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The thing is that honing in just on video games is silly because violence in our culture isn't the product of just one game or another. It's not like we released Doom and then all the kids decided 'okay, yeah, now's the time to kill each other'. It's the whole culture, it's the ambient noise
I have to say you're one of the few people that have enough sense to realize it's not just the presence of guns that result in mass or needlessly brutal killings, and it's nice to know that there are others willing to look past the veil of 'blame the gun' knee-jerkers.
You're full of shit, and a crybaby to boot. Not a single person has argued that "just the presence of guns" is what results in killings.
It's also sad to see how many people are willing to throw one amendment under the bus just to protect their favorite one, especially when the comic that produced this particular thread questions such behaviour.
Again, not a single damn person has suggested they want or need to destroy the second amendment for the purpose of protecting free speech. You are a shameless liar.
You're an ignorant peice of shit and I thank God you're just an idiot on a webcomic forum and not capable of actually doing anything that could affect the real world, good or bad. If you'd like me to point out your ignorance in person, feel free to stop by The Gun Store in Pleasanton, Texas, 1825 Old Pleasanton Rd., any day you feel like a lesson. I'd be more than happy to show you our books, every gun we've ever sold, who we've sold it to, and the ATF policies that we have to follow consistantly.
Until then, you're just a loudmouthed bitch with no idea on how the world outside your little forum works. Live happy in your ignorance. I doubt I'll ever see the likes of you, as you seem quite happy not knowing shit.
Furby, I removed the struckout section because I decided that it was unwise to personalize in that way; and for which I do apologize. And I didn't mean to imply that you're doing any less that the fullness of what's required by law. You'll note that I haven't made any complaints about legitimate gun stores that do background checks. Frankly, as someone who does all that already, I'm surprised you wouldn't be for ending paperless private sales for purely economic reasons (They have a real and unwarranted regulatory advantage in the market), or the PR reasons (It's just endless bad press for guns from this loophole every time it comes up). I meant to point out that I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of straw purchases, and I'm sure you've heard of the American/Mexican guns-for-drugs trade. These are all guns produced, shipped, and sold legally, before being funneled into the black market. It would be impossible to participate in any part of the weaponry market without also, unintentionally, feeding and enabling the illegal market as well.
I think it's extremely unlikely, but if I do ever find myself with time to kill in Pleasanton, I'll buy you a beer. Although I will try to leave before you found out why I was doing so.
And,yet no study has conclusively proven any link between desensitization towards violence in media and aggression in the real world, or what's more, desensitization to real world violence.
This is a parenting issue, not a political issue. Just as gun education is a parenting issue, not a political issue.
You achieved the right conclusion about parenting issues. Though you are clearly convoluting access to guns with education about their use.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of guns and gun owners in Idaho. Yet I have never seen Idaho on the news for a mass shooting, or gun violence.
Wow. Just wow. I really don't know where to start.
So my question, for the creator(s) of this comic; why bring up the 2nd amendment at all? Nobody is attempting to censor video games (not any more), nor are they attempting to curtail the first amendment in favor of the 2nd. This comes to me as nothing more than a cheap shot in favor of gun control.
You can't swing a stick without hitting a pre-Second Amendment person trying to take on the First Amendment. It's been that way for years - this is hardly the first time I've ever seen it nor will it be the last.
Not stating "We should ban violent video games!" does not mean said person is not attacking them - or, there by the First Amendment. Otherwise, they wouldn't be on tv talking them up as the source of violence in our culture. I would think all of the pro-gun members of this forum falling over themselves to complain about the comic as an attack on the Second Amendment would see it, but they are completely blind to the hypocritical double standard. And that is the entire point of the comic.
You are correct, there hasn't been a conclusive link established. There is still the missing link in Darwin's theory of evolution, but we don't question it... well, most of us don't anyway. Point being, sometimes you have to use a bit of sense and see that making it harder for kids to access violent video games is a good thing, not an infringement upon the video game industry. We don't allow kids access to pornography, and sex is a natural, essential part of life. Yet murder and violence, which we would be much better without, are thrown in our kids' faces as if they were of no consequence.
No, I'm not convoluting the point. The point is that all of this is a parenting issue, and a social issue. It is not an issue of access to guns. Access to guns has not decreased crime in Australia since their gun ban. It has increased it. In the first year: homicide up 3.2%, assault up 8.6%, armed robbery up 44%. For 25 years prior to the gun ban, these numbers were steadily decreasing. Home invasion, which had no legal definition in Australia prior to the gun ban, is now being reported.
You don't know where to start because it goes against your agenda for gun control.
There is no hypocrisy in stating a complaint about a cheap shot towards the 2nd amendment. None of us on this forum (from what I have read) are in favor of limiting free speech, or artistic expression. We may wish to legally limit children's access to violent video games and enforce legally binding ratings on them. But not to curtail their production in anyway.
No, just no to all of that. Instead of going point by point, I will just say everything you said is wrong on its face and simplify the whole post.
I have to slightly disagree with your statement that we need to make it even more difficult to buy and sell firearms though. As the inventory manager of a gun store just an hour north of the Mexican border, I can tell you that the federal laws that are in place and are already actively governing the the way gun stores operate, it's next to impossible to squelch out a living owning such a place.
Good thing we are all talking about private citizens being able to buy from and sell to other private citizens, then eh?
That argument might have been valid in, say 1800, but not any more. Unless you intend to argue that the general populace should have legal access to ACTUAL assault weapons - fully automatic weapons, RPGs, gun-working tanks, armed drones, fighter jets.
And all the "originalists" on the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v Chicago that the Second Amendment protects the right of the people to own guns for general self protection - ie, to shoot robbers.
How fortunate for the government that people like you exist to put such blind faith in it that it will always act in your best interests. But the reality of the situation is that you can not trust the government to put the preservation of civil liberties first without some concern (and maybe a healthy dash of fear) on their part that there would be repercussions for overstepping their bounds. The 2nd Amendment was not created so the average citizen could fend off a robber or stop a home invasion. It was created with the thought in mind that it may be necessary for future generations to rise up and replace the government. There's a reason the term "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a cliche.
It would be incorrect to also assume that a lack of civilian access to military grade weapons somehow precludes the possibility of an uprising because citizens would be facing off against the military on unequal terms. It is one thing to order the military to invade another country. It is an entirely different proposal to order the military to fire on its own nation. It would be an overstatement on your part to assume that the military consists of nothing more than "yes" men and government lapdogs that will blindly follow such an order.
The only group of people I trust less than the government is the general populace.
If some bizarre scenario came to pass and the population overthrew the government, I very much doubt that whatever replacement is created would be better given the extreme degree of political polarization we see today.
Even if any hypothetical revolutionary group had sane leadership, I imagine it would be difficult to organize a sufficiently large and influential group of people without the government catching wind and putting a stop to the whole thing. Meeting and carrying out plans in secret is a lot more difficult now than it was for the American revolutionaries.
That argument might have been valid in, say 1800, but not any more. Unless you intend to argue that the general populace should have legal access to ACTUAL assault weapons - fully automatic weapons, RPGs, gun-working tanks, armed drones, fighter jets.
And all the "originalists" on the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v Chicago that the Second Amendment protects the right of the people to own guns for general self protection - ie, to shoot robbers.
How fortunate for the government that people like you exist to put such blind faith in it that it will always act in your best interests. But the reality of the situation is that you can not trust the government to put the preservation of civil liberties first without some concern (and maybe a healthy dash of fear) on their part that there would be repercussions for overstepping their bounds. The 2nd Amendment was not created so the average citizen could fend off a robber or stop a home invasion. It was created with the thought in mind that it may be necessary for future generations to rise up and replace the government. There's a reason the term "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a cliche.
Good thing that the government is limited by laws and the democratic system then.
It would be incorrect to also assume that a lack of civilian access to military grade weapons somehow precludes the possibility of an uprising because citizens would be facing off against the military on unequal terms. It is one thing to order the military to invade another country. It is an entirely different proposal to order the military to fire on its own nation. It would be an overstatement on your part to assume that the military consists of nothing more than "yes" men and government lapdogs that will blindly follow such an order.
The military possesses things that no gun could stop. How are you going to stop a cruise missile, a drone, a B-2 with an AR15?
