Slashdot Mirror
Smart Guns To Stop Mass Killings
New submitter Bugs42 writes "CNN.com has an opinion piece on the possibility of cramming guns full of computers and sensors to disable them in certain buildings or around children. The author, in true mainstream media fashion, completely fails to see any possible technical problems with this. Quoting: 'How might this work? Start with locational "self-awareness." Guns should know where they are and if another gun is nearby. Global positioning systems can meet most of the need, refining a gun's location to the building level, even within buildings. Control of the gun would remain in the hand of the person carrying it, but the ability to fire multiple shots in crowded areas or when no other guns are present would be limited by software that understands where the gun is being used. Guns should also be designed to sense where they are being aimed. Artificial vision and optical sensing technology can be adapted from military and medical communities. Sensory data can be used by built-in software to disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child or someone holding a child."
Quite possibly the dumbest article I've ever seen.
I'm sure all this technology will make a huge difference for the millions of guns already in circulation in the US.
How about just filling them with air instead of bullets?
It’s not really worth discussing why all these ideas are stupid. It’s been done before, and I’m sure there are plenty of Slashdot gun nuts who will happy to rehash it all very shortly.
So my thought is to go non-lethal or less-lethal or whatever the term is. With all the technology we have, why do we still need to kill someone to stop them.
Obviously people have tried and mostly failed. The current range of non-lethal weaponry is scarily bad and non-lethal in general is hard for one of the same reasons this article’s suggestions are stupid: when you need to use it, you are going for the maximum possibility of success.
Make something that can stop someone reliably, make it’s use wide spread, and the number of exceptionally lethal weapons floating around will go down! As a side effect, you see less death in general! Again, this is hard, but probably a lot easier than what this article suggests. As a bonus, we'll kill less people!
So next time I want to murder a guy who has a gun, I have to kidnap a baby first to disable his weapon? Come on, people, I'm on a schedule. These guys aren't going to whack themselves.
... a black market for guns that don't have these features should it ever come to pass.
I'm honestly hoping both sides of the gun debate are smart enough to realize how stupid this article is and how little discussion it warrants.
How are we supposed to secure a free state if the tyrant can wirelessly disable our arms?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Stop giving them tons of media attention and "high scores".
Stop giving other crazy people incentives of guaranteed posthumous fame.
crazy dynamite monkey
1) Can you develop such a complex system that works in the practical world (ie, it's cost effective and reliable)?
2) Can you develop a system in such a way that it can't be removed or bypassed?
The gun is a fairly simple machine. I can't think of a way to prevent the removal of such a complex system. And if the argument is going to be "it'll be legally mandated that all guns have this," you run into the same problem that gun control laws run into right now. Criminals - especially those who are planning on committing multiple murders and probably killing themselves in the process - really don't give a crap about following the law.
Sensory data can be used by built-in software to disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child
What do I do if I'm being assaulted by a dwarf?
Is to disable them unless they are aimed at a target. But that wouldn't work for hunters, and a motivated owner would likely be able to get around it.
If we're really going to solve this problem, guns should have captcha-like technology, determining that the wielder retains the capacity for empathy before he can fire it.
As soon as he removes the safety, the gun should pose a simple question, such as "You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
The government must fear pissing off its citizens. Guns are power. Do you want only the military and the police to have power? Society works best when all types of power are distributed and not concentrated in just a few areas or restricted to just a few people or groups.
I sure wouldn't want the government or military to be able to turn off our weapons, and I sure don't support laws that say only the military and police can have the most powerful weapons. That puts the balance of power away from the people.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
This invites massive logistical issues that only expand if you take malfunctions and deliberate hacking into account. All because we live in a country where paranoia about gun rights trumps taking rational action to reduce gun deaths.
I can't let you shoot that.
Arguments about the second amendment used to revolve around whether guns keep us free. These days, however, they're all about whether guns keep us safe. Something significant has already been lost, even if we still have the right to bear arms.
That wants to kill. I can build a gun in less than 3 days from parts at a home improvement store. making black powder is easy. But if I do that, why not just build pipe bombs instead. Those are far more effective and stop guys in ballistic armor.
Only fools think that gun controls will stop the sick minded disturbed people from killing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Chris Rock was right. Time for the $1000 bullet. Make it not apply to birdshot (hunting) and build in an exemption for shooting ranges so long as the bullets are used there. I'm okay with home-made bullets and small armory jobs, but the idea that the average person needs a horde of 10,000 bullets in their house is just... dumb.
As soon as this idea runs up against gun-industry profits, it dies.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
but your smartknives wont let him cut your kid, so that is perfectly ok.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah, that's all we need. Ballistic malware.
Is the gps trackers they put into trucks with an engine shut off switch... even then I think that's just for hazmat. Not to even get into the outrageous cost of doing this, but wouldn't it
A. expand the black market significantly
B. be unenforceable to the billions of dollars of guns already in existence
Oh boy. This will be a civil discussion.
Why can't we mod whole posts?
-1, troll
you wanted to say whole threads. ...
you failed. i'll have to kill you now.
oh, wait, this stupid gun doesn't fire inside slashdot perimeter
lucky bastard.
We can save everyone from dying prematurely if we lock everyone up in a nice padded room with no access to sharp objects, too. There's more to the debate than "omg this can save lives, I'm scared."
Literally - please!
Every one of these psychos was mentally ill and on psychotropic drugs.
Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.
Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, Calif., in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban “semiautomatic assault weapons” in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.
Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Ore., and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.
more here: http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/the-giant-gaping-hole-in-sandy-hook-reporting/
"The public is growing increasingly confused by how we treat the mentally ill. More and more, the mentally ill are showing up in the streets, badly in need of help. Incidents of illness-driven violence are reported regularly, incidents which common sense tells us could easily have been avoided. And this is just the visible tip of the greater tragedy - of many more sufferers deteriorating in the shadows and, often, committing suicide." http://www.northshoreschizophrenia.org/Uncivil_Liberties.htm
The bottom line is we need to identify these people before they snap and get them off the streets and into treatment, not take guns away from law abiding citizens.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
there is the small problem of the hundreds of millions of guns that already exist that do not already have this technology in them and convincing people their old guns arnt as good as the new guns
portfolio
Why do you need more than 3 bullets ? I ask you nicely. please reply.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I'm sorry Dave - I can't let you shoot that.
You do understand that laws don't work by magic, right?
It is a lot more complicated than that.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
GPS spoofing has been done before.
Criminal spoofs GPS of local area with their own transmitters, making all the police guns think they're in the whitehouse or some other 'safe zone'.
Criminal has 'old fashioned' gun and shoots police who are powerless to fire back.
No, really it's easy. All we need to do is to program the three laws of robotics into them. Problem solved.
How about we take the even more useful step of applying artificial intelligence to determine when an idiot like this is expressing an opinion, and automatically disabling any electronic transmission or amplification of same?
---------------
Of course, that's just my opinion, but it comes with a money-back guarantee!
The anti-firearms hysteria needs to stop. This reminds me of when Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, so a bunch of dead stingrays started showing up everywhere because people suddenly thought of them as being too dangerous to have around. Yeah, firearms can kill people. So can a bunch of other things.
There are three times as many automobile related fatalities each year as firearms related fatalities:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/05/Federal-Gov-Annual-Auto-Related-Deaths-Three-Times-Higher-Than-Gun-Related-Deaths
Even better, there are more people killed with hammers and clubs than with firearms:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/03/FBI-More-People-Killed-With-Hammers-and-Clubs-Each-Year-Than-With-Rifles
So why the fuck are we going after people who own firearms?
First they came for the NRA,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't an NRA member.
(Yeah, I invoked Godwin's Law, so what.)
Also, in Afghanistan it is not unheard of for "enemy combatants" (we can't call them terrorists anymore) to carry kids while they are on the battlefield, either for the purpose of preventing themselves from being shot at, or propaganda ("Look at these baby killers! They must die in the name of allah!") That goes to show you what people are capable of. If firearms were disabled in a similar manner in domestic situations, only it happened automatically, I imagine that would come home as well.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I greatly enjoy target shooting with my PS90, AR15's and even my 10/22 and there is absolutely no reason to not have 50, 30 and 10 round magazines for these to appease someone like you is afraid of law abiding citizens and inanimate objects.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Shooting once or twice is still enough to make being a burglar or robber a quite unhealthy business in average (if you believe in the self-defense shit).
This sentence here by itself is enough to show that you don't really know much about guns or their usage or effectiveness. That makes it less surprising that you hate them so much.
Unless they setup those little kiosks like they do in convention centers and malls.
The Constitution was misinterpreted
http://images.uncyc.org/commons/9/9b/Right_To_Bear_Arms.jpg
so the first time a hunter pulls down his gun because there is movement beyond the trees, he gets whacked with a lawsuit for patent theft by avoiding a bad shot.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This idea is galactically stupid; it's the poster child for #whatcouldpossiblygowrong.
You really WOULD have to write perfect code or someone dies.
Maybe certain people are tired of the, "people kill people, not guns...", argument out of the discussion, and allow the, "Guns kill people!" to be true without question? Maybe they want guns to fail often enough for people to really have good reason to fear them and ban them?
Bottom line: Until people focus on the only important computer controlling the guns - the human brain (and soul) - there's no way to stop guns from hurting people.
You're smart person is going to look pretty dumb when he encounters and angry dumb person with a gun and a motive.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Rather than having guns that ware smart, we should have smart bullets that will only kill bad people. After being fired the smart bullet will immediately ascertain the worst person within range using a sophisticated algorithm weighing criminal history, internet searches, and music preference, and impact that person right in the face, piercing any face armor up to 2 inches of hardened steel, and igniting it's incendiary and high explosive payloads.
It is logically impossible that there is not at least one bad person nearby, because a room full of only good people would never fire a gun. It's logic.
The fact that the most likely target of a smart bullet is yourself, this will greatly reduce the number of shootings. The only trick is to get people to abandon regular bullets. I know, we could make people with regular bullets at the top priority of the smart bullet hit list algorithm! There will a violent but short war between the "smarties" and the "norms", but *then* there will be reduced shootings.
http://12160.info/page/gun-owning-mother-protects-kids-from-intruder-another-story-you-w
Note she fired 6 times, hit him 5, and he ran off when she bluffed about having more ammunition.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
Nothing related to guns can ever be considered "smart", since guns are for weak and fearful.
Smart people never own guns, because smart people know guns are more harmful than they are helpful.
Smart people do not make broad generalizations that are misleading and mostly incorrect.
Thanks for confirming that you're a complete moron.
Then dont the FUCK sell automatic/semiautomatic weapons. Best would be: sell no weapons to people which are not police Second best option: sell weapons which are able to shoot once or twice. Make a mechanism which requires approximately 15sec reloading time. Make the ammunition in a way which pollutes the weapon so strongly that after 10 shots the weapon needs to be cleaned.
Shooting once or twice is still enough to make being a burglar or robber a quite unhealthy business in average (if you believe in the self-defense shit).
Yes, you will neither be able to fend of zombie-herds nor the chinese army, should they be interested in you.
If you believe that bearing weapon is you constitutional right, fine. But please show me the paragraph where it says "any weapon of your choice, including weapons which were designed for warfare between military". Why don't you stack chemical weapons or nuclear weapons at home? Could be useful if you are overrun by atheists.
It doesn't need to say what we can choose to defend ourselves with... It was written in the spirit of defending ourselves from any potential repressive regime, up to and including the military. If it specified the firearms of the time, would citizens armed with flintlock muskets be able to defend themselves or their rights?
a) it's a weapon that kills things and protects things outdoors, mobile, high-impact, without professional maintenance. Software doesn't have a chance, let alone cemputers and electronics in general.
b) old guns. do you intend to get them all back? will the new gun not protect the user from an old gun? will millions of old guns still be allowed to kill children?
c) screw-drivers exist. hobbyists exist. enthusiasts exist. do you intend to run around auditing people's gun collections to ensure that they haven't be tampered?
d) paper-photographs can fool A.I. vision sensors, but they don't stop bullets.
e) that's not security. it's just retarded.
f) might think about fixing the actual problem instead.
So we have GPS enabled guns that won't fire multiple shots with fast reload if there are no other similarly equipped guns in the area. Clever. I don't think anyone could defeat that except by, say, carrying two guns. Just as an example.
Carry several guns. Then the guns will know there are others around firing too. You won't have to reload as often either if you have two guns.
Guns should "know" not to fire in schools, churches, hospitals or malls. They should sense when they are being aimed at a child, or at a person when no other guns are nearby... the ability to fire multiple shots in crowded areas or when no other guns are present would be limited by software that understands where the gun is being used... Sensory data can be used by built-in software to disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child or someone holding a child... guns should be designed to broadcast their location when they are loaded...
Guns used by the police would be exempt from such controls.
The last line being precisely why we should not ignore, but openly ridicule this asshole as an anti-American turncoat... Well, that and the fact that a good 80-90% of what he suggests is technically impossible.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The first is bullet IDs -- you pack the propellant with very small ID tagged glitter. Bullet fires, glitter covers the ground. Crime scene people carry equipment to find and trace the ID numbers. This has been proof-of-concepted years ago.
The second is tracking for ammo sales. You buy ammo? It gets logged, every damn bullet.
The third is liability for your ammo. If you own ammo, you are liable for the results. Regular gun owners get an ammo safe, which is cheap and sensible precaution in any case. If you're a trafficker? You now have a problem.
Important to note: ammo has a shelf life of a few years. Within a decade, culpability for gun crimes could be much more transparent.
s/gun/human/
and it sounds like his idea works. ..just sayin.
gun owners shot it down.
Basicly the government can disable all your guns at will.
great idea.
for Blue Screen of Death
When the police are minutes away, seconds count.
Or to put it another way. You don't know what the fuck your talking about. You stupid stupid little man!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
...two for every soldier. We can work out the details of the contract later. I just need to get a promise from you that you will be creating manufacturing plants set up in no less than 6 states with senators on the armed services committee and we'll have someone contact you about the paperwork.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Using your definition you have just insulted every single Law Enforcement Officer, member of the military, private armed security who own guns for their jobs. Do you really think there aren't smart people in those fields?
Guns are tools, nothing more, nothing less. People like you are the ones acting from fear and ignorance and are a threat to the future of the United States.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
McVeigh didn't use a gun in his most infamous deed. He used fertilizer. As has your argument. BTW, nice troll!
I think you're on to something. The weapons of choice during the signing of the bill of rights were muskets. Make all weapons muskets. That should be enough to dissuade the King of England, and yet not threaten an entire movie theater.
This is a manifestation of what I often call the "Elric Syndrome" after the saga by M. Moorcock. It's the obsession to solve a problem with the use of tools whereas the solution lies in oneself.
You can find it in almost every technical regulation policy, like speed regulators on cars or DRMs to name a few. Moorcock made a brilliant demonstration that this behavior is invariably set to fail.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Here's a very inform^h^h^h^h^h^h funny interview on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_XZvMwcluEg
because smart people know guns are more harmful than they are helpful.
Maybe for stupids with no training. As a former Marine, I can tell you my having a gun is more helpful. I know when to use it, and when not to use it. I have restraint, situational awareness, compassion, and the determination to use it when necessary. I can retain my weapon when someone tries to take it and I have it well secured when not in use. Plenty of smart people own guns, unless you are defining smart people as people who agree with you.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I don't really care about guns. I don't ever want to own one, but it doesn't bother me if other people own one either because I don't assume that people around me are all potential mass murderers.
What worries me about gun control is the idea that the government wants to control ownership of a piece of metal that anybody can fabricate in a day in their home and to which there are lots of lethal alternatives. I wonder what the principle there is supposed to be. Are we going to outlaw everything that person A can use to kill person B? Where are we going to stop? Are we going to make files and drills illegal because they could be used to manufacture guns? What's going to happen with 3D printers? And if government can throw people in jail for something as silly as merely carrying a piece of metal that's shaped a particular way, what are the arguments against government controlling how we have sex or whether women can have abortions? Control of what we see, record, eat and get high on already seems to be considered normal by everybody.
Let's try and turn this back. Liberals live up to their name and give in on gun control and taxation, and conservatives realize the small non-intrusive government they keep talking about and give in on abortion and restrictive marriage, and both agree to loosen up drugs and copyrights.
"disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child or someone holding a child.". This is absurd, what if it's an evil child? or what if someone is holding an evil child to prevent it from escaping and yelling "take the shot before he runs away!!" ? What about dwarves? this wouldn't work against e.g. minime.
Simplistic heuristics will not cut it when you're talking about, literally, a life-and-death decision.
But please show me the paragraph where it says "any weapon of your choice, including weapons which were designed for warfare between military".
Ok. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State"
The right to bear arms to there to be able to defend yourself against repressive governments. Therefore whatever weapons the government has you should be able to have as well.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Why do you need more than 3 bullets ?
Because it often takes way more than three bullets to disable even an unarmed attacker, never mind an armed one, or several of them. Most of the bullets will miss, especially when fired under stress. Most of those that hit will miss vital organs and fail to stop the attacker. Even some of those that hit vital organs still won't stop them immediately.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
A smart gun? Can't "smart" be just as destructive? Zorg ZF1, anyone? :)
http://youtu.be/7jVsQToSfag?t=31s
Imagine such a system... compromised.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"Midget goes on killing spree with sword. Police unable to stop him as their guns would not fire without another gun being present."
This ass hat should be given the opporunity to write whatever law he wants, with the undestanding that if anyone dies because of it, he'll be prosecuted for capital murder. See if he still wants to then.
You assume the purpose of shooting somebody is to kill them. That is not true. The purpose of shooting somebody is to stop them from doing what they are doing.
In cases like the recent mass shooting, what the school children were doing was living. The gun man decided he wanted to stop them from living.
Let's not pretend that the purpose of guns is not for killing. They are a tool and that is their purpose. You can kill a person or an animal to stop an action but that is the purpose of the person, not the tool. If you fire a gun at a person your expectation is that you will kill. There is an intentionality to firearms. Firearms are a weapon and the purpose of a weapon is to kill.
Network connected computers are powerful and dangerous items can be used to do illegal and "damaging" things (like leak classified diplomatic cables or video evidence pertaining to a rape) or commit property crimes (like downloading a digital copy of the music you already own on vinyl, but have no digital rights to).
They already contain powerful microprocessors and comm gear that could be required to submit each network related action to a central clearing authority for approval.
It would be easy to modify the existing hardware to create cryptographic systems built into the chips to prevent legitimate users from bypassing this requirement. This would remove any idle temptation to commit a crime on the part of the good law abiding people.
Obviously, criminals would not be detered from modifying their machines, but we would have raised the bar and thus eliminated many of the criminal acts and forced a higher degree of sophistication to be used
(Sarcasm flags activated for the clueless. It's obvious how the examples transfer to the subject at hand and all the problems thus arising.)
Smart people never own guns, because smart people know guns are more harmful than they are helpful
Given your ignorance on this topic you are hardly qualified to discuss what smart people know.
While having an accessible loaded gun around the house does in fact increase one's risk, having an unloaded locked up gun around the house does not. Smart people tend to go with the later option.
Good lord you're angry. I guess it's good you don't have a gun, or I'd be worried.
What do I do if I'm being assualted by a child? What do I do If I'm attacted by a 14 year with a 2 hand guns and a rifle?
Multiple assailants, failure to stop, ammunition malfunction, etc.
Have you ever fired a handgun?
If you believe that bearing weapon is you constitutional right, fine. But please show me the paragraph where it says "any weapon of your choice, including weapons which were designed for warfare between military".
There are plenty of documents from the founding fathers writing about the Constitution that say pretty much exactly that. The intent of the 2nd amendment was to allow citizens to possess the same weapons the military has. I know many gun advocates that say citizens should have the right to own tanks, flame-throwers, chemical weapons, etc and whatever else is necessary to overthrow the military in the event a coup is required to take back the government from the hands of the oppressors. I'm not saying I agree, but there is ample supporting writing by the authors that the intent is to allow citizens to have the same weapons the military has.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The best way to implement the 3-shot technology is to make the bullets too heavy to carry more than 3. Otherwise people can just carry a 4th round in their pocket, or a second/third/tenth firearm, duh. From my US Army MOS 55R/55B I think the ideal caliber would be about 105mm. I'm not sure of the exact weight but it was about like lifting a bag of road salt, so I'd guess 40 pounds per round. 155mm rounds are too heavy to carry 3 at a time, those are two-person lift around 150 pounds each.
There are probably going to be some collateral damage issues with issuing 105mm singleshot hand held pistols. At short range I think the muzzle blast alone would be somewhat effective.
Also the concealed carry jokes about that lump in your pocket are going to be ridiculous.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is what the chose to publish instead of my piece on "How to Deflect Bullets with Your Mind"
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Why do you need more than 3 bullets ? I ask you nicely. please reply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Goetz
One victim four attackers
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weapon_Shops_of_Isher
This reminds me of the movie Robocop when his software was "updated" with so much crap he couldn't even perform any task. Imagine trying to shoot your weapon and it just sits there for 10 minutes going through all of it's directives deciding on if it should shoot or not. By that time, you have been killed by your assailant.
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
A lot of smart people like guns. And owning a gun only really increases my chances of getting killed if I were suicidal. Because eating a bullet is more reliable than a painkiller od, or cutting ones wrists, or jumping out a window.
1) Guns should also be fitted with an electronic device which reads minds to ascertain whether the carrier intends to fire it for good or bad reasons. "Good" and "bad" can be decided by a live, crowdsourced twitter feed of the gun-carrier's thoughts. If bad intent is identified, a speaker on the gun's handle will begin reading responsive tweets, attempting to persuade the carrier not to fire (these responses will also be crowdsourced for appropriateness and effectiveness). At the same time, a special wireless network will alert emergency personnel of the carrier's location and mental state.
