By golly, the problem is not Islamic terrorism, but guns!

[Visvaldis]

America's Sacred Cow that no one will talk about:
American society is violent. Americans love violence. Brutality and violence appeal to Americans. If there is not enough in real life, then they get their dosage on TV and in movies where violence is glorified.

[stycotl]

Originally Posted by chattypatty

I've been watching CNN and they are peddling a **** and bull story right

first of all, you are entangling two, unrelated problems. political correctness is an issue entirely on its own, and should be addressed in its own thread. you made this thread about gun control, so we will stick to that.

now about all the mass shootings in the US in the past year and the common villain is "guns."

how so? tell me how a gun forced hassan to murder people. convince me that they just randomly went a-blazin' all by themselves while hassan still responsibly, innocently had then holstered and on safe.

if you can prove that, you might have a point here. since you can't, it is pretty obvious that you don't have an argument, and don't know what you are talking about.

Not Islamic terrorism, no, just . . . guns. We need gun control on our military bases! Yes, that's the answer!

do you often come up with these kinds of illuminating epiphanies without first checking to see if what you are about to argue has any merit?

"we need gun control on military bases, because people are dying out there!"

"umm, psst. chatty, we already have gun control on military bases... people are still dying."

guess what, chatty: you can't carry a weapon on base unless it is unloaded and encased, and being taken to or from an armory (or your on-base housing). you can't concealed carry, open carry, or anything else.

only on-duty law enforcement, and actively training or deploying troops are allowed to carry weapons around, and out of those, only the on-duty law enforcement are allowed to carry a loaded weapon, unless the training takes place at a live-fire range.

do your homework next time BEFORE starting the post, and then you won't look so ignorant.

Plus, every silly news anchor for the past 5 hours has managed to get in some comment about how they hope there won't be a backlash against Muslims due to the Ft. Hood attack. Not, "we hope we can prevent all future terrorist attacks against our military and our citizenry," but simply "we must all work together to protect the Muslims."

Unbelievable. It is so difficult to see so many people being so stupid.

again, unrelated, though i agree that the pc bull crap is just that: bull crap.

however, while you are ranting about stupid people, you might want to throw into that same group those that preach an opinion as if it had some sort of social or scientific merit, without even bothering to find out what they are ranting and raving about.

gun control on bases, ha! that is like saying that until we get gun control in schools, kids will still be shot by pathetic, angsty murderers in the making. again, gun control already exists there, and the shootings keep happening.

Originally Posted by mwruckman

Aren't you glad you live in a country where have the right to buy all the arms you need to inflict a little whoop ass on your fellow classmates and Professors (like Mr Choi did at Virginia Tech) or take down the lunch time crowd at Luby's in Kileen TX or get even with the US Army like Major Hasan.
Happiness is a warm gun yeh! Bang, bang, shoot shoot!

Since, America is not serious about regulating these dangerous toys, I actually get a real charge out of these mass shooting tragedies they are real funny.

antisocial much?

Originally Posted by momonkey

Yes, but if even one sane person on those planes had a fire arm, 9/11 would have never happened. The solution is to arm everyone who is not a criminal or lunatic.

i shudder at the idea of arming every noncriminal, nonlunatic person. they are only a large part of the fraction that causes violence and tragedy. the rest of the fraction includes many people that aren't crazy or criminal; you have the perennially selfish, irresponsible, ignorant, paranoid, easily scared, clueless, easily offended, easily confused, etc, etc, etc.

i'd rather these people stay away from guns too. so, rather than arming everyone that is medically and legally qualified, i say we just arm those that want to be armed and meet the qualifications.

that freedom, to be armed, or not to be armed, dependent upon our desires, is one that we founded this country for.

Originally Posted by Latin King

we have by far the highest rate of murders in the western world, while we have the most liberal gun control laws, coincidence?????

and within this country with high gun crime rates, those gun crimes almost exclusively take place within areas of high gun control. need proof?

schools.
government buildings.
military bases.
cities like dc and chicago.

to contrast, what do the low gun control areas look like?

vermont?
utah?
alaska?

coincidence?

if these people did not have guns to begin with, there would be no need for us to be protected from them....

yeah... because violence was an invention of the last few centuries, directly correlating with the invention of the firearm. everything was peaceful until then, right?

