If you're seeing this topic then another mass shooting hap…

On January 30 2013 13:45 StayPhrosty wrote:
[quote]

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 15:10 StayPhrosty wrote:
[quote]

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-

http://www.businessinsider.com/shooting-gun-laws-2012-12

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).