Whoa! That was a pretty bold interpretation of what I said!

I don't currently have a gun, but am in the process of getting lisenced. When I do have one, I have no intention of carrying it and if I did, it would be heavily concealed, as the local laws say it should be (thereby eliminating the possibility of you mistakenly thinking of me as a threat). I would also never carry a gun on school property.

All I was saying is that sometimes it's nice when the good guy has a gun.

As some background (this is the most I will ever talk about my political beliefs here):
I'm not some extreme right wing nut job - or a crazy left wing nut job. I fall dead center of the political continuum, am registered No Party Affiliation, and voted for Obama.

hahahahaha

It was a SURPRISE party for thoe creeps !!

I don't think so - but I think you might have added a little colour of your own to my comment.

Whilst I know you are getting a gun, that wasn't what I was thinking in my response.

Just as you didn't refer to your imminent gun ownership in your comment, I too was talking hypotheticals.

Gun ownership for any reason other than recreation (which if I remember rightly is your main reason for getting one) heightens the problem, it doesn't lessen it.

It's all very well to say that the problem was solved by someone owning a gun in this case, but really the problem was caused by people owning guns in the first place.

Take away the first round of guns and the second becomes superfluous.

Okay, putting all of this gun debate aside (which I don't feel like getting into today) I have to say that there is something extremely fishy about this story. I have to say that I don't buy it.
Why would the suspected robber flee the scene screaming for help and to call the police? I realize that he was shot but he was about to rape and murder people. Seems to me that he would try to avoid the authorities. Secondly, the man who claims to have been the victim didn't seem that surprised when he was told where the one suspect lived. His reaction seemed very contrived to me.

Maybe I am just a cynic.

Crimes of passion will occur with or without guns, you know this. I'm not going to argue gun control with you. My personal belief is that legal gun ownership should be limited to those who have not committed a felony and can be found to be mentally competent. Even with these provisions I'm sure gun crime will occur, just as it does in YOUR country where legal gun ownership is next to nil, but criminals still use and obtain guns. My thoughts on gun control also run deeper, to how citizen firearm ownership is a last defense against intrusive and over-reaching potentially tyrannical government. Likewise I'm not going to argue THIS point with someone whose country has happily allowed their erosion of civil liberties to the point that they can be expected to be monitored by camera anywhere on a public street. Rare is the loss of liberty by coup or overwhelming force, more often it is the slow and stealthy methods of incremental limitation, distraction, apathy and the creation of a culture who thinks it can't happen to them, or in their country.

Absolutly. 25 Years ago. There have been more murders in the city I live in than ever before.


I would prefer the society I grew up in. But If I want to live near my famliy I am forced to stay near by.

How many guns is too many?
Pardon my editing here... I tried to answer fast...

This.

We don't have a gun culture here in Ireland, really. Obviously there are guns - and actually the number is increasing - but all parties are anti-gun-ownership, right and left wing, so it's not an issue of politics for me.

Research just shows, consistently, that tighter gun control means less gun crime. It's not a surprising statistic, let's face it. If we remove the guns from the bad guys, we don't need to arm the good guys. America seems to have a culture of almost paranoid self-protectionism in this regard which I think is seriously misguided and deeply dangerous.

People equating strict gun legislation with Hitler and Stalin are adding nothing to the debate at all. "Constructing a highway, are we? You know who else constructed highways?" etc.

But guns have the potential to make them much, much worse.

Lucky you're not going to argue with me there because it would be very short. My feelings are similar. I think that the only issue we would have is usage. There's no reason for a person to have a gun cocked and locked in their home, to carry it about their person in public or to take it to a party.

Can you imagine what kind of person turns up at a party with a gun? If someone turned up to a social gathering at your house with a gun would you let them in?

I don't know where you get that idea, but it's wrong. There are strong restrictions on hand guns, certainly, but those are laws specific to hand guns, not other types.

To a much lesser degree though.

Hate to break it to you, but that rules out this discussion with all of your countrymen. You can't seriously believe that your "last defence" has had any effect, or that your country is in any different position. In fact, my experience (which I will admit could be called anecdotal) is that the erosion of civil liberties in America is far worse than in the UK. There may be more cameras here* but I've never experienced the intrusive nature to which they are used in LA here. Also, there's not an amusement park in the land here that would entertain the notion of taking the fingerprints of visitors. I'll give you three guesses as to which country that happened to me in.

And while we're on the subject, is all that presenting of photo ID for absolutely everything strictly necessary.

Bottom line, yes civil liberties have been eroded in the Western World, but that's the entire Western World. Don't kid yourself for a second that America has escaped or that your "well armed militia" has presented any kind of barrier to the erosion of your civil liberties by your government.

I'm thinking that by now you'll have realised that these words apply to you as much as to anyone else.

