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Post by redcase on Dec 17, 2012 19:03:42 GMT
Countries like Switzerland and NZ have extremely small populations , making it logistically much easier to provide training etc to gun owners.
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Post by SAF_Legend on Dec 17, 2012 19:05:55 GMT
Any sort of a ban on guns are an immediate, moderate term solution. The longer perspective is to make information readily accessible regarding psychological disorders, especially among teens and in young adults and how to deal with them. This doesn't equate to locking them up in asylums (that is the little understanding that I was talking about - not all psychological problems are asylum-bound like those in 'em movies), but just making sure that parents / mentors / schools / friends / kin (society in general) are able to pick out warning signs and approach the situation with enough care and concern - rather than be abrasive about it. This could mean pumping more money into psychological studies.
I think a ban on guns on the whole, however, is good for the whole of society. For example, it would set gun crime back and makes it that much harder for any man (or woman) who have ill schemes on society for self gains using firearms.
Regarding other countries, Fletchabey - my point was simply that it is a mixture of other factors that brought about the events that have transpired. It's not just about availability of guns. Switzerland has a population of 8 million; Hong Kong 7 million; Singapore 6 million; New Zealand 4.5 million; Japan 130 million and the UK 63 million in comparison to say, the US (300 million) and China (1.4 billion) - the higher the population, the higher the frequency / chance of unfortunate events. Size matters too, the smaller the country, the easier it is to adopt and promote certain ideas; also, the smaller the area, the better access to moderated communal education and healthcare.
Although we should be wary of the Education ranking - we all know it's pretty much just statistics, exam results are easy to manipulate, especially nowadays it's has become so hard to fail in school in the UK - but good enough for my general point that a generally better education helps better handling of situations such as these. Whether it helps a lot though, is difficult to find out truly.
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Post by Stew on Dec 17, 2012 19:20:31 GMT
If someone is mentally ill and has a serious grievance with society and this becomes violent, in the US these people can in a lot of instances get access to guns. If the exact same case happened in my city, Dublin, then he would struggle to get a gun unless he had underworld connections. So he brings a knife or say a sword to a school. Still dreadful but the level of carnage is on a far smaller scale.
This has never happened where I live, to the best of my knowledge. We have plenty of gun crime but it's contained to gangs.
Why does a woman have an assault rifle in her collection? What kind of society encourages that?
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Post by SAF_Legend on Dec 17, 2012 19:30:33 GMT
Sometimes though, I do wonder - do most Americans / people just feel more empowered having access to firearms?
"... power grows from the barrel of a gun." Ironically, by Mao Zedong.
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Post by Stew on Dec 17, 2012 19:34:38 GMT
Maybe so mate.
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Post by tommyred on Dec 17, 2012 20:19:41 GMT
Americans seem really paranoid (a lot of them anyway). They don't feel safe without a gun.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 17, 2012 23:17:12 GMT
Why does a woman have an assault rifle in her collection? What kind of society encourages that? Fuck me they are dangerous enough with a fucking screwdriver, an assault rifle is asking for trouble. |
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Post by fletchabey on Dec 18, 2012 9:50:41 GMT
Any sort of a ban on guns are an immediate, moderate term solution. The longer perspective is to make information readily accessible regarding psychological disorders, especially among teens and in young adults and how to deal with them. This doesn't equate to locking them up in asylums (that is the little understanding that I was talking about - not all psychological problems are asylum-bound like those in 'em movies), but just making sure that parents / mentors / schools / friends / kin (society in general) are able to pick out warning signs and approach the situation with enough care and concern - rather than be abrasive about it. This could mean pumping more money into psychological studies. I think a ban on guns on the whole, however, is good for the whole of society. For example, it would set gun crime back and makes it that much harder for any man (or woman) who have ill schemes on society for self gains using firearms. Regarding other countries, Fletchabey - my point was simply that it is a mixture of other factors that brought about the events that have transpired. It's not just about availability of guns. Switzerland has a population of 8 million; Hong Kong 7 million; Singapore 6 million; New Zealand 4.5 million; Japan 130 million and the UK 63 million in comparison to say, the US (300 million) and China (1.4 billion) - the higher the population, the higher the frequency / chance of unfortunate events. Size matters too, the smaller the country, the easier it is to adopt and promote certain ideas; also, the smaller the area, the better access to moderated communal education and healthcare. Although we should be wary of the Education ranking - we all know it's pretty much just statistics, exam results are easy to manipulate, especially nowadays it's has become so hard to fail in school in the UK - but good enough for my general point that a generally better education helps better handling of situations such as these. Whether it helps a lot though, is difficult to find out truly. Yeh I understood your point and it was a good one, its just the way you worded seemed to lumped the UK and US together, which isn't accurate. On the stats, I kind of get you point but its not accurate.Tthe US might have a bigger population, maybe 5/6 times that of the UK. That doesn't explain why we can have 14 gun related deaths in a year while they have 10,000 (to pull out some figures from 2002 I believe). Its not just the school shooting tragedies but the gun problems on the whole. And lets be honest America has load of them anyway, this is the third this year? |
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Post by johnboy14 on Dec 18, 2012 11:03:15 GMT
Population has nothing to do with it when the country has over 300 million guns in circulation and thats not including the military. If there was the 1 gun for every person in the uk this kind of thing would happen aswell.
