See ya next thread…
Thanks, amrussel, for formulating in two short paragraphs what I’ve been trying to unsuccessfully articulate through half of this thread.
Thank you
The last para of your last post is a most succinct statement of why I, as a responsible gun owner, opprove of legislation that restricts access to firearms to those prepared to expose themselves to sufficient scrutiny to ensure that these firearms STAY in the hands of responsible gun owners.
Unfortunately, in the USA that particular horse bolted a long time ago.
Now, anybody care to participate in a thread on US ‘zero tolerance’ policing, vast prison populations, and the effect of these on; a) Crime b) Individual freedom ?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=74018
I ask because here in Australia we are looking very hard at these things as a solution to our crime situation, which is a ‘time-slipped’ version of the US circa 1986.
Apologies for the extended absence; it was a great weekend. While being unable to locate a copy of The Cowboy, the Mountie and the Samurai…" I did find The Gun Control Debate (you decide). 2ed., edited by Dr. Lee Nisbet, Ph.D. Essentially a compilation of the best pro- and anti-control arguments from experts in “history, criminology, social scientists, public health specialists and jurists.”. Fascinating reading. I found this at Borders Books and Music, and while only half-way through, I recommend it to folks on both sides of the debate.
Svinleash: The link to the BATF works, Acrobat just takes a while to convert. Give it a few minutes to work.
Minty: (I missed this earlier)
Now that’s just damned silly. C’mon, teach; you can do better than that. You’re better than that.
No one, neither myself or the NRA, has ever advocated giving guns to children in anything less than a supervised (by an adult) setting.
But what if just one teacher on that school had had a gun? Being Japan, what if just one of those teachers practiced Kendo, and had either a Katana or one of their bamboo practice swords? Becauses, you see, guns occasionally need to be reloaded. There is a brief period between ejecting one clip and inserting another, and homing the action, that the gun cannot fire. During this period, any nominal gunman is defenseless, and can be overpowered physically.
Knives and swords never run out of ammunition, because they don’t need any, and thus are always ready for use.
As far as your former student being shot in the head: I’m sorry, but that is hardly a good case for arguing for more stringent gun control. It was a senseless training accident stemming from either faulty safety procedures or non-adherance to established safety procedures. And I hope your comments about “the rest of us mother !@#$%&s” is in jest. If not, it certainly smacks of an elitist attitude.
Rubber Entropy: please explain how even one million prior-service and veteran civillian are an “armed rabble”. Being that we are subject to recall to active duty before Selective Service (the Draft) is enacted, it seems that our Dept. of Defense considers us to be preferable to plain, untrained civillians. Considering that the average servicemember joins right out of high school or shortly thereafter, and serves 3-4 years before returning to civillian life, and will probably live another 50-60 years, I think we can safely estimate the number of prior servicemembers and veterans in civillian circulation around at least 10 million.
Being prior service and veterans, they already have the basic military training necessary. You keep overlooking the definition of a militia. Look it up. While they probably wouldn’t supply their own firearms in the event of call up to active duty, any event that would necessitate their call up may be so dire thst they may very well need to provide their own weapons. This, along with the U.S. v. Miller Supreme Court decision, would seem to indicate that, as the militia, the people certainly do have the right to keep and bear military grade weaponry, such as the M-16 and -16A2, or even an M-60.
Basically, while the U.S. may not seem to have any current or readily forseeable need for armed citizens as militia, I wholeheartedly agree with Freedom’s contention that the future is a wild card, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent balkanization of nations and ethnic groups about the globe.
I’m not arguing for supplanting a standing military with a militia; I’m saying that the militia supplements a standing military. Much as our “civil defense force” did during WW II. Our federal laws currently reflect this by defining the militia, and its classes in 10 USC, sec. 311.
Nor am I endorsing the OP, as stated. But the underlying truth (or at least the assumption of truth) of the OP is founded in law and history in America. The state militia that were called up during the Civil War were a hodge-podge group; some fought well, some undoubtedly poorly. Some served with incredible distinction, such as the 20th Maine at Little Round Top.
