I am fairly certain the police are required to "protect" you, it is essentially half of their job and that's not up for discussion, its a defined term.
Ever heard of Warren v. District of Columbia. I'm going to assume not. Which is fine. But if you read that opinion, you'll realize that it's been long held that cops have no obligation to protect individuals. None. Nada. Zilch. Zip.
You're right about it not being up for discussion though. But only because it's the exact opposite of what you thought.
I said the definition of police is not up for discussion. You don't have police then, you have guys with guns, who will help out if they can an try solve crimes. I have just given you a dictionary definition of what police means, how can you misconstrued that?
"protect members of the public and their property" http://www.prospects.ac.uk/police_officer_job_description.htm job description. The modern police force was invented in London. By definition you do not have police if what you have said is true.
Stop arming private citizens and get the law changed so police are actually police and are legally required to ""protect members of the public and their property""
Unfortunately both of those statements aren't true. Just because guns are made illegal doesn't mean that they suddenly no longer exist in the country. If you're planning on walking onto your college campus or into an elementary school and start killing everyone in sight, do you REALLY care if "illegal possession of a gun" is added onto the charges against you (assuming that you get captured rather than just blow your head of the moment SOMEONE ELSE WITH A GUN COMES TO STOP YOU).
A lot of shootings are stopped only when the shooter is confronted by someone else with a gun, at which point they generally kill themselves. It might be harder to find a gun if guns are made illegal, but something being illegal has never been a deterant against people who intend to commit crime.
Robbing banks is illegal, but people still do it.
Rape is illegal, but people still do it.
Speeding down the highway is illegal, but people still do it.
If buying a gun was made illegal, I can promise you that people would still do it.
why dont you ask a certain escapist poster about her incident and how she would have died if she didnt own a gun.
How about a mother who just lost her husband to cancer and now has to take care of her child alone when two armed men addicted to drugs invaded her home (even when she barricaded the door) to get at her deceased husband's leftover drugs and fended them off with a shotgun? Even the police dispatcher told her to do what she had to do to protect her family.
How about my FATHER who stopped two men who brutally raped and battered this poor woman from finishing the job when she managed to escape them and tumble/crawl to my father's property until the two men caught up to her again? The only reason she is alive is because my father came out to investigate the commotion/screams and had a shotgun at hand. He pointed it at the two men and told them not to move and had to wait 15 minutes for the police to arrive. Hell the poor woman is lucky to be alive, one of them had a bat and used it against her before she managed to escape.
I know the anti-american bigots like to think that american gun owners are just looking for an excuse to kill someone for fun, but that is not true. That woman trapped in the attic? Scared to hell. Even my father told me how even before this incident, the prospect of pointing a gun at someone scared the hell out of them. But he had one just in case something like this happen, where you have to do the right thing even if it scares you to death.
And how about the the 20 children who where butchered along with 6 adults in Connecticut, 100% avoidable if guns were illegal.
The Virginia Tech massacre 33 people dead , 100% avoidable if guns were illegal.
Or the numerous other school shootings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States it is frankly disgusting the state of gun control in america based off the history of school shootings alone, let alone the nation wide gun crime stats.
The situations you are stating are the exception. To be honest the more I hear the more it sounds like the main justification for gun ownership is an inept police unable to control the populace. But for some reason somewhere along the line someone has decided "I know rather than creating a police force that works and is able to protect the populace, lets allow them to arm themselves to the teeth and let them sort themselves out". How is that just logic.
Pointing out an inaccuracy in my own post earlier but actually didn't come to mind before. As a student I have had to live in a city that has a much higher crime rate than when I'm from. I was working in a store when it was robbed at knife point, I was threatened with a knife and he did threaten to stab me. I got away and called the police. Unfortunately while I was doing this the security gaurd confronted him (against procedure, but guy was a very brave individual and ex-military) unfortuantly the guard wound up hospitalized. Armed police with guns and dogs and an ambulance were there within 5 mins of me calling them. The guy did get away but was later caught and imprisoned. Would a gun have helped us there, yes, no one would of got hurt an the guy would of been caught in the act. But for someone else in the country, the guy robbing the store is the one with the gun, the police turn up or the robbery goes wrong, or the shop staff have a weapon, an someone is dead. Thats why I'm not screaming out about my right to have a fire arm. For each life it could possibly save, your dooming others to a violent and possibly unnecessary death.
Not everyone who rob's someone or commits a crime deserves to be killed either, because they are caught in the act by an armed individual without the training or powers of arrest to stop the crime using a weapon peacefully.
