On Friday, December 19, 2014, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > On 20 December 2014 at 13:Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 3:32 PM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> On 19 December 2014 at 23:02, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>> On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 9:24 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> They also failed to foresee that hand-held weapons would become so powerful. >>>> >>>> Are you sure that more powerful hand-held weapons would change their minds about the need to keep a balance of power between the government and the citizens? I suspect it would just reinforce the idea. >>> >>> I'm not sure of anything. However I doubt they could foresee a 9 year old girl being shown how to fire an Uzi. >> >> Kids drown in pools all the time but that doesn't mean adults should be forbidden from swimming. > > I'm not sure how that has any relevance whatsoever, but basically you should look after kids in potentially dangerous situations, e.g. near swimming pools. >> >> >>> >>> That was such a moronic thing to do that I can't really feel it was a huge loss that she accidentally shot and killed her instructor (indeed a Darwin award could be on its way - but it's indicative of the incredible stupidity that is exemplified by the NRA (I think it's called) which seems to think it's a good thing that America has way more gun related deaths and accidents than any other country in the first world (and most in the third world). >> >> It probably has far more lives saved and defended with guns than any other country in the first world (estimates range from 500,000 - 2,000,000 defensive gun uses per year). But news agencies are less interested in reporting tragedies that didn't happen. > > Saved from other people with guns.....can you spot the flaw in the argument?
The criminals may or may not be armed. But the flaw in your reasoning is that the laws would serve only to disarm the law abiding good people, not the criminals for which possession is already out later. The total number of gun related injuries and deaths in the US is massively greater per person than anywhere else in the first world. That's largely a factor of gang on gang crime, which is a result of our drug laws, not gun laws. If you factor those out we have a remarkably low murder rate. A recent Harvard study found no correlation between number of guns in a country and gun murders: http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf > Most of the problems from having guns around is due to "unintentional misuse" (like the 9 year old girl). To avoid this one could, oooh, I dunno - try not having guns around so much? Seems to work for the rest of the world. You ought to be more afraid of the concentration of guns in the hands of the few, governments killed 100 million of their own people in the past century, far more than victims of gun crimes or accidents combined. Something the decentralization of arms might have limited. >> >> >>> >>> Something else that I doubt the writers of the constitution foresaw, along with the entire society that goes with it. >>> Still, if the US government really believes in the principle behind the right to bear arms they should nowadays - going by your argument that there should be a "balance of power" - have no problem with a citizen constructing a nuclear bomb in their garden shed. >> >> Nuclear bombs have no defensive utility. A good rule of thumb might be that citizens should be able to own any weapon police departments have access to. > > I'm glad no one told that the the respective rulers in the cold war. They might have replied that they had defensive ability in that having them stopped anyone else using them. It was called Mutually Assured Destruction (they really should have found a suitable acronym for that) Ending the world can hardly be argued defense, though the threat of ending the world arguably can be. That said, they're defensive for nations not individuals. > Sadly, however, this isn't the case with guns, where there is an idea that having more lethal weapons around makes you safer. Like it or not, your life is protected daily by people with guns. When someone breaks into your house, will you not call on men with guns? Jason > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
