The gun thing - a question from a European

[LilyM]

I don’t recall reading any posts here about people deciding to brandish weapons against those who voted for a different candidate…nor do I recall reading about any pathological fear of neighbors…only fear of not being able to protect themselves against an armed criminal who wants to hurt them.

Uh, you clearly haven’t been reading the same thread as I have. There have been plenty of references to defence against government tyranny. And some harking back to the Civil War which didn’t have to do with self-defence against armed criminals at all.

Not to mention one particularly interesting reference to granddad to whom literally every unknown person approaching the property was a potential dangerous criminal to be shot at unless and until they proved themselves otherwise. Apologies to Zooey, who I love dearly and respect enormously, but that sounds a bit crazy. I mean what if that unknown person was a victim of some horrible crime fleeing to you for protection and unable to speak from terror, or because they were being followed? And what about St Paul’s warning never to neglect to be hospitable to strangers - shooting at said strangers certainly is incompatible.

 

[ProVobis]

the kind our forefathers left oppressive countries for and/or gave their own lives in order to have for themselves or for their descendants .

Well that’s kind of interesting too. According to wiki

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was heavily influenced by the English Bill of Rights 1689, which restricted the right of the English Crown to interfere with the personal right to bear arms. The 1689 Bill of Rights restricted the right of the monarch to have a standing army and to interfere with the personal right to bear arms. It did not create a new right to have arms, but instead rescinded and deplored acts of the deposed King James II which extended the right to Catholics and Protestant dissenters in addition to upholding prior legislation that limited the ownership of arms to certain social classes. The English Bill of Rights firmly established that regulating the right to bear arms was one of the powers of Parliament, and did not belong to the monarch.

Sir William Blackstone wrote in the eighteenth century, at a time when there were no police or forces of law enforcement, about the right to have arms being auxiliary to the “natural right of resistance and self-preservation”, but conceded that the right was subject to their suitability and allowance by law.

The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms

 

[neophyte]

neophyte;10164889:

There’s no danger if people who aren’t criminals or crazy have guns, no matter what kind of guns they are. And since most people are not

criminals or crazy there’s a net reduction in violent crime as rates of gun ownership and concealed carry go up. This is not conjecture, it’s a fact borne out by objective evidence.

Why would you need to prevent law-abiding citizens from being able to defend themselves? Why would you want to do so?
Because the chances that a psychologically unstable individual or child might get to them or that the law-abiding citizen will snap if he hasn’t been thoroughly psychologically evaluated or that he will get drunk or just very angry are higher than the chances of an evil US government starting to kill people randomly, or of the law-abiding citizen being attacked by a small army.

So you’re going to completely ignore the objective evidence that proves that more guns = less crime. You’re even going to ignore the unarguable evidence that innocent people all over the world are killed by rioters every year. rolleyes

 

[LightBound]

Uh, you clearly haven’t been reading the same thread as I have. There have been plenty of references to defence against government tyranny. And some harking back to the Civil War which didn’t have to do with self-defence against armed criminals at all.

Not to mention one particularly interesting reference to granddad to whom literally every unknown person approaching the property was a potential dangerous criminal to be shot at unless and until they proved themselves otherwise. Apologies to Zooey, who I love dearly and respect enormously, but that sounds a bit crazy. I mean what if that unknown person was a victim of some horrible crime fleeing to you for protection and unable to speak from terror, or because they were being followed? And what about St Paul’s warning never to neglect to be hospitable to strangers - shooting at said strangers certainly is incompatible.

Okay Lily, I see the other posts. But that’s not what the majority of them are stating and it’s not what I’m talking about.

I seriously doubt someone who is the victim of a horrible crime is going to break into my home and threaten my family with harm or come up and attempt to assault me on the street in their attempt to get help. If they did, should I then let myself be raped, hurt, or killed? I think not!!!

I’m going to leave this thread for now- not because I think I’m wrong in my beliefs (which I know I’m not ) , but because of what I said earlier- those who live in countries other than the US cannot begin to comprehend things from our perspectives- just as we cannot see things from yours.

 

[Litcrit]

Thanks. When I think of the S.E. Balkans I think of WWI, WWII, and the Cold War and all of the weaponry utilized in struggles to gain and maintain power.** Historical exposure to weaponry would thus, in my expectation, be considered seen as fairly norma**l. Your clarification was helpful.
Here in the States, seeing guns daily is normal for me as the police officers openly carry. Exposure to this tends to normalize it as an expectation. When I don’t see guns, I assume guns, Whenever I see a marked car or uniform.
While I less frequently see civilians with guns, (I’m lumping police and military here) the idea that people can own and do own guns is something I have taken for granted as part of our culture, history, and political system. This also seems, due to experience in this country, normalized behavior.
I imagine we both might experience culture shock adjusting to the differing expectations we might experience elsewhere.

