“We’ll work pro bono”, pledged attorneys in Houston, Texas, after a 4 year old boy shot his 2 year old brother in the head with a loaded .32 calibre automatic handgun which he was able to extricate from his mother’s purse.
“We’re investigating the circumstances surrounding this tragedy,” said a visibly stunned local Police Sergeant, who wished to remain nameless in case his own children attempted a copycat assault on Mom’s purse. “At this stage we believe that the child somehow managed to unzip the zip compartment of the bag, but we’re not ruling out the possibility of foul play. It’s feasible that the purse’s manufacturers had disabled the device that detects the presence of children, the elderly, crack addicts, escaped convicts, inquisitive dogs, and Michael Jackson, and this in turn resulted in this terrible, terrible tragedy.”
The mother and father of the two boys were too shocked to speak, but a friend of the family said that they would leave “no stone unturned” in order to bring the purse manufacturer to book.
The NRA issued a brief statement: “We deeply regret the incident in Houston. We join with all Americans on this tragic day in remembering before God not only this fine young boy, but also all the innocent victims of malfeasance and criminal negligence by greedy leather merchants and zip companies. When these kinds of tragic events happen, it serves to remind all Americans of our obligation under the Second Amendment to exercise our responsibilities as Militiapersons to protect our children and preserve our freedoms.”
A spokesperson for Michael Moore said that the award-winning film-maker had rushed from his gun club to his private jet on hearing the tragic news. Before taking off for Houston, sources say he had taken up options on a new documentary project, provisionally entitled “When Will This Madness End?”
I guess this is supposed to be a parody of America’s penchant for litigation.
Do you have a bigger point you’d like to make about the solution to the problem? Where do you stand on current tort reform proposals? How would you reduce frivolous lawsuits while preserving proper legal safeguards against negligence and malfeasance?
I read in today’s paper about three “gun-related tragedies” over the weekend in which people were killed or wounded by people firing handguns in the USA. The third story (following those on killings of seven people in a church and three in a courthouse) was about a four year old boy who shot his two year old brother in the head with his mother’s gun, which he took out of her purse, which was in her bedroom.
In Chinese, there is an expression “to point at a deer and call it a horse”. C.S. Lewis wrote an essay called “Fern-seed and Elephant”, in which he talked of those who “claim to see fern-seed and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight”. In other words, those who, wittingly or unwittingly, divert attention from or obfuscate the issue.
In England, the Not The Nine O’Clock News (the TV programme on which Rowan Atkinson cut his teeth) team did a sketch based in the format of the BBC programme Question Time, on which politicians and other public figures answer questions from the studio audience. In a classic spoof, the panel are discussing the prospect of imminent nuclear war, the four-minute warning having just been sounded. It comes to the trades unionist to have his say: “Here we are casually debating the end of the world, and ignoring the real issue, which is that three million people are going to die unemployed.”
This may be a first. I’m standing right here next to you beside myself. (Bonus points if anyone gets that movie reference.)
Roger, what the hell is the point? Let us in on the sick evil joke. And for God’s sake, quit posting stuff that leads mhendo to post a response that I can’t get pissed at. It’s unbecoming of you and anti-climactic for everyone else. :dubious:
After all the shit that has happened recently I realized the one thing we’d hear about for the next few weeks. Guns are evil!
Nothing (I hope) can surpass the rage I feel towards these fucksticks taking lives of innocents and destroying families. But running a close second are the people that will, based on these 3 fruitcakes, once again say all guns should be banned. The same people that will use the deaths to gleefully pad the numbers of gun victims while never telling you the guns used in a criminal way are a far lower percentage.
When you see the stats for this year, there won’t be any side-notes about the high number of these deaths being committed by only 3 people. All guns will be called into question. It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized how rare it was for the Chicago guy caught in West Allis to have not tried to take out as many as he could.
But the whole point of my little effort was that in the third case it was a 4-year old boy who pulled the trigger, because his mum had a loaded automatic handgun in her purse, because of her sacred Constitutional right to own and carry these weapons as part of a “Militia” against God knows what.
And we all know that like everything else established or decided 220 years ago, this particular human decision is inviolate and irrevocable.
The mother would have the right. She also has the onus of responsibility when owning a gun.
Millions of people also have the right to own knives. Care to look up stabbings in the US? There were probably a few in Chicago in the time it took to write this response. Anything, including bats, golf clubs and sewing needles can kill someone.
Oh, I suppose we could ban guns to the point there would be as many as before they were invented. That would solve the problem. I mean, surely murder never occured before that, right?
