On Dec 19, 11:24 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
wrote in message

...





On Dec 18, 3:24 am, Gunner wrote:
On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 04:22:03 -0800 (PST), wrote:
On Dec 10, 5:05 pm, "SteveB" wrote:
I saw a clear full body picture of the Omaha shooter. Anyone who had
a
concealed weapon and who could shoot decently could have lessened the
carnage. If you got a CCW, carry your weapon.

Steve

OK. I will probably regret the flames I get BUT

Are you saying that the populace needs to be armed when they go out to
get a bottle of milk, lest they encounter a "bad guy" and need to
defend themselves?

What if the "bad guy" gets the drop on you, and kills you. Is it YOUR
fault as you were not quick enough to "defend" yourself? (seems to be
a common thread by some here...)

Do you want to be in a combat ready state of paranoia when you leave
your house?

Are you happy living in a society where such things see to be a
frequent occurrence?

How come you Yanks are so obsessed with guns? -

Your otherwise decent people - what gives with this gun nuttiness?

Andrew VK3BFA

One assumes you not only dont wear your seat belt, but incourage
others to not wear theirs. And have removed all the batteries from
your residential smoke detectors and have stored away all your fire
extinguishers and first aid kits.

After all..to actually have them at hand, is the sign of paranoia and
an obsession.

Gunner

. Well. I remembered what the last thing Gunner mentioned - it was the
fire extinguisher, and how if you don't have a gun, a fire
extinguisher is no good to you.

On the face of it, this is a nonsensical statement - but I thought,
mm, there must be a logic here I cant understand, after all, Gunners
views are similar to many other pro-gun people here, they cannot all
be nutters. Besides, no one has beaten him to death yet, so he cant be
too bad....In GunnerLand, things are simple, so I came up with this
amplification of Gunners fire extinguisher beliefs, based directly on
my own life experiences.

When I got married, many years ago, I hadn't realised that my lovely
wife had a tendency to set fire to the kitchen. This has happened
twice, and both times I was able to put the fire out, then rebuild the
kitchen. After the first one, I counselled here on this extensively,
stressed the need to be safety conscious and not walk away from the
chip pan and start having long phone conversations with her
girlfriends. I thought I had got my point across, she promised it
would not happen again.

After the second time, I decided more drastic efforts were needed. In
GunnerLand, the solution would have been simple, expeditious, and
direct. Shoot her - she was a proven danger to my life, and the lives
of others. Ergo, I had a Right to shoot her in Self Defence. She was
an unlicensed person who had, somehow, in spite of all the checks and
balances, manged to get hold of a kitchen and was behaving in a
dangerous manner.

But, call me a sentimental softy, I couldn't do this - besides, she is
a great cook and good with the kids.

So I went and bought a fire extinguisher and a fire blanket. This
proved to be a total solution, the mere presence of them on the
kitchen wall has averted any more incidents. And my wife is still
here.

So, my conclusions. You don't NEED to carry a gun and be prepared to
use it, a fire extinguisher will do just as well. I have proved this
beyond reasonable doubt (see above - no lie) - just the very presence
of a fire extinguisher will avert any life threatening situations.

I rest my case. Its entirely consistent with the logic of the group.

Andrew VK3BFA.

I have a wife like that -- my first wife, who I've kept for 34 years. I,
too, keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen and remind her how to use it
from time to time. An impatient cook, she believes that a stove has two
speeds: On, and Off. I keep threatening to publish a cookbook titled
_Donna's Blowtorch Cookbook of One-Minute Recipes_. g

I feel a little sorry that someone who has a level head about this (you) is
getting a warped view of the gun situation in the US (from us). As you
probably recognize, the frequent posters here are unusually oriented towards
shooting and guns and can jerk out the ready-made and patented arguments
from memory. That's not to say they don't believe them nor that they don't
contain more than a grain of truth. It's just that, as TMT and Richard, and
maybe Don have said, they aren't the views of the vast majority of
Americans. This is a very conservative and independent-minded group for the
most part: it goes with the hobby in the US. To some extent that includes
me, although my views are not in line with those of Gunner or Steve, or the
others who have tried to...er, correct your thinking. d8-)

You're actually asking a question that should produce a lot of varied and
often contradictory views. Let me throw out a couple of facts that will
confuse the issue further. This is really dangerous ground I'm stepping on
here, so please hear me out before drawing conclusions.

