Gold Sold From Vending Machines In Germany

There are fewer hassles for an adventurer or business traveler bigger than lugging around bags of silver and copper pieces. Luckily TG-Gold-Super-Markt has installed gold vending machines in 500 locations including train stations and airports all across Germany. The machines charge about 30% more than the current trading price for gold, and are updated every few minutes. All are closely monitored by cameras, and like 3rd and 4th edition, electrum pieces are not accepted.

Comments

Sell signal

[Cereal Box]

If this isn't a "sell" signal, I don't know what is.

Interesting but inherently flawed!

[jchawk]

This is certainly an interesting concept but I have a handful of concerns -

1. Why as an investor would I pay a 30% premium to purchase physical gold?
2. Assuming I would I then have to worry about keeping the gold physically secure once I take possession of it.
3. I run into issues when trying to sell the gold after I've taken possession because how can anyone be sure that I haven't tampered with the gold? How do they know that 1oz is still 1oz? What if I drilled and filled it?

There are many other ways to purchase gold as an investment that eliminate the above issues. Gold ETF's are one. They are easy to trade and move in and out of. There are services that will let me purchase gold and store it at their locations, and will certify the amounts as to avoid purity issues as well as security issues.

If you truly believe that the world economies are going to collapse why bother to buy gold at all? You should be buying guns. Believe me, you'll need them to protect more important things like your family and your home.

Interesting idea but only suckers will buy from them. :-)

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[mr_mischief]

I think you'll find a candy bar or a soda in a vending machine is typically 30% to 60% higher than supermarket prices. People pay for convenience.

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[Alari]

The problem with pretend gold or pieces of paper that say you have some gold, somewhere, but no you can't have it, is that you don't actually have the gold.

Gold isn't as special as people think it is, but it is more special than might be apparent just from intellectual consideration. In other words, a smart person will realize gold is only really useful in industrial uses and electronic components due to it's properties. A smarter person will realize that, even if civilization collapses, certain people will still trade food, water, and sex for shiny objects.

Same thing with diamonds, they're nearly worthless rocks, useful to industry and science. But, oh wow, they're sooo shiny... :P :D And you know what they say. "Diamonds. She'll pretty much have to."

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[HiThere]

Whiskey is another good investment if you have such expectations. Good whiskey is difficult to make, in high demand, keeps well, and takes a very long time to make if you have only primitive equipment. (Consider the problem of seals in the still, and making pipes that don't leak lead.)

You'd probably want to make sure that it was securely packaged, and that the caps of the bottles were upright and not exposed to moisture. Doing such in the current environment is easy. After a collapse, much more difficult. And you can buy an extra liter of whiskey a week without anyone raising an eyebrow. (Try doing that with guns and ammo. And ammo doesn't store as well.)

Another good investment would be a medical degree. That one's more time consuming, but after a collapse doctors, those who know more than what drugs to prescribe anyway, will be extremely valuable. Nurses too.

Or you could apprentice yourself to a blacksmith. That would be a really valuable skill. But you'd better learn how to handle and recognize scrap metal.

Horse handling probably won't be worth bothering with in most areas for a few generations. Most of the horses will be eaten. Archery would be worthwhile, but learn to fletch your arrows at the same time. I doubt that you could learn to handle a longbow well, but it would be a good idea to learn how to teach the use of it. (Supposedly one needs to grow up with a longbow to learn it's proper use.) Having a few compound bows would be a good substitute, but you won't be able to replace them. So also get a few regular bows, and learn how to make them from wood. And which wood. (Yew is likely not to be available, so learn what's available in your area.)

Guns are a strictly short term answer. (So is whiskey.) Both only buy you time to establish yourself in a community...and you'll NEED a community. Self defense by an individual is a recipe for dying out within one generation.
 

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[Facegarden]

Whiskey is another good investment if you have such expectations. Good whiskey is difficult to make, in high demand, keeps well, and takes a very long time to make if you have only primitive equipment. (Consider the problem of seals in the still, and making pipes that don't leak lead.)

