Only in America

Jim,

I can’t wear anything low cut on account of my excessively hairy chest – my wife says I should be on a lead.

Didn’t know you were into that kind of thing John, but I suppose anything goes on this Forum………:D

Jim
Lincoln .7

My wife says that I look quite fetching in a frock and high heels.

On behalf of America, let me apologize if the sight of a firearm has offended you ladies. 🙂

It sounds like the Germans should have delayed the war by 75 years….:)

Not really wanting to kick off another bout of firearm justification (or vice versa) but whilst it has been said many times (with some logic, it must be said) that if you make guns illegal then only the criminals will carry them…just how do criminals come by their weapons? It has been the case that, in Britain, in the past, several firearms were shown to have been ‘imported’ by soldiers from the policing of the former Yugoslavian states as personal souvenirs that made their way into criminal hands, and others – seemingly the majority – have been smuggled through our lax border controls. Most of the rest are, apparently, stolen and reactivated display weapons.
Where does the American criminal get their hardware from?

No, still not working. Must be some US / UK difference thing.

I wouldn’t worry. I can’t see a YouTube clip making any great difference to entrenched opinions.

Moggy

Second link not working

It worked for me but I read posted it.

Second link not working

Well here for your viewing pleasure is more items foreign to the way of life in your local.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7pGt_O1uM8

This one gives details I had forgotten about the woman and shooting I mentioned.
I had forgotten at that time Texas had no carry law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YC5cVxTcQ

This one shows why the 2nd Amendment exists.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncdXfUAkMUI

Indeed.

Time to stop shouting into the wind for me.

It’s more or less true.

For convenience I omitted to mention several other wars going back to 1763

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and didn’t point out that ‘peacetime’ actually means “Since 1968”

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The above figures include suicides and accidents

Moggy

But I do just wonder why it doesn’t seem to concern the majority in America that more Americans have died by shooting in the peacetime USA than died in WW1, WW2, Korea and Vietnam added together?

Moggy

If true that is an astonishing statistic, being well over half a million. It is also interesting to note how many countries in the world have similar or far higher rates of firearm related deaths.

This is a pointless discussion as we all know.

But I do just wonder why it doesn’t seem to concern the majority in America that more Americans have died by shooting in the peacetime USA than died in WW1, WW2, Korea and Vietnam added together?

Has nobody managed to figure out that the answer to gun deaths is probably not having more guns?

Moggy

Thanks for that.

So, if Brazil were able to control the criminal gangs, AND you had secure borders, would there still be a need for guns? I take the point that we live in different worlds, so I cant apply my standards to you.

There is a corollary to your position – Russia borders a number of other European countries, and are also well known for criminal gangs. Other countries in the EU do not seem to have the huge issues you describe. Would you accept that there is a degree of paranoia inherent amongst your fellow men?

I am not trying to pick a fight here – I am just trying to understand something that makes no sense to me.

In Russia, to own a hand-gun is very hard, rifles are not hard to legally own. (shotguns are considered in the same category as rifles.)
It is illegal to drive with a fully assembled firearm in one’s vehicle.
Many Russian repeating shotguns have removable magazines, if the magazine is removed the firearm is considered disassembled.
This is from Russians who have seen it first hand, so many drive with a shot gun next to them and with a shell in the chamber and a loaded magazine next to them but not in the gun.

Paranoid, how do you mean paranoid?
Some or all as a whole.
Ask someone who has had some one killed or injured by an intruder, then tell them it is paranoia.

It happened probably over a decade ago now, and I am not going to look up her name but she was interviewed on radio and TV often back then.
She always carrier a pistol in her purse.
She was going to meet her parents at a fast food joint.
This was about the time some places started putting up “No guns allowed” signs.
The fast food joint had such a sign and to avoid all problems she left her purse in her car.
This was one of the first cable news mass shootings.
She has to watch the shooter shoot her Father and Mother to death in front of her.
She was one of the person that started the wave that has eliminated many former gun laws in the U.S.
Was she paranoid?
If she was, she would have taken her purse with her into the fast-food place, she regrets every day she did not.

The much maligned National Rifle Association puts out a magazine every month save one (for financial reasons as lifetime members receive them for life with only one payment).
In the front of each magazine each month are six to eight copies of newpaper briefs in which a person used a firearm to defend one’s self.
There is never an issue without one.
The age of the persons using a firearm for defense have ranged from young children defending their mother, to wheelchair bound men in their eighties who always kept a firearm near by.
Not all the bad guys are shot dead; I would say on average one out of ever four or five ends up worm food, many are arrested in the hospital seek medical attention, and many simply run away.
On rare occasions there is an actual brief gun battle.

