No, this 155 pound pit bull will take care of this problem.

A 155 pound Pit Bull??? Not even a 155 pound Rottweiler or 155 pound German Sheppard. A 155 pound Great Dane or English Mastiff maybe but Pit Bulls run in the 40 - 50 lb category. A gun however is usually cheaper to feed and does not incur vet bills.

:thumbup:

Honestly, I don't know where I stand on this issue. I'm still culling through the fact vs. fiction data---there are a lot of weak and irrelevant arguments out there, so this makes it hard for someone like me to decide.

However, let's say for a moment that our main underlying problem is mental health or a lack thereof... Is there a solution to this? Is it possible to prevent, through medicine, a psychotic episode like the murder of defenseless little kids?

To me, it seems like we live in an age of moral relativism. We have no moral reference point anymore. We try to understand how and why something like this can happen, but our own moral compass' are so completely wacked-out it's virtually impossible. We believe if we can either pass enough well-worded laws or arm every law-abiding citizen with a gun, we can eliminate this behavior from our society. Sadly, I don't think either solution will work. We are so immersed in violence, greed, sex, instant gratification, and materialism that we've lost all sense of what morality even looks like. How can we fix something we (our law makers) don't understand ourselves?

I don't oppose gun ownership, but I also don't own a gun. Like many, I don't know how to address this problem or come up with a solution to prevent another Sandy Hook that everyone can agree on. However, I do know that we need to stop working ourselves into a righteous huff before any form of useful productive discussion can be made.

It is very typical for gun lovers to take an exception to prove a general case. Your argument here is a perfect example. You seem to be implying that since the Swiss population has a very large number of guns and a low crime rate, the same formula will work everywhere. General conclusions are more correctly drawn from the entire available body of evidence, not from the one or two that present data favorable to your cause.

The number of guns in circulation is one, but not the only cause of a high murder rate. Violent crimes tend to be the domain of lower income groups, and Switzerland with a population of only six million has a generally high level of education and prosperity. Using the Swiss murder rate as you have, therefore, is akin to taking the murder rate of just one metropolitan area in the US, a prosperous one, and concluding that it has lessons applicable to the general population. The murder rate of very high income areas will never be as high as that of low income areas.

If you had been intellectually honest, instead of grabbing whatever you could to support your preconceived conclusion, you would have mentioned much data that militates against the conclusion toward which you are steering. In general, the countries with strict gun control laws have much lower murder rates. Britain has 2.1 per 100,000, and Japan .3 compared to 4.2 in the US.

The complexities of human situations allow for instances in which the presence of guns reduce crime, but that is not usually the case. It is analogous to seat belts, which can sometimes cause death by trapping a person inside a burning car, whereas more often than not, they prevent death by keeping people from being hurled through the windshield. So it is with guns. They were invented to kill and to maim more effectively than lesser weapons before them, and it is absolute sophistry to pretend the invention of guns has resulted in fewer deaths than we had before them, or that all other things being equal, an increase in gun ownership will lead to fewer deaths.