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On December 03 2015 08:42 Doraemon wrote: has trump come out and said if everyone was armed, this wouldn't have happened yet?
I'm sure if you were under attack by terrorist gunmen you'd want a gun for self protection. But I find that liberals and Democrats are afraid to own guns because they are afraid they may shoot themselves, at least it seems.
I care slightly less about "themselves" and more about "accidentally/ purposely shooting a family member or any other person".
As a Canadian socialist apparatchik dog and a gun owner, I feel like these concerns are legitimate but I'm a guy who goes above and beyond what's legally required. I own two rifles that are stored unloaded in a gun safe, the ammo is in another room, and there's a trigger lock on each rifle.
There's something fundamentally fucked up about taking those things lightly and sadly it gives me a bad name. Lethal force is to be treated with an amount of respect that many just don't seem to have. This macho confidence that everything's going to be alright and that shit things only happen to lesser individuals, it's disconcerting.
You're doing it right then
Thanks dad
You're very welcome, but take off your damn shoes when you come home. I just got the carpet steamed. Also, pick up some milk on the way home.
As genial as this exchange is, it doesn't matter how well trained you are or how safe you are. You could be the guy who snaps and decides to kill people, with all your training and preparation being brought to bear. Guns, outside of simple 3 shooter handguns and muzzle loading muskets should be outlawed or heavily regulated. Why the hell is it so easy to amass an arsenal in this country? (you're Canadian, I know, so sorry) It is just insane to me.
I am so tired of hearing how mass killings could occur with other weapons, or how the government wants us to be unarmed. Or how people won't attack us because we have guns. Clearly this shit happens, and it is time to do SOMETHING.
I understand your sentiment, I do. I was like you until I started looking at the numbers, and then I became interested in firearms, became a bit of a ballistics nerd and got into the hobby of shooting paper with my brother and a couple of friends.
I don't think there's much value in unraveling in the whole debate but to put it simply, I could also be the gun who kills his kids with a knife, or the guy who drinks and drives or texts and rives, or the guy who commits any number of atrocities. Why does "the guy who snaps" justifies banning or "heavily regulating" access? It largely ignores the root of the problem of shootings, I would argue. In Canada, the homicide rate is much lower per capita than the rate in the US, and I feel safe. Statistically, my odds of getting shot are so outlandishly low that I don't really buy into the fear rhetoric that you seem to have adopted. I'm more likely to get hit by a car or something like this. And we have a lot of guns here too...
Now to be clear, I'm fine with some legit regulation. I'm fine with ability tests, with all sorts of background checks and whatnot. But ultimately shootings like these are freak events here, and the reason why ESPECIALLY in the US, it's not gun control that needs to be looked at is because gun control for a country which insanely has decided that weapons should be the second amendment, it's simultaneously the path with the most resistance, and also the path that would yield the worst results easily.
Shootings happen in the US not because you have access to guns, but because the US is a breeding ground for poor and miserable unemployed mentally ill people who are treated like trash. So while I think that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is a silly thing to say because it oversimplifies reality, it's true enough. Violence doesn't happen in a vacuum. The US is really good at putting people in a corner until they lose their shit.
I appreciate your attempt to reason this out. Clearly many things factor into these events. Let's just make gun ownership more regulated. You need to prove you have training. You need to have no violent criminal record. You need to pass safety standards regularly. You can't get certain weapons at all, or at least not without reason and registration of those arms. All these little impediments make it much more likely that these events would be less common.
Well in Canada you need to have a course and pass a test that certifies that you can handle firearms safely, and you can't have a criminal records. Not sure that I'd appreciate having to go around passing those safety standards regularly, especially not if they also wanted to make sure I'm a safe driver regularly and all that stuff. I've got a life to life and I'd rather not live under government scrutiny. But I'd be fine with having my gun license looked at if I suddenly had red flags to my file or whatever. I'm cool with my "liberties" being infringed on, to an extent, if it can help prevent some of these things.
What's the reason for allowing normal people to carry automatic weapons? I'm fine with handguns if it is meant for 'protection' or hunting rifles against wild animals, but automatic rifles?
Every state should ban it, there's no reason for a normal person to have access to military grade weapons.
On December 03 2015 11:25 DucK- wrote: What's the reason for allowing normal people to carry automatic weapons? I'm fine with handguns if it is meant for 'protection' or hunting rifles against wild animals, but automatic rifles?
