Defend the Second Amendment!

Punish criminals, legalize drugs which are currently banned, don't punish the gun owner.

 

Coyotes fill the woods around here. They attack dogs and cats, stink the place up and make it necessary to put our trash into a vault. Most of the time they are easily scared off. The one that attacked our dog was not until I pulled the trigger. I only had rat shot in the chamber, so it was not a lethal shot. But it got the coyote off my dog and back into the woods.

A gun is a tool. I can murder someone with a pencil. However, I do think it's way too easy to get a gun and I also think that ammunition and projectiles CAN carry sequential numbers for registration. If we know who bought the bullet they pull out of a dead child in Chicago, it would go a long way toward finding the person who shot her.

We have the technology to close up many of the holes in US gun policy without "taking our guns away". Anyone aiming for a complete removal of guns from the US is not interested in compromise. That's why this issue doesn't move. It has to be incremental, not shoved into place. Look where that has gotten us with social policies. People are organic. They should develop naturally. Otherwise it's just a crash diet and all the weight comes back.

 

that's ridiculous. Do you have any idea the number of rounds sold/fired a day?
Hell, we used to go through 500-1000 rounds easy in one day of target shooting.
the logistics and economics of such an endeavor would make it nigh impossible.
what about solid lead rounds or the fact that you can pure/make your own pretty damn simple.

 

I used to believe in impossible. Then I found out about CNC, lasers, Lady Gaga and mass production.

Serializing any mass-produced object is just another step in the chain. Just like printing dollars!

However, I do believe it is impossible to deport millions of criminal border jumpers from the US. That has become absolutely clear to me.

 

Get off of the soap box folks. The people you keep talking about were all mentally ill and it was well known to family and or medical personnel.
The failure of the mental health system is not the fault of guns or gun owners. Decades ago this country decided that people with serous mental illness should be free to run in the general population and not even forced to take medications to control their illness. Blame the mental health system for letting seriously ill people run free without any followup.

 

Wouldn’t it be better to ask why they have become criminals and try and stop people becoming criminals and if they do wouldn’t it be better to try and rehabilitate them?

Wouldn’t it be best to try and manage and regulate the drugs market with the emphasis been on reducing risk and seeing it from a public health perceptive?

How are gun owners been ‘punished’ if the emphasis of gun regulation is about risk reduction?

 

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This is the same old ‘natural born killers’ argument - that it is not the easy access to guns that accounts for the high level of homicides in the US but the violent nature of Americans – that even without the ease guns give to killing, Americans would still kill as many (even with pencils).

[SIZE=11pt][/SIZE]

And this is just a variation on the same theme - that it is not the easy access to guns that accounts for the high level of homicides in the US its mental illness that is the problem, and that mentally ill Americans are just more murderous than others.

The US is not the only developed country in the world that has citizens suffering with mental health problems but it is the one with that has relative ease of access to guns.
Again this is an incredibly weak argument that doesn’t seem to have a rational basis.

And since most mass killings were committed with legally held guns this could be addressed to a large degree by stipulating that anyone wishing for a gun (along with anyone in a gun owning household) would need to pass a mental illness test before receiving a gun and then annually thereafter (as peoples mental situations change) anyone not passing the test in a household would mean the gun’s removal from that household.

 

As I’ve pointed out before there seems to be a divorce between what pro-gunners see as been prudent and rational and what would seem to be prudent and rational.

They don’t seem to want to tackle the causes of the problems that are often behind their desire for guns because as Meagain has noted these gun owners often seem to vote into power the type of people that seem to have no interest in tackling those causes and often seem intent on making them worse.

 

I'm a NE Kennedy liberal and I shoot.

 

[SIZE=11pt]Steve[/SIZE]

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Sorry not sure what a NE Kennedy liberal is but the thing is that I grew up in the countryside around people that owed guns for keeping down vermin and hunting. I was also a member of a gun club and was a fair shot, (shooting rats for pocket money at a local feed store).

As I’ve said before it is possible to get a gun in the UK, many people have shot guns and if you are law abiding and seem responsible it is possible to get a license. It is just that most people don’t feel the necessity to have a gun. I mean what would I do with a gun in the city? Hunting, I’d rather preserve the wildlife we have, rather than shoot it. Keeping down vermin, I think calling a professional exterminator would be more efficient and less time consuming than sitting out on my porch in the hope a rat will show up. As to home defence, well, as I’ve said before there just doesn’t seem to be the US pro-gunner’s level of fear about that here.

 

No of course not. Islamification without vaseline but you're still proud of being mentally and socially neutered and reduced to dihminni.
Thank god some of your people are fighting enemy invasion every way they can. If they make it? I bet they throw their stupid libtards in the drink along with islam.

 

Cheers Meagain

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Steve – would you vote for gun regulation?

 

Actually this is pretty much what I was talking about, trying to use statistics to make points that they don't make. There could be any number of reasons for lower death rates for knives than guns other than the one you are implying, one of which I mentioned earlier, that perhaps because of the ubiquity of knives people are better trained in the proper use and handling of knives and thus have a proper respect for knives from a young age.

Also I don’t if you have noticed or not but there seems to an uptick in stabbings lately, does that mean that guns are becoming less lethal or that knives are becoming more lethal?

 

No. As I pointed out there are any number of ways of looking at the data other than the way you are looking at it, I just gave one of those other ways of looking at it. Statistics are what they are but what they mean is another story altogether.

It doesn't, not any more than some of the other assumptions that are constantly being made.

 

Figures don't lie but liers figure.

 

[SIZE=11pt]Old[/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]But your analysis doesn’t seem to make any rational sense – [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]As pointed out all the following developed countries have knives [and are as equally trained in their use], so why is the USA’s figures for homicides per 100,000 populations so much higher than them? [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]USA 5.9[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]England and Wales 1.6[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]France - 1.6[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]Germany 1[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]Denmark – 1.1[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]Ireland – 1.1[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]Australia – 1.3[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]Canada – 1.5[/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Some argue for some type of ‘natural born killers’ explanation that it is not the easy accessibility of guns that account for the high levels of homicide in the US but that even without the ease of access to such lethal weapons American killers would still kill as many people but just with other things like knives. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]I’m skeptical of that argument because as you can see it doesn’t seem to fit in with what goes on in other developed countries with less ease of access to guns and it seems to suggest that Americans are much more murderous than other people, which I just don’t believe. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Now it is very hard to compare statistics from differing countries but it has been calculated that you are 1.27 times more likely to be knifed in the UK than the US (not killed, knifed)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]But you are 35.2 times more likely to be shot dead in the US than in the UK.[/SIZE]

Now that is what I would expect I mean if you are going to use a weapon for a crime and the more lethal gun is not available then the next choice is probably a knife. But it is the less lethal weapon.

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PS: Indie i know you like what Old says can you however defend it in any way?