ARmy Rumour SErvice

An interesting article for sure mate. I can see both sides of the argument and the saying "an armed society is a polite society" sometimes rings true. But, from a personal standpoint, i'm pretty much on the fence with this.

I can see the good but can't help but think of some of the tit's that would rush out and arm themselves and probably shoot their pissed up relatives when they come home from the pub at night, or some overzealous loony shooting some bloke he suspected was breaking into a car, though my biggest fear is pissed up blokes on a saturday night but armed with pistols instead of kebab compasses.

He makes a convincing argument, but I can't help but feel that the anti-gun lobby could come up with just as many cases where an armed passerby was not able to stop the gunman, or even made the situation worse- his evidence seems somewhat cherry-picked.

Originally Posted by The_Seagull

I can see the good but can't help but think of some of the tit's that would rush out and arm themselves and probably shoot their pissed up relatives when they come home from the pub at night, or some overzealous loony shooting some bloke he suspected was breaking into a car, though my biggest fear is pissed up blokes on a saturday night but armed with pistols instead of kebab compasses.

So you can be trusted but you cannot trust others with weapons? Is that what you're saying? There will always be loonies, guns or no guns.

In his autobiography Donald Rumsfeld quotes something along the lines of "a problem that has no solution is not a problem, but a fact to be dealt with" (excellent book by the way). Such, it appears to me, is the nature of firearms and the USA. A couple of points worth remembering are that firearms existed before the establishment of the country and Westwards pioneering - the genie was well and truly out of the bottle and will not be put back in. Also, they gained their independence through the barrel of a gun and that lies at the heart of the American psyche. Further, the reality of the vastness of the country means that, for many, local law and order agencies don't really exist; and I happen to quite like their attitude. towards defence of property. That said, I see absolutely no reason for an average Joe to possess an automatic assault weapon. When all is said and done I don't see the Second Amendment changing anytime soon.

Originally Posted by Alamo

That said, I see absolutely no reason for an average Joe to possess an automatic assault weapon. When all is said and done I don't see the Second Amendment changing anytime soon.

It ought to be noted that despite all the hoo-ha about 'assault rifles' and 'automatic weapons', the gats involved in incidents like Columbine, Batman etc are invariably just a semi-auto rifle with black plastic furniture. They're not 'automatic' or 'assault rifles' (having no selective fire option), they just look like them.

Personally, if I wanted to brass-up a cinema I'd go for a couple of semi-auto shotguns with big tube mags and SG cartridges.

Originally Posted by Pigshyt_Freeman

Personally, if I wanted to brass-up a cinema I'd go for a couple of semi-auto shotguns with big tube mags and SG cartridges.

An 'interesting' POV offered to me this morning was that it was a good job he used guns, imagine what he could have done if he'd used some of the IEDs he had in his apartment.

Eh, if there were no guns, no armed citizenry, then there would be none of these shootings.

This is a terrible argument.

I understand where Seagull is coming from. Trouble is, I also support the general principle that anyone without a criminal record should be able to purchase, and keep at home, a weapon for the specific purpose of self-defence. Carry permits should also be available on the basis of attending and passing a "CCW course" of some kind. The trouble with Seagull's POV (and no disrespect to him, as he has to face the possibility on pretty much a daily basis) is that I don't think it is a valid moral argument that "I can be trusted, but I don't think you can be trusted, so I want a Gat, but you can't have one".

The biggest pro-gun issue that all the anti-gun crowd miss, is that you don't need everyone to be armed. Just the possibility of a potential victim being armed will reduce street crime. Burglary is almost unheard of in states where gun ownership is very high.

There will be tragedies, but the statistics are very unsound in the USA in this regard. A copper I have total respect for in New Hampshire, who is probably one of the finest trainers in the use of weapons "on the street", once carried out a poll of the shootings in a bad inner-city area. It wasn't very scientific, but the results were interesting. Instead of calling all deaths by firearm to be a bad thing, he asked the local police to make a record on a piece of paper. Each reported death by knife or gun was listed in one of two columns; "tragedies" and "good riddance". The former had three entries after three months, the latter nearly a hundred. It was the bad guys thinning each other out.

You might hesitate before drawing the conclusion that on that statistical basis, we should arm the bad guys more; but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that an armed society tends, simply by the law of averages/Darwinism, to dispose of the dross far more than good people.