A couple quick lies:
1. "out of respect for the families and until the facts are known the NRA has remained silent." I told you why they remained silent.
First, like many pro-gun folks they experienced severe embarrassment and remorse for their role in the continuing spree shootings. And secondly, and most importantly, it was a calculated maneuver in order to give weight to the frequent and nonsensical "dancing in the blood" attacks against liberals and gun control folks who were talking about it.
2. "while some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain" is exactly what I expected. It's one of the reasons they remained silent. What gun control folks have done this week is not about political gain. It's about demanding changes that would make people safer.
Note to all pro-gun folks: at 18:00 Wayne admitted "violent crime is increasing again."
He spoke at some length about video games and he pointed out that the media doesn't know what it's talking about. He said one more law wont help since 20,000 have failed. All these remarks are diversions, desperate diversions to deflect attention from the real problem: easy access to guns by unfit people.
At 14:10 he reminded us that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." That's the biggest trick of all. As compelling as it is, the good guy with a gun would not be necessary if the bad guy didn't get one. In order to force this logic into something that resembles common sense, they insist that criminals will always get guns. This is a blatant lie and they know it. The UK has a 4 times lower murder rate than we do, largely due to the lower gun accessibility and Australia has completely eradicated mass shootings for the same reason.
Wayne seemed to be vaguely talking about arming teachers, yet he kept referring to putting police in every school. Either way, the whole speech was one big smokescreen. The first problem is the access to guns by unfit and dangerous people, something the NRA is directly responsible for. President Obama, and almost everyone else in the country, has been talking about the obvious solutions. This is what the fast-talking Wayne La Pierre desperately wants to avoid.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
"Australia has completely eradicated mass shootings"
ReplyDeleteI thought that was true until a few days ago myself. Turns out, yet again, the mainstream media is not being entirely accurate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_University_shooting
I wonder why?
OK, "almost eradicated" or "practically eradicated." How about, "vastly improved the situation?"
DeleteThe point remains in spite of your nit picking.
It is important. I already acknowledged that AU seems to be the lone rare exception. But it is important to realize that even there some will slip through the cracks. And, as the article I sent in the other thread highlighted - the violence will still occur in other forms.
DeleteBut the overall murder rate does seem to be down, so at this point, your side has 1 in the W column.
And while your statement that the U.K. has a murder rate that is one fourth of ours is true, it's also an artifact of small numbers. There's is about one per 100,000, while ours is around four. Here's a fascinating set of facts:
ReplyDeleteHomicide rate per 100,000:
U.S. Virgin Islands: 39.2
Puerto Rico: 26.2
Now what do those two have in common? They're islands, for one thing, and for another, they both have strict gun control laws.
But do explain--why do you believe that because you say something, that makes any comment to the contrary a lie? Speaking for myself, I feel no embarrassment and no remorse for my actions and my positions. I was not present in Newtown. The killer and I never met. If he had talked to me, I've have told him not to harm innocents, and if he'd told me about his plans, I'd have reported him to the police.
But as always, when you have a proposal for keeping guns out of the hands of unfit people without also disarming good citizens, I'll listen. Nothing you've suggested so far meets that standard.
You support minimal controls on who can own guns, you are complicit.
DeleteBy that reasoning, since I voted to make my county of residence wet instead of dry, I'm complicit if a drunk driver kills someone. I'm complicit every time any person misuses the freedoms that this country is supposed to protect. Whatever happened to holding the person responsible for his own actions?
DeleteAnd again, you ignore the point that gun control doesn't stop murder.
Sadly, Progressives, as a collectivist group, can't muster up an ounce of common sense between them.
ReplyDeleteorlin sellers
The UK has one quarter of our murder rate, yet historically they had a fifth. This dates back hundreds of years; back to when the US and Britain had similar firearms laws (the English Bill of Rights guarantees the Right to Bear Arms for protestants, and we inherited much of their law regarding self-defense and firearms). Even including non-firearms homicides, there were far more murders in New York City than in London for much of the era; so much so that even without guns Americans were killing each other more often than the total British murder rate.
