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rab2591
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« Reply #625 on: February 15, 2018, 07:42:54 PM »

Even if all gun manufacturers in the country were shut down, aren't there already hundreds of millions of guns in the country? Couldn't more just be smuggled in?

I think Australia had a pretty successful gun turn-in program when they adopted gun-control practices. Someone else here could probably detail how that happened and what the statistics turned out to be. There have been some great debates on the owning of guns here on this forum.. School shootings shouldn’t happen, Vegas never should have happened. And I think there are ways to curb those types of events by both stricter gun control and better mental health programs in this country and across the world.

In an ideal world it would be great for guns to cease to exist. I will be on a search for a reliable tool (that is not a gun) that could protect my family and myself in case of break in. Until that time I’m happy leaving a firearm safely in my home for protection. A gang of people tried breaking into my childhood home decades ago. Had they succeeded in breaking in I can’t imagine how my father would have defended us without the use of a firearm. When it happens to you it’s really not an illusion of protection. Statistically I’m sure it is an illusion, but on that night had events turned darker I shudder to think what could have happened to our family if we didn’t have a gun in the house.
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« Reply #626 on: February 15, 2018, 07:53:03 PM »

When it happens to you it’s really not an illusion of protection. Statistically I’m sure it is an illusion, but on that night had events turned darker I shudder to think what could have happened to our family if we didn’t have a gun in the house.

Yes, statistically it's very much an illusion.

And I have no doubt that what you are saying is true. Just as when, say, there's an element of truth when the US convinces the population to support a war against a country because they claim that the country represents a "threat." But the US doesn't go to war because they want to quell a threat - there's an ulterior motive that they guard from the public and simply use the exterior threat to garner public support. And what ends up happening like say in the case of the Iraq invasion, is the perfectly predictable outcome wherein the so-called act of self-defense actually made the the threat of an outside attack greater. In my view, the same is true regarding the issue of guns: there is a small possibility that you might be attacked in your home but that's not why gun manufacturers want you to buy their guns and the fact that they have convinced so many people to buy their guns for that reason has actually led to an increase of the possibility that those people will be injured by gun violence.
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rab2591
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« Reply #627 on: February 15, 2018, 08:06:22 PM »

When it happens to you it’s really not an illusion of protection. Statistically I’m sure it is an illusion, but on that night had events turned darker I shudder to think what could have happened to our family if we didn’t have a gun in the house.

Yes, statistically it's very much an illusion.

And I have no doubt that what you are saying is true. Just as when, say, there's an element of truth when the US convinces the population to support a war against a country because they claim that the country represents a "threat." But the US doesn't go to war because they want to quell a threat - there's an ulterior motive that they guard from the public and simply use the exterior threat to garner public support. And what ends up happening like say in the case of the Iraq invasion, is the perfectly predictable outcome wherein the so-called act of self-defense actually made the the threat of an outside attack greater. In my view, the same is true regarding the issue of guns: there is a small possibility that you might be attacked in your home but that's not why gun manufacturers want you to buy their guns and the fact that they have convinced so many people to buy their guns for that reason has actually led to an increase of the possibility that those people will be injured by gun violence.

Very much agreed. Out of curiosity, is there any way you yourself protect your home and (possible) family?
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"ragegasm" - /rāj • ga-zəm/ : a logical mental response produced when your favorite band becomes remotely associated with the bro-country genre.

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« Reply #628 on: February 15, 2018, 08:13:08 PM »

When it happens to you it’s really not an illusion of protection. Statistically I’m sure it is an illusion, but on that night had events turned darker I shudder to think what could have happened to our family if we didn’t have a gun in the house.

Yes, statistically it's very much an illusion.

And I have no doubt that what you are saying is true. Just as when, say, there's an element of truth when the US convinces the population to support a war against a country because they claim that the country represents a "threat." But the US doesn't go to war because they want to quell a threat - there's an ulterior motive that they guard from the public and simply use the exterior threat to garner public support. And what ends up happening like say in the case of the Iraq invasion, is the perfectly predictable outcome wherein the so-called act of self-defense actually made the the threat of an outside attack greater. In my view, the same is true regarding the issue of guns: there is a small possibility that you might be attacked in your home but that's not why gun manufacturers want you to buy their guns and the fact that they have convinced so many people to buy their guns for that reason has actually led to an increase of the possibility that those people will be injured by gun violence.

