Because some folks let emotion overrun logic.

And what logic is that? the logic from the statistics that can be shown to go both ways? or the well-funded 'logic' that buys its way into the mainstream consciousness?

The logic is quite simple from where I'm standing.

Guns aren't killing people. People are. What kind of people? Criminals. Most law-abiding citizens are not going to misuse their guns. Will some of them? Absolutely! But very few.

Banning guns is an easy fix. Oh my God! Look at people shooting each other on the streets of SE DC! Well! We better ban guns! Better yet, we should sue gun makers for ever putting those guns out there! If it weren't for those damned guns, we wouldn't have any violent crime!

Bull-fucking shit. It's impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are ingenious. In reality, the good guys (i.e. Joe Q. Public and friends) are losing out. The actions of a few fuck-ups are ruining it for everybody. How fair is that?

And even if every single gun were taken out of action (including the one from Moses's cold dead hands), what are you left with? A bunch of violent criminals that will use their hands, feet, body, rocks, knives, etc. to get what they want.

The problem is not guns, it's people. What is causing a person (or persons) to randomly shoot at people in the Washington, DC area? What caused 2 guys in body armor to rob a bank in Los Angeles, resulting in a massive gun battle between them and LA police? Is it bad brain chemistry? Socioeconomic factors? A bit of both? THESE are the factors that we really need to look at...not the guns.

How to get the sniper
 

Here's my suggestion. But the police hung up on me....

* Close deer season.
* sell sniper licenses.
* put a bounty on snipers of, say, $10,000.
* require proof that you actually killed a SNIPER and not a hunter.
* turn loose all those pissed off hunters.

Problem solved!

Brian

Now lemme get my tongue out of my cheek...

Then you'd better find another world to live in. No matter what laws may be passed by well-meaning but deluded people, <b>anyone</b> can carry a concealed weapon...and wishing for your "theoretical world" can't change that.

"Good people do bad things" is semantic sillyness. Do you believe that within every person lurks an evil spirt that might at any moment sieze control and make them "do a bad thing"?

Is your solution to this terrible situation a vast system of futile laws that magically protects you from evil? How could this ever ensure that the rest of the world is made as helpless as you feel yourself to be? *I'm* certainly not willing to live within the tangles of "safety nets" you would construct. No law will ever shield you from the unresolved anger you project onto the rest of the world.

Quite true of course as far as it goes. Guns are a tool that make killing easier. People could use bows, knives, swords, clubs, poison, and even just bare hands. However the job is more difficult. England which bans guns has dramaticly less murders per thousand of population then the US while at the same time having more violent crime

That means the English have a more difficulty getting murder done because they lack the tools to do so. The sniper could use a crossbow if he/she didn't have a rifle, but his/her killing efficency would be reduced considerablely and he/she would have more problems with concelment and excape. If the sniper were pegging rocks he/she would already be in custody and there is a good chance there would be many less dead if any dead at all.

I only make this argument for the sake of good logic. I'm not for the banning of guns in the US at least until there is real democratic reform. We may need the guns for the revolution.

So, we get rid of guns, and people start using bows to kill people, then we get rid of bows and people are using knifes to kill people, we get rid of knives and people are killing people with clubs. People have been murdering each other since the Stone Age. Banning a certain weapon is not going to solve the problem. If someone gets it in their head that they are going to commit a murder, they are going to commit the murder one way or the other.
Banning guns is not the answer. Then again having everyone carry guns is not either. Finding the middle ground is necessary. Giving well-trained individuals handguns and attempting to keep guns out of everyone else’s hands is about the best we can do. The problem with Gun Control laws though is that they are just that laws, and they are only as good as the people enforcing them.

I sense that is a facetious comment. ;)

However, it's really quite amusing how Americans maintain two indefatigable opinions:

1. There is no country or group of countries in the world that could withstand the military might of the US government.

2. We the people have a right to bear arms to ensure freedom from oppression by that government.

Not that I disagree with you entirely, but you are either an individual of indefatigable fatalism or a fan of black humour if you consider those beliefs to be 'amusing'. The vast, vast majority of non-US Americans seem to find them disturbing and worrying, judging from personal experience.

