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How pathetic that no one within two hours of the island had a rifle.
There is no reason for a society to march like sheep to slaughter. If you are in charge of children, it should be mandatory that you are able to take care of them.
In relatively peaceful countries, the people don’t feel the need to be armed all the time. You swap the safety of having a weapon for the safety of not having an accidental shooting or suicide or momentary anger attack. More guns, more people to go nuts and start shooting. Less guns and a determined individual can make a huge impact.
The man seemed extremely organised. Had gun ownership levels been different I’m sure his plan would have been different.
You use Switzerland as an example of how guns would prevent mass deaths. I give you Afghanistan where many guns cause mass deaths. The difference is the people, not the gun ownership.
It would need a lot of research to determine the overall benefit or disadvantage of having an armed citizenry. No two countries are the same in terms of stability or gun ownership.
However it does seem odd that there wasn’t earlier support from armed police. It was probably against EU health and safety rules 🙁
That’s why there are no accidental deaths, suicides, or anger attacks (that results in deaths) in the UK.
When it comes to gun deaths, Norway is better (less deaths) than Switzerland which is better than the US and the UK beats them all.
Murder is lowest in Norway with Switzerland slightly higher. The UK has about double the murders of Norway but the US has about nine times more murders.
In all four countries, I’m sure that you are far more likely to be killed by someone you know than a total stranger. You are also far more likely to be killed if you are young, male and/or black.
Chicken and egg – do you need to be armed because your country is unsafe or are you unsafe because your country is armed?
Suicide rates are – Switzerland highest, followed by Norway then the US with the UK bottom.
Incidentally – in 2009 (we had our own nutters in 2010) the UK has less gun deaths per capita in total than the US has for accidental shootings only.
These relationships vary from year to year but it gives you an idea.
The US comparison isn’t valid. Almost all of the murders are minority gang murders in cities where handguns are illegal.
So, essentially, there’s no correspondence between gun laws and violent crime (nor suicide). I guess that means we need to ban guns.
In the UK most murder, especially gun crime, is within minority gangs in cities. Ditto knife statistics. The next largest group of victims is amongst young male drunks. I don’t know about Norway and Switzerland but I guess they’ve got similar problems. One of the guy’s aims is to stem immigration.
To ban or not to ban guns? I really don’t think it’s a simple question. Yes, some or many of those kids might have been saved if a few or all of the adults had been carrying guns. But then I wouldn’t feel at all safe if evey adult who got into an argument was packing. I wouldn’t want to see the UK’s drunken crowds armed and dangerous. Again, it comes back to the people, not the weapons.
If terrorism became much more prevalent then yes, it might be safer to have some of ‘our’ side ready to fight back. Or it might just make it easier to arm the terrorists. Tough call.
Probably the third largest group of murders is victims of domestic violence and/or child abuse. It is unlikely that high gun ownership would reduce this and it would probably make it worse.
An armed population is a polite population. My neighborhood and my house are very polite. It would require a platoon to rob me.
Liberal gun laws (created to disarm my ancestors btw) only disarm the good people, the criminals by definition do not follow such laws.
The legally disarmed city hellholes (DC, NYC, Chicago …) are the murder capitals. The good people are defenseless in such places.
Hey TinyCO2, a serious questions …
(1) What do you reach for when someone breaks your window at 3am?
(2) What would you think about while an armed thug rapes your wife at gunpoint in front of you?
(3) How would you disarm the bad guys in any big city where gun bans are already in place?
Seriously, please respond.
You’re assuming I’m saying that guns are all bad. I’m not, it just isn’t a black and white issue. You can’t point to the event in Norway and say that life would have been better if the adults had all been armed. Life would have been different. People still get killed, just in different ways. The US is patently not safer than the UK but the differences are more cultural than legal. Sadly, due to modern attitudes of self indulgence coupled with a weak justice system, the UK is getting more dangerous.
As for your questions:-
1) Thankfully it’s never happened but I’d first reach for the phone, second I’d climb out of the window as nothing I own is more important than my life. Noise would be my third line of defence as most burglars here prefer to operate without detection. If it came to it I’d grab whatever sharp/heavy object I could, in the reasonable hope that my intruder would not be armed with a gun.
