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Forums - Politics Discussion - Another Shooting, Another Gun Free Zone

the_dengle on 17 July 2015
SpokenTruth said:

As much as we'd all like it, a gun free zone the size of the whole country will not magically make all the guns disappear.  It's simply way too late for total gun bans to have any positive effect.  Guns bans must be initiated before gun ownership volume and black markets form.  Otherwise they impact law biding citizens far more than criminals who don't give a damn about laws to begin with.

My post was at least half joking. But I expect a lot of volatile responses to it. Looking forward to ignoring them. :P



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RadiantDanceMachine on 18 July 2015
DialgaMarine said:
RadiantDanceMachine said:
Having guns doesn't prevent drive-by shootings. For fuck's sake, you can't seriously be presenting such a flawed propaganda piece and expect not to be ridiculed for it. Either you're incompetent and fail to recognize what is trivially illogical, or you're baiting people such as myself into a political rant.

Either way, I'm outta here.

 What's your solution then? Hate to break the news to you, but here in reality, the only thing that can prevent a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Why do you think that the most dangerous places in the country are the ones that happen to also have the strictest gun laws, while the safest are the ones with the most leniant? I'm not saying we all go willy nilly wild west with guns, but creating laws that make it more difficult for people to own firearms, simply removes the guns from law abiding citizens. Words on a paper aren't going to stop criminals from being criminals.

4 Marines are going to be put in the ground in a few days, all because the liberals in this country are so damn afraid of servicemembers (men and women who are specifically trained to use them) from carrying firearms in places where they have no other form of security and are completely exposed. 

There are no solutions beyond removing guns from basically everyone so the opportunity for criminals to obtain them reduces to near zero. That scenario is supremely unrealistic. People enjoy guns as much as they enjoy religion.

We live in a world where there is ample opportunity to slay people. Freedom comes at a price, and this is it. Makes no difference whether or not there were armed guards there, considering the fact that it was a drive-by. And that was my only point.

Blaming a "gun free" zone for this is flawed, but that does not mean I support gun free zones...unless it's the entire public space. 



outlawauron on 18 July 2015
Barozi said:
DialgaMarine said:
MikeRox said:


Reaction times prevent the good guy with the gun from preventing the bad guy with the gun before they are dead. You'd realistically need 2 good guys or someone else to fall first for the pro gun argument to work.

 It's called mutually assured destruction. The majority of criminals aren't suicidal. They simply want to commit their crime, gain what they can, and disappear. Knowing that at any moment someone else could pull a gun on them dampers their will to commit the crime in the first place. It's why places with the least restcitive gun laws end up having the least gun related crimes. If people are so set banning guns because people can use them to kill other people, then you might as well ban the other million and one items people can use to kill other people. 

you mean like the death sentence already does ? lol

Death sentence is very rarely given out to gun weilding or violent criminals. It takes a 1st degree murder conviction to get that.



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nuckles87 on 18 July 2015

I advocate for strict gun control, but every time I read "we should just ban guns" I cringe.

It's never that simple. Aside from the hundreds of millions of weapons already in circulation, and the absolute cultural impossibility of removing and destroying them all, the safest countries on the planet DON'T "ban all guns". They strictly regulate them. The places with the highest murder rates are typically the places with zero tolerance gun policies (and they are also typically poorer and can typically be classified as third world). The countries in Europe that people refer to, as well as places like Australia, have guns alongside strong, effective gun control laws.

Gun control, not gun banning, is what the US needs. And it needs to be nation-wide, not state by state. Only something like this would be effective.



Barozi on 18 July 2015
sc94597 said:
MikeRox said:


You'll never completely eradicate it without completely eradicating guns... however, the black market is a much more difficult way to obtain them than general sale. Hence the US has a much bigger problem than many other places.

The issue is that the people who do these crimes are the ones with access to the black market. The other portion would be happy using some other effective means like a bomb or a fire. I wonder how many people would've gotten shot by Breivik if at least five percent of the hundred or so on that island had a weapon. I think while gun bans help decrease the number of mass shootings they also increase the  number of deaths per incident.

