley Square.)

[1] To leave "gang A sees member of gang B and opens fire" incidents out of it, though those are still not anything I'd want to be around during.

According to my recent research, the FBI's current recommendation in school shootings is *against* shelter-in-place, FWIW.

The word from the Bureau these days is get the hell out, any way you can. They call them "sitting ducks" for a reason.

NBC Nightly News said he'd been fired by McDonald's the day before and wanted to go out with a show.

From the report I found on our ABC about it (Australian media) it appears the shooter was a disgruntled former McDonald's worker, who decided he was going to go out with a bang. Literally - suicide by cop, with the added joy of getting his honour guard in hell up to a decent amount. Selfish bastard.

My sympathies to the friends and families of all of those killed in the incident - including the shooter.

Seems like Mr Hawkins wanted to be famous. This is not a definition of 'fame' I recognise.

But as Jim hinted, if you imagine an identical situation - a vulnerable not-quite-adult who's been fired by McDonald's, gets depressed, wans to go out with a show and shoots up a mall - where the shooter is called Mohammed. What would happen? Today the media would be ranting about Islamic terrorism, and DHS would be asking for (and getting) $billions to put make-work security-theatre into every one of those 47,835 malls.
Instead, because the shooter is called Robert, nothing at all will be done: except for the few families whose lives have just been devastated, the nation will shrug and turn the page, just like last time and all the other times.

Christopher #26: Yeah, I've spent some time in Trolley Square, too, which makes this kind of story creepier.

Terry/Lee: I'm certainly not against having an idea what to do in weird but bad situations. I like posts like this. But most proposed changes in law or society to prevent them will probably cost more than they benefit.

Mary #24: It seems like we already spend a fair bit on depression and other mental problems, at least in the sense of lots of research into drugs to treat them. I'm all for finding better treatments, but I wonder how much we can do.

My belief is that the front-line doctors--the ones who routinely see you or I, beed better eduction about psychiatric problems and their treatment. And not the sort of "use this pill!" advertising. There's also specific problems with the system in the USA; not just who pays but the way the War on Drugs affects available medication.

The problem is that some drugs for condition A can also benefit condition B, even without the formality of approval, and there's a mental model of "side-effects" which can let such warning signs be dismissed or explained away.

I know. We're unusual people, able to find documents from reputable sources that raise awkward questions. And it's so frustrating when tha drug manufacturer's own warnings seem to be dismissed. It's annoying when the FDA or the BMJ are given no more status as a reliable source than is Wikipedia.

Amd. when I see the BMJ reporting how drug companies try to distract Doctors from trials which show their product kills more people than the drug it replaces, I get a bit angry. Did my mother nearly die because some Doctor got a promotional notebook and pen?

Trauma is the leading cause of death for Americans ages one through forty-four. After that, it's heart disease and cancer, with trauma as a strong third.

When I heard of this incident, though, I thought back to Tom Tancredo's speech when he came to Colebrook. Remember, he's the one who's been airing the commercial with the Islamic terrorist blowing up a mall in the USA.

Tancredo said that the FBI had reliable intelligence that Islamic terrorists were planning attacks on three malls in the USA this Christmas season.

I'm betting that Tancredo's full of it.

And I thought of Ann Coulter saying that you have to stop and search the brown people because they're the terrorists.

Not in America they aren't.

Such attacks may be rare, but I have been shot at twice, and that's int he relatively peaceful Netherlands, where guns are probably an order of magnitude more rare than in the US.

1. The Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) link with mass murder has not been fully explained.

In the early days of Prozac, there was such an incident. The relatives of the victims sued (the gunman was on Prozac) and lost.

I know enough about the SSRIs to know that we really have no idea about all the effects on behaviour of changing your neurochemistry in that way. Their use exploded so quickly, because of an apparently lower side effect profile than their predecessors (the tricyclics and the monamine oxidase inhibitors MAOIs) and, cynically, because they have become such a huge stream of profits for pharma cos, that we don't know the full side effect spectrum.

A certain number of mass murder cases have occurred (including, I believe, VA Tech) where the assassin was on an antidepressant (SSRI). Correlation or causation? We don't know. And of course each SSRI is idiosynchratic: Prozac is not Seroxat etc.

2. We are getting towards the Israel world. Where every shopping mall has armed guards (searching bags on the way in in the Israeli case).

South Africa, probably the most violent country in the world that does not have a formal civil war (ie excluding Somalia, Congo, Iraq, etc.) is also in that stage. So too I believe is Brasil.

If there are 40,000 shopping malls in the USA, and each needs an average of 3 armed guards 16 hours a day 7 days a week, then that is 1092 guard-days per mall per year, or about 4.333 man years. So say 160,000 armed guards at 252 working days a year each.

Say we double that to provide a similar level of security in schools and colleges.

That's doable. Easier in Israel, and South Africa of old, because you had so many men around with military training. Carrying a 12-gauge or a H&K submachine pistol around whilst wearing an Army-strength Kevlar jacket isn't the same as the guy in McDonalds with a .38 on his hip.

balanced against that would be the accidental shootings resulting.

3. I'm a militant gun control person. But in the US that is just not practical: there's already far too many guns out there. It's not even practical, I suspect, to talk about doing away with 'military type' rifles-- you can't really distinguish them from hunting rifles. Or even heavy calibre semi-automatic pistols, like the VA Tech shooter used.

So does 'permit to carry' do anything?

Should we all (when visiting the US) arm ourselves?

Can a 'freely constituted militia' of such people guard schools, shopping malls etc. safely?

Against terrorist organisations, it only needs to be probabilistic. If there is a 20% chance, say, that your flight has an armed civilian on it, the chances of a 9-11 are much reduced. Ditto putative gunmen attacking the Mall of the America-- say 7 gunmen with AK47s and grenades. Say there are 20,000 people in M of A on a normal Thursday evening. Then 20 or 30 with guns is going to complicate the plan immeasurably.

We might call this the 'Flight 93 Defence'.

However the security risks and complexities for local law enforcement are large. The press says the response time to the Nebraska shootings was 6 minutes, longer than usual-- that's pretty fast, even so.

