Discussion for article #222717
And the drug connection, in turn, ties in with the Waltham murders. Very interesting.
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Sean Collier was an MIT Police Officer. He was not a security guard. This comment is not to disparage security guards - but to give Officer Collier a name, and proper honor.
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They can track all sorts of other things, but their “trail” on a weapon is “fuzzy” somehow??? Rather than scoop up everything in creation in today’s electronic age why not work on keeping better track of something that CAN KILL SOMEONE?
Sorry, but I’ve lived all over the world. The Nations who closely track weapons are no less “Free” because some extremist can’t get hold of a gun. Anywhere in the UK or in Oz, this kind of thing just does not happen frequently.
When someone there owns a gun or uses it to commit a crime, the police worry just as much about that gun as they do the suspect. I simply cannot understand why in this case the gun’s owner (original or otherwise) was not made to surrender it to a competent holding authority once he was convicted of illegal activity. And if he sold it legally, why is there no record (and no responsibility) for this too?
We can have gun ownership. No problems, no argument. But the ways in which we traffic in guns must change. GPS can help us find cell phones,iPads, and missing kids. Why not firearms? Doing so would not impair responsible ownership of firearms, or their lawful usage. But when guns go wrong, because people go wrong, we should be able to track firearms, and quickly, before someone pays for someone else’s “freedom” with their blood.
There must be a balance point. To those who screech at the top of their lungs that even looking for that point is a violation of freedom, I say this: Your irrational fear that someone will take your guns away is superseded by the saving of one single innocent life. No responsible gun owner wants to contribute to crime or the spilling of innocent blood. There is common ground on this issue. I think we ought to ignore the screeching voices, and work to find that common ground.Every day that solutions are denied, someone dies.
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Well the Waltham triple involved someone selling “rich guy pot”(kinda stuff where fat cats used to proudly proclaim they were smoking an expensive imported cigar) versus the crap you’d buy on the street or Dzhokhar’s stuff
While it’s all drugs - at those different prices you just have different criminals
A well regulated militia . . .
Tracing handgun ownership has been made deliberately difficult by all those law-abiding red-blooded American gun lovers via their GOP lackeys in Congress. For instance, it is illegal for the federal government to computerize records of handgun ownership or use in crimes.
As someone who lives in Germany i can definitely say the police do worry as much about the gun as the suspect.
Germany was another of the Nations I wanted to mention. Fewer than 200 people in Germany died because of gun related homicide in 2010. You are more likely to be killed driving stupidly on the Autobahn than to be killed by a gun packing lunatic almost anywhere in Europe. Yet, people there enjoy the same freedoms except for gun ownership as many in America and a few more.
So this entire idea that firearms are somehow an absolute "necessity"in order to be “free” is a fallacy.
Any Finn, Frenchman, or Italian would be, I think more inclined to agree with me also.
The first question I get from many people whom I help to overcome the language barrier in America is most often something along the lines of “Can you really go into big Stores and buy guns the same place where you buy food?”
I get depressed when I must tell them the truth. That the answer is yes, although that is changing too, in some ways. Some big stores here no longer sell rifles and shotguns a few feet away from the soda pop and candy for kids. But this change took many years and many tragic events before it happened. Personally, I am glad that most of these stores no longer sell guns.
And then, one must ask: Is America really any less “free” because you cannot buy a shotgun, some Dr Pepper, and two pounds of hamburger for dinner on the way home from work?
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I am an American ex-pat so know what you mean. I was telling someone about fishing licenses and the fact i had to sped €300+ just to take the exam which included 48hours of classroom and ‘praxis’ - practical’- time. For hunting licenses it is even more stringent.
‘Freedumb’ for Americans has been dumbed down. Period.