ok people..the smoking Gun...your take on Gun control...

Gun Control is a very insane idea. Here is the list of absolutes:

1. You will NEVER be able to control all guns within the US.

2. The criminals will NEVER register.

3. They will NEVER go to place where they can be captured if control exists.

4. They will ALWAYS go to an illegal place if control exists.

5. You can't think for the citizens of the US. Controlists assume that they can somehow protect every citizen. Police usually can't get to a place in time. So its up to the citizen to protect themselves.
Overall the gun control advocates are micro-managers who insists upon having absolute control over guns in the name of protecting the citizen.

 

Yes, to Master Ben you must listen. The truth he speaks.

 

OW: kids in Britain also grew up playing those games (except, funnily enough, my dad. His dad wouldn't have toy guns in the house at all after being in WWI.)

But, I do think American culture does have a role to play in this. Your example of the westerns and such was interesting. I noticed George W. used the "Wanted: Dead or Alive" quote on TV after the 9-11 attacks. Y'all ( ) do seem to have this Rambo, kill the bad guys Hollywood mentality to it all.

I think what it comes down to now in America is that there are so many weapons in homes, glove-boxes and belts all over the country that any kind of gun prohibition would be as futile as outlawing underpants!

 

Exactly, Stu.

Note: I am not against reasonable gun control, but I think that teaching responsibility, safety and proper use are more important than new laws.

And I believe in stricter enforcement and harsher punishment for breaking the laws.

That and we need to focus on the cause, not the sypmtoms.

 

To Darthmomm you listen. good stats.

 

Obey wan..all points well made..Thank you...

Here I go:

Suicide: I realize that the end result is the choice of the person commiting suicide...BUT, let's look at other methods,

Overdose: ok, when one takes the pills, one has a long time to reconsider and seek medical attention. There is an out in that decision.

Slitting of wrists: Again, it takes a long time to bleed to death...time to reconsider.

Carbon Monoxide: Same...takes about 20 minutes.

Gun: one can not reconsider when a bullet is in the head.

While suicide is a choice, it is not a (for lack of better word) sane one.

From my point of view, that is only a half truth, because it doesn't show how many crimes were prevented by the victim having a gun, and the criminal running away w/o getting shot, etc. >>

OK, I read those stats before, I will find them again and post them it may take a while, but this is what I remember. The stats were so minute, it was smaller than a percentage. That is an argument that the NRA stands by, but like all extremest organisations, the true stats will not be reported by them. Like I said, I will post them as soon as I find them.

>>It is when the individual is uneducated, untrained, or unsafe that the firearm is a danger to those around them.>>

In all honesty, a 5 year old can not be educated on guns. Adults yes, children...no. That is where the problem lies...stupid adults letting thier kids get a hold of their guns. Hence....MANDATORY trigger locks. Yes, yes, I know, they are easy to figure out. BUT, colt has been developing a trigger lock that registers the owners finger prints...no fooling around..no waiting...only safety.

I must say: I wholeheartedly agree with more enforcement..better education. But I also agree with federal laws for all states on the Gun Issue. Every state is different, and that is not right.

Yes, criminals will always be able to get guns...not an argument. To be honest with you, if one gang member kills another gang member..well, no tears are shed from me. BUT, if a child is playing daddies loaded, unlocked gun that was found next to the bed stand, and kills his best friend...I have a HUGE problem.

Thanks for the discussion, your views are respected, even though I may not agree with all of them.




>>

 

darthmomm --I think we are in agreement.

And I found this little video on CNN, just so you can see other places with far worse gun control issues: here

 

>Connection? Simple. Both are stupid.<

Wow, that was eloquent. You really are supporting your position admirably. wild_karrde, I salute you and your amazing powers of reasoning and persuasion.

>LOL, a newbie called me a troll<

Yes, yes I did. Please don't hurt me, sir.

*runs away, intimidated by wk's vastly superior post count*

 

"Overdose: ok, when one takes the pills, one has a long time to reconsider and seek medical attention. There is an out in that decision."

Sometimes that timeframe is a lot shorter than you might think. Certain pills work faster than others and can disable a body quicker, making calling for help more difficult. That is why pills need to be highly regulated, with failsafes if we can manage.


Yes. Gun's kill quickly; that is their purpose.

