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Why are we so bothered about it?
A load of people I've never met have been murdered by someone else I never met. Happens every day in crapholes all over the world but because it's the usa people actually "care" about it.
Shrugs shoulders, moves on.
Not sure they can revoke an amendment but I'm sure they could change the specification of the arms they are allowed to bear and enhance the pre-checks made before ownership is permitted.
Without really upsetting the population, it would be impossible to mop up the lake of weapons that have been manufactured and sold in the last two hundred years.
But let's be honest. The gun is just a vehicle for delivering somebody's hatred and psychosis.
Why are we so bothered about it?
My thoughts exactly. The majority of US people love guns and wan t people to be able to have access to them. They are well aware of this downside but they think it is worth it. Let them get on with it.
But let’s be honest. The gun is just a vehicle for delivering somebody’s hatred and psychosis.
Yes but bullets do a lot more damage than thoughts. I'm trying to recall the last time multiple people died of a serious verbal assault
Why are we so bothered about it?
Partly because we actually share a lot of history with the US, partly because the US seems to insist on telling everyone how amazing it is and how it's the best place to be in the world.
The majority of US people love guns
The majority of "US people" don't own one.
The majority of US people love guns and wan t people to be able to have access to them.
Incorrect
The majority want stricter controls
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/28/gun-control-polling-parkland-430099
http://time.com/5167216/americans-gun-control-support-poll-2018/
Not sure they can revoke an amendment
What does the word 'amendment' mean?
When I lived there, my Father had a gun.
I found it.
I played Cowboys and Indians with it..
Aged 7
They don't need to revoke it, just implement it as the founding fathers actually intended....
Not sure they can revoke an amendment
thats why they still have prohibition of alcohol in the US 🙂
You can revoke and Amendment with and Amendment. The 21st Amendment revokes the 18th Amendment.
derek_starship
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Not sure they can revoke an amendment......
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They repealed the 18th amendment.
But let’s be honest. The gun is just a vehicle for delivering somebody’s hatred and psychosis.
Yes but bullets do a lot more damage than thoughts. I’m trying to recall the last time multiple people died of a serious verbal assault
So do knives as evidenced by the rising number of tragic deaths and serious injuries in this country.
Well the current president thinks he can revoke the citizenship by birth one without any hassle so he could sort this out tomorrow.
I mean it's not as if a lot of people make a lot of money from death in the US....
So do knives as evidenced by the rising number of tragic deaths and serious injuries in this country.
The majority of knife crime seems to be gang related, tragic yes but not the same as most mass shootings in the US. Sure there's been multiple random stabbing events but I'm pretty sure they'd have been even worse if guns had been more readily available here.
I can't see the 2nd amendment ever changing, US politics is just too ****ed up for it to get changed (even though the majority seem to support change). Looks like it's largely being left to individual states to introduce stricter controls but I can't see it having much effect any time soon.
That Sam Harris article is such a load of bollocks, are there women in the street getting raped at knifepoint in front of a dozen witnesses in the UK? No.
Gun control is about public health. Not about individual right to self defence. I don't care if it allows Sam Harris to defend his family more easily if that right kills a wider section of society.
The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense—and “diffusion of responsibility” has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time
My brother once overpowered 5 rugby players, causing two of them to need facial reconstructive surgery. I assume then that he his harder than a Seal Team 6 member.
Raybanwomble beat me to it. That Sam Harris piece far from being a “a warm shower of reason” is a cold shower of piss.
Some of my family own guns (concealed licence and carry), vote republican, and live in Texas. They’re lovely people. They’re also ****ing misinformed.
The reality is that even in the US you are more likely to be harmed by someone you know, someone in your family. Family owned weapons in the states are more likely to be used offensively then defensively.
Why are we so bothered about it?
A load of people I’ve never met have been murdered by someone else I never met.
Why am I bothered about it? Because I have a heart, and I care that innocent people are being killed there and all over the world even if I haven't met them.
But in the case of the US, my wife is American, as is (over) half my extended family, and they are all kind, compassionate and intelligent people. Your suggestion that all Americans are gun toting idiots is extremely ignorant, and your follow-up that even gun toting fools deserve to be shot is disgraceful.
