[Archived] Gun Law Debate: Please keep posts civil and conversational

[American Rover12]

In response to

jim ,start a gun debate thread.Like I said i started this as a respect for what happened.

Agreed this isn't a debate on gun law

I've started this thread using these two posts as a spring off point.

That said, stripping a free people of their right to bear arms because the occassional maniac commits an atrocity is poor policy.

Are people in liberal democracies where gun ownership is tightly controlled less free then?

The American proclivity for tying 'freedom' and 'liberty' to firearms is so unbelievably dated.

Going to respond to Rovermatt to get the ball rolling.

Personally, I feel that two main reasons are still in place that have me leaning to keeping the gun rights they way the are.

1. The fact that tighter gun policies will not effect the average criminal or shooting mastermind, but mostly the average home/property protector and hunter.
   
2. The over militarization of the base police forces in this country.
   

Expounding on 2, because 1 is pretty self explanatory, more and more these days you will find that regular town/city police forces are armed to the teeth like swat units. Any given day you can read about raids on homes that wind up in people getting shot and killed by officers, and many times these raids are on the wrong house or made with faulty information! Over time as well, the policy for first responding officers has gone from respond, contain, call backup to respond and charge in guns blazing.

This nation was founded (and not trying to bring up a couple century old non issue) on people standing up to an unjust system and by resorting to violence if necessary. Uncivil? Maybe. But if you take the guns from the common citizen and only the police and military have them, slowly and surely more rights and freedoms will be absorbed by the ruling oligarchy and this nation will become less of a democracy then it farcically appearers to be now.

[jim mk2]

But if you take the guns from the common citizen and only the police and military have them, slowly and surely more rights and freedoms will be absorbed by the ruling oligarchy and this nation will become less of a democracy then it farcically appearers to be now.

You'll have to explain that more fully because it does not make any sense to me.

[Rovermatt]

This nation was founded (and not trying to bring up a couple century old non issue) on people standing up to an unjust system and by resorting to violence if necessary. Uncivil? Maybe. But if you take the guns from the common citizen and only the police and military have them, slowly and surely more rights and freedoms will be absorbed by the ruling oligarchy and this nation will become less of a democracy then it farcically appearers to be now.

I kind of understand what you're saying and in itself the American tradition of resistance to actual tyranny (not the kind Michelle Bachmann is always harping on about) is fairly noble, the country's recent abject foreign policy notwithstanding.

However the argument is essentially the one the black helicopter brigade hiding underground in Montana will espouse. The idea that armed civilians could protect themselves in the unlikely event of the army and law enforcement turning against them is rather naive. In civilised countries all around the world, only the police and military (for the most part) have access to the sort of weaponry many Americans seem so keen on. The citizens of Denmark, France, the UK and Australia are no less free than their American counterparts with arsenals in the basement, nor are they more likely to be wiped out by the powerful elements in their respective societies.

Frankly, the seemingly terrifying menu of shadowy foes that the American right refers to on a constant basis (Muslims, NATO, Obama, socialists, people who can read) to justify their preoccupation with firearms is no more than a series imagined threats created to scare people.

[ABBEY]

GUNS

[Paul]

Quite a lot on this post I have difficulty with or difficulty with understanding.

[*]The fact that tighter gun policies will not effect the average criminal or shooting mastermind, but mostly the average home/property protector and hunter.

How will this effect the average homeowner? Presumably only that he/she will no longer be able to keep a gun? Even allowing for American love of the gun I can't imagine the majority do anything more with their guns than keep them ready to use which is hardly going to impact on their daily lives.

One of the strongest arguments for gun control is you never know who is carrying a gun. For me this is the greatest danger and has the biggest impact on your society. I feel knowing everyone potentially has a gun is likely to make the average decent citizen think twice about involvement with any minor anti-social activity. It almost has the effect of cutting people off from each other.

[*]The over militarization of the base police forces in this country.

