The Denver killer is clearly a very very sick young Man.

[dingodan]

Such a backwards way of looking at it.

"If EVERYONE had guns, EVERYONE would be ok."

Right.....

No. When you forbid people to have guns, law abiding citizens are unarmed while criminals are armed. It's not complicated.

Is it not the case, that one armed, law abiding person in the cinema could have saved lives?

 

[Mellotron]

No. When you forbid people to have guns, law abiding citizens are unarmed while criminals are armed. It's not complicated.

Is it not the case, that one armed, law abiding person in the cinema could have saved lives?

If there were more guns in that cinema, there probably would've been more fatalities.

Look at the London riots - are you really suggesting that would've panned out BETTER if everyone had a gun?! It would've been much, MUCH worse.

 

[Uncle Spielberg]

And how much does that cost? Who foots the bill for his secure stay, food, upkeep and counselling for decades? Certainly millions, if not tens of millions of tax payers money spent on his leisurely reflection.

Hold the front pages.

Lokki in 100% disagreement with the views of Uncle Spielberg shocker. If ever there was a racing CERTAINTY it wouild be you would disagree with me. Sorry I have been not be on here much recently to disagree with.

 

[Uncle Spielberg]

What an absolutely crap thread.

Well done [MENTION=3887]Uncle Spielberg[/MENTION] on somehow conjuring 5 or 6 pages of shite out of saying the square root of f*** all. Saying "there are no winners here" is no talking point at all. What next? Start a thread to inform NSC that placing a toddler in the fast lane of the M1 would be DANGEROUS?

Superb stuff mate even by your extreme standards. There have been some very reasonable comments and viewpoints on the matter shame you did not get involved. f*** me why do I bother coming on this board. LOL !

 

[JamesAndTheGiantHead]

When you forbid people to have guns, law abiding citizens are unarmed while criminals are armed.

The difference being that this bloke wasn't a criminal, just a very unhinged young man who had probably had a bad couple of months. I think you'll find most 'criminals' use guns for financial gain or shooting other criminals. Not mindlessly killing a bunch of people.

 

[Lokki 7]

Hold the front pages.

Lokki in 100% disagreement with the views of Uncle Spielberg shocker. If ever there was a racing CERTAINTY it wouild be you would disagree with me. Sorry I have been not be on here much recently to disagree with.

Apology accepted.

 

[dingodan]

If there were more guns in that cinema, there probably would've been more fatalities.

Look at the London riots - are you really suggesting that would've panned out BETTER if everyone had a gun?! It would've been much, MUCH worse.

People got shot during the riots. A man died in his car after being shot. I imagine he didn't have a gun as they are illegal. The person who shot him had a gun though did'nt he? Even though they are illegal.

A rioter might think twice in the first place if a victim can shoot back.

 

[Uncle Spielberg]

Apology accepted.

Quite funny I guess. Actually this thread has served a useful purpose to show me to only do one post a month now and wait and watch as the same old usual angry young men start to dish up their bile. Quite funny and utterly preditable.

 

[Ⓩ-Ⓐ-Ⓜ-Ⓞ-Ⓡ-Ⓐ]

The difference being that this bloke wasn't a criminal, just a very unhinged young man who had probably had a bad couple of months. I think you'll find most 'criminals' use guns for financial gain or shooting other criminals. Not mindlessly killing a bunch of people.

What really gets me is the fact that he meticulously planned the attack and there is evidence that he was preparing for it for at least the previous 4 months, he didn't just flip out and lose the plot in a moment, which although still terrible would be at least a little more comprehensible. Have you seen the video on the Guardian website of the police detonating his home made bombs in the desert? One of them makes a MUSHROOM CLOUD!

EDIT: Video of the controlled explosions in the desert Aurora authorities detonate explosives at James Holmes's apartment | World news | guardian.co.uk

 

[dingodan]

Good article from: Gun Control's Twisted Outcome - Reason.com

This sea change in English crime followed a sea change in government policies. Gun regulations have been part of a more general disarmament based on the proposition that people don't need to protect themselves because society will protect them. It also will protect their neighbors: Police advise those who witness a crime to "walk on by" and let the professionals handle it.

This is a reversal of centuries of common law that not only permitted but expected individuals to defend themselves, their families, and their neighbors when other help was not available. It was a legal tradition passed on to Americans. Personal security was ranked first among an individual's rights by William Blackstone, the great 18th-century exponent of the common law. It was a right, he argued, that no government could take away, since no government could protect the individual in his moment of need. A century later Blackstone's illustrious successor, A.V. Dicey, cautioned, "discourage self-help and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians."

