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Epignosis wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: Epignosis wrote: I'm a high school teacher man. Bothers me to think the state renders me defenseless in my place of work. Brilliant. Let's militarize schools. Let's have teachers bring guns to school. That way, when a teacher has a nervous breakdown, they can shoot up the class, and then other teachers with piss-poor aim can shoot back at them and stray bullets can kill more students. Would you like to be the hero who missed the perpetrator and accidentally shoot a 14 year-old girl right between the eyes? I'm sure her grieving parents will laud you for your bravery.  I own a 12 gauge Browning for hunting. I've been to the range. I've seen people that have concealed weapons permits that can't hit the broad side of a barn. No, I don't think guns belong in school. No, the question that remains is why dear old mom had such high-powered weaponry, and why anyone needs a Bushmaster assault rifle that has a 30 round magazine, plus a SIG Sauer 9mm and Glock 9mm that both shoot up to five bullets a second. Thankfully, the shooter kept the assault rifle in the car or even more kids would have died. I am all for 2nd Amendment rights, but there comes a time when you have to question our current gun control laws and what firearms are allowed to be sold on the open market. I don't hear about people shooting up police stations like they shoot up schools.  Wonder why that is?  Gun control laws do not protect people in the US.  If you think gun control laws work, please look at DC and Chicago, where violent crime went up after gun control measures went into effect.  A person who wants to kill innocent people does not care about the finer points of the law. "I want to kill a lot of people today.  What's that?  Oh?  The campus is a gun free zone.  A pity.  I'll have to go play checkers then." Gun laws do not stop people who want guns from getting guns any more than marijuana laws stop people from getting marijuana.  Illegalizing something only creates a black market for it, which, in the US, causes more crime than it stops. If you gun control folks want to show some data from the US providing evidence that gun control measures in the US make us safer, then do it.  I'm tired of hearing your pathos.

Pathos? Weren't Pathos one o' them thar Three Musketeers? Ne'er liked 'em Frenchies no ways.

The last time I checked, Washington D.C. was not an island with high walls (although that is a good idea) , so your example is utterly specious and a waste of graphical data. More effective gun laws require national, not local ordinances. There is no good data from the U.S. because stronger gun laws are not a national concern, particularly since the NRA has bought so many politicians -- not surprisingly, most of them Republicans, who have already abandoned the flag and instead pledged allegiance to Grover Norquist. 'Em are real 'Merikans.

No, you have to go elsewhere, like in every other civilized country in the world to get data. Here's a global view of murders by firearms in 2006:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-crime-murders-with-firearms

Look at who's with the U.S. in the top five -- third world countries like South Africa, Thailand and Colombia. Hell, we're not as bad as Mexico!

Now look at other western democracies: Germany only 269, Canada 144, Japan 47, etc.

Canada, our northern neighbor, recently reported the lowest homicide rate since 1966 (this includes all murders, not just with guns):

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/111026/dq111026a-eng.htm

A more recent British article put the deaths by firearms in Britain at 58 (BUT ONLY TWO BY CROSSBOW):

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/335-156/12554-58-murders-a-year-by-firearms-in-britain-8775-in-us

The article's most germane observations is as follows:

"The international comparisons show conclusively that fewer gun owners per capita produce not only fewer murders by firearm, but fewer murders per capita overall. In the case of Britain, firearms murders are 30 times fewer than in the US per capita."

And another point:

"Do hunters really need semi-automatic AR-15 assault weapons? Is that how they roll in deer season?"

The murderer in Connecticut had a Bushmaster rifle with a 30 round clip. The Colorado theater shooter had an AR-15 assault rifle that could shoot 50 rounds per minute (with power on par with the M-16s our troops use in Afghanistan).

Pardon my "pathos", but are you so detached from reality swaddled in your libertarian cocoon that you are incapable of thinking beyond your addled mantras and coddled creeds to see that these types of weapons should not be available for sale in the U.S.? They should be banned. Period. You can't buy live grenades, bazookas or rocket launchers, then why be able to buy a rifle that shoots 50 rounds a minute? Where is your logic? Oh, sorry, forgot. Logic is not one of your strong points.

Adding more guns to the process (like your brilliant idea of arming teachers) will invariably increase deaths by firearms, not decrease them. We've already seen vigilantism in the Trayvon Martin shooting. Would that murder have occurred if some self-possessed little faux-policeman did not have a gun?

