As with all things, it's not necessarily a law change that need to happen. Laws don't drive the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist drive laws (or should).

People need to be dissuaded from wanting to have guns. In Europe, people don't really want a gun, and don't even see a need for one. Sure, there are hunters and they have guns, and sure you can get one if you're in a dangerous area with bears and shit, but actually getting a gun is when you're hunted by mafia or something like that and you're desperate. Why would you ever want to walk around with a gun? I don't really get it.

Perhaps people have a fantasy about being a hero, where they shoot the bad guy. Everyone has that as a kid; most kids also grow up.

There's something deeply satisfying about firing a gun - power at your fingertips. Control. Maybe it's a control thing. People don't like to be out of control, with a gun they always have something to fall back on to control the situation.

Maybe it's a macho thing, although women carry guns too. I don't know the statistic of it, but I would imagine more men do than women. Men are intrinsically destructive while women are creative - it's our nature. We men beat up our rivals to gain access to that sweetest fruit of all: peach. Perhaps it's an extension of power; an penis extension. Don't pull the trigger, squeeze it tenderly. You are the gun; look down the aim at your target and fire.

Maybe there's some brain vs brawn in it. I would wager good money that as intelligence goes up, gun ownership goes down. No statistics to back it up, but I'd love to see if it's true. Brains are taking over everything - it's the decade of the Nerd. Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams could get all the girls and gets all the admiration in the big world, while Dick McKickaball failed to make the team and married Candace the exotic dancer his friends hired for him on his 21st birthday. But at least he could shoot JJ Abrams in the face with his 4½ inch death stick.

Society doesn't really gain much from guns does it?

It has its own market and thus gets people to move money around with someone around to skim the top. dft said this in point 2 as well. This could be done for worse stuff though - snuff porn has a market; heroin has a market.

Mutually Assured Destruction is always a fun acronym to throw around. If everyone does eye for an eye, the world will go blind, I've heard somewhere. Probably a shitty western or something.

Feelings of security? If I have a gun, do I feel safer from the people around me that may or may not also have guns? I would feel safer in my home, I think. If I feared home invasions. Home invasions are a weird thing; very rare in europe to the best of my knowledge, even though we don't have guns. Seems like something that would only happen if there was an enormous disparity between poor and rich, making the poor desperate (and lazy) enough to want to do a home invasion. If Brian the Aryan Man-God makes 10 million billion $$ a year, and Rommel the Dirty Mexican doesn't get anything because he has to pay child support off his social security and also cover his meth addication, then the chance of Rommel doing a home invasion is greater than if Rommel makes half of what Brian does. Maybe we need to raise the floor, instead of raising the ceiling on the extrema of wealth to lose the desire of guns.

Maybe it's all of the factors at once, and we have someone like the NRA pushing everyone to want all of them. I want security. I'm afraid. I have a small dick. Home invasions happen all the time. Schools get shot by crazies, I need to defend myself.

Bang!

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

There... the demons went away. Guns are your friends.

She wasn't arguing for that. She was saying that with private ownership (hopefully not advertised in keeping with these maps) there would be fewer home invasions in the UK.

Full autos are pretty heavily regulated. Lots and lots of red tape. I'm not sure I've heard of any crime being committed with fully automatic weapons. If there is any, it's minuscule compared to the homicides committed with handguns. Generally speaking though homicide isn't a major concern to me. I'm more concerned about general health, accidental deaths, etc. Gun control is placebo policy at best, and autocracy at worst.

@ Seltar - are you really that disengaged from or unaware of the common yet tragic events that occur that make your "Run, hide, call 911" statement completely inane? For a small sampling, go and have a look at the records of push-in or home invasion robberies for the greater Houston area over the past 4 years, especially on the west side. Nice new homes, expensive homes, deed restricted neighborhoods and prime targets for incredibly violent home invasion or driveway robberies. Where the fuck do you run and hide when the three dudes with guns, knives and bats decide to do target practice on you, your spouse or your kids? Am I supposed to use my own phone to call 911 or do I interrupt one of the mofo's that's busy punching my wife in the face to borrow his? If you are fortunate enough to live somewhere that crimes are few and the cops respond quickly, congratulations. If you don't, and believe that your response plan will keep you and yours free from harm, then congratulations on sticking to your moral standard, but for fuck sakes don't pretend for an instant that your run and hide idea is a solution or one that everyone should abide by. Wake up, take a look around the real world, even a little corner of it.

not really because you can't stop second hand smoke with smoking, whereas you can stop home invasions and bad guys with guns, with guns.

The intentions of most legal gun owners are not malicious in nature. Some are just hobbyists, some just have them for protection from those brandishing (most likely) illegal guns looking to do them harm...there's no way of avoiding those situations. If a bad person, such as the coward that took out the children, has horrible intentions, the only thing you can argue is the ease with which he managed to obtain the weapon. It was obviously too easy for a man with mental disabilities to get them. But with the intentions of killing innocent children, there are a hundred ways to do it without a gun. Would he have gone through more trouble had he not had access to guns? Maybe. Maybe not. But he had those horrible intentions and the capacity to carry them out, and that's the horrendous part of this. It's the part that scares every sane person is: how could somebody want to do that?

