Guns, Guns, Guns.
POSTED BY: FREMDFIRMA
UPDATED: Monday, June 30, 2025 05:56
VIEWED: 46757
PAGE 3 of 44
So the Kennesaw law swept corruption out of gubmint, did it? 'Cause that was the point of the discussion: the right to bear arms to keep gubmint in check. Try as I might, nowhere in the Constitution does it talk about the right to bear arms to reduce burglaries. But thanks for playing, and here's your booby prize:
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Next time, try to keep your eye on the target. 
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So Tony, aside from that inane interruption by rappy, I see that you have wisely stayed out where angels fear to tread.
But you did raise an important point: despite our Founding Father's best efforts and most creative thinking, our government has gone the way of many governments. A list of enshrined rights which are presumably the foundation of our government has proven to be no guarantee of... well, anything, really. It's like GW Bush said "The Constitution is just a god damn piece of paper". (Uh, vellum actually, but whatever.)
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Quote:
So what IS the solution?
Big class-action civil lawsuits against the two gun manufacturers by the families of the dead kids and the families of the traumatized kids. I know lawsuits against gun companies haven't fared very well in the past, but I'm confident that if a jury is shown pictures of the 20 6&7 year-olds shot in their little school chairs, that jury might be likely to rule in favor of the parents. Sue, sue, and keep suing. Sue until Glock & Sig Sauer are bankrupt. Sue the gunshop that sold the weapons. Sue the state of Connecticut for giving the mother permits for the guns without any sort of follow-up. Sue the bullet manufacturers. Reckless indifference is rampant in this entire disgusting and pathetic circle of death. Unrelenting lawsuits until THEY bleed to death. Sue 'em all into extinction.
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Quote:Hey Anthony,
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
You just keep saying no when they ask to take your rights away, and stand up for them when someone asks to take their rights away.
--Anthony
This is precisely the problem: NO ONE HERE is ever gonna take your rights away. Not a single soul among us. So, when you talk like this, reasonable people are inclined to think you're not present; like you're stuck in a nightmare shouting "NO, NO, NO!" and we all just want you to wake up and tell us about your dream.
And as to how to convince people that something they despise is valuable, you're framing the issue in the most hostile terms possible. What is it you believe everyone here "despises?" Guns? No. Signy has one. What then? Really, I can't guess what you're refering to here. And if something is crucially valuable to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, why can't you articulate that value to reasonable people? You and Frem are among the smartest guys in a room full of smart guys, but your arguments on the 2A couldn't be more ham-fisted. You're continually losing the argument, alienating everyone who shows the stamina to keep debating you.
Back in the 18th Century, the U.S. could look around Europe and see tyranny after tyranny. We could look at our right to bear arms and the lack of a standing army on our shores as causal links to the freedoms we enjoyed here in America. But all that has changed by now, and radically. Europe has entirely neutered their monarchies. And we have multiple standing armies in this country. So the Framers' arguments have to be tempered by that reality if you're gonna talk to real people living in the modern world.
It might be time for you and Frem to show some imagination and propose changed rather than always defending (TO THE DEATH!) a status quo that doesn't exist anymore. The precident you and Frem keep siting is obsolete.
How's about government subsidized gun training? Local gun repositories where every citizen of voting age could acquire a government issued gun for their personal use as long as they passed a compitency test? Maybe we could have guns installed in our homes like fire extinguishers behind glass. If ownership of a gun is truly an absolute right, shouldn't the goverment supply them to us? I know that if gun training were free and open to the public and the government had a gun with my name on it, I would be more inclined to go to the firing range. You could be pushing for "gun literacy" instead of shouting about how INALIABLE your right to shoot stuff is.
Again, I'd like to propose we think of gun control as a matter of public health. Think of guns as particularly strong industrial chemicals. It's simply not safe to have them lying around the home, so we have laws against that. But with the proper training and permits you can have such chemicals in your home. Why not treat guns the same way?
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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I was too tired last night to make my argument, so here it is now -
GUNS = FREEDOM is as simplistic a notion as one can have.
Historically, if it won the revolution (and that's a big if) it was a historical accident that had as much to do with our French allies and their superior navy, and the British fighting a ground war to hold large territories across the ocean, as anything else.
In terms of per capita gun ownership, Serbia and Yemen are number 2 and 3 respectively. Are they hotbeds of democracy? Tunisia is dead last - I suppose it's successful revolution gets disqualified from the Arab Spring on that account?
Obviously something else is at work achieving and keeping democracy than per capita gun ownership.
When it comes to potential revolution now in the US, the US has the largest military in the world, enough to occupy 800 installations around the globe. The military/ police have far superior arms. There is no large ocean between that government with its military and us. And we'd have very bad luck finding allies - I honestly think a large number of countries would gleefully watch from the sidelines as the biggest bully in the world collapsed in internal disarray. And in addition to military power, the US has its spy/ data gathering capability, its finger on the internet choke points, and it's ability to freeze accounts - indeed halt all banking transactions.
And you think gun ownership is THE answer for getting and keeping freedom.
Leaving history, what more and more people are realizing, with every incident, is that if nothing changes we will get more and more of the same. And that apparently is what you want.
