The right to bear arms
Posted on: December 20, 2012 - 3:33pm
Offline
The right to bear arms
I couldn't agree more. The 2nd Amendment must be changed to suit the times. Allow for a single bolt action rifle and a single shot revolver with a small amount of ammo. If you need more, then go to the armory to get the weapon and ammo so you can go hunting or fire at the shooting range. No more vast amounts of ammo and weapons. No more automatic weapons. If you are a collector, then weapons should be unable to fire and disabled. Finally, there should be laws against buying pieces of weapons individually and then putting the weapon together piece by piece.
- Login to post comments
1: BS
2: BS
3: BS
All lies and BS. You never once engaged in combat with civilians in a 1st world nation, so all your experience amounts to absolutely nothing.
Your country is far too divided, you'll never have a revolution. 4 or 5 maybe, not one.
And if any happen before the government starts to collapse, it'll be put down in no time, with very few military casualties.
You're just a naive, delusional idiot, and nothing you've said counters the reality of what I've said.
Try again, make me laugh some more.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
WTF are you talking about. I'm constantly promoting the things that would permanently fix poverty(i.e. giving money only to schools that train people for real jobs and mandatory birth control). Your answer to poverty is entitlements that will enavatable bankrupt society such that you'll need a gun to survive the chaos. Your answer is to make everyone equal in poverty, a recipe for more violence.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
Ridiculous. 99% of your claims would hasten the destruction of the US, not help in any way. And your perceptions of socialism never reflect actual socialism.
The only currently active member from the "right" who posts in politics and economics and has any clue about socialism is Beyond. He and I disagree often, but we understand each other and each others positions. You are clueless.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
According to the gun control nuts, civilians would have no chance against a modern military hellbent on genocide or enslavement. But look at the US military's success against civilian uprisings in Afganistan, Iraq and Vietnam. According Vastet, they couldn't even stop Canada from burning down Washington.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
Because they are a foreign entity. Seriously, how stupid are you people? The US military in Afghanistan is incomparable to the US military in America.
And the US military in 1812 faced a 1st world power in the UK. It wasn't 1st vs 3rd world.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Well if the government is collapsing then all hell is going to break loose and the rules and regulations will go out the window.
In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan there were all these rules and regulations preventing them from doing things much like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great would have done. If the US generals would have been allowed to do "what ever" they would have slaughtered those people.
Well apparently you thought it was since you said you provided studies and all your links were mother jones articles...
Where is your evidence that more laws is going to lower crime? Can you please explain to me how banning large magazines will stop even one murder? Furthermore, is lowering crime a goal that is worth any cost to individual freedom?
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
And in that situation do you believe it is better for average citizens to be armed or unarmed?
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
I don't think the following story is unique. I think it happens every day and is a good example of a flawed justice and mental health care system.
January 11, 2013On Monday morning, Thomas Richard Cowan loaded 13 bullets into two handguns, left his German shepherd chained to the fence and drove eight miles from his home in Kingsport to Sullivan Central High School. Whatever his mission, it was the 62-year-old Vietnam veteran’s final drive.
For about an hour, Cowan’s armed invasion spread panic throughout the school before a burst of officers’ gunfire brought him down. No others were injured.
No one knows why Cowan pointed his Honda in the direction of the Blountville, Tenn., high school, where his brother is a janitor. He is described – in court records and interviews – as a peculiar man with a history of erratic, sometimes criminal, behavior and a deep suspicion of the government.
He parked his car Monday morning in a handicapped space just in front of the school’s main entrance. Second period was just getting under way at 9:10 a.m. when Ashley Thacker, a junior, arrived at the main entrance of her high school. Thacker, 16, had been at a doctor’s appointment and was on her way to a music theory class as she approached the locked doors.
She noticed a man standing in the 10-foot waiting area between the two sets of doors, waiting to be buzzed in. His bald crown was framed with brown hair. He had a mustache, she remembered, and he was holding a cane.
He told her to go on ahead of him. But she never made it through the doors.
Instead, Melanie Riden, principal of Sullivan Central, came striding through the locked doors.
“He pulled out his gun and started pointing it at people,” Thacker said.
Cowan trained a .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol at Riden’s face, said Sullivan County Sheriff Wayne Anderson. Carolyn Gudger, the school resource officer, drew her gun, then shielded the principal’s body with her own.
Thacker remembers Cowan shouting something – possibly including the words “10 years” – but she isn’t sure. She turned and ran out the set of public doors to the mulch pile in the front of the school, and hid behind bushes.
“He might shoot someone,” Thacker remembered thinking. “I just wanted to get out of there.”
Riden fled and Gudger inched back into the school, leading Cowan through the scattered pastel chairs in the empty cafeteria. It was a tactical move, meant to lure the gunman into a more contained place, Anderson said.
