This is the worst post I have read in a very long time. I own guns and have for years. Many of my friends own guns. None of us have any criminal record, nor have any of us ever shot anybody. The statement that guns are mostly owned by criminals is just stupid.
I am very much in favor of gun rights. I own a few myself and do not want to see that right impaired. That being said, if you need an AK-47 for personal protection, you should probably re-evaluate your life situation.
I agree with this. It's weird that there's alot of talk about gun control, yet there are countries who have as liberal or nearly as liberal gun control laws as the US and you don't see the same type of gun violence going on or the obsession with having a gun. America has alot of loose wires in its people, especially the ones who consider themselves normal.
Exaggerate much? The twin towers were taken down by people with box cutters. Thousands died. Perhaps we need to ban box cutters as well
People should definitely have the right to bear arms.....BUT, I believe background checks are necessary and noone under 21 should have a gun license unless they're active military or policeman. I think the real issue and really a separate category I believe is our access to semiautomatic weapons. Unless you are planning to take out a small gang or have a ninja infestation in your community I dont see the logic behind their availibility
I said as far as I've seen all self defense cases don't require extended extra capacity magazines. I haven't read about one single self defense case that saved someone because they had an extended magazine that wouldn't have been accomplished without one. I posted some examples. If you can show me any cases that required extended magazines for self defense then I'll be happy to discuss those. There are also numerous mass shootings where the large capacity magazines were used. VA. Tech Columbine The Giffords shooting The Fort Hood Shooting Long Island Railroad San Francisco Law Offices The Beer distributor in CT. etc. So far you've provided zero examples where an extended magazine was essential to self defense. I'm open to the idea that there might be some, but I haven't seen any. Based on the limited statistics available it's not possible to discuss the standard derivative and mean of all the cases. If you'd like to use that as a cop out to avoid discussing the issue, you are free to do so. I've pointed out specific self defense cases where standard ammo capacity was effective, and mass shootings that used the extended magazines. You've pointed out zero cases where the extended magazines were essential for self defense.
No, its not foolish. You are missing very same point that an earlier poster missed - we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Maybe you believe that we should also severely restrict handguns, and while maybe you are right, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pursue higher restrictions on semi-automatic rifles. Just because handguns, cars, or calories take more lives does not mean we need to ban those and prevent the banning of other things that are less harmful like nuclear weapons, watering the lawn during as much as you want whenever you want, or the use of pesticides like pentachlorophenol. Tell us more about how you know all the is to know about guns and the danger that they pose. Please, educate us rather that leaving us ignorant. You keep saying telling others who don't agree with you don't understand the technical details without providing which technical details you think they don't understand. Instead of telling us, show us. Demonstrate how your superior knowledge about guns helps you see the truth of why semi-automatics should be open to easy ownership. This is unfortunate. I explained my reasoning as to why the right to own semi-automatic rifles can be impaired and I thought we were about to get into a larger discussion about the weighing of rights, but no, that moment has been lost in time, like tears in the rain. You have yet to answer any questions in this thread. You seem to acknowledge that semi-automatic rifles are not appropriate for self defense. So, show me how it is substantially impairing someone's rights to have additional restrictions on the ability to purchase semi-automatic weapons. Obviously you believe the that the right to be able to own and use semi-automatic rifles at the shooting range seems to weigh heavily on the scale of freedoms for you. I personally think that that freedom is outweighed by the right to life of those additional people who have been lost in incidents like this shooting at the theater where someone makes use of semi-automatic rifles to extinguish more life than they would have if they had been using a personal handgun. I could be, wrong, though. So show me how you the rights of the parties. Explain how my lack of knowledge about guns and tactics results in an error in my weighing. Or don't, and just continue claiming that because someone doesn't agree with you that they are ignorant and their ignorance about guns and tactics prevents them from understanding the one true answer.
The 2nd amendment was not about personal protection. It was there so the people could overthrow their government. People back then weren't too keen on the power of government. Those people today would probably be considered terrorists or crazy people today. However the bill or rights has worked for 200 something years so no reason to change.
The whole argument about guns being used as PDW's is silly. If someone feels the need to hunt, then get a single shot rifle. If you want to defend your home, use a shotgun, not a pistol or an AR. That said, any other weapons are merely dangerous toys. I fully support gun collecting as a hobby. That includes fully automatic rifles, silencers, extended magazines, ect ... I don't need any of that to defend myself. Just like some people like fast cars, I don't see why we need cars that go over 80mph.
Ben Franklin himself has stated (I remember reading this quote from a reliable source) that if it were up to him he would rip apart the constitution every 19 or so years to accommodate for all the varying degrees of changes happening around the world. Normalcy changes as time passes. Nothing in this world is ever going to be timeless, some just last longer than others.
The concern here isn't the weapons themselves, but the sudden purchase of all the weapons, massive amounts of ammo, and various chemicals/ supplies to make IEDs. There should have been a red flag somewhere in his preparation to the crime.
You don't understand why should I waste time telling you? They will never be restricted again. Ignorance is bliss. They are awesome for self defense.
Wow. So you would support anybody being able to purchase fighter jets with missiles and heavy artillery? That is what a group of citizens would need to make it of the first 90 seconds of an attempt to overthrow the government. The notion of the Second Amendment being necessary to overthrow the government in 2012 is simply absurd.
