Handguns are pretty much restricted from the hands of children…rifles and shotguns, not so much.
OK. I’m not really interested in wasting my time with these people anyway. Tom Wolfe called them the “poor fatties” in Bonfire of the Vanities. They have no common sense and say and do what they’ve been told to say and do, and by the time they are rudely awakened it will be too late. Guns are a tool. Tyrants want a monopoly on them. Have 'em come back and talk to me after they’ve been mugged or raped.
The USSR was awash with guns after WW2. The Bolshevik government solved that problem by announcing that anyone found with a gun or ammo would be executed. That is what they’d like to do here too - except of course the rule wouldn’t apply to “our lords and masters”.
PS I don’t like places, like this, where you can’t edit your posts. I also don’t like places where some kammissar is breathing down my neck. Asimovian. And I used to be in the same club with the original, Isaac.
I’m talking about certain ones on here, and on the other similar thread about some “hypothetical” all-knowing feminist deity who hates guns.
**werewolf **- please don’t be on my side.
I don’t know who you are, and I could’ve care less, nor do I even know what you are trying to say in your wishy washy way, so, in short, don’t worry about it. I don’t want to be on your side, whatever that is, either.
PS What do they do, leave the edit button up for a minute or something?
Well, yes. The same reason we can’t do anything on gun control, just on steroids, since it requires even more agreement to change the Constitution than to pass a law.
It’s a catch-22. If people didn’t oppose reasonable gun control, we wouldn’t need to repeal the Second Amendment. That little “well-regulated” line should give us enough wiggle room to do anything short of banning guns entirely. Yes, even gun licenses.
Heck, it’s constitutional to make IDs into what effectively are voting licenses. You register ahead of time, where they check and see if you are eligible to vote, and then they check your ID to match you to that eligibility before you can vote. They could do the same thing with guns.
It’s really just having the background checks done ahead of time, so then all you have to do is check the ID through some computer system. That way it’s easy for anyone to check. I’m not even sure why it would be unconstitutional now, when background checks aren’t.
No, he means allowing the existing laws to actually be enforced. Stop creating all these loopholes where you can sell a gun to a friend or cutting funding to the people who investigate stores to see if they are complying with the law. Stop treating gun shows as different from anywhere else.
It’s the fact that the pro-gun side always seems to do this that makes me not want to listen to you. It’s a dishonest debating tactic. Stop acting like reasonable controls mean depriving the general populace of guns.
This is actually a total mischaracterisation of the recent thread in question. Perhaps one poster in that thread said anecdotally they turned in some weapons and bought others. Many said they just turned in their guns as they had no use for them. I don’t know what the actual statistics say. That more guns are now in private ownership in Australia than before is probably about the only hard statistic given in the thread. And without looking at the actual numbers I don’t know if that statistic is meaningful given that Australia’s population has risen in the meantime.
My view is that the Australian situation is about culture in combination with our lack of constitutional protection for gun ownership. After the Port Arthur massacre there was simply a wave of revulsion about mass killings and a strong feeling it was a horrible trend that needed to be nipped in the bud.
There is simply no urban gun culture to speak of here, the way there is in the US. And Australia is the most urbanised nation on Earth (or was the last time I heard the statistic). Handguns are things you see in the movies. I don’t know anyone who owns one. Recently a colleague was telling a bunch of us a story about how he and his wife went to the home of a new acquaintance and the new acquaintance showed off his (legal) handgun. The colleague says the incident made him uncomfortable, and his wife will now never go back to that person’s home. It was, to everyone listening, an interesting story outside of our experience.
While country Australians have long had a workmanlike familiarity with rifles for pragmatic reasons, to rural people guns are something you have to shoot 'roos and downed stock and pests. The thought that you need to be armed to protect yourself from Bad Guys and the Guv’mint is alien.
Against that background there was insufficient popular pushback to prevent the gun buyback scheme and surrounding gun control measures. There was just no sufficient groundswell of outrage from average Australians. We just don’t see guns as being our God given right, or removal of guns as being an outrage against our very way of life.
We get a lot of US culture here but we also get a substantial amount of European and of course UK culture in particular. We are not so immersed in the US movie/TV “reality” that guns are what enable the good guys to beat the bad guys, and that guns in the hands of the hero are the near universally effective solution.
