Its all very funny unless you know someone or have yourself been the victim of a home invasion, especially those for whom police response times are many minutes -- as the sarcastic joke goes "Police are only minutes away when you need them to be there in seconds."
#stopgunviolence
- Thread starter silk123
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That's what happens when you destroy your city driving highways through it so your tax-base can live elsewhere. And only the hopeless are left in the riven, splintered neighbourhoods.
Not that anyone's city can raise enough taxes to have enough cops everywhere to nab home-invaders in the act, but it's not at all unreasonable to finance a town with a supportive social system that makes such violent acts extreme rarities instead of commonplace.
A good start would be making criminals work a helluva lot harder to get their tools. By definition, good, straight folks are already accustomed to working hard to get theirs, so what's a bit more paperwork for them.
There are places in Detroit that are no-mans-land territory. It's not that it will take the cops 1 hour to get there due to poor infrastructure, nor a lack of cops available - it's that in these sections of the city, the cops won't bother to go at all because it's too dangerous and not worthwhile for them.
The more paperwork solution will have zero impact aside from making straight folks work harder and cost them more money on furthering the bureaucracy around gun ownership.
In US inner cities, where most homicides take place, there are enough guns on the black market to satisfy criminal demand. Gun registration and more background checks will have little impact.
When there is enough despair, people will do anything to feed themselves and their families, and that includes illegal transactions, such as straw buying guns and selling them to criminals. The best place to start is trying to solve the root cause of crime: poverty. Poverty happens because of the loss of jobs because of corporatism, that have exported jobs (without the workers) to Asia in the quest for quick profit.
I recently read that FDR gave the plutocrats and oligarchs of the US in the 1930's an ultimatum: Either share the wealth or he would destroy them. They decided to share to wealth, and FDR credited himself for saving capitalism. Too big to fail is not capitalism: it is socialism for the wealthy.
Nowadays, US politicians are almost all stooges of the mega corporations. It will take another person of the stature of FDR to set the US plutocrats straight again, the way he did it in 1933. Unfortunately, the 2 party system in the US will not allow this now, as they are completely under the control of big business.
Even Bernie Sanders is.
There's nothing 'grey' about those forums. They are 100% legal because stupid US laws allow 'private' gun sales with no oversight.
I wonder how the number of law abiding citizens suffering home invasions compares to the number of accidental shootings.
Hopefully the Executive Order will cut back on the ease of straw sales or 'lost guns' from shady gun dealers where the majority of guns used in crimes come from.
And we willingly accept regulations on pools. If we have no problem when laws say that pools must be surrounded by a locked fence but some people go nuts when it's suggested that guns should also be kept locked.
Except when it's not, like selling a firearm to a known felon; another law antis like to pretend doesn't exist, so they can claim that the sky is falling.
Swimming pools are specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution?
Actually most people do keep their firearms so that they are not readily available to either children or burglars.
Accidental shootings are just that . An accident . You can't fault a gun for that now can we . Just like car accidents are . Cars are licensed and people have to pass a driving test before they are allowed to drive a car but you know what car accidents still do happen . In Canada a person has to take a gun safety course before he or she can own a gun . It's a gun owners responsibility to handle a gun in a safe manner . Fail to do that and accidents will happen . Make all the laws you want to but there're not going to work if people don't follow the laws .
We have laws on murdering some one . Every country has those laws but for some reason some people do not want to follow those laws .
Now your being ridiculous .
As you know we have those laws in Canada . All guns have to be locked up in a safe manner when not in use . Many States have those laws as well . Many people do not follow those laws because they want to have their gun readily available in case they need it . They just don't do it in a safe manner .
Just like the laws on prostitution that are on the books . How many are following those laws ??? Even though many cases of buying sex is not hurting anyone at all it is still against the law to do so . It's the Law of the land . Period . It's a pure case of which law a person wishes to follow . More laws don't mean shit if people aren't going to follow them .
Ignorance, fear and prejudice walk hand in hand.
It is apparent that there is very little common sense when it comes to most peoples thinking about firearms.
Criminals do not obey laws - that is what makes them criminals. You can pass a thousand new gun laws and guess what - it won't stop criminals from breaking them.
Background checks are mostly a feel good measure - do you really think a criminal is going to try buying a gun in a conventional manner?
