[MP-Ryan]

This story brought to you by stupid people, technology, poor judgement, and ridiculous firearms controls in Florida.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/movie-theater-witnesses-no-punches-only-popcorn-thrown-before-shooting/2160911

I've often said that there is a special place in hell for people who talk on the phone or text during a movie, but I never actually thought someone would try sending an offender there.  Levity aside, this story is tragic - 43-year old father and husband murdered over texting and a thrown bag of popcorn.

[Lorric]

Certainly didn't expect the murderer to be a 71 year old retired cop. Was expecting some punk.

[Goober5000]

ridiculous firearms controls

The murderer was a retired cop.  Are you in favor of restricting cops from carrying firearms?

It seems to me that this story is more illustrative of the astonishing lack of self-control demonstrated by cops in recent years.

[Phantom Hoover]

ridiculous firearms controls

The murderer was a retired cop.  Are you in favor of restricting cops from carrying firearms?

When they're retired? Yes.

[Scotty]

The point is that the retiree here had demonstrated an entire career and more of trustworthiness to carry a firearm.

That said, cut out the bull**** strawman Goob.  Lorric didn't say a damn thing about gun control.

[The E]

Goob didn't say anything about Lorric either

That being said, there is literally nothing about this story I understand. From someone carrying a gun, to carrying it into a movie theater, to shooting an unarmed person, everything in this is so far beyond my daily life that my only reaction can be summed up by a "wat".

[swashmebuckle]

We had a mass shooting in a movie theater a little while back, so you know, a good guy with a gun.

[StarSlayer]

Goob didn't say anything about Lorric either

That being said, there is literally nothing about this story I understand. From someone carrying a gun, to carrying it into a movie theater, to shooting an unarmed person, everything in this is so far beyond my daily life that my only reaction can be summed up by a "wat".

If you get a concealed carry license you can essentially keep a handgun on you at at all times aside from bars, federal facilities, airports and schools.

[Lorric]

Ryan is the one who mentioned gun control, not me.

I could imagine the possible scenario I suppose.

Dude is texting and it's really important. Dude 2 is annoyed by it. Dude is already wound up by whatever important stuff he's texting about and just wants this old geezer to get off his case and throws some popcorn at him. Dude 2 doesn't see it coming, it's dark, doesn't know what hit him, just knows he's been attacked, panics, pulls gun and shoots.

[Mars]

Or he just gets that angry.

[Sarkoth]

I'm just going to take the point of view of the ignorant European dude here: There's practically almost no guns around here that can be freely owned. The only exceptions being hunters (limited to single action HUNTING RIFLES, not fully automatic guns of mayhem) and people living so much out in the wilds that they actually suffer from the likelihood of wild animal attacks on their property. Even security personnel has to go through YEARS of weapons training and psychological evalution before they are even ever considered of being allowed to own a personal gun. Which must be kept in a safe in their home at all times and is not allowed to be moved in public without being stashed away in a way that it would take approximately 1 full minute to unwrap the firearm in any scenario (Not making this up, at least regarding Germany) The likelihood of being a victim of armed robbery in Europe or getting shot, ever, is practially zero if you aren't involved into heavy criminal activities or visit wellknown shady gang locations (and those are really RARE to begin with, and the reason for that is that practically no one owns weapons to begin with). Everytime I hear about a story like this, the only thing I can think about is the question of how moronic people actually can be before they become unable to actually be a conscious organism. I can understand the constitutional right to own arms, somehow at least and from a historical perspective. I can NOT understand why any civilian should be permitted to carry a gun around in everyday life. If the main argument becomes the need of having a gun just because other people also have a gun, the only possible result is a lot of people getting unneccessarily shot for the most ridiculous of reasons. To me, not having even seen a live weapon anywhere besides from meters away, in the holster of a cop or military personnel, all these stories sound simply unreal. And I have to admit: They don't exaclty improve my opinion of the American general state of law regarding firearms. Just my two cents here.

[Hellzed]

ridiculous firearms controls

The murderer was a retired cop.  Are you in favor of restricting cops from carrying firearms?

Actually, that's something cultural. Most European countries restrict cops from carrying guns :
- local police forces in Germany and France usually do not carry guns
- national or federal police forces carry guns, but they can only use it a last resort, in cases of self defence, and if a non lethal solution has already failed
- military patrols during anti-terrorist alerts have empty magazines

Every police officer I know keeps his/her gun at home in a locked box.

I guess it is all about threat reduction, avoiding an escalation between police forces and criminals. And of course, at some point, sometimes the police will get shot at, but it's still better than gunfights on a daily basis, or having the risk of being shot dead during an ID control or a road control gone wrong.

Too bad it only works in countries with an already low gun violence rate.

[Black Wolf]

Remember everyone - guns don't kill people; People kill people.

