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Aw… You sound disappointed, MagsJ. It would be nice to have a beverage (sounds good). However, selfish sod that I am, the prospect of travelling 120-140 miles to do so holds little appeal. Should it happen that you are ever down this way, I would be more than happy to have any number of beverages! :slight_smile:

Statistically, 160,000 humans on Earth die every day.
These mass killings make less than 0.01 of the deaths.

Fact is, people are a bunch of inherent cowards looking out for #1 - themselves. When someone dies they freak out and instantly assume it will be them. If you want to understand gun-control, follow the path of cowardice.

Since their line of thinking is inherently self-centered and short-term focused, they have no sympathy for people who live in areas with high crime, no sympathy for oppressed people, no sympathy for people who fear tyranny, and no sympathy for people who actually need guns.

Jakob: Several witnesses claim seeing multiple shooters (this can also be seen on video),

Perhaps show it?

Jakob: it is absolutely ludicrous to believe that a poor retired accountant with a gambling problem living in a retirement home with no experience handling weapons

A poor retired accountant?

youtu.be/SPZFN6VFFow

I wouldn’t normally bother. However, having began the thread…

Where is ‘this way’? :confused:

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A brief glimpse. Now you know. :slight_smile:

Canterbury?

Cambridge?

Winchester?

Chelmsford?

Banbury?

:-k

I’m not very well-travelled as far as the UK is concerned.

“I’m not very well-travelled as far as the UK is concerned.”

Me neither. You have NC1 as a starting point. (Your location as given)

D: “Down this way…” Ruling out Banbury, Chelmsford, Cambridge.

Clue: He dwells in the heart of the city.

Guns cost too much. They are all about money, regardless of who ever they harm or help.

How much would I need to pay to purchase a gun? I am in the UK. I have tried googling gun prices in the USA - “this site cannot be reached”. Is there a similar gun culture in Canada?

…nice marinas :wink:

Is it a famous writer that dwells in the heart of the city?

Yes… that’s a trek I agree, but if I’m ever down that way, I’m heading straight to the marina for drinks… and maybe visit you. :-k

:laughing:

Lucky you… what a beautiful place to live. Has it always been home?

Yes, it has always been home, Magsj. Expensive place to live! You get what you pay for! :slight_smile:

Pro gun crazies really need to think through realistic scenarios.

Someone breaks into your house, whether to steal from you or harm you, are you ready with your gun? Consider a few things:

  1. This doesn’t happen often, to most people it never will, so you won’t expect it.
  2. People are unlikely to break into your house at a time when you’re likely to expect it, even if you’re trying. You will probably be busy or relaxing if you’re even awake - it will much more likely be in the middle of the night when you’re asleep.
  3. If you keep your gun(s) around ready to use, people are far far more likely to use guns on themselves than against others, or to shoot others by accident - especially kids. And an intruder could just as easily find it first.
  4. If you keep your gun(s) safe they’re even less accessible if you’re ever attacked. You won’t have time to unlock them and load them, and you’ll likely be full of adrenaline, shaking and not thinking straight.
  5. Even if you’re ready with your gun, if you’re not trained to army standards you will very likely miss, and you will very likely not be able to bring yourself to hurt or even kill another human being. This even happened to most soldiers in the World Wars.

There are better ways to protect your home that stop people getting in in the first place. Most crime is opportunistic, and if you don’t give the opportunity in the first place then you wouldn’t need the gun.

In public places like schools and cinemas, a guy comes in and starts shooting, already the damage is done. A hero with a gun, assuming he has a clear shot and has a good aim (and he will be priority one for the attacker obviously) will stop it continuing once most of the damage is done at best. Again, adrenaline, shock, disorientation, guns can be very very loud. The attacker will usually shoot themselves at this point or soon after anyway, if they realise their spree is coming to an end, they’ve usually planned to anyway. It would be better if he didn’t have access to a gun in the first place, another weapon would have done much less and is much easier to counter attack. Who trusts a guy who brings a gun around with him everywhere anyway? Or even a knife? If it was common knowledge that most people did this, how scared would you be to even go outside? Even if there were an armed security guard, even they’re not going to be paid or trained like someone in the army, they’ll be there to resolve the odd minor act of violence or other disturbance but their incentive and ability to take down someone who out-guns them will be minimal.

Countries that banned guns see much less gun violence, fact. Other weapons will still be used instead but they don’t kill and injure nearly as many people. When these weapons are illegal they cost much much more because of the risk in selling them, meaning if you had the money you’re probably not likely to want one, and if you’re mentally unstable enough it’s probably apparent and the vendor probably won’t trust you enough to sell you any.

Onto government “turning against its people”.

a) if a government turns against its people, they are just old men in suits - they would need to convince the very people they’re turning against, the ones who happen to be in the armed forces, to do their dirty work. It’s not like in films and video games where the government has hordes of nameless, faceless minions.
b) these days their firepower is going to far outweigh what you are likely to have at home if anything, and with drones etc they won’t even have to turn up or involve the army and they’ll be far more lethal and with the reactions and accuracy of their technology you stand zero chance. What good are your guns then?

THINK IT THROUGH. Apply some realism to your rationale and you’ll find pro-gun arguments make literally no sense.

