FL Debates #1: Gun Control

[goigle!]

As a Danish myself, I agree with your point of view of most people here. However for the sake of debate I would like to give another reason for banning gun control.
So as you point out there is a lot of guns in the US, however the same can be said of Canada if we are talking about guns pr citizens. And you don't see this kind of shootings in Canada. So why is that?
Well if you have seen "Bowling for Columbine" then Mr. Moore points out that the difference in media and social structure. Media in the sense that the US media tense to be very dramatic and create fear. While in Canada the media is more like our two countries. Social stucture in the sense that ghettos ain't really a thing there and that Canadians don't fear each other.
So Micheal Moore point is this, as long as Americans have this culture of fear then we should make strict gun control.

I'd say the issue is media along with the lack of the ability to force treatment to the mentally ill. The media has an indirect effect in that messages that people intend to be taken one way (Republicans putting a map up with crosshairs for certain towns that they are trying to win over, one of which Gabrielle Giffords was later shot in) can be misinterpreted by people who have mental illnesses and either take the message too seriously or create their own message out of it and start to harm people.
There's also the fact that the media gives too much coverage of violence. As Gavin de Becker pointed out in the Gift of Fear, some mentally ill people that want attention see violence on the media and how much attention that gets people and then they do violent acts just to get the attention.

America also lacks the ability to treat people that are mentally ill, for a reason that is perceived good (the idea we'd rather let a guilty man go than an innocent man rot). It used to be easier to treat someone for mental illness (without their consent), but there was one court case where a man was unjustly put in a mental hospital for something like 2 decades by his family and the court then set a precedent that you need proof that someone is a harm to either others or themselves to force them to be in a mental hospital. In the case of the mentally ill with guns, that usually means they have to either say they're going to do it or actually do it in order to get treated unless they seek treatment themselves.
The other part of this is that there have been people who could have been locked up but people mistook what they were saying as jokes, as many people have a dark humor. That happens less now as more incidents happen and people are more aware.

I don't really think the issue is ease of access, I think it's not understanding how to approach that ease of access.
If you're going to let pretty much anybody have a rifle and then outright ban all weapons at schools for everyone (excluding on duty police), and you don't always have an officer stationed there, nothing is stopping somebody from taking a gun and shooting. I'm not advocating teachers having guns, but I am saying that there should be some form of armed security (even if it is a one man) to act as a deterrent. It wouldn't even have to be an extra guy, one of the school security guard positions could come with extra training.
The reason malls and schools and other areas like those are targeted is because they're soft targets. Light security and lots of people.
The reason there isn't more security there pretty much comes down to money. People will always think it won't happen to them (and statistically that's fairly true) and thus aren't willing to lower their profits (in the case of malls) or spend money they could use elsewhere (in the case of schools).