Gun laws.

[Clone552]

Actually, a great deal of people blame firearms. But guns are not the issue in those crimes. It's the mental health of the people that committed them. And just because your murder rate is lower, doesn't mean that all murders that occur in America are caused by guns. In '05 only about 9% of violent crimes had guns involved, if I read that right. There is no way that number could have jumped so high as to warrant any kind of backlash against guns. Heck our non-gun murder rates are higher than most European total murder rates. All that means is that there are more people willing to kill in America than in the UK. Besides, we already had a higher murder rate even before the UK had such gun control laws. It's not the weapon, it's the person.

 

[Clone552]

That has nothing to do with the citizen's mindsets and ideas regarding gun control. I was saying you can't just say the policies of one would work in another. If you want me to believe that a comparison between the two is really such a good idea, you need to put forth a better argument than that.

 

[Xhumed]

Actually, a great deal of people blame firearms. But guns are not the issue in those crimes. It's the mental health of the people that committed them. And just because your murder rate is lower, doesn't mean that all murders that occur in America are caused by guns. In '05 only about 9% of violent crimes had guns involved, if I read that right. There is no way that number could have jumped so high as to warrant any kind of backlash against guns. Heck our non-gun murder rates are higher than most European total murder rates. All that means is that there are more people willing to kill in America than in the UK. Besides, we already had a higher murder rate even before the UK had such gun control laws. It's not the weapon, it's the person.

My point was that saying you need guns for protection from criminals is not really true. the truth is, you are more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder. and im not sure what your point actually is- are you saying you should have no gun control because America is full of psychos?

 

[Vaudille]

My point was that saying you need guns for protection from criminals is not really true. the truth is, you are more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder. and im not sure what your point actually is- are you saying you should have no gun control because America is full of psychos?

The truth is? Tell me why I'm more likely to shoot a family member then a criminal? Give me a statistic.

Secondly, I've noticed a lot of people referring to Rednecks here, so let me explain to you.

Contrary to popular opinion, Rednecks don't all own guns, don't all live in trailer parks, and don't all dream of shooting a homosexual in the ass for being gay.

They're actually intelligent, kind people who you must think are crazy because you've never had experience living in their area. The idea that you think all Rednecks are crazy and gun toting is about the same as someone else thinking all blacks are from the hood and will shoot you up if you try to talking to them.

It's plain baseless discrimination.

Ultrajoe: Constantly, mate, you're trying to bring the argument to a personal level and I refuse to take your bait. Unless you can do this civilly, or at least semi-civilly, I don't think you should be posting.

And the deal between comparing Australia to America. Does Australia have serious drug cartel immigration problems they need to reform? Does Hugo Chavez send Australia 4000 jobless refugees every time he gets a little angry?
Did terrorists attack Australia's major city by ramming a plane into a building filled with thousands of people?

No. contrary to popular belief, a great amount of crimes are commit by those illegal and refugee parties who do not pay to become normal citizens and cannot be traced after commiting a crime, not just drunk rednecks shooting a place up. We can thank god there are no terrorists on our soil, though.

 

[Saskwach]

Besides, you can't compare Australia with America. They are different, so banning or reducing guns in America might not do the same thing it did there.

Oh goody, the old "Such-and-such is different to such-and-such, so you can't compare them" argument.

I'd actually say there's a lot of room for comparison between America and Australia. They're both countries that were colonized by emigrating Europeans. They both displaced the natives who were living there before. They both became independent from the countries that settled them. They both have crap beer... No, I think we should compare them

Actually, whether the gun banning here Down Under achieved anything is still under debate:

SMH article quoting a study of homicide rates before and after the gun ban [http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/buyback-has-no-effect-on-murder-rate/2006/10/23/1161455665717.html]

The study. Pretty unambiguous stuff. [http://armsandthelaw.com/archives/GunLawsSudden%20DeathBJC.pdf]

Article looking at the long history of gun control in Oz. Obviously biased but I don't see where the facts are disputable. [http://www.gunsandcrime.org/aussiegc.html]

Even if all these sources are totally wrong (I doubt they can be that far off) I posted this simply because I'm amazed people are quoting the Oz gun banning like many Christians quote the Bible- without studying the damn thing (this is not an attack on Christians; just the dumb ones).

