USA Gun Laws debate - questions ?

The militia is defined as males between the age of 15 and 60. Since a 15 year old is not allowed to join the National Guard, it stands to reason that you need not be a member of the National guard to be part of the militia.

The largest seller of arms in the US has been the US government, back in the 60's the government sold more than 100,000 M1 carbines and surplus ammunition was cheaper than .22 rimfire. 30 round magazines were available for the M1 carbine, I'm sure everyone remembers all the mass shootings from the 60's, the ones I remember were carried out with bolt action rifles or a M1 Garand with an 8 round clip. The problem we in the US face today is not a problem of gun control but of nut control.

If you feel you are not responsible enough to have a semiautomatic firearm and or standard capacity magazine, because it's the small magazines that are non standard, by all means do not acquire one. If you are from a country where they are not allowed, your government does not trust you, so why should anyone else listen to you on the subject? What special expertise do you bring to the discussion?

 

I believe the Obama Administration is trying to get agreement on two main things,......... keeping high capacity assault rifles out of the reach of non military and police personnel,.............and also putting in place more stringent checks and balances on who can actually own other guns that will still be readily available on the market to all Americans. Obama seems to be seeking proposals to assist with this.

It is just amazing the negativity towards the second one.O--O

 

Gass, you really paint with a broad brush. In the US I frequently hear of 400 years of slavery, last I checked, the USA was only 236 years old. We didn't invent slavery. Now let me see, who was in charge prior to 1776? Also I would like it noted that a very large amount of Americans gave their lives to right the wrong of slavery, they didn't have to. People seem to forget about the men who died to put a stop to slavery. I would also like to note that in the old days might used to make right, and that indigenous people around the globe have suffered. I have native American blood and Irish blood, so I guess I should be pissed at the United States and the British? From my native American heritage, I can tell you that before the colonists came that there were wars and you either conquored or you moved. At some point you have to let go of the old prejudices and live in today.

 

I wish the US government would make full automatic weapons easy to get, the nutjobs would hit less and run out of ammunition sooner.

People say you don't need a seiautomatic rifle, but what if you have a ranch on the Texas/Mexican border? Families have been murdered down there because while it's easy to slip across the border, you are in the middle of nowhere and you need transportation or you will likely be caught immediately, so they do what they need to do, and don't leave witnesses.

In the last decade we have had a resurgence in feral hogs of all things, people have been treed and some seriously injured. The hog problen has only been getting worse, they don't only keep to uninhabited areas, in fact you can see clips on youtube of people hunting them at night in cities, with? You guessed it, very military looking semiautomatic rifles, with silencers and night vision, no less. It's not a local problem, it's several states. Texas has a bounty on them. I recommend you not get caught out in the open with a rifle that holds less than 20 rounds.

I guess I'm done with this thread, you are an obvious troll and you find the US to be an easy target you can't resist. If you really held the convictions you espouse, and you are in the Philippines, you could start on gun control there. I have heard of some recent murders committed during the election gun ban. There is a reason why you won't cry out about guns in the Philippines though, because they will just tell you to STFU and if you don't like it you can leave. I won't be that impolite, but I will say that if you don't like the way things are in the US, you would be a fool to go there, or you could become a citizen of the US, and vote at election time. If you did that I would give you big props for sincerity.

 

Fortunately, robertk is not a member of the US Congress.

 

Hysteria v. Reason
The gun control issue could only be confronted by a second term president and will cause more berserk/hysterical responses than any political decision since the Civil Rights Act.
Those who cite history should realize history is continually rewritten.
Those who cite statistics will only face a bigger barrage of statistics.
Those who profess some expertise because they either owned or fired weapons offer nothing to the debate-Who cares?
Firearm restrictions excites a nerve in those insecure people fearful that another part of their culture is being sliced away. The fight against gun control will be led/supported primarily by white southern/western males who will see the proposal as yet another example of their being diminished. You can tell that person he may still be a hunter, may still have a weapon in the house, or even that a concealed weapon may be carried on his person but what you are actually facing is a far greater fear that the government (or some unknown force) is lurking behind all this.
Someone from afar who tries to show a successful example of what worked well in another country will only be dismissed and faced with the atavistic notion of "American Exceptionalism".
If that person described above can be relieved of his fear a dialogue is possible.

 

I was wrong to say I was through with this thread. I have personally used a semi-automatic rifle in self defence. I lived far from town and some drunks flipped their car over on my front lawn. None of the passengers were injured. They then advanced on my house. My rifle was to hand and I grabbed it and stepped out into my yard. They continued to advance and I told them to stop. Showing exceedingly poor judgement, they did not stop. I discharged one round into the ground six inches from the foot of the one I presumed their leader, he was closest anyway. He then dropped to his knees and alternated between begging me not to shoot him and he was going to call the police because I discharged the rifle. This is the sort of thing that does not make it into police reports and crime statistics because I did not report it, not because I had done anything wrong but because I didn't want to bother with the paperwork.Remember that when seconds count, if you live in the city, police are only minuites away. Where I lived, response time was 43 minutes when I called the sheriffs department because there was a car upside down on my front lawn. If I were at the old home place in North Dakota, it could be hours. I actually think the kind of weapon I was holding saved some lives, because I would not have fired a warning shot with a single shot rifle.

