Quote:
Originally Posted by Phantom-Takaya
To answer your second doubt, guns are expensive here in America. But, it's not difficult to get a job and save money to purchase them. High schoolers at the age of 14 are permitted to get jobs here. At minimum wage and at the maximum permitted hours a minor can work, a high schooler would have enough money to purchase every gun and bullet he had withn at least 3 months. Of course, just because they would have the money to do so doesn't mean they wouldn't have trouble due to gun laws. Now, I'm hearing he's 19 or something around that age, so he's no longer a minor, so he could work full time in a job, so you can imagine how much faster he would have been able to afford those things.
|
Random facts and comments:
AFAIK, most states require the purchaser to be 21 to buy a firearm legally and pass a background check (which still is inadequately implemented IMO).
Firearms dealers have to pass extensive checks and keep records ... the number of dealers have dropped substantially in the last 10 years with all the additional restrictions and regulation.
No supermarket chains sell guns anymore (outside of Wal*mart which is more of a WeSellEverything store than a supermarket) though there are independent general purpose stores that sometimes have a firearms section (in rural areas usually).
One question I do have is that the guy apparently purchased more than a couple of clips to go with his gun. That (though legal) is unusual and should have set the vendor's mental alarm bell off to chat more with the guy. All the vendors I deal with are careful to get to know their purchasers (using banter and small talk) --- they don't *want* to be tagged as "the guy who sold the gun to the perp".
A decent gun in the US will run $400-$1200. A crappy gun can run around $200. Some other banal data:
1) Auto-loaders (sometimes called semi-automatics) require one pull the trigger for each bullet.
2) Fully automatic weapons (rapidfire machineguns, etc.) are strictly regulated and virtually impossible to legally own (the number of licenses is fixed and onerous to maintain).
3) There really is no such thing as an "assault weapon" -- its a bias term used by people who either don't understand weaponry as it is almost always applied to any gun that looks extra scary. I have a shotgun with a pistol grip and foldable stock: those people would characterize that as an assault weapon though it is functionally identical to a goosehunting gun.
The phrase "assault weapon" as used by the military refers to any weapon which can be used to keep the enemy's head down while the infantry approaches the target.
4) Buying ammo requires providing personal information.
The background check system still sucks in this country (poorly connected databases) and is just as often wrong as insufficient. The mental healthcare system has been systematically starved for decades (like much of the infrastructure) and the attitudes and knowledge of the public towards mental health is still very UNinformed.
For that matter, we've got a serious education problem in America that results in poorly informed and poorly educated populace from our youngest to our leaders. This is a problem for the rest of the world because it reflects in our decision-making and permits a manipulative few to misdirect the many.
Beats me if we'll be able to correct it... ... ... ...
edit: I'm listening to some news articles now about the South Korean government "condolence and apologies" ... and the news media and some of the public are misconstruing it because they don't *get* the idea that in a collectivist society you apologize for the actions of someone from your "ingroup" whether or not you had *anything* to do with it. Yet another educational failure (the media is just as uneducated as the population they're serving... ouch).