Australians Have A Warning For Americans

[maxman]

I refused to debate gun laws at the time of the tragic slaughter of 28 people In Connecticut last month. Most of them were children. I said that could be a discussion for another day.

 

I won't debate this Issue today. I am a law abiding gun owner who has several guns. I strongly believe that I have the right to protect my home and the family who lives In It. I also enjoy target shooting.

 

I suggest you watch the video and draw your own conclusion(s) Lets keep the comments civil and play nice or they will most likely lock this MF down. Right Nanuq?

 

Mike

 

[kbh]

OK, I'll start. I'm also a law abiding gun owner, in fact I own several hunting rifles and shotguns. I'm also a firm believer in getting rid of all military type, assault rifle type, and all clips or magazines that hold over 5 bullets. And I don't buy the theory that the gun lobby perpetuates, that a semi automatic hunting rifle is the same thing as a semi automatic assault rifle. One is designed and bought for hunting animals, the other is designed and bought for killing people.

 

Also, I'd love to live in Australia, with or without my guns.

 

OK, Next.

[Mike on a bike]

Case and point,look at the numbers posted in Mike's video. The good people of Australia living in fear, the criminals are the only ones safer now!

 

PS Gun sales in USA up dramatically as population fears new legislation curtailing their rights to protect their lives ,home ,loved ones,liberty and freedom. Bully for us!

 

"(Reuters) - The number of FBI background checks required for Americans buying guns set a record in December, indicating that more people may purchase one after the Connecticut school massacre stirred interest in self-defense and prompted renewed talk of limits on firearms, according to FBI data.

The FBI said it recorded 2.78 million background checks during the month, surpassing the mark set in November of 2.01 million checks - about a 39 percent rise.

The latest monthly figure was up 49 percent over December 2011, when the FBI performed a then-record 1.86 million checks.

Consumer demand for guns appears to have accounted for the uptick in activity. There were no changes in FBI background check procedures that would have affected the December numbers, FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer said."

 

Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/02/us-usa-guns-record-idUSBRE9010H020130102

 

Please return to the vid and see results of disarming a population. I debated hard in that last thread on this because there is a lot at stake. Politicians use your emotions in a tragic tragic event like this to take advantage of you ,don't let them.

[Nanuq]

I usually try to stay out of these discussions, but consider this:

If there was a ban on clips holding more than x rounds, would all the criminals throw their hands up in the air and bemoan their large capacity clips? No.

If there was a law banning guns on school grounds, would that stop a psychopath from taking a gun to an elementary school? No.

It's not a gun problem.

Society is broken. It's full of broken people. One of the consequences is these heinous acts.

Fix the broken people, and there won't be anyone left that needs to kill a classroom full of children.

I think the Boy Scouts is a good place to start. Teach character, ethics, duty, responsibility, and teach them to value other people. Then watch them teach their friends. It can be contagious.

There's step #1 of the Nanuq Solution.

[TheRefinedSon]

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries — and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

More guns, less crime

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had enforced the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference. Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s — after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions — there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem — including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts. There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

 

- Thomas Sowell

Columnist and Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

[Ephry73]

What Nanuq said. Period.

I too have my love for Gina and target practice which I passed to my current wife and he now loves it as well. My you nephew and niece have been taken to the range and shown proper gun safety and etiquette. Even if they don't like guns, I believe fun safety should be taught.

X round magazines are enough for most of us, but when going to the range it becomes a pain in the butt. I deal with it. The AR15 is a great rifle, but I can live with a maximum capacity of ten. No biggie.

American Society needs to take a hard look at itself period.

[Tonyyammine]

Theres 300 million people in the US. There are bound to be assholes. All cant suffer due to the small percentage of clowns.

[TheRefinedSon]

I don't see the point in limiting magazine capacity. Mass shootings always bring about the argument of "Who needs magazines of such a high capacity?" but lets be honest the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to firearms.

 

Legislation will only stop the legal sale of such items and there is enough of it out there that it won't have any effect on future mass shooters. If there is a demand for such items, that demand will be met on the black market as it is in all countries, laws be damned.

 

We need to focus on the people that commit the crimes and the factors that contributed to their decisions leading up to and culminating in the crime. People really are the issue and the quality of the people in this world is markedly and measurably declining.  

[Guest zeleni kukuruz]

Anyone can take drugs, pills, alchole ect ect and get fockt in the head!!! BUT if that person has a chanse to get a gun, shiits will always happen!!!

