My natural right comment was not about guns. It was about self defense with the best tools. The best tools for self defense are weapons. That is my opinion. I dont want to face a knife or bat wielding home invader with empty hands, i want a weapon. I want a weapon better then theirs... Its the same reason i never got rid of my Bullet vest i had for security work. I keep it for my home defense kit. I can get it on very quickly. Only 2a though, I want to upgrade to a 3a vest. Will do more to lessen the concussion to my ribs a little bit. There was a case ill see if i can try and find the article. The gist of it was a guy was home and a guy with a knife broke in an threatened him. He had a legal to own shotgun and defended him self against the guy with the knife. Got sent to jail for a few years. The local government official said that despite the bad guy having a knife and threatening his life he has rights to and shooting him in self defense violated those rights. Ill see if i can find the article. With regards to Israel, I agree and will not mention it any longer. What i dont understand is how limiting capacity will hamper bad guys, since they wont follow the law anyways? Only thing a capacity limit hampers is the good civilians. Not sure how it helps the crime rate. Was there any studies done regarding this during the Clinton bans?
This ties in nicely to my point about dumb people owning guns I was looking for videos of military practising room clearance drills and stumbled upon a crop of "tacti-cool" videos that would suggest some think otherwise. Its where I also learnt you should take cover behind a door, fire 5.56 at a wall with your kids on the other side of it, and pursue and shoot in the back a burglar who is already fleeing. This is after the burglars, upon being discovered, grabbed cover and decided to get in a fire fight as I'm sure burglars normally do when confronted by an armed home owner. It was very educational.
This is the only case I can think of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer) But that was an illegal shotgun and he killed one of the intruders by shooting him in the back as he tried to flee. Or there is this case: http://blog.cps.gov.uk/2012/09/andy...-face-charges-over-shooting-of-intruders.html Which was a legally owned shotgun, but the couple were released after three days and were not prosecuted. You're right that the U.S. is beyond the point of no return. It would take decades, or longer, to take all the illegal firearms out of circulation. What I don't get though, is how living in fear of having a firefight is somehow equated with freedom?
I respectfully disagree. I think there is a lot more of diversity of opinions on this sort of thing than you imply. I consider my self somewhat "left", and have a bit of an appreciation for firearms and related stuff. I've spent a fair chunk of my life with it as a hobby. I've met several folks that are sort of in the same category. There are more than you think. It's funny when I read things like "the left hates those with wealth" that Kframe mentioned in this thread - and I just sort imagine the person saying that thinking all the "left" are eating granola beneath a poster of Che Guevera reading Karl Marx by candlelight on a commune somewhere. And honestly, I think the "right" gets just as bad a rap. There are plenty that believe the Earth is 4,000 years old, are against evolution, etc. But there are also many that are pretty open minded, well reasoned, etc. I've met some cool people I don't agree with on a lot of stuff. The caricatures you can invent for people that don't 100% line up with you are usually pretty false. Going by the media, you will think all Americans are a bunch of kooks. Talk to random people you meet out and about, and you will discover that only some are kooks...
Actually southpaw its kind of common for the burgler to fight back anyways. They dont normally just run scared from armed homeowners. In my area at least the common thread is they usually continue to advance on the home owner who then opens fire. Usually the home owner is barricaded in his bed room. Which is what the trainers and police here suggest for us anyways. It would be nice if the burglars just ran away when a armed home owner showed up but sadly thats not the case here in my area at all. Im honestly surprised that burglary and home invasion still happen in my area considering the fact that more then 1 in 3 of homes in my area is armed. Kinda explains why so many burglars around here end up in the coroners office..
How does Mexico figure into this debate? The proper government of mexico has some pretty strict gun control in place, yet the cartels were able to get actual military weaponry.. They are not really using civilian ar/ak SEMI AUTO rifles, but real military FULL AUTO rifles. With Mexico's fairly strict controls how were they able to aquire such weaponry and hold and control so much of Mexico? From what i gather you cant own military calibers and there are magazine restrictions and everything. Yet none of that stopped the cartels. I am truly stumped by this. They are using real military equipment. Who is supplying them, besides Eric Holder and Fast and Furious? Which was with normal gun shop semi auto guns. Just to clear up for the Non Americans here, you can not just walk into a gun shop and pay for a full auto gun. Not only does it have to be made and registered before a certain date, 1986 i think, you have to have a lengthy tax and background approval process and the local sheriff has to approve the NFA tax stamp. Oh and their is the matter of cost. For a Legal full auto, it can cost a minimum of $3500 for a crapper that does not work, up to more then $250,000 for some models.
Mexico doesn't figure into the debate at all. Entirely different country and culture. Again apples to oranges. It's the third world. It doesn't help when a large portion of their Spec-Ops population decides starting a narco cartel (Zetas) is more profitable than working for the government. That combined with full scale insurgencies of one type or another and well... you have a real mess. So I don't think there is much if any factor into the gun control debate. I'll be curious to see what others think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas
:topic: Well tbh I think that's more a product of bipartisan politics focused on incredible polarization in order to try to keep power for a party or individual. Fallacious arguments and attempts to both misrepresent an opposing party as well as create an identity built as opposing the caricature of the opposition. [/off topic] For example reasonable restrictions on firearm ownership being turned into "the government is coming for all the guns so they can turn the country into an Orwellian police state" comes to mind. I think that's part of the reason there is an issue with reasonable discussion of practically any divisive issue including and especially firearms.