2) All guns should be fitted with miniaturized versions of TSA body scanners which will scan all passersby to determine whether they are carrying guns whose safety features are disabled.
3) All guns should be fitted with a voice-recognition system which is able to analyze the screams of shooting victims and disable the gun if they are determined to be children.
4) Finally, guns should be fitted with an electronic device which can summon Jesus Christ and a his angels to heal the injured, resurrect the dead, and reverse time in the event of a shooting.
"I'd challenge anyone to show me any idea anywhere that has been fool-proof."
Nature's idea/invention of aging leading to death in higher animals.
That may change, but so far it's absolute as far as humans.
Unarmed woman shot multiple times by multiple intruders: http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/story/20501099/home-intruders-shoot-injure-woman-in-fulton-county So, it may take multiple shots per attacker, and there may be more than one of them. Fortunately calling the police will keep you completely safe. Oh, wait...
Just outlaw semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines. It's not difficult. Jesus fucking Christ.
Why outlaw semi-auto rifles if high capacity magazines are outlawed? There are an awful lot of ordinary hunting and sporting rifles and shotguns that are semi-auto in operation, far far more than there are the so called "assault weapons". For that matter, if an "assault weapon" has a 5 round "hunting" magazine in it why outlaw it? Because it has a black plastic stock, or is it the attachment point for a flashlight?
It's cute how people think stuff like this would work.
Black markets don't only trade in illegal goods.
In Soviet Russia (ha!) and similar environments, if anyone wanted to know the real value of any good or product, they checked the black market prices.
That's actually not a bad idea! That way only the shooter who'll have the feature removed from his/her gun will have a functioning gun in the case of a school shooting ... oh wait.
The right to bear arms in the US isn't just about defending against a random individual. It's also about retaining the ability to defend against potential invasion, or to defend against a tyrannical government. As it already stands, the US government is capable of bringing to bear much greater firepower than the citizen. By that virtue alone, we're too strict with our gun control. I'm not advocating making all guns available to everyone, but complete lockdown isn't the way to go either.
No, the US has *not* always been like any other system of government. The fact that we're on Slashdot having this damn discussion proves it. No, we're not perfect in the US -- there are bits of tyranny lurking around, but to say that we're the same as the Chinese or the Cubans or the Soviets or Mugabe's Zimbabwe? Ludicrous; the fact that you think that the US is just as tyrannical as these real tyrannies says something pretty sad.
There is that statistic about the accessible loaded gun creating a risk for its owner, but I wonder if it decreases the risk (of crime victimization generally) of its owner's neighbor? I imagine that a whole block of armed people will have less crime than a block of unarmed people.
1977 Browning Arms incorporated electronic triggers in R&D prototypes which functioned back then. The next endeavor was fingerprintID tech, at which point Fabrique Nationale acquired the company...
Hammer deactivation engineering to electronically disarm firearms in R&D labs is 40+ year old Safety technology.
Surely all the crazy people that go on rampages do it for the fame. It has nothing to do with their mental health.
It works better as a joke, because making your own bullets is pretty easy to do (pretty much trivially so if you have the equipment, which isn't hard to get).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
The controlled burn approach?
Remember that parody is easily confused with literal opinion on slashdot.
You do understand that laws don't work by magic, right?
Some laws are not intended to work, the actual intent is to get politicians the type of press coverage that they desire. The public is largely ill-informed regarding firearms in many regions and giving them a placebo gets votes. Real solutions would take too much time and distract a politician from fundraising.
mate, you'd have to have a prodigious member if you're going around killing deer with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Essex (gun only held 5 rounds)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre (used a kitchen knife, so 0 round capacity)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiguan_kindergarten_attack (used gasoline, so 0 round capacity)
To paraphrase what you wrote, "If you don't agree with everything I think, then you are not smart."
Welcome to the human race! :-)
Did get the whole Risperdal thing? Is he suggesting we dose people in the government so they are less tyrannical and criminals so they don't crime, or dose the conspiracy nuts so they don't think there's tyranny or, um, crime?
The only lack of intelligence is on your part.
Let's say you're a 75 year old woman, weigh maybe 90 pounds. You live alone. you don't walk or sleep so good anymore. You live down town in a major city in the south. A 300 pound thug breaks into your home. By the way he's a convicted rapist.
What do you do?
If you own a gun, you shoot him, just as my grandmother did a year ago.
Guns are for the weak? Yes, in the sense that they enable a frail old women like my grandmother to stand up to someone 3x her size, and survive. Nothing else would have enabled her to do that.
Guns are for the fearful? Yes, in the sense that she was afraid of dying and did not desire to do so.
Smart people never own guns? I guess you believe that there's a real world analogy to the charisma score in D&D talking your way out of harmful situations with someone intent on doing you bodily harm?
Guns are more harmful than helpful? Only to the criminal that illegally entered her house in the middle of the night. What is she supposed to do, try to reason with him? Hope the cops can get there faster than he can cross the house?
A gun is the equaliser that allows a tiny old lady to defend herself against someone 3x her size.
You are an absolute fool for saying what you did.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It worked for Bombs
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I wish I had mod points for this comment :D should be +5 Funny IMHO
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Seems to me the problem starts when an individual who is clearly under mental duress demonstrates or vocalizes the need to harm someone -- and nobody does anything about it. The-wait-and-see attitude for dealing with mentally unstable people is problematic on many levels. No amount of technology is going to stop that person from using some other means because their Judge Dredd gun isn't firing. I'm not saying that incarcerating people for making heated threats is the answer either, just pointing out the flawed logic in TFA.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'm amused that the poster uses the phrase "completely fails to see any possible technical problems with this". It's an article about a possibility. Of course it's not going to get into possible problems with implementation details that don't exist yet. Bad editorialisation sucks (and slashdot is chock-full of radical individualists who provide a lot of that), but here the editor doesn't even finish his/her idea. If you want to express that technolibertarian rage, try harder :)
The main technical problem with something like this isn't actually technically a technical problem because it has nothing to do with whether technology actually works reliably.
It's that we've got hundreds of millions of gun which do not have this feature, and are completely legal. While this would make the Va Tech shooter's murders less likely, because they purpose-buy their weapons; it would actually make murder easier for the Adam Lamzas of the world because their stolen firearms are old enough not to have the new smartgun feature.
To get this done we'd need a government that a) had the legal authority to buy up all 100 million of those weapons, b) had the money necessary to do so, and c) had the ability to move a bill authorizing this purchase through the US Congress. a) is unlikely to be upheld by the Courts, given that the Roberts Court is moving ever closer towards declaring the NRA's guns as individual rights position to be valid, b) just won't happen until the economy's turned around, and for c) to happen you'd need the Dems to take the US House (not happening until they redraw the district lines in 2020) and a Senate dominated by rural gun-rights interests to agree.
He was incarcerated and killed for his beliefs. Funny how all those pro-gun people who trot out the "we need to defend ourselves agaisnt the government" revile Mcveigh rather than actually look up to him for doing exactly what they claim they need their guns for!
Wow, this is truly one of the stupidest things I have ever read in my life. Timothy McVeigh was incarcerated and "killed" (as you put it) for murdering 168 innocent people. He was not defending himself or his beliefs. He was not engaged in combat. He just drove a bomb up and killed them. That is not something people should "look up to him" for. I would assume you're a troll if you had posted AC. Since you logged in, perhaps you are just crazy?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Quite a few people already reload their own brass....might just start more people doing the same, that way you can get custom loads easier too!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Everyone, repeat after me: "Technological solutions to social problems are doomed to failure."
You want to stop school shootings, here's what you do:
1) Vastly improve the mental health system. The number of deranged gunmen slaughtering kids is directly proportional to the number of deranged psychopaths.
2) Fix the media's obsession with violent tragedies. Half of them are only doing it because they'll get fame (or at least infamy) for doing so. I'm not advocating a total Herostratus solution, but do we really need to have weeks of constant news coverage for every single one of these?
3) Fix the school system. A lot of the things that would improve education overall (less focus on rote learning, stop keeping everyone generalists until college, smaller schools with a lower teacher/student ratio, etc) would also reduce student stress immensely.
4) And yeah, we could probably stand to lower gun proliferation a bit. It wouldn't have affected any of the school shootings I can recall, but it would reduce general gun violence, which isn't a bad thing. I think the laws we have right now are fine, or even too restrictive, but certain cultural biases towards prolific gun ownership could stand a change.
I suspect Grimbleton handles his gun several times a day.
And where, pray tell, would criminals get six-shooters if six-shooters were illegal?
That's the problem with every argument based on the idea that criminals are well-armed. When guns are banned criminals are the very first people to give them up because criminals do not want to be arrested for carrying a weapon that's clearly illegal. Japan is the perfect example. The Yakuza will actually punish any of their members who acquires a gun because the police are sure to arrest that guy, and then the local Yakuza boss gets to go to jail.
The rest of the world now feels smarter after reading such a dumb idea. Why anyone would use/carry a weapon if could fail in a situation where their lives could be at stake? Why adding even more weapons to the system will prevent that any of them being misused? Will those guns have positronic brains to decide when not harm?
From your link:
- It is highly doubtful the four guys would have attacked him, had they seen the gun, as they were unarmed and there were about 15 to 20 other passengers in the same coach;
- He was charged with reckless endangerment for missing one of his five bullets. Fortunately no other passengers got hurt because he ran out of bullets. He hit 4 out of 5;
- 'Later in the tape, Goetz said, "If I had more bullets, I would have shot 'em all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets."'
As an argument for having more bullets, this is about the worst argument possible.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Target practice?
Hell, I believe it is still a fscking Olympic sport is it not? Don't they even ski and shoot in winter?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There is that statistic about the accessible loaded gun creating a risk for its owner, but I wonder if it decreases the risk (of crime victimization generally) of its owner's neighbor? I imagine that a whole block of armed people will have less crime than a block of unarmed people.
The unloaded locked up guns would seem to provide the same effect. Loading takes little time. There are locked boxes that are designed to be quickly opened, even in the dark. A scenario where a homeowner, or even more so the neighbors, does not have the very brief time period necessary to unlock and load a firearm is so remote its not worth worrying about.
Err...that unloaded, locked up hard to access gun isn't going to do you much good in a time of emergency when you need to shoot some fucker that has just broken into your home, and is likely armed with a real, unlocked, loaded and cocked gun.
Hell, I keep a number of loaded and ready to go pistols all over my house so that at any given time, I'm never far away from one if it were needed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Instead of a permissive action link for handguns one might consider an x-ray backscatter sentry gun outside of schools, shopping malls and paintball arenas. In addition to fine points made by TFA it would offer backwards compatibility for all existing weapons.
Operation is quite simple. When a weapon is detected a gamma-ray radar in the sentry automatically estimates density of the weapon and transmits the calculated minimum energy required to the integrated fire control system.
The sentry gun then fires a projectile at the weapon shooting it out of your hand, holster, book bag, purse or fanny pack.
I can't think of any possible problems with this as long as you don't show up to class with a walking hard on or concealed water pistol.
are you sure you wanted to do that? click yes or no
And when you are defending yourself against an armed assailant, this gives a very literal meaning to "blue screen of death".
No, McVeigh was executed for killing 186 people including 19 children and injuring 450 others. His beliefs were never the subject of any of the crimes for which he was convicted. He may have done what he did to stand "up to what he believed was an oppresive[sic] government", but he did it in a cowardly and evil way. My own feeling is that a man who killed that many innocent people got what he deserved no matter his beliefs.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
lol your such a believer.
Again, try breaking a law, and see how much freedom you have.
...But how are we going to get the criminals to follow the law that says they should use that kind of gun? Every attempt at legislating the problem away ignores the basic, obvious fact, that criminals don't follow the laws.
Limit the amount of TV you can watch.
Inform everyone about how to operate, maintain, and respect firearms.
This is exactly why smart guns are a terrible idea. Who would have the ability to turn off all the smart guns with a single command? The government. Imagine being able to disarm one of the most heavily armed citizenry with one command. Does anyone see any potential for abuse there?
McVeigh's action were damned sure not defensive by any means, hence the fact that no sane person looks up to him.
That alone destroys what little argument you thought you had.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Like a poor bystander sliced in half by a flying arm bone two miles behind the shooter
Miller Lite tastes like water that's somehow managed to rot.
Then you just have to worry about the slow blade penetrates the shield...
But then perhaps you would only join each other in death.
Of course if some fool with a Lasgun comes along...
the ability to fire multiple shots in crowded areas or when no other guns are present would be limited by software that understands where the gun is being used.
So I carry two guns. Gun A senses the presence of Gun B, validates the possible threat and enables itself. Same for Gun B. That gets around the inconvenient 10 round clip limitation as well.
Sensory data can be used by built-in software to disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child or someone holding a child.
I predict the beginning of a crime wave conducted by midgets.
Have gnu, will travel.
the constitution has been turned into a set of "guidelines" for the government to refer to when it's convenient to them and fits in with their own agenda... did you not get that memo?
Err...that unloaded, locked up hard to access gun isn't going to do you much good in a time of emergency when you need to shoot some fucker that has just broken into your home, and is likely armed with a real, unlocked, loaded and cocked gun.
That home invasion type scenario is so remote in probability it is not worth worrying about.
Plus locked up does not have to be slow to access. As for time to load, dropping a shell into the ejection port of a 12 gauge pump shotgun takes nearly no time at all. Filling the magazine tube can be done at one's leisure since the sound of the pump action being worked has probably caused the "bad guy" to change his mind and leave.
Hi! I'm Clippy. You appear to be trying to fire this gun. Would you like me to open the Gun Wizard to assist you with this task?
[Yes] [No] [Never mind, my attacker just murdered me]
Get it? Gun? Clip? Eh? Eh? Eh? ... Ah, the hell with yous.
Yes, but the question is to what should you feed them...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's not fool-proof, but it is entirely smart-proof.
I would say that guns do have a peacefull purpose.
The very fact that a populace is armed means the government remains relatively peaceful torwads that population. It is when the populace is unarmed, that tyranical governments do their worst. That doesn't mean that it will always happen, but there is nothing to stop it if you are unarmed.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
The question isn't "what happens when you break the law?" but "Which things are illegal?"
Granted, some things are illegal here that shouldn't be (mostly related to drug use). But most things that are crimes are crimes because they deprive others of life, liberty, or property. If I steal from someone the police will show up and arrest me, and I damn well hope they will. This isn't tyranny, it's my neighbors hiring a police force to protect them from thieves.
Hell, I believe it is still a fscking Olympic sport is it not? Don't they even ski and shoot in winter?
Yes. There are several shooting sports in the Olympics, including rifles, pistols, and shotguns.
The Biathlon involves shooting and skiing in winter.
Of course -- I was more wondering about the other part of my question: how much does my neighbor owning a gun (stored however way you want) protect me?
Next, we install identification chips into hunting game and criminals. Your guns' sights will merely add them as blips. May the games begin!
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
This is Slashdot. Of course (s)he is.
"The purpose of gun control is to guarantee the right of 110-pound women to fistfight with 210-pound rapists." - the net
I couldn't imagine living in a country where everyone's so paranoid and scared of others that they think murderers are around every corner. I wonder if more people in the US die of fright rather than due to gunshot wounds.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting mass killing. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and
it may have other flaws which may vary from state to state.)
(x) Hunting, target shooting, self-defense, and other legitimate gun uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) Users of guns will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from criminals
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Deranged people don't care about not killing children
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for firearms
(x) Hundreds of millions of existing firearms
(x) Ease of smuggling non-conforming firearms into the country
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Susceptibility of schoolchildren to mass murder without firearms
(x) Willingness of criminals to violate additional laws
(x) Armies of 2nd Amendment advocates
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of firearms
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Countermeasures should not involve violation of the 2nd Amendment
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(x) I don't want the government controlling my firearms
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Guns are tools, nothing more, nothing less.
Very true, so is welding equipment. Do you think everyone should drive around with oxy-acetylene tanks and a blow torch JUST IN CASE?
The only thing that will stop a bad welder is a good welder.
(And blasting explosives... etc. etc.)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
It depends where you live. When I lived in a nasty neighborhood in a certain midwestern city it wasn't uncommon. That being said you can keep a fully loaded revolver in a LOCKED table top gun safe on the nightstand with reasonably quick access. Especially if you've got a model with the finger tip controls and the combo locked into muscle memory.
I'm a fan of the pump gun though..
Maybe for stupids with no training. As a former Marine, I can tell you my having a gun is more helpful. I know when to use it, and when not to use it. I have restraint, situational awareness, compassion, and the determination to use it when necessary. I can retain my weapon when someone tries to take it and I have it well secured when not in use. Plenty of smart people own guns, unless you are defining smart people as people who agree with you.
The problem, as ever, is that people who have none of those qualities that you have and who are mentally unbalanced or professional criminals can very easily get a hold of guns. Smart people know that we are never going to reduce gun violence unless we start filtering out the nutters and criminals right at the source, i.e. the gun shop or any other place where you can legally buy guns and start making it mandatory for gun owners to undergo serious training before getting to own a gun. Smart people also know that even if we do this will take a loooooong time for things to change. Stuffing guns full of sensors that deactivate them in the vicinity of schools won't help either since there are way to many legacy weapons with no such sensors and safety devices in circulation already. The USA has already created a situation where there are so many firearms in circulation and they are so easy to obtain in ways the police is powerless to monitor that no amount of legislating, policing, training or educational efforts by gun clubs/owners-associations will ever be really effective at keeping guns out of the hands of nutters and criminals unless, as I stated before, these measures are given a take a long time to take effect (not years, decades). Gun control works in Europe because it has been in place for many, many decades and the bar to owning a gun is so high you have to quite motivated to complete the process of getting a weapons license... especially one for a pistol. The byproduct of the European approach is that the vast majority of gun owners are people like you, well trained, responsible, mentally stable and not likely to treat a gun frivolously.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
First intelligent statement I've read! Guns are tools! People kill people, guns or not.
Better yet, stop using/selling/owning guns...
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
Pretending for a moment that I had a pro-gun-control position (which I don't; I really don't care to make much of an opinion on the issue), buyback plans would not violate any interpretation of the second amendment I've ever heard of. You may be right to worry about the funding of such purchase, although it presumably would have to be balanced against the economic cost of shootings (provided fewer guns actually result in fewer people being shot); those costs vary from direct medical costs to the large investments society puts into each individual (all the food someone eats, education, and so on). If it actually would be a net benefit to have a buyback program, it presumably would be a benefit to do so now (same costs I mentioned above).
I have no idea how the politics would work out though. It might not be as simple as getting dems in power, because a fair number of dems are not anti-gun.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Charge $5000 for a bullet
The whole problem is economic: gun owners/makers shift the cost of fatalities/injuries to the general public. If they paid into an insurance fund that paid millions to victims, there'd be a lot less complaining.
I wish people would just mourn the dead and stop trying to "solve the problem." The shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School was unendingly tragic. I was literally weeping when I heard the details. I can't even imagine the grief the parents and teachers and students and everyone else there felt and will never stop feeling. I have a son and I can't even comprehend of the depths of despair I would feel if...I'm not going to finish this sentence.
But, as much as we wish this had never happened, and wish it will never happen again, it probably will, and there's just about nothing that can be done to stop it. And it's such an incredibly, incredibly rare event. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, there are about 100,000 public schools in the US. There are about 180 days in a given school year. There are have been an average of two school shootings per year in the US since 2000. So in a given year, there are on average 17,999,998 times a school bell rings in the morning, students show up to class, no guns are fired all day, and everybody goes home in the afternoon. And there are 2 tragic, awful, awful days where gunshots are fired. If you're a parent with a kid in school, your chance of sending your kid off to school that day and then a shooting occurring at your child's school is one in 9 million.
You can't defend against 1 in 9 million chances.
Control the guns: Won't work. There are so many millions of guns already in the US, you can't round them all up. Even if you do, if somebody wants to do something like this, you can't control every household chemical or bag of fertilizer that could be used to construct explosive devices. If somebody wants to hurt people, they can find a way. People are fragile that way.
More guns! Arm the teachers!: Won't work, and is dumb. Really? So we're gonna have teachers walking around packing for 17,999,998 school days where nothing happens, but they're going to be primed and ready to instantly switch into Tactical Defense Mode on one of those 2 in 18 million days something tragic occurs? School teachers are not soldiers. Schools are not fortresses. And when all those days go by where nothing happens, people get complacent. Those teachers are going to wind up leaving a gun in a desk or something, and then it will be available when some kid gets angry another kid stole his girlfriend. "And oh look, the teacher keeps a gun in her desk, and maybe she didn't lock it today." The law of unintended consequences always bites you in the ass in the end.
Mental health treatment: Won't work for this. I'm not opposed to a greater availability of mental health counseling for people, but mental health treatment has to be voluntary. You have to want to get better. The "solutions" I see proposed on the news and online seem to involve "identifying people who might snap like this and get them off the streets." How exactly do you want to do that? Talk about a needle in a haystack. So the school shooter had Asberger's or something? Okay, how many people are there with Asberger's who don't snap and kill people every day? I bet a lot more than those who do. And the "signs" we're supposed to be looking for? Depressed and withdrawing from friends and family? Well, if your dog dies and your girlfriend dumps you and you lose your job, you've got a right to be depressed and maybe spend a couple weeks sobbing in the dark. But gosh, you know what'll help you get right back on your feet? Getting branded as "mentally unstable" and put on some watch list. Yeah the HR person at the new job you're applying for is going to look right past that! Ostracizing people going through rough times is just going to make it harder to reintegrate those who need help back into society before they actually DO suffer a psychotic break.
