Let's cut through the BS. Do GUNS kill people, OR...

[FlyingClayDisk]

Oh my God! This is what we call a killer argument!

Here's a thing. Guns facilitate killing. This is what makes them different from other kinds of weapons. It's easier to kill someone with a gun than a knife. You don't have to approach a target and fight with him. And if, let's say, a psycho wants to kill thirty something students in a classroom, using a knife for this or a machete would be fairly impractical. Not saying it would be impossible but a gun makes killing easier and faster.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking from experience. I didn't try various ways of exterminating puny humans. I take my life wisdom from Indiana Jones series and it led me to the conclusion that guns make killing definitely easier. And I can PROVE it!

Here's my killer argument:

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo]

Thank you for proving my argument.  Notice in all cases, someone with "intent" physically pulled the trigger.  The firearm, by itself, did nothing.

[boredhere74]

I bet half of the grief about "firearms in the hands of civilians" would disappear if there were firearm safety classes as part of a high school education curriculum.  It would eliminate the visceral fear, at least.

Yeah we had that when I was in high school. And guns in gun racks in trucks, hunting in the mornings or afternoons, and no school shootings. You might be on to something there, if it had never stopped, way too late for anything like that, which requires common sense.

[UltraBudgie]

Here's my killer argument:

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo]

That is a great scene, especially since it was improvised.  It was supposed to be a big thing, but Ford was experiencing, um, "intestinal distress" from breakfast, and wanted to get back to his trailer, so he just "cut through the bs", as it were.  The rest is movie history.

In another timeline, he was wearing his Depends, and there was an awesome fight sequence.

[FlyingClayDisk]

That is a great scene, especially since it was improvised.  It was supposed to be a big thing, but Ford was experiencing, um, "intestinal distress" from breakfast, and wanted to get back to his trailer, so he just "cut through the bs", as it were.  The rest is movie history.

In another timeline, he was wearing his Depends, and there was an awesome fight sequence.

Clever!  Very clever!  LOL!

[jaded]

Oh my God! This is what we call a killer argument!

Here's a thing. Guns facilitate killing. This is what makes them different from other kinds of weapons. It's easier to kill someone with a gun than a knife. You don't have to approach a target and fight with him. And if, let's say, a psycho wants to kill thirty something students in a classroom, using a knife for this or a machete would be fairly impractical. Not saying it would be impossible but a gun makes killing easier and faster.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking from experience. I didn't try various ways of exterminating puny humans. I take my life wisdom from Indiana Jones series and it led me to the conclusion that guns make killing definitely easier. And I can PROVE it!

Here's my killer argument:

The important point being "Let's say a psyco wants to kill thirty something students in a classroom". 

Without the Psycho the firearm is just a doorstop. When we collectively decided it's societies job to protect everyone from everything ignoring the fact life is & has always been chock full of risks just makes firearms the poster child and emotional appealing target for restrictions.

Britain harshly restricts firearms. The number of assaults with acid skyrocketed. Thankfully it didn't catch on widely in the US. Humans are a violent species. Restricting items isn't going to change that. School shootings, mall shootings, the Las Vegas shooting all were horrific. We already have firearm restrictions they happened anyways. 

Unless Humans are deliberately bred to be "docile", or we decide to selectively kill societal deviants as they are found to "protect society(N)" using mass shooter events as reasoning is just another emotional & inflammatory argument. 

Take firearms away an kids'll be driving semi's & mining trucks thru schools to again, kill as many as possible or making homemade bombs. When there's a will there's a way.

(n) Give everyone personality tests @ 18, euthanize deviants. Bye bye Wall Street, Politians an most CEO's. This is just a thought exercise, not endorsing it.

[FlyingClayDisk]

Yeah we had that when I was in high school. And guns in gun racks in trucks, hunting in the mornings or afternoons, and no school shootings. You might be on to something there, if it had never stopped, way too late for anything like that, which requires common sense.

That's exactly how it was in my high school too!  Every pickup in the parking lot had a rifle in the rack.  We had a shooting team "inside" the school, and an indoor range too (it was, believe it or not, directly under the POOL!  LOL!  Great incentive not to miss!).  I even had a gun rack in my locker to hold my rifle upright so the stock didn't get all banged up.  Never had a single firearms related incident in my school, or my town (perpetrated by a teenager).  Not ever.  No shootings, no accidental discharges, no negligent discharges...not a single one!

Just about all of us had firearms readily available at a moment's notice.  Nobody ever thought about shooting someone else.  It's not about the evil guns, people!

