[mike777]

I understand many will disagree with this point but I would guess the argument for these type of weapons are not for hunting but protection against governments. Governments that we have seen in our lifetime such as USSR or East Germany or the very real working concentration camps set up in Europe in the 1990's or Iraq/Syria or many places in Africa today.


Sure such a thing is unlikely in the UK or the USA but I would say that is the mindset.
That somehow an armed civilian population may or may not be able to beat an army but they will at least fight one as they are in Syria today.

I agree with posters you dont need a 100 round magazine to shoot a deer or home invader.


It is interesting that Europe which has known invasion and concentration camps and genocide in our families lifetimes strongly prefers an unarmed population. where just a short time ago half of Europe lived in an oppressive police state.

[hrothgar]

mike777, on 2012-July-27, 10:43, said:

That somehow an armed civilian population may or may not be able to beat an army but they will at least fight one as they are in Syria today.

It should be noted that the same armed civilian population is also fighting:

1. Members of different sects
2. Members of different religions
3. Members of the village next to them
4. People who look at them funny

[Phil]

mike777, on 2012-July-27, 10:43, said:

I understand many will disagree with this point but I would guess the argument for these type of weapons are not for hunting but protection against governments.

Perhaps we should update the 2nd Amendment to read:

Quote

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms ICBMs, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and F-16's shall not be infringed.

[jjbrr]

Cyberyeti, on 2012-July-27, 03:08, said:

No, but some of the people who hold guns for nefarious purposes will be getting searched for other reasons, if they know that being found with an illegal gun will get them in a heap more trouble than the other more mildly illegal stuff (petty drug dealing for example), they might dump the guns.

You are never going to eliminate the gun rampages, you can however reduce how often and how deadly.

Look at the UK, heavy gun control, how much gun crime do we have ? some gang related stuff in the inner cities, a few armed robberies and the odd wacko shooting rampage, most of the time our police don't need to carry guns. Different culture but it seems to work, the gun murder rates are vastly different to the US.

There are guns in the UK, and you have to apply for a licence to hold them. No handguns, some shotguns/hunting rifles, no automatic weapons. Before you get a licence you have to prove you have secure storage and good mental health. This process takes some time.

Show your work? I believe you about gun murder rates, but I'm curious how much different it really is, particularly when adjusted for population size.

As far as mass shootings, I'd argue it's not different.

From a Reuters Article about mass shootings:

Quote

March 13, 1996 - BRITAIN - Gunman Thomas Hamilton burst into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself.

April 28, 1996 - AUSTRALIA - Martin Bryant unleashed modern Australia's worst mass murder when he shot dead 35 people at the Port Arthur tourist site in the southern state of Tasmania.

April 1999 - UNITED STATES - Two heavily-armed teenagers went on a rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Denver, shooting 13 students and staff before taking their own lives.

July 1999 - UNITED STATES - A gunman killed nine people at two brokerages in Atlanta, after apparently killing his wife and two children. He committed suicide five hours later.

June 2001 - NEPAL - Eight members of the Nepalese Royal family were killed in a palace massacre by Crown Prince Dipendra who later turned a gun on himself and died few days later. His youngest brother also died later raising the death toll to 10.

April 26, 2002 - GERMANY - In Erfurt, eastern Germany, 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser opened fire after saying he was not going to take a math test. He killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman at the Gutenberg Gymnasium, before killing himself.

Oct. 2002 - UNITED STATES - John Muhammad and Lee Malvo killed 10 people in sniper-style shooting deaths that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area.

April 16, 2007 - USA - Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, became the site of the deadliest rampage in U.S. history when a gunman killed 32 people and himself.

Nov. 7, 2007 - FINLAND - Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed six fellow students, the school nurse, the principal and himself with a handgun at the Jokela High School near Helsinki.

Sept. 23, 2008 - FINLAND - Student Matti Saari opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwest Finland, killing nine other students and one male staff member before killing himself.

