Landmark Supreme Court Decision on 2A

[Alelou]

Show me study of a randomly-selected group of 100 families who had guns in the house over the children's lifetime, and if there were absolutely no gun accidents or deaths involving them, you may have a point.

My parents could argue that none of us kids ever got killed because we didn't wear seatbelts in the back of the car, and none of our friends did either. That wouldn't mean that seat belts or child safety seats don't save a significant number of lives.

All I'm saying is you're making an emotional argument without any data to back it up. I don't know what the data is. Could be the chance truly is so small that it's hardly worth worrying about and the cases I've heard about are just dramatic enough to stick in my head without being statistically significant. I don't know.

And jesum crow, BlacknBlue, I'm not sure I want to be at a con if you go! It will probably get hit by a tornado or something!

[CX]

No, what it comes down to is gun control advocates thinking they know what's best for everyone, based on some story they heard once, or perhaps something that actually happened to someone they knew, but it doesn't make them right, and they don't know what's best for everyone. Like I said, if for whatever reason you feel that you can't have guns in your home because you have kids, fine, if you have some, sell them. But don't go around telling other people who are perfectly fine with it that they're endangering their child just for the fact that they own a firearm. My parents educated me about this stuff, and they had to be repetitive about it because I was a kid, but it still sunk in out of fear of being punished by them if nothing else.

[blacknblue]

I guess, for me, the best summation is the standard question:

"How does disarming me make you safer?"

Passing a law to disarm law abiding citizens does not impress the law breaking citizens. Anyone who is willing to risk jail time for things like rape, murder, burglery, felony drug trafficing, etc., it not going to wince at breaking a misdemeanor ordnance against owning a gun. Only the law abiding abide by the law.

So again, "How does disarming me, and the other law abiding, inoffensive citizens make you feel safer?"

[Distracted]

My father kept a loaded shotgun propped up in a corner of his bedroom all my life. When I cut one of my front adult incisor teeth, he humorously had me come over and bite down on the stock of the shotgun, so that I could honestly boast someday that I had cut my teeth(tooth) on the stock of my father's gun.

LOL! Your dad sounds like mine, BnB... Mister "I know she's only a girl but my oldest child's gonna learn to shoot, dammit, even if she can't see past the end of her nose".

The man had me shooting a handgun at age six. I was crosseyed and blind as a bat, but I could handle a gun. Couldn't actually HIT anything, but I could handle a gun. I still hate the damned things...not really because they're dangerous, though. That's a given. I hate 'em because they're loud and they leave bruises on you when you shoot them... or at least they did when I was six.

[TPoptarts]

My dad has a gun and it scares the dren out of me... and like once he had to take it in the car and I'm like sitting in the car and it was summer and I'm trying to distance myself from the gun like as far as I can, and my dad tells me like how the gun can't be in the sun because the heat could like cause it to go off and I'm thinking like WHAAATTTT!!!! And I was so scared

[Distracted]

The sun can't cause a gun to go off. Guns don't shoot by themselves. Someone has to shoot them. They're perfectly safe as long as no one picks them up.

[CX]

It would take a pretty hot fire to make a bullet go off from just the heat.

[Distracted]

More like a furnace, if the bullet's in a gun. Definitely not a place where you'd be hanging around...and if you were, the bullet would be the last of your worries.

[justTripn]

Well I can match you emotional story for emotional story.

When I went to the Million Mom March, there were hundreds of thousands of moms there. I arrived wearing three buttons with pictures of my 3 adorable children in their soccer uniforms. I figured since my kids didn't want to come with me, I would wear the buttons to show I was a Mom. So I step off the bus and we are all psyched up to lobby for gun control. We head to the bathrooms. The women in front of me in the porta-potty line has the exact same sports photobutton, and her kid looks just like mine. So I say, "Hey your boy looks just like mine." She looks at my buttons like she's horrified and whispers, "Yes. And they're ALL dead?"

I went "NO, none of them are dead." She goes, "Oh good. Mine is dead." Turns out most people at the march out of nearly a million marchers are wearing buttons or shirts of their dead children killed by random acts of gun violence! So there is your emotional story.

I went to the march because I was outraged by two recent gun massacres in Pittsburgh in the month before the march. A black guy went on a killing spree killing whites and a white guy went on a killing spree killing nonwhites, including blacks and Asians. They set each other off. I can't remember which went first. It wasn't an abstract thing for me. Both events took place at locations I frequent. One involved a shopping mall and the other a McDonalds and other fast food restaurants.

