Gee, what a surprise: a Canadian stereotyping Americans. FWIW, I’ve reviewed your posts in this thread and my opinion of them remains the same: the criticisms made in them, being borne of ignorance, are invalid.
By the way, do all the men in Canada act like those guys on the Red Green Show?
It’s hard to fathom how regular shooting sprees, particularly 20 dead kids, can be seen as an acceptable price to pay for recreational gun culture. I really thought Newtown would be a turning point, but instead, the victims just got reduced to statistics and poof!, everything was hunky dory.
It’s simple; your typical pro-gun person has essentially zero concern for human life, but deifies guns. They don’t care about the cost because to them, there really isn’t much of one. People died? Well, people aren’t guns, so they don’t matter.
“Europeans”, eh? How do you explain Australians & New Zealanders then? Or are we part of Europe too? Cause I can assure you it isn’t just “Europe” that thinks US gun laws are entirely fucking insane.
In my experience, it ain’t just “Europe”; it’s the entire rest of the developed world and a fair percentage of the developing world too.
My two main thoughts on the matter are:
“Man, you guys really give a massive shit about guns.”. I’ve never been afraid of crime (or the government); I don’t need to own a gun to feel safe, and I don’t need to see new restrictions placed on guns to feel safe. When I think of gun control policy, it’s in the abstract, not how it will affect me personally.
“Man, you guys are weirdly hung up on your Founding Fathers.”. This goes beyond gun control, of course, but gun control is a “Founding Fathers topic”. I don’t think anyone up here cares what John A. Macdonald had to say about gun control or freedom of speech or taxation. Good laws are good laws, and bad laws are bad laws, regardless about what some dudes thought a quarter millennium ago.
You do realize that “recreational gun culture” has as much to do with the American view of freedom to bear arms as writing poems about flowers has to do with the American view of freedom of speech, right?
Bill Clinton was President last time I was in North America – do I qualify as non-American? 
Anyway, I offer no opinion; I only report what I heard an American say a few days ago.
He was proud that in his state he has the right to shoot a fleeing thief in the back, even when the thief has left his property. Further discussion involved whether he would aim at the head or at the “center of mass” or deliver a crippling shot to the knee so he could walk up and leisurely deliver a lethal blow. (This seems so astounding, Dopers may think I’m exaggerating. I’m not.)
Rather than augment my reputation as trouble-maker I remained mum.
Nevertheless…
This comment should be added, boldface in a large font, to many of the pretentious threads on this board.
[QUOTE=Qin Shi Huangdi]
This map: File:Abortion Laws.svg - Wikipedia
[/QUOTE]
It is the same for Finland - “social reasons” is the most common reason by far. I’ve never heard of anybody having trouble getting an abortion here if they wanted one.
I’m 100% with you on (2). It does appear odd to my POV to have so much argument over a document and what the authors intended, parsing each word, etc. It seems to be 1 part legalistic interpretation, 1 part deification, 0 parts current reality / practicality. There just seems to be the impression that this document is infallible, like it’s the country’s bible and everyone’s a fundamentalist. Yeah I’m exaggerating for effect, and I do realise that it underpins your laws, etc, but from my perspective, it’s an amazing document that was innovative and provided great protections in it’s time. Yup, in it’s time. It kinda seems to be holding you guys back more than helping these days.
Gun control debates specifically - just confusing from my POV. I’m from Australia, we’ve had the gun buyback, increased gun control laws, plenty of people burying their guns in their back yard rather than handing them in to the government, etc. I don’t necessarily think what we did would work in the US, so I’m not implying that you should do what we did at all. I think there’s a much bigger subset of people in the US who view guns very differently than we do (generalisation, I know - this is all just impressions). Put it this way, when I lived in suburbia, having a gun didn’t cross my mind, not once. Just wasn’t on my radar. My cousin has several, but he’s very into sport shooting (goes bush all the time, led shooting ‘safaris’, etc). Now I live in the country, and I’m considering getting a gun. Not once have I ever thought of a gun providing me with personal protection. Nor have I ever thought I needed personal protection… there just doesn’t seem to be any need to defend myself in that way, so it is hard to understand the fixation on ‘castle doctrine’ and fear of intruders.
USA appears like a country of contradictions to me. So progressive and inspiring in some areas, so backwards and bemused in others. Great and horrible at the same time. A shining light, and a flashing warning sign. No, I don’t think you guys should change and do the same as we do (re: gun control or any other area), you guys are who you are and will forge your own path, regardless of what the rest of the world does.
True justice is quite simply the will of the Emperor. - Librarian Franz Grenzstein of the Imperial Fists
I don’t. I feel it’s up to Americans to decide and we should respect their decision and their debate.
I think the thing I find most bewildering is the attitude (expressed occasionally even on this board, which, I understand, most Americans would probably categorize as having ‘liberal’ leanings) that if the government ‘came for their guns’, they’d suddenly find them to be gone, mysteriously; I think one mentioned just burying them in the backyard, while at another time, some elaborate story about a photo op on a lake going wrong and taking all the guns to the fishes was told. This just seems so incongruous to me: on the one hand, laws are treated as gospel as long as they allow a pro-gun stance (see second amendment etc.); however, should laws against (or merely regulating) gun ownership emerge, well those may be broken at will. The amount of cognitive dissonance necessary to maintain such a stance seems just staggering from my outside viewpoint.
