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<p>Why don’t you ask Obama why his childrens’ school has 11 armed guards? If they’re under “that kind of risk” surely he wouldn’t allow it, right?</p>
<p>“Except once again, that’s not what the statistics show. Feel free to prove me wrong though, go ahead and bring your “statistics” in here so we can all see.”</p>
<p>I already posted this but here, for you illuminated:</p>
<p>"From 1986 to 1996, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sponsored high-quality, peer-reviewed research into the underlying causes of gun violence. People who kept guns in their homes did not — despite their hopes — gain protection, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Instead, residents in homes with a gun faced a 2.7-fold greater risk of homicide and a 4.8-fold greater risk of suicide. The National Rifle Association moved to suppress the dissemination of these results and to block funding of future government research into the causes of firearm injuries.</p>
<p>One of us served as the NRA’s point person in Congress and submitted an amendment to an appropriations bill that removed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, the amount the agency’s injury center had spent on firearms-related research the previous year. This amendment, together with a stipulation that “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” sent a chilling message.</p>
<p>Since the legislation passed in 1996, the United States has spent about $240 million a year on traffic safety research, but there has been almost no publicly funded research on firearm."</p>
<p>We won?t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it - Washington Post</p>
<p>hayden, I was writing my last comment when you posted yours. So sorry that happened to you, and so glad you are OK.</p>
<p>I have a survival story, but it didn’t involve a gunshot wound. Shortly after college, I narrowly escaped a sexual assault in the entrance to my apartment building in Chicago. I was followed home from a nighttime aerobics class (yes, I know that dates me) at a little studio under the “el” tracks. I knew someone was walking behind me but I told myself that he must have just been going the same direction I was–a simple coincidence. I turned the corner, and so did he. I turned into the courtyard of my apartment building, and so did he. He seemed far enough behind me that he wouldn’t be able to get into the vestibule after I unlocked it, but I was wrong. He got in, quickly closed the door, and started to attack me. I didn’t have anything to defend myself except for one thing: my voice. I screamed at the top of my lungs. He ran off and got away. I didn’t need a gun, and quite honestly if I had had one he would have been able to wrest it away from me. He had about a 60-pound weight advantage and a lot more strength than I did.</p>
<p>I think the resistance to change after Sandy Hook is because that incident was so freaky. It was the perfect storm. It was a 20 year old (mental illness danger zone), friendless, fatherless, unemployed, odd young man, living alone with his mother (Norman Bates, anyone?), feeling like a failure, playing violent video games in his basement all day, with access to high powered weapons. He was probably bullied at school (hates students) and jealous of his mother’s attention to kindergartners (there’s your target), and angry at his mother for trying to have him committed (revenge target). Americans see the administration proposing changes to gun regulation that have absolutely nothing to do with them and their lives and never will.</p>
<p>The whole idea of owning firearms to protect yourself from the government is particularly delusional. Anytime anyone has tried to put that into practice lately has resulted in ruin for such a person. The fire power that our military and police force can have are not permitted for private citizens. It’s illegal. One thing that is on the table is moving that bar a bit higher and placing such semi automatic that fire more than a given number of repeats (6,7, -10?) should be outlawed because they can cause massacres in a very short time period where innocent people can get slaughtered with nearly no chance of escape. Why is anyone fighting this provision? Yeah, criminals will have these weapons, but when they are caught with them, they can be put away for a very long time which would reduce the number of them carrying these things around. We are not going to elimiate the problem,but can greatly reduce the number of episodes where someone goes unhinged and on a rampage. People can still keep their personal weapons that don’t fall in that category and get their kids, family, friends, passerbys and selves shot with them–at least they have a bit of chance to survive the shooting, unlike the targets of the types of weapons used at Sandy Hook. Anyone get a look at those things? Who sleeps with one of those loaded and under their pillows?</p>
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<p>Even if those numbers didn’t come from carefully selected areas, the safety of the gun owner and family would be based on their responsibility, which includes locking up guns so children don’t have access. How can you sit there and say nobody deserves to have guns because some other people used theirs irresponsibly? That’s like saying nobody should be allowed to drive because some people kill people with their cars. And how’s this for a statistic: Having a car makes you much more likely to be killed by another driver, as opposed to not having a car. Where’s your outrage on this? Just more contradictions.</p>
