12 Dead, 50 Injured in Shooting at "Dark Knight Rises" Premire in Colorado

[Magus]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

Just tossing this out there. Guy made homemade explosives and was able to use them for strategic advantage and the greatest difficulty in taking down suspects like this is the full body armor (ie the defensive aspect that no one seems to argue to regulate).

Sure it might have lessened number of dead but it wouldn't stop things like this. Could have easily have used other weapons

Japan has crazy strict weapon regulations. So some nut just drove a car into a crowd then started slashing people with kitchen knives. We are humans. The entire reason we are at the top of the food chain is our ability to make weapons

Yeah but I think you'll find that the murder rate in Japan is much lower. Sure you can find alternate weapons to kill people with but ultimately you will kill less people, presumably. It just seems equally pointless to go "well, they could just stab people, we might as well make it easy to buy assault rifles" or "they could just make homemade bombs, we might as well make it easy to buy assault rifles". I think I'm just looking at it pragmatically, if you make it harder to get guns that fire dozens of rounds you will reduce the amount of people killed by spree killers.

Tackling how this guy got access to high-grade explosives is another issue, but I presume he made them from separate ingredients that he put together himself, whereas the people with the technical expertise to make a home-made gun (or at least one that is like a real gun and not just a zip-gun that fires one or two bullets) would be incredibly rare.

As for regulating body armor I'm pretty sure you can't just buy kevlar body armor, either, but I know little about that.

EDIT: Presumably in most states body armor is regulated along the same lines as guns (you can't have a criminal record).