At 7/24/12 04:52 PM, Feoric wrote:

At 7/24/12 04:28 PM, TheMason wrote: So as grim as the math is...assault rifles are not ultra-lethal...but actually increase the odds of surviving.

Nitpick here, ...

I use the term 'assault rifle' here in it's common usage and I have pointed out previously (and alluded to it in my more recent posts) that what are called 'assault rifles' are in fact only clones of real assault rifles in that they are only available commercially (minus the license) in semi-auto.

The Bloombergs, Fiensteins and Schumers only have emotional arguments that do not reflect realworld realities. And therefore this is the time that their ranting gains any traction.

To be fair, the NRA is guilty of this as well, however on the opposite side of the playing field.

And that is a fair point; the NRA has become increasing more partisan and while I was once a member in my early twenties for about a year...I am not a member of the organization now.

However, the point that I am trying to make is that when one looks at ballistics, combat records and does more than descriptive statistical analysis of gun crime...this debate is unique in that one side is plainly wrong. The only thing people who want more gun control have going for them are emotional arguments.

* I have heard countless times from Bloomberg, Fienstein, Schumer, Sirus 127 Left talk show hosts and liberal editorials that we need to do away with high capacity magazines and 'assault rifles'. I have heard them also talk about how magazine capacity increases the lethality of weapons...as well as assault rifles being 'extra-lethal firearms'. When the reality shows that this is not the case. Furthermore, their claims are refuted by science when one looks at the ballistics.

* They also try to defend people's rights to own handguns, shotguns and hunting rifles. They try and act that these firearms are significantly safer for people to own because they (somehow) are not specifically designed to kill wheras assault rifles (and their clones) are. When in fact when you look at FMJ rounds and the Geneva Convention military arms are actually designed to be less powerful and less effective at tearing up a body than self-defense, shotgun shells and hunting cartridges.

* Finally, the guns they talk about protecting are the ones used in crime. Assault rifles are singled out as if they are a menace and an epidemic. When in reality they are used in less than 1% of crimes involving a firearm.

In the end, while yes there are organizations like the NRA and GOA who use emotional arguments to manipulate their base...at least they have the facts on their side. The pro-gun control side only has emotional arguments based upon ignorance and falsehoods.

I know I'm coming across as pretty 'extreme' here. But I've crunched the numbers and studied this issue exhuastively as well as being a shooter and military member. And I see nothing but a lack of information and disinformation coming from the other side of this topic. At this point this is the only political issue I see as there being a definitive right and wrong side.

At 7/24/12 05:30 PM, TheMason wrote: I use the term 'assault rifle' here in it's common usage and I have pointed out previously (and alluded to it in my more recent posts) that what are called 'assault rifles' are in fact only clones of real assault rifles in that they are only available commercially (minus the license) in semi-auto.

Yes, I know. I wasn't implying you didn't know what an assault rifle are, rather I was pointing out to everyone reading the thread that the two terms are not interchangeable. The takeaway from that part of my post is that assault rifles are really really rare among casual gun owning citizens and have technical specifications that make them what they are, and "assault weapon" is a bullshit term with no technical significance created in Washington.

* I have heard countless times from Bloomberg, Fienstein, Schumer, Sirus 127 Left talk show hosts and liberal editorials that we need to do away with high capacity magazines and 'assault rifles'. I have heard them also talk about how magazine capacity increases the lethality of weapons...as well as assault rifles being 'extra-lethal firearms'. When the reality shows that this is not the case. Furthermore, their claims are refuted by science when one looks at the ballistics.

I never listened to the Sirius talk show programs (only glenn beck's show one day ironically; left or right, those channels all boil down to "rah rah my side is right!" and I don't care for the,) but I don't doubt that's what being parroted there. Let's say there was a gun control measured passed that banned solely high capacity magazines: all you're going to accomplish by advocating for it is to make a few million Republicans hyperventilate as they sprint to the voting booth, which is going to risk setting back all sorts of other, frankly more important progressive legislation. There's just no political room on the gun issue. The people who care about this kind of stuff care way more than you'd think would be rational, and there are way more of them than you'd think, and they vote single issue, and the cost of encouraging them to vote is going to be untold harm to things like Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and other basic social safety net services that save tens of thousands of lives every year. And at what cost? How many lives have you effectively saved? Practically none, all you've done is make Democrats look like commie gun grabbers and Republicans as the defenders of a civil right. As a progressive, that's how I think of it, and it's kind of funny to have a left wing talk show host not come out and acknowledge that, but then again, they're talk show hosts.