And the hundreds if not thousands of cases per year where a gun protected someone from being assaulted, murdered, or raped? or do their lives not matter?
Yes, you can jump up and down about inefficient police protection, unfortunately nothing can be done about that. You have no idea how much that will cost. It will make our wars look pitiful by comparison. Not to mention that there are certain communities who would resist a rampant increase in police force, upwards of 30% of the population. That is a lot of votes. No matter how strongly a politician feels about the issue, very few, if any, will commit political suicide to do so. They like their power and money too much.
If we could stop the illegal guns and drugs coming into the country, the need for home defense would lessen dramatically. Course, women deserve the right to defend themselves as well. Ban guns and they are going to be even more at the mercy of potential rapists.
We are not a lawless country. In fact we have so many laws that those who careers revolve around law dont know of all of the laws that exist. Problem is we have too many laws, but dont enforce many of them as much as we should. I bet the residents of California could regale you with such tales.
I said the definition of police is not up for discussion. You don't have police then, you have guys with guns, who will help out if they can an try solve crimes. I have just given you a dictionary definition of what police means, how can you misconstrued that?
"an organized civil force for maintaining order, preventing and detecting crime, and enforcing the laws."
Don't see anything there about protecting individual citizens.
Stop arming private citizens and get the law changed so police are actually police and are legally required to ""protect members of the public and their property""
Both would require constitutional amendments that simply aren't going to happen. One to remove the right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the other to overturn this longstanding legal precedent.
Unfortunately both of those statements aren't true. Just because guns are made illegal doesn't mean that they suddenly no longer exist in the country. If you're planning on walking onto your college campus or into an elementary school and start killing everyone in sight, do you REALLY care if "illegal possession of a gun" is added onto the charges against you (assuming that you get captured rather than just blow your head of the moment SOMEONE ELSE WITH A GUN COMES TO STOP YOU).
Both those examples I stated the guns were soured originally legally. Except the Connecticut one where he took them from someone who had them legally. I'm talking about the ready avaliabilty from what I have heard neither of those individuals really had the connections or the means it would of taken to source those weapons illegally as they would of here in the UK. An I'm not going to BS an say british gangsters have some sort of code of ethics but generally most groups frown on the shooting of kids an organised crime are the only real people that know how to get weapons illegally, so in a gun illegal world, no those goes probably wouldn't have had access to those weapons. Also the extent of those weapons being automatic, I don't know the stats, but their existence in the UK from people I know in the police is that they are almost exclusively used criminal on criminal and even then rarely, so they defiantly would not get access to those kind of weapons.
Not care, but the government hear in the US wont. hunting is too big of a sport and states like PA, OH, WV, etc would never pass it because its too integral to their identity (not to mention any hunting fees and taxes I think go to the state).
EDIT:
Trezu said:
I have a question
Why do people wanna keep there guns? because its eaiser to ward intruders away? Makes you feel safer? People may perceive your genitals to be bigger?
Actually, batman does and has used a gun in issues of his comic.
<spoiler=As seen here>http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/batman-2.jpg
<spoiler=And here>http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/assets_c/2012/07/batman-5-thumb-465x220-189009.jpg
you can´t expect him to go toe/to/toe with goddamn vampires, (the first, just looking at that page) Second page, he doesn't use the gun to shoot at bad guys, just to warn the authorities. So is he really using it?
I think all guns are bad options, but that's just me.
he's the batman he should be able to go toe to toe with any god damn one he sees, thats why he's the batman.
And it was never said you had to use the gun to kill someone, just know how to use it. he seems pretty comfortable with it. really you could got tit for tat and saw the batgun is a gone and batman does use that.
I am fairly certain the police are required to "protect" you, it is essentially half of their job and that's not up for discussion, its a defined term.
Ever heard of Warren v. District of Columbia. I'm going to assume not. Which is fine. But if you read that opinion, you'll realize that it's been long held that cops have no obligation to protect individuals. None. Nada. Zilch. Zip.
You're right about it not being up for discussion though. But only because it's the exact opposite of what you thought.
I said the definition of police is not up for discussion. You don't have police then, you have guys with guns, who will help out if they can an try solve crimes. I have just given you a dictionary definition of what police means, how can you misconstrued that?
"protect members of the public and their property" http://www.prospects.ac.uk/police_officer_job_description.htm job description. The modern police force was invented in London. By definition you do not have police if what you have said is true.
