Do we NEED guns? (evolution, America, pagan, Zen)

[linwood]

lol checks and balances..here lets add a reality check to that.....bunch of average citizens with guns versus the US army.....hmmmmm...

It seems to be working pretty well in Iraq at the moment.

[painted wolf]

I would like to see more SAFETY in the gun ownership. Better tracking of firearms, licencing for owners, and better teaching.

Idealy I'd like to see gun ownership treated like we do Car ownership. Take a test, register the sucker, have insurance, periodic inspections of the things, have theft deterant devices and have licences which can be taken away if you don't prove capable of handling the responciblity.
Make shure that the owners have to keep up with thier certification, make them test every few years to ensure that they know the safety laws and what not.

Otherwise I don't see a need for any restrictions...

wa:do

[angellous_evangellous]

Originally Posted by martha

A sad, sad commentary on the question, IMHO.

I once purchased a gun for target shooting at the local range. It was an exilerating experience to see how good a shot I was. In retrospect, the feeling of power it gave to me was freightening! At one point in my ownership, I almost felt like, " Yeah, 'cmon just try to break into my apartment! This is mine and I dare you to try to take it, I'll' blow your@#!!@# brains out!"
In retrospect, I believe that when we come into posession of an instrument that is more powerful than we are, it will corrupt our thoughts, no matter how intelligent you think you are. It will allow us to inforce our ideas of what is or what should be, in a maliscious way. Guns give a false sense of superiority. Then again, if there were no guns, there would be sticks, rocks, crude knives,and boulders to name a few instruments of destruction. In the long run I guess there is no deterrent to man's inhumanity to man. Remember crucifiction, feeding christians to the lions, remember the holocost to the Jews, remember slavery and the bodies of blacks hanging from trees, etc, etc ad infinitum!

Think again, my beloved brothers and sisters of what you are truly capable of. Are you capable of murder, taking another life, pouring out the life blood of another human being who is alive at that very moment just like you? I used to think of actually pulling the trigger and shooting another being if they tried to transgress my supposed personal space. Could I actually do it? I mean, it wouldn't really be me feeling myself hurting the person. I would be at some distance, and the bullet would do the actual injury, right?,

I am sorry, my dears, but killing is wrong no matter what the circumstances in my belief, and I don't think I could really do it. We can justify killing for so many reasons, but in the end, IMHO, it is not the right thing to do. BTW, I no longer own a gun.

It is good, then, that you do not own a gun. Someone could take it away from you in a hostile situation quite easily and do more damage than they previously were able to do.

I said before that I wish that we lived in a world without war, cruelty, and malace. Unfortunately, we do, and guns are a very useful method of defense and agression (we needed guns to stop the Holocaust).

I am all for world peace, but I truly think that true peace must be sought in Jesus Christ, and the kingdom that he brings will be perfect. Until then, we will be infected by sin and will need guns and war to bring about justice and order in the world. I of course realize that this view is optimistic, but it is no more so than secular humanism, which I consider to be unrationally and wrecklessly optimistic in light of human history. We cannot bring about true peace without God, but we can attempt to achieve justice where we are able.

[michel]

Originally Posted by painted wolf

I would like to see more SAFETY in the gun ownership. Better tracking of firearms, licencing for owners, and better teaching.

Idealy I'd like to see gun ownership treated like we do Car ownership. Take a test, register the sucker, have insurance, periodic inspections of the things, have theft deterant devices and have licences which can be taken away if you don't prove capable of handling the responciblity.
Make shure that the owners have to keep up with thier certification, make them test every few years to ensure that they know the safety laws and what not.

Otherwise I don't see a need for any restrictions...

wa:do

I admire the intention, but I have seen youngsters pass their driving tests and, as soon as they are out of sight of the test centre.......
Good in theory, apply it to the human being, and things go wrong!

[linwood]

I admire the intention, but I have seen youngsters pass their driving tests and, as soon as they are out of sight of the test centre.......
Good in theory, apply it to the human being, and things go wrong![img]images/smilies/redface.gif[/img]

Yeah but it would be easier to track who was involved in those things gone wrong

[michel]

Originally Posted by linwood

Yeah but it would be easier to track who was involved in those things gone wrong

Do you really believe that?
With Motoring in the UK, you have a)drivers licence b)road fund licence (to obtain this, you need to produce valid insurance certificate, and certificate to prove roadworthiness of car if over three years old)c)Insurance cerificate d)M.O.T (roadworthiness certificate).