About the video, it’s not that good of one. At that level of sophistication you’d be better off sharing the comedian Jim Jefferies’ bit on gun control - he says everything I’ve just said, but it’s funnier if you like his sort of humour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah! All very interesting, Silhouette, but what’s any of the above got to do with where I live? :slight_smile:

Seriously, thanks for your very considered post. I find it difficult to challenge anything you say (perhaps question your assertion that all gun owners are crazies… 98% tops). I am sure one or two will still seek to justify gun ownership.

Thanks, I watched the video. Very funny, and as you acknowledge, pretty much what you posted. Difficult to argue with him!

One further thought, it occurred to me, should the government wish to turn on ‘the people’, they need only taint the water supply. No real need for mass destruction by way of drones or F15’s or 16’s or 17’s, or tanks! :slight_smile: Either way, the point is made, ‘your’ guns would be ineffective against such an ‘enemy’.

Let’s make everyone safe by making everyone powerless.

No guns for you, my friend, you’re dumb you’re gonna shoot yourself in the leg.

I’m afraid I don’t know where you live so I can’t answer your question specifically, but I can generally say that my arguments (or Jim’s, really) apply to everyone wherever they live.

And yes, good point that government, or any party that turned malicious just needs to taint the water supply - probably cheaper and easier than some army porn fantasy straight out of a film that people are probably imagining when they think they’re protecting themselves from government with guns. Like Jim said, it used to make sense when the 2nd Amendment was initially amended.

I’m also sure huge amounts of people would still seek to justify gun ownership out of irrationality, regardless of the rationality that I laid out. Like Jim said, some people just like guns, and like your video said, it’s just fear e.g. the following:

The problem is that making everyone powerful makes everyone even less safe. If safety is the aim, then ensuring powerlessness is rationally the optimal way to achieve it. Sorry.

If safety isn’t the aim, as I have heard such people as the late Christopher Hitchens speculate about Americans, then sure - let them carry on as they are. Let them continue to be under massively higher risk of themselves, people they know and people they don’t know getting shot by crazies on purpose, shooting themselves on purpose and getting shot by accident by either others or themselves. It’s a valid lifestyle, but you can’t have one intermingled with the other. Maybe all the adrenaline junkies can move to America and everyone else, “if they don’t like it, they can geeeet out” - just as those wise southern hicks supposedly say. I’ll continue to find the country an utterly ridiculous place to never visit again.

Maybe we should ban intelligence too. If everyone is dumb then noone can posit socially unacceptable goals and figure out a way to attain them.

The thing is that what makes you safe within one kind of environment makes you unsafe within another. Being docile can make you safe within moden environments but it makes you terribly unsafe outside of them.

It’s not as black and white as “either safe or not” and “always unsafe so no point in safe”.
The point of different societies is that they get to choose what kind of safe they want, and what kind of unsafe they want to leave more open as a result.

As it happens, safety from violence at the cost of less safety from intelligence caused us to rise from savages to a much more civilised and technologically advanced species, who would kick the shit out of our former iterations if some hypothetical time-war were to occur. Much of the rest of the world is further down that path than countries like America, which tries to do both and only scrapes by because of its size making it statistically likely enough that exceptions will emerge to carry the rest of them on par with everyone else. On average they do pretty poorly.

Of course you will always get those who would protest realms of unsafety when they are lacking in those particular respects - especially if they believe they excel in alternative ways that are currently underappreciated. And naturally what will happen is that if one of these alternative ways turns out to beat current ways, they will emerge as “the new realms of unsafety that occur as a result of safety in different ways” - it’s actually a good thing that we have all these protesting movements because potentially one day one might pay off and we’ll all advance in a new and improved direction. Whatever is around and works best will rise to the top, whatever it is. You just have to wait for new things to be around, like mutations, and eventually natural selection will favour one and we will evolve.

For every environment there is a set of traits the environment “favors” and a set of traits it does not “favor”. Consider a hypothetical environment where only organisms that are small in size survive. Everything that is big simply dies – it does not live long enough to reproduce. Whatever wants to survive must adapt in the sense that it must change its form to the one that is “favored” by the environment. You’re a big guy? Sorry, you must be a small guy. Either become a small guy or perish. Now, rationally speaking, it is better to be alive than to be dead. So faced with a choice between becoming small in order to live and going extinct everyone would choose to become small . . . even though it would require that they lose everything their ancestors accumulated in the past. However, in reality, the ability to adapt to a specific situation is not something everyone is born with. If you evolved to be a big guy and you suddenly find yourself within an environment where only small guys survive you’re gonna die. Sorry, my friend, you can pride yourself on being adaptable as much as you wish, but the ability to adapt has its limits. You take a fish out of water and it does not adapt . . . it dies. The gun debate is more about habits – what kind of environment we want to live in – than it is about maximizing our potential to survive within the current environment we live in. I want to own a gun because that’s the kind of environment I want to live in and not because that’s what will maximize my survival within the current environment. Who’s gonna be selected by nature in the end? I don’t know. Maybe docile people will win the game. I don’t care. But I want to own a guy and that’s the end of it. Maybe I am stupid and will shoot myself in the foot, I still want it no other way but to own a gun.

M A: But I want to own a guy and that’s the end of it. Maybe I am stupid and will shoot myself in the foot, I still want it no other way but to own a gun.

d: I would imagine most folk who wish to own a gun feel the same way.