Ryotknife said:
1. you are going to have to back up your claim that you do ahve the same problems. Show me proof.
2.since we can not stop or even stem the flow of illegal goods, banning guns or heavily restricting them is pointless. All it will do is insure that the criminals will be armed with maximum force while the law abiding citizens will be completely defenseless. Hell Mexico is getting a wee bit pissed at us for this, especially when a government operation was botched and they essentially gave illegal guns to...undesirables...in Mexico in an effort to pinpoint where the illegal guns were flowing from. Then we lost track of our own weapons that we gave them...
3. because of population density and economy, this has a big impact on police response times
4. because of the culture of distrust towards law enforcement and economy, any attempt to vastly increase the police force will be met with stiff resistence both because of the cost and because some people will see it as a method to persecute minorities.
I also justify the availability of arms as it is the only thing proven to work around these problems inside the US. If you want to point out that as a general rule of thumb getting rid of or heavily restricting guns reduces crime in first world countries reduces crime, I would actually agree. UNFORTUNATELY, it does not work in the US. Look at the crime statistics for the cities with strict gun control, then look at the cities of dallas or Austin, well reknown for their lax gun laws.
I WISH we had a silver bullet for crime. I WISH that banning guns would work in the US. unfortunately, gun control does NOT in the US. The data shows the exact opposite.
If we could solve general poverity, especially among certain ethnic groups, if we could get better police response times, if we could stop illegal goods from flowing, if we could spread out our population in a more controlled manner, then maybe gun control would work.
unfortunately, most of those problems are simply beyond our reach without implementing a police state.
Why is it okay for you to tell us how things are in america, but we have to provide you with proof? I live here and I've lived in various locations throughout the country, there's very few reports that are going to tell you what its like on the street. You look up stats and try and disprove it if you don't believe me. I'm not an encyclopedia, why on earth am I going to trawl through stats when I live here and know what its like, why would I lie?
I can't agree with you that in a supposedly civilized 1st world country the only solution is to allow everyone to arm themselves and defend themselves "wild west" style. Some of the descriptions on here I think have been over hyped, but essentially come to "we live in mad max world, theres next to no police, if you don't have a gun you die, if you do have a gun, you maybe won't".
"only thing proven to work around these problems inside the US" the US has never even tried tried a different system so how is it proven?
"most of those problems are simply beyond our reach without implementing a police state." see my post about scaling down over 50 odd years, it could be done, we're not talking about a "ALL GUNS FROM TUESDAY ARE ILLEGAL, DEAL WITH IT BITCHES!!!" kind of address.
"poverty" I read stats the other day that said the poorest 5% of Americans are richer than 85% of all Indian's. Americans don't know what true poverty is.
".since we can not stop or even stem the flow of illegal goods, banning guns or heavily restricting them is pointless" I simply CANNOT understand this kind of attitude for justifying everyone being armed. I'm just repeating myself over and over to different people. Admittedly there needs to be a whole host of changes to numerous attitudes laws and policing techniques. But america is no different than any other country. If you look at the European Union as a whole there is every single issue america has. Borders almost impossible to fully monitor, wide ethnic differences, stark differences in wealth. Religious tensions, drug and gang problems, people trafficking. And on top of that we have 2000 years of history of killing each other in various wars, the last one being within living memory. But gun violence is kept low, by a different policing attitude and strong regulated gun control.
I think we will just have to disagree, because frankly anybody who thinks the widespread ownership of guns is the way forward rather than anything but an outdated stagnate view from a bygone age, is not going to be convinced by reason. An unfortuantly its probably going to take allot more innocent people and children to die before action is done. The reasons everyone gets so up on the US for their gun control is because they have the power and the means to end the cycle, at some point someone is going to have to accept that the average american gun owners attitude to weapons is unhealthy and many people do not give them the respect they deserve. Arming everyone to the teeth and making it so very easy for criminals and those who should not own weapons, can not be justified that the police from the sounds of it are unable to protect individuals, vote for change, petition your politicians, restructure etc, there will never ever been any moving forward under the current system.