Anywhere else in the world, this would have been a scuffle, maybe some punches thrown. AR-15s and high capacity magazines aren't America's problem. I'd wager big money that handguns kill more people by orders of magnitude in situations more or less exactly like this (I.e. otherwise minor disagreements blowing up to fatal levels thanks to the presence of devices designed to quickly and efficiently kill humans) than mass shootings ever could.

I look at this story in much the same way that I see every pointless murder or mass shooting that comes out of the US these days. America has made a choice, a decision. As a society, they have decided to pay the price of random, unnecessary death on an insane scale in return for their "right to bear arms". They made their bed, and this is what they get for lying in it. The individual events are tragic, but it's hard not to be jaded about it from the outside looking in.

[General Battuta]

Handguns are not only really good at that, they're excellent suicide enablers. Most firearms deaths in America (last I checked) are suicides. They're very good engines for turning attempts at violence into fatal violence.

[Lorric]

Roughly once a week I see something that makes me glad I don't live in America. That's sad.

[Hellzed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

[Torchwood]

Getting an objective opinion on this topic is tricky, given the number of stakeholders who want to see this debate tipped in favour of one direction or another. That being said, the emotional cocktail in the human brain is unstable enough as is, and a heated situation could escalate quickly if means of expedient killing are at hand. Some would exaggerate this possibility, while others would prefer that it is not considered at all.

[MP-Ryan]

ridiculous firearms controls

The murderer was a retired cop.  Are you in favor of restricting cops from carrying firearms?

When they're off-duty and/or retired, absolutely.  The fact that this guy was a cop to begin with is an interesting reflection on the poor judgement and poor hiring practices common to many American police departments, but I digress.

There is no conceivable reason that one should feel the need, in a modern, first-world democracy, to carry a weapon into a movie theatre, particularly a weapon which is designed explicitly to kill human beings.  And before anyone cares to argue that "particularly" I encourage you to look up the history of pistols/handguns.

I am not a proponent of bans and various other forms of gun control, but homicide and suicide rates of the United States compared to literally every other advanced democracy are so far in the direction of insanity that it is abundantly clear that a major contributor to stupid **** like this is the ridiculously easy access to lethal weapons which many Americans enjoy basically wherever they go.

True fact:  if the 71-year-old man sitting in a movie theatre in Florida didn't have a .380 in his pocket (a weapon that can be obtained and carried legally and easily in Florida pretty much if you have a pulse and no current criminal convictions), a husband and father that did nothing more than get into a stupid argument wouldn't be dead and the idiot with the gun in his pocket wouldn't be about to spend the rest of his life in prison, inflicting all the accompanying anguish on his family.

So I blame, in order:
1.  A man stupid enough to bring a gun into a movie theatre and then shoot another man, through his wife's hand, over a ****ing stupid argument.
2.  A country that is OK with the legal environment that enabled the man to put himself in that situation in the first place.
3.  A culture in which violence is the altogether-too-common first resort to expressing anger and frustration.

The point is that the retiree here had demonstrated an entire career and more of trustworthiness to carry a firearm.

Did he?  Or did he merely never do enough - or get caught in the process of doing enough - to be fired, nevermind prosecuted?  Policing, particularly municipal/local policing, in the United States is in a remarkably sad state of affairs.  Not that American police officers are all bad people, but there is very little to suggest that even if the man were unfit to carry out the duties of a police officer or carry a lethal weapon that he would ever have been stripped of that.  Firings in American police forces are rarer; criminal charges are rarer still; convictions are basically a lottery win.  Hell, look at the Kelly case - there they had two police officers announce their intention to beat a mentally ill homeless man on audio and video, a surveillance tape of the beating itself, and they still couldn't secure a conviction.  And keep in mind you're reading the opinion of someone who actively does law enforcement as his job, not some YouTube cop-hater.

[Kolgena]

I'm wondering how much the mental/physical state of the 71 year old has to play into this. Old people already have poor night vision, and depending on whether they might have Mild Cognitive Impairment, might not always have the best snap judgment. It's not nearly enough for an insanity plea, but I think the guy's age might factor into this to some degree.

And I personally don't really care much for the gun debate since it's a bit pointless trying to talk about it outside the context of a culture's history. You can't really put severely limiting gun restrictions in place when none have existed for like a 100 years and everyone and their kitchen sink is already equipped with concealed carry. I reckon to gun supporters, telling them that guns aren't okay would probably feel similar to if someone told us that our internet should be censored and monitored as heavily as it is in China. Sure, the Chinese are used to it, but by and large, the rest of the world sure as hell isn't.

Spoiler:

btw you guys are all missing the point cuz if the father had a gun, he wouldn't have to resort to popcorn, and could have shot the cop first and saved his own life duh

[esarai]

Personally, I think this is a prime example of why America needs tighter gun regulations: humans are irrational.  Get one person emotionally unstable with a gun in a tussle and you have yourself a shooting.

Torchwood, I think you're spot on.

Psyche evals and background checks should be mandatory requirements for the purchase of firearms.