Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
Some people probably are like that...I would guess probably not many though, so who cares what some idiots that happen to be gun supporters think? That is kind of a generalization to say "people who argue that guns etc..." all just secretly hate and mistrust the federal government.
The point, at least for me, isn't that I'm expecting that to realistically happy, I just acknowledge that it is always a possibility though slim it may be. Look, I hate to bring up the cliche Nazi Germany, but it is actually a good example here: do you think they thought the same thing? That their government would never do something like what it did to them? It just seems quite a lot of risk in order to probably not do anything about homicide. I haven't seen any convincing statistics that gun control lowers murder in the United States.
On January 30 2013 11:31 Mohdoo wrote: Can't believe people are thinking guns would help you against the government. Ever heard of drones? Good luck.
People arguing for the right to defend themselves (right to bear arms) often do a bad job of describing why this may make sense. This is not the scenario they should be illustrating:
The US Government has wrongfully accused Bob of a crime he did not commit. They know he's innocent. They just don't care.
This summer, one man is going to exterminate the entire US government with his AR-15. Available in 3D.
Nor is it
New City voted against the president-elect. On his first day in office he is going to scramble several F-18s to bomb the city to the ground. Good thing New City has 5000 registered gun owners.
It is very difficult to predict what will happen in a country 50 or 100 years from now. In the wake of an economic meltdown, a major natural disaster, or other calamity, almost anything becomes possible. To say that there's no reason why you would need weaponry to protect your family, possibly from a government entity (not the entirety of the government obviously), is to be very optimistic. You don't keep and bear arms to stop the local swat team from assassinating you, or to destroy Fort Knox. For all I know the tea party could start to receive more and more support, at which point I suggest we all bunker in.
Can you describe a situation where owning a gun could help against the government? I can see the value in having a gun in some post-disaster free for all where people compete for clean water. I can not imagine any situation where an armed population would be able to push back any amount of government will. Its not like the revolutionary war, where both sides pew pew against each other across some field. Nowadays, we just throw drones at a situation and don't even deploy troops to a lot of places. Just look at all the shit we killed in Pakistan with drones. Now lets imagine actual air-force action. Or the fact that a lot of our navy could get missiles pretty deep into our country from out of range of anything else that would go against it. Its just not possible. Send one plane at an area, bomb their power plants and its completely fucked. How about send 2 and wipe out a bunch of houses, their hospitals, and some other shit. Or level an entire city from the ocean.
Those would most likely not be the goals of the government entity. Their goal would more likely be control than destruction. If their goal was destruction then yes, a neighborhood of gun owners couldn't do much. Even so, the military would not allow itself to be used for such a purpose, I would hope (but there have been exceptions in history).
In a situation where a government entity with tons of guns starts to lose power, how do you think they'll get power back? The point is that in a situation where any amount of fighting is necessary, it will be a steam roll.
If one government agent were to come to your house to take your child away, and you were armed, it would not necessarily be a steamroll. I'm not advocating shooting child protective services tomorrow, but in extreme cases (akin to the Nazi era which happened less than 100 years ago) there are many possible scenarios like that.
This situation doesn't make sense at all. Why is the government suddenly stealing babies? Why is it important enough to take place, but not important enough to enforce? Why wouldn't this be reported to someone followed by an actual group of armed people coming to make sure it does happen?
Someone isn't able to resist arrest current day either. If child protective services come for your kid, and you try to ward them off with a gun, what do you think will eventually happen? You keep the kid? Even in our current government, its impossible to make that work, let alone in a more oppressive one.
The idea being, by the time the government reacts to your defensive measures, the child has been secretly relocated. You asked for a scenario that could happen. Certainly, this one isn't the most likely. However, it is one of many possibilities, and your claim that it's unreasonable to think guns could ever be necessary against an oppressive government, at any point in the future is very difficult for me to believe. I'm not going to say that we definitely need current levels of gun ownership as a contingency for anything that can happen with the government in the future, but it should not be dismissed either.
On January 29 2013 01:27 Daswollvieh wrote: I really don´t. I tried to keep it short and that usually ends up to sound rather idealistic. But what I really want to question is the notion of "a government" as a singular body with an agenda, which can be friendly or hostile.
Yes that's exactly what it is. Idealistic. The government isn't a singular body with an agenda it's a whole bunch of people making incredibly important decisions that change the everyday citizen's life and the course of history. And they aren't held accountable by said average citizen whose very life is affected by said decisions. Hence why there is so much corruption left and right. Some guy has power some guy has money, they want what each other has ...
