Sniper Shootings

[BlackI]

This was a really strange event. I am pretty sure the will be studing this for years to come.

[kicker]

Yes I agree that this was a very strange event. I am glad it's over now even though it didn't reallyaffect me because I don't live near that area.

[Don Gwinn]

Taezee, I can understand the temptation to rant, but please take a moment now and read through that post. See if it still makes sense.

we need to get rid of guns in this country..when our forefathers wrote "the right to bear arms" they had no clue how bad it would get

 

Maybe. Does that mean that we should also strike out the First Amendment? After all, the founders couldn't have known about bullhorns, laser printers, desktop publishing, the internet, blogs, self-publishing services, microphones, typewriters, telephones, radio, television, the telegraph, photography, cinema, or a dozen others. Nor could they have known that there would be lots of "other" religions flooding into this country when they guaranteed religious freedom. They didn't know there would be "Five-Percenters," for instance, who would sympathize with Islamicist terrorists and kill Americans while proclaiming themselves to be God. Is Freedom of Religion out of date?

 

How about the right to a trial by jury? After all, they surely couldn't have known what sort of TV-addicted ignoramuses Americans would become.

 

Quite frankly, I'm on your side. If you're talking about actually trying to amend the Constitution in legal fashion to get rid of the Second Amendment, bring it on! At least you want to do it honestly and somewhat fairly, unlike most people who've tried to nullify the Amendment by illegal means.

the NRA needs to go

Well, it ain't gonna happen, Tiger. Four million Americans are members of the NRA, far more than the membership of the top three or four anti-gun orgs combined, and there's a reason for that. I suppose since the perpetrators were black, next you'll tell me that the NAACP has to go?

 

The ACLU, the NAACP, NOW, and the NRA all have their roles to play. They all protect rights that are vital to individual Americans and thus to all Americans. Discard them at your own peril.

need to instill much stiffer sentences for possesion of weapons

Why? You do know that Muhammed broke lots of federal gun laws when he bought his AR-15 "off the books," don't you? Why didn't the tough penalties for what he did stop him?

 

Could it be because he's a murderer and murderers don't follow laws? The guy is going to be executed for his murders, and you want to sentence decent people who simply want to possess weapons for their own defense to prison in order to discourage him.

i cant remeber the last time there was a news report saying some homeowner sucessfully gunned down an intruder in his house saving the lives of his family

And you very rarely will, because it almost never happens. In about 98% of successful defenses with a firearm, not a shot is fired. Don't fall into the "Kellerman trap" of believing that self-defense is only real when someone kills an intruder. Conservative estimates of crimes prevented each year by private citizens using firearms range between 750,000 and 1.5 million per year. Now, not all of these are preventions of murders, but you can still see how many lives are being saved. On the other paw, deaths of all types involving firearms (murder, suicide, accident, justified shootings, etc.) total just over 30,000 per year. You do the math.

 

Most successful defenses are simply not newsworthy.

i do however see repeated stories of children being gunned down in the middle of some gangters battle for a street corner..or some mentally deranged killer who had a bad childhood..start just shooting people at random..numerous school shootings

I can understand how these seem to be commonplace, but they simply aren't. They're newsworthy; "if it bleeds, it leads." They get massive attention, just like the so-called "sniper." It has however been statistically proven that the media in the U.S. overwhelmingly favors negative stories about firearms while ignoring positive ones. I can post the numbers and citations later; I don't have them in front of me.

 

 

all the accidents that dont even make the news..children finding thier parents guns and killing themselves

. . . . are, again, incredibly rare. Accidental deaths among children 14 and under amount to a few hundred per year. That sounds like a lot until you remember that there are about 280,000,000 people in the U.S. and about as many firearms. More children are accidentally killed by drowning, eating household cleaners, falls, bicycle accidents, etc., every single year than by gunfire. Among adults, accidents are the second lowest cause of accidental deaths. The only thing rarer is "specific types of poison."

i dont believe there is any strong argument to have firearms in ones home..or so easily available to americans

 

That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. I can give you a lot of reasons that contradict it. Will you read them with an open mind?

[Iron Arahat]

Society, and in this particular case America creates it's own demons too often.

[chh]

"if it bleeds, it leads."

 

Too lazy to write a response of my own, but this brought a recent Michael Moore article to mind I figured I'd post for kicks...