Sullivan County dispatch sent out a chilling alert: “Man with a gun at Central High School.”
Riden, reached by phone Monday night, said she could not comment without permission from Sullivan County Director of Schools Jubal Yennie.
Gudger told him to drop his weapon; he demanded she drop hers. Once, he tried, unsuccessfully, to lunge for her gun.
Cowan repeated one thing only, Anderson said. That he wanted to pull the fire alarms.
“I don’t know why, we can only speculate about that and I think everyone will speculate why he wanted to pull a fire alarm,” Anderson said. “Either to get the kids out of class or, I don’t know. We don’t know.”
Flattened against the bushes, Ashley Thacker waited two minutes, she thinks. “I didn’t hear anything else, so I thought Officer Gudger had arrested him.”
She was wrong. As she approached the school, two assistant principals opened a window and yelled at her to run away. Crying and shaking, Thacker ran to her car and drove a half-mile to her parents’ business.
The view from the classroom
At about 9:15 a.m., a shaken voice came over the intercom.
“Code red. Lockdown.”
There was profanity in the background. This was no drill, students realized.
With the announcement, teachers sprang into action – locking doors and papering over windows, turning off the lights and closing window blinds. Students huddled in the corners of classrooms, sitting in the darkness and searching for information with a storm of text messages.
Casey Deel, a 17-year-old senior, was on his way to a doctor’s office when his girlfriend, Alicia Edwards, sent him a text at 9:15 a.m.
“There’s a code red lock down. im scared,” the 16-year-old junior texted from her government class.
“r u serious?” Deel texted back. He skipped his appointment.
In Kayla Nichols’ cosmetology class, students squeezed into a storage room the size of a parking space, and locked the door, the 17-year-old said.
Ryan Kendrick was in algebra class, just off the main office. The 17-year-old senior thought he heard the gunman making threats – about not leaving the building alive and taking others with him – and Gudger urging him to calm down.
Then he heard a volley of gunshots.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.
Kendrick and his friend, Andrew Ray, began to pray.
Landon Sillyman was in his honors biology class, where the teacher had instructed students to put their heads on their desks in the darkened classroom. The 14-year-old freshman estimated the suspense lasted about an hour.
But it was all over in minutes, Anderson estimated. One hundred and twenty seconds after Cowan drew his gun, two deputies, Lt. Steve Williams and Sam Matney, arrived. They entered through separate doors and met Cowan and Gudger – still in a moving standoff – as they reached a science pod behind the cafeteria. Cowan wavered; he jerked his gun from Gudger to the other deputies then back again. The three officers told him, again, to drop his weapon. He wouldn’t.
So they opened fire. Some students counted five shots, others counted six. Anderson would not say how many rounds hit the gunman.
Cowan fell to the ground, his shoes just feet from door to the library full of teenagers. The pistol in his hand had seven bullets in the magazine and another in the chamber. He had a second handgun in his back pocket, loaded with five rounds.
“That’s how close he was,” Anderson said. “We all know this could have been much more dangerous.”
A troubled history
In a file at the Kingsport General Sessions courthouse, there is a handwritten note by a police detective:
“This is the fellow we discussed,” it reads. “He needs a mental eval.”
The note was written in 2001, after Cowan was charged with stalking. According to court records, a newspaper carrier said that twice he followed her as she drove her route.
When she turned, he turned. When she stopped, he stopped.
“At one point, he followed [her] into a driveway and would not let her pull out,” the affidavit reads. “Both instances put [the carrier] in fear as she does not know the defendant.”
The case was later dismissed because a witness did not show up at court.
The same affidavit also recites an incident from the previous year, when Cowan produced a gun at the Kingsport Police Department.
According to court documents, he arrived at the police station in February 2000 to talk with officers about “a problem that has been discussed with him several times in the past.”
Cowan confessed that tucked in the waistband of his blue jeans, he had a loaded .380-caliber Jennings handgun – the same type of gun used in Monday’s standoff. He was convicted of unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon, sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to seek a mental evaluation and counseling.
He did not do either, court records show.
His brother, Rodney Cowan, a janitor at the high school, declined to elaborate Monday evening on his brother’s history or character.
“Right now, I haven’t got a comment,” he said. “We’re just trying to get everything figured out.”
A “textbook” response?
At a Monday afternoon news conference at the Board of Education building in Blountville, Yennie, the director of schools, read from a prepared statement that lauded police, staff and students for following their emergency protocol.
“The students were never in any danger,” he said. “And Carolyn Gudger performed her job admirably to ensure the safety of students and staff.”
Anderson, too, said the school’s protocol worked perfectly. He hailed it “textbook” and “perfect.”
“These officers saved children’s lives today,” Anderson said.
But some students were not reassured.
