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Wrong door shootings.

I note that security guard isn't mentioned yet.

In Australia, being a security guard is another reason to carry a firearm and have a licence.

Some security guards are also licensed to own and wear body armour (which is also restricted in Australia).
 
Thermal said:
"Having a legitimate reason" is exactly what the general denial hinges on. You cannot have a gun, unless you fit into a fairly narrow set of exceptions.

Again, I'm asking about a garden variety city dude. No country club membership where he is winging pheasants or whatever you want to call it. Just some guy who wants to own a gun. Granted or denied? If denied, you have a general denial in place, carved in stone, for which an acceptable exception would have to be presented to override.

Nessie mentioned that a shotgun can be gotten with no reason given. That's interesting, because in my beloved NJ, everything from a BB gun to shotgun to AR-15 falls under the long gun umbrella and are treated the same.

{ETA: I recently found out that the children's toy of a plastic gun that shoots water/gel balls with full auto capabilities cannot be shipped to NJ because it violates our firearm regulations. It's a freaking water pistol}



Well, with the recent NY ruling, things will be changing soon enough. It's already in the pipeline to change NJ CCW to "shall issue" permitting. Not looking forward to this.



I didn't mean like a capitalized military Special Forces. I simply meant a specialized response team, rather than any old patrolman who is already equipped to kill.
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Armed response units here are necessary because our equivalent to “any old patrolman” does not carry a firearm.
 
Thermal said:
Ok, then I'm confused. That would mean there is basically no practical restriction of any kind. It means "I just want some guns" is good enough, and all this chatter about grousing at Country Clubs is irrelevant. You can just have guns if you want to amass guns?
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If someone can pass the background checks, they will get a gun. If it is a shotgun, they do not need to give a reason. If it is another firearm, they need to give a reason, but there are so many acceptable reasons, that in effect there are few restrictions.

The reason you are confused, is because you had an erroneous impression of the UK and firearms, based on self defence hardly ever being accepted as a reason, and the restrictions on type of weapon imposed after massacres, which mean no more rapid fire weapons in the UK.

That not many people have guns in the UK is not because of a ban, or anything like that. It is because the British are not that interested in guns. The majority chose not to have a gun, which is possibly as odd to an American as the American obsession with guns is odd to the British.

Ok but so what? You said there were far more reasons to own guns than I would have thought, but you haven't mentioned even one that I have not been fully aware of since I was a kid myself.
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Our kids can get guns, is another example of why your ban claim is wrong.

You expressed surprise at some of the reasons I gave, I was explaining them to you, to show that there is no ban.
 
Thermal said:
You are claiming, presumably with a straight face, that it is a "common scenario" for rural farm owners to contract out vermin shooting to telephone sanitizers from London who contract-kill varmints as a side gig? Color me skeptical. But more to the point, I didn't ask about a hypothetical mousey John Wick side gig scenario. I asked about city dwellers without rural connections, and pretty obviously.
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Anyone, city dweller or not, who cannot find a place, such as a farm, to get permission to shoot, or afford to join a club, will not get a firearm to own, but they can go to one off shoots and pay to have a go at many clubs.

Or perhaps your argument is not as persuasive as you feel it is.
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I have spent most of my time correcting your false impression of the UK's licensing and firearms system.
 
catsmate said:
Aren't all the non-NI PPW licenses issued by the Home Office directly?
Certainly most the ~3k UK PPW licenses are in Norn Iron.
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I don't know, I was never involved in a self-defence carry request.
 
Nessie said:
...snip...

That not many people have guns in the UK is not because of a ban, or anything like that. It is because the British are not that interested in guns. The majority chose not to have a gun, which is possibly as odd to an American as the American obsession with guns is odd to the British.

...snip...
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Just as a FYI - The majority of Americans don't own a firearm. https://www.statista.com/statistics...eholds-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/ Which does make the number of guns owned even more astonishing.

That aside, there is very much a cultural difference, even looking back to when we didn't have strict gun laws we didn't have a high percentage of the population owning guns - probably because of the expense more than anything. The first gun licences in the UK were introduced to raise revenue for the government not to restrict gun ownership, you didn't need a licence to buy a gun, you needed a licence to keep a gun, just like you didn't need a licence to buy a dog but needed one to keep a dog.

The last notable change (after the Dunblane 1996 massacre) to further restrict gun ownership reduced the number of people owning firearms by an estimated 45,000 to 60,000. A statistic I used to use was something like "Prior to Dunblane there were around 3 million people legally owning fireamrs, afterwards there were still around 3 million people legally owning firearms".
 
The problem is we let violent right wing extremists spend the last... forever on a time frame worth discussing make chapter 1 of their government takeover fan fiction be "Da gubermnet is gonna come and take all ur guns" and we never really created an alternative narrative for that.

The issue is the exact say every other functioning government on the planet solved this problem is going to real like the opening scene of "Red Dawn" to Ma and Pa Kettle.

It's the "Russia is Afraid of Ukraine Joining NATO" strategy.
 
Nessie said:
If someone can pass the background checks, they will get a gun. If it is a shotgun, they do not need to give a reason. If it is another firearm, they need to give a reason, but there are so many acceptable reasons, that in effect there are few restrictions.
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Thanks. That was a more direct answer to my question. Is it common for UK people to know someone who has farmland and gives casual shooting permissions? I live in an area with a ton of farmland (NJ is actually called The Garden State) and firearm discharging is pretty tightly restricted, outside of highly regulated hunting seasons. The idea of blasting away on private property would bring Mr Policeman there right quick. There might be three places within a 80 mile radius where you can shoot skeet, and those are tightly regulated too.

