40 Reasons to Support Gun Control

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Oh dear, oh dear. I have a phobia about Harry Potter, and particularly photos from Harry Potter films. Your Harry Potter picture is making me fearful, and impinging upon my Freedom to Live Without Fear (tm) ! Therefore, I demand that you remove it at once!

Or, alternatively... I could learn to deal with my irrational "HarryPotterPhobia" and you could learn to deal with your irrational hoplophobia (look it up), and we can each engage in our harmless (nay, possibly beneficial) pursuits as we please.

Umm...I don't have hoplophobia.

Oh, and from you previous post it sounds like you should learn to deal with your irrational anthropophobia or possibly anglophobia (look it up).

Fear of firearms.



I was joking I don't think you actually have anthropophobia.



Oh, why thank you vits3k. You have let me see the error of my ways. How wrong I have been not to waste my time going on about something when I have already expressed my opinions and beliefs in previous posts. Shame on me.

What a simply brilliant argument..... Hey - why not be proactive, guy! Why sit around and wait for the 2AM knock? Why don't you just start walking down the street and start shooting everyone you simply don't like the look of? Then they won't be able to hassle you anymore..... Genius!! !! !

Oh sorry.... Forgot...... A lot of Americans (surrogate or otherwise) do rather have a tendency to do that anyway, don't they? That's kinda the trouble, ain't it?.....

Psychos can have the "freedom" to make themselves feel like big tough, hard men by posing with their big shiny weapons (and no doubt decked out in their camouflage fatigues and commando makeup too) in front of the mirror...... Everyone else has the "freedom" to get their posteriors blown away when said psychos get bored with their miserable insignificant lives and go postal..... Jeez.....



Last time I checked, Harry Potter never actually killed anybody (the first 2 films nearly made me want to kill people though)..... Teensy bit of difference there...... Might be a bit subtle for you to spot I think..... I despise line dancing, but see no problem with allowing it to continue - it causes noone any harm, and keeps the blue rinse brigade off the streets if nothing else..... I also despise people having guns..... People having guns causes an enormous amount of harm to everyone and so of course should be banned...... D'uh!! !! !! !! !!



Any right (with a very small 'r') thinking person should oppose gun ownership with the last ounce of their breath...... I simply can't believe the utterly ridiculous arguments gun molesters can come up with sometimes.... I mean.... "Harmless"?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!..... Dear God, help us all.......

vits3k: What TAFKASH said.

What, even the bit about the first 2 Harry Potter films?

Well...the first two were a little hokey...I'm a fan of the books and the 3rd film.

Generally speaking, that tends to happen only in those parts of the US that have UK-style gun bans (you do know that US laws differ from region to region... right?) The shooter knows he's likely to get away with the deed, since anyone who might wish to stop him is unarmed.

You didn't read any of the references, did you?

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"Gun Control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety Locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins."

-Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, Mafia turncoat, asked about gun control in an interview in Vanity Fair

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And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

-- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"

Look, you can come up with all the glib quotes and bumf you want...... At the end of the day, a society that accepts the validity of private gun ownership as a whole (as the US does) is inherently more dangerous than one that does not (as the UK). The vast majority of criminals in the UK don't carry guns (because they are hard to get hold of and illegal to possess, they are only carried by ne'er do wells in extremis), and the majority in the US do (as you can get them given away free in cornflake packets, even if you do have to cross a State line , and everybody else has them, and in some States you get arrested for carrying anything less than a .45) - the argument "we need guns to protect ourselves from criminals who also have guns" therefore has more holes in it than the corpse of a California drive-by victim. You could argue that we all need to carry shotguns to protect ourselves from wild, man-eating lions..... Not if there aren't any bloody lions about, you don't!! ! Release 1000s of hungry lions onto the streets of New York and you have a different story.... But why would you want to? Hmmmmmm?

.....and why do all discussions on this forum always have to end up with Americans talking about bloody Stalin again? He died 50 years ago for Chris'sakes..... Get over it people!! !! ! What have comparisons with Stalin's or Hitler's regimes got to do with our society? Both used trains as tools in victimising and killing millions - should we be banning trains too, because S & H misused them? What kind of argument is that for the price of horse raddishes?

