Opinions/Discussions on Guns

[Bluto]

In the Houston Chronicle there is probably an average of two incidents a day where a homeowner shoots a burglar. Usually in the 'hood, but they deserve safety in their homes just as much as anyone else.

I do not believe this claim. That would put the rate of people shot in home invasions in Houston alone at 730 annually. Seems pretty high. Again, if this stuff is going on almost exclusively in the hood why do people in safe suburban neighborhoods need to be heavily armed?

 

[FLDomer]

I do not believe this claim. That would put the rate of people shot in home invasions in Houston alone at 730 annually. Seems pretty high. Again, if this stuff is going on almost exclusively in the hood why do people in safe suburban neighborhoods need to be heavily armed?

Whats you definition of heavily armed? Just asking.

 

[Irish Houstonian]

I do not believe this claim. That would put the rate of people shot in home invasions in Houston alone at 730 annually. Seems pretty high. Again, if this stuff is going on almost exclusively in the hood why do people in safe suburban neighborhoods need to be heavily armed?

I'm rounding/estimating of course, and I only read the paper on weekdays. And the Chronicle covers the whole area. The good news is that whether you believe or not doesn't matter.

 

[Bluto]

Whats you definition of heavily armed? Just asking.

Multiple guns with high capacity magazines, body armor, 50 caliber rifles.

A single 9mm or single semi-auto sure why not.

 

[FLDomer]

Multiple guns with high capacity magazines, body armor, 50 caliber rifles.

A single 9mm or single semi-auto. Not really concerned.

Like Irishpat has stated, about the cars, does your car top out at 70 mph? Why are you concerned with the others if they are owned by these people in the safe suburban areas?
I own several rifles (yes some can have high capacity mags), a couple shotguns, and a couple pistols, only one 50 cal muzzleloader, and I live in a suburban area.

 

[Cackalacky]

I hate guns for the record but I grew up around them my whole life and I still don't like them. I have thought about owning one but have not yet purchased one. As far as suburbs being safe.....interesting that the last few mass shootings have all been small quaint suburbs. I am not abdicating one way or the other I just thought this was interesting:

Sandy Hook, Clackamas Mall,OR, Aurora,CO, Columbine,CO, etc etc. All in small towns or white suburbs. My theory is that suburbs and small towns have higher concentrations of Republican paranoid gun nuts.

Intense Alienation Can Be an Incubator for Violence

GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: December 21, 2012 NYTimes
....................
Cities breed their own pathologies, and homicide is a predominantly urban form of lawlessness. But mass murder, in fact, is not. When James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has written extensively about extreme killing, compiled homicide data from across the country for 1976 to 2010, he found that 64 percent of mass murders — defined as any instance in which four or more people were killed more or less at the same time — had occurred in places with populations of less than 250,000.


When we narrow the field further and imagine the sort of tragedy involving a lone shooter, typically white and male, spraying bullets and embodying uncountable clichés of twisted solitude, the scales are tipped more. Researchers on school massacres have noted that those crimes almost always happen in rural areas or small towns, Randall Collins, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Why is this? In one sense it would seem to have everything to do with where guns are dispersed in our society. According to a national exit poll of 2008 voters analyzed last week by The New York Times’s Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight blog, 60 percent of rural households and 42 percent of suburban households own guns, while only 30 percent of urban households do.

.......................clip

In small communities, “large numbers of people know each other and know they know each other, so reputations and gossip circulate rapidly and intensely,” Mr. Collins said. “There is more sense of belonging, more social pressure to conformity. But if you are an individual who is not plugged into the network, who is regarded as an anomaly, the feeling of being excluded and looked down upon is much stronger.” Alternatively, in cities, networks are widely dispersed and no center of social gravity is perceived. If you are regarded negatively, that reputation isn’t likely to travel extensively. There’s always another world to penetrate.

Urban schools, although they are more violent generally, are not seen as easily susceptible to inexplicable mass assault. “All the violence that takes place is quite understandable, and there is always a story, well-known to most of those nearby,” Mr. Collins explained, “about why so-and-so is out to get someone.” Violence is motivated by vendetta, or jealousies.

...........clip

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/n...?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121223&_r=0

 

[Bluto]

Like Irishpat has stated, about the cars, does your car top out at 70 mph? Why are you concerned with the others if they are owned by these people in the safe suburban areas?
I own several rifles (yes some can have high capacity mags), a couple shotguns, and a couple pistols, only one 50 cal muzzleloader, and I live in a suburban area.

The car thing is a bad analogy. All cars are designed to go above the speed limit. If they weren't? Oh well. I do think however, that it's wholly appropriate that top fuel dragsters and formula one race cars are not allowed on public streets.