It was a youth summer camp organised by a political party on an island. How could you expect ANYONE to carry a gun there?



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Barozi on 18 July 2015
outlawauron said:
Barozi said:
DialgaMarine said:

 It's called mutually assured destruction. The majority of criminals aren't suicidal. They simply want to commit their crime, gain what they can, and disappear. Knowing that at any moment someone else could pull a gun on them dampers their will to commit the crime in the first place. It's why places with the least restcitive gun laws end up having the least gun related crimes. If people are so set banning guns because people can use them to kill other people, then you might as well ban the other million and one items people can use to kill other people. 

you mean like the death sentence already does ? lol

Death sentence is very rarely given out to gun weilding or violent criminals. It takes a 1st degree murder conviction to get that.

well neither are life sentences working as a detterence for committing crimes.



MikeRox on 18 July 2015
sc94597 said:
Conina said:
sc94597 said:
Scoobes said:

No, we're just next to Russia and have the issues in Ukraine. Then there's Libya and the short hop across the Mediterranean sea to Italy, Greece and Turkey. Oh, let's not forget the border with Iraq and Syria, those two countries where we're fighting ISIS.

But no, we've got nothing on the US/Mexican border...

Most of Western Europe is not next to Russia. If you want to make that comparison, I might as well throw in all of Central and South America. The distances between England and Russia is something like 3,000 miles. Meanwhile the distance from Pennsylvania and Columbia is 2,500 miles.

And most of the USA is not next to Mexico by your logic. London - Moskow is 1.550 miles, Berlin - Moskow is 1.000 miles

The question that next needs to be made, is - how many national borders must you cross between Moskow and London, and how many between  Mexico and the U.S? Using this logic, then we should also include much of South and Central America besides Mexico.


Um, cross into the Ukraine and you're in the EU. Pretty much free movement through to France so your next check would be the UK border. However for the rest of Western Europe pretty much, that is the only border where passport checks are required.

Have you not seen the scenes in Calais? They are African migrants that have got through the entirity of Europe to come live in the UK as illegal immigrants.

When I said in an earlier post about the US  geography cushioning it from a lot of the spillback of it's actions, I was referring to the Middle East, not the Cartel drug trade. It's pretty much a fact that there will be a lot more Western Blowback for the events in Syria/Iraq etc in Europe than there will be in the US. Gun control will have no impact on such attacks. If people are intent on killing, no amount of legal framework will stop this. However reducing access to guns will naturally have the result of there being less availability in order for people to be able to carry out such attacks.

The shootings in Europe have been of a very different type to most in the US. They are also a lot more frequent in the US. I don't really see why this is so hard to see.

I'm not saying ban guns, I'm saying if you did restrict the availability of guns you'd find it would reduce the number of incidents involving them. Historical evidence backs this up. It is a choice the US needs to make however continuing with the current gun framework will inevitibly mean that further tragedies will happen. If that is a price worth paying for the "freedom" that's for the US and the US alone to decide.

In the UK handguns are outright banned due to how easy they are to conceal. However, you can buy rifles and shot guns legally, there is a gun shop in my local town. It's just that you are heavily vetted and undergo a lot of security checks before you are granted a permit for it. You also have to demonstrate you are able to keep the gun secured safely so that nobody else would be easily able to obtain it. Once you have your license and permit for the weapon, you are free to use it how you please on private land. There are a few shooting clubs and ranges. I've been to one and it was a lot of fun.



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sc94597 on 18 July 2015
Barozi said:
sc94597 said:
MikeRox said:


You'll never completely eradicate it without completely eradicating guns... however, the black market is a much more difficult way to obtain them than general sale. Hence the US has a much bigger problem than many other places.

The issue is that the people who do these crimes are the ones with access to the black market. The other portion would be happy using some other effective means like a bomb or a fire. I wonder how many people would've gotten shot by Breivik if at least five percent of the hundred or so on that island had a weapon. I think while gun bans help decrease the number of mass shootings they also increase the  number of deaths per incident.

