Montana is a gun saturated red state so it's no suprise the killers came from there.

Stranger Readers being highly educated, urban, savvy, and high income are less likely to own guns than the uneducated country hicks from Eastern Washington and other red state areas. Ignorant small town poor people are dangerous.

i don't own a gun. but i think knute berger does. does he count as a stranger reader?

http://www.alternet.org/story/10466/

Want to see the scary kinds of people who own guns?

http://www.armedamerica.org/

Apparently I must be scary, if you saw me sitting in a Cafe somewhere reading the Stranger, youngish, hip, well dressed and armed, you would never guess, it is a shame I was not at that party, the outcome would likely have been very different.

Keep it coming, kooks.

Was Dominic Maldonado just some cook from the sticks when he walked into a Tacoma mall and opened fire?

Tacoma, last I checked, was a city and not some podunk hick town *(well for the most part anyways).

wow.

that was sort of harsh.

i think the income thing is what eked me, but i don't know if i can contest it...

maybe i'm interpreting this wrong, and i sure as hell haven't looked it up, but i don't think "Stranger Readers" (capitals?) can all be considered high-income and "savvy." ...it IS a free weekly paper.

maybe you meant "who are" instead of "being"?

hm. i have contributed practically nothing to this discussion.

by the way, my above post was directed at Chicago Kid. whoops.

Don't own a gun. Even if I had training on it, I think the overall safety concerns outweigh any safety benefits.

I own a gun. It was my grandfather's, then my dad's and now mine. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't.

Hey Chicago, what part of your education made you think it would be cool to be an urban bigot?

Looks like you should have stayed awake during Stereotypes are Stupid class. Sheesh!

I was talking with a friend of mine this weekend about a classmate of ours from Columbia University who's turned into a paranoid gun nut. He collects assault rifles and keeps a gun on one side of his bed and a clip on the other. Oh, and where does he live now? San Francisco.

Hey PK,

I have one of those. A .22 bolt-action rifle, 'squirrel gun'. My grandfather claimed it was the first thing he ever bought with his own money. My spouse hates that I won't throw it away. But c'mon!

I don't look at people who own a gun or two any different from those who don't have any, but someone who has a ton of guns and ammo (especially shotguns, assault rifles and the like) needs help before he snaps. (To date, I've never heard of any women who were arming themselves like they expected the apocalypse at any moment.)

You're exactly right, Matt from Denver. The Apocalypse is exactly what they're waiting for. Not just Huff but all these gun nuts. Hence all the talk about defending your home, when it's apparent that what they expect to be defending their home for is.... the cops. You know, those jackbooted Nazi UN thugs...

No, I'd say the government is pretty evil enough as is. No need to put in the Nazis or the UN.

With the Bush Administration threatening most of our Bill of Rights, its lucky that he hasn't targeted the 2nd. Doesn't change the fact that he still should be out of office, one way or another.

So, SOCIALUNRAVELIN, you're exercising your god-given right to take up arms against your government, I see. After all, there's no real difference between Bush, Hitler, the UN, or the Ukraine. Or burnt toast, for that matter. No one could ever say you lack perspective, could they?

Keep talking.

Who said anything about God? Nothing is higher than human beings!

Its not about perspective, its about truth. Just because something is the lesser of two evils, doesn't mean its still not evil. The lesser of two evils is still an endorsement of evil. So rather, its a matter of prioritization.

So when are you going to go shoot Bush? Or me, or whoever else is on your list? You have a list, right? Otherwise what's the point of talking about it?

And there you go again with the baiting...

I'm a sportsman too.

Water sports don't count, FNARF.

Oh, they count all right. My aim is true.

I do not, will not own a gun. I don't have anything against sportsmen who do, FWTW. Oh, and I think your "poll" will be a tad skewed by being taken on the Internet in your forum.

Chicago, you are the one who sounds like an ignorant hillbilly, I know many (and I mean many) people who own firearms and every one of them is educated, and making a good living, including myself. You may call me a kook or whatever other silly shit you can come up with but it truly shows your maturity level and inability to communicate in a meaningful way.

