http://www.theonion.com/articles/gorilla-sales-skyrocket-after-latest-gorilla-at...

BPaulsen wrote on 12/23/12 at 01:00:18:


There is no illogic in the attempt to forbid weapons at least teh semi automatic ones.
I would have liked it if BPaulsen would have adressed to one or two oft the questions I had here earlier on.
His way of life seems to go like "Help yourself as no one will help you" as back then in the pioneer days. And that indeed needs guns.

But one or two of my questions also deal with the hope for selfprotection under the fact that everyone is allowed to own a gun.

Under this circumstance imagine a situation unclear. May be someone stepping on your lawn or someone simply being aggressive in the pub or bar. Let there be some aggression only in the words, not more. And some acting, like hands to the pockets or so. What does the guy over there want? How to react? 

And now throw some guns in it - only virtually, only as a possiblity which in the US comes close to normality.
And now you, having yourself a gun at hand can really grip with your hands the nervous stress excerted on you. 

In the end you may shot someone just for the reason he might have drawn a gun out of his pocket - eh, you couldn't be sure. Or you yourself might be shot by the guy as you didn't expect him to have a gun.

You see: The crazy spice in this soup of life are the guns. They are available for a sudden death. So you allways have to be allerted. And if it comes to the point, statistically the normal citizen will nevertheless the slightest be able to cope with the situation as he has adapted his aggression to normal social proportions and not to a every day shoot out at the OK corral. What a pure horror.

From a musical genius who was shot coming out of his home in New York by a lunatic with a gun. Guns do kill people. Being Christmas day I somehow remembered this song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Vfp48laS8

Yes, Mr. Cox, America has violence problems. But so do many countries. Even China , as evidenced by a recent event. The problem is this country greases the wheels of violence to the point that crazy people don't have to reload very much, or that someone like Jared Lee Loughner can shoot multiple people and fire off 31 bullets in less than 30 seconds. Why do people need access to weapons that should rightly be in the hands of the military? 

The reasons we are given for this are merely constructs built from the rich fantasy life of gun fetishists. They are supposedly defending our freedom. However, Waco, Ruby and Rainbow Ranches prove that if the Feds want it, or the Army wants to get in your house - Newsflash! - they will. 

BPaulsen told me in another thread that I ought not to be concerned about the Constitution (the basis of our laws) because, essentially, no one follows it. Yet, despite the fact that people like Ted Nugent are free to own weapons and go watermelon hunting, and shoot at beer cans....we have the Patriot Act, NDAA, Homeland Security, the 4th Amendment trashed and the Fifth going in that direction. Yet Mr. Paulsen clings to the belief that Americans' ability to shoot one another keeps us "free."

In reality, the gun fetishists just bought into the gun industry's superior marketing. And because of this marketing, people and, yes, children, get shot with some regularity. 

So, I don't want to ban guns in general, but I do agree with Markovich. It is right and proper for the gov't to regulate weapons, regulate militias, certainly to limit the power and lethality of weapons for the sake of a well-ordered society.

I've done some googling since the Newtown tragedy. I used to think of restricting gun sales as the obvious way to reduce violent crimes, murders, suicides and accidents in America, but now I'm not so sure.

I tried to look at relatively unbiased sources (not the most frequent ones in this debate), and found some interesting conclusions:

- While absolute levels of gun violence are much lower in other industrialized countries (in Europe, for example), it's actually more relevant to look at changes in the same country or state when laws get stricter or more lenient. And here the results in both U.S. states and the U.K apparantly don't show an undisputed effect of gun laws on levels of gun violence, neither positive nor negative. 

The world is complex; the U.S. might be so full of guns and far from an ideal state of few privately owned guns today that any restriction policy now would have an effect only in the very long term, and maybe even a negative effect in the short term (the familiar "only the criminals will keep their guns" argument).

- More than half of all gun-related deaths are suicides. This is still tragic and worth preventing if possible, but not what's on most people's minds these days. While having a gun seems to increase the chance of suicide, most or all of that effect can be explained by people killing themselves within the first year of acquiring a gun, i.e. the gun was arguably bought with suicide in mind.

- Most gun murderers are known criminals with several convictions, often on parole (think stereotypical gang violence in cities). So a huge effect might be had by spending more resources on controlling these high-risk individuals. And also by identifying the "straw purchasers" (often with clean criminal records) who buy lots of guns legally and resell them to criminals.

- Most guns used in crime are "diversions" from the legal market (via "straw purchasers" or sales withoth background checks); not from burglaries or illegal foreign imports. So regulating the legal market should at least make it harder for criminals to acquire guns in the long term.

- School shootings and mass shootings seem hard to predict or prevent since they are rare and idiosyncratic; and strictly speaking involve far fewer deaths overall than "regular" homicides and suicides with guns.