In the end, while yes there are organizations like the NRA and GOA who use emotional arguments to manipulate their base...at least they have the facts on their side.

That's not good enough, though. They're doing nothing other than pushing right wing agendas and mobilizing single issue voters without actually addressing the real issues and making no effort to framethe narrative correctly. To be bipartisan, no side is, as far as I can see. We've had three major spree shootings relatively recently. Virginia Tech, Tuscon, and Aurora. In all of these cases, there's something these people had in common, and it stands out, and it might even something we can do something about. Of these three cases, all of the shooters were in college at the time and flipped the fuck out. By definition, spree killing is an insane act; not in the sense of 'insanity defense', but by the standards of everyday society, these are not sane individuals.

This gives us something we can look at and try to fix College is a stressful time. If we improved mental health treatment in colleges, maybe we could cut down on people going insane and gunning people down. Now, maybe it won't work in all cases. Sometimes it happens before college, like Columbine. Sometimes they just don't show any issues. There's always going to be one or two that slip through. But look at Holmes: he knew how to make bombs. He spent three to four months setting this up, and he was determined as hell to kill people. Even IF assault rifles were explicitly banned, he would have had 20 pistols strapped to his chest like they did during the Revolutionary War. Draw, fire, and discard. The best way of making sure it doesn't happen again is to remove that urge to kill people, not the tools he used to kill people with.

And this is why the NRA isn't going to go out and say this: they're ostensibly a pro-Republican organization and will never ever ever come out and officially speak on behalf on more taxpayer funded programs like mental health care or health care in general. Why Obama isn't framing this as a health care issue is beyond me. We're not going to get rid of guns. So let's change our relationship with them. Advocating gun control isn't going to achieve anything. If you really want to address the problem of mass shootings, lobby for increased mental health care funding.

At 7/24/12 09:07 PM, RacistBassist wrote: Good luck taking your time to place your shots in a shootout. This isn't Call of Duty. It's either you get the drop, you start firing, or you take cover. Yeah, people who blind fire are harder to kill, but they also never hit jack shit, unless they're in a crowded area, in which case, why the fuck wouldn't they just do some good old fashioned homebrewed explosive?

Because it's a lot easier to buy a gun and lots of ammo than to make an HME, let alone an HME of adequate quality and quantity to do massive amounts of damage.

At 7/24/12 09:20 PM, Feoric wrote: Because it's a lot easier to buy a gun and lots of ammo than to make an HME, let alone an HME of adequate quality and quantity to do massive amounts of damage.

It's called diesel + fertilizer = HME. It's not all that hard.

Furthermore, it appears that this dude was planning a two-pronged attack. His apartment was wired for sound and was set to bring his apartment building down. So he was planning both a shooting spree and a HME (and possibly Chemical) attack.

At 7/24/12 06:44 PM, Feoric wrote:

In the end, while yes there are organizations like the NRA and GOA who use emotional arguments to manipulate their base...at least they have the facts on their side.

The NRA.

I'm not trying to defend the NRA. What I'm saying is that one side has no facts just emotion to base their arguments upon. The other side has physics and social science (poli sci & criminology) data that supports their arguments. And the NRA just happens to be on the right (no pun intended) side of the issue.

Now the NRA and what it is and what it does is a totally different topic...and would be a straw-man to what I am putting forth.

As for increased mental health...I'm not convinced it's that easy either. If you look at most modern shooters they are receiving mental health care to include medication. For the rest of gun crime, the root causes seem to be either cultural or economic rather than health related.

At 7/24/12 10:04 PM, TheMason wrote:

At 7/24/12 09:20 PM, Feoric wrote: Because it's a lot easier to buy a gun and lots of ammo than to make an HME, let alone an HME of adequate quality and quantity to do massive amounts of damage.

It's called diesel + fertilizer = HME. It's not all that hard.