The majority of knife crime seems to be gang related, tragic yes but not the same as most mass shootings in the US. Sure there’s been multiple random stabbing events but I’m pretty sure they’d have been even worse if guns had been more readily available here.
Absolutely agree. Out of interest does anybody have access (or link to) US gun death statistics that show a breakdown along the lines of domestic, gang related, mass shooting etc?
A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time
What a dick. Even with a gun, regardless of who you are, you’d be knackered at close quarters. It’s sad, but I can’t see anything changing with their gun laws.
That Sam Harris article is such a load of bollocks
All written before Who Is America... but sounding much like an influence on Baron Cohen.
Guns aren't bad because knives can be bad. Okey doke.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
Absolutely agree. Out of interest does anybody have access (or link to) US gun death statistics that show a breakdown along the lines of domestic, gang related, mass shooting etc?
Shall we start with toddlers or suicide?
. It’s sad, but I can’t see anything changing with their gun laws.
The kids who turned 18 this year and started voting don't know a life without mass school shootings, they have done drills since they started school on this. They will be the change
My brother once overpowered 5 rugby players, causing two of them to need facial reconstructive surgery. I assume then that he his harder than a Seal Team 6 member.
Cool story Bro!
are there women in the street getting raped at knifepoint in front of a dozen witnesses in the UK? No
You really havent read it have you?
Harris is a gun owner but advocates significantly greater control on gun ownership than say.. Obama did. He makes a number of good points. You cant disinvent them.
I was just about to post on this i found out as its the lead story on the BBC website. However I'm sat having breakfast in hotel in Washington. I'm surrounded by Tv's showing NBC, FOX, CNN and some local channels. Only one has mentioned it in the past 30 minutes. We've had pet adoption, holidays obviously mid term results. This is so run of the mill it barely makes the news here
They could eat themselves to death instead I suppose. Here's hoping.
I'm afraid it's a nonchalant shrug from me. Even this week too high a fraction of the population voted pro Trump for me to attempt to understand them as a society. Kind of hope they rot and fester in their own juices long enough to become an irrelevant country. Even with their propensity to lock each other up, shoot each other or gorge themselves to death it's still going to take a while to get them down to manageable numbers.
Your brother over powered 5 Rugby Players each with a knife? He could well be "harder" than a Seal Team 6 member. I don't think Sam is suggesting we employ your brother to look after the world though.
As a former soldier, I know what Sam is referring to. He is saying you cannot reasonably expect to survive a determined knife attack against multiple armed assailants when you are unarmed. Unless of course you're either John Rambo or Chuck Norris.
As a soldier, one of the rules that lets you open fire is when you feel there is no other way to protect yourself or those it is your duty to protect from the danger of being killed or seriously injured (from the Rules of Engagement Card). If I was ever in the position where I saw someone with a knife threaten me or my troops, and I was armed with both a knife and a gun, I know I wouldn't drop the gun and ask for a knife fight.
What Sam is saying is exactly the same. He feels it is his duty to protect his family. He knows that the emergency services are unlikely to be able to respond in time to an armed intruder, his best course of action as he see's it is to use a gun.
His point about someone being raped at knifepoint isn't very well made. But he is talking about fight or flight, we see this regularly in the world around us. Most people would like to think that if we were in the position where we saw an event like this occur that we would intervene, but would we? Some will, some won't. Most likely there will be at least a delay while the scene in front of us is translated internally, this delay could all be required for an atrocity to happen. We've seen the social experiment where women have been getting abuse from a large male and the majority of passers by do not intervene. If the passer by was armed and the abuse on the lady had magnified to violence there could well be a different outcome.
Sam lives in the States where guns are already prevalent. Intruders are likely to be armed with a knife or a gun. Even if not, they are likely to be younger, stronger etc, so likely to win in any fight scenario. Banning weapons over in the states now isn't going to help as the people likely to use their weapons in a negative manner wouldn't turn their unregistered guns in at the local police station.
@W00dster thats what I took from the article. Its fine for the usual "dog whistle" types to jump in but the US is a basket case in terms of guns (more guns than people) it needs a considered and pragmatic approach to policy. That doesnt always go down well on here.