Camry Collins, a 17-year-old senior, wonders about the effectiveness of the second set of locked doors. She said she does not feel safer despite the outcome of Monday’s intrusion.
“Tomorrow, the same thing could happen again,” she said.
And tomorrow, Carolyn Gudger, Monday’s uncontested hero, won’t be there.
“Gudger is the “bomb-diggity,” Collins said. “She goes out of her way to protect us.”
Gudger and the other two deputies involved in the shooting are on administrative leave as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation concludes its investigation.
Anderson said they are doing well, considering. Cowan was taken to the hospital by helicopter, where he was pronounced dead at 10:15 a.m.
“This is not TV; you don’t shoot somebody then go to the local bar and have a drink and talk about it and laugh and go on and do something else,” Anderson said to dozens of teachers, school administrators and students packed into the news conference. “This is very, very – I can see by your faces how traumatic it is for you. You can imagine being that officer in that spot.”
An unusual man
Thomas Cowan’s house, on Mountain View Avenue in Kingsport, is hung with a brand-new American flag and an empty hummingbird feeder. His lived alone with his dog, Radar.
Cowan’s next-door neighbor, Jessica Strom, had heard of a gunman at Sullivan Central on the news, but she never connected it to Cowan.
“Not Tom. No way,” she said in an interview.
When showed a photograph of Cowan released Monday by law enforcement, Strom clutched her head in both hands and said, “Holy crap.” She sank to the ground and discussed what she knew of her “unusual” neighbor.
Cowan often talked about government conspiracy theories, Strom said. He believed the government used electro-magnetic waves to make his dog bark. He only used disposable cell phones because he believed the government was listening in on his conversations, she said.
“He didn’t seem to be crazy,” Strom said. She and her husband “just kind of ignored him,” when he spouted his conspiracy theories. “We let him say his piece and go on.”
Last week, he went to the Dollar General store where Strom works and purchased the American flag, and some household goods.
“Why Central, though?” Strom wondered. She had no answer.
In his newspaper box was an old, yellowed newspaper from Jan. 4, 2007, still wrapped in plastic. The lead story that day was about a fugitive wanted in Pennsylvania who drew a gun on Johnson City police officers.
The headline read, “JC police kill gunman in shootout.”
This article originally appeared in Tricities.com
That is a question left up to the individual. Every one is going to have their own opinion.
For me, no gun.
You sound like you reject "Mother Jones" like I reject "FOX news", but why? The information is provided with references? It isn't hearsay.
You can sift through the references below from each professor/researcher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime#Opposition
I have heard both sides of the story, but I am led to believe that corruption causes more problems than gun control or carry gun laws.
For example, in Mexico the murder rate is off the charts because of the drug trade.
There are billions of dollars being made every month from the trafficking of cocaine in to America.
This is spilling over in to America in every aspect of life, from the drug user to the drug farmer in Peru.
The bottom line? Money.
How do you get rid of the problem? I thought about using bugs to kill off the cocaine plants but Bolivia and Peru refuse to do it because the farmers make good money refining the coca in to cocaine.
In 1990 the Bush administration talked about doing just that and was prepared to do it, but the governments of Bolivia and Peru wanted to convince the farmers to produce other crops.
That was 1990.
Cocaine is more of a problem now than ever. Bolivia and Peru governments really don't want to stop the trade. They are making billions of dollars from the trade.
From all of this you have violent murders taking place because of a drug. It isn't the guns which are the problem or the people (though they are part of the equation).
Can you imagine what would happen if the USA spent some money developing a super bug that would eat cocaine plants, reproduce in 24-48 hours, then fly like locusts for in Africa to ravage the crops?
Holy shit? It would be a total melt down. What would the drug lords do? No cocaine from Bolivia or Peru for months while they figure out how to eradicate the bug. By then scientists here could produce multiple variations of the bug to be resistant to the chemicals.
Effectively you would eliminate the drug trade over night, but would it create more problems? What would all those criminals do with no cocaine? What would crack smokers do?
So good guys with guns killed the bad guy with a gun- seems to me to be a pretty good ending. How do you imagine you can prevent crazy people from doing crazy things and attempting to kill people?
Note that he had two pistols with 13 bullets total- he didn't have large magazines so your particular idea of gun control wouldn't have done shit to prevent this incident.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
Then why do you want to make that decision for me?
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
I don't consider any news source a "study" reporters as a rule are lazy and looking to sensationalize more than report facts whether they are from Mother Jones, Fox News or wherever. As far as actual studies I know them up, down and sideways- this is a subject I have been interested in for a long time. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that there is no relation between gun control and crime rates. Like you said,
Yet you support more gun control laws as a solution?!?!?!? If corruption is the problem, doesn't it make more sense to focus your efforts on that problem rather than focusing it on creating more gun control?