Perhaps the US could have taken the Australian fork in the road after the most shocking US mass killings, but a combination of your gun culture and your constitution probably stopped the US from proceeding down that route.
And werewolf let me suggest that your comments on Australia and crime rates are more than wrong; they are laughably clueless. The suggestion that violent crime rates have gone up in Australia due to the gun buyback preventing people from defending themselves is hysterical. So few people in Australia have personal firearms readily to hand - before and after the buyback - that it is simply uproariously funny that you could believe that gun availability could - pre-buyback - have been keeping violent crime rates down.
One of the big reasons that a lot of liberals demonize guns is a combination of fear and ignorance. By forcing many more people to own guns, a lot of people who don’t know much about guns would necessarily learn more about them – and thus realize that guns are not magical, evil things, but merely tools. This, in turn, would promote a much healthier attitude.
Also, I wanted to point out that your specific proposal left a LOT of room for things that you probably wouldn’t like. If you stop and think about it, your proposal wouldn’t do a thing about carrying guns into schools, etc.
Happiness is mandatory. All those who are not happy will be severely punished until they are.
Just in case anyone’s interested, this is a link to an Australian Government graphshowing violent crime rates 1993-2012. The gun buyback was late 1996-97. There was no massive increase in violent crime that could be attributed to the buyback.
[ul]
[li]There was no increase in homicides post buyback and indeed the total homicide rate has been well down on mid 90’s rates since the mid 2000’s.[/li][li]Sexual assault was on a slight but steadily increasing trend since before the buyback until about 2010 since which it has been falling. I don’t know the reason for this. I do know that sexual assault is worst outside the capital cities that the rate of gun ownership is also highest outside the capital cities. That and the fact that the trend in sexual assault seems to have been up since before the buyback strongly suggest it wasn’t guns that were preventing sexual assault.[/li][li]Similarly robbery was on the rise pre-buyback and had a real horror period 1996-2003 but is now below buyback levels.[/li][/ul]
The suggestion that Australia’s rates of violent crime went up due to lack of guns post-buyback seems baseless.
Tools that can do far more damage by accident or in a “red mist” moment, with a fairly simple movement of a finger, than the vast majority of people would be physically or psychologically capable of doing with a hammer or a carving knife or a baseball bat, never mind what they enable people with grandiose fantasies to do.
And while we’re at it, if the Second Amendment to your Constitution is so sacredly perfect, how come so many of its supporters think the rest of your Constitution is capable of producing a tyrannical government against which they need to arm themselves? Why do “checks and balances” have to be interpreted as a permanent cold war?
We could try raising our children to be decent, rational human beings who DON’T commit mass murder. Somehow this doesn’t seem like too much to ask. But I guess because it is difficult, it would be much easier to just take people’s guns away.
Liberals are the fearful ones? Really? Who are the ones who won’t leave their house without a gun on their hip? Who are the ones who are certain they need to arm themselves against home invasions? I’m afraid of lots of things (I’m looking at you, ceiling spider), but getting bushwhacked in public or my bed is not one of them.
OK, I’m in. You are too I take it. Let’s just assume some children aren’t going to be raised to be decent, rational human beings. What now?
Not to mention the “ignorance” bit. What am I ignorant about exactly?
The pro-gun lobby likes to get smug about slapping down its favourite strawman, namely that gun-control advocates think guns are magical and evil and are the problem in themselves (“guns don’t kill people, people kill people”).
I don’t think these things or know anyone who does.
Maybe you haven’t heard of this thing called “jail.” Or “the criminal justice system.” It’s kind of a big deal, and I hear it was designed specifically to deal with cases such as this.
Is that before, or after they are responsible gun owners?
There is not, per se, a “gun show loophole”. In every state I’m aware of, it is a crime to sell, give, or otherwise transfer a gun to someone who is not legally permitted to own one. If Judy straw-buys a gun for her boyfriend Bob who can’t because of his previous felony convictions, Judy is looking at jail time if they’re caught. It’s just that only federally licensed gun dealers are required by the terms of their license to perform a prior background search- something they have the facilities to do, which most private gun owners don’t. One can debate whether all gun transfers should have to go through a background check; but implying that gun shows are somehow a sneaky violation of the spirit of the law is misleading.
Then why do anti-gun people shit themselves at the sight of someone legally carrying, convinced they’re about to be bushwhacked, and phone in “man with a gun” alarms to 911? Sounds like fear, even paranoia to me.