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Wasn't it lucky that the "guy next door" just happened to be a gun owner, had a rifle handy, was a well qualified shooter and NRA member, and he stepped outside and took on the perpetrator, stopping him.
Thank you. Not many news outlets are mentioning this.
They only focus on what bad guys do to make the majority of gun owners look bad. They won't mention how many times law-abiding gun owners use weapons to stop criminals, and sometimes without firing any shots.
We have by far the most guns of any country on Earth with the highest rates of gun ownership. We also have the overwhelming majority of gun deaths, especially of women and children on the planet.
The safest countries on Earth have lower gun ownership and heavy gun restriction.
Which should not be the case based on pro-gun talking points. We should be the safest in the world with so many people owning guns.
Why the contradiction?
While I can't answer that question in full, I can point to a couple of issues that make our country far more dangerous than it should be:
1. Violent criminals are being released back onto the streets where they continue to be violent. Once someone has crossed a certain line, there should be no release until they are too old and decrepit to even pick up a gun, and have such palsy in their hands that they can't shoot accurately.
2. Our society has gotten to the point where criminals are victims and victims are criminals. When someone commits a crime, there is a segment of our society which asks "Why did they do this? What happened to make them do this?" Those questions don't matter. What matters is that an individual made a conscious choice to commit a crime, and they should be held accountable for that crime - no matter what kind of emotional trauma they may or may not have suffered as a child. If you pick up a firearm and intentionally use it to harm another individual who is not actively trying to harm you, you are a criminal. Why you became a criminal is not pertinent to how you should be treated as a criminal.
3. Personal responsibility has been thrown out the window. We no longer hold people accountable for their own actions. This relates to number 2 above but goes deeper than that. We have an entire generation of people who received participation trophies who are now realizing that every single adult they trusted as a child was lying to them. Life doesn't give participation trophies, and you don't get promotions and raises for showing up. Teaching children otherwise by rewarding them for the simple fact of existence does a disservice to our society. It really isn't any surprise when a young man - already dealing with the emotionally charged cocktail of adolescence - snaps out when he reaches adulthood and realizes that his entire childhood was a bald-faced lie. Add in the fact that parenting, in many instances, consists of making sure that there is food available and "appropriate" programming on the television rather than actually raising children to be responsible and well-adjusted members of society, and you have a recipe for violence.
4. The majority of the country will never see any serious gun violence. Most of the numbers that put us at the top of the charts are concentrated in urban areas which are densely populated by people who have the choice of starvation or criminal activity. Liberal and conservative policies have ensured that young minority men don't have many options, and have created an entire demographic of criminals. Liberal policies by forcing minorities into certain areas and making sure that they stay there, and conservative policies by pursuing an idiotic war on drugs that makes the simple possession of a plant worth your life if you are a minority.
Finally, as it relates to the more guns question, your argument is invalidated by the idiocy of certain laws. The Gun Free Zone, for example, has turned our public places into hunting ranges for the criminally insane. In schools, we've taken our most precious possession - our children - and turned them into soft targets with no protection whatsoever from those who want to commit atrocities. Any public venue has become a soft target, as demonstrated quite well in Las Vegas. The shooter sat in a hotel that was "gun free" and shot into a crowd that was "gun free".
While I'm sure that the intention of the Gun Free Zone law was to make schools and other public buildings safer, the intent was lost in the implementation. When the government removes the right of the individual to protect himself, the government needs to assume the responsibility for protecting the individual. In this case, the government did not do so. Instead, the people who passed the idiotic law thought that because it is illegal to carry a firearm in certain areas nobody would do so. The GFZ law is a prime example of something - either gross incompetence or harmful intent. Either way, the results of the GFZ law have been disastrous.
It is a fact that 13.8% of the population commits 50% or more of the murders. Take those out of the equasion and we go way down the list. They just happen to be black.
And last I checked, those 13.8% of our population were Americans, just like you or I. Aren’t those on the right saying we should all think of ourselves as Americans, not hyphenated Americans? Perhaps we should extend that to remembering that African-Americans are first and foremost Americans, too. It doesn’t matter, quite frankly, how you segment the problem out. We have an American problem with violence in general and gun violence in particular.
