There is no guarantee that being armed will make you invincible to threats, just as there is no guarantee that wearing a seat belt will always save your life. But it certainly puts the odds in your favor.
For the record, I think every person should have the right to bear arms without government interference. There are some exceptions, of course; those who are in prison should not bear arms, and a private property owner certainly has the right to forbid you from bearing arms on his/her land. And there are a few other exceptions (e.g. commercial aircraft). But for the most part, anyone and everyone should have the right to pack heat wherever and whenever they want.
Sorry, people, but I’m calling bullshit on all of this.
The milkman/perp/serial killer/spree killer was mentally ill. Yes, he committed this act with a gun, but do any of you honestly believe that if he didn’t have gun access that he would have stayed home yesterday…? Nut-jobs are not firearms-driven…they are Nut-job driven. I honestly believe that the killer in question would have been there yesterday with a machete if a gun wasn’t available. Or chef’s knives. It might have taken a little longer, but he still would have terrorized and killed them.
And he killed because he was an angry Nut-job.
Now, if you want to talk about better steps towards screening out the mentally ill from gun ownership, I can’t complain. But wouldn’t our collective anger and outrage be better placed in discovering why we are growing so rage-ful in America as a society and a culture? Are acts like these the price society pays for multitasking and forcing 16 hours of work into 8 hour days? Is this the logical result of enforced time-management at work and in the home? Or is it the result teaching our kids from the age of toddlers to be results-oriented, because only results oriented people, who step on everyone else, get ahead? Are there any studies being conducted on pressure-induced mental illness in the general public? If there aren’t, there should be, because more people seem to be cracking than ever before in our 230 year history. This guy’s just the one who made the news.
Under those circumstances, I would not, after all it is legal for you to do so. However, I’d rather other methods were implemented for the safety of all involved.
Well my country has a different experience from yours regarding personal defence. As you know, even our regular police are not armed. I accept that in the US, owning a handgun is viewed as perfectly natural.
I agree that sport shooting is a skillful pastime. my school even has a shooting range (22 rifles). But certainly I don’t think that qualifies guns as ‘damn handy’.
'Shouldn’t reasonable, moral human beings consider the possibility that school shooting will continue whilst guns are legal? ’
But in the UK we have far less gun crime, especially shootings. And guns are illegal here. So the evidence is with me.
I do acknowledge the point that guns are fully acceptable in the US.
(I don’t agree your point that there will be a rash of private gun manufacturing.)
So given your Constitution, the NRA lobbying and the cultural demand, sadly I predict there will be more school shootings in the US.
Do other countries, where people live under similar pressure, have that kind of problem. Is the US the only one where people work their asses off? If no other country, under similar circumstances, have the same problem, what is different?
That’s the thing, oh man who is desperately searching for a Classics Megatron, if he doesn’t have one, (try TRU, and hasbrotoyshops.com has a sale), the question that I was asking, the question that started this mess, was… how do we stop this, next time? And I thought about it for a while, and the only answer I came up with was, ‘have a teacher with a gun, and a bit of luck.’ Anyone got a better one?
So you still have gun crime? There exists a possibility that someone might open up in a school?
That doesn’t sound too dissimilar to what we have here. Remember what I said about talking past each other? This is yet another example. If you would be so kind as to concede the (self-evident) point that the possibility exists that someone could perform a school shooting we can move on.
I suppose the only way to substantiate such an assertion is to ban all guns and see what happens. I suspect that it will happen that way, though, for two reasons. First, there exists a considerable volume of gunsmiths who do, in fact, custom manufacture guns. Second, gunpowder is reasonably easy to make and bullet dies are nothing at all to manufacture. Oh, one more reason: if you’re already intent upon committing a crime, where’s your disincentive? Why avoid using a gun when you’re likely to be the only person in the room with one? You’re already a criminal. Again, I would think that these points are self-evident, but barring a nationwide pogrom to eliminate guns I guess we’ll never know.
None of which has to do with the root problem, which is this: why are people flying off the handle with alarming regularity?
I agree that it’s well worth trying to find the causes of the violence and tackling them.
But please see my story (post 105) regarding an unarmed teacher facing a machete.
Guns are far better at killing.
You’re working on the assumption that the problem (psychos want to attack innocents) can be stopped, or at least can be stopped without radically reshaping society as we know it. I’m more of the position that we might not be able to stop all the psycho-attacks, but maybe we can try to minimize (a) the number of psychos and/or (b) the amount of damage from the next attack.
