Shoot a camera, not a gun

[Roger Hicks]

I've never heard of anyone on the left described as gun-loving.

Admittedly it depends on how you define 'gun-loving', but I certainly enjoy shooting and would hate to give up my guns. Equally, I joined the Young Liberals in 1966, when I was 16 (that was when there was a Liberal Party, not today's Liberal Democrats). By American standards, all but the extreme right of the Conservative Party in the UK is pretty left-wing, and there's no US equivalent to the left wing of the Labour Party.

My point, really, was that a lot of people don't just 'buy the package' of (for example) right wing+Christian+gun owner -- though actually, in the UK, 'Christian' is often associated with the left, with social responsibility instead of individualism, etc. A lot of my Tibetan Buddhist friends hold similar views to mine about guns.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Sparrow]

... I wasn't expecting this thread to be still here this morning, but reading through this lot it's been a surprise how well people have argued the point without rancour ...

One thing that struck me was how the US courts have interpreted the constitution, give that it was drafted by William Lambert using a similar clause in the earlier English Bill of Rights, namely "That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law" I wonder if that last bit had been included how things would have turned out in US law, perhaps the "well regulated Militia" would have been interpreted differently.

 

[Roger Hicks]

The design doesn't matter. Killing is killing.

Just because you don't see why I need/want a so called assault weapon doesn't mean I shouldn't have one.

Talk some facts, not feelings...

It might, it might. Perhaps not for you personally, but for some people...

In another post you say, "I'm in America. As long as I can afford it and can meet all the Federal and State qualifications, I don't have to explain why I want what I want to buy." While this is technically true, quite a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of someone who is unwilling to say why he needs or even wants a rapid-fire military weapon.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

I'm puzled by the idea about engaging some lunatic in a firefight in a highly populated area with people ducking for cover all over the place. What scares me about this idea is that a lot of people actually believe they can neutralize the threat from a guy armed with automatic weapons moving around firing at will with a single to just a couple of rounds and not risk hitting some of the ones they try to protect. I personally would be scared, shaking all over and though being quite good I doubt I would hit a moving target in less than 5-10 rounds without bringing other lives in danger. Who knows where the stray bullets end up.

Same here. I am a good shot with rifle and pistol but I don't entertain empty fantasies about Saving The Day With My Trusty Side-Arm. Sure, I might be able to do it. But I don't fantasize that I'd be able to.

If it's going to be assault rifle against pistol, I'd rather have the assault rifle, thanks. And for home protection? Well, how about a double-barreled .410 mole gun loaded with bird shot?

When I lived in California, a lot of farmers liked AK-47s for shooting coyotes. Apart from that sort of vermin control, it's hard to think of many good reasons to own one.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

There are 200,000,000 guns in America. If guns were made illegal, and 2/3 of these guns were turned in, that would still leave a staggering amount left, and those which remained would be left primarily in the hands of criminals.

In America people are not subjects, or simply members of society, they are citizens with rights, and a surprising amount of power and authority. If I as a citizen witness a crime, I have the power and authority to arrest And detain the criminal myself. If I see a police officer or soldier commit a crime, I have the same authority to arrest and detain them. Where else in the world do preople have such rights?

Guns are not a problem, cars are not a problem, drugs are not a problem, people are problems. A gun is an inert instrument incapable of operating itself, just as a car is. It takes a hand under the instruction of a mind to operate these devices. In America we trust people to make the right decisions, freedom comes with a great amount of personal responsibility. If you want an absolutely safe society, you can imprison everyone in rubber rooms, regulate their diet, force them to exercise regularly, and force them to eat with their fingers. But even with all these measures, people will still find a way to harm each other. There would be far less violence, and people might live longer lives, but personally, I would prefer living in the current system.

I now live in Japan, where the guns have been illegal for generations, and where crimes are strictly punished, yet there are stories of murders in the papers every day. Despite a ban on weapons, guns are routinely used in crimes, even the mayor of Nagasaki was killed with a gun not so long ago. The lack of guns simply means people use knives, rope, poison, or blunt objects to kill.

One must remember that in America, the second amendment is written with the same ink and on the same paper as the other amendments, and if it can be struck down or removed, so can the other amendments. As for "a well regulated militia" this is the most misunderstood part of the amendment. Who exactly does the regulating of the militia or military? It is not the president, courts, or congress, but the people themselves. The militia or military is regulated by a powerful citizenry, who's power rests partly in arms. The supreme court understood this, and affirmed that the second amendment is an individual right.

One can argue the America system is broken, but it is not, it is working as it should. Those who would argue otherwise should travel to other parts of the world and see how most of the world lives. America is not a new country, but it now has the oldest unchanged government in the world. There is no such thing as a perfect society, and I have lived in enough countries to know that. You have to take the bad with the good, however painful it may sometimes be. By reducing the bad, you have the unintended consequence of reducing the good as well.

I'll take America as it is, the good, bad, and the ugly, over anywhere else.