 

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=2002-10-25

[taezee]

Quote:

 

"Quite frankly, I'm on your side. If you're talking about actually trying to amend the Constitution in legal fashion to get rid of the Second Amendment, bring it on! At least you want to do it honestly and somewhat fairly, unlike most people who've tried to nullify the Amendment by illegal means."

 

please inform me of what you mean by this "nullifying by illegal

 

means?

 

?"

 

The ACLU, the NAACP, NOW, and the NRA all have their roles to play. They all protect rights that are vital to individual Americans and thus to all Americans. Discard them at your own peril.

 

the fact that they are black and the involvment of the naacp has nothing to do with what i had stated nor with my view of gun control in america and frankly i find that statement patronizing..my opinion has nothing to do with race

 

Why? You do know that Muhammed broke lots of federal gun laws when he bought his AR-15 "off the books," don't you? Why didn't the tough penalties for what he did stop him?

 

Could it be because he's a murderer and murderers don't follow laws? The guy is going to be executed for his murders, and you want to sentence decent people who simply want to possess weapons for their own defense to prison in order to discourage him. Quote:

 

 

 

the fact that someone as crazy as this individual is able to get such a weapon shows that its too easy, and that there should be laws made to prosecute those who choose to sell guns to anyone in the name of the dollar bill without proper background checks or "of the books" AKA illegaly

 

they become as much responsible for the harm caused as the person who commits murdr with the weapon sold..just as now a person who host a party and lets a guest leave and drive drunk and kills someone is held liable by law and is also responsible in the death..decent people who carry firearms for self protection should not purchase them out of someones trunk or pawn shop nor carry them concealed without the proper license .i dont know much about where your from..im in new york where its ridiculous now that its almost a common thing for high school students to carry firearms as it is a backpack for thier books.alot of school yard disputes are settled with gunfights instead of the old fashioned fistfight where you may leave bruised not in a bodybag..mohammed may have broken alot of federal gun lwas in obtaining such a weapon..but he was not alone..those who supplied him are guilty also..if i was a drug dealer and supplied you with a heroin dose that killed you then im guilty of murder as well as distribution..

 

Quote:

 

And you very rarely will, because it almost never happens. In about 98% of successful defenses with a firearm, not a shot is fired. Don't fall into the "Kellerman trap" of believing that self-defense is only real when someone kills an intruder. Conservative estimates of crimes prevented each year by private citizens using firearms range between 750,000 and 1.5 million per year. Now, not all of these are preventions of murders, but you can still see how many lives are being saved. On the other paw, deaths of all types involving firearms (murder, suicide, accident, justified shootings, etc.) total just over 30,000 per year. You do the math.

 

Most successful defenses are simply not newsworthy.

 

statistics nothing but numbers my friend..until you see it in your neighborhood..until someone you know gets killed for nothing..that one number is one to many..if your mom is going to the store and gets shot for simply being there at the wrong time..and is killed by an animal who should have not even been on the street much less have someone sell him a firearm then whats a statistic chart worth?? my father is retired NYPD he was forced to retire after falling off a second story fire escape wrestling a firearm from a twice convicted felon who should have been in jail..he shot the convict and was lucky to not have been shot himself..while he aimed to disable the other guy was looking to kill..thats my pops always the gentleman.. if it was me i would have made sure i popped him in between the eyes..but since my father didnt kill him it was not news worthy .as a matter of fact my father had to be investigated as to why he didnt use other means to subdue the suspect..who had a firearm in the act of a felony burgalary..my father even had to go through post traumatic therapy dealing with feelings of guilt for shooting someone who would have killed him and not lost any sleep!! and my father is one of the toughest individuals ive ever known.i get my toughness from him...he felt bad for shooting a bad guy who had it coming ..i guess i can easily say i would have killed the guy and felt nothing..but i was never put in that position..ive never had to shoot anyone..although i wish i could shot this guy simply because he tried to kill my father

 

 