You'd probably want to make sure that it was securely packaged, and that the caps of the bottles were upright and not exposed to moisture. Doing such in the current environment is easy. After a collapse, much more difficult. And you can buy an extra liter of whiskey a week without anyone raising an eyebrow. (Try doing that with guns and ammo. And ammo doesn't store as well.)

Another good investment would be a medical degree. That one's more time consuming, but after a collapse doctors, those who know more than what drugs to prescribe anyway, will be extremely valuable. Nurses too.

Or you could apprentice yourself to a blacksmith. That would be a really valuable skill. But you'd better learn how to handle and recognize scrap metal.

Horse handling probably won't be worth bothering with in most areas for a few generations. Most of the horses will be eaten. Archery would be worthwhile, but learn to fletch your arrows at the same time. I doubt that you could learn to handle a longbow well, but it would be a good idea to learn how to teach the use of it. (Supposedly one needs to grow up with a longbow to learn it's proper use.) Having a few compound bows would be a good substitute, but you won't be able to replace them. So also get a few regular bows, and learn how to make them from wood. And which wood. (Yew is likely not to be available, so learn what's available in your area.)

Guns are a strictly short term answer. (So is whiskey.) Both only buy you time to establish yourself in a community...and you'll NEED a community. Self defense by an individual is a recipe for dying out within one generation.

I would think carpentry and farming are two of the most universally needed fields. People need to eat and have shelter, so those are really useful.

But all this talk of collapse is bullshit anyway.
-Taylor

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[HiThere]

Mead requires honey. Honey requires bees. Bees are currently in trouble. Also, beekeeping in a time when there aren't suppliers for the equipment is going to be much more difficult.

OTOH, if you DO successfully keep bees, they not only allow you to make mead, they provide the highly salable honey. (I don't know that much about beekeeping in low tech environments...just that it was a late development in northern Europe.)

Beer's good though. It's one of the earliest ways of providing safe water used in Europe. And safe water is going to be a desperate need. (That's one of whiskey's strong uses in a primitive environment. It's also a good disinfectant and a reasonable pain killer.)

N.B.: Whiskey will be a necessity for any primitive surgeon. As both a disinfectant and as a painkiller. (Well, ok. Brandy would work as well. Or Vodka. Anything 60 proof or over.)

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[HiThere]

Saltpeter's easy. Sulfur's the hard part. And getting the mix right. (You need more than just the right proportions. Grain size needs to be right. Meal powder means that all the components need to be ground VERY finely, and then you only have meal powder. To turn that into gun powder you need to moisten it, work it into cakes dry it and grind it back to powder of even grain sizes...without setting it off.)

(You don't need all that if all you want is firecrackers. And cannon are slightly more forgiving. But muskets foul even with very good black powder...but bad black powder causes them to foul much more quickly.)

P.S.: Perhaps modern gunpowder stores well, but I've heard tell of powder forming crystals that caused it to either hang fire or to burn quite irregularly. It's true this was from around the time of WWII, and the stories may have been old then. I've never wanted to experiment in this direction.

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[HiThere]

Basic carpentry is pretty easy. And that's all that one needs when there's no new lumber.

Farming is good...but what's your water source? The area that I live in is a natural desert, which is watered with water from the mountains. The pre-tech people who lived around here subsisted largely on hunting and acorns (ugh!). You need to check out the area you live in to see whether or not it will support farms. (There are very good reasons why the Nile and Euphrates valleys were places where cities got their start.)

Generally, if the disaster is catastrophic, people who live in the cities aren't going to have a chance of surviving. There's too many, and they're too far above the carrying capacity of the area. If that's where you live, guns are probably your only hope, but you'd better not advertize that you have them. (And you only hope is a pretty poor one.) Most people in rural areas will also die. Most of our rural population is in areas that can't survive without things like externally supplied water. And in areas where waters available (say rivers and lakes) people are going to be jammed in too close for the carrying capacity of the land. After, say, five years the survivors will start to have a reasonable chance of continuing to survive. During those five years every animal that can't escape will have been eaten, so hunting will be extremely poor. At this point farming will start to emerge as a necessary choice. But the farmers will need protection, either self supplied, or supplied by others. One way leads to village based democracy, the other to feudal totalitarianism. I suspect that what will usually happen is a "strong man" based democracy. This means that the village chief has nominally absolute authority, but when he angers too many people, he's cast out. Possibly alive. And then the next chief is chosen by consensus.

