I could give you what you will probably consider a corner case. Wildlife, specifically aggressive wildlife. I have a buddy that lives in Alaska was telling me about a friend of his that was out in the woods. A bear came after him to attack him, and he ended up emptying a 30 round magazine from an AK-47 into the bear…Which ended up falling 6 feet from him.
That’s not the only case of aggressive wildlife. I read a couple of months ago of a 12 year old that ended up having to shoot some wild animal that was about to attack his older sister.
But honestly, a semi-automatic rifle works in exactly the same manner as a semi-automatic shotgun, or a semi-automatic handgun for that matter. All it means is that for every trigger pull, the mechanism reloads the chamber.
Here is the point: WEAPON. I can understand a rancher in a rural area having a rifle or shotgun to defend against potentially dangerous animals, but in an urban environment? There are plenty of countries where the mass bulk of the populace survives without owning guns.
Wow dude, really? “Security and protection”? What do you think you’re going to do when you have to use your gun to defend yourself? Fire it in the air and hope they run away? You’re either going to use the threat of killing or injuring them, or you’re going to actually kill or injure them.
All guns are designed to eject a projectile at a target with the intent of hitting said target. If you point it at a person and shoot, unless they’re covered head to toe in Kevlar, and you happen not to be using armour piercing bullets, you’re going to kill or injure them.
I will wager the bulk of gun ownership in the US is of pistols and semi-automatic rifles. I will also wager the bulk of urban gun ownership is done under the auspices of “home defence”. Which means if you end up using it as intended, you are threatening to kill or injure the intruder(s).
I don’t know how much clearer I can make this point.
To me, the cleanest way to deal with it, is to ban personal gun ownership (with very, very specific, well controlled exceptions for those with genuine needs beyond the handwavey “home defence”), stage an amnesty for return of guns (possibly with an incentive - pay 10% less income tax for 3 years or something), and heavily police the usage and trafficking of illegal firearms.
But this will never happen, as American politics, culture and business are so heavily co-dependent on guns that the financial and political losses would be spectacular. All because some old guys 300-odd years ago thought everyone should have one, just in case the British came back again.
So tell me again why I don’t have an obligation to protect my family from home invaders (who may be armed)? To stop bad people from doing bad things to my family? Especially when the Constitution of the United States says I have a right to?
But there are also areas of the US (and other countries) where the animals are armed. Look at downtown Chicago. Last weekend was a slow weekend there. Only 18 people were shot (with illegal weapons). Chicago has one of the most draconian gun laws, something like you envision, Neuro. It is almost illegal to own a gun, yet they have one of the highest number of shootings in the country. Outlawing guns just doesn’t work, because the criminals aren’t going to abide by it.
Violent crime happens, even in England…Was it last year that a gang armed with machetes cut up a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq? Where you regularly see stories about gangs roaming the streets and occasionally having their asses kicked by a WWII veteran?
I didn’t say any of those things. However, there’s nothing to stop you using other means to defend your home. Strong locks on all doors and windows, alarms, smart CCTV, anti-climb paint on external pipe work, baseball bats …
I don’t live in England.
It was last year that two men attacked and murdered a soldier from 2 Battalion Fusiliers, who had served in Germany, Cyprus and Afghanistan. The two men were arrested, tried and convicted, one for a minimum term of 45 years, the other for a “whole life” term, that is, life imprisonment without parole.
Regarding the second part of that statement, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Given that any UK soldier who participated in World War II will be in at least their late 80s, I doubt any of them go around kicking anyone’s arse.
But (and forgive me if I am reading too much into this), you consider me a bad person if I choose to use the most efficient way to protect myself and others around me…? All of those methods have a place (well, except for the baseball bat, which is a losing prospect against an armed intruder), but the bottom line is that any fixed defenses can be battered down.
Alarms mean what when I am 30 or more minutes from police response? In my case, it is minutes where seconds count. And I, being former military, am completely comfortable with firearms. Taking the firearm option off the table, especially when it is possible, if not probable that an intruder is so armed, does not make sense to me. And I think that the difference between home invasions in which the homeowner was armed and ones which they were not are two very different sets of outcomes.
Correct. This is exactly the story I was thinking of. And while it was a successful outcome, not so much for the soldier…
@VulcanRidr / @neuro - it seems to me that the debate here between you both is not so much about the rights to own and operate guns, but instead about the cultural relationship with guns that is present where you live. It is just so different in different parts of the world.
I have experienced this first-hand moving to the US from England.
It is difficult to translate this gut-feel that many people have for guns in these different regions. When I lived n England all guns felt like merely tools of death and destruction with zero utility. I hated the notion of guns in all of their forms. I think part of this was that to me guns were something that affected other people so I mentally placed guns as something that I never wanted to be introduced to my life.
In America it is different. Many kids are raised going hunting, shooting in their back yard, and seeing adults using and maintaining guns. Also bake into this the phenomenal influence the constitution has had on this country and how important the different pieces are, and you can see that the primary defining cultural document about America and its values also places arms as core to that cultural definition.
This is why I see it from both sides. I totally see @neuro’s opposition to guns and intrinsic discomfort with them, but I also understand @VulcanRidr’s points too about guns used by trained and registered individuals.
Thanks Jono. I think you nailed it. I doubt there will be any way for me to make @vulcanridr see my point of view, and with that, I withdraw from further discussion on the matter.
I don’t necessarily want to reopen the discussion, because I think you’ve done a good job with your comment.