Criminalizing law abiding responsible gun owners is senseless.
Ironic that Trudeau jr's father tried to get an authorization to carry a handgun.
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It is apparent that there is very little common sense when it comes to most peoples thinking about firearms.
Criminals do not obey laws - that is what makes them criminals. You can pass a thousand new gun laws and guess what - it won't stop criminals from breaking them.
Background checks are mostly a feel good measure - do you really think a criminal is going to try buying a gun in a conventional manner?
Criminalizing law abiding responsible gun owners is senseless.
Ironic that Trudeau jr's father tried to get an authorization to carry a handgun.
https://reason.com/blog/2016/01/08/6-reasons-obama-is-untrustworthy-on-guns
6 Reasons Obama Is Untrustworthy on Guns
During last night's CNN "townhall" on "Guns in America," President Obama ruefully noted that "I've been very good for gun manufacturers," because fear of new firearm restrictions under his administration has repeatedly driven up sales. Yet he expressed dismay at Second Amendment supporters who do not trust him on this issue, who buy into the "imaginary fiction in which Obama's trying to take away your guns." At the same time, he demonstrated, both in his comments during the CNN special and in a New York Times op-ed piece published the same day, why he is not trustworthy. Here are six reasons:
1. The mass shooting bait and switch. As he did in his speech on Tuesday, Obama last night repeatedly invoked mass shootings to justify policies that would not have prevented them. He presented "sensible background checks" as a way to make sure that famillies "don't have to go through what the families at Newtown or San Bernardino or Charleston went through." But in those and the other recent mass shootings—as the surprisingly skeptical moderator, Anderson Cooper, pointed out—"none of the guns were purchased from an unlicensed dealer." That means background checks were performed and demonstrably did not stop the shootings. Obama himself conceded that "the young man who killed those kids in Newtown, he didn't have a criminal record, and so we didn't know ahead of time, necessarily, that he was going to do something like that." Given this reality, offering background checks as a solution to mass shootings is patently dishonest.
2. The argument from emotion. As I noted on Wednesday, Obama's policy proposals are all about showing that his heart is in the right place, which is why he so easily shrugs off questions about whether they would actually work. The implication is that people who oppose his proposals simply do not care, or at least do not care enough. In his New York Times essay, he appeals to "the vast majority of responsible gun owners" who "support common-sense gun safety" because they "grieve with us after every mass shooting." You either grieve with us, or you're against us. If you feel bad about murdered children, you have no choice but to support Obama's gun control agenda. A CNN survey suggests that focusing on intentions rather than results can be an effective strategy: While "67% of those asked [said] they favor the changes" Obama unveiled this week, "57% of those polled also said that the measures would not be effective in reducing the number of people killed by guns."
3. The false crisis. "The epidemic of gun violence in our country is a crisis," Obama declares in the opening line of his op-ed piece. But as he was forced to admit at the townhall, the murder rate in this country has reached historically low levels after declining for years. "Every year," he writes, "more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns." But as he mentioned during the townhall, two-thirds of the "30,000 deaths due to gun violence" are suicides. If the "gun violence" problem consists mainly of people taking their own lives, why does Obama keep talking about mass shootings, which account for a tiny percentage of homicides and an even smaller share of gun-related deaths? Presumably because they are scary and get a lot of attention. Yet the gun control solutions he proposes have nothing to do with mass shootings and little to do with preventing suicides, except to the extent that people who kill themselves have previously undergone court-ordered psychiatric treatment.
4. Cost blindness. In the Times, referring to the gun-related "executive actions" he announced on Tuesday, Obama says, "These actions won't prevent every act of violence, or save every life—but if even one life is spared, they will be well worth the effort." This formulation completely overlooks the other side of the ledger, which includes not just the dollars spent (money that potentially could save more lives if it were spent on something else) but the burdens imposed on law-abiding gun owners and on Americans unjustly deprived of their constitutional rights by expanded background checks.
