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Originally Posted by Lord Larehip
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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Parents "accidentally" leave dangerous things in the reach of children, plain and simple. And if you don't think there's an "epidemic" of children ingesting poison but you think there's an "epidemic" of children being killed by guns in the U.S. then I think you should probably look at the statistics and do a simple comparison. You would obviously be surprised.
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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:
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So you're essentially agreeing with me that making it a felony to be irresponsible with guns will reduce incidents where such a thing happens... Check.
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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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I'm finding it hard to conjure up the sort of empathic ability it takes to understand your perspective, because it's wildly outside the realms of common logic and reality. The funny thing is, you're basically saying, "remove guns, therefore, you remove the problem", but you are apparently ignorant to the myriad of other factors involved in the simple fact that you cannot just snap your fingers and cause all guns to disappear. Your perspective, in its current status, would be amazing and completely awesome, but you're limited by the fact that you live in reality, and you are obviously not paying any respect to that fact. If we're going to just tout "what I wish", then sh*t, I have a bunch of stuff I could randomly spout without any regard for the reality of it all.
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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 can only assume you don't trust yourself to be responsible enough to have one. And I commend you on that decision. We need more people like you.
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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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You do realize that not everyone has the same "odds", right? We're not this single, equal, circumstantially homogeneous species. Where I live, I have different odds than where my boss lives. My boss has different odds than where the mayor lives. Regardless of whether that's dictated by the area, the security, or the type of people that can afford to live in that area, the odds aren't the same for everyone.
Knowing this, you have to concede the fact that odds aren't across the board. And since you must concede that, you must also concede that your assumptions about how likely it is someone would need to protect themselves is not only irrelevant, but largely misguided, since you're treating it as a blanket case based on, worst of all, your own miniscule experience, which is obviously the case, since you haven't once considered the odds of people living in high crime neighborhoods having to defend themselves more than someone living in an affluent suburb.
I say all that to say that when someone says "Your odds are this much", they're talking out of their ass.
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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.
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.
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Hey, my life has been threatened many times. Most often with actual rockets and mortars. And there have been several occasions outside of the military. But I've never needed to resort to guns because that's a last resort. But it's still there, as a resort. The simple fact of the matter is this... If I am faced with an imminent threat to my life of which I cannot defend otherwise, I will use lethal force. Knowing that we cannot magically make all guns disappear out of the criminal's hands, we cannot deprive the right of self defense for those innocent people that would like a chance to protect themselves and their family from those that would harm them.
When you advocate removing that ability without addressing the PAINFULLY obvious fallout that "banning guns" would result in, you're simply carrying a blank, meaningless flag off into the wilderness where it stands for something great that won't make a speck of difference.
But hey, it would make you feel good, right?
Of course, that's all that matters...