Expounding on 2, because 1 is pretty self explanatory, more and more these days you will find that regular town/city police forces are armed to the teeth like swat units. Any given day you can read about raids on homes that wind up in people getting shot and killed by officers, and many times these raids are on the wrong house or made with faulty information! Over time as well, the policy for first responding officers has gone from respond, contain, call backup to respond and charge in guns blazing.

You do realise what you have written? Firstly you effectively state American police forces are out of control - shoot first ask questions later. By implication you seem to suggest citizens should carry guns to protect themselves from potential police raids? TBH even if you own an AK47 by the sound of it the police will simply react more powerfully.

I can't help feel your second point is a very strong arguement FOR gun control. American society having apparently reached the point when the public has to be armed to protect itself against the police. Glad I live where I do.

But if you take the guns from the common citizen and only the police and military have them, slowly and surely more rights and freedoms will be absorbed by the ruling oligarchy and this nation will become less of a democracy then it farcically appearers to be now.

If I've understood this correctly, and I have to concede I'm struggling with your whole arguement, the public should be armed to control the police and the military. The arguement is futile, the public could never take on the authorities.

If gun ownership has replaced the vote as the democratic process then America is in deep trouble. I can't help but feel the public should use the power of the vote not the gun.

[Jeru tha Damaja]

The problem with that being that the democractic process changes very little. Voting in America gives you the choice between the centre-right and the right.

Neither of the two choices particularly represents the public now. In the past 30 years the good folks in charge of the financial industry have gotten richer and been able to use that wealth to acquire political influence to the point where to be elected you practically have to be sponsored by people from this small circle of society. If you want to be elected then you need their money, so once you get elected you'd better represent their interests or you won't stand a chance of being re-elected. As wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of fewer people the politicians have been driven deeper into the pockets of this small, self-serving group.

The parties field the candidates that can raise most money for the party coffers and once you're in Washington you only get onto policy commissions by being an extremely senior member of Congress or having a lot of cash to contribute.

As a result, politicians tend to come up with a package that serves their financiers first and then appeases the people second. With that manifesto drawn up they go across the country to tell the people what they plan to do when, in a functional democracy (the like of which has never actually existed), the people would decide what they want and the politician would listen instead of giving endless speeches. But the way things stand the elected officials spend 3 years doing what is best for those who bankroll their careers and then in an election year they pick an issue they think is close to the hearts of their electorate and rally around it to ensure their PR machine has enough good material to work with in the next campaign.

Incidentally, one cash rich lobby group that does represent a fairly popular cause is the NRA. I’m not sure on current figures, but I remember seeing that they had 6 million members a few years ago, and they spend an inordinate amount of money on influencing elected officials, most of which pays simply to keep guns off the agenda.

If you take recent history for an example, politicians have been very concerned with the bail out of the banks and cutting the national deficit. These are not concerns for the average man on the street, nor should they. The free-market philosophy that America was built on says that if banks make a mess then they should be allowed to go bust and more efficient institutions will take their place. Instead of this, we found that the banks were rescued by taxpayer money while the actual taxpayers suffered the consequences.

The chief economic concern for Americans is unemployment. There are not enough jobs to keep everyone in the standard of living to which they have become accustomed. So what does the US government do about this? They continue to give tax relief to companies that create jobs in India and China (an opportunity exploited by presidential candidate Mitt Romney), they bail out major industries only to put them back into the hands of those who disastrously mismanaged them only a few years ago, then watch as the employees are cut loose and the assets are sold off. None of this helps the public.

Putting a public healthcare system in place would create the number of jobs and tax revenues that would balance the budget in no time, but Obamacare falls way short of that and still faced obstacles that almost killed the proposal, requiring a Supreme Court decision on whether or not the tax that was proposed to pay for the scheme was constitutional.

Updating the national railway networks would create a massive boost to the economy if they acted on it swiftly and undertook to use only American suppliers and contractors. However, progress on even the line from Washington to New York has been painfully slow and the logistics for it were initially outsourced to Spain.