You'll notice that here I didn't talk much about possessions. There won't be any transport, so what you have is basically what you can carry for 50 miles/day. Without a decent pack. And with no pack animal. If you invest your weight allowance in guns and ammo, you'd better hope you run across someone you can steal safe water from. (Note that guns and ammo also means all the other equipment you need, like gun oil. Which will be irreplaceable.) There are reasons that when I was talking about projectile weapons I mentioned bows. Being skilled with a spear-thrower might be nearly as good. (Different ratio of strengths and weaknesses, but not much inferior overall.)

To my mind, anything which catastrophically destroys civilization on one continent will make recovery on that continent a VERY long term affair, if it's possible at all without outside help.

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[greyhueofdoubt]

Well, you're right- the chemistry part of things could cause problems for a lot of people. But on the other hand so could soap-making. Me, I'm not a doctor or a chemist, but I can treat wounds and make helpful things like gunpowder and soap. You don't need a PhD to do those things- our ancestors did them thousands of years ago. What I like to see are people getting out of their element and learning a skill or two that they don't need but might prove useful. CPR class is an obvious example, but other really good experiences can come from craft fairs, boy scouts, summer camp, etc. Sometimes even just reading a book on a whim can give great insight when trouble arises (am I the only one who read a book on knots on a whim?)

It's sad to think about, but I'm pretty sure that in the event of a great disaster, our population centers would display markedly greater mortality per capita than other areas. From a survival standpoint, the center of New York City is about as bad as things get.

So anyways what I mean is, your original post was correct in that skill and knowledge may become the most valuable currency of all.

-b

Re:Interesting but inherently flawed!

[CodeBuster]

Why as an investor would I pay a 30% premium to purchase physical gold?

Agreed. Investor premium for gold should be 7-13% above spot depending upon the product. Anything more than that is a gold dealer taking advantage of an inexperienced buyer.

Assuming I would I then have to worry about keeping the gold physically secure once I take possession of it.

Among the convenient properties of gold is that a large amount of exchange value can be stored in a commodity which is quite compact. At the current price of ~$970.4 per troy ounce a 1 kilogram bar with a spot price value of $31,198.36 only takes up 4 1/2' X 2" X 3/8" or 117mm X 53mm X 8.7mm. There are not many other valuable exchange commodities about which that can be said; even an equivalent stack of $100 bills would probably take up more space than that.

I run into issues when trying to sell the gold after I've taken possession because how can anyone be sure that I haven't tampered with the gold? How do they know that 1oz is still 1oz? What if I drilled and filled it?

There again gold provides an easy answer. There are not many commodities and none worth less than the gold itself that could be used for the "filler" because of the high density of gold among other unique physical properties. There is a reason why gold has classically been chosen, where available in sufficient quantity, to be the exchange commodity. It is difficult or impossible to fake the actual gold content without the fake being almost immediately obvious to anyone who handles gold on a regular basis and doubly so when the gold object in question is standardized into a solid ingot or coin. You shouldn't have any trouble selling your gold back into the marketplace at any gold dealer in any major city. There are dealers in the gold and jewelry districts of major cities like New York and Los Angeles who will readily buy back your gold at spot prices. If you want to dispose of larger quantities of gold at one time then you might have to call around and make arrangements in advance, but generally the gold markets are almost as liquid as cash.

There are many other ways to purchase gold as an investment that eliminate the above issues. Gold ETF's are one.

