Another mass shooting in America

[Grand Moff Tim]

The Middle East isn't the best example because they have home field advantage and mountains. We have an uphill battle over there.

The US has mountains, too . Besides, hunting down armed resistance in cities is just as difficult and dangerous for a military as hunting them down in the mountains.

We have homefield advantage here, too. An invading military force won't know the lay of the land better than the locals, even if that military force is from the same country.

 

[Winspear]

Taking guns away from legal civilian owners would mean only psychopaths and the criminally intent would have (illegal) access to firearms, as it is in the UK, where most firearms are illegal.

I see this as an incredibly common viewpoint - but honestly, how often do these things happen in the UK? I recall just one in my lifetime, a couple of years back. Might be wrong.

Of course, criminals still have access to guns over here and there is gang violence just the same. But it doesn't seem to be the criminals that we need to worry about. 99% of these incidents are seemingly normal non-suspicious people who have access to a gun because it's legal, and suddenly lose their shit. Luckily, most normal people suddenly losing their shit in the UK don't have access to a firearm. There's only one way to look at it in my opinion - whether or not citizens around me are armed, if I have a gun in my pocket I can pull it out and kill at least one person before anything is done about it. So fix the law and get that gun the fuck out of my pocket

 

[flint757]

The US has mountains, too . Besides, hunting down armed resistance in cities is just as difficult and dangerous for a military as hunting them down in the mountains.

We have homefield advantage here, too. An invading military force won't know the lay of the land better than the locals, even if that military force is from the same country.

fair enough

I think we are safe for now either way...

 

[Grand Moff Tim]

I think we are safe for now either way...

NO WAY MAN! NWO ROTHSCHILD DAVID ICKE! TRUST NO ONE!

 

[TRENCHLORD]

The UK has about 1/6 the population of the USA. If you sectioned off 1/6 of the USA, and only looked at that section, then it would also appear to happen much less often.

What are the gun laws like in Norway where that guy mowed down dozens of kids?
(I've no idea what their laws are BTW)

 

[flint757]

Gun homicides and gun ownership listed by country | News | guardian.co.uk

Gun crime statistics by US state: download the data. Visualised | World news | guardian.co.uk

Here's the data. Make of it what you will, it is arguably inconclusive. Texas and California have the highest rate of gun crimes/ownership, but I think that also has a lot to do with how close we are to Mexico and not just guns/legislation. On the national chart mexico is the closest country with a way worse statistic for gun homicide. Something that could definitely be correlated. If you look at the state map most of the guns and the related crime are worse the further south you go it seems so it is definitely a possible correlation.

 

[TRENCHLORD]

Texas and California are the perfect demonstration that gun laws/or lack thereof aren't the problem.
The state with the most relaxed laws, and the state with the toughest gun laws, and they are both a mess of gun violence.

 

[Jakke]

I dont know, man. If the last few armed conflicts we've been involved with have proven anything, it's that armed civilians can cause some serious grief against a force armed with significantly better weapons, technology and strategies. Mujahadin aren't coming at us in Apache attack helicopters in Iraq, after all.

It's a good point. The Mujahedin would have been defeated though quite a long time ago if they did not have a constant refill of fighters from Pakistan and Somalia (mainly), I don't think that Canada and Mexico would send fighters if the US government went full retard

By pointing that out I'm not saying we should be able to have whatever weapons we want so we can deal with the extremely unlikely case that the government turns its military might on its own citizens, I just felt like pointing it out . In fact, a better argument to use would be "The government is never going to turn its military on the civilian populace, your overparanoid dickbag," not "civilian firearms won't be able to stop the military."

I'm going start using that one

I just have to ask, you as a born american, how comes some segments of the US population are so paraniod about their own government?



Ok, over to the rest of the thread. The argument "Well, he would just have found another way to kill all those people" does not hold up. Basically everywhere else in the western world has stricter gun control than the US. Are we having killing sprees with... What were those examples? Oh yes, paper clips, rocks, knifes, strangulation, dirty pipe bombs, and bombs.

- We don't? But then maybe....

Then maybe that argument is horseshit. You have an extreme homocide rate in the US, and also the laxest gun laws. Please, look past this as a partsisan issues, and please follow the smoke. The gun control people are not an evil kabbal hellbent on banning all your guns, they just want to possibly reduce people getting killed.

 

[Grand Moff Tim]

The Mujahedin would have been defeated though quite a long time ago if they did not have a constant refill of fighters from Pakistan and Somalia (mainly), I don't think that Canada and Mexico would send fighters if the US government went full retard

The US also has a population ten times larger than Iraq, so it'd probably take a bit longer before we ran out of homegrown resistance than it took in Iraq.

It's more interesting to think about what official international aid the American public would get if the government lost its mind. Do you figure the UN would send peacekeeping troops to the US under those circumstances? NATO? Anyone?

I just have to ask, you as a born american, how comes some segments of the US population are so paraniod about their own government?

No idea, really. I'm sure I could sit and speculate about it, but since I don't think it'll ever happen, it'd be pure conjecture.

 

[anthonyferguson]

I'm absolutely shocked and appalled by the news. I heard while driving home last night, and am totally lost for words as to how the families might be feeling.

Regarding comparing meth and firearms, I think that it's naive to use this as an argument for the legalisation of guns. Meth-amphetamine is incredibly addictive, and however much GAS you might have for a new gun, guitar, car, whatever, it doesn't have anywhere near the same effect as heroin or meth or any other highly addictive drug. With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to say guns should never have been legal in the first place, but we are all children of our time and things that seem like common sense to us now were probably dismissed as preposterous had they ever been suggested at the time the second amendment was made.

 

[flint757]

Well back then I imagine no gun would mean struggling to survive.

