Glorifying Guns?

Piffka, that's pretty much the way I see it too.

Timber,
"Last violent crime hereabouts was an assault with a golf club ... a pitching wedge, to be exact. I ain't fond of golf or golfers, and I question why there isn't more concern about protecting us all from irresponible, or even criminal, club wielders. And then there are baseball bats ... now, there's a weapon of positively prehistoric standing, clearly a refinement of humankind's very first assault weapon. Just because a baseball bat can be used in a sporting application in no way diminishes the lethality of the device, should it fall into the wrong hands ... where's the outrage?"

Shall we start a movement to register all sporting equipment? Just remember, if golf clubs are outlawed, only outlaws will have golf clubs!
They can have my baseball bat when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.

so lets ban "designated hitters"

Somebody's got to. :wink:

The poll responses. Yes, I remember them. Did anyone else notice that the final question was something like 'Do you want to send $50.00?" "No" was not an option, by the way.

I'm a member of the NRA, and will continue to be. From a gun owner's standpoint, it's the best I know of.

I guess I'm a rightie, but my reason for wanting to own guns is to protect my home from intruders... not from the government. My great grandmother was about to be robbed, but thanks to the fact that she wasn't afraid to use her shotgun, she lived another 3 yrs. The robber got away, leaving a bloody trail, but no one bothered her after that.

Go granny!

Realistically, the 'defense against your own rogue government' argument doesn't hold up well anymore. When the Constitution was written, the weapons carried by the military were no better than those owned by the average homeowner give or take a few primitive cannons. Now an arsenal of hunting rifles would be defenseless against one Apache or Blackhawk or an old fashioned Bradley let alone modern battle tanks.

A handgun or rifle in the house or workplace continues to be valuable in providing for one's own defense however. Given the average response time, if somebody was breaking into my house to do violence to me or mine, I would not want to count on the police arriving in time.

Take a bow Foxfyre. Guns are, indeed, no longer the bulwark against tyranny that some rhetoric would have us believe.

As I said earlier, the defense issue is pretty much moot to me. However, for a home defense situation, I'd lean toward a shotgun ... preferably an autoloader, or second-best, a pump, with no choke and a magazine full of buckshot. A little rough on the drywall and furniture, maybe, but far more effective at rapidly clearing a room of unwanted elements than a would be handgun.

For those who've never had the experience, discharging a moderate-to-large-calibre firearm within an enclosed, typical-room-sized space is attention-getting for all involved, to say the least. The auditory effect is just about stunning, and if the room is dimly lit or darkened, the flash is absolutely dazzling. The smoke and fumes are quite noticeable for a good while, too. You just don't get that on TV.

True Timber. I forgot about the shotgun.

All the more reason not to ban automatic assualt weapons. :wink:

LOL Finn. Well I am about as pro-gun rights as they come, but even I have a couple of neighbors that I wouldn't want to have a rocket launcher or 105mm recoilless rifle.

It bothers me though that the gang bangers are armed better than the police here though. So I'm thinking through the issue of the so-called 'assault rifles'.

I think the police ought to be trained in the use of and be able, given the appropriate emergency circumstances, to employ light infantry weapons, up to and including crew-served large-calibre automatics, man-portable rocket launchers, and small mortars. There probably wouldn't be much justification or need for flame weapons, wheel-or-track-mounted artillery, or air-delivered munitions in most law-enforcement situations, but it does outrage me to see the cops outgunned by the badguys, such as in that LA bank robbery where those Russian thugs held off the cops for hours. A couple short, well-placed .50Cal bursts, or a couple grenade-launcher rounds, woulda brought that debacle to a halt before the TV stations even knew it was going on.

OK, I'll bite with some fodder for discussion of guns in our society. I'll address two ideas from the perspective of my 20+ years as a paramedic in a sub-50,000, predominantly white middle class western town.

First, I've seen far more gunshot wounds (GSW), which often were fatal, than I can recall. NONE of these were home-owner inflicted injuries resulting from self-defense. Here are some that I recall:

A 16 y/o Male taped a picture of his newly ex- girlfriend, using black electrical tape, over his heart. He neatly put a bullet through both.

A 17 y/o Female confronted her brother about target shooting while drunk in the shed. He put a bullet through her chest along the left sternal margin. She miraculously survived.

An elderly Male was depressed that he was loosing his mind. While his son was showering, the father used the son's shotgun and blew his head apart, splattering blood on the other side of the bathroom wall.

A 4 y/o Male found a handgun on the daycare provider's bedroom floor and shot another 4 y/o. The gun was reportedly on the floor for at least a week.

