No, the debate is not over. Usually I am pro gun, whatever that means. It sounds a little scary. Today, I am too busy laughing at Bob Barr.
Guns don’t kill people, representatives with antique firearms and stupidity kill people. Didn’t clear the chamber…SMACK It’s those damn movies. I have seen dozens of guns made “safe” by simply removing the magazines. This works fairly well in films, where the guns are usually loaded with blanks. I thought this comment related to gun safety in some way. If not, never mind.
I’ve been around loaded guns my whole life. I would feel naked without one. Especially since we have a burglar working the neighborhood. I’ve called 911 two times in three years, average response time - one hour ten minutes. Hopefully, YMMV.
IMO, the most effective control of any device is good solid prosecution of the miss-use of said device with the laws already on the books. We have lots of good laws that we allow to be not used ; and then scream for more ineffective laws… :: sheesh ::::
When we get to the ‘no gun left’ point, me and my big stick are gonna be rich from taking your stuff…
My reading of the situation has been precisely the opposite.
The “war on terrorism” has indeed increased the desire for security, but that actually favors the anti-gun side.
“Oh my goodness!” Mr. and Mrs. Average American yelps, “My neighbor might be a terrorist! I’d feel a whole lot safer if we de-clawed him by taking away those naughty guns of his.” The thought that anyone you run into on the street might be armed, too, wouldn’t exactly be reassuring either. Mr. and Mrs. Average American might be more inclined to want to carry a gun for their own protection, but they don’t want anybody else to.
Sam: I seriously doubt that the larger debate is over; I agree with others (RT pretty much nailed it) who think its focus may have shifted a bit. As someone else pointed out, gun control proponents are just as much a “special interest” as the NRA is, and too much money and power are tied up in the battle for it to simply die quietly.
Phoenix Dragon: I also debunked that “10 children a day” lie here in GD during one of our numerous GCD’s, using links to the relevant tables in the CDC’s National Institute of Health Statistics “Annual Deaths” reports. Like you, I saw that the only way to get “10 children a day” was to “strecth” the definition of “child” considerably.
The ardently (extremist?) pro-control crowd here in GD pretty much were happy with elastically defining the terms of any GCD completely in their favor, w/o any pretense of objectivity. They were saying “define ‘child’,” at approximately the same time as the former President of the USA was prevaricating and dissembling to a grand jury with statements like “define sex.”
ElwoodCuse: whaddaya think NICS is? My only beefs with NICs is its operational [in]efficiency, not its concept or mandate, and its potential to turn into a defacto Registration List by “administrative means,” rather than legislative.
perspective: :rolleyes: This gem of opinion in spite of the fact that the worst act of domestic (U.S.) terrorism was carried out with box knives that probaly cost less than $5 each.
Unless you’re asserting that American gun shows are the arms bazaars of the international terrorist community? That my local neighborhood gun store is the procurement nodes of Al-Qaeda?
wring: valid points, if the primary reason you are purchasing a firearm is for self/home defense. If you are purchasing them for hunting, or recreational or competitive shooting, B goes away and C is reduced in relevance to practically non-existent. Whatever reason a person has for purchasing a firearm, basic firearm safety is near-universal, something the NRA constantly preaches and encourages (but which is near-universally unacknowledged by gun-control advocates and the mainstream media).
And thanks to the deeply principled decision of Mr. Ashcroft not to allow law enforcement to see whether al Qaeda members have been buying guns at your local neighborhood gun store, we’ll never know. :mad:
I’m sure some people feel that, but they probably felt the same way before 9/11, too (except replace “terrorist” with “criminal”, “deadbeat”, “Mormon”, or any other negative (the last one’s a joke, by the way) buzzword). Personally, the way I see things, the American public is very short-sighted and they have terrible long-term memory. After Columbine, we had a raving mob screaming for us to take all guns and hurl them into the sun. This kept up for quite a while, since there was then a string of high-profile shootings (made high-profile by the media trying to cash in on the ratings blitz) that kept the hysteria alive.
Nowadays, we got a big ol’ nasty terrorist hit, so now people are in the same hysteria, except they’re focusing on some vague, elusive thing that they call “terrorism”… even though most of them probably don’t know a single thing about terrorism other than “it’s bad”.
Bob Barr is a staunch 2nd amendment supporter and a board member of the NRA, and yes, I am (and I’m sure he is) deeply embarrassed at such a gross negligence displayed by him in this incident.
Ex-Tank - re: hunting/target etc. Absolutely, however, when I used to watch/participate in these threads, those two classifications aren’t generally the issue IIRC. Certainly not for me personally, anyhow, and we all know that’s all that is important here.
I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me why anyone, terrorist or no, would come into the US, with our comparatively high-tech border screening, find a small regional gun show, and try to buy a handful of semiautomatic-only AK copies that come with ten-round magazines, for upwards of $400 each, when a true select-fire capable AK can be had on the streets of Kabul itself for the equivalent of $25.
In America, with paperwork and red tape, you can buy a handgun limited to ten rounds. In parts of Russia and in Pakistan, you can get, out of the back of somebody’s GAZ, grenades, rockets, belt-fed machine guns and plastic explosives.
Near as I know, only Colt (or whoever’s making M16s and M4s for the US Military these days) makes full-auto or select-fire weapons in the US today. The rest are in Germany, Israel, Belgium, Russia, China and Japan. Our control and tracking of the product is arguably the best of the bunch…
To reiterate an earlier post I made, no the battle is not over, not by a long shot. Here’s a perfect example of what I’m writing about. This opinion column in the Detroit Free Press runs the gamut of emotional appeals from Columbine to terrorists and how ineffective current legislation is in combating gun violence. Please note the buzzwords, “common sense”, “gun safety”, “gun show loopholes”, “children”, etc., etc., etc.
Which was exactly my original point, Anthracite, in requesting a cite. There’s not a shred of evidence to support the rather surprising* claim that she’s for banning all private ownership of firearms. That’s what Johnny L.A. and BF were claiming, though.
[sub]I say “surprising” because there are very few Congressional districts in the country from which one could get elected while supporting such a ban, and probably no such states.[/sub]
I know, I know, we’re not prosecuting all the laws we’ve got.
Does anyone have any evidence that indicates that these failures to prosecute are somehow politically motivated, or are they rather simply due to the limited time and resources that prosecutors at all levels in our country (excepting Ken Starr, of course) always will have, no matter what we do?
And if the latter, what does that tell us about the usefulness of the “prosecute all the existing laws” mantra?
Why don’t they put some of the cheap guns from Kabul or Islamabad into the container ships they use to smuggle the terrorists in? Much cheaper, greater firepower. Whack that softball.