Every state should ban it, there's no reason for a normal person to have access to military grade weapons.
In my eyes that betrays a very serious misunderstanding of the situation though.
Normal people are generally not allowed to own, let alone carry automatic rifles in California. More importantly a LOT of shootings in the US take place with handguns, and a lot take place with semi-automatic rifles, not automatic. And while full auto sounds bad and mean, frankly full auto rifles are by no means particularly good at killing people.
Well for the US the answer is simple. It is because the consensus is that our Constitution says we can have them. So unless it is reinterpreted or changed (good luck with either of those), it will be hard to flat out ban things. Whether or not that is good policy is a different question.
Some argue the second amendment was only meant to apply to militias, but the consensus has been that the phrasing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" means that almost any regulation or ban is an infringement.
EDIT: Seems the history is a bit more complicated when taking Supreme court cases into account. Seems that they just want to leave it up to the states to deal with.
On December 03 2015 11:25 DucK- wrote: What's the reason for allowing normal people to carry automatic weapons? I'm fine with handguns if it is meant for 'protection' or hunting rifles against wild animals, but automatic rifles?
Every state should ban it, there's no reason for a normal person to have access to military grade weapons.
Down this logic lies a terrible trap. The gun control crowd has for a very long time focused on weapon side regulations. This is foolish. The difference between a Ruger mini-14 with a 10 round magazine firing .223 rounds and an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine firing .223 rounds is marginal when you shooting people in the same room. Not to mention, no matter how nasty you make the gun side regulations, there will always be naughty featured guns in circulation somewhere (Arizona is 5 hours from Los Angeles).
The better side to focus on is shooter side gun control. Licensing requirements, insurance, storage requirements, registries, tests, and regular criminal record checks on the registry backed up by a rigorous and well funded ATF/state police dedicated to finding and melting off-registry guns. The real murder weapons are the cheapy guns in the urban crime centers. Better policing and a strong legal regime dedicated to melting those things could really put a damper on the overall single-target murder rate.
On the mass shooter side, as long as someone is ready to die they can always inflict a lot of damage in a suicide gun attack. Cops were pretty close in San Bernardino and the shooting squad escaped with all damage inflicted. The stronger shooter side gun control might make suicide gun attacks harder, or perhaps less effective due to crappier weapon selection, but stopping someone ready to die just isn't something a free society is kitted out to deal with.
On December 03 2015 11:25 DucK- wrote: What's the reason for allowing normal people to carry automatic weapons? I'm fine with handguns if it is meant for 'protection' or hunting rifles against wild animals, but automatic rifles?
Every state should ban it, there's no reason for a normal person to have access to military grade weapons.
Automatic weapons are, and have been banned for over 50 years. By making this statement you have proven that you know less than Jon Snow.
On December 03 2015 11:31 Kickstart wrote: Well for the US the answer is simple. It is because the consensus is that our Constitution says we can have them. So unless it is reinterpreted or changed (good luck with either of those), it will be hard to flat out ban things. Whether or not that is good policy is a different question.
Some argue the second amendment was only meant to apply to militias, but the consensus has been that the phrasing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" means that almost any regulation or ban is an infringement.
The militia clause is, arguably, worse for the government position, because if you accept such an argument, the militia (composed of all the males in a state) must have access to all weapons necessary to combat a foreign state. Which means nukes and tanks. The Scalia interpretation is the most modest, plausible, interpretation, unless you read the 2nd Amendment as a nullity.
On December 03 2015 11:31 Kickstart wrote: Well for the US the answer is simple. It is because the consensus is that our Constitution says we can have them. So unless it is reinterpreted or changed (good luck with either of those), it will be hard to flat out ban things. Whether or not that is good policy is a different question.
Some argue the second amendment was only meant to apply to militias, but the consensus has been that the phrasing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" means that almost any regulation or ban is an infringement.
EDIT: Seems the history is a bit more complicated when taking Supreme court cases into account. Seems that they just want to leave it up to the states to deal with.
Which is why the gun control lobby push so the government was not allowed to eras each gun violence in the US. Period. Full stop. We can't even become informed about the topic even if we wanted to, because the law prohibits that type of research from being funded.
So now we are faced with the future where guns will be so prolific and the people can't even collect information on gun violence.
