TargetTalk

"It is time for opponents of gun control to stop mindlessly shouting "The Second Amendment!!" as if that ends the discussion. It does not. Just as there is no First Amendment right to falsely yell fire in a crowded theatre, there is no Second Amendment right to carry an AK-47 there."

Very interesting article zuckerman - thanks for posting. I wonder how often machine guns have been used in crimes or mass murders? Seems very little and they are legal but heavily regulated. Perhaps that shows that a strict interpretation of gun control works?

Gregor

zuckerman wrote:and here is an opposing opinion on the 2nd amendment:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey- ... 36549.html

643 gunshot deaths since sandy hook

The claim by this newspapers that since the 1st is not absolute then also the 2nd is not absolute is false. Freedom of speech is an absolute right. All rights are absolute. I have never heard of a law denying anyone to pocess a larynx. One can be punished for misuse of our voice but not for processing it. Nor have I heard that the government can restrict the power of our larynx. Are we reguired to be a certain age, take a test or prove need to have a larynx?
All rights are absolute.

Perhaps a world without guns would be better.
Before the discovey of gun powder there where no "gunshot deaths." We could then stroll through any jungle confident we would not die from a gun shot. This would be so cool.

There is consistency with Gerald' belief blaming the gun for those who misuse it and blaming God's Word for those who also misuse it. Ban the evil gun and the Bible and all will be well. Oh yes, I forgot, we did that in all these gun free schools. Nothing more here to discuss.

Societies will commonly develop there own moral codes. Rarely do theses standards protect the weak or the outsider.

sakurama,
I'm not saying that the article is perfect, it is easy to cherry pick one sentence out of almost any written article and point to it and say "see?!, this supports my stance." and I could then go on and say "For example:" and show and then give an opinion on, this or that written article, blog, your articles or even any of my own statements... in a long winded circular written argument that eventually says little, and sways any opinion even less.


These facts should be self evident, 300,000,000 guns in the usa, and over the years, thousands if not into the millions of gunshot deaths in this country, depending on when you wanna call the date, say 1900? and speaking of the statistical data, why does the nra cause Congress to refuse to allow federal monies to study the effects and reasons of gun deaths in this country, by promoting bills that limit the collection and study of information regarding guns that have been used to commit crimes and deaths? Could it be they are afraid of the findings?
With that number of guns and number of deaths, why is it that reasonable people, such as many gun owners are, (or hopefully they should be reasonable, given that many of them CCW), refuse to link guns with gunshot deaths? (people kill people, guns don't kill people), (oh yeah and the hammers kill comment too!)
And why is it that the nra promotes civil disobedience and the violent overthrow of the duly elected legislative government if there is even the talk of gun reform? By promoting anarchy from a warped conception of popular sovereignty that citizens need to arm themselves to safeguard political liberties against threats by the government? The idea that NRA and many of its members so believe in the right to take up arms to resist government policies they consider oppressive, even when those policies have been adopted by duly elected officials and subjected to review by an independent judiciary? I would say that they are opposed to constitutional democracy. I would go further and say they are delusional if the fantasy is that an untrained armed rabble will overcome our trained military. and if, by chance, this obscene fantasy does come to play, and you "win", you will have broken our true and free government. Broken it, because Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Washington, and all the rest of the leaders and signers of the Constitution, are gone. You have Rush, Liddy, O'Rielly, LaPierre, to "lead you to the promised land", into, hmm I dunno, anarchy and a fools paradise of angry men, hate, and weapons. and death.

693 gunshot deaths since sandy hook

odle,
There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land." Deuteronomy 15:11

zuckerman:

considering 300,000,000 guns in the US (your figure) and about 9000 gun murders in 2011, the rate of misuse is .00003 (three thousandths of a percent). Perhaps the VAST majority of firearms are in safe and sane hands.

Re: your link to the law professor.
Another lawyer who knows little about the language he uses (misuses?) daily.

Abridge comes from middle English abregen, and Latin abbriviare, both meaning to make brief or diminish.

Infringe is from Latin, meaning to break.