These events are terrible and tragic a
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
There is that statistic about the accessible loaded gun creating a risk for its owner, but I wonder if it decreases the risk (of crime victimization generally) of its owner's neighbor? I imagine that a whole block of armed people will have less crime than a block of unarmed people.
I imagine quite the opposite, actually. I live in a country that has pretty strict gun laws and almost non-existent gun ownership, and amazingly enough less crime than heavily armed parts of the US. What most pro-gun people don't tend to consider is that when everyone has guns, it's more likely that someone will lose their cool and fire one in anger at someone else. Or just be a dick and use one to commit crimes. Everyone else having guns doesn't actually prevent that... you might be able to shoot back, assuming you weren't the one shot to begin with, but it won't prevent deaths that wouldn't have happened had there not been guns there to begin with.
As pointed out by numerous posts, the suggestion is fundamentally flawed. Clearly what is needed is for us (the ordinary folk) to voluntarily submit to the "Ludovico technique" to remove our capability for violence.
That home invasion type scenario is so remote in probability it is not worth worrying about.
Indeed. In my nearly thirty-three years on this planet, not once have I been victim to a home invasion, and there's basically no reason to expect that I ever will be.
There is no solution that is going to prevent gun violence in the US, its too late. You have too many guns already available. Any tech you can possibly invent will not affect any of the guns who do not have that tech, and in fact will only make those who own the newer "safer" guns be at more risk.
The US is a violent place. Many of you practically worship the right to bear arms. I personally think that the widespread possession and availability of guns has aggravated that situation but it hardly matters whether or not that is true. The guns are there already, with a powerful lobby supporting their continued presence, and a powerful industry dedicated to producing and selling them. Its too late to fix that situation, period.
About the only thing that might help resolve the situation would be a vigorous buy-back program which saw the government purchasing any gun from any individual, for cash without questions. It would have to be sufficient cash to encourage people to actually sell their firearms, and of course with the US on the decline, where would that cash possibly come from. (and of course this would immediately spawn a black-market gun production industry making guns solely to sell them and have them be destroyed, would spawn a smuggling industry importing guns from elsewhere to sell them etc).
The real solution is of course to have a very effective socialized mental health system similar to our health system up here in Canada (although our mental health system sucks as much as is possible too). And of course, an effective healthcare system is also another bugaboo down there. To paraphrase:
"Guns don't kill people, mentally ill people with guns kill people"
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
this sort of thing would only work in a Star Trek perfect-ed world.
Just one example comes to mind: what if a bad guy is holding my kid with a knife to his throat and I can take him out with a double-tap to the head? Oops - my super smart gun won't let me because I'm aiming near a child. Sorry kid - better luck in your next life :/
And if you'd risk missing the dude's head, or having him stab the kid in his death throws, you probably aren't a very good father.
The ideas presented are some of the most thoughtless brainstorming I have ever heard. Brainstorming is good but some filtering should be the next step and certainly before you tell anyone your ideas.
First. Put computer into guns. Like they can't be hacked, turning your gun into your own worst enemy, shooting where you dont want or not shooting when you do.
Have building sensing. As if sensor signals can be suppressed or overridden. Like the Drones snagged by Iran which tricked it into landing inside Iran, intack if the stories are to believed. Or the hacks to turn the traffic lights to your advantage.
Lets say you have building sensing through some suppression signal. What would be the default behaviour. If you did not get the signal then allow firing, or not allow firing. Well probably the signal would allow firing (the default). Maybe a little aluminum foil on the antenna would trick the gun into allowing firing.
Biometrics, only prevents someone else from picking up you gun and using it. Doesn't help if its your gun that you want to clear out a school with.
Maybe some combination of all those things would be good. It would make the cost of a gun prohibitive and we would have fewer guns which translates to fewer gun deaths.
who are mentally unbalanced or professional criminals can very easily get a hold of guns.
...and gasoline, gunpowder, plans for explosives, and many other cheap and legal means to kill people. Solving gun violence doesn't solve violence. I agree in general that more stringent rules for purchasing guns and being issued concealed carry permits would not be a bad thing. I don't think the required changes are likely to be made, but perhaps that is another argument. Looking at myself, not only do I have military training (as do millions of Americans), but I have had 4 concealed carry permits issued in 2 different states which means 4 background checks. I have a security clearance, and have had 3 intense background checks done, every 5 years. I have undergone a psychological test in order to work in a particularly sensitive unit. I have undergone a polygraph, during which they asked me questions to determine if I was a spy, a saboteur, and or a terrorist. I passed. I think I can be trusted to carry a gun at this point, and even carry one into a school. (I also think I can be trusted to carry a knife on a plane since the govt is convinced I am not a terrorist, but that is yet another argument). There are millions of Americans who have military or law enforcement training, security clearances, and clean backgrounds. I have heard some say, here and elsewhere, that only police should be able to buy guns, and I think that there are plenty of people like me that are in effect trustable, and at least these people should be able to have guns. I think that teachers that meet similar criteria (there are plenty of former military teachers) should be able to carry a concealed pistol to school. Allowing trusted citizens to carry pistols into schools, sporting events, etc (as well as allowing them to carry non-firearm weapons on planes) would help curb some of these types of rampage shootings where someone is able to kill multiple unarmed people.
On a separate note, I think America's very recent history of having a revolution and a dangerous frontier has made the personal firearm a part of our culture. So while much of Europe enjoys lower murder rates and fewer guns, our culture is just different and solutions that worked for Europe may not work for the US.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
That's the kind of story I'd like to see a link to, but let's assume it's true.
If your grandmother has a gun in her house, she's more likely to use it to kill herself, or another innocent party, as she is to use it to defend herself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/opinion/at-the-er-bearing-witness-to-gun-violence.html
At the E.R., Bearing Witness to Gun Violence
By DAVID H. NEWMAN
Published: January 1, 2013
I do not know exactly what measures should be taken to reduce gun violence like this. But I know that most homicides and suicides in America are carried out with guns. Research suggests that homes with a gun are two to three times more likely to experience a firearm death than homes without guns, and that members of the household are 18 times more likely to be the victim than intruders.
Emergency rooms are themselves volatile environments, not immune to violence. Over the last decade, a quarter of gun crimes in American E.R.’s were committed with guns wrested from armed guards.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.long
Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study
Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow
Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4).
The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home
Arthur L. Kellermann, Frederick P. Rivara, Norman B. Rushforth, Joyce G. Banton, Donald T. Reay, Jerry T. Francisco, Ana B. Locci, Janice Prodzinski, Bela B. Hackman, and Grant Somes
N Engl J Med 1993; 329:1084-1091
October 7, 1993
DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3713749
N Engl J Med. 1986 Jun 12;314(24):1557-60.
Protection or peril? An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home.
Kellermann AL, Reay DT.
Only 2 of these 398 deaths (0.5 percent) involved an intruder shot during attempted entry. Seven persons (1.8 percent) were killed in self-defense. For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms. Hand-guns were used in 70.5 percent of these deaths.
http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(12)01408-4/abstract
Annals of Emergency Medicine
Volume 60, Issue 6 , Pages 790-798.e1, December 2012
Hospital-Based Shootings in the United States: 2000 to 2011
Gabor D. Kelen, Christina L. Catlett, Joshua G. Kubit, Yu-Hsiang Hsieh
In 23% of shootings within the ED, the weapon was a security officer's gun taken by the perpetrator.
Minor nitpick... but almost no one makes their own bullets. Lots of people do make and reload their own ammo with purchased bullets, primers, powder, and new or (usually) reused brass. Similar for shot shells, but with purchased shot and wad or slug and sabo.
I'm not trying to add an annoying amount of detail, I just think it's relevant for discussion of wild taxation schemes. If you were to levy an insane tax on bullets it would be a pretty big problem.
Social Accountability.
Growing up, I attended thirteen different schools (excluding university). There is something to be said about these small towns. The real issue that I observed is a cultural regression. People are no longer neighbors.
It wasn't that long ago, citizens acted like neighbors and took responsibility for all. Nowadays, if a child begins to develop behavioral problems, he is exiled instead of being compassionately rebuked.
You do understand that laws don't work by magic, right?
It is a lot more complicated than that.
LK
This would be easier to enforce then you'd think.
Criminals will actually be the last people to hold on to these weapons. If all it takes to have your entire operation investigated by the cops is a neighbor noticing you have an AR-15 you damn well don't have AR-15s lying around where curious cops can find them. That's why none of the criminals involved in any massacre using an AR-15 bothered pushing out the one pin that stops it from firing full auto.
If there was a buyback program, and the Feds got a warrant for the records of companies that sell these things; a lot of refuseniks would be tracked down.
You might get some wildcat manufacturing of illegal firearms, but criminals aren't bothering to manufacture RPG-7s or full-auto AK-74s, when either could be made fairly simply at any machine shop. Why would they bother doing it with AR-15s or high-capacity clips?
So, yes, if city-boys controlled Congress and the Presidency, and they decided to spend tax money on buying up all "modern rifles," and "high-capacity clips," then criminal usage of said things would drop to zero. The problem is city-boys don't control either House of Congress, not that the idea is actually unworkable.
God made man and woman.
Colt made them equal.
Nothing related to guns can ever be considered "smart", since guns are for weak and fearful. Smart people never own guns, because smart people know guns are more harmful than they are helpful.
Smart people know that firearms (and all other "paradigm shift" personal weapons before them) were invented by other smart people, so that they would not have to spend as much time mastering the previous-generation state-of-the-art self-defense weapon in order to protect themselves against dumb brute thugs - leaving them with more time for actual intellectual pursuits.
What most pro-gun people don't tend to consider is that when everyone has guns, it's more likely that someone will lose their cool and fire one in anger at someone else. Or just be a dick and use one to commit crimes.
Switzerland proves otherwise. They have universal conscription and have hundreds of thousands of genuine fully automatic assault rifles in private homes. Plus they also have hundreds of thousands of so called "assault weapons", semi-auto and capable of accepting military high capacity magazines, in private homes as well. However given universal conscription the gun owners have had proper training in safe handling, the guns are stored locked and the owners have had a background check.
I grew up in a part of the U.S. where hunting and firearms ownership was fairly common. A region with town populations generally in the low tens of thousands, a few over a hundred thousand. Our per capita crime rate involving firearms was low, far lower than more urban regions where firearms were banned or severely restricted.
Its not the guns. Its the lack of training, proper storage and background checks that seem to be the problem.
Its funny that you use the phrase "pro-gun". It seems that people familiar with firearms tend to support private ownership of firearms, even those that choose not to own one themselves. While those unfamiliar with firearms tends to be against private ownership. Familiar as in having gone shooting to some small extent at some point in their lives. Unfamiliar as in what they "know" they "learned" from the mass media, TV and movies. What does that tell you?
Again, just to be clear. Private ownership is one thing, however I think both the pro and anti sides generally agree that safety training, safe storage and background checks are all good things.
You're smart person is going to look pretty dumb
Your aliterate person who can't handle homophones looks pretty dumb, too. Look, folks, that kind of aliterate ignorance REALLY affects reading speed and comprehension. And if you actually know better, double shame on you.
You know what I see when I see "you're dog is loose"? I see a high school dropout who has never read an entire book in his whole life. I see a sad, uneducated individual. I see someone I pity. I see someone who is way out of his league at slashdot.
(waiting for an aliterate who thinks "aliterate" is a misspelling to comment...)
You seem awfully proud to know the meaning of the word aliterate...
How about you show me where it says "only firearms that the Government chooses to allow the people to own." Also consider that that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written in a manner that made it clear that if the documents didn't specifically limit something, then there were no restrictions.
I greatly enjoy target shooting with my PS90, AR15's and even my 10/22 and there is absolutely no reason to not have 50, 30 and 10 round magazines for these to appease someone like you is afraid of law abiding citizens and inanimate objects.
The Constitution doesn't specifically restrict air pollution, because that wasn't around to be restricted in 1789. But the Courts nonetheless allowed the Clean Air Act. The government has quite a few powers to do things in 2012 that it did not have in 1789.
Nobody's afraid of you as a law-abiding citizen. What scares us shitless is that you have friends and family who know where your firearms are. Nancy Lamza was you. She was as responsible as you are. She was a good person. But due to the fact she had the same hobby as you she was shot, and her son took out 20 first-graders for reasons that are still unclear. If she'd been a LARPer instead she probably still would have died (most LARPers have real, or at least real-looking, swords in their homes), but it's entirely possible those kids would have lived.
That's why I'd love it if your hobby was banned.
Criminals will actually be the last people to hold on to these weapons.
Only if you engage in circular logic. Because anyone who refuses to give up their firearm would then be a criminal. There are millions of people who are otherwise law abiding who will never willingly disarm.
That's why none of the criminals involved in any massacre using an AR-15 bothered pushing out the one pin that stops it from firing full auto.
You have just outed yourself. There is no such pin. The AR-15 bolt carrier is different than the M-16 bolt carrier so that if one were to alter or remove the sear, it will still not fire full-auto. A more likely reason is because these gunmen haven't possessed the skills to convert their rifles to full auto.
If there was a buyback program, and the Feds got a warrant for the records of companies that sell these things; a lot of refuseniks would be tracked down.
And that^ is the real reason why they want to "close the gunshow loophole" because as of now, it's possible to legally purchase a firearm that the feds can't track down.
What you're talking about is government applied gun violence in search of an end to gun violence.
Why would they bother doing it with AR-15s or high-capacity clips?
Because AR-15s are easy for machinists to make. And standard capacity magazines are cheap and plentiful enough that no one needs to make them underground.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Then dont the FUCK sell automatic/semiautomatic weapons. Best would be: sell no weapons to people which are not police Second best option: sell weapons which are able to shoot once or twice. Make a mechanism which requires approximately 15sec reloading time. Make the ammunition in a way which pollutes the weapon so strongly that after 10 shots the weapon needs to be cleaned.
Shooting once or twice is still enough to make being a burglar or robber a quite unhealthy business in average (if you believe in the self-defense shit).
Yes, you will neither be able to fend of zombie-herds nor the chinese army, should they be interested in you.
If you believe that bearing weapon is you constitutional right, fine. But please show me the paragraph where it says "any weapon of your choice, including weapons which were designed for warfare between military". Why don't you stack chemical weapons or nuclear weapons at home? Could be useful if you are overrun by atheists.
It doesn't need to say what we can choose to defend ourselves with... It was written in the spirit of defending ourselves from any potential repressive regime, up to and including the military. If it specified the firearms of the time, would citizens armed with flintlock muskets be able to defend themselves or their rights?
If you knew anything about the military you wouldn't be talking about defending yourself with firearms. They're as relevant to modern military operations as swords were during the Civil War.
IEDs are the man-killing weapon that an insurgent can use against the modern US Military.
You're smart person is going to look pretty dumb when he encounters and angry dumb person with a gun and a motive.
Why do angry dumb people in america have guns, and why would they shoot them? We have plenty of angry dumb people in the UK, yet very few are ever likely to shoot someone.
The only lack of intelligence is on your part.
Let's say you're a 75 year old woman, weigh maybe 90 pounds. You live alone. you don't walk or sleep so good anymore. You live down town in a major city in the south. A 300 pound thug breaks into your home. By the way he's a convicted rapist.
Out of interest, how come he wasn't armed?
Do you have a news story backing your claim up?
Let's say you're a 75 year old woman, weigh maybe 90 pounds. You live alone. you don't walk or sleep so good anymore. You live down town in a major city in the south. A 300 pound thug breaks into your home. By the way he's a convicted rapist.
It's funny because a very noisy, home invasion type crime such is this is the only scenario to my mind where the right to keep a gun in your home is any use.
The problem is that it hardly ever happens in the manner you describe. What actually happens is that the guy knocks on the door, old lady answers it and is then taken by surprise and subdued. As she was surprised a gun would only help if she was carrying it in her hand and only if she could keep some distance between her and her attacker which is unlikely.
This to my mind is always the problem with the idea of guns as a method of preventing crime: criminals generally prefer to rob you on the quiet when you are out or to ambush you in such a way that nothing you can do (even if you are carrying a gun) will help you or put them at any risk.
Guns are not really much of an advantage in a hand to hand combat scenario. They only really come into their own when at ranges greater than a few feet.
I would be interested to know whether the amount of crimes they prevent actually balance the number of car jackings they make much easier (without a gun in your hand convincing someone not to just run you over would strike me as difficult) .
I dont read
CNN opinion: Let's invest billions in creating an arsenal of super smart weapons using technology not even invented yet to make it impossible for someone to shoot a child.
OR
How about investing billions into education to create well educated and upstanding citizens that don't feel the need to buy a gun to resolve their issues.
Just saying in a country staggering under massive debt and many school districts are unable to buy text books, perhaps investing into children's futures is better then investing into weaponry.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
"Mexican guns" are actually generally bought in the US due our relatively lax gun laws. There is no chance the Mexicans would not require this system if it was physically possible. There is no country south of us that would not require these chips if they existed. Canada might. So your smuggled in real-gns are Canadian, not American.
As for 100% success, the government doesn't need it. It will have 100% success among smart criminals because smart criminals don;t want something lying around that will get them arrested two seconds after somebody notices it. Dumb criminals get caught pretty quickly. As for everyone else, what are they gonna do with an illegal weapon?
Can't take it to the range. Can't put on your roof-rack. Gotta hide it in the basement, maybe set some cans up on a fence if your property is big enough.
Err...that unloaded, locked up hard to access gun isn't going to do you much good in a time of emergency when you need to shoot some fucker that has just broken into your home, and is likely armed with a real, unlocked, loaded and cocked gun.
Bro, you are not Charles Bronson, and we are not living in Death Wish land. To be honest, I call bs on this, conjuring the most Kafkaesque, silence-of-the-f*-lambs-meets-taxi-driver scenarios where Ethan Hunt surreptitiously sneaks inside your home al the way to your bedpost with deadly and silent competency.
For starters, there are safe boxes that are quick to open even in the dark. It's not like you are going to put your gun(s) in a safebox on the other side of the house. Seriously.
Secondly, if you own hot weapons strictly for SD, one would imagine you invested some money on home protection/burglar alarm systems and, if you are worried/intelligent/paranoid enough that you have position furniture in your bedroom for ease of barricading yourself in it. Something that will give you time lock-and-load under realistic home burglary scenarios.
So no, you are not keeping hot weapons around (and dissing the idea of modern, easy-to-open gun boxes) not because you think about safety, but because you are living a fantasy where you want to pop a bad guy. That is all.
I mean seriously, forget safe boxes, how hard is it to slide a clip on a semi, or load a revolver with a speed loader???? What guns are you carrying? Tinie-tiny, hard-to-load Derringers???? I guess if you live alone, having a loaded gun under your pillow is an acceptable risk (I have kids so that is not an option.)
But that is doesn't negate the fact that such a precaution is largely unnecessary in the majority of cases where speed loading or having a quick-opening safe box is absolutely fine for the purposes of S/D.
Better yet is to have an unloaded gun with a clip or speed loader under your pillow, a 10 or 12 gaugue shotgun and two "00" buckshot rounds as a backup next to your bed. Crap, you don't even need to load the shotgun - you just have to rack the shotgun without even loading it, with the widely recognizable sound of it scaring the crap of most robbers.
And again, the whole point is self-defense, and what I described above is sufficient for that.
Hell, I keep a number of loaded and ready to go pistols all over my house so that at any given time, I'm never far away from one if it were needed.
To each its own, but that is still a dumb proposition of the knee-jerking, ill-turn-charles-bronson-in-a-split second kind. Threats have to be dealt in a manner effective and proportional to risk they pose. I dunno, maybe you are a black-ops agent by day, vigilante by night with bad guys springing out at every corner trying to kill you or something, and you need to keep loaded guns all over the place in a Tom Clancy novel fashion.
you are thinking it wrong! the problem is the thug breaking into the house. you fight this by changing the mentality (education) of people, not by giving them guns.
Yes, robbery, rape, murder happens only because the poor perps did not know that it was a bad thing. That is why if they get out of prison they never commit crimes again.
Do you have prisons in those civilized countries? Are there any convicted rapists or murderers serving time there? If so, why do you keep them there - just explain that what they did was wrong and let them out.
I just happens so rarely that it is NOT a problem.
Well, unless it happens to you, though I guess if it happens to you then it is less likely to happen o me, maybe it really is not a problem.
So are nuclear weapons but that doesn't mean I should be allowed to own one.
Just like the driver with seatbelts who gets stuck in a burning car, the man who finds out at the wrong time he is allergic to latex in condoms, or the patient who gets a vaccine develops the disease because the virus in the vaccine batch was not really dead after all.
Not owning a gun makes you safer . You may feel safer with a gun because you think you are in control, just like people feel safer in their cars but not in aeroplanes (even though last year only over 30,000 people died on cars in the US, none in airliners AFAIK).
The whole picture includes you having a gun during a serious depression and killing yourself over a moment of desperation, your children finding the gun the one time you left it loaded, you discovering you are a sleepwalker the day you shoot your wife in your dreams, and that angry dumb person with a gun (who might have been satisfied by robbing you) that turns out to be a faster shot than you are, and leaves you in a pool of blood.
Are you always less safe with a gun? No, in some limited cases it makes sense, such as when going in areas with aggressive wildlife (e.g. polar bears). In some occasions even in normal, civilian life it might be advantageous to have a gun to scare a casual would-be thief. But on average, all things considered, statistics shows that it is a safer decision not to have a gun around.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
No, actually McVeigh's motivation was a response to Waco and Ruby Ridge. That's why he targeted that office.
