Re: safety and politics
 

Without any government oversight, how do you suggest ensuring educated gun ownership?

Keep in mind you've already acknowledged a problem with convicted criminals owning firearms, and policing even that as a restriction requires official oversight...

Re: safety and politics
 

I said I did not advocate it.. not that I wanted to control or enforce it.

Re: safety and politics
 

If you Americans had kept proper oversight on your financial system, you wouldn't have let the greedy scammers eat out your whole system from within, like termites that eat the frame of a building from the inside; everything still looked fine on the outside, until, one day, the whole thing fell down... taking the whole global city with it.

Anyone else wonder about what else could be all rotten on the inside, just waiting to collapse? As we've seen, it tends to be the areas where nobody's really paying attention, and where it pays much better to pretend everything's all right than blow the whistle. Look for parts of our society that are largely self-regulated.

I actually don't know what these areas are. I'm mostly just wondering out loud. Maybe there aren't any areas left that are quite so free of scrutiny and full of easy money as Wall Street used to be.

Re: safety and politics
 

Hi qole,

I agree with your comment. Are we not living through yet another example of the consequences of deregulation? The idea is, 'please just leave us alone, we can be trusted, and it will be good for all of us' The fox guarding the henhouse, right?

Since fatal's recent comments in which he ( for some reason I assume you are a guy,:) ) refuses to budge from this position that we can not allow any regulation of guns because that would inevitably leed to an all out ban on guns, I have realized that this attitude is why the change will have to happen with a fight. If you and your fellow gun owners where willing to comprimise, fatal, I think it could be worked out. But instead there is this stubborn resistence to reasonable regulation.


I just don't want this country to turn into something like Somalia with people ruling the streets with guns. It just seems like a horrible possibility especially given the political divisions and economic hard times.

And why as it we need to own assault rifles and be able to buy them without a background check at a gun show? And what do you do with them ?

So there you go, gun owners fear a total ban and I fear lawless tribalism ( don't take that the wrong way, I don't mean skin color)
I think we better find the middle ground. The current situation is going nowhere. And I suppose that's the way gun owners like it.

Neil

Re: safety and politics
 

I've been thinking about it; if given the opportunity to make a quick buck doing something crooked, there's a lot of people out there who can justify it to themselves... I mean, who could put melamine into baby formula, just to make some more money? Who could trick poor people into buying a house that's way out of their league, with a mortgage that has credit-card interest rates after a short period of low interest rates?

I think these lowlifes are out there all the time, always looking to cheat and scam the system, and good regulation keeps them in check. Beware when a self-regulated industry says, "there's nothing to see here, it's all under control," because someone is probably being paid off by the scammers to turn a blind eye.

Honestly, I'm not nearly so worried about the legal gun owners; their motivations tend to be much "smaller," protecting their home, family, neighbourhood against ... well, whomever they think are the bad guys. I'm really not very worried about the muggers, thugs and home invaders. They're the petty criminals, and they're going to get caught because they're just stupid.

I'm terrified of the sharks in suits who know how to roll subprime mortgages into mezzanine CDOs, get the ratings companies to rate them AAA and then sell them to investors all over the world.

EDIT: Why am I scared of these white-collar criminals? They could destroy my life much more completely than a home invader, by destroying the value of my house, undermining my mortgage-holding bank, forcing my company to lay me off due to a imploding economy....

Re: safety and politics
 

This has already been discussed.. in great detail. And are you using the fake definition of an assault rifle? There is a difference between an AR-15 and an M16. M16's are still very tightly controlled.

Benson also addressed this in detail. Gun shows have nothing to do with it. Some states allow a non firearms dealer (like me for example) individual, to sell a gun I no longer want/need, to someone else, without requiring me to do a background check on the other person. Just like a credit card machine, every check through the BCI costs money. And this also does NOT apply to M16's. Anyone with a fully registered NFA firearm must have the recipient of the firearm go through the same 6 month process before he can sell it to them. (AFAIK).

Well no.. You want more controls, I want less. Doubt anybody is "truly" happy in the current half-limbo state of gun-control.. but I'm happier than I was prior to 2004 about it.

Re: safety and politics
 

I hear ya. This sort of thing is just going to make a better environment for the illegal gun owners to do their thing. You know, wrotten economy leeds to the young seeing guns and drugs as their economic crack cocaine.

And this leeds back to my original point. We, as a country need to spend our collective wealth more carefully so that the homeland is better taken care of. What are we doing spending billions on these wars over seas? Is it really worth it? Is it American lives we are saving over there or more Corporate greed? I'm goin with the latter. I know some are happy we got tough with the supposed bad guys over there. I can kind of see that. But I just think the price we are paying is way too high in GI lives lost, in Dollars and in the lost opportunities that huge pile of waisted cash could represent to a healthier economy and safer country.

Ah, but safety, what a boring subject. Right? Unless it's someone you care about.

Neil

Re: safety and politics
 

The point is, they might be seen as low life afterwards, and from an outside point of view, but it isn't that easy to spot while its going on.
I mean, if you ask any of those you accused of being low lifes why they did it, they would probably give a reasonable answer. There is very little evil needed for these things to happen.
Of course nobody would sneak into the storage room at night and spill melamine into babys milk, laughing an evil love and rub his hands. That's Hollywood. In reality, there is the scientist who says its possible but never suggests it, there is the business guy who might suggest it but never actually does it. there is the worker who mixes some stuff without really knowing what and so on.
And we are all doing it! We are buying the best deal and we are outraged if we learn that that company treats its employees poorly, waters their products down or dumps there waste in the lake near our home. We say to our selves "what horrible people" and go on shopping at the second cheapest place.
You may find a lot of similar examples. And thats why we need mild regulations. Not to keep us safe from evil people (aka "them"), but to protect us from things that people like us are involved in.

And by the way, its the same with guns.
It's not those robbers with a gun that I would be afraid of in the US, its people like fatalsaint who think they got it all under control and all the accidents that might happen (child gets hand on gun, late home dad gets shot by anxious wife, owner gets shot while cleaning, owner gets shot by armed robber who would otherwise just have taken some stuff, ...) could not happen to them.
Its the same with, for example, cars. They are really dangerous without anybody driving a car with the actual intention to kill someone.
But cars, unlike guns, have a better cost/benefit-ratio. And even they are very regulated (certain age, need a licence, take a test, can only drive on designated ways, have to follow a lot of rules while doing so...).

Coming back to my initial statements in some very early post: Most US-Americans posting here really scare me because of their attitude. Sungrove may be the only exception. Well and qole obviously, but he's from Canada. :)
Cheers you two. I salute you for coping with fatalsaint!

Re: safety and politics
 

fatal, I can go buy an assault rifle for a thousand dollars today. Period. People can go to gun shows and buy guns without a background check. These facts are all the detail I need to feel the way I do that some gun owners positions are way too radical and apparently unnegotiable. But I do think this is the year I go buy a shotgun. I see very little hope for political progress.

Neil

Re: safety and politics
 

There are of course 100% armed parts of the world, but not ones that most people here would like to live in. The phrase of Hobbes about life without government being nasty, brutish and short comes to mind. Child soldiers, not fans of gun control, have had large effects in some areas. I bet that a bunch of libertarians could buy property in one of those countries and demonstrate how well their theories work. They could carry guns and defend their rights against all comers. In fact, I think that several attempts to buy islands and put these ideas into practice have been made. For some reason, they didn't thrive (unless someone will point out an area where such an experiment IS thriving). I guess that a true test of this nature requires the cooperation of the rest of the world to work.