Gun Control

[SalesServiceGuy]

Re: Gun Control

Gun sales: Gun makers bring new products

"The surge was so strong that everybody was selling everything off the shelves. Virtually nobody in the industry had a bad year last year,"

"Clearly the biggest reason for the slowdown in demand is that previous years'

[Coptech]

Re: Gun Control

I think all we decided was that it IS possible to protect 11 unarmed donuts with 1 armed donut...Other than that, not much transpired.

[ZOOTECH]

Re: Gun Control

Duly noted!! at least the dialog was from two armed minds, as apposed to unarmed minds !!!!!!!!!!!!

That is exactly why I don't get into this kind of debate.

And what happened? I just got back with my popcorn, ready to sit back and watch the fireworks, and everyone went home.

[Tonerbomb]

Re: Gun Control

Maybe so, but these two members have given us a thoughtful debate from both sides without much 'mud slinging' (shit storm).

Duly noted!! at least the dialog was from two armed minds, as apposed to unarmed minds !!!!!!!!!!!!

[ZOOTECH]

Re: Gun Control

I love watching a good shit storm though............................................ .......

Maybe so, but these two members have given us a thoughtful debate from both sides without much 'mud slinging' (shit storm).

[Tonerbomb]

Re: Gun Control

Yep, so far - the same as the mentioned thread "There's another thread here for debate on religion, it had some lively discussion going on in its hay day, all in all I'm a little sad it tapered off into nothingness; once the petty squabbles got settled there was some good theological discussion."

I love watching a good shit storm though............................................ .......

[ZOOTECH]

Re: Gun Control

Yep, so far - the same as the mentioned thread "There's another thread here for debate on religion, it had some lively discussion going on in its hay day, all in all I'm a little sad it tapered off into nothingness; once the petty squabbles got settled there was some good theological discussion."

[Coptech]

Re: Gun Control

Given the admitted weakness in our justice system, I still believe that unsurety is the biggest deterrent to crime. To over simplify, If I gave you a box containing a dozen donuts and then told you one of them was poison, how many would you eat? Speaking for myself, and call it gutless if you will, I would leave the whole box. That in a nutshell is the pause before breaking into a house that I describe. It is as simple as that. The last thing I want is a gun in the hands of someone poorly trained to handle it.

You watch the news and every once in awhile, they will have a "turn in your guns amnesty program". Most turned in were stolen or reported stolen. Having it properly registered doesn't mean you will know who broke in and took it from a gun safe.

The story on my daughter? You will laugh over this one. She was of driving age, my son was not. She took him to school as they attended the same school. My son called upset because they could not wake her and he lost his "perfect attendance" that was very important to him. I ran home, checked to make sure she was OK, and took him to school and pleaded his case for him. At the same time, I told them that there would be no excuse for her tardiness. They changed the report so that he kept his attendance record intact. Now my daughter is a great kid. She was just "burning the candle at both ends and had a bad boyfriend at the time". She was a straight A student and other awards. The principal called me and asked if he could let her off this one time. I said no way and that she needed to suffer the consequences of her actions as a life lesson. (Which was Saturday school) Fast forward to the night before the scheduled Saturday school...A bad breakup with the earlier mention dumbass bad boyfriend put her in an emotional tailspin and I got a call that they had taken her from her work to the Emergency room. I went to Saturday school with her and sat in the desk behind her all morning to complete her punishment while making sure she was OK.

Look, as far as the video game, Kids have been acting like their heroes since the beginning of time. Whether it be flying around the house with a cape as superman, batman, to whatever. They grow out of it...I guess most do. My contention is that the "weaker minded" may have difficulty separating themselves from the game. Especially when it becomes more real. Is it the game's fault? No, but the game has the same guilt in that incident to that weaker mind than the gun does in the crime he or she commits. Here in the US, a bar can be held responsible for serving a drink to someone that has already had too much to drink if they get in an accident. I just think it is a matter of time before one of our wonderful attorneys successfully makes the winning argument that a game manufacturer can be held liable under the same thought process. It doesn't make it right, It is only more proof that our justice system is broken.