Gun control punishes the legal gun owner. We need to crack down - seriously - on criminals with gun offenses. Three strikes, perhaps.

 

Lord Bane, I see what you are saying and do not disagree with it, BUT it is hard to punish a criminal when the laws are up to the state. There are not that many federal laws that are enforcable. And, there so many grey area's like:

The boy who takes his irresponsible fathers gun and blows away his best friend because he was curious.

What do we do about that? My opinion is of the idea that if it happens, daddy is a murderer. 1st degree. But, most states do not see it that way. If that happens, the gun owner should go to jail to show the general public that what he did was wrong. IT tells people to safely lock up their guns.

I say again, Colt (right here in CT) has been developing a gun where the trigger lock only opens when the designated owner has it. UNfortunatly, there has not been a lot of press on it because it seems the gun lobby does not want it. I do not understand why? Perhaps that can be explained to me.

I know that many pills are faster than 30 minutes...but there are not that many. And pills are regulated....way more than any gun.

I just want to say again, I am not against the 2nd ammendment and the right to own firearms, I DO feel that there needs to be some responsiblity taken.

 

The biggest misconception about all gun owners is that we think the second amemndment means us pesonally. I think its real reason was for the revolutionary war not so bubba can have an arsenal of semi-auto machine guns.

I think to many gun owners are paranoid of gun control legislation.

I own four guns. I think if your a responsible gun owner and obey the laws. What do you need to worry about gun laws for.

if you can't wait a certain period for a gun. You probably don't need a gun.

Plus anyone who stores a gun with bullets in it or not locked up.

YOUR A FREAKIN IDIOT. And should be shot in the head with it. Your making the rest of us look like red-neck nascar watchin hicks.

 

DesertJedi...THANK YOU!!!!!! You are a good, sensible gun owner... I would allow my child over your house....

 

GunBanMovementonthewaydown

Well, folks. This pretty much sums up the gun ban movements actions since September 11th. Enjoy.

---

Terrorists Attacked Gun Control Movement


Friday, November 02, 2001
Glenn Harlan Reynolds



Respond to Editor

Email this Article
"I think all women oughta carry a cell phone and a three-fifty-seven. Loaded."


So declares a woman interviewed by The New Republic's Michelle Cottle.

That statement seems to sum up the post-Sept. 11 attitude toward gun control. Things were already tough for the gun-control movement. Convinced that Al Gore's strong anti-gun stance had cost the Democratic Party the 2000 election, the Democratic Leadership Council had already called for a softer line on gun control. Bill Clinton and former White House spokesman Joe Lockhart had pronounced Gore's stance a mistake. Meanwhile, product-liability suits brought against gun manufacturers were failing miserably in courts from New York to California.

These, however, were all tactical defeats. The gun-control movement could still boast the loyalty of most of the media; favorable treatment from the courts on Second Amendment cases; the strong support of women; and a new book by a celebrated historian that claimed guns weren't important to the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Most important of all, the movement resonated with the Rosie O' Donnell culture of "niceness" that assumed that the best way to avoid harm was to be harmless.

But now all of this has changed. Though gun-control groups have tried to capitalize on the Sept. 11 attacks, those attempts have misfired. Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center tried to claim that Barrett Firearms had sold .50 caliber sniper rifles to Usama bin Laden. Not many in the media bought this, which was a good thing since it turned out that those rifles had actually been sold to the United States Government.

Even lamer was the claim that the Sept. 11 attacks were an argument for closing the (nonexistent) "gun show loophole." This claim, made first in a Brady Campaign press release and then in a suspiciously similar op-ed bearing the byline of former Clinton Administration official Eric Holder, just plain flopped. Nobody could be persuaded that Usama bin Laden?s boys would have trouble laying their hands on an AK-47, regardless of what rules govern gun shows.

The much-touted book by Michael Bellesiles, Arming America?which claimed the framers of the Constitution must not have intended the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to own guns because private gun ownership was exceedingly rare at the time ? also lost most of its resonance when legal historians and reporters at the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, and National Review concluded that it was based on false, and possibly fraudulent, evidence.

Bellesiles? employer, Emory University, says that a prima facie case of academic misconduct has been made out, and is requiring him to explain himself.