The "governement" does not have guns. The president doesn´t wield a gun and forces random citizens to comply. The government consists of white collar workers, doing their jobs, following laws, like any other citizen. Yes, there is the police and the army, and in the US the national guard and whoever else is permitted and required by law to be armed in order to enforce the laws which have been passed by representatives of the people. But they are not armed for personal interest (like a civilian would be), but to fulfil a necessary duty for the community, which is to protect it against threats. It is only natural to distribute the necessary duties within a community to a specialized group of people (e.g. delivering mail, baking bread, enforcing laws). And in case of police work and military enterprises these duties require force and thus guns. And they being distributed by the government is not a sign of the government having all the guns, but of the government being charged with basic services for the community.
Yes the government has guns. Or since you want to argue semantics, the government has a whole lot of people WORKING FOR IT and CARRYING GUNS and USING THEM. That's slightly worse. And the government decides who gets to carry guns and who doesn't. I don't know what to make of the rest of your paragraph. The very point is that when "specialized group of people" who wield power, being by carrying guns, or deciding who gets to carry guns and who doesn't decides to work for themselves as opposed for the good of the community they can just do it. Unless the people they want to opress for their own benefit have the means to defend themselves, regardless of their actual chances.
Would Ghandi and Martin Luther King have been more successful in their endeavors if they and their followers were armed?
Maybe, maybe not. But what is certain is that had the french revolutionnaries not gotten some pistols and rifles, they would be dead and france would still have a king. Had the jews in nazi germany not been disarmed, they could have at the very least stood for themselves. Had the rebels in current syria not had weapons, they would be dead, and assad would be reverred. Oh and had the americans not been equipped by weapons which at the time were equivalent in effectiveness to their military counterparts, the us might very well still be a british colony. I can go on and on and on ... Also the right to carry guns is completely unrelated to your actual chances of victory. Besides that victory conditions may not be the same for everyone. The right to carry guns is so that people can stand up for themselves. You know, like, for instance, the resistance during world war 2
All of your arguments are based on the idea that we live in a perfect world where everyone is nice and everyone is honest and people do what they "should"... I can't argue with blind faith
In response to your last two paragraphs: French and american revolutions don't really relate. The operational strength of the U.S. military and police force has scaled a hundredfold better than that of our civilian population. I've already made a post in this thread detailing the numerical odds against the jews. As a jew myself, I can tell you that most of us are not Rambo, which is unfortunate because every single jew in germany would have needed that kind of bullet-stopping, endless ammunition star power to stand a chance. As to the rebels in Syria, you're wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Syrian_Army#Weapons As we are talking about gun control in the United States, your point is moot. Automatics are banned, and will not be unbanned. The Syrian rebels are not fighting a war with pea shooters, shotguns, and hunting rifles. They are mostly military defectors using stolen automatic weapons, or those shipped in through international backers. This does not build your case that small arms are necessary to fight a tyrannical regime.
French revolution and nazi germany also don't relate. That is precisely the point, giving you events that have very little in common aside from people having guns and making something happen because they have them. Yes the civilian weapons are plagued with restrictions, many of which are complete nonsense ( the whole "assault weapons" thing. They named it that way because they couldn't name it "big scary looking guns" ).
As a jew myself, I can tell you that most of us are not Rambo
So what ?? I am not jewish. I can tell you that most of the people who aren't jewish are also not rambo. just like i could tell you that tyler is not a tree. Maybe the jews in nazi germany would have still died but at the very least they would have had the option to fight back, and possibly killed a bunch of those people who wanted to do them harm.
Wikipedia : The Free Syrian Army is mainly armed with AK-47s, DShKs and RPG-7s. Besides AK-47s, some FSA soldiers also have M16s, Steyr AUGs, FN FALs, shotguns, G3 Battle Rifles, and PK machine guns The FSA has a few heavy weapons captured from the Syrian government
Jormundr wrote : The Syrian rebels are not fighting a war shotguns
Aside from the DshKs which are soviet heavy machineguns, all of those weapons are small arms. I don't see how you are proving me wrong, in fact it's the complete opposite, you're telling me rebels are fighting a war using small arms and aren't getting destroyed ( but are in fact currently winning ). Thanks for proving my point.
You state that people need to own the guns they do in order to protect against the possible tyranny of the government. You then conclude by saying that it doesn't matter whether or not owning small arms helps to protect against government tyranny.
No. you transformed :
Also the right to carry guns is completely unrelated to your actual chances of victory
Into :
it doesn't matter whether or not owning small arms helps to protect against government tyranny
To make me look like a hypocrite.