We are not as far in disagreement as you might think. Thanks for the debate on this. Everyone else got quiet. I hope they have been entertained.

[Akitu]

Re: Gun Control

I have not suggested arming everyone. Just enough to provoke second thought.

Registering guns from here forward? What would that really solve? There are enough currently to wipe out the population. Are they supposed to wear out and disappear over time like a used car or something? Talk about a Pollyanna attitude.

You got me on the video games. I have played but I just don't get them. My kids, my wife, that is a different matter. But I do believe that with every improvement in graphics, etc., they do blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Call me what you want on that one. My daughter tried an excuse on me once that she was late for school because "she dreamed she woke up and went to school". That was reality vs. fantasy. Guess what, they still counted her as late.

I'm not going to tackle religion with you but you do not have me correctly positioned on that one.

I'm not going to try and mail you a gun either but every time I do ship something, at the counter they ask me "Is there anything liquid, fragile, hazardous, or perishable" I answer no and they take me at my word. If I did send you a gun, you would probably just put your eye out and I would have to feel guilty about that. No thanks! I sleep just fine with my clear conscience as it is.

Are we through playing yet?

I have not suggested arming everyone. Just enough to provoke second thought. Registering guns from here forward? What would that really solve? There are enough currently to wipe out the population. You're arguing against yourself. There are enough guns to wipe out the population, yet more continue to be produced, sold and used. Why not just give everyone who's not currently armed a free weapon? Just to level the playing field. They don't even have to be new or surplus production, restore some old muskets and send them out to the masses as the great American forefathers wanted when they drafted up the second amendment of your constitution.

Registering them means they can be tracked to an original owner, who should have been responsible enough to a) not lose it in the first place/keep it secured; b) file the appropriate paperwork for sales and transfers of ownership. Registration does nothing to deter those who want to get one but can't through the legal means, but it does ensure proper ownership and usage of the items from those who want to own and maintain them by legal means. I agree with your point that the core of the problem lies in the punitive system itself, there are far too many slaps on the wrist and loopholes to be exploited.

Video games aren't something everyone understands, same with computers, routers, the internet as a whole, or any number of subjects. Nobody can be an expert on everything, but to flatly shut it out without making an effort to learn or understand is essentially the definition of willful ignorance. Ignorance is not a bad thing inherently, it simply means one is not aware. Willful ignorance on the other hand, is the reason why society as a whole is so dumbed down. To say they blur the lines between fantasy and reality is an ignorant statement, when the truth is the goal of game designers lately is immersion. They don't want to confuse the player into not knowing what is real and what is not, they want the player to feel as though the world they created has a complete and natural feel to it.

I do hope that you gave your daughter the benefit of the doubt, dreams are scary powerful things. Look up sleep paralysis for some really terrifying examples. It's a good example of how the line between fantasy and reality can be blurred actually. Dreams can be so vivid that sleepers can do anything from murder to have an orgasm. If there is any argument for blurring of reality, look to the human mind and not some flashy animations on a TV screen.

There's another thread here for debate on religion, it had some lively discussion going on in its hay day, all in all I'm a little sad it tapered off into nothingness; once the petty squabbles got settled there was some good theological discussion.

Did you ever stop and think what goes on behind the scenes at the post office? Do you really think they just take your word and then throw it on a truck to go on its merry way? Packages can be inspected no differently from your luggage at the airport, just a simple pass through an x-ray and they can determine what it really is in the same amount of time it took to walk out of that very same post office. Now that's not saying every post office rifles through packages and x-rays every single thing, but there is a central sorting facility involved somewhere along the line in most cases. The reason for example, behind the anthrax scare of the days of recent past, was because it could be shipped in a standard letter envelope, which is not subject to the same precautions as a large package. They typically pass through a mass sorter that scans the address on the front of the envelope to go on their way (see: How it's Made on the discovery channel, it's an older episode so you may have to do some digging).

