aemeijers wrote in
:

harry wrote:
(snip)
Handguns have no other function but to kill people.
Funny, I thought they were to keep the other fellow with a handgun (or
whatever) from killing ME.

--
aem sends...- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

If no-one has a gun, no-one gets killed with a gun.
It's this scumbag gun culture that results in these numerous school
massacres in the US. I bet the parents of these kids wished they had
lived somewhere else at the time,

If there was some way to magically make ALL the handguns vanish, at the
same time, I would agree with you. (and along with the guns, the
knowledge to make them- any half-competent machine shop can turn out a
servicable weapon in a couple of hours.) But you can't unring the bell-
they are out there, and there is no way to make them not be out here.
Unlike countries that nominally bow to the queen, if the government here
told everyone to line up and meekly turn them in, at best it would get
ignored, and at worst could lead to revolution. (Although I suspect a
lot of people in UK, CA, Oz, etc, turned in Grandpa's old fowling piece,
and quietly packed their modern arms away someplace safe.)

Sorry, but I don't feel noble enough to disarm myself first. My family
already had to flee halfway around the damn planet once. Ain't gonna
happen again. Nobody is in any danger from any weapon I own, unless of
course they show up pointing one at me.

A small reality check, by the way- probably 100x the kids who get killed
by guns, get killed showing off in cars. They are finally tightening the
drivers license procedure for kids to require more training and
practice, but nobody has suggested not letting kids drive. The changed
license procedures are reducing the number of vehicle deaths among the
young set. Instead of getting hysterical about guns, maybe they should
give all 8th-graders a week of instruction at a shooting range? Take the
mystique out of it, make them understand it isn't like TV- people don't
get up and go back to life as normal after being shot, make the boys
understand a gun does NOT make their genitalia any larger, safe
handling/storage procedures, get rid of the 'forbidden fruit' factor,
etc? Nah, that would never fly. Just because training and education work
to make operating other mechanical devices safer doesn't mean it would
work with those EVIL guns.


"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and
law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own
conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the
law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the
lawless will allow... For society does not control crime, ever, by
forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected
behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals
to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding."
---------- Jeff Snyder

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com