Maybe the solution is that CWPs have to wear a certain set of clothing or hat, to ID themselves. Longer term, we could use an RFID tag, so the police gun would flash an error light if they point it at a CWP holder.

This opens up the risk that the assailants disguise themselves as CWP holders, or that the mad gunman is a CWP holder. You'd certainly need to have stringent background checks.

Although the risks of these sorts of events are very low, we may be evolving towards the world where we consider these sorts of measures.

I keep thinking of that scene in Total Recall, where to get on the mass transit system you have to be screened for guns.

And as Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Security constantly warns us, the focus of terrorist (or madman) attack will simply shift.

2 Lance Weber

I think that SAC has been replaced by 'Strat Command' (USSTRATCOM).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command#History

18 Jim McDonald

The etiology of these events seems to be changing. There seems to be increased selection by the perpetrators of situations where they can lock doors, etc, to maximise the death toll a la VA Tech, and Columbine also I believe.

So therefore issues re situational awareness.

In 'The Tipping Point' Malcolm Gladwell talks about the suicide cults amongst Polynesian adolescents-- a serious and well-documented problem.

It's undoubtedly true that there are mass phenomena: apparently light plane crashes go up after a major plane crash.

So possibly that is what we are seeing here, with recent mass shootings. One deviant trips, and dies in a blaze of glory, and others are inspired by his actions.

(AFAIK there has never been a female mass murderer. Female serial killers are rare enough, and usually in the thrall of a dominant male character (Paul Bernardo and Karen Homulka, and the Yorkshire Moors murderer here).

I suppose we could count the growing trend towards female suicide bombers (Tamil first, then Chechnyan, now Arab) as female mass murderers, but the motivations of suicide bombers are different-- many seem psychologically quite healthy, even in an enlightened, quasi-religious state. Perhaps closer analogies to the female members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other terrorist organisations.

Martyn Taylor #30: I call it the Herostratus syndrome.

About three one morning, on my way home from the casino in El Paso, Texas, I stopped off at a Diamond Shamrock for some gas. I heard a loud noise, whipped my head to that side and saw what I remember as a stocky, glassy-eyed, shiny-faced skinhead, dressed all in black, firing a handgun in the general direction of the desert behind the station. Everyone scattered. I hightailed it for the dumpster on the other side of the Diamond Shamrock and hid behind it. Not sure if a dumpster is good cover but it was concealment until he started wandering around. Instead, things quieted down and when I poked my head out he was long gone. I never heard or read anything in the news about what had just happened; the clerk inside the store seemed to take it all in stride.

James at 34 (boy, TV isn't what it used to be): If the FBI claimed to have reliable intelligence about such attacks, I'm sure it's similar to the "unspecific threats" against banking institutions and the like that HS used to warn us about in its early days; at the very best, "intelligence" gained through waterboarding and its like.

Very few female mass murderers of the "spree" variety, but one I remember from just after I moved to California is Brenda Spencer. Most female mass murderers kill their own children, but there are instances (some fairly recent of women deciding to go out in a blaze of "glory".

Martin @ 35:

I have been somewhat lucky a few times (deciding to head to pub B instead of the originally planned pub A, where there was a gang shooting an hour later; that sort of thing) in Stockholm.

However, I don't think gun ownership is noticeably lower in Sweden than it is in the US (on average 0.3 licensed firearms per Swedish citizen, most of those are rifles and shotguns).

Just yesterday someone planted a fake bomb in part of the medical school here at UCSD.

I never go into the medical complex, but I was briefly right on the other side of the street from the evacuated area; it looked all very orderly and sensible, people were calm, there were cops standing around chatting.

The linked article talks about administrative sluggishness in responding to the threat, which does not surprise me at all (although I think it is unfair to assume they should have closed the med school based on phoned-in threats; perhaps there was good reason to think they were idle). But geez, don't make people stand around for hours.

On the subject of, "Being aware of your surroundings ..."

My very first job was as a cashier at an airport parking lot. I was a dumb teenager, but I was a dumb teenager who spent a chunk of my childhood in a rough neighborhood.

We had a customer "find" a woman's purse on one of the shuttles. The lot manager spotted him walking off with the woman's purse, and intercepted him. The lot manager wanted to take the purse to the airport and have the woman paged. The customer who "found" the purse claimed he was going to, "call the cops once he got home."

The manager was playing hero and everyone else was standing around staring. The customer was being belligerant, angry, arms-waving, in-your-face rude. Just out-and-out unbalanced-acting.

This belligerant, angry man was also OPENLY carrying a handgun on a holster on his belt. And he kept dropping his hand to it while arguing with the manager. Granted, this is Arizona, but most people who carry around here carry concealed, legally or not. Anyone who's carrying a gun openly in the city, without a very good reason, I would assume is either an aggressive nut looking for a fight, a very scared nut looking to frighten people off, or a cop. And this was no cop.

I took one look at his body language, coupled by where he kept putting that hand, and made myself very scarce. I called the police from the rent-a-car place next door. When the police arrived, the belligerant man was gone and the manager had apparently physically taken the purse from him.

Said manager announced he would write me up for scramming and calling the police because I "overreacted." He claimed he could have handled the guy if he'd gotten violent and that I should have stuck around and helped the other customers.

I pointed out the man HAD A GUN.

The manager gave me a completely blank look. He'd been arguing with a belligerant, angry, irrational-acting man presumably trying to steal a purse, who had been caught in the act, and who had a gun, and who had been resting a hand on said gun ... and had never noticed the gun. And the way the guy had his hand on that gun was definitely drawing attention to it. It wasn't just a "putting my hand where it's comfortable" thing, it was an, "I'm putting my hand here so I can draw this if I need to," type thing. Like, fingers closing around the grip, arm tense.

Astoundingly, no one else had noticed the gun either. (Probably four or five witnesses.) Not the other customers, not the shuttle driver.

I still can't believe they were so unaware that they did not even look at the man's hands. (I mean, one of the first rules if you're dealing with someone potentially hostile is to make sure they don't have something in their hands that they can stab, shoot, or brain you with.)

-- Leva

Bruce Schnier has a similar bomb-threat item on his blog today.

Comments yieldedthis bomb detonation simulator
integrated with Google maps.

