Joan , It’s a crazy country but your Walmart analogy is incorrect . The gun maybe on display but you can’t buy a gun legally without a permit to carry a weapon . The problem is not the weapons , availability or even the fact they have the right to own a gun. The problem is individual people in a society that’s medicated up to their eyes.
If you look back over the last 13 gun sprees in schools etc , the teenagers that committed the violent murders/shootings were all on mind altering drugs . Over half on Prozac and the rest on ritalin prescribed for the infamous ADHD .
Millions of American teenagers are on these drugs and have been brought up on them from a young age .
Do the research and you will see how much doctors are paid in commissions to prescribe the drugs for kids .
The company’s who sell the antidepressants make over 3 trillion a year.
Just my penny’s worth !!

Read this if you doubt me http://www.naturalnews.com/020394.html

@Niall

While I agree overprescription of drugs is a problem in the United States, you’d need a lot of evidence to link it directly with gun rampages. Even if there is a correlation between people taking these drugs and such people being more likely to go on a killing spree it would be an expected correlation as, overprescription of drugs or not, you are more likely to be prescribed these drugs if you do have mental issues. Keeping guns from these people would be a far better way of preventing such incidents but unfortunately there is a huge gun culture in the US to the extent that military style weapons are freely available to the public. Even after the Gabby Giffords shooting the gun lobby still had enough clout to prevent laws limiting the magazine size on such weapons even though such gunmen have been stopped in the past when they first try to reload.

Niall Boylan, I could not agree with you more. And as far as the argument from MY EL531W that if you have mental issues then you’re more likely to be prescribed these mind altering drugs is the greatest hoax perpetrated on America. The doctors will concoct a diagnosis so that they can prescribe these dangerous mind altering meds (aka POISON). Once the patient is on these drugs, that’s when the physcosis really begins. There is a pile of evidence that Prozac is a mind altering dangerous drug that causes homicidal ideation and suicidal ideation but the drug company covered it up and so did the FDA – they all knew that it was a dangerous drug, but it was going to make them billions of dollars. Big Pharma has lots of blood on their hands and someday they’ll answer for it. So we shouldn’t blame the guns, we should look at the root of the problem – Big Pharma and their never ending lust for money!!!
Little background – was diagnosed with MS a couple of months ago. Guess how much 1 intramuscular shot per week for a month would cost….a whopping $4,000.00 – what’s in this medication? Gold? Oh, and of course you have to be on these drugs the rest of your life. That’s $48,000 per year and if I live another 40 years, that adds up to $1,920,000.00!!! Needless to say, I started doing some research and I absolutely refuse to have these pharmacuetical companies try to make a slave out of me. It’s really amazing what you find out about the drug companies and how the drugs are ‘tested’ if you just do a little digging.

Where are you getting this information , that you can just walk in and buy a gun from . The law differs state to state . Just because they sell them in a store does not mean you can just buy them .

Americans can purchase firearms after a criminal background check. Anyone with a felony (and certain misdemeanors such as domestic violence) or mental health issues is rejected. In some states a separate permit is required to carry a concealed weapon ( hand gun) .

The laws are very relaxed compared to Ireland per say but it’s not as easy as you suggest .

Just going from my own personal experiences in Nevada. Not sure of other states so can’t comment. But in Vegas it was easy enough to buy a gun, think they do a back ground check when purchasing but other than that it’s plain sailing and I personally knew a lot of young guys in their early 20′s who owned guns. It was just the norm for them.

The availability of guns is not the problem. I could by a gun in Ireland tomorrow if I really wanted one. I wouldn’t as I would not have the urge to use one or want to murder somebody. As I said below read this and maybe it might go some way to answering the problem and it’s a problem that’s growing here too http://www.naturalnews.com/020394.html

RTE 1. Crime. Rte 2. Crime. TV3 Crime. What’s on people’s minds. CRIME Have a look at RTE guide to see just how often this is the case.