Why does America Want Guns? Following the latest shootings.

Originally posted by SpearMint

Per 100k population is just as fair as percentages. There is a very strong correlation between guns and murder rates, it is obviously the cause, but that can't be proven unless someone magically made all guns vanish. If you've seen the numbers and still don't believe guns are the cause of your extremely high murder rate, then you must be in denial. It's obvious.

Not really. You didn't take many things into account like quality of education or income inequality. The U.S. does not fare very well in categories like these, especially when you start to look at the poor Americans (an ever increasing number), which are the ones committing most of the crimes. We have almost as many people in poverty as the UK population. I bet you can make a strong correlation between murder rates and income inequality. I see UK, Canada, Australia in blue, it's no surprise they don't have the murder rate the U.S. does.

Originally posted by letseeit7
reply to post by manmental

 

To keep our govt. in check , take away the guns and only criminals will have them . Many reasons , protection from criminals . People will always find ways to kill each other . Do you know that more people are killed with baseball bats than guns ! Lets ban those bats.

I want to see those stats on bats..more likely BS. Not from some pro gun or conservative site.

Another lie spread ...we need our guns to control the government..yet the government still screws you over.


Guns Now Kill More People Than Cars in 10 States

The evidence is clear -- the more guns are out there, the more likely they will be used to take a life.

Another favorite lie by gun owners is...if they take our guns then only criminals will have guns..take Canada, we are not overrun by criminals and we do not live in fear daily...where we need guns to feel safe.

Where do these criminals get most of their guns...from law abiding citizen themselves.

Firearms Stolen during Household Burglaries and Other Property Crimes, 2005-2010

About 1.4 million guns, or an annual average of 232,400, were stolen during burglaries and other property crimes in the six-year period from 2005 through 2010.

On average, firearms were stolen in an annual average of about 4% of the 2.4 million burglaries occurring each year, in 2% of the 529,200 robberies, and in less than 1% of the 13.6 million other crimes involving theft from 2005 through 2010.

From 2005 through 2010, 86% of burglaries and 75% of other property crimes involving a stolen firearm were reported to police.

Originally posted by CudiTheKid

Originally posted by SpearMint

Per 100k population is just as fair as percentages. There is a very strong correlation between guns and murder rates, it is obviously the cause, but that can't be proven unless someone magically made all guns vanish. If you've seen the numbers and still don't believe guns are the cause of your extremely high murder rate, then you must be in denial. It's obvious.

Not really. You didn't take many things into account like quality of education or income inequality. The U.S. does not fare very well in categories like these, especially when you start to look at the poor Americans (an ever increasing number), which are the ones committing most of the crimes. We have almost as many people in poverty as the UK population. I bet you can make a strong correlation between murder rates and income inequality. I see UK, Canada, Australia in blue, it's no surprise they don't have the murder rate the U.S. does.

I don't see why that matters, guns are still the problem regardless of why people are using them. It may have a slight influence but I don't think it would be nearly enough to account for the murder rates.

"I bet you can make a strong correlation between murder rates and income inequality."

It's you that needs to do that.

reply to post by manmental



I guess your country doesn't have a powerful document call the Constitution and you have no clue how that document is of importance to real American citizens, we needs guns because our forefathers knew better, America is run by a corrupted government system and our guns is the only way we keep the corruption from getting worst that all ready is.

Originally posted by SpearMint
I don't see why that matters, guns are still the problem regardless of why people are using them.

"I bet you can make a strong correlation between murder rates and income inequality."

It's you that needs to do that.

I was using the general "you". I'm not going to spend my time doing that. Guns aren't the problem, the society is the problem. If we took guns away, our knife murders would skyrocket. It's the people and the environment, not the tools.

Originally posted by CudiTheKid

Originally posted by SpearMint
I don't see why that matters, guns are still the problem regardless of why people are using them.

"I bet you can make a strong correlation between murder rates and income inequality."

It's you that needs to do that.

I was using the general "you". I'm not going to spend my time doing that. Guns aren't the problem, the society is the problem. If we took guns away, our knife murders would skyrocket. It's the people and the environment, not the tools.

edit on 14-12-2012 by CudiTheKid because: (no reason given)

Well then you have no point if you're not willing to back it up.

I should add that if we look at countries like Mexico that has a weak and underfunded government, if the government removed all gun laws against civilians I bet crime would drop overnight.

Every criminal would think twice. A father would not allow the senseless killing of his family if he had the power to protect them.

At this point the government of Mexico does not have the means to control the drug cartels. If every citizen had a gun and were allowed to carry it, it would be a different story.