 

THERE IS NO WAY you can say, "fix the broken people" normal people get broken everyday , takes drugs, pills alcohole ect ect, AND if they have a gune? The math to me is very easy!!!

 

i rest my case!!!

 

 

GUN'S kill people, always have always will!!!

[maxman]

Lets take Chicago for example. Chicago has historically had the strongest gun-control laws In the US. Chicago also has one of the highest If not the highest homicide rates In the country. The same can be said for DC. Fact.

 

Mike

 

 

[Nanuq]

American Society needs to take a hard look at itself period.

 

Truer words were never spoken. 

 

We are isolated from our neighbors and we think a healthy outlet is sitting at a computer screen.

 

We take offense at the slightest provocation.

 

We are insular and spoiled rotten. 

 

We worship things, and have no time for people.

 

Society is lost one broken person at a time.  It can be recovered one person at a time.

 

It takes effort, and it means caring more for others than you do for yourself.

 

 

If we work on marble, it will perish; if on brass, time will efface it; if we rear up temples, they

will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and imbue them with principles,

with the just fear of God and the love of our fellowmen, we engrave on those tablets something

that will brighten to all eternity.

--Daniel Webster

[TheRefinedSon]

Anyone can take drugs, pills, alchole ect ect and get fockt in the head!!! BUT if that person has a chanse to get a gun, shiits will always happen!!!

 

THERE IS NO WAY you can say, "fix the broken people" normal people get broken everyday , takes drugs, pills alcohole ect ect, AND if they have a gune? The math to me is very easy!!!

 

i rest my case!!!

 

 

GUN'S kill people, always have always will!!!

 

If you want a gun and you have the money, you can get a gun. I don't care where in the world you are or what the laws are.

 

Mentally unstable people with guns are the least of problems surrounding violence committed with guns. We don't need to "fix" anyone, society has created an environment in which people have increasingly become more willing to take another human life in anger or for gain.

 

What happened in this country (and others) that even with ever increasing gun restriction measures people are killing each other in higher numbers? It wasn't like this in the 50's, what's changed? It isn't the ease of access to weapons capable of ending a human life. Its the ease of conscience in taking a human life. 

 

The truth is its easier and more pleasant to believe that you can pass a law and fix a problem, easier than it is to accept the fact that in order for peoples behavior to change that person must choose to change. Anyone that has seen a problem in themselves will attest to the fact that changing your own behavior is a very difficult thing indeed. Changing someone else's behavior is nigh impossible and anyone that believes that they can make someone else change is a fool. 

[gasebah]

If the gun lovers would care to take a loock over the fence to other civilized continents like Europe or Asia they would probably redo their phoney math. It is a cultural thing that won't change from one day to the next by taking guns away. But in the long run banning guns will pay off. Not seeing this is completely stubborn and unresaonable. Like having no speed limit on German highways. I would not like it as love driving fast but not seeing that this kills people and doesn't really make sense is nothing but immature.

[KB]

What I would personally like to see is where the figures quoted in that video can be shown as fact, because honestly it's a crock.

 

In Australia we do not have a ban on guns, we have a ban on automatic guns and the thing is that professional criminals have never favoured automatics anyway so it was never an attempt to decrease crime, it was simply an attempt to take these weapons out of the hands of people who may perpetuate these terrible mass shootings and since 1996 it has worked.

 

Yes I am sure there are still automatic weapons out there and at some stage some will find there way to the wrong person, but the point is....we are trying

 

If you need an automatic to hunt you are no hunter.

 

Ken

[FxrAndy]

I think the Boy Scouts is a good place to start. Teach character, ethics, duty, responsibility, and teach them to value other people. Then watch them teach their friends. It can be contagious.

There's step #1 of the Nanuq Solution.

 

Amen to that Bob

[maxman]

If the gun lovers would care to take a loock over the fence to other civilized continents like Europe or Asia they would probably redo their phoney math. It is a cultural thing that won't change from one day to the next by taking guns away. But in the long run banning guns will pay off. Not seeing this is completely stubborn and unresaonable. Like having no speed limit on German highways. I would not like it as love driving fast but not seeing that this kills people and doesn't really make sense is nothing but immature.

Germany's autobahn which for the most part has no speed limit has less vehicle fatalities and accidents In general than on the US highways.