Yes but bullets do a lot more damage than thoughts. I’m trying to recall the last time multiple people died of a serious verbal assault
You are Mr Stevens, Head of Catering and I claim my £5
My brother once overpowered 5 rugby players, causing two of them to need facial reconstructive surgery.
Is this them?
Even this week too high a fraction of the population voted pro Trump for me to attempt to understand them as a society.
What the hell is wrong with you? They didn't ALL vote Trump? Yet you wish ruin on them all despite that? Do you think you deserve some dreadful fate because you have a Tory government?
That is the argument of an absolute imbecile. I cannot criticise this level of brainlessness enough. Have a word with yourself. And then find someone to teach you what it means to be human.
How actually hard is a Seal Team 6's member?
Knives: my son used to be in counter terrorism in Australia and they did lots of training for up close and personal adversaries.
If I recall it right their attitude was if a person has a knife and gets closer to you than 6 metres* then it was a double tap job, and no hesitation.
They were taught your survival chances were low if a determined knife wielder got closer (as happened to that poor PC in Westminster).
* I may have the distance wrong, but it was around that.
What the hell is wrong with you? They didn’t ALL vote Trump? Yet you wish ruin on them all despite that? Do you think you deserve some dreadful fate because you have a Tory government?
I used the trump support as an example of a reason why I don't understand, or I guess respect, them as a society. Plenty of other reasons too - gun laws and attitude towards them being one of them.
Am I being serious about wishing them all a shitty death? Well of course not, anyone with an ounce of common sense will have read it as that. I would however contend the world collectively would be a better place if the USA was viewed as a quirky backwater both economically and culturally to be largely ignored.
Even this week too high a fraction of the population voted pro Trump for me to attempt to understand them as a society.
I suspect that if he was the leader of the tories in the UK, he'd get similar fractions of the population voting for him.
Your brother over powered 5 Rugby Players each with a knife? He could well be “harder” than a Seal Team 6 member. I don’t think Sam is suggesting we employ your brother to look after the world though.
As a former soldier, I know what Sam is referring to. He is saying you cannot reasonably expect to survive a determined knife attack against multiple armed assailants when you are unarmed. Unless of course you’re either John Rambo or Chuck Norris.
I didn't think we was talking about knife wielding assailants - either way, even with a gun, you'd be doing well to fend off multiple assailants armed with guns unless you were fighting from a highly defended position yes? Family rooms with their plasterboard walls and wood doors aren't going to be doing you any favours. That Sam thinks the world is a safer place because now, knife wielding gangs can't storm your house at night but heavily armed Trump voting militia armed with assault weapons, flashbangs, night vision and likely the training in how to use them and assault a house - can - is worrying.
Sam lives in the States where guns are already prevalent. Intruders are likely to be armed with a knife or a gun. Even if not, they are likely to be younger, stronger etc, so likely to win in any fight scenario. Banning weapons over in the states now isn’t going to help as the people likely to use their weapons in a negative manner wouldn’t turn their unregistered guns in at the local police station.
This is a sensible point - but not one that Sam made. Sam was saying that in a world without guns, eg generally the UK, the men there men can't defend themselves against brutes because they don't have guns and that "the real (and in Sams opinion, noble) use of gunpowder is to make all men tall." –Thomas Carlyle . Not the case, is it? We're doing just fine without easy access to them, thanks Sam the big fat scaredy cat who clearly wets the bed at night thinking about big men throwing punches.
Maybe there would be less firearms in the hands of criminals in the US, if they treated the distribution of firearms like they do in their war on drugs. But apparently, depending on who you talk to, that war works for drugs - but definitely won't work for firearms.
That Sam thinks the world is a safer place because now, knife wielding gangs can’t storm your house at night but heavily armed Trump voting militia armed with assault weapons, flashbangs, night vision and likely the training in how to use them and assault a house -can – is worrying.
Good straw man bro. Dont let the fact that the article was written in 2013 stop you 🙂
Sam was saying that in a world without guns, eg generally the UK, the men there men can’t defend themselves against brutes because they don’t have guns and that “the real (and in Sams opinion, noble) use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.” –Thomas Carlyle . Not the case, is it? We’re doing just fine without easy access to them.