And yes, we would go out elk and deer hunting in the early mornings and still make it back for 1st period class.  More than once I arrived at school with an elk or deer in the back of my pickup to be taken back to my house at lunchtime to be hung up for skinning.  (My 1st period class was Drafting, and the Drafting teacher, Mr. Kershisnik, was also the rifle team coach...so you had better not be late for 1st period!)

Our school store even sold ammunition!  Store had .22 target ammo and 12 ga. ammo (we had a trap range out past the football field).

So what changed?? 

People changed.  Firearms have remained largely unchanged for over 100 years.  I have a semi-automatic 1911 Colt pistol which was carried by my grandfather in WW1, manufactured in 1913.  So, even semi-autos were around back then.  What changed is the people, people changed, not the guns. 

Just thinking about this pisses me off.  And you know what, it's way more fundamental than just being about "guns".  At its very core, it's about personal responsibility and accountability, not just for guns, but for everything.  Today, society just "blames" all their problems on something else.  Personal accountability and responsible behavior...'isn't MY problem, it's THEIR responsibility (pointing)'.

The people who wish to outlaw firearms only demonstrate their own immaturity and lack of personal accountability by advocating such nonsense.  It's ALL someone ELSE's fault, right?  Rather than behave responsibly, they instead blame lawmakers (i.e. someone else) for not passing laws to deal with problems they themselves can easily deal with. 

It's truly sad and shameful.  People who advocate these things should be ashamed of themselves for being so immature.

[UltraBudgie]

It reminds me of how cocaine tonics and opiate elixirs used to be sold over over-the-counter, until the Rockefellows invented the pharmaceutical industry and gaslit everyone into outsourcing responsibility for their own health to the citadel of "modern medicine", at which point the American public became too infantilized to do anything more than trust the man in the white coat, and these items suddenly became unacceptably dangerous.

Which is not to say they weren't potentially dangerous, and could do harm, but for the most part the public was willing to accept that the consequence of freedom requires taking individual responsibility.

But those days are gone, it seems.  And here's a question: should people have the freedom to live like sheep?  Well, yes, but how do we reconcile that when their nerfed society drives the wolves to the verge of extinction?

[Byrd]

So let's cut through all the bullshit.  Do GUNS kill people, OR do the (twisted) PEOPLE who use guns kill people unlawfully?

I'm so sick of this debate.  It's not even a "debate" really, it's more of a liberal echo chamber on the subject.

Look, I've been a firearms instructor for over 30 years, and I can prove to any interested person that a firearm canNOT kill another human being on its own.  I can prove it!  Throw it on the floor, bounce it off a wall, drop it out of a vehicle...it will NOT fire on its own.  It will NOT FIRE!  The only way to make a modern firearm fire is by pulling the trigger, and a person has to do this...intentionally, consciously.  No exceptions.

Oh sure, you can come up with some cocked up thing about something catching the trigger, but please do point me to a single, even just ONE single, fatality or serious injury where this ever happened!  It didn't.  Repeat...IT...DID...NOT...HAPPEN!  Yes, drunk people and people on drugs kill people with firearms, BUT so do these same people with cars, trucks, hammers, knives, bats and even with their hands.  Okay, should we outlaw all those things too (like the UK seemingly tries to do)???  It doesn't work, folks.  The person you have to stop, is the person with "intent".  A firearm has no, ZERO, "intent".  A firearm is just a tool, like a hammer, or a knife, or a car.  Firearms don't think for themselves.

So, c'mon anti-2A people...let's get into it.  You have nothing to defend your "public safety" position other than your notion than...when all guns are illegal, then you can rule over you "slaves" like you've wanted to since Lincoln made slavery illegal.  It's about "control" for you.

I chopped your text there to highlight several points.

Yes, they're tools...but their ONLY purpose is to kill.  I can use a knife to cut meat, carve something, clean fingernails, take a rock out of a horse's hoof, let the air out of a tire, remove a foreign object from a wound, peel a peach, peel a grape, trim back an overly enthusiastic vine from my house, perform an operation, remove an appendix, pry open a jar lid, stir paint, apply paint on a canvas (or somewhere else), apply mortar, carve clay, free a trapped animal, kill a fish...and lots more that I could list if I decided to sit down and try to be comprehensive.

Guns shoot bullets.  Bullets make holes in things.  These holes are designed to Make Things Dead (including paper targets.  Lots of targets give up their lives for bullets.) or to threaten death/injury/violence to someone.

Do I want them totally banned?  Nope.  I can see them useful in a few situations.

