yes, because an airplane's only function is death and destruction and those two things are totally comparable. are you just trying to make flimsy arguments?

 

An airplane can be used to create more death than any gun can.

 

Also should we ban bows and arrows? Their only function is death and destruction.

 

Try walking down the street armed with a longbow and see what the police have to say on the subject.

I think the reasonable conversation has finished now.

 

lol. the argument of should we ban all guns is certainly the fun one to have, but the realistic one is whether we should have stricter gun laws and if certain types of guns like the one used in this most recent tragedy should be banned.

i would be behind banning all guns but it's not an option that's really on the table.

arrows and ninja stars and nunchucks require skill to use and can't kill 30 people at once. i'm cool with those. also with the guns that existed when the second amendment was written.

 

I've seen it quite a bit. The police don't really do anything about it. My highscool had about 20 cars in the parking lot with bows when hunting season was on.

Like I said I don't own a gun so it won't effect me. I already have to deal with the fact criminals have guns and I don't. So ban guns, make yourself feel better. But it won't change anything. Evil people will find something else to use, evil always finds a way.

I agree. I'm fully in favor of strict gun laws. That said I also firmly believe someone should have the right to be able to defend themselves in their own homes.

Like I said elsewhere if I was in charge the only type of guns allowed would handguns and hunting guns. No assault weapons of any kind.

Owning an illegal gun would carry a minimum 50 year prison sentence with no possibility for parole. To buy a gun you have to go through a one month waiting period and undergo a full psychological evaluation, maybe have everyone you live with go under one as well.

Also a cap on ammunition, you can't buy more than 100 rounds in a year, and no more than 10 in a month.

No one with any misdemeanor, felony, or juvenile record of any kind is allowed to own firearms or live with someone who does.

Of course if I could have my ideal solution all guns would be banned, including the military and police. Instead we would have super-powerful robots designed to annihilate anyone committing an aggressive act. Basically the Gort solution from The Day The Earth Stood Still.

 

I heard a rather interesting argument with regards to ending the gun culture in the US: shame them. Shame people that own guns like has been done with cigarettes. I find it a rather interesting argument and whether it would actually work. I could see slogans like, 'Don't be a ******, have a girlfriend instead.' Not sure how it'd go, but I like the premise. I think people should be ashamed to own a device whose only purpose is to kill.

 

tom - yours is a poetry which makes sense, sir.

GenAntilles - do you live in the kind of terrifying backwards working class rural abode that features in 96% of all horror films or something?

 

I suspect the massive, throbbing erection you get from gun ownership would dwarf any similar feelings you would get from a girlfriend.

 

Sad but true.

 

i dunno there's not really the opportunity for social ostracization there that smoking provides. gun owners dont feel compelled to take out their gun and fire it off ten times a day, often in mixed or non-gunowner company

at least i hope they dont

 

I too have never been to the deep south of the US, so I can't comment. But didn't Jesus advocate such behavior in the Bible? Book of Colt?

 

Even though you sound like Donald Pleasance from Halloween, that's still faulty logic. It's the scope and scale of violence that anti-gun advocates are trying to curtail.

 

Yeah, but in the boonies they fire them off fairly regularly. Especially on holidays.

 

At times I feel so.

They use guns because they are the easiest method. You take those away they'll just find another method. And if their sick enough they'll find a way.

Will removing guns stop some crime? Yeah it'll stop the lazy criminals for a little while until they come up with a replacement, but the hardened ones will just use the black market to get guns. And the crazy evil people will just come up with a new way to mass murder people. It'll make it harder, but it won't stop it.

 

Can't speak for GenAntilles, but this basically encapsulates where I grew up -- terrifyingly backwards (as in weekly letters to the editor decrying the evils of feminism and homosexuality), working class, rural abode. Mine was also economically depressed. When Barack Obama made his famous gaffe of:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

He was 100% right. People where I grew up did cling to their guns and religion as a means of dealing with their bitterness and, in fact, the antipathy my family faced was because we were foreigners (and successful ones at that).

People there are very attached to their guns, so I'm not sure that "shaming" them would be an effective solution. If anything, it might very well make them more hardline and increase the militia presence. That's why this issue can be so complicated. For a lot of those people, I imagine, their guns are the only things they have from which they can derive a sense of power.

 

I think something needs to be done to dismantle the gun culture in this country. If shaming won't work then something else that's not so oppressive needs to be done. Obviously confiscating will not work. So more restrictions or giving the citizens the ability to sue gun manufacturers into oblivion--there's enough gun-related deaths/injuries to do it.

 

Possible, or you'll rally gun owners to give their own money to support gun makers in law suits. Or they'll start making their own in the backwoods.

If you want to dismantle the gun culture you need to do it at the source. You need to target the idea of self reliance. You need to target the idea of individualism. You need to target the idea of doing things for yourself. Teach people to let other people protect them and do stuff for them, show them it's bad to do things on your own. Teach them that as individuals they are nothing, they need to be part of a community to have value. Teach them that the government is there to do everything for them, the government will take care of you, you don't need to worry about protecting yourself, feeding yourself, clothing yourself. Government and the community will do that for you.

You indoctrinate the kids with that through schools and I promise you in 100 years no one will want a gun.

Edit:

Also forgot, you need to teach kids early on to just submit to whoever is pushing them around and to always just give in. Do that and it's not likely they'll want guns to defend themselves as they will have been trained already to not defend themselves.

 

oh please.

 

That post has to be the biggest strawman I've seen in ages.

 

Yeah, your views are either genuinely insane or living in your own fantasy. Which would be redundant given that pile of garbage you just typed up.

 

What? People have guns for defense, because they rely on themselves for protection, because they don't trust others. You target kids and prevent those values from being instilled and instill with with counter values they have no reason to own guns.

I mean you can't deny that Americas gun culture is deeply tied to American self reliance and individualism. You target those things if you want gun culture to go away.

 

God Damn, you make me embarrassed to be an American.

 

If I'm wrong please let me know. Because it seems pretty clear to me that the gun culture in America developed out of those two ideas. Americans value self reliance so it's only natural they would come to idealize gun ownership as the ultimate form of self reliance, the ability to defend yourself. American individualism naturally would develop people who would rather trust themselves with their own safety than rely on police or government protection, thus they like guns as it allows them to do that.

 

even if we were to concede that the american gun culture is dependent on this ideal of self reliance, the argument you're making is that the ideal of self reliance is dependent on the gun culture. it's insane.