Oh, Shoot (Connecticut)Follow

Also, if we decided that everyone should carry a gun for protection, you'd have people like me with a gun. And said gun would pretty much be forced on those people.

I don't care for guns. Nothing you can say and no statistics you can show me will change that. There aren't enough gun classes in the world that will change that, either. I would hurt myself or others, I just know it. I'm old and set in my ways. I don't want to carry a gun to feel safe. I want assault rifles in the hands of the military. THAT would make me feel safer.

I don't want guns banned. I think that's silly. But it's also silly that such a deadly thing isn't regulated more. NO PRIVATE CITIZEN needs an assault rifle.

No one is remotely arguing to force people to own guns. There is a middle ground between not allowing firearms and requiring them.



How about knowing that there are people who are law abiding and do know how to handle guns safely who are carrying them on the street around you, so that should something happen neither you nor most of the population has to know how to or be comfortable handling guns, but will still be protected by the 5% or so who do and are. It's strange to me that you're comfortable with the military being armed, but not with your fellow law abiding citizens (most of whom btw are military or police, or former members thereof).



It's currently illegal (absent ridiculous licensing requirements) for a private citizen to own an assault rifle in the US. So you're safe! Yay!

What's funny is just how often the exact sort of statement is made. It seems quite reasonable, right? Thus, it seems quite unreasonable to oppose it. But the gun control advocates play with the phrases "assault rifle" and assault weapon" in order to make their unreasonable proposals seem perfectly reasonable. They do want to ban all guns. Period. They will lie, cheat, steal, and do whatever else they need to do to accomplish that. If making you think that we haven't banned "assault rifles" helps them pass laws that ban things which aren't assault rifles, they'll do it.

Look at the actual proposals, not the language used to describe them. It's often quite eye opening.

Because the folks pushing for such bans generally have this idea of banning "guns that are scary", but there isn't really a way to define that legally without a ban that hits every gun, even those that aren't scary.



Exactly. There's no way to legally define an AR-15 such that it also doesn't include any random rifle as well. Not without resorting to arbitrary physical characteristics which can be trivially changed to comply with the law. The problem is that they can't just limit total magazine capacity because there are a hell of a lot of "non scary" weapons with fairly large magazines. The sheer volume of 12-16 round magazines for various guns which no one would remotely call "assault weapons", and which very clearly look to be normal hunting rifles and whatnot makes it nearly impossible to achieve the intended goal.

They could try to just put hard bans on magazines, but they'd likely never get them passed. Too many Democrats like to hunt for that to work. At the end of the day, you end out with silly laws designed to appease the nutty anti-gun folks who don't realize ahead of time just how useless the laws really will be. Like all the people who today lament the expiration of the Brady Act. Yeah. Why? Because they've created this myth that it was somehow powerful legislation that was helping prevent gun violence or something. It wasn't, and it didn't, but they want to feel like they're doing some good, so they convince themselves of this, and then when the law expires, they lament it like we somehow just passed back into the dark ages or something.

The Brady Act was passed, and had no impact on gun crime at all. It expired and had no impact on gun crime at all. That's the reality. I just think it's absurd that we may be ignoring the lesson of that law and heading into another round of feel-good stupidity from the anti-gun lobby.

Semi-automatic rifles are not automatically assault rifles. And for that matter neither is the AR-15.


Handguns are much more effective.

Edited, Dec 18th 2012 3:25am by Deadgye

I didn't say they were?

Yeah, like the depressed, mentally unstable teacher who caught his/her spouse cheating the night before who decides life isn't worth living and the little runts in his/her class are better off not growing up to become the kind of ******** his/her spouse is.

See, everything is a hypothetical!

I have to believe that the more guns there are - regardless of their legal status, the more deaths to guns there will be. We have a LOT of guns in this country. We have a lot of gun deaths.

@gbaji, if you want to simply reduce mass shootings specifically in schools then yes, armed guards in every school will probably do that. But in the big picture adding armed guards to a community simply puts more guns on the streets.

I'm not sure what your point here is. You can plug in any scenario and the effect is the same. The more guns we have, the more opportunity there exists to abuse them. Whether the intent is to arm only the "safe" individuals for the "protection" of others, the fact remains that an armed teacher or an armed police officer or an armed mall security guard can still fly off the hook and start shooting. The point stands, then, that arming staff members to protect the children is a bad idea.

Or their gun can get stolen. I don't care how 'secure' something is, if a kid/teen wants it, they'll find a way to get it - kids are sneaky bastards.

If you have lots of guns, someone will always stop shooters.

If you don't have guns, shooters will always rampage with bomb-firing crossbows or something.

Easy-peasy.

Only if it's civilian jamokes running around packing. He didn't seem interested in saving us by militarizing the schools and patrolling the malls with soldiers. I'm starting to think he cares more about the guns than he does our safety

Edited, Dec 18th 2012 8:20am by Jophiel

I've been thinking a lot over the past 15 years or so about why the US has more gun violence than other countries, correcting for gun availability. I think we're a gun culture because of our cultural heritage, for lack of a less pompous phrase, of the rugged individualist. Our fascination for solving problems with confrontation, for solving problems as individuals, for walking like a got-damn MAN, for being a cowboy hero instead of a wussy negotiator, all contribute.

I don't know how you heal a culture.

You don't. It's integral to the big lie of the myth of American capitalism. If you remove the "America is magic and her people are fully self realized ubermenches" fantasy you get a brutal thuggish country who committed multiple instances of genocide, and lucked into a near perfect treasure trove of resources through an accident of geography. That's a much tougher sell as an explanation of why the US is the wealthiest nation on Earth than "American Exceptionalism".