The Cartridge Family

Marge: Mmm! No! (pulls gun from Homer) No one's using this gun! The TV said you're 58 percent more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder!

Homer: TV said that . . . ? But I have to have a gun! It's in the Constitution!

Lisa: Dad! The Second Amendment is just a remnant from revolutionary days. It has no meaning today!

Homer: You couldn't be more wrong, Lisa. If I didn't have this gun, the king of England could just walk in here anytime he wants and start shoving you around. (pushing Lisa) Do you want that? (pushing her harder) Huh? Do you?

Lisa: (quietly indignant) No . . .

Homer: All right, then.

The only people who change their constitution (entirely) every 50 years are the french. Of course then again they have a civil war almost that often too.

In Australia, gun murders skyrocketed after the legislation. This is because people who lived over 50 miles from the nearest civil servants of the law were forced to turn in all of their weapons. (Since they registered them and the government knew how many they had, and could easily take them away.) But criminals kept their guns. (Because criminals don't follow laws, and therefore do not register guns they will use to commit crimes.)

A gun in the house of a law-abiding citizen is not a threat to anyone who is not breaking into that house.

Britain might also have a lower crime rate because they keep criminals in jail. Perhaps it's because citizens of Britain don't feel they have the kind of freedom they do in the United States. It could be any number of things. By the way, i've seen similar statistics proving that the lack of guns (In the hands of law-abiding citizens, anyway.) in Britain have coincided (which is the word you should use unless you can prove a direct link.) with higher crime. It's all in how the statistics are made. Of course, if you don't know how the statistics are gathered and what the terms they define mean you probaly shouldn't take stock in the results of the statistics. For instance, most statistics cited by gun-control advocates don't count using a weapon in self defense as such unless you kill the person you are defending yourself from.

But, should these statistics matter? Probaly not.

What is more important, having the right to defend yourself or attempting to make society more safe thru laws which cannot be proven to work to their pourpose in all situations? If you give up the responsiblity/right to defend yourself, you lose more rights than just that. The police become a standing army and become responsible for investgating and preventing possible future crimes.

Gun control will cause a situation similar to america shortly before the revolutionary war and the quartering act. If you lose the right to bear arms, then you also lose the responsibility of defending yourself. And if you do not have the responsibility of defending yourself, you do not have the rights that the responsibility allows you to possess.

Let me just inject myself into this:
1) What happens in Switzerland or England is fairly irrelevant. Other countries have different cultures and different laws, and proposing that giving everyone in the US automatic weapons would work because it works in Switzerland(and that is along with compulsory military training) is lunacy.
2) There needs to be some kind of large, credible study done in the US, showing what happens when stricter gun control measures are enacted. Both sides throw out the same old statistics over and over, and they completely contradict each other.
3) The Constitution is not so sacred that it can't be changed. We've already changed it 17 times since the Bill of Rights, and we can make that 18 if need be. I agree that most gun control these days probably violates the Second Amendment, but pro-gun people must realize that the Constitution, by itself, is not an argument. You must set forth a reasoned, reasonable position, to convince the rest of us to let you keep your guns.
4) However, the fact that many Americans don't like the Second Amendment is not excuse for passing unconstitutional laws. If there's something in the Constitution we don't think makes sense, we should pass an Amendment. Just ignoring the Constitution whenever it becomes convenient to do so is not acceptable.
5) A gun in the house of a law-abiding citizen can be a threat to people. We see tons of accidental gun deaths every year. However, I will not give up my freedom because of laws based on the idiocy of the lowest common denominator in our society. I don't think requiring mandatory trigger locks is overly oppressive. Beyond that, if your child kills himself or someone else with the loaded gun you left sitting on the table, you should go to jail.

DMan speaks. Listen:

"In Australia, after almost completely banning guns, crime skyrocketed.
In Switzerland, where automatic rifles are everywhere, crime is low."

What does this even fucking mean?

In Australia, which is a large country, the population density is low.
In Switzerland, which is a small country, the population density is high.

I therefore humbly propose that the further up in the alphabet your country gets, the higher the population density! IT'S A FACT, PEOPLE!!! A single pair of cases makes it so. I would also presume it makes you more likely to speak Swiss (or some other language that actually exists and is spoken in Switzerland).

This would be ok DMan, if your statistics were even right to begin with.

And Shanoyu: give the fucking crack-pipe back to DMan. Your contribution was just plain 'black-hole of wisdom' stupid.

"In Australia, gun murders skyrocketed after the legislation."

What exactly is skyrocketing? Does this fit the bill?

"There was a decrease of almost 30% in the number of homicides by firearm from 1997 to 1998"
-Australian Institute of Criminology-

Yeah, assuming that skyrockets tend to shoot towards the earth on a regular basis.

From the Australian Institute of Criminology

Murder Statistics - Australia (Jan 1995 to Dec 1998)
 --looks very much like this---

             /\
        /\/\/  \/\/\/\/\
      1995            1998
  
             ^
            /|\
             |
             |
          (thing)

Gee...I wonder what the bump described by (thing) is. Why, guess what kids...it's when a disenchanted sociopathic retard had himself some fun with much semi-automatic weaponry, and many unwilling playmates. Port Arthur Massacre.

The big gun buyback - began in 1996, shortly after the tragic bump.

What was that statistic again? Oh yeah: There was a decrease of almost 30% in the number of homicides by firearm from 1997 to 1998.

I'm going to avoid making conclusions beyond the obvious. I see no instantly rampant increase in this particular (and one would assume most tragic) crime: the homicide. I attribute no significance beyond insignificance to the presence or absence or guns. That would be stupid.