Some people want physical possession of their gold or they don't want to pay the storage fees; to each his own after all. If one is dealing in larger quantities of gold then ETF's can be quite practical, but for smaller holders the advantages are somewhat lessened over simply keeping personal gold in a hidden safe or safe deposit box at a bank. For the truly paranoid, nothing less than physical possession will do.

There are services that will let me purchase gold and store it at their locations, and will certify the amounts as to avoid purity issues as well as security issues.

Yes, those are the main advantages of gold ETFs. However, don't some ETFs have rather high minimum amounts (i.e. at least 1 kilo) and increments?

If you truly believe that the world economies are going to collapse why bother to buy gold at all? You should be buying guns. Believe me, you'll need them to protect more important things like your family and your home.

Guns would be useful, no doubt about that, but gold would be useful too. Think about the purpose that gold serves. In the absence of a "money" commodity every transaction is done by barter and suffers from what economists call the "coincidence of needs and wants". Suppose that the two of us meet in the typical post apocalyptic setting and rather than shooting each other on site we exchange greetings and attempt to barter. Suppose that you need ammunition and that I have some to trade, but that I want compressed natural gas for my camping stove. If you don't have gas cylinders or anything else to trade that I want then you will first have to find someone else who has gas cylinders and will trad

Re:30 Percent!

[TinFoilMan]

If gold is selling for $1K per ounce, a 30 percent increase is $300!!

We be in the wrong business!

Maybe Gold foil hats would be better.

Re:The machines charge 30% MORE than trading price

[SomeJoel]

We are at the beginning/middle/end of a gold bubble, just like we had a .com stock bubble in 1999/2000 and a real estate bubble from 2001-2007.

Well, which is it?

Re:Gold is the currency of the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful??? At that time frame gold when from round $400/oz. to around $800/oz.

Re:Im sorry

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Trouble there is, nobody would be selling gold at +30% in exchange for a paper currency that will be worth half as much tomorrow.

If you want to buy gold at any reasonable rate, you pretty much have to do it well before you actually need it(or you have to be buying in some other apocalypse currency, like dog food or ammunition).

Re:Im sorry

[lgw]

It's a panic sparked by a fear of a coming currency collapse - quite a reasonable fear given the current rate of US government spending, but still a very low probability event. However, while hedging against the chance of the dollar collapsing (and taking the Euro with it) makes sense, it only makes sense to pay a very small premium to hedge against this unlikely event.

Some see this hedging going on by central banks and other who buy and sell gold by the ton, and overreact. Physical gold coins are a total ripoff right now (and entire industry has emerged to exploit the panic), and, seriously, if society collapses to the point that legitimate "intangible" gold (such as GLD shares) become worthless, you don't want gold coins, you want *guns*.

Re:Im sorry

[panthroman]

Gold at 30% extra is swell deal if you are faced with possibility that your cash would be worth 50% less tomorrow.

No it isn't, because one of your other options is gold without the 30% premium. If you don't like fiat currency, fine, invest in whatever you like. But why you'd pay a premium over the market value is beyond me.

Vending machines work for candy bars. I'm willing to pay a markup because I want my snack in my hand right now. What could possibly be the urgency with gold?

(Yeah, yeah, hyperinflation in post-WWI Germany or late '80s Argentina or current Zimbabwe. You think what Zimbabwe needs are vending machines for gold?)

Re:The machines charge 30% MORE than trading price

[schmiddy]

Am I missing something? Is there really such a demand for bottled water on the street that the convenience of being able to purchase it from a vending machine warrants a 10000000% markup?

In all seriousness, this will be a boon for privacy nuts, the very rich, money launderers, and anyone else too lazy to buy direct for cheaper. Keep in mind that tax evasion is something of a national pastime in Germany.

This is targeted at doomsdayer types

[Sycraft-fu]

This isn't a rational thing. It is to get the people who are doing the "OMG the economy is going to collapse!" thing and don't know what to do. They see this and go "Ahh I can buy gold, gold is always safe!" It isn't targeted at rational investors, or even rational survivalists for that matter. It is targeted at alarmist doomsdayers.