'
If we get to the point where firearms are the only protection against the government we're fucked as a society anyway.
Good thing that the government is limited by laws and the democratic system then.
The military possesses things that no gun could stop. How are you going to stop a cruise missile, a drone, a B-2 with an AR15?
If we get to the point where firearms are the only protection against the government we're fucked as a society anyway.
The assumption that the government will only act within a set of laws, when that same government is endowed with the power to change or remove entirely the same laws that limit it, seems extremely naive. You also seemed to quote my statement about military firing on civilians and then completely ignore it in the same turn. Read: It would be an overstatement on your part to assume that the military consists of nothing more than "yes" men and government lapdogs that will blindly follow such an order. The military, itself made up of civilian members that have civilian families, are most likely not going to turn on their homeland because a potentially irrelevant and dying government is desperately trying to maintain power.
The 2nd Amendment is the general population's insurance policy that guarantees the government remembers the line "by the people, for the people". Our democracy works because there is reasonable fear within the various levels of government that they can only go so far. Documented history exists proving that governments with absolute control over their citizenship rarely act with the well being of said citizens and creation or preservation of civil liberties in mind. And before you say "That could never happen here", you should ask yourself how many people said the same thing in Germany in the mid 1930's. Or in Soviet Russia during the height of the Cold War. Or even now in China, where exercising free speech that criticizes the government gets you tossed in jail. North Korea, anyone? Citizens of some middle eastern governments by their respective citizens also results in jail or worse.
I'm not advocating violent revolution or anarchy and I firmly believe in political discourse and the meaningful debate of ideas, but I cannot believe that it is in any way a good idea to sacrifice any Amendment to save another. Otherwise the foundation on which our democracy depends will cease to exist. In fact, it's put rather succinctly in your own signature:
Wendell Wilkie wrote:
The desire to deprive some of our citizens of their rights—economic, civic or political—has the same basic motivation as actuates the Fascist mind when it seeks to dominate whole peoples and nations.
Dude it took 50 years for the government to regulate the sale of cigarettes to children.
I am a federal civil servant. Don't tell me that I'm ignorant of how limited the government is by its own laws.
And your 'the government would never fire on its own people' idea? The same applies with the violation of laws. There isn't one 'government', with one 'interest'. There are separate bodies of government, legislative bodies both federal and local, bureaucratic bodies in a similar fashion. It was organized in this way, purposefully, by the founders, and it is a VERY UNIQUE STRUCTURE. You'll find barely any countries where localities are able to draft their own laws, take in their own taxes, and run social/health services. The UK parliament has more power than the American government does. As does the Canadian government. As do the Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, and French governments. It's telling, though, that Nazi Germany, the USSR, and China, the 3 examples of countries suddenly becoming autocratic, had never had democratic traditions in the first place. Weimar was only 15 years old when the NSDAP strangled it in its sleep.
Our federal structure means that one part of 'government' (such a monolithic phrase!) counteracts the other. When the first question asked when a policy is drafted is its legality, and whether it would be challenged by Congress, then I'm not sure how 'absolute' the 'government's' power is.
But you are right in a sense, the bureaucratic, less-accountable bodies of the American government have been getting stronger. But this has come out of a failure of the democratic portions of government to enact policy (to go back to the cigarettes regulation example, we knew that cigarettes were unhealthy starting in the 1950s, and it wasn't until the late 60s that the Surgeon General and the FDA even thought about acting on their own to deal with the problem. This was because the only people in congress who cared about tobacco were the senators of southern states) rather than some desire to deprive some of our citizens of their rights. The answer, then, is to fix our democratic bodies rather than holding to your guns worried about the possibility of the government suddenly going from one of the most deadlocked in the world to a ridiculously efficient and monolithic body that acts with the single interest of screwing its citizens over.
You want a regulated militia? Let's do it. Let's require that young men (perhaps women) enlist in the National Guard for a year or two. It'll be a great nation building exercise. That's certainly one interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. But when a right to own guns gets in the way of people's right to life, and the response by many is to advocate for MORE guns, then I start to question the necessity of the right to guns, and whether the right to own a deadly military-grade weapon wouldn't be seen by our grandchildren as similar to the 19th century right to not have a minimum wage (it was a real thing!)
Ethan Smith its a two way street: It took the government bureaucracy almost 30 years to approve the first medicines to control blood pressure in the US. But that is an argument about the inherent inefficiencies in government, another lengthy debate not exactly on topic
Let's think here with an eye to even recent history. I know in my state when the Columbine shooting happened, they placed armed police officers in the school.(they were referred to school resource officers). I'm a big fan of small government but I don't think that was a bad idea. I didn't feel that I had any more rights stripped from me than the normal mandatory attendance to a government schools and the restrictions on my freedom of speech that go along with it
At any rate posting armed guards is neither a NEW concept nor is a concept that has never been practiced in schools before. The issue should be down to the local/state level where decisions can be made to suit each individual school district, not a top-down order where the only local "control" is over how to raise the funds for these personnell
Violence in media has been a battle that has been waged perhaps as long as mass media has been in existence. Even Penny Arcade has done several comics on the absurdity of this idea and never once as a government act passed that tried to abridge the First Amendment when it comes to controversial content in media. The ratings systems on games and movies aren't attacks on the freedom of speech at all. They are tools for parents to help select the proper entertainment for their children. To borrow from an hated enemy here, Brent from PvP comics a while back said something to the effect that parenting isn't a sometimes job. As more people who grew up during the golden age of violent video games and gain voting power, there is less and less chance of the First Amendment being abridged for a reason such as this
"Tycho" (I can never get Mike or Jerry's comic persona correct) you seem to be a man of words, I'd recommend you do some research into Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Supreme Court escapades as the first person to put actual legal restrictions on the First Amendment. Once you break the ice for the greater good, it becomes easier to set the bar lower and lower for a reason to limit freedoms
Ethan Smith its a two way street: It took the government bureaucracy almost 30 years to approve the first medicines to control blood pressure in the US. But that is an argument about the inherent inefficiencies in government, another lengthy debate not exactly on topic
Let's think here with an eye to even recent history. I know in my state when the Columbine shooting happened, they placed armed police officers in the school.(they were referred to school resource officers). I'm a big fan of small government but I don't think that was a bad idea. I didn't feel that I had any more rights stripped from me than the normal mandatory attendance to a government schools and the restrictions on my freedom of speech that go along with it
At any rate posting armed guards is neither a NEW concept nor is a concept that has never been practiced in schools before. The issue should be down to the local/state level where decisions can be made to suit each individual school district, not a top-down order where the only local "control" is over how to raise the funds for these personnell
Violence in media has been a battle that has been waged perhaps as long as mass media has been in existence. Even Penny Arcade has done several comics on the absurdity of this idea and never once as a government act passed that tried to abridge the First Amendment when it comes to controversial content in media. The ratings systems on games and movies aren't attacks on the freedom of speech at all. They are tools for parents to help select the proper entertainment for their children. To borrow from an hated enemy here, Brent from PvP comics a while back said something to the effect that parenting isn't a sometimes job. As more people who grew up during the golden age of violent video games and gain voting power, there is less and less chance of the First Amendment being abridged for a reason such as this
"Tycho" (I can never get Mike or Jerry's comic persona correct) you seem to be a man of words, I'd recommend you do some research into Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Supreme Court escapades as the first person to put actual legal restrictions on the First Amendment. Once you break the ice for the greater good, it becomes easier to set the bar lower and lower for a reason to limit freedoms
Keep in mind, the average American has a 46% chance of experiencing a mental disorder at some point in their lives. Personality disorders have a 15% prevalence in the United States. Assuming we can screen for 2/3 of those with personality disorders, which is highly optimistic given that even the healthcare industry hasn't achieved that rate never mind the firearms industry, for every 100 guns sold, 5 of those are going to people who could be considered, with medical evidence, "crazy". Given these numbers, the mass proliferation of firearms really can't be considered anything but preposterous.
Alright, let's assume this is accurate. So that means that 5 guns to "crazies" and 95 to sane people... 5 to 95. Five to Ninety-Five.
That's 95 "good guy" vs. 5 "bad guys". I'm going to just let those numbers roll around in your head for a while and see if they spark any further thoughts on this topic.
