It became very clear that I've been right all along.
I've always suspected that the pro-gun guys were being less than honest when they claim that gun owners and especially concealed carry guys are more responsible and more law-abiding then the average citizen. The reason, they keep telling us, is because they value their right to own and carry guns too much to risk losing it.“As I begin to write this, not 20 minutes beforehand, I pulled my gun in self defense. For the second time in 4 months. In the gun free city of Chicago. I already know what you’re thinking, I’m not allowed to carry a gun in Chicago. Let’s get this out of the way, I have made the decision to conceal carry in Chicago. Yes this is stupid, but it has already been beneficial for me. Not once but twice.
Yet, when a post goes up on TTAG in which someone admits he carries illegally in Chicago, little criticism is heard. This is called the bad-rules-be-damned mentality, by them. To me it's proof that hidden criminals outnumber even the wildest estimates.
Check out some of the comments:
I am a telecommunications technician by trade, have worked in the gun-free Utopia of the People’s Democratic Republic of Chitcago more times than I care to count, AND HAVE ALWAYS CARRIED there (and elsewhere).
Good for you to do the right thing and still carry without the blessings of the dirty politicians.
I carry when I have to go into Chicago, too. Hey, concealed is concealed, right? No one knows, and I’m real okay with that.
What's your opinion? Do you think it's all right for gun owners to disregard certain laws and still consider themselves law-abiding? I mean, the guys who do this are not career criminals. Does my term "hidden criminal" work for describing this large segment of the gun-owning population?
What do you think? Please leave a comment.
You take the unconfirmed story of one person and conclude that we all are the same? That's a hasty generalization, the basis of forming a stereotype. But if we're taking the story to be true, you should read the rest of it. The man reports using his gun to drive away thugs who wanted to harm him, and he didn't fire a shot.
ReplyDeleteWhy Greg, you want us to trust people with guns because people are basically good (especially apparently in your silly world view if they have guns.
DeleteThere appear to be a lot of people who report illegally carrying guns, completely disregarding the law.
Are we supposed to believe they are ALL liars? Are we supposed to believe that if they are liars, they are also safe with guns and will follow the law in how they use it? (I don't.)
Can you produce a rationale for this to be a lie? What do you suppose could be gained by his lying? Where would the benefit to him be that would explain the lie?
There isn't one. If anything in this day of IP address functions on blogs, and other sources, it is the case tha they risk being caught by the admission, arguing for it to be more likely to be true than false.
We have another gun nut boasting about his show and tell, where his fantasy bad guys ran away when shown the power of his fetish object.
It's a lot like the historically inaccurate depiction of vampyres cringing away when shown a crucifix. Oh....the power of the sacred fetish object .....ooooooooooooh the potency of the magical fetish object. whoooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooh.
Bullshit. This guy is an ordinary average joe-public scofflaw, who will probably fuck up at some point, as so many of them do, and end up in trouble - as well they should.
DG - Why do you take the guy at face value that he was carrying a gun and then claim he made up the "fantasy" bad guys?
DeleteBecause there is no support for the claim that there was a bad guy. The same reasoning supports both beliefs. He gets a kick, a sense of empowerment from having a gun, but that sense of empowerment lessens with no use of their gun. An unsupported, unchallenged claim like that bolsters the same emotional payoff they get by carrying in the first place. If he could support his claim with a police report, video surveillance, something, that would be different.
DeleteWe know from the reports here that often - amazingly often - not only does waving a gun around NOT scare away the other party, whether the waving is done by the good guy or the bad guy, but the other person will grapple and wrestle away the firearm as a means of ending any threat. There is an inherent problem in fleeing someone with a gun - they can shoot you as you are running away. Grappling with someone for a gun can actually be the safer of the available options.
So I'm always a bit skeptical about the accounts of people being scared and fleeing.
I have heard a lot of bullshit boasting about their prowess and how their dangerous firearm scared away the cowardly criminal that was not credible. But most of the time in my experience when someone claimed they were carrying, they were.
Dog Gone, we've discussed critical thinking skills for a long time now. Why do you accept this story as true? Isn't it possible that the person in question made up everything from the first word? If we're just talking about the theoretical possibility of carrying a gun in Chicago and the advantages and otherwise of doing so, we don't have to verify the account, but to take this as fact requires more.
DeleteThis is why I call you biased against gun owners. The story here is of no greater reliability than something found in the Daily Mail. It could have happened, or it could be pure invention. But since it makes a gun owner look bad in your eyes, you accept it without question.
Will you now admit that on this matter, you allowed your prejudice to form your thinking?
Asked and answered, above.
DeleteThe story IS different than the daily mail. That you miss those significant qualitative differences only points out how poorly you apply critical thinking.