I'm not really concerned. I'm just wondering why? Guns are cool I get it. I like shooting them. It just seems that as a country we have a pretty unhealthy relationship with guns. It's the same with food, cars and on and on. It's seems like it's a mix of good is never good enough kind of gluttony and a sense of national paranoia that "somebody" is out to get us. In this case the object of our obsession is designed specifically to kill.

 

[Bluto]

I hate guns for the record but I grew up around them my whole life and I still don't like them. I have thought about owning one but have not yet purchased one. As far as suburbs being safe.....interesting that the last few mass shootings have all been small quaint suburbs. I am not abdicating one way or the other I just thought this was interesting:

Very interesting. Thanks!

 

[FLDomer]

The car thing is a bad analogy. All cars are designed to go above the speed limit. If they weren't? Oh well. I do think however, that it's wholly appropriate that top fuel dragsters and formula one race cars are not allowed on public streets.

I'm not really concerned. I'm just wondering why? Guns are cool I get it. I like shooting them. It just seems that as a country we have a pretty unhealthy relationship with guns. It's the same with food, cars and on and on. It's seems like it's a mix of good is never good enough kind of gluttony and a sense of national paranoia that "somebody" is out to get us. In this case the object of our obsession is designed specifically to kill.

I don't see the car thing as a bad analogy, corvettes, cobras, Porsche...are built for speed and are all legal on the road (kinda like an AR may be viewed by some as excessive, but is legal). While dragsters and a formula one car are illegal for the public to drive on the road was, so are fully autos illegal to be owned buy the general public.

Bolded portion: The object is not designed to just specifically kill but can be used in a recreation, target practice and such. Every time I go out to shoot I am not killing things.

 

[Bluto]

I don't see the car thing as a bad analogy, corvettes, cobras, Porsche...are built for speed and are all legal on the road (kinda like an AR may be viewed by some as excessive, but is legal). While dragsters and a formula one car are illegal for the public to drive on the road was, so are fully autos illegal to be owned buy the general public.

Bolded portion: The object is not designed to just specifically kill but can be used in a recreation, target practice and such. Every time I go out to shoot I am not killing things.

Hmmm....guns were made with one thing in mind. Killing things. In the case of semi-auto or auto with large magazines killing lots of things in a short period of time.

Anyhow, have fun blasting stuff. Good discussion. I kind of want to go to a gun range now. Haha.

 

[Irish Houstonian]

Hmmm....guns were made with one thing in mind. Killing things. In the case of semi-auto or auto with large magazines killing lots of things in a short period of time.

Anyhow, have fun blasting stuff. Good discussion. I kind of want to go to a gun range now. Haha.

Many people shoot at ranges or non-biological targets for fun.

 

[irishpat183]

Hmmm....guns were made with one thing in mind. Killing things. In the case of semi-auto or auto with large magazines killing lots of things in a short period of time.

Anyhow, have fun blasting stuff. Good discussion. I kind of want to go to a gun range now. Haha.

Why does the reason they were made really matter?

It's how the person uses the tool...not why it was created.

 

[Cackalacky]

I am beginning to understand how

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

has become

"the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

 

[irishpat183]

Great piece on one of the things not being brought up in the Gun control argument:

"What is not being mentioned in the Main Stream Media is that hunters, many of whom use semi automatic rifles with high capacity magazines, provide more food for the homeless than any other group of people. People in the United States living with food insecurity is growing and can be seen here at a; USDA site on Economic Research Service. America currently has a 15% poverty level which equates to 46.2 million Americans living in poverty. Since 2006 the poverty level rose from 12.3% to its current 15%.

The front page of the Houston Chronicle dated February 6, 2013 ran a headline, “Harris County has plan to bring home the bacon.” The feral hog population in Texas is out of control and in an effort to reduce the population they plan to capture and process hogs to feed the homeless. In Texas tons of pork is donated to homeless shelters and organizations that feed the hungry. With the wild hog population exploding here, the hogs have become a big problem in terms of property and land damage. As explained by one Texas hunter high capacity magazines or even fully automatic machine guns allow the killing of multiple hogs in a group as opposed to only one or possibly two.

Hunters have been quietly donating tons of meat to organizations that feed the hungry for an unspoken number of years. Groups like Hunters Harvest and Hunters for Hungry have been gathering meat donations from hunters via local processing plants. In one year 2011 -2012, 99 meat processors working with Hunters for Hungry provided 152,962 pounds of meat to agencies that feed the hungry. Groups like these are supplied large volumes of game meat from hunting members of organizations like the Safari Club International. A member of the Houston Safari Club reported that hunters in an effort to manage game populations need to cull the herds to insure the health of the animals. This creates harvesting in excess of what the hunters can eat. This led to the donating of meat by the tons to the hungry as in homeless shelters for example.

