I’m OK with this. Look, the stadium operators allow alcohol in the stadium, but they don’t allow alcohol brought in from outside, they require you to buy it from their concessionaires. They can do the same with guns. You can have guns in the stadium but you can’t bring your own, you have to buy them at concessionaire prices. And the law probably doesn’t compel the stadium to allow ammunition, just guns.
Despite someone’s anecdotal recount, a gun would not have saved the guy in L.A. who was beaten to death. He never had the chance to draw it; he was set upon.
Now, yeah, maybe if someone else nearby had one, and time to draw it…and could fire it without hitting someone else completely uninvolved…or to draw the fire of other idiots carrying…or get shot himself by a police officer for firing a gun in a stadium…
Yeah: spectacularly bad idea. It only works with magical guns, magical shooters, and magically clear firing lanes.
You’re like a Nostradamus. Except that everything you predict will never happen is something that has happened. I can pretty much just highlight your words, search them in google, and find an example of something that you says never happens.
I will say that I do not appreciate your caricatures of my reasons and motivations, and will say only once that you are even farther off base on that then you are on your "
predictions." You claim that I am afraid of nonsense, can you tell me what nonsense you are afraid of that means you don’t feel safe unless you have your gun with you in a stadium?
It’s absurd to even post that. Those things never exist in any defensive situation in any location. Having to use a firearm in self defense is always being in a horrible situation that was thrust upon you. It is not some ideal scenario like those on TV.
I’ve noticed that none of you have addressed that in most areas of the U.S. people are legally carrying firearms. In places that have large crowds, in places that children are present, even in places where alcohol is served. And that fact is not going away anytime soon.
Knowing this, how do some of you go out to dinner, go Christmas shopping, or buy groceries without shitting your pants in irrational fear?
In a country of 320 million you can show me 1 meager incident? By your standards we should ban cars, bicycles, and balloons.
Yep, here we go with another of the lefts favorite turds they love to spit out.
In most places those prohibitions don’t even apply to me. That doesn’t make them any less unreasonable for my fellow citizens.
Mostly because we are capable of logically looking at things, and not shitting our pants with irrational fear.
It is the people that shit their pants out of irrational fear if they cannot have their gun on them at all times that you are defending.
A specific example of exactly the thing that you say never happens, that took me all of 2 seconds to find?
So… no answer? You can’t even say what it is that you are afraid of? You just go directly to insults when called on the carpet? If it is a favorite of the left, then you should have a ready answer by now, shouldn’t you?
Just tell me what it is that you are afraid will happen if you don’t have your gun on you. If you can’t tell me that, then how can anyone evaluate whether or not your fear is justified?
Only in the US of A can an idea this astronomically stupid be debatable. Keep the metal detectors and the ban. There is no safe way to discharge a firearm in a goddamn stadium. American gun fetishism is mind boggling.
The merit of the idea depends on whether or not you support the local teams. If the visiting team is aware that there are probably armed fans up there, they will probably be careful not to perform too well. And the Clink is especially noted for being very loud, so a report would probably be consumed by the other noise in the stands.
At the same time, might be especially motivational for the home team to know that their fans are armed. Best not fumble.
BAD
Pittsburgh.
Heck, around here you aren’t even safe eating out if you’re favorite team is from another city. 
http://old.post-gazette.com/neigh_south/20021225beating1225p2.asp
Seriously, we get incidents often enough that the police and paramedics basically have come to treat it as business as usual. More often in the parking lots slightly removed from the stadium itself and on the way to those lots but its bad enough that I just avoid the entire area on game days. Which is really hard considering I only live about 2 miles away from the field. :smack:
(And I’m a Vikings fan who displays no signs of said fact whatsoever — just to be safe.)
pkbites was asked a reasonable question that he has failed to answer.
It should be clear from these quotes (and especially with my helpful bolding) that these two posters are talking past each other. IMO, pkbites is being evasive and unreasonable in his arguments. His characterization of people opposed to guns being prevalent (or more prevalent) in our society is unfair and poisons the well, especially in his back-and-forth with k9befriender. k9 has not posited a “doomsday” scenario nor professed fears that bodies will lie in the streets. He has not made any comments about chaos reigning o’er the land, yet that is what pkbites continues to argue against.
He argues against things happening “regularly” or at “an alarming rate”, yet he fails to tell us what he would find to be “regular” or “an alarming rate”, despite being asked.
Clearly, k9 feels that perhaps as few as one accidental death is too many. He seems displeased that anyone died because of someone’s desire to carry a weapon with them at all times when they failed to control that weapon.
pkbites, IMO you are arguing in bad faith.
Perhaps you could ameliorate some of that perception by answering k9’s question, so we can have a real discussion: how many deaths is acceptable to you? If ten toddlers had shot their parents as in the link, would that be too many? A hundred? 400? 1682? 13,773? Is there any number that would make you say “this is unacceptable”? If one stadium shooting kills 1 person, is that too many? 10 people? 1500 sports fans shot? 10,000?