Just dial in your chosen location and yield.

HYDESim maps overpressure radii generated by a ground-level detonation; these radii are an indicator of structural damage to buildings. No other effects, such as thermal damage or fallout levels, are included in this tool. Note that the displayed rings are "idealized"; that is, no account is taken of terrain, urban density, ground type, weather conditions, and so on.

The data used in HYDESim are based on information found in "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons", 3rd Edition, by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan.

Oh, and one more bit, for the curious:Emergency responders use the Department of Transportation's Emergency Response Guidebook[1] for determining evacuation distances. Guide entry 112[2] deals with unknown explosive (113[3] deals with wetted TNT specifically) and recommends an initial evacuation of 1/2 mile with a note that fragments can travel a mile or more. A mile is recommended for a rail car or trailer involved in a fire with suspected heavily encased explosives.

[1] http://hazmat.dot.gov/pubs/erg/gydebook.htm

[2] http://hazmat.dot.gov/pubs/erg/g112.pdf

[3] http://hazmat.dot.gov/pubs/erg/g113.pdf

Posted by: RK at December 6, 2007 09:56 AM

Fragano @ #38, that's a very interesting reference. Who were we talking about? I wish.

As for female serial killers - not mass murderers - the UK's very own Beverley Allitt has today been told she will stay in jail for 30 years, and that self harming because of a putated Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy won't get her out any earlier.

41 Ingvar

I believe the US is at over 1 gun per person.

From memory, there are something like over 150m handguns in the US, let alone shotguns and rifles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/ihavearightto/four_b/casestudy_art29.shtml

The BBC website article implies only 60m Americans own guns. However I believe the number of owners to be much, much higher-- perhaps 50% of American households.

Handguns are, of course, disproportionately used in crimes over rifles and shotguns. In fact there was a Frontline episode a few years ago 'Ring of Fire' about how a disproportionate number of handgun crimes were committed with the products of a small group of manufacturers in a valley in Los Angeles: basically cheap, automatic (semi auto) 'Saturday Night Specials'.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/ring/

Heh, in Ystad, Inspector Wallender doesn't even always carry his gun ;-).

Terry # 22
I'm with you on preparedness - my personal motto is, 'I might never need this knowledge or skill. But if I ever need it, I'm either ready or dead.'

Only in America . . .

You know, I know quite a few people who own guns, including handguns, and very few of them are in the habit of carrying them around most of the time, even when they have a concealed-carry permit.
Guns (and their ammunition) are heavy. Because they are, in fact, a strong potential danger, when you have them with you, you do have to make sure they are carried securely. There are plenty of places you can't take them. (There are plenty of places you wouldn't want to take them, for that matter.) I realize the volume of talk coming from the "Can't cross the street without my gun" sector of the US population is pretty loud, but trust me, they are a distinct minority.

The number of Americans who'd be appalled at the thought of schlepping a gun through a mall, holiday season or otherwise, is a lot higher than the number of Americans who wouldn't dream of going to the mall without one. If we all took guns to the mall, we'd be killing each other over the parking places near the entrances, and this remains a rare occurrence. In some cases, we'd be having shoot-outs over who got the last shopping cart. We're not.

When you look at figures on the number of guns in the US, keep in mind that they are distributed quite unevenly among the population.

One argument I've heard against serious gun control is that if it were attempted in the US, people would be making guns in garage machine shops. Is this at all reasonable, or would small enterprise guns be too hard to make compared to the huge number of guns already available?

So far as situational awareness goes, I tend not to be especially good at it--I've gradually ground down my spaciness as sort of a hobby, but I suspect I haven't gotten all that far with the project. Any suggestions for me or the general public?

albatross, #32: Agreed, but I think we're talking at cross purposes. My response and Terry's were both to someone who appeared to be saying, "The odds against this ever happening to you are infinitesimal, so why even think about it?" -- which isn't the same thing at all as what you say here.

Valuethinker @ #37:
Female serial killers are rare enough, and usually in the thrall of a dominant male character (Paul Bernardo and Karen Homulka,

Karla Homolka. It's not entirely clear to me that Bernardo was the killer, though - he was a nasty serial rapist before they hooked up, but the murders happened only when she joined in the fun. (And she was a very enthusiastic participant; there were videos.) Invisible Darkness strongly suggests that she was the actual killer and that the plea bargain that has her now out on the streets and Bernardo put away for life was disastrously wrong. Abuse victim or complete psychopath, it's hard to say.

Martyn Taylor #45: That was Herodotus's take too.

#50 - For situational awareness in this community? Try reading each person's story or placing them as a character in the current setting - might even write the story.

Zip guns are made on the street by untrained labor. See Foxfire 5 for how guns were made in America long ago under conditions relatively primitive by today's standards.

Atlanta used to have, and maybe still does, a large framed exhibit of working guns made in jail.

The simplest basic gun all home made is a capped pipe loaded with black powder, wad and shot fired by a flashbulb run down from the muzzle end with wires sticking out. Finding a flashbulb is the hardest thing - it can often be fired by static electricity.

The next step up is a capped pipe with hole drilled and tapped for a glow plug. The glow plug can fire either black powder (see Fox Fire 5 or Diderot's Encyclopedia) or a cartridge. See the Phillipine Guerilla gun for a shotgun.

I suspect brand identity in the market would result in more guns coming over the border than being made in garage machine shops but sure small enterprise guns are easier to make than to establish in the market place.

Rumor has it guns are a fashion accessory in mod and rocker parts of England - hence the conversions of replicas so the conversion looks like the pistol fancied rather than the easier and cheaper zip gun.

Don't overlook supine as an alternative to prone that may offer a better view depending.

#49 - If we all took guns to the mall, we'd be killing each other over the parking places near the entrances .... How do you know?

Clark, that was partly snark and partly a wild-assed guess based on the behavior exhibited by my fello-citizens during the annual hilday shopping frenzy. Mall parking lots get to be pretty scary then--and not because of the risk of being mugged.

De-lurking briefly--this just reminded me of an incident we had out here a month or so ago. Some people out walking on a hiking trail, and shots were fired. And fired. And fired some more, for about an hour. Due to some jurisdictional issues (and apparent skepticism/indifference on the part of 911 operators), the folks trapped on the trail were left to their own devices.