Originally Posted by 17th Street

I have absolutely no interest in being armed.

bingo. you don't wish to be, and therefore, you don't need to be. that is what is known as freedom. if someone was to force you to own a gun against your wishes, that would be as tyrannical as if they were forcing you to not own any guns.

Islamic terrorism is obviously not the reason behind mass shooting in this country, and while I know many people in this thread will not agree with me, I really don't think that it was the reason behind the Ft. Hood shooting.

religion was not the reason for the shootings, i agree. violence is the reason. selfish, immature, arrogant, ignorant violence. religion helps to instigate that in many cases, and in others, religion actually helps to mitigate that, but it is nothing more than a medium through which mankind manipulates the issues that it already has.

if we were to take away religion, humans would still be violent. the same is true for weapons. if we were to take away every gun, automobile, blade, bat, poison, or other instrument of violence, humans would still hurt and kill each other.

to focus on the religion or the tool used to commit the crime is to focus on a symptom of the problem, rather than the problem itself.

however, even though this is a human issue, it is a case of human religion––in this case, islam––that seems to have urged the shooter on to violence. there is a definite connection between religion and the desire to hurt others.

Gavin de Becker wrote an excellent book about violence and how to prevent it called The Gift of Fear. The one thing he constantly referenced in that book is that violence is preventable, and he never mentioned guns in keeping us safe.

nothing guarantees safety. not a weapon, a security alarm, a form of government, or anything else. there is nothing that we can do to 100% guarantee safety.

there are measures that we can take to increase our safety though, and guns, door locks, family dogs, exterior lights, and many other things can help to increase our safety.

It takes following our instincts and common sense. I have been following the news on this issue, and the one thing that I keep hearing is that there were "signs" however, these signs were not investigated. It's the same thing you hear with all of these shootings, "He wrote disturbing papers" (Virginia Tech), "They were bullied and depressed" (Columbine), "He might have long suffered from emotional problems that were exacerbated by the tensions of his work with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who returned home with serious psychiatric problems." (Ft. Hood). I mean seriously, these things don't happen in a bubble, but people refuse to acknowledge the walking bomb that is standing in front of them. We need to be more vigilant and aware, and maybe then we can prevent some of these tragedies.

there are almost always signs that people recognize in retrospect. many times, those signs are ones that should have been recognized before the fact too, if people weren't so disinterested in the lives and issues of those around them.

this comes down to one of the biggest measures that we can take to keep ourselves safe: the proper mentality.

as you mention above, paying attention to instinct is a key, as are others: being aware of your surroundings, having a plan, having the goal to never be a victim, etc.

the two biggest, in my mind, are education and social interaction. if i educate myself to my environment and the issues and personalities within that environment, and then become humanely, sincerely active in the lives of those within my community, then i will be enabling people to coexist in a friendlier, more peaceful environment. so long as i maintain that society's problems are none of my own, and i ignore those around me, i will be contributing to the dark, impersonal, apathetic demeanor that is beginning to characterize our society.

Originally Posted by Sunny-Days90

If there were armed guards at the base this idiot killer would not have even tried this.

again, guns do not guarantee anything.

there were armed guards on that base; there are *always* armed guards on a military base. the problem is that some of those bases are enormous (fort hood is one of the largest in the nation), and the security forces are already spread thin even during normal conditions, much less during an assault.

add to that the idea that our servicemen are not allowed to carry weapons themselves, as already noted above. when on base, the best shooters in the military cannot do anything about a crazed gunmen; they have to wait for base security to arrive.

And you would not see 13 people dead either because someone would have taken the killer out long before he got this far.

preliminary investigations are pointing to the fact that he was stopped prematurely; he still had plenty of ammunition to continue shooting when he was stopped. kimberly munley without a doubt saved more victims and families from tragedy.

with a gun.

that kind of screws the theory that guns can only cause tragedy, doesn't it? i know that there is someone out there thinking that she should have talked to the guy instead, but at this point in the day, the only realistic option to stopping his rampage was to put him down.

