Gun Laws
If someone shoots at you, maybe (probably) it is justifiable. You then go down the messy route of shooting because you /think/ someone has a gun - then there's the excuse of shooting them to protect yourself in case they have a gun.
Of course I don't know how I'd react in the heat of the moment, I have thankfully never confronted someone in the act of breaking and entering my property. But not having a gun myself I'm actually glad I won't have to worry about that.
And I live in London which is plenty city! And where I lived in Leeds a lot of people were putting security grilles over ground floor windows and doors so not exactly nice either.
What sort of people rob houses? They could be all sorts. They could be punk kids who have nothing better to do, or punk kids needing to support a drug habit. It could be some strung-out meth head with an unpredictable nature. It could be someone who has done nothing but crime all their lives. I am out of work and I have not had to rob anyone's house to feed my family.
Sorry, mate, but if someone breaks into my house I don't have time to play Dr, Phil or interview them. They are already a threat so they are going to get help, possibly permanent help. Help that means they need want no longer. I think you have an overly simplistic, idealistic view of crime and criminals. There are skinheads here, neo-nazis, whack jobs, malcontents and just some general jerk-offs running around. We have some arsehole up in the Poconos who killed one State Trooper and wounded another. Yeah, OK- he killed a police officer. So he needs to be shot, right?
Guess what? If he shows up at my house he will get shot by me no questions asked. I would probably get a commendation for it and of course it is an extreme example. You are approaching this as though in all cases the people being shot are general, all-around good people. In many or most cases, they are not.
Oscar Pistorious is likely to get away with manslaughter because of his celebrity, not because he is not guilty of killing his girlfriend. He is an example of taking the breaking and entering bit to an implausible extreme. I have followed a bit of that case and I really cannot see how he did that and thought there was a burglar. Nonsense.
A person does not have to have a gun to be a threat in someone's house. The delay in not taking someone else's life in a robbery situation may be the difference between your living or dying, or someone in your family living or dying. Say I find a guy in my house, confront him with a gun and he runs out of ny bedroom or living room and to my daughter, taking her as a hostage? I won't take that chance, especially with a dsperate person. Maybe they are desperate, maybe just dangerous. No percentage in it for me to find out; I'll be glad to be edified later.
Actually, I hope to never have to be in that situation. It would never be easy.
** LOL, stopping and entering is not a crime. :-)
Set up for tea, perhaps?
By then, it may be too late and the point is moot. The difference between you and me is, I am not going to wait. This is an age old argument, but it bears repeating for it is the absolute truth: If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
But this thread is derailed anyway. The thread title is Gun Laws. I have stated already that if the U.S. would simply follow and enforce the laws we already have, we would be in much better shape. We are on a side track of hypothetical situations that, though possible, are still hypothetical. No one actually knows what they will do in a given situation in the heat of the moment, and there are any number of scenarios that can involve guns, knives, baseball/cricket bats, heavy vases, bare hands, wine bottles, books, frying pans or other household items that can be used for killing in the heat of the moment. Every single item I mentioned has been used to kill. One woman in Texas fatally stabbed her boyfriend with a stilleto heel. Killer heels, mmmmmm! :-P
Which to me is conflating all of those as "will get shot at by me if I see 'em" by the context of the rest of your post. Or otherwise, how is it anything to do with the wisdom of having a gun? Anyway, if that's not what you meant, apologies once again for getting it wrong. Don't shoot!
Given that you 'merkans are in the minority on this forum I guess this could all feel a bit like you're being a bit ganged up on by us here so just wanted to say for sure that it isn't. As has long been observed in this thread we can't expect to convince one another, only obtain greater understanding :)
I am much older now and not quite as likely to get incensed at a post I disagree with, now I am more likely to perhaps take the piss, be sarcastic or sardonic in reply - or even (Gasp!) ask for clarification. I think your views would be fairly consistent with how they probably should be.