The reason why the issue has been shifted from "how could somebody do that?" to the means in which he did it, is because humans like to think they have total control of their environment and a wildcard such as mental insanity scares people just as much as our own mortality. Whereas blaming something tangible is easy because we could "technically" stop it. So we end up blaming things like video games and guns.

Sorry I'm trying to avoid other examples (Timothy McVeigh, etc.) because they are hackneyed, but some of them might give an insight as to the cause and the ends being more significant than the means.

And people like this freak me the fuck out.

I get the thing about collecting items. But having a collection of weapons that kids think would be awesome to play with (because what kid DOESN'T play shoot em ups?) just would make me so much fucking more nervous than any perceived threat of home invasion or the country collapsing into anarchy.

The cabinetry is lovely. The secret compartments opened by magnets are cool.

But I would not feel at all fucking safe storing what he has stored in there if there were kids around. As mentioned above, they work out how to get into shit.

No key, the ability to get to all of those guns AND AMMO with some fiddling... is scary.

such a weird video but it still gets my upvote.

1. not that I really care one way or the other, but why is pigeon shooting illegal? Aren't they vermin for the most part? They aren't endangered or anything are they?

2. Kudos to the woman for standing up to the cop and the owner, but at the same time, I'm not really going to fault the cop for not being up to a lawyer's standards in the law. Their job is really to stop people from getting physically hurt. There is the issue of whether or not they were on the guy's property sure, but they are two people with cameras, there is no threat of home invasion or anything like that. Sure there is a obviously a dispute whether or not it's ok for them to be there, but they're obviously peaceable so cop intimidation clearly isn't necessary.

Just makes me wonder if there isn't some need for an unarmed subset of the police that handles disputes like this but when you clearly don't need a armed cop. Someone who does know property/civil law very well and can act to settle disputes like this and are unarmed because clearly an armed cop is a waste of resources in a situation like this but you obviously do need a third party to respond to the dispute. For example, wouldn't a police negotiator be better than actual armed police in this matter?

Cops obviously do need to know the laws they enforce, but using cops to settle disputes like this where there clearly is no threat of harm or use of force is utterly ridiculous. Maybe the cops respond to the call, but when they assess the situation and there is clearly no threat of force or harm, hand it off to an unarmed party that can settle the dispute.

I just have a hunch that neither side is completely innocent in this situation.

Congratulations! Your comment has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

I did initially think so too, but on reflection it's not entirely true. I was even sure I had voted up one or two of his comments, but got to page 6 of that and didn't find one.

In reply to this comment by VoodooV:
QM sinks to new lows every day. Seriously, how is what he does not trolling/hijacking? He doesn't contribute AT ALL

>> ^transporter:

I forgot how much I hate videosift>> ^FlowersInHisHair:
>> ^transporter:
God, her play by play commentary is atrocious. This needs like a Mexican soccer announcer or those guys from the Danny Hart mountain-bike racing video.
Also, FUCK your son's Wii video game, tell the dispatcher he's got a crowbar. Favorite Part: "I'm sorry I can't calm down, I've just been robbed of everything!"

Yeah, it's as if she's all, like, scared or something. You'd never think that she comments on live home-invasion video feeds for a living, would you?


Whaaaa? Come on, I was only joking. Quantummushroom is the reason you hate VideoSift.

>> ^quantumushroom:

How sad that a camera had to greet these Democrats instead of a gun owner.


yeah, fuck a proportionate response. Someone commits a crime? Fuck it, just shoot them. This whole "due process" thing is a waste of time.

You really are retarded.

Heresy, QM, that is outright heresy. If the Islams (though most people, people who know what they're talking about, call them Muslims) had their way then how would we ever have a Wall Street? I'm reporting you to the committee on unamerican activities, you know, as soon as it get's formed... again...

>> ^quantumushroom:

Well, we know she's not a Loyal Democrat cause she's at a job or a vacation from a job.
I've been lucky never to have been burglarized. I understand--without really understanding--the feeling is that of being raped, violated. Maybe the islams really do have the right idea about what to do with thieves.

>> ^jcf79:
I guess from now on she should just give up her career, buy a gun, and wait for the next time someone tries to burglarize her, 'cause nothin' says republican like paranoia and over-reaction. And, just so you know, they prefer to be called Democratic Americans now...
>> ^quantumushroom:
How sad that a camera had to greet these Democrats instead of a gun owner.

WTF!
Seriously dude. You're just trolling!

>> ^quantumushroom:

How sad that a camera had to greet these Democrats instead of a gun owner.

>> ^transporter:

God, her play by play commentary is atrocious. This needs like a Mexican soccer announcer or those guys from the Danny Hart mountain-bike racing video.
This video and your comment make me want to buy a CCTV setup for my house so I can someday be that announcer.

Well, we know she's not a Loyal Democrat cause she's at a job or a vacation from a job.

I've been lucky never to have been burglarized. I understand--without really understanding--the feeling is that of being raped, violated. Maybe the islams really do have the right idea about what to do with thieves.


>> ^jcf79:

I guess from now on she should just give up her career, buy a gun, and wait for the next time someone tries to burglarize her, 'cause nothin' says republican like paranoia and over-reaction. And, just so you know, they prefer to be called Democratic Americans now...
>> ^quantumushroom:
How sad that a camera had to greet these Democrats instead of a gun owner.

Thanks for the promote. Without it, it would have never made the top 15

In reply to this comment by Hybrid:
*promote