 

post your citations then..if you need to review your notes to come up with an argument...i can recall on a daily stories of guns being used to kill innocent people just by last weeks news articles and im talking about only those that made the papers its become so common that only the extrodinary make the news .. a security guard who works in my store part time is a new york city cop..and for some reason he carries around poloaroids of crime secenes ..the real end results of crimes most of which arent in the news just a hobby of his i guess ..honestly scares the shit out of me for carrying such pictures..crime photos..such things as decapitations.. car accidents or bodies found weeks after death ..mafia victims and such i get a chill up my spine just looking at them realizing that these are "real" not just news stories for all of theses photos would ever be printed in any newspaper he has "real life" or in this case "death" in his little envelope of "polaroids" nothing you would ever see in an episode of "COPS"some of the pics made me want to throw up.. incredible the amount of brutaliy that they see on a daily that the media will not show.one pic had a human head on the curb just staring up at you like a soccer ball .. just yesterday in my local news a enstranged boyfriend was trying to kill his ex girlfriend and new boyfriend with a shotgun.. he was told repeatedly by the police to put down his weapon aftere showing up at her house..before being shot down..how does a sixteen year old have a sawed off shotgun in his trunk in the first place?? he was shot down trying to show his love..

 

. . . . are, again, incredibly rare. Accidental deaths among children 14 and under amount to a few hundred per year. That sounds like a lot until you remember that there are about 280,000,000 people in the U.S. and about as many firearms. More children are accidentally killed by drowning, eating household cleaners, falls, bicycle accidents, etc., every single year than by gunfire. Among adults, accidents are the second lowest cause of accidental deaths. The only thing rarer is "specific types of poison."

 

i dont know the exact amount..i will research it..however "incredibly rare' is not the case..everyone has heard of such horrible incidents..that defintely does not make it rare.. incredibly rare is ones house being hit by a meteor

 

ill tell you what seems to be rare is someone shooting and killing a person commiting a crime against themselves or thier family/property this is something we dont hear ........."news flash good guy shoots drug dealer dead in an attempted car jacking..film at eleven!!" when was the last time you heard a story like that??

 

and finally you are correct i do have right to my opinion..and my opinon stands that a gun is made for nothing else then killing..i served in the military..ive seen up close and personal what a weapon can do..i was a corpsman(medic) in the service.you dont see soldiers wincing and crying out "go on without me" but instead crying out for thier mothers in extreme pain and fear knowing that they are dying..in the real world there are no "flesh wounds" or "grazing"..as you see in the movies.. a bullet hitting you anywhere is serious and most times fatal...no matter where you are hit..a leg wound as a matter of fact may be more deadly then a chest wound..if your hit in a femoral artery in the leg your dead. in a few minutes..but in the movies youve only been shot in the leg..youll live..ive spent a few nights as a child growing up wondering if my father was going to make it home..knowing alot of bad guys out there had a a gun they were more then willing to use on my father or any other "pig" that got in there way..because a nine to five was far beneath them..ive had more then a few people i know gunned down..i myself was shot at on two occasions one time feeling the heat of a slug whizzing past my ear which was meant for my head not even in military action..but by common thugs who felt they needed to shoot me to prove how tough they were..and in recent events in washington/virginia which are allready fading into yesterdays news..i bet you no one living around those areas will ever feel safe again in thier god given constitutional right to fill thier gas tanks without being shot to death..much less the right to bear arms and i leave with this.. can you really tell me firearms in america is not a problem?

 

_________________

 

Javier l Rosario

 

instructor taekwondo/hapkido

 

under master Atef s Himaya

 

"whenever youre lazy enough not to train .someone, somewhere is training very hard to kick your ass"

 

Last edited by taezee on Wed 04 Dec, 2002, edited 1 time in total

 

 

 

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taezee

 

Sempai

 

 

 

Joined: 13 Jul 2001

 

Posts: 698

 

Location: Bayshore New York

 

Posted: Wed 04 Dec, 2002 Post subject:

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

okay something got messed up in seperating your qoutes with my rebutal but if you read straight through you know whats mine and yours..and i am openminded..but i stand firmly my belief is the sole purpose of a firearm ..each one thats is manufactured is to someday kill a human being..wheter they are desreving or not..moreso then to kill a deer by a hunter..just as any car manufactured is to transport people from point A to point B just as we pratice martial arts to subdue or cause serious harm to an assailant who tries to harm us ..all other reasons are secondary we can get into debate about that also..it is also my belief that this is the main reason for studying martial arts..to be able to harm those who choose to harm me..same can be said of possesing a firearm..to kill those who choose to try to kill me..all he other things that come with it.."self discipline..enlightenbment..physical fitness..confidence..characther..e.t.c are secondary as to why martial arts where created..its is to defend one from an attack not to win a gold medal with a ref controling a match in a ring with rules..a firearm to the crminal to be able to do what i he/she wamts to to to gain with deadly force..even if it means picking off innocents because he/she feels like it..and for them to be able to get such power in thier hands so easily means there is something seriously wrong with the amount of guns in america..you are at thier mercy same as you are at the mercy of fate that the next drunk driver wont ram head on into your car as you try to get home from work which also took the life of my anut 12 years ago because someone wanted to get high and then drive a car she was taken..no defense aginst that..just chance..she was just coming home from the supermarket..trying to make some breakfast for her family..but she was in the way of some person who didnt care..was drunk and killed her at stop sign..no matter the amount of time i have studied martial arts (twenty five years) ive never left the dojang confident in the fact that i can defend myself against a thug pointing a gun at me to ever think that would be denial at its best..real life is a big difference then the movies where you may see jet li grab the gun empty the magazine and smile at the bad guy before kicking him in the face.. ..all those years of training mean nothing in the second it takes for a trigger to be pulled and i would laugh in the face of anyone who would argue otherwise..self defense against a gun my ass..the best defense against that is to give up what i got and pray the guy doesnt shoot me..just as i pray im never in the wrong place at the wrong time..the more we have laws that prevent people with easy access to weapons the more we wont wind up in such an incident..its easier to get a firearm then to get cuban cigars again go figure..and yes i am ranting.. * and maybe when a whole lot of people get as pissed as i am something will change..instead of forgetting about it weeks later and being glad after reading or seeing the latest news report that it didnt happen to me or someone i know.its only news or another statistic until then where ONE is a devastating number that will haunt you for the rest of your life.where ONE is someone you know.or your death where people will read about you..and how your life was taken.."he was just pumping gas".."he was just going to school".."he was just trying to get home"..but someone who had a gun didnt care about all that..they may have even sneered and pulled the trigger..then went on to brag about how scared you looked as you realized you where going to be on the news that evening..please someone tell me how great guns are....tell me a story about how great it is to kill an deer..how it was a lifetime experience for you...how forfilling it was..or tell me a story about a crime that happened around the corner from you in which someone was shot dead by some scumbag..which one is more common?? more specifacally mr don gwin tell me of the advantages of having firearms as i see you a gun enthusiast? i myself choose not to have a fire arm because of the responsibility involved if i use it..i feel that even if justified i will be prosecuted with more scurtiny then a felon in the act of a crime..i will have to prove i had no choice. buy your profile tell me of the great advantages of the firearm and how noble the cuase of the NRA? educate me..guns dont kill people..people kill people...but people without guns make it much more difficult..yes or no??

 

_________________

 

Javier l Rosario

[Don Gwinn]

please inform me of what you mean by this "nullifying by illegal

 

means?

 

The legal means of nullifying the 2nd Amendment would be to amend the Constitution legally and fairly by the mechanism clearly set out in the Constitution itself:

 

1. Get 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or 2/3 of state legislatures, to call for a Constitutional convention.

 

2. Propose an amendment repealing the 2nd Amendment at the Convention.

 

3. Get 3/4 of the state legislatures or state conventions to approve the amendment.

 

"Illegal means" are all the 20,000-plus laws that have been passed to date which violate the 2nd Amendment but have not been struck down. Illinois' FOID law, for instance, or Chicago's de facto ban on guns, or D.C.'s total ban on gun ownership or possession, or the Brady Bill, or GCA 1968, or the GOPA 1986, or GCA 1934. According to the Supreme Court's accepted doctrine, any law which is contrary to the Constitution is automatically null and void. However, for going on 70 years now, the Supreme Court has refused to rule one way or the other on the 2nd Amendment. They know they have little choice about this. On the facts, it's obvious to most Constitutional scholars that the 2nd was raped in 1934 and the Justices turned a blind eye. Now the Justices don't want to see gun control invalidated because they personally believe it's a Good Thing. If they rule, they either have to uphold gun control (thus gutting the 2nd, removing all hope of gun owners and other Constitutionalists that the Constitution can be restored by peaceful means, and--possibly--touching off another civil war. Obviously no one wants that.

 

But if they rule in accordance with the 2nd, those 20,000 gun control laws become null and void overnight and we go back the the 1930's in terms of gun control. I think that's wonderful, but they don't, so they don't want to do that either. So they simply refuse to rule on the issue and have for almost 70 years now.