And again. I think with the whole "6 rugby players" thing you probably dont have a lot of credibility.
I don't really care surfer, but it ended up in a lot of trouble for him...
Sam is wrong on so many levels.
Sam is wrong on so many levels.
Fine but challenge on what he has said, not what he hasnt
Fine but challenge on what he has said, not what he hasnt
Errr
Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn’t any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn’t understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want.
So has the biggest, heaviest bastard in your local pub gone round to your house and raped your wife in front of you yet, surfer? Because you didn't have a gun? No, probably not.
Hey Rayban, I guess its interpretation. I'd agree with what your saying about the world without guns with having read it again. My point wasn't made in relation to that specifically. Its as an explanation as to why he isn't supporting the outright banning of guns. He admits he stands on both stands of the debate, I can see his point entirely.
But in terms of the article, the world without guns doesn't add anything apart from confusion, it is too unlikely a scenario. But in a violent world I can see what he is implying. There are certain parts of the world where he is entirely correct, but that is straying way of topic.
Of course woodster - but we could have a sensible and informed discussion about that, something that Harris (who apparently values logic and reason) cannot, it would seem.
And I agree, the actual logistics and practicality of gun control in America is open to reasoned debate.
But in terms of the article, the world without guns doesn’t add anything apart from confusion, it is too unlikely a scenario.
If only there were places around the world who had serious controls on guns and we could observe the results.
. But in a violent world I can see what he is implying.
In a violent world help your law enforcement to sort out the problems.
I would admit that there is a flipside to the coin Mike, guns serve a place in countries that are too corrupt for effective law enforcement to take place.
The argument in America is that it is simply down to geography, it takes law enforcement too long to reach many places, which is why they still have a frontier mentality. This is an argument that I am on the fence about.
depressingly right wint twitter idiots & 'journalists' were spreading news that the shooter was middle-eatsern , some even tweeting a fake arab name
Hes now been identified as a white military vet with possible PTSD & theyre saying its a cover up....
The argument in America is that it simply down to geography, it takes law enforcement too long to reach many places. This is an argument that I am on the fence about.
Yeah let's see the stats on that because it's mostly bs... If only there were countries with similar geography ...
Then you have to weigh up the cost, such as the toddlers who have killed with guns.
The argument in America is that it is simply down to geography, it takes law enforcement too long to reach many places, which is why they still have a frontier mentality. This is an argument that I am on the fence about.
The vast majority of shootings are in built up areas.
Yeah let’s see the stats on that because it’s mostly bs… If only there were countries with similar geography …
Then you have to weigh up the cost, such as the toddlers who have killed with guns.
Yeah.
For me, whilst I would prefer to carry a gun in certain parts of Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines (if I was a journalist) etc - but it's usually a bandaid for corruption and socioeconomic mismanagement.
The vast majority of shootings are in built up areas.
And the vast majority of them are over before someone with a concealed carry permit can respond - if they aren't killed in the confusion of the first few seconds of the attack. They are in the vast majority of cases, ended by law enforcement. But what I was talking about was the culture.
How actually hard is a Seal Team 6’s member?
Twice as hard as a Seal Team 3 member, but not even half as tough as one of those from Seal Team 15
And the vast majority of them are over before someone with a concealed carry permit can respond
Which is actually something Harris stated in the piece that you rubbished!
Thank god for experts. I am so waiting for the STW Protection Squad movie to be released.
Twice as hard as a Seal Team 3 member, but not even half as tough as one of those from Seal Team 15
Which appear to a about a qtr as hard as Raybanwombles brother.
We’ve seen the social experiment where women have been getting abuse from a large male and the majority of passers by do not intervene.
If it's the one i recall precisely none intervened when it was a man being abused (including physically), several (though low %) did intervene on behalf of the woman.
These days more people would take out their phones and video it than intervene though, guns or no.
Ultimately guns don't kill people, the US has a little less than double the gun ownership in terms of weapons per capita of Switzerland, 89 to 46%, about 4x the firearm related homicide 3.2 to 0.8 per 100k [edit: population for clarity] yet that's a lower % of actual murders 67.5% in the usa vs 72.2%. (2014 figures)
Norway has a relatively high ownership (32%) high firearm related murder rate @ 2 per 100k population but only a tiny % rate 8.1% of all murders are murders with firearms.