Furthermore, it appears that this dude was planning a two-pronged attack. His apartment was wired for sound and was set to bring his apartment building down. So he was planning both a shooting spree and a HME (and possibly Chemical) attack.

The government is incredibly interested in people who are purchasing precursors for explosive material, as the laws to track that aren't nearly as weak as the ones to track firearms purchasers. I'd posit that the fact that we've had a couple of terrorist attacks carried out through explosives and several more failed ones in the past twenty years might account for that discrepancy. Also, I don't think there's a bomb-makers advocacy group like there is for gun owners that spends millions a year in legal graft on lawmakers, that could also be why it's harder to build a fertilizer bomb than it is to buy a few guns and crates of ammo and unload on a movie theater/school/guy down the block. Bomb making takes time, a decent amount of knowledge, and willingness to risk a hand, also there are tons of ways to get flagged in the process of building a bomb. We don't have mad bombers (Timothy McVeigh is the obvious exception to the rule) because it's actually hard as fuck to make enough explosives to do your job without winding up at the very least on a few lists, and there's the whole 'you could blow yourself up' factor guns don't have.

I'm not trying to defend the NRA. What I'm saying is that one side has no facts just emotion to base their arguments upon. The other side has physics and social science (poli sci & criminology) data that supports their arguments. And the NRA just happens to be on the right (no pun intended) side of the issue.

Look, I'm not trying to lump you in with the NRA-type crowd, I think your arguments so far are very reasonable and devoid of the prevalent sensationalism. However, when it comes to that kind of evidence I see it used very very little. When it comes to that kind of evidence it's used in specific cases (assault rifles vs handguns) but this is not the main talking point of the nation-wide discussion at all. There's plenty of evidence pro-gun control activists bring up, for example, this international study concludes gun ownership positively correlated with homicide and suicide rates, another study that shows gun ownership is positively correlated with homicide rate, and this report that shows the more lax a state's gun laws are, the more gun crime occurs in that state. So while you definitely have a lot of emotional people who are in favor of gun control who are just as guilty as the emotional people against it, to say there's no evidence supporting gun control is an objectively false statement to make, as much so as saying there is no evidence that supports the position of people against gun control.

As for increased mental health...I'm not convinced it's that easy either. If you look at most modern shooters they are receiving mental health care to include medication. For the rest of gun crime, the root causes seem to be either cultural or economic rather than health related.

It's totally not either/or, it needs to be both. It needs to be a combination of a larger social safety net to improve economic mobility and more funding for mental health care. I've looked at a lot of studies on this issue recently and the data seems to indicate that the best way to reduce violent crime is to have a two pronged approach of reducing the social causes of crime as well as removing the chief murder weapons from public availability. It's not an either/or situation, countries are very able to do both. Here's the thing though, the latter part of that is extremely difficult to do in the United States and it's a pipe dream for progressives. It's pure political suicide to touch gun control because gun culture in this country is very much a part of American identity. So, what do we do? Taking away all the guns, even after a constitutional amendment, is such a massive undertaking that it's not that much less in the realm of fantasy than Red Dawn III: Armed Rebellion against the US Government. There's literally hundreds of millions of guns out there. You might be able to work out some sort of massive, hundred year phasing out, but even that's going to be near impossible to enforce unless you created an enormously intrusive policing system to run all of that. At that point, you run the risk of actually turning into something from a right-wing survivalist's paranoid delusions. So, in the case of the United States, the national discourse concerning this topic needs to be about health care and economics, because our overall attitude towards guns in this country is creating a culture of sensationalism on both sides of the aisle and severe gridlock.

I saw an episode of Penn and Teller's "Bullshit" and they said that you actually shouldn't have gun control and there was this one woman who preached that people should have guns and she was the daughter of two people who were killed by a gunman. Suddenly, everyone seems to be in favor of people not being allowed to have guns. So, I'm just going to give my two cents and what I think should happen. I think we should be allowed to have guns, just have background checks on everyone who gets them.

lolz

No matter how much gun control laws you make, people will still get guns. You make strict laws to make it very very difficult to get guns legally, the market of illegal guns will increase.

If you have very low gun control more people will have guns. People who want to shoot people will have guns, yes. But the people who they want to shoot will also have guns.