This is what I see: the government of the US doesn’t take care of the people, and Americans think this is fantastic and want even less of it. Well, so long as I don’t have to live there that’s fine. I do feel bad for the people who suffer for it, but there’s not a lot I can do about it.
The government not taking care of people on principle seems to me to be the source of most of the problems: it’s why people want guns in the first place, but it’s also why the healthcare system is so bad, it’s also why lawsuits spiral out of control and why you absolutely have to tip in restaurants.
The government doesn’t protect you, so you (think you) need guns. The government won’t look after you, so there is no sense of balance and fairness in general, so people are out to take care of themselves and seek these ridiculous lawsuits. The government won’t look after you by setting minimum wage, so customers supplementing income becomes an informal law.
Inexplicably, Americans think this is called freedom and are proud of it. For the life of me I cannot fathom it, but so long as I don’t have to live there they’re welcome to it.
I am astounded this turned into a shit fight.
See! The ferinors are trying to take our guns!!!
I’m pretty sure he’s saying that if the Presidential elections past 8 years are any indication, the failures of the Republican party indicates a potential shift away from the traditional right-wing values. Values that have long been associated with xenophobia, religeous fanatacism, if not racism, certainly white exceptionalism and, of course, unrestricted gun proliferation.
It will “get ugly” because as that group becomes more marginalized, they will feel more threatened and may lash out politically or with outright violence.
As a moderate American, I’m less concerned about “big brother government” as I am about groups of isolated, paranoid, angry, frightened, gun toting religeous fanatics with a high school education.
Several years ago, when I was a young Canadian naval officer having a conversation with a young American naval officer about gun control, he said that you can’t have gun control because of the constitution. I then asked him “What if the constitution’s wrong?”. His reply was “the constitution can’t be wrong.” My thoughts regarding American gun culture as portrayed in the media is that it is almost beyond my imagination to think that way. Most Canadians I know are urban and would never consider owning a firearm. My impression is that rural Canadians (of the serious farming variety) and hunters have firearms for hunting and/or animal pest control.
A co-worker of mine, a Texan and retired US Army officer who has been living in Canada for about the last ten years offered an interesting take on this. He and his Canadian wife were visiting Texas and while in a shopping centre parking lot she saw someone littering and was about to take the litterer to task. My co-worker then told his wife to back off because the litterer was likely armed and that the confrontation wouldn’t be worth it.
I don’t.
It’s sad to hear of school shootings or some nut job shoots up a bunch of people but we have school shootings up here (Canada) too. But it’s their country it’s up to them to figure out, although I feel it’s a little too late to put the lid on it, and any legislative measure to take guns away will make some people who’s sole reason is to become violent if they try to take their guns away. All of these cases of school shootings it’s been because of seriouls mentally ill individuals. I don’t think if they take away the “scary” looking guns will not stop people who are ill from just using handguns instead.
I still love the US, and if I had to pick another country to live in it would be the US, and I would be armed for home protection like I am here. Although here I’d be thrown into, an expensive legal morass for killing an intruder in my home at three in the morning , If I didn’t have a polite discussion with him first to find out if his intentions was to harm me over tea and biscuits first.
So the system works.
A little-known fact is that American redneck right-wingers have little intellectual acumen and get their “best” ideas from parodists. I’m one of the ones to blame: I’ve written about
The Ten [del]Commandments[/del] Amerndments written by the Finger of God atop Mt. Sinai
hoping such words would wake up the Right to their own absurdities. Instead they read such parodies and adopt them as part of their doctrine. :smack:
As a Canadian, I am also sometimes bewildered with the reverence it seems a lot of Americans have for their Constitution. Not just thinking that the Constitution is the framework to judge which laws can be validly enforced in a legalistic sense, but it seems like some believe that the Constitution is inherently and morally the most perfect document and that anything that is contrary to the Constitution must be inherently wrong. Kind of funny since the 2nd Amendment is an amendment that wasn’t in the Constitution in the first place.
As others said upthread, I find it strange how often Americans seem fixated on “what the Founding Fathers would have thought of situation X” or “how the FF would have responded to Y”. When X or Y could be completely modern things that the FF never would have considered to be even in the realm of possibility (like gay marriage, or the internet). I think it’s more important what the citizens, law-makers and judges think about it today.
What would someone from the 18th century in a time of single-shot muskets think about assault rifles, or rocket launchers, or predator drones, or nuclear weapons, or missile defense shields? I could easily image that if you could use a time machine to bring some FF’s to the present day and bring them up to speed on today’s issues, culture and technology, it’s likely that at least some of them would give an answer about gun control that is “inconsistent” with how textualist/originialist judges are interpreting the 2nd amendment. IMO, you can’t just “scale up” the FF’s position on one thing and apply it to something bigger and very different.
It reminds me of how futurists nearly always get their predictions wrong - it’s impossible to predict the technological breakthroughs and paradigm shifts that will occur in the future. A futurist in 1935 might have predicted that in 50 years the future of mass transport to take people around the world would be fleets of giant dirigibles. Arthur C. Clarke is often credited with coming up with the idea of geosynchronous satellites, which is a truly huge idea - but I remember reading a short story he wrote with geosynchronous telecommunications satellites, and they were basically manned space stations, because you’d need staff to maintain and operate the radio relays. So even his great idea was wrong in some major aspects.
