You're right. I knew a lot of people who had guns when I was growing up but they were never obsessive or belligerent about them like people are now.
This is a culture where lots of people want to be perceived as having the best of whatever it is. Why would it be any different with guns? Cars, clothes, etc., some people just have to go there.
What I mean is, that to some people having the "big guns" might just be another status symbol for them.
Well... they need to be very aware of the heavy responsibility that comes with owning guns. An AR-15 can shoot through walls and kill your neighbors. No ordinary person needs to be able to kill 50 people at a time. Fifty burglars are never going to show up at your house at the same time. And even if they did, they would have 50 guns with them, so you wouldn't stand a chance against them, no matter what you had. Just about any other status symbol lacks the ability to kill a lot of people. The only other one I can think of is a private airplane. I wish more people could understand that difference.
Oh yeah. Maybe one generational difference with the gun culture is that fewer young people have been in war. The WWII generation saw a lot of death, and didn't want to see any more of it. Seeing it on a screen isn't the same, according to those who have seen both.
The US has had a shitty foreign policy that it keeps repeating: giving weapons to the enemy of our enemy. This has been a reoccurring process since Reagan gave military grade weapons to the Taliban. I don't see the point, we all know your stance on the gun issue and it ain't ever gonna change even an inch. I'd say even if Omar Mateen couldn't get his hands on a gun, who's to say he wouldn't've blown the place up and taken the same number of lives? He was a terrorist after all.
It's too bad Omar Mateen was a registered democrat, a religon-of-peace member, and his brother in law "worked with refugees and hates Trump." Too bad he wasn't a white negative redneck stereotype with a Donald Trump hat. The media would've had so much more fun with biased reporting.
I think you do. The bias of the mainline report always changes depending on the profile of the shooter.
I find this quite interesting. He doesnt fit the profile of the typical white and under 25 mass shooter Yet he doesnt fit the profile of a typical islamic terrorist either. He wasnt particulary religious by reports coming out and now there is news coming out that perhaps he was in the closet and he even frequented gay night clubs. How does one define cancer when there are so many different types?
Exactly. Both of my granddads, WW II vets, owned firearms. Each owned a double-barreled shotgun, a .22 caliber rifle and a six shooter. And that's it. They would have considered military grade firearms useless and stockpiles of weapons stupid. This obsession with firepower, as far as I can tell, is recent. I don't consider myself a strict gun control advocate but I don't follow any of the arguments in favor of allowing the sales of quasi-military style weapons to the general public. These weapons are useless and don't make anyone any safer.
That's just another form of the 100% effectiveness argument that you made before. I'm not willing to wait for a solution that is guaranteed to work perfectly every time. Since it's impossible to prevent all traffic accidents, why have any restrictions on who's allowed to drive? Why have speed limits? Criminals don't obey laws, right? So let's just get rid of all traffic laws and have a real bloodbath on the road, every day. People are going to die on the highway one way or another, so the numbers don't really matter, do they? It's just more of the same. :wall: The truth is, we don't apply twisted gun control logic to anything else in life.
Aerianne I don’t know what legal issue Skips is talking about. I wrote the guideline on cut and paste back in 2007 (after consulting with Skip) but I’d been moderating it for some time before then. The reason was that there were many who’d just come to politics and never debate only paste articles or links which ran counter to the point of a debating forum. Thing was that sometimes the things posted were interesting and sparked debate in others, if not the original poster, and sometimes people who did usually debated posted a paste job but many times the cut and paste’s were just propaganda, political spam, so even today it’s not a strict rule. Now I know some sites don’t like their articles copied and others allow it but want a link, but I don’t know of any actual legal requirements. A Guardian journalist I’ve meet thought that cut and pasted articles as long as they had a link were like advertisement that might lure people to go to the Guardian site to read more.
6 I agree and it goes back further than Reagan or even the existence of the United States it’s a type of foreign policy that goes back into ancient history so to single out just one person seems perverse. And it doesn’t exactly back up your claim that Obama has purposely armed terrorists and drug cartels. Because nobody has set out any rational or reasonable reason why I should change my stance. You see that is how you should come to position, you weigh up the evidence and the arguments and come to an opinion that you can defend from criticism in a rational and reasonable way. But there seems to be a problem here in that those opposing prudent gun control don’t seem able to defend their views in any rational or reasonable way BUT they still hold on to them, and I can’t work out why. Why do you do it? See what I mean – this has been covered many times and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny (Karen has given above one rational and reasonable criticism) – but you and others with anti-gun control opinions seem totally unable to address such criticism, why? I mean ask yourself who seems to have the better stance the person who is happy to present their argument and is able to defend it from criticisms or the person like yourself who can’t address the criticisms and just keeps repeating stuff that didn’t stand up to criticism last time it was presented?
Karen I think this stems from a strong streak of Social Darwinist/free market/neoliberal thinking within US culture that was placed there and has been nurtured by wealth financed propaganda. To me there seems to have been only one period from the late twenties to the 1940’s when a more socially inclusive and collectivist model rivalled it. The fake ‘science’ of Social Darwinism postulated that we should all be in competition with everyone else (and everyone wants to screw you in return) and that is ‘natural’ and ‘good’ and any collective action such as banding together in a union, is ‘unnatural’ and so ‘bad’. It also preaches that it is the individual that should provide and protect etc and people should be wary or hostile to things done collectively by the state, such as welfare or police (which will be corrupt and corrupting because the individuals in them according to SD principles be working only in their own self interest not in the interests of the wider community). And it also claims that those with advantage in society ‘earned’ that advantage (because they are better genetically) and so those that are disadvantaged deserve those disadvantages because they are of inferior stock. This is a ‘natural’ and therefore ‘good’ process and should not be undermined in ‘unnatural’ ways like state intervention to assist the more disadvantaged. This philosophy is unlikely to produce ‘nice’ people it’s much more likely to produce greedy, self interested and fearful people, that are very aware of social status (material belongings show you are a successful ‘good’ person not a less successful ‘bad’ person) and create a society that unlikey to be enthusiastic about aiding the disadvantaged. But it is a philosophy that is common on the right and it underpins a lot of free market/neoliberal economic ideas.
Great post, thanks for sharing this link! I understand that the biggest tragedy gets more attention in the news but its kind of disturbing the public is (kept?) oblivious to all the others. And it is very disturbing to know how often mass shootings really happen in the USA. I wonder where those guns were made.
A company called "BulkAmmo . com" is struggling to fill its orders since Monday... But don't worry, “As you can probably imagine, it’s been a wild day or so in the ammo world but our boys in the warehouse are working hard and shipping fast,” Seriously, that's a real thing. http://time.com/4368521/orlando-shooting-ammunition-demand/ .
Yeah But How Do you Know Who is Buying It ? Found this on another forum i use I will Just put it here without Comment