(Oh, and the new Titanium Megatron is fugly. The Classics series looks nice, though, especially the new Bumblebee…)
There is cumpolsory military service in Korea so all the males have been exposed to and know how to use firearms. 50 years ago, there were AK47s and M-16 strewn around the country like the leaves of autumn. There are guns all over the palce in the hands of military and police. Today there is a ban on firearms. Yet strangely, this has not resulted in a society where criminals are armed and the law abiding citizens are hapless victims. What do the criminals use instead of guns in Korea? Swords, thats right fukkin swords, its really scary if you’re a shopkeeper who is being asked to pay “protection money” but not so scary if you are a cop with a gun. As a matter of fact, the criminals in Korea go through pains to let the cops know that they do not have guns (to the point of turning themselves in for questioning if the cops start telling people that they believe you have a gun) because if you are known to have a gun, they just shoot on sight (not that they are allowed to shoot on sight but noone expects you to negotiate with the sort of crazy fuck that would carry a gun in the first place).
No matter what we do, we will always have crazy muthafuckas running around. If they were running around with swords instead of guns (heck if they were running around with rifles instead of semi-autos and pistols), they’d be easier to handle. In Korea, shooting sprees are susually perpretrated by cops, military or other people who are authorized to have guns. You just can’t eliminate all the crazies in society but you can reduce the population that will have access to guns.
It would take a constitutional amendment to get rid of guns and that would take a significant shift in the attitudes about guns in this country.
However, the idea of forcing teachers to carry guns is not very well thought out. We already have trouble recruiting teachers, now we are going to tell teachers that they have to be armed? Most people I know who have the temperament to forego the money they could otherwise make in order to be teachers are not the sort of people who would feel comfortable carrying a weapon around school.
How about we don’t design our entire lives and society around the actions of the unavoidable freaky crazy muthafuckas that create a lot of headlines.
The best argument I have heard for guns in society is that it allows us to rise up against our government if it ever became oppressive and we needed another revolution. I used to think this was a stupid argument, now I’m just hoping that this administration considers the 22nd amendment as important as the 2nd amendment.
(Titanium is the one from the Devil’s Due retelling of the Biggles Jones era GI Joe comics. I said Classics, who is a gun, and therefore relevant… tangentally.)
See, I’m working on the theory that an armed teacher can stop (b). (A) is… well, the statistical number of these cases are still low enough to be outliers. There’s so few of them to start with that little we do will really change anything. (And Count, check my link for a 1927 occurance)
Glee, I’d like your opinion on my comment as to your question as to ‘damn handy’, okay?
We passed further restrictions on handguns, especially at gun clubs.
As far as I know there hasn’t been a school shooting since, apart from this one:
‘Darragh Somers was shot in the head as he played outside Mullinaskea Primary School, near Enniskillen, on 22 April.
The police believe the shooting was accidental.’
Since 1997, there have been at least 18 US school shootings.
I therefore don’t concede your ‘self-evident’ point.
Well we have effectively banned all UK ownership of guns (and the regular police don’t carry either).
Yet our murder rate (especially school shootings) is lower than in the US.
Therefore your points are again not self-evident.
I assume crime is affected in general by economic hardship / drugs / social policy.
I wonder how much school shootings is due to the circumstances I referred to above (your constititution protects gun ownership / you have armed police / you have a period of history where guns were glorified / teenagers think using guns is cool).
Its easy to think that all countries are the same, but I have to believe that they are not. I never implied that people everywhere don’t ‘work their asses off’, but how many holidays do you get per year? How many weeks vacation? Could there not be corporate and indeed cultural difference between our countries?
Also, not to be too cynical, could it be that there are just as many attacks and out breaks here as anywhere else, but that events here are just reported/sensationalized more? Could it be that we see this event different subconciously because the victims were all, to be crude, ‘little white girls’?
There is not a single gun free society on the planet that is 100% gun free. But in countries where guns are banned, you generally have fairly low incidences of gun violence.
WEith all that said, you have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Its in the constitution so that the law cannot be changed based on the vagaries of poipular opinion. There may be some question about how much we can regulate the right to keep and bear arms but we are so far from getting 2/3 of the states and 2/3 of congress from signing onto an amendment (and there is some question if the first 10 amendments are even subject to change or if they are just so fundamental and unalienable that they can never be taken away), we can only talk about better regulation.
I think we have about 25,000 schools in England. Your suggestion would mean training and arming 50,000 people. Far more in the US.
I can assure you that the pupils would soon find out who had the guns. They love that sort of thing!
How much does a biometric gun cost?
We still have licensed shotgun owners in the countryside here. But surely bets way to deal with the animal problem is not to give everyone a handgun?
See my previous post. They haven’t in the the UK.
How many incidents?
How many deaths?
And why not eliminate the shootings, then deal with the bombs?
Not in the UK.
Well I appreciate your determination. But I think this is a problem society needs to solve, not individuals.
But in all seriousness, a gun in the hands of a good person is a good thing.