But then, if anyone is to induce the end of western civilization as we know it, it may as well be the leaders of the free world. In a sense, it is as fitting an end as any.

X.

Since Americans can point with some justice to historical occurrences to support both opinion 1 and opinion 2, with some of us going so far as to say that opinion 1 makes it a necessity to supply a check-and-balance in the form of opinion 2, small wonder these are "indefatigable."

Hermit22's postulation of carry guns for elite persons only as his preferred way to approach CCW is a viewpoint essential to oligarchy or dictatorship. It is absolutely antithetical to a republic, which requires the electorate to be the ultimate source of power in all things, life and death included, to be delegated by the electorate to its political representatives, or its public servants, who must serve at the suffrance and pleasure of the electorate, which may withdraw said suffrance at any time for cause.

Hermit22 does not himself recognize any individual right to self-defense, that is certain. Hermit: friendly notice -- that is one biiiig booboo. Don't screw up like that; it embarrasses you to demonstrate so clearly that you prefer totalitarianism to any other sort of social order, for only totalitarian regimes delegitimize self-defense in the way that you do, that they may the more conveniently assault anyone they deem inconvenient to their interests.

Hermit, do not let your discomfort with killing tools, and the morally responsible martial-arts mindset that should and usually does accompany them, lay the groundwork for social oppression of yourself, or others, or of our descendants. Too much of this already goes on, with the sinners all unconscious of their sin, and it has eroded our freedoms to a degree that requires repair and an altering of certain insufficiently freedom-friendly paradigms. If you desire in your heart to be a free adult human being, rather than a shackled slave (and you know how childish slaves get), then do not be anti-gun.

Have you noted how you seem unable to conceive that you might be of that armed elite you postulate? I can conceive of that for myself -- what's stopping you, in 25 words or less?

Try your statistical understanding on the study that was the foundation of John R. Lott's More Guns, Less Crime which covers all 3015 counties in the United States over a period of 15 years -- not exactly a small or narrow study. It convinced me that the gun carriers have a real point -- in short, I think it's proven now. There have been allegations that Lott's work has been debunked, but every such allegation I have seen fogs into such a haze of erudite-sounding polysyllables that may or may not be terms of art in the discipline of statistics that I end up being unconvinced. These allegations fail of being comprehensible enough to persuade me that Lott's method or thesis is fundamentally flawed.



I propose an experiment, Hermit: move to the most urbanized portion of the state of Vermont, which is a state where anyone can carry a concealed weapon, and without the officious bother of keeping a carry permit on their person as well. Remain there for five years, and then take stock as to how nervous you felt during that time. Since Vermont's crime rate looks like prewar England's, or North Dakota's, I think you will find it really a very placid experience. You may find it congenial to carry, yourself, with all those shining examples before you.

... or Virginia, to keep on topic.

The presence of guns in the hands of the citizens does change the balance of power.

In order to use the military, first a US government would have to violate Posse Comitatus rules which prevent the use of the military against civilians. If this happens and is not an isolated incident (such as Waco), the shit must really have hit the fan.

Up until that point, the effect of deadly force in the hands of the citizens does act as a check on the amount of power that any particular government agent is willing to use. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

For example, during prohibition 1 (alcohol), there was a significant cultural note of southerners protecting their home-built distillers with shotguns, on the lookout for "revenuers" -- federal agents using the power of taxation to investigate and prosecute people producing alcohol.

Knowing that one's ass might be peppered with buckshot is enough to prevent agents from being willing to do house-to-house searches and such. This in turn changes the political will for different things, and the political ability to do different things. Maybe I need significant armor to do that search, or significant numbers of agents, or light violation of Posse Comitatus (Waco again).

It's not a perfect situation by any means, but IMO it means that there's only about one Waco per decade and not one per state per year.

The image that came to my mind wasn't the prospect of the US military rounding up southern white boys for moonshinin'.

It was the prospect of using the military to round up Muslim Americans and locking them up in military facilities without American Justice en masse like they did to the Japanese Americans during WWII.

Posse Committal that, Jose Padilla.