One student dead after high school fight ends in shooting - Sensationalist Headlines

Butler High School shooting The shooting was believed to be an isolated incident, the police said on Facebook. Tyrrell didn't release the victim's age or identity but referred to the student as a male. Tyrrell said officials reviewed surveillance video, which showed the fight. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District said on Facebook that the weapon had been secured by law enforcement. The school was placed on lockdown, which has since been lifted. Families were allowed to pick up students from the entrance to the campus. Before the lockdown was lifted, dozens of parents gathered outside of the school to await word on the students. Multiple parents told local television channels that they felt confused and unsure about where to meet with their children. Video provided to CBS affiliate WNCN by a freshman student showed panic in a crowded hallways in the aftermath of the incident, with students asking to be let out of the school. Wilcox said: "I don't know how a young person gets a handgun in the state of North Carolina." He said the school system was reviewing its security procedures.

It is so fucking easy for anybody who wants a gun to get a gun in the United States it's sad. There's basically nothing preventing a 15 year old from getting a gun if they really want one

Nothing is going to prevent someone from getting a gun, knife, drugs, ect. Welcome to the world of capitalism. If someone wants something, someone is gonna be selling it. Just the harsh truths of life.

This is not a problem with capitalism, this is a problem with America's unenforced gun laws. It is far harder for a child to get a gun in much of the EU and East Asia

That's quite a huge blanket statement you made there, dropping drugs and knives with guns. Idk about you but I don't have a lot of faith that I'd find someone to sell me a gun as easily as finding someone to sell me weed or a kitchen knife.

America's gun laws will sadly never be enforced. As for getting guns in East Asia and EU, not really. Lot of places in East Asia have farmers which build matchlocks for hunting food and the like, and use matchheads as gunpwoder. Europe is also a hotbed for firearms activity at the moment, namely due to arms smuggling from Ukraine and Syria.

I don't agree with this fatalist attitude of "if someone wants it they'll get it". It treats all levels of "wanting" as if anyone who wants it will go to significant lengths and take significant risks to obtain it, which simply isn't the case for the vast majority of people. The more risk or impediments involved, the more people are discouraged from obtaining it. I certainly don't know of any illegal means that I could reasonably use to find a weapon or harder drugs. Sure I could try to find someone to sell it, but that involves a certain level of risk and premeditation that acts as a barrier to getting it. If I hypothetically wanted to harm someone in a fit of passion, I can't get a gun immediately through legal means (gun legislation prevents me from doing that), and I certainly don't know anyone I could trust to buy one off the street from. To do so, I would have to have a motivation and persistence that raises above the level of "fit of passion" to a level premeditation that is much less common. The same analogy can be applied to hard drugs and those who abuse them. You can't say "if someone wants it, they'll be able to get it" without ignoring the trade off of the motivation to obtain illicit goods vs the availability and ease of access of them.

Oh don't downplay it. The difference is astoundingly big. It's obviously a lot easier for a kid to get a handgun in the US than in most of the rest of the world, simply because of abundance and lax laws when it comes to weapon containment.

Doesn't even matter if guns were illegal, in the uk you csn grt guns on the blsck market if you look hard enough. We have gun crime in the uk and gun ownership islike 0.9 percent of thr population, heavily controlled.

I'm this case the parents should be charged for neglegenceat the least. Part of the issue is rooted in American gun culture, and I'm not talking about the NRA and conservative hicks in the back country. A lot of children learn to shoot when they're young, myself learning at 7 years old. By the time kids are in their teens many parents feel that their children are responsible enough to have access to their firearms, in the event of having a home burglary while the parents are away among other reasons. In many regards most people in their mid to late teens are responsible, and in many instances teens get charged as adults in cases such as this as the courts recognize that they understand responsibility. In that regard it is then difficult for people to want to comply with the law, which federally no one under the age of 18 can have direct access to firearms until they become legal adults. This is further compounded by actual events where children have defended their home from Intruders while their parents were away and the courts sympathetically chose not to prosecute the parents over breaking the law. So on the one hand your talking about children that can and have bared the full weight of the law in regard to being charged as adults being considered responsible enough to know where the family's guns are to defend themselves, and on the other you have those who instead choose to do things like this, and in the middle you have a government that picks and chooses when it decides to enforce laws and to what degree. If the laws that were already on the books were uniformity enforced I think something like this would have been preventable. I don't think there addition of any new laws that would be enforced at the degree current ones have been would have made a difference.

what federal law only allows people 21+ to buy handguns he obtained it illegally most likely. if an older person bought it for him, it would be a straw purchase which is also illegal. if he stole it, that would also be illegal. iirc, handguns can't legally be gifted until the recipient is 18+ anyways. i don't know of any way he could have obtained it legally not that he was inclined to obey the laws, but it was already illegal, so what laws would you propose tacking onto what we already have that will somehow magically stop this?

Gun crime in the UK is really low compared to the US. It's nonsense to put it as if the UK has a problem of the same scale.

"He could have got a gun legally anyway" isn't what proboards was arguing and you fucking well know it lmao. The massive availability of firearms in the US makes it incredibly easy for people who by all legal standards should not have a gun, to have a gun. When the average owner seems to secure their guns with little more than strong prayers and maybe a little bit of duct tape it's no surprise at all that people are able to just grab their parents guns, or steal guns during break-ins. And that's not taking into account the under-the-table private sales that don't use any of the (woefully cared for from the sounds of it) background checking systems that are actually in place. Stop be disingenuous, could you?