The America where everyone has the same opportunities and anyone could make themselves into a millionaire has been replaced by an America where a million isn’t enough and the top end of society, the real rich bit, has fallen into nepotism. The industries that have left the public struggling to carve out a dignified existence for themselves are the same ones that are insured by the government, so they pay themselves huge bonuses and when their gambles result in catastrophic losses they just make their way back to Capitol Hill with their caps in hand once more.

What can the average American do about it? Not a lot. Of course, there’s always Occupy, but the staggering number of arrests at these peaceful protests across the country (over 200 in the first 6 months) does lend itself to the idea that the authorities are overstepping their mark. I believe one woman in Sacramento was arrested for throwing flower petals.

Does arming the public help? Not even a little bit. David Koresh found out what happens when you have toys that the ATF doesn’t approve of, and the heavy-handed policing of that incident should be an indicator of what would happen if the American public decided to stand up and “take back their liberty”. Picture Syria on steroids. Assad can only fantasise about the kind of hardware the American military could turn loose on its lightly-armed public.

However, despite the hopelessness of actually using their weapons against the people who represent the biggest obstacle to them, Americans will not part with their guns. They’d insist that if they can’t protect themselves against the authorities then they at least need to protect themselves against each other. Never mind that if the criminals didn’t find guns so easy to get hold of then the property owners wouldn’t need guns to defend themselves. If George Zimmerman had felt a little less certain of his ability, indeed duty, to police his neighbourhood then he’d be a little better off and Trayvon Martin would be much better off. You can dismiss that as just one case, but actually it’s just the one that happened to make the news because of the racial interest, in truth there are plenty of these incidents.

The bottom line is that guns are not especially good for society, especially one as divided and paranoid as America, but they give people the illusion of control that stops them from realising that they’ve been disenfranchised on so many levels. Besides, the agenda-setting elite are safe in their secluded communities, it's mostly just poor people killing other poor people, so who cares?

[Baz]

To me it's pretty straightforward. More regulated gun distribution = less gun crime.

It won't stop the more determined like the guy in USA, but may stop those having a bad time shooting people without stopping to think about it.

For those incidents like last week you need to get proper psychologists in to find out why it has happened, and try to learn lessons from it. As Jeru has said, it's mainly poor people killing other poor people in the USA, so poverty may be the common link, but it also could be a lot of other things too. There may be missed trigger points in the guys past that needed formal assessment of his mental health too, that meant he should never have got a gun licence even under current legislation (I'm not sure he had one anyway).

In the UK there was a massive outcry when the Brazilian guy was killed by the police straight after the London Bombings, you just don't see that in the US, that can only be because it's not an exceptional event.

[speeeeeeedie]

AR is right about the police turning into mini armies. They received oodles of cash after September 11th and decided theat the best way to stop those pesky terrorists was to buy enough weaponry to win an African civil war. I remember a case where I live when the local plod burst into some bloke's house and shot him dead. He'd been fingered for stealing a play station but because he lived close to a school they went in all guns blazing. One apology later all was well. No one lost their job over it. I do disagree that people are arming themselves because of this issue though.

Right wingers do like a good fear story, and like to feel safe. Gun purchases went through the roof after Obama was elected.

I think gun killings have been dropping over the years but it's still nearly 10,000 per year. My guess is that the vast majority of those live at the lower end of the income scale regardless of race. The same type of person that doesn't think before doing something. Why not only allow people who earn above $X per year have a gun. It might help.

[Baz]

AR is right about the police turning into mini armies. They received oodles of cash after September 11th and decided theat the best way to stop those pesky terrorists was to buy enough weaponry to win an African civil war. I remember a case where I live when the local plod burst into some bloke's house and shot him dead. He'd been fingered for stealing a play station but because he lived close to a school they went in all guns blazing. One apology later all was well. No one lost their job over it. I do disagree that people are arming themselves because of this issue though.

Right wingers do like a good fear story, and like to feel safe. Gun purchases went through the roof after Obama was elected.