We need to remember evil accurately if we're going to be watchful of it.
Fair enough, but you certainly can make your own bullets (casting lead if you have to). You are correct that most people don't, because it's a lot easier and more precise to use mass-manufactured bullets and simply do the loading process yourself, but you could.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Democrat Underground is down the hall on the extreme left.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
While at it, an adjacent memorial could list those whose lives were saved by armed defenders.
cops better not have stuff like this as it will slow them down and may even get them killed.
>
Last century but one, this was tried with printers' ink.
Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't infringe a Constitutional Right via onerous taxation....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Funny how all those pro-gun people who trot out the "we need to defend ourselves agaisnt the government" revile Mcveigh rather than actually look up to him for doing exactly what they claim they need their guns for!
No, we revile him for parking his truck-bomb outside of a daycare. I understand his anger, it was righteous anger, he should have been more selective in his targeting. If he had killed only BATF agents or FBI HRT, I would have stood up and cheered.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They are not personal arms...
That said, I believe a collection (town, county, etc) should have the right to own such. Why not, the Federal government is giving all these grants to small cities to buy light armored tanks vehicles.
Are you saying that Joe Biden isn't smart?
He's a gun owner, you know?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
What it comes down to, is it worth it? Is it worth having massacres over someone potentially saving the day from a home invasion? I would still say no. Is it worth collecting and having fun trap shooting or having massacres continue to happen? No. I cannot find any worth of private ownership of a gun that would outweigh piles of dead children. It just isn't worth it to me anymore. This is coming from a former gun owner, deer hunter, and trap shooter.
the problem you and everyone else seems to be misled on is that the idea that removing guns will somehow stop violence. The anti-gun crowd ONLY want to quote statistics on gun violence and not overall violent crimes. The per-capita statistics on overall violence is still very high when you don't pick out some meaningless statistic as the instrument used to commit the crime. By the same logic I could say that we should ban the import of British cars in the USA because the number of drunk driving incidents involving British cars in England are astronomically high; and here, where there are fewer British cars, there are almost no drunk driving incidents where those cars are involved. Its a useless statistic that does nothing to address the real problem associated with drunk driving.
The truth is, getting rid of the gun does nothing to stop someone from committing a violent crime no more than banning straws keeps you from drinking your soda. When Hamas blows up a city bus in Tel-Aviv they manage to kill 20 people without so much as firing a single bullet. They make their bombs out of grocery store items including table sugar. There is nothing you can do to stop a determined crazy person hell-bent on mass homicide. They will research how to make bombs or whatever alternative solution they choose to carry out their plan. In China, back in October, a person went into a school and killed 6 or 7 kids with an Axe. Its not like 6yr olds can put up such a fight that making due with some other weapon wouldn't do enough carnage. The same psycho could rush in and hack the teacher to death first, before he/she had any warning, leaving you with a classroom of 20 or so terrified children unable to defend themselves. In theory, a sick individual could lock the door and kill them slowly, one at a time, hacking them to pieces before the cops could arrive and break down the door.
a vast majority of guns carried by gang members (also referred to as gang-bangers) are sold to them by crooked cops. They just caught a cop in NYC just a couple months ago that sold 10 or 20 police issue glocks to those that would never pass a criminal background check.
if you wear your conceal carry weapon at all times it also reduces the chance that someone can steal it out of your house. locking up guns, while a good thing, is only effective in reducing the accidental death rate associated with guns. That crazy guy from the sandy hook shooting tried to buy a rifle a few days earlier and was denied due to background checks. He then when and murdered his mom because he knew she had guns. Whether they were locked up or not is unknown and not really relevant since picking a key off a dead corpse isnt overly complicated. Step 1.. stab mom to death when she isnt looking. Step 2 take key and obtain guns step 3 load guns and go on a killing spree
ever since Australia banned guns their breaking crimes have soared through the roof. When there is no threat of being shot you tend to take more risk. I think there is more to your statistic than the approach you are claiming. There has to be a different catalyst at work if the break-in rate is that low. I do know that here in the USA violent crimes are higher in areas with the highest amount of gun control. I also notice that they also coincide with the highest population densities. Perhaps your statistic is more about population density? In southern states its not uncommon for people to leave their back door unlocked all the time. While in northern high density cities they cant leave it unlocked to take out the damn trash.
less crime than heavily armed parts of the US
That is a very, very bold statement. I don't know of any place you could get adequate data on this - in particular, we don't really know what the most heavily armed parts of the country are in anything like the detail we need (e.g., census-tract or smaller units). Care to share?
Because when I'm at the range I don't like reloading my magazine every 10 seconds. Because my personal carry firearm was designed to hold more than that. Because I may need more than 3 bullets.
Why do you think having less bullets in a magazine will stop violence? I ask you nicely. Please reply.
FYI - 3 10-round magazines weighs approx. the same as one 30-round magazine when loaded. The only difference is magazine-change time - which is about 5 seconds or less for anyone who has done so more than once.
The buyback would have to be mandatory, which means it would be a de facto ban on weapons that aren't on a government-controlled computer network. Since most gun-guys swear the Major Reason Gun Rights are Sacred and not simply a fairly expensive hobby is that they allow you to challenge the government, and the Second Amendment is premised on a state's right to have a militia independent of the Feds, forcing everyone to have a weapon the Homeland Security department can disable with the touch of a button is probably not gonna fly.
The politics would never work. Republicans won't bring anything up for a vote because the NRA is one of their core constituencies. Democrats won't all vote for it because a lot of them are from rural areas where single-issue gun voters are very important,
As for a position on the issue, I try to stay neutral. But gun-guys make it really, really hard. They're convinced Freedom is on their side (and nobody-else's), and they don't seem to think about the fact that gun rights rare pretty much the only reason we a) needed a Civil War to end the most anti-freedom thing the US has ever done (slavery), and b) needed a Civil Rights movement to end Jim Crow. They've got their silly little hobby, which is not a silly little hobby because Second Amendment, they are pro-freedom because things that happen to non-gun-guys (and there are very few black gun guys) just don't seem to count. I'm not actually black, but at some point you just have tell these guys they're being incredibly arrogant or your head explodes.
One of them actually had the balls to say that gun rights have been useful for freedom because they allowed a Jim Crow-era TN County to get rid of a corrupt Sheriff.
not sure where you live that 75yr old equals frail and full of arthritis. I've seen plenty of 70yr olds at the gym walking and running laps around younger people. However it wont matter if your 75 or 25 if you only weigh 90-110 lb (not uncommon for a skinny 5'8" woman) against a 300lb man. Unless she has trained in TaiChi or Judo for years and years the guy with more mass is going to win that conflict. Recently a 90yr old man fired a shotgun (more kick than a handgun) killing a teen trying to break into house. He had to use the armrest of his chair to stabalize it, but he did manage to kill one kid and cause the other one to flee. When they caught the other one he confessed that they likely would have beaten the man to death had they discovered him during the course of the break-in.
Smart people do not make broad generalizations that are misleading and mostly incorrect.
That is a very astute broad generalization. ;)
so you think that without a gun, they wouldnt commit suicide? If I ban straws will you die of dehydration? Or will you get off your fat lazy ass and lift that glass to your mouth? More drunk driving incidents involve SUV's than any other make of vehicle. Does baning SUVs stop the problem or just shift the vehicle? Its a stupid statistic quoted by a narrow minded person who cannot think outside the box. When you really want something you will do it. Do you think death only happened after the invention of the firearm? What about that 100 year war?
Then we should outlaw cars, abortion, and televisions that can tip over on top of children. All of these kill far more children than are killed by gun wielding morons every year.
Like James Holmes who rigged some fairly complex Breaking-Bad-type bombs in his apartment, would probably also be able to circumvent such countermeasures in his guns. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't buy a bunch of guns and then sit at home going "oh, shoot, I can't use these to blast-up a theater full of people. Dang!"
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
...criminals do not want to be arrested for carrying a weapon that's clearly illegal.
Bear with me as I finish wiping all of the soda I just spit all over my screen while reading that statement.
There, all done. Let me see if I follow your logic here. A 'criminal' (by definition someone who does illegal things), would not carry a weapon because it is... illegal?
...and gasoline, gunpowder, plans for explosives, and many other cheap and legal means to kill people. Solving gun violence doesn't solve violence.
I agree in general that more stringent rules for purchasing guns and being issued concealed carry permits would not be a bad thing. I don't think the required changes are likely to be made, but perhaps that is another argument. Looking at myself, not only do I have military training (as do millions of Americans), but I have had 4 concealed carry permits issued in 2 different states which means 4 background checks. I have a security clearance, and have had 3 intense background checks done, every 5 years. I have undergone a psychological test in order to work in a particularly sensitive unit. I have undergone a polygraph, during which they asked me questions to determine if I was a spy, a saboteur, and or a terrorist. I passed. I think I can be trusted to carry a gun at this point, and even carry one into a school. (I also think I can be trusted to carry a knife on a plane since the govt is convinced I am not a terrorist, but that is yet another argument). There are millions of Americans who have military or law enforcement training, security clearances, and clean backgrounds. I have heard some say, here and elsewhere, that only police should be able to buy guns, and I think that there are plenty of people like me that are in effect trustable, and at least these people should be able to have guns. I think that teachers that meet similar criteria (there are plenty of former military teachers) should be able to carry a concealed pistol to school. Allowing trusted citizens to carry pistols into schools, sporting events, etc (as well as allowing them to carry non-firearm weapons on planes) would help curb some of these types of rampage shootings where someone is able to kill multiple unarmed people.
Ok, firstly guns are much more convenient and easy way of killing than any of the methods you mentioned. Building a bomb takes time and skill, stabbing somebody means getting close and it's risky because your victim might be able to defeat you in close combat. Guns are easy to draw in the heat of the moment and the odds of your victim being armed with a concealed gun are relatively slim so guns are way higher on my priority list than bomb components, anarchist handbooks, gasoline or even knives. Regarding your statement that teachers should be armed with guns... say that out loud and listen to yourself say it. I don't not live in a country where this is necessary, I would not want to live in a country were arming teachers is necessary and if it has become necessary to arm primary school teachers in the US with firearms that is quite frankly a very, very sad state of affairs.
On a separate note, I think America's very recent history of having a revolution and a dangerous frontier has made the personal firearm a part of our culture. So while much of Europe enjoys lower murder rates and fewer guns, our culture is just different and solutions that worked for Europe may not work for the US.
I have heard this argument before and I don't buy it, you Americans have not cornered the market on fighting tyranny. Your history of revolution dates back to the 18th century, and I am not quite sure why people in New York or LA today would need similarly easy access to guns as people did during the 19th century on the American frontier. Also keep in mind that Europe was devastated within living memory by WWI, I know people who fought the Nazis and people who fought for them. My (German) grandparents witnessed firestorms that killed tens of thousands of people in hours, room to room combat in the house they lived in, my grandmother's neighbor was dragged out of her apartment and summarily executed by the SD in 1945 after some Quisling fingered her for listening to British radio broadcasts. After WWI and WWII Europe was awash with millions of military grade small arms and yet we normalized the situ
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Time to stock up on flintlock pistols!
"For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms."
Ahh my old nemesis Mr. Dictionary. He understands what individual words mean, but has not quite mastered the difficult art of putting them together into sentences. I thought I left him behind in High School, but he comes back.
Yes criminals do illegal things by definition. But since they are doing illegal things they generally try not to draw police attention. If you're a drug dealer and six-shooters are illegal you won't carry one for two reasons.
1) They will be very difficult to find, and a significant proportion of the people selling them will be narcs.
2) If anyone notices you have one, and reports it to the police, your entire career as a drug-dealer is over.
OTOH if you steal a three-shooter you have a weapon, and even if the cops see it you can make a case that it's legal and they should let you go.
You might keep the six-shooter with your other clearly illegal equipment, because if the cops find that you're screwed anyway, but you ain't gonna be carrying it with you when you're walking around town. And if you read the sentence again you'll note I was careful to use the word "carry."
I don't not live in a country where this is necessary, I would not want to live in a country were arming teachers is necessary and if it has become necessary to arm primary school teachers in the US with firearms that is quite frankly a very, very sad state of affairs.
The alternative is mandating everyone in a school be completely unarmed, and we have horrific school shootings where nobody is able to stop them. I want there to be no violence of any kind. But since that isn't going to happen, let's pick from one of the realistic alternatives. Unarmed and helpless schools, or trusted teachers with pistols. If there is another realistic alternative, i'm all ears.
I have heard this argument before and I don't buy it, you Americans have not cornered the market on fighting tyranny.
And yet America has a love and fascination with firearms unequaled in the developed world. Do you have an alternative explanation?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Criminals will actually be the last people to hold on to these weapons.
Only if you engage in circular logic. Because anyone who refuses to give up their firearm would then be a criminal. There are millions of people who are otherwise law abiding who will never willingly disarm.
Re-read what I wrote. I'm saying the opposite of what you think.
I'm saying criminals would actually tend to follow this law more then non-criminals. Why?
Because as a law-abiding citizen with a hobby that involves firearms the worst that happens to you when the local sheriff notices your gun isn't transmitting to his network is you lose the gun. As a first offense you get off fairly easily.
OTOH if you are a meth dealer, then when the Sheriff takes you in there's a fairly good chance he notices something else and yo'll be lucky to end up in Club Fed.
That's why none of the criminals involved in any massacre using an AR-15 bothered pushing out the one pin that stops it from firing full auto.
You have just outed yourself. There is no such pin. The AR-15 bolt carrier is different than the M-16 bolt carrier so that if one were to alter or remove the sear, it will still not fire full-auto. A more likely reason is because these gunmen haven't possessed the skills to convert their rifles to full auto.
If they can't convert an AR-15 to fire full-auto, how are they gonna make an entire M-16?
That's like saying "Bill can't upgrade his Hard Drive, but she's about to build his own PC from the motherboard up."
If there was a buyback program, and the Feds got a warrant for the records of companies that sell these things; a lot of refuseniks would be tracked down.
And that^ is the real reason why they want to "close the gunshow loophole" because as of now, it's possible to legally purchase a firearm that the feds can't track down.
What you're talking about is government applied gun violence in search of an end to gun violence.
To an extent you're right. They want to be able to track every weapon down. But you're assuming they have some concrete plan in place re: guns for the near future. This plan does not exist. There is no plan. They wanna restrict weapons like the AR-15 because they have been used in a lot of very bad shootings recently. But AFAIK nobody's even proposed an Australia-style buy-back.
They also want to be able to enforce existing gun laws. Since gun-show purchases get around background checks and proven sanity they think it's a look-hole.
Why would they bother doing it with AR-15s or high-capacity clips?
Because AR-15s are easy for machinists to make. And standard capacity magazines are cheap and plentiful enough that no one needs to make them underground.
LK
Not as easy as a Soviet weapon. The USSR designed everything to be easy to produce because their doctrine required large numbers of troops, and their economy couldn't support spending $1,000 on a rifle. As you've pointed out ammo is trivial if you can make firearms, so if criminals had any desire to set up their own illegal gun factories they already would have done so.
They'd have better guns, cheaper, and they'd be untraceable. They wouldn't have to risk losing any couriers to suspicious gun-store owners. They could completely re-arm themselves in a matter of weeks if the cops started wearing some armor their old weapons couldn't penetrate. They'd make a mint selling to their competitor/colleagues. But they don't.
Not owning a gun makes you safer .
Ah, the Lippmann study rears it's head.
Hint: There is one time that people in the gun culture believe it is not merely moral, but sometimes morally required, to lie. That is when someone asks you about whether you have/what guns you have, in an inappropriate context and/or when they're not entitled to the information. An example of such a context is when you're in a doctor's office or emergency room being treated for something NOT related to an injury resulting from your own firearm.
The right answer to such questions is "no", unless it's obvious (like from an accidental self-inflicted wound) the answer must be "yes" - but with details withheld.
Such reporting bias invalidates studies dependent on questioning the subjects. (And how else can you obtain the information?) Authors of similar studies in the past (notably Kellerman, author of the debunked study behind the "43 times more likely" meme) have actually repudiated and withdrawn their own work once things like this were pointed out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Smart people do not make broad generalizations that are misleading and mostly incorrect.
Thanks for confirming that you're a complete moron.
That sounds like a fairly broad generalisation to me - by your own standards, you're not smart, or were you being ironic?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
So, your answer to behavior you don't like is to drug them instead? Lovely. You are so 'enlightened' and 'intelligent.' Yours is the typical left wing counterpart to right wing brute violence. While violence is sometimes necessary to survive, there is never an excuse for subjugating people with drugs in order to get ever increasing compliance with ever increasing inhuman social expectations.
having an unloaded locked up gun around the house does not. Smart people tend to go with the later option.
Since most people claim "self defense from home intruders" as the reason they need a gun at home, what good does it do to have it properly secured?
Learn to love Alaska
The last few sets of home invasions I heard about were targeting houses with guns. So I'm not sure the statistics would agree with your imagination.
Learn to love Alaska
I agree that the article and summary were some of the dumbest ideas I have yet heard with regard to "gun control", probably not for a lot of the reasons others have mentioned but because everything they described the computer doing is what a responsible, well trained gun owner is supposed to do! Seriously!?!? The best way to control those things is by training the operator or not letting them have the gun to begin with. Hell! We as sysadmins take less offensive and destructive things away from stupid people ALL THE TIME! Should we take guns from or keep them out of the hands of untrained (and/or unstable) people? Logically, the answer would be YES!!!
I find it interesting that so many people responding have looked and nobody found anything online to substantiate your story. It sounds made up, and because nothing about it can be found (many self defense killings get lots and lots of media coverage).
Learn to love Alaska
That's unscientific conjecture!
Something like 90% of murders, the two people know each other because because of previous criminal involvement with each other. If you can be bothered to educate yourself, here's a paper from the harvard journal of law and public policy which has a section dealing with those claims. Click Here for PDF
In Australia after law changes banning semi-automatic firearms, suicide with a firearm fell somewhat, but suicide by any method just followed the trend, indicating method substitution. It's clear that having a firearm doesn't change suicidal tendencies, and this conjecture that firearms are more deadly and therefore suicides are more likely to occur is completely unproven and not backed with any evidence at all.
Sorry. What you're looking at is someone contorting statistics to try and prove a point.
That's like saying "100% of people who've never flown have never died in an airplane crash".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I don't not live in a country where this is necessary, I would not want to live in a country were arming teachers is necessary and if it has become necessary to arm primary school teachers in the US with firearms that is quite frankly a very, very sad state of affairs.
The alternative is mandating everyone in a school be completely unarmed, and we have horrific school shootings where nobody is able to stop them. I want there to be no violence of any kind. But since that isn't going to happen, let's pick from one of the realistic alternatives. Unarmed and helpless schools, or trusted teachers with pistols. If there is another realistic alternative, i'm all ears.
Arming teachers in primary schools is still treating a symptom not curing the root cause and the root cause is the complete failure of the USA as a nation to ensure that only responsible, mentally stable, well trained and law abiding citizens get to own guns.
I have heard this argument before and I don't buy it, you Americans have not cornered the market on fighting tyranny.
And yet America has a love and fascination with firearms unequaled in the developed world. Do you have an alternative explanation?
I am not going to argue with that, you are right, this is why Americans love guns. This is also why gun violence in the USA will remain a problem until the US people change their gun culture, not abandon it, just modify it a bit. I was just tying to make the case that two fights against tyranny gave birth to two different gun cultures and one of them has a significantly lower rate of gun violence associated with it. Maybe that tells us something about how to reduce gun violence? I don't want to take your guns away from you, I have nothing against gun ownership and I own two guns myself. I just feel a lot better in a place where every gun owner has at least a portion your kind of qualifications, where a gun owner gets background checked, then trained properly and finally has a heavy dose of gun ethics hammered into his head by somebody who knows his stuff. That's the process I went through and it did me no harm, It would also be a huge step towards reducing gun violence but as I said it's a cultural change and it takes lots of time.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
the problem you and everyone else seems to be misled on is that the idea that removing guns will somehow stop violence. The anti-gun crowd ONLY want to quote statistics on gun violence and not overall violent crimes. The per-capita statistics on overall violence is still very high when you don't pick out some meaningless statistic as the instrument used to commit the crime. By the same logic I could say that we should ban the import of British cars in the USA because the number of drunk driving incidents involving British cars in England are astronomically high; and here, where there are fewer British cars, there are almost no drunk driving incidents where those cars are involved. Its a useless statistic that does nothing to address the real problem associated with drunk driving.
The truth is, getting rid of the gun does nothing to stop someone from committing a violent crime no more than banning straws keeps you from drinking your soda. When Hamas blows up a city bus in Tel-Aviv they manage to kill 20 people without so much as firing a single bullet. They make their bombs out of grocery store items including table sugar. There is nothing you can do to stop a determined crazy person hell-bent on mass homicide. They will research how to make bombs or whatever alternative solution they choose to carry out their plan. In China, back in October, a person went into a school and killed 6 or 7 kids with an Axe. Its not like 6yr olds can put up such a fight that making due with some other weapon wouldn't do enough carnage. The same psycho could rush in and hack the teacher to death first, before he/she had any warning, leaving you with a classroom of 20 or so terrified children unable to defend themselves. In theory, a sick individual could lock the door and kill them slowly, one at a time, hacking them to pieces before the cops could arrive and break down the door.