 

I sometimes forget that not everyone spends as much time on civil-rights stuff as I do. I apologize if I sometimes lapse into jargon or make assumptions.

[Don Gwinn]

Taezee, I mean no offense and I'm sorry if this brings up painful memories for you, but as long as you're making these assertions I have to answer. If we get to a point where you don't want to continue because of that, I'll certainly understand. But a lot of what you're saying is simply not true and I feel compelled to answer it.

the fact that they are black and the involvment of the naacp has nothing to do with what i had stated nor with my view of gun control in america and frankly i find that statement patronizing..my opinion has nothing to do with race

I wasn't accusing you of racism. My point was that you would not say something as silly as "The NAACP has got to go!" or "The ADL has got to go!" You wouldn't demand that those organizations be disbanded simply because they fight for the rights of their members, even though you might sometimes disagree with one of their policies or another.

 

But when it comes to the NRA, your first thought is "The NRA has got to go!" Why is that? Why is it good that the NAACP fights to protect its members' Constitutional rights, but bad that the NRA fights to protect its members' Constitutional rights? There's a double standard there.

the fact that someone as crazy as this individual is able to get such a weapon shows that its too easy, and that there should be laws made to prosecute those who choose to sell guns to anyone in the name of the dollar bill without proper background checks or "of the books" AKA illegaly

Fine, but the point is that those laws are already on the books. Everything you just mentioned is already illegal. In fact, it's a federal felony. You do hard time in a Federal penitentiary if you're convicted. The GCA1934 has been around for 68 years. The GCA1968 has been around for 34 years. The Brady Bill has been around for about ten years. They were all in force when Muhammed bought his rifle, and both he and the seller simply ignored them (that's what criminals do with laws.) So why are you still demanding that these laws be passed if they've been on the books for years? Is it possible there are aspects of this issue you don't fully understand?

i dont know much about where your from..im in new york where its ridiculous now that its almost a common thing for high school students to carry firearms as it is a backpack for thier books.alot of school yard disputes are settled with gunfights instead of the old fashioned fistfight where you may leave bruised not in a bodybag

Again, it's great that you want a law against this, but . . . well, again, the things you want to outlaw are already federal felonies. Any kid under 21 who buys a handgun is already committing a federal felony. In New York, I believe you've got to have a Pistol Permit as well, so it's also a state felony. Here in Illinois, we've had the FOID (Firearms Owner ID) law for years and it hasn't done squat to reduce crime, but again, a kid doing what you suggest is legal would be committing both federal and state felonies.

 

In accordance with the Law of Unintended Consequences, you also commit a state felony in Illinois if you let your teenage son (or an adult without a FOID card) touch your handgun, even to shoot a tin can on your own property with your supervision. Thank God we're protected from those kinds of horrors.

statistics nothing but numbers my friend

Of course--when statistics support my side, they're nothing but numbers. When you were quoting your highly scientific study of crime rates--reading the paper and seeing how many heart-tugging articles about shootings there were each day--that was a valid argument. There's that double standard thing again.

from a twice convicted felon who should have been in jail

Again, I don't want to sound like I don't care about your father's loss, but

 

that is the key phrase. Would gun control have kept that from happening? Would that twice-convicted felon who, for whatever unimaginable reason, got sent out into society and told to sin no more have simply given up and gone straight if he'd had a harder time getting a gun? Come on. You know better than that. It would have been a knife, a razor, a pipe, whatever. And your father, being the nice guy that he was, would still have tried to do what he thought best, which still means a wrestling match, which means he still would have fallen.

 

What happened to your father was terrible, but blaming it on the availability of guns is not logical.

post your citations then..if you need to review your notes to come up with an argument

Look, I don't know what you're so pissed about. I'm not the one who posted a public call for your property and your rights to be stolen by the government. Anyway, the argument has already been made (and I notice you didn't bother to respond to it.) I was simply offering to back up my assertions so that you could see for yourself that I'm telling the truth. In other words, simply offering a courtesy you didn't offer me. You've made all kinds of assertions about statistics, trends, etc. without ever once offering any kind of proof that any of it was true.

i can recall on a daily stories of guns being used to kill innocent people just by last weeks news articles and im talking about only those that made the papers its become so common that only the extrodinary make the news

. . . . and we're back to anecdotal evidence gathered by looking at newspapers. Not exactly rigorous science, sir, especially since we all know the news media emphasizes blood and gore as much as possible and is generally anti-gun to boot. The Center for Media Research looked into this and found that for any given incident, the average gun crime received about three times as much coverage as the average defensive use or other positive story. They also found that when so-called "experts" were consulted in the news, members of anti-gun groups were quoted several times more often than those from pro-gun groups.