 

http://www.upsb.info/forum/index.php?showtopic=20198

[panerai153]

I live in the South, owning guns and hunting have been a way of life down here for generations. I Own guns, I don't hunt as much as I used to, just don't hate those critters like I used to, plus I hate getting up before dawn and sitting in a freezing cold duck blind for hours. I do enjoy getting out in the outdoors, in fact sometimes I go out alone and sit in the same blind, but in mid day when it's warmer, and I take a camera and binoculars instead of a shotgun.

 

While I do own one semi automatic "assault rifle", I really don't see any need to have 30 round clips. In fact anyone who practices and gets good with a particular firearm, can change 10 round clips and keep firing almost as fast as the guy shooting the 30 round. Why do I have an assault rifle, and several handguns? Simply this, I live in a fairly isolated area, there have been a few home invasions in our area, all of them turned out bad for the homeowners, none of which were armed.That is the only reason I keep firearms in my house, other than rifles and shotguns that are strictly for hunting. In actuality,if one were looking for a home defense weapon, the best would be a short barrel open choke double barrel or pump shotgun with # 6 shot, From 10-15 feet, you don't have to aim, and the projectiles will not go through half a dozen flimsy walls if you miss.

 

Am I a "gun nut" I really don't think so, I'm just a firearms owner who has guns and supports the rights of others to keep and bear arms.

 

So what is the real problem. I think nanug expressed it very well. There are literally thousands of mentally unstable people walking around in society today, some of them are violent, some of them don't appear to be any different from their peers, but over time folks that are around them will know. One of the big problems is over the years, the federal and state governments have slashed mental health budgets to the bone. Years ago the grand scheme was to move people out of structured mental health facilities, and attempt to assimilate them into society. The problem is that hasn't worked, it's created a terrible problem, with homeless people people that have been abandoned by family and young people who need help, but cannot because the mental health facilities are so crowded and understaffed and under funded that patients spend weeks and months waiting for appointments. Medication is expensive, and most folks who need medications are not eligible for any government help. another problem, and the one that I believe is the more pervasive and ultimately more serious is the total lack of morals and conscience in our population. this has been fostered by the avalanche of extremely violent movies, video games and Television. Gratuitous Sex, violence and gristly killings are the everyday fare that we are inundated with today. Kids are assailed with this all day every day. They think that what they see on TV, what they play on their video games are in fact reality. And in a lot of cases, it does become their reality. killing a hundred people in a video game, or walking out of their house and killing 20 -30 people in a mall, school or on the street has the same reality, and elicits the same emotions. Is their a solution to the problem? Truthfully, I don't know. We have an almost complete breakdown in the family in our part of the country, probably 60-70 percent of the babies born are born into a single parent household. the fathers take off way before the baby is born and single mothers anf grandmothers bring up the children, so right off there is no father figure, and no one to establish rules and boundaries of discipline. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the father figure is replaced by a gang leader, who takes young boys in and teaches them the ways of the criminal. So here we have it, Loss of mental health facilities, movies, TV and video games that are filled with blood and gore, and finally the breakdown of the nuclear family. With all that's going on today, we are probably lucky that there aren't more killings.And I can promise you one thing, you can disarm the honest citizens, but the criminal will ALWAYS find a way to get a weapon, and it won't be a stick or a sword!  

[Utheman]

I too have my love for Gina and target practice which I passed to my current wife and he now loves it as well. My you nephew and niece have been taken to the range and shown proper gun safety and etiquette. Even if they don't like guns, I believe fun safety should be taught.

 

 

I hope your wife doesen't find out about Gina....   just sayin'

 

[maxman]

I hope your wife doesen't find out about Gina....   just sayin'

 

More like Va-Gina.  Just saying

[sgtguk]

American Society needs to take a hard look at itself period.

 

Agreed  I think the whole planet needs to mate!

[ldegeneve]

I will leave this here, without any further comment. From Alec Wilkinson:

 

Years ago, when I was twenty-two, I was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and I had a .38 Smith and Wesson. It wasn’t mine; it had been given to me on my first night of work, selected by the sergeant, who took it from a desk drawer in the chief’s office, along with another .38. He measured them beside each other then decided that one of them had a problem with its trigger and gave me what he was pretty sure was the other one. Two thousand people lived in Wellfleet, and we were a fairly informal two-car department of nine men.

