Santa Barbara aftermath: how California is breaking new ground on gun control

[n2doc]

By Daniel Wood, Staff writer

LOS ANGELES — Four months after a mentally unbalanced student went on a shooting rampage – killing six and injuring 13 next to the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus in May – California has taken the national lead in gun control with two new laws allowing temporary seizure of guns from those who courts have decided are a threat to others or themselves.

With one of the laws, signed yesterday by Gov. Jerry Brown, the state becomes the first in the country to allow close relatives to request that a judge order that firearms be removed from someone who may pose a threat.

Several legal analysts say the laws neatly walk the tightrope between the constitutional right to bear arms and public safety. Gun rights advocates, however, say they trample on Californians’ civil liberties and deny the accused due process.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2014/1001/Santa-Barbara-aftermath-how-California-is-breaking-new-ground-on-gun-control

[TheVisitor]

1. I honestly...

don't think gun control is going to do much of anything. I don't believe guns contribute as much as they are believed to contribute to mass killings. I think society as a whole is screwed up. There are many alternatives to killing mass amounts of people, and murderers will find them. I think we need to all stop excluding people and labeling them, that by outcasting people they find extremist views more appealing. Most people who go on rampages didn't fit in somehow or were feeling societal pressure (a lot of times for being mentally ill). The guns being used for violence are a symptom of a societal disease, honestly. In fact, there are countries with high population percentages owning guns, but they are do not have anywhere near the amount of gun violence we experience.

I don't think it's a good time to enact more gun regulations until we have enacted strict police regulations and start holding murdering and power abusing police to the same standards as the rest of the population. If our guns are restricted and the police still have their abundance of weaponry, it leaves us completely defenseless against their rampages and leaves us vulnerable to a complete and utter extremist police state control.

In a perfect world, the police would also realize not many people have guns, therefore they had nothing to fear: but in reality, I don't think the police will ever put their massive weaponry aside to take a risk without strict judicial process adherence for their crimes against humanity, and we will only see an increase of brutality, because they will still assume that criminals illegally own guns... that people are guilty until proven innocent... and use this as justification, as they have up until this point, for killing innocent and unnamed people.