The details of the recent Colorado massacre are bothering me this week. What bothers me the most is that both political parties seem to take an event like this and use it to further an agenda. The right wants everyone to get armed, and the left wants to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. The first would likely result in lots more people getting shot accidentally, and the second would make criminals feel safer because they would be less worried about someone they were attacking fighting back.
Uh.. So, the "well trained" moron that accidentally grabbed his gun, instead of his wallet, shot himself in the ass, and wounded a woman and child, in the process, was what, a fluke?
Where is your actual statistical evidence that its untrained people that are the risk? Criminals I get, but arming people, trained or not doesn't change that, or alter events. Four points of reality - 1) we train cops for years how to safely use guns, and they still kill people they shouldn't, by accident, either via mistaken identity, over reactions, or other errors. 2) normal people, no matter how well trained, are not that well trained, and 3) how do you possibly make sure, even if the above two things where not true, that only the "well trained" ones carry? What definition do you even apply, logically, to that, the one that the guy described above fit into? 4) There is little evidence that everyone being armed, or even a significant number being armed, would really stop crimes, but lots of evidence that the bloody stupidest thing a person can do is "escalate" the situation, by refusing to cooperate with someone committing a crime, if you are not specifically trained to do law enforcement, preferably as someone outside the situation, with time to think about how to deal with it. And, that isn't just, "knowing how to shoot a gun.", so you can react, as soon as it happens.
Heck, my brother was a cop at one point, my father worked with the sheriff's department in California, both helped during the LA riots, both are "leftist", and both think its fine to own a gun, or guns, but not for them to be walking around on people that could go nuts for no reason, in public places.
I also don't think, at this point, that a non-standing army, short of completely erasing the standing one, has a chance in hell of fighting the government. Why? Because a) the government doesn't need to just be screwed up, but actually seriously corrupt, enough so to make even the military want to appose it, to be bad enough to actually do something about, b) there is the slow fall syndrome, by which, by the time it is that bad, its possible that the military won't see anything wrong with it anyway. I would argue, we came close to that with the communist delusions and McCarthyism, but not quite, and during that time, the military would have, possibly, supported McCarthy, even if he had ordered them to bomb parts of California, to get rid of the commies. Finally, c) if it, somehow, goes wrong enough, then if situation (b) is the result, citizens haven't a snowball's chance in hell of fighting the military in a useful manner. The assumption is we would act like freedom fighters, but we could just as easily be the next "Jewish problem". But, we are dealing with people that imagine they can't make mistakes, don't miss, its not their fault if they do, and "well trained" means not cleaning your gun, while its loaded, so, you can be pretty sure they imagine themselves being Rambo, or the hack Chuck Norris, not the next person to find themselves in some place like Auschwitz. I have no such illusions, perhaps because I belong to the wrong religion, political party, etc. for some people, who would like nothing more than to deport, arrest, or shoot me..
So, the original point of the right, other than hunting, is questionable at best. We don't much need to hunt any more, and some people would argue that there are better ways to a) control animal populations, and b) avoid killing animals in general (not that I agree with either point, at least to the extremes they take it). So, the only argument that is left is... we need them to arm ourselves against the threat of all those people arming themselves... WTF?
Doesn't. Make. Sense. What ever other argument there is, that one is just flat insane.
We had a mass shooting in Australia that so revolted our citizens that the government funded a gun buy-back program and banned automatic weapons. We still have a democracy, we're still free. We just don't have people being slaughtered in movie theatres. Maybe Americans could look to a fairer society rather than a 'free' society. At present your citizens are free to wander around heavily armed. It's just not terribly fair to anyone else. As for the issue of politicians taking this matter up, they would be derelict in their duty if they didn't address such a tragedy.
The point of the right is freedom and the goal to assure that isn't taken away, strangely that is also the goal of the left they just disagree on what freedom is. At the core of this problem isn't guns, it is a system that the left supports that protects privacy to a degree that folks that are known to want to kill people aren't discovered by law enforcement until they do. There are actually very few, statistically, deaths due to automatic weapons here. Every murder, however, has a person behind it. If we want to keep folks alive, as opposed to just take away another freedom we likely should be focusing more on keeping folks off the street who like to kill other people. Even if you were able to take away their guns, which is doubtful, they are pretty sure to find another way. 911 didn't have a single gun event and we did have the information to stop it, we just didn't get it to the right people until too late.