Highlight 1: Like many others, you conflate 'control' and 'ban', but your point that there are so many guns in circulation that it would be effectively impossible to get rid of them is undeniably true. That's why I suspect that ammunition control, while imperfect, might be a better bet.

Highlight 2: Most places, as far as I am aware. Certainly in the UK, and apparently in Australia too.

Highlight 3: How many other places have you lived, besides the US and Japan? I mean, I could equally easily say "I'll take France as it is, the good, bad, and the ugly, over anywhere else." I've lived in Britain, Malta, Bermuda, the United States and France.

Nowhere's perfect, which means that the obvious thing to do is to try to get rid of the things that aren't so good -- I can't recommend trying to run a small business in France, for example -- and try to import the things that are good: one of the reasons I left the USA was the absence of anything resembling a National Health Service.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

It all starts with poor parenting and lack of family values.

Video games and violent movies are not the cause for the violence these days.

Hold on. This is an unsupported (and insupportable) assertion. Many would say the exact opposite, on exactly the same evidence. It is not impossible that 'poor parenting and lack of family values' are one contributory factor, and 'video games and violent movies' are another, but it seems somewhat cavalier to dismiss one and state that the other is the ONLY factor.

Cheers,

R.

 

[sevo]

Highlight 2: Most places, as far as I am aware. Certainly in the UK, and apparently in Australia too.

I suppose just about everywhere, save maybe a few (theoretically) absolutist monarchies (maybe Bhutan, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates?) where your life is indeed at the mercy of the king and can be taken by him whenever he chooses, at least as far as traditional rights (that haven't been exercised for a century or more) are concerned.

The right to defend against officials exceeding their legal powers is so much a fundamental constitutional right of post-absolutist societies that even Nazi Germany and Maoist China had it. Where we come to the weak side of it - it does not help an inch against governments that grant their officials the legal right to commit atrocities.

 

[sevo]

I now live in Japan, where the guns have been illegal for generations, and where crimes are strictly punished, yet there are stories of murders in the papers every day.

According to the United Nations, the homicide rate in Japan is 0.03 per million, compared to 0.42 for the US. I can't speak for Japan as my Japanese is too poor to follow their tabloids, but in Germany, at 0.08, or the UK (0.12) media awareness of homicides and violent crimes is just as big as in the US (and the same goes for Liechtenstein, where they have to import their murder stories from abroad, being to small to have more than a murder in a decade) - "stories in the papers" are a poor measure of anything other than the market appeal of the story.

 

[paulfish4570]

quoting UN statistics? now, there's a neutral source ... 🙂

 

[sevo]

quoting UN statistics? now, there's a neutral source ... 🙂

As they are the compiled official data of the members, they obviously are no better or worse than the latter, even if the US refused to pay for the compilation... 😉

As long as you don't use UN data to count human rights violations or similar matters where a government can be expected to lie in its self-representation, they are about as good as can be - in retrospect they often have been better than the US intelligence data, sometimes even when it came to human rights matters...

 

[Avotius]

A big difference is that the Chinese incident ended with 22 wounded children, rather than 20 shot dead children. I think if the guy in China had had an assault rifle or even any gun at all, the results may have been different.

This time they were very lucky. There are often many fatalities in these attacks that happen with alarming frequency.

Dont think there is no gun violence here because there are no (few) guns. When I lived on the other side of town there were 3-4 murders a year in our neighborhood alone, one of them right on the other side of a wall downstairs of my apartment. Far more common is knife murders, and those numbers are skyrocketing out of control. When I came here some years ago I felt perfectly safe walking around outside at 3 am. Now in the last 5 years I dont want to go outside anymore. Things got ugly here...fast. Really fast.

People who are determined to kill others will find a way to do it with guns or without. Guns are easier though.

 

[frank-grumman]

@Roger,

there ya go with that ammunition control bit again. I'd be quite intrigued to learn how you would go about doing it? And why it is that you continue to assume that we here are just target shooters? Targets pose no threat to me, none whatsoever, so why in the world would I spend countless rounds of ammunition putting holes in them? I don't!! That's why my ammo stores will last a life-time (apart from the fact that I don't go looking for people in whom to deposit any 😀 😀) A paper target has two basic purposes: to acquire basic weapons competency; and for folks who are into shooting paper holes, to enjoy themselves. So, lay it on me, sir, propose you ammo control scheme, in full recognition that you know about reloading 🙂 BTW, I love the little bit of France i've seen: Normandy, which left me in tears; Chartre whose charm is remarkable and hospitality to those of us who must apologize for not speaking French is touching, and, of course, Paris is exotic to me, where I've been now for the last three years in row. But I digress...

 

[ColSebastianMoran]

there are doubtless some lives saved throughout the year because someone had a gun; we don't know how many.

But what is undeniable to any rational person, is that that number is dwarfed by killings by accident, on impulse, or suicides. ... snip ...