I am not trying to argue that all guns should be melted down and turned into can openers. I'm just trying to say that ensuring that guns end up in the hands of responsible, well trained, mentally stable citizens would contribute hugely to reducing gun violence. Compared to many other developed countries the USA has a major gun violence problem. That is hard to argue with. And I don't accept the idea that because there are also axe murders and bus bombings we should do nothing about gun violence. Axe murders are way less common that shooting rampages, you can do something to prevent them and you can also do something about bus bombings just like you can do something to reduce gun violence.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
FYI Modern militaries don't "charge at each other". And military guns still have bayonets and soldiers still have combat knives. Most death in combat comes from indirect fire, a.k.a.: not from an assault rifle or pistol. Also, if guns are the cause of so much violence, why hasn't the crime rate in the UK dropped since the banning of guns? Why has the crime rate in the US dropped during the same time period without the use of draconian gun laws? In fact it has dropped since the assault weapons ban expired. All of this seems to contradict the idea that guns cause violence.
You may not like this becuase it doesn't fit your little world view, but millions of people defend themselves each year with guns. This is a recent example of a mom who saved herself and her children from god knows what - with a gun.
The truth of the matter is that people cause violence. It's not a coincidence that all of the recent mass shootings in every country have been the result of mentally unstable people. Banning guns does nothing but put the guns in the hands of criminals and removes them from the hands of people who would otherwise protect themselves from the same criminals who are going to have guns no matter what the law says. People, who want to ban guns in good faith, are ignorant and have the blood of innocents on their hands.
Wow loads of engineering is attributed to weapon design throughout the ages. What the fuck could we have ever done without you to come along and tell us after all this time that we're just weak and fearful. Hell, I bet you're superman , all strong and brave. Why don't you go put on some tights and go down to the "hood" and stop some people from getting shot. Better yet, you're so damn smart, I bet you could just go start taking guns away from all those bad, weak, fearful gun owners.
If they gave you any trouble you'd just give them a 4mg Risperdal enema with that mighty hose of yours. So now I guess you can go blow bubbles. Hey, Bubbles, OVER HERE!!!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
That's called an a priori observation. It's like saying that all bachelors are unmarried. The very act of making "broad generalizations that are misleading and mostly incorrect" makes you != "a smart person".
""For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms.""
Exactly. I have guns to defend myself against many things, but the ultimate reason for owning a gun is so that if I lose my faculties to Alzheimer's, or some other form of dementia, in one of my lucid moments I can use one of those guns to end my misery. I'm sorry, I won't live like that, and I don't trust the medical profession to help me "die with dignity".
If it was common where you live that is was necessary to weld a large iron shield around your car to prevent attack from roving bands of rhinoceroses, yes. If on the other hand you want to protect yourself from carjackings and robbery it might be a better idea to take a gun with you. Pointing a welder at a crook and saying "make my day" doesn't have the same effect.
Also, nothing can stop a bad welder, they just blow away any project they work on. You're better off replacing the whole thing and starting from scratch. But most get it sooner or later. Using a MIG welder helps though.
More people die in falls than from firearms. The figures aren't even close. That's why we need ladders which are impossible to climb. It would save literally dozens of lives every year. A computer controlled chip attached to pressure switches in the base would automatically call the BATFLNHT (Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms Ladders and Nose Hair Trimmers) who would immediately arrest the culprit under the Use a Ladder Go to Prison Law. To paraphrase Obama, if it saves only one life its worth it.
It's the same faulty risk analysis that plagues people who think "vaccine risk > mumps/polio/whooping cough/etc risk". They haven't seen these diseases firsthand so they mentally minimize them and then over-inflate the vaccine risk until it exceeds their imagined "disease risk".
When it comes to the "US vs. Dictatorships", they haven't seen a real dictatorship so they minimize the "Dictatorship risk" and then increase the "US risk" until it is more. Here's a hint: The mere fact that we can complain about the US government without being arrested means that our risk in the US is less than in a true dictatorship.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
... pigs will fly. This is probably the stupidest gun control idea I've ever heard.
A gun with all these bells and. whistles would cost a small/medium fortune. GPS is not all that accurate that it necessarily be able to tell when this gun is inside a school or some other area where guns are banned. (Will you need to plug your gun into a USB port to update the maps after every city planning, zoning meeting, or city council meeting where gun-restricted zones are defined? And I don't mean your town's planning meeting. I mean all of 'em. Everywhere.) A regular guy who wants a gun in the house for protection won't be able to defend the family if the kids are at home.
Sheez...
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It's not as black and white as "smart people don't have guns" or "smart people have gun training & stupid people have no training." There are plenty of smart people with guns. These people treat their weapons with the requisite care and respect knowing that being careless with a firearm can be deadly. Then, there are plenty of stupid gun owners who think nothing of leaving their loaded gun on the coffee table or waving it around like a toy. (They then cry about what a random tragedy it was that little Billy got shot and they were completely not to blame.) On the other side, there are plenty of stupid people without guns (usually the ones saying "ban all kinds of guns for everyone - no exceptions), but also plenty of smart people without guns.
I, personally, don't have any guns. I tend to be a huge klutz, can be careless at the wrong times (when distracted, for example), and am a horrible shot. I wouldn't trust myself with a gun so, in my case, the smart decision is to not own one. Gun ownership, like many things in life, isn't for everyone.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
mentally unbalanced or professional criminals can very easily get a hold of guns. Smart people know that we are never going to reduce gun violence unless we start filtering out the nutters and criminals right at the source, i.e. the gun shop
Here's a Free Clue: criminals don't obey the law. Even if you did somehow, magically, stop criminals or 'nutters' from buying guns legitimately, they'd just buy them illegitimately- from other criminals or smugglers who get them into the country (like drugs) from Mexico. Or they'd lay in wait for a cop, hit him upside the head with a baseball bat, and take his gun.
Here's a free clue: It is a lot harder for a nutter to get a gun in Europe than it is in the USA. I live here and I would not begin to know how to get a gun without having a license. The only thing I can think of, off the top of my head, is that I could travel to... say... the Ukraine buy a gun there and smuggle it over two national borders into the Shengen zone but even if I did get in my car and travel to the Ukraine I would not know where to go. I do, however, have a very good idea of how to get a gun without having a license in the USA. Western Europe borders several countries sitting on huge cold war arsenals that leak guns. European criminals who want to get a gun can get it but our gun violence problem is still smaller than that in the USA. Over here the only way to get a gun without a license is through illegal sources and monitoring them is way easier than keeping track of thousands of unregulated gun shows and other forums where guns change hands without any oversight or background checks. This guy went to a gun show in Virginia and bought 10 guns in an hour without any background checks and without anybody even asking any questions:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7297745
I would love to see you pull this off in Britain, Germany or France, walk into a gun show and walk out with a bunch of pistols and Colt Carbines without even having a firearms license or being asked for it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
Also, read the book More Guns Less Crime, by Professor John Lott.
Statistics aside, I have the moral right and duty to protect myself from unwarranted aggression. This right was recognized in the middle ages as existing independently of any government, and was codified in the English Bill of rights, which was one source of inspiration for our own Second Amendment. That a gun helps me in that effort is indisputable.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
So since the Constitution doesn't specifically limit arms that means I can own any weapon I desire and the government can't say no? Question: Should I put my new surface to air missile launcher in the backyard or mount it on my roof next to my nuke?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If done correctly a great idea, if done incorrectly a train wreck.
*pulls trigger*
*nothing happens"
"HAL, unlock the gun's safety!"
"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't allow you to do that."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You're always safer when you're in control. A gun (or the bullet coming out of the end) is very, very hard to control. If you have the proper training on owning guns, you're safer with one than not. If you don't have such training (like the millions who go out to buy one because they feel "safer" just having one around), then you're less safe.
Being safe requires effort. News at 11.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I just had a flash of terror at the thought of them having a $5,000 per primer tax.
Ok, I'm a gun control advocate. Not in the "all guns should be banned" sense, but in the "some guns should be banned, large magazines should be banned outside of firing ranges, and background checks should be required for all sales" sense. Even I think this is a bad idea. Introducing technology like this into a gun is just asking for it to go wrong. Of course, it will pretty much HAVE to default to disable the gun (since doing otherwise will make it worse than useless). After a few firings (say at a gun range to get used to the gun), will the computer components hold up? Or will they be damaged and fail thus "breaking" the gun? If they do "break" the gun then people are either going to a) buy a new gun (only one who benefits here are gun manufacturers) or b) find a way to hack the gun to work again. The Internet ensures that instructions to do the latter WILL get out thus making the computerized protections useless in the very cases where they were supposed to prevent damage.
There is no one easy answer to stop mass killings and, yes, gun laws will have their place in the overall plan, but this idea just won't work at all.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That's a poor article to link to, it admits the reason for the increased risk associated with guns is due to suicide. Without a gun the suicide method would just be something else. Further, you'd save twice as many lives by just banning anything that allows you to get more than 2 feet off the ground than you would banning guns.
having an unloaded locked up gun around the house does not. Smart people tend to go with the later option.
Since most people claim "self defense from home intruders" as the reason they need a gun at home, ...
That would surprise me. I expect hunting and sporting to be the primary reasons, self defense a secondary reason. I think self defense is merely a more common talking point since it represents an established legal principle, and because as some anti-gun folks toss out high emotion arguments some pro-gun folks toss out their own high emotion arguments.
... what good does it do to have it properly secured?
Unlocking and loading can be done rather quickly, even in the dark. A scenario where there is no time to do so is so unlikely it is not worth worrying about. The scenario where someone gets hurt with an unsecured loaded gun is far more likely.
I think that teachers that meet similar criteria (there are plenty of former military teachers) should be able to carry a concealed pistol to school.
While I generally agree with you, I'm not so sure about that one. Yes, teachers may have gone through the proper training. But the numerous students that go in and out of the school won't. The challenge of bringing a gun to school becomes securing the weapon from the students, rather than from an adult like the teacher or the teacher's peers.
At that point, it'd be more useful and less risky to have a throwing knife than to have a gun. While a gun can do a hell of a lot of damage very quickly in unskilled hands, doing the same kind of damage in the same amount of time with a knife would require a hell of a lot of skill. Most students won't have that skill, while trained adults will. The worst that'll happen with a knife is one student will stab one person or cut up a lot of people.
It's purely my opinion, but if somebody was about to shoot up a public place near me, I'd rather have a knife tucked away in my boot than a gun on my belt. This is especially true if the shooting hadn't actually started yet.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
They only really come into their own when at ranges greater than a few feet.
I believe it is 21 feet. But that includes the time necessary to draw the gun.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Re-read what I wrote. I'm saying the opposite of what you think.
I misinterpreted your meaning. I too intend to be among the last holding onto my firearms and as of right now, I'm not a criminal.
If they can't convert an AR-15 to fire full-auto, how are they gonna make an entire M-16?
They won't be making them, they'll be buying them from underground gunsmiths.
That's like saying "Bill can't upgrade his Hard Drive, but she's about to build his own PC from the motherboard up."
More like, Bill can't upgrade his hard drive but he can buy a new computer.
They wanna restrict weapons like the AR-15 because they have been used in a lot of very bad shootings recently. But AFAIK nobody's even proposed an Australia-style buy-back.
Three to five is not a lot. Several have been proposed, but I do not believe that any have gotten out of legislative committees yet.
Not as easy as a Soviet weapon.
In any industrialized nation, like ours, the difference is negligible. Khyber pass manufacturing technology favors the AK, that's not much of an issue here.
The USSR designed everything to be easy to produce because their doctrine required large numbers of troops, and their economy couldn't support spending $1,000 on a rifle.
The US isn't spending $1,000 per rifle. At least not for the main battle rifle. Spec-ops types and sniper rifles notwithstanding.
As you've pointed out ammo is trivial if you can make firearms, so if criminals had any desire to set up their own illegal gun factories they already would have done so.
Why would they need to? Today, they just steal them. If it were suddenly impossible to steal them, they'd make them.
They could completely re-arm themselves in a matter of weeks if the cops started wearing some armor their old weapons couldn't penetrate.
If the goal is simply to take out cops in body armor, they'd just use hunting rifles.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
you're missing the bigger picture. the USA doesnt have a major gun violence problem. It has a major violence problem. The statistics of non-gun-related violence is just as obscene as gun related violence. Its not that the non-gun violent offenders preferred another instrument of violence, it was that a gun simply wasn't available to them. Had they had access to a gun they would have used it, many admit as much. Its absurd to think banning guns will somehow lower these statistics. They choose to use a gun because its convenient and effective. Denied a gun, a bad person is still going to do bad things. Most of the crimes committed by guns are done so by people ineligible to legally obtain one in the first place. A lot of gang-bangers are getting their hands on stolen police service weapons sold to them by crooked cops who steal them from co-workers and sell them on the street. The rest are buying them out of pawn shops where that whole private sale clause applies since the pawn dealer usually isnt an FFL.
Look, I am all for doing something about the crazy's but not at the expense of millions of normal everyday people who have done nothing wrong. That's like suggesting a ban on the sale of automobiles because there is just too much drunk driving. No one would ever dare suggest that. Its time to look deeper than the instrument in order to get traction on the problem. We've had guns in households longer than we've even been a country. At one point during our colonial history it was a standing order that every house in the colony maintain 2 flint-lock rifles and a bag of powder and balls of ammo. Fewer homes have guns now, per capita, than any other time in our history. Yet the crime rate is increasing despite this statistical fact. So if guns in the homes are nothing new, then its time to put those debugging tools to good use and look at what has changed recently. Its time to figure out what HAS changed recently to result in this new spree of crime, because mass gun ownership predates all of that.
If this was really about public safety then why do they always single out the kinds of weapons that statistically account for less than 0.2 percent of all gun homicides? According to our FBI crime reports, more homicides were committed with bare hands in 2012 than homicides committed by rifles of all make and model and style including shot guns and breech-loaders. The same comparison holds true for blunt object homicides (bludgeoning). 99% of gun homicides are committed with small, inexpensive, small caliber, concealable handguns. If it were really about public safety why not have a bill banning small .25 caliber handguns and guns less than $300 instead of targeting a civilian nerfed version of a military rifle that is responsible for less than 0.2 percent of all gun homicides? If you were truly trying to lower the statistics of gun violence wouldn't the best place to start be the statistically highest used item? A decent AR-15 cost more than $900 for the base rifle before you even start putting anything on it. The cost alone is one reason why its used so infrequently. There's been a huge debate over banning .50 caliber BMG rifles that are similar to military sniper rifles. Yet not once in the history of FBI statistics has one ever, and I do mean ever, been used in a gun related crime of any sort. Your talking about something that starts around $4k. But circling back to my original point, that's only going to move a statistic from one category to another, the victim is still just as dead because the excessive majority of our gun crimes are not premeditated and often committed during fits of rage. During a fit of rage, the victim is just as likely to be killed by whatever instrument is nearby, whether its a gun, a knife, bare hands, or beat to death with a blunt object.
Ban ladders, only licensed professionals should be climbing up high any way. You'll save twice as many lives (guns killed about 11,000 people last year unexpected falls killed 24,000 people) and you won't prevent anyone from exercising their right to self defense.
This is a good point. Pouring lead bullets is pretty trivial and people have been doing that for centuries. But modern cartridges need brass shells which aren't that trivial to manufacture (which is why reloaders are called "reloaders" and not "people who make cartridges from scratch"), and neither are the primers, which use small charges of high explosive.
Making your own ammunition isn't that hard if you're making ammo for a black powder rifle, but for a modern rifle or handgun it's not.
The problem with statistics is that they assume everyone is identical, and they aren't. For instance, the bit about your children finding your gun doesn't apply if you don't have kids (or your kids are adults), which is true for a very large number of adults these days. And not that many people have such severe problems with depression; moreover, I'm pretty sure the number of women that use guns in suicide attempts is quite small compared to men. And sleepwalkers? Seriously? How many people actually do that? And how many people have actually shot someone while sleepwalking, according to your statistics?
If you care, search the internets about prisons, correction facilities, etc.. in countries around the world (hint Europe).
I live in Europe :) Yes, the prisons in my country are not as full as those of the US, but violent crime happens (either the criminal working alone or doing a job for a criminal organizaion). There are a few cases where a criminal killed an old man/woman for their money (usually a small sum, like $50, or for a bottle of vodka) and the criminals do not have a lot of problems killing an old person with a knife (or some other object) or just their bare hands.
Life in prison is too easy for the criminals - they have TVs, some even computers and complain that they do not get enough vitamins. The government should bring the Soviet style prisons back - poor living conditions, lots of work etc, so that the criminal would think twice about returning.
Everyone needs to take precautions - I lock my car, do not leave anything even remotely valuable (like a cigarette pack) visible from the outside, especially if parking in an area with bad/unknown reputation etc. Too bad owning a gun is quite difficult, if my home gets invaded, the only hope for me to defend myself is to be able to get to where I keep the battery acid, pour some of it in a container with a large opening and then try to get it on the attackers face and hope the 33% or whatever concentration is enough to make him stop (instead of just making him angry).
Constutions are there to define the minimum rights for the citizens (rights which the govt can not take away), not the gouvernment. If a right for something is not in the contitution then it is not there.
If you greatly enjoy targeting practice with these, i am sure you dont mind if i experiment around with toxic chemicals (yea, just making some sarin to kill the mules in my garde) or nuclear materials in the house down the street. Or drive with 200km/h on the highway and kill some family which was stupid enough to be in my way? All things which some people might enjoy, which are luckily no the norm.
but you have not indicated in any way how getting rid of a gun will in any way reduce the 4.6 criminal homicides or 37 suicides. I do agree that the accidental death rate would probably go away but the other two statistics are not going to change. Someone committing suicide isn't going to say "oh damn, there's no gun so i guess i cant kill myself." They'll use some other method. A gun really wouldn't be my first choice anyway, it seems so messy and painful. Did they use a gun? Nope, they are just as dead in the end though. So I cant even give the 37 suicide statistic any credit what so ever. Playing the statistics game is akin to that school district in Texas that was expelling the low test scorers to increase their state testing scores to comply with the No Child Left Behind benchmarks. Did they really increase the education level of the student populace? No, they just played a numbers game, the dumb kids are just as dumb as ever.
As far as the gun related homicides, as I've pointed out many times, a gun is used only as a matter of convenience. Most gun related homicides are done in a fit of rage and denied a gun its just as likely that fit of rage would have resulted in homicide by any other instrument available. We have plenty of non-gun related homicides to back this theory up also. Did you know there were more homes with unsecured guns, per capita, in the first 150 years of the USA's history than in the last 50 years? The number of homes with guns, per capita, had fallen sharply in the last 50 years yet the gun-related incidents are soaring through the roof. I don't think its the guns that are at the heart of the problem. In fact our gun related crimes are often committed by gangs who are in the business of selling illegal drugs. Drugs that, ever since the 1980s war-on-drugs, has become astronomically expensive in price. Given the consequences of losing millions in 'product' it is understandable why these criminals are carrying guns in the first place. They are likely to be killed by their employers anyway if they lose that kind of profit. Just like the alcohol prohibition of the 1930s resulted in a wave of crime, the war on drugs as had a horrible side effective of an alarming amount of violent crime as a result. If I were to single out any one major recent change that contributed to the new increase in crime, gun and non-gun related, I would say the war on drugs probably has had the biggest hand in this increase.
Home protection is a helpful side-effect of the 2nd amendment, however, the 2nd amendment had absolutely nothing to do with home defense when it was drafted. While home defense is a good reason to have a gun, its got nothing to do with the reason it was in the constitution to begin with. It has some to do with preventing another tyranny but mostly it has to do with securing the country from invasion. What happened in the the late 1930s in France would and could never happen here. Did you know that Japan, after having leveled our entire pacific fleet, consider a US invasion? We didnt have a large military force at the time and with the war in Europe tying up our troops they could have easily come in and laid siege to our nation, save for one issue. When Admiral Yamamoto was ask why they didn't press for invasion of the USA, he responded that they would face a barrel of a rifle hiding from behind every blade of grass. The 2nd amendment does more for this country to insure against invasion than any amount of military might the government could ever hope to financially maintain. Instantly and all at once your citizens suddenly become a militia to protect against invasion.
Yeah, because you know. The only thing which can stop a bad guy with a nuke, is a good guy with a nuke.
Imagine the filthy atheist communist liberal coming running madly from washington to take away your right to be a redneck, strapped to a nuke. I mean the nly thing which can stop him befor he reach the school to nuke it with homosexual propaganda is if you nuke him herically first.
What i know about firearms:
You can use them to kill people
What i know about semiautomatic firearms with big magazines:
You can use them to kill many people
What i know about using weapons for self-defense:
For a criminal it does not make a difference if he is shot in the torso once, or 5 times in the head. So istead of mentally matrubating how much am M16 would help you there, turn on your brain. If everybody would wear a short-arm small-caliber weapon in his pocket that would be much more effective than some nutheads collecting an arsenal of semiautomatic weapons.
This figure is false for the USA. Using the FBI figures for 2010, 12.5% of murders were committed by people who were strangers to one another. In 44% of murders, the relationship was unknown. 21% were "acquaintances", which would include but not be limited to people who know each other due to criminal involvement. The rest were family, friends, neighbors, and employer/employee relationships.
Yeah, yeah. We know where that leads because anti-gun advocates have tipped their hands so many times, suggesting that anyone who wants a gun must be mentally unbalanced and therefore not allowed to have one.
Serious training? It's a gun. The original point and shoot interface (it has a point and click mode too, but only for certain types of training). Follow the simple rule of not pointing the thing at anything you don't want to put a hole in, and you're good.
How many gun crimes would have been prevented if the shooter had "serious training"?
Sure and if some guy starts trying to kick in the front door of your 1 bedroom apartment while your asleep at 3 am, because he is on drugs and thinks you looked at his girlfriend wrong, how much time do you think you would have to mess with combination locks and loading the gun. Of course the real problem here is even that would not be enough for many anti gun people, they would want the gun disassembled and the ammo stored in a seperate locked box in another room.