Nor have the courts been much help. On Oct. 16, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit released its opinion in the case of United States v. Emerson , holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun. The opinion is long, scholarly, and careful in its dissection of flawed reasoning in earlier decisions by other courts.

As a result, according to Michael Barone, "It will now be very hard?I would say impossible?for any intellectually honest judge to rule that the Second Amendment means nothing."

These are all serious defeats, and would have left the gun-control movement reeling all by themselves. But it is the change in the culture since Sept. 11 that has probably been the most damaging to the gun control movement?s project of removing guns from the hands of ordinary Americans.

Properly understood, the gun control movement has always rested on certain essentially religious notions (indeed, though it is little publicized, much of the gun-control movement?s finan

 

Gee, that's funny, I did not see that on the CDC-FBI websites.....

oh, was it from the NRA?

Oh, and California JUST passed new gun control legislation...so did Connecticut...tough times?

 

DarthMomm- Quit with your lying because I can go to the BradyWebsite and produce those statistics you just quoted. That is exactly where they came from.

The reason you never see the media post the lies that the MMM and HCI run with is because they have to maintain a semblance of journalistic credibility, and the MMM and HCI rely heavily on lies, distortions, and fear to get their way.

Funny, though, how the MMM and HCI celebrate laws that specifically make it harder for law abiding gun owners; because the CA law does very little to criminals who use guns. Of course, going after criminals is bad, because Criminals tend to vote for democrats so........

 

Yeah, because ordinary citizens carrying guns is really going to stop terrorist attacks! Christ, you think the Taliban are going to come rolling down Fifth Avenue and New Yorkers will have to defend the city? Duh!

 

gun control seems to very from state to state, i don't think there exist many absolute rules about it..........for example in the US there is a lot of gun related crime, no doubt about that, so oyu have to address that, whereas in my country there is stuff all, and 90% of that is performed by illegal weapons anyway, yet we have a very strong gun control system, which really seems uncessary.....I guess some countries are just more violent than others, wonder why america is?

look at australia and NZ, both had similiar colonial histories to America, NZ especially.....with vigerous armed indigenous opposition to settlement, we had colonial militas, every house had a rifle etc.......yet by 1905 we had phased out armed police, and it wasn't until the late 1980s that gun control got really harsh, after a series of high profile massacres

 

There are millions of statistics to support both sides of the Gun-Control debate. And I cannot 100% trust any stats made by anyone for anyone for anything.

Ciou-See the Sig

 

1) Most 'seasoned' criminals will be able to aquire guns illegally. It doesn't matter if there are gun control laws or not, a large majority of them will be able to aquire weapons either way.

2) Most 'amateur' criminals (by amateur I mean people who committ spur of the moment crimes, such as shooting your wife in a fight...) aquire their guns legally.

So now if we enact gun control laws, a large number of the seasoned criminals will retain weapons and a very small number of the amateur criminals will have guns. And the number of amateur criminals far outnumbers the number of seasoned criminals.

So what does this mean?

A gun is a very, very easy way to kill someone. Once you pull the trigger, you can't go back. And it is very 'clean' as well. You can do it from far away, you can avoid having to touch the victim...

If you don't have guns then you have to kill with say a knife. In which case you have to get up close to the victim, stab them possibly a few times, have blood spill onto you...It is much, much harder to kill someone that way than to kill with a gun.

So the decrease in the number of amateur crimes will be great. And we have to remember that amateur crimes constitute the vast majority of the crimes in burglary and killing.

Now the problem of seasoned criminals remains. They are still going to commit crimes. And a gun in someone's house isn't going to deter them. They know how to carry out a crime. They have done it many times. And you having a gun is not going to stop very many of them at all. So this is where you invest in a house security system and put your faith in the police.

A gun in your possession will decrease the number of amateur crimes, but it will not decrease the number of seasoned crimes. And having gun control does the same, with one difference. With gun control it is a lot less messy in terms of collateral damage (you being injured warding off the intruder...)

Many countries have gun control that is ver strict and no guns are allowed. Why do they have a crime rate lower than that of the US? Why does the US have one of the highest crime rates in the world?

The answer is tied partly to the availability of guns and every single person in this country knows it.

 

Why does the US have one of the highest crime rates in the world?

PPOR please.