This is straying quite a way from the topic at hand though. The truth of the matter is that guns begat guns and the more you have around the greater the potential for trouble. This is born out by every single statistical source on the matter. This one story is an exception and by its rare nature detracts nothing from the argument against such free and easy gun possession.



*A false impression anyway - the implication is always that the cameras are all under government control. In truth this number includes all the security cameras in shops, train stations, pubs, clubs and other privately owned premises. These cameras are not at the disposal of Big Brother.

I go for weeks on end without appearing on a single camera and I'm not uncommon in that. Don't believe anything everything you read in The Daily Mail - they thrive on an atmosphere of fear and paranoia.

I wasn't talking about geography. The city itself hasn't changed. What I was getting at there was that you seem to have a quiet acceptance that it is inevitable that the world should turn to crud. I wasn't suggesting that you move away but that you wonder about how you can make the place in which you live the kind of place you want to live in.[/quote]One.

Once you get that first one, that's when the problems start.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that no-one got killed in fights before guns, but you bring in that first gun and it's only going to get worse from there.

I just want pock (and you other non-Americans) to know there are Americans (Texans, even!) that believe we are absolutely failing on the gun-control side of life.

... Just please don't tell my neighbors. They might shoot me.

I would hazard a guess that the majority of American (including me) would agree with you.

Don't worry - I've been to America on more than one occasion and met many Americans and been constantly aware of how few of them tried to shoot me.

Both of my parents have legal carry permits, and carry concealed firearms everywhere, including to my children's birthday parties and first holy communion. I have never really given it a second thought. 11,000 gun crimes occurred in the UK in 2005 43% of them by handgun from the statistics I could find. I DO think our "well armed" militia weighs on the minds of all of our politicians, judges, and police, be that good or bad. Knives are the most popular tool of killers in your society, and people get beaten to death more often, in the States...we are just more efficient. Our armed law abiding citizens are more prepared to defend themselves from violent attack. BTW is it a charge of your police to provide protection for the masses or to protect every individual? In the US the police are not responsible for personal safety, and as I see it if you are responsible for your own safety it is a travesty to not allow a person the best means to protect himself.

I'm not sure what chills me more - that they thought taking guns to a birthday party/first communion was OK, that you let them or that it doesn't even register in your conscious. That, brother Blur, is truly terrifying.

I did this before in a similar discussion with 2Many and can't be bothered to find the details right here and now but if you focus on just knife crime, then America has that one sewn up too. There are more fatal stabbings in Florida per year than there are in the whole of the UK. And the population of Florida is less than the UK.

I suppose that it didn't occur to all those with knives who were in the mood for stabbing that their victims might have a concealed gun.

Which sort of negates the personal defence argument I initially commented about.

I presume when you were looking for that figure you stumbled on this article and chose the larger number to give the spin you wanted. In the year you cite 49 people died as a result of being shot in the UK.

I don't believe that the number of gun owners in the US has much more bearing in the minds of your politicians than in the context of gun crime.

People (as a whole, not just in the US) are too complacent. Church is no longer the opium of the masses. It has been supplanted by consumerism and celebrity culture and they are far more effective at keeping the people quiet than tub-thumping preachers.


Just as the less law abiding ones are more prepared to perpetrate violent attack.

My understanding is that their job is to uphold the law, a function that is determined by situation, not something that can be laid out in black and white.

The way I see it, in that situation you find yourself locked into a spiral of weaponry one-up-manship. It's clearly not the case that civilian gun ownership reduces violent and armed crime - the suggestion that criminals will think twice about attacking someone in case they are armed is pure nonsense. The opposite is true. Jeb Bush's attempt to reduce gun crime in Florida (again) by promoting personal gun ownership caused a 20% increase in gun crimes in that state.

All that happens if you arm yourself is that the criminals will arm themselves better.

At the risk of becoming repetitious, when you have too many guns, more guns is not the answer.

My parents are both responsible, well trained, permitted carriers of concealed firearms. The reason I CHOOSE not to carry or even own a firearm is I have seen the burden THEY carry as people prepared to use deadly force if the situation arises. Constant vigilance makes a person jaded, and paranoid, and that is not how I choose to live my life. I've had a gun pointed at me in stupidity, and in anger, I managed to talk my way out of it. If I HAD a gun...would I have used it? Probably not, the situation did not call for deadly force, although I probably would have been justified in using it. That constant weighing of whether a situation calls for force and if that force would be justified is not something I want to bear. In BOTH of our countries the chance of being involved in violent crime (depending on your lifestyle) are pretty low, and for me not worth strapping on something that burden my mind with the potential of ending a life at any given moment of every day. Although you did not state that you believe that a solution to having too many guns is to reduce guns, by your repeated statement of the solution to too many guns "not being more guns" I will accept that you believe that guns should be taken away. In this we disagree. The BIG difference between us is that if at some point in our lives we are struck by the terrible taint that is human on human violence and feel it necessary and prudent to defend ourselves with a gun, I can and you can't.

