I am unfamiliar with how easy it is to manufacture a gun. I guess it depends on where in the process you start. Do you have already machined barrels and other pieces at hand and assemble or are you melting metal blanks and forging everything? Can the government not track sales of 20 tons of metal to Joe Blow in the Bronx and wonder?
Beyond that what kind of mass production of guns can you expect out of a basement and go unnoticed? Churning out a gun or three a day is one thing and would still make them expensive.
Guns smuggled in from Mexico? If thousands and thousands of people can get through our border, the same is true of guns.
Guns smuggled through ports from the former Soviet Union and other countries with shitloads of surplus weapons? Only a tiny percentage of ships are checked at ports and it would be easy as fuck to smuggle guns in that way.
Guns manufactured in underground shops just like the ones that I mentioned in my last post?
The guns would just be driven underground, become a huge black market economy, enterprising smugglers would be making millions of dollars sneaking real, automatic AK-47s in and selling them to real criminals, and meanwhile our population would be disarmed and you can forget about kids learning proper gun safety.
Whack-A-Mole,why do you SO passionately believe in our citizens being disarmed and defenseless? “I’d be fine with gun enthusiasts storing their guns at a shooting range.” Are you kidding? Why are you so vehemently terrified of guns?
Joe Blow in the Bronx won’t be making these guns - it’ll be guys out in rural areas, maybe people who already have existing machine shops, who will then sneak them into cities. Black market capitalism knows no bounds - look at the drug situation - and enterprising criminals will ALWAYS find some way of plying their trade.
In his defense, the same could be said about you (and me, when I start to go off the rails) from the other side of the argument.
Why must this devolve into this same fight every time? Dispelling myths and correcting factual errors, I get that, but these endless hypotheticals with surreal conditions? Not for me, thanks.
Please continue to fight amongst yourselves, though.
Will there be a black market of smuggled guns whether imported or built in clandestine labs? Sure. The point is you raise the price dramatically. Presumably fully auto AK-47s can and are smuggled in today. Why do we not see them used in endless gang battles in the inner city as doubtless they’d love some? My guess is they are too bloody expensive for most to bother with.
And as I said guns might be kept at shooting ranges. If you want your kids to learn gun safety go there.
Defenseless from whom? From what? I am unarmed. I have no guns. I live in downtown Chicago in an area that while not bad is not exactly good either. I feel very safe nonetheless. My 100 pound German Shepherd helps with that feeling but I do not have her all the time and feel safe without her too. Rather have my dog than a gun anyway. The vast majority of people living around me do not have guns either. They are fine too.
I am hard pressed to manufacture a hypothetical situation where I wish I had a gun because no other options existed to my safety than having that gun. Do such situations occur? Sure. Are they common? No.
The presence of guns in our society cause more problems than they solve. As such the math is easy and they should have no place…particularly handguns.
Well, those situations might not be “common,” but I’d rather be able to protect myself and my girlfriend on the off chance that it happens to me. You’re basically just hoping that all the burglaries, robberies, rapes, and murders that happen to people all over the country never happen to you. And if they do, you’ll be putting your life at the mercy of the police who may or may not respond in time.
Fine, if that’s how you want to live life, it’s quite clear that I’m never going to be able to convince you. But I don’t want any asshole politicians (who have armed guards and security details) taking away MY right to protect myself instead of leaving my life in the hands of other people.
It’s been stated over and over that concealed handgun owners are a law-abiding and safe group of people, but you’re choosing to ignore that and keep insisting that the handguns, not the criminals who use them illegally, are the problem.
Well, I think Barack Obama probably feels the same way that you do, which is why I’m not voting for him.
For the record, I happen to be descended from hundreds of years of people who were massacred because they put all their trust in their government. Hint - their name rhymes with “blues.”
One of my guns is over 44 years old. It has no serial number, and no record of existence. There are no laws to track it. It can be bought and sold, legally, by a handshake deal, and has been.
Have fun.
You, sir, is why there is no middle ground. You want to take my guns away. And you really don’t see the problem with that, nor why people equate it with censorship. Would you approve the government censoring all news to what they wanted published?
Airman Doors, as someone whose bias has historically been on the other side of the equation allow me to shout out “Preach it brother! Amen!” These discussion end up filled with so much hyperbole on each side that reasonable discussions get drowned out in the cacophony more often than not.
