Courage not cowardice; balls not bluster

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Xelor, Apr 23, 2018.

  1. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Guys, so we don't make a cliche of gun control discussion turning into a poo-show (too late!), why don't we try dialing back the insults and epithets?

    It is self-evident that there are strongly-held opposing viewpoints, so calling someone else names for apparently being obtuse, is in fact, being obtuse oneself.

    Don't be obtuse. Recognize that this is an issue with no objective right and wrong.
     
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  3. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    There was a guy a few years back who tackled some idiot who was shooting at the White House with an AK. He didn't need a gun.
     
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  5. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    You put words in my mouth, I corrected you. Apparently none of you socialists can read, therefore a personal attack is the only thing that produces any results except a feeling of superiority on your part.

    Or maybe you read selectively, attributing things to people that haven't said anything remotely like what you parrot back as their words. Seems to be a symptom of a more basic problem than gun control.

    I wouldn't trust you to have a gun, so I can't have any? That's not liberty. That's fascism.
     
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  7. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    I suspect that:
    There comes a time when one must stop thinking objectively if one is to be up for the moment.
    Just analyze the situation and act.
    What went through James Shaw's mind in the moment of action? It's one thing to state after the fact that he thought that he was not going to make killing him easy........................ but that is analysis after the fact. If he had taken the time to think that grabbing a hot barrel was gonna hurt, would he have done it?
    What is it about James Shaw that made it possible for him to act in the moment?
     
    Truck Captain Stumpy likes this.
  8. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Apparently he felt that if he allowed the perp to reload he was most likely going to end up dead...
     
  9. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    Were any imminent rapes and murders prevented by showing your gun, or were you just ready to kill someone to protect your car/TV/front porch?
     
  10. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    Fuck you, bork. There. You win.
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    There are several objective rights and wrongs featured here.
    This, for example, is an objective wrong - bullshit statistics used to make a fraudulent argument:
    And here are two falsehoods, also objectively wrong:
    (the deputy did not "cower behind a wall", there were at least four people killed and several others badly injured at the Waffle House).
    And the thing is, both posts are in a better cause than the "other side". But by dissociating themselves from standards of reason, right and wrong, they create an situation in which "both sides" are dissociated from standards of reason, and neither can be trusted with power.

    And this in spite of the objective fact - the "right" - that the OP and other posts indicate: bad guys with guns are as often as not stopped, when they are stopped, by good guys without guns.
    Even in the US, good guys with guns are sparse and public mayhem situations in which they can make a positive difference even sparser.
    Notice how many of these stories include, as an important feature, the perp needing to reload. That even seems to have been - nobody is clear on the matter but the narrative indicates - what gave the good guy at the Waffle House the break he was waiting for.
     
  12. Bells Staff Member

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    24,270
    Yeah, you sound like someone who should be trusted with a firearm....

    Anger issues, lack of impulse control, anger issues, takes offense so easily, anger issues, lack of control over your emotions, anger issues..

    At this point, you're like a walking advertisement for why your country needs gun control.
     
    pjdude1219 likes this.
  13. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    so your were threatened and needed to protect yourself.
    did you report the need to show deadly force to protect yourself to the police ?
    unles your friends with a police officer i would gues no ?

    obviousely these offenders intend to do harm to others. i am just wondering how many incidents like yours go unreported and if by reporting them the police can aprehend the criminals.
     
  14. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    so
    Toad
    you gonna start the poll?
    How you gonna phrase it?
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Again, it is sad that you can't make a cogent argument without all the anger and vitriol.
     
  16. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    I would have to phrase it in vitriolic terms, with great anger, but no, I won't bother now.

    I guess I'll have to gain weight at the range, all the while attempting to lecture people not from America on how their laws are just so wrong. Cogently.

    But I forget: Lawyers and trolls can both read minds from far, far away. Maybe they should tell us what the poll results would be.
     
    Truck Captain Stumpy likes this.
  17. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Colonel Lawrence (of Arabia) was putting out matches with his fingertips. A British soldier decided there must be a trick to it but when he tried it he burned his fingers. "Ow!" he said. "That bloody hurts!" "Of course it bloody hurts," Colonel Lawrence replied. "The trick is not to mind that it hurts."

    The trick is not how to ban guns. The trick is not to want guns in the first place.
     
  18. Truck Captain Stumpy The Right Honourable Reverend Truck Captain Valued Senior Member

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    that is the most rediculous thing I've read in a while...
    so no first world nation that bans guns "that makes it easy" will have a high suicide rate, then?