So self protection doesn't count if the attacker is shot but lives? Or if the defender fires but misses and the attacker runs away before the defender fires again? Or if the defender pulls the gun and points at the attacker, who discovers he has a pressing engagement elsewhere before the defender pulls the trigger?
A lead mold is not that expensive, and scrap lead is easy to acquire.
That would surprise me. I expect hunting and sporting to be the primary reasons, self defense a secondary reason. I think self defense is merely a more common talking point since it represents an established legal principle, and because as some anti-gun folks toss out high emotion arguments some pro-gun folks toss out their own high emotion arguments.
Well, nobody wants to solve the problem. Having the problem helps keep the population in line. We feel like we get a choice in November if one is pro-choice and the other is pro-life, one is pro-gun and the other pro-gun-control. It's all part of the illusion.
Learn to love Alaska
I do just love this particular anti gun argument, maybe I am just unlucky, but I know of several people that have been killed in home invasions and other similar circumstances
My step sister's boss was killed at his vacation house in the tropics (I forget which island) duirng a home invasion, I did not know him well, but had met his wife a few times.
The family that lived next door to my mother had a ranch in Oklahoma that the husband would often go to for weeks at a time, one time he went there and a group of escaped prisoners were living in the ranch house, they killed him when he arrived. His wife called the police to go check on him after a couple of weeks of not hearing from him since he left home.
My ex-wife had a co-worker / close friend whose brother in law (husbands little brother) was killed by a group of juvenile gang members while withdrawing money from an ATM in Colorado, they were caught on video, and 2 or 3 were actually imprissoned until they turned 21. I was standing there when she received the phone call.
My step father had a business aquaintance who was the victim of fairly classic home invasion, he came home to find his wife tied to a chair, the burglars wanted money they thought he had hidden in the house, and beat both of them, he gave them what money he had in the house which was far less than they imagined. Thankfully this one had a more pleasant outcome as they were found alive, but tied up many hours later.
I suspect there are more, they just don't come to mind at the moment, Note I live in a relatively low crime area, if it is so rare why do I know people involved in so many.
Not everyone lives in a house with paper thin walls and 12 kids behind each one, my shotgun is loaded with buck shot, my nearest neighbor is several hundred feet away and my son is grown up so it is just me and my wife in the house. It has been shown numerous times that while bird shot can cause a gruesome looking wound its abilty to penetrate deep enough to be reliable at immediately stopping a threat is minimal.
Wow that quote again, try doing a little research and you will see the guy you are quoting has been proven to be an anti gun nut that outright lied findings to support his position
"Georgia mom home alone with kids shoots ex-con intruder" http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/01/06/georgia-mom-home-alone-with-kids-shoots-ex-con-intruder/ Another article, jump to the end to read about an 18 year old single mom in mobile home shooting intruder days after her husband died on Christmas. http://www.ibtimes.com/mom-shoots-intruder-five-times-days-after-single-mom-kills-burglar-protect-her-infant-995578
Unfortunately, as a result of NRA lobbying, Congress passed a law which effectively prohibits government-funded research into guns. So there are no published studies that can tell you how frequently each of those scenarios is. (In contrast, there are lots of studies of automobile injuries and deaths.)
Those studies I cited above summarize all the research we have. They explain it better than I can. If they can't convince you, I can't convince you.
The bottom line is, if you have a gun around the house, it's many times more likely to be used for suicide than it is for self-defense. You want to bring suicide into your family? I can't stop you.
When vaccines are fraudulently maligned, the news covers the initial unusual finding, as well as the retractions. Who was I quoting, anyway? After something is repeated enough, I remember a repeat, and not the original researcher.
Learn to love Alaska
... because guns are about the only things I haven't seen running Android at this years CES.
Someone committing suicide isn't going to say "oh damn, there's no gun so i guess i cant kill myself." They'll use some other method. A gun really wouldn't be my first choice anyway, it seems so messy and painful.
Actually, there are good studies of suicides. People who attempt suicide don't always succeed. and if their suicide fails they they often go on to never attempt suicide again. People who attempt suicide with a gun are more likely to succeed than most other methods. A gun makes an impulsive suicide easier. By design, it's an easy way to kill yourself.
People who take drugs are more likely to wind up in the hospital and be referred to a psychiatrist.
Men are more likely to succeed in suicide than women, because men are more likely to use a gun.
Those medical journals make a better argument than I ever could. If they can't convince you, I can't.
You want guns? The price is a large increase in suicides.
give me all your money or i'm going to pour gas on you and set you on fire
1 abrams tank could kill an indefinite number of gun owners
This has been shown to be true in Kennasaw Georgia I believe. A couple of years ago when they were trying to ban guns across the nation the city council made a law that homeowners must have a gun in their home. While they didn't track guns that were in homes, the crime rate in the area dropped considerably. It's only one example but it was significant enough at the time to be carried in national papers. Shouldn't be hard to find the actual articles.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Since you are nitpicking, a lot of people do cast their own bullets. You are talking about cartridge parts.
Obligatory xkcd
The reason some studies find that not owning a gun makes you safer is because approximately 3/4 of violent crime in the US is perpetrated by people with multiple felony convictions, upon other violent people with multiple felony convictions. Statistically speaking, the scenarioes you describe are mostly insignificant.
Suicides are modestly significant, but pills and alcohol work just fine for that, too.
It pains me to say this. He did indeed murder numerous innocent people but his intent was NOT to murder innocent people. His intent was to fight back against what he saw as an oppressive government. Characterizing it as purely murder is a lie of omission.
Note that what I am saying is not an agreement of his actual results. Killing even one innocent person is a crime, even if all 168 were not innocent in his eyes. He even acknowledged his mistake when he found out that there was a childcare center in the building. Yeah, well, there is no going back now. All of those innocent people are dead and not coming back. :/
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Smart people do not make broad generalizations that are misleading and mostly incorrect.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Not to forget, an adept opponent that shoots you with your gun.
According to the FBI, 300,000 people defended themselves with guns - not millions. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm
Gun related crime in the UK has fallen http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8153392.stm
The ratio of gun crime to population in the UK is 0.0001. In the US it is 0.0011.
So, with easy access to guns and culture of gun ownership means that you are 10 times as likely to be involved with a gun crime in the US, even though you have a gun to defend yourself.
By all means, defend Gun ownership on the moral grounds of your US constitution, defend it on cultural grounds, or how you wish to own a gun, or how you want to rise up to overthrow your government. Don't defend in any way by claiming it makes the world a safer place, because that, sir, is bollocks.
Except that in Europe, there is less violent crime, period. If it has a direct correlation to gun control laws is open to debate. The thing that I notice is the total difference of how law enforcement and security personnel react to a critical (not yet violent) situation. In the US they always expect the worst and react as such. For example if you get pulled over in the US the sheriff will walk up to the car with his hand on the gun and talk to you in a stern voice; they are trained that way. Contrast that to Germany, no big deal all is peachy, it sounds like you neighbor asking you to trim your tree, since the branches are starting to come on his property. In the US everything is more tense.
Sadly what a truly shit article :(
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Yep, i done goofed up. The paper says that approximately 90% of murderers have felony records, a statistic that apparently has been consistent since about the 1890's, and they are people who are denied firearms anyway. It doesn't give a statistic on how many knew each other due to criminal involvement, it just said that it was the most common. I think it's also pertinent to show that according to one paper, a history of violence was present in over 95% of cases, and "90% of all the family homicides were preceded by previous disturbances at the same address, with a median of 5 calls per address.”
It's all written up in section "III. DO ORDINARY PEOPLE MURDER?" of the paper i linked earlier.
Its funny that you use the phrase "pro-gun". It seems that people familiar with firearms tend to support private ownership of firearms, even those that choose not to own one themselves. While those unfamiliar with firearms tends to be against private ownership. Familiar as in having gone shooting to some small extent at some point in their lives. Unfamiliar as in what they "know" they "learned" from the mass media, TV and movies. What does that tell you?
I am entirely familiar with firearms, and grew up with them around me in the country in the UK. However, they were used for hunting and that was it. Handguns and automatic rifles are only useful for killing people.
So I have no problem with handguns and automatic rifels being illegal here. My only real criticism would be that the laws were drafted too stringently, so that even target shooting pistols were outlawed, which seems unnecessary.
But, yeah, I know, I'm defenceless to rise up in armed revolution against the goverrnment, because obviously if I were a revolutionary I would be asking for a fucking gun permit first, just like I would for handling explosives.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You asked for stories:
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/10559641/ (WRAL TV)
http://www.vladtv.com/blog/80199/14-year-old-kills-intruder-in-gang-of-four-trying-to-break-in/ (link confirming the aforementioned)
http://www.amren.com/news/2013/01/woman-hiding-with-kids-shoots-intruder/ (mom defends herself and her kids from asshat hellbent on getting his hands on her)
You can find these stories all over the internet... just google "______________ defends themselves with a firearm" (fill in the blank) and you'll find plenty of stories like these.
Another thing that you'll find (if you do some research and ignore the lamestream media and BS talking points from both sides) is that the gross majority of these mass killings are done by deranged individuals with histories of mental illness, criminal actions, terrorist connections, and the like. Very few of the weapons used to perform these horrid actions were acquired legally, and even fewer were legally allowed to even possess a firearm.
Here's a link to some no bullshit firearms statistics:
http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp (justfacts.com)
Out of interest, how come he wasn't armed?
I expect the granny just out-drew him, Western gunslinger style. It's about as likely as the whole story.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
He was incarcerated and killed for his beliefs. Funny how all those pro-gun people who trot out the "we need to defend ourselves agaisnt the government" revile Mcveigh rather than actually look up to him for doing exactly what they claim they need their guns for!
Wow, this is truly one of the stupidest things I have ever read in my life. Timothy McVeigh was incarcerated and "killed" (as you put it) for murdering 168 innocent people. He was not defending himself or his beliefs. He was not engaged in combat. He just drove a bomb up and killed them. That is not something people should "look up to him" for. I would assume you're a troll if you had posted AC. Since you logged in, perhaps you are just crazy?
You're missing the point of why he murdered 168 people. It was because they represented the evil government who had dared to storm the compound at Waco because of all the guns being stockpiled there and the threat that David Koresh posed to society.
And that is exactly the sort of thing that all the armchair revolutionary gun nuts on the internet always say they will do. "You can pry my gun from my cold dead fingers", no?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Once a government turns the army on its own people, it is a mainly a question of how far that army will follow orders to kill civilians. Once they start doing that, then you will likely get a true civil war, all bets and laws are off, and the population will arm itself with fucking axes and sticks if necessary and overwhelm the oppressors by sheer weight of numbers. If they're not prepared to die doing that, they wouldn't be prepared to die doing it with guns, either.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Define onerous. Shooters and the anti-gun crowd will have vastly differing amounts in mind when asked the same question.
You assume that people prone to kill themselves wouldn't use another tool than a gun. That if a gun wasn't available they wouldn't down a bottle of pills or hang themselves. I can also tell you that owning a car equates with an increased risk of dieing in a car accident. Swimming equates with an increased risk of drowning. Working in the banking industry equates to an increased risk of you committing financial fraud. Only people who have speak English will be telemarketers. Only people with law degrees will be patent lawyers. What's your point?
And another adjacent memorial could list those whose lives were lost because they had been disarmed and could not defend themselves, both from criminal attackers and criminal governments. That memorial would be at least 6 orders of magnitude larger than the first.
"... could be required to submit each network related action to a central clearing authority for approval"
Yes, we should hook all of humanity's weapons into a giant central AI for real-time arbitration of all firing decisions. We could call it "Skynet", perhaps. What could go wrong.
Spoiler alert, bro!
+= E
What if I own guns but don't keep any ammunition in the house?
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Deliberately engaging in an act that foreseeably results in the death of another person is murder, even if your subjective intent is not to kill that person. For example, if you are deer hunting, and you see a marvelous buck, but some other hunter happens to be standing between you and the deer, and you decide to shoot anyway because you really, really want those antlers on your wall, you're guilty of murder. It doesn't matter that you were indifferent to whether the other hunter lived or died.
Whatever McVeigh's imaginary persecutions were, the fact is that he deliberately blew up a building, knowing it was full of people, not one of which was an immediate threat to him or his safety. You don't get to do that and be a hero. The guy was just evil.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The second amendment was designed to prevent a standing military, sapping our produce and spreading tyranny. Cooler heads have prevailed. I, for one welcome our jack-booted overlords.
I used to collect Colt revolvers, I just love a fine piece of machinery. After they acquitted those fools that beat down Rodney King, I got to hang out and see some interesting things. (I happened to be reading Gibbon, and working as an un-armed security guard in the Fairfax District at the time.
You would not believe the money they charged me for the Springfield M1-A and Thompson carbine I bought after that.
I find Wayne LaPierre, et al, a trifle embarrassing, but I have to ask, if I can't trust you with a machine-gun then what in the fuck are you doing at large?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Close enough for horseshoes.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
someone like you is afraid of law abiding citizens and inanimate objects
It's the old problem of, if you let the good people have their own H-bombs to play with, one day, a bad person might steal one of them and use it to be naughty with.
Simple enough to understand?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If they can't convert an AR-15 to fire full-auto, how are they gonna make an entire M-16?
They won't be making them, they'll be buying them from underground gunsmiths.
Is there any country in the world that actually has underground gunsmiths? In particular I'm looking for countries that have enforced gun control because you're arguing enforcing stricter gun control in the US would create a market for black-market firearms.
If the answer is nobody does that's very good evidence for my side.
They wanna restrict weapons like the AR-15 because they have been used in a lot of very bad shootings recently. But AFAIK nobody's even proposed an Australia-style buy-back.
Three to five is not a lot. Several have been proposed, but I do not believe that any have gotten out of legislative committees yet.
Whose done the proposing?
I've seen press releases announcing a couple pols want to ban new sales, but banning new sales is much different then proposing the government spend Billion$ buying back existing weapons. They didn't do a mandatory buyback of actual machine guns.
I'm sure that before the dust has settled somebody's gonna file a bill before committee that does exactly that. But it hasn't happened yet, and when it does the pro-rural bias in the House GOP and the entire Senate will mean it won;t come up for a committee vote.
Not as easy as a Soviet weapon.
In any industrialized nation, like ours, the difference is negligible. Khyber pass manufacturing technology favors the AK, that's not much of an issue here.
The USSR designed everything to be easy to produce because their doctrine required large numbers of troops, and their economy couldn't support spending $1,000 on a rifle.
The US isn't spending $1,000 per rifle. At least not for the main battle rifle. Spec-ops types and sniper rifles notwithstanding.
You might be surprised about that. I was guessing it was $800-$900ish from what little I know of civilian weapons prices, but according to this:
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Colt-M4-Data-Rights-The-Individual-Carbine-Competition-06942/
Colt's latest bid was $1,221. This is a significant increase on it's '99 bid of $521, and indicates either a) Colt understands supply/demand really well, b) M-4 cost more to make then Colt thought, or c) a and b. I suspect Colt's accountants have really really good evidence for b), but I don't believe them.
Last I heard the Russians were paying their supplier $150 or so. The Taliban seem to be getting them $400, and in many places in Africa the price is closer to $100.
So what you are saying is since I am not a licensed welder but a programmer, I cannot own/use welding equipment. That I have no use for it. It may surprise you but I do, and I use it often on many of my own projects, I even use it to help out friends and neighbors. Not once have I cause an injury to other people and I have actually fixed many dangerous vehicles/property preventing injury and damage. FYI I don't own an oxy tank for welding - I use that for cutting. I do have Argon/CO2 tanks for welding, and yes, they have been in my truck. I also own firearms - legally in my state, I have a legal Carry Permit as well. I have use my gun in the past to scare off a group of 4 men trying to break into my home one night 4 years ago. If I did not have that gun, I am sure those 4 men would have got in to my house and I would not have been able to protect my wife and child. The police did not arrive for over 15 minutes.
NEJM.org, 50.2% were killed with other than firearms, also the study talks about the prevelance of illicit drugs and alcohol; NEBI, only uses deaths when firearms are used, ie, if a firearm is used and intruder only wounded this is disregarded; Annemergmed, my question is why were the ER guards armed in the first place? Also, the study showed that the number one source of guns in a hospital were used in the most cases, shocking I know; Aje, Blacks and those under 35 were over sampled, ie, counted more than once, the two groups with the largest number of gun violence were over sampled, also, Violent deaths, whether from suicide or homicide, were excluded, respectively, from the “other causes of death” category, ie, if you didn't die peaceful and didn't fit the death by gun, your death was excluded; Also, the NY Times article was an opinion piece.
Man stabs 20 schoolchildren, teacher armed with "smart" gun. Colt sued over malfunctioning "smart" gun that did not allow him to fire. Smith & Wesson sued over malfunctioning "smart" gun that allowed him to fire. Man hacked gun software, committed greatest atrocity in history of mankind. Two gunmen slaughter dozens as "smart" guns allow them to fire because there is another gun in the area.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'm using speculation more than science here, but I would say most people are idiots with their guns, and they skew the statistics so that if you look at the population as a whole you get results such as you described.
This is not the same as talking to one person and saying "not owning a gun makes you safer". A highly responsible gun owner could very well be safer with a gun, and I say they should be allowed to have one.
No, what I wanted to see a link to was that particular story about his 75-year-old grandmother.
You can also search the Internet for "gun suicide" and come up with stories. The problem is that for every one of these stories of people defending themselves with a household gun, there are 37 stories of people using a household gun to commit suicide, according to the research in New England Journal of Medicine. And there are more people who use a gun to kill a family member or friend in an argument.
The research doesn't give as much detail as we'd like, because the National Rifle Association got Congress to stop funding research. So there are a lot of questions left over. But the research people did before the NRA put an end to it was showing that if someone has a handgun at home, somebody in his household is more likely to be killed by it than use it for defense.
If the fire department can get to your house in 2 minutes, why can't the police get to your house in 2 minutes? Every time I see one of these stories, I wonder whether they could have just called 911. I once had an intruder trying to rob somebody in my apartment building. I called 911, then I yelled, "I just called the cops!" I never saw somebody run away so fast.
I realize there may be people in rural areas far from the nearest police station, who would need a gun to defend themselves in some scenarios. But if they do get a gun, they're more likely to kill themselves than save their lives.
how you want to rise up to overthrow your government.
I wish they'd get on and do it.
Free speech zones are a known fact, but now there's NRA members against the first amendment, with people calling for Piers Morgan to be hung, drawn and quartered for disagreeing with them
It seems that the 4th amendment has been thrown out with the TSA
Refusing to answer questions about yourself results in being tasered, as Steven Anderson found out. That knocks out the 5th and 8th
José Padilla didn't exactly get his speedy trial guaranteed under the 6th ammendment. The 10th seems meaningless too, from the war on drugs to obamacare, to federal highway funding.
I suppose the 3rd amendment is still rock solid, although given the amount of hysteria the media whips up in favour of American soldiers I expect that if the government wanted it, they could find enough rooms to quarter the entire army. Anyone not offering up their daughter's bed would be ostracised as anti-america
Why doesn't the NRA defend all the freedoms enshrined by the bill of rights?
There's a lot of research on suicide, and the evidence is that people who attempt suicide with a gun are more likely to kill themselves than people who attempt suicide by other methods. After all, guns are designed to make it easy to kill someone.
And people who attempt suicide and fail (with pills, most commonly) usually wind up in a hospital, get help, and don't attempt suicide again.
So more guns means more successful suicides. Fewer guns means fewer successful suicides. If they didn't have a gun around, they'd be more likely to be alive.
My point is that people who buy guns are more likely to use them to commit suicide with them than to use them for self-defense.
If you're a drug dealer and six-shooters are illegal you won't carry one for two reasons.
So drug dealers will carry drugs (illegal), but not six-shooters (illegal)?
Do you even read what you type?
So in your opinion, it is better that you are raped and murdered than if you kill yourself?
Your logic is "guns make suicide easy so having a gun around is bad." By that logic, "swimming pools make drowning easy so having a swimming pool is bad." Correlation != causation. Owning a gun doesn't make someone suicidal. Taking anti-depressants also is linked to suicide. There are a wide range of things linked to suicide. What about alcohol? Should we make it illegal too?
Besides, shouldn't that be a decision that individuals make on their own? When making life choices it is our job as individuals to perform our own personal risk assessment and make a decision appropriate for our individual needs. Who are you to tell me that you think I might try to off myself so it's better for me to be raped and murdered? Next thing you are going to be telling me that I can't drink soda because you think it's bad for me... oh wait...
Tuesday the CDC released information about how 23,000 women and girls die each year due to binge drinking. Is that not statistically significant? Shouldn't we now impose drinking restrictions? Maybe background checks so they only buy six packs of beer if it is for a man?
[End Cynicism] Why do you hate freedom? Citation
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Well not quite. for thousands of dollars and bulky equipment we,e reached the point of anti collision equipment in airplanes. Completely impracticable with firearms, but the left extremest media never let that stop them on a quest for a cause.
If you live in the United States, this would be followed quickly by the return of a poll tax...
...then taxes on exercising your favorite right guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
Perhaps a 50 percent tax would be instituted on not having an item searched without a warrant. This could be conveniently administered via a Search Protection Plan you buy at the time of purchase. The item (for example, computer, luggage, chest of drawers, clothing, ammo storage box, safe, or even your entire house) then could not be searched without a warrant. The item would be registered and tagged with RFID (so police could figure out if they could search it). Best Buy would then pester you to buy these with your computer (to get their Tax Collection and Enhancement Commission).