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Post by Kamilo on Dec 18, 2012 15:18:44 GMT
Here comes the conspiracy
-----------------
The father of Adam Lanza is Peter Lanza, a VP and Tax Director at GE Financial, one of the many corporations owned and controlled by the international central banks, and was also a partner at Ernst & Young. ¹ The father of James Holmes is Robert Holmes, and, at the time of the shooting, the lead fraud scientist for the credit score company FICO. ²
FICO works with all major banks and is directly connected to the function of London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, or LIBOR. I have read the claim, in both cases, that these men were actually slated to testify in the LIBOR hearings before the U.S. Congress, but I have not been able to find anything substantial or conclusive to prove that. Both men, however, it has been evidenced, were quite knowledgeable on the LIBOR interest rate fixing scandal, with at least the potentiality to be subpoemaed for testimony in hearings regarding the fraudulent scheme.
16 international central banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC, a multinational banking and financial services company also owned by the international bankers and headquartered in London, has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested related to this LIBOR scandal. This is undoubtedly the largest financial fraud scheme within our collective lifetimes, and I would venture to say, in the history of the world.
If you think that the international banking mafia/cartel is not capable of murder, and it all sounds too impossible to believe that these incidents are more than coincidences, consider the case of Kevin Krim. Kevin was a CNBC executive responsible for publishing news of a $43 trillion lawsuit that implicated "top government officials in the Obama White House along with several major US banks, bankers involved in the wrongdoing, and their profiteering cronies." ³
His family ended up murdered the day after with the mild-mannered, highly-praised nanny being blamed for the murders. If all of these situations sound more like coincidences rather than conspiracies to you, then it seems to me that you don't know exactly how ruthless these crooks are. Suffice it to say, that to compare them to the mafia in terms of murderous ruthlessness could best be paralleled by respectively comparing the New York Yankees to a Little League team.
They literally persuade governments to start wars, so that they can finance both sides, and no matter who wins or loses, they are always winners, because they will always be receiving their interest payments at the end of any given conflict. You need look no further than to investigate who financed the Nazis to build them up into a power that would be dangerous enough to justify a second world war, which they desperately sought, in order to increase support for the establishment of the UN, with the overall goal being one world government, otherwise known as the New World Order. The Rockefellers, the Morgans, and even Prescott Bush, father of George HW Bush, are all implicated in being party to the international banking cartel, and, at best, indirect financers of Hitler's Nazi party.
Another factor of consideration is the fact that we have seen the most marked increase in "mass shootings," and incidents billed as "mass shootings," since the time that the UN small arms treaty has been being considered here in the US. Not only have these two incidents shown marked discrepancies between "official" accounts, the Sikh Temple shooting as well had eyewitness accounts of multiple suspects(four shooters with a paramilitary appearance, in this case), with the "official" story claiming that there was only one shooter.
As I understand it, one of the primary containments of the UN's global government grab is the fact that the US'citizenry is too heavily armed to force or coerce into the global government scheme without it becoming, most undoubtedly, the most monumental conflict in human history without a formal declaration of war. Any country, to the best of my knowledge, that has given up their gun rights, has experienced increased oppression and police brutality, as well as increased home invasions and gun related homicides perpetrated by outlaws.