Someone two blocks away killed their wife and themselves, while the daughter was at school. That was about 4 or 5 years ago. Supposedly someone halfways normal who lost it one day.

So Alelou's right. What are the statistics? People go crazy. Mental illness is prevelant in society. Many (most?) people will struggle with a bout of depression at some point. I don't know what the statistics are, but looking around I would say, lots of people. People who loose it don't always give advance warning. So why have the gun sitting around the house?

[Elessar]

More like a furnace, if the bullet's in a gun. Definitely not a place where you'd be hanging around...and if you were, the bullet would be the last of your worries.

There was a MythBusters about this. They showed that just about any bullet will go off in or out of a firearm if it's in an oven at I think 350? Maybe it was 450. Somewhere between 300-400 degrees F, a typical cooking temperature. But they were trying to see if a bullet in an oven would be a hazard to anyone. They tried a .22LR, a .44 mag and a .50 BMG but they found that the bullet on its own was not very dangerous because the bullet was so much heavier than the shell casing (in the reverse of the gun vs. bullet when its fired from a weapon), the shell casing actually did more damage in EVERY case than the bullet itself, but still never broke through the metal insides of the oven. The .50cal messed it up pretty bad though. But it didn't puncture it and exit the oven.

Now, on the other hand, a loaded firearm in an oven, the .44Mag blew the hell out of it. Obviously, you couldn't fit a weapon chambered in .50 BMG IN an oven , but I'm sure it'd tear a hole straight through it.

[Elessar]

When I went to the Million Mom March, there were hundreds of thousands of moms there. I arrived wearing three buttons with pictures of my 3 adorable children in their soccer uniforms. I figured since my kids didn't want to come with me, I would wear the buttons to show I was a Mom. So I step off the bus and we are all psyched up to lobby for gun control. We head to the bathrooms. The women in front of me in the porta-potty line has the exact same sports photobutton, and her kid looks just like mine. So I say, "Hey your boy looks just like mine." She looks at my buttons like she's horrified and whispers, "Yes. And they're ALL dead?"

I went "NO, none of them are dead." She goes, "Oh good. Mine is dead." Turns out most people at the march out of nearly a million marchers are wearing buttons or shirts of their dead children killed by random acts of gun violence! So there is your emotional story.

I went to the march because I was outraged by two recent gun massacres in Pittsburgh in the month before the march. A black guy went on a killing spree killing whites and a white guy went on a killing spree killing nonwhites, including blacks and Asians. They set each other off. I can't remember which went first. It wasn't an abstract thing for me. Both events took place at locations I frequent. One involved a shopping mall and the other a McDonalds and other fast food restaurants.

Someone two blocks away killed their wife and themselves, while the daughter was at school. That was about 4 or 5 years ago. Supposedly someone halfways normal who lost it one day.

So Alelou's right. What are the statistics? People go crazy. Mental illness is prevelant in society. Many (most?) people will struggle with a bout of depression at some point. I don't know what the statistics are, but looking around I would say, lots of people. People who loose it don't always give advance warning. So why have the gun sitting around the house?

I would agree with the moms being there to protest - but I would say they're protesting the wrong thing. See, if you think about it, there are two groups of people in this country: the people, and the government. Any chance the government gets to not have to step up to the plate and fix a nationwide problem, they're happy as can be, because it costs billions, it forces them to make tough decisions that not all of their constituents will agree with one way or the other -- and effect, it makes them do their jobs.

Those women were there to blame the guns, and by proxy the people who were carrying them. They were there to blame other People instead of who they should have been blaming - the government that wasn't properly or sufficiently investing in their children's safety with proper enforcement of existing gun control, resources for child education about the dangers of handguns, or basic blood n' guts law enforcement. You gotta take it to the Feds on civic issues instead of turning on your fellow citizens. Its' the Feds' job to make society safe because it can't be anybody's job to change people's behavior - i.e., the curiosity of kids or the maliciousness of adults. You can't change behavior by protesting, you can only change it with nationwide education and civic reform. But that doesn't quiet a grieving mother's sobs or reduce her tears. People always want something to blame, and the natural entity to choose is another person.