 

[Alliednations]

Actually, a great deal of people blame firearms. But guns are not the issue in those crimes. It's the mental health of the people that committed them. And just because your murder rate is lower, doesn't mean that all murders that occur in America are caused by guns. In '05 only about 9% of violent crimes had guns involved, if I read that right. There is no way that number could have jumped so high as to warrant any kind of backlash against guns. Heck our non-gun murder rates are higher than most European total murder rates. All that means is that there are more people willing to kill in America than in the UK. Besides, we already had a higher murder rate even before the UK had such gun control laws. It's not the weapon, it's the person.

I agree; we wouldn't blame a bomb for killing people, we blame the planters of the bomb. The weapon makes little difference, people were able to kill before the invention of firearms. Serial killers still existed; it's not as if they sprouted up from the ground once they invented guns. Anyone heard of 'Jack the Ripper'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper

He didn't kill people with an AK-47, he killed them with a knife. Although one theory suggests he strangled them first, it doesn't change the fact that people were able to kill before the invent of firearms. We don't outlaw fists or knives because they are able to kill, which is what banning firearms does. Hell, you could kill with a block of cheese if you tried hard enough.

But I do understand the other side of the story. Blocks of cheese aren't the main weapon for many armies of choice - cheese has many uses, and one odd one would be as a murder weapon. The same goes for knives or fists. You won't use it to kill only, it's just a possibility. But with guns, it only kills. There is little else it can do. It could be a hammer, a flashlight, or a night vision tool, but that's stretching it.

It makes sense to put some blame on guns when a person kills, but it is really the fault of the person who used the gun to kill. Guns are just a tool, neutral until used by a human. We could blame the laws that limit access to firearms, but not the gun itself; it is an object. By all means, create gun laws, but if the murderer uses a gun to kill innocent people, its the person's fault, not the gun. The gun is just what he used. A tool.

We don't congratulate the hammer for building the world's tallest scyscraper, we congratulate the builders. In the same sense, we don't shun the water hose for hitting the neighbor in the head with water, we shun the man using the water hose.

 

[WlknCntrdiction]

*Points to Lord of War*

Go watch it.

 

[Xhumed]

My point was that saying you need guns for protection from criminals is not really true. the truth is, you are more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder. and im not sure what your point actually is- are you saying you should have no gun control because America is full of psychos?

The truth is? Tell me why I'm more likely to shoot a family member then a criminal? Give me a statistic.

Apologies, that should have read, "your gun is more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder"
see here: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/111/4/741
and: http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/yourchild/guns.htm

I notice people keep saying, guns don't kill people, people kill people, etc. The gun does help though, surely? mowing a group of people down with a knife isn't particularly easy. And saying there should be restrictions to stop crazies getting their hands on guns- well, aside from the fact that that is a form of gun control, where do you think most criminals and crazies get their guns?
http://www.neahin.org/programs/schoolsafety/gunsafety/statistics.htm#guns (the guns in the wrong hands section)
The questions i ask are: why do you want to keep them so badly? why do you think you need them? If guns were banned completely in the U.S, what do you honestly think will happen?
So far all you've done is suggest that you're a country full of murders and lunatics. It doesn't seem logical that you don't think guns should be controlled, on that basis.

 

[Silver]

Did terrorists attack Australia's major city by ramming a plane into a building filled with thousands of people?

Now what the hell does that have to do with gun control? Would it be better if everyone on the plane was armed and there was a gunfight that caused it to crash? No, not even you have guns on planes. Would you shoot it down before it hit the building? I may be stupid but I don't see the relevance.

 

[Vaudille]

My point was that saying you need guns for protection from criminals is not really true. the truth is, you are more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder. and im not sure what your point actually is- are you saying you should have no gun control because America is full of psychos?

The truth is? Tell me why I'm more likely to shoot a family member then a criminal? Give me a statistic.

Apologies, that should have read, "your gun is more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder"
see here: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/111/4/741
and: http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/yourchild/guns.htm

I notice people keep saying, guns don't kill people, people kill people, etc. The gun does help though, surely? mowing a group of people down with a knife isn't particularly easy. And saying there should be restrictions to stop crazies getting their hands on guns- well, aside from the fact that that is a form of gun control, where do you think most criminals and crazies get their guns?
http://www.neahin.org/programs/schoolsafety/gunsafety/statistics.htm#guns (the guns in the wrong hands section)
The questions i ask are: why do you want to keep them so badly? why do you think you need them? If guns were banned completely in the U.S, what do you honestly think will happen?
So far all you've done is suggest that you're a country full of murders and lunatics. It doesn't seem logical that you don't think guns should be controlled, on that basis.

Unintentional firearm death is estimated to be 2.82% of all firearm deaths.