Iceland has 30% ownership but 0 gun related murders.
The UK has tiny ownership but a higher % of firearm related murders.
The problem is the number of murders in the USA not gun ownership. You won't fix the murder rate by reducing gun ownership.
Iirc (can't find numbers) Switzerland has the highest gun ownership in terms of % population vs USA which is actually quite a low% as most gun owners have multiple weapons
The problem is the number of murders in the USA not gun ownership. You won’t fix the murder rate by reducing gun ownership.
Your stats miss some really key points on things like storage and carrying of the weapons along with the types available for purchase. It's not apples and apples there.
Ultimately guns don’t kill people, the US has a little less than double the gun ownership in terms of weapons per capita of Switzerland, 89 to 46%, about 4x the firearm related homicide 3.2 to 0.8 per 100k yet that’s a lower % of actual murders 67.5% in the usa vs 72.2%. (2014 figures)
Norway has a relatively high ownership (32%) high firearm related murder rate @ 2 per 100k population but only a tiny % rate 8.1% of all murders are murders with firearms.
Iceland has 30% ownership but 0 gun related murders.
The UK has tiny ownership but a higher % of firearm related murders.
The problem is the number of murders in the USA not gun ownership. You won’t fix the murder rate by reducing gun ownership.
This is some sort of logical fallacy, I'm just not sure which one. A reduction is absolute gun ownership will reduce the amount of firearm related deaths, not equally across cultures - but it will. The murder rate would also likely go down, but that would of course be offset somewhat by murders with weapons that are harder to use.
Switzerland is a bad example, a lot of guns, not a lot of ammo - as the Swiss have to store their national service rifles in their homes.
My brother once overpowered 5 rugby players, causing two of them to need facial reconstructive surgery. I assume then that he his harder than a Seal Team 6 member.
Is he a Chef?
He is saying you cannot reasonably expect to survive a determined knife attack against multiple armed assailants when you are unarmed.
You cannot reasonably expect to survive it if you are carrying a handgun either. Not unless they nicely line up 40 metres or so away and calmly walk towards you one at a time.
You might possibly manage it if you are that seal team 6 member fully armed and armoured for a close quarters fight but joe bloggs firing a few rounds every couple of weeks or months isnt going to do to well.
His reference to the prison guards is interesting. In the US they may be armed when they are safely separated from inmates but wouldnt when walking around the cells since chances of them being overpowered would be a tad too high at which point things would get interesting.
He feels it is his duty to protect his family
Problem with this is does it make them safer? What is the risk of being attacked at home vs a mishap with a firearm. Bearing in mind if it is going to be useful for self defence it is going to have to be loaded and easily accessible.
A reduction is absolute gun ownership will reduce the amount of firearm related deaths, not equally across cultures – but it will.
You'd have to have a very very big reduction, e.g. what we saw in the uk post hungerford or dunblane.
So the firearms (ammendment) act which banned handgun ownership post dunblane in the UK saw reductions of firearm related homicides reduced from 80 ish per year in the early 90s to 25 ish now. That's a complete ban, including surrendering of most privately owned weapons. (I'm not sure how many of that 80 would have been related to "the troubles" given 94 is pre good Friday agreement, so those figures may be representative, they may not).
80 is already low 0.14 per 100k pop in 1990.
I can't readily find numbers for the impact of the firearms act pre/post hungerford but I'd *guess* the rate of murder with firearms in '65 in the UK was still lower than in the USA then or now.
The problem is cultural, it's not ownership.
Your stats miss some really key points on things like storage and carrying of the weapons
which is a culture thing
along with the types available for purchase.
Austria has gun laws which make the USA's look positively draconian (ok harsh at least), people don't go round shooting each other for the same reason they tend not to go round killing each other. Ownership isn't the problem, it's attitudes which say "a gun is good for defence" as opposed to "target shooting is great" and so on. Which leads back to your point about carrying etc.
[Edit:
Switzerland is a bad example, a lot of guns, not a lot of ammo – as the Swiss have to store their national service rifles in their homes
And deliberately chosen to show low ownership is not equal to low crime, for which is actually a very good example. It's complicated, it's about people more than it's about guns.