Many are calling for gun control based on their emotions but the facts weigh in on the side of gun owners. All the anti gun arguers combined don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to what they do to help the less fortunate in comparison to gun owning hunters in this country. Gun owning hunters clearly let their actions and deeds speak for themselves instead of knee jerk emotions sparked by a tragedy that happen to involve a gun.

When the anti-gun people do for the less fortunate as much as the gun owning hunters do then they may earn the right to be vocal and be seen as having a bit of validity in their arguments. There are hunters feeding the hungry organizations in nearly every state but there seems to be an absence of any anti gun groups that advocate for the hungry in every state. The righteous point always prevails in the end."

 

[chicago51]

Why does the reason they were made really matter?

It's how the person uses the tool...not why it was created.

So the gun manufacturers should not be responsible for all those guns you sold to Mexican drug cartels?


I kid because I care.

 

[Cackalacky]

Great piece on one of the things not being brought up in the Gun control argument:

"What is not being mentioned in the Main Stream Media is that hunters, many of whom use semi automatic rifles with high capacity magazines, provide more food for the homeless than any other group of people. People in the United States living with food insecurity is growing and can be seen here at a; USDA site on Economic Research Service. America currently has a 15% poverty level which equates to 46.2 million Americans living in poverty. Since 2006 the poverty level rose from 12.3% to its current 15%.

The front page of the Houston Chronicle dated February 6, 2013 ran a headline, “Harris County has plan to bring home the bacon.” The feral hog population in Texas is out of control and in an effort to reduce the population they plan to capture and process hogs to feed the homeless. In Texas tons of pork is donated to homeless shelters and organizations that feed the hungry. With the wild hog population exploding here, the hogs have become a big problem in terms of property and land damage. As explained by one Texas hunter high capacity magazines or even fully automatic machine guns allow the killing of multiple hogs in a group as opposed to only one or possibly two.

Hunters have been quietly donating tons of meat to organizations that feed the hungry for an unspoken number of years. Groups like Hunters Harvest and Hunters for Hungry have been gathering meat donations from hunters via local processing plants. In one year 2011 -2012, 99 meat processors working with Hunters for Hungry provided 152,962 pounds of meat to agencies that feed the hungry. Groups like these are supplied large volumes of game meat from hunting members of organizations like the Safari Club International. A member of the Houston Safari Club reported that hunters in an effort to manage game populations need to cull the herds to insure the health of the animals. This creates harvesting in excess of what the hunters can eat. This led to the donating of meat by the tons to the hungry as in homeless shelters for example.

Many are calling for gun control based on their emotions but the facts weigh in on the side of gun owners. All the anti gun arguers combined don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to what they do to help the less fortunate in comparison to gun owning hunters in this country. Gun owning hunters clearly let their actions and deeds speak for themselves instead of knee jerk emotions sparked by a tragedy that happen to involve a gun.

When the anti-gun people do for the less fortunate as much as the gun owning hunters do then they may earn the right to be vocal and be seen as having a bit of validity in their arguments. There are hunters feeding the hungry organizations in nearly every state but there seems to be an absence of any anti gun groups that advocate for the hungry in every state. The righteous point always prevails in the end."

 

[JadeBrecks]

The car thing is a bad analogy. All cars are designed to go above the speed limit. If they weren't? Oh well. I do think however, that it's wholly appropriate that top fuel dragsters and formula one race cars are not allowed on public streets.

I'm not really concerned. I'm just wondering why? Guns are cool I get it. I like shooting them. It just seems that as a country we have a pretty unhealthy relationship with guns. It's the same with food, cars and on and on. It's seems like it's a mix of good is never good enough kind of gluttony and a sense of national paranoia that "somebody" is out to get us. In this case the object of our obsession is designed specifically to kill.

Why do you jump the guy who collects guns and not the guy who collects baseball cards, stamps, coins, etc..... We enjoy firearms. We enjoy collecting and shooting them. I currently have roughly 10 firearms. Every one serves a different purpose right now. When i get more than i have a specific purpose for then i will begin collecting "cool" guns that i think would be fun to shoot out fun to own for one reason or another. Anyone who enjoys shooting will have a fun time shooting a lever action rifle. Do i have a specific use for it as a tool? No. It will be a fun gun to shoot and own. I don't see myself any different than a stamp, coin, card or even car (minus the finding required for the last one) collector. I am not automatically a nut case because i own a firearm someone else might not want.

As far as the designed specifically to kill that is the same thing as saying a car is designed only to speed, a bow and arrow or knife are designed only to kill, or is designed only to knock people out to wrong them. Could each of these be used that wary? Yes. It that the only way they can be used? No.

As far as the person saying we have a unhealthy relationship with guns take a look at our background. It wasn't eternity ago (as far as time goes) we were under a tyranic government. And until we fully forget that fact we will hold on to the idea we want to be able to protect ourselves. Also until we can be guaranteed 100% safety all the time another from anyone we will still want to hold on to our guns.

