The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Defensive shooting relies on you killing someone. As "shoot to injure" is, according to every firearms supporter I've ever met (ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE), a terrible idea and never taught.

You want to make that leap?

I am 24 years old, never had a need for a gun or any weapon whatsoever. I think I've said it before in this thread: I live in a place where people are usually not after my life, so since nobody attacks there is no need for defense. I go jogging at the local park at 23:00 in the dark and feel save. On my way to that park I walk through the street in my town with the statistically worst criminal-rate and even there it is rather benign usually. Like the crime rate there mainly comes from drunk people attacking each other with broken glass or at worst knifes. Luckily the police is showing a lot of presence there which has calmed the area down in recent years.

Did you ever actually need a gun to defend yourself from anyone? Is it really that bad were you live?

I've never needed one. Having one and knowing how to use stops people stealing and/or murdering your household in the first place.

Just because you've never needed one yourself doesn't mean you can argue that it is unnecessary. You obviously have zero experience with the matter. I've got family who has needed a gun to defend themselves more than once in their lives, and they were all glad to have one on hand. Some regretted not having one with them. If you can't comprehend the need for a gun to defend oneself from an armed assailant, whether directly or indirectly, you need to stop participating in this debate and be an observer. Your opinions are not informed on this matter because you don't have the experience or knowledge necessary to form a base foundation.

Sorry for not living in the wild west. The thing with "defending yourself with a gun" that really is weird to me is that a gun is a tool that is very good for offensive action. One hit and a person is at minimum badly hurt if not dead. Whoever shoots first tends to win. Having such a tool in your hand drastically raises the stakes in a conflict: Shoot first or be shot. So suddenly drawing a gun in a conflict situation makes it easily more dangerous, as all sides start to act in very real fear for the life. People tend to act very stupid when they're that afraid.

And no I don't think having a gun next to your bed makes you more save against people who might "attack your household". It just means you raise the stakes. People who break into households will arm themselves as well and react much more drastically. In doubt they might adopt a strategy were they actively shoot you dead first to make sure you don't shoot them.
Just like the police will be much more volatile if they know that any random person on the street might have a loaded gun hidden somewhere. Massive escalation everywhere.

It's kind of an embarrassment that even with all this high tech stuff of the modern world we have no effective means of taking down a possible attacker without using tools that easily kill people.

"boom you're dead" "wait what?"

For reasons I stated, is why we should have guns. You didn't explain any bit of your "why", just your stance.

I tell you what. I'll agree nobody needs a firearm, when you provide adequate protection to every single person under the rule that discourages firearms, adequate enough to even stop attackers with firearms.

That includes rural areas, which you say cannot have firearms, and providing rural areas with an officer every 15 miles or 1 household since it's a rural area.

As well as dense areas, Houston has a 2.1m population and 627 mi. squared, we need reasonable an officer for every 400, which we barely have, 6,000 officers, and each one covering an adequate amount of area, 10 per square mile, but wait, that also includes jail staff, desk staff, dispatch, ect.

You, need to provide us, with at LEAST double that, to sprinkle into regular areas, to respond to local attacks from assailants, which you cannot expect to follow the law considering you cannot stop them in the first place from making or obtaining a firearm or committing a 4 man knife robbery, in order to make it as safe, as if only older previous-experienced firearm owners could carry everywhere, which would in fact double the police presence if you included them as "enforcement" considering they are more than capable of responding and preventing a crime until an officer can respond.

Then, you have to explain to me, why more situations involving a concealed carry citizen, end with less people dead, including the criminals, than when the police handle it. The police have a guy tackled to the ground, and still shoot him, while multiple armed assailants rob a convenience store and are both nonfatally shot by some average joe. Why not deputize him ON THE SPOT considering his statistics are more impressive than the average officer's is from get-go?

Good question indeed. Why not deputize the populace, when they are "allowed a lower standard" (to kill any criminal that jeopardizes their life), but strive for a "higher standard", while actual officers are "held to a higher standard", but get away with a "lower standard"? Any answer to that?

