Gun control

I think we've long gathered from observing the rabid right of America that the majority of the people fiercely dedicated to the literal adherence of the constitution as if it's some kind of biblical tablet and not something that can occasionally be amended (arf, amendments) to accomodate changing attitudes, are the same general populace who would jump head first at the chance to 'amend' the separation of church and state.

Those that wouldn't probably listen to Alex Jones, own bunkers or live in Ruby Ridge style fort like outposts for fear of the coming socialist land confiscation.
 
ukbob said:
Looks like we have a war brewing. The Prez v The NRA !!
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If O is to win this he must use the so-called bully pulpit and get the people involved. I was hoping that yesterday he would look into the camera and say "I want you, the ordinary American who believes in sane gun control, to write your representatives, march in your towns, write your newspapers and demand change".

Unless the public make their voice heard he will get drwoned in all of the hate spewing from the right. I'll bet even those righties who agree with his gun policies will not join him and simply use the issue cynically to beat him up to gain political points.
 
Mockney said:
I think we've long gathered from observing the rabid right of America that the majority of the people fiercely dedicated to the literal adherence of the constitution as if it's some kind of biblical tablet and not something that can occasionally be amended (arf, amendments) to accomodate changing attitudes, are the same general populace who would jump head first at the chance to 'amend' the separation of church and state.

Those that wouldn't probably listen to Alex Jones, own bunkers or live in Ruby Ridge style fort like outposts for fear of the coming socialist land confiscation.
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These are the same people who demand a constitutional amendment whenever women, gays or brown people start gaining rights but when someone talks about reasonable gun laws all you hear is "the constitution is sacred and can't be changed!".
 
Feeble regulations anyway. Not even a mention of handguns which is what really need banning.
 
Wibble said:
Feeble regulations anyway. Not even a mention of handguns which is what really need banning.
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Baby steps...if they even hint at that then the gun nuts will freak. Everyone sensible knows they need to be banned but it'll take while....about 30 years I reckon.
 
The BBC's series Altered States had a report from a school in rural Texas where some of the teachers carried concealed weapons. Their justification is that they are at least a 35 minute drive from the nearest police presence, the isolation necessitating the option of an independent response.

What do you think of that, do you find it understandable and worthy of a different approach?
 
Wibble said:
Madness
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Being that remote relatively speaking and in a country with such a history of school shootings, i can understand the desire to have some sort of help close at hand. The mindset in a more contained community like that can't but be different in some ways. It sounded a bit ad hoc at the minute though, an approved and trained member of staff known to the authorities would be a better way of going about it at the least.


Grinner said:
fecking hell!!!

Watching last night's Daily Show and a clip they showed was of a guy who was actually on CNN claiming that if the slaves had been granted the right to bear arms that slavery might never have happened!

You just can't make this shit up...these people are fecking insane!

From about 4:30s on...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/...y-wouldnt-have-happened-if-slaves-were-armed/
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What a stupid and opportunistic argument. What's worse it actually looked like he was reading from notes at that stage, it wasn't even off the cuff idiocy but planned.


It comes as a surprise to me that something as basic as a background check has not been in place nationwide for many years.
 
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
Being that remote relatively speaking and in a country with such a history of school shootings, i can understand the desire to have some sort of help close at hand. The mindset in a more contained community like that can't but be different in some ways. It sounded a bit ad hoc at the minute though, an approved and trained member of staff known to the authorities would be a better way of going about it at the least.
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How do remote schools in Australia protect themselves from the possibility of a gun attack?
 
Grinner said:
fecking hell!!!

Watching last night's Daily Show and a clip they showed was of a guy who was actually on CNN claiming that if the slaves had been granted the right to bear arms that slavery might never have happened!

You just can't make this shit up...these people are fecking insane!

From about 4:30s on...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/...y-wouldnt-have-happened-if-slaves-were-armed/
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Thinks about it. Jews with guns = no holocaust.

Cows with guns = no Big Macs (assuming we can get past the lack of opposable thumb problem)

pre-teens with guns = no kiddy fiddlers

foxes with guns = no need for anti-hunting legislation as we now have a level playing field.

