Debate: Gun Control - should we have it?
Side: We need our guns

We have gun control.Now, I suppose the argument from gun control advocates is as scattered as arguments from gun advocates. There is little to no consensus on either side on what level of gun control is "right."Here are some things to note, however. The weapon used at the Elementary School and Movie theater was an AR-15. It is a semi-automatic assault rifle. As assface has pointed out in an earlier debate, this weapon is no more dangerous than your standard hunting rifle. It doesn't "spray" bullets. Automatic weapons are not the most tactical nor are they the most reliable. The military rarely even uses automatic weapons. It really does depend.So killers, either trained by the government or just lunatics, tend to not use automatic weapons. Automatic weapons are for non-skilled people who would rather unload a magazine and make sure they hit their target. They are also for people like me, who enjoy guns as a novelty. And they are even for hunters, who are about killing the shit out of their prey.In general, when it comes to preventing these horrendous mass murders, going after automatic weapons is pointless. Going after all assault rifles is only in the right track if you get rid of all hunting rifles as well. However, assault rifles are RARELY used in gun related homicides. Handguns are. Handguns, in fact, are the most dangerous type of guns, for they are easy to conceal and not as expensive. However, they are the most reliable for women who need to fend off attackers for they are small and easy to use (depending on the handgun, of course.) Assault rifles are big and bulky, very difficult to conceal, and for a woman being attacked not very accessible or usable. In general, your average American prefers handguns because of its affordability and easy to carry. You are allowed to keep a handgun on your persons in states with right-to-carry laws, which is good for people whom are afraid of being attacked in dark alleys or other areas where they are at risk. So what kind of gun control would prevent a mass murder like what we've seen in the past few years? If we had a nationwide ban of all guns, it's possible that it would be difficult for lunatics, especially those who aren't very well-connected, to get their weapons right away. A killer like John Holmes wouldn't have been stopped, for he definitely knew his shit (considering how he even rigged his entire apartment with explosives, which I will get more into detail later,) however the recent murder at the Elementary school could possibly have been prevented. Or, it would have merely delayed it. Best case scenario, the kid would have only killed his family and maybe only a few kids. Some of them would have possibly escaped, considering he didn't lock the door. In total, we could have seen a few less deaths overall, or maybe none of them could have died. It's very possible that this kid would have not been able to chop up or beat the life out of these kids after doing it to his family, since it is far more intimate to use blunt or sharp weapons than guns.But what about explosives? They are not hard to come by, especially if you have a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook. This kid might not have been able to make devastating explosives, but John Holmes did. He didn't use them to kill those people at the theater because he had his AR-15, a grim but important fact to note. Now, rigging an entire theater to blow MAY take time, but not that much time. Maybe he could have gotten caught, but if not he would have killed even more. And then we look at the murders at Virginia Tech. roughly 30 killed with handguns. So an all out ban and "War on Guns" is really the only thing we could try to prevent shootings. Explosives would become the new weapon of choice for people hoping to get a lot of kills in short times, but as a country I suppose we'd deal with it then.However, maybe disarming the populace isn't the best choice.1. No guarantee that this will work. Prohibition rarely works in this country, and guns are pretty much everywhere in this country. There is little to nothing we can do to get rid of the guns that are already here. Not only do guns get smuggled in here, we smuggle guns everywhere else. America is a major gun nation, and a "War on Guns" would be a full-scale war that may be even more detrimental than the War on Drugs. Especially since we have enough trust issues with our police and military. 2. Disarming the populace won't necessarily make the people safer. People have used guns in self defense for many [different cases]. More people use guns for self-defense than they do for murder. A dick load more. It's very easy for a murderer to use a knife instead of a gun, for murder tends to be by surprise. Guns for self-defense, on the other hand, are either in fire-fights or something of the such. Not to mention it's a lot harder to apprehend someone if you only have a knife, especially if you know nothing about knife fighting. I had more reasons, but this is pretty long already.So what CAN we do to prevent these massacres? Two main things, luckily:1. Loosen gun control. Gun free zones are basically areas where you can't defend yourself or your family. School shootings are terrible and scary, but fear of the guns instead of the people doing the shooting is more of a problem than the tools of murder. If teachers were armed, they'd be far more likely to prevent a school shooting... like in Israel. Israel is a more dangerous place, so they keep their teachers armed. It has proven to be of good results. There's the fear of unstable teachers, but that's all it is... fear. Fear, the thing that keeps us from protecting ourselves. If a teacher wants to kill his kids, he's not going to listen to the "gun-free" rule put in place. However, another armed teacher could prevent him from doing too much damage. It's more of a fact, that the greatest threat to a mass murderer is another person with a gun.2. Focus on the Psychology of these people. We focus so much on shifting blame, be it gun control, violent video games, or heavy metal, and we never think about the fact that these people were unstable and created by society in the first place. there are probably so many preventative measures we could have made in raising our children or spreading media that would stop these spree killings, but instead we seem to only provoke it by spreading the fear and paranoia. A lot of these people are bullied, abused, or simply not right in the head. They find that a mass murder is exactly what they need to get their emotions on the media. We as a populace eat this shit up. Whenever a tragedy occurs we start saying "omg, what a monster, he's not human, he's evil," and avoid the fact that he was human and that we are all just as capable. Maybe our Psychology isn't fucked up like his, but something made it fucked up in the first place. It's not the devil, it's not that he's an asshole, it's something to do both Neurologically and Socially that is causing this. This is going on for awhile, so I'll cut it short here. I hope I've made my point well.