The Mexican government would rather allow deaths of citizens knowing they cannot protect them, than allow them to carry firearms. Sad.

Two things make crime in Mexico and other third world countries bad:

1. The government stands in the way
2. The average person cannot afford a gun (the cartels can afford lots of guns)

Originally posted by SpearMint

Well then you have no point if you're not willing to back it up.

edit on 14-12-2012 by SpearMint because: (no reason given)

No my point stands, look at the map and some of the numbers presented in this and other threads. There is a clear correlation, Im just not going to waste my time figuring it out for every country. Your point is wrong, you point only to guns, when clearly there is much more to the situation than just that.

You don't see the stories about guns saving lives because the media will not cover them generally. House breakins are extremely common and gun ownership saves lives in those situations. Muggings generally involve the mugger having a gun, if you have one too your life might go on. There are a lot of lives saved daily because they were used in self defense. Not every criminal shot dies either. Most Americans do not think of guns as objects for destruction. At least in the South they are tools. They load their freezers up every year with deer meat and feed their families with it. Hunting is not just a sport here. If the deer population was not controlled by hunters then our highways would be deathtraps from the over population of deer running in front of cars. Uncontrolled illegal imigration has brought in/bred violent gangs that will kill you for fun and or initiation into the gang. If you live in a metro area you would be wise to carry a gun if you wish to live. I am sure we all want to live in a society that does not require guns for anything but putting meat on the table but it is not our reality.

Originally posted by CudiTheKid

Originally posted by SpearMint

Well then you have no point if you're not willing to back it up.

edit on 14-12-2012 by SpearMint because: (no reason given)

No my point stands, look at the map and some of the numbers presented in this and other threads. There is a clear correlation, Im just not going to waste my time figuring it out for every country. Your point is wrong, you point only to guns, when clearly there is much more to the situation than just that.

But there's nothing to say the gun murders are due to income inequality.

Originally posted by SpearMint

But there's nothing to say the gun murders are due to income inequality.

That would be the correlation part. More income inequality -> more murders = correlation.

An old 1960's Anti-Gun Bumper Sticker -

If Guns Were Out-Lawed
Only Out-Laws Would Have Guns

Therein lies the problem. The Adam Lanzas will somehow manage to procure a firearm.
The rest of us need guns to protect ourselves from these maniacs.

IMO

I had never heard of this before today, but someone posted it on another forum while discussing this.

Bath School Disaster

The Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, on May 18, 1927, which killed 38 elementary school children, two teachers, four other adults and the bomber himself; at least 58 people were injured. Most of the victims were children in the second to sixth grades (7–11 years of age [1]) attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest mass murder in a school in U.S. history and the third-deadliest non-military massacre in U.S. history, behind 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Yup, stuff like what happened today can only happen because of guns, right people?


I posted this on the main thread for the shooting, then immediately copied for posterity since I was criticized for posting it on the main thread. This was the first thread I found in the recent posts that I thought it might fit in case my post is removed from the main.

Originally posted by manmental
guns are #... why would anyone defend them?

Because they are an efficient tool if the necessity to kill large amounts of bad people or animals arises.

You think the world is all gumdrops and rainbows? Those times are dead.

I'll post as I did in another thread favoring the disarming of the public:

Sorry, but this is absolutely the most ridiculous statement I have heard in favor of gun control.

The only result is that the Govt. Military, Police, Criminals, CIA, DHS, TSA, FBI, ATF, FEMA and many other alphabet agencies...will be the ones who are armed. And what do you do when they decide you are dangerous because your neighbor has reported you for talking in a rebellious manner?

I'm not American either but even I can see that it's too late to disarm an entire Nation of millions of guns. It's going to be a blood bath that makes today look like a blip on the radar.

Better grab your butter knife to protect your family and property.

Are you seriously ok with that?

It's gone too far and to take back the guns is nothing short of another Civil War starting on American soil. Only this time the death toll will be in the millions.

People need to protect themselves and that's just a fact. What should everyone do? Give up their only way to protect themselves in an already failing society? Private gun ownership makes more sense now than it ever did.

Peace

reply to post by manmental

Ah a troll thread. How many in Britain are hurt or killed with knives per year. By your logic knives should be banned in Britain. Seems I heard a while back that they were considering it. Then why not ban bats as well. Ban everything. It seems to me that per capita Britain kills as many people as the US with knives. To me that makes Britain more violent then the US. I love trolls like you.

reply to post by jimmiec

Nice point. Doesn't MS13 prefer to use machetes rather then guns? Yet they still kill......unarmed citizens. They do not do so well against armed citizens.

reply to post by manmental


...I really don't see how people don't get this yet, but again, even though OP can guess for themself.