So lets say some nut job walks in a park and starts shooting, someone else who is visiting the part also has a gun and shoot him. Loss of life is minimal.

Same situation, but where gun control is strict. Guy walks into a park and starts shooting, only thing people can do is run because no one has a gun with them.

First scenario the gunman got his gun legally.
Second scenario the gunman got his gun illegally.
The only difference is the people in the park.

Gun control only hurts law abiding citizens. People who want to kill will obtain guns anyway regardless. And if they can't get guns they will use something else to kill people with.

Either way, bad people will still acquire guns. Gun laws don't mean shit when bad people don't obey the laws.

At 7/26/12 09:03 AM, HogWashSoup wrote: No matter how much gun control laws you make, people will still get guns. You make strict laws to make it very very difficult to get guns legally, the market of illegal guns will increase.

Yeah but literally almost no one does that in countries where theyre banned. Dont know about if a country where they were legal went illegal though.

If you have very low gun control more people will have guns. People who want to shoot people will have guns, yes. But the people who they want to shoot will also have guns.

That just means someone will almost definitely end up dead though

So lets say some nut job walks in a park and starts shooting, someone else who is visiting the part also has a gun and shoot him. Loss of life is minimal.

That almost never happens and people dont actually do that even if they have guns usually

Same situation, but where gun control is strict. Guy walks into a park and starts shooting, only thing people can do is run because no one has a gun with them.

wouldnt happen in the first place

First scenario the gunman got his gun legally.
Second scenario the gunman got his gun illegally.
The only difference is the people in the park.

Its a stupid scenario

Gun control only hurts law abiding citizens.

If a country has a history of gun enthusiasm like the USA then yeah I mostly agree

People who want to kill will obtain guns anyway regardless.

nah they wont

And if they can't get guns they will use something else to kill people with.

Makes it almost impossible though unless you have serious connections and wont give people as much confidence

Either way, bad people will still acquire guns. Gun laws don't mean shit when bad people don't obey the laws.

Only people with serious connections will get one, which is almost no one. Almost everyone wont be able to. I still dont agree with a ban though since most people who get them just want to feel safe or are enthusiasts. It should be harder to get some of the more serious weapons and stuff like that.

At 7/26/12 09:15 AM, BumFodder wrote: Only people with serious connections will get one, which is almost no one. Almost everyone wont be able to. I still dont agree with a ban though since most people who get them just want to feel safe or are enthusiasts. It should be harder to get some of the more serious weapons and stuff like that.

You people think that by making strict gun laws that suddenly there will be no more violence and no more killing. That isn't true. Take away guns and people will still kill others. No guns means people will use knives or what ever they can get their hands on.

But you feel that with more laws against guns and crime that crime will stop. As if.

At 7/26/12 09:15 AM, BumFodder wrote: Only people with serious connections will get one, which is almost no one. Almost everyone wont be able to. I still dont agree with a ban though since most people who get them just want to feel safe or are enthusiasts. It should be harder to get some of the more serious weapons and stuff like that.

Gun Show go to a private seller No questions ask except cash up front. even if you did make more restriction people would still get their hands on them. restrictions or even a ban wouldn't stop people. Look at the UK or Mexico they have strict gun laws and a high crime capita.

At 7/26/12 09:15 AM, BumFodder wrote: Yeah but literally almost no one does that in countries where theyre banned. Dont know about if a country where they were legal went illegal though.

Probably the closest example of this would be Australia's revision of their gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre. There was a willingness within the Australian public to comply with the new gun laws you're basically never going to see in the United States.

That just means someone will almost definitely end up dead though

Not only that, the whole 'mythical vigilante with a gun' scenario amuses me. If someone is opening fire on you, you're somehow going to have nerves of steel and pinpoint accuracy and only hit the attacker, not anybody else on accident.

At 7/26/12 09:29 AM, HogWashSoup wrote: You people think that by making strict gun laws that suddenly there will be no more violence and no more killing. That isn't true. Take away guns and people will still kill others. No guns means people will use knives or what ever they can get their hands on.

But you feel that with more laws against guns and crime that crime will stop. As if.