Whoever believes that this is about guns and not radical islam needs to be deported.

So they want to take away our guns so only radicals like this killer and criminals have them? Ok.

as already mentioned, religion played a nasty role in this tragedy, possibly directing the already unstable, violent actions of this man to lethal ends.

Originally Posted by Wapasha

Its a mental disease of the liberal left, they simply cannot hold a person accountable for their actions, they will bend, twist and contort themselves to excuse away Hasan's scream of "Allahu akbar!" as he gunned down soldiers, and instead try to suggest it was more like "Smith & Wesson".

to blame it all on the left is pretty naive, in my opinion. both parties twist and spin info in order to further their own agendas. there are tremendous amounts of people arguing that this man is simply a victim and shares none of the responsibility. but as already noted, there are plenty of folks on the other side of the political spectrum that are trying to strip this guy of his responsibility and pin it to his ethnicity or religion.

either way, in the end, the guy made the decision all by his lonesome. no firearm brainwashed him into doing it, no religion made him do it, and no societal ill stripped him of that choice. he did it all by himself.

Originally Posted by parfleche

it seems to me all these mass shootings happen in gun free zones such as schools military basses and the workplace. seems the crazies are smarter than the no gun nuts. its almost like advertising do it here were unarmed by law. we cant defend ourselves

it is notable that a large majority of these shootings happen in areas where the government has assured the shooters that their victims would be unarmed.

in this case, on a huge military base, where the civilians and military personnel did not have the right to defend themselves, this psycho had ample time to hurt a lot of people.

in the end, it was stopped by someone that did have the right to defend themselves. kudos to her; she did the right thing, and did it well. too bad she hadn't been around when it first started.

Originally Posted by Memphis1979

In a world like ours, criminals will always be able to get the guns they want to commit crimes. We have to many non-registered handguns floating around the world to try and outlaw guns. It'll do no good.

Both sides use this kind of attack to bolster their position.

A. "If one of those people just had a gun, all of this could have been prevented earlier!"

B. "If we outlawed all guns, it would mean this kind of thing would never happen!"

The fact of the matter is, both sides are wrong. The answer, as is usually always, is in the middle. You continue selling guns, regulating whom they are sold to, and the types that are sold.

You live in a free country. There was a reason why Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" With this type of country, with all of our individual freedom, with everything we enjoy here, you run the risk of some psycho killing you. The odds are very low, but people kill people, they always have, and always will.

So go ahead, either try and turn this into the wild west (where they did ban guns in city limits I might add), or continue trying to turn this into a draconian society where no one can do anything because we are so afraid of the individual.

Either way, I will be fighting you tooth and nail the whole way.

agreed. political parties have commercialized this debate, and have commercialized the many tragedies that have happened, in order to boost their own standings. it takes selfish, sick, and twisted people to do that, but it happens on both the right and the left.

Originally Posted by BentBow

With that said, the only thing a handgun is good for, is to get you in serious trouble.

if you are speaking from experience, then i would question your intelligence and capability to follow simple instructions. likely though, you are not speaking from experience, but confusing uneducated opinion with fact. unfortunately, a large percentage of people seem to partake in this pastime.

if you disagree with either of these two conclusions, feel free to support your ridiculous claim with something resembling evidence.

Originally Posted by Visvaldis

America's Sacred Cow that no one will talk about:
American society is violent.

baloney. who isn't talking about it? it seems to appear in the media and forums pretty often for never being talked about. straw man all the way.

Americans love violence. Brutality and violence appeal to Americans. If there is not enough in real life, then they get their dosage on TV and in movies where violence is glorified.

you might not be aware of this, but obsession with violence is not an american thing. it is a human thing. i can promise you that violence was around long before america existed.

note that i am not disagreeing with you about american society being violent; i am just letting you know that you might be missing the forest for the trees if you focus only on american society being violent.

now, care to tie your claims of american society being violent to the issue of the fort hood shooting serving as a catalyst for more gun control?

