That’s the kind of xenophobia you just don’t expect from the Austrians.
Anyway, now that’s out of my system, the article says:
Only 7.6 million more to go and they’ll approach the US rate of gun ownership. You can do it, guys!
Could you give some examples of that? I often hear right wing commentators say that eliminating private gun ownership is the secret goal of the left wing, and Fox News can usually find some hippie somewhere to say anything they want someone to say so they can pretend it’s what all liberals want, but I honestly can’t recall anyone with any real influence saying he wants to ban guns.
For example, I can easily find sitting Republican Congressmen, governors, or Presidential candidates, who say they want to ban abortion, or gay marriage, or abolish various government agencies, etc. I consider myself fairly current in politics, but I don’t know of any Democratic Congressmen, governors, or Presidential candidates who “have openly stated their goal is to eliminate private gun ownership.”
So who are you talking about?
The Daily Fail is not a very reputable source. Deutsch Welle, a fairly respected local news outlet, mentions anxiety and paranoia in the border town of Freilassing, where some have taken to carrying pistols, but the “flying off the shelves” bit gets no coverage. Being right there, I should expect DW to be on details like that.
Are you one of those who think gun ownership is a Universal Human Right; that countries like Britain or France that don’t feature gun rights are not True Democracies?
Look, having millions of bombastic blowhards wandering around armed to the teeth may be either good or bad, and that might be an interesting debate if your ilk were capable of thought, but the question of whether having citizens too cowardly to walk around unarmed should be debated on its own merits; basing your case so firmly and solely on the Second Amerndment makes all y’all gun nuts seem like mindless zombies.
Yes, that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make in the previous paragraph.
And accidental discharge, misuse, loss and theft are far more likely than attack by burglars, rapists and rioters unless you live in a particularly bad neighborhood.
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Self-defense is a universal human right. And the democratic principle involved isn’t guns per se, but whether the government should be so strong and the people so weak that there is nothing but a tradition of democracy stopping the government from ceasing to represent the people.
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Anyone who resorts to the “coward” slur has shown that their view of gun owners is a caricatured straw man, and that they don’t really know many permit holders or why they choose to carry.
Not all neighborhoods are the same and not all gun owners are the same. In effect, you’re lumping the responsible and irresponsible together without distinction.
Do we really want a society in which what’s allowed is chained to the most criminal, foolish and stupid 10% of the population?
Do tell.
Fine, tell us how to make that distinction.
No, so we need to stop resisting the disarmament of that 10%, don’t we?
How about “paranoid”, then? Is that a slur? Because feeling the need to carry a gun everywhere sure sounds like paranoia to me.
Every gun owner is a responsible gun owner until they are not. Like that expert at the gun range who ate a slug because he put the gun in the four-year-old’s hands on full auto and forgot to hold onto her. You think you get to define what “responsible” means, many of the rest of us feel your definition is way too loose.
This bullshit again? Everybody is a ____________ until they ___________. This one is more intellectually bankrupt with each repetition.
So gun ownership is necessary to overthrow the government whenever the gun owner thinks it has ceased to represent the people?
In his own opinion, you might add. The situation arises whenever his side’s arguments are declined by a majority of the electorate in a democracy, meaning it must then be resisted. In practical terms, that means preparing to kill the cops who come to enforce the law.
All of that is purely hypothetical for anyone who lacked enough commitment to that principle to join the Cliven Bundy Brigade, of course. And no one here did.
It merely means that claiming yourself, or others, to be a “law abiding citizen”, in contrast to those “thugs” you claim to need to protect yourself from, is preening at best, self-delusion at worst. It’s especially risible if the only laws you abide by are the ones you like, while the rest mean it’s time to lock and load.
I’m happy to slur in this Forum since I’ve come to despise some of the gun-lover’s cognition so much. Obviously I knew it was an over-generalization. Lumpy is barely a name to me; you may be one of the relatively rational and intelligent Dopers for all I know. But if you really thought I didn’t know my slur was just a fatuous caricaturizing insult, expressly for the Pit, then you actually are, at least on this specific matter, stupid.