 

Well, I got no problem with responsible gun laws. The problem is that the Gun Ban/HCI/ MMM want is they want laws that go after gun owners who obey the laws; and rarely go for things like prosecuting criminals, making life hell for people who use guns to commit crimes, and such.

It is also a proven fact that concealed weapon laws reduce crime. Something else the Gun Ban movement tried to target, but are failing miserably to stop in most states now.

I will try to find it, but the Brady Campaign may have again skirted ethics, on that bogus concert they put on last month with Yoko Ono and such. The fact was that since September 11th, a lot of donations they normally would have gotten went instead to aid the victims of the terrorist attacks. They promoted that thier concert would give some of its proceeds to the September 11th fund, but instead are trying to keep it all for the Gun Ban movement. Pretty sad if you ask me, to exploit the tragedy just to get some more money that you would not have gotten otherwise.

Again, the funniest thing about it is that I have yet to hear a single report that ANY of these terrorists made any visit to a gun show or to even attempt to purchase a gun. Of course they were trained in the use of guns in Osama Bin Laden's terrorist camps. But in all the stuff they have done, they have not found a single firearm in any of these terrorists possesions yet and probably wont. Why would they need guns? They knew that the pilots were unarmed, all they needed were those box cutters to do what they did.

 

Here is some data to back up the statement about the US having one of the highest crime rates (when I said that I mean in 1st world countries, because lots of 3d world countries have higher rates of crime, but those are different situations). And this is even worse if you only focus on firearm related crime. And it is even worse if you stick on violent crimes (which we should because guns are generally used for violent crimes and not stuff like fraud.)

Link 1
This one is from data collected in 1991. From a congressional report.

Link 2
Scroll down to the last bullet in the first set of bullets.

Link 3
This page is linked to from safecities.gov (for validity purposes). Scroll down until you hit the large graphic at the bottom and examine it. Deals with children deaths/crime

Link 4
In this one (1998 survey I believe) the US has 5th highest crime rate. BUT, it has the highest offender rate (most # of people comitting crimes) by two times over the next closest country, highest murder rate behind Russia (which is like a 3d world country right now), highest rate of rape...I really suggest glancing at this entire report. The US leads the world in violent crime rates. And ignore the stupid pop-up that says "download... " to view properly, ,it works fine

 

>>
Well, I got no problem with responsible gun laws. The problem is that the Gun Ban/HCI/ MMM want is they want laws that go after gun owners who obey the laws; and rarely go for things like prosecuting criminals, making life hell for people who use guns to commit crimes, and such.>>

PPOR

It is also a proven fact that concealed weapon laws reduce crime.
PPOR


Something else the Gun Ban movement tried to target, but are failing miserably to stop in most states now.

PPOR

I will try to find it, but the Brady Campaign may have again skirted ethics, on that bogus concert they put on last month with Yoko Ono and such. The fact was that since September 11th, a lot of donations they normally would have gotten went instead to aid the victims of the terrorist attacks. They promoted that thier concert would give some of its proceeds to the September 11th fund, but instead are trying to keep it all for the Gun Ban movement. Pretty sad if you ask me, to exploit the tragedy just to get some more money that you would not have gotten otherwise.


PPOR

"Again, the funniest thing about it is that I have yet to hear a single report that ANY of these terrorists made any visit to a gun show or to even attempt to purchase a gun. Of course they were trained in the use of guns in Osama Bin Laden's terrorist camps. But in all the stuff they have done, they have not found a single firearm in any of these terrorists possesions yet and probably wont. Why would they need guns? They knew that the pilots were unarmed, all they needed were those box cutters to do what they did."


I have also wondered the same thing. But after doing some investigating, I learned that (in CT atleast) they are going after legislation that will decrease the number of guns that the TERRORIST are KNOWN to use. On a personal note: I am not a big fan of capitalizing on this tragedy, and I think it is wring, and WILL NOT lobby for it. In CT, those weapons are not legal anyways.


In response to you calling me a liar....MOST of those stats come from the CDC-FBI. Look them up your self on those websites. I guess they are liars too.

 

CDC? Center for Disease Control??

I never knew they dealt with this type of stuff...

 

The CDC takes stats on everything having to deal with injury, and death. They even have stats on knife violence..ect, ect.