It was a youth summer camp organised by a political party on an island. How could you expect ANYONE to carry a gun there?

There were no adults at said camp? Are not political desitinations like these ripe for attacks?



sc94597 on 18 July 2015
Scoobes said:
sc94597 said:
Scoobes said:
sc94597 said:

Most of Western Europe is not next to Russia. If you want to make that comparison, I might as well through in all of Central and South America. The distances between England and Russia is something like 3,000 miles. Meanwhile the distance from Pennsylvania and Columbia is 2,500 miles. Alaska is closer to much of Russia. ;) 

Anyway, I would argue that drug cartels are more responsible for criminal activity in the U.S than the Ukrainian civil war in most of Europe outside of Ukraine.

Using that logic I could easily say that New York isn't exactly next to Mexico either, but has its fair share of crime. Or that the bible belt shouldn't really count as part of the US stats as the culture is so different to the coastal states.

Europe is Europe, and the US is the US. Throughout history, and today geographically, it is far more vulnerable to violence from neighbouring states. Where do you think a large portion of terrorists come from? 

The border with Mexico doesn't really compare considering this is the same country where many go for Spring Break (don't see that happening in Ukraine, Libya, Iraq or Syria at the present time).

So now we come full circle to the topic at hand, because you're right, in most of Europe criminal activity isn't anywhere near as bad the gun crime/homicides you get via the Cartels even with the more dangerous neighbouring countries as we haven't had the huge gun culture the US has had over the years. Less guns coming in, less going out.

The effects of drug prohibition and cartels travel all the way to New York, however. That's a empirical dataset. Can the same be true with regards to Ukraine's civil war and London?

"From neighboring states" is the key word here. A lot of crime isn't commited by de jure states though, but by smaller organizations.

The question is how does the border affect crime rates. It isn't about where one will vacation to. The crime rates of the U.S are more influenced by Mexico's situation, than European countries with regards to Librya, Iraq, or Syria.

It has very little do do with "gun culture" and much more to do with power differences between those involved in the drug trade. Cartels are worst in "gun controlled" Mexico than they are in the U.S, for example.

Hmmm.. sounds like we're arguing two different points.

For the cartels, I would argue they have more to do with the "war on drugs" and general drug policy than actual gun control. The cartels have grown ridiculously powerful over the years due to the failure of sucessive Mexican and US governments to get a handle on the issue.

I don't get your point on "gun controlled" Mexico however. The laws might be stricter than the US but they have the right to own firearms for protection in private residences, and with reason, can carry guns outside. Laws in Europe are generally far stricter. In both Mexico and the US, there is very little gun control compared to most countries in Europe.

The gun crime is the main argument being used for gun control. You can't separate the crime part from "gun crime." What causes people to kill others, is the question being asked. The answer is disputes over drugs and no common legal procedure to settle these disputes. Then you have gangs and cartels killing one another. If said issues weren't existent, then the gun murder rate in the U.S would drop significantly, possibly putting the U.S in line with European countries in terms of homicide rates (from 5 out 100,000 to 2 out of 100,000.)



sc94597 on 18 July 2015
Conina said:
sc94597 said:

That wasn't my point. Borders are much more than their controls. They represent geo-political distinctions. People within borders interact more with others within their borders than outside due to aligned political and cultural similarities (albeit there are exceptions when the politics don't coincide with culture.) I'm sure there is much more interaction between Los Angeles and New York City than Kiev and London.

I'm sure there is much more interaction between Hanover and Venice or between Amsterdam and Warsaw than between Houston and Seattle. Do you really think there aren't political and cultural differences within the USA?

How are you sure of this? I listed much more explicit examples that don't require much empirical evidence to accept. For all we know Houston and Seattle can have quite a lot of business ties, and Hanoever and Venice, not.  And no, I am not pretending the U.S doesn't have any cultural or statual differences within it. But any two states in the U.S are going to have more similarities (as a function of distance) than any two European states. Population movement will be much greater, due to a common language and culture, and common law. I can't see how anybody could argue against this.