Re:Im sorry

[oldspewey]

The term "market value" for gold is idiotic to begin with. Market value for what? Gold smelted into 1000oz bars? Gold minted into pretty 1g wafers with a fancy design on the face and fluted edges to prevent dishonest vendors shaving some off? Gold in the form of a promissory note from a bank that holds the equivalent in metal in their vaults? Gold in the form of a promissory note from an institution that holds only a fraction of your gold but claims they are "good for the rest?"

Each of the above will command a different premium over the spot price you see quoted in your newspaper ... and some of those premiums might even be 30% or more depending where you buy.

Re:Im sorry

[vertinox]

If you want to buy gold at any reasonable rate, you pretty much have to do it well before you actually need it(or you have to be buying in some other apocalypse currency, like dog food or ammunition).

See. I don't understand the gold bugs. Most of their hyper-inflation apocalypse scenarios they state that gold will be the new currency, but time and time again nations that have went through hyper-inflation have reverted to bartering instead.

When people are in times to need, they look to commodities with utility rather than value.

So in the wastelands in the future people will value gas, water, canned food, guns and ammo and not a pretty metal.

Secondly, if anarchy does set in, you can always use your gun to take someone else's gold if you wanna bother lugging that around.

Re:Gold is the currency of the future

[Cereal Box]

Yeah, and guess what? If you bought in the late 70's, you STILL haven't recouped your investment. ~$750/oz in 1980 equates to ~$2100/oz adjusted for inflation. Gold reached its all time high a year or two ago at... ~$1000/oz. Oops.

So yeah, in the short term it's possible to make money with gold. But again, talk to the people who bought and held 30 years ago how their investment is doing.

Re:Im sorry

[Lord Ender]

Meanwhile, back in reality, paper money is gaining in value as prices fall.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aE9AA32hx8ek

So go ahead and buy your vending-machine gold (instantly losing 30%) and keep talking about hyperinflation as the recession eventually ends and gold crashes back to pre-recession prices.

Re:30%?

[david_thornley]

What's so special about gold? There's a whole lot of things you can buy bulk and sell at a considerable markup.

Some of my favorite places to visit do this with books: they buy large quantities, and sell individual copies to me at a markup.

Re:Im sorry

[MBGMorden]

I think you'll notice though that much like the gold mentioned in the article, people are stocking like CRAZY on ammunition right now. Prices have doubled (or more) in the last 6 months. You have about a snowball's chance in hell of finding any common pistol ammunition on the shelves right now (9mm, .45acp, .40s&w, etc) - people are literally waiting at stores as the boxes are unloaded and buying it all up immediately. All the local stores have had to put a per item limit on customers just to try and keep the speculators from buying it all.

Even if you reload your own it's tough times. To load a round of ammo you pretty much need a case, a primer, powder, and a bullet. Cases are reuseable. For slower rounds bullets can be cast at home out of scrap lead (I've got about 400 lbs melted into lead bars if needed). Powder and primers usually must be purchased (you can make black powder at home, but it's usually poor quality and most loaded rounds use smokeless powder rather than black powder anyways). Like the loaded rounds though, the primers have become rarer than hens teeth. When they become available people are buying them 10,000 or more at a time.

I think overall, be it gold or ammo or canned goods, a lot of people are dumping a lot of money into supplies that they feel will see them through some tough times.

Re:The machines charge 30% MORE than trading price

[meringuoid]

According to Ray Jastram's "The Golden Constant," the purchasing power of gold has remained relatively stable over the last 300 or so years.

Relative to what? Suppose I was in London with ten sov'reigns bright in my pocket in the year 1709. What could I buy with them? Suppose now I am in London with ten sovereigns in 2009. What can I buy?

One thing hasn't changed: London was and is a colossal trading centre, so if it exists and I have the money I can buy it. But everything else is completely different. What if I want a passage to Boston, in the colonies - and back again? Well, in 1709, my sovereigns might buy my passage, several weeks on a sailing ship in dubious conditions. Just. The cost of such a trip was many months' pay for a labourer - people would indenture themselves for years in exchange for their passage. What if I want the same in 2009? Why, I can get from London to Boston and back again the next day if I wish it, and I'll have ample change left over for shopping while I'm there.

