I thought I had made it clear: I know how the world works and it APPALLS me. I want to change it for the better, but I can’t do it alone. I must recruit help because I want to change it all, not just one tiny piece of it (me).
If the world doesn’t work the way it should, it’s because some people LIKE the world the way it is. Why? Because it’s to their advantage.
They are the ones I oppose, in my own small way.
As andros deduced, I know this is not a realistic goal. However, if you set before yourself an unrealistic goal, you can accomplish far more than if you had tried for something less. Did we go to the Moon because it was easy or because it was hard? Will Cecil ever succeed in eradicating ignorance? If not, does that mean he shouldn’t even try?
What have you done to accomplish this goal, to eliminate this need for guns to defend yourself?
Have you tried video games? They, too, can help one develop hand-eye coordination. Or is there some other reason you engage in target shooting?
My name is not “Chuckles.” And you ain’t “Diddly.”
I suggest: Take guns away from people before they kill somebody.
So if the majority of people are agreed on this, why does so little ever seem to get done about gun control in the US? Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea, but I understand there’s massive opposition even to compulsory gun registration. In the UK we had one maniac with a gun shoot up a primary school and we completely banned the vast majority of guns a month or so later. Granted things in our two countries are very different, but is it that big a deal for law-abiding people in the US to do something as simple as notify the police when they have a weapon? I genuinely don’t get this.
In brief, because registration is seen (by many on both sides of the gun control debate) as a mere stepping-stone on the way to confiscation. Should the government decide to outlaw gun ownership entirely, they’ll know exactly where to go to pick the guns up. And we pro-gun folk don’t like that idea.
A recent NRA infomercial shows an example of this very phenomenon. A person moving to California owned an SKS, a semi-automatic rifle formerly (and perhaps currently) the standard-issue rifle of some foreign armies. The man wrote to the BATF and the California attorney general’s office to make sure that his SKS didn’t violate California law; both offices replied that it didn’t. When, some years later, California decided that private SKS ownership just wasn’t kosher, they knew where to find him, wrote him about the change in the law, and came to get his gun, which, as a good citizen, he handed over. Makes you wonder what “no ex post facto laws” is really supposed to mean…
Sometimes people have no choice. The soccer players in the Andes were forced to resort to eating the dead bodies of their friends. I’m certain they were remorseful later, but they had to do or die. If it comes to the life of my wife or the life of a criminal aggressor, I choose my wife. If you want to think me a bad person for choosing thusly, that’s your problem, not mine. I love my wife and enjoy having her around, and will not see her sacrificed to a robber or rapist.
When you get elected God, I will answer to you for my motivations and actions. Until then, you’re just practicing armchair ethics from the comfort of an ivory tower. Don’t fall out; you might get hurt.
That’s not what you said, what, four posts ago? You said some people are superior to others. So which is it? Do you want to stick with that point, or this one? You can’t have it both ways, I’m afraid.
Not true, but we’ll get to this. The recidivism rate for pedophiles is somewhere near 99%.
This is hardly a categorical statement. I’d like to see some evidence to back this up.
Neither do I.
You are attempting to reduce a very complex issue concerning the purpose and intent of the criminal justice system to a single issue of money, which only goes to demonstrate that you have absolutely no concept of penal theory or complex social problems. Prison is designed in part to punish, in part to reform, and if it fails in one part, the answer is not to scrap the other part. Furthermore, some crimes merit removal from interaction with society forever. John Wayne Gacys and Ted Bundys have given up their right to exist in society. I also don’t think that means we should kill them. But if they were to get killed in the act of perpetrating one of their sick crimes by a victim or bystander, tough shit.
I’m not going to address the strawman of war. It has nothing to do with penal theory or gun control. I certainly am not going to address collateral damages or the killing of civilians in wartime; it has nothing to do with the topic.
If you don’t think it would be quickly replaced by the next most likely method, you are a naive fool. Furthermore, just because suicides comprised the largest category of gun deaths does not mean that gun deaths comprised the largest category of suicides. Don’t make that assumption.
Hypocritical, to choose not to exercise a right that I nevertheless support for others? You have really gone off the deep end. Should I make my wife go get an abortion to prove that we are pro-choice?
There is a legitimate argument to be made that drug addiction harms the family of the user in subtle but real ways. I happen to support legalization, but that doesn’t make the mother and child wondering where their crackhead husband/father is tonight any less real.
You are so irrational as regards this topic, jab, that I am going to cease speaking to you. You are in no position to be convinced or to compromise, despite having a head filled with untruths and half-rendered notions based on poor information. That’s the very definition of unreasonable.
Back to the OP, I think that it is a good idea to buy out the rebels’ weapons. The problem is that the price demanded will probably be very high.
