:eek:
You mean people have been killed?? With guns? Guns kill people??? Why hasn’t anybody told the gun rights activists this yet? Does the government know? 
This is an airtight case against guns, folks. I mean, how can you argue against that?
The OP is right…regular citizens shouldn’t be armed. Only police officers should be armed.
Like the police officers who shot and killed all those people at…what was it called again…the Haymarket riot?
Or rather, paid the highest price of their lives because this guy obviously snapped?
:rolleyes:
Maybe our debate can be about whether pointing to a disastrous event as an example of what an obsolete policy causes necessarily means we are rejoicing in the disaster.
If an argument is important enough to want to win, does that mean winning is like dancing?
Without easy access to guns, it’s unlikely so many would have been hurt or killed. In not just this, but all such mass murders. This sort of thing IS the price paid for the Second Amendment, like it or not.
This whole argument is a bizarre non-sequitor to me. Whenever comedians attempt to parody gun rights advocates or the NRA, they pretend that the NRA actually advocates murder and such. Like we should be celebrating this because it’s what we want.
Actual good satire usually takes the actual position someone holds to an extreme. In this case it’s just a non-sequitor. It doesn’t resemble the position of those you’re attacking in any way.
Snarky.
Show me politics without tragedy and I’ll show you anything else you can imagine.
I agree with aldiboronti, he was a soldier on a military base; even if he happened to use his own gun, how hard would it have been for him to get a firearm? Even a complete ban on the civilian possession of firearms wouldn’t have prevented this.
What I find supremely ironic is that on a military base filled with trained soldiers, a gunman can shoot for so long and kill so many, because regulations stipulated that personnel be unarmed except for range drill and a handful of security persons. Maybe if holstered sidearms were part of the regulation uniform, things would have been a lot different. In my mind, all this tragedy proves is that the worst of all gun situations is when a handful of people (a few rare protectors, and criminals) have guns and no one else does.
He was shooting at people who worked for the Big Bad government. The gun rights people are always talking about how we all need to be armed so we can shoot exactly the sort of people he shot; government employees. So yes, this is what they tend to advocate, on a smaller scale than they usually fantasize about. It’s just not as dramatic and heroic in real life as it is in their rhetoric.
Considering that as I understand they are kept under guard, probably pretty hard.
Yes; instead of an aberration, killings would likely be common. Every time someone’s temper snapped, he’d be ready to kill.
And how typical that the pro-gun side’s solution to a problem with guns is “MORE GUNS!”
Well, it’s been fairly widely established that “LESS GUNS!” doesn’t work, and whilst “MORE GUNS!” might not necessarily be the answer, it is worth bearing in mind that the individual at Ft. Hood was eventually stopped by someone who was carrying a gun.
Nonsense. America is awash in guns.
America is not the only country in the world, you know.
Actually, when I was staioned at Hood, we were issued our personal weapons fairly regularly, for various guard duty details we were assigned.
We also drew all weapons at least once on a weekly basis for cleaning/maintenance. That’s an M-2 .50 cal. machinegun, 2 M-240 7.62 machineguns, an M-16, and M-1911 .45ACP handguns.
We typically weren’t issued ammo for routine guard duty, and certainly not for cleaning/maintenance.
But just how hard do you think it would be to get a box of .45ACP or 5.56mm from the local gun store onto post? And during the weekly cleaning, load up some clips and start taking people out?
It would’nt have been much harder than talking about it.
And yet we don’t routinely see soldiers going apeshit with service weapons. Especially combat soldiers, who by now are mostly seasoned combat vets from a pretty fucked up warzone.
I’d personally be more worried about admin weenies and other assorted ash-and-trash REMFs, who never volunteered to be shot at, never thought they’d see a warzone, much less the dead bodies of American soldiers blown to shredded shit by a roadside IED.
The nutjob at Hood, being a doctor, probably never handled a service firearm beyond once-a-year qualification.
When was the last time you heard of a massacre in Vermont, which has the most permissive gun laws in the entire United States? Really - tell me. How often do such things happen in this gun-saturated state? And when was the last mass shooting in Switzerland - a country where every citizen keeps an automatic rifle in his home? When was it? I want to know.
2006 in Essex, when a man killed his girlfriend’s mother, and then went to the school she taught at and shot three teachers and himself. Also, about a year ago, there were shootings in the Northeast Kingdom. It wasn’t a massacre, and in fact nobody was hurt, but somebody shot up a police barracks and some churches, fortunately empty at the time.
2001, the Zug massacre, where somebody in the canton of Zug who thought he was being persecuted by the government killed 14 members of the canton’s parliament, injured 18 more, and then shot himself.
That’s tragic and sad, but also happened nearly a decade ago, which does rather support **Argent’**s point that a country full of people with ready access to automatic weapons does not also equate to a country with the world’s highest incidence of spree shootings.
I’m not saying it does or it doesn’t. He asked a question and I answered it. What he wants to do with that data is up to him.
I will point out that Switzerland and the United States are very different countries in ways other than gun ownership as well, and there are undoubtedly other factors contributing to the amount of gun fatalities in a country other than the amount of guns.
Wait, so your case now is that gun rights advocates believe that one of the purposes of private gun ownership is so that one can join the military and then randomly kill other people in the military?
I’m so glad you’re not on my side on this issue. Whenever we happen to be in agreement on an issue, I cringe everytime you speak because I know you’re doing more harm to the belief than good… by a wide margin.
Of course it is. That didn’t keep the RW from starting immediately.
No, don’t distort what I’m saying. The point I was making is that the defenders of private gun ownership love to go on about how we need guns so we can kill the minions of the evil tyrannical government. In the real world, what that boils down to is crazed massacres like this.