However, it is worth a wee footnote to say that this particular point of view isn’t necessarily representative of the whole of the UK. It’s probably prevalent in urban situations, but in rural situations guns are often tools of the trade. Indeed, my father-in-law runs a gun shop, and was previously both a farmer who would routinely shoot foxes and deer, and a commonwealth games competitor in clay-pigeon shooting. But even in those areas, I doubt you would see anyone justifying the owning of assault weapons, or carrying of sidearms (concealed or not).
Not trying to fan flames or re-open old arguments, but this article highlights the differences between criminals and legal gun owners. From the article:
“…is that criminals have no respect for the law by nature of being criminals. Criminals aren’t going to be stopped by a “no guns allowed” sign. If somebody is going to rob or shoot up a Chipotle, for instance, they’re not going to care that they cannot (or have been politely asked not to) bring a gun onto the premises. Criminals are not going to submit to background checks. They’ll use straw purchases or just buy a gun from an illegal source. All these policies and laws do is make it harder for legal gun owners to protect themselves.”
I’m sorry, but that’s an awful article. They need to back up their claims with actual facts. Every criminal was, at some point, a law-abiding citizen. Until the robbers are caught, there is no evidence whatsoever to prove that the guns were illegally obtained; there is no evidence to confirm whether or not these were previously convicted criminals.
And even assuming that they were criminals with illegal guns, they injured 2 employees, but not badly, compared to Elliot Rodger, who killed 6 people and injured 13 more with 3 legally purchased guns.
…again…the issue here with Elliot Rodger was not the guns, it was the mental health problems he was suffering from.
We have the same debate over and over again: “guns are bad, they kill people”, yet in almost all circumstances it seems the most horrendous gun (and non-gun) related crimes are due to mental health problems. This is the thing we as a society need to focus on.
Whilst I concur that mental health is a serious issue that we as a society need to combat, I worry that it will fall into the same “trap” that VulcanRidr’s article points to - the idea that you can somehow “tell” that someone has a mental health issue and prevent them access to firearms. More often than not, you can’t tell. And thus the only realistic way (IMHO) to prevent “mentally ill” people having access to firearms is actually by drastically reducing everyone’s access to firearms. But that’s unlikely to happen in the US, for all the reasons stated above. That is what happened in the UK following Dunblane, although there are vociferous debaters on either side as to what the impact of that has been.
So, yes, mental health is certainly a factor in far too many of these incidents. But to suggest that it is somehow more of a factor than access to guns is, again IMHO, a red herring.
I didn’t want to get into this argument again, because it’s upsetting to me to see people defend personal ownership of deadly weapons in the face of never-ending reports of innocent people being shot for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope at some point, @VulcanRidr, you’ll start to get upset at the unnecessary waste of our species.
Specious.
People who drive at galactically unsafe speeds on public roads, for instance, don’t care about speed limits. Or insurance. Or driving licences. They’re going to do it with or without speed limits, insurance or licences. So let’s just get rid of speed limits, car insurance and driving licences. They’ll probably just borrow or steal a car to speed anyway.
Do you see what I did there?
I was going to go through a list of shootings in the US to list those conducted with legally purchased guns, realised there were too many in total, so decided to restrict myself to those that occurred in the 21st century, realised there were too many in total, so decided to restrict myself to those that occurred in the 2010s, realised there were too many in total, so decided not to wade neck deep into those kinds of statistics. I’d be here for days generating the list.
Suffice to say many recent shootings have been perpetrated with legally purchased firearms, and used either by the owner or a family member.
At what point do you cut your losses and simply say the cost of gun ownership is too damn high? When it happens in your continent? Your country? Your state? Your county? Your town? Your street?
Your priorities are the wrong way round. There are many people in the UK with mental health issues. When was the last time you heard of a mass shooting in the UK?
Guns ARE bad. They KILL PEOPLE. People who DO NOT HAVE GUNS cannot use guns to KILL PEOPLE. I admit this will not stop people being killed by other means, but given the indiscriminate nature of gunfire, it will go a long way to curb that.
I never said guns are not bad, and I never suggested I like them. My point is that guns are not the root cause of the problem; mental health issues are.
Sure, if there were no guns, I agree there would be no mass shootings. I suspect though that there would be mass stabbings, or people would drive cars into people, or there would be bombs. The issue here is people who have something in their brains that makes them want to harm people and while I agree that you can remove things that could be used by dangerous people to make society safer, I think it is more important that we strike at the root cause: mental health.
I think the solution is dual-pronged. It needs to include better mental health services and stronger checks for gun ownership.
If I had my way, I would make some guns available to citizens (not assault rifles or military-grade weapons) but I would have the most rigorous test I could think of to ensure that a citizen can’t get a weapon unless they are of sound mind and skill. This would not stop black market weapons, but that is a different topic.
My main issue with gun legislation in the US is that I think this checking is not strong enough and there are some guns on the market that frankly should be illegal due to how powerful they are.
I refer you back to my previous post. How are you going to determine sound mind? How “mentally ill” do you have to be? 1 in 4 people in the UK will have a mental health issue this year alone. By 2020, according to the WHO, depression (a mental illness) will be the 2nd most common disability in the world. And why should we discriminate (bearing in mind previous discussions on this forum) against people with mental health issues, the vast majority of whom will never commit violent acts?
Tying the Elliot Rodgers killings to mental health problems serves 2 purposes - it allows the pro-gun lobby to muddy the waters, and it further stigmatises mental health issues.