According to Dept. of Justice figures, 52% of homicides in the US are
committed by blacks. I hesitate to say "African-Americans" because here in
the northeast the ones committing crimes appear to be mostly mulatto
Caribbeans -- Dominicans, Haitians, and so on. Blacks make up (IIRC)
something like 13% of the population nationwide, according to 2004 stats.

Also, it's difficult to dig this out of the statistics, but if you remove
the Hispanic "whites" from the figures, you've sliced off another large slug
of homicides. They're three times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to
commit a homicide.

When you remove those two groups from the statistics you get something that
looks like Europe, in terms of violent crime rates. I may be off with my
numbers a bit because I haven't picked this apart for a very long time, but
that's the general character of the situation.

Now, listen carefully, please: If you take away the large metropolitan
statistical areas and analyze the remainder by race and ethnicity, you get
the confusing result that blacks and Hispanics are hardly more likely than
non-Hispanic whites to commit homicides. So it's not really a race/ethnicity
issue. As Gunner rightly says, it's a cultural issue. And the culture we're
talking about, where most of the crime comes from, is inner cities that have
a lot of gangs and/or drug dealing. This is not always the largest cities.
Camden, NJ is a good example. It's a small city but a real violent-crime hot
spot, right here in the middle of the largely non-gun-owning part of the
country. The large majority of the gun crime in New Jersey is concentrated
in three small cities and one medium-sized one.

Five miles outside of Camden and you could be in France, as far as gun
crimes, or even crime in general, is concerned. The lines are sharp. And
most of us non-Hispanic whites don't go into places like Camden unless we're
dragged there by a court order.

Another statistic: I'm only moderately involved with guns (some hunting and
a little more target shooting, and that mostly because I was brought up with
them in rural areas, unlike my neighbors who have always lived in dense
suburbs), but I currently own 8 of them. I've owned as many as 16, mostly
inherited from my father and uncle. Ask Gunner how many he owns. Ha!

If I own 8 and there are maybe 250 million guns in the US, with a population
of 300 million, that means there are 6 or so people out there who don't own
any. Gunner probably has more guns than all of some small towns. g

There's another statistic that says something like 50% or 60% of the
households in America have at least one gun. Most of them, I'll venture, are
like my father-in-law: one ancient shotgun that hasn't been out of the
closet in 30 years.

So, we have a gun-crime problem, but it's mostly in inner cities and it's
heavily related to gangs. This is confused in your eyes, perhaps, because
all but a few of the nutters who have committed mass murders are young white
kids (the one in Virginia last year was an extremely rare ethnic Chinese,
and the one at the law school a few years ago was black, but the nutters are
mostly white). These are psychopaths and they don't seem to know they're not
supposed to be white, statistically speaking.

The upshot is that, as several others have said, most of us are unlikely
ever to encounter a gun crime. I used to work in New York City and I never
saw a gun in all the time I was there, except on the hip of a cop. I never
heard a shot. My wife worked for years in Newark, NJ, which used to be an
insufferable pesthole and which is now a moderate pesthole, and she never
saw or heard one, either.

In other words, you're getting a highly skewed view from the discussions
here. This is a very concentrated dose of gun-related discussion and
activity. The philosophies of carrying a concealed gun you'll hear in this
place are not necessarily odd, but they're not majority views. Most
Americans are a lot more like you in that regard. But not completely. We'll
usually make a stronger case for self-defense, even though most of us will
never encounter a need for it. d8-)

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Very good discussion Ed.


I have a wife like that -- my first wife, who I've kept for 34 years. I,
too, keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen and remind her how to use it
from time to time. An impatient cook, she believes that a stove has two
speeds: On, and Off. I keep threatening to publish a cookbook titled
_Donna's Blowtorch Cookbook of One-Minute Recipes_. g


LOL....if you publish, sign me up for a copy...no make that copies...I
know several cooks who would benefit.

TMT