The possibilities are endless.
 
Grinner said:
How do remote schools in Australia protect themselves from the possibility of a gun attack?
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They don't. You can generally walk in to most schools in Australia unchallenged and any fencing is to keep vandals out at night. Weapon concerns are generally in inner city schools and more to do with knives than guns. Most school violence is still happily of the fist variety.

We had a kid bring a live bullet to school this year and that ended up with the kid nearly suspended. If it had been a public school he may well have been expelled much less suspended.

A kid at my son's school 2 years ahead of him got expelled for bringing a knife to school just to show his "mates" although he was a complete dropkick who was on a final warning. Knives scare the shit out of me as well. a couple of years earlier the kid who got expelled started kicking the shit out of a friend of my son's and my son stepped in to stop it. It never occurred to him that pushing the kid away and saying stop might not have worked :nervous:
 
Grinner said:
How do remote schools in Australia protect themselves from the possibility of a gun attack?
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Fortunately for most Aussies i imagine, they don't find themselves with that outlook.

Some of these campaigners say that they would be better off if all walked around with a gun ready to draw, sounds closer to the wild west than modern society.
 
Grinner said:
How do remote schools in Australia protect themselves from the possibility of a gun attack?
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Remote schools problems are usually less about guns than substance abuse and truancy at least in the truly remote areas where indigenous Australian's predominate.

Guns are very common in rural Australia but handguns and semi-autos are very rare thus the low death rate. Suicide by gun is still a major consideration in rural Australia although I suppose that drugs or hanging would take the place of a gun if rifles and shotguns were banned.
 
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
Fortunately for most Aussies i imagine, they don't find themselves with that outlook.

Some of these campaigners say that they would be better off if all walked around with a gun ready to draw, sounds closer to the wild west than modern society.
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Sem-auto machine gun type weapons were freely available here until the change in gun law after the Port Arthur massacre and we have seen a great improvement in gun murder and much of it is now drug gang scum shooting other drug gang scum.
 
Wibble said:
Sem-auto machine gun type weapons were freely available here until the change in gun law after the Port Arthur massacre and we have seen a great improvement in gun murder and much of it is now drug gang scum shooting other drug gang scum.
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I see.

Crucially both with that and the Monash University shooting [it was necessary for me to do some reading up] the political order brought about change, whereas the US has had how many potentially defining moment since the 90s?

Australia sounds fairly similar to the UK, when you mentioned the likely sources of crime related to schools and gun violence.
 
I think that is pretty much right. The US is a special case because the gun culture is so out there.
 
Just read over the past few pages. The same theme runs through my head when these silly opinions began to surface. The power of fear and paranoia. And they say adults are supposed to be the wise ones eh?

Humans have a wonderful way of complicating matters. The fact the gun culture is so pervasive in the states is scary. Lost count of the amount of times I have scratched my head in confusion to all this.

So if I'm correct, it's perfectly reasonable in America for an individual's emotional attachment to an object meant to kill another individual, to override the loss of life as a result of using these same objects?
 
I don't see anything particularly 'wrong' with gun culture. There are perfectly reasonable people (Dr Dwayne is an example) who like guns in the same way there are many perfectly reasonable people who enjoy sado-masochistic sex.

I think the oft overlooked point in all of this is that guns are just tools. Very dangerous tools, but tools nonetheless. The only effect a restriction of guns is going to have is to reduce the usage of guns in these kinds of shootings (professional criminals will be largely unaffected), but what's to stop the types of people who do these shootings from making home-made explosives? Focusing on the tool rather than the actual crime is a serious mistake and it's sad to see people are so intent on it.

Even considering a ban on the kind of semi-automatics like the AR-15, I don't see what they will achieve when it comes to combating the vast majority of gun-based violence in the US which is done by hand guns and small sub-machine guns. So this all strikes me as the kind of misdirected moral outrage that happens whenever something tragic happens.

There is also a sense of irony that an administration which gave guns to Mexican drug cartels is leading the moral charge over gun control. Anyway, banning guns is never really going to happen in the US, but the idea seems sinister to me. All it does is monopolise firearms in the hands of government and criminals; and they may as well be the same thing as far as I'm concerned.