5. Skepticism of armed self-defense. "I respect people who want a gun for self-protection," Obama claimed during the townhall, but that clearly is not true. Later, in response to a rape victim who keeps a gun at home to protect herself and her family, he questioned the value of keeping a gun at home to protect yourself and your family. "There are always questions as to whether or not having a firearm in the home protects you from that kind of violence," he said, warning that "there's always the possibility that that firearm in a home leads to a tragic accident." He conceded that "there are times where somebody who has a weapon has been able to protect themselves and scare off an intruder or an assailant" but claimed "what is more often the case is that they may not have been able to protect themselves, but they end up being the victim of the weapon that they purchased themselves." On balance, in other words, owning a gun for self-protection—a right at the core of the Second Amendment, as recognized by the Supreme Court—is a bad idea, and you're deluding yourself if you think otherwise.
6. Support for gun bans. Obama supported Chicago's handgun ban, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2010, and claimed it was consistent with the Second Amendment. He favors a new, broader federal ban on so-called assault weapons, although he does not seem to know what they are. Last night he said the Newtown massacre would have been less lethal if its perpetrator had not been able to obtain "a semiautomatic," an observation that suggests he joins New York Times columnist Gail Collins in supporting a ban on a category of firearms that includes many hunting rifles and almost all modern handguns aside from revolvers (which Collins claims "are totally inappropriate for either hunting or home defense"). And as Cooper pointed out, Obama admires Australian-style gun control, which features mass confiscation of guns and tight restrictions that would be clearly unconstitutional in this country.
If the idea that "Obama's trying to take away your guns" is an "imaginary fiction," it's not because he does not want to take away your guns. It's because political and legal realities prevent him from doing so. But for anyone who cares about the right to armed self-defense, the understanding that Obama does not like guns and reads the Second Amendment so narrowly that it has no practical meaning colors everything he does or proposes in this area. When he talks about "universal background checks," for example, you have to wonder how that requirement could be enforced without a national gun registry, a prerequisite for the sort of mass confiscation that Obama has repeatedly praised. That's not paranoia; that's logic.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist.
6 Reasons Obama Is Untrustworthy on Guns
During last night's CNN "townhall" on "Guns in America," President Obama ruefully noted that "I've been very good for gun manufacturers," because fear of new firearm restrictions under his administration has repeatedly driven up sales. Yet he expressed dismay at Second Amendment supporters who do not trust him on this issue, who buy into the "imaginary fiction in which Obama's trying to take away your guns." At the same time, he demonstrated, both in his comments during the CNN special and in a New York Times op-ed piece published the same day, why he is not trustworthy. Here are six reasons:
1. The mass shooting bait and switch. As he did in his speech on Tuesday, Obama last night repeatedly invoked mass shootings to justify policies that would not have prevented them. He presented "sensible background checks" as a way to make sure that famillies "don't have to go through what the families at Newtown or San Bernardino or Charleston went through." But in those and the other recent mass shootings—as the surprisingly skeptical moderator, Anderson Cooper, pointed out—"none of the guns were purchased from an unlicensed dealer." That means background checks were performed and demonstrably did not stop the shootings. Obama himself conceded that "the young man who killed those kids in Newtown, he didn't have a criminal record, and so we didn't know ahead of time, necessarily, that he was going to do something like that." Given this reality, offering background checks as a solution to mass shootings is patently dishonest.
2. The argument from emotion. As I noted on Wednesday, Obama's policy proposals are all about showing that his heart is in the right place, which is why he so easily shrugs off questions about whether they would actually work. The implication is that people who oppose his proposals simply do not care, or at least do not care enough. In his New York Times essay, he appeals to "the vast majority of responsible gun owners" who "support common-sense gun safety" because they "grieve with us after every mass shooting." You either grieve with us, or you're against us. If you feel bad about murdered children, you have no choice but to support Obama's gun control agenda. A CNN survey suggests that focusing on intentions rather than results can be an effective strategy: While "67% of those asked [said] they favor the changes" Obama unveiled this week, "57% of those polled also said that the measures would not be effective in reducing the number of people killed by guns."
3. The false crisis. "The epidemic of gun violence in our country is a crisis," Obama declares in the opening line of his op-ed piece. But as he was forced to admit at the townhall, the murder rate in this country has reached historically low levels after declining for years. "Every year," he writes, "more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns." But as he mentioned during the townhall, two-thirds of the "30,000 deaths due to gun violence" are suicides. If the "gun violence" problem consists mainly of people taking their own lives, why does Obama keep talking about mass shootings, which account for a tiny percentage of homicides and an even smaller share of gun-related deaths? Presumably because they are scary and get a lot of attention. Yet the gun control solutions he proposes have nothing to do with mass shootings and little to do with preventing suicides, except to the extent that people who kill themselves have previously undergone court-ordered psychiatric treatment.
