We don’t need to change genetics to rid the world of mass murderers. It’s pretty evident that to create a mass murderer, all you need to do is take a type A personality child and put them in an enviroment of unceasing violence, poverty, desperation, fear and anger.

So, fix the environment, and you overwhlmingly mitigate the problem of sociopaths. Of course, to do that, you need more social services to assist in helping kids who live in environments that breed sociopathy. Which means you need more government. But I know how all you folks feel about more government, so I don’t really see a viable solution to this problem until we can get some consensus across party lines that big government is not necessarily evil.

You can’t be serious? More government leads to a peaceful population? Nazi Germany had more government; so did the Soviet Union and Communist China. Are you going to try to argue they were peaceful, or somehow less prone to mass murder than the U.S? You don’t seem to be a thinking person, really, just someone who parrots silly opinions you’ve heard somewhere else, but I am one of those optimists who hopes that one day reason will penetrate your thick skull.

Banning guns, is utterly pointless. As the tired saying goes, “guns do not kill people, people kill people.” that said, if it isn’t a guns that you see before you meet your end, it’ll be a knife, hammer, brick, rope or hands around your throat. Personally, I’d prefer to be ready to defend myself and a gun will beat out a knife everytime. Sorry but that’s the world we find ourselves living in.

Perhaps you should google “Pearl High School” and “Appalachian Law School:”- no gunfight; psycho arrested.

To back up Mr Clayton: in the overwhelming majority of cases of armed self-defense, NO shots are fired, and nobody is injured. The sight of a citizen’s firearm alone is sufficient to deter the crime, and induce the criminal either to flee or surrender.

Your ‘Look at Somalia’ comment is beyond the pale. Somalia is a lawless land; America is not. Just because we have guns does not indicate a willingness, desire, or propensity for law-abiding Americans to abuse and misuse them. In fact, in states where ‘right to carry’ has becom law, violent crime statitics have almost always improved, and the statistics on those carry-permit holders are equally favorable.

As to your ‘gun fight’ comment, yes, hopefully there would be one, and perhaps one of the good guys could take out one of the bad guys, and by doing so potentially save an awful lot of innocent lives.

More guns in the hands of decent Americans is my answer, and I stand behind it. What do you propose beyond asking everyone to cower, pray, and hope the boogeyman passes them by until the cavalry can arrive?

I understand that per Ron Borsch – instructor at the Southeast Area Law Enforcement Academy in Ohio – “25% of mass murder shooting sprees he has researched were ended by armed private citizens”.

Perhaps the next pair of disaffected high school students a la Columbine could be persuaded to boil a bunch of mercury in home-ec class and the whole building will be contaminated waste?

Very true. And that’s the reason that I pointed out that a big part of the mass murder problem (and part of the general murder problem) in the U.S. is related to the well-intentioned effort to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill, which led to a dramatic increase in not just murder, but homelessness, people freezing death sleeping on park benches, and a general degradation of the quality of urban life–not to mention dramatic increases in mentally ill homeless people dying of violence and exposure.

Focusing on the guns distracts attenton from what a horrible mistake deinstitutionalization was–and that’s probably why so much leftist media focuses on guns. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

This is simply not true. There are several dozen surveys of defensive uses of guns, with a range from 82,000 uses per year to as high as 2.45 million. The bulk of these studies (some of which are from when crime rates were higher than today) come in the 200,000-400,000 defensive uses a year.

Criminal misuses of guns are typically higher, but not dramatically higher–often around 500,000-600,000 per year.

Unfortunately, you can’t just sum them and get a net benefit number. Many of the criminal misuses of guns can be quite effectively replaced with other weapons. Many of the defensive uses of guns can’t be easily substituted with for another weapon, because the person using a gun defensively isn’t as strong, or as brutal as the attacker.

“No, if someone else had a gun, there would be a gun fight.”

Instead, there’s a massacre. Hmmmm. Ten dead victims, and one suicided mass murderer. Or, perhaps two dead victims (and perhaps even the defender with a gun) and a dead mass murderer.

It’s not pretty. But it’s better than letting the mass murderer decide when he’s had enough fun terrorizing people, then killing them.