One way to also fix the Federal debt problem!
(Seriously, the Supreme Court frowns on taxes and fees which substantially interfere with exercise of rights -- esp. those tailored to do just that).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
The alternative is mandating everyone in a school be completely unarmed, and we have horrific school shootings where nobody is able to stop them. I want there to be no violence of any kind. But since that isn't going to happen, let's pick from one of the realistic alternatives. Unarmed and helpless schools, or trusted teachers with pistols. If there is another realistic alternative, i'm all ears.
Whenever someone has an idea, It is always good to think of ways that the idea might fail.
So let us issue every teacher a sidearm. Let's also assume that a requirement for a teacher is the willingness to kill someone. Let's get down to a operational scenario.
Right away, the sidearm must me immediately accessible. If the teacher has to fumble around unlocking a storage cabinet, the deterrent effect is completely lost. The teacher must understand that the bad guy with a gun will have an initial target of killing the teacher, so they will have to be very quick to judge and kill.
Other considerations are that this now makes the teacher's handgun a theft and assault target. The teacher must also be prepared to kill their own students. We will need to make a determination of whether the teacher is approved to kill students, and what infractions make it appropriate to kill a student. This is not trivial, as students assaulting teachers is not all that uncommon. Will we need extra sidearms in case a student successfully relieves the teacher of their sidearm and proceeds to kill people in the classroom? Do not forget that there are often large disparities in size and strength in people, so a person might easily overcome that 95 pound or elderly teacher and use the protective weapon to kill other people.
A rational assessment of armed teachers shows that many are not willing to kill other people, there are severe problems with sidearms versus semi-automatic assault weapens, and the presence of a sidearm in every classroom is a potential theft target.
A further assessment shows that many if not most of the bad guys have no intention of surviving the incident. They either plan on killing themselves, or being killed by law enforcement in the end. It is plausible that armed teachers or guards has no deterrent deterrent effect upon them.
So let's assume that we want to have an armed solution to gun violence in the classroom. How do we do this and have it actually work?
The teacher's job is to teach, so really, the only way to mount an effective defense of a classroom is to have an armed guard present in the classroom at all times. that would be his job, to kill intruders. There would be a determination on whether the guard was their to kill students who assault the teacher also. There would probably be some mitigation in student teacher assaults, a plus. I do have concerns about accidental shooting
Next we move outside the classroom. The concept of having one armed person patrolling an entire school is innefective. There would need to be at least one armed person at every ingress/egress point in the school. Given that the guard would become the first target, there would be a need for hallway patrols too.
The woefully inadequate ideas of arming teachers and putting one armed guard per school is just security theater. I also fear that the sudden easy access to the teacher's gun might increase school shootings.
And frankly, the idea of turning our schools into some sort of armed camps is insane. I certainly would not send my child to such a school.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I would be fine if every gun owner had to make their own ammo. Then, they would have less ready made on hand, when their crazy relative killed them to steal the guns.
That is a really good idea.
A similar one I had was to offer only small grain, slow muzzle velocity bullets inside city limitts. A rock salt load is just as good at stopping a burglar when necessary, but is less likely to kill a family member.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The only lack of intelligence is on your part.
Let's say you're a 75 year old woman, weigh maybe 90 pounds. You live alone. you don't walk or sleep so good anymore. You live down town in a major city in the south. A 300 pound thug breaks into your home. By the way he's a convicted rapist.
What do you do?
The only cure for gun violence will happen when every person, young and old, has a gun and shows that they will use it.
Just like Afghanistan, the peace center of the universe.
Oh, and we have to ban video games too - Then we'll be safe.
I own guns and fully intend to keep owning them. But the old arguments are starting to sound a little silly. By the way, who's trying to take your Grandma's gun away from her? And since she shot the guy, do you have a link to the story? That would have to benn reported.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The only lack of intelligence is on your part.
Let's say you're a 75 year old woman, weigh maybe 90 pounds. You live alone. you don't walk or sleep so good anymore. You live down town in a major city in the south. A 300 pound thug breaks into your home. By the way he's a convicted rapist.
Out of interest, how come he wasn't armed?
Do you have a news story backing your claim up?
Remember how everyone used to know someone who knew somone who was saved because they were'nt wearing a seat belt? I will be the first to apologize if I'm wrong, but granny dropping the 300 pound rapist certainly sounds apocryphal.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Its funny that you use the phrase "pro-gun". It seems that people familiar with firearms tend to support private ownership of firearms, even those that choose not to own one themselves. While those unfamiliar with firearms tends to be against private ownership. Familiar as in having gone shooting to some small extent at some point in their lives. Unfamiliar as in what they "know" they "learned" from the mass media, TV and movies. What does that tell you?
I am entirely familiar with firearms, and grew up with them around me in the country in the UK. However, they were used for hunting and that was it. Handguns and automatic rifles are only useful for killing people. So I have no problem with handguns and automatic rifels being illegal here.
Automatic weapons are also outlawed here in the U.S. The "assault weapons" ban in the U.S. would outlaw semi-automatic firearms that when equipped with a 5 round magazine are functionally identical to common semi-auto hunting rifles. The differences are entirely cosmetic appearance.
Semi-autos are also used in tournament shooting. Again, a 5 round magazine is all that is required. Even in the tournaments sponsored by the U.S. military no more than 10 rounds are fired at a particular stage. These stages are timed and a reload is required, so two 5 round magazines work perfectly.
Semi-autos are also used for pest control. For example feral pigs, coyotes, etc on farms and ranches.
And of course semi-auto are also used for plain old informal target shooting.
Semi-autos have many perfectly legal uses in the U.S. that involve harming no one. This includes the "assault weapons", which again are functionally identical to regular hunting and sporting semi-autos when equipped with a 5 round magazine. I believe such firearms manufactured in the U.S. ship from their factories with such magazines to be compliant out-of-the box with hunting regulations.
... I'm defenceless to rise up in armed revolution against the goverrnment ...
The preparation for armed revolt thing is just coming from a small fringe that the media loves to high light. The media is somewhat biased in the U.S. regarding gun control and seems to intentionally provide a distorted image. I am not making up the following, the following was actually broadcast on TV during the nightly news the last time an "assault weapons" ban was proposed in the 1990s. A lawyer working as a PR representative for a national gun control group was interviewed to provide the pro ban argument. To be "fair" a representative from the anti ban side was also interviewed. The national gun rights group had its own lawyers working as PR representatives, was one of these interviewed? No. They interviewed the first guy with facial hair and wearing camouflage that they could find exiting a gun store. You may not be getting an accurate portrayal of U.S. gun owners from your local media either.
This is completely true, but nobody with a gun will believe it. That is because humans are, in general, unable to apply base rate statistics to themselves. People typically consider themselves 'above average' in all things, and so reason that base rate statistics do not apply to them. This is a well known cognitive bias. See Thinking Fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
"Crime rate" is people. "murder rate" is guns. Why? Because stabbings are much less likely to cause death, and much much more liekly to cause the perpetrator to be caught (most knife murderers manage to stab/cut themselves, leaving plenty of clues behind).
The other interesting thing I saw is one of the conservative pundits claiming that the rash of killings by mentally ill people proves we should cut funding on mental issues. Something like "It isn't working anyway, so give me my money back so I can buy another gun with it to defend myself from all of them." I found that very telling about the mindset of the gun nuts. We should issue a gun to every person and abolish the police. What could possibly go wrong?
Learn to love Alaska
Ok, everyone always brings up Switzerland when the US gun violence debate is on. This is not a valid comparison on so many levels.
Actually I think the comparison is spot on, but perhaps not for the reasons you assume.
The reason for having the rifles at home was always "if Switzerland is attacked, you as a militia man can fight your way to your assembly point with your 20 shots of general issue ammunition", which is stupid.
This seems to be a digression. I am not arguing that the motivation for having these rifles in private homes is good, nor am I arguing that everyone should be armed, nor am I arguing that people should be carrying firearms around. What I am arguing is that we have an example where a million (if wiki is accurate) fully or semi automatic firearms capable of accepting high capacity magazines in private homes and they seem to be no threat to society. The theory that the mere presence of such firearms is a threat to society is disproven by counterexample.
Also, everyone with a rifle has gone through military selection (which can and does not accept you if you are too eager to learn how to shoot people with a gun)
This seems to suggest the value of a background check. Checking the criminal background of gun purchasers in the U.S. is common, admittedly there are some loopholes (private person to person sales usually) and these loopholes should be closed. I am not sure if a mental health check is common, if not it should be. All of which can be accomplished without enlistment in the military.
Similarly training in the safe handling and storage of firearms can be accomplished without military enlistment. We actually have a national infrastructure in place to do so. To get a hunting license a safety course is required, these classes are 3/4 general firearms safety and only 1/4 hunting related.
There is a strong tradition of having rifles for sport shooting in rifle clubs
Participation may be less common in the U.S. but we have similar traditions.
There is a very rigid tradition of how and when you load and fire your guns, juniors are taught gun handling and gun ethics in these groups.
Been there, done that in Boy Scouts. In fact we were allowed to use the range at a local military base and always had an hour of safety instruction by a sergeant. This instruction was mandatory regardless of how many times one had visited and heard it in the past. After the safety instruction came instruction in proper sight alignment, sight picture and trigger squeeze. Then under close supervision we were allowed to fire .22 cal bolt action rifles.
Admittedly the above was atypical. However even at regular summer camp there was a mandatory several hour safety class if you wished to use the rifle range or shotgun trap/skeet range during the week. The instructor for this safety class was a state certified instructor. I don't know if this was required but such instructors are plentiful due to the required hunter safety classes mentioned earlier.
In college I went on to shoot in some matches that are sponsored by the U.S. military. The military supports a national tournament. High powered rifle, 100 and 300 yard stages.
... In summary, in Switzerland the owners of all "assault" rifles are all background checked in the vast majority military trained ...
I believe we should have required safety training, required background checks and store firearms in a locked manner. All of which can be accomplished quite easily without military enlistment. I think military enlistment is a "red herring" in the gun control debate. The relevant portion of military training is not terribly different than the basic safety training available to civilians. Much of the additional handling training is not applicable to civilians, for exa
However given universal conscription the gun owners[...]
It may be nit-picky minutia, but my understanding is that there is near-zero private gun ownership. Th guns in homes are owned by the government, and it's illegal to have them in a gun rack in your pickup, or hidden under your coat, even after you pass all the tests and training. The guns are hidden everywhere, but carried and used nowhere. Thus, it's exactly like the US, only the complete opposite.
Learn to love Alaska
The argument is not that home invasions do not happen. The argument is that the likelihood of a home invasion is lower than the likelihood of accident when a loaded gun is left unsecured in the home.
This gun is being used in an American school: DISARM.
as opposed to
This gun is being used in a school/village in (for example) West Africa or the Middle East: MEH. FIRE AT WILL.
Kind of a "our children are more important than yours" scenario, by the sounds of it.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
However given universal conscription the gun owners[...]
It may be nit-picky minutia, but my understanding is that there is near-zero private gun ownership.
Last time I checked wiki that was not the case. This includes having military weapons that are downgraded from selective fire (full auto capable) to semi auto only being available to private citizens. IIRC the number of semi autos in private hands exceeded 1 million.
I understand that rifle tournaments are fairly popular over there.
Th guns in homes are owned by the government ...
Even if true it does not matter who owns them. All that matters is that they are in private homes and they seem to pose no threat to society. Personally I think the key to this is proper training, proper background checks and proper secure storage. A low poverty rate and a good educational system probably helps as well.
I believe this whole thing has been initiated by Apple to prepare the market for the launch of their next kinky device the iShoot.
Achille Talon
Hop!
As the reply below you shows.
You can still die from an airplane crash even if you're not on that airplane.
Again, the world is inherently unsafe. Now this doesn't mean you should lock yourself into a concrete bunker and never venture forth. But that *has* to be some acknowledgement of this basic fact.
Also, you're never going to make sure "nobody" has guns. You just aren't. Because you're not going to disarm the police or the military.
Also, you're not going to get around any sort of black market for firearms. If you make sure nobody but criminals and crazies have guns, you still have the problem of criminals and crazies with guns.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"12 gaugue shotgun and two "00" buckshot rounds"
Your ignorance is showing. NEVER use anything bigger than #4 bird shot in a 12 gauge you use for home defense. That's the largest commercial shot that won't go through two thicknesses of sheetrock, and it'll do plenty of damage to a perpetrator, without putting anyone else in the house at risk.
Dude, #4 bird short has little stopping power (it has kill power, but little stopping power), I might as well not use it at all, and stick with JHP .38 SP or heavier. True that the caliber I'm suggesting will go through sheetrock, but its penetration is not the same as with a hefty caliber round. There is better chance of deadly over penetration with multiple solid (non-hollow-point) .38 SP +P rounds than with the buckshot/gauge I suggested.
Constutions are there to define the minimum rights for the citizens (rights which the govt can not take away), not the gouvernment. If a right for something is not in the contitution then it is not there.
If you look at the history of our country what our found fathers did was restrict the powers that the government has. Or in other words the freedoms that the government could take away. That is a completely different mindset than what you're exposing. It was never intended to declare what rights we have as citizens, except in areas where the citizen's rights were potentially in conflict with the powers granted to government. A good case in point is freedom of speech. A governments role, generally speaking, is provide a stable and reasonably safe environment for the people live their lives in. But people can, merely by speaking, turn that environment into an unsafe one. The first amendment is intended to clarify that conflict.
Owning a gun doesn't make one suicidal, but having a gun around makes it much more likely that if you have an impulse to commit suicide, you'll succeed.
Recent study seems to show (correlation part of study) a direct relationship between the use of lead in gasoline and in the final success of lead remediation in the home with both the rise of aggressive and brutal crime in the 20s and 30s and the falling off of the same crime in the 80s and 90s. The study authors then went on to show data that shows a causative agent in that lead damages the brain in the very places that are currently understood to control civil behavior and self-control (as I remember, the exact function of that part of the brain, fuzzy, fuzzy, but the effect/causation was there in the effect of lead on the brain).
So the availability of weapons had nothing to do with it, neither did it affect the increase.
So... it doesn't help or hurt the argument and the entire argument must be moved onto another front.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
What if you are killed on the ground when the plane crashes on you?
http://tinyurl.com/42geekcode
IIRC the number of semi autos in private hands exceeded 1 million.
That's irrelevant to my comment. Whether they are in private hands or not is not relevant to the owner of them.
I understand that rifle tournaments are fairly popular over there.
Shooting is also fairly popular in England, despite guns being highly regulated and with little private ownership.
Personally I think the key to this is proper training, proper background checks and proper secure storage
So you are suggesting that government inspections of private homes to ensure proper storage, and government inspection of your ammunition are a good thing for the US? You want more firearms regulations, not less, and you want to base them on a location with very strict firearms regulations. It seems a little odd to me.
Learn to love Alaska
"That a gun helps me in that effort is indisputable." It is highly disputable because you will probably miss your attacker. Police training shows that it is very difficult to hit a person who is just 10 feet away and threatening you with a gun. It is also likely that you bullet will ricochet and take of your daughter's face. Your attacker is probably only intending to threaten you with his gun. Your gun will cause him to shoot you. A gun does not help you. Having one makes you feel better about the risk of being shot, but it is a poor mitigation strategy because it increases both the probability and consequence of the risk.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
One of the many Poe addenda...yup, I tried addendums first but spell-check, which will let you misspell almost anything if you insert a hyphen, insisted I reconsider.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
You don't even have to imagine as its a fact of life for many of us. I live in a rural area that takes me around an hour to drive to the nearest big city, (1,000,000+), people and ten miles away is the closest town of 5000 people or so. Where I live a lot of people hunt and even more people own firearms for many reasons. In the ten years I've lived here I have never locked my doors and have never seen a neighbor lock their's. When I go to the gas station, with dozens of other patrons around, I don't even bother to turn off my car or lock my doors if the AC or heater is on. Why? My neighbors are armed. There have been two attempted car jackings/robberies in my county and both were at gas stations and both ended with multiple people pulling firearms keeping the criminal on the ground until the county police arrived. Word about things like that spreads pretty fast and I'm sure when those guys hit jail, the other criminals eventually learned that even though those thugs were armed, people that had each other's backs were armed too. The last one was over five years ago. The only crime I ever hear about coming over the scanner in my garage is people fighting, drunk drivers and people getting arrested for weed and shoplifting. And those are few and far between. Its just a completely different environment where every bullet fired in the last thirty years was into an inanimate target or an animal that was going to be eaten. Contrast that with Cincinnati. I grew up there and lived there for five years as an adult. I had my car broken into twice, stolen once and caught some people trying to open the back door to my house on another occasion. Most of my neighbors there didn't talk to each or even know each other's names.
Is there any country in the world that actually has underground gunsmiths?
Yes. The USA.
Who do you think makes the illegal silencers and illegally converts guns to fully automatic?
Colt's latest bid was $1,221. This is a significant increase on it's '99 bid of $521, and indicates either a) Colt understands supply/demand really well, b) M-4 cost more to make then Colt thought, or c) a and b. I suspect Colt's accountants have really really good evidence for b), but I don't believe them.
The M4 isn't the standard infantry weapon. The M16-A2
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
IIRC the number of semi autos in private hands exceeded 1 million.
That's irrelevant to my comment. Whether they are in private hands or not is not relevant to the owner of them.
However it is relevant to my point. The person in the house has access, this person can unlock it, this person uses it ... and yet society is not endangered.
Plus I believe only the full auto's are owned by the government, the service weapons. Civilians can buy semi-autos, at least according to wiki. Another poster who is Swiss seems to be saying so as well.
Personally I think the key to this is proper training, proper background checks and proper secure storage
So you are suggesting that government inspections of private homes to ensure proper storage, and government inspection of your ammunition are a good thing for the US? You want more firearms regulations, not less, and you want to base them on a location with very strict firearms regulations. It seems a little odd to me.
I am suggesting no such thing. Gov't can set the standards for safety training and let the private sector handle the actual classes and tests, as they currently do with hunter safety classes. Gov't would obviously do the background checks and give the private sector dealer the go/no-go, which is pretty much what happens in gun shops across the country today. As for properly securing firearms, that is a side effect of the previous safety class.
If you want so good statistics, see the Kleck and Gertz study
Reading that article you refer to (which is on a pro-gun web site, as I'm sure you are aware), it seems Kleck disputes studies which show lower use of firearms in self-defence, while other people dispute Kleck's studies. What this proves remains unclear. There seems to be a lot of argument about how often guns are used to protect oneself.
There are studies which dispute Kleck's claim that over a million people use guns in "self-defence" each year, such as:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
"Most purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments and are both socially undesirable and illegal"
"Criminal court judges who read the self-reported accounts of the purported self-defense gun use rated a majority as being illegal, even assuming that the respondent had a permit to own and to carry a gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly from his own perspective."
"We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns." Hear that? Guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime.
So "self defence" in studies like Kleck's gets in to very dodgy territory. It includes assholes who can't resolve an escalating argument without one of them pulling out a gun (or threatening to use one) to shut the other person down. This would tend to happen a lot when people have, for instance, been out drinking. I bet Kleck didn't determine how often alcohol was involved in these so-called "self-defence" situations.
Its important to note that in switzerland the gun is issued but bulltets are not.
Ammunition is available on the civilian market.
.223 Remington ammunition may be substituted for NATO 5.56x45mm ammunition. The converse is not true, the NATO ammunition and rifles are designed for higher pressures. NATO ammunition should not be used in civilian rifles.
Civilian ammunition works in the military rifles. Civilian
Also, read the book More Guns Less Crime, by Professor John Lott.
Why? There are as many studies rejecting his findings than there are supporting it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime#Controversy
Funny, though, that 90% of the supporting study references are from a single source - the Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001. I guess it must have been rather difficult finding supporting studies. Opposing studies, however, are found from Yale Law, Stanford Law, Georgetown University, University of Chicago and various journals.
So it doesn't sound like a worthwhile read.
Is there any country in the world that actually has underground gunsmiths?
Yes. The USA.
Who do you think makes the illegal silencers and illegally converts guns to fully automatic?
Do you have a reference for this, or have you just watched too many Tarintino movies?
Because I am actually from the City of Detroit, and I have actually met criminals, who actually tried to steal from me (occasionally they were even successful), and I have never heard of anyone making a business of converting firearms to fire on full auto, or building silencers.
Heck, off the top of my head I can't think of a time when a criminal did a full-auto conversion on his own, or used a silencer. I;m sure somebody's done it, probably a Mexican cartel, but it just is not common.
Colt's latest bid was $1,221. This is a significant increase on it's '99 bid of $521, and indicates either a) Colt understands supply/demand really well, b) M-4 cost more to make then Colt thought, or c) a and b. I suspect Colt's accountants have really really good evidence for b), but I don't believe them.
The M4 isn't the standard infantry weapon. The M16-A2
LK
Depends on how you define standard. The M16 is being phased out and replaced with the M-4.
And again Mr. Dictionary strikes.
[sarcasm]
Clearly every time a drug dealer sees a another person (even a police officer), he immediately decks that guy. Decking guys is illegal and drug dealers are by definition illegal.
[/sarcasm]
Note that my argument's major weakness is not the dictionary. It's that it's a testable hypothesis. If you could provide evidence that cops routinely arrest drug dealers with weapons that are actually illegal then you'd be able to prove me wrong.
Honestly I doubt you'll even be google for evidence. You've really got this little non sequitar stuck in your head. You'll either refrain from responding, or repeat it.