Very much agreed. Out of curiosity, is there any way you yourself protect your home and (possible) family?

I have a family, yes. And I don't have anything like a weapon in the house. Again, I don't live in the United States so the situation is perhaps different. But save one person, I have never known a single person who kept a weapon in their home here. In the one counter example, it's a person who I met at a wedding last year, who perhaps not coincidentally espouses US-centric libertarian views, who said he keeps a baseball bat in his bedroom at night. The table looked at him as if he were insane. I have never known anybody to have ever been in a situation where they would have needed a weapon. That's not to say that something like house invasions never happen but they are a fairly rare occurrence - again, I've never known one to have happened.
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« Reply #629 on: February 15, 2018, 08:25:22 PM »

Chocolate Shake Man, what country do you live in?
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« Reply #630 on: February 15, 2018, 08:27:17 PM »

Canada
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« Reply #631 on: February 15, 2018, 08:38:41 PM »

For some reason I’ve always assumed you were from the US, honestly I don’t know why!

Man, home invasions seem to happen often in my area. As I said before, some friends of mine just last week dealt with that (many of their neighbors had the same issue). The small city I live near had a slew of them a few years ago, and a slew of sexual assaults, including a series of disappearances/murders. I had a friend mugged right in front of me. I’ve been in a near empty school on lockdown while a gunman running from the police was loose on the premise - thank god he didn’t shoot anyone there (forgot about that one in my post earlier). I envy you live somewhere where such a thing is pretty much unheard of!
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« Reply #632 on: February 15, 2018, 08:49:30 PM »

Man, I could use some of CSM's sanity in the USA! Wink
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« Reply #633 on: February 15, 2018, 09:37:19 PM »

Greetings from Australia!


Your obsession with guns is fucking stupid.
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« Reply #634 on: February 16, 2018, 02:19:58 AM »

Greetings from Australia!


Your obsession with guns is fucking stupid.

Greetings from Mainland Europe!

What exactly are you driving at, sir?

As for the gun ownership issue, the McVeighs of this world will always find a way but gun ownership restrictions would make it very difficult for the socially and mentally challenged to act out what are often spur-of-the-moment fantasies. My two eurocents.
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« Reply #635 on: February 16, 2018, 08:05:39 AM »

As for the gun ownership issue, the McVeighs of this world will always find a way but gun ownership restrictions would make it very difficult for the socially and mentally challenged to act out what are often spur-of-the-moment fantasies. My two eurocents.

Exactly. We can at least reduce some of the carnage.

XXXXX

On another topic, I woke up to a scurrying noise in my bedroom. Eek, a mouse must be about.

Before hearing about the shooting, I was watching a show called The Talk, mainly because Carnie Wilson was on and she is always very engaging. She talked about having a "rat problem" while living in Bel Air. This would have been after Marilyn and Brian broke up. They had cats who would dispatch the rats - Marilyn would cry about seeing another rat carcass. One time Wendy starting screaming upon seeing a rat, which then ran into the bathroom while Carnie was sitting on "the throne." The rat ran past her legs and jumped into a vent.
 Carnie said that rats (the animal kind!) are common in Bel Air. Seems strange considering all those expensive homes.
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« Reply #636 on: February 16, 2018, 08:20:18 AM »

2NOLA BB Fan: Speaking of pests, is roach big issue in the U.S. houses/ blocks of flats? F.ex. yours?
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« Reply #637 on: February 16, 2018, 08:53:58 AM »

Addressing a few of the points raised here and unfortunately complicating the issue in the USA:

 - Shutting down gun manufacturers would not eliminate the estimated 300+ million guns legally owned in the USA now (to say nothing of illegal ones).
 - The Australian buyback program, as I understand it, eliminated about 30% of the legally owned guns there; the others remain legally privately owned.
 - A buyback (or even more so, confiscation) would almost certainly result in tremendous violence, especially in areas where gun culture is prominent.

It seems to me most "solutions" raised are overly simplistic and unrealistic. The seeds of the US being in revolution seem to have left a strong root system that isn't so easy to tear up as making guns illegal or seeking their return. There are as many or more guns here than people, and unfortunately there is some small number of people who will literally go down in what they see as blazes of glory before they turn them over. Some of those people--maybe even many or most--would never commit a crime otherwise, but if challenged on this, they would. They mean it. And that's terrifying.