2) The only way I could do anything about this was if I got a gun out first and my assailant (yeah, I’d be the one in danger of assault) believed I was prepared to use it. I would only get that familiar with a weapon if I felt the area I lived in warranted that. However the likelihood of it happening is very low. I live where I live and conduct my life such that threats are kept to a minimum. The closest I’ve come to being murdered was a bomb and a gun wouldn’t have saved me.
3) The biggest single incidents in the UK and Norway were both carried out with legally held weapons. How would you reduce gun crime amongst those well able to get hold of weapons? No idea. There may come a time when I would like to see guns return to UK households but only because things have got so bad there is no other solution.
Thanks for responding. Most people that write anti-gun nonsense (I say nonsense because switching the focus to the gun *is* the nonsense) just hit and run. Credit to you for standing up.
The focus on the inanimate object, the gun, is the first detour off the road of reality. This part actually is black and white. It is about the feel-good myth that there is a way to remove risk. You cannot. You cannot even remove every last gun, which makes up only a part of the overall risk.
My favorite old analogy is that of a theoretical clean room. Start with a broom, clean it well. Bring in hired help and sanitize it better. Contract some company to make it a class 100 clean room. Contract with IBM or Intel to get it to Class 10. Then spend a fortune to get Class 1 or better. Without making the room an airless vacuum it is impossible to get that last micron spec of contamination. What happens is that you are riding the asymptote toward perfection but it cannot be achieved.
The contamination in this analogy are the guns of course. The guns can and often are removed from the bulk of the population, but someone is still left with them, whether it is police, military, or yes, the bad guys that will not sign on to the ‘turn in your guns’ laws. All they will have achieved with their gun-grabbing goal is getting to the 99th percentile, an achievement the do-gooders will no doubt celebrate. However, there is someone else celebrating also, the criminal that sees that statistic and says: ‘hey, 99% of the population is unarmed, thank you’.
What it means to the realist is is that since you cannot eliminate that last 1%, the most dangerous percent by definition, you certainly do not sign on to this suicidal pie-in-the-sky pipe-dream. I’ll stay armed to protect my people, and yes, my country.
What it means to the do-gooders, the liberals of course, is that we’ll do this 99% thing anyway. This guarantees bloodbaths in these captive situations (schools, universities, islands) where no-one could stop the perp(s). And it will continue until people stop blaming the gun, and turn their wrath on these do-gooders that made them into sitting ducks.
Ah, but we can. This scenario is exactly the worse-case, adults should have been prepared. Even a gun in a locked cabinet could have been retrieved and fired in the air to at least slow him down a bit. An experienced shooter might have taken him out. I cannot imagine a sorrier result. The perp is still alive? Sickening. No doubt the taxpayers will fund a special solitary confinement wing for him to wallow away the days until he is reformed and released. I suggest Norway see to it that he is in general population in prison and pray the criminals do the job that the oh-so-civilized population could not.
I’ll give you credit for having at least thought about this. Of course you make it clear that it is only you, not your wife, or your kids down the hall. Please invest more thought in this if you have kids in the house. Unless you are all in the same room, barricading the door and calling the cops probably will not work. There is no easy answer for you I’m afraid because I suspect you fear the consequences of the court as much as facing the burglar. In most parts in the USA (except liberal infested cities) that is not an issue, and blowing away the intruders (breaking in at 3am) with 00 buckshot would be simple and legit. Contrary to the twisted liberal cartoon view of home defense, this doesn’t mean firing wildly in the dark! Often racking a slide or pumping a shotgun is all that is needed. Over one million times a year in the USA, exactly this type of scenario occurs. Those infamous child shooting statistics are heavily padded with teenagers involved with drugs and gangs. The truth is that the citizens are the real cops, they stop far more crimes than police ever do, before the telephone is even picked up.
It was a trick question. It’s too late at the point I described unless you can grab a weapon during the crime and take them out. It was more a thought exercise, a very disturbing one indeed. It is meant to ignite the thought process. Why wasn’t I prepared? What is my wife thinking right now? Does she want me to stand here and watch or should I make a move on them? It is about thinking and only you and her can work that out. Speaking for myself I would make the move even if we got hurt badly in the process. It is a matter of principle. Years ago there was a movement of feminists (made up of unfeminine women) who said it was best for the woman to submit when raped, do what he says, this way you might escape with your life (eerily similar to ‘better red than dead’). We don’t think like that. Real Americans don’t think like that.