Interesting. When I think of WWI and WWII, I think of relatively distant history that I certainly haven’t witnessed. My grandparents did, however, but they never used guns, nor were they ever involved in any wars. When I think of guns in the context of history, I think of them as I do of horse carriages - but, of course, guns are very much still used, just not around me.

Yes, I experience culture shock on CAF regularly, but I usually find it fun and fascinating. Many threads I’ve started ask questions about the different cultures here.

Thank you for your detailed response. This was helpful.

 

[Litcrit]

So you’re going to completely ignore the objective evidence that proves that more guns = less crime. You’re even going to ignore the unarguable evidence that innocent people all over the world are killed by rioters every year. rolleyes

I have to ask you to provide this objective evidence so I can consider it.

• those who live in countries other than the US cannot begin to comprehend things from our perspectives- just as we cannot see things from yours.

We can at least try to understand what that perspective is. We don’t necessarily have to convince each other of anything.

 

[oldcatholicguy]

To be clear, I’m not advocating banning all weapons for all people. Just: strict checks on people who want them, including psych evaluation and taking into consideration risk factors, and banning weapons that can kill multiple persons in a second or less.

That sounds reasonable to me and my question was simply why it seemed so problematic to US people here. I still don’t quite understand, but my desire to has dwindled somewhat.

Weapons that can kill multiple individuals in a second or less are already banned or heavily regulated (this of course does not count the freak magic bb moments). I don’t understand why Europeans think we are all walking around with high caliber automatic weapons with exploding shells over here.

 

[Zooey]

Well, this is not snarky, just honest: you’ve actually been here. Please, really don’t inflict your guns on us again.

I don’t like to disclose my location precisely because I don’t want to talk about it here, but I couldn’t help it this time.

Good question.

So, if a gun-wielding man in a house is possibly battering women or raping children or cooking meth, the evil officials and bureaucrats should also know they’ll get shot if they approach and just leave the house alone? How do you know which gun-wielding citizens who won’t let, say, a police officer in are law-abiding, and which just haven’t been convicted yet, if everyone just threatens to shoot the cop that comes near?

This sounds like completely paranoid anarchy to me.

To me, it sounds like a recipe for fewer lunatics running around with guns. (Mind you, some of those lunatics may well have stopped running when they took a round chest-high. Does anybody besides me think that CT would be a much better place to live if, say, the school principal who gave her life in defense of those children, would have had an assault rifle of her own? And used it on Lanza? Wouldn’t we all be talking about something else, if poor Mrs Lanza had had her gun in her hand when her son came in her room, & she shot him before he could kill her–much less others?

Because the chances that a psychologically unstable individual or child might get to them or that the law-abiding citizen will snap if he hasn’t been thoroughly psychologically evaluated or that he will get drunk or just very angry are higher than the chances of an evil US government starting to kill people randomly, or of the law-abiding citizen being attacked by a small army.

Piffle.
Psahw!
Pfui!!!
If, say, my:thumbsup: beloved great-grandfather (who was a Baptist pastor, by the bye), had been visiting the school,I know** he** would have taken Lanza down before that particular loon got a shot off.

It takes a lot of planning, time, and effort to do something like this. It’s not something a child or a random psycho or a drunk or temporarily insane person can do. With guns, which were designed to kill, all it takes is pulling a trigger.

Making explosives FROM household items is difficult to prevent, but do we have to have guns, instantly ready to kill and easy to use, AS household items?

Baloney. Just this past summer, one of my friends narrowly missed being at a Walmart when some woman put together explosives in the ladies’ room. Out of stuff she bought from the pharmacy department & the groceries.

I would say folks that are posting on here in defense of our right to own guns probably didn’t vote for the candidates that seek to take this right away.

Dang straight. Never have, never will. You try to take the right to keep & bear arms away, you just lost my vote forever. For anything. Even dog-catcher. Or toilet-bowl scrubber.

 

[Zooey]

Apologies to Zooey, who I love dearly and respect enormously, but that sounds a bit crazy. I mean what if that unknown person was a victim of some horrible crime fleeing to you for protection and unable to speak from terror, or because they were being followed? And what about St Paul’s warning never to neglect to be hospitable to strangers - shooting at said strangers certainly is incompatible.

:grouphug:
I am sure those folks often showed up.[Check his day job in my previuos post, just above.] They were safe in his house precisely because their pursuers were NOT safe, not anywhere near him (nor his wife & nor his offspring).

 

[neophyte]

I have to ask you to provide this objective evidence so I can consider it.

You could start with the work by John Lott (e.g., law.uchicago.edu/files/files/41.lott_.final_.pdf , or the full version at kc3.com/pdf/lott.pdf) or John Kleck (saf.org/lawreviews/kleckandgertz1.htm). Also, a book entitled The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy (David Kopel, 1992) is very well researched; you can get it at abebooks.com for just a few bucks.

