Las Vegas...

We've kicked this ball around before, Hatter, and you are right. We will likely never agree completely, but I know you are educated on the matter and sincere in your words. I always learn from you and I'm sure the accepted solution will be somewhere in the middle anyways. Thank you for your kind words and your patience with a more grumpy than usual Senan.

Senan wrote: Thank you, Trisskar, for your concern and support, and your understanding. This event has rubbed me the wrong way and I am surely a bit to raw to be considering things as important as this right now. I am shaken and I do need to grieve properly. While I agree with Arisaig that there are logical, not emotional, motivations to have this conversation. I understand that it needs to be a conversation that includes all sides.

I should also be fair and clear and point out that I myself own three guns and am not anti-gun. I'm anti-stupid, and too many people have been allowed to do stupid things with guns lately.

I am also a gun owner. I enjoy going to the range and shooting both Pistol and Rifle. I am in the market for a Scorpion Evo as soon as I can afford both the gun and the short barrel licence I wish to aquire.

Do I NEED an Evo?

No....

But I sure would like one. And all this fear mongering because Mentally Idiotic people go and do tragic things is not fair or just to my own right to own it.

I have family near Las Vegas who love country concerts...... Don't think my heart didn't jump when I heard about the shooting....it did. I sent messages out and I am still waiting to hear updates from a couple of them. But I would never turn this around to "More Gun Control!" Instead i would question the motive and mental state that caused this to happen in the first place. I blame the killer(s) not the guns.

Trisskar wrote: I have family near Las Vegas who love country concerts...... Don't think my heart didn't jump when I heard about the shooting....it did. I sent messages out and I am still waiting to hear updates from a couple of them. But I would never turn this around to "More Gun Control!" Instead i would question the motive and mental state that caused this to happen in the first place. I blame the killer(s) not the guns.

The killer doesn't kill 58 people from the 32nd floor more than 300 yards across the street from the venue if he doesn't have an automatic weapon, or at least a modified semiautomatic weapon. The weapon allowed him to commit the crime he did. The guns are not separate from the shooter. They are the tools used, and many of these tools shouldn't exist, or at least be extremely hard to acquire, but in Nevada, you can get pretty much whatever you want. It really is the wild wild west in terms of gun laws there.

You might like to collect guns and shoot them safely, which I'm fine with. I do too. Either way, we cannot discount the terror inflicted upon 20,000 people and the actual casualties inflicted on almost 600 of them by saying, "well, he was crazy". That's a cop out of the worst kind. We don't know that he was crazy. Most indications from family, friends, and his own record show that he had no previous signs of mental instability. The "only a crazy person would do this" judgement means nothing. Would our opinions change if we learned that this was a calculated attack by a totally sane person?

I never said the guy was a "Crazy" screws loose kind of guy. I simply said we should consider the "Motive" and "mental state"

AKA

Religious Reasons? Political Reasons? ISIS? Antifia? Set up by the Government? Purple Unicorn Rights Kind of Guy?

Regardless of what the family claimed.....There is and was a reason behind it. And that reason is far more important to consider. IMO and we wont know that for a little while yet.

Its possible we may never know.

Don't talk about Anti-Pro Gun Control, it doesn't do you any good. Get the people that are allied with you in your pursuit, draft a letter together, and each of you send that letter to everyone in your governmental chain of command from your city/town council up to the President. Let them ALL know where you stand on the subject. And then don't let up on it until there is talk about at some level of government that will affect you.

You might not get things accomplished at the federal level, but we know that even as low as the city level can get ordinances put into place (look at Chicago). And that takes people directly talking with their government officials, letting them know how they feel.

And I don't just mean get people locally to ban together with you, I mean- start up a facebook group/email chain of friends where you can all discuss the idea of what you want and work together on what to write in your letters. Have each person come up with their own words, support one another and look over what they have- give suggestions on how to improve their argument in their letter (kinda like looking over a friend's resume), etc. THAT will do FAR MORE than trying to talk about the issue on a forum/social media.

Senan- I am so glad that you were not on the ground last night. That horror is haunting, and I am still waiting for information to come in on what this guy's motive was. I want this nightmare to be over, but it won't be for awhile. Those people that experienced the crisis first hand will have that with them for their entire lives. And I'm not sure how they are going to cope with the what they experienced.

Is this useful?
http://twentytwowords.com/4-things-you-can-do-right-now-to-help-the-victims-of-the-las-vegas-shooting/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=hh&utm_campaign=hh

To the extent that the gun control vs. constitutional rights argument has been had 1,000 different ways in 1,000 places on as many or more days with few new approaches to the emotional, logical, or ethical being offered, perhaps we should look at it from an entirely different perspective.

Krishnamurti usually presents a notion that when we enter a discussion with a position one way or the other, we more or less close the discussion at its outset since we have already tendered a result and are not truly remaining open to resolutions. Perhaps we are afraid of being wrong. Perhaps we are afraid of seeming to condone something we obviously don't. Perhaps we are just afraid. But what is fear?

Maybe we are asking the wrong questions.
Maybe we are seeing the wrong side of the issue.
Maybe we are ignoring factors in all of these situations which would allow both sides to find common ground.

Either way, it seems rather obvious that the current tone of the gun control debate is not likely to bring about a resolution which would be agreeable by opponents, and we can only expect our efforts to have lasting effect if there is an agreeable solution to both sides.

So how can we take the conversation in a direction where we may discover possible answers?

@Rosalyn
VERY!!!!

https://www.gofundme.com/dr2ks2-las-vegas-victims-fund