Indeed, there is literally not much of an argument to make in the way of gun control, as most criminologists who were initialy in favor of gun control, throughout their research on the subject, and their careers, have largely ended up supporting gun rights. 4 From the article that my annotation just referenced, this information is presented:
[Principal among the facts that [Dr.]Wolfgang [Kleck] was disappointed to learn, is that guns are used for self-defense between 2.1 million and 2.5 million times every year. The following facts from the Kleck/Gertz study, relate directly to this fact:
In the vast majority of those self-defense cases, the citizen will only brandish the gun or fire a warning shot.
In less than 8% of those self-defense cases will the citizen will even wound his attacker.
Over 1.9 million of those self-defense cases involve handguns.
As many as 500,000 of those self-defense cases occur away from home.
Almost 10% of those self-defense cases are women defending themselves against sexual assault or abuse.
This means that guns are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of law-abiding citizens than to take a life.
At an estimated 263 million US population, in 1995, when the study was released, it also means that an average of 1 out of every 105 to 125 people that you know will use a gun for self-defense every year.
Dr. Kleck also wrote in his book titled "Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Social Institutions and Social Change)" that burglars are more than three and a half times more likely to enter an occupied home in a gun control country than in the USA. Compare the 45% average rate of Great Britain, Canada and Netherlands with the 12.7% of the USA. He continued to point out that citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals every year as do police (1,527 to 606). In a related article titled, "Are We a Nation of Cowards'?" in the November 15, 1993 issue of Newsweek Magazine, George Will reported that police are more than 5 times more likely than a civilian to shoot an innocent person by mistake.]
In my opinion, these incidents, as well as discrediting and/or intimidating potential witnesses in the LIBOR scandal hearings, are poorly disguised attempts at manipulating the population of the US into a state of fear that will provide popular support for increased restrictions on gun rights, with the eventual goal being gun confiscation. We have certainly seen similar tactics used by our government in the OKC bombing, which was perpetrated to gain support for un-Constitutional "anti-terrorism" legislation being passed by the Clinton Administration. 5
If we allow this to happen, I believe it will not be too long before we find ourselves in a dystopian nightmare of oppression and tyranny imposed by a global communistic government, and we will only have ourselves to blame if we allow this to happen, as we have seen the warning signs before, if only we have been paying attention…
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Post by ratbag on Dec 18, 2012 15:29:34 GMT
Fuck me that's delusional....
This is interesting:-
If we allow this to happen, I believe it will not be too long before we find ourselves in a dystopian nightmare of oppression and tyranny imposed by a global communistic government, and we will only have ourselves to blame if we allow this to happen, as we have seen the warning signs before, if only we have been paying attention…
Kind of shows where he is coming from...McCarthy is alive and well......
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Post by Bestie on Dec 18, 2012 16:18:48 GMT
I love the word "communistic".
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Post by fletcherini on Dec 18, 2012 17:02:36 GMT
You just cannot generalise like that. The United States of America is a 'stupid country' because a selection of nutters decide to go out and gun down people, while millions of licenced gun-holders are responsible people, who restrict acess to their arms and keep them safe? It's about access to guns and tightening up the law dramatically. Tatty's just pointed out that 22 kids were stabbed to death in China. So we're now going to label China a 'stupid country' because their laws on the possession of knifes simply doesn't exist? This is China we're talking about, one of the strictest communist countries in the world..!! With respect, saying that certain countries are 'stupid' due to the fact that certain atrocities happen to take place there, is a niave point of view. Bad things happen worldwide. Life is tough. This is America we're talking about, superpower and all that. Yet the politics prevent any real change in a topic as clear cut as this. It didn't take Britain that long to realise. And its done good ever since. Yes it is a stupid country because its not just a selection of gun nutters anymore. Its not just a few people who are dying. 11,000 deaths due to gun violence a year ! Is that acceptable to you? Is it still okay to say that there are majority of good gun users its only very few that are bad? 11000 deaths a year and its still okay to sell guns without any REAL regulations on the streets? It is a stupid country that allows a civilian access to a bushmaster rapid fire assault rifle. It is a stupid country for not having tightened the laws at least 10 years ago ! Now here we are, 20 kindergarten students riddled with as many as 10 bullets per child. Yet you say I am naive for wanting as many guns off the street as possible. With regard to the knife incident in China, while it is a tragedy again, is not comparable to this. Because regulation of a kitchen knife is tough, seeing as it is in large public demand for, well, using in the kitchen. But regulation of guns on the other hand shouldn't be that