Thanks for that.

So, if Brazil were able to control the criminal gangs, AND you had secure borders, would there still be a need for guns? I take the point that we live in different worlds, so I cant apply my standards to you.

There is a corollary to your position – Russia borders a number of other European countries, and are also well known for criminal gangs. Other countries in the EU do not seem to have the huge issues you describe. Would you accept that there is a degree of paranoia inherent amongst your fellow men?

I am not trying to pick a fight here – I am just trying to understand something that makes no sense to me.

Why is it the phrase “trying to justify the unjustifiable ” come to mind?

Because you live in your small world and maybe expect the rest of the world to live by your small standards.

Justify
Show or prove to be right or reasonable:

Our Constitution say it is right and reasonable, your attitude is trying to justify the unjustifiable.
I.e. you do not like it, therefore; it should not be so.

To Bruce:
Live in fear, that could only be if we lived by your standards.
What you are saying is try to imagine a world where there are not bad people.

You, try to imagine that you had a semi-lawless country adjoining your border, not water separating you from cartel flunkies that kill because they can.
Brazil passed a law that was going to stop those criminals because we all know they respect the law.

A gun control movement was born and in 2003 the government passed a law called the Disarmament Statue which, among other restrictions, limited who could buy and sell guns, and prevented civilians from carrying them in public. The new law built on previous regulations that mandated background checks and registration of weapons. Gun sales dropped, and firearm deaths fell from nearly 40,000 in 2003 to a little over 34,000 in 2004.

Therefore:

A report on violence in Brazil says around 42,000 people were shot dead in 2012 – the highest figures for gun crime in 35 years.

Must have been legal gun owners being driven crazy by owning a firearm, as we know criminal respect those laws so well.
Hmm, the underlined part really makes people safe as we know criminals keep their at home in a safe, unloaded, like the laws many liberal U.S. politicians tried to foist on the voting populace.
But WAIT, how can this be the U.S. now has laws that allow more firearms freedom, to own and to carry, than they had twenty years ago?

May 7, 2013
Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak

Maybe that is why the Brazilian law is an asinine feel good bit of dung, passed by people who never go, much less have to live where criminals thrive.

I do not carry a firearm with me when I go out.
If some one tried to break into my abode, to break out of it would be the only method for that one to stay among the living.
Will I carry in the future, maybe and maybe not, not near the top of my priorities right now.

I am glad I can if I choose to?
Absolutely, especially as some states bordering mine are allowing carrying across state lines for those with paper to show it is legally carried. (Not licensed, legal carry has nothing to do with a license.)
This way one can visit others and not have to find the proper place for a firearm when crossing state lines.
There is a growing number of states recognizing legal carrying from other states.

We have our answer.

We do it this way, because we have always done it this way. No imagination – which is not specifically a criticism of ‘RpR’.

Just try, for a moment to imagine a society in which guns are not necessary, and not wanted. We do not live in fear. You do. It must be awful.

Why is it the phrase “trying to justify the unjustifiable ” come to mind?

Your reply paints a wonderful picture of a land where you are not safe, where violence awaits you at every turn, where the only condition for living in this land is to be a slave to the gun – you either have one or beholden to those who have.
I have been to America, lived there for a (short) while: what I saw and felt was nothing like that. Are you sure you are not being sold a pup by the arms manufacturers – you gotta have a gun, you have the right to have a gun, you need a gun, you must have a gun because it is unAmerican not to have one?

It is a fact of life, if such a scenario were true in a country as small as yours, it would be a very dangerous place.

You wondered why anyone would want a firearm and I told you one very good reason why but only in your mind is this happening to everyone anywhere all the time.
It happens and to pretend it does not is naive stupidity.
You could come where I am now and probably never run into anyone who would cause you grief, especially if you attention about where to not go if you truly wanted to avoid trouble.
And then you might because you were new and different paint the picture of a mark that a local two-bit criminal would see as an easy mark and get robbed.

Now as you read this, if you were robbed, you might think, damn, the Yank was correct about how nasty it can get, OR, you might react like like so many the local small town soccer moms who often say something like: “I cannot believe this happened in our small peaceful, there are no bad people, community” blah, blah, blah.

