Time for strict gun restrictions. Do what ever can be done to stop the violence.  Nonsense. Why would you say that? The facts prove there is no correlation between gun ownership rates and murder rates or violent crime rates. So logically there cannot be a causal relationship between guns and violence. So how would your 1st sentence logically achieve the goal in your 2nd sentence?  As guns have never been proliferated more in our society over the last 20 years, while high capacity magazines and "assault" rifles have proliferated to historic highs, and as more permits to carry than ever have been issued over that 20 years, the murder rate has falled 49% and so has the violent crime rate. Over the last 10 years the murder and violent crime rates have fallen 20%. There has been no rise in mass murders (they hit their peak in 1929). Sure, there has been more media coverage, but not more murder and violent crime in America per capita (not even in the recession).  So logically, rationally, there is no connection between guns and violent crime rates and murder rates. It's a myth. If there was such a correlation then you could maybe argue causality (although correlation is not necessarily causation)...but there is no correlation, so there is no possible causation.  Anti-gun people suffer from paranoia and ignorance about the facts, and rely upon studies with flawed methodology to try and claim things that just aren't true.  Tip 1: If a study uses "homocide" instead of "murder", it's full of crap. "Homocide" means murder, suicide, legal self defensive deaths (justifiable homocides), death by cops, and accidents. They use this bigger stat to create correlations where no correlation exists for murder and violent crime.  Tip 2: If a study only looks at rich countries (OECD nations) they are admitting without saying it that poverty causes murder and violent crime, not guns...otherwise they'd look at all nations by just gun ownership rates and murder rates and violent crime rates. They don't because it ruins their argument.  Here a few things people need to know:  1. Violent crime – including violent crime using guns – has dropped massively over the past 20 years.  The violent crime rate - which includes murder, rape, and beatings - is half of what it was in the early 1990s. And the violent crime rate involving the use of weapons has also declined at a similar pace.  2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years.  Despite terrifying events like Sandy Hook or last summer's theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, mass shootings are not becoming more frequent. "There is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox of Northeastern University, who studies the issue. Other data shows that mass killings peaked in 1929.  3. Schools are getting safer.  Across the board, schools are less dangerous than they used be.Over the past 20 years, the rate of theft per 1,000 students dropped from 101 to 18. For violent crime, the victimization rate per 1,000 students dropped from 53 to 14.  4. There Are More Guns in Circulation Than Ever Before.  Over the past 20 years, virtually every state in the country has liberalized gunownership rules and many states have expanded concealed carry laws that allow more people to carry weapons in more places. There around 300 million guns in the United States and at least one gun in about 45 percent of all households. Yet the rate of gun-related crime continues to drop.  5. "Assault Weapons Bans" Are Generally Ineffective.  While many people are calling for reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons – an arbitrary category of guns that has no clear definition – research shows it would have no effect on crime and violence. "Should it be renewed," concludes a definitive study, "the ban's effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement."  If you go to the link, the links in the article I quoted above lead to debunks of several opposing studies that are used frequently to claim there have been increases in mass murder in the USA lately and that guns can be correlated to murder (they use that "homocide' word).  A study done by the Harvard Jounal of Law and Public Policy reports some interesting statistics.  The study, which appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is "no." And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.  The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:  Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).  For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study's authors write in the report:  If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)  As you can see, gun ownership rates are NOT correlated, let alone causal, to murder rates (or suicide rates). The same is true of violent crime rates.
An "officer-involved shooting investigation" has been launched after a suspected gunman's death at a Portland, Ore., hospital. Officers were called to the Adventist Medical Center in south-east Portland  at 9:30 p.m. Sunday local time (0:30 a.m. ET Monday) following re …