I offered both reason and experience to indicate what was plausible and what was not. I didn't confuse anything as fact; I evaluated it for plausibility, not proof of being a fact.
That you can't tell the difference is part of your problem with critical thinking.
DG - I propose you should serve on every jury since you have the ability to tell when people are making up parts of their story but not others. What a great supernatural ability you have.
DeleteDog Gone, your asked and answered response is an example of what's wrong with the moderation of comments. I asked my questions about why you believe this story before your second comment had appeared. If you'd post comments immediately, the order of actual writing would be obvious.
DeleteYou see the idea of a person carrying a gun illegally is credible, but the idea that bad guys could be driven away isn't. I said that the whole story is unverified. I don't know if any of it is fact. You bought the part of the story that you want to believe.
Let's put the shoe on the other foot.
DeleteSuppose that some event and a grass roots campaign leads to overwhelming public support of ubiquitous firearms ownership and carry everywhere. Then law and policy makers fall in step and repeal all gun control laws. And upon further consideration, our elected officials conclude that it is integral to law-and-order and public safety. In fact it becomes so important to public safety that lawmakers view public debate to introduce gun control as a danger to society. Thus they pass laws making it illegal to debate gun control publicly because it jeopardizes the right of people to be secure in their persons.
Of course some people would cry out that they have a right to free speech. So this issue goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and they hold that the government can limit free speech when people want to talk about implementing policies that cause citizens to die because such discussions are essentially "a conspiracy to be an accessory to homicide" and "a conspiracy to deny civil rights under color of law".
So it becomes the law of the land and public debate about gun control is illegal. Would all of you gun grabbers simply go silent and never bring up the topic of gun control again? If a few people who advocated gun control brought up the topic, would that mean that all people who privately favor gun control are just not trustworthy?
CC, you love to bring up improbables.
DeleteLets add in to your unlikely scenario that little green men from Mars are landing in the back yards of suburban soccer moms, and that we now need a lot of pink M-16s to defend ourselves from interplanetary invasion, and Congress passes laws funding such weapons for every home for national defense and alien vermin control.
Sorry but you need a whole lot more probable scenario before this deserves any further or more serious answer.
It is a ridiculous question, and you hold a ridiculous position.
If we are getting into "what ifs", Crunchy--
DeleteWhat if the Citizens of the US had a good educational system which provided knowledge.
What if the people of the US were intelligent, responsible, and capable of logical thinking?
Then we wouldn't have idiotic questions like yours and this argument would be moot.
I must point out that people who advocate gun control and a proper historic interpretation of the Second Amendment are harassed by people who want to bully us out of our opinions.
That is not governmental action, but the action of ignorant people who only want to see their ignorant opinions reinforced.
As such, it is not a violation of the US Constitution.
I could say the same exact thing about your side.
DeleteIn the end you are going to great pains to try and ban the possession and use of firearms for the overwhelming majority of the public -- and even law enforcement according to dog gone. And for what? To try and prevent some fraction of a few thousand deaths and injuries to citizens where the attackers used a firearm? I have yet to hear anyone predict how many of those injuries and deaths that gun grabbers could prevent. I have yet to hear anyone tell me why our local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies would be successful "this time". I have yet to hear anyone tell me what stops local machine shops from producing all the new guns that criminals want. I have yet to hear anyone tell me how we prevent smuggling guns across our 12,000 miles of shoreline and borders around our nation. I have yet to hear anyone tell me why violent crimes wouldn't increase once criminals lose their fear of an armed citizenry. I have yet to hear anyone tell me how "weak" people in our society would successfully defend themselves without firearms. I have yet to hear anyone explain how violent crime rates are now at their lowest levels since the 1960s and 1970s when we now have several million concealed carry licensees armed out in public. I have yet to hear anyone explain why there is so much violence in South Africa and Mexico which have strict gun control laws. I have yet to hear anyone explain why there is no violent crime at gun ranges or in hunting settings where there are millions of armed citizens every year.
I could go on and on. These are not trivial matters. The gun grabbers are promoting an agenda that strips almost everyone of firearms for the possible gain of preventing a couple thousand crimes with firearms annually but at the expense of the 10s of thousands of defensive uses of firearms in the hands of citizens annually.
But that is logical stuff. You guys are missing a much larger picture. Regardless of whether you do or do not know better than everyone else about history, the 2nd Amendment, moral philosophy, or whatever else, the masses know that they inherently have a right to defend themselves. It is instinctive. And the masses know that they need effective ways to defend themselves. And the masses will demand it.
The masses don't care about convoluted complex legal arguments that tell them they cannot defend themselves ... any more so than they would care about a convoluted complex legal argument that they have to allow someone to rape them. It is instinct.