Leaving aside the question of why any private citizen would feel the need to have a military semi-automatic weapon lying around the house (spammers is the only thing that springs instantly to mind), it seems to me about as likely that your Government are going to come round and take everybody’s weapons away as it would be for our Government to stick another 10p tax onto a litre on the price of petrol. (Petrol taxes been the source of unprecedented civil disobedience in the UK over the last month, for those who don’t follow the news.) Given some of the reactions so far on this thread, I’d say that any Government would have to have a death wish if it started seizing guns en masse. It would be electoral suicide. To me it just doesn’t seem likely to happen.
However from what you’ve said, the spectre of this threat is being used to justify a complete lack of regulation which I would suggest is costing hundreds if not thousands of lives a year in the US.
In my view, a society in which continued loss of life on this scale is considered preferrable to the most basic regulation is one that should be rethinking its priorities.
Well, you are certainly not alone on this board, and may not even be in the minority.
I have avoided most of those debates because my views are somewhat uncertain (like on abortion as well). I did ask once the rhetorical question of why it was fundamentally “wrong” to want vengeance. But since no one answered it, I assumed it was too silly to be worth considering. This of course makes me look like even more of a “low life”, but I will be brutally honest yet again - if someone hurts, rapes, or kills me, I want vengeance. I refuse to tip-toe around this issue like many death penalty proponents will. I believe it (capital punishment) has little deterrence potential, and has a large, terrible risk in executing the wrong person. I agree more with pepperlandgirl than I think I’ve ever told her, but with one key difference: while she would accept killing in the heat of the moment only, as a last resort to protect herself or her loved ones, I would accept it after the “heat of the moment” as well.
Obviously, this attitude of mine will horrify you. I cannot help that, but I do understand your viewpoint.
Well, that pretty much sums up my feelings too, except I would be less sad for the criminal perhaps. We are different people with different views on this.
No, no, no. This point is irrelevant. Do you know if England has it in the Magna Carta that ex post facto laws will be prohibited? Because over here, my understanding of our Constitution is they were prohibited. If you cannot trust the Government’s own written word, why can you trust anything else from them? Such as, “don’t worry, we aren’t asking you to register your weapons because we want to take them away from you. We just like cool statistics.”
Or words to that effect.
Jabbers…
We went 'cuz, until then, Russia had dominated the space scene, and a lunar landing was considered an even race. I see no corrolation to guns, gun control, gun banishment, or the second amendment.
I’ve pointed out to ignorant dicks like yourself that current and desired future gun control measures only fuck over people like me, who are responsible and educated and law-abiding in the use of firearms.
That being said, what have YOU done to accomplish your goals? Aside from whining and spouting factless bullshit, of course.
Yes, I have. Quake 3 is extremely fun. However, if you had an ounce of sense you would know there’s a difference between looking at a computer screen while tapping some buttons, and holding a handgun and getting a bullseye from fifty yards.
The games are fun not because they involve “guns”, but because they involve many fantasy elements that cannot be replicated in real life. Target shooting involves reality that cannot be replicated in a computer game.
As long as you continue acting like a joke, it is.
Punish somebody before they even do anything? What kind of a dumbshit are you? I can draw corrolaries with cars, knives, airplanes… heck, even ropes, gloves, the Internet, prescription drugs… but if you can’t figure out what kind of a moronic statement that is on your own, no amount of reason will pierce the fat in your skull.
Precisely why the gun-control crowd prefers to take baby steps. Today, restrictions; tomorrow, registration; the day after, confiscation. You have to sneak up on the people with guns to take 'em by surprise.
Incidentally, I’ve fired a Chinese-made SKS, and it’s a fun gun to shoot. Very accurate.
On what scale? Sure, the U.S. has more gun crime than the U.K., but the U.S. has always had more crime in general than the U.K.; it’s a societal thing, and banning guns tomorrow would not magically transform the States into Britain. Besides, violent crime in the U.S. is on the decline, and it’s declining fastest in the states with liberalized gun-carry laws (see Lott’s work). What law would you propose? One that makes a particular kind of gun illegal, such as “anything with a magazine in front of the trigger guard”? One that bans semi-automatics, guns that, unlike revolvers, leave behind shell casings often invaluable to police investigations? Perhaps a law restricting purchases to one gun per month, despite the criminal tendency to purchase firearms from places other than gun shows and stores, where enforcement of the law would be possible?
A law that makes his gun “super-duper double-plus illegal” doesn’t matter to the criminal intent on committing a crime. Follow me here: he’s already planning to commit a crime, so he doesn’t care whether his gun is illegal to own, any more than a bank robber cares whether his getaway car’s tires are too wide to be street-legal. A criminal’s only concern is whether he can get away with his crime. A greater number of armed citizens increases the risk to the criminal. Anything that makes the mugger think twice about mugging you is A Good Thing.
