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Originally Posted by Freebase Dali
I feel like sometimes we're advocating for the continued irresponsibility of gun owners by blaming the guns. What about children that die of unintentional poisoning by common household chemicals? Do we blame the chemical, or the dumb ass parent that leaves that sort of thing in easy access of unsupervised children?
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Children don't accidentally poison their siblings or a neighborhood kid. I don't think there is any particular epidemic of kids ingesting poison. Kids killing other kids or themselves is incredibly frequent. After everything that has happened, people still leave their guns around for kids to get hold of.
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Personally, I think any parent whose kid kills someone else with their gun, accidentally or not, should be charged with negligent homicide. I also think that if someone owns a gun and has children, it should be a felony to simply have the weapon accessible to them, and their gun should be taken away.
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Yoou can't even get the NRA to go for that much. You see, if we charge stupid parents, then more of them won't buy guns and then the gun manufacturers won't haul in as many billions as they currently do every year. In 2012, it was almost $12 billion in sales and nearly a billion in profit:
How the U.S. gun industry became so lucrative
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I do not, however, think that banning guns across the board is going to be effective in the U.S. Not only are there far too many of them, it simply creates a black(er) market for them and shifts the availability to criminals who simply don't follow laws, and disarms those that do.
If the statistics are such that you're more likely to die at the hands of a friend or loved one versus a violent criminal, then it's rather naive to think it wouldn't swing the other way when the only people with the guns are the criminals.
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??? The number of guns deaths will QUITE OBVIOUSLY go down since you're removing the major source of them. If only a criminal could shoot you, you have far less chance of being shot because right now ANYBODY can shoot you. This fact is lost on Rez or he pretends it is.
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ersonally, I've had guns all my life. I've had them during my 6 years in the military, and I know how to handle them.
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I had a marksman's ribbon--the first ribbon I earned. Don't own a gun now. Never will.
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I'm pretty sure you can find PLENTY of examples of someone defending themselves against violent criminals. It's not nonexistent.
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Nobody is saying that aren't any examples of a gun saving someone's life. There must be thousands of such examples and I smile anytime I read of a stupid wretch being shot to death for messing with the wrong person. All I am saying is that the ODDS are that this will not happen to you in your lifetime. The odds are greater that you will, in fact, blow a toe off or kill a neighbor or loved one by accident. It may not happen but the ODDS are GREATER then the odds that you will justifiably shoot someone. Before someone buys a gun, they need to know that and, as long as they do and have weighed the risks and practice rigid gun safety then I have no problem with them. But the truth is, most people buy guns stupidly, wantonly and then they pay a terrible price or a neighbor does or family member. No one should EVER buy a particular firearm because they think it would be cool to own it. You must have a need for it and have a place to stow it safely.
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Just because your life was never threatened does not mean that no one's is.
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My life HAS been threatened and so was my brother's in another incident. Neither of us own a gun nor required one to neutralize said threats and resorting to guns would have been disastrous. In my case, I would have gotten innocent people killed and I'm thankful none of them had a gun and tried to use or they might have gotten me killed.
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For every single incident where someone's is, that's a real person that is affected by whether they can protect themselves or not. Even if it's not on your own radar. It's still people.
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If you try to play Dirty Harry and get a family member of mine killed, you're going to need that gun for real when I come looking for you.