March 11, 2009 - GERMANY - A 17-year-old gunman dressed in combat gear killed nine students and three teachers at a school near Stuttgart. He also killed one other person at a nearby clinic. He was later killed in a shoot-out with police. Two additional passers-by were killed and two policemen seriously injured, bringing the death toll to 16 including the gunman.

June 2, 2010 - BRITAIN - Gunman Derrick Bird opened fire on people in towns across the rural county of Cumbria. Twelve people were killed and 11 injured. Bird also killed himself.

April 9, 2011 - NETHERLANDS - Tristan van der Vlis opened fire in the Ridderhof mall in Alphen aan den Rijn, south of Amsterdam, killing six before turning the gun on himself.

July 22, 2011 - NORWAY - Police seize a gunman who killed 69 people at a youth summer camp of Norway's ruling political party, on the small, holiday island of Utoeya. Anders Behring Breivik is later charged with the killings, as well as with an earlier bombing in Oslo which killed eight people. The trial ended last month with Breivik saying that his bombing and shooting rampage was necessary to defend the country - prompting a walk-out by relatives of his victims.

Dec. 13, 2011 - BELGIUM - Gunman Nordine Armani killed three people, including a 17-month-old toddler, wounding 121 in a central square in the eastern city of Liege, before shooting himself. The next day Belgian investigators found the body of a woman in warehouse used by the gunman raising the death toll, including the killer, to five.

July 20, 2012 - UNITED STATES - A masked gunman killed 14 people and wounded 50 others when he opened fire on moviegoers at a showing of new Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" in the city of Denver.

The US has a population of 312M, those other countries combined have a population of 232M I'm told (but a quick google search suggests this is wrong. whatever the number is, the point stands), so on a total per capita basis you don't see much difference.

[mike777]

I grew up and went to the local school in the Roseland part of Chicago.


Teen shot, killed in Roseland

Here is a short list of the current crimes and shootings.

http://www.spotcrime...hicago/roseland


Search resultsRoseland, South Shore shootings wound 2 - chicagotribune.com
[Jun 20, 2012] Police are investigating two separate shootings tonight on the South Side. The first happened about 6:30 p.m. in the 7100 block of S. East End Avenue when ...
www.chicagotribune.com/...roseland-south-shore-shootings... - Cached.


More results from chicagotribune.com »
9-Year-Old Killed | NBC Chicago - Chicago News, Local News ...
Some reports suggest the shootings came after an argument between a group of teens ... Thomas said the family knows the dangers of living in the Roseland neighborhood.
www.nbcchicago.com/.../roseland-shooting-girl-100402659.html - Cached

Nine-Year-Old Boy Shot In Head In Chicago's Roseland Neighborhood
[Jul 6, 2011] Comedy; Arts; Books; Culture; Style; Weird News; Moviefone ... year-old boy was shot in the head in the city's Roseland neighborhood. Authorities say the shooting ... ( 6 Comments )
www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/06/nineyearold-boy-shot... - Cached.


More results from huffingtonpost.com »
2 Men, Teenage Boy Shot In Roseland « CBS Chicago
Two men and a teenage boy were hurt in a shooting in the 10400 block of South State Street in the Roseland neighborhood. (Credit: CBS)
chicago.cbslocal.com/.../2-men-teenage-boy-shot-in-roseland - Cached

Boy, 9, Critically Wounded in Shot to the Head | NBC Chicago
A 9-year-old Roseland boy was shot in the back of the head early Wednesday morning ... The shooting was the second in the neighborhood this week. Martel Fields, 17, was ...
www.nbcchicago.com/news/.../boy-shot-roseland-125108939.html - Cached

[jjbrr]

mike777, on 2012-July-27, 13:56, said:

I grew up and went to the local school in the Roseland/Pullman part of Chicago.

I just googled and came up with about ten or twenty shootings there in the past of couple of years.

Is this a gun law thing or a gang violence, drugs, street violence, poverty, culture thing?

[mike777]

jjbrr, on 2012-July-27, 14:06, said:

Is this a gun law thing or a gang violence, drugs, street violence, poverty, culture thing?