As for the drug trade, you wouldn't eliminate the drug trade overnight, there are already numerous substances that can work as a replacement for cocaine (meth, bath salts, ketamine etc) And new drugs can be created overnight, for example, Russia has effectively shut down the heroin trade and overnight a new drug appeared on the market called Krocodil- look it up, it is extremely nasty shit and far worse than heroin. Drug addicts want to get high at any cost and dealers will find a way to give them that high. You can shut down drug sources one and a time and they will keep creating more faster than you can shut them down. Which is why the US is losing their war on drugs and always will lose the war no matter how many people we kill. We should stop wasting billions of dollars and all the collateral damage caused by the drug war. All it does is cost money and kill people. Ending the war on drugs would be the quickest way to lower the violent crime rate in the US as the vast majority of violent crime is related to drug trafficking.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
It'd certainly make a difference, but it would have no impact on school shootings and firefighter ambushes.
For that you need some kind of gun control or a functional health care system or both.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Carolyn Gudger with a gun made a difference, who knows how many people would have died if that school was a "gun free" zone. A pity there wasn't someone like her at Sandy Hook.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
I won't deny that arming everyone could decrease crime (I'm a proponent of giving all sane and mature individuals on a plane a machette instead of attempting to ban all weapon-capable objects from planes), but it wouldn't necessarily. And it certainly would increase accidents.
Some people just have no business owning a weapon. But it's impossible to deny weapons in general, too easy to make one.
Best you can do is limit the efficiency and effectiveness of easily obtainable weapons. And firearms are the most efficient and effective weapons on the planet. So effective and efficient that even a toddler can pull a trigger and injure or kill someone.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
The School Resource Officer... yeah.. their armed, what shouldn't they be?
I'm all for putting an armed officer in every single school in America. Some of them, two or three.
The question was: "for average citizens to be armed or unarmed", which is really up to the individual. Again, I'd love to see no guns, but that ain't going to happen, not during my lifetime. You also aren't an average citizen
If I had my choice, let people have X number of guns. If they hunt, X number of guns. If they collect, Y number of guns (which can't fire shots), if they are protecting their house or personage, Z number of guns. Of course none of this matters for gun dealers.
Stop people from having 150 drums or more than 7 shots in a clip. Stop people from stock piling tons of ammo. Why are you always thinking Armageddon is tomorrow?
Well we can agree on that much, either have an officer or certain members of the staff allowed to carry. Several schools here in Ohio are allowing any staff members with concealed carry permits to carry. I think that should be a decision made by the local school board.
I remain perplexed as to exactly how you think such measures would prevent even a single crime. Whether you have two guns or a thousand is irrelevant, you can only fire at most two at a time and doing that probably saves more lives than it kills because what looks cool in movies makes for really inaccurate shooting. I have tried the two pistol thing and consider myself to be an above average marksman with either hand, two pistols don't work so well. Whether a person has two guns or a thousand does it make a difference?
And what is with the hard on against magazines? I am completely mystified how you believe that will prevent a single murder.
Define "tons" of ammo. When you have a dozen guns even a couple hundred rounds for each gun you have over 2000 rounds. Sounds like a lot, but really you need to stop to buy more ammo the next time you take any of your guns to the range. The required classes to get a concealed carry permit in Ohio usually require 400 rounds, any high quality class will approach 1000 and I consider those classes to be very minimal. Any class that will adequately give you training will require 1500-2000 rounds- for just the one gun. IMO if you are carrying a handgun in public you have a responsibility to go through several thousand rounds a year. An average practice session should be 200-300 rounds and if you are only doing that once a month I would consider that minimal (I try to get out with my carry gun at least once a week in practice I probably average three times a month). I am more concerned about the people who buy a hundred rounds that sit in their closet for ten years than the guy who purchases thousands every year and probably spends a day reloading a few thousand rounds on a regular basis.
2000 rounds of ammunition is a lot if you are shooting unarmed innocents, if you are dedicated to being familiar with a firearm so you can use it safely and accurately in a high pressure situation it is not a lot at all. I am far more concerned about the number of people who own guns and don't go to the range regularly. I am far more concerned about the number of those people who are police officers that carry their guns daily but only fire a couple hundred rounds a year at stationary paper targets to qualify. That is how accidents happen and why innocents become collateral damage in police shootings. I am more concerned about the hunter who doesn't fire a shot all year long and then walks out into the woods where other people are around in an uncontrolled environment and starts shooting. Every gun owner should either go through several thousand rounds a year or they should leave their gun in the safe and never take it out. And it only makes economic sense to bite the bullet and buy your ammo 1000+ rounds at a time, it is much cheaper that way.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
Here is my solution to your issues.
That rifle is no match against the defense of a GUN FREE ZONE™