With a bat, yes, at least some chance of blocking. With a gun, and with calm control and good aim (challenges, admittedly, when the adrenaline is pumping furiously), the guy doesn’t even reach me.
What I have a healthy fear of are the many gun-toting Toms, Dicks, and Harriets who think they’re ready to handle such a situation. I hope I don’t live near to, and down range from, them. Because when they miss, the walls of my house might not stop their bullets.
A quick double-tap to COM, then one just above the eyes.
I agree. We don’t ban guns. We force gun owners to take their ownership seriously, and that means making them criminally liable for accidents and crimes that are the result of their negligence.
There is a significant difference between liability for negligence, which we already have, and the strict almost overreaching liability that **China Guy **proposes.
I’m not suggesting either is a bad idea. Merely that tossing the term “negligence” around negligently is, well, negligent. In law it has a specific meaning that doesn’t line up with what many people think.
they make AK-47’s with hand tools in Pakistan. What do you think a nation full of people with a machine shop in the basement and 3D printers could do? Take 300 million guns away and 500 million will pop up. the difference is that the person making them underground isn’t going to stamp a traceable number on any of the parts.
The graph was completely un-sourced, no cites, so I’m exceedingly suspicious.
They’re already liable for this and prosecuted accordingly. While you can make a separate point about non-violent deaths being more preventable the thread is about violent use of a gun.
Magiver, maybe I have a misperception, but off the top of my head, Gun Show loophole guns do not have a liable owner (in most if not all cases), ditto with buying off the internet. You can take the case of Nancy Lanza, who’s estate certainly can’t even begin to cover the costs of what her son Adam perpetrated.
From NPR: instead of taxing guns, we should tax gun violence. Basically, this is the same as saying that we should make gun owners liable for any damage their guns do. Not only would this discourage some people from buying guns, it would lead those who do keep guns to be more careful with how they’re stored. Indeed, greater care would surely have kept Adam Lanza out of his mother’s cache. The problem, though, is that Nancy Lanza is neither with us to pay the damages her gun caused, nor could she afford to pay for the enormous damage her gun wrought in Newtown.
Here’s another http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/11/how_liable_is_the_owner_of_a_s.html: If the gun is used to intentionally commit a crime, to kill or injure someone, the court will not impose civil liability on the gun owner for the acts of a third person. Again, under the proximate cause doctrine, the actions of the thief would supersede the negligence of the gun owner, cutting off his liability, LeCesne said.
LSLGuy: “In law it has a specific meaning that doesn’t line up with what many people think.” What does a legal definition of “negligence” mean?
Is culpable a better word to use? If one’s weapon is not sufficiently secured, and ends up being used in a violent crime, then IMHO the owner is culpable. The owner didn’t pull the trigger, but enabled in some part because the weapon was not sufficiently secured.
That’s part and parcel with the government not defining what “secured” means, since the onus is on the gun owner. And are there any gun owners on this board that have a issue with “all gun owners are responsible for securing their weapon?” I could be wrong, but that was the basic tenet I grew up with.
Outside the edit window. The Times-Picuyune (New Orleans and I have no idea if they are liberal, conservative or have a particular axe to grind on this issue one way or another) also had this tidbit:
The courts, he said, generally view the shooting another person as unforeseeable act for a lawful gun owner who simply forgot to secure their weapon. “It’s unfair and unjust to hold that person responsible,” LeCesne said.
that says that, by far, handguns are used the most to kill people. firearms of all types kill about 4 times the amount that knives and blunt objects do.
I think you know, and Scumpup too, that what I said was hyperbole. In case there’s any room for doubt here I’m not suggesting that knives and blunt instruments are never used as murder weapons.
But I would suggest that in a society where guns are easy to get hold of, they will be used in far, far more homicides than knives and blunt instruments. Sure enough, your link bears that out.
Of the 12,000 or so murders it looks like 8,000 were by firearms of some type.
In the UK for 2012 there were about 550 murders and only 39 were by firearms. No that isn’t typo.
From FastStats - Injuries guns cause about as many deaths as cars, but not as many as poison.
I would expect poison is generally not with murderous intent but largely accidental.
Seconded on basement workshops. Formerly you had to be a skilled machinist to make parts for a quality firearm (anything better than a cobbled-together zip gun). Today you can buy a CNC milling machine that automates most of the production process, and 3D printing will make it even easier. Producing physical objects may soon be as unblockable as producing words.
My friend likes playing with guns. He has some kind of blinged out to heck AR, a blinged out to heck Sig-sauer pistol, and probably other weapons I don’t know about. He knows that tougher laws would make it far more difficult to obtain these premium, “military grade” firearms, as they did during the last round of bans. (assault weapon ban made it moderately more difficult to get ARs without playing the “does it have a flash hider” game, and higher end pistols like a Sig, there are often various bits of proposed legislation that might ban em).
He doesn’t want his law abiding hobby to be inconvenienced out of a misguided attempt to reduce gun violence. He doesn’t say the laws wouldn’t do anything - they would make it harder for law abiding citizens to obtain new, higher end weapons. He just doesn’t think it would make any difference in how many people are shot.
If you were a hardcore gamer, and they decided to pass laws that made the higher end consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One illegal, unless they are purposefully made to suck : “no more than 4 gigs of ram, or a gpu with 500 shader units, or it’s too addictive for any gamer to handle”. Sure, someone could use a PC (just like someone could make their own AR and full capacity magazines), but that’s inconvenient.
Presuming you’re going to repeal the Posse Comitatus act along with the second amendment, you will still have to create military units who are willing to go against American citizens on American soil. I don’t expect you’re going to have a lines of volunteers for that duty. A few thousands at best and they will be engaged in a serious war of attrition.
Better to dry up the supplies of ammunition. Sure, there are people with tens of thousands of rounds stashed, but those are the outliers on the bell curve of gun owners. I imagine your typical gang-bangers and 7-11 knock off thugs have a few hundred rounds at most and they won’t last nearly the years projected for any sort of firearm reduction plan.
Your typical gang-banger might have trouble but anything as rudimentary as guns/amunition can be made at home.
Well they caught them red handed all right. I don’t know if they ran out of ammunition or were just exhausted from squeezing the trigger but they did stop them.
Sure I can go to my bench and crank out a thousand rounds of ammunition in an afternoon.
With components I have to buy at a store. I can cast slugs as long as I have a source of lead; not too great a challenge. But while I can probably mix up my own mostly functional black powder, primers are right outta there. The primer is the part that ignites the gunpowder that makes the actual bullet go forward. The primer compound is incredibly unstable during the production process and would probably take someone out of the manufacturing business in a very short amount of time.
That’s a large document, can you point to the relevant section?