No one killed or injured, although the potential was certainly present. And of course, since no police arrived until the incident was long over, the shooter(s) haven't been caught. The 911 operators have been "disciplined", although no one will say what that discipline entails.

What the lesson or takeaway from all this is, I have yet to discern. I just know I won't be biking on that trail anytime soon.

mjfgates: Taking care of one's health and being prepared for unlikely, but possible, catastrophes are not mutually exclusive.

And given that my father survived a shoot-out at the hospital where he works (stuffed himself and his patient under a desk with a modesty panel) last year, I'm not inclined to take thinking about what to do if there's a shooter around as a waste of time.

I remember the first time there was a major drive to take "Saturday Night Specials" out of circulation and off the market.

It resulted in higher firearms casualty rates.

Reason being: the older, cheap models flat didn't work. As in, wouldn't propel a round down-range. Firing pins that crimped over when struck by the hammer and so on. The weapons that replaced them were better constructed and more reliable, hence the greater destruction.

(I live in a state with very liberal firearms laws. Anyone can get one. I know lots of people who own one or more firearms. But the only folks I know who carry them on a day-to-day basis are uniformed law enforcement officers. This is a good thing.)

Stu @ 48 Only in America . . .

I wish that were so. One of the defining moments in my dad's life, and not in a good way, was being trapped at Australia Post the day someone went crazy and shot up two floors of personnel, for reasons noone ever understood. He spent the rest of his life, except the last days of his last illness, being scared.

He made us think about, and talk about, what we'd do in a similar situation - I think it gave him a degree of comfort to know that whatever we chose to do, our minds would not be the terrible blank that his was in the situation. We could do something. He couldn't do anything - he was too astounded.

Certainly not only in America. We've had two of the world's worst mass shootings right here in Australia. As vian says, nobody knows what caused it, in either case. They just went mad with a gun, or in the Port Arthur case, guns.

I hope that the gun controls put into place after the last atrocity will prevent people as deeply crazy as this from getting guns capable of that. Or at least, when they wake up one morning feeling brisk and energetic, and decide on the spur of the moment to go out and kill lots and lots of strangers, it will be difficult for them to succeed. I hope.

Only think Howard ever did right, in my opinion. The gun controls he instituted after the Port Arthur shootings do seem to have made a difference. There have been gang-related shootings, which are awful, and use guns which have been obtained illegally, but there have not been cases of people using legally obtained firearms to institute a massacre. Progress, of a sort.

You might argue (actually, on this blog, you probably wouldn't, but some might) guns don't kill people, people kill people, but people with guns kill way more people than other people.

Clark, #54: If we all took guns to the mall, we'd be killing each other over the parking places near the entrances .... How do you know?

Two words: road rage.

To elaborate, there's plenty of research pointing to the "anonymity effect" of being in a car as one of the things that leads to aggressive behavior while driving. There's a well-documented subset of those aggressive drivers who will pull out a gun and take potshots at another driver who's irritated them. The competition for close-in parking spaces at a mall, especially during the holiday shopping season, is nasty and brutal; I've narrowly avoided being run down (as a pedestrian) on multiple occasions when someone was so intent on getting THEIR parking space that they weren't noticing anything else. Add guns to that mix, and I don't want to contemplate the results.

Valuethinker, #36, the shooter at VA Tech got the guns because Virginia law only required the central database be notified (and then the gunstore owners) when someone went into a psych unit. Not when they were told to go and nobody followed through, which is what happened at Tech. The laws are being changed. (Hmmm, I spent a week in a psych unit. I wasn't supposed to be there, and the doctor who put me there got fired, but I wonder if I'm barred from having a gun?)

Martyn, #45, that would be Munchausen's Syndrome. The "by proxy" is when they hurt someone else -- usually a child -- to get attention.

It's still December 6th both here and in Montréal, so I will just repost this from James Nicoll:

December 6th, 1989
Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student.
Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student.
Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student.
Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department.
Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student.
Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student.
Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student.
Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
Annie Turcotte (b. 1969), materials engineering student.
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (b. 1958), nursing student.

How to instill some SA in yourself?

Oddly enough I've taught this. It's easier than one thinks.

Pick something. Preferably something one can see regularly, isn't too hard to spot and not overwhelmingly common. For those who live in a city, a color of car is good. Lets say you choose beige.

Now, start counting the number of beige cars you see in a given hour. Increase this to two hours.

After a while you will see them all the time.

After a week or so (one must be diligent) add another feature. Make of car is pretty good. Make it beige Volvos. When that's tooled up, make it something else (say light blue Mercedes coupes).

That's the basic skill. Being able to see things.

Then you have to decide what things you care about, e.g. I happen (for various reasons) to care about people who have guns. The first thing I do when I see a cop is eyeball to see if he/she is right or left handed (it's really easy, the nightstick goes on the off-hand side. Nightstick on the left, gun on the right).

That way, should something really crazy go down, I know which way the cop is going to be moving, and where the muzzle is likely to swing.

Lots of years dealing with that, and it's so automatic I don't really notice it; until something odd happens (or I see something stupid, like a mixed pair [left/right handed] keeping the gun hands centerlined to themselves. It was most obvious recently when a pair on Segways was like that).

Things like body language, concealed carry (harder to spot, and most often a case of... I'm pretty sure X is packing, than "I know X is packing) and the like take more practice, but watching how people move (terraces/window seats in cafes are good for this) will make it easier to spot.

In an urban setting the thing to look for is the person who is acting abnormal for the neighborhood. They might be unbalanced. They might be lost. Follow up will give you a better idea.

It's like hearing the odd ping, listening to it on the way home, and then deciding to take the care to the mechanic or not.

I really appreciate Jim's "what to do if" advice. I hope that I will never have a chance to use any of it, but I also hope that if I ever do, I will remember it.

Marilee @63 -- I too spent a week in a psych unit; in my case it was intentional on my part and voluntary, and I could at least theoretically have left any time. I wonder if I would now have trouble getting a gun? As it happens, I have no desire for one, but it doesn't seem quite right that voluntarily seeking medical care may have cost me at least an arguable constitutional right. Worse, I can easily see it leading some people who do care about guns in non-theoretical ways from not seeking care they should have. And yet...