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Gun deaths statistics:-
# 1 South Africa: 31,918
# 2 Colombia: 21,898
# 3 Thailand: 20,032
# 4 United States: 9,369
# 5 Philippines: 7,708
# 6 Mexico: 2,606
# 7 Slovakia: 2,356
# 8 El Salvador: 1,441
# 9 Zimbabwe: 598
# 10 Peru: 442
# 11 Germany: 269
# 12 Czech Republic: 181
# 13 Ukraine: 173
# 14 Canada: 144
# 15 Albania: 135
# 16 Costa Rica: 131
# 17 Azerbaijan: 120
# 18 Poland: 111
# 19 Uruguay: 109
# 20 Spain: 97
# 21 Portugal: 90
# 22 Croatia: 76
# 23 Switzerland: 68
# 24 Bulgaria: 63
# 25 Australia: 59
# 26 Sweden: 58
# 27 Bolivia: 52
# 28 Japan: 47
# 29 Slovenia: 39
= 30 Belarus: 38
= 30 Hungary: 38
# 32 Latvia: 28
# 33 Burma: 27
# 34 Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of: 26
# 35 Austria: 25
# 36 Estonia: 21
# 37 Moldova: 20
# 38 Lithuania: 16
= 39 United Kingdom: 14
= 39 Denmark: 14
# 41 Ireland: 12
# 42 New Zealand: 10
# 43 Chile: 9
# 44 Cyprus: 4
# 45 Morocco: 1
= 46 Oman: 0
= 46 Luxembourg: 0
= 46 Iceland: 0
Devout Keeper of Jayne's Lunchbox
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Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:Quote:
So what IS the solution?
Big class-action civil lawsuits against the two gun manufacturers by the families of the dead kids and the families of the traumatized kids. I know lawsuits against gun companies haven't fared very well in the past, but I'm confident that if a jury is shown pictures of the 20 6&7 year-olds shot in their little school chairs, that jury might be likely to rule in favor of the parents. Sue, sue, and keep suing. Sue until Glock & Sig Sauer are bankrupt. Sue the gunshop that sold the weapons. Sue the state of Connecticut for giving the mother permits for the guns without any sort of follow-up. Sue the bullet manufacturers. Reckless indifference is rampant in this entire disgusting and pathetic circle of death. Unrelenting lawsuits until THEY bleed to death. Sue 'em all into extinction.
^ Great idea. Like cigarette companies.
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THE air in the United States is thick with calls to avoid ''politicising'' the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for ''don't talk about reforming gun control laws''.
Let's be clear: That is a form of politicisation.
If roads were collapsing all across the US, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what America could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port across the US, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation's security measures. If a plague was ripping through US communities, public health officials would be working feverishly to contain it.
Only with gun violence does America respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that's unacceptable. Talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't ''too soon''. It's much too late.
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What follows here isn't a policy agenda. It's simply a set of facts - many of which complicate a search for easy answers - that should inform the discussion that America desperately needs to have.
1. Shooting sprees are not rare in the US. Mother Jones has tracked and mapped every shooting spree in the past three decades. ''Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,'' they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally.
2. Eleven of the 20 worst mass shootings in the past 50 years happened in the US. In second place is Finland, with two entries.
3. Lots of guns don't necessarily mean lots of shootings, as you can see in Israel and Switzerland. As David Lamp from the Cato Institute writes, ''In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a licence to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel 'have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States'.''
4. Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened since 2006. That doesn't include the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting.
5. America is an unusually violent country. But it's not as violent as it used to be. Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, in July made a graph of ''deaths due to assault'' in the US and other developed countries. The US is a clear outlier, with rates well above other countries. As Healy writes, ''The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the US is than other OECD countries … and (2) the degree of change - and recently, decline - there has been in the US.''
6. Gun ownership in the US is declining. ''For all the attention given to America's culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows,'' political scientist Patrick Egan, of New York University, wrote in July. ''Long-term trends suggest that we are in fact currently experiencing a waning culture of guns and violence in the US.''
7. More guns tend to mean more homicide. The Harvard Injury Control Research Centre assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found there's substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you're looking at different countries or different states.
8. States with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence. Last year, economist Richard Florida dived deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, u
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I just wanted to repeat a more general thought that Tony joggled loose. (Sorry Tony, you get tagged with this one.)
Tony posed the thought that our government is a giant clusterf*ck despite ALL of our enumerated rights, and instead of bolstering the right to bear arms as one of those important rights, all he did for me was call into question the efficacy "rights" in general and (by extension) the efficacy of democracy. Because despite all of those rights: free speech, privacy, the vote, right to bear arms and so forth, the government is usually doing something we DON'T want done and neglecting things we DO want done, and quite often doing it secretly.
Whatever it is that we have been using for self-determination obviously hasn't worked- including the right to bear arms. They should work in theory, but in practice... not so much.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard... Religion is good, it's the priests that are the problem or Democracy is a self-correcting system, it just needs time to sort itself out or Capitalism is good in theory, but only fails when it's excessive or If we only adhered to these 'inalienable' rights around the world, we would be fine I could retire tomorrow.
Many simply want to do more of whatever it is they've been pushing... more religion, more rights, more guns, more rich people, more cooperation, more military, or what-have-you. Few seem to have stepped back and really ... and I mean really... absorbed whether those ideas are actually effective in the real world. For example, one of the things that this great list of enumerated rights may have actually done for us is allowed us to believe in the fantasy of "rights" when in fact they don't exist at all.
So guns haven't guaranteed our freedom, and I can point to a whole laundry list of theories that haven't worked. Maybe it's time for us to examine the power structure instead of our fantasies. Who is preventing us from gaining power, and what can we do about it? And please, dear god, not "more guns". Been there, done that to death. Really.
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OT: am I the only one who want's to complete the line, "C'mon, Sal! The Tigers are playin'. TO-NIGHT. Never miss a game...?"
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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