ReplyDeleteSince British and American crime statistics aren't computed the same way, it may not always be fair to compare the two. US annual homicide rate counts every single time a human being kills another human being (discarding accidents), including self-defense, manslaughter, and even shootings by the police. The US annual homicide rate also does not process where the case goes; many cases are dropped due to self-defense, something that is not processed into the numbers. The UK homicide rate, on the other hand, processes exclusively murders, and only those for which charges are filed and convictions receive.
Thus, we can't always take the disparity prima facie.
However, what can be ascertained is:
A) UK gun homicides are on the rise if you look beyond England and Wales
B) The UK still has a violent crime rate that beats out most other countries in the world
Neither of these is necessarily explained by their gun ban; it's only indicative of the overall ineffectiveness as gun control as a means to crime prevention. Crime is incentivized by a variety of social factors like alienation or poverty. I'll quote the Office of Health Economics in London on this one, "one reason often given for the high numbers of murders and manslaughters in the United States is the easy availability of firearms...the strong correlation with racial and socio-economic variables suggests that the underlying determinants of the homicide rate are related to particular cultural factors."
Sources (for the A/B claim):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/5712573/UK-is-violent-crime-capital-of-Europe.html
It's a MAN thing.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure he feels superior with a deadly weapon in his hands.
The same type that feels superior because his penis is bigger than others.
Like hazing that ends in death. Oh well, boys will be boys.
Be a REAL man, toss the guns and duke it out.
Be a REAL man, throw your body over a bunch of 6 year old children, to protect them from bullets.
Be a REAL man, face danger without a gun.
Definitely childish crap, except people die.
The problem is not the lone wolf, but the average Joe who ends up accidentally shooting his child. Shocked because he thought he knew how to keep a gun safely.
The kind of "accidents" Mike writes about daily, that others come here to condemn him for writing. Talk about fools.
What about for women?
DeleteAgain with the penis jokes? Your side is obsessed with that. But what we see here is a call for fist fights and for putting oneself at risk. A man's body isn't designed to stop a bullet, and a dead man can't do anything to protect those children. As a sensible human being, I own and carry firearms. Avoiding accidents is easy--there are about 100,000,000 gun owners in this country and only 600 accidental fatalities in a year.
DeleteIf you don't want a gun, that's fine. Don't own one. If you want to disparage gun owners, you're entitled to your opinion, no matter how idiotic. The irony here is that I'll defend your rights, but you apparently won't defend mine.
Idiotic? Over 10,000 deaths a year from gunshot, usually preventable. When gun owners prove that they can handle a deadly weapon without killing innocents, then I might think differently. You read this blog, you know to many idiots have guns, that should not, and I'm not talking about the crazy killers.
DeleteThe problem is that "gun rights" advocates buy into the myth of the "law abiding citizen". No such thing exists in the U.S. There are no "law abiding citizens", only criminals which have yet to be convicted.
DeleteI suggest that gun "ownership" proponents substitute the term "criminal who has not yet been convicted" in the place of "law abiding citizen" when making one of their idiotic statements.
Black Cap, thank you for warning us that you are a criminal.
Deleteorlin sellers
Anonymous, you're conflating murder with accidents. Have you seen the data showing that the strictness of gun laws has no correlation with homicide rates? But what was idiotic was your assertion that owning a gun has some Freudian implication. Guns are not sexual objects for me. What they are for you is your concern.
DeleteChickadee, are you seriously claiming that there are no law-abiding citizens in this country? Of course, you don't believe in the idea of a citizen at all, so it's no surprise that you'd make yet another silly statement. You keep to your rhetoric, and we'll keep to ours, thanks.
Because you may not have accidentally killed someone means nothing. Statistics show legal gun owners are the source of gun deaths in America. Obviously Americans cannot own such weapons responsibility. Interesting you don't care about those deaths, only your ability to own a gun, no matter how many die. The fact that you missed my point (no not sexual) shows you don 't understand humans. No surprise since you show such a lack of care for human life.
DeleteWhat's your source for those "statistics"? Please not the Kellerman study. Oy. I suspect you have as much evidence for that statement as you do about your opinion regarding my concern for humanity--in other words, none at all.
DeleteYour statements are all the proof I need to conclude your lack of concern for humanity.
DeleteHow typically vague, Anonymous.
DeleteThis boy doesn't read his own writings.
ReplyDeleteWhat?
Delete