Any gun you could send me that would be legal for me to own would be a long barrel rifle, as handguns are insanely hard to come across by legal methods in Canada unless you happen to be law enforcement. Anyone seen with anything small enough to be concealed is typically instantaneously questioned. There are numerous safety courses that have to be passed as a prerequisite to owning any type of gun here as well; coupled with some of the best hunting areas in North America, it makes it so the only purpose to have one essentially is hunting. To assume I would injure myself would be making the assumption I also believe in an omniscient sky deity who planted dinosaur bones in the ground to trick us into thinking the world is much younger than it appears. Anyone in possession of common sense could reasonably handle a gun without incident.

[Coptech]

Re: Gun Control

I like how you think you know me as an individual. I'm all for the swift hand of justice with an eye-for-an-eye perspective in certain circumstances. I just don't think the solution is to give every Tom, Dick and Jane a gun in the hopes that it may deter violence.

I have not suggested arming everyone. Just enough to provoke second thought.

Registering guns from here forward? What would that really solve? There are enough currently to wipe out the population. Are they supposed to wear out and disappear over time like a used car or something? Talk about a Pollyanna attitude.

You got me on the video games. I have played but I just don't get them. My kids, my wife, that is a different matter. But I do believe that with every improvement in graphics, etc., they do blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Call me what you want on that one. My daughter tried an excuse on me once that she was late for school because "she dreamed she woke up and went to school". That was reality vs. fantasy. Guess what, they still counted her as late.

I'm not going to tackle religion with you but you do not have me correctly positioned on that one.

I'm not going to try and mail you a gun either but every time I do ship something, at the counter they ask me "Is there anything liquid, fragile, hazardous, or perishable" I answer no and they take me at my word. If I did send you a gun, you would probably just put your eye out and I would have to feel guilty about that. No thanks! I sleep just fine with my clear conscience as it is.

Are we through playing yet?

[Coptech]

Re: Gun Control

Look, a good friend of mine had a nephew that was a first responder at Newtown. I saw how it affected him and never want to take anything from the tragedy that day or the many like it before and since.

I just believe that the truly bad will always find a method to arm themselves and make them the favored candidate in a crime. I believe criminals are cowards in that sense. If you could blink your eyes and take all guns from the planet, do you not think they would still rob with something like a crossbow?

The root of the problem is in the punishment system (in my opinion) If there is no real consequence to bad actions, why not try it? Nothing to lose and everything to gain.

You and I may never agree...That doesn't matter, We may both only be partially right or one of us may be all wrong. But you and I will not live long enough to know.

As far as statistics, take them with a grain of salt. Anything can be distorted for a desired outcome and I do believe both sides of the argument use that power to bolster their belief. I'm willing to back out of this debate if you are ready to "shake hands and agree to disagree". It is just my belief that you take the simplistic approach to resolving violent crime. My belief still lies in getting bed seed out of the gene pool or at the very least, making the criminal responsible for their actions to a level of at least the same as their crime. An eye for an eye kind of thing...intentionally take a life, surrender theirs.

Oh, and by the way, as much as it may sound otherwise, I am not a "gun toting anything". I have shot competitively, I don't even hunt. I just believe what I believe. We OK?

Oh yeah, If I am ever facing a case where I have to dial 911 against an attacker, I hope they send a policeman with a gun and not a preacher with a Bible...does that make me a bad person?

[Akitu]

Re: Gun Control

Guns are here. They will not go away on their own. Registering them is not possible. Where do you get importing them as prohibitive. Throw one in the mail. I bet 9 times out of 10, they will arrive safe and undisturbed. You could buy a gun issued to a police officer if the price was right, they would turn it in as stolen in a chase and it would be on it's way to a statistic.

I did not blame video games but they do contribute in my opinion. They blur the lines between reality and fantasy. It is as simple as that.

I would LOVE to live in the world that is in your head...what color is the sky there?

