I’m an older Australian who has always ‘looked’ to the US as being the epitome of all things wonderful, ground-breaking and liberal.
In latter years though, my vision/s have been challenged somewhat, and the death of this poor little tyke is just the latest in the nails in the coffin of American Wonderfulness.
So, would you like to rephrase your question for those of us who are not US citizens?
Thanks.
:rolleyes:
Rachellelogram, kambuckta speaks the truth. It ain’t over till the laws have changed. If you grow weary and give up, the bad guys win.
Her story may or may not hold up, but I’m not sure how her teenage son being stabbed five years ago makes it more suspicious, unless you think she was somehow behind that too. As you said, he apparently tried to rob another kid using a knife and ended up being the one stabbed.
There was this from the mom:
The little bastard had it coming! If you wait til I get drunk tonight, I may come back and argue that position. 
Yep, because we all know that when laws are changed bad people will stop being bad.
I didn’t say that it makes any difference to the veracity of her story, merely that it adds to the strangeness of the whole situation - if only as an awful coincidence that both of her sons died by violent means at the hand of someone else.
Georgia has an unfortunate history of racial hoaxes which makes me look sideways at the details of an event like this; living there for a few years didn’t ameliorate that concern at all. No, I would NOT make a good juror.
Nope, PlainJain, everything doesn’t automatically become all sweetness and light. But we can make it harder for them. What’s the alternative?
Dead babies can’t take things off the shelf.
“If you shoot a baby you die! You go to hell and you die!”
Sad.
Well, no.
That is just silly - as you intended it to be.
However, if laws are changed to make guns less easily available, then bad people will have less access to guns, and crimes like this will occur less frequently.
But that’s probably a little too nuanced for you.
Nope, not nuanced. Fucking stupid. Criminals do not follow the law. They will get guns, and use them to commit crimes, regardless of what the relevant laws may be.
how is babby shot?
how is babby shot?
They don’t get guns if they are few in number. But then that would be an anathema to you and yours.
“No guns? Then how would we protect ourselves against criminals with guns?”
That this does not sound stupid to you is just sad.
Does everyone down under like pureed equine, or is it just you? As we’re both Dopers, I trust you’ve encountered the same tiresome gun control threads from Australia as I have from the US.
Engaging in forum discussion #4786 about gun control is nothing more than masturbatory slacktivism. We’ve had a billion bullshit threads (+/-999,999,999) about the same bullshit, and they always devolve into exactly the same bullshit end product. If you really care about this cause, get off your tuckus. Write letters to your congressperson, actively protest, run for political office.
And no, I can’t/don’t intend to stop you from talking about whatever the fuck you want on a public fucking forum. But I can point out that it’s a colossally misguided waste of fucking time.
Actually a crime like the one mentioned by the original poster, a mugging gone bad, does not require a gun at all, merely the ability to create a perceivable threat of violence. It could have been carried out with a crossbow, a machete, a switchblade, a hand made prison-style shiv or they could have just snatched up the baby and bashed its head against the nearest concrete wall. No, weapon of any sort, involved in that scenario just basic strength. While there are valid reasons to reduce the amount of guns and rifles in American society, this incident certainly isn’t one of them.
But that’s probably a little too nuanced for you.
That ship sailed in United States a long, long time ago. Guns will essentially never be in short supply here, not if you somehow cut world production today and didn’t produce another firearm for 50 years. It really doesn’t matter what side of the gun debate you’re on - if the goal is to reduce availability of privately held hardware to negligible levels in U.S. society, that is a war that is already lost and politically an utter waste of resources. It will never, ever happen.
More licensing and thorough registration ( for the law abiding )? More required training ( for the law abiding )? Minor restrictions on types and models ( a la “assault weapon bans” for the law abiding )? All potentially possible with the right political environment.
Bans/confiscations on paper? Exceedingly unlikely. Effective bans/confiscations? Utterly impossible.
I hate to affirm the antecedent, but this really isn’t the best foot forward the pro gun folks could come up with. After all, by this logic, reducing crime would mean taking all the crimes off the books. If we did that, the 2000 plus gun deaths since Sandy Hook would still have occurred, by they wouldn’t be crimes, but rather people acting out, and not a matter for the courts. Of course, we would still have thousands of dead bodies, but it isn’t respectful of the dead to use that to make a political point until while later. Of course there will always be gun deaths in this country, so it is never the time.
Well, why doesn’t Canada have this problem? They have guns and the same TV shows and movies. I suspect it is because Canada doesn’t ignore its mental health problems like we do in the US. Mental health problems have been removed from coverage under insurance plans during the last three decades, and these mentally ill people are shown through media that effective people have guns to solve their problems. We are going to continue to have the hideous slaughter we have, worse than the Wild West, until we do something about the state of mental health of Americans. Virtually all of these gun deaths, particularly the mass shootings, are the result of untreated and undertreated mental illness. And let’s make sure that mentally ill people don’t have access to guns. If we do that, we might make some headway with insane people open firing in schools, theaters, post offices, fast food franchises etc.
You’re spot on here, and with the rest of your post. Sad but true.