He actually got it through a straw purchase. That's where essentially someone buys the firearm for you and gives/sells it to you illegally. Being a convicted he's not legally allowed to own any firearms.
You (edit: or maybe holyhead) said you didn't want to talk about gang crime before--simply mass shootings (when we talked about legally-acquired and illegally-acquired weapons). That's what I'm doing, now you're bringing gang crime back into it. The US has more crime overall (probably a result of our higher poverty rate and inferior social services), including but not limited to higher handgun crime overall (robberies, gang crime, etc, most of which involve small handguns not assault rifles). But when it comes to random mass shootings, Finland is worse per capita than the USA.
The point is not to say that "other have problems too" (yet ANOTHER thing you keep putting in my mouth--that's a really obnoxious way to debate, you know), but instead to say that gun laws don't deter mass-shootings, because Finland's gun laws are much stricter than the US's but their mass-shooting problem is actually worse than ours.
Also worth noting: Only five Wal-Mart's in the US sell fire arms. The top five earners in firearms purchases were the only ones allowed to continue selling. And as of now, they only sell one "assault" rifle. The rest is pistols, shotguns, and hunting rifles.
Really I just wrote that entire tangent to say... Why bring Walmart into it? They sell everything.
Ok, we'll keep normal gun crime (not all of it gang related) out of the discussion for the moment.
Finland may be worse per capita over the last 5 years, but what about the trend?
The US has had several in the last 6 months.
I can't find many examples of Finnish mass murders outside of the 4 that have happened in the last 5 years (there was one previous school shooting in the 80's), so they might be outliers. I'm not convinced that this is evidence of a greater problem than the US is suffering from.
One thing I did notice, most of those shootings were carried out with single semi-automatic handguns, so Finland's stricter gun laws may have prevented them from obtaining more powerful weapons.
A six-month trend is such a narrow time frame that it's just the ebb and flow of natural occurrences. Two of the Finnish massacres were one right after the other; doesn't mean anything about Finland changed that month.
And what would a sudden upswing in the past six months show? US culture and US gun laws haven't changed in the past six months.
Well, whether you're "convinced" or not, that there's a "greater problem," they've had far more mass shootings than we have in the past five years.
Anders Breivik used an auto-loading 5.56mm rifle in his 2011 massacre in Norway--the same category of rifle used in the Dark Knight Rises massacre and the Connecticut massacre. So in Scandinavia some massacres use easy-to-conceal handguns and some use auto-loading rifles...just like in the USA.
I've already said I support increased background checks, closing the private-sale loophole on background checks (all firearms transfers should have to go through licensed dealers as brokers so ALL firearms transfers involve a background check), increased police presence in public areas, and banning high-capacity magazines. I just don't support attempts to ban semi-automatic firing mechanisms, ban pistol-grip-equipped rifles, get rid of conceal carry permits, or cast aspersions on law-abiding citizens who choose to own and carry firearms for self-defense.
At least in my eyes, that DOES make me a centrist on firearms regulation. But I feel I'm being portrayed as some sort of right-wing gun nut by some of the folks here. Go figure.
I definitely never said that. Must have been the other guy. From my point of view gun crime is gun crime. It makes no difference if it's some nut on a random mass shooting rampage or some poor guy getting mugged. The end result is the same. Someone dies or ends up seriously injured because guns are so easily available.
I do however find it particularly heartbreaking that it takes a mass shooting at a school to get Americans to seriously consider the situation with the proliferation of firearms in the USA. Frankly the second amendment argument is bollocks. Practically nobody who owns a gun in the USA is part of a well formed militia.
Government funded healthcare is seemingly seriously taboo in the USA. So who provides the mental health care that some very dangerous Americans clearly need? Are they expected to pay for it themselves?
The way I see it, Americans are at a cross roads. They can either accept they have social responsibility for one another or accept more of the same head in the sand nonsense.