BBC: A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned.

Adam Lanza and his mother were rich. Extremely rich.  Top 1% rich.  She could have afforded all the mental health in the world, but chose not too.

From the very limited information I have available, I am definitely assigning some of the blame on her.

Taking a mentally unstable child to gun ranges with semi automatic assault rifles.  Absolutely disgusting.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has called on United States lawmakers to ban automatic weapons following the Connecticut school massacre, alluding to Australia's response to the Port Arthur massacre.

The News Corp chairman used the social media platform Twitter to express frustration at the easy availability of automatic and semi-automatic guns in his adopted country.

'Terrible news today,' he tweeted. 'When will politicians find courage
to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar
tragedy.' link

Back in 1996, Australia imposed a much stricter version of the assault weapons ban after a mass shooting. The Australian version did not carry many of the loopholes in the U.S. law: Not only did the country ban all types of semiautomatic rifles, it also spent $500 million buying up existing guns from private owners.

As Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff pointed out, Australia's law appears to have curbed gun violence. Researchers in the British Medical Journal write that the ban was "followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides."

Still, it's unclear whether Congress would go for anything that sweeping. Over the weekend, Feinstein explained that her new version of the assault weapons ban would still "exempt over 900 specific weapons." link

Hopefully I'm just having a bad dreams or a reaction from not having enough caffeine.

Amid all the problems she identifies, the only current solution there seems to be is the criminal justice system to get the disturbed child, "in the system".

I am way out of my depth here, but the purpose of a criminal arrest seems to be to get them into NCIC data base so authorities have broad instant access to them when they are encountered.  

Is it unreasonable to consider setting up another national data base that mirrors NCIC but strictly for mental issues?  It could have levels of caution just like A/B/C misdemeanor and 1/2/3 felonies but without the stigma or need for an actual criminal arrest which is obviously the wrong tool.  

Convictions are public records but arrests are not, so access to the data base could be limited along the same lines.  The data would be available to authorities but not the public without a court order.

My point is that everyone locally says, "no surprise" but without a criminal act or a clear cut mental issue there is no identification of the problem people.

Lets just hope whatever the response is, it doesn't carry the unintended consequence of making us collectively crazier.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Parsed into modern English, it says essentially:

As long as we need a well-regulated militia to preserve the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Note that the emphasized clause determines whether the depended clause is active or not.

Our founding fathers had a real distaste for the idea of a standing army, and so fostered the idea of the soldier-citizen, ready to drop the plow, pull the old musket off the fireplace mantle, and assemble into a "well-regulated" militia.  The Constitution, in Article I, describes what a well-regulated militia is, how these state militias are formed, trained and armed, and what they are to be used for (enforcing the law, defending the country in case of external attack, and putting down insurrections (NOT arming radical insurrectionists).  In Article II, the Constitution gives the President as Commander-in-Chief the ultimate power to take leadership of all state militias (today's equivalent is the state National Guard organizations) when used for national defense.

Since we DO have a standing army - and one that is more than adequately powerful and well armed to protect the country than the National Guard units, the first clause can reasonably be construed to negate the need for the second.  Ergo, no Constitutional right to keep and bear personal arms.

Also, the framers were VERY careful in their language, and used "person" when referring specifically to individual rights, and "people" when discussing aggregate rights.  There is nothing in the Second Amendment, even if taken as applying, that says that the well-regulated militias can require that each militia member keep his or her weapons in the militia armory until the militia is called out.

Lastly, if you ever read an annotated version of the original Constitution, you will see that a goodly portion of its content has been overridden through the amendment process. Check out Cornell's Law Institute version and see how much of the original text is highlighted in green an made into links to amendments that override the original document.

NOTHING in the Constitution is carved in stone and beyond altering.  Thomas Jefferson explained why they included an amendment process in the first place:

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment... But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, and more enlightened as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions changed with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also and keep pace with the times."

"Assault rifle" has a very specific definition, and is, essentially, the standard service rifle carried into battles of any modern army. Usually the user can choose to fire them as fully-automatic or semi-automatic with the flip of a switch.