You didnt even read my post at all, so why bother replying? Thats exactly what I typed wouldnt happen. Dont try to act as if my whole post is one comment.

At 7/25/12 04:59 AM, Feoric wrote:

Two years ago I cross-trained into the Air Force's AFSC comparable to the Army's Chemical Soldier MOS. Since that time I have had extensive training on Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear explosives (CBRNe) to include their manufacture. I am sorry to say that your appraisal of the situation in regards to difficulty of making and/or acquiring precursors is way too sunny.

As for the studies you mentioned:

They don't prove what you think they do. All a correlation is is an observation in relationship to the scientific method when we're talking about the social sciences. Many PhDs used their graduate assistants (aka "slave labor") to mine for correlations in data sets. That's how we get correlations like when ice cream sales go up so does the murder rate. (True story.) This is statistical analysis at the descriptive level, ie: saying that when x is present y is (or is not) present.

What is missing is a causal link that shows how the two variables are related. In the ice cream example cited above the reason there is a positive correlation between ice cream sales and murders is both are increased during hot weather. Thus the relationship is not causal (ie: x causes y to exist or not exist) but spurious.

Neither of the studies you linked describe a causal relationship between how permissive a country's gun laws are and gun crime.

Furthermore, they do not offer any rival alternative hypothesis to test against their hypothesis that permissive gun laws cause increased homicide rates. Furthermore they use suicide rates as a proxy for gun proliferation, which I find promblematic because you still have problems with sample bias because you are looking a very specific sub-group of a society, especially when you consider that psychology tells us that availability of a firearm will have an insignificantly appreciable effect on someone's decision to kill themselves.

So while those studies actually tell us nothing new...they are significantly flawed from methodological perspective.

As for the 'study' in the Washington Post you linked to...I read the article and it's the same ideological stuff Bloomberg totes everytime he dips his shirt in the blood of a shooting victim. It is not an academic study but a 'report' churned out to support a politician's agenda.

At 7/26/12 09:15 AM, BumFodder wrote:

At 7/26/12 09:03 AM, HogWashSoup wrote: No matter how much gun control laws you make, people will still get guns. You make strict laws to make it very very difficult to get guns legally, the market of illegal guns will increase.

Yeah but literally almost no one does that in countries where theyre banned. Dont know about if a country where they were legal went illegal though.

Sorry, but HogWash is right here Bum. If you look at Canada there are still mass shootings. In fact about a week or so before Colorado there was one in Toronto. Unfortunately one of the survivors was killed in Colorado.

If you have very low gun control more people will have guns. People who want to shoot people will have guns, yes. But the people who they want to shoot will also have guns.

That just means someone will almost definitely end up dead though

Again, reality is on HogWash's side here.

* States with concealed carry tend to have lower violent crime rates.
* The vast majority of defensive gun uses only involve the intended victim brandishing their firearm and the criminal leaves.
* A civilian pulling their gun results in about half the injuries that occurs when a cop pulls their's.

So lets say some nut job walks in a park and starts shooting, someone else who is visiting the part also has a gun and shoot him. Loss of life is minimal.

That almost never happens and people dont actually do that even if they have guns usually

Again the historical record proves you wrong. In the University of Texas mass shooting of 1966 the armed civilian response is credited with saving lives.

Furthermore, criminial psychologists have found that spree-shooters do tend to avoid areas where people can carry and focus on so-called "gun-free" zones.

First scenario the gunman got his gun legally.
Second scenario the gunman got his gun illegally.
The only difference is the people in the park.

Its a stupid scenario

Again...no it's not and claiming irrelevance doesn't make it so. We do have incidents where it has helped.

People who want to kill will obtain guns anyway regardless.

nah they wont

Again, this is all a thought experiment to you. The facts paint a different picture.

Either way, bad people will still acquire guns. Gun laws don't mean shit when bad people don't obey the laws.

Only people with serious connections will get one, which is almost no one. Almost everyone wont be able to. I still dont agree with a ban though since most people who get them just want to feel safe or are enthusiasts. It should be harder to get some of the more serious weapons and stuff like that.

Please define 'more serious weapons'.

As for requiring 'serious connections' we've seen it the world over. Criminals can still get guns. They can get them in England. They had them under the USSR. They have them in China.