Look at history since the beginning of time. Man, beast, every living thing attacks what is smaller and weaker. It is nature. My point again is that if both sides are armed, most likely the weapons both might stay hidden. The fear of finding out the playing field is level might just be the deterrent needed.

You are a funny guy, I like your thought process. I sat next to several people just like you during jury selection in the aforementioned murder trial. They didn't feel it was right to take the life of a person who had taken another's.

Somebody gets stuck with the dirty work. It is just a fact of society.

Your thought of the registered guns? I like that...I can see the police interview now. "Did you happen to see the serial number of the gun that the man had that robbed you"?

Guns are here. They will not go away on their own. Registering them is not possible. Where do you get importing them as prohibitive. Throw one in the mail. I bet 9 times out of 10, they will arrive safe and undisturbed. You could buy a gun issued to a police officer if the price was right, they would turn it in as stolen in a chase and it would be on it's way to a statistic.
Who said anything about registering them after? At time of a legal purchase they would be registered, which is where a majority of guns used in the largest reported statistics tend to be; ie. a friend or family member legally owned said gun and was taken by perpetrator. Please try sending one in the mail and tell us how it goes. 9 out of 10 is a pretty reasonable number, statistically you should be fine, so what are you afraid of by sending it in the mail?

You say video games blur the lines between reality and fantasy; you sound like everyone who has never played a video game. Do you also believe there is an omniscient sky being who determined every event in the known universe several thousand years ago when it was all created at once? I like your thought process. The colour of the sky in my head is blue, as it's merely the refraction of light off the surface of the earth's oceans. What colour is the sky in your world?

You're correct in your statement of how nature works, with the biggest asserting dominance of the weakest. The fact humans have the intelligence to behave differently but choose not to shows where we as a collective species are failing. The playing field is also level if nobody has any sort of weapon, but as always there are variables (pre-emptive stop of a "hands are dangerous weapons on a trained professional" comment). If the fear of finding out the playing field may be level, why is there no current deterrence? Your solution seems to be "give everyone a gun, then nobody will want to harm anyone else"; which is about as farfetched as the above mentioned omniscient sky being. Look at statistics from nations with harsher gun control laws, take into account variables such as population density and give us some real data to comment on as opposed to hypotheticals and straw-man arguments.

I like how you think you know me as an individual. I'm all for the swift hand of justice with an eye-for-an-eye perspective in certain circumstances. I just don't think the solution is to give every Tom, Dick and Jane a gun in the hopes that it may deter violence.

[Coptech]

Re: Gun Control

Guns are here. They will not go away on their own. Registering them is not possible. Where do you get importing them as prohibitive. Throw one in the mail. I bet 9 times out of 10, they will arrive safe and undisturbed. You could buy a gun issued to a police officer if the price was right, they would turn it in as stolen in a chase and it would be on it's way to a statistic.

I did not blame video games but they do contribute in my opinion. They blur the lines between reality and fantasy. It is as simple as that.

I would LOVE to live in the world that is in your head...what color is the sky there?

Look at history since the beginning of time. Man, beast, every living thing attacks what is smaller and weaker. It is nature. My point again is that if both sides are armed, most likely the weapons both might stay hidden. The fear of finding out the playing field is level might just be the deterrent needed.

You are a funny guy, I like your thought process. I sat next to several people just like you during jury selection in the aforementioned murder trial. They didn't feel it was right to take the life of a person who had taken another's.

Somebody gets stuck with the dirty work. It is just a fact of society.

Your thought of the registered guns? I like that...I can see the police interview now. "Did you happen to see the serial number of the gun that the man had that robbed you"?

[Akitu]

Re: Gun Control

Random statistics in articles from TheGuardian and Washington Post, take them as you may. I found the article somewhat comical in the response of those debunking the statistics.

The gun lobby
Map: There have been at least 74 shootings at schools since Newtown - The Washington Post

So is the general consensus in those articles correct? Is there a "numbness" to these school shootings that have happened almost weekly since Newtown? Are you siding with Charles Johnson in reclassifying "school shootings" to something so specific it rules out any other variable?