*********************************

i would just like to point out that a military base is in many ways a microcosm of whatever community you or i live in. there are many people in a given area; the majority of them are unarmed and unprepared for an assault like the fort hood tragedy.

base security/local police is spread thin in an area like this, especially when the area is that large and crowded. you can't expect security/police to be everywhere; you can't expect them to already be in the area where a crime is about to take place; and you can't expect them to be able to react to an incident in time to insure that no one will be hurt or killed.

this was exactly what happened at fort hood.

kimberly munley did her job; she was a base security officer, and according to one of the articles i read, a firearms instructor and swat member. she did what she was supposed to and saved lives, and i hope that she is treated well because of it.

but she and her fellow security officers are only human. she was not there when it all started. she couldn't end it after the first shot. this lunatic was allowed to kill multiple people because only kimberly and her fellow officers were given the means and right to defend themselves and others. had i been at that area of base during the shooting, despite my military training and my firearms expertise, i would have been as much of a victim as anyone else, because i would not have been allowed to have the means to defend myself.

i would have fought with everything that i could have, whether a knife, a brick, a backpack, or something else. but i would probably not have been able to stop this man before he hurt myself or other people.

this happens in our communities as well. assaults happen everyday across the country, and in many instances, the victims are refused the right to carry a firearm that might stop the situation before it begins.

in those instances, we are told to rely on the police for protection; the police, who are sometimes more than half an hour away at a given time.

in almost not instance will the police be able to neutralize the situation. they usually get there in time to clean up, and every now and then in time to arrest the perpetrator––but even that is a rarity.

not everyone needs to carry a weapon. but to deny anyone the right is to become directly responsible for the deaths of those that would have otherwise defended themselves from harm.

[okccowboy]

Originally Posted by NVplumber

Sounds like moonshadow could be in the UK or Australia, but I don't know. At any rate, there are a LOT of places here in the US that have restricted firearms ownership to a select, elite few. NYC requires a harsh permitting process, and self defense requires retreat before lethal force is used, regardless of the circumstances. A thug in your home is not enough, you have to try and lock yourself in a room or whatever, and LE pulls the incident down to a fine edge, they like to prosecute folks for defending themselves. CA is the same way. The burden of proof as to the justification of a defensive shooting is totally on the defender, criminals have filed suit, and WON, after being shot in comission of a crime. CA has used the UK as a premise for this insanity, as has NYC, Chicago, and the insanity in CA originated in San Fran in the early 80's, when Feinstein was mayor there.
CA has also been the closest thing to an actual firearms confiscation program as well. They out right banned so called 'assault weapons' , and required people who owned them to surrender them. Out of the estimated 500000 such weapons owned there, les than a 10th of a % were actually turned in under that law. Massive civil disobedience. Yes, the federal 'assault weapons ban' was allowed to expire. W at least had the common sense to see it was a useless measure, that accomplished NOTHING in terms of stopping crime, of any kind. Had the president and congress we have now been at the helm, rest assured that would not have happened, and more than likely would have been massivley expanded as well. There are a lot of folks that would love to see a surrendering and/or confiscation of personal arms. So far, such things have been limited to municipalities and in CA, and have been dismal failures. I am certainly glad I do not live in CA. I have friends who have run afoul of the laws there, perfectly honest people, who were arrested and prosecuted as if they were hard core criminals, because they own firearms and were using them for perfectly legal and honest things. One guy lost his competition handguns, paid a hefty fine, and spent THIRTY days in jail, because his guns and ammo were in locked cases in the trunk of his car when returning from the IPSC/USPSA west coast championship in Stockton. Turns out the guns and ammo were secured properly, but, needed to be in SEPERATE Areas of the vehicle, however, having a firearm, or ammo, in the passenger area of a vehicle, locked up or not , is also illegal....pretty sneaky. It appears that transporting a firearm for legitimate reasons, or not, is a crime. They got ya, coming and going. He tried to fight it, asking how he was supposed to handle his situation in getting to and from the match and seperate his gun and ammo without using the cab of the car etc. The judge threw the book at him. It all sounded hinky to me. But I'm not a lawyer, and I canceled all plans to compete in CA this year because of this, as did a lot of my fellows.

All that is fascinating but when did anyone take your guns?