But had more murders per-capita than Massachusetts with strict gun laws, and higher than two other New England states: Maine and New Hampshire.
I don’t need to distort what you’re saying, it’s batshit.
Some gun rights advocates say that preventing a government from having a monopoly on force reduces their ability to forcefully oppress a population. This in no way translates to “Man I hope people randomly kill government employees all the time”
But this is consistent with your worldview that anyone that disagrees with you politically is a cartoonishly evil Hitler-level villain.
Tell ya what, we’ll make such a hall of fame…If we get to take a name of one of the victims of a mass slaying down off the wall for every person who’s life was saved by having access to a firearm. I know a bunch of them personally…I am one in fact. I bet you the hall would be empty. because people use firearms in self defense a lot more than they do for a mass shooting like Fort Hood.
I’ve used a gun in self defense a couple of times, never had to fire a shot. And that’s how it usually goes down, the sight of a firearm is usually enough of a detterant.
As it’s been said, the guy at fort hood could have gotten a weapon even if they were outlawed. He was a soldier. but even if he wasn’t…pipe bombs are easy to make…
Because we can expect great judgement from people who arm themselves to defend against the government’s black helicopters. I resent the fact that the govt has a complete monopoly over nuclear weapons and handheld anti-aircraft missiles.
What relation does that have to the current topic? Was the Fort Hood shooter a sleeper agent who decided to join the military so one day he could try to kill as many random soldiers as he could with small arms as a political statement in support of second amendment rights?
Seriously, you’re defending one of Der Trihs’ off the wall points. Think about that for a minute.
November 13, 2007. The shooter used his military-issue weapon and ammunition to shoot up an Islamic center in Lausanne.
Vermont’s population density is around 26 people/square kilometer, less than 1% that of DC. You don’t hear of mass murders in Vermont because it’s hard to find enough people in one place to kill them en masse, not because of their gun laws.
You’ve brought crime rates up before. Well, you mentioned them; you didn’t actually “bring them up” as in “cause them to increase”. Specifically, Alaska’s crime rate. Well, I checked, and while Anchorage boasts a slightly lower murder rate per cap, it also has a rape rate three times the national average and an aggravated assault rate twice the national average, despite the guns. How does a rape rate three times the average help your argument?
Right up front, let me say that I do not think trying to take away anyones guns is the answer to this. Let me also say that I do not think that there is any political desire from politicians and lawmakers to tackle this issue. The gun lobby, the NRA and its supporters, have effectively won the public debate regarding governmental action on guns. I do not expect government to do anything about this now or in the near future.
I would very much like to see an attitudinal step taken on this entire issue. Everything in our society has its price and there is a price to be paid for everything. We live in a society with over 100 million guns and in some states the number of guns outnumbers the number of adults in that state.
The laws in Texas made it possible for a man to purchase a handgun designed to hold 20 bullets at one time and was partially designed to be powerful enough to pierce body armor. This is legal under the law of that state.
All I want is a simple acknowledgement that in a nation with a strong Second Amendment, there is a price to be paid for that right to bear arms. And some of the people who pay that price are the innocent dead in these reoccurring incidents of gun slaughter. Lets all please simply acknowledge that there is a price to be paid and innocent people are paying it.
I do not want this to be seen as an attack on gun owners because it is not. No more than criticism of a drunk driver who kills a family of four on the highway should be seen as an attack on the bar industry or liquor industry. Sadly, when tens of millions of people drink, some to excess, there is going to be some damage associated with that activity. We have tried mightilly to change the public attitude about drinking and driving because we came to the societal conclusion that thousands of dead people from the deeds of drunk drivers was too high of a price to pay for alcohol.
Why can’t we do much the same thing regarding guns? I have no problem acknowledging that guns help protect people from crime. There are plenty of examples of this happening and one would be foolish not to admit that there are benefits to gun ownership. All I want is acknowledgement that while there is an upside, there also is a downside.
And perhaps once that is acknowledged, we can then have the discussion that government and society do not want to have now about such things like selling people handguns that can shoot twenty armor piercing bullets in under a minute.
Is that too much to ask when innocent people are paying with their very lives so that we have weapons like this? There needs to be a middle ground where rational and reasonable people can meet and discuss this issue. There has to be a middle ground somewhere in between the NRA and gun banning. I think we need to find that.
You’re attacking a straw position. Who says that guns don’t cause any sort of societal harm? The argument is over whether the benefits outweigh the harm, or if basic human rights trump a simple use/harm calculation.
What is it that you want us to do about guns? Ban murdering people with them? I’m all for it.
What you claim as “all you want” almost certainly is not indeed all you want. Your misuse of loaded terms like “armor piercing bullets” belies your agenda - or at least ignorance.
You can always pick-and-choose tidbits of evidence to support your claims, but the simple fact of the matter is it’s not that simple.
Compare western states. Wyoming appears to be a criminal cesspit, compared to bordering Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and South Dakota. All these states have very similar, liberal gun control policies. So why the anomaly in Wyoming.
Then look at Illinois, compared to neighboring Iowa and Wisconsin; or Texas, the rootinest-tootines gun-owning state in the Union, compared to neighboring Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.
So maybe, Dan, the situation is just a little more complex than the typically moronic battlecry of “GUNS BAD!,” and the single malnourished nugget of data you tossed out there.