We get rid of guns (assuming we could) and we'll just have nutcases like the Japanese fellow a week ago who killed something like 13 people with a knife - or the elderly Japanese man just 2 day sago who killed his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and 3 year-old granddaughter with a hammer. Repressed much?

Violence is an impulse, not a hunk of metal or brass-encapsulated cartridges with gunpowder & lead.

Parents and spouses think about it this way: If you catch your neighbor raping and beating your daughter, your wife, or your sister, and you don't have a gun on you, are you gonna stand there adn do nothing, later on thinking, "Man, if I'd had a gun, I might've killed him." ?

Or are you gonna break your knuckles in the process of shattering his jawbone? Guns just make it more convenient. But humans will make do with what they've got.

We shouldn't just argue this back and forth, because everybody has their opinions... But like I said once, even if guns did breed more danger, more accidental violence, I personally want my 1-in-365,000,000th share of that accidental violence in order to protect myself and my future family from what I percieve to be a much higher risk of deliberate violence from someone else.

Another thing I came into contact with was the urban-middle-class kids who find guns. When I was about 6 we found my dad's gun. I had grown up in the city and I didn't know what a gun really was or what it was for. Had my older brothers not been there, I could potentially have picked it up and messed with it - but my dad never kept it loaded. But my point is, I think the majority of gun accidents happen because kids are around guns who are not educated how to stay safe with them. And in my experience, that tended to be urban kids, because urban families are less likely (IMO) to have firearms, unless you specifically have a gun enthusiast for a parent. What I'm saying is there are casual gun owners out in the rural areas. I know, I live in one now, haha. But in the cities you don't have casual gun owners. People who own guns in the cities own them specifically for self defense, for the most part.

[Distracted]

He's got a point about education, but education's not enough. By the time I was old enough to reach the shelf where my dad kept his gun I knew darn well not to touch it, but I was capable of being taught. On the other hand, the only member of my family to be killled by a gun was a hunter who collected guns. He was cleaning a handgun and failed to clear the chamber first. Not too smart. He accidentally shot himself under the chin with his wife in the next room and his kids in bed. He was DOA at the hospital. This was a man with a learning disability who did manual labor because he wasn't able to do anything more intellectually challenging, though. Maybe an IQ of 90 at best. He was nevertheless able to legally buy a gun. Maybe there should be an IQ and Psych eval requirement for gun ownership.

[Alelou]

I'm reading this and thinking boy, this really is a microcosm of America here.

That and I'm up too late.

[TPoptarts]

Maybe there should be an IQ and Psych eval requirement for gun ownership.

Totally

[blacknblue]

I recall a news story a few years ago about two men, a father in law and son in law, who were out fishing on a boat. they got into an argument. I forget which one it was who lost his temper, but one of them broke his ceramic coffee cup and used the jagged shard to cut the other one's throat.

Gunpowder was invented in China centuries ago, but they mostly used it for fireworks I think. For centuries afterward, most of their killing was still done with bow, crossbows and blades. And boy, did they ever pile up the bodies!

In Europe, corpse piles are not hard to find. The battle of Visby is one of the more famous of the dig sites, with multiple skeletons that were exhumed showing, for example, that a warrior had been hit with an axe hard enough to split his helmet and the skull inside with the blade passing through, continuing downward into the shoulder, splitting the shoulder and breastbone, and finally ending about halfway down the chest. I remember also seeing one skeleton where both legs were cut off with what was obviously a single blow, from the way the cuts lined up perfectly.

People don't need guns to kill each other. One of my neighbors across the street got in a fight a few weeks ago. They used a knife. Gun laws are pretty lax around here, but they still used a knife. Maybe they are cheap? Or maybe just too poor to afford a gun. Or perhaps they just like to get up close and personal, some folks do.

How many baseball bats are used in the commission of violent crimes every year? Has anyone done a comparison? i am serious. I want to know. Baseball bats are cheap and easy to get, and I know for a fact that they are often used in gang fights and in domestic disputes. Has anyone ever seen a study done of the relative number of baseball bat attacks compared to the number of gun attacks? Or butcher knife attacks? i seriously would like to know? I keep hearing horror stories about how many people get killed by guns every year (leaving aside the fact that more people die in auto accidents in America every year than are shot). But I never hear how many people are stabbed, beaten with ballbats, poisoned, etc.