I'd make getting guns significantly harder, especially assault weapons and the long-clip semi-automatics that the shooter's mother had a large stock of.
Interesting. Can anyone define "assault weapon"? Because I've been in LOTS of gun shops and NO ONE EVER has called ANY weapon behind the counter an "assault weapon". Ever.
Why? Because that is a made up term... made up to get people riled about about a TOOL that some people think looks "scary".
Back in the 80s, "assault weapon" meant fully automatic... now it means "high capacity semi automatic"... it sounds like to me that "assault weapon" ACTUALLY means "any weapon we don't like".
I would think all of the pro-gun members of this forum falling over themselves to complain about the comic as an attack on the Second Amendment would see it, but they are completely blind to the hypocritical double standard. And that is the entire point of the comic.
That's right... it's only the pro-gun crowd that is blind. We're too rabid to see what is going on in the world. We're out of touch with reality.
Let me tell you something. There is only ONE "experiment", "study", or "laboratory" that has tested the consequences of the decisions we're talking about here... and that is the laboratory of HISTORY. The anti-gun crowd wants to ignore history.
Mark my words: If semi-automatic guns are banned, we will see war on our soil within a generation. History has shown us that a disarmed citizenry ends in dead citizens.
Mark my words: If semi-automatic guns are banned, we will see war on our soil within a generation. History has shown us that a disarmed citizenry ends in dead citizens.
I feel that your knowledge of history is not entirely complete.
The only group of people I trust less than the government is the general populace.
Yet, you trust the general populace to elect the government?! Interesting. Unless you think we should change to a non-democratic government. In that case, I think we have more fundamental disagreements than merely who should be able to own what types of guns.
The main problem with the comic is that it only further conflates issues already conflated by the NRA's statement. It puts the 1st and 2nd amendment in opposition with each other and unnecessarily angers proponents of each... just like the NRA's statement. BOTH are stupid and wrong. BOTH conflate two separate and distinct issues. Perhaps that wasn't Gabe and Tycho's intent in writing this comic... and perhaps it wasn't the intent of the NRA to suggest censorship (that word was never used, nor the idea expressed... merely the possible connection between violent video games and real world violence).
There is no reason we can't have free speech AND gun rights. It is a false dichotomy intended to splinter us into competing factions.
I will support your right to free speech if you'll agree to support my right to own guns. That's called "society"... it is what makes civilized society function. I don't drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, but you can be sure that I will stand next to you in defend your right to use those things.
Why is it that we have to isolate ourselves and ONLY defend the rights we personally care about? That isn't American and that certainly isn't patriotic. It is self-serving cowardice.
One last note that I think bears pointing out: Whenever a discussion of the second amendment comes up, I always hear some anti-gun person mention "muskets". Not that anyone has done that here, but I've seen it in other places and I think it's worth clarifying before someone gets the bright idea of bringing it up here. If the second amendment is about "muskets", then the first amendment is about hand-operated printing presses. If you think the 1st amendment should be adapted to modern communications, then the 2nd amendment should likewise be adapted to modern "arms". You can't confine one amendment to the 18th century and not the other. And if you want to restrict one amendment to your subjective value system, then you must expect others to restrict the other amendment to their subjective value system.
The better answer is to not try to restrict anyone's rights... only their harmful actions.
Keep in mind, the average American has a 46% chance of experiencing a mental disorder at some point in their lives. Personality disorders have a 15% prevalence in the United States. Assuming we can screen for 2/3 of those with personality disorders, which is highly optimistic given that even the healthcare industry hasn't achieved that rate never mind the firearms industry, for every 100 guns sold, 5 of those are going to people who could be considered, with medical evidence, "crazy". Given these numbers, the mass proliferation of firearms really can't be considered anything but preposterous.
Alright, let's assume this is accurate. So that means that 5 guns to "crazies" and 95 to sane people... 5 to 95. Five to Ninety-Five.
That's 95 "good guy" vs. 5 "bad guys". I'm going to just let those numbers roll around in your head for a while and see if they spark any further thoughts on this topic.
First of all, 5% with a personality disorder, which are a rather serious type of psychiatric disorder, including things like borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia. All mental disorders was 46%, including temporary conditions like suicidal urges.
Second of all, this ain't a video game. One good guy doesn't counteract one bad guy. 100 good guys don't counteract one bad guy. Go look at what's happening in Afghanistan if you want to see what one unidentified crazy person with firearms can do amongst a group of fully armed, highly trained soldiers.
Third of all, sane doesn't mean "good guy". Gangsters are often highly rational individuals.
Finally, I'm still awaiting the great Canadian/European bloodbaths that you've promised.
First of all, 5% with a personality disorder, which are a rather serious type of psychiatric disorder, including things like borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia. All mental disorders was 46%, including temporary conditions like suicidal urges.
So now you don't want to just keep guns away from people who are "crazy" you want to keep guns away from people who have ever been or might possibly in the future become depressed, have an eating disorder, be a hoarder or become alcoholic. You gun grabbers always frame your argument as "reasonable", but when push comes to shove, you just want to totally disarmed populace. Well, again, I urge you to study history, because you clearly do not understand the consequences of those ideas.
Second of all, this ain't a video game. One good guy doesn't counteract one bad guy. 100 good guys don't counteract one bad guy. Go look at what's happening in Afghanistan if you want to see what one unidentified crazy person with firearms can do amongst a group of fully armed, highly trained soldiers.
Ah, appeal to anecdotal evidence. Yeah, one person can do a LOT of damage. But government, unafraid of a disarmed populace can do a HELL of a lot more. Again, study history.
Third of all, sane doesn't mean "good guy". Gangsters are often highly rational individuals.
True, but criminals already break the law, so why would they obey gun laws? We're going to expect that when law abiding citizens give up their guns somehow, miraculously criminals will no longer have guns?
Finally, I'm still awaiting the great Canadian/European bloodbaths that you've promised.
Study. History. Now. Stop typing, go study history. Immediately.
Here, I'll give you a few examples of disarmed citizenry ending in dead citizens to get you started:
Ottoman Turkey passed gun control (permits; government list of owners; ban on possession) in 1866 and expanded it in 1911 and 1915 -> from 1915 to 1917 over a million (1,000,000 to 1,500,000) Armenians (most Christians) were put to death by their own government
Soviet Union passed gun control (license to own; ban) in 1918, expanded in 1920 -> from 1929 to 1945 over 20 million people labeled as political opponents and people in rural farming communities were slaughtered by their own government
Nazi Germany & Occupied Europe passed gun control (registration; licensing; strict handgun laws; ban on possession) in 1928, expanded in 1938 -> from 1933 to 1945, 20 million "political opponents", Jews, Gypsies, critics, and anyone else the Nazis wanted to make an "example" out of were killed.
China passed gun control (permits; ban on private ownership) in 1935 -> from 1927 to 1949, 10 million political opponents and others were killed, which led to...
Communist China's gun control laws passed in 1951and expanded in 1957 -> 20-35 million people killed from 1949 to 1976... mostly these were "counter-revolutionaries"... that is those who opposed the communist regime in China. People who wanted freedom.
Guatemala first passed gun control (government list of owners, licensing, ban on guns, widespread confiscation) in 1932 and expanded it in 1947 and again in 1964 -> from 1960 to 1981 100,000 to 200,000 Mayans & other Indians were systematically killed by their own government.
Uganda passed gun control (registration, licensing, confiscation) in 1955 and expanded it in 1970 -> from 1971 to 1979 300,000 Christians were killed by their own government
Cambodia, similar story -> 2 million dead.
Rwanda -> 800,000 Tutsi people slaughtered
But I can just see it now: Nazis don't count because that was Hitler and we don't have to worry about that happening ever again, especially not in the US... and all the others were never mentioned during your High School or College history class, so it must be made up, right?
The fact that these parts of history are never mentioned during gun control debates causes me great concern.
If gun control does not lead to dead citizens, then why do tyrants and madmen always seek to disarm citizens before slaughtering them?
You think it can't happen here? Talk to someone who lived in a Japanese Internment Camp (i.e. concentration camp) during WWII. Talk to victims of Hurrican Katrina, when firearm registration lists were used to go house to house and disarm law abiding citizens.