What happens if there is a total ban on guns in the U.S.? You like Japan and the UK theyve got the answer right? Well a ban will start with millions of guns in this country.

You can check out registered owners and send SWAT teams to collect all those guns from the cold dead fingers of the gun nut owners. Meanwhile you perform warrentless searches on the well mannered sportsmen who have one or two.

That leaves the gun grandpa left which probably isnt registered. Good sheeple will volunteer to hand them in or their kids can be trained to rat them out as part of the DARE program. Big Bro could add a few more words to their NSA search criteria and ferret out still more from phone taps.

That just leaves us all safe and cozy doesnt it. Except for the fact that theres still going to be TENS OF THOUSANDS of guns hidden away in this country.

People carry guns illegally, they commit murders which are against the law, they do illegal drugs A LOT of illegal drugs. Laws do not stop behavior they simply influence it for ill or good.

There is simply no possible way to effectively remove all guns from the U.S. You can lessen the amount through a ban but that just means only criminals will have access to them.

No one who owns a gun should ever admit it in something as public as a blog; it could be stolen.
When I took "Criminal justice and the law" at the University of Washington, I did a report on gun laws. I found out that in place where strict gun laws were put into place, it either didn't make a difference in terms of criminals using guns; and ironically, it contributed to more crime. I came to the study thinking the NRA was wrong and that their mantra, "If guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns," was inaccurate. Sadly, it seemed the facts bear them out. And that was in 1977. The proliferation of guns in America - and the world - make it even more unlikely that anyone can indeed put the "genie back into the bottle," so to speak.
My hunch is that more readers of The Stanger will own guns, after this incident, to protect themselves. But if anyone thinks that they can do the same things Viggo Mortensen did in "A History of Violence," when his character was confronted by two killers, think again. The human urge to flee is so strong, hardly anyone can truly know how they will react, when put into a combat situation.
One might think that, if he or she had their sidearm with them, they couldn've "taken out" the killer on Capitol Hill; but to do that, and not sustain some life-threatening wounds oneself, would have required someone trained at the level of a U.S. Marine. How many of us are at that level of training.
Buy a gun, if you wish and go to Wade's, possibly the best gun range in the Puget Sound area, over in Bellevue. Once there, it is worthwhile in that one finds gun owners are not morons, people with mostly missing teeth or all the other hoary old cliches. You don't even need to own a gun to go there: borrow a friend's or use one that Wade's offers.

way to hype your undergraduate research report! don't suppose you wrote any book reviews in high school you'd like to share too? btw comparing nations, rather than states, might have changed your results a wee bit.

as for the idea that you can't get people to turn in guns they own: you could pay people to return a lot of them. here's a report by our own harborview medical center about it:

http://depts.washington.edu/hiprc/practices/topic/firearms/buyback.html

they must have overlooked your study from 30 years ago! didn't you publish it in a peer-reviewed journal?

anyway, even if it's not a perfect policy, and you can't totally remove all guns from the public sphere (could we at least start with all automatic weapons, for christ's sake?), it's better than arming yourself with some stupid fantasy about how if we all had more guns we'd somehow be safer.

You can add paying people for their guns to the list of methods for removal and it still wont change the fact that people want guns and are willing to spend money on them. I bet criminals are willing to pay more money for guns than any Gvt. or NGO program possibly could. Criminals who make big $$ from other illegal activities.

We did start with automatic weapons. I believe you can only get them in Arizona and a very few other red states. But what you intended to say was assault weapons or guns designed for combat. Which you can get as a semi-automatic and with a little technical skill and some extra parts make into automatic. However, any way you look at it theres still thousands of them in the hands of ordinary citizens who want to keep them and no law, cash incentive, or moral obligation is going to reverse that.

I think if we took the cash weve just dropped on invading a soveriegn nation and poured it into education and healthcare we would see a much greater benefit than passing laws to make ourselves feel better.

I own weapons(much more than Kyle Huff)

and I've never shot, nor do I ever PLAN to shoot a person.