Guns don't kill people, people do, AND you can't ban guns (that's the most absurd and down right idiotic thing about it).

"Hey guys why don't you ban guns, and then you can make heroin and coc aine illegal and no body will ever shoot guns, heroin, or coc aine ever again!"

In all these incidences there are multiple similarities that led to the deaths, none of those things are the guns. They are, mentally ill guy, and a soft target (one of the places he is the least likely to meet someone with a gun that might stop him).

More legal guns, in more places, equal less death innocent death toll.

Originally posted by manmental
This is a general conspiracy.
And a question to all American ATS-ers.
Why the frig does the US insist on having guns given the hellish result of guns?

I live in the UK and I am horrified by mass gun killings and the USA breeds them.

Why doesn't the USA ban guns?

That is the BIG CONSPIRACY I am harking too.

Your black president cries but allows gun laws to continue.

What gives USA?

As an American...let me try to answer this in a way that will make sense to someone from a sane country where normal people live. The problem has three main aspects...they are:

#1 - Americans are a broken and conquered people. We are the victims of RELENTLESS psychological warfare, propaganda, social engineering, and some of the most sophisticated psychological mass deceptions in the history of the human race. Joseph Goebbels was once quoted as saying that Germany "wouldn't need tanks if we had the USA's propaganda machine"...BACK IN THE 1940's. So what did we do after that? We kidnapped as many Nazi scientists, psychologists, and marketing minds as we could and brought them back to the US to get DEAD SERIOUS about mass mind control. TPTB in this country have drugged our food chain and our water supply, encode messages in ALL of our media and entertainment, flooded our cities with crack coc aine and machine guns in the '70's to break up the civil rights movement, and sent every single generation of American males off to die in some other country for the last 120 years...right after we got done killing 1,000,000 of our own right here on American soil after the Civil War.

#2 - Our government SCARES THE HELL OUT OF US. We watched our CIA murder our own President in broad daylight in 1963 for god's sake. Every single week we hear about another cop executing a 10lb dog at point blank range for no reason, beating a homeless guy to death, or deploying chemical weapons on an 84-yr old woman in Seattle last year. We have sat here and WATCHED our government build HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS of empty concentration camps...railroad tracks running through the center and all. If you want to REALLY see how DAMN CREEPY we have become...watch Season 3, Episode 4 of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" (Former Governor of Minnesota). He drives through an underground CITY built just this year, completely in secret, in the middle of nowhere near a town of only a couple of thousand people. Unfortunately, this fear and paranoia results in us BUYING lots of guns...but being too afraid to use them against the lowlives who actually deserve it...instead, the peasants turn them on one another.

#3 - Our health care system sucks. Not only for PHYSICAL health care...but MENTAL HEALTH as well. Every presidential administration since REAGAN in 1980 has cut inflation-adjusted funding for mental health issues and employer-provided insurance almost universally does not cover things like psychiatric care or therapy. Instead we get whats called "EAP" (Employee Assistance Program) in which people who may have some very serious mental health issues to an unlicensed "counselor" who basically serves as a motivational speaker who gives them a little pep talk and sends them on their way. Then we sit around all confused why we have all these problems when we've been dumping our crazy people into the street to fend for themselves for the last three decades.

This explanation is all fine and great...but if you want to FEEL what Post-Reagan America is like...listen to Lou Reed's 1989 album entitled "New York"....especially this track.

www.youtube.com...

Where I live we have grizzly bears, mountain lions, black bears, wolves, and so on, and by that I mean, sometimes right outside our front doors (so far only moose in my yard but is just me.... if you want pictures of bears in our houses, mountain lions in our yards, and wolves wandering the neighborhood, you need only look in our newspaper archives). I have no intention of giving up my guns.

I have no intention of killing any person. If I did, and I didn't have guns, I might use.... a sword, a spear, a knife, a chainsaw, an axe....... I might not kill as many people so quickly as someone with a lot of bullets and guns, but I could still kill, still cause terror, still act crazy.

I still believe that government should be of the people, by the people, and for the people, and lately I see the government acting paranoid. To me.... this means they just might be hiding things. The government should not fear the populace unless the government is no longer for the populace.

Should Orwellian matters continue, as the increasingly videoed British should be well aware of....... I personally would like the chance to fight back against an unjust government that gets out of control. Perhaps you can stage a sit in with tea in lieu of fighting back. America threw off its shackles thanks to its determination AND armed citizenry. THIS is why we have kept the right to bear arms. Sometimes words are not enough on their own, even over a civilized cup of tea.