Do not fool yourself into think that we live in some enlightened age of reason. Human nature is human nature and no amount of bureaucracy changes that, if anything it increases the likelihood for atrocities.
An efficient government is the greatest threat to freedom.
I feel that your knowledge of history is not entirely complete.
Good thing reality isn't based on your feelings.
But see, all you've done is list places that had/have strict gun laws and shitty governments. You haven't actually shown that if a population isn't armed they're doomed to die at the hands of their governments. Hell, one of your examples, China, continues to have very strict gun laws and they've only continued to increase individual freedoms. Then there is the long list of countries with strict gun laws that aren't shit. There is also the long list of countries with plenty of guns that are utter shit.
Soviet Union passed gun control (license to own; ban) in 1918, expanded in 1920 -> from 1929 to 1945 over 20 million people labeled as political opponents and people in rural farming communities were slaughtered by their own government
There was no Soviet Union in 1918. The Soviet Union was also a post-revolutionary regime; that is, it was literally the citizenry who had acquired guns and just overthrown their previous government in the Russian Civil War. In the analogy you've constructed here, this is you, after overthrowing the government, you proceed to ban everyone else from owning guns, and then kill all of us liberal bourgeoisie.
I'm going with Quid on this one.
Speaking of history, you should at least familiarize yourself with my post history. Calling me a "gun grabber" attributes beliefs to me that I have not expressed.
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Saint JusticeMercenaryMah-vel Baybee!!!Registered Userregular
edited December 2012
Hippofant, you are correct that the Soviet Union wasn't formed until later, but I don't see how that applies to WM's broader point about governments heavily restricting and banning guns. He gave plenty of other examples and even the example re: Soviet Union is germaine as one can see how a disarmed populace falls easy prey to genocide.
Saint Justice on
Some people play tennis, I erode the human soul. ~ Tycho
But see, all you've done is list places that had/have strict gun laws and shitty governments. You haven't actually shown that if a population isn't armed they're doomed to die at the hands of their governments. Hell, one of your examples, China, continues to have very strict gun laws and they've only continued to increase individual freedoms. Then there is the long list of countries with strict gun laws that aren't shit. There is also the long list of countries with plenty of guns that are utter shit.
Basically your claim is meaningless.
Yes, and how do we define "shitty government"? Do we wait until government become "shitty" before we start putting limitations on what it can do? Remember that Hitler was democratically elected. Germany was considered very advanced. Hitler didn't run on a campaign of "kill all the Jews and take over all Europe"... at least he didn't spin it that way... it was all very "reasonable" until the Germans started seeing the reality.
And as Quid points out the "Soviet Union" (I used that term because it was the Soviets who committed the atrocities) didn't exist when the gun control laws were first put in place (although the revolution started in 1917, it was a series of revolutions that eventually culminated in the USSR's formation). So, we pass gun control laws while under a supposedly non-shitty government (we'll not argue this point right now) and what is there to prevent the USA changing fundamentally into some other form of more "shitty" government?
This is the ENTIRE POINT: You cannot trust government to stay "non-shitty"... ESPECIALLY if the citizens are stripped of their power for armed resistance.
Yes, Hippofant (/edit sorry, got names confused), the citizens became the government and then disarmed everyone else... that is the pattern of tyrants... first gain power, then disarm your opponents. But the point is the horrific consequences of disarming the people. Armed citizens disarmed other citizens.
Isn't that what we're seeing advocated in this discussion? You want some citizens (those wearing the nifty hat of "government") to disarm other citizens.
Maybe you really like and trust Obama... I don't, but then I didn't like Bush either... they have both stripped us of our Constitutional protections. But the point is that what happens when someone you DON'T trust has the power to strip you of your right to defend yourself?!
And isn't that what the comic was about? Sacrificing one Constitutional right to protect another? With the NDAA (google it) giving the president the power to indefinitely detain US citizens without trial and suspend Habeas Corpus, how are we to resist a tyrannical government at all if we are also stripped of our right to keep and bear arms?
You don't know when and how our government might turn "shitty" and if the citizens are incapable of fighting back, your children or grandchildren will wind up living under a totalitarian regime or worse, being killed by a totalitarian regime. Don't say it can't or won't happen because it HAS happened OVER AND OVER AND OVER through HISTORY. Human nature doesn't change.
You might take comfort in the warm embrace of your big-brother friend, but I do not. I am a devout Christian, but people like Rick Santorum scare the crap out of me. I might think that homosexuality is gross and a sin, but I would never give the power to government to prevent homosexuals from living their lives as they see fit (so long as it does not harm me).
The proliferation of guns might be scary, but I am more scared by a government powerful enough to take guns away from citizens. I've studied history far too much and know the outcome of that scenario.
Maybe England and Europe are CURRENTLY having great success with gun control. But the people are far too trusting of their government... it's like they think they're above the inexorable laws of history.
But see, all you've done is list places that had/have strict gun laws and shitty governments. You haven't actually shown that if a population isn't armed they're doomed to die at the hands of their governments. Hell, one of your examples, China, continues to have very strict gun laws and they've only continued to increase individual freedoms. Then there is the long list of countries with strict gun laws that aren't shit. There is also the long list of countries with plenty of guns that are utter shit.
Basically your claim is meaningless.
Yes, and how do we define "shitty government"? Do we wait until government become "shitty" before we start putting limitations on what it can do? Remember that Hitler was democratically elected. Germany was considered very advanced. Hitler didn't run on a campaign of "kill all the Jews and take over all Europe"... at least he didn't spin it that way... it was all very "reasonable" until the Germans started seeing the reality.
And as Quid points out the "Soviet Union" (I used that term because it was the Soviets who committed the atrocities) didn't exist when the gun control laws were first put in place (although the revolution started in 1917, it was a series of revolutions that eventually culminated in the USSR's formation). So, we pass gun control laws while under a supposedly non-shitty government (we'll not argue this point right now) and what is there to prevent the USA changing fundamentally into some other form of more "shitty" government?
This is the ENTIRE POINT: You cannot trust government to stay "non-shitty"... ESPECIALLY if the citizens are stripped of their power for armed resistance.
Yes, Hippofant (/edit sorry, got names confused), the citizens became the government and then disarmed everyone else... that is the pattern of tyrants... first gain power, then disarm your opponents. But the point is the horrific consequences of disarming the people. Armed citizens disarmed other citizens.
Isn't that what we're seeing advocated in this discussion? You want some citizens (those wearing the nifty hat of "government") to disarm other citizens.
Maybe you really like and trust Obama... I don't, but then I didn't like Bush either... they have both stripped us of our Constitutional protections. But the point is that what happens when someone you DON'T trust has the power to strip you of your right to defend yourself?!
And isn't that what the comic was about? Sacrificing one Constitutional right to protect another? With the NDAA (google it) giving the president the power to indefinitely detain US citizens without trial and suspend Habeas Corpus, how are we to resist a tyrannical government at all if we are also stripped of our right to keep and bear arms?
You don't know when and how our government might turn "shitty" and if the citizens are incapable of fighting back, your children or grandchildren will wind up living under a totalitarian regime or worse, being killed by a totalitarian regime. Don't say it can't or won't happen because it HAS happened OVER AND OVER AND OVER through HISTORY. Human nature doesn't change.
You might take comfort in the warm embrace of your big-brother friend, but I do not. I am a devout Christian, but people like Rick Santorum scare the crap out of me. I might think that homosexuality is gross and a sin, but I would never give the power to government to prevent homosexuals from living their lives as they see fit (so long as it does not harm me).
The proliferation of guns might be scary, but I am more scared by a government powerful enough to take guns away from citizens. I've studied history far too much and know the outcome of that scenario.
Maybe England and Europe are CURRENTLY having great success with gun control. But the people are far too trusting of their government... it's like they think they're above the inexorable laws of history.
The United States already has limitations on it, though. As do European countries.
You're severely underestimating the power of democratic accountability and rule of law and severly overestimating the ability of an armed populace to resist tyranny. In the examples you presented, in which one did an armed population defeat the government?
This is the ENTIRE POINT: You cannot trust government to stay "non-shitty"... ESPECIALLY if the citizens are stripped of their power for armed resistance.