(and yes, I realise how hyperbolic that last sentence was.)
 
Andrew~ said:
The only effect a restriction of guns is going to have is to reduce the usage of guns in these kinds of shootings (professional criminals will be largely unaffected), but what's to stop the types of people who do these shootings from making home-made explosives? Focusing on the tool rather than the actual crime is a serious mistake and it's sad to see people are so intent on it.
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That is probably the most idiotic argument made in this thread to date.

If such silliness was true why aren't people blowing people up instead of shooting them in countries with (half) decent gun control? Or beating people to death with rhubarb?

Hint: Rhubarb doesn't kill people, angry pie makers kill people.
 
Wibble said:
That is probably the most idiotic argument made in this thread to date.

If such silliness was true why aren't people blowing people up instead of shooting them in countries with (half) decent gun control? Or beating people to death with rhubarb?

Hint: Rhubarb doesn't kill people, angry pie makers kill people.
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What are you talking about? People are getting blown up: Anders Breivik only recently blew up the Norwegian capital and went on a shooting rampage - a country with very strong gun laws. And recently here in the UK we had the cases of taxi driver shooting up his village; plus that crazy guy in Newcastle (I forget the names). But that's all beside the point really, my point was that banning the tool without addressing the causes of the crime will only likely make them move on to a different tool, rather than stop.

A few days after the Newtown shooting, a man walked into a school with a small knife and went around casually cutting off the ears and fingers of 22 small children. Ban knives too?

Again, banning guns does not stop the crime. Instead of school shootings, we'll be saying 'school [something-else]'. This is why I said all of this is just misdirected moral outrage, and why all this discussion about gun 'crime' statistics is meaningless. The majority of gun crimes in the US are done with illegal weapons used by unlicenced users. Banning a certain magazine or semi-autos won't even dent that.

There's a really important problem about why there's so much violent crime in the US (and the UK - which is the most violent country in Europe), but let's all get into a tizzy about AR-15s because it's easier to attack guns than have an introspective discussion about why our families and societies are producing so many psychopaths. :rolleyes:
 
Andrew~ said:
What are you talking about? People are getting blown up: Anders Breivik only recently blew up the Norwegian capital and went on a shooting rampage - a country with very strong gun laws. And recently here in the UK we had the cases of taxi driver shooting up his village; plus that crazy guy in Newcastle (I forget the names). But that's all beside the point really, my point was that banning the tool without addressing the causes of the crime will only likely make them move on to a different tool, rather than stop.

A few days after the Newtown shooting, a man walked into a school with a small knife and went around casually cutting off the ears and fingers of 22 small children. Ban knives too?

Again, banning guns does not stop the crime. Instead of school shootings, we'll be saying 'school [something-else]'. This is why I said all of this is just misdirected moral outrage, and why all this discussion about gun 'crime' statistics is meaningless. The majority of gun crimes in the US are done with illegal weapons used by unlicenced users. Banning a certain magazine or semi-autos won't even dent that.

There's a really important problem about why there's so much violent crime in the US (and the UK - which is the most violent country in Europe), but let's all get into a tizzy about AR-15s because it's easier to attack guns than have an introspective discussion about why our families and societies are producing so many psychopaths. :rolleyes:
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There will always be people like Breivik, and they will always be hard to stop.
However, making guns (not just assault rifles) easily available, enables the mentally unstable person, or the disenfranchised teenagers, easy access to an efficient tool to kill. He did use guns, y'know?

It is funny that you refer to the knife-maniac in China, whilst completely ignoring that, that attack resulted in ZERO fatalities.
What do you think would've been the outcome, if he, or someone close, had had a permit to carry firearms?

As for your last point, most psycopaths don't kill people. They will be just as likely to be your boss, your bank manager, your local store owner.
A killer may have psycopathic tendencies, but it is not a condition that guarentees physical violence.

