Freedom, misdefined

[Rogue 9]

Can anybody see the problem here? Anyone? Bueller?

U.S. won't be safe until NRA loses hold on legislation

BONNIE ERBE / Scripps Howard
Monday, October 9, 2006

Like most Americans, I've become regrettably inured to the daily reports of gun violence and gun death in this country. Last week's attempted slaughter of 10 Amish schoolgirls (as of this writing, five had died) hit me in a place the National Rifle Association had not yet calloused over with the propaganda.

I guess the visual picture of Charles Carl Roberts segregating out children by gender, binding the girls' feet, then shooting them execution-style, gut-punched me in a place I thought I'd toughened off and hidden away. I thought my emotions were bullet-proofed by the daily horrors we Americans are forced to stomach for "Second Amendment freedoms."

Perhaps Roberts' psychotic ramblings about being "angry at God" touched off an unexpected reaction. Perhaps it was the laundry list of weaponry he brought into the schoolhouse - a shotgun, a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol and a stun gun - that seemed so insane. According to police, he also had 600 rounds of ammunition. How can a milk-truck driver acquire such an arsenal in a country that's supposedly free?

How free are we, when peace-loving Amish children are slaughtered? How free are we when 30,000 Americans die by gunfire each year? How free are we when our elected officials are so hog-tied to the National Rifle Association that they cannot pass meaningful, national gun control?

How free are we when we let the obscenely lengthy list of child deaths (and adult deaths) take precedence over banning gun ownership outright? Just days ago, a 15-year-old boy brought two guns to a school in Cazenovia, Wis., and killed the principal. Two days before, a 53-year-old man took six girls hostage at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., sexually assaulted them and used them as shields before fatally shooting one girl and killing himself.

In August, a 27-year-old went to a Vermont elementary school, where he killed one teacher and wounded another, then left to kill his ex-girlfriend's mother and shoot himself twice in the head before being arrested. And on it goes.

I was particularly touched, then, by a recent editorial in The Salt Lake Tribune, written by the two parents of a student who was killed by another.

Ron and Norma Molen lost their son, Steven, when he came to the aid of a fellow female student who was being stalked by a third student armed with, as they wrote, "a pistol with a laser sighting device and bullets that explode on contact. A bullet blew up the artery in Steven's leg and he quickly bled to death. Susan was shot twice and was left an unrecognizable corpse. Then the stalker blew out the back of his own head."

They went on, "The NRA is a secular, fundamentalist special interest so focused on gun rights that it dismisses the 30,000 deaths each year as the price of freedom, and this includes the deaths of 14 children every day ... The co-conspirator in this home-grown terrorism is the Republican Party (note: I would add, pro-gun Democrats as well) that allows the NRA to write its gun legislation in exchange for money and votes."

What Nickel Mines, Pa., teaches us is that we are not truly free until we're free of the choke hold the NRA has on national anti-gun legislation.

[B4UTRUST]

I see a problem, yes. But I also see that anti-gun legislation won't stop school killings or the random other bullshit we see on the news.

It won't stop gang violence. Most of gang weaponry is unregistered to begin with, aquired through back door dealings and is unregulated by our systems in place. Until you can stop black market gun running in the streets you can't stop gang warfare. That's the problem.

It won't stop school killings. Instead of using a gun to cleaning take our one or two or five other students, teachers, faculty, whatever, they'll switch to making crude or not-so-crude explosives which anyone with half a mind and some time to research can do easily. So they run the risk of blowing themselves and their families up with stupidity before hand by building a bad bomb, or they bring lots of good ones to where they attack and kill a lot more plus bring in buttloads of structural damage if done right.

It certainly won't allow your average citizen to have a gun for personal protection and home defense, which in this day and age is, sadly, almost a neccessity in some areas.

I have a gun. In fact I have more then one, or will as soon as the background check and the holding period for police balistics clears. And after that I'll probably have a third! I take them to a gun range on base. I take them home, clean them, and put them away. What I don't do go door to door with it or go to work with a Armalite AR-10 Carbine-gas powered semiautomatic, bitterly pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers.

