The Ultimate Superheroines Forum

You are comparing accidents with premeditated murder (in not all, but many cases of children misusing guns, particularly in school shootings where they don't bring them by accident, but rather to settle a grudge).

The point remains, the US is the only civilized country in the world where your child runs a real risk of getting shot to death in school by one of his colleagues. It happens several times per year, while in Europe we've had maybe two similar cases of weapons used in schools (and they weren't firearms) in the last decades. So no, if I'm to have an opinion on it, no weapons for us, thank you.

Mr X , my point was clearly that easy access to guns is fundamentally a bad idea, if you can't see that inspite of all the evidence, I pity you, as you will continue to bury your children.
Yes other societies with stricter gun laws still have shooting tragedies but the point is we HAVE LESS. The UK has had Dunblane and Hungerford in the last 25 years, the states has one or two a YEAR. The day of the last mass shooting in the states there was actually a SECOND that barely made the news as only 4 people died (ONLY 4!)[Any deaths over 3 are classed as a 'mass shooting'

If you can't see a relationship between
NO GUNS =2 INCIDENTS IN 25 YEARS
LOTS OF GUNS =50 (or more)
then there's not much hope for you.

AFTER I wrote that I thought I'd check the numbers I found I was wrong via the Guardian newspaper.
'994 mass shootings in 1,004 days: this is what America's gun crisis looks like
The Oregon school shooting is evidence that the US response to gun violence ‘has become routine’, Barack Obama says. The data compiled by the crowd-sourced site Mass Shooting Tracker reveals an even more shocking human toll: there is a mass shooting – defined as four or more people shot in one incident – nearly every day'


So its really 2 in the UK v SEVERAL THOUSAND in the US.

Yeah, no relationship there.

You mentioned that the British soldier hacked to death in the street could have defended himself with a gun and when it was pointed out he was run over first and so couldn't have, you then twist the view point to sarcastically say should we ban cars now. The point is GUNS ARE DESIGNED TO KILL cars are designed for transportation. ANYTHING can be used to kill someone - one guy was stabbed to death with a potato- but there's a fundamental difference between the misuse of an object which you cannot control and the intended use of an object that you clearly can and other societies clearly do, control.
Again, if you can't see that...well no point carrying on.


But as I say lets please leave this alone and leave this thread as one to express sympathy.

Interesting stuff here...

1. It's natural that a thread like this is going to evolve from the expression of immediate emotional response(sadness, sympathy, anger, etc.), to more 'practical' related matters. Like for example... What could've prevented it? How could the carnage been minimized? I don't agree with MR. X on this, but his original statement was on topic in that broader sense. The rest has simply been spun off of that.

2. I'm an American. I HATE guns. They are just another reminder of the vast amount of human ingenuity that's been channeled into creating more efficient ways of killing each other. However, my hatred of guns has somehow failed to preclude their existence. There are millions of privately owned guns in America registered and unregistered, legal and illegal. The elimination of privately owned guns in the US under the circumstances, would require the implementation of a police state. I hate guns...but the actions that would be required to eliminate them here would be far worse.

3. It's pretty clear to me that our friends from across the pond do not understand us. America is predominantly a child of Europe, but that child was raised in the wilderness. Even though he's now mostly civilized, the ethos of self reliance formed in the past remains. It doesn't just disappear because it isn't as necessary as it once was.

kingles wrote:Interesting stuff here...

1. It's natural that a thread like this is going to evolve from the expression of immediate emotional response(sadness, sympathy, anger, etc.), to more 'practical' related matters. Like for example... What could've prevented it? How could the carnage been minimized? I don't agree with MR. X on this, but his original statement was on topic in that broader sense. The rest has simply been spun off of that.

2. I'm an American. I HATE guns. They are just another reminder of the vast amount of human ingenuity that's been channeled into creating more efficient ways of killing each other. However, my hatred of guns has somehow failed to preclude their existence. There are millions of privately owned guns in America registered and unregistered, legal and illegal. The elimination of privately owned guns in the US under the circumstances, would require the implementation of a police state. I hate guns...but the actions that would be required to eliminate them here would be far worse.

3. It's pretty clear to me that our friends from across the pond do not understand us. America is predominantly a child of Europe, but that child was raised in the wilderness. Even though he's now mostly civilized, the ethos of self reliance formed in the past remains. It doesn't just disappear because it isn't as necessary as it once was.

+1 (Other than I am a gun owner)

To be honest I'm actually envious of the gun lobbies commitment to this particular freedom. I mean there's a pretty hard and fast rule, when somebody dies, or something scary happens, a politician will very often jump on a related personal right, blame that right for the death, and have it taken away. We all signed away our right to private communication sometime in the last decade (regardless of who we voted for), because of the threat of terrorism. Hell In the UK we even lost a bunch of rights to do with making porn because of the Potential risk, not even the actual one. And I'm not talking about paedophilia or beastiality here, I think the last ones to get banned were to do with facesitting and female ejaculation.

Our governments dismantle our personal freedoms on a whim, and very few people speak out, few enough they can just do it anyway.

But the gun lobby in the USA, I mean, damn. I may not agree with the principle itself but holy shit I admire the commitment. If people fought that hard for privacy, for the right to free expression and for the sanctity of the democratic process, we would live in a much better world.

Can we not turn this into a gun argument thread? Can we keep that in a seperate topic. I feel it's very inappropriate to completely neglect the topic of this thread for US politics.

Blx wrote:Can we not turn this into a gun argument thread? Can we keep that in a seperate topic. I feel it's very inappropriate to completely neglect the topic of this thread for US politics.

Thank you.