The deal is that if your background is sketchy, it is ridiculously easy to legally buy a gun without being subjected to a background check.
“The Philippines? I might be wrong, maybe there was a base somewhere nearby. But 150 years into the future no one knows what the geopolitical climate would be. Maybe Mexico will be contemplating invading the US. It doesn’t have to be an overseas power.”
There was no Air Force or satellites during that war and not likely a country would know in advance another country was on the way by ship to invade.
You think our military would need gun owners to pitch in? Do you know what kind of sophisticated weapondry the US military possesses, along with individual state’s national guard? Not to mention we have nuclear weapons we could use to annihilate invading country.
One of the things to consider is training students in “crowd self-defense”.
Most shooters aren’t going to be able to complete their nefarious plans in a given classroom if faced with a barrage of books, tables and chairs and assaulting rugby players.
So our response to this terrible problem, a problem which BTW is unique to the US, should not be to attempt to solve it, but to bury our heads in the sand. Wow.
Today no. In 150 years who knows?
That is very clearly not what I was implying. Come on now.
Also it’s not unique to the US.
So you think in 150 military weapons are going to be less sophisticated then now? And that goes for any invading country too. No invading army Is going to be stopped by civilian yahoos with guns. I suggest not watching any of those fictional TV shows about life in the US after some future revolution.
I’m guessing you were being tongue-in-cheek, but it is not a bad idea. It could be incorporated into the annual fire drill exercise.
After 9/11, I have never sat through a flight without thinking about the possibilities, and I think most passengers now would rise to the occasion to try to stop the perpetrator if it were to happen again.
No, I think that another country or countries may have a military that can and does decimate the US military, and that the best hope for the US is civilians taking up arms to protect the country.
@hayden: Really, JustOneDad? Really? Regardless of which side of the gun argument a person is on, to imply that there are parents who wouldn’t find the vision of a dead and bloodied six year old murdered in a classroom is to insult those parents. I’ll go further out on the limb than Knitkneelionmom went: I think any normal parent would find such a vision haunting, and if a parent isn’t moved by such a thought, there’s something wrong with him/her.
I am a parent of two teenage daughters. I am not “haunted” by any visions of Sandy Hook. I did not know any of the people involved, nor was I implicit in any of the cause.
I have trained my daughters in the proper use and care of all my firearms as my dad did for me when I was very young. They have had access to them since about the age of 10.
I am more haunted by the lack of reporting on the many murders occuring every single day in this country (mostly by handguns) in the inner cities of Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta. These murders are of children and teenages, some innocent caught in crossfire, some not so innocent. These murders far outway the numbers of killed in premeditated mass shootings we are talking about.
Those of us with a little bit of empathy are haunted by it. But perhaps you consider empathy to be a mental illness.
“No, I think that another country or countries may have a military that can and does decimate the US military, and that the best hope for the US is civilians taking up arms to protect the country.”
So a country strong enough to wipe out our military is going to be protected by a bunch of yahoos with guns? LMFAO.
Gun owners sure do have some very crazy fantasies.
National priorities may move away from funding the military, so that the US military in the future may be weaker than the US military today. I’m not saying that’s what will happen, I’m saying that’s what could happen. Germany in 1940 had a stronger military than Germany today does for instance.
So the kindergarteners should have rushed the shooter… I read an article about one of the families that lost a child at Sandy Hook. A couple of years after it, the parents and surviving siblings still all sleep together in one bed – when they can sleep at all. But if you want to hang onto your guns with no inconvenience to yourselves, then I suppose putting it out of your mind and not putting yourself in their shoes works best.
We haven’t said it outright but simply implied it. But I’ll say it outright now. Your idea for banning all handguns is infeasible. It’s too expensive, and it’s not going to get the guns out of the hands of criminals for a generation. Even Britain still has handguns floating around. And that’s a small island that was never nearly as armed as the US is.
“National priorities may move away from funding the military, so that the US military in the future may be weaker than the US military today. I’m not saying that’s what will happen, I’m saying that’s what could happen. Germany in 1940 had a stronger military than Germany today does for instance.”
And we might get hit with an asteroid someday, too.
Frankly, I’m not concerned with what the world is going to be like in 150 years. I’m concerned with life now and how our lax gun laws make us the western worlds leader in gun violence. It just astounds me that gun nuts don’t care about doing anything to change the trajectory we are on and need to come up with insane fantasies to justify their positions.
I don’t know why that’s an insane fantasy. And that not even the main argument against gun control, it’s just another thing on the list. And there’s nothing we can do about an asteroid…
Banning all handguns doesn’t do anything good in the immediate term. The idea is that in 30 or 40 years it will, hopefully.
Did you know that police don’t even carry guns in Britain?
Yes I did, and so what. There are still handguns in Britain despite the ban in 1997, and previous the ban where were less than 140 thousand handguns owned by the public. There are still murders with firearms (and still plenty of murders in general) in Britain. In the US there are over 140 million handguns owned by the public. For every gun Britain had before they were banned the US has over a thousand.
Well, that sounds like just another unreasonable plan.
Everything is always, “we can’t because it won’t make a difference.” No, we can’t because we won’t even try anything,
Many countries have gone before us and successfully dealt with the problem of guns. I actually believe gun nuts know we can solve the problem but simply refuse to support anything because they care only about their guns and the ability to get more guns unfettered.