As for the terrorists who just want to cause mayhem...they'll just turn to things like Homemade Explosives (HME) and Toxic Industrial Chemicals (TICs) which will be far worse.

I just love sitting back watching TheMason make you guys look like the illiterate pseudo-intellectuals you guys are. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, or watching Mike Tyson beat the living shit out of, well... anyone.

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see what you guys think is wrong with the law, specifically. I'd just like to see what you think is deficient about it and what actually needs to be improved, just to see what you actually know or don't know about it. You guys clearly don't know your ass from a hole in ground when it comes to guns, so I'm curious to see what you don't actually know about the law.

Keep in mind, though, that at no point were any of the shooters involved in these crimes ever adjudicated mentally incompetent before the commission of their crimes, so at no point would the law have been able to step in and prevent them from purchasing a gun. Also, the vast majority of the weapons they used were not targets for anti-gun legislation.

Every anti-gun nut here has to shut the fuck up. Good God pick up a history text book and read.

-Prohibition, we banned alcohol, and that stopped everyone from drinking, right?
-It is illegal to cross the border of the United States without going through the proper and legal system, this has worked out fabulously too.
-Today, several narcotics are illegal as well, including weed, yet some how I was able to hold enough in my life time to warren an arrest for "intention to sell."

What is so difficult to understand here, the people committing the crimes are CRIMINALS, they don't give a flying fuck about the Law. Which is why most of the guns used in these crimes are illegal in the first place.

And stop comparing the U.K., again it's been said they lack the amount of minorities as us, and on top of this, there are hardly any gangs in the U.K. and your so called "cracked down on guns" has really stopped the I.R.A. in N. Ireland right?

All such laws would do is take away guns from Law-abiding citizens.

Gun laws won't do anything to stop gun crimes. Criminals do not obey laws.

At 7/31/12 01:26 AM, DoctorStrongbad wrote: Gun laws won't do anything to stop gun crimes. Criminals do not obey laws.

That's why states and countries with higher/better gun control has less gun related crimes....right?

At 7/31/12 01:26 AM, DoctorStrongbad wrote: Gun laws won't do anything to stop gun crimes. Criminals do not obey laws.

Tell Trayvon Martin that.

I don't know why we keep bringing this up. This his already been decided in the secant amendment. People have a right to bare arms. We are never going to get rid of guns so stop trying to and focus on other issues like fixing the economy.

At 7/31/12 02:47 PM, Jmayer20 wrote: I don't know why we keep bringing this up. This his already been decided in the secant amendment. People have a right to bare arms. We are never going to get rid of guns so stop trying to and focus on other issues like fixing the economy.

We keep bringing this up because people keep shooting others with legally obtained firearms.

At 7/31/12 11:04 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 7/31/12 01:26 AM, DoctorStrongbad wrote: Gun laws won't do anything to stop gun crimes. Criminals do not obey laws.

Tell Trayvon Martin that.

Too early to tell. I'll be watching the trial to evaluate the evidence for myself, since the whole incident has been blown-up politically...I don't know what to believe yet. It may prove that my initial assessment was right: Zimmerman acted brashly and didn't disengage when he should have. Or the evidence may point to he acted appropriately.

At 7/31/12 01:43 AM, CaveStoryGrounds wrote:

At 7/31/12 01:26 AM, DoctorStrongbad wrote: Gun laws won't do anything to stop gun crimes. Criminals do not obey laws.

That's why states and countries with higher/better gun control has less gun related crimes....right?

Not true at all and this gets back to my argument that you cannot look at mere correlation as proof of this hypothesis.

If you look at a country like England before they instituted high levels of gun control you'll see that they had a much lower violent crime rate than the US already.

On the other hand you have countries like Mexico where in 2004 they had a total murder rate of 13.04 per every 100K (5yr average is 14.23) 2.58 of these were with a firearm (5yr avg 3.55) in the US the total rate was 5.62 and firearm was 3.12. Thus Mexico with more stringent gun control than the US had a higher non-firearm related murder rate than the US' total murder rate.

Finally you have countries like Switzerland and Israel that have less stringent gun control...and they have exceedingly low murder rates.