What i meant is that you don't need to be able to straight up WIN A CONVENTIONAL WAR AGAINST YOUR ARMY ( hint : VICTORY ) to be protected from your government. And the next sentence is :
victory conditions may not be the same for everyone
which should have been a hint. If you know your potential victim can fight back and has a very real chance of causing damage to you, you are a lot less likely to do it. Not everyone is willing to go all in, otherwise you'd have millions of murder every day. Is it worth murdering some guy because he said something offensive and refused to apologize ?
Besides that, when the people is armed, it becomes far more difficult to neutralize them without shedding blood. I'm willing to bet that not all the cops who are willing to use their tazers against someone would be willing to use their guns knowing someone may very well actually die in this.
As i said, it's completely unrelated to what chance you really have, it's about being able to stand for yourself, maybe you'll loose, maybe you'll win, but at least you get to choose.
If they have nothing in common with our current situation, then they don't further your point.
Your point about the Jews in Germany is outright stupid. Here's your logic: It would have been better for everyone if, instead of just the Jews dying, the Jews also killed off some Germans while they were at it. So you're basically saying that Germans should die just for the fuck of it because they're the 'bad guys'. Grats, you failed basic ethics.
Aside from the shotguns, none of those weapons can be legally owned in the United States by a common citizen in the condition they are used in in the Syrian rebellion. The fully automatics that are legally owned have to have been made before '86. They also have to be registered with the ATF.
Your last bit reiterated what you said earlier. You don't care whether or not there is a statistically significant chance of survival or victory. You argue that ability to fight is crucial regardless of this. In most schools of philosophy, things are valued based on their merits. If having a gun doesn't help you or anyone else, then you don't need the gun. In the case of government tyranny, it doesn't help you, and it has a negative impact on whoever you're trying to "defend" yourself against. That's a net negative. Your best option against the US police force is to either surrender and face trial or to try to escape. Escalation is not very smart because if you manage to kill or wound one of them, you've worsened your situation.
That being said I'm not against gun ownership, I just don't like idiots who think they're going to fight the government with their 1911 and remington 870. A brief overview of american history would show you that those do not tend to protect you from the government when the government wants you. This may be anecdotal, but I hear that shooting a cop or a member of the armed forces is one of the most surefire ways to die (other than suicide).
ALL those weapons are legal in the US, they were all made before 1986. Even if you exclude the automatics, there are semi-auto versions of all of them that are practically the same. The only feature they lack is full-auto, and that doesn't make a huge difference due to how guerrillas would have to fight.
It would have been better for the jews, or for the people Stalin killed, or for the people Mao killed, if they could have possibly fought back. Whether or not they win isn't the issue. It is important that they have a chance.
Also, "Most schools of thought" to you just seems to mean Utilitarianism. Kantianism would totally disagree with you. Things are good or bad based on their relation to moral duties. Any oppressed people has more responsibility to protect their own than to worry about the lives of their oppressors, So if a few gestapo officers have to die along the way, oh well sucks to be them.
You also assume that losing is somehow worse than not even trying. If the jews had fought back against the Nazi's, or if the capitalist sympathizers had fought back against Stalin, they may have indeed still died. But it would have been quick. Much quicker than rotting away in some death-camp.
Last, even if you die, you might still support your cause. Martyrdom is in fact a thing.
I said legally obtained by a common citizen. Your average citizen doesn't have $15,000 to spend on a gun. You say its important if they have a chance. Cool. The jews who were disarmed and killed in Germany were the third who refused to leave under any circumstance. My point is that they were going to die anyway. Your next point shifts to contradict your first point. First you suggest that jews need guns so that they have a chance of survival, now you're saying they need firearms so they can get shot faster. Make up your damn mind.
As for your martyrdom claim, that is not very useful. You don't need a gun to become a martyr. In fact it kind of gets in the way because people start to lose sympathy for people who shoot at police / government officials. Couldn't find anything with a google search of "hero shoots cop". Found plenty for "cop shoots unarmed man".
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Also the argument on why anybody 'needs' an assault rifle.
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
On January 30 2013 11:31 Mohdoo wrote: Can't believe people are thinking guns would help you against the government. Ever heard of drones? Good luck.
People arguing for the right to defend themselves (right to bear arms) often do a bad job of describing why this may make sense. This is not the scenario they should be illustrating:
The US Government has wrongfully accused Bob of a crime he did not commit. They know he's innocent. They just don't care.
This summer, one man is going to exterminate the entire US government with his AR-15. Available in 3D.
Nor is it
New City voted against the president-elect. On his first day in office he is going to scramble several F-18s to bomb the city to the ground. Good thing New City has 5000 registered gun owners.
