And BOOM! Here comes the victim blaming. They were just in the wrong church at the wrong time; nothing we can do about this; guns don't kill people...etc. etc. blah blah f*** that.

He killed 26 people in a matter of seconds. The AR-15 is designed to do exactly that, so any idiot with one becomes supremely deadly. Chances are, if this tosser tries to build a bomb, the only person he blows up is himself. Also, if he goes on the web and researches bomb-building, all of a sudden the FBI are all over him like a rash. Meanwhile, he can buy a gun off ebay, no questions asked.

Toddlers kill people with guns. It happens with ridiculous regularity. Take the gun away and they're about as deadly as a toothache. Same with these mass shooters - without these military-style, semi-automatic weapons, their ability to kill is dramatically reduced.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

The biggest and worst of the lot is that the only protection from a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. It's the Rambo fantasy. The truth is that the good guys with guns almost never get to use them, and if they do they run the risk of being misidentified as a bad guy and shot by another good guy.

Meanwhile, the bad guy gets the drop on everyone and the shooting is over in moments, long before the good guys have a chance to respond. In this case, the shooter wasn't engaged in a fire fight by a good guy until he was leaving the church, carnage already achieved. He was not taken out by that guy (two very brave souls, actually), drove away and killed himself only when he wrecked his truck and knew he was caught. That's not how it goes in the Die Hard movies...

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

Wrong colour perp.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

Guns are great, they're on of the most efficiently designed tools for killing things - so much so in fact they can elevate a human to apex predator status. No one ever wanted to go hunting Lions with a sharp knife and some sticks... Invent the gun, boom you have an industry of hunting dangerous prey.

That's the problem, guns are really good, and the assault rifle is the pinnacle of the small arms when it comes to a combination purpose firearms. Stopping power, range, good ammo capacity, rate of fire - It is the general purpose firearm for killing and wounding people.

Which is why an assault rifle is the general purpose battle field arm of the military (admittedly backed up with other specialist squad weapons).

Sure other weapons are better in one or two categories, but across the board, if you're going out to kill people, the assault rifle is the Swiss army knife of shooting people.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

I'm guessing if the perpetrator had been Muslim that the dialogue wouldn't have been rhetoric about mental illness, and Trump would have been in full on political capitalising.

I don't think it would have made much difference had the shooter been black.

The weird thing though is always that these kind of arguments (mental illness, religion, politics) seem to be more important than the elephant in the room of owning large magazine capacity assault rifles.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

Apparently the answer is to bring your guns into church...

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]