A bit of background: My family owns guns, many of which are heirlooms passed down through my dad's side. My dad has a special license to carry a concealed handgun on an airplane because he's a pilot, and his company doesn't want him unarmed should terrorists attempt to take over. Both my parents are ex-military and we often go to an outdoor shooting range when the weather is nice. I enjoy shooting guns—there's not really anything more satisfying than shooting a ping-pong ball off a golf tee at fifty yards.

However, my parents instilled in me from a very young age that guns are deadly weapons that you always handle as if loaded, and you never, ever point it at anything you don't intend to shoot. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for everyone; I can't help but think of those stories you hear on the news about toddlers accidentally shooting themselves because a parent left a loaded handgun unattended somewhere a small child could easily reach, instead of unloaded and locked away in a safe.

I knew gun laws were lax in America, but I didn't really know how lax they were until I took a look at my own state's laws.

"No state permit is required for the possession of a rifle, shotgun, or handgun."

I'm sorry, what? What? Are you kidding me?

Seriously, just look at that chart at the top of the page. It's quite honestly terrifying.

I can't wait to move to England.

Again, I'm not much for debate on the Board. My opinions are basically the polar opposite of everyone on here, I think, and there's only one of me and many of you, so any defense I try to make will probably be rather rough and frazzled.

Also, who knows? Maybe more gunmen at Pulse wouldn't have helped at all. Maybe the crossfire would have killed as many as it saved; we'll never know. I think more would have helped, but I'm not an expert.

In any case, I'm one of the ultra-right wingers ST mentioned down below. Guns are a very nice safeguard against tyranny. Molon labe.

-Alleb

P.S. You guys can keep talking about it--obviously--but this is the last I'll say on this thread.

But... well... there's that one phrase that Spider-Man constantly brings up: with great power comes great responsibility.

Firearms are a great power. But not everyone is responsible enough to handle that kind of power. People are prone to fits of passion, or darkest despair, and easy access to firearms makes those moments disastrous.

Unfortunately... I think that wanting to do anything about it is just wishful thinking. America's government is never going to take guns away from civilians, and we'll never have the world peace necessary to make guns obsolete.

Putting them into terms I can actually test for, I see two hypotheses in your post:

1/ After a certain point, increased number of guns decreases the number of firearm-related homicides, and possibly the total number of homicides.

2/ (After a certain point,) increased number of guns decreases the number of rapes.

Here's how I propose to test them:

I will plot graphs of countries for which these data are available. I will sanitise the dataset by removing Africa and South America entirely - a lot of those countries, the large numbers of guns are in the hands of paramilitary groups.

I know Wikipedia has the data for hypothesis one (I used it in this post). I don't know whether it has rape data, but I'm guessing I can find it (which is why I chose rape over thefts-in-dark-alleys). I don't know what the numbers will say.

Do you agree with the hypotheses as stated? I don't want to misrepresent you or the data. I'll wait on your response before looking at/for it.

hS

I *am safer* -- my children *are safer* -- living in a country where we cannot buy guns to defend ourselves.

Partly because: owning a firearm doesn't make you a *competent* marksman. It can't teach you to deal with the panic of an ambush situation. It doesn't replace drilling and training that people receive in the military or law enforcement. It doesn't grant you the protective equipment that they need to survive the standoff. Civvy good guys with guns are a VERY POOR line of defence.

Partly because: a lot of good guys with guns use them to kill their families in the heat of an angry moment.

Partly because: a lot of good guys with guns use them to kill *themselves* in a moment of despair.

Partly because: humans are massively accident-prone, and if you have an accident with a gun, you stand a good chance of doing severe or fatal damage. I knew somebody whose 12-year-old grandson accidentally shot and killed his best friend while hunting squirrels. Worth the thrill of the sport?

Partly because: criminals appear to be essentially lazy (gosh, really?). Most are not mob bosses plugged into the black market. If they can't pick up a gun with their weekly shop, they'll use a knife instead . . . and while that's obviously terrible, I'll take my chances with a knife over a gun any day.

Wild horses could not drag me back to the US. The stats are pretty clear. Increased numbers of people-killing-machines => increased numbers of dead people.

I find it curious that you cast your hypothetical alleyway attacker with a knife and not a gun. What happens if you both have guns? What happens if he has an automatic weapon and you have a single-action?

Is the situation not far less deadly-dangerous, both for you and any innocents within firing range, if he DOES only have a knife, and you perhaps also have a knife and some self-defense skills, and resort first to screaming as loud as you can and running away without the danger of being shot at?

~Neshomeh

To wit, that it's really hard to get illegal guns, not to mention, y'know, illegal. You can run afoul of the black market; you can fall for a police sting; etc etc. Disarming the general populace would also reduce the amount of criminals with guns simply because it will be harder for them to get guns. You can see the effects of such an environment right here in Israel — there's a reason the recent terrorism wave is a knife-and-car wave and not a shooting wave. Even the Sarona attack last week was performed with an improvised weapon. If Israel would've been like the States, we wouldn't be looking at four dead, six wounded and two wounded terrorists; we've been looking at ten times those numbers.

...is that they have an incredibly powerful gun lobby that essentially has the government by the throat. The National Rifle Association is backed by the USA's gun culture and is incredibly difficult to ignore. They are the ones pushing the rhetoric where a safe America is an armed America-- a statement that is about as inane as saying "if you stab everyone you meet, you'll never have to worry about getting stabbed yourself". After all, a little bit of mass paranoia never hurt anyone, eh? Furthermore, what could possibly go wrong when you have a bunch of angry people and some easily-accessible weapons?

I find it interesting that there's such a vehement defence of easy access to guns after every mass shooting -- it's quite telling of what the real priorities are here: who cares about the dead people? They're going to take away my guns and my rights!

Etc, etc.

I went and dug around in /r/The_Donald. I found that they share two mods with /r/TheRedPill, which kinda made me lose any respect I had for them (which wasn't a lot to begin with).

Seems like these mass murderers are actually learning from each others' mistakes. Their entire plans, everything that happened, is in the news.

If anything gives me a WWII vibe, it's Trump. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

"You can have my gun... when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

"Your terms are acceptable." *crunchy alien noises*

Either that or when the NRA gets their mind out of the muzzle

Is that I won't say what he did was right. It's wrong to just discriminate against people like that, and it's worse to kill because of that discrimination. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to understand. Everybody has motivations. Even the most hateful or most insane of people have their reasons for doing things, and even if we don't agree with what they're doing or why they're doing it, it's important to understand why they're doing it, if only to keep it from happening again. It's wrong for something like this to happen. It's worse to let it blind us to the fact that this was a human being, with thoughts and feelings and reasons for doing everything he did who did this. It's worse to allow this to cause us to hate someone without even trying to comprehend who they are, even if they are dead. When something like this happens, it's easy to put yourself in the shoes of the victims. It's a lot harder to put yourself in the shoes of the perpetrator, but it's something that must be done. After all, the reason this happened could be said to be because this person didn't understand that just because love is between two people of the same sex, that doesn't change the fact that it is love. If we allow ourselves to give up our understanding, then we become monsters. We won't condone what he did, because it was wrong. We will understand him, because to not do so would be to become him.