Thus, I don't understand how my gun is more likely to kill my family then the criminal robbing my house.

Since everyone on this forum has clearly graduated from the College of Foreign People Hating America with a degree in attempting to understand things that go on in another country without ever having experiences them, you should know all about the Gangster Wars of Prohibition.

The government tried to outlaw alcohol, make it un-purchasable. What happened? Entire smuggling rings were formed to import the stuff.

If you look on that piece of history I'm sure you learned in "Why America Sucks, 101", you can tell that completely outlawing something in a country with millions of people will not work.
Applying that to guns is very simple. If the FBI went around searching for every REGISTERED gun in America and put them in a pile to burn, what would that leave? It'd leave all the criminals who buy their guns from secondary dealers, and, gasp, the guns there are not registered. Who knew? A criminal, who commits acts that already break the law, not buying registered weapons!

Silvertongue, you missed my addendum: "We can thank god there are no terrorists on our soil, though."

 

[Vaudille]

Two points:
2. With the might of the US military, it is absolutely imperative that Americans have the right to own guns. If our "fearless leader" decided to take the country hostage and install himself as dictator, do you really think the UN or NATO or anyone else could do anything about it if we didn't have the ability to defend ourselves?

Yes, a bunch of gun toting red necks with .22's will hold back the US military. Though I suppose teens with old soviet equipment are doing just fine (See: Afghanistan)

In Australia, since the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, in which 35 people where shot and 37 other injured by Martin Bryant, the Federal Government has tightened gun ownership laws considerably and as a result, during the period of 1991 and 2001 the number of firearm related deaths in Australia declined 47%. (http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi2/tandi269t.html)

If I remember correctly from a documentary I watched a while back, Australia has something like 20 gun related deaths per year, most of which are police shooting someone. Japan have even less. Why does America have gun deaths in the thousands?

Posts like this truly disgust me. This entire topic is about Gun Control in America, not Australia.

Furthermore, talking about everyone who owns guns as "a bunch of red necks with .22's" is both rude and discriminatory. We have many different guns. We've got 30-30s, 30ot6, Ar-4, .38s, .357s, 9mm, .45s, and .40s. Don't be ignorant by understating the number of guns we're packing over here.

 

[ReepNeep]

In this day an age we simply haven't outlawed guns because war is different.
Who remembers Pearl Harbor? (wierd question to ask.) Let's get our facts straight though. When they bombed Hawaii, they weren't just aiming for boats. Don't be so naive. They didn't give to shits about who they hit. They wanted as many Americans dead. (And we responded, showing that if they show little regard for civillians, we will take them down.)

I'm sure you will pardon me if I call you on your bullshit. I could say much worse about your jingoistic diatribe, but I like to think I have SOME tact. Less than 60 civilians died that day, compared to more than 2300 military personel. Now you tell me what you think that says about their target selection.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a precision strike on military targets with the aim of crippling the US Pacific Fleet to the point that the US would be unable to bring serious challenge in the Pacific.

There were two things that went wrong with it from their perspective;
1: They didn't sink any of our carriers. This is especially important because battleships were nearly worthless by comparison.
2: They underestimated just how stubborn we can be about these things.

They didn't take parachutes, they even had to strip the radios out of the planes and communicate with hand signals because they needed to cram as much gas into the planes as possible to even make the flight. You think they had ammo to waste on non-military targets? The Japanese did plenty of horrible things during that war, but Pearl Harbor was a straight-up professional military operation directed at another country's military. Any attempt to portray it as otherwise is disingenuous.

What we did to Japanese cities near the end of the war was several orders of magnitude beyond anything the Japanese did to us. We basically leveled every major city in Japan, civilian targets or not. We used primarily firebombs specifically because they would start the mass fires that Japanese architecture was particularly vulnerable to. The goal of American air raids was to burn the city to the ground, civilians and all. Add the gratuitous nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and we subjected them to far worse than they ever even had planned for us.

You also seem to talk about 9/11 as if it was the beginning of the 'explosive' relationship we have with that part of the world rather than the perhaps inevitable result of decades of antagonism from both sides, but I don't feel like getting into that one.

Go read a history book. *EDIT* Hell, even wikipedia would be a good start for you.

 

[Usnota]

I do not beleive in gun control at all because, it is a freedom that we as americans can choose to excersize, if I remeber my brilliant histroy teachers lectures, the 2nd ammendment was put into place to give the people some method of protection agasint the govern ment, however, and back then america relied heavily on citizen militas, and u cant fight the brittish military without guns, can u?