As I said above, chasing that last gun to achieve liberal bliss cannot happen. But let’s say against all logic they choose to try anyway. DC, Chicago and NYC are the gold standard for gun control. Police, Feds, a small amount of citizen licenses (celebrities, politicians, rich collectors) have the few legal guns. The crooks have the rest (along with some stubborn good guys). Now imagine the logistics of the door-to-door, room-to-room searches that will fail anyway. This is beyond Third Reich or Soviet actions, it is unprecedented. And impossible.
The over-riding point is that it must be realized, even by the densest stubbornest most suicidal liberals, that they cannot get all the guns. If someone still thinks it is possible they are not paying attention. Now, once they accept this simple truth, that there are and always will be guns, they have to learn to deal with reality. Being disarmed, voluntary or not, creates a victim in waiting. If one chooses to live in that disarmed location anyway, either they must break the law and protect themselves illegally, or prepare for a no-win situation.
There are natural-born slaves and natural-born free people. If one is a member of the former, and still goes on about how civilized their country is and how uncivilized the USA is, it still does not change the facts although it might make them feel better or superior. People in many disarmed societies look over here and roll their eyes looking down their nose scoffing about the Wild West mentality in the USA, and we see the comments. Guess what, we really enjoy it.
Doh! Obviously that first (2) should be a (1).
Dagnabbit!
TinyCO2 you seem to be a commercial on why making CO2 larger would be good for the intellect of the world.
Has it worked for you?
Indeed, it comes down to the evolution of a people and where they’re at psychologically.
Attempting to change mother nature or human nature has been done from the beginning of mankind and is a piecet of our nature (some folks anyway). Expecting people to adhere to your personal beliefs always ends badly and in a country like ours where we are protected by a constitution that makes sense to the majority, guns are a way of life. Had something like that tragic event happened here, the death toll would have included the maniac(s) within minutes, not hours.
Nothing an RPG couldn’t have brought to a quick conclusion, but is it the answer ?
.50 cal snipers on an overwatch?
The man should be drawn and quartered, and if he ever “escapes” the authorities, he probably will be.
One $0.40 .223 round would have done the job just fine as the DC snipers proved
Yep, I’ve got a bolt action .222, just waiting for someone to end their gene pool.
.50 cal puts the fear of god into bystanders.
Too heavy. .303* can put the finger of God on someone from 1000yds+, and the rifle isn’t the size of a small car.
* or .30-06, & some of the longer 7.62 stuff, as well. (I’d love to have a .257 weatherby, but . . . $$$$$$$$$$*cringe*)
I’ve got a few Mosin-Nagant 7.62×54 rifles I picked up for $90 each. The same ones used by Vassili Zaitsev to get the Nazis out of Stalingrad. Russians use them for Polar bear hunting
Interesting the media helicopter was flying around as the shooting was happening, but it took police almost 2 hours to get there because they couldn’t find a helicopter?
The murder rate in Washington D.C. is 80/100000. In Arlington, VA, it is 1.6.
Whatever could be the disparity be about? 🙂
Its because people in Arlington are killing each other with the guns and dumping the bodies in DC, where it is obvious there is the indigenous murder rate is zero, since handguns are non-existent /sarc
This is all one needs to know about ‘gun control’…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nf1OgV449g
Someone tell TinyCranialObject2 that he should be most afraid of Switzerland. It’s awash in automatic weapons Eeek!
I have been injured by two large deadly weapons during the last 15 months while riding my bicycle. Those weapons are freely used by 16 year old children.
Swiss drivers are crazy but not as bad as the Italians.
But none of them are as bad as New Jersey drivers!
Well, women drivers maybe?
Ummm, unless they’re Italian women drivers from the Jersey Shore.
:’)
(yeah, I know she’s not Italian)
On the contrary Switzerland is a lovely place. Very law abiding. It’s got nothing to do with the guns. It would drive you mad however as there are countless rules and regulations.
Please don’t resort to silly insults, it promotes the idea that sceptics are limited in their arguments. If you can argue the points I’ve made, just agree to differ.
Then explain this comment of yours…
“In relatively peaceful countries, the people don’t feel the need to be armed all the time. You swap the safety of having a weapon for the safety of not having an accidental shooting or suicide or momentary anger attack. More guns, more people to go nuts and start shooting. Less guns and a determined individual can make a huge impact.”