But...here's the thing:  many people in support of 2A (who own guns and are responsible) reach for a gun as a first response rather than trying other methods.   If you and I hear a bunch of noise at our front door... and it's night... and someone comes in, you're likely to grab a gun and shoot them.  I would call the cops, turn on the light and the cameras, and grab a wooden sword --because that might be someone who's at the wrong house accidentally or one of my kids surprising me or any number of relatively innocent things.

Guns are for killing.  I don't think you need to bring them to the grocery store (no tomato, in the entire history of the planet, has ever gone berserk in a grocery store and mowed down dozens of people along with their service dogs.)  I think that if you're a hunter or if you're trekking in the backwoods, a gun is absolutely a self-defense tool that you need.

You are also assuming that the guns are in the hands of people like yourself... and not in the hands of people who stole them from people like yourself.  If you want the numbers, the best I've got is that between 2017 and 2021, roughly 2 million guns in America were involved in crime  The people using those guns aren't like you or me, but they're getting the guns from people like you and me.  They even steal them from Border Agents to use in crimes

You're not thinking about them in terms of teenagers with grudges (like the one who killed so many students in Uvalde, Texas.

And that's the difference.  You're thinking of people like you, who are responsible and not quick to take offense.  We're thinking of friends and family who committed suicide, of criminals like the ones above, of street gangs, of gun owners who kill other family members, of teens wanting revenge on bullies and others.  When we ask "how do we deal with the above" the responses we get seem to be things like "arm the teachers" and "get another gun"... more killing and more death.

It doesn't seem to be a solution.  If we say "licensing and databases" the counterargument is "it's already a law" (but the counter to that is that 2A prone lawmakers often overturn these laws.)

I can understand that someone might want to have fun shooting a high capacity magazine (doesn't sound like fun to me, but... hey, whatever floats your boat) and would have no problem with licensed gun ranges having them for rent to use inside their facility.  They're pretty useless for hunting, but great for making lots of noise.

It'd be great if Americans could be acculturated to the idea that the first response to a threat (or someone cutting you off in traffic) is NOT to get out a gun and go after someone.

There's a reason gun laws were passed in the first place (and a reason why, after the Mafia gang wars, machine guns were outlawed for civilians.)  There's a reason why some towns in the Old West didn't allow guns.  There's a reason why military bases don't allow open carry (or weapons carry unless you've been issued it for a specific reason.)

And no, the gunman and his friends and a stockpile of weapons won't hold off an army...as Ukraine has shown.


...Wow... got kind of long-winded there, didn't I?  Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.  :)

[FlyingClayDisk]

..

It'd be great if Americans could be acculturated to the idea that the first response to a threat (or someone cutting you off in traffic) is NOT to get out a gun and go after someone.

There's a reason gun laws were passed in the first place (and a reason why, after the Mafia gang wars, machine guns were outlawed for civilians.)  There's a reason why some towns in the Old West didn't allow guns.  There's a reason why military bases don't allow open carry (or weapons carry unless you've been issued it for a specific reason.)

...

I cut out a fair bit of your reply because I wanted to focus on these two statements, not because I am dismissing what you have said.  It was a fair enough reply.

I don't have the exact statistics, but I'm more than confident my estimates are WAY low with what I'm about to say.  In the US drivers cut off other drivers probably hundreds of times every second of every day.  There are roughly 285 million vehicles in the US.  Conservative estimates are that 10-12% of those vehicles will be on the road at any one given time, so let's say 28 million (and that's probably low).  There are roughly 395 million privately owned firearms in the US.  If even 5% of those were being carried at any one time, this would equate to roughly 20 million.  Let's say that 5 million of those drivers are armed.  Consequently...

The notion that (every) armed driver's "first response" to being cut off in traffic is to jump out and start shooting...is a wildly exaggerated assertion.  Furthermore, it is exactly these kinds of wildly exaggerated assertions which makes arguments such as mine both necessary and relevant.  It's simply not true.  If it were true, there would be tens of thousands of firearms fatalities every...single...day on America's roadways.  And, we know this isn't the case, yet the gun grabbers love to use exaggerated arguments such as this to justify their actions.  This, all while failing to accept (and DEMAND) personal accountability and responsibility before piling more legislation on top of already voluminous legislation.

Secondly, yes gangsters in the '20's and '30's wreaked havoc with 'machine guns', but society wasn't brought to the brink of extinction because of these firearms.  Far from it.  In fact, "machine guns" (i.e. fully automatic firearms) were legal to own in the US up until 1986, fully 60 years later.  And, while we're at it, let's take a look at what was happening in 1986 when Reagan passed the National Firearms Act.  Where there mass shooting events at schools back then?  Nope.  Were large swaths of society being mowed down by machine guns in 1986?  Nope.  The NFA was a political concession by Reagan to assuage the gun grabbing left at the time, one he believed would get them to back off...but they didn't, only doubled down since then. 