Also, the Second Amendment, although the "well-regulated militia" is a clause validating the necessity of the right and NOT a requirement to practice a right, entirely supports deputizing as many citizens as want to participate in self defense against violent criminals. One can argue that a "nonexistant militia with no regulations to join as there is no membership anyway", isn't a well-regulated militia anyway, meaning if it WERE a clause, which it isn't, then the government would already be violating the constitution...

Eating at a nearby diner, I see a regular, who open carries holstered to his belt, come in and eat all the time. He never robbed the place. Nobody else has either. In the famous words of Samuel Jackson, "The absence of evidence, is not the evidence of absence.". You can use that as argument against gun control, given the low crime rate around that armed guy, and for gun control, given the rate of crimes stopped by that guy.

You know which argument I use it for. More of them guys, less home invasions and armed robberies (and mass shootings).

So people in your family have used a gun to kill an assailant?

You need to stop telling people that their experiences are invalid. Smacks of fear, to me, that your viewpoint could actually be flawed. You don't seem to want to entertain any opposing ideas.

FYI, I've been on the receiving end of a knife. I didn't need a gun. Or a knife. Because that introduces the element of escalation, and escalation with a gun results in "dead".

There are very serious problems with your police force, that I agree on.

"More people with guns results in less mass shootings".
Fun logic.

Well in the end I am living in a place that works fine with the amount of gun control I want to have and you live in a place with the amount of non gun control you want.

except the statistics of concealed carry stopping any aggression/robbery/ect is 3%

If you're making that into the reason to allow firearms you've got nothing to go on basically. you'll have to find another argument then that.

clearly you haven't watched the video above or I wouldn't have had to type this out.

We been through this before.

Yes, you do, and your country is border-locked where it's easy to manage and STILL doesn't prevent all mass killings when terrorists have wanted to slaughter in mass. Build us a 12 mile wide shoreline, or at the very least a barren DMZ, plzkthxbai.

No, I don't, there is still plenty of gun control preventing the right people from legally having firearms. I would vote for a bill, that introduced registries and training classes, if it PROMOTED and PROTECTED the pursuit of carry and limited the financial cost of seeking it and even promoted it and overturned every gun ban in the country for those that seek the legal way.

No, the logic isn't fun, it's scientifically proven. Guy carries gun, less crime around him than in the country on average. The evidence SUPPORTS this claim, and is so flexible anyone can claim anything, but that just means we're at an impasse and nobody's statistics support introducing NEW laws, which upholds the ALREADY ESTABLISHED laws, such as the Second Amendment.

Lastly, you STILL didn't address the lack of police force, or how we extend police force to areas 100s of miles distant from any developed town. Why can't THEY have guns? Why is police coverage thin, but we need to ban firearms so the police are the only hope remaining, being an absent hope at that?

it's mindblowing how much you sound exactly like the guy in the above video.

except you're like taking it even further and parodying HIM

so ....sources??

and don't tell me FOX news presenters

Source? Events, like South Carolina Nightclub shooting and Dallas Wafflehouse shooting, prevented by concealed carry. Statistics, like self-defense and enforcement shootings, compared to questionable-enforcement shootings and homicides, removing suicides as a parallel statistic. Personal experiences, being in a high school marksmanship team (an olympic sport, mind you), and being a former security guard and friends with many other armed guards and encounters with peaceful armed citizens regularly.

But, besides all that evidence, what ELSE is my source? Ya got me. I have no other sources except the mountain that I already presented, so my argument MUST be wrong...

Hmmm germany ain't border-locked...

Why do you want so much police anyways? Is the US crime rate so high?

I told you guys, you can't talk with Americans about guns. It makes them cuckoo.

So what you're saying is that you're predisposed to supporting the use of carry (concealed or otherwise) because it's a privilege you personally enjoy and have a history of supporting (security work)?

Oh we're back to this again...

Do I have to remind you all how pointless this is? We've been over this at least 3 times and nobody ever changed anyone's opinion.

There are countries where everyone has guns and mass shootings happen all the time.

There are countries where very few people have guns and mass shootings basically don't happen.