Oh, and please, I don't want to hear the ridiculous saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people", because I would reply that guns make it easier for nut jobs to kill in quantity. It emboldens "loose cannons" to act out their sordid sociopathic dreams. Any punk is twice as tall with a gun.If you have seen pictures of the nerdy little nebbish in Connecticut who pumped round after semi-automatic round into those innocent school kids, it is obvious he was not capable of attacking the school with a knife. One of the women there would have beat his ass.

You are so wrong in your nearsighted posturing that there isn't a synonym that can adequately describe the epic nature of how wrong you are.

thellama73 wrote: If fewer firearms produces fewer murders, how do you explain the extremely high gun owndership rates in places like Switzerland and Israel combined with their low murder rates?

Israel has soldiers with M-16s patrolling the streets. The Swiss are too busy laundering Republican money.

P.S. Here is an explanation of the Swiss circumstances:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland

In both instances, in Israel and Switzerland, the highest percentage of gun ownership is due to military or militia application. Oh, and here's a bit of myth busting:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/mythbusting-israel-and-switzerland-are-not-gun-toting-utopias/

But please, try again. Perhaps use even smaller countries like Lichtenstein or San Marino to prove whatever points  - devoid of logic or humanity - you wish to make.


Edited by The Dark Elf - December 17 2012 at 23:44

Of course different countries have different circumstances. I was merely pointing out that the simple correlation you were asserting doesn't tell the whole story. I don't see why that makes me void of humanity (a bit harsh, I think.)

The T wrote: Ok, the US has had guns everywhere always, hasn't it? Yet the mass shooting thing is mostly a relatively recent phenomenon (in gravity and recurrence). What has changed? Not the guns, not the laws (maybe some). People have changed. The stupid newer generations of the US might manage to lose the right that their forebearers very responsibly held for so long.

Firstly, saying guns haven't changed since 200 years ago is, I'm tempted to say ignorant, but I won't because it's not a very nice thing to say.  

Second, guns in the US have never been about "responsibly held rights"; guns in the US are, or were, about providing citizens with a means to protect themselves and to provide food in hard times.   It comes from a deep desire to be self-reliant, relatively safe in a once mostly rural (and enormous) country, and a stop-gap against the potential abuse of power by government, something the FF's were acutely sensitive to based on the Old World realities they fought so hard to get away from.   It was a way to allow people to help themselves instead of relying on an army or police force that may or may not be available or effective.    But things have changed in some of these respects, and the idea that high-power automatics with endless bullet capacity are somehow the same as any other gun is obviously becoming outdated.

I hear you, but as an immigrant citizen you may want to learn more about the legal mentality around guns in America--  the general thinking is that a gun is a gun; a six-shot revolver is seen, in legal terms, as no different than an M-16.   This sweeping idea stems from the importance of universal legality.  That is, lawmakers shouldn't partially legalize or qualify something, that somehow it is unfair or impractical, and if one kind of deadly weapon is legal it's somehow untenable to make any other deadly weapon illegal.   This is the mentality that needs to change around guns.

I'm usually uncomfortable with lawmakers making anything illegal, but I know what you mean. Nobody needs an M-16 to defend his house (unless it is attacked by violent hordes), nobody needs to hunt with an M-16 (it would reduce accuracy, though since I loathe hunting, I might support this). A revolver is a defense tool; an M-16 is a slaughter machine.

Just seeig it from another perspective, I wished people in, for example, Mexico, would have M-16s so the M-16-wielding drug cartels wouldn't be so ready to dare to kill; I wished more people in Rwanda had M-16s when one tribu started killing another.

I'm just uncomfortable with only the government and the criminals having real firepower. That small little irk aside, I don't think people need assault weapons.

Dean wrote: Is it possible to support gun control without libertarian idealism crumbling at your fingertips?

I'm not Libertarian so I don't know, but I don't believe Libertarianism is a prevalent politik so it isn't really an issue.   I would hope the answer is Yes.   At this point, the answer must be Yes.

What we are really talking about is "killing control". As far as I know it has never been controlled. There is an illness which is prevalent now and the media is part of that illness. We will dissect this latest atrocity down to the nth degree and yet we won't ever acknowledge that enough is enough. it is time to take our medicine. Where is this guy Sig Sauer?

Yeah, and even if they do take the guns away - I've got acquaintances who can build their own bombs and rifles - working ones, too. I know teenagers that already have the knowledge and scrap ready to construct relatively stable killing machinations. Poisonous chemicals can be stolen from hospitals and all sorts of places. I'm also one of the folks that feels it goes much farther than mere gun ownership (though not to claim gun laws have zero impact either). I don't have the answer right now. And I don't think a big-mouth guilt-artist like Michael Moore does, either.