That really depends on your definition of "mass shooting." As you've also posted heavily in the thread claiming over 300 "mass shootings" in the country this year (I guarantee those aren't a vast majority white), you seem to be cherry picking data for your arguments.
Wow, life explorer would be really old to have brought blacks over from Africa.
Yet, today many white Americans feel guilty for something in which that had nothing to do with, and Africans themselves profited from the slave trade. Not to mention most of the African slaves went to countries other than the United States. However, our Democrat politicians, Media, and Educational system makes a living out of polarizing us over race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.
The politicians seem to have no motivation to stop inner city violent crime.
Thank you. Not many news outlets are mentioning this.
They only focus on what bad guys do to make the majority of gun owners look bad. They won't mention how many times law-abiding gun owners use weapons to stop criminals, and sometimes without firing any shots.
CNN and MSNBC have mentioned it in every article I’ve read. I don’t think anyone has ever said that a good guy with a gun NEVER saves the day, but it is rare and not enough to keep us from suffering as a society over and over again from bad-guys-who-looked-like-good-guys when they purchased a gun.
And last I checked, those 13.8% of our population were Americans, just like you or I. Aren’t those on the right saying we should all think of ourselves as Americans, not hyphenated Americans? Perhaps we should extend that to remembering that African-Americans are first and foremost Americans, too. It doesn’t matter, quite frankly, how you segment the problem out. We have an American problem with violence in general and gun violence in particular.
The one good thing about the Alt Right is that they have exposed the far right for what they are.
We have by far the most guns of any country on Earth with the highest rates of gun ownership. We also have the overwhelming majority of gun deaths, especially of women and children on the planet.
The safest countries on Earth have lower gun ownership and heavy gun restriction.
Which should not be the case based on pro-gun talking points. We should be the safest in the world with so many people owning guns.
Why the contradiction?
We are the most economically-successful nation on earth because we are an open society, having attracted the most motivated and driven from other societies; but this success comes at a price, because an open society will also attract all manner of misfits and outcasts, some of whom are not that motivated, just lazy.
The process of separating the two is continuous, and it involves judicious application of the use of force (coercion) which in any organized society, is vested in the nation-state or, when that method proves ineffective, usually via corruption -- which is more common in large cities where the dead weight, (and the manipulators who exploit them usually self-identifying as "liberals", "progressives", or common-mutt Democrats) tend to congregate. A firearm is the single most prominent manifestation of that use of force, be it for legitimate, or immoral purposes.
It's not actually a contradiction, just a matter of semantics. The contradictions lie among the basic principles and motivating factors driving the individuals involved -- the accumulation, management, and safeguarding of lawful property vs. the desire for autonomy and individual rights of the population.
"When you arrive at a contradiction, re-examine your premises, because at least one of them is wrong." (Ayn Rand)
For most of us, the definition of the two (usually described in the contemporary media as "work/life balance") can be accomplished via the workings of the markets. But there will always be lazy individuals seeking to avoid all effort, and on the other side of the equation, overindulged individuals seeking far too much (especially in terms of personal attention and service) for far too little.
Some of the biggest exploiters of that paradox, such as the OP, end up in places like C-D.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 11-07-2017 at 09:34 AM..
That really depends on your definition of "mass shooting." As you've also posted heavily in the thread claiming over 300 "mass shootings" in the country this year (I guarantee those aren't a vast majority white), you seem to be cherry picking data for your arguments.
Nearly every one of these high profile, high casualty mass shootings are perpetrated by white men. Deny it if you want, but that's the reality.
Wasn't it lucky that the "guy next door" just happened to be a gun owner, had a rifle handy, was a well qualified shooter and NRA member, and he stepped outside and took on the perpetrator, stopping him.
stopping him from what?
Sorry but this story sounds glammed up with all the things needed to make a movie.
"former NRA instructor.. LETS GO.. I knew every shot I heard represented a body"
not trying to tear the guy down but the story doesn't make me feel better about the NRA or guns in general.
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Not many news outlets are mentioning this. 
