Shooting at Virginia Tech

[duck_duck]

Originally Posted by AgentApathy

I've only heard ONE in this thread say that a firearm has been necessary to preserve their life. The rest, like me, have said that we aren't afraid and many of us, me included, do not even own a gun. I leave my windows open and my doors unlocked the vast majority of the time. Don't judge ME by a minority group of people who are either paranoid or choose to live in bad areas of the cities they live in.

I am sorry if I misjudged you but I see americans as crazy with the crime.

Originally Posted by AgentApathy

We get it: you are 16, idealistic, and scared to death of the average Joe's ability to use reason and logic.

Correction.. I'm scared to death of the average Joe's ability to get a gun and use it.

Originally Posted by AgentApathy

The US is unlikely to change its policies on the right of citizens to arm themselves, since it was something the founding fathers saw as important enough to put in the documents created in the founding of this country, regardless of how brilliant a 16 year old thinks she is in knowing what is best for an entire nation of people!

Did they have this in mind when 230 years later armed gangs roamed the streets? Or when 1 in 5 women are raped? Did they expect crime in america to be so out of control by now that everybody needed guns?

Originally Posted by AgentApathy

So you have two years, maybe less, until you are a legal adult and can get the hell out of the United States of Wyatt Earp of your own accord.

I just left thank you

Originally Posted by AgentApathy

Think about this for a minute: is your father an idiot to have moved his family to a gun-totin' country like the US, or did he have good reason to come here? Perhaps all isn't as rosy in Hong Kong as you would like to think? I have some friends from HK who would argue that life is much, much better here, and they have been around the block many more times than you have.

My dad moved here for greed only not because america is woohoo.
And you have friends from hong kong huh? What did they do? where did they work? Were they mid level?

Originally Posted by AgentApathy

You say in your profile that you are a simple person who sees the world in simple terms. It might be time for a broader world view, since the world is far from simple and to dumb it down to the level of simplicity is to close your mind to things you don't know. And trust me, at 16, there is a whole lot that you don't know.

Yes I was made fun of for my simple view before. But you complex guys who pretend to know what you are talking about don't really say anything do you? Your time is spent pointing out how simple or stupid somebody like me is.

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by duck_duck

Correction.. I'm scared to death of the average Joe's ability to get a gun and use it.
...
Did they have this in mind when 230 years later armed gangs roamed the streets? Or when 1 in 5 women are raped? Did they expect crime in america to be so out of control by now that everybody needed guns?

As your second paragraph alludes to, its not the average Joe you should be afraid of. Average Joes aren't the ones committing most of the gun crime. And the armed gangs that you imagine are taking over America's streets at sunset are a fiction of Hollywood. Besides, gang members aren't legal gun owners now nor would they be even if the most draconian of gun control laws came to be.

And the founding fathers lived in a society substantially more violent and threatening than the one we live in now. Part of - a lot of- the reason America has prospered as it has is because the founding fathers were very distrustful of the government and gave it as little power as they could since government authority comes at the direct expense of individual freedom.

I mean who would you trust - the half-wit millionaire club running America today with its religious zealots, Marxists who don't even understand Marx, petty men fueled by greed, power brokers, men of limited intelligence, men who worship empty ideologies they don't understand or men such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and James Monroe - the forward-thinking visionary architects of the most powerful nation in world history.

If the clowns in Washington today don't want to screw up the little country club they have built for themselves at the expense of those they supposedly govern then they are advised not to screw with the one we citizens were given by the men who made this whole thing possible.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by duck_duck

Correction.. I'm scared to death of the average Joe's ability to get a gun and use it.

And never never ever did Duck_duck consider that an average Jane like Duck_duck might get a gun and become skilled with it. At sixteen, she'd still have to wait a while, but still, there it is. Rapists (and I very much doubt the one-in-five-women figure she cited earlier -- sounds like an Andrea Dworkin shibboleth not well borne out by the stats) tend to lose their enthusiasm when somebody lines up a .38 on their naughty bits.

And the ones who can rape a .38 -- maybe they deserve to. But they should really buy their own guns. Spoogeing down the bore of somebody else's fighting tool is not behavior Miss Manners would approve of.

But you complex guys who pretend to know what you are talking about don't really say anything do you? Your time is spent pointing out how simple or stupid somebody like me is.

Actually, we disagree with you because we have studied the matter, and we are persuaded of the veracity of the researchers we've studied. In a word, we know more about it than you do.

Opening up the path to crime, on a retail scale or a wholesale, by eliminating self-defense is stupid, on its face. The pretense that armament benefits only criminals is given the lie by not only the carrying of guns by government arms such as the police and sheriffs' departments, but also by the universal experience of every state in the Union that went more liberal on its concealed carry of weapons: in every single such State, crime went down and stayed down. The States that have not done so have crime levels that remain higher than the states that actively enable self defense even unto arming oneself and fighting crime by shooting back. You could look it up -- the NRA got it right, and lives are being saved en masse.