Now you want to change the focus to incarceration being the key to reducing crime? Guns cause crime? Guns reduce crime? If the answer to the problem of violent criminals is lengthier periods of incarceration, or wider definitions of criminal behavior (a point I wouldn’t want to push up a hill on a hot day), then what’s the point of more stringent gun control?
amrussel has restated what I’ve essentially been saying: violoent crime has a multitude of causative factors. Gun control may alleviate some of the symptoms, but is and of itself not curative. Other positive social benefits (not clearly established through emperical research; but then neither has the control side offered up anything all that hot either) of gun ownership may suffer due to excessive regulation by avowed gun banners hiding within the ranks of the moderates.
Addressing the underlying social conditions will alleviate the motivational factor to commit crimes in the first place, rendering the concomitant issue of gun violence a relative non-issue.
Just admit it Rubber: you like bashing the USA. What with all of our crime, drugs, gangs, politicians, school shootings, Pauly Shore, and armed crazies hiding out in the hills, waiting to blow up the “one-worlders” gub’mint. It’s a wonder our Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturliazation Service bother to show up to work at all, being as they have nothing to do since America’s such a crummy place to live.
Quote:
Just admit it Rubber: you like bashing the USA. What with all of our crime, drugs, gangs, politicians, school shootings, Pauly Shore, and armed crazies hiding out in the hills, waiting to blow up the “one-worlders” gub’mint. It’s a wonder our Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturliazation Service bother to show up to work at all, being as they have nothing to do since America’s such a crummy place to live.
Unquote:
Have you actually read my posts? Exactly where is ANY critisism of the USA ?
Because I disagree with one aspect of US culture does NOT give you the right to extrapolate that into some kind of general anti-american sentiment. I disagree equally with the many Australians who hold the same views.
I have stated that justice policies the USA has adopted in the past 10 years have reduced crime, and that maybe WE should look at those policies ourselves.
Quote from one of my earlier posts;
“Australians and the USA have common frontier histories, and so many cultural similarities that Australians are often mistaken for Americans when travelling overseas. There is USN carrier battle group here at the moment, and the memorials to US servicemen who died defending this country are never without fresh flowers 60 years on. Australian and American troops fought side by side in WWII, and Australia was America’s only ally in Vietnam, never withdrawing that support even at the expense of Australian lives. My own father was at Midway as a young exchange officer to the USN and during my tour in Vietnam we were ultimately under US military command. Anyone representing Australian criticism of US gun laws as some form of anti-democratic or anti-American sentiment needs a basic history lesson.”
End Quote:
As to the effectiveness of ‘old soldiers’ I stand by my view that a few highly trained professionals are far more effective than large numbers of enthusiastic but less able individuals.
Look up the battle of Long Tan in August 1966, where a single company of Australian infantry (108 men), defeated 3 battalions of NVA and 1 of VC irregulars (about 2000 men),with a kill ratio of about 10 to 1, maybe more as we don’t know how many Charlie dragged away.
I am sure you will find similar outcomes inflicted by US units. In the OP it is an internal dictator supported by a peacetime PROFESSIONAL army that you are supposed to be facing. Form your Militias if it makes you feel better, but you can rely on getting your butt kicked.
Freedom:
At this point continuing to bicker over the argument from deterrence is pretty pointless; I think the anti-gunners in this thread have established a very strong case against it. If you can’t concede then point, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree for the time being.
However, regardless of whether or not you read this, I promised I would try to respond to the rest of your post (now on the previous page). Sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to it, but I’m busy as hell with other stuff these days, and in addition, the information you requested was not that easy for me to dig up.
The problem isn’t the lack of info, it’s the excess. Swedes keep statistics on everything, so I’ve had to wade through shit like reports on the reduced chewing capacity of the elderly (I swear to God) to find this stuff. But I finally found it. Anyway, here we go:
Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is yes, I can post a link to an official site with crime rates in my city. The bad news is that the site is in Swedish. In addition, you have to use the search engine on the left hand side of the page to locate the information you’re looking for – I don’t seem to be able to link directly to the page with the info we’re interested in. I could walk you through the process of locating the relevant statistics and translate every step for you, but perhaps it’s easier if you just allow me to answer your questions directly.