There are countries where everyone has guns and mass shootings basically don't happen.

So clearly gun ownership isn't the only factor.

Now since it's easier to change laws compared to changing the hearts, minds, and culture of a country I don't think it would be a terrible idea for the US to stop giving people military-grade firepower because an ancient piece of paper written when guns were actually just small cannons said they can have them.

For the most part, the people shooting up everyone else aren't terrorists or criminals, they're once-ordinary people who just went nuts. ANYONE can go nuts so it seems like a pretty sensible idea to stop giving EVERYONE the right to enough firepower to mow down 50 people.

And I think it should stay that way until America can grow up, stop worshipping weaponry, ditch the doublethink of claiming to be the greatest nation of all time in the universe forever, and yet also a lawless wasteland where everyone NEEDS a gun to protect themselves from the psychomurders allegedly lurking on every street corner.

/rant

If it's pointless, why did you make a long post about it?

I mean, you make a lot of sense, but there isn't a lot of correlation between a lot of weapons and less mass murdering sprees. I'm not aware of any country like that, that is. The best use case is Australia who turned in a large amount of their civilian weaponry and saw a sharp drop in gun violence (or mass murders, I can't recall the precise metric).

Obviously what is trotted out a lot in favour of guns is "increased guns doesn't cause increased gun violence", and that's arguable both ways. However the killing sprees that keep happening definitely have more of a correlation with increased ease of access to guns and / or a culture of gun use.

Is everything a privilege these days? I'm predisposed to supporting it because it's the same form of self defense used by every politician above the city level. They have multiple personal security guards, we share 1 police officer per 500 people. I wasn't aware that the freedom to do something, and even support regulations that weren't detrimental to it, was a privilege. It sounds like freedom of speech and the right to due process, are all privileges then.

Being a member of the EU our borders tend to be rather open. We have 1+ million refugees in our country right now. The vast majority of them seem to be pretty peaceful.

But ofc if crazy people want to commit mass killings they'll find a way. That's just the way it is. As long as there are more people dying from car accidents than from terrorist attacks or amok runs I don't see why everyone makes so much drama about those. 3475 people died in traffic accidents in Germany in 2015. That is ~289 people per month or nearly 10 people a day.
There is barely any news about those accidents, nobody goes crazy about this.
But when a young man driven to insanity by this fucked up world takes up an axe/gun/whatever else and goes on a bloody rampage the news is full of it.
When an apparent thread from such people shows on the horizon politicians demand we throw away all our core values of freedom in favor of security. Completely out of proportions.
I should be more worried to get run over by a car when I go buy my cookies than worried to get shot by insane person.

Considering there is less "boom I shot you dead" crime where I live compared to where you live maybe we should all start carrying guns to finally eradicate even the last bit of such crime.... wait that sounds pretty weird.

How about you make some of the people in those ares police officers.

So again: Actual sources? I see claims. Many just small scale singular events.

Well your politicians tend to be filthy rich and tend to basically have a ton of enemies. No matter what you stand for somebody is gonna hate you for it. I kind of can understand that they're a little scared about that in a nation where it is very easy to get pretty big guns in your hand. Especially looking at how extreme some of your political parties are becoming.

The ability to wield a gun without being shot dead by police is a bit of a privilege, given current events, yes Or have you forgotten the notable amount of black folk killed while legally carrying, and / or when carrying toy guns?

And yes, your freedom to speech is a privilege because while ostensibly a lot of American citizens are meant to be protected by it (in the context of being oppressed by your government - something a lot of folks screaming about "free speech" online seem to forget), those selfsame citizens regularly aren't allowed their speech against the government (or their representatives) depending on their class and / or race.

The politicians themselves don't tend to pull the trigger. The professional trained bodyguards they hire, tend to, and they're briefed excessively on the right amount of force to use in any situation. Your average American (not you, and yes I'm generalising, sorry) - at least, the average ones I've met that support gun usage - seems to think that holding a gun magically makes you superior in any confrontation. Which isn't a sensible attitude to have, and makes me fearful considering the amount of guns these people with this kind of "shoot first" mindset have access to.