Here's how I hope it works:

Instead of doing the insanity defense *after* something goes wrong, do it before. If there is reason to believe you are not in your right mind, you have to have a current evaluation by a qualified medical professional before you can buy or carry a gun.

I'm sure I've introduced problems by simplifying that so much, but it seems reasonable on the surface, at least.

Clark,

If we all took guns to the mall, we'd be killing each other over the parking places near the entrances ....

How do you know?

Because historically speaking, phrases like "large numbers of weapons smuggled across the border" have an anti-precedence for occurring just prior to phrases like "And widespread peace broke out.".

That's why.

52 Susan

The profile of Paul Bernardo is so close to that of many sexual criminals, who begin with violent rape and move on to murder, that it's hard for me to credence that he was innocent. I think, if we could find all of his rape victims, we might find 1 or 2 dead ones, as well.

Myra Hindly comes to mind (Moors murders) as a woman clearly under the thrall of her partner. Ditto the West woman (Fred West in Gloucestershire, and at least 19 murders of young women down the years).

Karen Homolka I don't know (excuse my Ukrainian transliterations ;-). The plea bargain was a mistake, in the sense that the police house search was incompetent (they found the video behind the light fitting, and apparently that is one of the first places you look when doing a house search).

49 fidelio

The situation I describe is true of modern South Africa. You don't drive anywhere (as a white, middle class person) without a gun. You just don't. And yes that increases the risk of getting shot randomly.

I remember a flatmate's brother, who was mouthing off someone in a bar. The guy pulled a gun, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger-- fortunately the chamber was empty.

Israel I believe is getting that way too, although the armed people are mostly (wholly?) soldiers, policemen and off duty soldiers. But certainly most people probably have guns at home (guessing there).

We are getting into the land of Heinlein's 'Door into Summer'. His guess is that the genetic result would be a politer population. Colour me sceptical.

50 re home made guns

I'm not sure about home made weapons, which strike me as beyond the abilities of the average gun owner, but it's essentially irrelevant. The US has porous borders, and 200 million domestic weapons (plus). The guns would flow in, and the domestic supply would meet needs for decades.

The New York City precedent says that stop and search can be used to reduce street crime, by arresting concealed weapons holders (knives as much as guns). But New York has several times the density of policemen of most American cities, and is geographically concentrated: they used to wait at transit stops and stop suspects. You couldn't do that on American freeways.

60 Dave Luckett

We've had at least 2 mass shootings. Hungerford (where the cops diverted motorists *into the path* of the shooter) and Dunblane (14 children killed). Whether the subsequent gun laws have helped I don't know: cheap Eastern European pistols and converted replica guns are apparently awash on the streets, and we've had a number of gang shootings in London this year.

However we haven't had any more mass shootings, touch wood.

The Omaha shooter apparently had an AK47. It's hard to understand from the outside why a civilised country allows its citizens to possess weapons like that*: they're not particularly good for hunting, and they aren't really a self defence weapon (vs. a 12 gauge or a hand gun). If he'd had an ordinary hunting rifle, he might have had a chance to kill fewer people.

However I don't see the US changing on this point any time soon. Even if say, a terrorist group did use AK47s that they bought commercially (as I understand the law, they could only buy a semi-automatic version, and converting it to full auto is a serious piece of gunsmithing). They would buy them at a gun show, I would think, as again as I understand US law, ordinary gun checks don't apply at gun shows. The IRA used to use Armalites (civilian M16s) so acquired from the US market (although at least some were also stolen from National Guard arsenals).

"Friends of Eddie Coyle" by George V. Higgins remains my point of contact with the US gun trade (the Robert Mitchum movie ain't bad, either), although it is over 30 years old, now.

www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/george-v-higgins/friends-of-eddie-coyle.htm

worth it for the language alone (Boston Irish).

* I believe also Finland does, a legacy of the civilian defence force. Don't know about other European countries, although Germany certainly not.

70 - Valuethinker -
50 re home made guns
I'm not sure about home made weapons, which strike me as beyond the abilities of the average gun owner, but it's essentially irrelevant. The US has porous borders, and 200 million domestic weapons (plus). The guns would flow in, and the domestic supply would meet needs for decades.

Average gun owner in the US? Probably. Average criminal enterprise more sophisticated than four teenagers stealing cars? No. Lots of drill presses in the US, lots of hobbiest engineers and mechanics of various sorts, and enough of them have questionable ethics (or other reasons) to make sure that criminal enterprises will have access to firearms even if someone managed to do a door-to-door search and seizure (without triggering open revolt, that is), and managed to actually secure the US's impossible-to-close coastlines and borders.

The New York City precedent says that stop and search can be used to reduce street crime, by arresting concealed weapons holders (knives as much as guns). But New York has several times the density of policemen of most American cities, and is geographically concentrated: they used to wait at transit stops and stop suspects. You couldn't do that on American freeways.

NYC also has some of the most stringent gun laws in the US (Chicago and Washington DC may be the only cities with worse), to the point where if you pull someone over and they have a pistol, nine-times-out-of-ten they are doing something illegal (if only just carrying an illegal firearm).

The Omaha shooter apparently had an AK47. It's hard to understand from the outside why a civilised country allows its citizens to possess weapons like that*: they're not particularly good for hunting, and they aren't really a self defence weapon (vs. a 12 gauge or a hand gun). If he'd had an ordinary hunting rifle, he might have had a chance to kill fewer people.

Or he might have laid down in a truck bed at the edge of the mall and sniped a couple of dozen before being discovered, likely killing more of them (instead of injuring), and possibly killing some police as well.

However I don't see the US changing on this point any time soon. Even if say, a terrorist group did use AK47s that they bought commercially (as I understand the law, they could only buy a semi-automatic version, and converting it to full auto is a serious piece of gunsmithing). They would buy them at a gun show, I would think, as again as I understand US law, ordinary gun checks don't apply at gun shows. The IRA used to use Armalites (civilian M16s) so acquired from the US market (although at least some were also stolen from National Guard arsenals).