I think gun killings have been dropping over the years but it's still nearly 10,000 per year. My guess is that the vast majority of those live at the lower end of the income scale regardless of race. The same type of person that doesn't think before doing something. Why not only allow people who earn above $X per year have a gun. It might help.

Poverty doesn't mean a lack of intelligence.

[Mike Graham]

I was at a BBQ in Washington State (Richland) last month.

The guy got out his gun collection which was over 50+ ( I have seen similar in the States on a number of occasions) and the 8 of us had a bit of fun shooting dingoes and other assorted wildlife. The guy also had 2 concealed guns in his house, one in his car glove box and one on his body.

I asked why, he thought it was one of the most crazy questions he had ever been asked! "Because I can, it is my right, and I will do whatever I need go defend me and my family and any robbing b'tard will have their brains blown out."

[American Rover12]

Some absolutely wonderful questions and commentary in here. A ton of stuff to read/ look over and respond to so it might take me a few days to post my full thoughts and responses to people who quoted me specifically. Also wanted to mention that Jeru's post is simply wonderful and took a lot of what I would have had to explain and put it in much better terms. Thanks so far for the discourse and keep it coming.

[thenodrog]

But if you take the guns from the common citizen and only the police and military and the criminal fraternity have them, slowly and surely more rights and freedoms will be absorbed by the ruling oligarchy and this nation will become less of a democracy then it farcically appearers to be now.

Corrected for you..... And there is the rub, make gun laws all you want but they will only be adhered to by those who live within the law of the land. In a nutshell anybody who pretends that gun laws work is seriously deluded. Despite very stringent gun legislation imposed on the general public there appears to be a shooting in Lpool / Manchester on an almost daily basis these days. For any law to work they must be enforceable. So what do the police do? Ban a few people from carrying an empty coffin through Brig and have a clamp down on traffic breaking the speed limit in 30mph areas.

[speeeeeeedie]

Poverty doesn't mean a lack of intelligence.

Baz, I never said it does. My non too subtle point was that, especially where I Iive, shootings tend to occur within low income areas. Either in town or the sticks. Some of it is cultural, some of it is bravado.

To me, as long as there are vast areas of vacant land for people to hunt on guns will be a part of life. Hunting creates jobs which makes people money, and in the USA cash rules.The downside of this is that some paranoid nutter does have the ability to arm themselves to the teeth, and psycho's can commit vile crimes.

[SIMON GARNERS 194]

A friend visited America a few years ago and out of curiosity called into one of the many arms dealer shops while there,he stated the sight of a kid, not more than around 12, 'trying out' and cocking a semi-automtic rifle scared the shyte out of him... he said the choice of weaponry on sale was horrific

You cant argue against a bullet........

[Baz]

Baz, I never said it does. My non too subtle point was that, especially where I Iive, shootings tend to occur within low income areas. Either in town or the sticks. Some of it is cultural, some of it is bravado.

To me, as long as there are vast areas of vacant land for people to hunt on guns will be a part of life. Hunting creates jobs which makes people money, and in the USA cash rules.The downside of this is that some paranoid nutter does have the ability to arm themselves to the teeth, and psycho's can commit vile crimes.

It may not be what you meant but this is what you said....

"

I think gun killings have been dropping over the years but it's still nearly 10,000 per year. My guess is that the vast majority of those live at the lower end of the income scale regardless of race. The same type of person that doesn't think before doing something. Why not only allow people who earn above $X per year have a gun. It might help.

Implying those at the lowest income levels don't think before they shoot someone.

anyway, I take your point about the hunting situation. In the Uk you can apply for a gun licence, and are fully vetted by the police beforehand, you are also asked to prove you have your gun locked away securely ( in a metal cabinet bolted to the wall), or kept at a gun club. I also think that in the UK you wouldn't be able to buy semi automatic weapons too. Is that not something that could be done in the USA?

[speeeeeeedie]

Baz, without getting into a philosophical discussion on income v. intelligence I do think that people who earn less are more likely to shoot someone. There was a case where I live only the other week. 6 lads (16 to 18) have been arrested for killing a 60 odd year old Chinese food delivery driver. Why? For a laugh. After they shot him they took his food and ate it. Sickening. But they are too stupid to understand.

