[Vision2020] Oath for gun ownership/self-government
Donovan Arnold
donovanarnold@hotmail.com
Fri, 16 May 2003 01:16:01 -0700
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<P>Josh,</P>
<P>It is very clear you are highly emotional about this. It is also clear you misunderstanding what I am saying. So I will go through each of your arguments one at a time.<BR><STRONG></STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>>Seems to me if you are just worried about accidental or intentional deaths, you ought to be calling for much higher regulations on cars and who can drive them. In 1999 41,345 people lost their lives due to car accidents. That's only about 8 times your statistic on gun deaths. And how many of those deaths by bullet are due to self-defence? </P></DIV>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>First, you are right, about my numbers being off, over 10,000 are killed every year from guns from murder alone. I don't have good numbers on the accidental deaths from firearms, it depends on what is considered "accidental".Cars are designed to transport people, not kill people. And they are heavily regulated, and need to be further regulated. And yes, I think there are many idiots on the road that should not be, and they should be prevented from driving. Second, their are twice as many vehicles on the road, about 500,000, vs, 200,000 guns. Most of these vehicles are on the road and used everyday. Most of the 200,000 guns are rarely is ever used. Third, most accidents occur because of untrained, unprofessional, inexperienced drivers, or drunk drives, or people violating the law by speeding or passing in a no pass zone, or running a stop sign or red light. </P>
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<P><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG> ">But the problem is that we have so many regulations. Should cars really be so regulated? Should houses be regulated? And why in the world are baseball bats regulated? We might as well regulate tree branches, since they can be very good clubs too. And rocks, which might kill if they accidentally hit someone hard enough on side of the head."</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Actually, cars are not regulated enough, many of them have safety problems that car manufactures lobby not to fix. Houses need to be regulated for safety and health reasons. Natural Gas has no smell to it. It is a regulation that an artificial additive be added to it so when there is a leak the inhabitance can smell and get out. This has saved many lives. Fire alarms are also regulations, and well as fire extinguishers. Another important regulation is that of the hot water heater. It builds up with pressure after about 10 years. A safety value is placed on it to relieve the pressure. In the early and mid 1900's before regulations were placed, these water heaters would suddenly explode killing people in and around the house. There is also the sewage system, electrical wiring, toilets, kitchen utilities, all that then kill a child or someone that does not have an excellent grasp on physics if they were not regulated be!
fore and after installation. How about a microwave with no safety on it, every see what that can do to human flesh? Or how about a home made out of asbestos, what to know what that does to your lungs?</P>
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<P><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>Regulations rarely fix anything. Morons and criminals, as Mr. Hansen pointed out yesterday, can always get guns and weapons and tools that can be used to kill and murder. Regulations only restrict the law-abiding citizen. Think of how many car deaths are due to people driving with suspended licenses, no insurance, etc. etc. Did all the laws on the books do anything to keep those people alive? NO! </P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Actually, regulations have saved many lives and have fixed many things. Lets name a few, Airplanes, the Stock Market, 20% mice meat in restaurant food and packaged goods, Safety in the work place,seat belts, fire escapes, railroad car connectors, playgrounds, toys, just about anything. The funny thing is, all these regulations have reduced the death rate in each area, and it saved money too!</P>
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<P>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>Here's an interesting statistic for your consideration. According to the National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists in 1994, the rate of Defensive Gun Uses can be projected nationwide to approximately 2.5 million per year -- one Defensive Gun Use every 13 seconds. In 91.7% of these incidents the defensive use of a gun did not wound or kill the criminal attacker.[or anyone else!] That was about 9 years ago, but nonetheless clearly guns are used very regularly for legitimate defense.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Have no idea what your point is here! Nor data collected, nor the questions asked on the survey, Was the Survey of 2,500 or more people. What was the margin or error? What was the statistical significance on the test? Was the survey phone or personal interview? What was the non-response rate? </P>
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<P><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG> And get real. How many innocent bystanders die in burglaries, car-jackings, or the like?</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Not many, most are not around when their car is stolen or their homes robbed, kind of reinforcing the point that a gun would not have done them any good if they weren't there.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG> And the nation over, how many children die in schools due to guns each year? Oh, yes, the media makes a big deal of about 5-12 dead at a school. </P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Yeah, gee, that liberal media, what is 5-12 children. Josh that is not kewl!</P>
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<P><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>And indeed each time that happens it is a sad and serious tragedy and needs to be dealt with. The murderers, if they haven't killed themselves yet, need to be put to death for robbing others of life. And some of the teachers ought to be armed with handguns and trained carefully in how to deal with such situations.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Good idea! We give old Mrs.. Smith a machine gun so she can enter a shoot out with an emotional distraught teenagers in a room full of children. Now why didn't others think of that. Oh, maybe because it would end up killing more innocent children? </P>