I do believe there is a substantial difference in diminishing something and breaking something.

ahh thank you for correcting me, it seems I was taking the media published number of guns in the US, sorry, as usual they inflated it, the nra says 200,000,000, so the percentile of gunshot deaths per gun in the US goes up, and the gunshot death numbers I have been writing are also wrong, but by how much? I do not know, they come from one guy who has a computer program to track news items that publish gunshot death as local news. If there was a national clearing house that had this data, (but nra had Congress block that), I'm sure this number would be higher.
and you'll say only a little bit...
695 gunshot deaths since sandy hook

So .000045% misuse.

I think much of our problem comes from the desire to live in a "risk free" world. It can't be done!

So what is an acceptable risk of misuse of firearms to live with? If 99.9955% of all firearms are already in safe and sane hands, it seems to me we are so near perfect as to not be able to make much impact.

Last night I watched a documentary about kids, how they are treated in schools, and the huge over-prescription of psychotropic drugs (Ritalin, etal), and the problems stemming therefrom. Eye opening! This seems to be a more fertile area to investigate than the infinitesimal misuse of firearms.

gonna explain your math to the parents of sandy hook victims?
695 gun shot deaths since sandy hook

I would have thought the important statistics are the ones which measure the risk of being assaulted or murdered by your fellow citizen, not how safe an inanimate object is.

If everyone doubled the size of their gun collection would that make guns statistically twice as safe? It would, but its a meaningless factoid.

The fact is the murder rate in America is four times that of most developed countries.

Whether thats because Americans are four times angrier than people of other countries - and watching the anchors on Fox News it seems that they are - or because they have access to more useful tools for murder - turning the average punch-up into a shoot-out - I don't know.

JamesH wrote:I would have thought the important statistics are the ones which measure the risk of being assaulted or murdered by your fellow citizen, not how safe an inanimate object is.

If everyone doubled the size of their gun collection would that make guns statistically twice as safe? It would, but its a meaningless factoid.

The fact is the murder rate in America is four times that of most developed countries.

Whether thats because Americans are four times angrier than people of other countries - and watching the anchors on Fox News it seems that they are - or because they have access to more useful tools for murder - turning the average punch-up into a shoot-out - I don't know.

I believe it was Will Rogers that observered there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Any study's conclusion that attacks person freedom is obviously flawed.
Some in this discussion advocate more gun laws to stop violence. This advocacy views the gun as the problem though recognizing they are inanimate objects.. When pointed out the huge number of personal owned guns resulting in a very small percentage used in crime then this is supposedly countered by by claiming double the number would not make us doubly safe.
All statistics aside we can wonder what the outcome would have been if the first adults responding to the Sandy Hook attack had the will and the means (a gun) to defend themself. I believe that in this casedoubling the number of guns in the hands of prepared people would obviously have the students safer.

PRAVDA says:

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/column ... ns_guns-0/

They also have a religious comment or two:

http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/crime ... _sirius-0/

This has been interesting, and obviously there are those here who are smarter and more educated than I am. Given the recent shooting in California, which is the strictest gun regulated state in the Union, and the crime was committed with a shotgun by a minor, I am having a hard time understanding how applying the same model, stricter gun regulation, is going to be effective on a national level without the seizure of weapons to reduce the market? Regardless of the "what if" scenarios, it seems to me that California (or Chicago) are relative samples that can be extrapolated on without all the theoretical. It seems we have lost the "responsibility" part of the "rights" argument. Instead of making people accountable, the decision is to regulate, which really doesn't appear effective?

I know its a bit simplistic, but I also live rural, raise cattle and stock my freezer with elk to feed my family which has been viewed as archaic as well...

JamesH wrote:

I would have thought the important statistics are the ones which measure the risk of being assaulted or murdered by your fellow citizen, not how safe an inanimate object is.

I whole-heartedly agree. Unfortunately others have chosen to make it about the tool.

Based on FBI stats [/url]http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/cr ... es/table-1 the violent crime rate has been cut ... good use.

[quote=
I believe it was Will Rogers that observered there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Any study's conclusion that attacks person freedom is obviously flawed.
quote]

Maybe Mark Twain? That's who I always give credit to.

Joel

Apparently the most common and probably correct attribution is that this phrase was established by Benjamin Disraeli, a British prime minister, and only later adopted by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).

