Ditto if you include a requirement for demonstrating knowledge of safe handling skills & reasonable accuracy. The current Tennessee requirement is a total certain number of hits inside the silohette at various ranges. We are a shall issue state but I'd like to see a requirement at each range using the scoring rings. As it is currently written, it is possible to get the required score with a gun you haven't fired before & are rushing the shots.

What it takes to aquire a sidearm aside, the question that keeps coming to me regarding the shootings; What can be done to keep someone from getting to the point of thinking that they have to kill people before committing suicide? It appears that through Cho's life he left many signs that he needed help. There were people that recognized these signs but no one persued getting this young man the help he needed.
Ben

The only thing that prevents us from open carry in public is the crime of Affray, which is to say that a holstered or shouldered firearm carried by a civilian tends to scare some folks as much as if it were being brandished. It is not a real well published law, but I think you will find it is on the books in most jurisdictions these days.

While you'll not find a stronger advocate for effective firearms training, I still have a real issue with attaching qualification to any rights. We have have other rights that I don't think we put such stringent qualification against, though pretty much all our rights are conditioned to some degree (freedom of speech except for slander, libel, or fraud, for instance).

I can agree to that.

I wonder where being convicted of a DWI would fall into the mix.

It's probably staring me in the face, but it's been a long shift and my eyes are crossed.

Yeah, around here they call it going armed.

I'm in the far right crowd on gun control myself. I consider proper gun control to be hitting what you are aiming at. I like the Arizona set up (if it's reasonably openly carried it's legal).

The only thing I'm wanting to get tougher about our CCW is that you would have to get so many in the center rings 7?-10 rather than just in the outline and situational questions on the test w/ gray areas. Everything else would get looser. Everywhere that is now off limits is valid except courtrooms as long as you are dead cold sober. This includes schools, parks, bars, restaurants w/ by the drink, etc (including government offices)

From what little I've seen in the news, his English teacher did sound the alarm but there was little that could legally be done.

I haven't watched much in the last 24 hours as I'm on pathos overload so there probably has been some more info on this that I've missed.

The mental health laws will vary from state to state but here in Louisiana I believe only a family member can go to the local coroner's office and file an order for protective custody (allows LEOs to pick someone up and take them to the hospital to be evaluated), if the family is not willing to do that then there's not much the college could do.

Even then it's tricky. I have run across families that were trying to get a perfectly sane family member picked up and locked up because they wanted to get a hold of some property.

A lot of mentally ill folks don't get into the "system" unless they have repeatedly run afoul of the law and even then it's not a lot that can be done.

The system is skewed towards incarceration, not treatment. (That's not me being a liberal, that's reality).

Unfortunately, the way the system is set up the only way to get this guy off the streets for any length of time was to arrest, convict and sentance him for some crime. That means he'd have to commit a pretty serious crime which of course is exactly what happened in the VT case, he just didn't survive to make it into "the system".

Psych hospitals are geared toward emergency stabilization and outpatient referal only, and if he doesn't have insurance, he as to wait for a public bed (good luck).

I repeatedly have to explain to wigged out families that I cannot legally hold their mentally ill family member any longer because they are not exhibiting dangerous behavior at that time.

Yeah, I know from experience that he's probably going to stop taking his meds and decompensate, but at that moment there's nothing objective to hold him on.

There are multiple factors in this tragedy that are broken.

Unfortunately, they won't get anymore attention once the news cycle turns and something else gets the public's attention.

For the record, in my postings on this issue some of ya'll have given me some good objective points to think about.

Some have validated my thoughts on the subject, others have given me pause to think.

For those, I thank you.

Actually, there was court ordered evaluation at which time it was clinically determined he was a danger, but not enough of a danger to not let go. *shakes head* We kibbitz about the criminal justice and welfare systems, but no one ever wants to work on the mental health system- that would lessen the load on the other two.

I think that mental health is one area of debate that should definitely be explored. We (and by we I mean the entire country) have quickly jumped to the gun debate. But guns are not the most important issue here, IMHO. Mental health care is much closer to the issue at hand. It certainly seems like steps should have been taken earlier. It's very difficult to restrain someone who is showing danger signals. In this situation they tried to get the man into counseling. The English teacher tried multiple times, both appealing directly to him and trying to get a mandate. In some respects its good that its difficult to get someone locked up. The danger of witch hunts, greed, ignorance, and malice shouldn't be ignored either. Some people tend to talk about creepy subjects but aren't a danger to anyone, other people seem calm and well adjusted and have a crawl space full of bodies.

Whatever the legal and moral issues to serpentine, I think it is clear we need to lose the coyness about mental disease. The subject shouldn't be taboo and treatment shouldn't be either.

Three words: "well-regulated militia." It's not a blanket right.

Shooter licenses would be a reasonable implementation of that.

So would mandatory training in firearm use, with testing (heck, I'd welcome the lessons).

For the person who gave the stats on doctor-caused versus shooter-caused deaths, you need to add in murder and suicide. Your point is valid, but your statistics are way off.