The latest statistics available are for the year 1997. They don’t represent Gothenburg exclusively, but also include a very large region around the city known as Bohuslan. I suspect the population is considerably higher than that of Omaha; I believe Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden, has about 550,000 inhabitants. Anyway, here are the raw numbers, quoted from the page in question:
**Murders and manslaughter, including assault with a resulting death **: 19
Percentage change from 1996: -24
Number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants: 2
There was a drop in the murder rate between 1997 and 1996. Not surprisingly, it was in no way connected with an increase in gun ownership. For what it’s worth, the statistics for 1996 are 25 murders (including manslaughters and assaults with a deadly outcome), for a rate of 3 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Now, there are 55 weeks in the year, and with an average of 27 “killings” per year in Omaha that adds up to right at two murders a month; about half the number my friend claimed actually occur. I can’t tell you what that number is in Gothenburg proper, but you can easily see that if you take Gothenburg and add an entire region around it, you still don’t quite make it to two per month. The really telling statistic, of course, is the rate per 100000; from that perspective, the rate in Omaha is 400% higher than it is in Gothenburg.
In addition, the statistics I’ve presented include both manslaughters and murders. How much higher would your statistics be if they included manslaughter? And then of course there’s all the other gun related violence – shootings that the victims survive, accidents, and so forth. We have a vanishingly small amount of shootings and such over here.
To continue:
I suspect that the pro-gun lobby is so strong that passing enforceable legislation is nearly impossible; so the anti-gun lobby has no choice but to press for watered-down, near-impotent legislation instead. I’d guess that the power struggle between pro- and anti-gun groups leads to the passage of compromise legislation that doesn’t satisfy anybody. Minty pointed out above that trying to pass enforceable legislation is almost impossible, and Tank responded that he thought that was a good thing. Seems to me that if the pro-gun lobby stymies all attempts to pass enforceable legislation, they are at least as responsible as the anti-gunners for the mess of laws that are currently on the books.
You should ask Minty that, he’s more of an expert than I am. How about the Brady Bill?
I’ve read something Project Exile somewhere, but I know almost nothing about it. Doesn’t it involve enforcing harder punishments against repeat offenders? Anyway, I’ll gladly read any info you care to post concerning it. As I wrote earlier: educate me!
Hmph. Would you be interested to learn that here in the “land of gun control,” should you wish to purchase a hunting or rifle or shotgun, there’s no required waiting period?
Rubber: just who, exactly, are you calling “old”? 
Profuse apologies. I actually don’t know if ex-tank means circa Sherman or M1A1 ! but I suspect the only thing older than me around here is this thread.
But seriously folks, like Svin I am quite interested in ‘Project Exile’ and would like to know more about it. Do you have a cite ?
As I have said ‘ad nauseum’ I am not among the ‘banners’ just the ‘sensible controllers’ and am interested in anything that might meet the needs of both sides of the problem.
Although the topic is of great interest to me, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to being a lurker in it; keeping up is too much of a strain. That being said, occasionally one gets a gimme:
I believe no comment is necessary.
What I was thinking of doing was starting a few sequel threads examining specific aspects of the gun control debate, to keep things focused. If no one objects.
Uh, I mean, 52 weeks…
Hey, man, it was two o’clock in the morning. Cut us some slack, will ya?
Well…ok…but you owe me one
Svinlesha
I just don’t see anyone as even coming close to debunking the militia as an effective weapon.
Let me just preface this next point by saying that I am only using it as an illustration of the damage one man can do, not as an endorsement of what was done.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/front/939437
Then look at the World Trade Center bombing.
It isn’t much of a stretch to see how much damage could be done by a militia that was fighting against a dictator.
Someone has to be out there enforcing the laws. If you deny that person the ability to govern, then you are halfway to overthrowing them.
I don’t see this as a side issue to the whole debate. Unless you guys want to amend the Constitution, then this point was settled on the battlefield a couple of hundred years ago.