No the point is that you claim
History has shown us that a disarmed citizenry ends in dead citizens
History has shown us that a disarmed citizenry ends in dead citizens
And that this claim is blatantly untrue.
Right... and tell me: How many citizens at Sandy Hook were armed? How many at Virginia Tech? Seems like that portion of the disarmed citizenry ended in dead citizens.
And even if violent crime was stopped by gun control (which it isn't even remotely stopped), you'd still be ignoring the VAST amounts of history that point to my point being right. You think it will happen within a decade or two or three? Let's wait and see what happens in Europe and England. Their government has stayed benevolent, but how long will that last? How long will that last when their greatest ally (the US) is disarmed? The strength of American rights helps protect all other nations. If Americans' rights fail, the rest of the world will soon follow.
Hippofant, you are correct that the Soviet Union wasn't formed until later, but I don't see how that applies to WM's broader point about governments heavily restricting and banning guns. He gave plenty of other examples and even the example re: Soviet Union is germaine as one can see how a disarmed populace falls easy prey to genocide.
Sir, he's the one yelling at us about how we should know history. And again, the Russian Revolution was one in which the armed citizenry overthrew the pre-existing government, and THEN banned guns, and THEN proceeded to kill everyone. Not that the Romanovs were all sunshine and rainbows, but he's actually saying that we shouldn't ban guns, because if we banned guns, then it will not come to pass that people who have guns will overthrow the government, ban everybody else from having guns, and kill them all.
There's no real point in addressing anything else in that post, because it's completely devoid of historical understanding (and also obviously selective). To say that the Chinese Communists banned guns and THEN oppressed the citizenry is absurd. The notion that there was even a ban on guns in China in 1935 is absurd, given that the Chinese revolution had already begun a decade earlier. Oh, and then there were all these Japanese people running around with guns too. And we're talking about a nation that a) is nuclear, and b) was willing to run over its citizens with tanks. Are we advocating proliferation of anti-tank guns too now?
I mean... I just... my brain hurts so much. The Chinese have been violently killing each other since before the Roman Empire. The notion that gun bans ever factored into this at all is....
History has shown us that a disarmed citizenry ends in dead citizens
And that this claim is blatantly untrue.
Right... and tell me: How many citizens at Sandy Hook were armed? How many at Virginia Tech? Seems like that portion of the disarmed citizenry ended in dead citizens.
And even if violent crime was stopped by gun control (which it isn't even remotely stopped), you'd still be ignoring the VAST amounts of history that point to my point being right. You think it will happen within a decade or two or three? Let's wait and see what happens in Europe and England. Their government has stayed benevolent, but how long will that last? How long will that last when their greatest ally (the US) is disarmed? The strength of American rights helps protect all other nations. If Americans' rights fail, the rest of the world will soon follow.
Only if you ignore the vast amount of history that proves you wrong.
I mean, by your logic China should have only worsened while a gun rich country like Afghanistan a haven of peace. Except that's not the case at all.
Oh and this right here:
Their government has stayed benevolent, but how long will that last?
That is literally history proving you wrong. You don't get to hand wave it away as if only the history you want gets to count.
I would think all of the pro-gun members of this forum falling over themselves to complain about the comic as an attack on the Second Amendment would see it, but they are completely blind to the hypocritical double standard. And that is the entire point of the comic.
That's right... it's only the pro-gun crowd that is blind. We're too rabid to see what is going on in the world. We're out of touch with reality.
Let me tell you something. There is only ONE "experiment", "study", or "laboratory" that has tested the consequences of the decisions we're talking about here... and that is the laboratory of HISTORY. The anti-gun crowd wants to ignore history.
Mark my words: If semi-automatic guns are banned, we will see war on our soil within a generation. History has shown us that a disarmed citizenry ends in dead citizens.
Good job not sounding crazy in spite of yourself. You totally succeeded.
I never claimed to be unbiased in my assessment of history, I wish you were equally honest with yourself. Because you too are biased in your assessment of history. Every instance I mentioned of government sponsored genocide is written off as somehow "unique" or an exception to the rule. That is a biased assessment of history. Why are the countries that I listed the exception, but you won't consider the possibility that the countries you listed are the exception? Besides, some of the countries I listed enacted gun control laws decades before the genocide... whose to say that France, England, Germany, etc... aren't just in the pre-genocide stage?
Yes, I'll concede that gun laws might have a superficially beneficial effect on a nation... but at the risk of allowing government the power to oppress and slaughter its own citizens. The founding of this nation was based on mistrust of government and you gun grabbers want to ignore that fact and blindly put your trust in a benevolent government that would never exceed its bounds.
It is ignorant of history to claim that we can rely on the government to ban guns and refrain from becoming tyrannical. Keyword there: RELY. We can't rely on government to not screw up anything it does.
And I have limited by examples to only those nations that have committed mass murder of its population after enacting gun control laws. If we were to expand that list to include countries that have enacted oppressive policies and social regulations of their citizens, I would definitely put Great Britain, France, Modern Germany, and Modern Japan on that list.
The only reason that I do not leave the US is because as bad as things are here, everywhere else is FAR worse. That is why I fight so hard to stop things from degenerating any further here because if we lose freedom here, there is nowhere left in this world we could run to. The Germans, Cubans, Russian, Ukrainians, Chinese, etc... have fled to the US for safety from their oppressive governments. If the US people lose the rights guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, then there is no guarantee for ANY of the other amendments.
Government SHOULD be afraid of their people, not vice versa.
Guns are just one form of power. The US Government has all kinds of power, and it's already better at guns in the first place. The guns available to private citizens are basically meaningless compared to what the government and military can do right now. It's only good against other private citizens, if you can call that "good", so it's pretty much insipid to try to explain how our puny little "assault" weapons (which would be the best thing we can get) could do much to drones, or organized disruption of communication and simple siege warfare in the form of starving us out should we try anything, or just plain national guard. We ain't got shit, captain. The old rule of armed resistance doesn't matter anymore (if it ever did) if you're thinking about anything we can acquire legally, unless you are arguing that we should be able to legally acquire everything up to and including nuclear arms. In which case, you're suggesting an arms race between the citizenry and the government which can never be won. Otherwise, you may as well drop this babble, WM.
Now, you might say "But wait! The military won't shoot on citizens!", which is great because then not only are you an incredible optimist but you also have defeated your own argument.
I never claimed to be unbiased in my assessment of history, I wish you were equally honest with yourself. Because you too are biased in your assessment of history. Every instance I mentioned of government sponsored genocide is written off as somehow "unique" or an exception to the rule. That is a biased assessment of history. Why are the countries that I listed the exception, but you won't consider the possibility that the countries you listed are the exception? Besides, some of the countries I listed enacted gun control laws decades before the genocide... whose to say that France, England, Germany, etc... aren't just in the pre-genocide stage?
And what are Africa and most of the Middle East in? The mid-genocide, pre-everything-will-be-ok-because-we-now-have-guns stage?
And when were Japan, Australia, Britain, and Canada ever in the genocide stage? Or any closer than the US has ever been.
Posts
Furby, I removed the struckout section because I decided that it was unwise to personalize in that way; and for which I do apologize. And I didn't mean to imply that you're doing any less that the fullness of what's required by law. You'll note that I haven't made any complaints about legitimate gun stores that do background checks. Frankly, as someone who does all that already, I'm surprised you wouldn't be for ending paperless private sales for purely economic reasons (They have a real and unwarranted regulatory advantage in the market), or the PR reasons (It's just endless bad press for guns from this loophole every time it comes up). I meant to point out that I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of straw purchases, and I'm sure you've heard of the American/Mexican guns-for-drugs trade. These are all guns produced, shipped, and sold legally, before being funneled into the black market. It would be impossible to participate in any part of the weaponry market without also, unintentionally, feeding and enabling the illegal market as well.
I think it's extremely unlikely, but if I do ever find myself with time to kill in Pleasanton, I'll buy you a beer. Although I will try to leave before you found out why I was doing so.
No, just no to all of that. Instead of going point by point, I will just say everything you said is wrong on its face and simplify the whole post.