Kids did bring hand guns to my local grammer school, tough kids but I can honestly say I was never afraid of staying out late and getting shot.

I went back a few years ago and found:
1) the main department store and grocery stores gone.
2) catholic churches shut down or turned into who knows what..
3) the local catholic high school....gone and turned into some kind of academy.
4) THE MAIN BANK PUllman bank gone and empty..I think they moved out..
5) I lived in two places..one is now an empty lot the other was boarded up.

The local Y and Local park..Palmer Park where I spent my youth were still there.

--

I dont really buy it is a poverty thing, we did not own a car or a home or dishwasher,air cond....etc.....

[jjbrr]

Right, my point is Colorado happens and everyone starts crapping on America for gun laws, but doesn't it seem drugs/poverty/gangs/culture/education/whatever are the real problem?

My list, which admittedly is cherry-picked (but from Reuters UK) suggests that in the last 5 years, these sort of public, mass shootings have caused MORE deaths in Finland than in the US.

Is it much of a surprise that the UK doesn't have much gun violence given it doesn't have much gang violence?

What are the gun murder numbers like in Mexico or some Latin American countries?

I just think it's very wrong that Colorado happens and people start hurling their gun control opinions at everyone as if that's actually the issue.

[blackshoe]

There is a myth running around that Americans routinely buy and use automatic weapons. It's bull. It is theoretically possible, and practically highly unusual, one might even say very improbable, for a US citizen to own an automatic weapon. Also, it's been a while, but as I recall, there's not been more than one incident of a legally owned automatic weapon being used in a crime in the US, at least not since Prohibition (and I don't think those were legally owned either, I just don't know for sure). The media have been making a big deal of the guy in Colorado using weapons that could fire "50-60 rounds a minute". These are not automatic weapons. The problem is that the government has confused things by labeling certain "evil looking" weapons "assault weapons", which is more BS: an assault weapon is an automatic weapon, the government's so called "assault weapons" are semi-automatic.

Thirty years later, I might handle the situation differently. For one thing, I've learned to know where the cops are. For another, I carry a cell phone. For a third, I no longer carry a firearm routinely. So things would certainly be different. Thirty years ago, I would have tried to talk him out of doing violence even if I didn't have a gun, but I'd have been a lot less sanguine about the outcome if I couldn't. And I'll grant that the outcome could have been a lot different if he'd had a handgun as well.

When I retired to Rochester twenty years ago, my friend Gary handed me a map of the city, which had a number of areas circled in red. I asked him "what's with the circles?" He said "don't go there". I still don't. Gary was a police dispatcher, and the areas he'd marked were known bad parts of town. I think Rochester, which has a reputation for gun violence worse than some places and better than others, has had something like 76 shootings this year, which may sound like a lot, but compare it to Detroit, Chicago, NYC, or LA. Or various cities in Mexico. When a shooting happens, the media are all over it. Unless, of course, it was a "righteous" shooting - for example where a homeowner shot an armed intruder. Then they just sort of mention it in passing and forget about it.

Would I like to live in a society where there's never any violence? Sure. Do I expect such a society to exist anywhere any time soon? No. Do I want to be prepared if violence comes my way? Damned straight. And that includes being armed.

[luke warm]

Phil, on 2012-July-27, 11:10, said:

Perhaps we should update the 2nd Amendment to read:

Quote

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms ICBMs, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and F-16's shall not be infringed.

it is true that things have progressed at a rate unimaginable by the founders... the world is far more dangerous than they could have envisioned, to the point that we the people now have arguably more to fear from outside forces than from our own gov't... even so, what mike said is accurate - though possibly outdated... could americans, no matter how well armed, successfully fight the gov't if the need arose? that would depend upon whose side the military took... they do, after all, swear to uphold the constitution and not the gov't

[barmar]

blackshoe, on 2012-July-27, 14:48, said:

There is a myth running around that Americans routinely buy and use automatic weapons. It's bull. It is theoretically possible, and practically highly unusual, one might even say very improbable, for a US citizen to own an automatic weapon. Also, it's been a while, but as I recall, there's not been more than one incident of a legally owned automatic weapon being used in a crime in the US, at least not since Prohibition (and I don't think those were legally owned either, I just don't know for sure). The media have been making a big deal of the guy in Colorado using weapons that could fire "50-60 rounds a minute". These are not automatic weapons. The problem is that the government has confused things by labeling certain "evil looking" weapons "assault weapons", which is more BS: an assault weapon is an automatic weapon, the government's so called "assault weapons" are semi-automatic.

Does it really matter what you call them? Does any ordinary citizen need a weapon capable of firing rapidly and holding dozens of rounds for self-defense or sport shooting?

[barmar]

Phil, on 2012-July-27, 11:10, said:

Perhaps we should update the 2nd Amendment to read:

I'm actually of the opinion that this is what the framers intended. They'd recently been part of an insurrection against a tyrannical government, and wanted to protect the right of future citizens to rebel if the new government went overboard. So the people should have weapons capable of fighting against the government.

Of course, this is totally unrealistic now. The US military is the most effective fighting force in the world, routinely besting armies of other countries. No citizen group could possibly arm itself well enough to fight against it successfully. The 2nd Amendment is outdated and unnecessary now, but there's no way it could ever be repealed or revised because the gun lobby is too powerful.

[mike777]

barmar, on 2012-July-27, 15:45, said:

I'm actually of the opinion that this is what the framers intended. They'd recently been part of an insurrection against a tyrannical government, and wanted to protect the right of future citizens to rebel if the new government went overboard. So the people should have weapons capable of fighting against the government.

Of course, this is totally unrealistic now. The US military is the most effective fighting force in the world, routinely besting armies of other countries. No citizen group could possibly arm itself well enough to fight against it successfully. The 2nd Amendment is outdated and unnecessary now, but there's no way it could ever be repealed or revised because the gun lobby is too powerful.

in fact citizens groups have fought well against it...see Iraq and Afghanistan. that is kinda the whole argument by those that advocate for these heavy weapons.

They are using the weapons to blow up tanks and jet fuel and spare parts depots to keep the planes grounded. Small cheap boats took out a Navy ship.

They are not for dove hunting.

When people see working concentration camps in Europe, in the 1990's and see the UK get invaded in the 1980's where many died in a war and eastern europe under a home grown police state including half of Germany.....they get worried.

I understand such a think happening in NYC or London is unthinkable but that is the argument for 100 round clips.


I grant the next battle/war is much more likely to be fought via computers attacking banking or the electrical grid, but people tend to prepare for the last wars not the next ones.

[Cyberyeti]

jjbrr, on 2012-July-27, 14:25, said:

Is it much of a surprise that the UK doesn't have much gun violence given it doesn't have much gang violence?

It has lots of gang violence in some areas, a lot more of it with knives than guns, but particularly in 2 or 3 cities some gang related gun crime.

I live in a city of 137K population. I don't remember the last time anybody was shot here (I've been here 25 years), although very occasionally people are threatened with guns in robberies.

There was one maybe 45 miles from here where somebody shot 2 burglars who were in his house killing one. He was somebody who had held a shotgun legally, but his licence was not renewed as the police didn't like his mental state. As the two were running away and he shot them in the back, plus the shotgun was illegally held, he went to prison for a long time amid huge national media coverage.

Quote

Show your work? I believe you about gun murder rates, but I'm curious how much different it really is, particularly when adjusted for population size.

Well if you believe Wikipedia US 4.14 firearm homicides/100K population, England/Wales 0.07

source: http://en.wikipedia....ated_death_rate, these are old stats and the UK ones are older than the US ones.

Or see http://www.nationmas...s-with-firearms

US 9369 murders with guns in the last year for which stats are available, UK 14. Well US is maybe 5 times bigger but still ...