As a native Floridian who was there when they eased concealed-carry, it certainly resulted in a significant reduction in crime rates. I can’t lay my hands on the data at the moment, but it was funny how suddenly most of the carjackings were happening to people who’d just arrived at the airport. When the perps got busted, to a man they said they were casing flyers because they were the only people they were sure had no guns. It drove the gun control advocates nuts, because it proved them wrong.

I might also direct your attention to the countless cases of private citizens needing to defend themselves from looters and rioters during, for example, the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, the aftermath of hurricane David in South Florida, or any number of similar events. I imagine that you might have had one or two in the Balkans at some time.

Perhaps where you live the government has a legal obligation to protect every individual from crime, can be sued for not doing so, and in fact effectively prevent the commission of all violent crime. It’s not like that here. In the United States, the government has no obligation to protect anyone and cannot be held liable if they don’t show up in response to a call for help. The bottom line is that it’s the responsibility of the police to clean up the mess after a crime’s been committed, and until they get there a victim is completely on his own.

And in fact, the two most recent mass-murders in the US both happened in places where guns were not allowed. Not only that, the gunman in the Colorado “Batman movie massacre” could have gone to five other theaters that were closer than the one he chose, which happened to be the one located where no guns were allowed in theaters.

Gun control is based in the absurd notions that criminals will obey the law, that crazy people can regulate their own behavior, and that most people are one or the other. It’s rubbish… if the teachers in the Newtown school had been armed then a lot of kids wouldn’t have been killed there. Just ask the teachers in Israel: in 1974, terrorists broke into a school and murdered 31 people. In response, they armed their teachers and parent chaperones, and since then not a single child has been murdered in a school.

More guns = less crime.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[jeannetherese]

: Wouldn’t we all be talking about something else, if poor Mrs Lanza had had her gun in her hand when her son came in her room, & she shot him before he could kill her–much less others?

We might well be discussing what it is about U.S. culture that encourages parents to have to think about arming themselves in order to protect themselves from their own children.
Posters to this thread do seem to be in agreement that we have a problem with violence in this country.

 

[LilyM]

:grouphug:
I am sure those folks often showed up.[Check his day job in my previuos post, just above.] They were safe in his house precisely because their pursuers were NOT safe, not anywhere near him (nor his wife & nor his offspring).

Hmm, most people aren’t blessed with the gift of being able to infallibly tell goodie from
baddie, or pursued from pursuer. Hence even the police whose full time job it is arresting or even shooting the wrong person on occasion.

 

[benjohnson]

I would say that any though-full discussion about armed citizens in Europe should take into account the millions of people who were first disarmed and then sent to die in concentration camps.

It is well know by tyrants that the first thing to do is to disarm the citizens. If you can convince the citizens to disarm themselves willingly for the greater good, so much the better.

 

[neophyte]

Hmm, most people aren’t blessed with the gift of being able to infallibly tell goodie from
baddie, or pursued from pursuer. Hence even the police whose full time job it is arresting or even shooting the wrong person on occasion.

A guy being robbed knows exactly who the robber is. A woman being raped knows *exactly *who the rapist is.

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/15985_514569071895332_2108742773_n.jpg

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/483434_502642763087963_431840464_n.jpg

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/224022_502642976421275_710856633_n.jpg

 

[ProVobis]

If you can convince the citizens to disarm themselves willingly for the greater good, so much the better.

Economic theory says that given the right price, anyone will turn in their possessions.

 

[ProVobis]

A guy being robbed knows exactly who the robber is.

The one with the gun?

 

[LilyM]

A guy being robbed knows exactly who the robber is. A woman being raped knows *exactly *who the rapist is.

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/15985_514569071895332_2108742773_n.jpg

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/483434_502642763087963_431840464_n.jpg

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/224022_502642976421275_710856633_n.jpg

But we’re talking about bystanders. Who do not always know who is who. And him would be the majority of armed people.

 

[meltzerboy]

A guy being robbed knows exactly who the robber is. A woman being raped knows *exactly *who the rapist is.

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/15985_514569071895332_2108742773_n.jpg

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/483434_502642763087963_431840464_n.jpg

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/224022_502642976421275_710856633_n.jpg

One should consider, however, that Israel is a country fighting for its very survival. And despite all its military superiority and might beyond gun power, it cannot achieve a lasting peace through force. Are we, the United States, already in that situation, or do we want to become a country similar to Israel?

 

[ProVobis]

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/15985_514569071895332_2108742773_n.jpg

Excuse me but you sure you want to use this as an example?

It looks like she’s using the weapon to keep the kids in line.

 

[LilyM]

Excuse me but you sure you want to use this as an example?

It looks like she’s using the weapon to keep the kids in line.

By the way - those guns work so very well for Israel as a means of defence that they’ve had to resort to building hulking great walls between them and those who want to harm them - and even those don’t stop rockets from being fired at them

You really sure you want to go down that route?