JoeTheJuggler
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2006
- Messages
- 27,766
Yup.
And since slightly more than half of the gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides, it's not even about good guys and bad guys or criminals.
2nd Amendment for the U.K. -- long overdue
- Thread starter Baylor
- Start date
Yup.
And since slightly more than half of the gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides, it's not even about good guys and bad guys or criminals.
?????
How many suicides do not involve firearms? Any idea?
You're right, we should give them up. You first of course.
'Target Practice.' By inference, practice for shooting live things. That's one. Give me two more.
In reference to the Cumbrian incident, a memorial service was held some days later, for the victims and the gunman.
A relative of one of the victims appeared on the news and said that tighter gun control would not prevent further incidents of this type, what was needed was to address the shortcomings in society that allow people to reach such levels of despair without getting any help.
And please guys, since when has this forum been about the UK and the US taking swipes at each other?
What with the BP bollocks, the mercury typo thing and now this? We're supposed to be all on the same side...woo is our enemy.
'Target Practice.' By inference, practice for shooting live things. That's one. Give me two more.
In reference to the Cumbrian incident, a memorial service was held some days later, for the victims and the gunman.
A relative of one of the victims appeared on the news and said that tighter gun control would not prevent further incidents of this type, what was needed was to address the shortcomings in society that allow people to reach such levels of despair without getting any help.
And please guys, since when has this forum been about the UK and the US taking swipes at each other?
We're supposed to be all on the same side...woo is our enemy.
I've hunted before to put food on the table, and make no apologies. I also make no apologies for owning firearms and using them in a safe and legal manner. I object to generalizations made about U.S. gun owners by people who have never personally met such an individual, and thus have no idea about what they are generalizing. That's just lazy, and not a very good example of critical thinking. I understand that some might find it amusing to characterize an American like myself as some sort of Goober, but how does that inform this argument? I don't care about a second amendment for the UK, only care about the one where I live. As it happens, I also care deeply about the rest of my country's Constitution as well.
Damn straight. You shoot 'em, we'll bite 'em.
Nor should you have to. I'd quite like to go hunting actually, and I mean the way you guys do, not, as another poacher...poacher? Freud?..poster mentioned, blazing away at farmed birds with your haw-haw chums, or the disgusting mounted barbarism.
So do I.
Let stop labelling the woo-woo fruitloops we get in here according to where they come from, and label them according to their utterly bonkers beliefs. A nutter is a nutter wherever they live.
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Region Rat
Stinky Cheese Eater
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2006
- Messages
- 2,825
Driving nails
Deflating tires quickly
Ringing the dinnerbell from a distance
Knocking Frisbees off of the roof
Breaking the glass in case of emergency
Draining swimming pools
Making sure raccoons are not hiding in your mailbox before opening (although to be fair, this may involve shooting live things, so you can disregard it if you wish)
Making a hole in the floor so you can escape the zombies (ala Underworld. But this requires 2 machine guns and a tight leather suit, so it may not apply to the general population)
Shooting dynamite from a distance when your fuse or plunger comes disconnected.
Shooting watermelons, canteloupes, muskmelons, half-empty paint cans.
Actually, you forgot 'shooting a hole in the floor of your car when you filled it with water driving through a river.'
Polaris
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Apr 8, 2006
- Messages
- 11,396
Fully-automatic, none. Unless you count hide and seek:
Semi-automatic shotguns can be used in duck and deer hunting. Semi-automatic rifles can be used for deer hunting. Many target pistols are semi-automatic.
It's spelt 'homicide'.
We hunt deer extensively in my country and use rifles. Shotguns are of no practical worth given their limited range.
Grouse, pheasants, and other low-flying game birds are usually shot with double-barrelled shotguns because the number coming forward at any time tends to be quite low, especially given the window for firing.
Apples and oranges comparison; if we were to look at Gun Crime in say, the Scottish Highlands or in North Wales, then the rates in these regions are going to be very low too. The big cities, and in particular London, have much higher rates - as one would expect.
But really, feel free to try and use statistics properly next time.
funk de fino
Dreaming of unicorns
You could take the Glasgow violent crime stats out of the whole of Scotland and the figures would be ridiculously low. The knife culture there skews our figures tremendously.
Rolfe
Adult human female
But even that is genuinely "underground". When I was at school and university I travelled alone into and across Glasgow on public transport for 16 years, starting at age 11. In my mid-teens I had a spell of trawling small newsagent shops in the scruffier districts, looking for issues of American comics to complete my collection. In my late teens and twenties I had a serious opera habit, which involved hanging around in the city between the end of classes and the performance, and again hanging around between the end of the performance and the late train home.
This all involved trains, buses, walking and latterly cycling through the city, including some moderately rough areas. In 16 years I was once tentatively propositioned by a guy in a dirty raincoat who didn't realise that the shop doorway I was sheltering in was right next to a bus stop (this was on a Sunday afternoon), and I once saw a group of football fans having a bit of a rampage through the low level of Glasgow Central station - even that was quite high-spirited though, and not actually alarming. That's it.
One of my close friends has lived in Govan all her life, and I often go over to her place and we go out for the evening. Never encountered any trouble. Never heard her mention any trouble.
Stuff is obviously happening. I read the papers. I see the statistics. But again, it seems to be bad guys knifing other bad guys most of the time. That's what I meant by "is anybody feeling terrorised?" Whatever is happening, just doesn't impact on the lives of your ordinary middle-class punter. And that's the bit with the high crime levels. As you say, take that out, and the stats for the rest of the country would look like utopia.
It's not that the guns aren't there, because they are. I hear gunshot quite often in the late summer and autumn. Somebody's got to be keeping the pheasant and grouse numbers down, and if they have a go at the rabbits too I'm not exactly going to complain.
What isn't there is this puerile gun-totin' culture. Or mostly not. If you look at Ryan, Hamilton and Bird, they show signs of trying to ape that American horror-show. There's a good argument that the spree killing is something that has its roots in precisely that culture. Why anyone should imagine that enacting legislation to encourage more of that mind-set would improve matters, I have literally no idea.
Rolfe.
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Cosmic Roy
Critical Thinker
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2009
- Messages
- 261
So, some favourable subdivisions of the US have murder rates that are comparable to the UK as a whole? If you choose arbitrarily an area to use in a comparison, then you can make whatever argument you like. As an extreme example, I expect that there are some small areas of Baghdad in which no murders or assaults have ever occurred. Would it make sense to compare such an area to the US in general? Perhaps you Americans should learn a few things from the Iraqis about how to run a safe country.
I don't think anybody's making an argument as simple as 'individual gun rights cause gun crime' (except for where you suggested the inverse in your opening post). Of course, the causes of crime are various, complex, and probably deep. But I think on the whole - as is evidenced by the responses to your provocative post - people in the UK are happy to sacrifice individual gun ownership to minimise the likelihood that they will themselves be victims of gun crime.
And perhaps you could give an example of what you mean by the state allowing "criminals to terrorize its citizens like the U.K. does."
funk de fino
Dreaming of unicorns
