Trib Live reports with a follow-up to the Pittsburgh Psychiatric Clinic shooting.
I find it hard to believe gun-rights folks still try to justify this one.After he tangled with police and was committed to a mental health facility in Oregon in 2010, John F. Shick should not have been able to buy a gun in America under federal law.
But an Albuquerque, N.M., man told investigators he sold two 9 millimeter handguns with no background check to a man resembling Shick when Shick responded to a newspaper ad in April 2011, Pittsburgh police Cmdr. Thomas Stangrecki said on Friday.
Private sales without background checks are legal under New Mexico law. Shick tried to buy a handgun in Oregon in January 2011 and was denied after a background check.
Pittsburgh police believe Shick used the handguns to fatally shoot therapist Michael Schaab, 25, of Regent Square and wound five others at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic on March 8.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
We don't try to justify what this nutcase did. We do the following:
ReplyDelete1. We recognize that what was done here is probably already illegal. It's not clear which state Shick is a resident of, but buying a handgun outside of one's state of residence is a crime. That didn't work, did it?
2. Imagine now that background checks are required in all states. What makes you think that someone who's willing to violate one Federal law already will be deterred by another or by an additional state law?
3. Most of us buying guns aren't this guy. You can't acknowledge that the numbers of people like Shick are tiny. If the law is tailored to restrain them, we all will find ourselves living in a mental institution.
2. Many people end up doing crimes without having had a determined intention to do so beforehand.
Delete3. People like Shick are rare, but he's an exaggerated example of the problem. Let's lower the bar a little bit, not enough to hit you on the head, but enough to catch the Shicks and Loughners and Chos of the world, or at least some of them.
Look at what you just said: People end up doing crimes without having had a determined intention to do so beforehand. How will you stop that from happening? Do you have some way of determining who's going to snap sometime in the future? You can run all the mental health screenings that you want, but you'll miss the people that you just described. The only way to stop them is to remove all guns from private ownership and to severely restrict the agents of the government from getting guns. That's not an option in this country.
Delete"1. We recognize that what was done here is probably already illegal. It's not clear which state Shick is a resident of, but buying a handgun outside of one's state of residence is a crime. That didn't work, did it?"
ReplyDeleteTypical Gunzloonlogic: Work aggresively to make sure that there is no coherent national policy re: keeping the mentally unbalanced and outright felons from easily obtaining firearms and THEN say it can't work.
"Most of us buying guns aren't this guy."
Does it penetrate that squash of yours that a lot of us don't really give a fuck if only SOME of the assholes that have "issues" kill people with easily acquired (legally or not) gunz?
And here we see Democommie's typical avoidance of logic. He can't tell us how someone who already ignored laws by selling Shick a gun will be made to follow a new law. He also fails to recognize the dangers of allowing the Federal government to have the kind of control over guns that his side wants.
Delete