Or, in your view, is that simply the price society must pay because having guns is just that important?
To be fair and to argue in good faith, “too many” bad gun deaths would have to be balanced against incidents in which guns actually save lives. The NRA has, for years, been publishing anecdotes in which, for example, a home-owner shouts, “I’ve got a gun” and the burglar flees out the kitchen door.
The trouble is that there aren’t any meaningful statistics on these incidents (nor any agreed-upon definition of such cases,) whereas statistics on gun injuries and gun deaths are easy to amass.
If it could actually be shown that guns save significantly more lives than they take, especially in the given context of sports stadiums, the pro-gun side might have an argument. At present, they cannot present us with useful data.
I am personally absolutely of the opinion that if you feel a gun in your home makes you feel safer, you should have the right to have a gun in your home. I do not feel that way, so I choose not to, but I fully support your right to do what you feel you need to there.
It is when you start taking your gun to other places that I start to question whether your impact on safety is a positive or a negative. I have few issues with someone with a CCW carrying around in public (though I do think that it should be more than an 8 hour class for one, but at least there is some barrier to entry against the truly irresponsible). There aren’t all that many of them, and they tend to be mostly responsible. I do feel that the statistics show that they are a net negative to safety in general, but it is small enough that I don’t know that it is worth fighting about. There is the slight argument that maybe it does improve public safety, by preventing the crimes we never hear about. I don’t necessarily agree with said argument, but at least it is one that can be made for having a small number of people in public armed.
When it comes to private and privateish property, I do think that the owners should have some say. I don’t let people bring loaded guns into my house, and I would object if I knew they were carrying them into my business. I may not object too strenuously on a client, but there is no way I would let an employee be armed.
If the stadium owners want to be open to guns, I don’t have a problem wit that. I would probably be less inclined to go to games, and I think many people would be, but it is the owner’s choice.
This is insisting, against the owner’s wishes, that they must allow guns into the stadiums. Even if this means that attendance drops.
All I am asking here, is what scenario do you think would be improved by having a gun at a stadium? In what scenario do you think that even one life would be saved by you having a gun? I think the answer to that is exactly zero, if you feel otherwise give a reason. Otherwise, any death or injury that results from this is completely unnecessary, and is completely a net negative to public safety.
ETAish: realized I put alot of “you’s” in there, while replying to trinopus. I did not mean you, trinopus, I meant you, the advocate for carrying guns in stadiums.
No, I have no faith.
No faith that if this law passes and there are no problems with it any of you will come back on these boards and admit you were wrong.
Because, as I posted earlier, every time something like this is proposed many of you start squaking worst case, doomsday blood in the street scenarios. And when those fail to manifest there is absolute silence from those that made the most noise.
Wow. So you blatantly decline to offer an opinion on the question asked, and then spend time further excoriating people for views they haven’t expressed. Indeed, you are not discussing this in good faith.
If by “this” you mean the proposed change to the existing law, then it would only apply to publicly owned stadiums, and would only allow people with a valid concealed pistol license to carry in the stadium. Such people haven’t been shown to be a problem, in Washington State at least. Though there were some drunk Bellevue cops harassing some women at a Seahawks game a few years ago…
Agreed. It takes some fanciful scenario building to come up with an hypothetical or proposed situation. In most realistic cases, guns would just make things worse.
People have proposed the fantasy that the theater shooting would have produced fewer casualties if people (how many?) in the audience had had guns. This seems extremely fanciful. Firing, in a crowded room, in the dark? It multiplies the confusion, and has an incredibly high likelihood of hitting someone other than the real perp.
Too many people are judging gun performance on the basis of action movies.
Suppose that the stadiums didn’t even have metal detectors, and it really was just a “no guns allowed” sign that the law-abiding folks heeded and the criminals didn’t. I’m picturing two scenarios:
1: The signs are in place. The responsible gun owners grumble about the policy, but abide by it. The only person in the stadium with a gun is the psycho criminal. He starts shooting, and kills maybe half a dozen, ten tops before the fans around him manage to subdue him with fists and improvised weapons.
2: The policy is changed, and the signs are taken down. Perhaps one person in twenty in the crowd is packing heat, most of them law-abiding, but one of them a psycho criminal. The psycho criminal starts shooting, and kills maybe three, five tops before the first armed fan gets in a clear shot and kills him. And then the second, third, and fourth armed fans also shoot, but their shots weren’t as clear, and they accidentally hit bystanders. And then the fifth and sixth armed fans aren’t sure who the bad guy was, and shoot the second and fourth ones. And then armed fans seven panics, and starts shooting everyone who isn’t himself or his family, and so on. There’s a lot of potential for a chain reaction, with so many people in such a close proximity.