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<P> <STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>If the teachers had been armed at Columbine, less people would have died. Criminals lose against armed civilians regularly. But really such things are blown out of proportion. Around the same number of people die in a large car pileup, to put it in perspective. And yet car pileups are national news for just a day or two, if that.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Humm, maybe because one is an unintentional accident by adults that had can control of their vehicle and knowingly took a risk driving on an icy road, and the other is an intentional and avoidable slaughter of children that had no control over the situation at any point. What you ought to be asking is how children get a hold of their parents guns, ammo, and go to school unnoticed?</P>
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<P>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>Mr. Arnold, could you please back up your statement that "5,000 people are killed every year in this country by guns, and most of them were accidents by people that were careless and irresponsible." Especially the "most of them were accidents" part. I would guess, though I haven't checked, that a majority of them are due rather to intentional killing or murder, whether in self-defense or in assault. </P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>As I admitted earlier, I had misread that original statistic, and apologize. 10,000 people are murdered every year by guns. 1 to 2 children are killed every day by the use of guns that are under the age of 14. The number of teen suicides is about 20% of all teen deaths. Which means the overwhelming majority of juvenile deaths are caused by a gun. </P>
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<P>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>And Mr. Arnold, men have an inherent, God-given right to life. But that is not the same as a God-given right to avoid accidents, whether they be accidental discharges of a firearm or some other accident.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Yes we do have a right to be safe from accidents from criminal neglect. Would you permit a person with no Doctors license to operate on you? How would you feel if they forced you to operated on by this man. That is how I feel with retards walking around with loaded guns. No training, no care for another's life, no respect for your rights at all.</P>
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<P> <STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>If you're so afraid of people dying, like I said before, outlaw cars. Outlaw planes. Outlaw all sorts of things that yearly kill more people than guns. Outlaw slippery roads. Outlaw road-crushing rock slides.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Your first too points are well taken. But, they are designed for transportation, not for killing people like guns. Guns, are machines built for the purpose of killing another person. That is their only function and purpose. They do not fold laundry, they do not transport people from NY to LA. They do not get you work and back. They do not take you to the movies or children to soccer ball practice. The kill, they maim, they injure, they cause death and suffering, that is their function and only function. </P>
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<P>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>Mr. Arnold, you say "It is not reasonable to someone who wants to use [a gun] to make up for small dick or wants to use it to commit a crime or threaten his neighbors or other members of his community." Again, you can't stop criminals from getting guns. Legislating the object, or who gets to possess it, only affects those who are willing to obey the law. And anyone who is going to commit a crime with a gun or threaten his neighbors or his community or his fellow school-kids is obviously not willing to obey the law anyhow.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>You can't? Well why is it that every other industrialized nation in the world has successfully reduced to the number of guns to a tiny fraction of what we have in the United States. How is it that in the United States has more deaths by firearms then England, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, China, Belgium, Canada, México, Japan, Russia, Australia, Indonesia, Italy and Spain COMBINED? Let me put it to you this way, in a typical year the US has 10,000 murders by hand guns. The UK has 7, not 7,000 just 7 murders.The closeted to us is Sweden which has about 55 murders by guns a year. Canada has 8 murders a year. </P>
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<P>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>You are neglecting personal responsibility again. You are blaming the gun, or access to it, instead of putting the guilt upon the person who does the crime, which is where the guilt ought to firmly and immovably rest. </P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>I agree! If you want to have a gun, and wave it around, shoot it, and carry it, you need to take the personal responsibility to get trained and educated before you do that. </P>
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<P><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>Otherwise, your argument must then apply to cars, which are very deadly weapons and almost a full order of magnitude more deadly than the guns.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Again, you and your cars, you can't compare the two. One is used for transportation. A gun is far more deadly then a car. Do our troops drive Rambler's and Chevy Nova's onto the battlefield? No they don't, because a gun is more deadly when used. Most of the 250,000 million guns sit in a closet all year long never used. Most of the 1/2 billion vehicles in the US are driven 15,000 miles a year. Now I ask a simple question, if you doubled the number of guns in the country, you gave them to 16 year olds, and taught them to use them in public, loaded the guns and then shot each one 15,000 times each year in public on streets full of people, would you think the death rates of guns would be less then cars? Because that is what you would have to due to make them on the same level as cars. When you make your comparison of cars to guns it is like comparing China to Togo and saying that Togo is better living conditions because only !