You are completely right in saying they will no likely be restricted in our lifetimes, the NRA, just like all well-funded highly focused interest groups, will always defeat the diffuse interests of the many due to contours of our representative democracy. Your position is not based on rights (or at least you haven't explained how you feel it is a based on rights), but rather on an appeal to authority. That's cool. I guess there is nothing more to discuss.
Unfortunately, as with so many issues in America today, the zealots on both sides dominate the debate in such a way that no meaningful middle-ground solutions can even be seriously contemplated, much less adopted.
I have a lot of thoughts about this. Here they are: 1. I would be more concerned with the tear gas, which made Aurora the massacre it was. That isn't legal anywhere for anyone to own and I don't think you'd find anyone in the gun lobby or on this board that will say owning tear gas canisters is protected by the Second Amendment. 2. I can think of plenty of reasons a person might have a very good reason to own an AR-15 or a mini-14 or weapons of this type. I agree that for most they are expensive toys, and don't fulfill a practical role that most sportsmen or target shooters would require. But I've also seen feral hogs on my father's land that were territorial, attacked people and pets, and required multiple shots with large caliber rounds to fall. If some guy in middle-of-nowhere Montana says he needs one, I'm not going to be the guy to argue. 3. I don't see why someone in say, downtown Houston would need one, and I think the problem, as I said before in another thread has more to do with how alienating and impersonal our culture is. It's difficult to receive quality mental health care (take this pill - that'll fix it!), and it's extremely stigmitized if you do. One of the flaws of our individualistic culture in the US is that it breeds socially isolated people. In much the way that any society breaks down into chaos if it misses three meals, people break down if they see enough hard luck without any support. And there's a lot of that going around. All the gun bans in the world aren't going to stop the problem of disenfranchised people blowing that final gasket and taking everyone around them into their personal hell. The lone gunman wasn't some Travis Bickle living under a bridge. This was a PhD student from suburbia. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. At some point, the people around him failed him in some way, if by nothing else, not noticing that something was wrong. I don't have any easy answers, but I suspect that if he was MY friend or brother and started dying his hair red, calling himself "The Joker," spending a great deal of time alone and buying a load of guns, I would suggest that he start a punk band and dress in drag. Or join a community theater. Or consider a career change and find something that made him feel good and let him find some healthy way of getting the attention he clearly craved. I've never met an actor or musician that wasn't at least a bit nuts, but I've also never heard of one that later killed a bunch of children. 4. Taking Farmer Joe's rifle away isn't going to help stop shooting massacres as much as just looking out for the people in your life and being brave enough to say something to someone that's drifting away from functioning in society. It's something that I noticed living abroad that was very different from the US. 5. The US is still very rural and the gun culture isn't going anywhere. It's an understatement to say that any effort to change the status quo won't go over well and any politician outside urban, heavily blue areas stands a poor chance of re-election. People feel very strongly about this, and you'll have a harder time changing anyone's mind about it than you would converting them to a new religion. As I said before, had Al Gore not made gun control a major plank in his campaign, he would have won the 2000 election soundly. The Democratic Party doesn't want to touch the subject with a ten foot pole and the president will be the last person to sign on. Anyway, that's my take. I realize I'm completely an outlier on the subject to either side of this debate, but there it is.
And we aren't talking about tear gas because most people believe that it shouldn't be something that citizens have access to despite the fact that the police force can get access to it, though it not banned in all states (it likely should be because it is a chemical agent that is prohibited in war through the 1993 chemical weapons convention). A question for you since I have not gotten an answer yet, do you think the shooter would have done less damage if he had still used tear gas but had used a personal handgun instead of the weapon he used? I haven't yet received a response from a person who is favor of allowing semi-automatic and fully-automatic weapons and I'm curious as to what their take is. These type of weapons are unnecessary for hunting and just because one dude in Montana says he needs these weapons for killing wild hogs or if say he says, "you know what, I could kill these hogs better if I had fully automatic weapons," I would ignore him because while he likely correct, just because an item has a valid use does not mean that the social downsides do not outweigh. Additionally, relying on statement of someone in support of semi-automatic and fully auto-matic weapons who says he needs them to kill hog, is sort of unfair because the few extra dead people can't speak to say "listen, I might have made it out if he had been using just a personal handgun and had to reload." It is extremely difficult to receive quality mental health care, and even in societies that do provide quality mental health care, you cannot catch every dangerous person before they commit an act. Because we cannot stop them, we should do everything in our power to minimize the risk to life. Hence the whole discussion. Sure, they might not, but if the weapons they acquire are slightly less effective at killing large groups of people, we can likely limit the damage that is done. It might not stop the shooter from committing the act, but it quite likely would save lives once he does decide to blow a gasket and go off. Taking Farmer Joes semi-automatic rifle or fully automatic rifle away from him or even adding additional restraints on his ability to acquire one are IMO well worth the lives of those couple of people who would likely have survived. Once again, this is a facet of our representative democracy. While politically the U.S. is very rural oriented, demographically most people live in the urban areas. The imbalance or rural orientation is quite a bit due to our system which was originally set up to be undemocratic in certain ways - hence why we have a supreme court and a senate. Additionally, due to inherent collective action problems, concentrated well-funded interests of the few prevail over the diffuse interests of the many. Probably, but just because a position is politically untenable does not necessarily make it a bad position (e.g. cutting out high subsidies for corn farming). Neither does the fact that a position is supported make the position a good position (e.g. slavery in the early 1800s) It's not an outlier to this subject, it is very relevant. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