There were also *increases* in other forms of violent crime during the same period. Points for the gun people?

Because GUNS will protect us they cry! They will certainly protect the 10-14 year old girls, who unfortunately experience the highest rate of sexual assault of any age/gender group. Where, I hear *everybody* ask was the most likely location for sexual assault? Sixty-six percent of the time, in a 'residential location'. Of these assaults, how many were by the trench-coated stranger? 17 percent.

Yes, mummy & daddy & uncle steve will protect you, sweet thing, with their GUN. Because they want to make sure nobody else abuses you: abusing you is their job. If these kids want to be protected by a GUN, they'd better be using it themselves.

See kids, how fun statistics are? They can be used to say many things that sound reasonable, without any need for real direct proof.

Most of the pro and con arguments for gun control that I've heard are plausible. On the one hand, you want to reject having yet another freedom ripped from you by the mechanisms of control. On the other hand, you wonder why, in a (cough..hack) *civilized* society we need nicely polished and immaculately blued instruments of death. There are two children named agenda1 and agenda2, plain and simple, and they will continue to scream at each other from opposite ends of the seesaw. At the very least don't feed them bad, sugary, information.

Do See: The Great Australian Gun Law Con 'http://www.ozemail.com.au/~confiles/'.
Do See: Australian Institute of Criminology 'http://www.aic.gov.au/index.html'.
Don't : fucking blindly trust statements of 'fact'.

Just want to clear up a couple of points which amout to the same argument: in the same way that guns and knives are dfferent so are different types of gun.

The first one being already quickly brushed on by crayz. All Swiss do own rifles but gun crime is not a problem because of the unique compulsory national service. Where most countries' national service involves a year or so in a military establishment at about the age of 17 the Swiss have to go on military service for a few weeks every year where they are trained about the proper usage of their rifle (and, allegedly, also trained to shoot a target at 300 meters!!!!!). What people have not picked up on is that they are given (or made to buy, i'm not sure..) a rifle you know, one of those extremely long things that fires one bullet at a time and are not much use in a crime because it is difficult to conceal; great for self defense because they look mean and are accurate and are also too big for little kids to take to school with them.

Second point - Britain. yes there are gun control laws but it is still legal to own shotguns and sporting rifles. what are illegal are pistols and any gun that is capable of firing multipe rounds at the same time (i.e. machine guns). I feel that making the law like this solves all the problems. The people who enjoy gun sports still can (to my knowledge there is not an event in the Olympics called 'Fill a rabbit with as many holes as you can using an Uzi 9mm'), the people who want self defense have all they need in a double barrelled shotgun (face it, when have you ever seen the headline 'Father bravely kills 58 intruders with his M16'?), there is no way a small child is going to kill his classmates with a shotgun (have you ever tried firing one? if he doesn't know what he is doing the kickback can send a full grown adult to the floor (breaking his shoulder in the process) never mind a child) and there is little chance of a madman going on the rampage and killing 16 children with only two shells.

It seems (to me at least) that yet again compromise is the solution. The people who want guns for legitimate reasons only need rifles with a low ammo capacity. It is invariably the criminals and the psychologically imbalanced who go for the weapons better suited to mass murder and general warfare.

BTW, just a side note. There is a news article today about a village post office that was held up by a man with a rifle. He was disarmed and stabbed to death by the owner with his parcel tie cutter. Guns are formidable weapons but the close contact that theives need make rifles pretty useless for them.

Technically, guns don't kill people. Most times, it's mass internal bleeding or lack of oxygen to the brain that kills a person. Even if you assault a person directly with a gun without shooting, it's not the gun that kills them, it's the concusion, or whatever other injury they may sustain. Sure, sure, guns kill people indirectly, but guns are never the actual cause of death. That's why you'll never read on a death certificate "Cause of death: gun". Because guns don't kill people.




People with their cliches.

Here comes my hat.

Being the stubborn 22 year old American that I am, I firmly believe that where you come from has a drastic impact on your opinion over guns.

I hail from a wonderful place called North Dakota. For anyone who doesn't know, North Dakota consists of farmers and snow.....THAT'S IT.

Now, I was raised with a gun in my hand. I was practically issued one at birth. I now own several, most of which are family heirlooms and I never shoot. I own one pistol which I target shoot with and carry on my person when I have to work late at night in the bad parts of Dallas.

What was the one thing I was always taught about guns?

"Don't you dare fuck up. Because you will pay."

So, what do total headcases from Southcentral L.A. think about guns?

"I'm gonna bust a cap and steal shit, because that's what everyone before me has done."

I come from a place where there are 2 gun related deaths every ten years. One person who was killed, on March 20, 1996, in Watford City, North Dakota, was my uncle, Keith Braddock. A police officer of 17 years. He was killed by an insane rancher who didn't like the beer he was served. Has any member of my family screamed for gun control because of this devastating event in our lives?

Nope. Because it's part of who we are. We've had this right for well over 200 years and we aren't about to just roll over and give it up. Yes, the Constitution can be changed. Yes, you can think to yourself that I'm just going to give in. But if you want my guns, you'll have to come convince me to give them to you. And that's going to be tough, because I'm stubborn. As patriotic as I am and as much as I love my country, America is like a playground somedays. The big kids just change the rules as they please.

And, even if America does manage to ban firearms, some day down the road, they'll be brought back. We aren't just going to forget they exist.

On a closing note, show me someone whose life was ruined by a gun, and I'll show you someone whose life was saved by a gun. I know that's a poor argument, but that doesn't make it any less plausible.

Let the flaming begin.