2,000 people die in Togo each year and 10,000,000 die every year in China. There is very good reason why. The number of people in Togo is well under a million and the number in China is well over 1 Billion. No comparison. </P>
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<P> <STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>I for one am appalled at the ease with which college kids get cars to drive home on vacation weekends while they are drunk. College kids die from drinking and driving each vacation time. Someone ought to put a stop to this! Maybe you, Mr. Arnold, can start the Crusade against Cars Driven by Drunken Morons... I too am concerned about the poor innocent person riding in that car with the drunken college student.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Me too, my Aunt died at the age of 16 by a drunk driver right here in Moscow just one block from where I live. </P>
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<P>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>And that is not to make fun of the serious problem of drunken driving, but to point out that your arguments, Mr. Arnold, do not solve the problem of foolish weapon use, just like more laws won't solve the problem of foolish driving.</P>
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>I think the laws do. Had there been a stop sign up then she would not have died, or had they required the automobile manufacturer to install seatbelts in cars then she would be alive now. </P>
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<DIV></DIV>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>And it's all great and good to be concerned about the welfare of the average person on the street, but you, nor anyone else, can force people to be decent law-abiding citizens. Criminals will always get the guns and the poisons and the knives and anything else they want. As to your idea of simple common sense rules. Back in the war for independence, when boys learned to shoot at age 10, (most of them uneducated), everyone understood personal responsibility and understood that common sense was something that is learned. Which is why they had no laws about guns at all. People were their own gun-smiths, you know. I'm all in favor of citizens being allowed to manufacture their own guns, with the barrels whatever length they want, and whatever caliber they want. And whatever firing speed they want.
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<P><STRONG>Arnold Wrote: </STRONG>Actually, you don't know your history.</P>
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<P>1) People were forbidden to own guns by the british in many areas</P>
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<P>2) It took a full minute to load and fire a gun. A knives could kill you faster and more actually then a gun made in 1776. </P>
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<P>3) People lived miles away from the nearest neighbor, making it kind of hard to kill people</P>
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<P>4) People did not make their own guns. As a matter of fact, most the materials used to make the guns they had were imported from Britain. Which changed Thomas Jefferson's mind about the US being a solely agricultural state because we needed to be able to independently protect ourselves without reliance on foreigners. </P>
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<P>5) Most the guns were made as one whole piece fully manufactured. Interchangeable parts were not made and manufactured and put into practical use until the mid 1800's, well after the war of independence.</P>
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<DIV></DIV>><STRONG>Josh Wrote: </STRONG>No one wants insane, doped, mentally unstable, dangerous people running about the place with guns. But really, Mr. Arnold, you are describing an extreme and trying to make it the norm. The world ain't perfect, Mr. Arnold. And it seems to me that you are discriminating heavily against the uneducated, the untrained, and those who happen to have slightly slower synapse firings than yours and can't quite grasp the nuances of your arguments. And that isn't right, Mr. Arnold. Just the fact that someone isn't educated doesn't mean that they cannot wield a weapon carefully. And there have been some amazing things done by people with low IQ's. And it ought to be standard operating procedure for parents to teach their kids how to handle guns carefully, if they have guns in the house. Perhaps we should make hunters-safety a required course for all elementary and highschool kids. That would be the only potentially reasonable regulation. But th!
at should only restrict those who don't pass! from buying hunting licenses and that sort of thing. To restrict ownership is to restrict the basics rights of the citizen.
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