But modern English governments have put public order ahead of the individual's right to personal safety. First the government clamped down on private possession of guns; then it forbade people to carry any article that might be used for self-defense; finally, the vigor of that self-defense was to be judged by what, in hindsight, seemed "reasonable in the circumstances."

The 1920 Firearms Act was the first serious British restriction on guns. Although crime was low in England in 1920, the government feared massive labor disruption and a Bolshevik revolution. In the circumstances, permitting the people to remain armed must have seemed an unnecessary risk. And so the new policy of disarming the public began. The Firearms Act required a would-be gun owner to obtain a certificate from the local chief of police, who was charged with determining whether the applicant had a good reason for possessing a weapon and was fit to do so. All very sensible. Parliament was assured that the intention was to keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and other dangerous persons. Yet from the start the law's enforcement was far more restrictive, and Home Office instructions to police -- classified until 1989 -- periodically narrowed the criteria.

At first police were instructed that it would be a good reason to have a revolver if a person "lives in a solitary house, where protection against thieves and burglars is essential, or has been exposed to definite threats to life on account of his performance of some public duty." By 1937 police were to discourage applications to possess firearms for house or personal protection. In 1964 they were told "it should hardly ever be necessary to anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person" and that "this principle should hold good even in the case of banks and firms who desire to protect valuables or large quantities of money."

In 1969 police were informed "it should never be necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person." These changes were made without public knowledge or debate. Their enforcement has consumed hundreds of thousands of police hours. Finally, in 1997 handguns were banned. Proposed exemptions for handicapped shooters and the British Olympic team were rejected.

Even more sweeping was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, which made it illegal to carry in a public place any article "made, adapted, or intended" for an offensive purpose "without lawful authority or excuse." Carrying something to protect yourself was branded antisocial. Any item carried for possible defense automatically became an offensive weapon. Police were given extensive power to stop and search everyone. Individuals found with offensive items were guilty until proven innocent.

During the debate over the Prevention of Crime Act in the House of Commons, a member from Northern Ireland told his colleagues of a woman employed by Parliament who had to cross a lonely heath on her route home and had armed herself with a knitting needle. A month earlier, she had driven off a youth who tried to snatch her handbag by jabbing him "on a tender part of his body." Was it to be an offense to carry a knitting needle? The attorney general assured the M.P. that the woman might be found to have a reasonable excuse but added that the public should be discouraged "from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets; it is the duty of society to protect them."

Another M.P. pointed out that while "society ought to undertake the defense of its members, nevertheless one has to remember that there are many places where society cannot get, or cannot get there in time. On those occasions a man has to defend himself and those whom he is escorting. It is not very much consolation that society will come forward a great deal later, pick up the bits, and punish the violent offender."

In the House of Lords, Lord Saltoun argued: "The object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy. I do not think any government has the right, though they may very well have the power, to deprive people for whom they are responsible of the right to defend themselves." But he added: "Unless there is not only a right but also a fundamental willingness amongst the people to defend themselves, no police force, however large, can do it."

 

[Lokki 7]

Quite funny I guess. Actually this thread has served a useful purpose to show me to only do one post a month now and wait and watch as the same old usual angry young men start to dish up their bile. Quite funny and utterly preditable.

What is predictable is your tired worn out old posts about how the thread has descended into name calling when, as usual there is no such thing going on anywhere but your persecution complex. You have not "lit the blue touch paper" and have not caused any controversy despite that being your stated aim. Seriously, this is very boring from you. Time to change the record?

 

[Acker79]

Apologies Acker,wasnt having a pop at you

I know, I was just explaining.

 

[Commander]

Quite funny I guess. Actually this thread has served a useful purpose to show me to only do one post a month now

I think that is fairly unlikely.

 

[Don Quixote]

Governments ban guns so the people can't rise up against them.

 

[Lokki 7]

Governments ban guns so the people can't rise up against them.

Easier to vote them out, no?

 

[Mellotron]

A rioter might think twice in the first place if a victim can shoot back.

Yes, because there's no gun crime in America is there? Especially compared to here?!?!

 

[dingodan]

Yes, because there's no gun crime in America is there? Especially compared to here?!?!

I did not say there is no gun crime in America did I?