How fortunate for the government that people like you exist to put such blind faith in it that it will always act in your best interests. But the reality of the situation is that you can not trust the government to put the preservation of civil liberties first without some concern (and maybe a healthy dash of fear) on their part that there would be repercussions for overstepping their bounds. The 2nd Amendment was not created so the average citizen could fend off a robber or stop a home invasion. It was created with the thought in mind that it may be necessary for future generations to rise up and replace the government. There's a reason the term "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a cliche.
It would be incorrect to also assume that a lack of civilian access to military grade weapons somehow precludes the possibility of an uprising because citizens would be facing off against the military on unequal terms. It is one thing to order the military to invade another country. It is an entirely different proposal to order the military to fire on its own nation. It would be an overstatement on your part to assume that the military consists of nothing more than "yes" men and government lapdogs that will blindly follow such an order.
If some bizarre scenario came to pass and the population overthrew the government, I very much doubt that whatever replacement is created would be better given the extreme degree of political polarization we see today.
Even if any hypothetical revolutionary group had sane leadership, I imagine it would be difficult to organize a sufficiently large and influential group of people without the government catching wind and putting a stop to the whole thing. Meeting and carrying out plans in secret is a lot more difficult now than it was for the American revolutionaries.
Good thing that the government is limited by laws and the democratic system then.
The military possesses things that no gun could stop. How are you going to stop a cruise missile, a drone, a B-2 with an AR15?
'
If we get to the point where firearms are the only protection against the government we're fucked as a society anyway.
The assumption that the government will only act within a set of laws, when that same government is endowed with the power to change or remove entirely the same laws that limit it, seems extremely naive. You also seemed to quote my statement about military firing on civilians and then completely ignore it in the same turn. Read: It would be an overstatement on your part to assume that the military consists of nothing more than "yes" men and government lapdogs that will blindly follow such an order. The military, itself made up of civilian members that have civilian families, are most likely not going to turn on their homeland because a potentially irrelevant and dying government is desperately trying to maintain power.
The 2nd Amendment is the general population's insurance policy that guarantees the government remembers the line "by the people, for the people". Our democracy works because there is reasonable fear within the various levels of government that they can only go so far. Documented history exists proving that governments with absolute control over their citizenship rarely act with the well being of said citizens and creation or preservation of civil liberties in mind. And before you say "That could never happen here", you should ask yourself how many people said the same thing in Germany in the mid 1930's. Or in Soviet Russia during the height of the Cold War. Or even now in China, where exercising free speech that criticizes the government gets you tossed in jail. North Korea, anyone? Citizens of some middle eastern governments by their respective citizens also results in jail or worse.
I'm not advocating violent revolution or anarchy and I firmly believe in political discourse and the meaningful debate of ideas, but I cannot believe that it is in any way a good idea to sacrifice any Amendment to save another. Otherwise the foundation on which our democracy depends will cease to exist. In fact, it's put rather succinctly in your own signature:
Wendell Wilkie wrote:
The desire to deprive some of our citizens of their rights—economic, civic or political—has the same basic motivation as actuates the Fascist mind when it seeks to dominate whole peoples and nations.
I am a federal civil servant. Don't tell me that I'm ignorant of how limited the government is by its own laws.
And your 'the government would never fire on its own people' idea? The same applies with the violation of laws. There isn't one 'government', with one 'interest'. There are separate bodies of government, legislative bodies both federal and local, bureaucratic bodies in a similar fashion. It was organized in this way, purposefully, by the founders, and it is a VERY UNIQUE STRUCTURE. You'll find barely any countries where localities are able to draft their own laws, take in their own taxes, and run social/health services. The UK parliament has more power than the American government does. As does the Canadian government. As do the Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, and French governments. It's telling, though, that Nazi Germany, the USSR, and China, the 3 examples of countries suddenly becoming autocratic, had never had democratic traditions in the first place. Weimar was only 15 years old when the NSDAP strangled it in its sleep.
Our federal structure means that one part of 'government' (such a monolithic phrase!) counteracts the other. When the first question asked when a policy is drafted is its legality, and whether it would be challenged by Congress, then I'm not sure how 'absolute' the 'government's' power is.
But you are right in a sense, the bureaucratic, less-accountable bodies of the American government have been getting stronger. But this has come out of a failure of the democratic portions of government to enact policy (to go back to the cigarettes regulation example, we knew that cigarettes were unhealthy starting in the 1950s, and it wasn't until the late 60s that the Surgeon General and the FDA even thought about acting on their own to deal with the problem. This was because the only people in congress who cared about tobacco were the senators of southern states) rather than some desire to deprive some of our citizens of their rights. The answer, then, is to fix our democratic bodies rather than holding to your guns worried about the possibility of the government suddenly going from one of the most deadlocked in the world to a ridiculously efficient and monolithic body that acts with the single interest of screwing its citizens over.
You want a regulated militia? Let's do it. Let's require that young men (perhaps women) enlist in the National Guard for a year or two. It'll be a great nation building exercise. That's certainly one interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. But when a right to own guns gets in the way of people's right to life, and the response by many is to advocate for MORE guns, then I start to question the necessity of the right to guns, and whether the right to own a deadly military-grade weapon wouldn't be seen by our grandchildren as similar to the 19th century right to not have a minimum wage (it was a real thing!)
Let's think here with an eye to even recent history. I know in my state when the Columbine shooting happened, they placed armed police officers in the school.(they were referred to school resource officers). I'm a big fan of small government but I don't think that was a bad idea. I didn't feel that I had any more rights stripped from me than the normal mandatory attendance to a government schools and the restrictions on my freedom of speech that go along with it
At any rate posting armed guards is neither a NEW concept nor is a concept that has never been practiced in schools before. The issue should be down to the local/state level where decisions can be made to suit each individual school district, not a top-down order where the only local "control" is over how to raise the funds for these personnell
Violence in media has been a battle that has been waged perhaps as long as mass media has been in existence. Even Penny Arcade has done several comics on the absurdity of this idea and never once as a government act passed that tried to abridge the First Amendment when it comes to controversial content in media. The ratings systems on games and movies aren't attacks on the freedom of speech at all. They are tools for parents to help select the proper entertainment for their children. To borrow from an hated enemy here, Brent from PvP comics a while back said something to the effect that parenting isn't a sometimes job. As more people who grew up during the golden age of violent video games and gain voting power, there is less and less chance of the First Amendment being abridged for a reason such as this
"Tycho" (I can never get Mike or Jerry's comic persona correct) you seem to be a man of words, I'd recommend you do some research into Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Supreme Court escapades as the first person to put actual legal restrictions on the First Amendment. Once you break the ice for the greater good, it becomes easier to set the bar lower and lower for a reason to limit freedoms
Let's think here with an eye to even recent history. I know in my state when the Columbine shooting happened, they placed armed police officers in the school.(they were referred to school resource officers). I'm a big fan of small government but I don't think that was a bad idea. I didn't feel that I had any more rights stripped from me than the normal mandatory attendance to a government schools and the restrictions on my freedom of speech that go along with it
At any rate posting armed guards is neither a NEW concept nor is a concept that has never been practiced in schools before. The issue should be down to the local/state level where decisions can be made to suit each individual school district, not a top-down order where the only local "control" is over how to raise the funds for these personnell
Violence in media has been a battle that has been waged perhaps as long as mass media has been in existence. Even Penny Arcade has done several comics on the absurdity of this idea and never once as a government act passed that tried to abridge the First Amendment when it comes to controversial content in media. The ratings systems on games and movies aren't attacks on the freedom of speech at all. They are tools for parents to help select the proper entertainment for their children. To borrow from an hated enemy here, Brent from PvP comics a while back said something to the effect that parenting isn't a sometimes job. As more people who grew up during the golden age of violent video games and gain voting power, there is less and less chance of the First Amendment being abridged for a reason such as this
"Tycho" (I can never get Mike or Jerry's comic persona correct) you seem to be a man of words, I'd recommend you do some research into Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Supreme Court escapades as the first person to put actual legal restrictions on the First Amendment. Once you break the ice for the greater good, it becomes easier to set the bar lower and lower for a reason to limit freedoms
Alright, let's assume this is accurate. So that means that 5 guns to "crazies" and 95 to sane people... 5 to 95. Five to Ninety-Five.