Firearms purchased from FFL license holders must go through the NICS instant background check process, and documented with a form 4473 (stored at the dealer's place of business). Personal sales at gun shows (or anywhere else) are not subject to those provisions, although some personal sales do do a NICS check (some dealers will run one, charging twenty bucks or so per call), and most will at least check to make sure the buyer is legit for purchasing in that state (checking for a pistol permit in NYS, for example).

NFA (National Firearms Act) weapons - fully-automatic weapons, explosive devices, weapons of "curious or non-military nature" (sawed-off shotguns, cane guns, pen guns and other disguised or hidden weapons) and the like are subject to pretty tight scrutiny* by the BATFE. There is a transfer stamp ($200 per device), and you have to go through several hoops before you can purchase them - if the State laws even allow it (NYS does not allow private ownership of NFA devices at all).

The chances of terrorists (foreign or domestic) purchasing such devices legitimately in the US are slim to nil - beyond the level of scrutiny involved in such transactions, no new fully-auto firearms have been imported or produced for the civilian market since 1986, and the weapons in circulation routinely sell for thousands of dollars each. The black market would be a much easier source for such weapons.

*Some would say abusively so, given the marginal nature of their criminal usage in the US - there have been something like two uses of legally-held FA weapons in the US in the commission of a crime in the last forty years, and one of them was a police officer's H&K MP-5.

Valuethinker @ 70: We are getting into the land of Heinlein's 'Door into Summer'. His guess is that the genetic result would be a politer population. Colour me sceptical.
I think you mean Beyond This Horizon. It's been a while since I have read either but I seem to remember Beyond being about shooting for politeness and Door being about time travel and cats.

Scott @ 71
sawed-off shotguns

Which include shot pistols, too. My father jumped through the hoops to get one of those - antique, at that - registered. His father had gotten it during the Depression as payment of a milk bill. The hoops included a photograph and his military serial number - you have to understand, my father was 75 years old when he started the process on the registration!

PJ Evans @ 73 -
Scott @ 71
sawed-off shotguns
Which include shot pistols, too. My father jumped through the hoops to get one of those - antique, at that - registered. His father had gotten it during the Depression as payment of a milk bill. The hoops included a photograph and his military serial number - you have to understand, my father was 75 years old when he started the process on the registration!

Yeah, it's not a fast or easy process - especially if it's a "discovered" firearm (where it's been in possession for a long time, but not registered as an NFA because of lack of knowledge, whatever).

(Shot pistols, AIR, count as sawed-off shotguns - the exception is .410 bore, which is the same diameter as .45 colt revolver, leading to some pistols that are chambered to be fired in either caliber (which means very long chambers, and usually a revolver action, as the .410 bore casing is a couple of inches longer than the .45 colt revolver casing. As long as they have a rifled barrel, they count as a pistol, not a shotgun.

Re shot and pistols: There is an ugly (with a capital UG) revolver, five shots, in 45/70.

The thing kicks, so I am told, like a mule on steroids. When loaded with .410 shotgun rounds, it's much more manageable.

Scott @ 74
It was a .410 shot pistol (a 'horse pistol', as it was called in my family).

Valuethinker @36: A theory explaining the Prozac "connection to mass murder" (and also a Prozac "connection to suicide") is that the antidepressant has lifted serotonin levels enough so that the patient now has the emotional energy to do what (s)he had been brooding about but had been too depressed to actually do. The underlying dysfunctional behavior patterns are still present and need therapeutic monitoring and aid to be resolved. Personally, I've found that if you take a high enough daily dose of that stuff it can act as a stimulant and tip one over into a manic state.

There's a few different revolvers that shoot .410 bore - Magnum Research does one in .45-70/.410 (which I have only seen pictures of, but it is ugly). I can easily imagine it being a wristbreaker with .45-70, however - that's a brutal round for any pistol. Taurus makes a similar revolver, AIR.

Another company made the Thunder-5, which I have actually held (but did not get a chance to shoot). It's chambered in .45LC/.410, with a real stubby barrel. To call it "point heavy" would be an understatement - it's practically all cylinder. I don't think they're in production any more.

Notice however that handguns are quite common in certain circles without ensuing mayhem just as they are quite common in other circles that do shoot each other.

Every black woman in my mother's reasonably upper class - upper middle class for the Brits reading - social circle (google my name and Emory if you care what circles) in Atlanta/Decatur carried a handgun in purse and/or glove box (jockey box for you Northwesterners) without shooting anyone at the mall parking lot or otherwise. It just wasn't done.

Neither Sportsman's Warehouse nor Cabela's report shootouts in the parking lot - they do ask that folks either keep it concealed or stop at the service desk.

For those who care here is Michael Bane (host of the Outdoor Channel show SHOOTING GALLERY) on stealth living:
...stealth living a fundamental survival skill. It wasn't that I slavish imitated the dress and mores of wherever I was...rather I focused on being invisible. I spent time observing people and making note of what stood out to me. Then I consciously tried to eliminate those "flags."
.....
I've talked and written about how my goal in concealed carry is to have nothing on me that stands out.

Curiously enough it made me very nervous to shop in a Safeway in Renton with lots of Swat dressed off-duty police guards standing around like men in black pajamas with guns - long ago I shopped at a supermarket in the Back of the Yards (Chicago) that belonged to a Muslim based organization and was guarded by Fruit of Islam - grocery carry out might be by an armed guard in a Blazer and tie - much less threatening to me.

I do wonder why folks who value precision in language in general don't distinguish AK-47 (milled dustcover etc.) from AK-M and others.

Valuethinker:

The New York City precedent says that stop and search can be used to reduce street crime, by arresting concealed weapons holders (knives as much as guns). But New York has several times the density of policemen of most American cities, and is geographically concentrated: they used to wait at transit stops and stop suspects. You couldn't do that on American freeways.

Scott:

NYC also has some of the most stringent gun laws in the US (Chicago and Washington DC may be the only cities with worse), to the point where if you pull someone over and they have a pistol, nine-times-out-of-ten they are doing something illegal (if only just carrying an illegal firearm).

