Why do you keep going on about the liberty of ‘all’? The latest handgun ban only affected members of gun clubs.
If the policy is popular (and it is), why is the Government attacking our liberty?
You must realise that school children getting shot is pretty rare here. We were shocked that someone **who had guns only for use in target practice ** killed so many children. So we banned the use of handguns in gun clubs.
The public don’t own firearms here. We haven’t done so for over 80 years.
The beat police don’t have guns.
A few farmers have licenced shotguns to shoot vermin, and it is still legal to fire a rifle in a licensed gun club.
So what ‘millions of people’ are you talking about?
Well this just shows a remarkable difference between the UK and the US. We don’t understand why the public need guns. We don’t understand why regular police need guns.
(I do understand really because I have some knowledge of your history - the Constitution, the Wild West period, the NRA. But why do you know so little about my culture?)
Clearly you don’t know the facts. Only target shooters had to give up their guns.
We don’t understand why you react to US school shootings with ‘guns are good’.
Gee, it was only a few doctors being quoted on a slow news day. No chance of any legislation.
Aren’t you more worried about attempts to restrict the teaching of evolution in the US?
What made the US Government so quick to think that the solution to drugs is to have a Drugs War?
We have spent nothing on any knife ban. How much have you spent fighting the Drugs War? Are you winning?
What made the US Government so quick to think that the solution to terrorism was to invade Iraq?
There weren’t any polls or referendum. Why would there be?
We already had extensive bans on guns here. This extra legislation didn’t affect the general public. At all.
I already estimated there were only a few thousand members of gun clubs affected. With a population of 55 million, the support was indeed quite high.
Look, you do know that our beat police are unarmed, don’t you?
If you see someone carrying a gun in England, you run inside your house, lock the door and call the police. It’s rather similar to Americans seeing a Muslim-type carrying a bomb-like object into an airport.
Why would we be bothered about banning a few people from handgun target practice in order to save children’s lives?
The right of a citizen to own a firearm is certainly something that affects all citizens, whether they own firearms or not. It’s irrelevant whether a particular individual actually exercised that right at some point in the past. What matters is that the option was there before, and it now is not. Therefore that citizen has lost that particular right, and lost some of his/her liberty.
It’s not exactly common here, either. It gets a lot of publicity when it does happen, though.
How is this not the epitome of a knee-jerk emotional response? You were shocked, and so you immediately banned based on your shock, outrage and fear.
Every citizen. There are what, 80 million lawful firearms owners in the US, and approximately 300,000,000 citizens. Those 220,000,000 who don’t currently own firearms still enjoy the right to do so if they wish, and so banning them would affect those people as well. Curtailing a right that someone has not yet exercised is still curtailing a right.
Everyone had to give up what was once a legal right - to own a firearm if one chose. That is not rational.
You assume that because I didn’t bring it up in a thread completely unrelated to evolution that I don’t give a damn about it? This thread is about some senseless ban of an inanimate object in England. Why the hell would I take an opinion on evolution in this thread?
This thread isn’t about the US ‘war on drugs’. There’s no reason for me to bring up that topic in this thread. If you look around the forum long enough, I’m sure you’ll find my opinion on the legality/illegality of drugs.
Not the topic of this thread, therefore not going to discuss my opinion of that here either.
Try to stick to the topic at hand instead of trying to bring completely unrelated issues into the thread. You want to argue my opinion on UK gun law? Go for it. But please try to stick to the topic. Bringing up Iraq, evolution and drugs does nothing to support your point. It only makes me think that you can’t support your point, so you have to try to dodge the issue by throwing out decoys.
OK, then from now on feel free to butt out of any gun discussions that affect the US. If we can’t take potshots due to our ignorance of the UK, then the same should apply to “all o’ y’all furriners” when it comes to our “inner workings” and eccentricities. As for regular police needing guns, well over here, an unarmed cop would probably be very dead, very fast.
Because maybe we understand that you punish the evildoer and not the innocent. Because maybe we don’t believe in “preemptive restriction”. Because maybe we believe in “presumption of innocense”. Catsix nailed this one already.
We know that, but it’s mystifying how people jumped to the defense of these doctors (only 3 doctors have the UK in all this turmoil). Talk about tyrrany by the minority. Anti-evolutionstis - Hell yes they worry me.
This thread has already been hijacked away from knives and pointy sticks. No need to send it off on yet another tangent.
This thread has already been hijacked away from knives and pointy sticks. No need to send it off on yet another tangent.
Well, originally they were your apples. But seriously, if I show you one hundred random apples and say, “Yesterday I had 101 - somebody ate one and it killed him. Please, have an apple.”, that you would only hesitate to choose the nicest looking one?
(My bolding) Not knowing which one or when is precisely the problem. If it were easy to identify potential spree shooters, we would all do it. Given that it’s impossible to identify them beforehand there are only a few choices. Accept that a number of innocent people will be killed in spree shootings, tell yourself that will never be any more spree shootings, or don’t give people the wherewithal to conduct spree shootings.