"Assault weapon" is a non-technical term that refers to whatever the person using the term wants it to refer to. A term of art.

The "bullet hose if you just hold down the trigger" you describe is fully-automatic, commonly called "automatic." A machine gun. They are, for the most part, illegal for the average Joe to possess.

There is, essentially, no way to make a semi-automatic weapon that cannot be converted to a fully-automatic weapon.

BUT, also realize that there is, essentially, also no way to make a single-shot weapon (must reload one round after each shot) that also cannot be made into a fully-automatic weapon.

iow, it's all just mechanical bits and pieces. If you want to change the firing mechanism of any gun, you can do so. Some, of course, are much easier to change than others, semi-auto to auto is typically much easier than single-shot to semi-auto or auto, but basically guns are pretty simple mechanical machines, not rocket science.

Semi-automatic guns have been around since the late 1800's, and are, I would expect, to be the most common gun-type manufactured for many, many decades. They are literally as common as dirt.

Revolvers have the same effective result as a semi-auto, one shot per trigger pull. They've been around since the early 1800's.

But the classic early-adult-onset (usually male) mood disorders are typical in that the most difficult part is to get the depressed/bi polar/schizoid patient to actually ACCEPT care. To get them to go to therapy, and most especially to take the prescribed medication.

The disorder itself brings on its own perception of reality, and their reality is that they are OK. They don't need therapy. They don't need meds.

So even if the very best help is available (and of course, it often is not) the toughest part is getting the patient to accept the help, go to therapy, take their meds and so on.

Local law enforcement officials have indicated that there's "some very good evidence" that will help explain how and why Adam snapped, but they've declined to get more specific as the investigation continues.

As best the neuro-psychologists and neurologists can tell (it is a very new field as we are still just creating tools to explore it), there are three basic categories of mass murderers.

The first is the serial killer, who is often a full-blown violence-oriented psychopath (Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy come to mind).  The second is the psychotic, primarily schizophrenic with paranoid delusions.  The third, and possibly the most common is the person suffering from a particular strain of profound depression (endogenous or exogenous).  Some experts have described much depression as anger turned inward.  When the pressure builds up beyond the person's ability to handle it, he or she can strike out - usually at the person or people s/he believes responsible for their internal agony.  That's why so many of these incidents start out with the person shooting a parent, spouse, boss, or working colleagues.  Once unleashed, the anger sometimes spreads to a more generalized anger, and some elect to keep on shooting people, even innocents.  These people typically end up by shooting themselves.  In essence, this is an elaborate suicide combined with the desire to punish the person or even the entire community perceived as responsible.

Since depression can ofter go undetected for many years and even schizophrenia typically doesn't manifest itself until late teens or twenties, there may be no effective way to identify in advance many of the candidates to become serial or spree killers.   Maybe thousands of teens are depressed for every one who is driven to externalize their rage.  The only group that can be identified in advance is psychopaths/sociopaths, who are born with the condition and typically show symptoms (to one trained to interpret them) and even have abnormal EEG readings that can identify them.

I tend to disagree.  LtCol Dave Grossman' (Pulitzer nominated author on the silence of desensitizing to killing) brought up some excellent points at a seminar in San Francisco  a few weeks before this tragedy with respect to school violence.  

He asks the audience "How many children have died from school fires in the last 50 years?  Answer:None.  How about school violence?".  He walked around the room and showed all the passive fire measures that were in place.   Hissing was that if we would look to preventing violence with the same ingenuity, great inroads could be made.  We found the money for fire measures.

And on the point of these active shooters and their mental state, I am not a psychologist, but  my wife is an educator and she tells me how powerless schools are to interdict abhorrent behavior.  That includes bullying.  

All of these recent active shooters were outcasts and most were highly intelligent.  Some of the comments in the press suggest he was ostracized if not outright bullied.  

The guns were a way to empower themselves.  Just a theory, but nobody stands up on their behalf like they did in my youth.   With no release or help, perhaps  it just builds and builds.  

And then, even in the 5th most restrictive gun state in the union, they shoot Thier mother in the face 4 times and go out to even the score....