Cite, please? I’m not snarking, I genuinely have never heard of such a thing.
Edit: Okay, I just went googling. All I found through three pages of hits were STUN guns shaped like flashlights or cellphones, which I don’t think is what we’re talking about in this thread.
That was my point. Congratulations.
Again, congratulations.
What makes you think that banning handguns in the US would result in a situation where handguns are as difficult to acquire as they are in the UK? Also, a bunch of these shooters have used weapons that would not be covered under a UK-style handgun banning.
Just wanted to say that one interpretation of the “enough ammunition to kill perhaps 30 people” line is as an attempt to show things weren’t as bad as they could have been. If things had gone exactly as the bad guy wanted, a lot more would be dead, so we have at least that to be thankful for.
Not the best way to express a silver-lining thought, but it may not have been intended to be a negative portrayal of the amount of ammo—instead, it was a tiny positive to a terrible event.
Holy shit! Thought that was a parody site what with all the over-the-top “manly” bullshit. But it isn’t.
Makes The Freepers look sane by comparison. :eek:
I think he is talking about Tasers and similar devices, and it is not unknown for them to be referred to as “firearms” in the UK (I’ve also seen BB guns referred to as “firearms” in the Western Morning News, for example). Of course, it’s certainly possible someone, somewhere, has designed a gun to look like a flashlight or cellphone. I’ve been a shooting and self-defense enthusiast for 25+ years and never even seen one.
Bolding mine. Obviously, the minimum number is 2.
ETA: Dumbass.
The cell phone gun is real. It’s only a .22 and I see nothing wrong with it (except the caliber) since I carry a concealed firearm most of the time. Concealed is concealed, whether it looks like a phone or it’s hidden in your pocket.
Well, click on this link and you will.
Sure, the guy says it’s a prototype and they have no intention of producing it, but as you can see for yourself the technology is there. Never mind homemade ones.
Don’t care for guns at all, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
ETA: Beaten by Finn on first link.
As I was looking for an automatic knife earlier today I discovered that, because of some bad movies many years ago, switchblades are illegal in Colorado. I’ve never known that to slow down anyone, but the point is that a knife that is no more or less dangerous than any other knife of the same size has been banned because of hysteria. This, I believe, is the same type of thing that drives people who wish to ban guns. The media portrays them as scary and anyone with more than a 20 gauge O/U as possessing an arsenal so people who know little about them jump on bandwagons.
The media loves guns. The American entertainment media romantacizes and glamorizes guns beyond all reason. The allegation that the media-is anti-gun is laughable.
The news media is *sensationalist/i], and loves to cover shooting sprees, but that’s not an anti-gun conspiracy, it’s just what gets ratings.
Okay, I concede the point that cellphone and flashlight guns exist. Given that neither of those is likely to actually be mass-produced (and given that the flashlight gun looks like it would be totally useless, given that it unfolds like a goddamn Transformer (i.e., slowly and clumsily)), how do these change the equation at all?
There have been different manufacturers as well as independent jobbers who have been making guns into different items for decades. The zip gun, the pen gun, the suitcase/briefcase automatic are all examples of such things, but we’re not talking about what the average mutt on the street is carrying illegally. These are weapons for assassins and spies and the like. The illegal guns most problematic are those stolen and those straw-bought from regular gun shops which 99% of the time take a more, uh, traditional format.
They don’t. The idea that the technology exists is scary enough for some people.
Plus you just know the guns were chosen due to their owners’ enjoyment of salty snack foods.
Rather my point, actually.
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True, and I absolutely understand why gun owners object to this. Then again, “you pussies can get my guns from my cold dead fingers, suck my Glock” isn’t any more productive, if what you’re looking for is a productive discussion. (I think you hear these refrains equally often from the opposing sides.) And for that matter, “guns should be banned” is less threatening than “I’ll shoot anybody who tries to take my guns.”
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Generally agreed and I hate the 'cold, dead hands" crowd but the POV of the second group is that the loss of a right is tantamount to the loss of a life. I’m not saying they’re right per se, but that there’s some middle ground no one is bothering to tread.
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How do you know she “blamed the object” instead of just reminded painfully of her friend’s death? Not a good example of gun phobia in my opinion.
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Because she reacted to the stimuli of the sound of a gun, knowing it was a gun. People who lose loved ones in car crashes aren’t brought to sobs by the revving of an engine or the sight of a busy freeway.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
Fear is irrational. You’re not likely to ever fall off a building and it’s incredibly unlikely your elevator is going to plummet down the shaft, but people are afraid of it anyway sometimes. The odds don’t matter.
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Cars can be dangerous, but what really makes people nervous is that you can be in your car and driving safely and still get killed if somebody else fucks up. You don’t really know who else is on the road with you. It’s more or less the same with guns, except it’s hard for most people to live without cars and guns are more of a choice.
The only issue to me is that that fear has crept into the laws.
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I disagree. Fear is completely rational and in fact a necessary human protection mechanism. This is phobia-grade fear that is, or at least seems irrational.
To a thinking person, the odds absolutely matter. I ride an elevator to and from the 18th floor at least 4 times a day. I know the odds are very much against me plummeting to my death and in fact I know that there are no less than three systems that must fail in order for me to fall to my doom in that box. That makes me cautious, but not fearful. In my job, I’ve fallen through the floor of a burning house into a basement. I continue to go into burning houses becuse I know that’s not a common condition. Life is not a risk-free endeavour, a peanut can kill you if you’re allergic to it. At some point we’ve got to stop trying to insulate ourselves from every conceivable risk, take the bull by the horns and punish with vengance those who would use a gun to commit a crime. We don’t do that though. No career criminal is truly fearful of jail because he knows the system and how it works and how to beat it. THAT, IMO is what we need to fight.
Well I did say it was “certainly possible.” I’ve still never seen one IRL. Regardless of how it looks, it’s still a firearm and its use and handling is still covered by Federal, State, County, City, and other laws.
Oh well, what can you say? This thread will be no different than innumerable other SDMB gun threads. No one convinces anyone else, no one changes their opinions, no one is going to do anything other than argue. Seeing the same names arguing the same points for 5, 6, or even 9 years (myself included) makes me despair.
I changed my opinions on gun control over time, but it was as a result of external factors, and nothing anyone said on here changed my mind.
No question, and as a pro-gun ownership person I do NOT approve. People who have been raised around guns and taught how to handle and use them responsibly are light-years removed from punk wannabees whose prior experience with guns is videogames and action movies. They are also light-years removed from people who have the same (non)experience and who instead of glamorizing guns become phobic to them instead. I wonder how many people who support “assault weapons” bans basically know scary-looking guns from the movies? The reality of guns is done a great disservice by Hollywood, which invariably depicts people with guns as either sociopathic killers or gun-samuri heroes.
I wish I could find the cite, but it was just some movie I caught two minutes of on cable one night and I don’t even know the name. Some fat aging white guy (a detective? I dunno) was holding some inner city bad guy at gun point and the bad guy was mocking him “You think you’re bad?” and the white guy said something like “no, I think I’m a fat, white-bread nerd. The thing is though, even fat white-bread nerds can use a gun”.