Sources:
National Academy of Sciences (2004): Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881
(pdf available after free registration)
Pdf summary of the above report: http://www.nap.edu/nap-cgi/report.cgi?record_id=10881&type=pdfxsum


Greenberg, Mark and Litman, Harry, Rethinking Gun Violence (January 4, 2010). UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 10-02. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1531371

Still, both mandatory background checks and better access to mental healthcare also look like obvious policies to try and reduce mass shootings to me, if that's the goal.

I missed the part where MNb wants guns ...

Come on, KISS! Keep it straigt and simple. There is some philosophical tussle here that tends to be over-sophisticated and moralin-sour.
Put some chessy logic in it. And then answer a series of simple questions as I tried:

Where you count more murders and killings, in the US or in Europe?
US

When was the right to own guns implemented in the US History?
At times where the US were an evolving country with ever shifting borders and unclear situations out there and weak authorities - when it was a time of mere survival of the fittest.

What are guns good for?
To defend against brutal aggressors.

Are the overall threats in US today as severe as they were then?
Surely no.

Are the autorities in the US today as weak as they were then?
Surely no. 

Does some of the threats arise directly from the right to own a gun?
Clearly yes. 

Is it allways easy to detect brutal aggressors?
Surely no.

May an owner of a gun fail to jugde a very situation rightly?
Oh yes. See Mr. Zimmermann. As there is the right to own a gun, you allways have to calculate with the fact, that the guy over there too has a gun in his pocket.
So the level of alert rises to unhealthy proportions - and leads to misjudgements. As Mr. Zimmermann seemingly wanted to see a threat and if it were only a guy dressed with a hoody.

Apart of this concrete situations: Is the easy availability of a gun in normal households problematic?
Absolutely. The gun itself bears a latent but lasting danger as is shown in Newtown. This guy there converted his problems into the death of some 26 innocent people.
A gun may be bought stricktly under defensive aspects by his owner (here the mother of the guy) but nevertheless it may all too sudden be used as a killing-mashine (as the guy did). 

Will the NRA-approach to guard every school with at least one gun-man solve the problem?
No, surely not. What a silly approach by this die-hard ignorants.
The psycho who wants to go in for the kill will know who is the guard. So he will simply kill him first. And then he will go on with the kill. This in turn will alert the guards to have a closer look at suspect guys.

May a guard fail to jugde a very situation rightly? 
Absolutely. Quite a few young guys like e.g. Marilyn Manson or gothic music or so and dress alike with long black coats for example. Looks threatening somehow and you can’t be sure that there isn’t a gun under the coat. And a boy who was normal up to now may tomorrow be over the top and a latent killer. The failure to judge a situation rightly will be an integral part of the decission making.
Just wait for the first boy to be shot innocently...

Will it make the US society more dangerous if at least semiautomatic weapons will be forbidden?
No. These are weapons for wars. And if someone instists on owning them on grounds of the fear that there may be a civil war in the future, then we have someone who is quite suspect to psychic lability. Who knows when this guy will go over the top and will feel threatened by quite normal circumstances?!

Will it make the US society more dangerous if guns at all will be forbidden?
No. Take a look at Europe.
We have to seperate three groups: The first are victims who are shot under real criminal circumstances. The second collects those shot by  misinterpretation of the situation, see Mr. Zimmermann. And the third ist for those who are killed in a conflict where the availability of a gun lead to a mere over reaction by one of the participants. If there is no gun the over reactor may hit em, if there is a gun he may shoot em.
Victims of the first group should be avoided. But if one thing is clear then it is that you can't live in total security. As sad as this fact may be. But it can't by no means be that society accepts the existance of the groups 2 and 3 as a permanent collateral damage on society just to make individual situations - not - more secure.
The right to own a gun does not give anyone more security simply because any other guy too has the right to own a gun - even the bad guys. And the bad thing is that the bad guys are simply ahead, as they know when they turn to be criminal while you as a normal citizen aren't aware. So the gun is statistically seen surely no assurance. 

Does the individual right to protect yourself with a gun stand higher than the right of the society to cut down the overall damage done with weapons?
A political to philosophical question.
From the individual point of view it is preferable to survive any kind of threat (and the individuum may hope to never misjudge a situation).
From the point of view of the society the question fills a wider frame. The society should ask for the collateral damage resulting from the availability of guns. In the Newtown-case the mother will have bought the weapons for defensive aspects. But ironically that very security lead her to death and has cost the lives of many kids and adults. The hope for security with weapons has turned into a massacre.
As in any society the common interests stand higher than the individual the consequence seems clear. Overall security stands higher than indiviual. All the more since the individual aspects vary from person to person. Where the one feels secure the other will yet sling the gun.  

Will it be easy to make the US a weapon-free country?
No, sadly. Perhaps it will never work at all to the country clean.
 

The only persons who should be allowed to use guns are the military and special branches of the police force. If Adam Lanza hadn't of been able to obtain a rifle I have no doubt that the loss of life would have been much less. If someone snaps and decides to go on a killing rampage the best we can do is limit the damage they can do. There was an almost identical case to this in China on the 14th Dec, the difference is the person used a knife instead of a gun. He wounded 22 children but none were killed.