Stop arming private citizens and get the law changed so police are actually police and are legally required to ""protect members of the public and their property""
even if police WERE required to protect it, a good police response time is still 2 minutes. which is about 90 seconds too late.
Hell, where i worked for the government in Alabama, if we needed police we would have to wait at least 45 minutes before they would arrive from the next town over. In fact the local Air force base could get a jet fighter here quicker. At least im assuming there is an air force base, they keep using my workplace for practice bombing runs.
...yea...that doesnt exactly make me feel good when the military practices blowing me to smithereens. Thank god they dont use helicopters, otherwise i will take my chances in the middle of the woods wearing a deer suit in the middle of the hunting season than stay near where they are practicing with helicopters.
I'm not the type to jump on the 'America is Evil' bandwagon. I've always attributed things to disorganisation and stupidity before malice. America of today is what happens when you adopt an us-against-them mentality for most of your country's history. By the time your feud with Britain was getting cold, there were black people trying to be treated as equals. When that stopped being an issue, Europeans started behaving weirdly and Germany was your target. Then it was Russia. Now your government wants things to be the way they were, and the people, devoid of any actual target, are targeting each other and the people in charge.
Britain isn't going to conquer America. China is not jealous of your freedom. Russia doesn't want to destroy you all. It's time to lay down the weaponry. Time to stop competing against everything and take life a little slower.
But see, this is where it gets even weirder. Words like 'socialist' get thrown around like insults, and people loudly declare "I'm not paying for white trash to get medication for their alcoholism."
British government is notorious for one department doing one thing, and another not getting the memo and doing something totally contradictory, leading other nations to believe that the United Kingdom was all about duplicity and deceit.
Americans are raised on pride, patriotism and power...and now I guess we're seeing the flipside of that. "Take away my gun and you take away my freedom."
Is this really about the Constitution? Laws change over time. You can't keep resorting to an old document any more than we English can cite the Magna Carta as justification for the preservation of old laws.
Think less on the concept of a gun as 'freedom'. I'm pretty free. I've never owned a gun. I'd LIKE to own a gun - those Python revolvers are elegant and stylish and I would love to have a couple of them above my mantle. However, I would rather use a couple of replicas if it means people don't accidentally get shot. No amount of laws you make will prevent the acquisition of illegal guns - but the most common news stories aren't about mugging or murder. They're all accidental. Policeman shoots bystander. Wife shoots husband. Kid shoots self. Accidents.
Beware of the wall of text; I've got a lot to say about this, but I'll include a TL;DR version at the end for your convenience.
Agreed on the first part, and that's going to have to change. Unfortunately that was just how history worked out for us, as you pointed out. There's nothing that unites this country like a common enemy outside of our borders, but we're also an extremely diverse country. Unlike many other nations we don't have to look outside our borders to find someone significantly different from us, and while that can be an extremely good thing it can also present problems, as it does around the world. Even among straight, white, affluent Christian males we get some extreme differences in political stances which only become more divisive as more and more polarizing topics are brought up and people are forced to take sides instead of working on the actual problems.
Something that a lot of people seem to be missing is that Socialism is rarely thrown around as an insult among the people of the country. Most of us, the people I have any sort of interaction with anyway, know what it really means and don't see it as an insult. I've never legitimately seen someone call someone a Socialist as an actual insult outside of political maneuvering. Socialist Healthcare systems and Obamacare, although separate from this topic in general, present their own issues. Since it's a separate topic I'll spoiler this next part, although it's relevant to the conversation we're having.
America is currently one of the best nations in the world to get healthcare in if you're seriously ill. The vast majority of the time you'll get the treatment you need without having to worry about paying until afterwards. You won't be turned away because of a lack of healthcare, you won't be told you won't be treated because you can't pay. It's the small things that make the current healthcare system faulty, but if we look at the Canadian example of Socialized healthcare you can see where it can go very wrong at times. We hear stories of how people have to wait for months to get any sort of tests done when they have cancer, and by that time they've already gone beyond the point that it can be treated. It doesn't happen all the time, but it seems to us to happen more often than it does here. Couple that with wait times for basic checkups and stories of notoriously sub-par doctors and it's understandable that it can be a bit difficult to part with what we have.
Obamacare, on the other hand, doesn't really fix anything that needs fixing and tends to increase the cost of supplying healthcare to employees while making it mandatory for those who can't afford it in the first place. One of the few good things that comes from it is that a child can stay on their parent's healthcare plan until they're 26, which is only really necessary because the economy is so broken at the moment that it's extremely difficult for anyone without the best of connections to find a decent job. The problem with it is that by increasing the cost to hire and keep employees it makes it even more difficult to find a job. The economy is slowly improving, and companies are starting to hire again, but that's more a matter of the economy doing what the economy does than any influence the government has. Obamacare has only made that process slower.