"if you look hard enough" <- This is the key here. You have to try harder to get guns when they are heavily controlled. Also, gun crime specifically is much lower in the UK vs the US. The firearm homocide rate is 3.6 per 100k in the US vs the UK's <0.1. It's all about degree.

like, the thing is, how would you enforce these laws? it's not the gov't being unwilling to enforce it as much as it is most gun laws being unenforceable. due to this, most gun owners are simply self-policing since there's not really much of a way to enforce most gun laws, at least where I am (california). shit like mag cap bans, assault features, etc are simply unenforceable short of combing every house every so often. but with regards to obtaining a weapon, FFLs already generally refuse to do an illegal transaction for a good reason, so it's unlikely that he bought it from a FFL. if he bought it off the street or through a straw purchase, or stole it that's already illegal and police in general try pretty hard to prevent illegal sales and theft. if preventing that shit was so easy to enforce, they wouldn't be problems to begin with, and just because they involve guns doesn't somehow make it any easier to enforce

Right, legislation on how a gun should be safely stored would likely drastically cut down things like spur of the moment spree shooters, or break-in thefts fuelling the black markets. Then you have people saying "But what if someone lives in a card-board box because it's all they can afford and they still want to own guns?! You can't expect a poor slob like that to afford a gun-safe, let alone have anywhere to put it!"

We can point at it and say that we see a problem, but it's understandably hard to think up any real solutions. Things are so very complex. I personally think gun lockers are a good step in the right direction however - but there's going to be people against that, even if it would statistically save a lot more lives than it would endanger.

i agree that it is too easy to obtain a gun. that's a difficult problem to solve though. california's gun laws originates from trying to prevent groups like the black panthers from being armed, funnily enough. but personally, i do feel that there's a lot of irresponsible gun owners who probably shouldn't be able to own them. private transfers require a FFL already, who mostly only check if you're a felon or w.e to my knowledge. i'm more familiar with CA laws than anything else, and even here, that's mostly what our background check does. either way under-the-table sales have no obligation to obey the law anyways we have that in california. i don't think it's really as effective as you might think

This is a genuine problem tbh. But if you're going to allow personal ownership of firearms in your country, you should really provide mechanisms to help people actually secure these things. They're not toys (as the 2A guys here like to remind us), so they should be properly secured. Subsidies are a decent way to encourage the poorer owners to be able to afford these things. Progressive tax breaks on them could help too, allowing those who don't have high income to pay a bit less than those who can afford the higher end models. When it comes to things like rental properties, perhaps providing some legislation that enables tenants to demand facilities to store firearms safely without fear of being evicted could be useful here. Mandate that all new builds have a conveniently gun cabinet sized cubbyhole somewhere. There's a lot of things that can be done, that wont be done under the Repblicans at the very least.

North Caroline requires you to have a handgun permit to buy a handgun.

Considering the kid we're talking about here, we're not talking FFLs at all and I honestly have no idea why you're even bringing up legal avenues of obtaining a gun when it's clear they would almost certainly not apply to this case. America is going to struggle to solve the firearms black market problem so long as things like totally unmonitored transfers can occur. Along with the whole gun theft thing. Illegal firearms don't just crop up from nowhere (well, unless you 3D print one), they were all legal at some point.

If they're subsidized in some way, sure. Otherwise you're just taking from the poor.

i think it's a nice idea theoretically. i guess there's two main problems with it some people just end up not using it they're mostly a deterrent. a prepared attacker who knows you have the guns and wants the guns will break through about any safe not that it we shouldn't try. i'm not too opposed to those laws, although it does disadvantage the poor who cannot afford safes/lockers or w.e. it's another can of worms of whether the poor should be allowed to own guns or not. again, california has these sort of laws already, but to my knowledge, it has not been incredibly effective.

Unscrupulous FFL's (gun sellers who deal under the table) and straw purchases (otherwise law abiding citizens buying guns for a criminal) are the two main sources of illegal firearms, with stolen guns coming third.

We shouldn’t be legisating the poor out of their rights, so yeah cost is a very valid concern.

we can't prevent theft as it is, so how can we somehow prevent gun theft? how can we somehow force people from just giving somebody else a gun like they would any other object?

That's pretty absurd. Britain hasn't had a mass shooting since '96, and Australia had 13 mass shootings in the 15 years leading up to Port Arthur, with 0 in the many years after '96 (when they also did the gun buyback scheme.) I am not suggesting America bans guns, or anything like that, but reasonable precautions definitely can work in reducing these sorts of crimes. I know this was not a mass shooting, but I am just using this as an example.

i feel like CA is actually trying to crack down pretty hard on straw purchases. at least, i see signs and notices and notes about it any time i walk into a gun-related place here, but it's just so hard to enforce. all you get is the promise that the law will shit on you with the force of a thousand suns if you ever get caught, but that's the question isn't it

Cracking down on misbehaving FFLs is going to require people to either report their FFL (and why would someone report the guy who doesn't do background checks when it makes their life easier), or random checks against FFLs to make sure they're following the rules. The latter is definitely more plausible to do, but like fuck it would ever get funded. Straw purchases are a whole different level of fuckery to stop, short of bugging every customer to see who they talk to in their spare time.

Yeah, it's definately not easy. That's probably why Democrats like to go after the "assault weapons" instead.