And, in a quiet little local road from here, cars (Three or four/week) are 'dumped' on the road (parked) because they are no longer roadworthy, the repair would be prohibitive, and salvage companies noe CHARGE to accept wrecks. The owners of most of these cars will never be found, to refund the local council for costs involved in 'clearing away' the car.

[linwood]

I don`t see how you couldn`t find the last documented owner of any car.

The VIN number is a direct trace back to the last registered owner.

If trhe VIN number is removed from the car then yes, it would be difficult to track but thats no easy task.

If registering a car is of no use then why do we do it?

My point is nothing is going to be perfect but it sure as hell can`t hurt.

[thorswitch]

Re: Working ok in Iraq - they insurgents there have significantly different weapons that civilians here in the states can have (and I'm glad civilians can't have the kind of weapons the insurgents do because there's be a lot more death and destruction here, too, if we did, IMO)

I have to admit, my opposition to guns comes from a very personal and emotional place. When I was 13, I was visiting a friend of mine, and she decided to show me her father's gun. She assured me her dad never kept it loaded and unlocked the nightstand next to her parents' bed. She demonstrated how you would chamber a round if the gun were loaded and , then pointed the gun straight at my head (muzzle no more than a foot away) and started to show me how to pull the trigger. At the very last second, she swung her arm, and when the gun - which wasn't as unloaded as she'd thought - went off, the bullet went through the bedroom wall into the bathroom on the other side, shattered the shower door, went through the far shower wall into a walk-in storage closet on the other side, though the closet and out the front of the house to finally land in the front yard of their home. Had she swung her arm even a split-second later, I wouldn't be here to talk about guns at all. Nearly having had your head blown off tends to trump a LOT of what might otherwise seem logical.

I also know that - even if I weren't deathly terrified of guns in general - for me to have a gun would be too much of a risk in general. I am far to tempermental to be trusted with one. I know there have been times when I've gotten upset by or about something where I've actually WISHED I had a gun so that I could just lash out with the full force of my anger - and been so relieved that I didn't. Part of what I see as a problem in this country, though, is that while there are a good number of people who are self-aware enough to realize just how dangerous they coudl be if armed, and thus choose to remain unarmed, there are also a good number who either don't realize they have hair-trigger tempers (no pun intended) or just don't care. These are the people who shoot someone because they inturrupted a football game or over other such stupid incidents.

I tend to agree that if we must have gun in our society, then each gun owner should be required to take gun safety lessons, get a gun-ownership license and face losing that license if they violate gun safety regulations too often (like we take away driving licenses for misuse of a car).

I also think that gun owners should be legally responsible for their weapons - if their weapon is used in a crime and they have not previously reported it missing or stolen to the police, then the owner should be subject to some kind of legal charges - obviosuly not as much as the charges against the actual criminal, but stiff enough penalties to make gun owners take the responsiblity of keeping their guns safe seriously. For example, if a kid steals his parents guns and uses them to shoot someone at his school, then the parent faces criminal penalties for not having kept the gun out of their kids hands. Or if your cousin steals your gun and uses it in a robbery, you face charges for not having kept your gun secure enough that your cousin couldn't get at it.

In addition, I think that we should make penalties for crimes that involve the use of a gun - ANY crime using a gun, even if it's not fired - significantly stiffer than crimes that did not involve the use of a gun - similar to how armed robbery is a worse charge than non-armed robbery.

Lastly, if we're going to have guns, then I think that all gun owners should be required to be part of a "well-regulated militia" such as the 2nd amendment calls for. I would suggest that membership in the Army/Navy/Air Force Reserves or National Guard could reasonably be considered "well-regulated militias", and thus all gun owners would be required to belong, in some capacity, to one of those organizations. And for those people who would not normally be considered physically fit enough to join the Reserves or the National Guard, we could create a class of, say, clerical only positions that would not be subject to overseas deployment, and rather than having their service limited to "2 weekends a months and 2 weeks a year" they would serve "2 days a month and 2 weeks a year", so that the duties could be rotated through the reservists and guardsmen as they report for their service shifts.

Those are just some of the ideas I've had about guns over the year. Some may not be all that practical, but with some work, I think we could find a better way to ensure that if we have to have guns as a part of our society, gun owners fully appreciate the responsiblity of owning such weapons and are held accountable for their misuse.