Besides, I don’t think anyone here is arguing for a complete lack of regulation. We are, however, arguing against laws that unnecessarily burden the law-abiding and don’t affect crime. Be honest: how much SKS crime have you heard of in the past few years?
Thanks for all your replies, guys. I’m still trying to get the anti-registration argument clear in my mind and I’ve tried to summarise it below - let me know if I’ve misunderstood anything.
Since the country was founded, all Americans have the right to bear arms enshrined in the Constitution. The possession of guns is a private matter for an individual which the State should have no say in determining.
Law-abiding pro-gun individuals want this right upheld, unchanged, so they can own guns of any type for recreational purposes and to protect themselves and their families.
The other type of gun-owners are criminals who use guns for the commission of crimes. There is a negligible amount of overlap between the two groups.
Gun regulation is wrong because it will eventually be used to take guns away from the law-abiding gun owners while having no effect on the criminals who won’t register their guns and who will continue to obtain them from illegal sources.
11,000 people were killed by guns in 1998, this is regretable but there is no point in registering guns because the vast majority of these people were shot by criminals who (as noted in 4 above) would not register their weapons anyway. The best way to stop criminals shooting people is to get them off the streets and into prison, not to restrict guns.
While accidents and tragedies do happen, these can be reduced by better education, keeping guns locked up etc. not by gun registration.
The type of guns people own don’t matter, the automatic and semi-automatic weapons owned by law-abiding gun owners won’t ever be used to hurt anybody and criminals would get hold of them and use them no matter what legislation was passed to restrict them.
It is more important for law-abiding Americans to have the right to own guns for pleasure and to protect their families than it is for the State to take away some of their gun-owning rights in an attempt, which gun-owners believe would be unsuccessful, to get guns out of the hands of criminals and decrease the yearly death toll.
Pretty good synopsis, Wombat. The only part I’d correct would be this…
We really aren’t asking for it to be “unchanged”… some regulation we’re agreeing with. However, we believe, based on the evidence at hand (mostly tossed about in the GD threads, just ask and I’ll dig them up for you) that some of the regulations do more harm than good. Some, like the registration of firearms, and waiting periods, only apply to those who would be willing to obey the law, which as I’ve said above, can be considered as punishing someone before they’ve even done anything yet. On the other hand, some rules, such as restricting gun ownership for felons and/or the mentally impaired, seems like a necessary step to take.
Just one question on that - how are you going to restrict gun ownership for felons and/or the mentally impaired if there’s no waiting period and you don’t have any form of registration?
I believe there’re little things called “social security numbers”.
I believe you misunderstand me… I, for one, am not saying “Down with waiting periods and registration!”, I’m saying that excessive amounts of such measures only result in diminishing returns. If a police officer can drum up your criminal history in a few minutes during a traffic stop, or if a hospital can get their hands on your medical history when you check into the ER, why do gun dealers need a month to do either?
Many killings are crimes are committed by people without criminal history. Like that killing in Hawaii this year by the guy who thought he was fired by Xerox. Or the killings in Florida by the guy who lost a lot of money in the stock market.
Until that that time, those guys were law abiding citizens. Regular people are more afraid of those things than anything else because most killings done by criminals are to other criminals over bad debt, drugs, turf wars etc. It’s this random out the sky stuff which is so scary because it could happen to anyone. Anyone that is fired at work could come back and mow down employees. I don’t send anyone to collection anymore just in case it’s the last straw on the camel’s back and he decides to end his life, but mine first.
So my question is: If we took away guns, would the Xerox guy or the stock market guys have brought knives, clubs and swords to do their killing? Would it have made them think twice because it’s harder, and more emotional to kill with knives?
My comment to one of the above post regarding not restricting gun laws so that criminals will be afraid to get into homes where the occupants will be armed.
So are we going to make each home an armed camp? Carry guns under our coats? I think the problem is education and taking care of our poor. That’s where all the crime is coming from, but that’s another subject.
Are we going to blow arguments out of proportion? Run around like raving lunatics claiming that the sky is falling?
Maj. Feelgud, so the shootings people are afraid of are like the Xerox guy and the daytrader in Atlanta? But all the crime is coming from the poor. And most of the killings are criminals shooting each other. Then, please tell me then, how “education” and “taking care of the poor” is going to alleviate the fears of the people.
The fears of the people are fueled by the sensationalist media. The types of shootings you claim “the regular people” are most afraid of, simply do not happen that often. There are very few of these types of incidents. I suggest removing the rights of citizens on the basis of a perceived problem is an extremely lousy way to make law. Especially when it involves one of our fundamental rights delineated in the Constitution.