Not googled the numbers but i believe for the same reason swizerland has one of the highest rates of firearm related suicide in the world, could very easily be wrong on that)]
Is he a Chef?
No Drac.
The kids who turned 18 this year and started voting don’t know a life without mass school shootings, they have done drills since they started school on this. They will be the change
Thanks for the link mike and I genuinely hope the above turns out to be true. It’ll be a time for celebration if the next generation in the US manage to make lasting changes to policy and the current attitude towards firearms.
If you want to keep it simple though over the last 12 months a reasonable amount of the people carrying out these mass shooting have had mental health issues of some sort. A simple background check would have prevented them obtaining the guns or had them removed.
In other cases a ban on large capacity magazines would have saved lives. These are laws many states have now.
At some point a very badly written ammendment about arming a malitia will be tested against the right to live.
It’s complicated, it’s about people more than it’s about guns.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/chart-of-day-the-link-between-gun-ownership-and-gun-deaths/
So what you're saying, is that it's actually gun culture across the states and not ownership rates that accounts for that fairly strong correlation coefficient?
I'm in the US at the moment. The depressing thing here is that this is just normal, another everyday occurrence. It's on the news, yes, but in the same way as 'bus hits low bridge'might be, it just "is".
It's normal. They're not even talking about it, it's just background noise. It's vile.
Worth noting, as per, that I own guns, I shoot, I'm pro gun ownership. But not like this, not the hideous gun culture of the US where mass killings are normal. My guns are for killing small fluffy animals (before eating them, for the most part!). I'd never think of having one in my car, or using one for self defence.
US gun culture disgusts me, as does the sad fact of waking up to yet another of these stories.
Thankfully, I'm leaving today, home via a brief stop in YYZ (one for the Rush fans!)
So along with Culture, is it also poverty related? For me there's also a humanisation element as well. But that's hard to explain, in my travels I've been to some places that weren't very nice. Collapsed governments, what should be rich prosperous countries run by corrupt incredibly wealthy individuals. Then dire poverty on the streets.
Overly simplified, but does this poverty versus immense wealth lead to a dehumanisation element. So taking someone else's life is an easy thing to do.
Whereas in our culture, for the majority of people killing someone is a complete abstract thought.
I'm a middle class, white English man. I live in a semi rural environment in the UK and have a holiday home out in Florida. The security guards on the estate my holiday home is on all carry hand guns, majority of neighbours all have hand guns.
As mentioned earlier, as an ex soldier, I've fired weapons. The power and destruction they can cause is horrible. I personally find it confusing as to why people would carry them. May seem strange to say but I never actually liked firing them.
^^^ *like*
See, we're having a more sensible and enlightened debate than Sam Harris?
Can anyone care to explain to me why you lot aren't writing internationally acclaimed books, but somehow Sam Harris is?
It genuinely irritates me.
I've just read that Harris article. It's a mishmash of straw man arguments and wooly logic, isn't it.
On the one hand, many gun-rights advocates reject even the most sensible restrictions on the sale of weapons to the public. On the other, proponents of stricter gun laws often seem unable to understand why a good person would ever want ready access to a loaded firearm.
Aside from the notion that this isn't really the extreme position, the extreme position would be "ban all guns,"
I don't think anyone doesn't understand why a "good" person would want access to a gun. The question is whether they should. Plenty of people want all manner of ill-conceived things, just look at brexit.
Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him.
When on earth is this a likely scenario, ever? Who breaks into someone's home just to give the owner a kicking? If this is a real concern for you then the real problem isn't weaponry, is it.
The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training.
The fantasies of many Rambo wannabes aside, to go armed against a person with a gun is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training.
And the only reliable way for one person to stop a man with a knife is to shoot him.
How does one reliably stop a man with a gun? Grenade launcher?
The liberal commentariat seems to have no awareness of what “well-trained” signifies.
The hit rate of armed law enforcement officers is 18% and I'd imagine that they're reasonably well trained. But sure, Dwayne from Albama is bloody Hawkeye because he goes to a gun club once every couple of months. Got me there, Sam.