That is legal under the laws of most states. There is nothing remarkable about the FN Five-seveN or the 5.7X28 round that makes it inherently more harmful than any other weapon. As far as the armor-piercing aspect of the weapon, the round that can do that is generally unavailable to the general public. You can get it, but it’s very expensive and fairly rare. With regard to ammunition capacity, again, there is nothing remarkable about that. That is only a bit more than most standard magazines, and reloads take such a small amount of time that it wouldn’t matter in any case.
That’s not even to mention that “armor-piercing” is a pejorative applied to many different types of ammunition. It was even applied to the Black Talon round in the eary 1990s, which was a hollow-point round, making it impossible to pierce armor. It is applied to virtually all centerfire rifle rounds.
Who would deny that? Nobody is arguing that there is a problem with violence in this country. We do, however, argue the cause of that violence. While the presence of guns make these sorts of things possible, they are not the cause of it. That is what we disagree with.
There is a downside. There are downsides to countless things that we as Americans are legally allowed to do. Acknowledgment of that does not do anything to address the problem.
Government and society can therefore act by attempting to pass another ban governing these very things, just as they did in 1994. The reason that ban lapsed is because it didn’t accomplish anything. Not even arguably. It didn’t accomplish anything at all.
The appeal to emotion is not necessary. Discuss it dispassionately and you’ll find you get better results.
Every time I get involved in these discussions something always happens that is predictable as the sun coming up tomorrow. Defenders of the gun lobby take exception to anything that criticizes their love of guns. They find a way to defend high tech weaponry of the type used in this latest slaughter. Guns like this, capable of piercing body armor and having a magazine of 20 or even 30 bullets, are simply not necessary for normal people to have.
Is there something wrong with saying that you can have a gun to protect your home or business or you can have a rifle to hunt with but you don’t need a military style weapon? Yeah, I know, don’t call it a “military style weapon” and you give me a lecture on why.
Gun people should face a simple fact - lots of folks in this country do not want to repeal the second amendment and accept the right to have a pistol or rifle for protection or hunting. But lots of those same people are disgusted and repulsed by the availability of guns like this and the damage they can do.
Why does this have to be an all or nothing proposition? Is there no middle ground where people can still bear arms but we are going to sensibly control and restrict what those arms are?
“Every time I attack someone’s beliefs, they defend them. WTF. Those idiots. Clearly I win.”
Your fixation on “piercing body armor” is counterproductive. Damaging human flesh and piercing armor are actually quite at odds with another. For the former, you’d like a big, wide bullet that deforms or shatters in the event that it strikes the target to inflict damage. In the latter case, you want a narrow, fast, hard bullet that will maintain its integrity to travel through armor. The more “armor piercing” a bullet is, the less lethal it is and the less damage it does to people. So to say “OMG WE ALLOW ARMOR PIERCING BULLETS!” in the context of some guy shooting unarmored targets is just reacting to scary buzzwords without much thought. We’d actually be quite better off from a lethality standpoint if everyone only used armor piercing ammunition. By the way, did you know those hunting rifles you seem to have no problem with are much more ARMOR PIERCING!!! than any handgun by quite a large margin?
Wouldn’t want to let the facts get in your way.
There is quite a large middle ground actually, and we’re in it. Your assumption that we’re somehow in an unrestricted environment where everything goes is wrong. There are enough gun laws on the books to fill a library. There are lots of very real restrictions on guns. Your “middle ground” probably is nowhere near an actual middle ground, but is rather heavy gun control with some minimal freedoms.
Mostly because the antis have repeatedly proven over the years that they cannot be trusted. Compromise with them has historically meant we gave something up and they shortly returned calling for further “compromise.”
Does anyone have a link to Haymarketmartyr’s last thread on this subject? We could save ourselves a lot of time by just reposting the counter-arguments from the last time he got a bee in his bonnet about metal boxes with springs in them and scary looking guns.
Bullshit argument that seems like it means something on paper but actually means nothing in reality. I used to vacation in Maine and Vermont with my family when I was a kid. There were always enough people around in any one place in Vermont that if someone wanted to, he could kill a bunch of them. Vermont is not some desolate ghost town or some kind of giant farm. There are, you know, towns, with people gathered in them…in like, restaurants and stuff. Seriously - this argument of yours about population density makes no sense.
It has? Again I don’t get the memo. Somebody is getting fired.
What I don’t get about haymarketmartyr’s whole posititon is that this tragedy supposedly had something to do with the Second Amendment. Yes it did so happen that the gunman used his own sidearms. But:
This massacre could have happened anywhere in the world, because every country in the world has armed forces and SOLDIERS HAVE GUNS. Soldiers are the one group of people who always will have guns, even when no one else does. So what, what WHAT!? does this have to do with the Second Amendment???
And as he said in TAXI DRIVER
Are you talkin’ to me? Are you…talkin’ … to ME? I don’t see anyone else – oh, wait a minunte, there’s plenty of peoplle here. Never mind.
He wasn’t using military weapons, but even so this is a lame point. It doesn’t invalidate any of the other regular shooting sprees that happen several times a year in this country. As long as we’re going to have a 2nd Amendment, we’re going to have shooting sprees. It’s childish to deny the correllation.
Cite that he was a terrorist?
Right now, you should change “Islamic terrorist” to “American soldier,” because that’s the one thing we know he was for sure.