    Suicide isn't about the tool in any form, be it gun, knife, overdose, jumping or any other method. The most you can say about suicides and method is the typical differences seen between male and female suicides. and that isn't even written in stone.

    what is the point?
    are you saying that your superior combat experience has trained you to disarm assailiants?

    your self-proclaimed combat experience means that you should know the better trained and armed person has a far more likely chance to succeed in a confrontation.
    especially one that has degraded to a point of applying lethal force

    this is one reason the military trains the way it does: reaction time is critical

    surely the superior trained combat veteran can attest to this
     
  19. Truck Captain Stumpy The Right Honourable Reverend Truck Captain Valued Senior Member

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    the police can't always do anything about it except file a report that will be used later for prosecution or to establish a pattern
    What happens usually depends on the prosecutor, the LEO and the leadership of the department, the desire of the people involved to press charges and the situation. If charges were to be pressed, there has to be a paper trail. If the powers-that-be choose not to file any charges, and no parties wish to press charges, then it simply gets a short write up and filed...maybe, because this is assuming they even write it up, mind you. Policy can be very loosly applied (and the paperwork is a pain in the butt)

    this is one of the biggest problems of the current data collections - the only data we have any kind of information on are the reported crimes. There are some crimes that are estimated because it's well known that they'erhighly underreproted (like rape) and there are very, very few reported crimes stopped by firearms (except by police incident, which can also be underreported as police presence can deter crime but is not reported, let alone reported as a successful armed intervention)

    so how are we to get a clear picture on the efficacy of a firearm when we can't and don't collect the requisite data?

    If we could only see statistics on vehicle deaths, or vehicle crimes (or used in crimes) with the occasional anecdote where a vehicle saved a life, there would likely be a concerted push to ban them as deadly weapons.
     
  20. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Gunners make out as if the only thing that will keep you safe is a gun. In point of fact having a gun at home is the real danger.
     
  21. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    I suspect that you are wrong in this.
    It seems that, for most people, having a car in the garage is actually a greater danger.
     
    Dr_Toad and Truck Captain Stumpy like this.
  22. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    3,864
    :chortle:
     
  23. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Really? You think that the ease of doing something has nothing to do with how many people do it, then? Hmm.
    If you take guns away the suicide rate goes way down, yes. But don't take my word for it:

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    A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and ManagementMatthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states where guns were prevalent—as in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning guns—rates of suicide were higher. The inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower.

    https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/
    =========
    In 2005, the most recent year for which mortality data are available, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among Americans 40 years of age or younger. Among Americans of all ages, more than half of all suicides are gun suicides. In 2005, an average of 46 Americans per day committed suicide with a firearm, accounting for 53% of all completed suicides. Gun suicide during this period accounted for 40% more deaths than gun homicide.

    Why might the availability of firearms increase the risk of suicide in the United States? First, many suicidal acts — one third to four fifths of all suicide attempts, according to studies — are impulsive. Among people who made near-lethal suicide attempts, for example, 24% took less than 5 minutes between the decision to kill themselves and the actual attempt, and 70% took less than 1 hour.2

    Second, many suicidal crises are self-limiting. Such crises are often caused by an immediate stressor, such as the breakup of a romantic relationship, the loss of a job, or a run-in with police. As the acute phase of the crisis passes, so does the urge to attempt suicide. The temporary nature and fleeting sway of many suicidal crises is evident in the fact that more than 90% of people who survive a suicide attempt, including attempts that were expected to be lethal (such as shooting oneself in the head or jumping in front of a train), do not go on to die by suicide. Indeed, recognizing the self-limiting nature of suicidal crises, penal and psychiatric institutions restrict access to lethal means for persons identified as potentially suicidal.

    Third, guns are common in the United States (more than one third of U.S. households contain a firearm) and are lethal. A suicide attempt with a firearm rarely affords a second chance. Attempts involving drugs or cutting, which account for more than 90% of all suicidal acts, prove fatal far less often.

    The empirical evidence linking suicide risk in the United States to the presence of firearms in the home is compelling. There are at least a dozen U.S. case–control studies in the peer-reviewed literature, all of which have found that a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of suicide. The increase in risk is large, typically 2 to 10 times that in homes without guns, depending on the sample population (e.g., adolescents vs. older adults) and on the way in which the firearms were stored. The association between guns in the home and the risk of suicide is due entirely to a large increase in the risk of suicide by firearm that is not counterbalanced by a reduced risk of nonfirearm suicide. Moreover, the increased risk of suicide is not explained by increased psychopathologic characteristics, suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts among members of gun-owning households.

    Three additional findings from the case–control studies are worth noting. The higher risk of suicide in homes with firearms applies not only to the gun owner but also to the gun owner's spouse and children. The presence of a gun in the home, no matter how the gun is stored, is a risk factor for completed suicide. And there is a hierarchy of suicide risk consistent with a dose–response relationship. How household guns are stored matters especially for young people — for example, one study found that adolescent suicide was four times as likely in homes with a loaded, unlocked firearm as in homes where guns were stored unloaded and locked.

    http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923
    ========
    Agreed. Guns just make it much easier to perform quickly, easily and successfully. Which is why there are so many successful gun suicides in the US.
    Training, by far, trumps what sort of weapon you have - as evinced by the recent cases we've been discussing.
     

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