In the end what it is is the US has things about it that makes it more prone to violence than say Israel or England...that are NOT related to our gun laws. If you reveiw the social science literature you'll find that things like
economic factors, education levels and ethnic-linguistic diversity have far more causal links than gun control.

So I'm sorry...but the premise of your bumper-sticker argument is not factual.

america is a country built on murder, virtually anyone in america is allowed a gun because of the thought of having to fend off invasions and not having enough troops. but in the end, guns need to go away.

At 8/1/12 05:22 AM, Aquilar wrote: america is a country built on murder, virtually anyone in america is allowed a gun because of the thought of having to fend off invasions and not having enough troops. but in the end, guns need to go away.

*sigh* Yet another brilliant and insightful statement from a voice of a generation unencumbered by awareness of their own vapid ignorance.

I didn't read the whole thread here. But i want to put my two cents on the topic.

Personally i think its not a matter of making guns illegal or legal. It's a matter of how you sell and who you sell to. There should be age restrictions and tests people have to qualify for that deem you as being qualified to own a gun. Kinda like the DMV and driver's license. Except you should have regular psyche evaulations and other things to guarentee you know how to handle a gun properly when you get one.

Now that wont limit and do everything needed to help stop violence with guns. Because in reality a gun is meerly just a tool of power. When people have access to power they act rashly and boldly. Not only is it a tool of power, but it is an easy tool to implement that anyone of any age can utilize (if they know how they are doing it or not). This is where things get complicated.

By having such a tool, and such easy access, you give more people more power. But that isn't always a good quality for society because that will has more people trying to overtake other's. It's survival of the fittest after all everyone will want more from life and constantly look for more power. (not everyone though). So basically the question is how do you keep an eye on these things and monitor it.

Well you can develop gun awareness systems where you put people at early ages into these programs and try to direct their psychological learning patterns of right and wrong early. Have them exposed to guns but not necessarily give them a gun. Program's like Driver's Ed, but for guns. (i am going to use driving as a reference here).

This won't stop the modern day gun users and criminals from their behaviors, but it will improve the next generations to come. Now for the modern day people who are exposed to a drastic change with guns. We have the issue of this. Take away guns from the general public, that restricts it to the criminals who will buy it from the black market. You may stop some criminals from access, but those who want it will get it. That leaves all the individuals with less power subjective to the ones with guns (more power).

To end.

Gun control is iffy, i think the government needs to spend money on gun awareness and stricter the laws but not necessarily ban guns from the public. But instead, teach people how they should use them, the reasons they should be used, good and bad ways to keep guns and even provide with a reliable source of stats and information to strengthen the reasons why someone should use the guns based of psychological sciences and other various factors.

At 8/1/12 05:24 PM, PMMurphy wrote: Gun control is iffy, i think the government needs to spend money on gun awareness and stricter the laws but not necessarily ban guns from the public. But instead, teach people how they should use them, the reasons they should be used, good and bad ways to keep guns and even provide with a reliable source of stats and information to strengthen the reasons why someone should use the guns based of psychological sciences and other various factors.

Two questions sir:

1) In what ways does the government need to make the laws more strict?

2) What training/awareness programs would you see implemented...that are not already in existance?

At 8/1/12 06:12 PM, TheMason wrote:

At 8/1/12 05:24 PM, PMMurphy wrote: Gun control is iffy, i think the government needs to spend money on gun awareness and stricter the laws but not necessarily ban guns from the public. But instead, teach people how they should use them, the reasons they should be used, good and bad ways to keep guns and even provide with a reliable source of stats and information to strengthen the reasons why someone should use the guns based of psychological sciences and other various factors.

Two questions sir:

1) In what ways does the government need to make the laws more strict?

2) What training/awareness programs would you see implemented...that are not already in existance?

Programs like D.A.R.E where they go to school by school and talk about guns. Growing up i never was told anything about guns from anyone. I learned everything on my own. Or more indepth programs that kids at young ages (middle school) HAVE to attend and go to.

As for making laws more strict. I am not qualified to answer that question as i am not an expert on the subject. I would have to study it and come up with an appropriate answer. All i know is, whatever they are doing is simply not working. If we cant develop a proper system around technology to help people use it properly, then what is the point in furthering technology.