{ETA: there are four, and in an 80 mile +/- diameter, not radius. Three are regulated county ranges, and one is a crazy large parcel that fits discharging range regulations. The reason we can only hunt with shotguns is that my State is densely populated any pretty flat, and rifle rounds easily travel to populated areas}

The reason you are confused, is because you had an erroneous impression of the UK and firearms, based on self defence hardly ever being accepted as a reason, and the restrictions on type of weapon imposed after massacres, which mean no more rapid fire weapons in the UK.
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No, the reason I was confused is that saying "I just want to collect some guns" was a criteria I hadn't heard before, and it seems to render the rest of the reasons pointless.

That not many people have guns in the UK is not because of a ban, or anything like that. It is because the British are not that interested in guns. The majority chose not to have a gun, which is possibly as odd to an American as the American obsession with guns is odd to the British.
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As Darat said, most Americans don't own guns, nor are we "obsessed"with them. The long guns I had were for hunting and occasional plinking. Please don't think most Americans are obsessed because of a loud and obnoxious minority. We don't like them either.

Our kids can get guns, is another example of why your ban claim is wrong.

You expressed surprise at some of the reasons I gave, I was explaining them to you, to show that there is no ban.
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Nessie said:
Anyone, city dweller or not, who cannot find a place, such as a farm, to get permission to shoot, or afford to join a club, will not get a firearm to own, but they can go to one off shoots and pay to have a go at many clubs.
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Wait, you just described how trivially easy it was, now you are back to saying he would be barred from ownership. Why couldn't he simply say that he wants to start collecting guns? Even one or two is a collection, or the start of one anyway.

I'm asking to get a sense of the practical, real answer, not the canned answer or technically accurate answer. For instance, if the applicant has permission to shoot on a given property, and loses that permission for one reason or another, is his license then revoked? If our intrepid phone sanitizer says he plans to start a rural vermin killing side business, and he doesn't actually do so or gets no clients, does he get to keep his license and gun or are they conditional upon maintaining the initial terms?
 
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jeremyp said:
And it's great. Nobody in the mainland UK is going to get shot by the police except in exceptional circumstances, because the police don't generally carry firearms.
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Man, I would love to disarm our patrolmen. The only times I've ever had a gun pointed at me was by our brave law enforcement officers, and overwhelmingly when I was completely docile and posed no threat at all.

But they actually do regularly run up against suspects who are armed and dangerous. I mean, we'd have piles of dead cops if they weren't armed. So it's a weird balancing act. I really don't like those barells pointed at me, but I know that if police were unarmed, our criminal element would solidly have less reason to give themselves up peacefully.
 
Abolish stand your ground laws; encourage people to retreat from violence.

Question Are “stand your ground” (SYG) laws associated with increases in violent deaths, and does this vary by US state?

Findings In this cohort study assessing 41 US states, SYG laws were associated with an 8% to 11% national increase in monthly rates of homicide and firearm homicide. State-level increases in homicide and firearm homicide rates reached 10% or higher for many Southern states, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana.

Meaning These findings suggest that SYG laws were associated with increased homicides each year and that the laws should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths.
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Degli Esposti M, Wiebe DJ, Gasparrini A, Humphreys DK. Analysis of “Stand Your Ground” Self-defense Laws and Statewide Rates of Homicides and Firearm Homicides. JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(2):e220077. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.0077

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/ja...ferral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=022122
 
Planigale said:
Abolish stand your ground laws; encourage people to retreat from violence.



Degli Esposti M, Wiebe DJ, Gasparrini A, Humphreys DK. Analysis of “Stand Your Ground” Self-defense Laws and Statewide Rates of Homicides and Firearm Homicides. JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(2):e220077. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.0077

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/ja...ferral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=022122
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All of these shootings would still have taken place if stand your ground laws were abolished. These shootings took place under the castle doctrine, which says you have no duty to retreat from your home or place of business when faced with a violent threat.
 
Thermal said:
Man, I would love to disarm our patrolmen. The only times I've ever had a gun pointed at me was by our brave law enforcement officers, and overwhelmingly when I was completely docile and posed no threat at all.

But they actually do regularly run up against suspects who are armed and dangerous. I mean, we'd have piles of dead cops if they weren't armed. So it's a weird balancing act. I really don't like those barells pointed at me, but I know that if police were unarmed, our criminal element would solidly have less reason to give themselves up peacefully.
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About ten years ago I was hanging out with some friends. One of them is a retired South Carolina State Trooper who was an instructor at the SC State Police academy. He lamented that there were guys he saw graduate who'd made him uneasy. He'd do everything he legally could to see if he could push them over the edge - to wash them out. But some of them made it through none the less, and he'd watch them graduate thinking, "I hope I don't see this guy in the news". He also complained about how many police departments would have these "training seminars" with "experts" who were supposedly teaching officers how to deal with life threatening situations. These training sessions, which are conducted by private contractors who get paid for them, often contain cautionary tales about The Guy Who Died Because He Hesitated. I'm sure that's why we see some cops pointing guns at people who aren't acting threatening in any way. I also think it goes a long way toward explaining shootings like Philando Castile and Justine Diamond.
 
99% of the time we're not talking "stand your ground."

The original vague legal concept behind things like the Castle Defense and Stand Your Ground was (mostly) a simple right to self defense NOT being predated on having to try and escape FIRST and I'm mostly okay with that IN THEORY.

I've long argued against the "Hide under your bed like a good little victim, call the police, and wait for them to make the big scary bad man go away" mentality, not the least of which is because the police have no legal responsibility to actually do that. I reject, wholesale, any legal philosophy that requires the victims of crimes to be passive.

If someone is in my house I have a right to make them leave my house. How much damage inflicted on their person before they leave my house is up to them.

And no this doesn't give people carte blanch to ignore simple concepts like reasonable and appropriate force and de-escalation.
 
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