<p>Bl4ke360. My exact point is that guns are indeed dangerous and cause horrific damage and death.</p>
<p>They should be available, but because they are dangerous there should be reasonable regulations that go along with owning, storing and using them. I don’t know any persons who have served in a war zone who feel any differently.</p>
<p>Bl4k3, I’ve addressed the fact that there are some people who are at high risk that need protection. The POTUS and family fall in that category. They are also guarded by those who are highly trained in weapons… They aren’t carrying the guns themselves. I think those in business of transporting money need protection as do police. There are certain people who need that extra protection. I acknowledge that fully. The chances are zip, zilch, zero that the Obama kids are going to get shot by their own Secret Service guards. Not so when private citizens have guns. The stats show who get shot more times by far by those weapons. Those are the facts.</p>
<p>bl4ke360, for the love of God. ALL presidents’ children have security at their schools. And Obama, in particular, has been the target of a lot of wingnuts. Of course you know this.</p>
<p>You have not submitted any legitimate statistics or unbiased sources for your claims. The “open carry” website is not an unbiased source. Neither is Wikipedia, as others have explained to you already. </p>
<p>Pages and pages back I posted some links to CDC statistics on gun violence and accidental gun deaths. Why don’t you look for that kind of source?</p>
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<p>So then what would have happened if nobody was around to hear you? What good would your magical voice be then?</p>
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<p>Eastcoast,
The law usually applies the “reasonable man” standard. If it was reasonable under the circumstances for you to think that someone’s life was in immediate and grave danger, then you are justified in shooting the perpetrator, even if you are wrong. A judge/jury are going to scrutinize the facts very seriously when you take a human life, and if they don’t think you were reasonable in your assessment, then you will pay the price with a sentence of some kind. That is why you need to be right and be able to prove that you were right. Regardless, you will have to live with the fact that you killed someone, obviously.</p>
<p>If you open the link to the Tales of Thread, and open each thread (which I confess after several I stopped) each one has a “this story has already been posted.” So 41 pages of threads reporting the same few stories over and over again.</p>
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<p>What you’re saying is they’ve convinced you obama’s family is worth protecting, but ordinary citizens aren’t.</p>
<p>Apparently Bl4ke360 doesn’t have any homework tonight.</p>
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<p>You must not know many people. Half of my family served in the military and they don’t agree with you.</p>
<p>That someone cannot comprehend that the President’s children are likely targets of an assassin is mind boggling. </p>
<p>I would say more but I do not want to be banned.</p>
<p>Bay, I do agree with parts of your last post. I think Adam Lanza’s friendlessness was a huge factor. Apparently he was also physically very awkward–apparently 6 feet tall but barely 100 pounds. </p>
<p>I know we can’t keep people like him from thinking the things they do and having the issues they have (in the short term, anyway). BUT–his mother made a series of very, very bad decisions that in turn endangered a large number of people and cost more than two dozen of them their lives. That’s why I keep harping on the responsibility angle. There can’t be no consequences. Nancy Lanza paid with her life, but what if she had lived? What about the people in a rural area near me who were robbed at gunpoint over the weekend of their 30 guns and many rounds of ammo? Those guns are now all on the street in the hands of meth heads or heroin addicts or God knows what else they might be. (Actually, the two “kids” fit the general description of an Adam Lanza–skinny boys in their late teens or early 20s.) The problem is that for every responsible gun owner, there are people who are cavalier about their weapons. Some want to brandish them in public as a show of their “don’t mess with me” attitudes; others just think they will never fall into the hands of a visiting child or a petty criminal or a depressed friend or a jilted lover. And that is what scares some of us, a lot.</p>
<p>Bl4ke360: Go do your homework, you are boring and not as clever as you think you are.</p>
<p>I said served in a war zone, not served in the military.</p>
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<p>You must have missed the news on the sandy hook shooting, because those children didn’t belong to the president and yet they were still targets of assassination.</p>
<p>Other than my cousin, the retired homicide detective who only fired a gun once a year when required to go for training and never in her entire career in law enforcement… was a friend’s DH who methodically hunted down a weapon he was not old enough to inherit from his father upon his father’s (career military) passing… he used it to murder their soon-to-be 5 year old daughter and then commit suicide… while she was away on a business trip… she only learned of the history of the weapon and how he obtained it postmortem from the police…</p>
<p>She never slept in her apartment ever again…</p>