There is also an obvious cultural issue here, and I don't just mean gun ownership, or hunting, or self protection. Call it "mental health" if you want, obviously it's that on some level. People don't shoot people unless they are mentally ill, in my opinion. (Does a sane person decide to shoot someone?) So ... what makes Americans batshit crazy that they disproportionately shoot people? It isn't just the existence of guns. There is something wrong with us. There is something wrong with our minds. Our culture. How we raise children. Something. I don't know what it is.

To be clear, just as I don't think elimination of guns is realistic, also I don't believe in the escalation of gun ownership to solve the problem, the right-wing "good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns." While it could work on a single instance-by-instance level, it's also the small-scale equivalent of a nuclear arms race. That just means instead of 300+ million guns we end up with 400 million, 500 million. So there are more guns floating around to be stolen, illegally obtained, and used inappropriately. One disaster mitigated, maybe, but at what cost?

People need to stop wanting to kill people. In that sense, the right is correct when they say "guns don't kill people; people kill people." There is some degree of truth in that, even if it's (obviously, I think) not entirely true, not exclusively true, not true without context.

I have no idea how to actually solve the problem, in that I don't see anything being practically workable. It definitely doesn't help any that people who have opinions--I'm talking media blowhards, not people here--seem not to have thought them through or even consider actual give-and-take discussions and compromises, instead repeating tired talking points based mainly on villainizing political opposition.
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« Reply #638 on: February 16, 2018, 09:30:09 AM »

How did the "What did we all do today?" turn into a debate on gun control? 

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« Reply #639 on: February 16, 2018, 09:31:25 AM »

How did the "What did we all do today?" turn into a debate on gun control? 



Typing.
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« Reply #640 on: February 16, 2018, 09:33:19 AM »

(Hoping that came across as a joke, not a nasty swipe. Glad to shift the talk elsewhere.)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Decided to work from home, meaning I'm wasting time online with y'all (he said in a faux southern accent for no reason). Also was mean to the dogs, in their opinion, by not sharing the bagel I ate for breakfast. And about to go workout, which I hate doing more than anything other than dying from eventual complications that could have been avoided by exercise! (Plus it'll help me justify the happy hour I'll head out to in a few hours.)

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« Reply #641 on: February 16, 2018, 09:35:21 AM »

(Hoping that came across as a joke, not a nasty swipe. Glad to shift the talk elsewhere.)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Decided to work from home, meaning I'm wasting time online with y'all (he said in a faux southern accent for no reason). Also was mean to the dogs, in their opinion, by not sharing the bagel I ate for breakfast. And about to go workout, which I hate doing more than anything other than dying from eventual complications that could have been avoided by exercise! (Plus it'll help me justify the happy hour I'll head out to in a few hours.)



Nah, I've seen your sense on humor on these boards enough to know it wasn't a swipe. 
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« Reply #642 on: February 16, 2018, 09:37:04 AM »

You mean my SUPER HILARIOUS sense of humor.
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« Reply #643 on: February 16, 2018, 09:40:41 AM »

2NOLA BB Fan: Speaking of pests, is roach big issue in the U.S. houses/ blocks of flats? F.ex. yours?
Speaking from the other side of the country, I can say they're not a major issue as far as I know in this region. None of the buildings (dorms, apartments, or houses) I've ever lived in had an issue: I've never seen a roach. But my understanding is the denser cities have bigger problems with them, especially in poorly maintained properties like public housing or  buildings with absentee landlords.
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« Reply #644 on: February 16, 2018, 09:40:50 AM »

You mean my SUPER HILARIOUS sense of humor.

Yeah, that one. 
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« Reply #645 on: February 16, 2018, 09:42:06 AM »

(Hoping that came across as a joke, not a nasty swipe. Glad to shift the talk elsewhere.)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Decided to work from home, meaning I'm wasting time online with y'all (he said in a faux southern accent for no reason). Also was mean to the dogs, in their opinion, by not sharing the bagel I ate for breakfast. And about to go workout, which I hate doing more than anything other than dying from eventual complications that could have been avoided by exercise! (Plus it'll help me justify the happy hour I'll head out to in a few hours.)


Thoughts on the "new" cleveland Cavs? Wink
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« Reply #646 on: February 16, 2018, 09:42:54 AM »

You mean my SUPER HILARIOUS sense of humor.

