I'm not looking to get into an argument over guns. I've been in hundreds
and never once was I convinced of the necessity or the efficacy of owning a
gun and never once have I swayed a gun owner that society would be
immeasurable better without citizen ownership of weaponry. My world view
(as opposed to my non-existent religious view) is that private ownership of
guns is insane for any society. The manufacture of guns should be against
the law and punishable by stoning. Guns exist to kill and only to that
end. Yes, there are other means of killing -- strangling for instance, but
hands have other uses. Guns do not. Knives have other uses, guns do not.
Dynamite has other uses, Guns do not. The various poisons have many
different uses. Guns do not. Etc., etc., etc. We do not need to shoot
game for food. We haven't for quite some time now. And yet it is
estimated that 1 in 3 Americans owns a gun. WHY??? Because they're afraid
of that "other guy" -- who just might own a gun. It's insane.
Confiscate ALL the goddamn guns and melt them all down, each and every
one. I suppose it's amazing that our suicide and murder rates are so "low"
given the amount of weaponry around. What am I bitching about? So 9
college kids get blown away. So what, we've still got the Constitutional
right to own our own guns. It's in the Constitution -- the 2nd Amendment
to the Bill of Rights: *"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed." To hell with those 9 kids. *It's just another
day in Amerika. Flip Wilson had the best answer to guns. Let people have
their guns. Just tax ammunition so much that each bullet costs $5000. I'm
not looking to anger people, just wanting to get rid of the guns.
On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I don't disagree with the criteria disparities. I found that to be true
as well. I have heard something a bit different about the Homicide
statistic in America, namely that if you shoot someone who has invaded your
home or in any other way defend yourself such that an attacker is killed,
the event is initially called a homicide until someone later on, perhaps
even a jury decides that it isn't. In the meantime it is called a homicide
and entered into statistics as such. There probably isn't anything that
can be done about that. Local police forces aren't given the authority to
determine when a death is a homicide and when it isn't.
As to the definition of violent crimes, probably we in the U.S., many of
us, wouldn't accept the idea that it is more acceptable that our wives and
sisters be raped than that we kill the rapist, e.g, he had your sister down
and had pulled her pants off and you shot him??? Did you have to do that?
Attempted rape isn't as serious a crime as an actual rape. we're going to
call that a homicide and you are in a whole lot of trouble.
Would a few cases like that get gun owners stirred up so that they would
strenuously fight having their guns taken away? The way the media works,
just one case has gotten Geary stirred up -- a lot of other people as
well. If the threat of the creation of a bureaucracy to take away the guns
of normal American citizens became serious enough, counter examples could
be produced in abundance.
Having said all that, I was a rifle instructor in the Marine Corps at one
time and all the coaches I knew would agree that some of our shooters
couldn't be trusted with weapons. You get a shooter who falls well below
a qualification score, forgets that he needs to keep his rifle pointed down
range, fires a shot into the air by accident and you tell the coach next to
you, "I sure hope I never end up living next to that guy." If "that guy"
had a family that cared about him they ought to make sure he didn't have
access to any guns once he got out of the Marine Corps.
Heck, a lot more people get killed by cars than guns, and each time my son
is in a car with me, he watches me suspiciously (even more so now that I've
entered my 80s) and threatens to take my keys away if I start showing any
signs of senility. He laughs and jokes about it, but he'd do it. I read
an article in this morning's paper about the Oregon shooter showing
homicidal inclinations. He was living with his mother and had tantrums
like the ones he had as a child. Also, he had a fascination for murderers
who killed a lot of people. If we are going to authorize the intrusion of
a governmental agency into anyone's life to take their guns away, I would
much prefer you do it to people who are inept with firearms (as my shooters
of old) or people with a fascination with homicides -- than old fashioned
folk who think its okay to protect their wives and sisters.
Lawrence
On 10/3/2015 12:56 AM, Donal McEvoy wrote:
"According to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace, the U.K.
had 933 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2012, down from 1,255 in 2003.
In the U.S., the figure for 2010 was 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
Still, while the U.S. violent-crime rate is less than half Britain’s, its
homicide rate between 2003 and 2011 was almost four times as high."
It would help to have access to reliable statistics but this kind of claim
raises obvious issues as to its reliability: reliable comparisons should be
like-for-like, but nothing in the above makes clear (a) whether the US and
UK are using a comparable definition of "violent crimes" [is 'threatening
behaviour' a "violent crime" in the US?] (b) how reliable is the data
gathering process (given differences in underreporting of crimes or in the
classifications of reports of crimes) (c) how prevalence of "violent
crimes" relates to factors like population density.
These issues are particularly acute within the criminal justice system
where parties [like police and government] may have their own agendas in
how they define and assemble data.
As a rule of thumb, the figures as to "homicides" are likely to be much
less questionable than figures as to "violent crimes" generally, as
homicides are more clearly defined and less subject to underreporting and
other forms of distortion within the societies in question.
The above quotation is inadequate to ground an argument that by having a
much higher homicide rate the US avoids having such a high rate of "violent
crime" generally as that suffered by the UK - an argument that (even if it
were soundly based statistically) might be met with the (moral) argument
that suffering the lower homicide rate is better than suffering the lower
rate of "violent crime" generally.
D
L
On Friday, 2 October 2015, 23:30, Lawrence Helm
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here's another interesting article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-24/u-k-gun-curbs-mean-more-violence-yet-fewer-deaths-than-in-u-s-
It includes the following paragraph: "According to the Sydney-based
Institute for Economics and Peace, the U.K. had 933 violent crimes per
100,000 people in 2012, down from 1,255 in 2003. In the U.S., the figure
for 2010 was 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. Still, while the U.S.
violent-crime rate is less than half Britain’s, its homicide rate between
2003 and 2011 was almost four times as high."
There is a lot more violent crime in the UK but fewer homicides. Perhaps
a lot of bad guys that would be walking around in the UK with guns and
occasionally killing people are now walking around with knives, clubs or
small gangs and since all the innocent civilians over there (with few
exceptions) are unarmed . . . they provide a great feast of victims -- so
why kill them and draw the attention of the bobbies when you can rap them
on the head with a steel pipe and take whatever you want -- and with so
much of that going on the chance of being cot is way lower than if they
murdered someone
We are still (in the US) a nation of Emersonian self-reliant people and
would rather, many (if not most) of us, defend ourselves than hire a huge
expensive bureaucracy to control us so that we don't kill to many of each
other. The idea of letting ourselves be robbed or letting someone we love
be raped in order to reduce the homicide rate wouldn't set very well with a
lot of us.
And I always wonder about some of these statistics. If you shoot a bad
guy who has broken into your house with the intent to do you or a loved one
bodily harm, does that count as a violent gun-related death? Probably, but
I'm not sure.
Lawrence
On 10/2/2015 1:15 PM, Mike Geary wrote:
What a sad little country we are. What is it that supposedly we value in
our gun "rights"? Obviously not life. Are we all hoping that one day we
will have a chance at shooting the bastards, to know the relief in blowing
the sonsofbitches away? During the Vietnam war I was working (in Memphis,
not Vietnam) with a guy who would talk about joining the Army so that he
could get over there and mow those commie gooks down. He really,
truly wanted to kill, to destroy everything that he didn't understand, that
he saw as hostile to his own very small world.
I quit that job and I have no idea if he ever made it to Vietnam ( but 3
million Vietnamese were killed, so I doubt they needed his help), but on
learning of massacres like this one today in Oregon, I wonder just how many
people out there are cleaning their rifles everyday aching to mow the
bastards down.
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