We have less gun crime. But we have always had (even before gun ban laws) low rates of gun crime. We do not have less gun crime because of gun ban laws. In fact after the handgun ban in 1997 gun crime rose by 40%.

And we have less gun crime over here, but, other than rape and murder, we have more serious crime than in the US. You are 6 times more likely to get mugged in London than you are in NewYork.

I think there is a case to be made that a culture of helplessness, where the government will be everyone's savior, has actually created a society of easy prey for criminals, and a dependent population without a sense of responsibility.

From Gun Control's Twisted Outcome - Reason.com

On a June evening two years ago, Dan Rather made many stiff British upper lips quiver by reporting that England had a crime problem and that, apart from murder, "theirs is worse than ours." The response was swift and sharp. "Have a Nice Daydream," The Mirror, a London daily, shot back, reporting: "Britain reacted with fury and disbelief last night to claims by American newsmen that crime and violence are worse here than in the US." But sandwiched between the article's battery of official denials -- "totally misleading," "a huge over-simplification," "astounding and outrageous" -- and a compilation of lurid crimes from "the wild west culture on the other side of the Atlantic where every other car is carrying a gun," The Mirror conceded that the CBS anchorman was correct. Except for murder and rape, it admitted, "Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes."

In the two years since Dan Rather was so roundly rebuked, violence in England has gotten markedly worse. Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of north London. And on New Year's Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone. London police are now looking to New York City police for advice.

None of this was supposed to happen in the country whose stringent gun laws and 1997 ban on handguns have been hailed as the "gold standard" of gun control. For the better part of a century, British governments have pursued a strategy for domestic safety that a 1992 Economist article characterized as requiring "a restraint on personal liberty that seems, in most civilised countries, essential to the happiness of others," a policy the magazine found at odds with "America's Vigilante Values." The safety of English people has been staked on the thesis that fewer private guns means less crime. The government believes that any weapons in the hands of men and women, however law-abiding, pose a danger, and that disarming them lessens the chance that criminals will get or use weapons.

The results -- the toughest firearm restrictions of any democracy -- are credited by the world's gun control advocates with producing a low rate of violent crime. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell reflected this conventional wisdom when, in a 1988 speech to the American Bar Association, he attributed England's low rates of violent crime to the fact that "private ownership of guns is strictly controlled."

In reality, the English approach has not re-duced violent crime. Instead it has left law-abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals who are confident that their victims have neither the means nor the legal right to resist them...

The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported that England's firearms restrictions "seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld." Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse, they are increasingly ready to use them...

London's Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.

Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England's inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July, England and Wales led the Western world's crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.

 

[Bold Seagull]

Good article from: Gun Control's Twisted Outcome - Reason.com

This sea change in English crime followed a sea change in government policies. Gun regulations have been part of a more general disarmament based on the proposition that people don't need to protect themselves because society will protect them. It also will protect their neighbors: Police advise those who witness a crime to "walk on by" and let the professionals handle it.

This is a reversal of centuries of common law that not only permitted but expected individuals to defend themselves, their families, and their neighbors when other help was not available. It was a legal tradition passed on to Americans. Personal security was ranked first among an individual's rights by William Blackstone, the great 18th-century exponent of the common law. It was a right, he argued, that no government could take away, since no government could protect the individual in his moment of need. A century later Blackstone's illustrious successor, A.V. Dicey, cautioned, "discourage self-help and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians."

But modern English governments have put public order ahead of the individual's right to personal safety. First the government clamped down on private possession of guns; then it forbade people to carry any article that might be used for self-defense; finally, the vigor of that self-defense was to be judged by what, in hindsight, seemed "reasonable in the circumstances."

The 1920 Firearms Act was the first serious British restriction on guns. Although crime was low in England in 1920, the government feared massive labor disruption and a Bolshevik revolution. In the circumstances, permitting the people to remain armed must have seemed an unnecessary risk. And so the new policy of disarming the public began. The Firearms Act required a would-be gun owner to obtain a certificate from the local chief of police, who was charged with determining whether the applicant had a good reason for possessing a weapon and was fit to do so. All very sensible. Parliament was assured that the intention was to keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and other dangerous persons. Yet from the start the law's enforcement was far more restrictive, and Home Office instructions to police -- classified until 1989 -- periodically narrowed the criteria.

