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A statement that might be straight out of Animal Farm: 'All Americans are equal, but some are more equal than others'. There is no such thing as a 'true American', a 'true Briton' and so on. Those who say such things have far too narrow a view as to what constitutes nationality, citizenship and national identity.Quote:
Originally Posted by Roamy
And why is that, do you think? Might it have something to do with the underlying attitudes to firearms possession and ease of purchase?Quote:
Originally Posted by nigelred5
If everyone is dead set on holding up the wording and intention of the Bill of rights (which incidentally seems to borrow heavily from the pre-existing English bill of rights) then you should be limited to keeping and bearing arms that are equivalent to what was available at the time. Your forefathers could not have predicted the weaponry available a couple of hundred years later, nor, in the infancy of the union, predicted that what they wrote then would be expected to be followed to the letter long into the future without room for the world to have evolved in so many ways. Your rights should be limited to muskets and civil war era rifles, not what has been invented since as they were not the "arms" intended by your precious and outdated bills. Incidentally how many amendments to the constitution have there been now? 27 or so? So there is clearly a mechanism for improving on the original model in the face of modernity?
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And still no-one would care, so ingrained is the attitude that extra security is a price worth paying. I think it's a deeply pernicious process, personally.Quote:
Originally Posted by D-Type
So we should also ban kitchen knives, hunting knives, turkey trimmers, samurai swords?... It's not only guns that criminals use to commit crimes. I had a butcher knife held to my throat in my own home while I our home robbed at 15 years of age. I am alive because my father woke up, heard something downstairs and chased the criminals from the home with my 12 gauge that I had not yet put away in my gun cabinet after a day of duck hunting. The criminals were never cought but they definitely have #8 scars in their a$$. That will NEVER happen to me or my family again.Quote:
Originally Posted by BDunnell
Our government is broken. Why would we have ANY faith in their ability to legislate an effective solution to violent crim?e. I'd start with challenging Hollywood to quit sensationalizing violence. The same with the video gaming industry. We are also a country that was attacked and still at war. DO I agree with the current continued military involvement in Afghanistan? NO. DO I entirely support some of our meddling, No, however we americans do support our soldiers that we pay to protect our shores and gun ownership is strongly tied to our tied to patriotism. When the soldiers are away, it is our duty to protect ourselves.
I find this a weak argument, to be honest. They may be dangerous, but none of them have the destructive power of a firearm. There is simply no comparison. Most also have a perfectly reasonable secondary usage, with the exception of samurai swords, and it's not as if these are exactly freely available.Quote:
Originally Posted by nigelred5
This would all be fiddling around the edges. The attitudes that need to be changed run rather deeper than tackling violent films and video games (not that I believe they need to be tackled, given that one person's view of undue violence is totally different to another's).Quote:
Originally Posted by nigelred5
Quote:
Originally Posted by BDunnell
I can walk to the variety store at the end of my street and buy a samurai sword in about ten minutes. There is no regulation of any sort for something like that. Would you prefer a sabre? I can buy one of them as well from the arab fellow down the street. Destructive power? I worked for ten years in a shock trauma Hospital. I know destructive power of a knife very well. Knife wounds outnumbered gunshot wounds 20X over.
Every one of the mass killings was almost scripted straight out of a movie. As is much of the violence in our society.
You REALLY just don't understand the mentality of our society.
I'm getting quite a reasonable idea from some of the contributions to this discussion, believe me, though this won't stop me finding it unpleasantly alien and, in the supposedly modern, civilised world, inexplicable.Quote:
Originally Posted by nigelred5
It beggars belief, as far as I'm concerned, to suggest that films and video games are primarily at fault. You're just searching around for excuses, scapegoats and ways of avoiding the real issues. Films and video games are not the problem; on occasion there may be warped interpretations of them, but this in itself is not reason to legislate. There's enough prurience and over-caution about what's 'suitable' for people to watch and not watch as it is. And it is also legitimate to ask whether or not these forms of entertainment have their roots in a society that's violent enough in any case. These things don't exist in a vacuum.
Oh it's "the government's fault" that this happened is it? Can you provide any evidence for this at all?Quote:
Originally Posted by nigelred5
No, the American people are broken and badly so.
Let's just look at the aspect of war shall we? Even if you use the most expansive estimates, a total of 90,800 people have been killed to date as a result of the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In that period the number of people killed in the United States due to guns has been about 140,000. Who are you supposedly protecting yourselves from? Other Americans?
The Constitution itself has been amended another 17 times on top of the original 10. It already happens.Quote:
Originally Posted by Starter
Of course legislation should be amended to suit current conditions. Are we to assume that you still think that slavery is acceptable too? It took 76 years and a war for the American people to work that one out and another five years before you gave black people the rights to be citizens after they'd been slaves.