[Akitu]

Re: Gun Control

Are you under the impression that crimes are committed with registered guns? No, the majority are stolen guns, illegally imported guns, fabricated guns, borrowed guns, found guns, the list goes on.

If someone is in a police pursuit, usually, they will toss the gun in an attempt to not be caught with it when they feel they are about to be caught. The penalty difference makes it worthwhile to ditch the weapon. So now you have kids finding them in the sandbox at the neighborhood park. Guns can be made from most anything. You need something to hold a shell casing, a makeshift barrel, and something to hit the primer. Guns will never be removed from society.

My point is that a level playing field makes a better deterrent than the current hand slap penalties. Yes, we have over medicated youth that have been numbed from real world by video game addiction feeling like firing a shot into a crowd can just be reset by starting the game over. Society is screwed up! Reading the Prozac, Zoloft, Ritalin report, how many of those kids do you think will be released back into society after some doctor proclaims them "rehabbed" from their particular drug? None of them should be...At least in my opinion. Blame the meds, blame the guns, blame their environment, but for God's sake, don't hold it against them that they killed someone. "They might not have even known what they were doing"..."They were just kids". Bullshit! Take them out of society. Take them out of the gene pool. Make them the example that give the next kid the pause to rethink his actions feeling that there might just be real consequences after all.

Take care of the problem. Don't just try to remove one of the props. I am told that near the border in Arizona, there are places so dangerous from drug cartel, it is not a place for anyone to hazard into. Our Government has chosen to put up signs warning of the dangers posting to "Keep out" rather than attempt to stop or even control the illegal activity.

It is bad here and trying to control the law abiding citizens while ignoring those that do not care about the laws will resolve nothing.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, they stopped Tim McVay for not having a license plate on his car. People thought "what kind of a moron attract attention to himself after that kind of a crime by such a stupid means. Truth is, if you have such little regard for law and human life, why would you care about a traffic law? I bet it never entered his mind that it would be his downfall.

Are you under the impression that crimes are committed with registered guns? No, the majority are stolen guns, illegally imported guns, fabricated guns, borrowed guns, found guns, the list goes on.
A stolen gun would have been registered at one point. Illegally imported guns cost a fortune. Fabricated guns are a real thing, but very impractical and just as likely to harm the wielder (having seen a homemade shotgun in action it was only good for a single use). Borrowed and found are still likely to be registered at one point. I'd challenge anyone to find usage statistics, I would hazard the assumption that most are standard issue firearms that were stolen or registered to the perpetrator.

If someone is in a police pursuit, usually, they will toss the gun in an attempt to not be caught with it when they feel they are about to be caught. I'd like to see the data that supports this, usually in these publicized situations the perpetrator was apprehended with their weapons on hand unless they were carrying enough of an arsenal that discarding each weapon as it was spent was the problem... But how often does that really happen?

Yes, we have over medicated youth that have been numbed from real world by video game addiction feeling like firing a shot into a crowd can just be reset by starting the game over. Over medicated, yes; but to blame video games for any of that is asinine. Studies have shown that video games remain just that to those of us who are mentally competent, it's a scapegoat for people to find a correlation between violence and youth.
Here's my source, a 10 year study on 11000 children. Do television and electronic games predict children's psychosocial adjustment? Longitudinal research using the UK Millennium Cohort Study

"They might not have even known what they were doing"..."They were just kids". Bullshit! I wholeheartedly agree. Age being the magic number that determines mental wherewithal is grossly inaccurate. A 13 year old should have no problem identifying something right from something morally reprehensible.

The problem in majority of these cases seems to be mental illness or deficiency of some sort; the solution is to stop the idea that mental illnesses can just be taken care of with a lifestyle change and to "stop being such a downer" and actually treat the people who require it. Everything else just happens to be a constant variable around mental illness.