My daughter's high school was in lockdown yesterday

[Billy Barber]

Turned out to be a hoax but after an hour of terror for teachers, students and parents there was a lot of psychological damage done, especially to the kids. Not to mention being in Greenwich,CT just down the road from Newtown.

I understand we are not to be political in this forum but I'm hoping to be exactly the opposite. Apolitical. Because I can't help but think there is a solution to this that could please (almost) everyone. Some of the smartest dialogue I've ever read has been on Reduser and wanted to pick your brains, if allowed.

A hundred years from now will we still be dealing with this? No one I know thinks so, that there will be, well, an app for that. So why not solve it sooner? Can't we innovate our way out of this? If someone had told you twenty years ago there was to be a digital camera that will fit in your hand capable of 6K resolution and sixteen stops of dynamic range one would have been skeptical, but Jim started by asking himself and his team 'how do we build the best?' not how do we survive the short term or make the easy compromise.

So in a perfect world.....a GPS chip in every gun? A James Bond chip that only fires for it's registered owner? Stiff penalties for guns that don't have these innovations? I have a friend from Toronto, a city about the size of New York. Something like thirty three gun related deaths in all of last year. Why? Can't get a gun.

I hunted and shot clay pigeons as a kid but that hobby looked pretty meaningless yesterday when I picked my daughter up from school.But perhaps if we're smart we can have both.

Thoughts?

 

[ericyoung]

This thread will be shut down fast, but from my personal UK perspective, it's not ONLY the easy availability of guns, but also the way it's bound up in an idea about being able to defend oneself against enemies real and imagined.

I've read 80-90% of Americans polled support greater gun control, beyond mandatory background checks, yet a small number of influential pro-gun politicians and organisations hold sway in government so that any meaningful progress is always watered down to ineffectiveness.

GPS chips and the like won't recall the millions of firearms already out in the wild.

It's not hopeless though. For a long time, no one thought the tobacco industry could be taken on (although there's still a long way to go there, especially in developing countries). What it took was making it less socially acceptable - legislation and technological fixes can't fix the cause as they only address the end result.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

All I can say is that I feel for you. I don't want to politicize it either as that simply leads to shutting reasonable discourse down.

Regarding the matter, I am currently in development (with my partner) to shoot a documentary about the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution; the one that addresses "the right to bear arms." Our goal is to present the subject in the most factual, balanced and fair way possible. The language of the amendment itself is very ambiguous and lends itself to whatever interpretation you care to overlay. But the legal, social, cultural and political histories (which we intend to discuss at length) give some hint as to what was meant by the original language and how history has interpreted. I welcome any suggestions here from RU folks as I, too, consider this an intelligent, capable and thoughtful community.

Terry VerHaar

 

[Jacek Zakowicz]

I think these are signs of a corrupt political system and the society reaction to it. Went through a (conceptually) similar ordeal when I was growing up in another system.
These events lead to a collapse. Cracking down on one small aspect of it won't change a thing- only empower the angry.
Anyway, just my personal perspective...

 

[Martin Weiss]

This is a very important subject, but here on reduser it will only serve to divide people. There are places much better suited discussions for this than a forum for professional camera users. You could start at http://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics

I hope you understand.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Awww... Martin pulled the plug. Yeah, I was going to do it too.

I agree with Billy's thought process here, some of the most intelligent discussion the net has to offer happens right here on these forums. Unfortunately, politics divide a community.