It is very difficult to predict what will happen in a country 50 or 100 years from now. In the wake of an economic meltdown, a major natural disaster, or other calamity, almost anything becomes possible. To say that there's no reason why you would need weaponry to protect your family, possibly from a government entity (not the entirety of the government obviously), is to be very optimistic. You don't keep and bear arms to stop the local swat team from assassinating you, or to destroy Fort Knox. For all I know the tea party could start to receive more and more support, at which point I suggest we all bunker in.
Can you describe a situation where owning a gun could help against the government? I can see the value in having a gun in some post-disaster free for all where people compete for clean water. I can not imagine any situation where an armed population would be able to push back any amount of government will. Its not like the revolutionary war, where both sides pew pew against each other across some field. Nowadays, we just throw drones at a situation and don't even deploy troops to a lot of places. Just look at all the shit we killed in Pakistan with drones. Now lets imagine actual air-force action. Or the fact that a lot of our navy could get missiles pretty deep into our country from out of range of anything else that would go against it. Its just not possible. Send one plane at an area, bomb their power plants and its completely fucked. How about send 2 and wipe out a bunch of houses, their hospitals, and some other shit. Or level an entire city from the ocean.
Those would most likely not be the goals of the government entity. Their goal would more likely be control than destruction. If their goal was destruction then yes, a neighborhood of gun owners couldn't do much. Even so, the military would not allow itself to be used for such a purpose, I would hope (but there have been exceptions in history).
In a situation where a government entity with tons of guns starts to lose power, how do you think they'll get power back? The point is that in a situation where any amount of fighting is necessary, it will be a steam roll.
If one government agent were to come to your house to take your child away, and you were armed, it would not necessarily be a steamroll. I'm not advocating shooting child protective services tomorrow, but in extreme cases (akin to the Nazi era which happened less than 100 years ago) there are many possible scenarios like that.
Yes, but an example on this scale has no place in the common discussion because we're talking about gun laws for law abiding citizens. I doubt that people who would willingly murder a government official would shy away from buying a gun on the street. Regardless, they're criminals, and the law should not be formed with their interests in mind.
On January 30 2013 11:31 Mohdoo wrote: Can't believe people are thinking guns would help you against the government. Ever heard of drones? Good luck.
People arguing for the right to defend themselves (right to bear arms) often do a bad job of describing why this may make sense. This is not the scenario they should be illustrating:
The US Government has wrongfully accused Bob of a crime he did not commit. They know he's innocent. They just don't care.
This summer, one man is going to exterminate the entire US government with his AR-15. Available in 3D.
Nor is it
New City voted against the president-elect. On his first day in office he is going to scramble several F-18s to bomb the city to the ground. Good thing New City has 5000 registered gun owners.
It is very difficult to predict what will happen in a country 50 or 100 years from now. In the wake of an economic meltdown, a major natural disaster, or other calamity, almost anything becomes possible. To say that there's no reason why you would need weaponry to protect your family, possibly from a government entity (not the entirety of the government obviously), is to be very optimistic. You don't keep and bear arms to stop the local swat team from assassinating you, or to destroy Fort Knox. For all I know the tea party could start to receive more and more support, at which point I suggest we all bunker in.
Can you describe a situation where owning a gun could help against the government? I can see the value in having a gun in some post-disaster free for all where people compete for clean water. I can not imagine any situation where an armed population would be able to push back any amount of government will. Its not like the revolutionary war, where both sides pew pew against each other across some field. Nowadays, we just throw drones at a situation and don't even deploy troops to a lot of places. Just look at all the shit we killed in Pakistan with drones. Now lets imagine actual air-force action. Or the fact that a lot of our navy could get missiles pretty deep into our country from out of range of anything else that would go against it. Its just not possible. Send one plane at an area, bomb their power plants and its completely fucked. How about send 2 and wipe out a bunch of houses, their hospitals, and some other shit. Or level an entire city from the ocean.
Those would most likely not be the goals of the government entity. Their goal would more likely be control than destruction. If their goal was destruction then yes, a neighborhood of gun owners couldn't do much. Even so, the military would not allow itself to be used for such a purpose, I would hope (but there have been exceptions in history).
In a situation where a government entity with tons of guns starts to lose power, how do you think they'll get power back? The point is that in a situation where any amount of fighting is necessary, it will be a steam roll.
If one government agent were to come to your house to take your child away, and you were armed, it would not necessarily be a steamroll. I'm not advocating shooting child protective services tomorrow, but in extreme cases (akin to the Nazi era which happened less than 100 years ago) there are many possible scenarios like that.