 

Do you still really believe you can find the truth by reading the newspaper?

just yesterday in my local news a enstranged boyfriend was trying to kill his ex girlfriend and new boyfriend with a shotgun . . . . he was shot down trying to show his love..

Riiight. Poor kid was just trying to show his love--by murdering the woman he claimed to love, plus the guy she chose over him. That makes sense.

how does a sixteen year old have a sawed off shotgun in his trunk in the first place??

He couldn't have. It isn't possible. Possession of one of those has been against Federal law since 1934, and we all know that gun control stops people from getting guns, right?

 

Therefore it couldn't have happened, right?

i dont know the exact amount..i will research it..however "incredibly rare' is not the case..everyone has heard of such horrible incidents..that defintely does not make it rare.. incredibly rare is ones house being hit by a meteor

 

No need. In 2000, according to the CDC, the number of accidental gun deaths for children 14 and under was 86. The number of suicides was 110, and the number of other deaths (meaning homicides, both murder and justified, and the large category of "undetermined intent") was 239. How many kids 14 and under do you think there are in the U.S.? Maybe 30 million? Maybe 50-60 million? Let's try 30 million. Divide 86 by 30 million. Hell, divide 435 by 30 million. What do you get?

 

0.0000145. One hundred and 45 per ten million.

 

You don't call that incredibly rare? Are you being honest about this?

 

By the way, the numbers for drowning, exposure to smoke and fire, and auto accidents were 943, 593, and 2,591 respectively. Compare those to the eighty-six accidental gun deaths.

 

Face it, Taezee. You are being fed a pack of lies.

 

Now, as for having heard of someone who had a child die in a gun accident, that has nothing to do with whether it is rare or common. That only means that it is newsworthy, not that it is common.

ill tell you what seems to be rare is someone shooting and killing a person commiting a crime against themselves or thier family/property this is something we dont hear ........."news flash good guy shoots drug dealer dead in an attempted car jacking..film at eleven!!" when was the last time you heard a story like that??

I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist bolding the word "seems" above. That's the crux of our disagreement. I'm dealing in facts here, and you simply aren't. Your whole argument is based on how it "seems" and how it "feels" when you read newspapers. I'm not trying to be snide here, but I can't argue with your feelings, and you can't use them to support any real argument.

 

Now, I've already explained that the VAST majority of defensive uses of a gun (98%) do not involve the firing of a single shot, much less the killing of the assailant. It is indeed rare for an armed citizen to shoot an intruder or an attacker, because it's not generally needed. Most flee at the sight of the firearm.

 

And I've already explained to you that it has been proven that the majority of the news media reports the news the way they want it to appear. In fact, they simply don't report things they don't personally find newsworthy, like an armed citizen chasing off an attacker with no shots fired and no gory pictures of blood on the pavement.

 

If you'd lived in the 1930's and I'd told you Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, I suppose you'd have called me a liar then too. After all, it wasn't printed in the news, so it couldn't have been true. . . . . right?

knowing alot of bad guys out there had a a gun they were more then willing to use on my father or any other "pig" that got in there way..because a nine to five was far beneath them

Again, those PEOPLE were the problem, not the fact that someone else was allowed to own a gun. Most of them were probably legally barred from owning a firearm by federal law (if they had an past convictions or mental illness history, or if they were addicted to drugs or alcohol)

 

They'd have done the same thing with knives, pipes, swords, or whatever weapons were current, had they lived in a different time or place. If your father had been on night patrol in ancient Greece he'd have been in just as much danger (well, maybe not in Sparta) except that they'd have been using knives or short swords. The spirit is the same. The criminal ethos of "work and honesty are for suckers, and suckers are there for me to steal from" is nothing new and it did not appear with guns.

can you really tell me firearms in america is not a problem?

I already did. You just don't seem to want to hear it. As I say, that's your choice. Give your father my best and tell him I thank him for his service--and thank you for yours. I'm sorry you can't get past your image of me as somehow evil or responsible for the evil of other people.

[Patrick]

Going off topic and out of bounds (guidelines wise).

 

Relax guys.

 

Closed.