tough. Because last I checked guns weren't very good use in vacuuming my carpet. So lets not compare the two. There is no comparison. That was almost an NRA-esque comment. You need to read my posts fully. They are not 'NRA-esque comments' they're facts which quite clearly people feel uncomfortable to accept. Of course 11,000 deaths isn't acceptable. I'm stating that the gun laws in the States need to be changed radically. Of course guns kill more people, but nutters will still find other ways of ending peoples lives in the same numbers if they're intent on doing so. Knifes, bombs, arson etc. You can't legislate with nutcases. Even if that kid hadn't access to guns, don't think for one moment he wouldn't be able to kill people by other methods. That kid was described as a genius, of course he could do it if he really wanted, even if he was without firearms. He could have knifed those kids to death like his less news-worthy nuttter in China. It's ridiculous in the extreme to state that the U.S. is a 'stupid country' because people who are mentally ill decide to gun people down. Tatty, just said it in previous posts, guns don't kill people- idiots do. Millions of licenced gun holders in the United States of America do not go out to intentionally kill people with the weapons they possess. Fact. The major incident in China is swept under the carpet, because the headcase in question wasn't carrying an assault rifle or gun? The killing of 22 children in China is comperable because the unfortunate kids in question aren't coming back- what makes their lives insignificant? If he was carrying a gun Sky would be all over it- forget about loss of children's lives elsewhere, the nutter in question wasn't trigger-happy. Nutcases will find other ways of killing people. |
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Post by Kamilo on Dec 18, 2012 17:35:44 GMT
This is America we're talking about, superpower and all that. Yet the politics prevent any real change in a topic as clear cut as this. It didn't take Britain that long to realise. And its done good ever since. Yes it is a stupid country because its not just a selection of gun nutters anymore. Its not just a few people who are dying. 11,000 deaths due to gun violence a year ! Is that acceptable to you? Is it still okay to say that there are majority of good gun users its only very few that are bad? 11000 deaths a year and its still okay to sell guns without any REAL regulations on the streets? It is a stupid country that allows a civilian access to a bushmaster rapid fire assault rifle. It is a stupid country for not having tightened the laws at least 10 years ago ! Now here we are, 20 kindergarten students riddled with as many as 10 bullets per child. Yet you say I am naive for wanting as many guns off the street as possible. With regard to the knife incident in China, while it is a tragedy again, is not comparable to this. Because regulation of a kitchen knife is tough, seeing as it is in large public demand for, well, using in the kitchen. But regulation of guns on the other hand shouldn't be that tough. Because last I checked guns weren't very good use in vacuuming my carpet. So lets not compare the two. There is no comparison. That was almost an NRA-esque comment. You need to read my posts fully. They are not 'NRA-esque comments' they're facts which quite clearly people feel uncomfortable to accept. Of course 11,000 deaths isn't acceptable. I'm stating that the gun laws in the States need to be changed radically. Of course guns kill more people, but nutters will still find other ways of ending peoples lives in the same numbers if they're intent on doing so. Knifes, bombs, arson etc. You can't legislate with nutcases. Even if that kid hadn't access to guns, don't think for one moment he wouldn't be able to kill people by other methods. That kid was described as a genius, of course he could do it if he really wanted, even if he was without firearms. He could have knifed those kids to death like his less news-worthy nuttter in China. It's ridiculous in the extreme to state that the U.S. is a 'stupid country' because people who are mentally ill decide to gun people down. Tatty, just said it in previous posts, guns don't kill people- idiots do. Millions of licenced gun holders in the United States of America do not go out to intentionally kill people with the weapons they possess. Fact. The major incident in China is swept under the carpet, because the headcase in question wasn't carrying an assault rifle or gun? The killing of 22 children in China is comperable because the unfortunate kids in question aren't coming back- what makes their lives insignificant? If he was carrying a gun Sky would be all over it- forget about loss of children's lives elsewhere, the nutter in question wasn't trigger-happy. Nutcases will find other ways of killing people. So lets talk nutcases. In the US it is very difficult to properly treat and seek attention for someone who may be psychologically troubled and put others at risk unless they have actually committed a crime/ act on record. Until that point they are almost brushed aside. Same with acquiring chemical and materials on the watch list used to potentially make harmful agents. The psychological disorder would have to be again acted upon. Without the action all you have is suspicion and that accounts for nothing in the US. The system is failed in dealing with mental health (or failed in general, another topic). |
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Post by Bestie on Dec 18, 2012 18:00:41 GMT
I know where you're coming from, but to be honest the 'mental health issue' is zero excuse for the dangerous lax gun control that blights most of America.
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