Appologies if I was unclear about what I thought was a bit bold. I'm posting from my iPhone so when I quote, if I want to be selective about what I quote it takes a while to delete the excessive portion of the comment.

I was objecting to your summary of my entire comment with the "cold dead fingers" mentality, as that is far from my stance. If guns were to be made illegal, there would be no prying. I'd turn in my gun, no questions asked. Hell, I might even vote for the legislation, because guns probably should be illegal. Seriously. They're dangerous and humans can't handle the responsibility.

Agreed. Completely. Problem is that while law abiding citizens with legal registered firearms would turn them in, there's no way to get the illegal ones from from the gang bangers on the street, and they sure as shot aren't going to turn them in voluntarily. So we can eliminate a lot of crime committed with legal firearms, but then how do the gunless "good guys" protect themselves from the criminals - who now know you no longer have them. It would give illegal gun-owning criminals more power than they ever could've dreamed of.

It's for this reason that I support responsible gun ownership and useful gun control. What I feel they should do is fire every gun (in the factory, before shipping) into a block of ballistic gelatain and save the fired slug. They should then scan and digitize the outside circumference of the slug, creating a searchable "fingerprint" of every gun sold. It would be tied to the serial number. This way, when a crime is committed, they could determine the serial number of the individual gun used in the crime (assuming it was fired). From there, if the indivdual had transferred the gun illegally, it could be tracked.

That's a twist in what I'm saying. You make it seem like I think guns should be removed by force. A reduction in guns and removal of guns are not the same thing. What is required is an attitude shift.

As far as gun control laws go it's only because they appear to be necessary that I think they have merit. I do think the controls here are unnecessarily draconian in their nature - like so many knee-jerk laws that have been introduced on the urging of the popular media it addresses the symptom and not the cause of the problem.

(Interesting fact, fact fans - the commission that investigated the implications of the Dunblane massacre counselled against the handgun ban that was introduced as a result of that incident)

I hope that situation never crops up for either of us (or anyone else reading this). Your own personal choices mean that you can't really use a gun either, just by dint of your own rejection of the option (and lest we forget that is the choice made by the majority of Americans when presented with the option too), but I can see your point. I am very aware of how lucky I am that I'm very rarely at risk of being a victim of gun crime (or any crime - as a wise man once said of this fair and pleasant land "Please... This is Hobbiton and I'm Bilbo Hicks").

But this is all part of the spiral. You're wanting the option to carry a gun in case someone comes at you with a gun but if less people have guns then less of them will be coming at you brandishing them and so you have less reason to carry one yourself.

Ultimately guns are tools and just like a hammer, chain saw*, or as you mentioned earlier a knife, a tool is inherently neither good nor bad. It's how they are used that make their outcome good or bad. It's the old "guns don't kill people, people do" sentiment, but there is a truth to it. It might be because it's 2:30am and I'm beginning to feel foggy that I say this, but perhaps the ultimate solution is not having less guns, or more, but to address the things over which people shoot each other. Sort that out and they could give a Desert Eagle away free in every pack of Sugar Frosted Chocolate Cocoa Bombs and no-one would bat an eye.



*Of course it goes without saying that you should never** try to assemble furniture or cut down trees with a gun.

*Except if you're doing it in a "Hey! You! Cut down that tree and then build me an ottoman or I'll shoot you with my gun". That would probably work.

My apologies in return - I was going for a light hearted summary there, not attempting to paint you as a snarling fundamentalist NRA member. At the time I made that comment I had no idea it was going to expand to quite the degree.

I've touched on the experience of places where guns aren't so readily available and the evidence there shows that illicit gun ownership doesn't fly out of control. But these places are not America, which is a less obvious statement than it may at first seem.

There are few countries that rival the US in gun ownership and it's very likely that things have gone to far to simply step away - too much of a Mexican Stand Off which is all to reminiscent of nuclear proliferation during the Cold War era. Everyone who has a gun has it not for themselves but because of the other people who have guns.

It may well be that a softer approach to change the position of the gun in society.

One thing that springs to mind (in addition to what I said to Mr More up above) is to return gun ownership more to the spirit of the 2nd Amendment in that gun ownership would only be permissible to someone who was demonstrably part of a well-regulated militia, and that without commitment to that militia, licence to bear arms would be removed.

Of course you'd have to make sure that didn't turn into organised crime through a path of initially well intentioned vigilantism. That would be a bad turn.

Glad you clarified. I was about to join the NRA, oppose equal rights, drill for oil in my back yard, and carry my pistol on an everyday basis, all out of spite.