Arizona Congresswoman shot in Tuscon

[knell]

Simple, guns belong with officials. The rest is just plain bullshit, you really don't need a gun.

you really want cops to be the only ones with guns?

your logic is tragic, even excluding hunters and the like.

[deadly_habit]

Simple, guns belong with officials. The rest is just plain bullshit, you really don't need a gun.

officials are often the ones causing the deaths by firearm, too many idiots in positions of authority and power with itchy trigger fingers/using lethal force when unnecessary.
god knows how many corrupt and or racist cops there are in my city alone. it's to the point that people aren't surprised when one of them is busted for something.
also like i said gangs here in the states are often better organized and have more firepower than the authorities.
you don't see the police forces afraid to patrol the neighborhood of joe blow who has a legally registered arsenal, yet go to any large urban center and there are areas police are scared to patrol

[knell]

god knows how many corrupt and or racist cops there are in my city alone.

so true, especially when they advertise for people to enroll in criminal justice during daytime TV

also like i said gangs here in the states are often better organized and have more firepower than the authorities.
you don't see the police forces afraid to patrol the neighborhood of joe blow who has a legally registered arsenal, yet go to any large urban center and there are areas police are scared to patrol

double true, since gangsters can smuggle guns in from wherever they want, so limiting guns in the US would achieve nothing

[tyson]

I agree that because there are guns in the country there will be gun crime. The real problem is that they have been here for centuries so they aren't going anywhere. Banning them will make it worse. A quick google search tells me that 1 in 4 americans owns a gun and on average each gun owner has 4 of them. That's 1 per person excluding police, military, etc. One gun per person and we aren't all shooting each other!

There are two reasons I can think of that would cause someone to shoot an innocent person; theft and insanity. Some people can't feed their kids so they rob the corner store with a gun and it goes wrong. Some people like this guy in arizona are just fucking crazy. A couple years back some guy in canada CUT A GUYS HEAD OFF WITH A KNIFE ON A PUBLIC BUS for no reason. I'd rather be shot... Point is guns aren't the problem, humans are. No one can solve the fact that we are terrible.

In all seriousness I think that allowing people to have cars is more scary than guns! I like to go for a run occasionally and dumb fucks reading, punishing children, eating, talking on the phone, putting on makeup, being drunk, etc while driving nearly kill me once a month. Even so I'm not getting rid of my car and the guy who likes to hunt down the street can keep his gun imo.

[esfandyar]

actually the usa is the 8th highest murder rate with firearms per capita in the world, the UK is the 32nd
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_m ... per-capita
people don't seem to take into acount how large the us is and population when they spew these stats about

i corrected myself in an earlier post if you read it :p

the statistics i was refering to might have been a few years old.

[esfandyar]

There are two reasons I can think of that would cause someone to shoot an innocent person; theft and insanity. Some people can't feed their kids so they rob the corner store with a gun and it goes wrong. Some people like this guy in arizona are just fucking crazy. A couple years back some guy in canada CUT A GUYS HEAD OFF WITH A KNIFE ON A PUBLIC BUS for no reason. I'd rather be shot... Point is guns aren't the problem, humans are. No one can solve the fact that we are terrible.

yep what i was also saying earlier, restrictions on guns is not gonna help, its getting to the causation that made the human act the way he/she did, which i think is at fault of our society. get to that problem and change it there. restricting weapons is not gonna solve shit.

also this is something which i highly recommend you all read.
dont worry its not too long, its an article on gun laws and its history here. and how brutally racist it is and was:

http://phoenixinsurgent.blogspot.com/20 ... g-jim.html

[stappard]

high gun crime and legality... of course there is a link there. but, you have to factor in the fact that populations differ between the UK and the US, and that the gangs that are over here are far more serious than those that are over there... you have no idea what you're dealing with... we're talking about a population of 60 million versus a population of 307 million (mostly urban)

really, you dont understand how dense populations work...

The UK has a higher percentage of people living in urban areas than america does. And the great thing about per capita statistics is that it accounts for differences in population.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_p ... rban-areas

"you can't ban them because no one will listen" ... fantastic point, not a horrible one... give me one instance in which making anything illegal produced a greater good, and i will give you a hundred in which it failed... really, do you want to roll a dice where the odds are .01 to 6 ?

the different outcomes on a dice are affected by nothing but the roll of the dice, and are different only in appearance. that analogy has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with illegalisation of different things, obviously. people don't make decisions on laws by seeing how successful unrelated laws have been and counting their odds...

silly, silly... you mean to tell me that no one in the UK has a gun...?

what's that, you say? someone does? at least one person aside from the police owns a firearm?