To take that point a step further, I’m not sure the Constituiton would remain legitimate if you removed part of the Bill of Rights, which would seem to put us at the point where the government itself is then illegitimate.
Murder Rates
I’m afraid that you have me at a disadvantage. While I trust what you posted, I have no way to sort through the information mysef to look at how other crime stacks up against Omaha.
Until they publish in English, or I learn Swedish, I think this comparison has run it’s course.
Svinlesha
I just don’t see anyone as even coming close to debunking the militia as an effective weapon.
Let me just preface this next point by saying that I am only using it as an illustration of the damage one man can do, not as an endorsement of what was done.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/front/939437
Then look at the World Trade Center bombing.
It isn’t much of a stretch to see how much damage could be done by a militia that was fighting against a dictator.
Someone has to be out there enforcing the laws. If you deny that person the ability to govern, then you are halfway to overthrowing them.
I don’t see this as a side issue to the whole debate. Unless you guys want to amend the Constitution, then this point was settled on the battlefield a couple of hundred years ago.
To take that point a step further, I’m not sure the Constituiton would remain legitimate if you removed part of the Bill of Rights, which would seem to put us at the point where the government itself is then illegitimate.
Murder Rates
I’m afraid that you have me at a disadvantage. While I trust what you posted, I have no way to sort through the information mysef to look at how other crime stacks up against Omaha.
Until they publish in English, or I learn Swedish, I think this comparison has run it’s course.
Project Exile
http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1998/Exile-kf.htm
[sub]the board is crawling, so I skipped preview. Please be forgiving of typos and other assorted errors. I am sure there are a bunch.
LOL.
Come on, Freedom, don’t even try that. You know you love it.
That’s pretty fucking bold, using the Oklahoma bombing to support a pro-gun argument. I think you almost damage your case instead, but I’ll leave that for others to decide – if anything it ought to get a rise out of minty and RubberEntropy. Me, I’m not touching it.
Since I don’t figure we can get much further in this “deterrence” discussion at the moment, I’d like to call a truce on the issue for the time being. We’ll just have to agree to disagree. I was going to say that you and I appear to be equally pigheaded regarding the question, but then I realized that I’m letting this one go and you’re still arguing about it, so…well, you do the math.
In reference to this…
…you know as well as I do that that particular interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is contested. In addition, you’ve moved from the argument from deterrence to the argument from (natural) rights: the one doesn’t necessarily follow from the other.
However, what I would like to turn to now is the third common pro-gun argument, which I call the argument from social value (hmmm…I seem to be on a labeling kick these days). Please – let’s not allow your unilinguality to hinder us here in the pursuit of truth. If you tell me which crime statistics you’re interested in, I’ll gladly look them up for you. To help you out, I’ll give you a run-down of some of the other crimes listed for 1997 along with their numbers. Perhaps I should clarify here: these are the statistics for “anmäld brott,” or “reported crimes:”
Assaults (minor and serious): ------> Number of instances: 5051 -------> Number per 100,000: 651
Rapes: ------> Number of instances: 175 ------> Number per 100,000: 23
Car thefts: ------> Number of instances: 9342 ------> Number per 100,000: 1204
Bicycle thefts: ------> Number of instances: ------> 9140 ------> Number per 100,000: 1178
Breaking and entering(Residential): ------> Number of instances**: 2330 ------> Number per 100,000: 300
Robbery: ------> Number of instances**: 1077 ------> Number per 100,000**: 139
Finally, I just want to say that I find it disheartening that you and I seem to have such fundamental disagreements on so many issues. While I thank you for your link to the info on Project Exile, do you think you could direct us to something just a little less propagandistic?
No, Svinlesha, Freedom’s invocation of Oklahoma City and teh World Trade Center to justify gun ownership is far more laughable than offensive. He’s trying to prove that we need unrestricted gun ownership because roving bands of resistance fighters can prevent the emergence of a fascist totalitarian regime, or whatever.
So how does he prove that this isn’t just a pipe dream? By giving examples of terrorists killing a bunch of people with fertilizer bombs.
