Poll: The Mass Shooting in Buffalo: Is Banning Weapons the Answer, or Should More Good People Carry Guns?

Each time a tragedy involving guns strikes, politicians immediately jump on the opportunity to further their agenda with regards to guns.

Some will claim this highlights the need for more gun control, and banning weapons is the answer, while others claim that murderers will obviously not follow the law, and the only answer is to arm the good people to combat those looking to cause bloodshed.

Take the poll and let us know what you think.

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26 COMMENTS

  1. Someone actually had a gun and shot him, but he had armor and just shot him back and killed him. It is much more realistic to stop dangerous people from buying guns than it is to put a gun in every hand and hoping we don’t turn into the wild west. Arm cops, not random teenagers.

    • Yes, in this case, one guard shot him and he had body armor, Overall citizens with guns is more realistic and actually is proven to help.

      • I think thats silly.
        Look what people do with cars, you need them to have guns?

        The fact is, almost no mass shootings occurred with machine guns since they have been UNIVERSALLY BANNED in the US.

        Of course banning guns would help. The only issue is, that the right to have it is enshrined in the constitution.

        So, yes banning would help, but legally you have issues.

        The solution is to amend the constitution, but to argue that bans dont help is a silly argument.

    • I’d like to say the choice is a no-brainer, but that leaves so many people out.

      Banning guns has proved 10,000,000,000 times over to be a worthless or even worse than worthless solution. Gun bans only keep guns out of the hands of the people least likely to use them irresponsibly and therefore assures that we have a population of unarmed law-abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals who will get guns no matter how strong the laws are: see, eg. Chicago, toughest gun laws, most gun crime; and, see war on drugs, drugs are banned, everyone can get drugs.

      Another fallacy of gun bans is that that will miraculously reduce or eliminate gun violence. There are hundreds of millions of firearms in private ownership in America. Banning every single gun will not reverse that to any measurable extent. And, there will just be a very lucrative black market for guns.

      No, the answer is really cultural: a large percentage of the nation has lost any semblance of moral code, virtue, religious feeling or other compelling sense of obligation not to do harm to others. Unbridled passions, rage and self-righteous vengeance are let loose.

      Unfortunately, that cannot be easily reversed either, but it is the right place to start. Until it takes effect, I am in favor of two particular gun control requirements: 1) vigorous background checks, including mental health and 2) firearms training certification. The first one is obvious, the second one is for twofold reasons: too many people (See Alec Baldwin) are simply ignorant of basic firearm safety and a certification process should help to screen out mental health problems that can’t be picked up by background checks. Instructors should be able to recognize unstable individuals and have some kind of process for referring them for testing before a certification can be issued. Although these requirements are onerous burdens on Second Amendment freedoms, experience tells us that we must do something to protect the innocent.

      • no patience to read the whole rant, point but to your first point…

        No. It has NOT been proven to be ineffective, because if you can get guns in one place you can bring them to another.

        The solution is to get RID of guns entirely. Like they did with machine guns. Thats worked out quite well actually. There hasnt been a machine gun massacre since it was MACHINE GUNS WERE UNIVERSALLY OUTLAWED!

        Now I’m not saying thats Legal, or even smart, but it WOULD help with gun violence as we know it today.

        • You can make all the laws you want; it will not stop people who wish to harm from getting a weapon. This would be the new “war on drugs,” which has been a catastrophic failure. Banning guns would bolster the black market, which even the ATF cannot trace. We can’t even protect our borders

          Handguns are the most utilized weapon for criminal activity; how hard do you think it would be to smuggle in thousands of these smaller firearms every day.

        • If you consider my well-reasoned, sober essay on the subject of the poll as a rant, I can’t really consider your opinion seriously. And, true to form, it is not serious, because it imagines a non-existent world in which you could make both guns and the Second Amendment simply disappear. I prefer reality and realistic analysis and solutions.

  2. In more than 90% of deaths by guns in America, the shooter and the victim knew one another – family member, neighbor, fellow employee. And in a large part of that group, the shooter and the victim were the same person.

  3. Neither. How would you get all the guns away from people that own them legally or illegally? On the other hand if you arm everyone that wants to be armed then you will end up with incidents such as Arbery or Trayvon Martin. The country needs a national gun law and a national gun database so all dealers can run background checks through a common database. What needs to be banned is people owning body armor.

  4. If you ban guns, the illegal bad guys will still get the guns they want and use them. But by arming more (sane) people, you will have protection.

  5. Zman,
    We have national gun laws though they’re minimal. We have a national database as well. When a person goes to buy a gun they are run through the NICS system which is run by the federal govt.

    • What? There are over a dozen major Federal Statutory schemes governing every aspect of guns: manufacture, distribution, sales, specific firearms, ammunition, prohibited locations, etc. Of course, for every statutory scheme, there are dozens or hundreds of regulations.

      Please do the research.

  6. Arm the (sane) people? Who is to determine who is sane and who is not? Maybe they’ll determine an extreme right-wing religious sect (guess who) are all insane.

  7. I think it’s all hypothetical when it comes to nj gun laws one the strictest gun control that exists in USA which our previous governer Chris Christie said he is sceptical if nj strict gun carry laws are even legal heaven help us if soneone chas vashaloim would try this in lakewood what this lunatic did in Buffalo cause everyone is basicly unarmed then gun in ur house is not going to help

  8. After thousands of years of Jew haters killing us, you’d think Jews would NOT want the government to disarm us.

    Every pesach we read how they’re coming to get us. Meanwhile, shmartem Al nafshisechem is a mitzvah d’oraisah. How can you perform this mitzvah without the means to do so?

    Chamushim Alu Yisrael Mi’Mitzrayim. They were armed.(and no, Rashi doesn’t replace p’shat) We should be armed as well. Maase Avos, Siman L’Banim.

    And finally, what would have happened if 6 million Jews had guns and the training to use them?

  9. Bad people will manage to get guns despite gun bans. People have to be able to defend themselves. So I’m for gun ownership in the hands of people who only will use them in the right way.

  10. Midnight,
    Machine guns were not Universally Banned. I entered a raffle to win one. They just banned the introduction of new ones so the ones currently owned cost a lot and get recycled between buyers. They’re not used because A. They are harder to get and B. More importantly they’re basically useless. They are almost impossible to control so after the first few shots it’s aimed at the ceiling and they fire so quickly they don’t do much widespread damage. Better to have a 30 round magazine fired on semi-auto than a machine gun that empties the mag on one or two targets in 2 seconds then requires a reload.

    • While it is technically true that machine guns are not universally banned, they might as well be for the average person. First of all, all fully automatic weapons manufactured after 1986 cannot be purchased by a private citizen at all. Pre-1986 weapons are extremely hard to find and prohibitively expensive, like in the 10’s of thousands of dollars.

      I don’t know what raffle was offering a “machine gun” as a prize but I’d look at the fine print on that one.

Comments are closed.