When I visited there in 2000 via a Land Rover sponsored trip, I found England to be an idyllic, magical place; I was in Stratford-upon-Avon and the "worst" thing I saw was a couple of young women who flashed their boobs as they walked across the (a) bridge of the Avon (forgive me that I do not recall if the bridge has a proper name) - an action I found not objectionable in the least. I found my time there to be quite different than anything I could possibly find in America and I reveled in the differences. The fact that my mum was born there only added to the allure.
So I got to experience some of the best that England has to offer, but by no means complete. I am sure if you came here, I would hope that you would be exposed to our best and never experience anything unpleasant. Fortunately, the pleasant outweighs the unpleasant tenfold. The media unforunately plays up the negative things because it sells.
All this by way of saying, yes - we might actually be better off if we didn't have guns here. But the other side of the coin is, because we have had them for so long, there are far too many people who shouldn't have them as compared to the people who really could have them for a nonviolent use. Some people will look at the recent militarisation of police departments across the U.S. as a sign of foreboding and cling even tighter to their 2nd Amendment rights. If you are interested in it, you can easily find out about it on any U.s. news web site.
Perhaps all we need do is spend more time on vacations intead of the too many hours we spend as a country working and then spending money on crap we can ill afford, creating a perpetual loop of workaholism.
I Promise i'm not trolling ;-) I just wanted to get your opinion on that viewpoint, given the huge negative reaction we heard on our news feeds relating to Obamacare.
Over here even with our NHS, mental health care is best sought privately , the nhs only tend to get involved once you get to sectioning a person (placed in a secure unit for their own good) which is waaaay past the point a person needs help, so it's not much better here.
Yes, the recent militarisation of the US Police is insane, fucking school districts with anti-mine personnel carriers and stuff, what the fucking hell is that? I don't know that you lot being able to arm yourselves with various weaponry is going to help much there really. Get yourselves some Army surplus Apache helicopters perhaps.
I do not really have any personal knowledge of how obamacare treats mental illness, but traditionally it hasn't been done well here for a very long time. there's a lot of stigma associated with MI so some people avoid an MI diagnosis to avoid the stigma. It is really only recently that the trend has been better understanding of mental illness; maladies like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other related issues.
It might interest you to know that I have suffered from a level of depression from time to time. Many people do not know that I do, but I know it. My wife probably doesn't know it. Why? Because I am able to disguise it fairly well. People who do not see me on a regular basis might not be able to see the difference between me at 100% and me at 50%, because my 50% is sometimes better than others 100%. I am not saying this out of arrogance or anything, it is just that I tend to be an optimistic pragmatist. Yeah, I know - hooey. What I mean by that is I am opyimistic that things will work out fine but pragmatic enough to try to be prepared in case they don't.
Some people turn to porn when depressed, others masturbate excessively or turn to other sexual outlets, some turn to drink, drugs, or crime; others withdraw from society. Back in the day, they called it "coping". Some people do it (coping) by working, other with the aforementioned negative means, others have a recreational outlet.
The fact that our economy is not good does not help in any of these matters and obamacare has not helped at all in that regard. We were told that 40 million people needed insurance, and fewer than 7 million signed up, of which some of them haven't paid a premium yet. Companies are sitting on massive cash reserves because they do not know how the new obamacare scenario will affect them. So there are a couple million people out of work, a couple million more underemployed and hundreds of thousands who have sort of given up actively looking for a job because they fee like they have exhausted their opportunities.
Yet companies will tell you they can't find people. They can't find people because they have outsourced their generally useless anyway Human Resource departments, but at least when they existed they were in-house if one could manage to get to talk to someone. I actuallly just spent over an hour talking to a recruiter for a postion that is probably at least a 40 minute commute away. If one is lucky enough to find and apply for a job (a lot of job descriptions look like they are looking for Purple Cows), the software they use likely throws out a good 50% of likely qualified, excellent candidates to a job whose skills probably transfer well to a different line of work, yet their "keywords" were wrong. Or they lacked experience in that particular field - although in a better economy would possibly be considered due to highly transferrable skills.