I have no interest in statistics. I work with them and place no faith in them. Plus, they lead to ever more detailed minutiae, plus the inevitable fruitless definitions, which take the discussion bacwards not forwards.
The situation in which a 4-year old a) knows that his mum carries a gun in her purse and b) has easy access to it and c) uses one to settle an argument with his 2-year old brother (they’d been in a fight) rather than, say a knife, or a sewing needle or a hammer - all fo which he would have seen used - because “gun” for him is synonymous with how to solve problems is truly frightening.
Is the Mom being charged with anything? Not that it would do any good, but she was not keeping the gun in a safe and secure manner. Unless the purse involved was sold specifically as a child proof bag for the carrying of conceiled weapons, then the mother (not the gun, not the 4yr old, not the purse manufacturer) holds all existant blame in this terrible tragedy.
Well, while questioning roger thornhill’s particualr conclusions is entirely unproblematic, your second question is just silly.
So what if he’s a Brit in Hong Kong? So what if US firearms law don’t affect him?
Is there some rule that i failed to read which states that members of this message board must only engage in debates on topics that directly affect them?
Your attitude is intellectually unsustainable and, if adopted by everyone, would stifle conversation to such as extent that the Boards would probably have to shut down.
The same way I leap to all my conclusions. After years of practice, after serving my apprenticeship at it, I am now a fully qualified conclusion-leaper.
No way at all. But I get all pissed because everyone in Hong Kong, even after I tried to learn the language and go native culture-wise - I even pretended I liked eating chicken’s feet and going to endless banquets so that I’d get accepted, and all they’d do is laugh at my chopstick use and answer in English every time I spoke Cantonese (and laugh like fucking hyenas at my fucking tones - did you know they have 9 tones - they never stop telling me, the dickheads…and *I’m * the fucking linguist and they know shit) - looks at me as a “foreigner” (and I’ve got a fucking Chinese wife, a fucking permanent ID card, and I even learned the words (in Putonghua) to their crappy National Anthem - okay, the last bit’s a lie) - after 17 and a half fucking years.
Meanwhile, when I go back to Britain (my so-called mother country - even though my mum was actually born in New Zealand, but that’s another story - I’m not accepted by my 13 first cousins there either), everybody there, apart from my mum (whose affirmation I neither want nor need), thinks I know fuck all about Britain. My own place of birth! Even on this board, it’s taken me 8 fucking months to be accepted - no, not accepted, tolerated - by my own flaming compatriots.
So, your conclusion is spot on. Perhaps you could tell me how you can get to the right conclusions a) without leaping and b) without getting emotional?
Right, I’m outta here. And don’t bother starting a pit thread or a crappy lovefest thread.
Because it has nothing to do with him. Whatever his opinion is, he’d by definition have less of an appreciation of the consequences of that opinion than any single person in this country. So that’s 300 million people we’d have to hear from first about this issue before his views become even close to relevant.
Wot he says. I’ll take my turn behind the citizens, the nationals, the green card holders, the legal immigrants, the illegal immigrants, the Al Qaeda cell members at the flying clubs, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the research students from China. Oh, and the toddlers…
So you don’t believe that the issue is open to rational debate and logical arguments that might transcend someone’s direct experience of the way the policy is implemented?
That’s an astoundingly shallow and narrow view what constitutes allowable expression and relevant discourse. My sympathy for your provincial ignorance.
Shit. Your whole argument went the way of the French Army. As in, it can’t be found. :smack:
How did the FOUR YEAR OLD make ‘gun’ synonymous with ‘problem solving’?
Oooh, oooh, oooh, I know!(wildly waving hand in air) It must be because guns are inherently evil, right? A 4 YEAR OLD would know that the gun is the best way to solve whatever problem is facing him at the time.
What do I win?
What? That wasn’t the right answer? OK, I’ll try again. Maybe a different tack is needed.
If a 4 year-old is ready to pull a Glock on a playmate, the problem may be, oh I don’t know, whom could we look to:
THE PARENTS!. But that doesn’t help your view of banning gun ownership, so let’s try something else. Since mom keeping a gun in her unattended purse upsets you so much and you see, ahemTHE FUCKING GUNahem as the problem, you show yourself as a whiny little bitch blaming items for tragedy rather than those responsible for those items being kept in a way that don’t cause undue harm.
More people die from car crashes than gunshot wounds every year. If you care about life, ban cars. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. College students in the '60’s beat you to the gun banning and they, at least, had the common sense to get stoned and leave everyone else to live their lives.
And to think I respected and defended you. :smack:
