NRA calls for an armed police officer at every US school

[Electro Rock]

I thought the "personal attack section" had been moved? .. I have been shooting all manner of weapons for over 50 years without a problem .. you seem well versed at "shooting your mouth off" when told not to by the Moderator .. you'd best practice more as your aim is off kilter ..

[Tearloch7]

Hypocracy; thy name is Tearloch.

[Wetcoaster]

And now Canada has been heard from (via the Piers Morgan Tonight program) on the NRA statement...

"That was the most irresponsible, and I think, hurtful response to an American tragedy that I have heard. He should be ashamed of himself to come and tell the American people 'I am not going to do anything reasonable – not one thing.'"

"It is shameful because they can give you not one logical reason that an American citizen needs an assault weapon. Not one. They aren't good for hunting, they serve no purpose. In the hands of someone really mentally ill, they can do damage that is inconceivable to us."

~ Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone

http://piersmorgan.b...t-i-have-heard/

Oh those wacky Canadians, eh???

And the take on the NRA position from a Cuban...

"I think the NRA press conference is what the Mayans had in mind when they said the world would come to an end today." ~ Mark Cuban

Goldang furriners.

[Wetcoaster]

Hypocracy; thy name is Tearloch.

[Wetcoaster]

Now he should try having the gun and showing us how quickly one can swap magazines. Having experience with this, I know first hand. Unless his insinuation is throwing a smaller magazine at someone will cause less damage.

[woofwoofmoomoo]

<p>

Hypocracy???

Poor spelling thy name is Electro Rock.

[woofwoofmoomoo]

Which would certainly keep them out of your hands...

Anyways, people, I hate to break this to you but the '70s are over and its time to move on from that whole counterculture mindset.

[Electro Rock]

I have had the opportunity to fire fire both restricted and prohibited (fully automatic/selectable fire) weapons in the past (old VPD firing range) and swapping out magazines does take time.

Assuming a 30 clip magazine, that would have taken five swaps for the same firepower with a 5 clip magazine and while swapping the shooter is otherwise occupied even assuming that the shooter makes smooth clean swaps.

Proponents of outlawing high-capacity gun magazines note that as many as a half-dozen kids escaped from the school when Lanza paused either to reload or because his gun jammed, and they suggest the death toll could have fewer than 26 if the gunman's clip held fewer rounds.

http://www.usatoday....ooting/1791827/

[Mr. Ambien]

I have had the opportunity to fire fire both restricted and prohibited (fully automatic/selectable fire) weapons in the past (old VPD firing range) and swapping out magazines does take time.

Assuming a 30 clip magazine, that would have taken five swaps for the same firepower with a 5 clip magazine and while swapping the shooter is otherwise occupied even assuming that the shooter makes smooth clean swaps.

Proponents of outlawing high-capacity gun magazines note that as many as a half-dozen kids escaped from the school when Lanza paused either to reload or because his gun jammed, and they suggest the death toll could have fewer than 26 if the gunman's clip held fewer rounds.

http://www.usatoday....ooting/1791827/

[MC Fatigue]

zaibatsu.................

/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&section=findpost&pid=11023587">theminister, on 21 December 2012 - 04:37 PM, said:

You've laid out your normal rhetoric here, zaibatsu, but please explain the above.

You say it isn't the guns and gun culture that is responsible for Yanks killing Yanks yet you have failed to explain what is.

I think after reading your denial of everybody else's opinion I think it's only fair you actually tell us WTF is wrong with America.

GO.

- Why have you refused to respond to 'theminister' ? I think all of us contributing to this thread are waiting...

[Pouria]

"Proponents of outlawing high-capacity gun magazines note..."

What a huge surprise that anti-gun proponents would suggest such a thing.. but nonetheless, someone who was trained like Lanza couldn't have taken more than five seconds to reload his Bushmaster.

The irony is, the amount of shots that were fired could have easily been fired off by a handgun, so the notion that he would have killed less is laughable. He also wasn't spraying like the Home Alone parody of gangster Johnny to only fire off a hundred rounds in ten minutes. You really need a better lesson about guns, and perhaps stop listening to anti-gun propaganda.

[Electro Rock]

For one thing, ARs *are* used frequently for hunting, and it looks as if the Sandy Hook shooter might have not have even used the AR-15 he had. The other thing is that every U.S. citizen is technically in the military, the United States Militia.

[Tearloch7]

The British are coming !!!!! ... oops, I mean the Chinese are coming, and all the semi-auto's in the world are not going to stop em .. they are just buying up the Continent from off-shore ..

That gun is designed for folks who need to spray bullets to be effective, when one properly placed shot is all you need .. the rest of the world just needs to sit back and allow America to implode, which it is doing quite nicely ..

[Electro Rock]

Yeah because none of the special forces, SWAT, professional trainers, hunters and last but not least, competitive shooters who use that platform can shoot?

Anyways, your crack about the British points towards the huge difference in mentality between the U.S. and Canada; remember the U.S. started off by defeateting the world's greatest power, whereas Canada, bent over really well.

[Tearloch7]

While the US is in a "hands and knee's" position for the Chinese entry? .. Canada and the British drove the Yanks back south in 1812, and done scorched the White House while kicking their collective arses .. the US, for the most part, defeated German mercenary troops in the Revolution ..

