Oh, I didn’t know “I’m a fiddler crab” is a Daffy Duck line.
Aw, crap. Those weren’t from the same cartoon?
I’ll just slink away now.
I’ve made my views known in this thread but what about this scenario:
An armed theatre goer starts shooting randomly towards the ceiling just to let the gunman know that there is turn fire. Would that cause him to duck or maybe even run? Would it buy others time to escape? Would he then just turn his machine gun on the armed theatre goer (subject to the smoke etc.?
Has anyone pointed out that if a lot of civilians are armed and willing to shoot, all a terrorist has to do is fire some shots in a crowded area and slink away, and people will continue killing each other?
Would the people to the left, right and front and rear of you appreciate your bravery as he turned the machine gun in your general direction?
Then maybe the answer is to raise the standards for carry, rather than a flat ban on citizen carry.
If I were the shooter with the machine gun, I’d just spray the general area I thought the shots were coming from, knowing I’d have a way better chance of hitting the person returning fire (and everyone else in the vicinity).
Why, that’s anti-gun nut talk!:eek:
Here’s your more typical concealed weapons permit holder:
Yeah, yeah, a responsible gun owner would never have done this. Which just goes to show you, they don’t check whether you’re responsible or not when they hand you a gun, they just check to see if you’ve been declared officially irresponsible by some judge.
Considering how many people around the nation carry every day and have never had an accident, calling one instance “typical” of permit holders is biased. And of course police officers never, ever have a negligent discharge. :rolleyes:
ETA: what riles me about the anti-gun crowd is their sheer contempt for the intelligence and responsibility of the average citizen. Apparently they believe that 80% or more of the population needs babysitting (presumably by such wise enlightened persons as themselves). Apparently the Enlightenment has been discredited and we’re returning to Hobbes’s view of the people as a mob of ignorant savages who need to be kept on a leash.
I’m not sure dumbasses are “typical” but neither are they necessarily atypical. I suspect the vast majority of CW carriers manage not to shoot themselves or others accidentally even if the number who do is non-trivial.
Occasionally I think that gun ownership should require a test and license like drivers get, but then I think of all the dipshits I see on the roads and I despair.
*ETA: Ninja’d by Lumpy. Which sounds vaguely rude. *
Very true and that’s what makes it irritating.
Everyone reacts differently to such frightening situations, and you can never really know how you will react until you are there.
I like to think that I would be able to keep my head and respond appropriately, maybe even bravely…but it’s possible I could stand frozen, babbling incoherently and weeping.
Training can play a part in how someone would react, but even well trained and well armed people (police officers and soldiers) can panic in a firefight.
Of course even cops have negiligent discharges. Cops are normal people, and while they have some training on how to use a gun, 99.9% of their job doesn’t involve using a gun, many cops go their whole career and never remove their gun from their holster except to clean it.
Of course, like I said responsible gun owners don’t accidentally shoot themselves or some toddler at the Walmart. I’ll go as far as to say that a very large majority of gun owners are resonsible enough not to accidentally shoot anyone. But accidental shootings aren’t exactly unknown, are they? That sort of shit happens all the fucking time. And your response is that is to shrug your shoulders.
I am perfectly willing to believe that 80% of the population can be trusted to safely own and carry a firearm. And I trust that 80% of the remainder is smart enough to realize they shouldn’t own or carry a firearm. That still leaves 4% dipshits who can’t be trusted to tie their own shoes.
Devil’s advocate: why wouldn’t they? They’d probably say that such incidents are the price of freedom, just as tolerating Fred Phelps’ sermons is the price of free speech.
No it’s not. There are few self-defense advocates more strident than I, and I protested when Kansas recently reduced the qualifications for CCW. I think the qualifications for CCW should be much higher, but the freedoms exercised should be much greater in return. But then no one on either side seems to agree with that, so I don’t push it much.
How does that make him “typical?” What are the stats on negligent discharges from CCW holders versus non?
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Just once can we not have one of these threads turn into a general debate on guns?