sounds liberating.

maybe i'm too old fashioned to know what a troll really is, isn't a troll like a persona that's not a real person? that's kind of what i think of it.

you really can't accuse anyone of making false assumptions about people you know nothing about, since that's all you've been doing.

As of recently, yes (but only toward you)....I'm just playing your game.

congratulations.

now i'd like to hear from people who have something to say on the original subject.

hold on sway. why did you edit that part about how your reps show that you're winning the game? it was the funny one.

If there is anything worse than an argument on the internet, it's to find out that all your opinions have been put forward more incisively outside of it many times before already.

knox, i don't have a radical view on the matter. i think it's possible to find a balance.
there are examples of this.

currently there's a huge segment of the population very passionate about this amendment and very well supported politically, to me it's not feasible to think that such measures would even be approved.

it's something that will have to be solved progressively and will need broader actions than just gun control.

well, yes i agree completely.

i don't think you can just ban it, but you'd have to introduce much stricter regulations, stats show lives can be saved with this.

as it happens with every change, people would protest here and there and then get used to it and probably realise the benefits.

i don't think i've been suggesting it wouldn't have to be progressive, so maybe i gave that impression.

the only people who should be able to own guns are the ones that actually need them for something specific, and under constant control.

something has to be done about the industry too i'm not sure how tho.

but you sure have a different view when you can see the result of the irresponsible american gun industry in your face everyday, or simply pointed at you.

yeah, i understand that.

that said, let's not push all responsibilities.

but the argument: "shit happens, people die" is truly disturbing.

How so?

this one is almost as good:
exactly, who needs laws?

let's live in a fucking anarchy.

in b4 utr0ll
just sayin'...

lol.

its true they dont need anymore laws or rules because no one will be shot when they dont need to be anytime in the future and guns will not be used in crimes or accidents in the next 10 years.

That's one hell of a sentence, Jon Boy.

ha ha, borracho.

look, i lived in washington dc. murder capital of the usa in the early 90s.

washington had a handgun ban. so criminals were free to do whatever the fuck they wanted because every home invasion or rape or assault on a taxpayer was virtually risk-free for the criminal. that's not the case anymore.

this is maybe paradoxical to you, but in the united states, the higher the gun restrictions the higher the crime rate. criminals are always armed, so when you ban guns the victim is the one who loses, that's what i meant. the criminal doesn't care about regulations, permits, fingerprinting, or anything, they go to a gun trafficker and they're ready to go to work.

i have a friend whose brother was a church organist. the brother had aids, but he kept working, and one day walking home from the metro at night he was jumped in the street by thugs, and kicked on the ground until he was almost dead. it was supposed to be a simple mugging but he got a beatdown. i'm not sure why. because he was gay? probably. he was hospitalized and was in bad shape for a long time and eventually died from the damage.

my friend then started carrying a handgun because he didn't want to suffer the same fate as his brother. he moved from maryland to dc but kept his maryland driver's license so he could continue owning a gun-- he was breaking the city law because he was afraid for his safety. now the city law has been deemed unconstitutional.

when i first saw the gun i was scared shitless, it was a fucking magnum, huge, but i understood my friend feared for his safety. he had army training and knew how to use it and nobody was going to stomp him to death or near death.

of course he didn't know he "needed to own" a gun until his brother was stomped in the street for being a "faggot", just like you don't know you'll need a fire extinguisher or car insurance until you're in an accident or in a fire.

i've seen a lot of people mugged in dc, mugged and beaten and purple with concussions. the reason civilian gun carry works it's because it works as a deterrence, the same way that mutual assured destruction prevented nuclear war. yes, it sounds absurd if you don't get the math, but it works. it's easy to rob and abuse helpless victims.

where are the cops when you need them, anyway? all they do is write fucking reports after you've been fucked up. they don't show up to save you when you're in trouble.

i'm not saying make guns a free-for-all, obviously, but we have enough regulations, they just need to be sufficiently enforced to keep them off the hands of criminals. law-abiding people don't need their guns taken away from them by a nanny state, and the regulations (background check and registration) are already in place. americans will never put up with a "need to own" requirement.

there is a loophole for background checks and that is that of gun shows where they don't do those. should that be fixed? sure.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to !@#$%! again.

I don't think that that sounds absurd because of the math. The reason it seems absurd is because security based upon mutually-assured destruction is hardly the most civil scenario. At a certain point, that very solution maintains its own minimal level of violence through the culture of fear it produces. Certainly less crime is preferable to more crime, so repealing gun restrictions in some cases may have evident practical benefit, but I think that would require a slew of statistics and reliable sociology to determine that such a scenario is preferable. Would it makes sense to arm the populous in instances where there exists less crime than if you did arm everybody? Of course not. Also, there is that matter of guns bleeding in from de-regulated populations. It was the lesson of the Cold War that neither Comintern nor democracy was infectious but the mutually-assured destruction that they birthed. It isn't even about ideologies or justice at that point. It provides its own reason for being. Not a thing is more infectious than fear.

It's not a question of less crime/more crime, it's more like how fatal the consequences are.
everyone i know has been mugged more than once and they're still around, i'm pretty sure if they had a gun something worse would have happened - they would have been shot, they would have shot someone, both cases would have been worse than having personal belongings taken away.

hate crime will continue existing, but we just make it easier for people to kill people by giving them guns.

on the top of my mind here are the news i remember seeing on tv yesterday:
- 12 year old boy is shot in the dark in his street because he looked like a member of a gang they wanted killed.

- woman is sitting by the beach with her husband when a bullet coming from god knows where goes through her face.

I don't imagine these things would have happened with knives.

death is all around.

damn! my idea to let them all have guns the way they have for all this time in the hopes that nothing bad would happen has been blown away.