My personal belief towards this sitiuation, though is far simpler, have any of u actually seen the people that run our country? I want some type of protection from that! I however don't own a gun, beacuse i am only 15 and my parents are pro-gun control

... And the town that i live in is Temecula, CA, and i hate it

 

[ReepNeep]

I don't think America should pull out, that country needs you there now and if you pull out now it would ruin the nation for decades to come.

I might be a pacifist but i do know a bit about politics and logistics.

On another note, i've always thought the second amendment was there so that the populace could rebel should the government become convoluted, oppressive and bureaucratic.

That is EXACTLY what it intended for. Having citizen soldiers ready when the nation is invaded is a distant concern compared to the very real threat of our own government. The founding fathers had just smashed one dictatorship and were genuinely worried about their own creation growing into another.

 

[werepossum]

SNIP
I am not against people owning guns, I am against them having them in a community. If there are children within 50 miles of your home, you should not have a gun. If a man breaks into your house in the middle of the night, a bat works just as well if you don't walk like an elephant.
SNIP

Just to make up a few examples that could of course never possibly happen in the real world -what if there are four men breaking into your house? What if they have bats too? What if you're in a wheelchair, or a fifty kilo woman with two small children, or elderly?

I have no problem with pacifism, but I have a big problem when people attempt to force their preferred helplessness on me. I don't greatly fear for my safety - for instance, I don't keep loaded guns around the house, although snapping in a clip or dropping a couple shells into a shotgun doesn't take much time - but what about people in, say, Detroit? Statistically you're more likely to die a violent death in Detroit than serving in Iraq. Certainly it would make it harder for bad people to kill you if you had a way to disarm every single person, but then assuming being disarmed didn't suddenly make them good people they'd have plenty of time to do whatever they wanted to do. (It's kind of like New Orleans; people don't call in gunshots because they no longer have any expectation that notifying the police will help. Calling 9-1-1 is for when it's not an immediate threat to you - or for when you have no other choice.)

Another thing - guns do more than kill. Besides being pleasurable for sport shooting and hunting, often simply presenting a gun will deter the aggression. One of our school shootings ended because a teacher ran several blocks to get his legally owned pistol (because of course you can't have a gun on a school campus unless you're a cop or a psychotic killer), then ran back and confronted the gunman who dropped his weapon. Of course the totally unbiased national media, except for a handful of newspapers, failed to mention that little item, preferring to concentrate on the two students who tackled the gunman after he had been disarmed by the armed teacher. Even a strung-out druggie can often recognize that you have the power to hurt or kill him and will move on to easier pickings. When convicted carjackers in Florida were surveyed to find out why they were preying on - robbing, beating up, often killing - foreign tourists, using both guns and simpler weapons like knives and improvised clubs, there were only two parts to the answer: They have money. And they don't have guns. Guns deter predators. Seems like a pretty simple concept to me.

To those who say hunting is not a valid reason to be armed, remember that the same arguments apply to gaming. Kids get all hopped up on violence playing violent video games and watching violent movies, and then they act out that violence on others! Computer games breed violence, and gaming computers use lots of energy and therefore cause global warming! Computers are used for identity theft! Computers are used for child pornography! Why should any individual be allowed to own a computer when you can easily get your excitement and necessary information from the safe, properly monitored computers at the public library?

When you help deprive others of their preferred freedoms, you also move your own preferred freedom up in the queue. Sooner or later, thine own ox shall be gored.

 

[utimagus]

from: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

from: http://www.ngb.army.mil/media/factsheets/ARNG_Factsheet_May_06.pdf

The Army National Guard (ARNG) is one of the seven reserve components of the United
States armed forces. It is also the organized militia of 54 separate entities: the 50 states,
the territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,
and the District of Columbia.
Administered by the National Guard Bureau (a joint bureau of the departments of the
Army and Air Force), the ARNG has both a federal and state mission. The dual mission,
a provision of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Code of laws, results in each Soldier
holding membership in both the National Guard of his or her state and in the U.S. Army
or the U.S. Air Force.

With both of those, only the National Guard is allowed to have weapons as it is comprised of the Militia's of the 50 State and various Federal Territories.

Because the second ammendment has never been incorporated onto the States, they may regulate as they see fit as long as the states support their State militia. Interestingly enough, if the Supreme Court recently had voted to uphold the Washington D.C. legislation that ruling would have no impact on the States as Washington D.C. is a Federal territory and not a sovereign entity. Unlike States which under the Constitution hold sovereignty.