[QUOTE=Bone]
This was the part that responded to you (He’s got you there):
[/QUOTE]
Ah, the smug, self satisfied pity of a Canadian for poor Americans who would enshrine gun rights along with the other rights in the Constitution. Maybe that is the ‘pretty clear and in English’ response to my own after all. 
And I’ll happily drop it to after this post, but I would just like to note that I gather your municipality provides you with relatively few services for which I assume you pay relatively low taxes (a situation probably not uncommon in large parts of the U.S.) so even if your local government was vexatiously forced into bankruptcy, it may not have that much effect on your life. This doesn’t hold elsewhere, though, and I register my objection to seeking to “punish” other Americans in this way. If I can offer a comparable idea, imagine a corporation with an effectively-unlimited litigation budget who really really wants to build a chain of toxic-waste dumps in your region (or something comparably undesirable), because they see it as their right to do so and they have the means to force your local government into compliance, so why not?
Heck, feel free to compare your country’s gun-violence stats with mine. It’s pity in the same way I might feel for someone raised in a religion with harmful practices that serve little modern purpose but persist out of sheer tradition, i.e. “we’ve always done it that way”, and efforts to stop it are likely futile or even aggravating.
Gun rights in June, corn be heavy soon.
Be sort of a meaningless comparison, since your country has less of a population than California. I will concede that your 1000 deaths per year due to guns (mostly accidents) is far less than the US total deaths…it’s even less than the order of magnitude difference in our population warrants. I’m happy for you that this makes you feel smug and superior. Gives me a nice warm glow inside knowing we can do that for you, Bryan.
Then go per capita.
Oh wait, I see you kinda did, and our stats are still better.
I guess your point, if you had one, escaped me.
Um, if you really feel the need then feel free to do it yourself. I already said I’m not particular interested and conceded that, indeed you have less gun violence than the US even after accounting for the order of magnitude difference in our population (our non-gun related crime rate is equally higher than yours as well…as is our deaths due to alcohol and other such stats, so you can feel smug all over). If you need further validation feel free to look up the stats yourself (from memory, something like 2.8 to 10.2 per 100,000).
On the plus side, you get to shoot things.
On the negative side, you can be shot at.
So clearly, it’s a wash.
Um, no, I don’t feel such a need. You’re obviously trying to be condescending but failing because your position is not an elevated one. I don’t need smiley icons to enhance such an observation.
Anyway, pity for you doesn’t automatically translate to smugness for myself, though I can see how it might. Even if I am smug, it’s not relevant to valid criticisms of this particular longstanding (and self-destructive) American practice, a flaw in the country’s “fabric”, as it were.
I acknowledge incidentally that you were quoting the original form of my response, though I later edited after reconsidering, which is my failing for being overly reflexive.
And on the plus side of the negative, you can shoot back at people shooting at you.
Works for me …
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
Um, no, I don’t feel such a need. You’re obviously trying to be condescending but failing because your position is not an elevated one. I don’t need smiley icons to enhance such an observation.
[/QUOTE]
My position? What would that be? Do you mean the manufactured one you brought up to compare US and Canadian gun violence stats? I didn’t take a position on that. You never did respond to my ACTUAL position in this thread…you quoted me, but your response was almost entirely at something Bone had posted. It’s what started all of this in the first place.
As for ‘condescending’…well, I’d go with your own posts as being much more condescending than mine. My posts were SUPPOSED to be mocking, since to me what it looked like you were doing was trying to muddy the water after I gently (for me) pointed out that your response to what you quoted from me really didn’t actually, you know, respond to what I wrote.