While I certainly agree that statistics can be used to deliberately mislead, statistics can be fabricated, and can unintentionally fail to address just about any sort of information in ways which are directly applicable, it seems all sides of every argument like this (drug legality, economics, political ideology, all the usual stuff we're not supposed to bring up at dinner parties) do use statistics. And there's nothing wrong with that. Bringing scrutiny to the numbers helps to clarify what those numbers actually mean, especially when brought together with various other numbers from different sources for comparison.

In the discussion leading to this one, I put in one post sorting various columns of a spreadsheet showing various relationships between guns and violence among the many countries involved (some left out as they don't provide statistics), and showed how, for example, the 'war on drugs' has a rather obvious link to gun violence among Latin American countries. That's not something the US government is likely to be too keen on bringing to the table in the current discussion on gun control. Not because it wouldn't help their case for controlling weapons (if that's what's to come of these discussions with Biden), but because it would risk shifting the spotlight to just how dismal a failure is that war on drugs, and how nasty the side effects on non-US populations, those in drug-producing countries. A related statistic within the US would seem rather obviously to be the heavy preponderance of young men from relatively impoverished minority groups being vastly over-represented in your prisons, over drug-related charges, alongside the equally obvious rates of gun violence among those same groups. Shut down the war on drugs, and I'd wager plenty that the rates of violence and incarcerations among these groups would be halved virtually overnight. And no study I've seen has ever demonstrated that legalization leads to statistically significant increases in rates of addiction.

Focusing on mass shootings is a rather more difficult matter to address. Bringing in psychiatrist-ordered mind altering drugs into the mix alongside weapons availability, sociological imbalances such as bullying, failing community and family life due to economic pressures, mental illness itself (not including the sometimes perverse relationship with medications), whatever contributing factors might be involved, and I find it a bit weird that this question of gun control is at the top of the list at the moment. These mass shootings need to be discussed, but if we're bringing in statistics on gun violence then shouldn't the whole topic be on the table? The numbers would seem to support having the war on drugs front and centre if body counts are really the issue folks want dealt with. Those young 'thugs' dying in that war were kids too, often only a few years before street violence takes them down.

Here is an interesting statistic. This was published yesterday in USA Today.

Step up prosecution by the Justice Department of felons and others prohibited from buying weapons when they attempt to buy them. In 2009, the FBI referred 71,000 cases to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), but U.S. attorneys prosecuted only 77.

So if I am reading this correctly we have a law designed to keep guns out of the hands of people that aren't supposed to have them. However the Justice Department has chosen to largely ignor the people that this law was supposed to catch.

This should make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside about any new law they want to pass to make us all "safer" shouldn't it?

Also, I have yet to hear anything that will actually PREVENT a mass shooting from happening again.
Scott

an interesting article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... NTCMP=SRCH, and the referenced article at http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... k-gasoline

Is this the same Bible which gave us...the Catholic Church?

One of, if not the, world's largest charitable givers. So yes, I'd hope this is the same Bible.
As noted by Forbes, even the relatively non-Catholic U.S. has Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, etc, among its largest charities
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/14/Revenue_3.html

where can one find examples of that kind of demonstration of faith, on any significant cultural scale?

regarding any historical example of a region experiencing a significant drop in violent crime due to the adoption of a faith

You can find a demonstration of that kind of faith in certain areas of the U.S. Christianity is quite effective at promoting charity. As a percentage of income, the more religious population gives, on average, 400% of what the more secular population gives, despite being poorer on average (5% of one's income means more to a poor man than a rich man, making this even more significant). So yes, it has produced results on a cultural scale.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 85394.html
If people are donating time and money to help the poor, they are less likely to engage in random violence, as this teaches them to care. Agreed?

So you make the assumption that before Moses came down with the 10 Commandments killing was looked upon as favourable

Ever read some Greek tragedy? Or heard of Gladiators?

Also, I have yet to hear anything that will actually PREVENT a mass shooting from happening again.

This is the perfectly reasonable appearing but monstrously deceptive straw man regularly set up by the NRA and similar organizations. No law can PREVENT any bad act from occurring. What a good law can do is to remind those who choose to obey the law what society expects of them AND to provide mechanisms that make it more difficult for those with other than good intentions to carry out their plans or more costly should they try.

PREVENT - unlikely. REDUCE - why not try?

Ever read some Greek tragedy?

Just to clarify, I meant ancient Greek poetry, not just tragedy specifically.