Back closer to topic, taking away our guns is very much about taking away our freedoms. In time there might be a point where we don't care about our guns anymore, but as you've already stated we have a very different history from the rest of the world. We fought for and won our independence with our guns, we expanded from the Atlantic to the Pacific with our guns. There are times when our guns have prevented other nations from actively invading the United States, and times when our guns have defended us against our own people. Over the two hundred and thirty seven years this nation has been around the gun has evolved to represent our freedoms as much as anything else we own. Through that, it's come to represent our individuality and the ability of one man to stand up against whatever may come against him. It's a culture thing that's been a part of the nation since the beginning, and that's difficult to change in any nation. Japan ended up changing much of their culture only after it was annihilated and rebuilt after WWII. Other nations have only undergone drastic cultural changes after major wars; Germany after WWI and WWII, France after the French Revolution, and so on. Other things have taken time to change, and often done so extraordinarily slowly. Britain's Royal Family may be more figureheads than anything at this point, but they still exert enormous influence over the population, don't they? And many of you still drink tea quite a bit, do you not? While guns are quite a bit different from famous people and tea, they're as much a part of our culture as those are a part of yours.
That's where our Constitution comes in. For those that don't know, the first part of it was written to set up the checks and balances of the government, to keep the elected officials in line and to make sure no group to gain too much power over another and that they were all held in check by the voting power of the people. However, after it was written the writers realized that they hadn't dictated anything about how the government could treat the people of the nation. To fix that they wrote up the Bill of Rights, which is where the Amendments come in to play. The first ten Amendments are as important to our culture as guns themselves, since they represent our rights regarding how the government can treat us. A big part of taking away one of them is that it would then show that others could be taken away. If you go through and read them, it's pretty easy to see that the original text of the Constitution, as well as the Bill of Rights and the majority of the other amendments, aren't detailed enough to be more than guidelines, and are really more a set of ideals that are intended to guide the government and people of the nation. They represent basic human rights that won't - or at least shouldn't - change over any period of time.
The Second Amendment may be considered to be an exception to that by some, but you have to remember that the people who wrote the Constitution recently got out of a war for the freedom from what they perceived as a tyrannical government who was oppressing them. Part of the purpose of the Constitution was to make sure that couldn't happen again, at least not easily, and that's the point of the Second Amendment. Now, before we start saying that that sort of thing couldn't happen again, the fact of the matter is that it could. The history of the past hundred years should be enough to show that tyrannical governments can crop up in some unexpected places. The Communist Revolution in Russia, and then in China, was meant to free the people from a Monarchy, and it ended up putting them under the rule of a Dictatorship. Hitler's rise to power took place in a Republic. We'll see what the end result of the Arab Spring is, but I'm willing to bet that at least one of those revolutions ends up with another dictator in power, albeit under a different name. In my last post I said that the only people running for office here in the United States are those who are in it for personal gain. One possible result of that is an attempt at turning the nation into something closer to a dictatorship than it is. Is it likely that it will happen? No, not really. But it's always a possibility, especially if the economy takes another downturn or we hit other rough times. Keeping our options open is something that needs to be considered.
Are the accidents worth it? Well, technically the amount of accidental deaths due to firearms is significantly less than the number of purposeful uses of guns - 606 people in 2010 according to the CDC, which by the way is by far the minority of gun deaths in the United States. Most of the accidental deaths - you could consider it to be all of those deaths if you wanted, but we'll stick with most for the moment - are caused by people being stupid. Kids shooting themselves should never happen, and can be prevented by locking your weapon up in a safe, keeping it unloaded and separated from the ammo, or only having it loaded and in a safe place when you're around to keep an eye on it (as in keep it locked in a nightstand when you're sleeping). Basic firearm safety here. Even then, the numbers of all firearm deaths in the United States is significantly less than the number of deaths caused by car accidents. In 2010 more people died from accidentally falling than did from accidentally shooting themselves. More people also died from accidentally poisoning themselves than either of the other two. I'm not saying that limiting people dying is a bad thing, but I'm not in favor of restricting the freedoms of millions of people because of a few idiots, and I'm even less inclined to do so because some insane murderers decide to kill people with them.