At first police were instructed that it would be a good reason to have a revolver if a person "lives in a solitary house, where protection against thieves and burglars is essential, or has been exposed to definite threats to life on account of his performance of some public duty." By 1937 police were to discourage applications to possess firearms for house or personal protection. In 1964 they were told "it should hardly ever be necessary to anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person" and that "this principle should hold good even in the case of banks and firms who desire to protect valuables or large quantities of money."

In 1969 police were informed "it should never be necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person." These changes were made without public knowledge or debate. Their enforcement has consumed hundreds of thousands of police hours. Finally, in 1997 handguns were banned. Proposed exemptions for handicapped shooters and the British Olympic team were rejected.

Even more sweeping was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, which made it illegal to carry in a public place any article "made, adapted, or intended" for an offensive purpose "without lawful authority or excuse." Carrying something to protect yourself was branded antisocial. Any item carried for possible defense automatically became an offensive weapon. Police were given extensive power to stop and search everyone. Individuals found with offensive items were guilty until proven innocent.

During the debate over the Prevention of Crime Act in the House of Commons, a member from Northern Ireland told his colleagues of a woman employed by Parliament who had to cross a lonely heath on her route home and had armed herself with a knitting needle. A month earlier, she had driven off a youth who tried to snatch her handbag by jabbing him "on a tender part of his body." Was it to be an offense to carry a knitting needle? The attorney general assured the M.P. that the woman might be found to have a reasonable excuse but added that the public should be discouraged "from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets; it is the duty of society to protect them."

Another M.P. pointed out that while "society ought to undertake the defense of its members, nevertheless one has to remember that there are many places where society cannot get, or cannot get there in time. On those occasions a man has to defend himself and those whom he is escorting. It is not very much consolation that society will come forward a great deal later, pick up the bits, and punish the violent offender."

In the House of Lords, Lord Saltoun argued: "The object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy. I do not think any government has the right, though they may very well have the power, to deprive people for whom they are responsible of the right to defend themselves." But he added: "Unless there is not only a right but also a fundamental willingness amongst the people to defend themselves, no police force, however large, can do it."

per 100,000 population in 1 year, fire arm related death rates:

USA 10.27 (unintentional death rate 0.23)
UK 0.46 (0.01)
Germany 1.57 (0.04)

In the US, per year, on average 700 or so people die because of an unintentional firearm accident. Not defence, simply guns going off and accidentally killing people. 700. That's more than a Boeing 747 crashing every year - just so people can apparently feel safe.

There were 13,000 murders in the US in 2010, 9000 of which were caused by a fire arm. How is this consistent high percentage maintained if people have guns to defend themselves?

Do you simply buy into anything that is subversive giving you the illusion that you are some how enlightened and the rest of us controlled?

 

[Bold Seagull]

we have more serious crime than in the US. You are 6 times more likely to get mugged in London than you are in NewYork.

A true twisting of actual statistics taking a 'once notorious' single neighbourhood area of New York city and comparing it with the whole of Greater London. 6 times more likely is utter bullish*t, even the Daily Mail only jumped it up to 25% more likely, and they twisted the figures for their own ends.

And if you haven't been reading the international news, I'm not sure the NYC mayor agrees with you either!

 

[dingodan]

per 100,000 population in 1 year, fire arm related death rates:

USA 10.27 (unintentional death rate 0.23)
UK 0.46 (0.01)
Germany 1.57 (0.04)

In the US, per year, on average 700 or so people die because of an unintentional firearm accident. Not defence, simply guns going off and accidentally killing people. 700. That's more than a Boeing 747 crashing every year - just so people can apparently feel safe.

There were 13,000 murders in the US in 2010, 9000 of which were caused by a fire arm. How is this consistent high percentage maintained if people have guns to defend themselves?

Do you simply buy into anything that is subversive giving you the illusion that you are some how enlightened and the rest of us controlled?

1,901 people killed on Britain's roads in 2011. That is multiple boeing 747 crashes every year. Should we ban cars?

The murders were "caused by a firearm"? You mean had the firearm not existed the murders would not have taken place? Are you sure?

Why do you call my view subversive? The concept of an individuals right to defend himself is a historical one. Lord Saltoun said "Unless there is not only a right but also a fundamental willingness amongst the people to defend themselves, no police force, however large, can do it." Is he being subversive? Accusing me of being "subversive" just a cheap way of demonizing me and my view without having to use your intellect.

The article I posted is by Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor of history at Bentley College and a senior fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program, author of "To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right".