The same goes for almost everything I might seek to buy. What if I desire personal transport? How many horsepower can I get for ten sovereigns in 2009? A hundred or so? How many horsepower can I get in 1709? One or two? Or contrariwise: what if I would hire myself a servant? Ten sovereigns will get me a labourer for six months or so in 1709. In 2009, ten sovereigns for even two months' work would be a low wage.

Economy and society and technology have changed so much: how do you compare the value of those sovereigns across the centuries?

Oh, of course: some things don't change so much. Always there is demand for beer, and beer changes little enough. When I go into an alehouse, and order whiskeys and wines of the best, what can I have? Well, a pint of London porter was 3d a quart, or a penny and a half for a pint, or 160 pints for a sovereign (this being back when a sovereign really was worth a pound, not just having that nominal face value). Nowadays, a sovereign sells from the Royal Mint for £200, and a pint of porter - Dublin porter more likely nowadays - is something like £3. That's 67 pints for a sovereign.

So to my mind, where it really counts, on a London street buying beer, the value of that sovereign has fallen substantially in the three centuries gone by.

Re:Im sorry

[corprew]

Out of curiosity: Is the manufacturing process for ammunition particularly trick, or are there other reasons that supply hasn't expanded to meet demand(or at least lag demand a bit less)?

You mean like the US fighting two foreign wars at once taking up most of the supply capacity of the ammo factories?

Re:30%?

[h4rm0ny]

Right - because someone who reads a site on tech news because they're interested in tech has to also play Dungeons and Dragons? Are the two groups synonymous? If I see a group of people rolling dice can I go over and ask them to design the schema for my database?

Actually, this is targeted at illegal immigrants

[gregorio]

Nuff said.

Re:Gold is the currency of the future

[Anonymous Coward]

What bullshit Libertarian gold standard propaganda. Gold absolutely does not in any way "hold its value like nothing else." Gold is much more variable, up and down, than many possible investments.

Re:Im sorry

[mattack2]

Your political diatribe didn't actually answer the question asked. (Plus [citation needed].) One other answer, currently score 0 troll, did say without citation that 2 wars were using up a lot of the bullet supply, which might be true.. maybe the supply is truly more fixed than us non-gun owners know.

Ceiling at $980

[Nom du Keyboard]

One current problem with gold is the lid at $980/oz. Every time the market touches that trigger someone big is coming in and sell sell selling until they drive it back to near $880. Don't know who, but they must have a pretty good pile of the stuff at the moment to have kept this up this long.

Re:Im sorry

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Demand is through the roof as some of us--the ones who believe that the government is answerable to its people--are stocking up in case of future interruptions in supply.

I'm sorry... Maybe it's cause I'm from Europe, but what does guns have to do with government being answerable to the people?

If they don't answer, you'll shoot them? Hell, in Norway we got 1.5 million weapons with a population of 4.7 million. Yet we don't go around having wet dreams of a future where the government becomes totalitarian so we can shoot people we don't like in an excuse of a revolution.

We got the 11th lowest murder rate in the world. I think you guys just need to stop being so angry at the world.

Re:Im sorry

[totally bogus dude]

I think it's because the war of independence -- where the citizens of North America took up arms against the then government and won their independence -- is a significant part of the identity of many North American citizens. Also don't forget that the founding fathers made it very clear that all citizens must have the right to possess arms, for the explicit reason of being able to overthrow a future corrupt government. While one hopes that would never come to pass, it's still an important part of the very identity of US citizens.

Or to put the question back to you: if your government ignores the apparent will of the majority of the people, how will you react? If they start imposing martial law to keep the peace and outlaw protests against their clearly unpopular policies, what can the ordinary citizen do?

Armed revolution is most definitely a last resort, but if you don't have an unpalatable last resort then what's stopping those in power from abusing that power in the extreme?

