Extremist Militias in the US

[Archonsod]

The UK has one of the highest crime rates in Europe

And yet the murder rate is 1.28 per 100,000 population. Compared to the US's 5.0. Possibly because when violent crime is recorded over here, the worst that tends to happen is someone ends up in hospital. Rather than dead. Wonders of requiring a minimum of effort from would be murderers.

Guns are a tool that some criminals will use, yes. They'll also use that tool even when it's illegal for them to own or carry one.

Yes, so for the small minority of dedicated criminals who plan, prepare and equip for their crimes, you give the majority who simply grab whatever comes to hand, access to guns. And that's before we consider the vast majority, given that rather than being some independent species of human criminals are simply ordinary citizens who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, and thus everyone is a potential criminal.

Ending drug prohibition is probably the biggest single biggest and most effective strike that the US government could make against crime.

And now we get onto the legalise drugs soapbox Truly, your ****wittery knows no bounds.

 

[Shatari]

And now we get onto the legalise drugs soapbox Truly, your ****wittery knows no bounds.

Hey, let's do away with all restrictions on drugs and guns! Nothing could possibly go wrong!

 

[Deloused]

The American problem isnt in its gun policies, it is in its culture. Kids get to learn about their history of countless Wars, their father went to Vietnam and their grandpa went to WW2 and Korea. They have this thing called ''the terror meter'' wich is broadcasted largely to tell the people what is the scale of the terrorism threat, they are flooded by medias dedicated to control the crowd (see the movie, ''the longest night'' about McArthy's media reform) abusive consumerism, and crazy competition as a result of a capitalistic government. If you have pimples you are ugly, if you are fat you wont get laid, if you dont smell like flowers people wont talk to you, if you wear old clothes you wont make any friends, 60% of murderers are close friends with their victims... violence is completely normalised, the army comes in schools to speak about war, they build a mosque on ground zero... bla bla, all theese contradictions that form the american paradox.

A culture of Fear + fascist propaghanda + religious based war + lots of guns = a whole bunch of dead people.

there was a saying in the Canadian army during the WW2: When british saw germans, they shot, when germans saw british they shot, when we saw americans, everybody ran for it.

 

[Voutare]

There are ~2 million defensive uses of firearms each year in the United States.
Vermont has one of the lowest crime rates in the United States, but some of the most liberal gun laws.
Washington DC has one of the highest crime rates in the United States, but some of the strictest gun laws.
Switzerland has an extremely low crime rate, yet lots of people with guns.
The UK has one of the highest crime rates in Europe (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html), yet also has exceedingly strict gun laws.

Woo VT.

There's so many guns here, and so many bat**** crazy rednecks that no one really wants to try anything.

 

[MrMeat]

Um no, the best thing you can do is get them out of harms way. Or are you one of those idiots who thinks criminals regularly send their victims little memo's like "I shall be coming for you at exactly 15:00 this Thursday. I'll be the guy with the shifty eyes and the pink carnation".

Wow, thanks for letting me know I'm an idiot. You totally missed the point.

Because you never know when a killer will strike, the best way to avoid them is to carry some kind of weapon with you at all times, for two reasons:

1. In the off chance someone wants to kill you, they will notice your weapon and might decide to avoid engaging you.
2. In the off chance that person decides to engage you, you will at least have something to fight back with, instead of running around screaming and frantically calling 911 in the hopes that somehow they will arrive and stop the man in the next 3 seconds before he kills you.

By the way, those two facts I brought up are indeed facts. Read this book and see for yourself. While you're at it, you should also read this book, which further proves what I'm trying to point out to you.

 

[Archonsod]

Fight back? You going to ask nice Mr Mugger to put his gun away so you can draw your own or something? You're the one missing the point, the funny thing about crime is that it happens entirely at the instigation of the criminal.

 

[Devercia]

Though the criminal would like them to be, the potential consequences of the initiation of crime are not always instantaneous.

 

[Swadius 2.0]

Because you never know when a killer will strike, the best way to avoid them is to carry some kind of weapon with you at all times, for two reasons:

1. In the off chance someone wants to kill you, they will notice your weapon and might decide to avoid engaging you.
2. In the off chance that person decides to engage you, you will at least have something to fight back with, instead of running around screaming and frantically calling 911 in the hopes that somehow they will arrive and stop the man in the next 3 seconds before he kills you.

It's not so much that the public has guns, but the knowledge that the state broadcasted that the public can have guns. How high a prevalence of actual gun ownership is irrelevant. The government might as well make a mandate that people take with them conealed machetes, undercover body guards, or let them have access to trained attack dogs in public.
The guns in this picture is completely arbitrary.
If someone wants to kill you, they'll do it like any good homocide. You'll probably never see them when they attack. Besides, they'll probably shoot you sooner if they see you trying to draw out your gun. In fact, your chances would probably be higher of successfully drawing your concealed gun in a state where it is prohibited due to the fact that the mugger wouldn't expect you to be carrying on as much as in a state that does.

By the way, those two facts I brought up are indeed facts. Read this book and see for yourself.

Spoiler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime#Evidence_Against

 

[Ashmond]

Wow.  All of this insightful spin-off that started over media propaganda?  Yet none of you appear to realize the fact.  Of course, since if you read a book or news feed, you're in the loop! 

 

[Devercia]

Wow.  All of this insightful spin-off that started over media propaganda?  Yet none of you appear to realize the fact.  Of course, since if you read a book or news feed, you're in the loop! 

The grammar here is ambiguous. Also, I question your mastery of the colloquialism "in the loop."

 

[Ashmond]

So elegant and obviously highly intelligent, yet you present an equivocal ad hominem tucked within a red herring?  I'm utterly disappointed.