Regarding chastity belts, I note that you missed my earlier question. Do you think young Muslim males should be allowed to carry machetes on to aeroplanes? If you want to prevent them from doing so, how is this not pre-judging them based on the actions of other people?
I’m not trying to change it. As I said before, I’m just trying to get you to see how and why the British people arrived at their position, that they are perfectly happy with it, and that this is not the result of a nationwide mental defect.
Let’s not exaggerate - no one was locked up in Britain for owning a gun. The reason I pointed out that “not having shot people yet” was not the same as “guaranteed never to shoot people” was because you seemed to me to be contending that it was. If you weren’t, I apologize. But out of curiosity: the day before the Dunblane Massacre, the shooter was in the state of “not having shot people yet”. If the police had turned up at his house that day and confiscated his guns would this have been an infringement of his rights?
Yes, but is it likely? Or is it more plausible that people started out with different premises, which were themselves based on their own culture and attitudes?
And I don’t think that safeguarding against an unlikely yet possible event is necessarily fear either. But if you want to simply characterize your response to danger as a sensible precaution, and others’ response as gibbering fear, that’s your privilege. It’s not much more than rhetoric though.
“Legitimate public interest” does not mean “having a super-large majority”. It means being in the interests of the average member of the public. So in the drink driving example, it is in the interests even of the pro-drink drivers that drink driving be made illegal, as they are as likely (if not more so) to suffer as the result of drink driving.
That is your assessment of the risk. Other people decided that a combination of an unpredictable risk and a high cost (dead innocents) did justify banning gun ownership. But, crucially, you must understand that the British do not consider banning of gun-ownership any more of an infringment of rights than the banning of DDT. I know you disagree with them - but that does not make them insane.
Well, tell me about the realities of crime control. How has America controlled the crime of spree shootings? It seems to me that it has not - although I admit I could easily be unaware of legislation, police policy or common practice that does control them. But unless I am uninformed, it seems that America has decided that unpredictable, unpreventable spree shootings are the price paid for widespread firearm ownership.
You are indeed uninformed. In a large percentage of so-called spree shootings here, the perpetrators committed their acts with illegally held and/or acquired firearms. Simple fact is, the widespread ownership of firearms is overwhelming peaceful and law-abiding. These owners present absolutely no risk to anyone who isn’t immediately presenting a violent threat to the gun owner. I simply do not understand the motivation to restrict the freedoms of peaceable and law-abiding citizens because of the actions of others.
As you say, you are not comparing like with like. The two activities being compared are:
Driving drunk
Spree shootings
Both of which are inherently dangerous to random people. How then, are we to prevent, or at least minimize, the incidence of these activities? In the case of 1) we are lucky in that we can test drivers for sobriety - in the UK with a breathalyzer, in the US with physical co-ordination tests. So finding a driver, we can determine whether or not he is drunk. In fact, just by observing his driving, we can make a good guess. The crucial point here is that we can do all this before any random people are killed.
Now consider spree shootings. There is no test we can apply which will say of a gun-owner: you are mentally imbalanced and will, in three months time, gun down a traffic warden and two bystanders because you got a parking ticket. We can’t tell at all. The only way to know is to wait and see - once the traffic warden’s uniform is blood-stained, we can slap our collective forehead and say “D’oh! He was one of the dangerous ones.” This not an optimum solution. So, unable to detect which gun-owners will become spree-shooters and which will not, we either accept that letting people own guns means suffering a number of spree shootings, or we decide that this is too high a price to pay and prevent people owning guns. If you know of a third solution, there’s a lot of people will be interested in what you have to say.
Uh no. Spree shootings were, I’m pretty sure, illegal in Britain (and probably most other countries) before the latest handgun ban. We’re talking here about the ban.
They’ve been made illegal. And persons found guilty of such grotesque crimes are punished according to the law. Same things we do to prevent other activities we believe damaging to society and harmful to our citizens. Removing the rights of entirely of law-abiding and ostensibly free citizens has not deemed (to date) an acceptable practice.
I don’t find prior restraint, the treating of people who have never committed a crime as if they are nothing more than a future criminal, to be reasonable and as such would not even list it as an option.
I’d like to know (as a U.S. citizen) if there is any real evidence that legal gun ownership prevents more injury than it causes. The argument is that you should be able to protect yourself from a mugger if necessary. Is there any real evidence that a significant portion of handgun owners protect themselves this way? Are there more muggers shot by someone protecting themself than others shot on accident?
Depending upon which study you happen to read, the number of crimes prevented by use of a firearm (aka defensive gun uses) ranges from 200,000 to 2 million per year.
Yes, they were illegal. But they still happened. Given that the question I asked was:
it seems clear that simply making them illegal had failed in this goal. So the question then was, what more could and should be done? From this:
It seems clear that your answer is that no more should be done. If people crazed enough to start shooting down random strangers aren’t going to stop and think about possible jail time or state execution like sensible people, then there is no alternative but to wait until they’ve commited the crime and then arrest them. This is not what is meant by crime prevention. This is the basic minimum for any unwanted activity from speeding to drug dealing. But the cops have strategies for dealing with speeding and drug-dealing that involve taking pro-active measures to prevent them. I am arguing that it is impossible to do this for the unpredictable, random crime of a gun-owner becoming temporarily insane and randomly shooting people. So the alternatives are: arrest surviving spree shooters (don’t most of them kill themselves anyway?) or prevent spree shootings by restricting access to guns. The US finds the latter option unpalatable: the UK the former. Neither of these are irrational positions.