And jakke the paranoia is a slow build up. Someone tells you something everyday and people start believing it. The NRA calls people up during election time saying "Obama is gonna take your guns". What happens? People go our in droves and buy as many as they can afford and sales go up by a large margin (but they're looking out for you ). Some people have let others control their actions unintentionally. Same with politics; Both sides are fighting to convince us the ship is sinking so they can have our vote and they can 'fix' the problem. Same thing happens in journalism too. That bath salt 'zombie' thing sparked dishonest journalism and writers seeking far and wide to find correlated stories to up their viewer count. Chaos sells, simple as that.

 

[Jakke]

The US also has a population ten times larger than Iraq, so it'd probably take a bit longer before we ran out of homegrown resistance than it took in Iraq.

It's more interesting to think about what official international aid the American public would get if the government lost its mind. Do you figure the UN would send peacekeeping troops to the US under those circumstances? NATO? Anyone?

Yeah, not to mention that all afganis are not supporting the Mujahedin, but I am sure most americans would object to being shipped to FEMA camps (or whatever).

It's an interesting problem. What I would predict first is splintering in the resistance, we will have socialists going in one direction, religious guerrillas in one and the secular and moderate resistance going one, we will probably also see the neo-nazis forming a movement, as this is an opportunity for them to usher in the council-based dictatorship that most of these groups seems to want to have. We will also probably see a sharia-motivated muslim movement, even though it's hard to predict how big it would be. That group would however probably get a lot of support, in ways of both arms and soldiers, Al Quaida have a history of sending fighters to places where there is Jihad, and I suspect the majority of the world's muslim nations not in NATO would support them with materials.

The US has a permanent seat on the Security Council with the right of veto, which would make it possible to veto any official interventions from the UN's side. It is possible for the EU to send people, however, I'm not sure if we'd have a military collaboration between the EU nations, or even a standing EU military force. We probably will, but that's just a probably. A possibility is of course that NATO loyalties are greater than EU ones, and in that case we'd lose the bigger European military powers, such as Germany and France.

I would imagine that China and Russia would see a chance here to circumvent the Security Council, and I could very well see a Afghanistan-type situation, that is that the resistance has rabbited up into the woods and that they are being supported by Russian and Chinese arms, Chinese support will probably go first and foremost to the marxist and socialist groups.

I could also see that the mexican drug cartels would see this as an opportunity to seize parts of the United States, and they would probably be pretty harsh with anyone from the population objecting to the new management.


This is all very hypothetical of course, since the rest of the world with nuclear weapons would, at the first sign of batshittery, send a communiqé along the lines off:
"You lay the fuck off, or we will turn Washington into a fucking scorched desert. If you don't think we're serious, just fucking try us. We have had it up to here with you, and believe us, it would be a relief to bomb you back to the radioactive stone age"
And then they would blow up Greenland for emphasis.

 

[SenorDingDong]

I think this tragedy was a perfect example of the media's vastly competitive nature taking precedence over even accuracy of event coverage. News stations were quite literally pointing fingers from one brother to the other, making up casualties, and doing practically whatever they could to act as if they had more information than other news channels.

Instead of bitching about guns, I'm going to gripe about our country's media; besides being a joke, it has gotten to a point where it is now offensive to see them scrambling for threads of a story and simply pulling what they don't have out of their asses and representing it as fact. More than anything, it is entirely disrespectful to the families who lost loved ones. They care more about the story than they do about those involved. It's nothing new, but it's just as sickening as ever.

 

[Konfyouzd]

Gotta get dem ratings, yo!

 

[BIG ND SWEATY]

Gun laws prevent shootings? Please, tell me more about how criminals follow laws.

im sorry for quoting this so late but this thread got really big really fast lol.

iv never understood why some people say this, its not about criminals suddenly following the law because of some change in our gun laws, its the thought that anyone or everyone around you has a gun and can take you out the second that you pull out your gun and use it to cause harm to innocent people.

 

[fps]

The UK has about 1/6 the population of the USA. If you sectioned off 1/6 of the USA, and only looked at that section, then it would also appear to happen much less often.

What are the gun laws like in Norway where that guy mowed down dozens of kids?
(I've no idea what their laws are BTW)

Norway has been discussed, if anything the calls for gun regulation in Norway are now even greater than they were before. It was a complete one-off, and they are still looking at making it harder to own more weapons. In the US these kinds of things have happened about 25-30 times in the past decade.

The gun crime stats for the UK and US per capita were posted earlier, by me, what you said about the UK is completely wrong I'm afraid, the gun crime per capita is much much lower.

Since mass murders almost always seem to be committed with guns, doesn't it make sense to take action against the things that ARE happening rather than shrugging and saying *theoretically something else could happen*?

 

[synrgy]

Good read with lots of verifiable/sources data: Washington Post

When we first collected much of this data, it was after the Aurora, Colo. shootings, and the air was thick with calls to avoid “politicizing” the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for “don’t talk about reforming our gun control laws.”

Let’s be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It’s just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws.

 

[vstealth]

Im not sure if it would work in America but introducing strict gun laws in Australia has meant there hasnt been a shooting massacre since 1996. It probably would work after some time but there is the issue of what to do with the people who already own guns.

 

[TRENCHLORD]

what you said about the UK is completely wrong I'm afraid

The only thing I said about the UK is that they have a population that is 1/6 that of the US.

So I'm afraid I was right.

I also said that if our population was 1/6 of what it is, that these crimes would likely happen not nearly as often.

Once again my statements are not false.

 

[flint757]

Statistically we do have higher gun crime by ratio. That being said I agree that if our population was smaller (and realistically we aren't all equal, so percentages don't necessarily shrink equally) we'd have less crime overall.

We shall never know...