Posted on 12/16/2012 7:32:04 AM PST by marktwain
SCREAMING mums at schools, dads cradling children... it’s all too familiar to those of us who live in the United States.
Hours after the latest outrage the internet was awash with the unapologetic views of those who live and die by the gun.
Take this: “No crime would be permitted on my property because I am f****** armed. I can’t wait to kill someone legally.”
Or this from Alan Gottlieb, head of the pro-gun 2nd Amendment Foundation: “There was nobody in that school allowed a firearm. I find that deplorable. I’m sure Lanza felt he could go in because no one had a gun.”
It’s insane. Insane to think teachers should be armed and insanity itself to try to explain the killer’s motives.
(Excerpt) Read more at mirror.co.uk ...
Good post
Thanks!
We have many instances of homicide rates from low to high, where gun control has been implemented. The homicide rates generally trend up after gun control is institutited, though cause and effect are hard to differenciate. Perhaps Finland or Sweden could be used, but both had low homicide rates to begin with.
You may be on to something, though, when you note that there are no countries with high homicide rates and high legal firearms ownership. The highest homicide rates are uniformly in countries with very strict firearms laws.
But, as I said, it is culture that determines homicide rates, not legal firearms ownership.
Let us not be so hard on the Aussies and Brits. They are fellow members of th Anglosphere, which I would argue are some of the most civilized places on the planet.
It is true that they have been led down the garden path of disarmament by bad philosophy and a fearful leadership, but most of our traditions and the Second Amendment can be traced directly to the British and the rights of Englishmen.
Prediction: we cant agree what to do about the problem, so we will end up doing nothing.
‘In Britian, if you are the victim of a violent criminal, you just have to die because if you defend yourself and hurt the predator, you could end up in prison.’
No, you dont. We’ve been through this on FR a million times.
Exactly.
Most “pacifists” aren’t really. They just oppose whatever war is in prospect and set themselves up as the morally superior pacifist. Einstein was a pacifist till the Jews started being wiped out, when he suddenly discovered a need to fight back.Only when his own people were affected was fighting OK.
A true pacifist will refuse to use violence under ANY circumstances. If there is some extreme circumstance under which violence is, they believe, justified, they’re not pacifists, just people with a higher “violence threshold.”
I have a thought experiment to determine if a person is “really” a pacifist.
You are tied to a chair in room A, facing a one-way window into room B. All you can move is your right hand, which can just reach a red button.
A man enters room B with a little girl and prepares to rape and torture her to death. The only way to stop this is for you to push the red button, whereupon he will immediately and painlessly be killed, saving the little girl.
Do you push the button, or do you sit and watch her terror and agony for hours? If you push the button, you’re not really a pacifist, you are just posing as one. If you do not push the button, IMO you’re a despicable person who puts your own moral purity above the safety of a little girl.
In that extremely small subset of circumstances, so very carefully defined, this may be true, but it does not appear that overall there is a significant effect. We cannot measure how many crimes were deterred or stopped because of the presence of guns, or how the overall increase in self reliance and responsibility created in an atmosphere where guns are routinely present can result in less crime.
It does appear though, that over all crime rates are not affected much by the presence or absence of legal weaponry. Mind set created by culture is much more the determining factor.
Generally an excellent essay.
However, I think it’s a little hyperbolic to call pacifism “the ultimate evil.”
It’s a refusal to resist evil. I think the evil itself is by definition worse.
You might be interested in the history of the Sikhs. For their first century or so, they were pacifists and non-resisters. Ghandi would have approved.
In the early 1600s they got tired of Muslim persecution and reinterpreted the principle of ahimsa, or non-violence, to mean armed protect of the innocent against violence by the oppressor. They took the sword as their symbol.
That’s a form of non-violence I can support!
It’s insane. Insane to think teachers should be armed and insanity itself to try to explain the killer’s motives.
Since teachers in Israel were armed over three decades ago and they haven’t had a school shooting since.
Insanity seems to work!
I have read that the murder rate and violent crime rate for
the WHITE population in the U.S. is roughly comparable to the rate in other western nations.
Apologies for being boorishly pedantic after that compliment, but I can't resist pointing out that your statement 'it is true that in the UK only criminals have guns' (often repeated here) is incorrect. There are many thousands of legally owned guns, since the types of guns which were always the most widely-owned in Britain (shotguns and sporting rifles) have never been banned. It would, however, be true to say that most handguns in circulation are criminally owned.
You are most welcome. I think conservatives find if difficult to admit these facts because they feel (accurately) that liberals want to take away their gun rights. When you feel existentially threatened it is difficult to admit the other side has any reasonable arguments at all.
Liberals of course do much the same by refusing to recognize the benefits of widespread gun ownership.
It seems obvious to me it’s a cost/benefit ratio issue, with perfectly reasonable arguments on both sides.
I am indeed an American conservative, and I believe strongly in the 2nd Amendment, but I hope I’m still honest enough to admit there are costs to this freedom. One of them is greater likelihood of something like the Newtown massacre happening than in say, UK, where weapons of the type used are much more rare and difficult for nutjobs to get their hands on. OTOH, a much larger death toll occurred recently in Norway, which I assume (with little knowledge) has more strict regulation than most US states.
For me perhaps the greatest frustration with regard to the discussion after something like this is that both sides propose “solutions” that wouldn’t have prevented the shooting anyway. How can that be considered a solution? The solutions are often just an excuse to implement your desired policy.
I guess nobody really wants to recognize that there just isn’t much we can do to prevent these atrocities. We might be able to cut down on them, but we certainly can’t stop them.
The “gun debate” in the US is primarily about handguns, since long guns are only rarely used by criminals. And also about the infamous “assault weapons,” which are also only rarely used but make great scary images.
I am assuming that most gun crime in UK is by handguns, despite their illegality, and that “assault weapons” are also illegal.
For most US gun rights people, the UK registration and licensing requirements are very nearly equivalent to confiscation.
I won't presume to describe the condition of the U.S.: but Britain was then just embarking on the 'pax Victoriana', more than half a century of unprecedented, settled, peace and prosperity. There were few if any serious threats, either internal or external. There was crime, of course, but for the most part it was successfully contained by the new police forces, without the need for them to be routinely armed. In that environment, it would simply not have occurred to the average Englishman that he might want or need a gun. The suggestion that he might do so would have been thought somewhat preposterous, unless he happened to be either a sportsman or a countryman needing to control vermin. The guns suitable for those two purposes therefore became the only guns owned in any great quantity. Yes, handguns were available and there was a market for them: but it was always a small minority, minute compared to the U.S. Despite all the subsequent historical changes, that pattern has remained largely unchanged ever since: so that when the handgun ban arrived in 1997, the number of legally-owned weapons which had to be surrendered was, as far as I remember, only in the low tens of thousands.
What a fantastic post. Well done
I will die for my and any kids. No matter what...
I will die for my friends. Not for my wallet.
I will and would die for a stranger to avert them from dying.....
That is how I live.
dbehsman posted: From the article:
Take this: “No crime would be permitted on my property because I am f****** armed. I can’t wait to kill someone legally.”
I’d like a source for this quote. I think it’s been made up.
You could email the author of the article. It could be real. Hard to say about the context. If you look hard enough, you can find an example of almost any idiocy on the internet.
However, I did a google search for much of the phrase, and all responses come back to the article in question. It might be worthwhile to question the author.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.