These attacks are carried out by mentally unstable people. Mentally unstable people that inhabit every country in the world.
It is just that in America, they are surrounded by weaponry that makes their crimes shatter more lives, and far easier to achieve.
 
those supporting the gun nuts are doing so just because it is the position of conservatives.

yesterday my priest went on about Rove v Wade costing 50 million lives...or some nutty number...and just a casual mention about violence in the country.

I'll start listening when he says we need to have gun control.
 
Andrew~ said:
What are you talking about? People are getting blown up: Anders Breivik only recently blew up the Norwegian capital and went on a shooting rampage - a country with very strong gun laws. And recently here in the UK we had the cases of taxi driver shooting up his village; plus that crazy guy in Newcastle (I forget the names). But that's all beside the point really, my point was that banning the tool without addressing the causes of the crime will only likely make them move on to a different tool, rather than stop.

A few days after the Newtown shooting, a man walked into a school with a small knife and went around casually cutting off the ears and fingers of 22 small children. Ban knives too?

Again, banning guns does not stop the crime. Instead of school shootings, we'll be saying 'school [something-else]'. This is why I said all of this is just misdirected moral outrage, and why all this discussion about gun 'crime' statistics is meaningless. The majority of gun crimes in the US are done with illegal weapons used by unlicenced users. Banning a certain magazine or semi-autos won't even dent that.

There's a really important problem about why there's so much violent crime in the US (and the UK - which is the most violent country in Europe), but let's all get into a tizzy about AR-15s because it's easier to attack guns than have an introspective discussion about why our families and societies are producing so many psychopaths. :rolleyes:
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What percentage of death in violent crime is by explosive? :lol:

Give me your wallet or I'll throw this semtex at you.

If guns aren't the problem you might as well hand out rocket launchers because rocket launchers don't kill people etc etc

And if the UK is the most violent country in Europe then how come so few people get killed in comparison to the US?

Hint: availability of guns
 
Andrew~ said:
I don't see anything particularly 'wrong' with gun culture. There are perfectly reasonable people (Dr Dwayne is an example) who like guns in the same way there are many perfectly reasonable people who enjoy sado-masochistic sex.

I think the oft overlooked point in all of this is that guns are just tools. Very dangerous tools, but tools nonetheless. The only effect a restriction of guns is going to have is to reduce the usage of guns in these kinds of shootings (professional criminals will be largely unaffected), but what's to stop the types of people who do these shootings from making home-made explosives? Focusing on the tool rather than the actual crime is a serious mistake and it's sad to see people are so intent on it.

Even considering a ban on the kind of semi-automatics like the AR-15, I don't see what they will achieve when it comes to combating the vast majority of gun-based violence in the US which is done by hand guns and small sub-machine guns. So this all strikes me as the kind of misdirected moral outrage that happens whenever something tragic happens.

There is also a sense of irony that an administration which gave guns to Mexican drug cartels is leading the moral charge over gun control. Anyway, banning guns is never really going to happen in the US, but the idea seems sinister to me. All it does is monopolise firearms in the hands of government and criminals; and they may as well be the same thing as far as I'm concerned.

(and yes, I realise how hyperbolic that last sentence was.)
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Spoken like a true gun lover
 
The US is just a more violent society than most others, and would be even if they banned assault weapons and similar and just had hand guns. Obama is right to come out against assault weapons but that is only a small part of the problem. Whether or not he gets his way, the homicide rates by gun will not go down appreciably. That's the depressing part.
 
Wibble said:
What percentage of death in violent crime is by explosive? :lol:

Give me your wallet or I'll throw this semtex at you.

If guns aren't the problem you might as well hand out rocket launchers because rocket launchers don't kill people etc etc

And if the UK is the most violent country in Europe then how come so few people get killed in comparison to the US?

Hint: availability of guns
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err. that just went over his head Wibbs...
 
I was thinking of culture....being white is part of that imo. Many in the South still think it is Yankees imposing 'their laws'...and taking away their guns is re enforcing their beliefs.

EDIT:

thanks Marcello...think you put it very simply and correctly....but there are some nuts who have not got over a Black President....that has nothing to do with where they are from..but everything to do with race.
 
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