Yes, but an example on this scale has no place in the common discussion because we're talking about gun laws for law abiding citizens. I doubt that people who would willingly murder a government official would shy away from buying a gun on the street. Regardless, they're criminals, and the law should not be formed with their interests in mind.
In the type of situation I'm describing perhaps guns are no longer easily available, even on the street, because people like you had their way.
When the government is coming for your child to put them into the mandatory neo-nazi training program (or whatever situations we can't even conceive of) you probably won't care about whether or not you are a criminal.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
It actually shocks me that people claim to value someone's life over theirs when they are attempting to kill or rob them. Not to mention shooting a mugger/murderer could save another innocent persons life. If you try to kill somebody as ffar as I'm concerned whatever you get you deserve if you get killed by your victim.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
It actually shocks me that people claim to value someone's life over theirs when they are attempting to kill or rob them. Not to mention shooting a mugger/murderer could save another innocent persons life. If you try to kill somebody as ffar as I'm concerned whatever you get you deserve if you get killed by your victim.
right, good work ignoring the entire argument. Oh well, I guess you think you have a point. Yet, hopefully you'll think this through a little.
Here's an example situation - I'm a single father raising 2 kids. I have been working shit minimum wage jobs since highschool because I've had to pay for my kids, or perhaps I have an education but I fall and injure my leg and get laid off. I can't afford to support myself and two children and I'm getting desperate. I notice a guy walking down this dark, empty street and he's wearing a nice jacket. I pull out a swiss army knife and yell at you for your wallet. Really, I just want to feed my kids, instead you pull out your glock and give me a couple shots to the chest. Now my 2 kids will end up on the street or in an orphanage. Well, I suppose I deserved it but what about those kids? What if my brother becomes suicidally depressed and jumps off a bridge as well? I mean, it sure is a good thing you had your glock with you, it sure is helpful in every situation. I mean, you standing there on the street with your handgun definitely have better moral judgment than a court system or law enforcement officer. You wouldn't want terrible immoral people like me wandering the streets trying to feed their kids all the time would you? You're definitely 100% innocent and the gun had absolutely no negative effect on society whatsoever...
In case you hadn't noticed, I was being sarcastic there. Killing is morally wrong, and I really don't see any way you can justify ending another life. I mean, we spend all this time arguing about individual rights and freedoms, yet somehow the right to live is non-existent in your mind. I mean, how do you honestly decide what's worth killing for? Is stealing a loaf of bread worthy of death? How about if I physically assault you? If I kill someone? Is it okay then? Will killing me bring them back? Or will it merely satisfy your disgusting need for 'revenge'... Who are you to say that I couldn't go to a correctional facility and reform myself. I could come back into society and start a local charity or just pay taxes all my life and be a huge benefit to those around me. How can you tell my future and know 100% that I will never contribute anything positive to society ever again...
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
His point is that the criminals do exist and won't go away and just because you put laws in place, that doesn't mean the criminals are going to turn around, obey these laws and give you whatever high capacity clips or guns that they currently have and that you're putting ban on. All that you're doing is punishing people that obey the law in the first place and want to defend themselves.
If everybody had an AK slung around their back, as you presented for your example, don't you think given whatever tests and permits that were required in such a world would be given to (mostly) those who have the right mind for it? If not, whatever psychotic you bump in that happens to have an AK over his back and tries to get violent in Walmart has 10 other people with AK's walking around him to think about before he acts irrationally.
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
His point is that the criminals do exist and won't go away and just because you put laws in place, that doesn't mean the criminals are going to turn around, obey these laws and give you whatever high capacity clips or guns that they currently have and that you're putting ban on. All that you're doing is punishing people that obey the law in the first place and want to defend themselves.
If everybody had an AK slung around their back, as you presented for your example, don't you think given whatever tests and permits that were required in such a world would be given to (mostly) those who have the right mind for it? If not, whatever psychotic you bump in that happens to have an AK over his back and tries to get violent in Walmart has 10 other people with AK's walking around him to think about before he acts irrationally.
*sigh* Please do me a favour and go back to some of my earlier posts, I've covered all this - but I'll try to summarize.
Essentially I'm not arguing that this particular law against high capacity clips will solve all our problems, I'm arguing that a society that minimizes gun ownership will be better off than one that promotes the current gun culture of the US. Sure criminals exist, and I want more government policies that deal with poverty and untreated mental health disorders and other underlying causes of crime. As well, I feel that reducing the number of guns that the public uses has been shown to reduce crime and reduce the number of deaths that result from the crime inevitably occurring. Obviously punnishing people who obey gun laws is not my intent, but this argument is often used to assert that there should be little/no gun restrictions, which is an entirely flawed argument.