Scott. That's actually an argument in favour of gun control, if you follow your own logic.

Make guns very illegal, and then when you pull someone over with a gun, they are likely to be a criminal.

Valuethinker:

The Omaha shooter apparently had an AK47. It's hard to understand from the outside why a civilised country allows its citizens to possess weapons like that*: they're not particularly good for hunting, and they aren't really a self defence weapon (vs. a 12 gauge or a hand gun). If he'd had an ordinary hunting rifle, he might have had a chance to kill fewer people.

Scott:

Or he might have laid down in a truck bed at the edge of the mall and sniped a couple of dozen before being discovered, likely killing more of them (instead of injuring), and possibly killing some police as well.

Again your logic has undercut your own argument.

Or I don't understand the point you are trying to make?

You are essentially arguing

'if we prevent people like this from having access to those kind of weapons, they will commit worse crimes with other weapons'

This is very unlikely to be true. Our 19 year old kid with a Kalashnikov is replaced by our 19 year old kid with a Remington who is a super sniper?

But because he had the Kalashnikov, he did the dumb thing and went into the shopping mall, and only managed to kill 9?

Apply the same argument at VA Tech. Psycho with 2 semi auto pistols is replaced by the Texas Tower sniper?

As I said I don't think gun control is going to happen in the US. But then, I said that about universal healthcare. And I never thought the US would get bogged down in another guerilla war in Asia.

The interesting thing about the USA, for such a fundamentally conservative country, (much more so than Europe in many ways), is that some psychic switch can click, and lo', the country turns on a dime.

Valuethinker@ 80
Scott. That's actually an argument in favour of gun control, if you follow your own logic.

Make guns very illegal, and then when you pull someone over with a gun, they are likely to be a criminal.

Except that, as you note, it doesn't actually work without a very dense police presence - which is barely possible in NYC (and in fact, most police in NYC would note that while they can make an impact, they cannot actually remove the threat of illegal guns in NYC at present density and enforcement patterns), and all but impossible in most US cities without creating a de facto police state*.

Again your logic has undercut your own argument.

Or I don't understand the point you are trying to make? You are essentially arguing - 'if we prevent people like this from having access to those kind of weapons, they will commit worse crimes with other weapons'

Something very like that, actually.

This is very unlikely to be true. Our 19 year old kid with a Kalashnikov is replaced by our 19 year old kid with a Remington who is a super sniper?

He really doesn't need to be all that good a sniper, actually. Hunting rifles with scopes are plenty accurate, and much more lethal on a per-shot basis than a Kalashnikov is likely to be, even at range.

And depending on his upbringing, at nineteen he might not be a trained sniper - but could have been hunting white tail deer for upwards of six years (depending on the state).

But because he had the Kalashnikov, he did the dumb thing and went into the shopping mall, and only managed to kill 9?

Yes. Thank goodness.

Apply the same argument at VA Tech. Psycho with 2 semi auto pistols is replaced by the Texas Tower sniper?

hmm... Imagine the havoc he could have wreaked with a pair of pump-action shotguns and two-three bandoleers of ammunition.

And the Texas Tower sniper happened. It's not inconceivable that someone could choose to do it again.

I find it very fortunate that people who are going to run amok usually choose very poor ways of actually inflicting casualties. If more of them used energy-dense methods (like explosives, gasoline, or just running over people with a very large truck), more of these amok times would be deadlier.

The worst mass murders in US history (exempting acts of war or near-genocide) were committed not with guns, but with explosives, vehicles, or (in one case) chains with padlocks, and cans of gasoline.

The best situation is that these kinds of things never happen - that people are given the insecurity management tools (to steal a phrase from Graydon) to deal with their issues, or at least to get help when they feel they cannot. I would very much prefer that our society not generate people who turn into human pressure cookers, building up steam until they explode, taking everyone around them out when they go.

Failing that, I would much rather amok runs be committed with inefficient tools than with truly efficient ones like stolen gas tankers, panel trucks filled with ANFO and a stick of dynamite, and the like.

I think we would be much better served, as a society, looking into the root causes of some of these problems - whether it be "why are guys going bonkers, grabbing some weapons, and running down to the local mass of people to go whack-whack until he's shot down like a dog in the street" or "how do we deal with the fact that illegal industries have no methods of problem-solving other than violence and/or the threat of violence."

Getting rid of the tools they use just leads to substitution - I don't think there are dozens of people sitting and simmering, going "if only I had a gun, I'd show them all." - the thought process, from what I can tell, doesn't work that way.

As I said I don't think gun control is going to happen in the US. But then, I said that about universal healthcare. And I never thought the US would get bogged down in another guerrilla war in Asia.

The percentages of people who support universal healthcare in the US - for purely pragmatic as well as more "socially conscious" reasons - is much, much higher than the percentages of people who support Great Britain (let alone Japan) levels of gun control - and relatively few people in that discussion are willing to go to jail, let alone support violent uprising, over it.

*Whether or not a completely disarmed population could be classified as a police state anyways would be a completely different - and much more contentious - question.

Valuethinker @ #70:
The profile of Paul Bernardo is so close to that of many sexual criminals, who begin with violent rape and move on to murder, that it's hard for me to credence that he was innocent. I think, if we could find all of his rape victims, we might find 1 or 2 dead ones, as well.

I'm not arguing that he was innocent; clearly he was a rapist and kidnapper and at minimum an accessory to murder. I'm quite happy he's behind bars forever. But the picture of Karla as an innocent victim of abuse seems like a bit of a stretch. Anyone whose idea of an appropriate Christmas surprise present for her boyfriend is to steal drugs from work, drug her little sister senseless, and present her as a ready-to-rape surprise is deeply sick. (Her sister died from, if I recall correctly, aspirated vomit due to the drugs during/after being raped by Paul. Karla got two whole years for her part in this.)

Karen Homolka I don't know (excuse my Ukrainian transliterations ;-). The plea bargain was a mistake, in the sense that the police house search was incompetent (they found the video behind the light fitting, and apparently that is one of the first places you look when doing a house search).

Yeah, and by missing the videos they missed tons of evidence showing her as an enthusiastic participant in all of the rape and abuse. Who exactly did the killings (which were not videotaped) came down to a he-said, she-said issue. And I am far from convinced that it was Paul, or Paul alone.