The main gun ban in England was over 80 years ago. Why do you mention this in a thread about 3 doctors recently suggesting a knife ban?
And please try to understand that over here we don’t see gun ownership as a right. Nor do we see gun control as an infringement of our liberty.
Yes, but over here we think it’s useful to ban guns to stop such incidents in future.
What irritates me about your attitude in this thread is stuff like:
‘Which to me is the absolute epitome of extremist reactionism. One single crime was used as the basis for a nationwide ban on firearms. One man, one crime, and an entire nation (well, the law-abiding folks, anyway) disarmed. It seems like such an absurd overreaction I can’t even fathom the thought process there.’
‘The fact that the UK is the kind of place in which the actions of one, maybe two, people are enough for the government to shit on the liberty of all, and for the ‘all’ to cheer about it.
I’ve never seen people so happy to give up liberty, nor so extremely reactive to one small event before.’
‘I never said anything about why people own firearms. I said that it seems completely batshit insane to me to react to one act, committed by one man by having millions of people turn over their rights.’
I’ve repeatedly pointed out that only a few thousand people were affected.
That there have been many incidents, not one.
I’ve tried to explain about our culture.
Why won’t you listen?
Why do you keep insulting an entire nation?
If you will keep harping on this, I will try to shock you into realising how unpleasant you are being:
‘deprive millions of rights because of the actions of one?’
Please consider the US response to a single appalling terrorist act. They invade Iraq, set up Guantanamo Bay, set up Homeland Security, change rules on airport security etc.
What are you talking about?
This comment by 3 doctors on English knives has no proposed effect on the US gun ownership!
An entire nation of madmen, huh?
How about ‘Everyone had to give up what was once a legal right - to own a slave if one chose. That is not rational.’
Why are you so hostile to my country?
No, I see that you repeatedly assume that our entire country is full of stupid sheep who go along with anything that restricts their liberty.
And I want to emphasise again that this is just a comment by 3 doctors. It’s not law. it’s not a proposed law. No politician is backing it.
By contrast the US has enacted laws claiming that religious superstition should carry equal weight with proven science*.
They spend billions to achieve nothing in a Drugs War.
What, in your rude way, does that say about the US?
(*Of course I know that this is one district only. Nevertheless I would express disappointment about it. I wouldn’t insult the whole country.)
You still don’t get it.
I know about your constitution, about the NRA etc. If I join in a discussion, I don’t need to be told such things. And I don’t make inflammatory remarks about the whole of the US population. You didn’t know that our regular police were unarmed. You didn’t know that gun ownership was effectively banned here in 1920.
Yet you dive in with insults like ‘In addition, in order to prevent death by drowning, the British Medical Journal should suggest banning water. For the children.’
Please consider that our country works perfectly well with unarmed police. You admit that this wouldn’t work in the US. Think about that.
How does ‘presumption of innocence’ apply to Gunatanamo Bay?
Here is something that has a major effect on how the US is seen around the World. British citizens have been held without trial there for years, tortured and when we finally managed to get them released, it turns out there was no evidence against them. Of course this thread is not about that. But the principle applies. You insult England, then claim to be ‘holier than thou’. That’s what I object to.
Who has ‘jumped to their defence’? I am protesting about how you and Catsix insult an entire country over some proposal that will never become law.
I’m not bothered one way or the other by some doctors making a suggestion. Why do you make this thread sound so important? We all have far more important things to worry about.
Call me stupid, but it seems to me that many of those crimes prevented, would not have been attempted in the first place, if guns were not a factor.
If you arm the law abiding types you guarantee the crims will have guns.
I know it is hard to understand Catsix but many democratic countries operate without the paranoia involved with the ‘right’ to own guns.
We can vote freely (no guns or pointy sticks intimidating us), all our citizens can vote (even the duck hunter-gun owning ones), we have the right to free speech (pointy sticks all the way :D)…yes demoracy.
It may be democracy “without the right to bear arms” (though we can own a gun…shock, horror!) but that is because the “right” to arm oneself was never seen as even vaguely important.
PointysticksPointysticksPointysticks… It really is fun to say and legal EVERYWHERE
/aside. catsix, thanks for the info about Heston. It makes much more sense of his quote to know that he was talking about the right to continue owning a cherished antique.
glee, just some friendly advice from someone who has read quite a few threads in which catsix goes on about a pet topic: You won’t change her mind. She is always right, whereas you will be possessed of a mental defect of some sort for not agreeing with her.
If you happen to be a masochist, far be it from me to interrupt your pleasures. Otherwise… if you let it go, I don’t think many people here would doubt your wisdom in doing so.