It happens because they run around with the heads up their ****, while turning their noses up at those types who are not a perfect as they are. I.e. those who live in the real world, not their bs world where all the whoring around, and rich little kids who shoot drugs and smoke joints does not happen because they will not believe it does, regardless of the truth.

That same narrow mind distortion of reality that these soccer moms and their panti-waste husbands have of reality, is similar to the distortion you felt when you heard some of the facts only at opposite ends of the spectrum.

As the liberals placate the ghetto trash more and more they are spreading like cancer.

That a person was killed in a small town in not common, neither is it rare.
My home town had more murders when it was less than 4,000 people than it has had in the forty years since.
My home county in which my home town, which now has 13,000 some people, is the largest by over one hundred percent, also had more murders pre-sixties than it has had since.

Minneapolis/St.Paul, the largest community in Minnesota, less than half as large as Chicago even if suburbs are included, about a decade ago one year had a murder rate that exceed either New York or Chicago.
Unlike Chicago, the Twin Cities did what Giuliani did in New York to eliminate the problem, Law Officers cracked down extremely hard on criminals.

A special force of officers was created who operated on a very loose set of rules, the problem went away quickly.
Ghetto trash does not stick around places where they are the subject of strict law enforcement.

So they meandered out to smaller communities such as the one I am in right now where the police’s major problems were once petty crime, drunks and civil disputes.
At the same time, Wisconsin, where my sibling lives, cut welfare drastically so the ghetto trash, while hard core are still in Madison, Wisc. (One of the men, very familiar with the criminal types my sibling ended up surrounded by told her NOT to go there, she had no idea what she was dealing with. It was nothing more than a little Chicago. She found out stupidity has just rewards and now has perfect 20/20 hindsight) , many left for Minnesota which has much better welfare and often the women, even though on welfare, are not a real problem but their boyfriends and fathers of their ******* children see they have place to live now where they are not known by their rap sheet and move in with their asininely stupid girl friends until something such as my cousin ran into puts them back where they belong.

The price of freedom is some abuse it.

The cities with the highest murder rates in the U.S. have most liberal governments and strictest gun laws.
The year Minneapolis/St.Paul had horrid murder rate, Minneapolis had well over 90 percent of the murders, it also has far more liberal Democrat set of politician.

After the bad year, a Republican mayor was elected and he formed the special police group that did away with problem caused by not cracking down on the criminals.
After the criminal element had been seriously stepped on, liberals started whining about how these bad policemen were discriminating by performing all those legal raids in minority areas. (during the high murder years, just under one hundred percent of the victims were minorities.)
Typical liberal politicians would not simply shut down the force which the public knew was the only reason the murder rate was under control so they cut their funds to the point the force had to use confiscated drug money to be able to pay its bills.
Some how that fact was leaked to the press and the Democrats quickly shut down this force that was out of control, although actually it was merely out of money, even though the Minneapolis politicians had continued to demand that they continue to do all they had done while they were fully funded without the funds.

After reading a book about the beat being a crime photographer back in the days of Speed Graphics and flash bulbs, I found out that percentage wise it is the way it has always been, there are peaks and and valleys but per one hundred thousand people, it is not really any worse than it was, and as far a violent crime goes per population some what better right now.
The only real difference in perception is caused by the fact that news that used to takes days to weeks to span the country, if it even left its local, now can do it in minutes, and there are far more gossip type news sources out there to gladly willing to do it.

One last note, my home town when it was still less than ten thousand people, had group of Latino tough guy wannabes start to float into town.
The town had always had Latino migrant workers beginning pre-WWII but these were the bad boys.
Well the local Latinos that stayed year round spoke to the police telling them what to look for to tell the bad boys from normal people.
The local police hounded the bad boys till they decided to go some where else where they did not stick out like a sore thumb.

If they would do now what they did then, the ACLU and liberals would be out crying racist discrimination and the liberal press would be out crying how small white communities opposed diversity, even though it was the local Latino community that saw the problem brewing and worked with the police force to eliminate it.

…As far as what the tool is used for, that is totally up to the owner at the time and the business of no one else…

Your reply paints a wonderful picture of a land where you are not safe, where violence awaits you at every turn, where the only condition for living in this land is to be a slave to the gun – you either have one or beholden to those who have.
I have been to America, lived there for a (short) while: what I saw and felt was nothing like that. Are you sure you are not being sold a pup by the arms manufacturers – you gotta have a gun, you have the right to have a gun, you need a gun, you must have a gun because it is unAmerican not to have one?