I’m really hoping when you say “cacophony” you’re not referring to my numerous, completely reasonable, and well-argued points. I fail to see how anything I’ve said is hyperbole.
The other side wants to prevent people from having that right.
I’m just a freedom-loving guy. I think marijuana and psychedelics should be legal, and I think hard drugs should be decriminalized. I think prostitution should be legalized and regulated. I am one hundred percent in favor of all free speech, all free expression, and everything else covered by the first amendment. I am not a libertarian because I don’t believe in unbridled capitalism. When it comes to personal freedoms, I’m pretty much Hunter Thompson. I’m the average Republican’s worst nightmare.
I wish I didn’t have to choose between a bunch of assholes for President.
Even if faced with a criminal intending me to do harm I wonder how the gun will save me.
Mugger has the drop on me with a gun or knife. Do I go for my gun and hope I am faster or just give him my wallet?
Guy breaks into my house. Presumably, as a law abiding citizen, my guns are locked up, ammo separate and I am to go running around to assemble the pieces? If I have the gun actually loaded in my nightstand am I better off stalking the intruder or just getting the hell out?
I am walking down the street and see a purse snatcher take off with an old lady’s purse. Do I shoot him?
I’m in a bar and a bar fight starts. Do I pull my gun? Get out? Or just lay in the good old fashioned way and beat on each other a bit?
We could do this all night. The point is most bad situations we are likely to face will not necessitate a gun to defend yourself and even those situations that would it is not very likely you could bring it to bear anyway. And for all that we need to have guns?
I do not accept that guns are your only means or even your best means of protecting yourself.
Great…concealed handgun owners are a credit to society. To allow them to do their thing necessitates the building of an item that bad guys also use. To me that is like saying some people can drink and drive responsibly so there should be no restrictions on drinking and driving.
I find it interesting that you started the thread seeming to be on the fence and looking for opinions. Seems you had your answer before you started since most everyone on that subject has opined that Obama will go nowhere near the gun issue and even if he wanted to he needs congress to actually do it and they will not do it.
So you are a single issue voter making your decision on an issue that will not even be an issue. Glad to see rationality wins the day and you say the pro-gun side are the ones with real common sense. :rolleyes:
If it comes to that I am not sure what good you think your guns will do. Yeah you may take a few with you but in the end you’re screwed…we’re all screwed if things come to that.
Granted the SCOTUS does not seem to agree but I think a common sense reading of the constitution does not provide a blanket, every is allowed a gun, message. If that is what they wanted why include the militia part? They could have simply said, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and be done with it.
Be glad you have powerful PACs and the NRA to buy our politicians to get your way because common sense won’t get you there.
And kind of curious where you think the middle ground is that I am avoiding.
There are two sides to every subject, and each side thinks that they are right. What makes us the “right” side? We have history, law, and a document on our side, but it is very easy to lose the ground that we stand on. Making spurious arguments and (as these discussions tend to go) increasingly tortured hypothetical arguments does not help. Isn’t it enough to let the argument stand on its own merits? 200+ years with little change and the upcoming SCOTUS decision makes me more than content with that.
Whoever said that the only way for a law-abiding citizen to store a gun is locked up with the ammo separate? And even if you did store a gun that way, you don’t have to go “running around to assemble the pieces.” Do you even know anything about guns?
I’m going to tell you something. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with Nazi Germany. It has to do with Tsarist Russia. The example I’m going to give is an actual incident that happened to my family in Belorussia during the early 1900s. It was in the middle of a pogrom. You may have heard that word before. During this particular pogrom, my great grandfather’s house was broken into - by a policeman. The Tsarist police at this time were total thugs who terrorized the Jews. My great grandfather’s response to this was to pick up his rifle and kill the policeman. He and his family went on the run and fled the country.
If he hadn’t done that, I would not be typing this.
It’s B.S. that “your guns won’t help you” if your government is oppressing you. This is a topic for a whole other thread, but suffice it to say, our military is getting hurt pretty bad in Iraq, a country that’s not exactly on our level in terms of military technology. And we were kicked out of Vietnam by a bunch of barefoot farmers with antiquated weapons and primitive traps. Anyone who thinks that guns are useless in the face of a larger, more powerful foe, has not read their history.