'tis a shame that they have something to wipe you off the face of the earth, leaving you defenseless.... because of laws, now, isn't it..?

im sorry, i truly am, that the one person willing to rob you blind holds the upper hand because of their connections..

oh well... it's for the greater good of society... when only the criminals have guns... keep calm and carry on, then...

Obviously I don't have a specific rational argument to dargue against that attitude, just as you don't have one to support it. All I can say is that I'd rather live in a country where firearms are against the law.

[tyson]

Yes it does create an arms race, I agree with that. Problem is, legal or not, the average criminal could easily get a gun here. Take the guns from the police and the legal owners and that leaves the criminals armed.

[magma]

Guns don't kill people, people kill people; but people without guns have to get a lot closer than people with guns.

Guns possession is very silly thing to make "normal".

[karmacazee]

What I want to know is, what's Canada doing right that the US isn't?

I'm sure I've seen statistics before in these types of discussions about canadian gun crime vs US gun crime, and how there's just as many people with guns in canada but far less crime.

I could be mistaken though.

[AxeD]

agreed, but i will say that the 99.99% of people who legally purchase firearms are not violent criminals

owning and using a gun makes you amongst the most violent people on the planet.

Using a gun is an olympic sport since 1900 though.

[flyingointment]

If you don't understand what it's like to live in America, especially in areas with lots of crime, you have no right to be telling us whether or not we should be owning guns.

I'd go as far as to say it's a goddamn necessity depending on where you are, though I would personally never own any kind of illegal guns. I do wanna get a legal one eventually, though.

A few years back this girl's house got broken into out here, she was in the shower, they raped and tortured her.

All the idealistic "IF U WANNA STOP CRIEM TAKE AWAY THE GAUNZ" bullshit is understandable, but not realistic in any sense.

[stappard]

If you don't understand what it's like to live in America, especially in areas with lots of crime, you have no right to be telling us whether or not we should be owning guns.

What does that even mean? The area of London I live in has 33% more violent crime per capita than detroit. Does that qualify me to talk about this? (I'm not saying it does, but I didn't make that point first) Criminalise guns, attach a 10 year sentence to carrying one, find out if criminals feel like taking the risk.

A few years back this girl's house got broken into out here, she was in the shower, they raped and tortured her.

That's obviously a horrible thing to have happened but it zero bearing on whether guns should be legal

[Phigure]

i'm surprised to see no mention of the sarah palin's website where she:

made a hitlist of candidates that should be eliminated, so they can be replaced with republicans
said "we've diagnosed the problem, help us prescribe a solution"
put crosshairs over the targeted districts on a map
encouraged supporters to "aim and reload"






Fuck you sarah palin. You fucking tnuc

[flyingointment]

What does that even mean? The area of London I live in has 33% more violent crime per capita than detroit. Does that qualify me to talk about this? (I'm not saying it does, but I didn't make that point first) Criminalise guns, attach a 10 year sentence to carrying one, find out if criminals feel like taking the risk.

I just mean that if you're not used to the random and arbitrary nature of street crime, especially in a country as prone to violence as the US, you may not be able to understand why so many people feel compelled to arm themselves. The point has been made numerous times in this thread already, but anti-gun legislation wouldn't really do anything apart from making it harder for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. However, I do think that your suggestion of harsher penalties for illegal possession would be a good deterrent, at least for most criminals.

As recently as either last week or the week before, a mother and her 2 year old son were shot to death execution style by an MS13 member in a relatively affluent area of Long Island. People like the bastard who did that are going to have access to guns regardless...

That's obviously a horrible thing to have happened but it zero bearing on whether guns should be legal

Don't you think people should ultimately have the right to defend themselves in their home?

I mean, forget home invasions and all that, really, a gun would be a very good thing to have in any kind of situation that could lead to widespread rioting and looting. That's pretty much the only reason for why I want one...partially also because this area is slowly going to shit and we've had a steady increase in burglaries over the years.

[flyingointment]

Article about the murders.

[-dubson-]

Isn't the point that in America the attitude leans more to shooting people than the UK's attitude. Just changing the law instantly wouldnt do anything.