I have no idea what it takes to buy a gun, the Americans on here might know more. Different states have different rules. You may have to wait a few days so they have time to run a background check on you. I do know that George Bush Jr. let an automatic rifle ban expire in 2004 hence Rambo's everywhere started buying up stock just in case they get banned again. What people do with them though is anybody's guess (aside from shoot people in public places) as you can't shoot animals, there would be no meat left.

[purplegrover]

Since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australia)) gun crime in Australia has fallen significantly. After that massacre, the government cracked down on guns, did a forced buyback and destruction, and implemented severe gun laws.

Yes, criminal elements will always find a way to own guns, and there will always be the occasional shooting (usually bikie related), but personally, I feel much safer walking down the street knowing that here, any angry marginalised 18yo @#/? who is ###### off at the world because he can't get laid, can't walk into a shop and buy a gun.

It is not the 'criminal element' that goes on shooting sprees. Its loonies like Anders Brevik, the 'Joker' and in Australias case, Martin Bryant.

An american friend was laughing the other day because headline news in Sydney was a driveby shooting in which bullets were sprayed into a house (drug related bikie crime). No-one was killed, no-one was even injured.

In America, he said, even murders are so common they wouldn't even make the news, let alone a drive-by with no injuries....

I have all the freedoms that Amercians have. And I don't need, or want a gun. Thankfully.

For what its worth.

[thenodrog]

In America, he said, even murders are so common they wouldn't even make the news, let alone a drive-by with no injuries....

Is it my imagination? I seem to recall in my youth a murder in Bristol or Nottm or Newcastle for example would have been front page news for days. Now some random murder in Blackburn / Darwen / Burnley / Preston freqently does not even make the front page of the LT.

[jim mk2]

Is it my imagination? I seem to recall in my youth a murder in Bristol or Nottm or Newcastle for example would have been front page news for days. Now some random murder in Blackburn / Darwen / Burnley / Preston freqently does not even make the front page of the LT.

Rubbish. There are only about 500 - 600 murder in the whole of Britain each year and the rate is declining every year and because it is a rare event each one is reported fully. You need to have a think about your stance about on this.

Read this

http://www.channel4.com/news/uk-murder-rate-falls-to-its-lowest-for-almost-30-years

[Guest]

I thought America struck a pretty good balance with Clintons ban on assault weapons and the deal set up with Smith & Wesson to provide trigger guards with all new guns sold.

Surely Shotguns and handguns are ample firepower to defend your home? (Don't even get me started on how flamethrowers are still legal).

Unless your home invasion is similar to Tony Montana's, do you really need an Uzi which fires 600 rounds per minute?

It seems to me that the people who buy assualt rifles elsewhere in the world are like men in the UK who buy Burberry baseball caps. Why not just arrest them at the cash register and save the cops the time and trouble?

[thenodrog]

Rubbish. There are only about 500 - 600 murder in the whole of Britain each year and the rate is declining every year and because it is a rare event each one is reported fully. You need to have a think about your stance about on this.

We must be a nation of poor shots then..... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1576406/28-gun-crimes-committed-in-UK-every-day.html

[jim mk2]

We must be a nation of poor shots then..... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1576406/28-gun-crimes-committed-in-UK-every-day.html

Dated 2008. You're living in the past as always.

[LeChuck]

Gun sales soar in Colorado.

So, according to some, that's a good thing...right?

It's not difficult to see why a lot of the world are anti-American. I'm not one of them at all, but it's an incredibly frustrating and confused place sometimes.

[jim mk2]

I have to say I love visiting the US but some of their "values" are confused to say the least. The gun culture and death penalty are two reasons why much as I like the US I could never live there.

[SIMON GARNERS 194]

Your typical 'one stop gun shop'......Heckler and Koch MP5SD your's for just £323.

http://www.davidsons...one&sight_class_

Have a nice day folks!