[Electro Rock]

The Chinese will likely be a has-been competitor 20 years from now as the Japan as the Japanese are now.

Anyway, the Brits were by far the most powerful country in the world in the early 19th century, but the early

Americans were at least able to hold their own.

[Tearloch7]

Guerrilla/terrorist tactics worked then as they work now .. the US should learn a lesson from spreading your "empire" too thin ..

[Wetcoaster]

Here is an article by Conservative pundit David Frum making the point that "Guns endanger more than they protect".

Frum says the NRA statement surfaced the key rationale for its views on guns as LaPierre talked of battle between criminals and civilians, who use guns defensively. Frum writes in fact, guns are used to intimidate and threaten more often than in self-defense and armed civilians turn ordinary altercations into murderous exchanges of fire.

Editor's note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He is the author of eight books, including a new novel "Patriots" and his post-election e-book, "Why Romney Lost." Frum was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002.

(CNN) -- The National Rifle Association's Friday press event has received almost uniformly negative reviews. Yet the speech by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre had this merit: It pulled into daylight for all to see the foundational assumption of modern American gun culture.

LaPierre argued that our society is stalked by unknown numbers of monsters, potential mass murders like Adam Lanza. Then he said this: Even if we could somehow identify future Adam Lanzas, "that wouldn't even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country."

The "criminal class" sentence is key. In LaPierre's mind, the world is divided between law-abiding citizens and dangerous criminals. Citizens and criminals form two separate and discrete categories. The criminals pose a threat; if the citizens do not go armed against the threat, they will be victimized by the threat.

I know people who carry handguns with them wherever they go, and for just the reason described by LaPierre.

Now let's take a look at the real world of American gun ownership. The following incident occurred in August:

"A man was shot in the face 9 p.m. Friday in an altercation with a neighbor over barking dogs on Atlas Street," Troy Police said.

"Police arrested David George Keats, 73, of Troy [Michigan] and charged him with attempted murder in the incident," according to a media release from the Troy Police Department.

"According to police, witnesses stated that the altercation began when Keats let his three dogs outside and the dogs began to bark. According to the media release, Keats' 52-year-old next door neighbor yelled at the dogs to be quiet and kicked the fence. Keats then ran up to the victim, yelled, 'Don't tell my dogs to shut up,' and began shooting at the victim.

"One bullet hit the man in the face, piercing both cheeks, and four more shots were fired at the victim as he was running away," according to the report.

The encounter between Keats and his neighbor ended nonlethally only by good luck. A shot in the face is a shot to kill.

Nor was this encounter aberrational. There's solid research to show that most so-called defensive gun uses are not really defensive at all.

In the late 1990s, teams of researchers at the Harvard school of public health interviewed dozens of people who had wielded a gun for self-defense. (In many cases, the guns were not fired, but were simply brandished.) The researchers pressed for the fullest description of exactly what happened. They then presented the descriptions to five criminal court judges from three states.

"The judges were told to assume that the respondent had a permit to own and carry the gun and had described the event honestly from his/her own perspective. The judges were then asked to give their best guess whether, based on the respondent's description of the incident, the respondent's use of the gun was very likely legal, likely legal, as likely as not legal, unlikely legal, or very unlikely legal."

Even on those two highly favorable (and not very realistic) assumptions, the judges rated the majority of the self-defensive gun uses as falling into one of the two illegal categories.

The researchers concluded:

"Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self-defense. Most self-reported self-defense gun uses may well be illegal and against the interests of society."

That certainly describes the Keats shooting. With a little Google searching, you can pull up dozens of similar incidents.

Here's a story from just this past week, December 22.

"Longview, Washington -- A man shot and killed his uncle during an argument at their apartment complex late Friday night. ...'We heard a big bang,' said Ron Nelson, who lives a few apartments down...Nelson said the men were fighting over a hat and a cell phone."

Now that so many Americans carry weapons when they go out of the home, shooting incidents can occur anywhere, including very commonly the road. Another recent incident: In Pensacola, Florida, in October a man in a Jeep Cherokee cut off another car. A roadway confrontation followed, the two cars stopped, and the Jeep owner emerged to shoot the other driver in the knee. He was arrested this past week.

In these cases, and thousands like them each and every year, it is not so clear who is the "good guy" exercising responsible self-protection and who is the "bad guy" who can only be deterred by an armed citizen.

But the guns in their hands protected exactly nobody. They turned ordinary altercations into murderous exchanges of fire. They brought wounds, death and criminal prosecution where otherwise there would likely only have been angry words or at worst, black eyes.

LaPierre's offers a vision of American society as one unending replay of the worst scenes in Charles Bronson's 1974 vigilante classic, "Death Wish."

The people most victimized by this nightmare vision end up being the people who believe it -- and who carry the weapons that kill or maim their neighbors, their relatives, their spouses, and random passersby.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/24/opinion/frum-nra-nightmare-vision/index.html

[Wetcoaster]

Guerrilla/terrorist tactics worked then as they work now .. the US should learn a lesson from spreading your "empire" too thin ..

[Tearloch7]

Fighting on your home turf is a huge advantage and equalizer against what on paper looks to be superior forces as we have seen in many conflicts.