Praise God and pass the nitrogen. :rolleyes:
In Spain in the 1970’s a drunken driver crashed a propane tanker into a trailer park and about 130 people died in the resulting fireball. I am amazed that Spain has not since relaxed its stict gun control legislation because if those people had been armed it wouldn’t have happened, right Freedom.
Give us a bloody break !
In an early post to this thread I said that I was glad I lived in a country where no child had ever been shot dead in school. I should have kept my mouth shut.
Quote:
BOY DEAD AFTER SCHOOL SHOOTING
From AAP
14jun01
13:30 (AEST) A TEENAGE student is dead after a shooting incident in a New South Wales school. Police say the boy, believed to be 17-years-old, was found by two students.
The incident happened at Bomaderry High School on the NSW south coast. The boy was taken to Shoalhaven hospital where he was pronounced dead.
End Quote:
You guys really piss me off.
I can’t tell if you are unable to understand, or just prefer to twist a person’s words beyond recognition.
Let me help you:
Svinlesha and me have been going round and round about whether or not a citizen militia COULD make a difference when fighting against an armed government. His position is that they could not, and my position is that they could.
Svinlesha position boils down to the assumption that lack of trianing, numbers and organization would render any mititia ineffective when it was needed most.
My position boils down to the assumption that out of all the ex-military and hunters in this country, even without a co-ordinated effort, they would have a fighting chance to bring down a government.
It seems acceptable to me to find EXAMPLES that show what kind of damage one man or a small group can do.
Afghanistan, Vietnam, Chechnya, Ireland and countless South American and African groups have been cited in previous debates as examples of what a militia can do. None of these are groups that I would hold up as shining examples of acceptable behavior. All have committed atrocities.
McVeigh was a pyschotic scumbag who deserved to die. As screwed up as Clinton was, we are still a million miles away from any kind of armed conflict in this country. It isn’t even on the horizon as far as I am concerned.
The point wasn’t about McVeigh or his cause. The point was about the damage one man can do. The point wasn’t addressed as to whether gun laws had anything whatsoever to do with the explosion, it was directed at showing a militia could cause considerable damage.
I don’t see what what difference it makes to the discussion Svinlesha and I were having whether or not a bomb or firearm was used. Our debate on that point was strictly about whether or not a citizen militia COULD be effective.
I was in Lithuania for a holiday recently, and took a break from the pure enjoyment side of things to visit the ex-KGB prison, which is now a museum of genocide. Amidst some truly horrific displays, it details the struggle of Lithuanians against the USSR. No-one’s sure how many were involved in the partisan militia movement, but the death toll for Lithuanians in the c.15 years of active resistance was 10,000. These were guys armed with hunting rifles, chiefly, who had some military experience from WWII, but not a great deal. The partisan movement was a failure, not only in terms of ultimate result, but also in terms of damage inflicted for damage caused. Essentially, hiding in the woods they were reasonably safe but could acheive little, and when they ventured out they tended to come out worst. They could assassinate a few officers, for example, but there’s always a keen lad ready for promotion, so it had little strategic affect. The Soviet suppression techniques were damned harsh (including ferrying bullet-riddled corpses around villages for “identification” purposes).
An unarmed revolution (in what I absolutely admit were different times and circumstances) won freedom.
I’m not trying to hammer home a point here, but I thought I’d throw in an example where the resources and capabilities of a professional army were sufficient to mitigate and defeat an armed insurrection, by way of contrast.
What do you mean by effective? The purpose of a militia is to preserve freedoms to some degree. Militias in this country have had several chances to prove themselves relevant and effective and have not delivered. Waco was front page news for months before the compound burned down. Where were our militias then? What about Ruby Ridge? Why didn’t militias come to the rescue? When since the revolutionary war, when the militia was basically our national military, has a militia effectively carried out any offensive or defensive manuever with lasting results? How was the OK bombing an example of an ‘effective’ militia strike? It preserved no freedoms, altered no legislative paths, did not alert people to covert oppresive government action. I think OK and World Trade Center are good examples of what militias are capable of: Cowardly, futile acts of destruction.