The fact that bystanders do occasionally get shot, even by police officers, does not prove that putting guns in the hands of good people would be a bad idea.
I'd be curious to hear what would. "Innocent people getting shot, even by police officers" is a pretty ****ing compelling argument that it might just possibly not be a good thing, n'est-ce pas?
But when I contemplate atrocities of this kind, I do not think of “gun control”—because it seems extraordinarily unlikely that a deranged and/or evil person will ever find it difficult to acquire a firearm in the United States.
... umm, because there's lax gun control? Dime Bar?
I also think of how differently things might have gone if the shooter, who seems to have shown signs of mental illness for years, had been more intrusively engaged by society prior to the attack.
I also think of how differently things might have gone if the shooter, who seems to have shown signs of mental illness for years, had been barred from buying a gun because he'd been showing signs of mental illness for years.
And then we suddenly get a hard left-turn for a common sense conclusion. He closes by arguing for preventing armed nutters entering schools, that an assault rifle ban would be a smokescreen, and that the fact you can just go buy a gun without background checks is madness. It's difficult to see what the previous three-quarters of the article going "yeah, but guns" was in aid of, unless it's all a clever subterfuge to reel in the NRA lot just to bait and switch them at the end.
I think better (and easier access to) proper mental health care would go a long way in helping too.
Yes, at least one mod agrees with me. WHOOOO!
On a serious note Cougar, I don't even think we need to write all that - that graph in the article I posted is the smoking gun needed. Unfortunately, I'm clearly an idiot and can't work out how to get picture URLs using Microsoft Edge.
That's not to say that poverty and culture don't play a part - and it really heartens me to see someone mentioning poverty and dehumanisation.
and a lot of that is summed up perfectly here, so good he made a film about a real shoot out and how long it takes to kill them all.....
my son used to be in counter terrorism in Australia and they did lots of training for up close and personal adversaries.
If I recall it right their attitude was if a person has a knife and gets closer to you than 6 metres* then it was a double tap job, and no hesitation.
* I may have the distance wrong, but it was around that.
conversely, I've been in cold places, and I've done a bit of training for up close and personal polar bears. We were told that if you've not managed to scare it off, it's still coming at you, and you're definitely going to have to kill it, wait til it's 6 feet away before you fire.
We met a French group while we were out, and they asked us if we'd been given the same instructions. They said they'd planned on "translating" that to 6 metres. Fair enough, I thought!
That might be because given your average geologist or conservationist, most would panic and shoot one of the local seabirds out the sky instead of the charging polar bear. 😛 If you miss the first shot, by the time you've cycled the bolt - the polar bear will probably be swinging you around by your head.
Yes, at least one mod agrees with me. WHOOOO!
I should clarify, I'm not necessarily a rabid anti-gun advocate. Rather, I'm an anti-bullshit-argument activist. (-:
If I recall it right their attitude was if a person has a knife and gets closer to you than 6 metres* then it was a double tap job, and no hesitation.
From six metres away I reckon I'd rather be the one with the knife than the one with the gun. Someone with the element of surprise could surely close 6m and be in someone's jugular faster than the other could unholster a pistol and get it into a firing position?
I should clarify, I’m not necessarily a rabid anti-gun advocate. Rather, I’m an anti-bullshit-argument activist. (-:
Glad to hear it.
It does actually annoy me, the amount of exposure Sam Harris gets when there are loads of more thoughtful and erudite people than him on here.
See the point Ben Wheatly makes and Cougar above, trained professionals struggle to hit the side of the bus they were aiming for when the pressure is on.
As I learned playing Red Dead this week if you wait until the bear is close enough you find it hard to miss just make sure it doesn't fall on you.
As I learned playing Red Dead this week
Well, I'm glad someone else made a daft comment. 😛
Another one was an American comedian who suggested there was only one criteria needed to decide who should be able to have a gun.
Do you want a gun?
Yes! -No Gun
No - you can have one
The US, just like the UK is a dysfunctional State.
In differing ways and for differing reasons, to a degree, but with similar results.
We just have a far lower amount of mass murder weapons available fortunately.
I see neither country improving anytime soon.
P.S. Apparently this is the 307th mass shooting this year in America. So it's not going to change.