Lastly, and I can't stress this enough...what has changed in the recent decades?  Not guns.  People have changed.  We will have to agree to disagree on the point that the only purpose of a gun is to kill.  Guns, like nuclear weapons, are also a deterrent.  They often also prevent bad people from doing bad things without even being fired.  So, this is my rejoinder to the notion that a firearm's only purpose is to "kill".  Earlier in this thread another member posted an Indiana Jones clip.  You saw a man with a sword who surely would have "killed" Indiana Jones had he not possessed a firearm to defend himself.  In the absence of that firearm, well, it would have been a sword against a bullwhip, not much of a match.  Point being, people will find a method to kill if this is their "intent"...and this has been proven the world over.  If they don't have a firearm...they'll find another way.  Once again, the firearm is just a tool; it's the "intent" which matters.

 

...Wow... got kind of long-winded there, didn't I?  Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.  :)

LOL!  That's okay, I think I did too!  Likewise, thanks for listening (or reading, as it were).

Cheers!

[argentus]

So let's cut through all the bullshit.  Do GUNS kill people, OR do the (twisted) PEOPLE who use guns kill people unlawfully?

I'm so sick of this debate.  It's not even a "debate" really, it's more of a liberal echo chamber on the subject.

Look, I've been a firearms instructor for over 30 years, and I can prove to any interested person that a firearm canNOT kill another human being on its own.  I can prove it!  Throw it on the floor, bounce it off a wall, drop it out of a vehicle...it will NOT fire on its own.  It will NOT FIRE!  The only way to make a modern firearm fire is by pulling the trigger, and a person has to do this...intentionally, consciously.  No exceptions.

Oh sure, you can come up with some cocked up thing about something catching the trigger, but please do point me to a single, even just ONE single, fatality or serious injury where this ever happened!  It didn't.  Repeat...IT...DID...NOT...HAPPEN!  Yes, drunk people and people on drugs kill people with firearms, BUT so do these same people with cars, trucks, hammers, knives, bats and even with their hands.  Okay, should we outlaw all those things too (like the UK seemingly tries to do)???  It doesn't work, folks.  The person you have to stop, is the person with "intent".  A firearm has no, ZERO, "intent".  A firearm is just a tool, like a hammer, or a knife, or a car.  Firearms don't think for themselves.

So, c'mon anti-2A people...let's get into it.  You have nothing to defend your "public safety" position other than your notion than...when all guns are illegal, then you can rule over you "slaves" like you've wanted to since Lincoln made slavery illegal.  It's about "control" for you.

So, let's get it on!  Bring it!  Explain your position.

Oh, and NO, Australia is not a good example, despite everyone looking to it for their last grasp.  I love Australia, and one of the things I love about it is Australian independence.  The gun ban in Australia had little bearing on gun ownership except in the big cities.  In the rural areas, far away from cities, Australians just laughed.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Done.  Break into a rural home in central Australia and find out...'Fuck around, and find out'...as the saying goes.  Good!  Don't ya' think?

This whole "gun" thing isn't about firearms, it's about controlling YOU.  It's about controlling every single thing you do...where you go, what you have, why you have it, and what you're allowed to do. 

How can some of you people not see this?  It's about "Control". 

I don't care if a person doesn't wish to own a firearm.  There's a lot of reasons why this might be a credible reason.  That's okay.

BUT...for those people who are qualified, competent and willing...there should be no reason, under the umbrella of the founding fathers of this once great nation, which should prevent law abiding citizens from owning as many firearms as they wish, including fully automatic weapons (only thing I take issue with Reagan for...fuck the Firearms Act of '86).

I rest.

P.S.  Now, I know this is not a topic welcome here on DI.  Hey, I get it.  Okay, but I posted it...and I really don't give a flying...(connection lost)

Take care all!!

It's a no-brainer, my friend.   Do cars kill people?   Do planes kill people?   No, of course not.   They are inert devices which have no will to choose.   Guns do not kill people.   Chemicals do not kill people, because that implies intent.   People kill people, and people kill themselves with bad choices, and putting themselves in situations that cause accidents.   Weather kills people.  Weather isn't to blame, because the people that weather kill, had the opportunity to live elsewhere where the weather would not manifest itself.   That said, almost everywhere has a natural disaster just waiting.