I do notice you use the slur as an excuse to ignore the other points I raise.
But, while we’re on the subject of cowardice, we’ve seen plenty of examples of cowardice. Tamir Rice’s killers probably acted with casual bloodlust, but the defense offered in Pit threads makes them in sudden fear for their lives which, IMO makes them too cowardly to be suited for police work.
One Doper can’t fulfill his dream of visiting Europe because they don’t allow guns. Another’s father has no way to visit Alaska. I’m happy to use a word different from “cowardly” – how about “pathetic.”
Several Gun Dopers have asked to Count them Out for taking down a crazed killer. Again, withdraw the term ‘cowardly’ if you wish, but they aren’t fulfilling the role that many Americans might wish them too.
Ben Carson brags that he pointed to the other guy when a gun was aimed at him.
And whenever we hear of the existence of “good guys with guns” when there’s a mass killing, Umpqua for instance, it’s mostly about them *not *involving themselves. ISTM that’s mostly good sense, not cowardice, since we know what can happen when bullets start flying everywhere. But it does make one wonder about the value of carrying at all, for those with such sense. If they had previously talked big tough words about what they would do if they ever saw one of those “thugs”, unlike the “sheep” **Damuri **refers to above, and then failed to do it when it really happened, then you could call it cowardice, though - just like with all of the Internet tough guys who have failed to act in any of the situations where they talk big about how they would need to be ready to.
Not “the” gun owner: whenever 2/3 to 3/4 of the population think that the government has ceased to represent the people, and moreover the government has proven it by ignoring a supermajority large enough to control the Congress or even pass a constitutional amendment.
The original presumption of the Founders was that democracy would be a consensus of the armed: a purely local uprising against the government, or a fanatical minority, would be put down by the populace able and willing to enforce the law. This was (admittedly very imperfectly) the case during the Civil War, when enough people were willing (however tentatively) to back the Union government’s case that secession was treason.
What I don’t understand is how the gun control crowd can insist that Americans overwhelmingly favor gun control and yet somehow are stymied by a supposedly tiny handful of nuts and fanatics, led by an alien entity called “The NRA”. Don’t these legions of gun control proponents vote? And if you claim that it’s because the “gun nuts” hide behind their claim that gun ownership is a protected right (because, ah- because it on a list of enumerated rights in our government’s founding charter?), then why doesn’t your supposed supermajority get together and abolish the Second Amendment?
Gun owners are politically mobilized because they have a direct stake in the question of whether guns should be allowed. The portion of the population that sorta-kinda want guns restricted want someone else to do it for them. The only people who seem to be fervently active in the restriction of guns are the professional controllers: politicians, policy advisers, sociologists and other people who consider themselves wise enough to helm the ship of state.
Wow. End of Lumpy’s credibility, right there.
Before professional police forces, what do you suppose the militia did? If a sheriff or a town marshall and their deputies couldn’t handle a situation, the militia was called out. Before the federal government had armies of law enforcement agents, calling out the militia was the only recourse to enforce the law.
Which comes first, the gun or the nut? I say the nutty are drawn to guns. In particular, the pathologically fearful kind of nutty.
Heaven forfend we should lump all people on the same side together. Glad to see you never do this.
And of course, just like everyone thinks they’re an above-average driver, everyone thinks they’re a responsible gun owner.
We frequently do that exact thing in the name of public safety, often on the basis of only a few incidents. How many deaths will it take until we are allowed to act with regard to guns?
And yet it keeps cropping up as an actual argument from gun supporters. But I agree that it’s intellectually bankrupt.
Did they all get to decide on their own whether to shoot someone? Or were they organized militias acting under the direction of a government agent?
How can they be expected to defend themselves against a group of people historically known for supporting fanaticism, violence, and wanton murder of innocent men, women and children in the name of religion? Now that the Austrians have bought up all the guns, I mean.