The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

i'd be curious about the numbers of civilians who saved themselves or others/prevented a crime because they had a handgun, if such studies are in fact done.

Sorry to revive a touchy thread, but this story has my coworkers asking again why this kind of thing happens in America.
(I'm an American living abroad). What do I tell them?

Boy, 8, fatally shoots self with Uzi at gun show

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081028/ap_on_re_us/boy_shoots_himself

this is already being discussed in a rational and clear headed manner on the disgruntled shootings thread

you should probably reassure your coworkers that it was for the best that the child's accidental uzi suicide genes were removed from the genepool btw

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/08/gun.soccer.mom.dead/index.html

yeah... the irony

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*chokes on sip of beer*

wow, at this point I doubt there;s anything one can say about guns that hasn't been covered.

True that, Android. In the US, it's really about location. Pragmatically speaking, widespread gun ownership in NYC is terrifying. In the rural West, it's no big deal and it's a given. It's a deep chasm that will never be universally applied in some proxy of federal law or under the cover of federal mandates in which both sides will be appeased. I suppose that the states and localities overall do a halfway decent job.

Gun fanatics are truly some of the biggest asswipes around. They really screw the pooch.

I took a bit more than a year off from shooting (primarily thanks to costs), have started up again recently.

This means reading gun forums for info (I'd like to start reloading on my own to save money). Which means pounding my head against the wall reading posts from people who are 10 times crazier than Roger Adultery. It's depressing, and pointless to even engage those people on any level.

But a sub-frustration is the uniformity of their political line. There's no reason for it! Even if you want to stockpile guns for self-defense, there's no intrinsic connection to thinking the President is a native-Kenyan communist. But they do. (Althought my in-person contact with other gun owners tells me there are a lot of them just avoiding the political talk completely.)

Is it the fault of the center/center-left that they've abdicated such a large issue and such a large group of people to the right?

Here's a gun control thread for people to use instead of doing it on the Giffords thread.

Also, most of the arguments anyone is going to make have already been made here, so it could save some bandwidth.

where is roger adultery when we need him

we do not need him

sorry i thought this was a debate thread

But a sub-frustration is the uniformity of their political line. There's no reason for it! Even if you want to stockpile guns for self-defense, there's no intrinsic connection to thinking the President is a native-Kenyan communist. But they do. (Althought my in-person contact with other gun owners tells me there are a lot of them just avoiding the political talk completely.)

Is it the fault of the center/center-left that they've abdicated such a large issue and such a large group of people to the right?

cmon you really can't see any correlation? 'if you want to stockpile guns for self-defense' is already suggesting a ton about someone's worldview, and in turn, political beliefs.

seriously, can we take this back over here?

topic relevance lawyers are like a horrible rash on ilx

would much rather live in that scary authoritarian world than the current one where innocent 9 year old girls get shot

― iatee, Sunday, January 9, 2011 1:56 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

I can't even comprehend this, dude.

idk try shooting at your screen, maybe it'll make sense

see that's not a very convincing approach to take when confronted with people who disagree with or don't understand you.

Hey do you want to have an actual conversation or just be dicks to each other?

haha wtf is hard to comprehend about my sentence?

are you in favor of the Patriot Act? cuz that seems to run on a lot of the same kind of justification.

In every totalitarian state that has ever existed the value of human life has decreased, not increased. If anything there would be more 9 year old girls getting shot, or gassed, or sterilized, or vivisected...

I can also not understand someone who actually pines for a police state but I think iatee was making a (hyberbolic) point not saying he actually wished to live in Stalinist Russia.

He's saying that the sentiment is hard to comprehend, not the sentence.

I personally would prefer to live in the authoritarian world where people's guns are taken away than the world where it's really easy to shoot a 9 year old girl. pretty straightforward!

That you think innocent people of any age are somehow safer under the boot of tyrant than everyday law-abiding people have access to guns because what they *could* do with them.