I’m pretty anti-gun but that sounds reasonable to me.
Well like most gun laws, they don’t, except for the Mass. safety course, which isn’t a bad idea at all.
Well, of course I’m sure there are many people here in Illinois who have illegal guns. If guns were outlawed completely, this would no doubt still be true.
Similarly, even though most of us have our cars legally registered and our driver’s licenses up-to-date, there are probably a lot of people driving around illegally as well. So…how does the licensing & registration promote safety among these illegal drivers? Anyone who works outside the law in any aspect is probably not operating under the mode of maintaining public safety. This doesn’t mean we should take rights or privileges away from people who do.
In California you have to possess a Basic Firearms Safety Certificate to buy a handgun. It’s a simple, common-sense test, not hard at all. AFAIK the card is good for life.
Obviously not, but the exception proves the rule.
I’ll put up with Canada’s stats on firearm injuries and fatalities against the US anyday. We don’t have daily gunshots in our neighbourhoods.
Check this cite.
Look at the graph Firearms Death Rate (per 100,000, age adjusted) for Selected Countries in one year between 1990 and 1995 (Krug, Powell and Dahlberg, 1998)
Notice that Canada has 1/3 the fatalities per capita due to gunshot that the US has? Notice that the US even tops non Islamic third world countries and that no other western country even comes close?
Look at the graph titled ** Firearms Deaths by Mode of Death for Children <15 Years of Age
Top 10 Countries - Rate per 100,000**
Fuck!!! What are you Americans doing? Sacrificing your children for the sake of your constitutional right ? You’ve got more than twice as many kids shot to death than the next western country.
Your right to bear arms results in many many innocent victims, many of them children. I can’t understand how Americans can live with that.
According the statistics here, drowning is the second-leading cause of accidental deaths of children under the age of 15, and that 19% of those are at public swimming pools (wish I had the statistic for how many are at privately-owned swimming pools, but can’t find it right now). In the book Freakonomics, statistics are shown that owning a swimming pool puts children at higher risk than owning a firearm in the household. Fuck! What ARE we Americans doing? Sacrificing our children for the sake of our constitutional right to swim?
More homicides than other countries per 100,000.
One wonders if that is gang related and should be addresses as a social issue.
Northern Ireland has more suicides. That is unusual.
On that note: BAN HYDROXIC ACID! 
Also, it has been said that statistics are the worst kind of lie, since the results can vary depending on any number of things, including sampler bias or just the cultural workings of the people being polled. IIRC, there was a survey done at some point that showed that countries with predominantly Catholic populations had a much lower reported rate of suicide than countries not strongly affiliated with the Roman Church.
Two theories that came from this were that somehow being Catholic (or being in a country that did not experience the political upheavals related with widespread changes in religion) somehow made you less likely to commit suicide. Another theory was that since the Catholic church stresses that suicide sends you straight to hell, family and friends of the deceased are more likely to lie about the cause of death to preserve the deceased’s public reputation.
Of course, the smartass in me is tempted to say, in resposne to our higher per-capita gun-related death rates refered in the stats above, that this is just because we can’t stand to let anyone outdo us, no matter what. More than likely, it is related to different social/cultural happenings in the two countries. I’d be willing to bet that Canada has less problems with issues like urban crowding that are strongly tied to poverty and crime in the United States. Alternately, I’d be willing to bet (not having looked up any statistics for this) that Americans have a much lower per-capita rate of deaths related to exposure to the elements than Canadians have (Fuck! What ARE you Canadians doing? Sacrificing your children for the sake of your constitutional right to… erm… go outside?!)
I dunno, we might beat them in heat related deaths. 
Yep. Right here on this Official NRA altar. :rolleyes:
After reading your post, I’m still pro gun control. As long as we live in a society, there are certain things that should be controlled. For instance guns, heroin, anthrax powder. It might restrict my freedom a bit, but I believe it’s good for society as a whole.
I’m in the camp that believes it is the actions of the individual that matter, and that we, as a race, caused plenty of death and destruction with rocks and clubs long before firearms were invented, and that as a race, we would cause similar events if they were all to suddently ‘disappear’.
As long as I conduct myself in a legal and responsible manner, what care you if I have an M-1 Tank in my garage? (responsible manner must include making sure (to the best of my ability) that nefarious persons not gain access nor control of said tank).
To continue to hold responsible people at bay for the actions of the criminals… which by definition could care less about any laws that are out there wrt gun control… is not only illogical but self defeating.
Hey, welcome to the club! I am also a pro-owning-a-gun-if-that’s-what-you-want-to-do-and-know-how-the-fuck-it-works leftist. I consider it a right of privacy issue just like abortion, drug use, sex, etc. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and while taking away the weapon might lead to fewer deaths it will not cut to the heart of the social issues that lead to those deaths. Giving everybody a drug to dampen their libido would cut down on the number of STDs, but would we consider that an okay thing to do? No! (Well, maybe some people would…)
Someday I really want to learn how to shoot. I think it would be fun and a good skill to have.
I have seen pro gun and NRA signs on peoples property. Thousands of them.
I have seen ONE sign that said the property was gun free and they kept it up for less than a day. (It was on a bet.)
Your point being? Conservatives are always more likely to wear their political beliefs on their sleeves anyway.
I realise you’re re-evaluating your position on the whole “Gun Control” thing, but your views on handgun ownership are… woefully misinformed, verging on the dangerously ignorant.
There are plenty of uses for handguns that don’t involve shooting people. In Australia and NZ it’s illegal to own a handgun for self-defence purposes, but there are many, many competitions and legitimate sporting uses for handguns- they aren’t all designed purely for bustin’ caps in the Hood or for use by SpecOps teams on Deniable Operations somewhere in South America, you know…
I don’t understand. You have to explain why you are buying a pistol, or it is illegal to shoot someone in selfdefense with it?
Bingo. Canada has roughly, big picture, more or less the same rate of gun ownership as the U.S. There are cultural reasons that Americans use their guns in lethal ways - I know I sound like Bowling for Columbine - but that part seems to be true.
Where I find it hard to weigh in is that we all have different ideas about what “gun control” means: Even the OP says he would have licenses to own guns … if that is not “gun control” what is? Are the cited Massachusetts and Illinois laws “gun control”? If so are people “against gun control” actually in favor of just saying anyone, anywhere, at any hour should be able to by a gun on the spot? Should a man paroled after 25 years for robbery and murder be allowed to stroll out of the prison and into his local Liquor N’ Gun buy the gun of his choice? If the answer is no isn’t that “gun control”?
I think there is more middle ground on this issue than people realize and that the NRA, Media, politicians and gun control groups all have reasons to hype us and make us think there are HUGE differences.
Trigger locks, Teflon bullets, background checks, waiting periods automatic weapons – really these are side issues -to total wild west vs. total gun ban – I think what most people really argue about is not *gun control vs. no gun control * but what level of registration and licensure is appropriate
No. In my state I don’t have to have a license to have a gun in my house. I have to have a license to carry it concealed. Your above felon if caught would go back to prison. I remember an instance where the girlfriend was afraid of the shotgun and took it to the police station. The paroled felon, who if he were intelligent would have had a job instead of stealing things, went to the police station to pick it up and thence returned to prison.
I could see that even a license to be able to own a firearm without a list of any could be misused.
Perhaps some general certificate of having not been convicted that would allow one to vote, own a firearm, drive a taxi, etc. which could be revoked upon conviction of a felony.