 

[MrMeat]

Fight back? You going to ask nice Mr Mugger to put his gun away so you can draw your own or something? You're the one missing the point, the funny thing about crime is that it happens entirely at the instigation of the criminal.

The criminal might not instigate if he sees that you have a weapon of your own. Also, these crimes are usually not instantaneous. Most of the time the killer is after something more than just your life. In the case of the mugger, many will not attack until after confronting you.

Also, More Guns, Less Crime is indeed a controversial book. One of the critics quoted on Wikipedia mentioned that the author of the book is "racist" since he called black people one of the larger causes of firearm homicides. But that's just arguing with the statistics.

Oh, and I found a nice gun fact sheet on the Gun Owner's of America website some of you might do well to read:

http://gunowners.org/sk0802.htm

Oh yeah:

Can you imagine how Columbine would've played out if even half the students there were armed? Sure, a few innocents would've probably been killed at first, but the killing would've stopped then and there as the rest of the students put the killers down.

Heck, if the students at columbine were armed, Dylan and Eric might not have even gone on their spree in the first place for fear of being shot seconds after the shooting started.

I think you're the first gun "advocate" I've ever heard to suggest arming children at school. Really? You don't think there might be a problem here? Like say hormones, lack of discipline, and childish pranks, just to name a few? Further, what would have stopped them from simply using a bomb instead? After all, there would have been a plentiful supply of gunpowder...

Hmm... Maybe I wasn't thinking right there after all. My cold's been getting to my head...

What I mean to say is that people above the age of 18 should definitely be allowed to carry defensive firearms onto school property. Plenty of sexual abuse and assaults occur on college campuses. And even if the students aren't armed, the teachers probably should be (by their own accord).

 

[Urlik]

There are so many things to address here. The people at the Waco Siege had guns, that was the problem: They had illegally modified their guns to be automatic without filing for the proper permits. When the government stopped by to seize the illegal guns, they were ambushed. That sparked the siege.

the Waco siege is one of the biggest cover ups on American soil.

you do know that prior to the DATF and FBI initiating the siege, the local sheriff had been out to the Waco commune in response to the claim that they had fully automatic weapons and found none.

in the unedited video of the end of the siege there is a tank/apc fitted with a flamethrower torching the building.

if, as the official story states, Waco was a crime scene, why did they bulldoze it immediately after the buildings were burnt to the ground?

 

[Oyipggy]

Can you imagine how Columbine would've played out if even half the students there were armed? Sure, a few innocents would've probably been killed at first, but the killing would've stopped then and there as the rest of the students put the killers down.

Heck, if the students at columbine were armed, Dylan and Eric might not have even gone on their spree in the first place for fear of being shot seconds after the shooting started.

Given how they offed themselves at the end, I don't think being shot was any fear of theirs. The problem was their having guns, not other people's lack of them. And a huge ****ing problem it was.

 

[Ashmond]

Can you imagine how Columbine would've played out if even half the students there were armed? Sure, a few innocents would've probably been killed at first, but the killing would've stopped then and there as the rest of the students put the killers down.

Heck, if the students at columbine were armed, Dylan and Eric might not have even gone on their spree in the first place for fear of being shot seconds after the shooting started.

Given how they offed themselves at the end, I don't think being shot was any fear of theirs. The problem was their having guns, not other people's lack of them. And a huge ****ing problem it was.

Are you suggesting that stripping the right to bear firearms will prevent future episodes of that scenario?

 

[Oyipggy]

No. I didn't suggest anything. I was simply pointing out a flaw in what MrMeat wrote.

However, it does logically follow that nobody having guns would, in fact, lead to nobody being shot.

 

[CJ1145]

Can you imagine how Columbine would've played out if even half the students there were armed? Sure, a few innocents would've probably been killed at first, but the killing would've stopped then and there as the rest of the students put the killers down.

Heck, if the students at columbine were armed, Dylan and Eric might not have even gone on their spree in the first place for fear of being shot seconds after the shooting started.

Given how they offed themselves at the end, I don't think being shot was any fear of theirs. The problem was their having guns, not other people's lack of them. And a huge ****ing problem it was.

Even if the right to bear arms was stripped, they would have gotten a hold of guns anyway. People like that aren't deterred by things such as the law.

 

[Oyipggy]

Of course they will. I wasn't trying to say that prohibiting guns is the answer to the gun problem, if you want to call it that, just that giving everyone guns in that situation wouldn't have stopped it.

 

[Swadius 2.0]

Can you imagine how Columbine would've played out if even half the students there were armed? Sure, a few innocents would've probably been killed at first, but the killing would've stopped then and there as the rest of the students put the killers down.

You're saying that as if people would know who was doing the shooting . Panicked people with weapons looking to defend themselves but don't know who is attacking them is not a good thing.

Even if the right to bear arms was stripped, they would have gotten a hold of guns anyway. People like that aren't deterred by things such as the law.

Arguably, a bomb is probably easier to acquire than guns if you're in a state that doesn't allow them.

 

[Evilknightz]

Can you imagine how Columbine would've played out if even half the students there were armed? Sure, a few innocents would've probably been killed at first, but the killing would've stopped then and there as the rest of the students put the killers down.

You're saying that as if people would know who was doing the shooting . Panicked people with weapons looking to defend themselves but don't know who is attacking them is not a good thing.

Even if the right to bear arms was stripped, they would have gotten a hold of guns anyway. People like that aren't deterred by things such as the law.

Arguably, a bomb is probably easier to acquire than guns if you're in a state that doesn't allow them.

I'd rather be blown up than shot, lower survival rate, less pain.