As for the AK example, did you even read my post? Do you honestly feel safer in a store surrounded by people with assault rifles? Really? Even if you have one yourself, do you somehow thing that you're less likely to get shot compared to a store where nobody has a gun? As for the psychotic guy, isn't he supposed to be acting irrational? Why would he give two shits about the 10 other people if he's insane and ready to die anyways? And these 'tests and permits' I think would do a great job of promoting responsible gun use, but I rarely see anti-gun-control arguments that want more regulation as a means to promote gun use... Generally it's seen as a 'slippery slope', but I won't assume that's what you mean. Let's say people are properly trained, but more people in general own rifles, etc. How does this help us? We can now stop all those home invasions that are happening. Except they aren't. Read back a little, I posted a bunch of homicide statistics, if you check the numbers on home invasions, you really shouldn't be worried. That being said, I don't think it's fair of me to want 'everybody' to give up their guns. I really just want fewer guns on the streets and fewer people killing each other, whether they're the assailant or the victim, I don't think either needs to die - and it's going to happen more often just because they're carrying guns...
On January 30 2013 11:31 Mohdoo wrote: Can't believe people are thinking guns would help you against the government. Ever heard of drones? Good luck.
People arguing for the right to defend themselves (right to bear arms) often do a bad job of describing why this may make sense. This is not the scenario they should be illustrating:
The US Government has wrongfully accused Bob of a crime he did not commit. They know he's innocent. They just don't care.
This summer, one man is going to exterminate the entire US government with his AR-15. Available in 3D.
Nor is it
New City voted against the president-elect. On his first day in office he is going to scramble several F-18s to bomb the city to the ground. Good thing New City has 5000 registered gun owners.
It is very difficult to predict what will happen in a country 50 or 100 years from now. In the wake of an economic meltdown, a major natural disaster, or other calamity, almost anything becomes possible. To say that there's no reason why you would need weaponry to protect your family, possibly from a government entity (not the entirety of the government obviously), is to be very optimistic. You don't keep and bear arms to stop the local swat team from assassinating you, or to destroy Fort Knox. For all I know the tea party could start to receive more and more support, at which point I suggest we all bunker in.
Can you describe a situation where owning a gun could help against the government? I can see the value in having a gun in some post-disaster free for all where people compete for clean water. I can not imagine any situation where an armed population would be able to push back any amount of government will. Its not like the revolutionary war, where both sides pew pew against each other across some field. Nowadays, we just throw drones at a situation and don't even deploy troops to a lot of places. Just look at all the shit we killed in Pakistan with drones. Now lets imagine actual air-force action. Or the fact that a lot of our navy could get missiles pretty deep into our country from out of range of anything else that would go against it. Its just not possible. Send one plane at an area, bomb their power plants and its completely fucked. How about send 2 and wipe out a bunch of houses, their hospitals, and some other shit. Or level an entire city from the ocean.
Those would most likely not be the goals of the government entity. Their goal would more likely be control than destruction. If their goal was destruction then yes, a neighborhood of gun owners couldn't do much. Even so, the military would not allow itself to be used for such a purpose, I would hope (but there have been exceptions in history).
In a situation where a government entity with tons of guns starts to lose power, how do you think they'll get power back? The point is that in a situation where any amount of fighting is necessary, it will be a steam roll.
If one government agent were to come to your house to take your child away, and you were armed, it would not necessarily be a steamroll. I'm not advocating shooting child protective services tomorrow, but in extreme cases (akin to the Nazi era which happened less than 100 years ago) there are many possible scenarios like that.
Yes, but an example on this scale has no place in the common discussion because we're talking about gun laws for law abiding citizens. I doubt that people who would willingly murder a government official would shy away from buying a gun on the street. Regardless, they're criminals, and the law should not be formed with their interests in mind.
In the type of situation I'm describing perhaps guns are no longer easily available, even on the street, because people like you had their way.
When the government is coming for your child to put them into the mandatory neo-nazi training program (or whatever situations we can't even conceive of) you probably won't care about whether or not you are a criminal.
Just to make sure I am not misreading this: If the law (government) ordered you to hand over your child to a state child protection agency, would you shoot the people that came to your house to physically take the child away?
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
It actually shocks me that people claim to value someone's life over theirs when they are attempting to kill or rob them. Not to mention shooting a mugger/murderer could save another innocent persons life. If you try to kill somebody as ffar as I'm concerned whatever you get you deserve if you get killed by your victim.
right, good work ignoring the entire argument. Oh well, I guess you think you have a point. Yet, hopefully you'll think this through a little.