Right. Of course one meets people with politico-socio thinking that falls between the two extremes - one should! I'm quite amased at the sheer number of people who buy into the 'us' and 'them' cartoon caricaturisation that is presented to them. One would expect to find in the gen pop only a few ... but that is not the case. I suppose my thinking may be coloured, somewhat, by personal association with those that hold party-lines to that degree. My half-sister, being one, I recall. Despite a tenured professorship of Feminism and Modern Languages at a major University, having traveled to different part of the world and so forth, she clung for dear life to this litany of thinking and ideas that seemed quite...artificial - for a lack of a better term - manufactured - not the result of impressions that one is left with as a result of living life but ... as if all her experiences had to fall on one side or another of some manifesto ... odd. I do recall towards the end of her life, it seemed every other word was rightwingextremist - she was obsessed with it - everyone was 'nazi' or 'rightwingextremist' this or that. I remember her being quite depressed over the fact that she had glanced or read a Martha Stewart or somesuch - cookbook - a cookbook, mind you - and she was quite worried that she might have become a - yes, you guessed it - a rightwingextremist - as a result of having glanced at this cookbook. She was anti-gun. Very anti-gun. Was in on all of the class-action lawsuits, really gave her a reason to get up in the mornings, I suppose. When she committed suicide ( suffered from mania and depression ), she wrote in the note that she left that she chose to overdose instead of using a gun as a form of protest against the gun lobby or something to that ilk, IIRC. The frightening thing is knowing how many of her friends held similar views. The media-driven polarisation of everything - so many unstable people out there that buy into it.
I know I'm a bit late coming to this particular party, but I'm going to chime in anyway because I get a bit irritated about the amount of cobblers I read about Switzerland and it's supposed 'gun culture'. People happily trot out the same old line about 'every house having a gun' and it's complete nonsense. Being part Swiss, I've been in a fair number of Swiss homes and the total number of them which contained firearms was.....one. (They were army-owned guns for men of national service age.) I don't know the actual figures, but I'd be very surprised if more than 25% of homes contain a military-owned firearm. As for private gun ownership, it isn't something I've come across at all. Maybe it's more common in the German part, but I haven't heard of it.
Ah, fair enough. Was looking at things with UK tinted specs on Apparently in total there's 45.7 guns per 100 people in Switzerland in total. America has 90 which is insane. In terms of how they're split between actual houses and families I'm struggling to find out. In 2005 it was 10% of homes had handguns, 29% had a firearm full stop. Comparatively the US had 18% and 43% respectfully. In 2001 (so way off I know) it was 420 000 military rifles in homes, which assuming its one in each and using a population from 2011 is 19 odd percent. I'm god awful at maths so I might be wrong with the last one. But while I agree Switzerland is a bad comparison with the States, gun ownership isn't rare there. Its still half the US, but purely by numbers its the closest in a similarly developed country. Serbia and Yemen are the only two in between. For anyone who was interested, the stuff about ammo being restricted is tougher than I thought. You basically aren't allowed to have military grade ammo for the 550s in your home unless you need it for work (airport security etc.)
According to your figures, gun ownership IS rare in Switzerland, because guns issued to men on national service remain the property of the military, not the serviceman. Take those out of the equation and there doesn't seem to be a very high per-capita rate of gun ownership.
Meh, if the point is purely that Swiss manage to be around X amount of guns and not shoot each other every day then pedantics like that aren't relevant. If you have easy access to a firearm then whether its technically in your name or not is a bit moot. But yeah Switzerland clearly isn't the gun-topia its made out to be when brought up as a comparison. Although what those figures really surprised me with was that gun ownership in the States isn't as high as I thought it was. The number of guns is still ludicrous, but the percentages are lower than I expected, especially for handguns. Although with the amount in circulation that means there's people with essentally armouries, and the comparative populations means there's still a bajillion more guns in America than Switzerland, but I was still surprised.
I haven't spent much time there in 20 years but I did spend almost two years worth of kicking around in both Basel and Bern back in the early 90s. I do remember seeing young soldiers on leave carrying rifles home with them. But it's not like anyone carries a concealed weapon that I remember. There is no plethora of illegal, cheaply made saturday night specials like in most major cities in the US. There are also no people who have adopted wholesale the 'gun culture' lifestyle. It just doesn't exist there.
Yes, I would assume that there a huge number of Americans who don't own a firearm and a much smaller number who own a huge quantity.
The main sticking point on gun regulation I've come across on MAP over the years is "normal" people wanting to own a gun but being in favour of denying that right to people that shouldn't have them (felons and people with mental health issues usually). To my mind there's no reliable way of determining who exactly will be a "good" gun owner and who won't up until the bad owner does something bad with their gun. For example...I might very well be a good gun owner. Keep it safely, do some training etc. But my neighbour is an idiot and I'm pretty sure would be a bad gun owner. But there's nothing you could really do to differentiate between me and him. He's not a felon or diagnosed with any issues. He's just a muppet. So in a world where such differentiation is impossible to make accurately I'm happy to forgoe my right to own a gun if it means my muppet neighbour doesn't get one either.
Exactly. You have to cater for the lowest common denominator. Trouble is, very few muppets realise they are a muppet... ...they think they're Charles Bronson.
And if you start to deny gun ownership to people with mental health issues (a demographic that is actually more prone to being attacked by others than attacking other people IIRC) I could see quite a few people "hiding" their issues or not seeking treatment in order not to be labelled (something that already happens with mental health anyway).
A guy in NY just had his weapons confiscated supposedly because he went to get help for insomnia. I say supposedly because I've seen one article from the NRA. Who isn't exactly unbiased.