TL;DR: Our history is different from others, yes, and our outlook on many things needs to change, but guns isn't really one of them. The Constitution and all parts of it are still relevant today because they're simple enough to be taken as ideals that can be interpreted and aren't solid laws. I've never heard anyone use "Socialist" as an actual insult outside of political maneuvering, and we've already established the United States politicians are goddamned idiots, and there were only 606 accidental deaths from firearms in the United States in 2010, compared to about 20,000 suicides and 10,000 homicides. While you have a point on a lot of things, guns are a part of the culture of the United States and have been since the founding of our country. They represent more than just our ability to shoot things, and are important to us, much like the Royal Family and Tea are to you. Culture may change in time, but it's going to take either time or a country-wide tragic event for it to do so. I, for one, am not in favor of restricting the freedoms of millions based on the actions of a few people.
I said the definition of police is not up for discussion. You don't have police then, you have guys with guns, who will help out if they can an try solve crimes. I have just given you a dictionary definition of what police means, how can you misconstrued that?
"an organized civil force for maintaining order, preventing and detecting crime, and enforcing the laws."
Don't see anything there about protecting individual citizens.
Stop arming private citizens and get the law changed so police are actually police and are legally required to ""protect members of the public and their property""
Both would require constitutional amendments that simply aren't going to happen. One to remove the right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the other to overturn this longstanding legal precedent.
I'm not delusional enough to think strong gun control in america is likely to happen in my life time, still does not make it right imho .
So you would not consider preventing any act that would constitute a crime against an individual committed by another individual as protecting you?
Honestly that the police are not legally required to "protect members of the public and their property" in the US and it sounds so hard to change the law that governs it there, suddenly makes me allot more appreciative where I have grown up. Not having a go or trying to be condescending but does genuinely make me sad that other countries do have the means to do so, but the same level of protection is not afforded to people that I enjoy here in the UK.
I would give up my hypothetical gun on the basis that I was reimbursed for any and all costs I can prove that I made for that gun. If I can prove I bought the gun and anything else for the gun (sliding stocks and whatnot) then I should be refunded accordingly (ammo probably shouldn't count since it's diminishable anyway.)
Well I don't own any guns, but if I did I'd probably attempt to hide them, stage a break in and pretend they were stolen (assuming they were registered in the first place).
Then, assuming the law stayed in place for a while, I'd imagine there would be a decent black marker for guns, so I'd sell all/most.
You mean your government passes a law. My government already has and I don't give a shit that I can't own one. When America grows up past the "ooh, cool: guns" you'll stand a chance at gun control. Until then you'll have to teeter on the edge of scrapping the first amendment to save the second.
I don't own guns but am in the running for this year's crop of Police Academy recruits.
I've shot, but I've always seen them as just a tool and always had things higher on my list of priorities than firearms.
Basically, if all goes well, I'll have mine government sanctioned. If it doesn't, not particularly interested in owning them for reasons that don't involve $45 an hour and a government pension.
even if police WERE required to protect it, a good police response time is still 2 minutes. which is about 90 seconds too late.
Hell, where i worked for the government in Alabama, if we needed police we would have to wait at least 45 minutes before they would arrive from the next town over. In fact the local Air force base could get a jet fighter here quicker. At least im assuming there is an air force base, they keep using my workplace for practice bombing runs.
But on response time 2mins is only too late when any criminal with half a mind can rob a private residence when they are not at home and get access to firearms.
I'm not going to pretend that your situation is ideal.
But in all honesty if I decided to go live in the highlands of Scotland miles away from anywhere, would I demand I be allowed to arm myself with firearms because I have chosen to live miles away from anywhere? nope my choice, an there are reasonable limits. Allowing the entire non-criminal record citizenry of a country with anything up to full blown assault weapons, with in most cases no yearly license review or strong legal checks or any required training is just madness to me.
Police can not stop call crime, but neither can guns, are people armed with guns not also victims of crime? and it creates a whole host of other issues and knock on crimes.
This actually already happened here in Australia. We had one of those massacres go down in a place called Port Arthur, not far from where I live. About 35 people dead if memory serves. Within a couple of week they passed a law banning private ownership of automatic and semi-automatic weapons and tightened controls. There were large scale buy-back schemes and voluntary hand-ins.
Gun crime went way down and we haven't had another massacre since.
Precisely this. In Australia there would be some level of anger, but it'd happen and people would move on. Australians by and large aren't addicted to gun ownership and gun violence. It's countries like America that desperately need to have fewer guns floating around (none at all, for preference) because the culture is too trigger-happy, as tragically appropriate as that phrase is.
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