I just love folks who comment about a country they clearly know nothing about. We have 300M people to your 20M, we have laws against carrying a weapon unless you have a license and getting a license requires you prove you are in fear of your life, or it is part of your job, and local law enforcement has to sign off (really rare). Assault weapons are already banned in most large cities and automatic weapons are only allowed in a couple of states, when they are used in crimes it is generally by folks who are criminals and aren't allowed any gun let alone an automatic. The idea that folks that break laws will obey a gun control law is just silly.
We are not one country but a set of aligned States, rules are very different in each. But some of the biggest mass murders here haven't had a single gun.
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How Technology Could Keep Politicians From Killing Us
Posted by: Rob Enderle July 30, 2012 05:00 AMThe details of the recent Colorado massacre are bothering me this week. What bothers me the most is that both political parties seem to take an event like this and use it to further an agenda. The right wants everyone to get armed, and the left wants to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. The first would likely result in lots more people getting shot accidentally, and the second would make criminals feel safer because they would be less worried about someone they were attacking fighting back.
Where is your actual statistical evidence that its untrained people that are the risk? Criminals I get, but arming people, trained or not doesn't change that, or alter events. Four points of reality - 1) we train cops for years how to safely use guns, and they still kill people they shouldn't, by accident, either via mistaken identity, over reactions, or other errors. 2) normal people, no matter how well trained, are not that well trained, and 3) how do you possibly make sure, even if the above two things where not true, that only the "well trained" ones carry? What definition do you even apply, logically, to that, the one that the guy described above fit into? 4) There is little evidence that everyone being armed, or even a significant number being armed, would really stop crimes, but lots of evidence that the bloody stupidest thing a person can do is "escalate" the situation, by refusing to cooperate with someone committing a crime, if you are not specifically trained to do law enforcement, preferably as someone outside the situation, with time to think about how to deal with it. And, that isn't just, "knowing how to shoot a gun.", so you can react, as soon as it happens.
Heck, my brother was a cop at one point, my father worked with the sheriff's department in California, both helped during the LA riots, both are "leftist", and both think its fine to own a gun, or guns, but not for them to be walking around on people that could go nuts for no reason, in public places.
I also don't think, at this point, that a non-standing army, short of completely erasing the standing one, has a chance in hell of fighting the government. Why? Because a) the government doesn't need to just be screwed up, but actually seriously corrupt, enough so to make even the military want to appose it, to be bad enough to actually do something about, b) there is the slow fall syndrome, by which, by the time it is that bad, its possible that the military won't see anything wrong with it anyway. I would argue, we came close to that with the communist delusions and McCarthyism, but not quite, and during that time, the military would have, possibly, supported McCarthy, even if he had ordered them to bomb parts of California, to get rid of the commies. Finally, c) if it, somehow, goes wrong enough, then if situation (b) is the result, citizens haven't a snowball's chance in hell of fighting the military in a useful manner. The assumption is we would act like freedom fighters, but we could just as easily be the next "Jewish problem". But, we are dealing with people that imagine they can't make mistakes, don't miss, its not their fault if they do, and "well trained" means not cleaning your gun, while its loaded, so, you can be pretty sure they imagine themselves being Rambo, or the hack Chuck Norris, not the next person to find themselves in some place like Auschwitz. I have no such illusions, perhaps because I belong to the wrong religion, political party, etc. for some people, who would like nothing more than to deport, arrest, or shoot me..
So, the original point of the right, other than hunting, is questionable at best. We don't much need to hunt any more, and some people would argue that there are better ways to a) control animal populations, and b) avoid killing animals in general (not that I agree with either point, at least to the extremes they take it). So, the only argument that is left is... we need them to arm ourselves against the threat of all those people arming themselves... WTF?
Doesn't. Make. Sense. What ever other argument there is, that one is just flat insane.
We are not one country but a set of aligned States, rules are very different in each. But some of the biggest mass murders here haven't had a single gun.