Numerous men who after a separation or job loss, drive to remote locations and commit suicide by GSW.

A gang want-a-be kidnapped a young couple and killed them both execution style in front of several high school kids to prove his toughness.

Several domestic disputes where one member became so enraged, that the convenient hand gun was used.

Few of the GSW events that I knew about made the news. What you see on the news or read in the papers is just the tip the iceberg. Suicides are virtually never exposed. For every life saved by using a gun in self defense, many unintended lives our lost. One statistic that I read was that for households with guns, a resident of that house is 43 times more likely to be shot than for a resident of a household without guns.

The other point I would like to make is spot on the heading of this thread. The glorification of guns. We have a fire education program that uses the concept of tools vs. toys to help these kids make good decisions. I have been struck by the paradox of many of my co-workers delivering this lesson to young kids then returning to quarters and proceeding to talk about of the cool guns they own or would like to own. Several own two dozen. One of these people woke up one morning to discover that his bedside gun had been stolen by a burglar as he slept!

A local news anchor returned here and spoke on the problem, as he saw it, of news morphing into crime, sports, weather, and now war/terrorism. Surfing the television I find numerous cop reality shows, histories of weapon systems or war, shows about cops or criminals, etc. In our society, guns rule. In college, I didn't have a TV and went to few movies. When I returned to normal life, I was stunned to find that I was rocked to my sole by the violence in the first few movies I saw. Now, it's no big deal emotionally.

So, as you may guess, I'm strongly in favor of reducing the number and types of firearms available. IMHO, single shot hunting rifles are perfectly alright. Handguns and assault rifles for cops only.

Nothing speaks like experience Wild Bill.

I wonder, though, in those 20 plus years how many suicides and/or attempted suicides were there involving ingestion of pills/drugs, jumping from a substantial height, or other means? And how many injuries were inflicted via knives, blunt objects, or other weapons not to mention accidental injuries involving bicycles, motorcyles, automobiles, etc.? Did most of the bad stuff you saw involve some kind of firearm? If so, would you say that your town was unique?

I think our metropolitan area which is roughly 10 times the size of your town has an uncommonly large number of shootings, but evenso they are mostly gang related and are uncommon enough to usually make the front page of the newspaper when they happen. And it is not handguns but sawed off shotguns that are often the weapons of choice.

I grew up in a time where every household had some kind of firearms and these were generally kept in plain view, up high away from the toddlers. Every child was taught to shoot by his/her daddy but we knew not to touch the guns without permission and we didn't. And I don't recall a shooting, accidental or on purpose, in our small town and county ever.

I know times are different now. But I don't think guns can be blamed for all the screwed up societies we are dealing with.

Sure, people use other means to commit violence. That's almost beside the point. Guns are just so g-d d--n easy. If I were to ask almost any joe on the street in this town "How often are guns used on people in this town?" They probably would come up with one or two examples. This is not an area known for its violence, quite the opposite. The problem is far greater than people realize.

If one takes this community and extrapolates a national figure, one would find that the problem is almost unimaginably large.

Well of course I can't speak for your area. I just haven't seen the same evidence here.

Anyhow Wild Bill, welcome to A2K.

Thanks, It's nice to find a place with such little flaming and such appreciation for logical discourse.

Oh, one more point - It's illogical to blame guns, I certainly don't. I don't like the concept of blame except where mal-intent is involved. People are responsible. People are prone to anger, carelessness, emotional problems at some point in life, and more.

Mixing people and large numbers of easy to use killing devices with not so much as a license requirement or easy tracking mechanism seems extremely ill-advised.

Foxfyre, take an encore bow.
Craven the clarifier also.

For the sake of discussion and wild musing, let me postulate a couple of scenarios. Suppose one of our presidents got on the networks Sunday evening and sadly announced that, due to national security threats, next Tuesday's upcoming election has been postponed or cancelled. What would you do? Who would the gun owners start shooting? Their neighbors? Federal employees? Strangers?

If a rightwing president declared martial law "due to an imminent threat by terrorists ," would the gun owners go after the president or well-known dissenters? Or, would they aid the military in enforcing martial law?

Crazy, outrageous, stupid scenarios? Maybe. But I've never met someone who can give me an answer to what they would do if elections were postponed other than "I'd go to work."

I hope this muddies the water, because I think everybody is a bit too certain of the clarity of their viewpoints. Remember, the optimist sees a glass half full of water, the pessimist sees a glass half empty, and the realist sees a glass half full of polluted water.

Whuthehell ... half full, half empty, whatever. Somebody's gotta wash the damned thing anyway, unless it gets broken first, then there's that mess to deal with.