That's 95 "good guy" vs. 5 "bad guys". I'm going to just let those numbers roll around in your head for a while and see if they spark any further thoughts on this topic.
Interesting. Can anyone define "assault weapon"? Because I've been in LOTS of gun shops and NO ONE EVER has called ANY weapon behind the counter an "assault weapon". Ever.
Why? Because that is a made up term... made up to get people riled about about a TOOL that some people think looks "scary".
Back in the 80s, "assault weapon" meant fully automatic... now it means "high capacity semi automatic"... it sounds like to me that "assault weapon" ACTUALLY means "any weapon we don't like".
That's right... it's only the pro-gun crowd that is blind. We're too rabid to see what is going on in the world. We're out of touch with reality.
Let me tell you something. There is only ONE "experiment", "study", or "laboratory" that has tested the consequences of the decisions we're talking about here... and that is the laboratory of HISTORY. The anti-gun crowd wants to ignore history.
Mark my words: If semi-automatic guns are banned, we will see war on our soil within a generation. History has shown us that a disarmed citizenry ends in dead citizens.
I feel that your knowledge of history is not entirely complete.
Can you show me how any of the recent mass shootings were the result of private gun sales? Any?
Yet, you trust the general populace to elect the government?! Interesting. Unless you think we should change to a non-democratic government. In that case, I think we have more fundamental disagreements than merely who should be able to own what types of guns.
Translation: The people most dangerous to my Constitutional rights are people who want to keep their Constitutional rights.
Frightening.
Good thing reality isn't based on your feelings.
There is no reason we can't have free speech AND gun rights. It is a false dichotomy intended to splinter us into competing factions.
I will support your right to free speech if you'll agree to support my right to own guns. That's called "society"... it is what makes civilized society function. I don't drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, but you can be sure that I will stand next to you in defend your right to use those things.
Why is it that we have to isolate ourselves and ONLY defend the rights we personally care about? That isn't American and that certainly isn't patriotic. It is self-serving cowardice.
One last note that I think bears pointing out: Whenever a discussion of the second amendment comes up, I always hear some anti-gun person mention "muskets". Not that anyone has done that here, but I've seen it in other places and I think it's worth clarifying before someone gets the bright idea of bringing it up here. If the second amendment is about "muskets", then the first amendment is about hand-operated printing presses. If you think the 1st amendment should be adapted to modern communications, then the 2nd amendment should likewise be adapted to modern "arms". You can't confine one amendment to the 18th century and not the other. And if you want to restrict one amendment to your subjective value system, then you must expect others to restrict the other amendment to their subjective value system.
The better answer is to not try to restrict anyone's rights... only their harmful actions.
First of all, 5% with a personality disorder, which are a rather serious type of psychiatric disorder, including things like borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia. All mental disorders was 46%, including temporary conditions like suicidal urges.
Second of all, this ain't a video game. One good guy doesn't counteract one bad guy. 100 good guys don't counteract one bad guy. Go look at what's happening in Afghanistan if you want to see what one unidentified crazy person with firearms can do amongst a group of fully armed, highly trained soldiers.
Third of all, sane doesn't mean "good guy". Gangsters are often highly rational individuals.
Finally, I'm still awaiting the great Canadian/European bloodbaths that you've promised.
So now you don't want to just keep guns away from people who are "crazy" you want to keep guns away from people who have ever been or might possibly in the future become depressed, have an eating disorder, be a hoarder or become alcoholic. You gun grabbers always frame your argument as "reasonable", but when push comes to shove, you just want to totally disarmed populace. Well, again, I urge you to study history, because you clearly do not understand the consequences of those ideas.
Ah, appeal to anecdotal evidence. Yeah, one person can do a LOT of damage. But government, unafraid of a disarmed populace can do a HELL of a lot more. Again, study history.
True, but criminals already break the law, so why would they obey gun laws? We're going to expect that when law abiding citizens give up their guns somehow, miraculously criminals will no longer have guns?
Study. History. Now. Stop typing, go study history. Immediately.
Here, I'll give you a few examples of disarmed citizenry ending in dead citizens to get you started:
Ottoman Turkey passed gun control (permits; government list of owners; ban on possession) in 1866 and expanded it in 1911 and 1915 -> from 1915 to 1917 over a million (1,000,000 to 1,500,000) Armenians (most Christians) were put to death by their own government
Soviet Union passed gun control (license to own; ban) in 1918, expanded in 1920 -> from 1929 to 1945 over 20 million people labeled as political opponents and people in rural farming communities were slaughtered by their own government
Nazi Germany & Occupied Europe passed gun control (registration; licensing; strict handgun laws; ban on possession) in 1928, expanded in 1938 -> from 1933 to 1945, 20 million "political opponents", Jews, Gypsies, critics, and anyone else the Nazis wanted to make an "example" out of were killed.
China passed gun control (permits; ban on private ownership) in 1935 -> from 1927 to 1949, 10 million political opponents and others were killed, which led to...
Communist China's gun control laws passed in 1951and expanded in 1957 -> 20-35 million people killed from 1949 to 1976... mostly these were "counter-revolutionaries"... that is those who opposed the communist regime in China. People who wanted freedom.
Guatemala first passed gun control (government list of owners, licensing, ban on guns, widespread confiscation) in 1932 and expanded it in 1947 and again in 1964 -> from 1960 to 1981 100,000 to 200,000 Mayans & other Indians were systematically killed by their own government.
Uganda passed gun control (registration, licensing, confiscation) in 1955 and expanded it in 1970 -> from 1971 to 1979 300,000 Christians were killed by their own government
Cambodia, similar story -> 2 million dead.
Rwanda -> 800,000 Tutsi people slaughtered
But I can just see it now: Nazis don't count because that was Hitler and we don't have to worry about that happening ever again, especially not in the US... and all the others were never mentioned during your High School or College history class, so it must be made up, right?
The fact that these parts of history are never mentioned during gun control debates causes me great concern.
If gun control does not lead to dead citizens, then why do tyrants and madmen always seek to disarm citizens before slaughtering them?
You think it can't happen here? Talk to someone who lived in a Japanese Internment Camp (i.e. concentration camp) during WWII. Talk to victims of Hurrican Katrina, when firearm registration lists were used to go house to house and disarm law abiding citizens.
Do not fool yourself into think that we live in some enlightened age of reason. Human nature is human nature and no amount of bureaucracy changes that, if anything it increases the likelihood for atrocities.
An efficient government is the greatest threat to freedom.
But see, all you've done is list places that had/have strict gun laws and shitty governments. You haven't actually shown that if a population isn't armed they're doomed to die at the hands of their governments. Hell, one of your examples, China, continues to have very strict gun laws and they've only continued to increase individual freedoms. Then there is the long list of countries with strict gun laws that aren't shit. There is also the long list of countries with plenty of guns that are utter shit.
Basically your claim is meaningless.
There was no Soviet Union in 1918. The Soviet Union was also a post-revolutionary regime; that is, it was literally the citizenry who had acquired guns and just overthrown their previous government in the Russian Civil War. In the analogy you've constructed here, this is you, after overthrowing the government, you proceed to ban everyone else from owning guns, and then kill all of us liberal bourgeoisie.
I'm going with Quid on this one.
Speaking of history, you should at least familiarize yourself with my post history. Calling me a "gun grabber" attributes beliefs to me that I have not expressed.
Yes, and how do we define "shitty government"? Do we wait until government become "shitty" before we start putting limitations on what it can do? Remember that Hitler was democratically elected. Germany was considered very advanced. Hitler didn't run on a campaign of "kill all the Jews and take over all Europe"... at least he didn't spin it that way... it was all very "reasonable" until the Germans started seeing the reality.
And as Quid points out the "Soviet Union" (I used that term because it was the Soviets who committed the atrocities) didn't exist when the gun control laws were first put in place (although the revolution started in 1917, it was a series of revolutions that eventually culminated in the USSR's formation). So, we pass gun control laws while under a supposedly non-shitty government (we'll not argue this point right now) and what is there to prevent the USA changing fundamentally into some other form of more "shitty" government?
This is the ENTIRE POINT: You cannot trust government to stay "non-shitty"... ESPECIALLY if the citizens are stripped of their power for armed resistance.