Yeah, that one. 
See, now I'm a happy captain.  Grin
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« Reply #647 on: February 16, 2018, 09:43:30 AM »

(Hoping that came across as a joke, not a nasty swipe. Glad to shift the talk elsewhere.)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Decided to work from home, meaning I'm wasting time online with y'all (he said in a faux southern accent for no reason). Also was mean to the dogs, in their opinion, by not sharing the bagel I ate for breakfast. And about to go workout, which I hate doing more than anything other than dying from eventual complications that could have been avoided by exercise! (Plus it'll help me justify the happy hour I'll head out to in a few hours.)


Thoughts on the "new" cleveland Cavs? Wink

Wrong thread. Didn't I just redirect this one back on track? Even a happy captain can only do so much.
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« Reply #648 on: February 16, 2018, 09:59:27 AM »

2NOLA BB Fan: Speaking of pests, is roach big issue in the U.S. houses/ blocks of flats? F.ex. yours?

It's a big issue down where I live. They are huge!
People joke about them. There's a sign in one of the "hipper" parts of town; along with the watch out for ducks signs, someone put up a "cockroach crossroads" sign.

I can take mice, spiders, snakes, wild boars...but am reduced to being a blubbering baby at the sight of a flying cockroach, especially as they always fly towards me. Eww!
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« Reply #649 on: February 16, 2018, 02:03:53 PM »

Addressing a few of the points raised here and unfortunately complicating the issue in the USA:

 - Shutting down gun manufacturers would not eliminate the estimated 300+ million guns legally owned in the USA now (to say nothing of illegal ones).
 - The Australian buyback program, as I understand it, eliminated about 30% of the legally owned guns there; the others remain legally privately owned.
 - A buyback (or even more so, confiscation) would almost certainly result in tremendous violence, especially in areas where gun culture is prominent.

It seems to me most "solutions" raised are overly simplistic and unrealistic. The seeds of the US being in revolution seem to have left a strong root system that isn't so easy to tear up as making guns illegal or seeking their return. There are as many or more guns here than people, and unfortunately there is some small number of people who will literally go down in what they see as blazes of glory before they turn them over. Some of those people--maybe even many or most--would never commit a crime otherwise, but if challenged on this, they would. They mean it. And that's terrifying.

There is also an obvious cultural issue here, and I don't just mean gun ownership, or hunting, or self protection. Call it "mental health" if you want, obviously it's that on some level. People don't shoot people unless they are mentally ill, in my opinion. (Does a sane person decide to shoot someone?) So ... what makes Americans batshit crazy that they disproportionately shoot people? It isn't just the existence of guns. There is something wrong with us. There is something wrong with our minds. Our culture. How we raise children. Something. I don't know what it is.

To be clear, just as I don't think elimination of guns is realistic, also I don't believe in the escalation of gun ownership to solve the problem, the right-wing "good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns." While it could work on a single instance-by-instance level, it's also the small-scale equivalent of a nuclear arms race. That just means instead of 300+ million guns we end up with 400 million, 500 million. So there are more guns floating around to be stolen, illegally obtained, and used inappropriately. One disaster mitigated, maybe, but at what cost?

People need to stop wanting to kill people. In that sense, the right is correct when they say "guns don't kill people; people kill people." There is some degree of truth in that, even if it's (obviously, I think) not entirely true, not exclusively true, not true without context.

I have no idea how to actually solve the problem, in that I don't see anything being practically workable. It definitely doesn't help any that people who have opinions--I'm talking media blowhards, not people here--seem not to have thought them through or even consider actual give-and-take discussions and compromises, instead repeating tired talking points based mainly on villainizing political opposition.

I was being a bit purposefully dramatic when I suggested shutting down gun manufacturers but, yes, I do think that would have an enormous effect. I'm assuming ammunition would go with it and at that point you wouldn't have much use for your guns.

I do think that what you are saying about the revolutionary origins of the country holds weight. My friends from Haiti have the same attitude towards guns and Haiti also has a revolutionary past. Canada, on the other hand, doesn't.

Also, as much as Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine has been lambasted, I think his thesis is quite accurate: that the US constructs a model for its citizens, which privileges aggression over diplomacy. This is the mindset that is enacted on an almost ritual basis by the political system and it filters down into the mindset of the people. Every couple of years the people are relentlessly told through the media that there is an outside force that poses a threat to them and the only solution to this is to build up the biggest arsenal of weapons in the world and preemptively strike them. Well, that mentality I think does have an effect of the pysches of the public. Obviously that's not the only reason to reverse policies like that, but it's another good one.
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