Switzerland is awash with extremely ‘deadly’ weapons and yet has virtually no gun homicides. In fact the vast majority of gun related crimes in Switzerland are perpetrated by foreignors. Where I live we all have multiple firearms and shoot on a regular basis. We teach our children at an early age how to properly handle firearms and have virtually no gun crime. Unfamiliarity is as deadly as anything else
It is in the cities that you find the root of our problems. Progressives and welfare slaves. More guns in the right hands means safer neighborhoods.
Your logic does not hold up, and contradicting yourself is not helping.
But the majority of the Swiss are not armed all the time. They usually keep the weapons locked up at home unless they are travelling to and from where they plan to use them. Norway has a fair number of guns too but it didn’t save them because people who feel safe usually don’t carry weapons around, even assuming their laws allow them to. People who are happy to shoot at targets or wildlife or even defend their home are not necessarily equiped to take on a crazed gunman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_ownership
Here’s a wiki link on gun ownership – not sure how accurate it is but there is no relationship between guns held and the relative safety of the country. Switzerland isn’t safe because there are a lot of weapons it’s safe because of its culture.
And yes, the majority of gun crime in both our countries is within minority communities. They most often kill each other. Which brings us back to Anders Breivik and what he was trying to prove. He no doubt thinks his country would be safer with guns and without minorities. And while he may be right I’m not sure anyone would like to applaud his determination to get his point across.
The people at the camp weren’t armed because who would have expected them to need a gun?
I disagree. The vast majority of gun deaths in Norway over the last few years were perpetrated by a single white Norwegian who wanted to prove that minorities were the problem. He sounds stupid as a rock and probably should have gotten a job at GISS, rather than directly murdering people,
“The murder rate in Washington D.C. is 80/100000. In Arlington, VA, it is 1.6.”
According to the 2010 Census, the population distribution of Washington, D.C. is 50.7% Black or African American……
Arlington, Virginia As of 2010, . ….. 8.23% Non-Hispanic Black or African American
So in Washington, the murders are being committed by the majority population.
Looks like it……………………………….
The worst gun tragedies happen in gun free zones. Period.
Criminals do not follow laws. Outlawing guns would only disarm the peaceful. This has been shown over and over again throughout history. The Swiss choose to leave their guns at home, they have the ability to shoot at will but do not.
We have more guns per capita by a very large margin here than the city, and do not have the problems that citioits seem to have with proximity to weaponry. It is not the guns that are causing trouble, it is criminals and you cannot legislate them away. I’ll keep my 12 ga next to the door, thanks.
In YOUR country. A gun free zone isn’t a gun free zone if you can travel a few miles and purchase a gun. Nobody’s asking you to give up your gun. I’m sure this guy felt the same way.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2018167/Gunman-shoots-dead-sons-11th-birthday-party-Texas-roller-rink.html
And notice, he shot himself, so his gun spree wasn’t brought to an end by an eager gun toting citizen.
Yes, in my country. That’s where I live. The statistics prove my point over and over again. When guns are banned, crime goes up. When bans are repealed, crime goes down.
I receive the NRA magazine each month with a section devoted to criminals stopped by gun toting citizens. It happens everyday. You can alway find an anomoly if that is your game. It is a childish and pointless game.
And I again point you to Switzerland. Wht do you deny the swiss success story? Switzerland is not my country.
The Norway shootings are an anomoly too. They don’t define the safety of the country unless it starts a trend. Globally there is no trend. Look at the list of gun ownership by country. There are safe and very unsafe countries in the list.
You seem to want to make this into an argument about your situation of owning a gun. I don’t care one way or the other. I accept that if you live in a country where anyone can get a gun, you should have one too. Some people are saved by owning a gun. Some people are killed by owning a gun. Fact.
The Swiss success has nothing to do with their guns and you’ve offered no proof that it is. See this description of them being the ‘most law abiding’.
http://www.executiveplanet.com/index.php?title=Switzerland:_Public_Behaviour
The Swiss keep a very tight control on their country and clearly they like it that way. It’s like one really big gated community.
If someone nearby would have had a rifle and ammo, the event would have been over much more quickly. Why are you arguing about this?
I am familiar with the list. I know what works here. I live here. This is why the UN and other busybodies need to concern themselves with what happens within their own borders.
I also know history and what happens to those who submit to tyranny. So do the Swiss. You fail utterly to see the example they serve, and I’m not surprised.