You know what? None of this matters. Not one tiny, teeny little bit. I have a right to own a gun if I chose to. Whatever reason I might personally have for buying that gun is no concern of yours. None, nada, zero, zip zilch. It’s my right, no more needs to be said. Once one right is eliminated, it is only a matter of time before they all are. Anyone who doesn’t realize that is a fool.
Well, slavery was once a right too (see Dred Scott Supreme Court case). Somehow we managed not to lose all our other rights when that went down the tubes.
I see a decline in enthusiasm on the left for gun control, at least in part because it just ain’t worth it. There are too many of the damned things anyway, even if we totally banned the manufacture tomorrow, there’d still be enough for every kid in the country, K through 12, to pack heat in their Little Mermaid lunch box. And if that weren’t hopeless enough, a significant portion of the population has a firearm fetish that would fascinate Freud.
If you so much as suggest that maybe, you know, this ain’t that great an idea they glare at you and clutch thier little death dispensers to their chest, for all the world a child clutching a red firetruck and about to scream “Mine!”.
Enough, already! The rock is too big, the hill is too steep, ain’t gonna happen. Some people are gonna get shot, but nothing can be done, its like STDs and Republicans, you can’t make them go away, you can only be mindful of the company you keep.
Maybe some day, after ED treatments become more widely available, this firearm fascination will simply fade away. Maybe someday you will open your local paper to the movie ads and not see a single picture of a movie star brandishing a hand gun.
“Gee, Grandpa, whats that?”
“A Glock Nine, child. Had to walk all the way to Shelbyville to buy it from Krazy Kaiser Bill’s Gunne Shoppe. I wore an onion in my belt, which was the fashion in those days…”
Yup, it’s all about penis-size insecurity. You’re right. That’s the correct answer. You win this debate. I’m going down to the local trophy shop tomorrow with a 20-pound brick of gold, and I’m going to say, “I want you to melt this down and craft it into an elegant goblet,” and then I’m going to take a little cloth sack full of rubies and sapphires and empty it on the counter and say, “and I want you to ring the upper portion of the goblet with these jewels,” and then show him a piece of parchment on which I wrote, with a fine quill pen, a unique and beautiful calligraphic script of my own design in both the upper and lower case letters of the alphabet, and say, “Using this font that I’ve designed specifically for the purpose, I want you to engrave ‘elucidator’ right under the rim of this goblet, and beneath that, ‘Winner of Great Debates, May 4, 2008,’ because this trophy belongs to him. He has truly earned it.” I’ll let you know when it’s finished (it’ll probably be a few weeks, but hey, quality takes a long time.)
Ok then, Nicholas II, not Hitler. Much better. I wasn’t attacking you for godwinizing–sometimes genocide is relevant to the topic. I just thought the method was humorous.
How many of our brave men and women in Iraq do you think have died of small arms fire? Of total deaths, I’d wager that it is less than a third. Probably less than a quarter. I don’t think bullets are the make-or-break for US success in Iraq. And you can bet that if our goal there were simply to kill off some subset of the population, we’d be accomplishing that goal just fine. So the argument that Iraq demonstrates that a well-armed populace can fight off the US Marines with small arms seems pretty specious to me.
To the people who want to ban or heavily regulate guns: doesn’t it bother you that, in order to support your ideas, you have to keep coming up with more and more authoritarian regulations just to make them feasible? Yes, just create a registry here, or spy on more people there. At least you won’t have to worry about militarizing the police forces in preparation for the gun confiscation campaigns, since that’s already being done in the name of an ever more violent “war” on recreational drugs…
Wake up, people! Our rights are under assault every day from both sides of the political spectrum, and if we don’t stand up for them, they’re going to vanish. Shouldn’t we be a bit more worried about that than about our personal safety?
No, rationality would be if the Democrats would finally wake up and realize that by failing to respect people’s fundamental rights, they’re alienating voters who would otherwise support them.
So, you’re arguing that we should be even less prepared for it? :dubious:
I think he means that it’s your attitude that radicalizes many people who believe in gun rights. I know I myself would be much more willing to listen to the arguments of moderates if there weren’t such a vocal group of people wanting to disarm me entirely. But because of their activism, I feel like I have no choice but to fight for every inch.
EDIT: Yeah, luci, let’s break out the penis arguments. Because we all know how relevant and mature those are. :rolleyes:
I wasn’t attacking you for godwinizing–sometimes genocide is relevant to the topic. I just thought the method was humorous.