Re:Im sorry

[Muad'Dave]

That's why I invest in gold _and_ lead.

USian fears

[oboeaaron]

I don't think it's anger, I think it's fear. [snip] Even before our strict gun laws very few people owned hand guns, I can't imagine living in a country where fear of your fellow countrymen is the norm.

Speaking as a USian, I think it is overstating the case to assert that "fear of [our] countrymen is the norm" (if that is indeed your implication). Although I can certainly see where you would get that idea from all of the wingnut apocalyptic talk around here. I think that the primary motivation for preserving and exercising the right to keep and bear arms is to keep those in power just a little off-balance. At least, that was the original idea. Whether that is a realistic expectation given the federal government's access to modern military weaponry is another question.

Anyway, it is definitely not the case that most people walk down most streets in the US worried about getting their caps peeled by Their Fellow Americans. Some people, and some streets, yes, but not the vast majority.

Yeah, I know, Off Topic, No True Scotsman, Citation Needed, blah blah blah . . .

Re:Im sorry

[bogwoppit]

Whenever a group of people wishes to control another group, the first thing they do is prohibit that group from having weapons.

You are sounding rather limited in your own grasp of world history - many enlightened countries of the modern world prohibit weapons, and none of of them have totalitarian governments. There is simply no need for anyone to possess powerful weapons if nobody else does either. And why does your government want to "control" you (hint: that's a big part of what they're for)?

First of all, it's totally disrespectful and hypocritical to imply that someone else is unable to handle weapons responsibly, while claiming you are able to do so.

Who says anyone has to have them? Here in the UK, gun ownership is illegal, and the police do not carry guns either. Nobody feels they need a gun, criminals rarely use them, and nobody is upset by the army having them. Over here, the hysteria is about pen knives instead.

If people have weapons, there is only so far you can push then before they fight back ... if people lack weapons they will only fight back once they've literally decided it is not worthwhile to live.

Or in other words, "black is not white, therefore it must be red". Are you mental? Why would people not express their opinion just because they don't have a gun?? Shooting people isn't the only (or even a likely, or indeed effective) way to fight back, surely you can't think it is? In your vision of the future, are rednecks going hand to hand with robotic agents of the government in the streets, heroically winning through their wise stockpiling of assault weaponry? And then the government says "OK, we give up" and everything is hunky dory again? Methinks you've missed about a million steps in between (probably involving an election). I hear this time and time again, and it's always from people who secretly fantasise about an apocalypse in which they get to shoot a looter/robot/zombie/graboid in the face.

There is simply no good reason for a benevolent government to ban weapons. That means that any government that wishes to do so must be malevolent

Err, reasons to ban weapons:
  1. weapons are dangerous
  2. people with weapons are dangerous
  3. without weapons, weapons are unnecessary
  4. the government is there to make life good for people (which includes keeping them alive)

What reason exactly are you suggesting for your malevolent government's wish to "control" you? I could just as easily turn your statement around and suggest that a benevolent government has no reason to allow ordinary citizens to take up arms.

Re:Im sorry

[hesaigo999ca]

Dude, you should not even dignify him with a response, he so just wanted to take a shot at how US is so crap, and his nation is so great because they don't use their weapons, they also sit on the side lines, when dictators are busy using the new genocide weapons they bought on their own population.

He forgets his nation went through a transition with the similar problem back in the dark ages, seeing as his nation is 1000s of years old, and ours hundreds.... I would say we did pretty good for ourselves so far, considering we have 60 times the population they do....and 60 times the possibility for crime, chaos, and gov. related disasters.

When a gov of 20 people find out they were tricked by one amongst them who is leader...not much happens other then ...guess we wont be doing that again...when a gov. of 1200 people
find out they were tricked, they will surely act more like a lynch mob then the 20 people..why...because of the numbers.

Many studies prove the bigger the number, the bigger the differences in a government. You can not apply to a government like the US, policies that would work in Okinawa!

Anyways...lame comment on his part if you ask me..... raise that US flag bud!