Yes, Hippofant (/edit sorry, got names confused), the citizens became the government and then disarmed everyone else... that is the pattern of tyrants... first gain power, then disarm your opponents. But the point is the horrific consequences of disarming the people. Armed citizens disarmed other citizens.
Isn't that what we're seeing advocated in this discussion? You want some citizens (those wearing the nifty hat of "government") to disarm other citizens.
Maybe you really like and trust Obama... I don't, but then I didn't like Bush either... they have both stripped us of our Constitutional protections. But the point is that what happens when someone you DON'T trust has the power to strip you of your right to defend yourself?!
And isn't that what the comic was about? Sacrificing one Constitutional right to protect another? With the NDAA (google it) giving the president the power to indefinitely detain US citizens without trial and suspend Habeas Corpus, how are we to resist a tyrannical government at all if we are also stripped of our right to keep and bear arms?
You don't know when and how our government might turn "shitty" and if the citizens are incapable of fighting back, your children or grandchildren will wind up living under a totalitarian regime or worse, being killed by a totalitarian regime. Don't say it can't or won't happen because it HAS happened OVER AND OVER AND OVER through HISTORY. Human nature doesn't change.
You might take comfort in the warm embrace of your big-brother friend, but I do not. I am a devout Christian, but people like Rick Santorum scare the crap out of me. I might think that homosexuality is gross and a sin, but I would never give the power to government to prevent homosexuals from living their lives as they see fit (so long as it does not harm me).
The proliferation of guns might be scary, but I am more scared by a government powerful enough to take guns away from citizens. I've studied history far too much and know the outcome of that scenario.
Maybe England and Europe are CURRENTLY having great success with gun control. But the people are far too trusting of their government... it's like they think they're above the inexorable laws of history.
Yes, and how do we define "shitty government"? Do we wait until government become "shitty" before we start putting limitations on what it can do? Remember that Hitler was democratically elected. Germany was considered very advanced. Hitler didn't run on a campaign of "kill all the Jews and take over all Europe"... at least he didn't spin it that way... it was all very "reasonable" until the Germans started seeing the reality.
And as Quid points out the "Soviet Union" (I used that term because it was the Soviets who committed the atrocities) didn't exist when the gun control laws were first put in place (although the revolution started in 1917, it was a series of revolutions that eventually culminated in the USSR's formation). So, we pass gun control laws while under a supposedly non-shitty government (we'll not argue this point right now) and what is there to prevent the USA changing fundamentally into some other form of more "shitty" government?
This is the ENTIRE POINT: You cannot trust government to stay "non-shitty"... ESPECIALLY if the citizens are stripped of their power for armed resistance.
Yes, Hippofant (/edit sorry, got names confused), the citizens became the government and then disarmed everyone else... that is the pattern of tyrants... first gain power, then disarm your opponents. But the point is the horrific consequences of disarming the people. Armed citizens disarmed other citizens.
Isn't that what we're seeing advocated in this discussion? You want some citizens (those wearing the nifty hat of "government") to disarm other citizens.
Maybe you really like and trust Obama... I don't, but then I didn't like Bush either... they have both stripped us of our Constitutional protections. But the point is that what happens when someone you DON'T trust has the power to strip you of your right to defend yourself?!
And isn't that what the comic was about? Sacrificing one Constitutional right to protect another? With the NDAA (google it) giving the president the power to indefinitely detain US citizens without trial and suspend Habeas Corpus, how are we to resist a tyrannical government at all if we are also stripped of our right to keep and bear arms?
You don't know when and how our government might turn "shitty" and if the citizens are incapable of fighting back, your children or grandchildren will wind up living under a totalitarian regime or worse, being killed by a totalitarian regime. Don't say it can't or won't happen because it HAS happened OVER AND OVER AND OVER through HISTORY. Human nature doesn't change.
You might take comfort in the warm embrace of your big-brother friend, but I do not. I am a devout Christian, but people like Rick Santorum scare the crap out of me. I might think that homosexuality is gross and a sin, but I would never give the power to government to prevent homosexuals from living their lives as they see fit (so long as it does not harm me).
The proliferation of guns might be scary, but I am more scared by a government powerful enough to take guns away from citizens. I've studied history far too much and know the outcome of that scenario.
Maybe England and Europe are CURRENTLY having great success with gun control. But the people are far too trusting of their government... it's like they think they're above the inexorable laws of history.
You're severely underestimating the power of democratic accountability and rule of law and severly overestimating the ability of an armed populace to resist tyranny. In the examples you presented, in which one did an armed population defeat the government?
No the point is that you claim
And that this claim is blatantly untrue.
Right... and tell me: How many citizens at Sandy Hook were armed? How many at Virginia Tech? Seems like that portion of the disarmed citizenry ended in dead citizens.
And even if violent crime was stopped by gun control (which it isn't even remotely stopped), you'd still be ignoring the VAST amounts of history that point to my point being right. You think it will happen within a decade or two or three? Let's wait and see what happens in Europe and England. Their government has stayed benevolent, but how long will that last? How long will that last when their greatest ally (the US) is disarmed? The strength of American rights helps protect all other nations. If Americans' rights fail, the rest of the world will soon follow.
Sir, he's the one yelling at us about how we should know history. And again, the Russian Revolution was one in which the armed citizenry overthrew the pre-existing government, and THEN banned guns, and THEN proceeded to kill everyone. Not that the Romanovs were all sunshine and rainbows, but he's actually saying that we shouldn't ban guns, because if we banned guns, then it will not come to pass that people who have guns will overthrow the government, ban everybody else from having guns, and kill them all.
There's no real point in addressing anything else in that post, because it's completely devoid of historical understanding (and also obviously selective). To say that the Chinese Communists banned guns and THEN oppressed the citizenry is absurd. The notion that there was even a ban on guns in China in 1935 is absurd, given that the Chinese revolution had already begun a decade earlier. Oh, and then there were all these Japanese people running around with guns too. And we're talking about a nation that a) is nuclear, and b) was willing to run over its citizens with tanks. Are we advocating proliferation of anti-tank guns too now?
I mean... I just... my brain hurts so much. The Chinese have been violently killing each other since before the Roman Empire. The notion that gun bans ever factored into this at all is....
Only if you ignore the vast amount of history that proves you wrong.
I mean, by your logic China should have only worsened while a gun rich country like Afghanistan a haven of peace. Except that's not the case at all.
Oh and this right here:
That is literally history proving you wrong. You don't get to hand wave it away as if only the history you want gets to count.
Good job not sounding crazy in spite of yourself. You totally succeeded.
We all know the Middle East and Africa are the epitome of a free and safe societies.
Yes, I'll concede that gun laws might have a superficially beneficial effect on a nation... but at the risk of allowing government the power to oppress and slaughter its own citizens. The founding of this nation was based on mistrust of government and you gun grabbers want to ignore that fact and blindly put your trust in a benevolent government that would never exceed its bounds.
It is ignorant of history to claim that we can rely on the government to ban guns and refrain from becoming tyrannical. Keyword there: RELY. We can't rely on government to not screw up anything it does.
And I have limited by examples to only those nations that have committed mass murder of its population after enacting gun control laws. If we were to expand that list to include countries that have enacted oppressive policies and social regulations of their citizens, I would definitely put Great Britain, France, Modern Germany, and Modern Japan on that list.
The only reason that I do not leave the US is because as bad as things are here, everywhere else is FAR worse. That is why I fight so hard to stop things from degenerating any further here because if we lose freedom here, there is nowhere left in this world we could run to. The Germans, Cubans, Russian, Ukrainians, Chinese, etc... have fled to the US for safety from their oppressive governments. If the US people lose the rights guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, then there is no guarantee for ANY of the other amendments.
Government SHOULD be afraid of their people, not vice versa.
Now, you might say "But wait! The military won't shoot on citizens!", which is great because then not only are you an incredible optimist but you also have defeated your own argument.
And what are Africa and most of the Middle East in? The mid-genocide, pre-everything-will-be-ok-because-we-now-have-guns stage?
And when were Japan, Australia, Britain, and Canada ever in the genocide stage? Or any closer than the US has ever been.