4. Cost blindness. In the Times, referring to the gun-related "executive actions" he announced on Tuesday, Obama says, "These actions won't prevent every act of violence, or save every life—but if even one life is spared, they will be well worth the effort." This formulation completely overlooks the other side of the ledger, which includes not just the dollars spent (money that potentially could save more lives if it were spent on something else) but the burdens imposed on law-abiding gun owners and on Americans unjustly deprived of their constitutional rights by expanded background checks.
5. Skepticism of armed self-defense. "I respect people who want a gun for self-protection," Obama claimed during the townhall, but that clearly is not true. Later, in response to a rape victim who keeps a gun at home to protect herself and her family, he questioned the value of keeping a gun at home to protect yourself and your family. "There are always questions as to whether or not having a firearm in the home protects you from that kind of violence," he said, warning that "there's always the possibility that that firearm in a home leads to a tragic accident." He conceded that "there are times where somebody who has a weapon has been able to protect themselves and scare off an intruder or an assailant" but claimed "what is more often the case is that they may not have been able to protect themselves, but they end up being the victim of the weapon that they purchased themselves." On balance, in other words, owning a gun for self-protection—a right at the core of the Second Amendment, as recognized by the Supreme Court—is a bad idea, and you're deluding yourself if you think otherwise.
6. Support for gun bans. Obama supported Chicago's handgun ban, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2010, and claimed it was consistent with the Second Amendment. He favors a new, broader federal ban on so-called assault weapons, although he does not seem to know what they are. Last night he said the Newtown massacre would have been less lethal if its perpetrator had not been able to obtain "a semiautomatic," an observation that suggests he joins New York Times columnist Gail Collins in supporting a ban on a category of firearms that includes many hunting rifles and almost all modern handguns aside from revolvers (which Collins claims "are totally inappropriate for either hunting or home defense"). And as Cooper pointed out, Obama admires Australian-style gun control, which features mass confiscation of guns and tight restrictions that would be clearly unconstitutional in this country.
If the idea that "Obama's trying to take away your guns" is an "imaginary fiction," it's not because he does not want to take away your guns. It's because political and legal realities prevent him from doing so. But for anyone who cares about the right to armed self-defense, the understanding that Obama does not like guns and reads the Second Amendment so narrowly that it has no practical meaning colors everything he does or proposes in this area. When he talks about "universal background checks," for example, you have to wonder how that requirement could be enforced without a national gun registry, a prerequisite for the sort of mass confiscation that Obama has repeatedly praised. That's not paranoia; that's logic.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist.
That "public" audience at Obama's town hall was selectively picked by invitation only. CNN has been pro-anti-gun and I'm sure together they made sure the audience was stacked in their favor with a couple of pro-gun members to make it seem like everyone was well represented.
Criminals aren't going to obey the laws. Taya Kyle gets it and good for her for standing up and bringing attention to where the focus should be and not wasting time and money on more gun control. There are so many firearm laws already in place in the US but the only folks obeying them are law abiding ones.
San Bernardino guns may have been purchased legally and they were California compliant, a state which happens to have THE toughest gun control laws in the country along with Illinois and NY. Farook and his wife disregarded the California gun laws by illegally removing the "bullet-button" device so that they could quickly change magazines and they purchased high-capacity magazines which are banned in California. They even tried to convert one of the guns to fire in auto mode. Gun laws failed because criminals have no moral conscience. What are more gun laws going to accomplish?
Criminals aren't going to obey the laws. Taya Kyle gets it and good for her for standing up and bringing attention to where the focus should be and not wasting time and money on more gun control. There are so many firearm laws already in place in the US but the only folks obeying them are law abiding ones.
San Bernardino guns may have been purchased legally and they were California compliant, a state which happens to have THE toughest gun control laws in the country along with Illinois and NY. Farook and his wife disregarded the California gun laws by illegally removing the "bullet-button" device so that they could quickly change magazines and they purchased high-capacity magazines which are banned in California. They even tried to convert one of the guns to fire in auto mode. Gun laws failed because criminals have no moral conscience. What are more gun laws going to accomplish?