Here's an example situation - I'm a single father raising 2 kids. I have been working shit minimum wage jobs since highschool because I've had to pay for my kids, or perhaps I have an education but I fall and injure my leg and get laid off. I can't afford to support myself and two children and I'm getting desperate. I notice a guy walking down this dark, empty street and he's wearing a nice jacket. I pull out a swiss army knife and yell at you for your wallet. Really, I just want to feed my kids, instead you pull out your glock and give me a couple shots to the chest. Now my 2 kids will end up on the street or in an orphanage. Well, I suppose I deserved it but what about those kids? What if my brother becomes suicidally depressed and jumps off a bridge as well? I mean, it sure is a good thing you had your glock with you, it sure is helpful in every situation. I mean, you standing there on the street with your handgun definitely have better moral judgment than a court system or law enforcement officer. You wouldn't want terrible immoral people like me wandering the streets trying to feed their kids all the time would you? You're definitely 100% innocent and the gun had absolutely no negative effect on society whatsoever...
In case you hadn't noticed, I was being sarcastic there. Killing is morally wrong, and I really don't see any way you can justify ending another life. I mean, we spend all this time arguing about individual rights and freedoms, yet somehow the right to live is non-existent in your mind. I mean, how do you honestly decide what's worth killing for? Is stealing a loaf of bread worthy of death? How about if I physically assault you? If I kill someone? Is it okay then? Will killing me bring them back? Or will it merely satisfy your disgusting need for 'revenge'... Who are you to say that I couldn't go to a correctional facility and reform myself. I could come back into society and start a local charity or just pay taxes all my life and be a huge benefit to those around me. How can you tell my future and know 100% that I will never contribute anything positive to society ever again...
How do you know he's just after your wallet? Are you a mind reader? Let's pretend I'm a female walking home from work when some ass hole pulls a knife on me. What should I do then? Do I assume he's just gonna take my wallet and let me go on my way or is he the next Ted Bundy or BTK. Why the fuck should I gamble my life?
If your gonna go around committing violent crime with a deadly weapon you forfeit your right to safety. You don't give a criminal the benefit of the doubt when it would make your safety be put at risk.
It's not about my wallet and the money in it or my pride being hurt when I get my shit stolen by some punk it's about that slim chance that he is a two legged monster. I mean if some guy is in your house walking into your kids room are you really gonna think "maybe his second cousin twice removed will become so depressed by his death that he will commit suicide, hmm, better see where this goes then".
Why call some one out for ignoring your "entire argument" when theres 4 or 5 wall of texts and he makes a good point >.>
In the type of situation I'm describing perhaps guns are no longer easily available, even on the street, because people like you had their way.
When the government is coming for your child to put them into the mandatory neo-nazi training program (or whatever situations we can't even conceive of) you probably won't care about whether or not you are a criminal.
weapons wont help you in a situation like this at all. as long as the state has the monopoly of physical force, they can and will hunt everyone down who does not obey the law, no matter what the law is. the only thing you can do is either shoot the official who tries to take your child and flee the country (but then you could have fled already anyway) or shoot the official and get arrested for your crime.
to be honest, the idea of a bunch of guys with guns and no military training or combat experience overthrowing or even resisting the government with all their police and military force always makes me laugh. there are battlehardend veterans who know nothing but war for all their life with a proper military organisation who fight for a higher cause and have very little fear of death (taliban), and even they can not stand against 20 years old boys (and now even girls!) because the training and equipment of western militaries (especially the us military) is so much ahead of them. yeah but a bunch of rednecks with shotguns will do the job... sure.
the reality is: in case of a civil uprise in an absolute sovereign state (as opposed to countries where the government can not enforce jurisdiction in some parts of it), it depends solely on the military if the uprise has success or not. if the military stays neutral there is no need for guns, because a couple of stones will do the job. (i.e. egypt, east germany 1989) and if the military is on the side of the government, the uprise is doomed to fail (i.e. most countries of east europe between 1948 and 1989 or lybia where the revolution went very poorly before the nato decides to bomb gaddafi into oblivion).
so no, guns will never ever protect someone from the government.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
It actually shocks me that people claim to value someone's life over theirs when they are attempting to kill or rob them. Not to mention shooting a mugger/murderer could save another innocent persons life. If you try to kill somebody as ffar as I'm concerned whatever you get you deserve if you get killed by your victim.
right, good work ignoring the entire argument. Oh well, I guess you think you have a point. Yet, hopefully you'll think this through a little.