I was going to say something smart ass here, but I think I’ll try and tone down (again, for me). Perhaps you didn’t mean it to come across smug, superior or condescending. It did. But, on a deeper level, what it shows is that you disagree with Americans on this issue. Which is fine. Different strokes and all. A lot of Europeans (and many other nations) have similar disagreements…and similar quirks. To most Americans, the price in lives lost per year is worth it for what we think we gain wrt a personal freedom that we’ve had since shortly after the founding of the country. Americans associate the freedom to keep and bear arms along with the other rights I was originally responding to you up thread…they ARE on par. You disagree and find it a ‘flaw’ in our nations ‘fabric’. Again, all well and good…you don’t live here after all, and are happy with things the way they are in your own country.
As I said upthread, I didn’t see much in your response to what you quoted from me to be relevant. I’m unsure why you didn’t simply acknowledge that…to me, seems simple enough to have just said that your response was really to Bone and not to me and left it at that, instead of saying that it was pretty plain English.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… chill out.:p:p
:p:p:p (so as not to be outdone).
BTW, I meant to also say that even a lot of Americans disagree with the right to keep and bear arms to a lesser or greater extent. You can see it in threads like this. To date, a majority of Americans haven’t disagreed enough to enact a change. The mechanisms are in there, however, so if as a society we ever decide that the price in lives is more than the worth of the right we can always create a new amendment. After all, we decided to give up our collective use of alcohol, and then decided later on that, well, we actually do want to keep drinking, despite the obvious cost to society in lives lost each year. Same goes for cigarettes…and now, the seeming movement towards legalization of marijuana. It’s all about cost to benefit and perception.
Depends on what you’re arbalesting. BMWs, for example, would be pretty noisy.
I find the number of people who get shot in any given year to be a negative aspect.
How’s that?
I don’t own a gun. In what way am I more free than if gun ownership was illegal, other than that I am currently free to buy one?
[QUOTE=Ethilrist]
I don’t own a gun. In what way am I more free than if gun ownership was illegal, other than that I am currently free to buy one?
[/QUOTE]
Because you have a choice, while on the other hand if it were illegal you wouldn’t have one. I don’t actually own a gun either btw.
Put it this way…if you don’t read (and don’t know how to read), how does it benefit you to have a right to a free press? If you never protested a thing in your life, what’s your personal benefit to the right to free assembly? If you aren’t religious, how does freedom of religion benefit you? Answer is, of course, that they don’t, personally, but that they grant a little bit of freedom to society as a whole…and that many of your fellow citizens (a majority in fact) who DO want to use and exercise those rights would be a bit miffed by having them taken away, which might impact you at some point.
And you can also be the person who shoots first! Another positive!(?)
Felons can’t own guns … worst possible case for the typical gun-nut. As a class, the gun-nut is the best behaved in our society.
Or just the negative side of the positive side. Although from a certain perspective, it’s more the positive side of the negative side of the positive side … as long as it’s done negatively.
Look, it’s very simple logic. You can’t say guns are a positive part of society because it allows you to shoot people who are shooting at you. If guns weren’t part of society they wouldn’t be shooting at you in the first place.
Guns have always been a part of our society, and in a big way starting after the Civil War. Take away the guns and we’ll still have drug violence, turf wars and investment bankers. I don’t think you solve the problems you think you can by taking guns away from the people who would let you take them. I’m not saying return fire is the best deterrent to getting shot at, but it is engrained into our society.
We’re unique in that way.
Well, you might be unique in your nation’s particular history (as all nations are in theirs), but your level of gun violence and gun-ownership isn’t unique, just above average.
From Wikipedia, we have the “big five”:
United States of America - 89.0%
Brazil - 8.0%
China - 4.9%
India - 4.2%
Indonesia - 0.5%
Yeah, unique, unless the country is the size of a postage stamp. Now don’t misunderstand me, UK sports the highest rate of violent crime, per capita, of any other nation in the world. They’d be idiots to let guns loose in Great Britain. On the other hand, make every Palestinian mother pack a handgun on her hip, with instructions to control her men-folk, maybe we’ll start seeing real peace progress in the West Bank.
It’s like any double-edged sword, it cuts both ways. The OP got it right, there’s positive and** there’s negative. A gun it just a thing, neither good nor evil.