At what point in our lives, and not just in this mind you, but in a lot of laws and bullshit decisions as of late, do we go with personal responsibility and not punishing the masses for the fuckups of a few. At what point do we hold those who need to be held accountable for their actions and not passing the buck and the problem onto others?

Writing a lot of legislation towards anti-guns and massive gun control will not solve the problems you're looking to solve. Those who still want a gun will still be able to find one. That won't change. Those, however, that need something to defend themselves, won't be able to.

[Batman]

Okay, I read the post, I read the article on the link (which are identical but I thought I'd make sure), and I can't find the part that actually deals with freedom, as opposed do advocating a gun ban. Call me silly but I find the two concepts quite contradictory.
I'm shocked by the Amish School Shooting as much as the next man but I fail to see how making gun ownership illegal would have stopped people who were bent on commiting a capital crime anyway (if you've got your mind made up to commit multiple homicide-on little kids no less-somehow I doubt being charged with illegal possesion of a firearm is going to faze you much).
Do those gun ban advocate ever think things through?

[Rogue 9]

Okay, I read the post, I read the article on the link (which are identical but I thought I'd make sure), and I can't find the part that actually deals with freedom, as opposed do advocating a gun ban. Call me silly but I find the two concepts quite contradictory.

Exactly. She makes repeated references to how the United States will not be free until guns are banned... but government restriction, while it might in many cases be the right thing, is the opposite of liberty. It is possible for a completely reasonable person to be in favor of heavy gun control, but it is exceedingly deceptive to call it freedom when it is not.

But then, what do you expect from a woman who once (on May 13th, 2000, while hosting the PBS show "To the Contrary," just to assure everyone that I'm not going off of vague recollection here) claimed, as part of a rebuttal to an argument on carrying a firearm for self-defense, that a woman is more likely to be struck by lightning than raped?

[frigidmagi]

that a woman is more likely to be struck by lightning than raped?

I honestly wish to God that was true.

As for guns, illegal guns, and criminals with guns. In order to choke out the black market (which I tell you is fucking impossible but I'll outline what you need as a start of the operation) you have to cut it's supply lines. The Mexician border is the chief entry zone of illegal goods into the nation from outside. In order to have an effective gun ban you're going to need megatons more border control and more port security and costums checks.

We can't get that shit to look for Osama himself. A gun ban is just going to ensure that the crooks enjoy a greater amount of firepower superiority.

[B4UTRUST]

But then, what do you expect from a woman who once (on May 13th, 2000, while hosting the PBS show "To the Contrary," just to assure everyone that I'm not going off of vague recollection here) claimed, as part of a rebuttal to an argument on carrying a firearm for self-defense, that a woman is more likely to be struck by lightning than raped?

... Yes, because no statistic shows anything like that every two minutes in America someone is being sexually assaulted or that one in six women in America will be the victim of an attempted or completed rape. In college that number drops to about 1 in 4. So if you take four random college females there's a strong chance that one of them has been the victim of some sort of sexual assault.

I think that last year there were an estimated 260,000 rapes reported. Read that last word again. Reported. No survey even begins to go into the rape statistics that aren't reported which is probably close to the same number if not more.

Oddly enough going off some statistical data from NOAA we find that from 1959-1994 there were 13,057 casualties. In 35 years there were only 13,057 casualties from lightning.

1 in 6, every 2 minutes, over 260,000 reported rapes. Thirteen thousand deaths from lightning, male and female, in thirty-five years. And which is more likely to happen? This bitch is fucking nuts.

[Comrade Tortoise]

I think that last year there were an estimated 260,000 rapes reported. Read that last word again. Reported. No survey even begins to go into the rape statistics that aren't reported which is probably close to the same number if not more.

A little over a third of actual rapes are reported. So the number of unreported rapes are actually DOUBLE that number. Annually. And that only counts women. Only 10% or so of men who are raped ever tell ANYONE let alone the police

[B4UTRUST]

Thanks for clearing that up. I knew a lot of rapes didn't get reported but I didn't have an exact figure and couldn't find one in the various pages of statistics I was looking at.

[Batman]

Get off your high horse, people. She's off by less than four measly orders of magnitude. That's damn near parity, isn't it?
Err-I'm afraid not, Master Bruce.
That was sarcasm, Alfred.