And before people say that private groups could do it, this assumes that they are able to get the information the states.
On December 03 2015 11:25 DucK- wrote: What's the reason for allowing normal people to carry automatic weapons? I'm fine with handguns if it is meant for 'protection' or hunting rifles against wild animals, but automatic rifles?
Every state should ban it, there's no reason for a normal person to have access to military grade weapons.
Automatic weapons are, and have been banned for over 50 years. By making this statement you have proven that you know less than Jon Snow.
On December 03 2015 11:31 Kickstart wrote: Well for the US the answer is simple. It is because the consensus is that our Constitution says we can have them. So unless it is reinterpreted or changed (good luck with either of those), it will be hard to flat out ban things. Whether or not that is good policy is a different question.
Some argue the second amendment was only meant to apply to militias, but the consensus has been that the phrasing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" means that almost any regulation or ban is an infringement.
The militia clause is, arguably, worse for the government position, because if you accept such an argument, the militia (composed of all the males in a state) must have access to all weapons necessary to combat a foreign state. Which means nukes and tanks. The Scalia interpretation is the most modest, plausible, interpretation, unless you read the 2nd Amendment as a nullity.
Banned may give a false impression, there are several states where you can own automatic weapons. They have this in Knob Creek every year.
Of course they aren't cheap though, so it's not as if some homeless person can just go snag a mini-gun. Plus there is usually some level of licensing required.
On December 03 2015 11:52 xDaunt wrote: Well, now we know why terrorism hasn't been ruled out. One of the shooters has been ID'd as Syed Farook. Another shooter was his brother.
If you are a regular person, and not a dealer/broker/FFL ect.... you basically have to buy a pre-ban rifle.... which is going to be about the same price as a car.
And while full auto sounds bad and mean, frankly full auto rifles are by no means particularly good at killing people.
Unrelated to gun control discussion:
while i agree with you on a lot, this is wrong. And actually quite ironic, if you watch the cell phone video that a person took when the raid on the SUV went down (SFW, you can't see anything, just hear the shots). Seemed pretty decently effective autofire. There's a place and time for every firemode, and a small to medium sized room is certainly where automatic weapons (not necessarily rifles) shine.
Also, as a small sidenote: in that video, you can actually also hear the impacts of stray bullets relatively close to the video guy (he's like 300m away, roughly, if i would need to guess)
edit:
If the shooter is actually the "Syed Farook", then it most likely was not terrorism. The person named "Syed Farook" is an employee for the county that gathered there that day (reuters couldn't confirm that name).
If it's him, i bet my new RC truggy that this was personal.
edited out "certainly", obviously it's not certainly, but very likely.
And while full auto sounds bad and mean, frankly full auto rifles are by no means particularly good at killing people.
Unrelated to gun control discussion:
while i agree with you on a lot, this is wrong. And actually quite ironic, if you watch the cell phone video that a person took when the raid on the SUV went down (SFW, you can't see anything, just hear the shots). Seemed pretty decently effective autofire. There's a place and time for every firemode, and a small to medium sized room is certainly where automatic weapons (not necessarily rifles) shine.
Also, as a small sidenote: in that video, you can actually also hear the impacts of stray bullets relatively close to the video guy (he's like 300m away, roughly, if i would need to guess)
It's not wrong, it's only a tiny portion of shooting that are committed with automatic firearms, and automatic rifles, the ones that are at least somewhat available, they're not too good unless at very close range, and even then I think people underestimate how fast and with how much control you can fire a semi-automatic rifle. It's ridiculous how often journalists report full auto fire and we then find out that the weapon was semi-auto.
I haven't seen the video but I wouldn't be surprised if it was that.
Edit: Looks like there hasn't been a fully automatic weapon used in a US shooting for literally decades anyway.
And while full auto sounds bad and mean, frankly full auto rifles are by no means particularly good at killing people.
Unrelated to gun control discussion:
while i agree with you on a lot, this is wrong. And actually quite ironic, if you watch the cell phone video that a person took when the raid on the SUV went down (SFW, you can't see anything, just hear the shots). Seemed pretty decently effective autofire. There's a place and time for every firemode, and a small to medium sized room is certainly where automatic weapons (not necessarily rifles) shine.