 

Somewhere Chesterton writes—I think it is Chesterton—that you cannot reason a man from a position that reason didn’t deliver him to. A few days later I was taken to the firing range and given six bullets to shoot at a hillside, which was all I could hit. It was the first time I had fired a gun, and by the time the chambers were empty I understood something: a gun was an object in which a power of nature was concentrated so forcefully that a person could use one and feel party to a solemn and thrilling mystery. The thought crossed my mind, unbidden, that if I pointed the gun at the man beside me I could end his life. I don’t mean that I had a murderous impulse, I mean that I had become aware of the authority that the gun had given me. Absent its hard, mechanical shell in my hand, I had no special power. I was just a guy.

 

For a year I wore the gun on my hip, and it made me feel like someone of more substance than I was. One of the other officers used to say, “As long as I have Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson with me, I need fear no man.” Sometimes to search a dark building at night where a door stood open, I held the gun in front of me. Once I caught my reflection in a picture window illuminated by a streetlight, holding the gun and crouching, and I was thrilled to see that I looked like a movie star in a role, or even someone who might have a movie made about him—someone knowledgeable about and attentive to the sinewy truths of life, like in a fable. I did stupid things with the gun. When I wasn’t working, I sometimes carried it in the glove compartment of my car. (The others wore theirs under their coats or in holsters that fit into the small of their backs.) I didn’t think I would run into a need to draw the gun, but I had a girlfriend who lived three hundred miles away whom I would visit on my days off. When I was pulled over for speeding, I would say to the cop, “My registration is in the glove compartment, but I’m a cop and my gun is in there, too,” and I would not be given a ticket. Once during the winter I had driven up to Provincetown on an errand and coming back along Route 6 a car of what I took to be high-school students, or maybe fishermen, drew alongside me. This was the late seventies, when some of the people who lived in Provincetown had hard feelings for the gay people among them. The boys, taking me for being gay, I suppose, began cursing at me and pointing to me to pull over, so we could fight. I pursed my lips as if offering them a kiss, and when they began screaming and shaking their fists, I pointed my gun at them, and they fell away like bridesmaids parting at the end of the aisle. I was so excited that I sang “Me and My Uncle,” by the Grateful Dead, which is about cowboys, all the rest of the way home.

 

I don’t think there is any mystery to understanding the passionate feelings people have for guns. Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. What argument can meet this, I am not sure, especially since the topic isn’t openly discussed. To people who support owning guns, the issue is treated as a right and a matter of democracy, not a complicated subject also involving elements of personal mental health. I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.

 

As for the assertion that someone with a gun might have prevented one of these recent catastrophes, I can think of two things to say. One is that the idea of a solitary figure with a hand gun dispatching a man in combat gear with an assault rifle is not a sensible one. I knew only one cop who had fired his gun at someone, and he had missed the man completely. I asked what had happened, and he said, “I got a sudden case of shaky hands.” The second is that some years ago I wrote a book called “A Violent Act,” which appeared in two issues of this magazine. The book concerns the permanent shadow cast across the lives of a woman and her two little boys when a man on a rampage killed her husband with a sawed-off shotgun. This happened one morning in Indianapolis. The husband had been a probation officer who came to the man’s house for an interview. The killer shot him as he walked toward the front door, then left in a car. He drove to a convenience store where he shot the clerk when the man didn’t hand over the money from the cash register fast enough. Over the next few hours he killed a few more people and kidnapped others in Indiana and Missouri—by the end of the day he was the most sought after criminal at large in America—-and then he crashed his car beside a highway and ran into some woods and disappeared. In reconstructing the day, I sought out as many witnesses as I could find, and one was a man who had been in the store when the shotgun went off. He had had a handgun in his coat pocket. I asked why he hadn’t used it. “It just all happened too fast,” he said,” and by the time I might have got to it, he had the jump on me.”

[freddy333]

Regardless of which side you are on, here are a couple of facts -

1. The people who wrote the US Constitution included the 2nd Amendment primarily to give citizens a way to protect themselves from the government.

2. Israel has 1 of the world's highest number of guns per capita (nearly every family has at least 1 military-style firearm), but 1 of the lowest rates of gun-related crime in the world (both Switzerland & Canada have significantly higher numbers of gun-related deaths than does Israel).

[mch2112]

Regardless of which side you are on, here are a couple of facts - 1. The people who wrote the US Constitution included the 2nd Amendment primarily to give citizens a way to protect themselves from the government.

Source for this?

[freddy333]

The Federalist Papers.

[KB]

Sorry Freddy the 2nd Amendment was referring to a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State

 

Every citizen in Israel has their backs to the sea and a common enemy who surrounds them on all sides, hardly a good example for gun safety.

 

 

Ken