OK, so I have wandered off topic a bit right? Not really because all of this ends up in frustration and exacerbates the already fragile condition known as mental illness. Some of these folks commit suicide (it has been on the rise), some turn to those things I mentioned earlier. The Left, who ramrodded obamacare through claim that it isn't a job killer; perhaps "kill" is overdoing it but it is certainly putting a limp in the recovery, as have the massive bailouts to the auto industry and Wall Street/Banks. Had I been able to get a business loan back in 2011-2012, I probably wouldn't have the time to post here. I'd be putting away cases of beer, setting up Oktoberfest gatherings and running the distributorship.
People who work don't have time generally to do the wrong things. Idle hands are the devil's work. Some of it find better outlets than others and some of us keep plodding along regardless, even though were are depressed. Somehow we still know that it is wrong to take what does not belong to you, try to hurt others or otherwise become a problem to others. Some folks just get extremely desperate perhaps, but I don't know how much gun crime is done by folks in the situations I described. I think sometimes there are just bad folks out there that do stuff because they are just inherently evil.
** No wonder nobody answers my CVs if my spelling is as sh*tty as it has been here...
We do, and I will gladly show you my boobs although I doubt it would be the same for you. By the time you get here I hope to have lost the bit of relaxation that has caused this bit of manboobery (it isn't like I need a bra or a "mansier", mate :-P ).
"Show" is probably overstating things a bit, since I was a bit far away and could not really see what may have been lovely assets those two had. Is that some sort of a custom to do that in Stratford, upon that gentle, arched bridge? In any event, should you find yourself on the East coast, I shall do as much as I can to ensure you will experience a vision of lovliness appropriate for a chap of your stature. And not by going to Double Visions, either. [G]
Good intentions gone all wrong. But even at that, the local townships, even with a fancy RV would be no match for guerilla warfare if it came down to it. At least I expect not. I don't think they are allowed to have Apache helicopters and they are a bitch to maintain anyway. If we had Apaches, you guys would be bitching that we had those too. LMAO
No college campus needs an MRAP, APC or 10,000 rounds of ammo for AR-15s and neither does a police precinct. If there is a neighborhood that has gotten out of hand to the degree that all those munitions are required, then the police and local government has allowed it to get that way. Call the National Guard in and clean it out, using bulldozers if necessary.
If Stratford has a custom involving boobflashing it's not one I've ever heard of. I can only surmise that once the UK heard you were coming, they were laid on as part of the special treatment we all planned for you.
Yes, I do know you are joking, but that is exactly the kind of comment I have grown accustomed to in talking with those of the Anglican persuasion, or Angling Saxons as I prefer. It is almost pleasant to be insulted by a Brit. LOL
I know a few helo pilots and they say they are easier than fixed wings to fly - well, after about 300 hours of practice or so. ;-)
Everyone knows my view on the subject, and I promise to keep the list of requested firearms from teh a secret!
About the only thing I have to add is this...
Just because you have a gun and shoot someone doesn't mean they instantly fall dead. Well they do if you shoot their brains out, but hey that's probably some kind of delicacy over there you blood pudding monsters!
I've said this multiple times, but dammit I'm saying it again! :) Most law abiding gun owners here pray they never have to use it on another person! But if someone found themselves in that position most criminals would get the point with a shot to the knee or leg or hand or ass or whatever. Just avoid the vitals. I'm starting to think you guys don't watch zombie movies or horror films! Don't you see the punishment people can take? Hell, I just rewatched Tropic Thunder last night and fucking Tugg Speedman had to have taken 200 rounds and he even played volleyball with a grenade and didn't die! But he did lose his hands. That was pretty sad I guess...
Which goes against all the rules of shooting people. Aim for centre mass, don't shoot what you don't want to kill etc. Sorry, but that bit is absolute bollocks - no way is someone full of adrenaline and who has probably never fired a shot in anger going to be able to accurately target a body part like that, and if you shoot you know that.