Also, as a small sidenote: in that video, you can actually also hear the impacts of stray bullets relatively close to the video guy (he's like 300m away, roughly, if i would need to guess)
It's not wrong, it's only a tiny portion of shooting that are committed with automatic firearms, and automatic rifles, the ones that are at least somewhat available, they're not too good unless at very close range, and even then I think people underestimate how fast and with how much control you can fire a semi-automatic rifle. It's ridiculous how often journalists report full auto fire and we then find out that the weapon was semi-auto.
I haven't seen the video but I wouldn't be surprised if it was that.
You don't need to explain automatic weapons to me, i used quite a few over a timeframe of 4 years. That's back around 2000, but i don't think stuff changed too much. I was trained on how to use full automatic weapons, and when.
And while you're right that only a small portion of shootings are done with automatic weapons, that has more to do with availability, less with "deciding to go semi auto".
Edit: Looks like there hasn't been a fully automatic weapon used in a US shooting for literally decades anyway.
Correct. That's why i said "unrelated to gun control discussion".
I don't know man. I don't think most people can fire a full auto rifle effectively even at a crowd of people, even if they had access to it, IMO it would just be ineffective unless it was a well trained individual. There's a reason why full auto is mostly for covering fire in combat situations. Where, IMO, it gets significantly more deadly, is large capacity magazines, whether it be semi or full auto. That said, this is getting macabre, so I'll drop it.
in unrelated news Donald Trump ladies and gentlement
"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families," Trump said.
On December 03 2015 11:25 DucK- wrote: What's the reason for allowing normal people to carry automatic weapons? I'm fine with handguns if it is meant for 'protection' or hunting rifles against wild animals, but automatic rifles?
Every state should ban it, there's no reason for a normal person to have access to military grade weapons.
Automatic weapons are, and have been banned for over 50 years. By making this statement you have proven that you know less than Jon Snow.
On December 03 2015 11:31 Kickstart wrote: Well for the US the answer is simple. It is because the consensus is that our Constitution says we can have them. So unless it is reinterpreted or changed (good luck with either of those), it will be hard to flat out ban things. Whether or not that is good policy is a different question.
Some argue the second amendment was only meant to apply to militias, but the consensus has been that the phrasing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" means that almost any regulation or ban is an infringement.
The militia clause is, arguably, worse for the government position, because if you accept such an argument, the militia (composed of all the males in a state) must have access to all weapons necessary to combat a foreign state. Which means nukes and tanks. The Scalia interpretation is the most modest, plausible, interpretation, unless you read the 2nd Amendment as a nullity.
I just wanted to point out that DucK is from Singapore. That may be why he asked such a question. Try not to come off as a dick.
"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families," Trump said.
Yeah because ISIS folks won't use that soundbite in propaganda... "See! You are already on their kill list! Might as well join us instead of being bombed for being related". Throw in the town meeting with the guy shouting down all Muslims as terrorists, and throw in some of the random retaliation attacks against innocent Muslims and you're good to go. + Show Spoiler +
On December 03 2015 11:25 DucK- wrote: What's the reason for allowing normal people to carry automatic weapons? I'm fine with handguns if it is meant for 'protection' or hunting rifles against wild animals, but automatic rifles?
Every state should ban it, there's no reason for a normal person to have access to military grade weapons.
Automatic weapons are, and have been banned for over 50 years. By making this statement you have proven that you know less than Jon Snow.
On December 03 2015 11:31 Kickstart wrote: Well for the US the answer is simple. It is because the consensus is that our Constitution says we can have them. So unless it is reinterpreted or changed (good luck with either of those), it will be hard to flat out ban things. Whether or not that is good policy is a different question.
Some argue the second amendment was only meant to apply to militias, but the consensus has been that the phrasing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" means that almost any regulation or ban is an infringement.
The militia clause is, arguably, worse for the government position, because if you accept such an argument, the militia (composed of all the males in a state) must have access to all weapons necessary to combat a foreign state. Which means nukes and tanks. The Scalia interpretation is the most modest, plausible, interpretation, unless you read the 2nd Amendment as a nullity.
I just wanted to point out that DucK is from Singapore. That may be why he asked such a question. Try not to come off as a dick.
"Trump said he would "knock the hell out of" ISIS, and criticized the U.S. for "fighting a very politically correct war."
Now the frickin SJW's have also undermined the military, what a time to be alive. If you make this guy president I'll apply for Mars One to get off this planet
EPT