Here's an example situation - I'm a single father raising 2 kids. I have been working shit minimum wage jobs since highschool because I've had to pay for my kids, or perhaps I have an education but I fall and injure my leg and get laid off. I can't afford to support myself and two children and I'm getting desperate. I notice a guy walking down this dark, empty street and he's wearing a nice jacket. I pull out a swiss army knife and yell at you for your wallet. Really, I just want to feed my kids, instead you pull out your glock and give me a couple shots to the chest. Now my 2 kids will end up on the street or in an orphanage. Well, I suppose I deserved it but what about those kids? What if my brother becomes suicidally depressed and jumps off a bridge as well? I mean, it sure is a good thing you had your glock with you, it sure is helpful in every situation. I mean, you standing there on the street with your handgun definitely have better moral judgment than a court system or law enforcement officer. You wouldn't want terrible immoral people like me wandering the streets trying to feed their kids all the time would you? You're definitely 100% innocent and the gun had absolutely no negative effect on society whatsoever...
In case you hadn't noticed, I was being sarcastic there. Killing is morally wrong, and I really don't see any way you can justify ending another life. I mean, we spend all this time arguing about individual rights and freedoms, yet somehow the right to live is non-existent in your mind. I mean, how do you honestly decide what's worth killing for? Is stealing a loaf of bread worthy of death? How about if I physically assault you? If I kill someone? Is it okay then? Will killing me bring them back? Or will it merely satisfy your disgusting need for 'revenge'... Who are you to say that I couldn't go to a correctional facility and reform myself. I could come back into society and start a local charity or just pay taxes all my life and be a huge benefit to those around me. How can you tell my future and know 100% that I will never contribute anything positive to society ever again...
I didn't ignore the entire argument, I just chose to respond to one part of it, do I have to respond to every single word you said? Killing is wrong, who has to clarify that? You seem to not really care about the victims as much as the criminals. You use a ridiculous story that says if we let people protect themselves with guns a good person who was desperate could make a foolish decision and try to rob the wrong person and get shot and killed. Well...that is a tragedy, but I still have more sympathy for the victim who has EVERY RIGHT to protect their self. You don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Your story is an unrealistic representation of the real world and ignores the threat of random assaults. Rape is wrong too, you think a woman armed with a gun is as likely to be raped as an unarmed woman? Would it be so bad if these rapists got shot, or do you think it would have been better for her to have been raped? I firmly believe in this right to protect yourself. Punish the rapists and murderers, not the victims.
Friends: Man shot dead after pulling into wrong driveway LILBURN, Ga. —
Lilburn police are investigating the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old man.
Police said they were called out to a man's home on Hillcrest Drive on Saturday night.
A group of friends said they were going to pick up a girl who lived in the area to go ice skating around 10 p.m. when their GPS system sent them to the wrong home.
The friends said they pulled into the driveway and saw a man peer out the window. They said they waited in the car for a bit and then the man, Phillip Sailors, 69, came out of the home with a handgun, firing a round into the air.
“The guy came out. He went in again and he came out with a gun in his hand and he shot into the air,” 15-year-old passenger Yeson Jimenez said.
The friends said that's when they tried leaving the house, and said Sailors pointed the gun at the car and shot Rodrigo Diaz, 22, who was driving the car. An arrest warrant said Sailors had a .22-caliber pistol. The passengers said Sailors never asked what they were doing there.
“’Shut up.’ That’s the only thing that came out of his mouth,” passenger Gandy Cardenas said.
The friends said Sailors held the rest of the people in the car at gunpoint until police arrived at the home. All three passengers in the car are Parkview High School students.
Sailors is being held on no bond on charges of malice murder. He has no known criminal history.
The warrant said the Diaz was struck on the left side of the head.
Friends told Channel 2's Tony Thomas that Diaz had just arrived here from Colombia three months ago.
Thomas has also learned Sailors is a war veteran and a former church missionary. Sailors' attorney told Thomas that the man believed he and his wife were being attacked.
“He is very distraught over the loss of life from the defense of his home. This incident happened late in the evening hours when he was home with his wife and he assumed it was a home invasion and he maintains his innocence,” the attorney said.
Stories like this that make me want a license to own any firearm to be required in this country. A license that requires something similar to what is required to earn a driver's license: a written test of basic knowledge (including law and when you can and cannot fire your weapon in self defense) and a basic test at a firing range to prove you know how to handle a firearm. I don't see how that is such a horrible thing. Firearm owners that I know are all competent, and would have no problem passing such a test.
EPT
