bullzeye wrote:Come on man. You've got 10,000 posts on here, surely you can see there is a problem in the US. You can't be blind to what is happening.
The issue in America is they have so many guns in circulation - no registration, no licenses - basically no record with a lot of these firearms. Any laws they enact won't have a strong impact for the simple reason that they are swimming in guns and basically any person can purchase a gun privately with no background check/ cooling off period/ no license or registration required. No safety training required either.
I've lived in the US, some areas feel fine. But you do get the feeling in certain cities/ towns/ neighbourhoods you shouldn't be walking around/ anything could randomly happen. Even walking through a big shopping centre with people everywhere - in the back of your mind you know something crazy could happen based on the simple fact that gun violence is more probable there.
You simply don't get this feeling in Australia. You know we used to have mass shootings in Australia pre 1996. Since then, these have dropped significantly. I think in Australia now - most of the gun homicides is gang on gang. Not random shootings of people in the public.
Yes, Chicago has a high number of gun homicides but look at the whole of the US - every state has many times more than Australia as a whole:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/301 ... rearms-us/Even US states with less than a million people have more gun homicides than the whole of Australia.
These are the statistics, plain and simple.
usguns.jpg
I have said many times that there is most certainly a problem, but it's not the firearms, it's the people. They are killing each other at a huge rate, and will continue to do so even if they somehow managed to remove every single firearm from the country. Attacking the vast majority of Americans that have nothing to do with violent crime, despite owning millions of firearms will not fix the violence problem. If somebody is so intent on inflicting extreme violence against their community, taking lawful access to firearms away from them won't stop them.
Stop looking at it as if firearm violence is somehow different from any other violence, it's _all_ violence with the same root causes. When somebody murders with a car or truck we don't blame everybody that owns a vehicle, we blame the driver. When they use petrol we don't blame everybody that owns petrol, we blame the person. When a murder is prevented by a person with a firearm, we don't praise the firearm, we praise the person. But when somebody kills with a firearm...we blame everybody else that owns a firearm, millions of law-abiding people right across the country...and you believe that makes sense?
Yes, Americans can buy firearms illegally, just as Australians can here. We also have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of semi-auto rifles and shotguns here that simply disappeared in 1996. We know they were imported, we know they were sold into the population. And we know they were never handed in. Ruger 10/22's, Stirling Model 20's, Mini-14's, M1 Carbines, AK's, SKS's, AG42's, AR's, etc. But, we don't see them turning up in crimes, and they're not being used to commit mass murders. So clearly they're not an issue to public safety. Access to criminals illegally getting firearms can never be addressed through piling more laws on that will also be ignored. It certainly will not be addressed by lumping 99.9% of the law-abiding population in and labelling them all as mass murderers and putting restrictions on their choices of lifestyle when they have committed no crimes, and are a threat to nobody's safety. Countries that don't have the same level of violent crime have different societal values, they simply don't want to commit these atrocities against their communities, that's why they don't occur - it's not because they can't lawfully buy firearms. But treating the entire public as criminals, and placing more and more restrictions on their lawful activities, will, and does turn peaceful societies into the very societies that do want to strike back against their oppressors.
Stop deflecting violent crimes like these into your anti-gun arguments as it will never get us anywhere, as is proven every time it happens. The argument simply isn't logical so it can't possibly go anywhere. It simply dies out until the next atrocity occurs, then people like yourself will moan the same argument about guns being the cause until it again devolves into nothing - again.
As firearm owners we are the best placed to fix this. The anti-gun people are too frightened of firearms simply because they don't understand them and are happy to be told that they're bad and evil. We use them every day, we know there is no evil in them, or in we that use them. We can look at the problem logically without that mental block.
I have long believed that most anti-gun people are this way because of failings in their own character. They don't trust themselves to safely own a firearm due to their own failings and simply assume we are all just as useless as they are, they assume none of us have the self-control and discipline required to own firearms. We have owned firearms safely for many decades, and the vast majority of us never injure or kill anybody with them, not even accidently. These people certainly are not fit to own firearms, and nobody is forcing them to do so. But they have no right to insult the rest of us that are far more sensible than they are by assuming we're just like them.
These antigun morons are unsafe with most things, not just firearms. Tim Winton as a child used to sit in his bedroom window with his father's rifle and take sight on people in the street, so he assumes _you_ did the same things. I can't recall the name of the politician (I think) that found a pistol stashed in the toilet of his home, brought it out to the kitchen, pointed it at his brother and pulled the trigger. This guy believes _you_ would do the same thing given access to firearms simply because of his own horrendous failings in common sense and respect for other people. These people are absolutely correct that _they_ should never have access to firearms, but they do not have the right to assume you and I are messed up like they are.