I agree with you on the rampages, they will happen anyway, it's much more the single victim gun crime that changes.

Also US has a maybe 50% higher suicide rate than UK (http://www.who.int/m...icide_rates/en/), and a much higher proportion of those suicides are with guns (first link above), I wonder (with no evidence whatsoever) if the availability of guns makes suicide "easier" and some of those people might not go through with it without a quick and pretty certain way of doing it.

[mike777]

Cyberyeti, on 2012-July-27, 17:58, said:

It has lots of gang violence in some areas, a lot more of it with knives than guns, but particularly in 2 or 3 cities some gun crime.

Sounds like the Sharks and Jets

btw some may think modern day Russia, which is a large part of Europe, is basically run as a giant organized crime family.

[blackshoe]

barmar, on 2012-July-27, 15:40, said:

Does it really matter what you call them? Does any ordinary citizen need a weapon capable of firing rapidly and holding dozens of rounds for self-defense or sport shooting?

It's not a matter of "need", it's a matter of "right". Aside from that, who gets to decide? Some bureaucrat? No thank you.

barmar, on 2012-July-27, 15:45, said:

I'm actually of the opinion that this is what the framers intended. They'd recently been part of an insurrection against a tyrannical government, and wanted to protect the right of future citizens to rebel if the new government went overboard. So the people should have weapons capable of fighting against the government.

Of course, this is totally unrealistic now. The US military is the most effective fighting force in the world, routinely besting armies of other countries. No citizen group could possibly arm itself well enough to fight against it successfully. The 2nd Amendment is outdated and unnecessary now, but there's no way it could ever be repealed or revised because the gun lobby is too powerful.

BS. 1. The US military routinely bombs the ***** out of people. In head to head combat, sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose. See, as Mike777 points out, Afghanistan, and also Vietnam. We did win in Nicauragua and Grenada, but the schoolyard bully could have beat those guys. 2. Just because you claim the 2nd Amendment is "outdated and unnecessary" does not make it so. And the gun lobby is a good thing. Without that, those of us who still wish the government to recognize our right to bear arms would be up the creek. No doubt that would make some people happy, but I'm not in the habit of giving up my rights to make somebody else happy. And I'm not going to get in that habit, either.

[Cyberyeti]

mike777, on 2012-July-27, 18:00, said:

Sounds like the Sharks and Jets

But did it only get that way because of the relative lack of guns. There are gang fights in bits of London you'd never see as a tourist all the time, there is just a culture of using melee weapons more than guns.

Quote

btw some may think modern day Russia, which is a large part of Europe, is basically run as a giant organized crime family.

It's not really a large part of Europe, the population of Russia is 143M approx the same as UK + Germany. Actually it's worse, it's being run as a crime family organised by the KGB.

[billw55]

A possibly relevant bit of news, a mass killing with a knife:

yahoo story

So yes, this is entirely possible without any guns at all.

[Cyberyeti]

billw55, on 2012-August-02, 06:42, said:

A possibly relevant bit of news, a mass killing with a knife:

yahoo story

So yes, this is entirely possible without any guns at all.

Yes but you're unlikely to get to the Breivik situation with a knifeman. It's always possible, particularly in a Dunblane type situation in a primary school, but simply, you kill people more slowly with a knife than an auto weapon or a number of handguns and you don't have range if people scatter.

[billw55]

Cyberyeti, on 2012-August-02, 08:02, said:

Yes but you're unlikely to get to the Breivik situation with a knifeman. It's always possible, particularly in a Dunblane type situation in a primary school, but simply, you kill people more slowly with a knife than an auto weapon or a number of handguns and you don't have range if people scatter.

Certainly, it is not the same thing. Obviously the death potential is higher with guns. For that matter it is even higher with explosives (Oklahoma City). Sometimes I wonder why these guys use guns instead of bombs. I think it must be psychological, perhaps some glory image they have in their minds, or just simple copycat-ism.

On another angle, I wonder what the gun laws were like in Norway when Breivik did his deed.