For all those who have never needed a firearm for any reason and couldn't see needing one consider yourself lucky. Trust me i don't wish everyone have a dark ally experience so you understand why guns aren't all bad but don't think I'm a wacko or nut because i have.

P.S.

Jade and FLDomer, thanks for the insight. As you guys know there has been a lot of rhetoric on both sides of this argument. Lots of folks throw out "what if" scenarios and I'm just trying to get a feel for what really happens, not some fiction. I appreciate you guys answering. Anyone else's experiences would be appreciated.

GoIrish41 click on my signature picture too if you want some more examples.

 

[JadeBrecks]

So the gun manufacturers should not be responsible for all those guns you sold to Mexican drug cartels?


I kid because I care.

no Obama should

I kid because its true.

 

[Cackalacky]

 

[BobD]

I am beginning to understand how

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

has become

"the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

 

[chicago51]

I find it fascinating that some groups are all bent on making it harder to vote but easy to own a gun.

 

[JadeBrecks]

I find it fascinating that some groups are all bent on making it harder to vote but easy to own a gun.

Making it harder to vote multiple times is different than making it harder to vote once.

 

[GoIrish41]

Making it harder to vote multiple times is different than making it harder to vote once.

I think we should enforce the laws we already have on the books instead of creating new ones.

 

[Bluto]

Why do you jump the guy who collects guns and not the guy who collects baseball cards, stamps, coins, etc..... We enjoy firearms. We enjoy collecting and shooting them. I currently have roughly 10 firearms. Every one serves a different purpose right now. When i get more than i have a specific purpose for then i will begin collecting "cool" guns that i think would be fun to shoot out fun to own for one reason or another. Anyone who enjoys shooting will have a fun time shooting a lever action rifle. Do i have a specific use for it as a tool? No. It will be a fun gun to shoot and own. I don't see myself any different than a stamp, coin, card or even car (minus the finding required for the last one) collector. I am not automatically a nut case because i own a firearm someone else might not want.

As far as the designed specifically to kill that is the same thing as saying a car is designed only to speed, a bow and arrow or knife are designed only to kill, or is designed only to knock people out to wrong them. Could each of these be used that wary? Yes. It that the only way they can be used? No.

As far as the person saying we have a unhealthy relationship with guns take a look at our background. It wasn't eternity ago (as far as time goes) we were under a tyranic government. And until we fully forget that fact we will hold on to the idea we want to be able to protect ourselves. Also until we can be guaranteed 100% safety all the time another from anyone we will still want to hold on to our guns.

For all those who have never needed a firearm for any reason and couldn't see needing one consider yourself lucky. Trust me i don't wish everyone have a dark ally experience so you understand why guns aren't all bad but don't think I'm a wacko or nut because i have.

P.S.


GoIrish41 click on my signature picture too if you want some more examples.

Look I've already made it clear that owing a gun is not the issue with me. Owning multiple weapons seems to like odd behavior to me (as is any other obsessive behavior like hoarding comic books at say age 40 or owing multiple sports cars that you just site around a gawk at). Again what makes guns that are semi auto and have large magazine capacities unique is that they are specifically designed to kill multiple things in an instant, cars, hunting bows, swords, knives, ice cream and comic books are not. If I'm going to go on a mass killing spree I'm not going to force feed people sweets untill they develop type 2 diabetes or attempt to run a bunch of people down in my F-150. If it all comes down to sport shooting there is no need for this ability? When you add the rhetoric that comes from groups like the NRA to all this it only adds some highly combustable fuel to a national sense of paranoia that seems to revolve around gun ownership in this country.

 

[JadeBrecks]

If it all comes down to sport shooting there is no need for this ability? When you add the rhetoric that comes from groups like the NRA to all this it only adds some highly combustable fuel to a national sense of paranoia that seems to revolve around gun ownership in this country.

If you read my previous posts it doesn't just come down to sports shooting.

 

[chicago51]

"@BlizzyBe: Senate has given preliminary approval to HB1229 - mandating background checks for all gun sales.
Check and Balance - Senate Hearing Gun Bills Today #UniteBlue #ctl"

So we may have universal background checks.

 

[DSully1995]

Canadian gun owners get a background check done every single day, with a automated system to check if they have committed crimes. Not a big deal...

 

[chicago51]

Canadian gun owners get a background check done every single day, with a automated system to check if they have committed crimes. Not a big deal...

Thank you for sharing that.

 

[chicago51]

NRA's Wayne LaPierre says only a good guy w/a gun can stop bad guy w/a gun. I must remind him JFK & Reagan were surrounded by armed pros.

 

[HereComeTheIrish]

NRA's Wayne LaPierre says only a good guy w/a gun can stop bad guy w/a gun. I must remind him JFK & Reagan were surrounded by armed pros.

Well put...