Scott

I have to say I think that's an amazing line of argument.

That we should be glad our next Hungerford killer has access to the civilian versions of military automatic rifles, because that way he can't do something really dangerous. That we should be glad that Thomas Hamilton only had automatic handguns to kill 15 kids in Dunblane, because he might have done something really dangerous with a petrol tanker otherwise.

I don't find that logically credible in the least.

Wild suppositions about a 19 year old kid who raked a shopping centre in Omaha, having been more dangerous if only he had had a Remington hunting rifle, but actually we are really glad that all he had was a Kalashnikov?

On your other point:

I actually think most of these guys do lose the plot, grab what is handy, and go off to kill people. The Columbine killers didn't have access to dynamite, so they cobbled together bombs which didn't work.

On the healthcare point, or the gun control point, it isn't that the one is more popular than the other, or more likely, or what the polls say.

It's that the political ground can move that swiftly. The impossible becomes conceivable.

I don't see it, but I was simply commenting about the ability of the US zeitgeist to change quite suddenly, to turn on a dime.

valuethinker,

Israel I believe is getting that way too, although the armed people are mostly (wholly?) soldiers, policemen and off duty soldiers. But certainly most people probably have guns at home (guessing there).

after living in israel four years, i would be surprised if most people have guns at home. the only ones i knew who did were soldiers, or lived over the green line (i don't know many of the latter, but i would assume the ones i met do have guns at home).

i don't know that non-political violent crime is higher in israel. (although i think domestic violence may be a bit higher than western averages, & i've heard that attributed to militarism.) (anecdotally, i was sexually assaulted on the street several times in israel, & my sister was, once, more seriously. we were able to get away, though, because in none of the incidents did the attacker have a weapon. so that's a data point both for & against, maybe.)

Valuethinker @ 83 -
Wild suppositions about a 19 year old kid who raked a shopping centre in Omaha, having been more dangerous if only he had had a Remington hunting rifle, but actually we are really glad that all he had was a Kalashnikov?

Glad?

No.

Relieved, maybe, in the "it could have been a lot worse."

Bombs, accelerants, and vehicles just plain can kill more people than guns do. Jack Gilbert Graham killed 44 with a dynamite bomb on an airplane. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 with a panel truck full of ANFO. David Burke killed 43 by crashing a BAe 146-200 into the Santa Lucia mountains. Julio Gonzalez killed 87 people in the Happy Land Social club with gasoline and a lit match. 9/11 killed almost three thousand.

Obviously, the best situation is for no murders of any sort, let alone mass murders. Failing that, I'd prefer that amok murderers (as opposed to those incited by a direct relationship - "crimes of passion", murders over economic transactions, etc.) fixate on the least deadly tools available to them, instead of those that will actually do the most damage when they choose to go out in a blaze of glory.

I actually think most of these guys do lose the plot, grab what is handy, and go off to kill people. The Columbine killers didn't have access to dynamite, so they cobbled together bombs which didn't work.

Your previous statements are presumably based in part around this assumption - that amok killers just go off the rails, grab the nearest deadly implement, and go whackity-whack on whomever they come across until they realize what they've done and blow their brains out, or they force someone else (usually a cop) to do it for them.

This is, unfortunately, not the case.

1927, Bath Michigan. Andrew Kehoe killed his wife and set fire to his farm. While fire crews were responding to the scene, he detonated a large stockpile of pyrotol and dynamite under the north wing of the local school, killing many within. When others gathered around the disaster, he drove up and detonated a second fragmentation bomb in his truck, killing himself, the school superintendent, and several others. Rescuers found an additional stockpile - five hundred pounds or so - of pyrotol and dynamite under the south wing of the school, which had failed to detonate. The whole plan took almost half a year to enact, including purchasing and laying in nearly a ton of pyrotol and dynamite. He killed 45, and injured 58.

1964 - Cologne, Germany. Walter Seifert, armed with a lance, and a flamethrower built out of a converted insecticide sprayer, attacked a Catholic elementary school in Volkhovener, a suburb of Volkhoven. He killed 11 people.

1994 - Hollywood, Northern Ireland. Garnet Bell, armed with a flamethrower, attacks students taking A-Level examinations, injuring 6.

The list of mass murder attacks that involved at least some planning - rather than simply berking out and killing everyone in the way - goes on and on - the Clock Tower shooting in Austin. Columbine involved accumulating weapons, building explosive devices, etc. Seung-Hui Cho had to wait a month between handgun purchases.

It should be noted there are several Columbine-style mass murders that have been foiled, some of which could have been much worse than Columbine or Virginia Tech. (one, at DeAnza college in Cupertino, included highly sophisticated explosive devices, and plans on where to place them). Again, many of these involve substantial amounts of planning and acquisition before being enacted.

Sometimes people just go off the rails, grab whatever is handiest, and start killing people. But often there is at least some level of planning and development that goes in to these episodes - they are not simply the result of an immediate psychotic break. These are the ones that are really dangerous.

The solution, again, is to figure out why half-a-dozen people or so a year go off the rails, and start killing randomly, and then work towards ameliorating as many of those reasons as possible, minimizing the impact of the rest, and setting up resources and training so that the next generation will have the tools to deal with their problems - and personal integrity and incentive to step up and ask for help when they can't deal with their problems on their own.

Switzerland also has a heavily armed civilian population, and considers compulsory military service one of the guarantors of Swiss neutrality. I don't know to what extent guns are carried in public places, rather than stored at home.

A friend of mine was at the Tacoma Mall the day of (though not during) the shooting. His wife has been freaking out ever since: he's an Army Ranger, and she figures he would have run toward the shots instead of away.

Most gun owners are pretty much like most ordinary citizens (in the US, they mostly *are* ordinary citizens): if someone starts shooting in a public place, they won't have any idea what to do and could easily do as much harm as good. (Would you rather avoid one random shooter, or two?) And, as someone else pointed out, most gun owners don't actually carry their guns with them most of the time. Someone nervous enough about his surroundings that he feels the need to go armed may not be hugely reliable in a crisis.