I carried an M203 (M-16 with 40mm grenade launcher) in my nations armed forces. My country found me worthy to do so. But before I ever picked up the weapon my country wished me to carry, I had already had the right to bear an arm almost as formidible. I have not abused that right, and now you, who have not had that right, cavalierly wish to extinguish mine, pardon me if I don't thank you for your efforts.

The other thing I don't get is how all the semi-auto and standard capacity magazines are supposed to disappear. The prohibition of spirits didn't work, that law made the maffia a force to be reckoned with that is with us to this day. You can be sure that weapons will be smuggled in if there is demand. You can outlaw the magazines but small capacity magazines can be modified to large capacity magazines in a sheetmetal shop in a matter of minutes. They say that a good machinist could make a submachine gun from scratch in 4 hours. I'm not a great machinist but I was a small arms repairer and I could make one with a few parts ready made, but not from firearms in about 2 1/2 hours. There must be well over 5 million centerfire semi-automatic rifles of military pattern in the US, how would you find them all? Would the criminals give up theirs? If limited to small capacity weapons, do you not think the nutcases would practice mag changes? If it takes an extra ten seconds to kill 26 people will it matter when the response time of the police is so much longer? Minutes at least?

You can't put the genie back in the bottle. If a magazine ban doesn't work then it's the rifle, until there are no rifles. Then it's the handguns which are banned by ordinances in places already and the people using them there to commit crimes don't seem to realize that they should not have them. Then the shotguns, the only thing left, if we could just get rid of them, then finally all this violence will stop, but it won't. It's called incrementalism. It's what the US government does when they want something that they know would make us rebell, they try to get it a tiny piece at a time. For this issue, there are watchdogs because without the second amendment, all the others are meaningless. The second amendment was meant for only one thing, to keep the government fearful of those who are governed because if the politicians did not fear us, our rights would melt like a snowflake in hell.

I like guns, they are handy tools, they are not evil in and of themselves. We need to fix society, not inanimate objects. The weapons were there long before they were so frequently used. If you got rid of everything but singleshots, people would use them, or bombs, machete, baseball bats, iron pipe, rebar, hammers, home made flamethrower. We have to fix society and government can't do that. That nutcase that shot 20 kids and six adults, his mother knew he had problems but she was the one who bought the guns and was his first victim, I believe. Her son was probably raised in daycare. People have to take responsibility for their own kids and anyone else in their family that has a mental problem. You can't just sit back and let the state and the world take care of it. These people were outside of society or at least thought they were. If you have a family member like that, drag them into society, kicking and screaming if necessary. If you fail, then they should become the states responsibility, after you tell the state, they are your responsibility until you do. It may sound tough, but if you have been around long enough, you will remember some family close to you, not necessarily your family, but someone you know that had to do what I just described, for the good of their family member and society. You can't leave responsibility for your family with daycare, mental hospitals or the state, which is what we have done, and now we pay the price. But getting rid of certain types of guns as a cure all is rediculous. Getting rid of a certain type of firearm is trying to take the easy way out and does nothing to solve the real problem. Will you really feel better that the children were not shot but killed by a bomb made from a flowerpot with 5 kilos of nails? It turns out that all these mass shooters had mental health problems known to their family. These crimes could have been prevented. Each and every one of us is responsible for the society that we live in.

Ok Kiwibob, over to you for the snide remarks.

 

Unarmed people more dangerous..........

Hmmmm

Care to supply some kind of support or evidence for such a, lets say, at a minimum, controversial statement?

To give a sane, credible and accurate response i shall say:

History has shown, again and again, over and over, also repeatedly recurringly, that the only thing more dangerous than an unarmed human, is a human with a weapon.

Also History has shown, again and again, over and over, also repeatedly recurringly, that the more devastatingly destructive a weapon humans are armed with, the more dangerous they are.

A man with a rock is more dangerous than man with an empty hand

A man with a knife is more dangerous than man with a rock.

A man with a sword is more dangerous than man with a knife

A man with a spear is more dangerous than man with a sword.

A man with a Bow and arrow is more dangerous than man with a spear

A man with a pistol is more dangerous than man with a spear

A man with a rifle is more dangerous than man with a pistol

A man with a assault rifle/machinegun is more dangerous than man with a rifle

A man with a Rocket launcher is more dangerous than man with an assault rifle/machinegun

and so on and so on...........


A person armed with Nuclear weapons is the most dangerous of all


Just ask the spirits and survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima how dangerous they think Trueman was.....


With Abomb: Truman catastrophically dangerous

Without Abomb: Truman relatively harmless.


Unarmed people more dangerous..........O-|

 

Yeah, your right!

No limitations!

There should be an Arms Race so that the average Joe Citizen has the right to try to outgun any potential intruders to his house.

That will definately make the USA a safer place

Hmmm, i can just see Greg ambushing the AK47 armed house invader with his RPG-7.

Sure he will have to renevate one side of his house (unless he gets the sucker out in the garden)

Every US citizen should have the right to have an electronically activated minefield surrounding his house so that he can sleep with peace of mind, only interupted by the occaisional sound of a stray cat, dog or native fauna being fragmatized. :D