Anyway, you have my admiration for your stubborn, single-minded determination to continue to defend the indefensible, futile though it clearly is - keep it up! Its good for a boy to have a hobby!

Switzerland. There is also the fact that in the US, the regions with the strictest gun control are also the most dangerous.



Actually, in the US, the vast majority of criminals don't carry guns either. Only 7 percent of violent crime is gun-related (a crime will be scored gun-related if there was a gun in any way present, the 9/11 hijackings had to be removed from the data that year because all ~3000 deaths would be considered gun related since the hijackers used guns to hijack the planes) for the latest year statistics are available. While guns account for 60% of all homicides (homicide in the US means, "killed by another person", it does not necessarily need to be murder, it includes justifiable homicide), homicide rates (indeed all violent crime rates), and the proportion of gun homicides have been falling dramatically even as the number of guns owned and the percentage of households owning a gun has been rising (all US statistics).



Someone without a gun is not incapable of violent crime. A large number of rapes and murders are carried out without a gun. A gun is an equalizer, as a woman with a gun in my hands, I have a much better chance against a larger man.

Incidentally, in the US, if a criminal breaks into a home while someone is at home, the chances are extremly high that the people inside the home are their target. Criminals intending solely property crimes will almost always break in when no one is home, and if someone is home when they break in, it is almost always because they either made a mistake and thought no one was home, or because they are young and inexperienced.

In the UK, criminals are much less likely to bother to ensure that no one is home. The reason? Since about half of all US households have a gun, a criminal who just wanted to rob the place would have a very high risk of getting shot, and thus they have a strong incentive to make sure no one is at home (note that breakins with people at home are also much higher in areas with strict gun control than in areas without). In the UK, this safety consideration isn't present, because very few households have guns, and even in those that do, the gun owner tends to try to scare them off rather than firing, because there is no near certainty that the break in is targetted at people.

I have a few interjections to add here.

First off, I have to ask those in the UK, are there any areas in the UK that do not have a regular police presence. I believe the UK in more urbanized than the US and it does make a difference.

Point in example, years ago, I had friends that lived in Pottersdale PA. This was a small hamlet (not even town, was considered part of the Town of Karthus) in Eastern Clearfield County. Clearfield County does not have a sheriff and the nearest village (9 miles/15km) away did not have a police force either. The nearest police force was the PA State Patrol Barricks in Clearfield which was about 30 miles (50km) away from Karthus. The state patrol was seen in Karthus once per month, whether needed or not. The last time Pottersdale saw a police officer was when the had a breakout at the boot-camp style prison in the Quehanna Wildlife Area.

Another point is where I live. Granted, most counties in the 11 county south eastern Minnesota area have a sheriff department and all incorporated areas must have a police department, there are still areas that lack immediate police services. On an average sunday evening, there are 4 state patrol cars in the 11 county area (approx 7000 Sq. Miles, 11200 Sq km).

In areas this large with little police presence, owning a gun is the safest way to protect your family. It is not the job of the police to protect you, only to clean up the mess.

I would like to end on this note, I have seen gun control and I do not like it. I grew up in the ghettos of Buffalo New York. New York is one of the states with the strictest gun control laws and yet even 8 year olds are running around with guns (and were doing so when I was in my teens over 10 years ago). Gun control does nothing but take the guns out of the hands of innocent, law abiding people.

That is why I do not like it. Of course, I do not personally own a gun but that is a different story for a different time. My non-ownership of a gun though does not make me believe however that gun control is the of all, end all solution to safety in society.

The fact that you jumped from restating our point as guns being a deterrence against tyrannical government to mentioning us going down the street and shooting people at random shows that you are no longer a serious contender on this thread.

We want to discourage any such regime that may come about in the future.

Huh?

Perhaps you might want to get yerself hold of a little ol' dictionary and look up the word "irony"

....and I'm sure some redneck jerk sleeping with a revolver under his pillow is really going to stop your average heavily armed swat team.....

I'm doing a lot of eye rolling on this thread I notice.....

....and I'm sure some redneck jerk sleeping with a revolver under his pillow is really going to stop your average military dictator seizing power.....

Wow, that little sarcastic comment works in so ways.....

go, TAFKASH!! ! yay!