It probably is too late to put the genie back in the bottle; the NRA are simply too powerful. They even effectively ban the gathering of statistics to study gun ownership effectively.

These numbers are knowable. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta are the world's experts on epidemiology and have the competence to produce reliable statistics.

We should make these choices based on facts, not isolated stories and absolutist positions.

X-Ray, I'm just glad that your story came out on the better side. I also have a neighbor who held a robber at bay because he had a gun in the nightstand.

But, more recently, in our neighborhood, a drunken angry husband killed his wife. Then said to police, "I was only threatening her; the gun went off accidentally." Then they found four bullets in her head. Four kids left with no parents. That's not a good outcome.

We hear good stories and bad ones. Gun advocates and the NRA say guns make us safer. If they are responsible in making that argument, they will support gathering the statistics. Same for the gun-control advocates on the other side. Let's see the facts.

 

[frank-grumman]

@ a number of ya'll who posted here:

Can some of you please explain to me why you are so comfortable with only Police and Military having firearms? I don't know about other countries, in the USA, and indeed on US military bases throughout the globe, sadly until recently even in combat zones, military personnel are stripped of their weapons except when they are a) Military Police; b) on orders of their commander to be armed; c) at the range or shoot-house while being trained.

So, as the terrorist attack in TX three or so years ago demonstrated:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33678801/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/gunman-kills-wounds-fort-hood/

Shucks, the military was disarmed, many first responders were civilian LE. I'd be grateful to to those of you in other countries to explain to me what your military does about that kind of issue.

Second: why are you all apparently so comfortable with Police having firearms? Why? What about Police make them so special. I gotta admire England (and perhaps elsewhere in the UK, I don't know), where of course all the Subjects are disarmed (except of course the criminals 😀), in a rare display of non-hypocrisy, even LE on patrol are apparently unarmed with anything other than what appears to be a baton and/or pepper spray. I do know, moreover, that as recently as 5 years ago, body armor was not a part of their load out. I know that because there was a drive afoot here in the US who had serviceable armor and were trading it in, we were being asked to donate it to the London Police.

So why would/should we trust LE?? Why would we ask them to do a job - which in the moment of their greatest need by the disarmed - THEY CAN'T DO, and yet provide them with the weaponry to do it?

 

[sevo]

Second: why are you all apparently so comfortable with Police having firearms?

I am not. The UK model demonstrates that they could do perfectly well without them - statistically there are less UK police officers killed due to being unarmed than German officers killed in gun accidents and suicides (or to rob their gun).

 

[Sparrow]

I am not. The UK model demonstrates that they could do perfectly well without them - statistically there are less UK police officers killed due to being unarmed than German officers killed in gun accidents and suicides (or to rob their gun).

Perversely, in recent years the police in England and Wales have had stab-proof vests ... and more of them have been stabbed.

However I am, unlike many, not inclined to ascribe cause to effect in such a simplistic manner.

 

[frank-grumman]

These are data I took from the US's National Center for Injury and Disease Control, WISQARS Unit, and just for the purpose of looking at the role played by at least one sub-culture in the US, I have broken out the data by race (here is the link if you'd care to peruse it on your own:

http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/index.html Doggone it, I pasted the direct link here to the data below and when I check it out, it didn't work. Sorry. You'll have to use this link and search through the drop down menus in the left hand side.

for those who don't, these a excerpted from the WISQARS site, homicide by firearms by age by race by gender expressed as a percentage per 100,000 population for the years 1999-2010

Black males aged 15-29 77.9%

White males aged 15-29 26.6%

I choose this age group because it represents arguably the most violence prone range at least in the US

Here are the data separated out across all age groups and combining all races across the same 10 year time frame.

Homicide by Firearm 24.5%

This is a remarkably useful site with only minimal political/ideological bias.

 

[frank-grumman]

Perversely, in recent years the police in England and Wales have had stab-proof vests ... and more of them have been stabbed.

However I am, unlike many, not inclined to ascribe cause to effect in such a simplistic manner.

Aye, perverse it is. Though not surprising for at least these reasons:

A) there is no bit of technology which protects absolutely 😀

B) no technological improvement in protective gear goes without corresponding technological development in the means by which to compromise the "improvement," almost always to the detriment of the prior "improvement" and, sadly, the demise of the person depending upon it :bang:

I'm sure there's a law of the universe which has named that dynamic, but I leave that to others whose pay grade is above mine to name 😀

 

[helen.HH]

Though alot of You may Differ... :angel:

Me thinks T Shirts should be made...
"Shoot a Camera, Not a Gun"

 

[Soeren]

General crimerates in Dk shows a similar picture between etnic danes and second generation ones. Thing is due to racism, social and educational problems second generation danes are having problems getting work, being accepted in society and therefore ecomical troubles as well as trouble in dealing with the general values here. We do have a much lower rate of homocides though. Such statistics in themsevles does not show a specific group to be more criminal just caused by their race etc. but more or less that certain groups in society are dealing more with social troubles like powerty etc than others.
Best regards