When are you going to try and work with the masses rather than oppose them?
Ooops! hit publish before changing plausibility to credibility, which would be a better choice of word to express the concept I had in mind.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea how prevalent this may be. My best guess for the explanation is as follows.
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. Constitution is the law of the land and any laws in violation of the Constitution are null and void. While gun grabbers argue that citizens have no fundamental right to keep and bear arms in public, gun rights advocates argue that they do via the 2nd Amendment. If you believe in the latter, then prohibitions on the right to keep and bear arms in Chicago are null and void and those people that do carry are not criminals.
In my humble opinion this conflict will exist forever. For all human history people have banned together to exercise collective power (e.g. mob rule). And people operating as individuals have sought individual liberty. Firearms symbolize and engender liberty and thus will always be a point of contention.
This is completely unsurprising. As an avid listener to the right wing media via AM radio (keeps the blood pumping), there is an insane, irrational push to pass a national law that would force every state to recognize any state's concealed-carry license. The big rub here, of course, is that requirements are different in the states that do have them as it pertains to training, experience, and background.
ReplyDeletePassage of something like that would be disastrous on many, many levels.
You're not kidding, Ricky.
DeleteNot surprising at all. Brings to mind one of the recent pro-gun demonstrations at Virginia Tech, just before the most recent shooting there. One of the pro-gun speakers admitted that he and others already carry concealed there against school policy.
ReplyDeleteThe gun guyz claim that they are law-abiding and that fighting criminals means "enforcing the laws already on the books", but at the same time break the law in this way, and advocate for private sales *without* background checks, which would screen out prohibited people. Shame on them! It only proves that these guys are pro-criminal.
"One of the pro-gun speakers admitted that he and others already carry concealed there against school policy....The gun guyz claim that they are law-abiding..."
DeleteI believe that is a school policy, not a law.
If you want a safer society, why not work with us instead of against us? What are you willing to compromise on?
DeleteNope. I believe that the law allows the school or other location to determine if they permit firerams on their premises. So the individual is breaking that law which gives them that property right.
DeleteIt's also a form of trespassing. They are not allowed on the premises with guns. Therefore when they are present with guns, they are trespassing.
One more instance where you gun nuts want to trample the rights of others, in this case property rights, and rights NOT to have to put up with your guns.
For those businesses or other entities that require insurance to operate, their insurance policies almost certainly are part of that decision. So you would also wish to assert that gun nuts have a right to put organizations and businesses out of business, just so you can hang onto your gun fetish object.
That's wrong, that's NOT a right, and it goes far beyond mere school policy into law breaking, and no one should do it.
If it is done by an instructor of some kind, they should be fired. If it is done by a student, they should be expelled, permanently. If it is a staffer, they should be fired. If it is a visitor, they should be removed and not allowed to return for being so disrespectful of others and for being a danger to others.
If you can't follow those rules, you have lost any basis for being trusted.
Now the insurance aspect is interesting. I am wondering how long it takes the insurance companies to increase the premiums at businesses that prohibit guns. When a business prohibits me from defending myself, they take on that responsibility and corresponding added liability.
DeleteHidden criminals are very prevalent among the so-called lawful gun owners. My main objection to them is not that they break some laws, it's that they claim they're squeaky clean.
ReplyDeleteGreg CampFeb 9, 2012 01:03 PM
ReplyDeleteIf you want a safer society, why not work with us instead of against us? What are you willing to compromise on?
YOU are part of what makes for a more dangerous society. It is YOU as well as the gang bangers who are the problem.
Why would it make sense to compromise with that?
I want to see effective gun regulation and enforcement, which has proven to reduce gun violence, gun injuries, gun accidents, gun crimes, and gun suicides.
You don't. Your ONLY justification is you don't want to, not that it would be effective - you have NO evidence of that, and not that it would harm you - you have no evidence of that either, particularly as crime statistics continue to decline.
If crime statistics continue to decline, then why do you insist that we're such a problem?
DeleteAs I've said before, this discussion is more than just theoretical. It's also political, which means that your side and our side both are seeking to win votes. If we want to accomplish something, we'll have to make some kind of deal. But until you're willing to compromise, why should we give up anything?
Because, if crime statistics are declining slightly with all the gun availability out there, just imagine how much they'd decline with proper gun control.
DeleteRemember, no one is saying gun availability is the only factor. But it's an important one. What we should have instead of the frequent multiple murders is more of those attempted murders with baseball bat. One guy goes to the hospital with a concussion instead of 5 going to the morgue.
Crime isn't in slight decline. Since the 90s, it's been falling. Why do you insist on a solution that many Americans will oppose vehemently? What about arguing for solutions that we all can agree on?
Delete