CerealKiller wrote:hamburger wrote:if cerealkiller is right , he must be living in the safest country in the developed world . since most countries in the developed world have much lower crime rates than the united states , i wonder if cerealkiller would enlighten us why that is so .
perhaps cerealkiller has never experienced what it feels like to live in a "safe" country .
to get an idea what that is like he might want to read aidan's entry ... but i'm not going to hold my breath .
hbg
Today's events prove that violent, deadly crime can happen anywhere, at any time - especially where people feel the most secure, are least able to defend themselves. Why would anyone insist that such a basic right of self protection should be denied to law abiding citizens?
I'm not going to wade through pages and pages of self-serving tripe by people who oppose gun control, so i'll just take this as an example.
In the first place, such appeals to the alleged right for everyone walking around packing heat almost always include the emotive expression "law-abiding citizens." Well, how the hell do you know any particular citizen is law-abiding? All a background check tells you is that the person in question has not been convicted of a felony in the last 20 years, and in many jurisdictions, the records are only kept for 10 years. You don't know if they have been accused of a felony, and you don't know if they've committed a misdemeanor or a felony, and gotten away with it.
Even if the citizen in question neither had been convicted of a felony, nor ever committed one, it would be small consolation if the first criminal act by a citizen were to shoot down one or more people, but had legally acquired a firearm and carried it concealed, because they had no previous record of criminal behavior. Appeals to the rights of "law-abiding citizens" are red herrings.
This nation is awash in firearms, and i can think of few arguments more stupid than that the dead were doomed because of gun control laws. I've seen firearms pulled from under the seat of a pick-up truck and sold in a back corner of a parking lot, with no paperwork, no background check--and that was not an isolated incident. People at gun shows sell firearms without paperwork and without background checks on a regular basis. Finding and buying guns on the street is a relatively simple affair. The gun that shot Robert Kennedy was stolen during the Watts riots (from a presumably "law-abiding citizen"), passed through several hands on the street, and ended up in the possession of Sirhan-Sirhan. When Canada passed new gun laws a few years ago, i was crossing the border at night, and asked the border guard (whom i had seen a few times before, enough to be conversational) why he was wearing a flak jacket and carrying a machine pistol, because i'd never seen him decked out like that before. He replied that since the new law came into effect, they had repeatedly stopped American yahoos who had loaded the trunk with shotguns, rifles or handguns, and attempted to cross the border to make a quick buck.
Gun control didn't put a gun in the hands of this shooter, and the lack of it would not have saved anyone. Someone fleeing the shooter could as easily been mistaken for the shooter, and killed by a hand-gun toting vigilante. Training doesn't change that either. When i was in the army, i was spotting for a guy at the rifle range. He pulled the bolt on his M16, and it jammed. When i looked over, the door to the chamber was open, and i could see the round jammed against the cleaning rod which he had failed to remove the night before when he cleaned his weapon. That also means that the ordnance NCO failed to notice that the cleaning rod had been left in the weapon when the trainee turned it in, and had re-issued the weapon to him in this dangerous state. In the first example, weeks of training had not prevented the trainee from making a stupid mistake, and in the latter case, years of experience did not prevent the NCO from failing to correct the stupid mistake.
The problem we have is not that there is gun control, but that there is no effective gun control. A hundred years of effective gun control would be needed to begin to clean up the mess that two hundred years of selfish and self-serving stupidity has created.