Any bets that he googles it, finds a single example, and is then surprised by a) the phrase "anecdotal evidence," and b) the point that if it was common it wouldn't be news. You gonna need crime stats bucko.
Gov't can set the standards for safety training and let the private sector handle the actual classes and tests, as they currently do with hunter safety classes.
Wait, you are equating draft,.conscription, years of training, and mandatory firearms checks with a weekend hunting class and no followups. No wonder the gun debates drift quickly off into useless hyperbole.
Learn to love Alaska
...15 years after the Police, FBI, CIA, and Army have adopted them (but only if they didn't drop them), and throwaways are all computer checked bio-metrics too.
I'm assuming that, even if the police and military for some reason beyond my ken become early adopters, 15 years will be enough to iron out the bugs.
Though I may be over-optimistic.
A weapon is something that you really don't want to fail when you NEED it to work.
I can imagine adjusting and readjusting your grip trying to get it to recognize you in the heat of a gunfight.
THINK! It's patriotic
Are you saying he's homophonbic?
THINK! It's patriotic
You may not like this becuase it doesn't fit your little world view, but millions of people defend themselves each year with guns. This is a recent example of a mom who saved herself and her children from god knows what - with a gun.
While the woman and her children were definitely in a situation where they would feel threatened there was no mention in the article that the intruder intended to do them bodily harm. Cornered in the attic? I doubt he was hunting them down, remember he had checked the house several times, both by knocking and ringing the bell, to make sure nobody was home. He was robbing them and when he opened the attic closet he was immediately shot. If the intruder had had a weapon or in some way was threatening bodily harm then you can be sure that the digitaljournal (what is digital about guns?) would have included it and probably close to the top as it would have been much more sensational and brought in more readers / clicks. "Cornered" seems to be the best they could get away with but is obviously biased. It's quite the anti-climax to a sensational story, in the end the intruder was sentenced only to burglary. At least you admit that nobody seems to know know what she saved themselves from, "god knows what."
Less *is* more.
So I have no problem with handguns and automatic rifels being illegal here. My only real criticism would be that the laws were drafted too stringently, so that even target shooting pistols were outlawed, which seems unnecessary.>
Target pistols (.22LR) were to be exempt from the ban in the same way that .22LR semi-auto rifles are still available, but Tony Blair's "ban everything" government decided otherwise. The closest you can go is either black-powder or the abomination that is the Long-Barrelled Pistol (a .22LR handgun with a 12" barrel and a bit of metal sticking out the back to make it long enough to be classified as a rifle).
People here are raised to be terrified of guns. Hell, up here in Scotland, the nanny-state nationalist government even wants a firearms-style licence for air guns, because they are evil and scary machines of death. Or something.
Er, maybe homophonophobic (yes, that is not a real word; I just made it up). Since he can't use homophones, he actually should be afraid of them!
Free Martian Whores!
Oh dear - using correlation to prove causation is fraught with difficulties. Yet you have dived straight in and repeated the biggest lie that the NRA promulgate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
It's funny because a very noisy, home invasion type crime such is this is the only scenario to my mind where the right to keep a gun in your home is any use.
The problem is that it hardly ever happens in the manner you describe.
Maybe where you live, but in Central Florida, home invasions where criminals bust through the door or sliding glass doors is quite common, especially around the universities where invaders target students. And quite a few times the criminals don't make it out, and I am glad. Just a few months ago, 3 criminals busted into an apartment where students lived. One of the students happened to have a gun in the apartment. He came out of his room and fired at the criminals, hitting 1 of them. The other 2 jumped out of the second story window. All 3 were caught. I wish all three were buried, but maybe next time.
I'm not sure I get your 'sarcasm'. I never said that a criminal will go out and do illegal things just for the hell of it. My point was that making something illegal will not suddenly make a criminal not want to do whatever is now illegal. You know, like carrying and selling drugs.
You'll either refrain from responding, or repeat it.
Eh, I'll go ahead and repeat it... a... little... more... slowly...
Drugs like cocaine are illegal to posses.
You can be arrested on the spot for having them.
Drug dealers carry them anyway.
So, why do you think making another item (guns) illegal will make criminals stop carrying that item?
If you could provide evidence that cops routinely arrest drug dealers with weapons that are actually illegal then you'd be able to prove me wrong.
http://www.davekopel.com/2a/lawrev/japanese_gun_control.htm
Including the possession cases, there are about 600 handgun crimes a year and 900 long gun crimes
A small number of craftsmen specialise in converting toy and model guns into working handguns for criminals.
..illegal guns are usually smuggled from overseas (especially from the Philippines and the United States) by organised crime gangs
And this is in the most gun-controlled country in the world.
Here is the story I was referring to: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-10-25/news/os-suspect-shot-home-invasion-ucf-20121025_1_home-invasion-suspect-shot-deputies
The last data I had is that 95% of all cases of armed self defense end at brandishing a weapon, at which point an assailant flees. This was found in the Uniform Crime Report.
Found in another portion of the same report (early 2000s, I think?) was a claim that immediately complying with an attacker got you in the hospital or morgue 25% of the time, resisting with a knife or unarmed got you hurt or dead 75% of the time, and resisting with a gun got you in trouble 5% of the time.
Really, the study ban - if it truly was the NRA's doing - was a bonehead move. They've got rather a lot of data on their side.
Gov't can set the standards for safety training and let the private sector handle the actual classes and tests, as they currently do with hunter safety classes.
Wait, you are equating draft,.conscription, years of training, and mandatory firearms checks with a weekend hunting class and no followups. No wonder the gun debates drift quickly off into useless hyperbole.
Much of the military training is not relevant to civilians. A Marine Corp Gunnery Sergeant thought he only needed one hour to instruct a group of us scouts visiting his rifle range in proper safe handling procedures and practices before we were allowed to shoot some .22 bolt actions. My great-uncle, a highly trained WW2 paratrooper who fought from Normandy to Germany thought he only needed a couple of hours to teach me how to safely handle a pistol. After a quick review he was satisfied with the rifle and shotgun training I had received via scouts. That training included the previous visits to the Marine range and a mandatory three hour safety class at summer camp for those who wished to use the rifle range or skeet/trap range.
As an adult I received some law enforcement training. Most of it was not relevant to civilians.
I've also had a few hunter safety classes in various states over the years.
So yes, I do believe that something comparable to a four hour hunter safety classes can make a big difference. The military has to learn to maneuver over obstacles while carrying loaded weapons. Civilians, as they learn in the hunter safety class, simply unload their gun when they have to climb over a fence. In my law enforcement training I had to learn to maneuver from one position to another, individually and as a team, and to engage multiple targets. This is the sort of training that takes an extraordinary amount of time. Not basic safe handling and storage.
As a teen I took a trip to Fort Sill and fired M-16s and M-60s. We didn't get much training either, but the trained military were all around us during the activities. Did the Gunny tell you what to do then wander off, or were you under supervision? Would Gunny follow you into your bedroom if you kept your gun in the bedroom closet for proper supervision?
Learn to love Alaska
Have you ever heard the phrase "low profile?" Because it's a pretty important concept for a criminal to understand, which means it's a very important concept for a person talking about criminals to understand. Carrying a weapon that will instantly be recognized as illegal is the opposite of a low profile. OTOH it's not that hard to disguise Cocaine as flour. All you have to do is find an empty flour box.
As for the Japanese, you do realize that a 1500 in a nation of 127 million is a rate of 0.0012%? Do you have any idea how much Mayor Bing would pay if he could reduce Detroit's gun-crime rate that low? Do you have any idea how much he'd pay to reduce the number of gun crimes to 1,500?
Hell your evidence reinforces my point. I'm arguing that if six-shooters were illegal they'd be used by criminals very rarely because the instant a cop saw you had a six-shooter he'd arrest you. You'd get no chance to claim a permit, or otherwise BS your way out of trouble, you'd just be arrested. The risk is not worth the extra trouble. In Japan long guns are the only legal guns, and 60% of gun crimes are committed with them.
My guess is that poor "undeducated" person just made a quick typo that a spell checker doesn't highlight unlike the "undeducated" person that made this post and couldn't even bother to check his spellchecker.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-10-31/news/os-home-invasion-suspect-dies-20121031_1_home-invasion-deputies-shot-several-times
You were referring to? The GP mentioned his grandmother killed someone. That story is obviously not related, unless the 35 year old Hispanic male is someone's grandma.
Learn to love Alaska
Yea sorry, that's what I get for reading the comments too quickly while at work; I hate when I do that.
I can just see this fantasy weapon issued to military and police... while the user is waiting for it to boot, recognize and authorized user, and ping the location for possible conflicts a baseball bat would be used to take them out...
There are reasons that even the fantasy legislation that's already been enacted in some states exempts police and military weapons...
I've wanted a cool smart weapon since reading The Weapon Shops of Isher... ESPECIALLY one that won't work for any government agent!!! But technology isn't there yet
I had a much snarkier reply, until I saw you wern't the GP, then I looked elsewhere and saw your references to home invasions in FL. Your reply wasn't as bad as I initially thought, just a bit off. I blame Slashdot's threading. Now, if only I could find the one about the home invasions in Anchorage that targeted gun owners to steal their guns. No successful defenses there, and the guns made them a target (and no, it wasn't from public information that they were targeted, like looking up CCW holders to steal their guns).
Learn to love Alaska
That first hour that I mentioned was not training to shoot. It was instruction in general safe handling and practices, it was universally applicable. These instructions were valid decades later. These instructions reappeared in some form in all subsequent firearms training that I had. Nearly every firearms accident I have heard of violated one or more of the instructions.
.22 bolt actions made available to us. No rounds in the magazine. Just manually loading one .22LR into the chamber at a time.
The second hour contained additional instructions, shooting related stuff. Body position, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger squeeze, etc. Thinking back some more, this second hour contained safety instructions as well. Not handling but procedures for misfires, partial discharges (bullet may not have cleared the barrel), piece of hot brass goes down your shirt, etc.
Only after these two hours of instruction did we actually have a chance to shoot the
While we were closely supervised on the Marine's range there was no need for us to take home anything other than the instructions.
Seriously, a four hour class in basic safety before someone can purchase their first gun would do a whole lot of good.
That first hour that I mentioned was not training to shoot.
Nobody needs training to shoot. My 2 year old knows how to work a gun (there are enough water and toy guns that the idea of point and shoot is easy to get, and almost nobody needs training to point something down range and pull a trigger). Getting good may take some training, but for new shooters, lessons on how to hit the middle of the target are generally lost on them until they've put at least a few rounds through it.
Thinking back some more, this second hour contained safety instructions as well. Not handling but procedures for misfires, partial discharges (bullet may not have cleared the barrel), piece of hot brass goes down your shirt, etc.
On a well supervised range, isn't the proper procedure to put the gun down, swiftly but without jarring, pointed downrange, step back, and raise your hand (while jumping up and down and yelling "ow" for the case of the brass)?
Seriously, a four hour class in basic safety before someone can purchase their first gun would do a whole lot of good.
Wouldn't that infringe on our right to keep and bear arms?
Learn to love Alaska
Do you have a reference for this, or have you just watched too many Tarintino movies?
Yeah, because the people who commit federal crimes by illegally modifying firearms to full auto and manufacturing silencers advertise on craigslist.
Because I am actually from the City of Detroit, and I have actually met criminals, who actually tried to steal from me (occasionally they were even successful), and I have never heard of anyone making a business of converting firearms to fire on full auto, or building silencers.
Yeah, because if you've never heard of something, that's proof positive that it doesn't exist.
How about a media report of an arrest of someone in possession of illegally converted machine guns and suppressors?
Like this...
Heck, off the top of my head I can't think of a time when a criminal did a full-auto conversion on his own, or used a silencer. I;m sure somebody's done it, probably a Mexican cartel, but it just is not common.
More often than not, they take their money to someone who knows what he's doing and get him to do the conversion and build the suppressors.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Seriously, a four hour class in basic safety before someone can purchase their first gun would do a whole lot of good.
Wouldn't that infringe on our right to keep and bear arms?
IMHO, no. It is difficult to imagine a person being unable to pass a safety class comparable to the various hunter safety classes that I have had. Is there someone out there, sure, but a statistically insignificant number. I'd wager most of such individuals have some mental issue that would bar them from firearms ownership. As for literacy, the test can be given orally.
Just to be clear I am referring to classroom general safety instruction. I am not referring to any sort of proficiency instruction and testing on the firing range. I don't care if people can hit what they are aiming at. I just want people to have been told at some point to keep the thing pointed in a safe direction and their finger off the trigger.
Consider the abortion debate and the fight over banning "partial birth" abortions - a type that at it's height was done about a dozen times a year, and never in cases where the mother's health wasn't at heightened risk from the pregnancy or the fetus wasn't viable.
They're not going to let you set much more of a tax than is already on firearms and ammo.
Still, let's examine effectiveness. Let's say we impose a $1/round tax. That's around a 20% price increase for premium hunting ammunition, which currently runs around $5/round. Plinking ammo is more like $.20-.60/round, so you're looking at 3-5x the price. Still, going by my readings of spree killings, despite having large amounts of ammo on them, most go through less than 100 rounds, and I don't remember an incident where they broke 200. Maybe they're optimists. Still, I'll break 200 in a day at the range easy. I've shot more than 500 in a day before.
Let's say the median number of rounds is 100, you're looking at a pre-tax price of $20-60. Post tax, it's $120-160, which for somebody going on a suicidal rampage is not what I'd consider a hefty price.
Let's look at it a different way: Spree killings are an extreme outlier compared to most murders. Let's think about regular criminals. Regular criminals generally use whatever gun they can get hold of, in whatever caliber. They actually tend to prefer smaller, easier to hide calibers. Whatever.
I remember reading that the median number of shots by a criminal, in a confrontation where they shoot, is 3. In most confrontations, the criminal doesn't fire. In their case, you're increasing the cost of him feeding his weapon from $20 to $40.
Also ineffective, yet sufficient to have a real chilling effect on the completely legal hobby of target shooting.
I don't read AC A human right
You're right, the technology needed to make this stuff isn't exactly cutting-edge. All the technology needed is easily pre-WWII, if not earlier; modern .45ACP ammo for instance goes back to the early 1900s.
However, you'd still need some tools that most Americans probably don't have, like some kind of hydraulic press. But you can get one of those at Harbor Freight these days (though I don't know if a 20-ton press is sufficient to make brass ammo from brass stock). A lot of older technology like that isn't helped much by hand tools; they used a lot of forgings and castings back in those days, and that's not actually that easy to do at home (it is for lead, because the melting point is so ridiculously low, but not for other metals). There's some websites showing how people built their own furnances and other things for doing investment casting at home, but again it's not something you can just go buy from Harbor Freight.
As for this guy in Afghanistan, where'd he get his raw materials? What parts did he start with? One thing I can think of that's absolutely necessary for making ammunition is primers, which are small high-explosive charges. Again, it's not super high-tech stuff; they've been making them since the 1800s. However, not many people have easy access to the chemicals needed to make reliable high-explosives, and then to actually make primers out of them safely, without blowing themselves up. Many of the other parts needed to make a firearm like an AK-47 again are pretty specialized, just as presses to stamp the sheet steel into the appropriate parts, or the special tool needed to cut rifled grooves in the barrel. The barrel itself is probably the most difficult part of that weapon to make.
A simple recipe isn't going to help you make firearms; you'll need a lot more equipment than that, plus access to various raw materials like steel, brass, wood, lead, aluminum maybe, and explosives.
According to the FBI, 300,000 people defended themselves with guns
Not According to the FBI, that's the National Crime Victimization Survey(NCVS) figure.
It's also a low end estimate - 1M is more the middle.
I don't read AC A human right
Why doesn't the NRA defend all the freedoms enshrined by the bill of rights?
Why doesn't the ACLU defend our firearm rights? At least the NRA is explicitly about firearms, though I chided* them recently about their attack on the 1st.
*To put it politely.
I don't read AC A human right
The paper says that approximately 90% of murderers have felony records
Indeed, not only that, but in reading that paper I found that it was implied that victims are often criminals as well.
Searching the internet, I found several sites that are estimating a 60-90% figure as well for the victim normally having a felony background as well.
Matter of fact, the biggest variation I saw was 80-60 - 80% of suspects had felony arrest/conviction background, and 60% of victims did. Most had them about even at 70-70. Combined with the low rate of 'stranger murder', If you aren't a criminal and don't associate with criminals, you should be fine.
I don't read AC A human right
There's been a huge debate over banning .50 caliber BMG rifles that are similar to military sniper rifles. Yet not once in the history of FBI statistics has one ever, and I do mean ever, been used in a gun related crime of any sort.
I agree with the general sentiment, but this is no longer true. It is still true that no .50 BMG rifle has been used to cause injury or death on a human, but remember the guy who turned his dozer into a tank? He used one to shoot at a number of propane tanks during his rampage - but caused no explosions or injuries from that.
Personally, I figure it's due to the targets. 70-80% of those murdered have criminal backgrounds. 70-80% of those who commit murder have criminal backgrounds. Most murder victims were at least acquainted with their killers. With handguns, if you're not a criminal and don't hang out with criminals, the odds that you'll be murdered, even with a cheap handgun, are very small. Spree killers with 'assault weapons' violate this standard, thus are of more concern to the 'average man'.
I don't read AC A human right
On a well supervised range, isn't the proper procedure to put the gun down, swiftly but without jarring, pointed downrange, step back, and raise your hand (while jumping up and down and yelling "ow" for the case of the brass)?
In a gun safety course, they'd be covering things like that you're supposed to do that, emphasizing that that's what you're supposed to do(minus the hand raising plus unloading) when a cease fire is called, etc...
My quick list(off the top of my head, no particular order)
1. Firearms are to be uncased at the firing line
2. Barrels are to point down range at all times
3. Cease fire immediately upon the call of 'cease fire'. Immediately unload the weapon and place, facing down range, with the magazine out and bolt/slide/action open and facing up(if possible).
4. Follow range master instructions
5. You only go past the firing line during a cease fire.
6. If you see somebody go past the firing line, yell 'cease fire' as loudly as possible.
Range safety should take no more than 15 minutes to teach. Firearm safety in general should take no more than 30. Hunter safety is a 4 hours class - and that includes things like how to use a tree stand without getting killed.
Seriously, a four hour class in basic safety before someone can purchase their first gun would do a whole lot of good.
I'd have the class in high school, along with driver's ed and such.
I don't read AC A human right
It's more complicated than that.
While 5.56 is typically loaded a touch hotter than .223, it's not guaranteed. 2nd, 99% 'civilian rifles' like the AR-15 are produced with some variant of the 'wyld chamber' that can take both calibers, and have chambers and barrels that are more than strong enough to take the hottest loads.
Even the oldest of .223 AR-15s are going to have more failures to feed/clogging; their safety margin is more than enough for the pressure increase.
Stuff produced in the last 10 years or so? Rated for both. The only exemption would probably be bolt actions* and such, rifles with actions not descended from military rifles, but even then they should have plenty of overhead.
In the end, for a specific rifle I'd consult the manufacturer.
*Even then bolt actions tend to have high amounts of safety overhead.
I don't read AC A human right
Dude, #4 bird short has little stopping power (it has kill power, but little stopping power),
I'll echo this: It takes more penetration to cause damage sufficient to stop a human in a short period of time than it does to penetrate 2 sheets of drywall. Ergo, any weapon/round sufficient to be a reliable self defense caliber is going to completely blow through 2 sheets of drywall, and anything below that is fairly likely to only piss off the one you shoot, at least in the short term.
Solutions: 1. AIM. 2. Use glaser or .223, the first holds together just long enough to penetrate deep enough when it hits a person; it'll go through 2 sheets of drywall, but be non-lethal a rooms distance past that. .223 destabilizes through drywall, again, it'll be dangerous the next room over, but after that it'll quickly be stopped.
I don't read AC A human right
Statistically speaking, you are more likely to be shot by someone else with your own gun than shoot someone else with it.
Citation? Cops are about the biggest group this happens to. The only study I remember that comes close was that 'gun at home' study would count things like the husband shooting his wife with their 'dual owned' weapon, criminals entering the home with their own weapon and shooting the occupants, illegal possession, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
You can also search the Internet for "gun suicide" and come up with stories. The problem is that for every one of these stories of people defending themselves with a household gun, there are 37 stories of people using a household gun to commit suicide
You're assuming there wouldn't be substitution. Japan, for example, manages to have a suicide rate nearly double our suicide + murder rate, all without guns.
And there's plenty of people who kill a 'family member or friend' with their bare hands or other weapons.
We'd be better off ending the war on drugs(treat addiction as a medical issue) and solving poverty.
I don't read AC A human right
Unfortunately nobody knows how realistic scenarios like that are, because the NRA lobbied Congress to cut money for firearms research.
I thought the reason for people having guns was to use them in defence of their liberties against a corrupt government?
Dunno. Why not ask him?
BTW - while the link I posted was from a pro-RKBA site, please notice that the article was reprinted by permission of Northwestern University School of Law, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 86, issue 1, 1995
And, as I noted in my original post:
"Statistics aside, I have the moral right and duty to protect myself from unwarranted aggression. This right was recognized in the middle ages as existing independently of any government, and was codified in the English Bill of rights, which was one source of inspiration for our own Second Amendment. That a gun helps me in that effort is indisputable."
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
There is no national clearinghouse for reporting the defensive use of a firearm in the USA, so the collected statistics are guaranteed to be only a small percentage of the number that actually occur. They also do not include the non-firing defensive use of a weapon, which is likely to dwarf the number of defensive firings.
This article is really really scary! I feel less smart having read it. We as a nation need a comprehensive firearm education program.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke