I don't disagree that weapons don't necessarily make anyone more free. I also can't say people are wrong to observe in a civil war level of unrest, a dissenting party armed with fully automatic weapons has more leverage than one armed with knives.

Freedom to practice religion is not 'fairly safe' without guns, unless you want to ignore attacks with cars, trucks, IEDs, and, historically, civilian airliners.

I am mostly pointing out that restricting laws on gun ownership to protect people is not so terribly different from limiting freedom to practice/express idealogies. It is readily demonstrable that BOTH those freedoms have directly contributed to civilian casualties.

The difference between say, banning automatic weapons, and the banning of affiliation with extremist groups like the KKK or ISIL is mostly divided along partisan lines, logically they are pretty much two sides of the same coin, with democrats and republicans each decrying one as necessary and the other as evil.

But, without guns, the freedom to practice religion is fairly safe, without religion, guns aren't.

If the Catalonians had automatic weapons in their basements they would be being shot by the police looking for those illegal weapons AND beaten up when unarmed in public. Having weapons hasn't stopped brutality in America, it's exacerbated it. They don't make police respect you, they make you an immediate threat to be stopped.

Canadian devil's advocate here.

We've got incredibly strict gun laws up here by comparison to the US. So our country has done the 'more than nothing' on gun laws. 3 days before the LA shooting we had a terror attack up here in Edmonton but the attacker used vehicles and a knife.

If we accept the rationale that current levels of freedom to own guns is leading to higher body counts and that restricting those freedoms will reduce body counts, that rationale is slippery.

Here's the parallel.

If we accept the rationale that current levels of freedom to 'practice religion' is leading to higher body counts then restricting those freedoms will reduce body counts.

Because, the Attacker in Edmonton was a Somali refugee. They had an ISIS flag in their car. The US tried to extradite him before Canada welcomed him with open arms. Canadian police even investigated him before when a co-worker reported him advocating genocidal ideas about Shiite scum.

We had a lot of potential red flags that we could have acted harder on or used for profiling and in this case having him in jail would've prevented the attacks.

The thing is, it is NOT immediately self evident that restricting those freedoms is objectively the best answer.

Personally, banning automatic weapons as my country has seems a very sane thing to do. Countering myself though, would the Catalonians in Spain be getting beaten up for holding a vote if the residents had automatic weapon in their basements or would the police show a little more respect to the citizen's than they did?

Place de la Concorde Suisse...John McPhee's book exploring Swiss...paranoia...
---All military age men have an automatic weapon at home; the penalties for using it or even open the ammunition other than military duty are severe
---The bridges and tunnels in to the country are rigged with places for Swiss Army Engineers to stick explosives and drop them all
---Airbases tucked into mountain sides; not nuke proof; but damn hard to get at any other way
etc
etc
etc

"in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. "

Harry Lime; Orson Well's "The Third Man"...

BTW, you can own Bombs/RPGs/Missiles/etc.

Just fill out a form4 to get one transferred to you from a current owner, or a form1 if you wish to make a new one.

If you get a class 7 firearms license, and make sure to make whatever you make available for sale to LEO/military, then you can also make new automatic weapons for yourself (usually by converting semi auto to auto).

You can also own tanks and fighter planes.
There are clubs where folks hang out and drive around in their tanks, and fly around in their fighters, and shoot heavy weapons, etc.

Granted, the expense and paperwork of all of these makes them something only wealthy/organized people can afford. And realistically, anyone who has the cash to play with these sorts of things has his ducks in a row to begin with. (eg. An automatic rifle runs around the 20'000 usd range.) With a median individual income of around 26k per year, practically everyone in the U.S. can't afford such items (or is unwilling to).

Things called NFA items (rockets/artillery/etc) are registered, but not denied. Since AFAIK the mid 1930's, only a dozen NFA item owners have been convicted of a serious crime, and none of those crimes involved any NFA item. Only one shooting involved an automatic weapon, and it was committed by a police officer that lost his mind.

Other than a periodic flashy event like Fla, practically every gun crime is committed by cheap pistols. Crime and lack of wealth go hand in hand. Poor people are less likely to be educated, less likely to be from a stable well adjusted home, more likely to grow up in a strife ridden neighborhood, and less likely to be able to afford more than a cheap pistol. This is why you never hear about rockets/tanks/etc regarding crime - if the typical criminal could afford them, he wouldn't have to be a criminal. Realistically speaking, the U.S. is wealthy as a nation, but as individuals, people are not that well off. Majority of the country lives hand to mouth. TBH, that's the real problem. That's not to do with exceptions/unicorns like Fla - only with the most common/likely case.

As a side note, Swiss civilians are more heavily armed than U.S. civilians. But as a people they have their heads on straighter, so gun attacks are rare.

-scheherazade

I love how "survival" always seems to include automatic weapons.

I guess it would be true in a sense that if you are lost out in the woods with an automatic weapon you can pretty much survive everything.

I didn't say they were killing millions, I said they were trained to kill...

US police conflict resolution is at the point of a gun as the first step. Most other countries where a reasonable rule of law exists teach conflict resolution prior to drawing weapons on people.

APC's, body armour, fully automatic weapons etc are not the tools of a police force, they are the tools of an army, but somehow small towns now feature APC's and heavily armed under trained SWAT or tactical response forces. Even US military personal have made the comment, all of the equipment, none of the training or discipline. If you are armed to the teeth and taught to shoot first/ask questions later, it's no surprises that your death by cops tally is so high...

For example, total Australian police shootings in the period 2008-2011 (for a population of 25 odd million or 1/13th of the US) came to /drumroll .... 14

And 7 deaths in Victoria over that time raised eyebrows.

http://theconversation.com/shoot-to-kill-the-use-of-lethal-force-by-police-in-australia-34578

US police, on the other hand, eclipse that total every single year, often by more than the per capita average (often by much more than the per capita average).

2015 (total: 150)
2014 (total: 625)
2013 (total: 342)
2012 (total: 611)
2011 (total: 165)
2010 (total: 227)
2009 (total: 63)

And it's just amazing in how many of those cases, the words "cleared of wrong doing by the district attorney, city paid out to a civil trial for wrongful death" appear. Or "shot while running away", "shot while unarmed" etc.

And to be absolutely clear, I have nothing but respect for most of the people that choose to bear that duty, but they are being trained to go to the gun first and foremost. If that is the first and last tool to resolve conflict, it's no wonder there are so many deaths...

"Cooked" rounds only happen in automatic weapons where the chamber becomes hot enough to cause the propellent to spontaneously ignite. That cannot be the case here.

Of course, it could be some sort of defect, but it's pretty clear to me watching the video that he wasn't handling the gun with anything like the respect something so dangerous deserves.

Their are plenty of non-assault weapons that would not be subject to the ban, and those "dangerous criminals" are using them. They are handguns and shotguns, not automatic weapons.

See, I have no problem with this.
I grew up shooting at the firing range with my dad too. (or often at the gravel pit.) I've never seen or ever witnessed any negativity to it as a sport. I can't relate to this guy's story. We always had rifles in the home. (Locked Up!) There was no negativity towards them, myself or anyone I knew involved.

But WE DON'T carry them with us, everywhere we go. We don't have handguns under our pillows, and we don't have automatic weapons. I can walk down the street knowing for a fact that there is no one that I pass on the street that has a gun under their coat or stuffed in their pants! (at least I'm 95% sure - and that's much different than being 99% sure that people I am passing DO have a gun)

You can do your own research if you really want to find the answer. From the research I've done, I've already established that the availability of guns does not guarantee a significant reduction in violent crime. If that were the case, DC's violent crime rate would be significantly lower than it is because they have very strict gun laws. I've also established that a ban on assault rifles would not have a significant impact on gun-related crime because the vast majority of gun-related crime is committed using pistols, not fully-automatic weapons. I've also established that the majority of guns used in gun-related crimes are obtained illegally, either stolen or obtained through unofficial means. The facts simply don't support the idea that banning assault rifles (or even all guns) would significantly reduce violent crime.

The current fixation on gun control is a purely reactionary response to recent shooting sprees (which comprise a negligible percentage of all gun violence). The only reason people care now is because these shooting sprees generally take place in middle and upper-class areas. Nobody cares when people get killed in poor areas, where the bulk of violent crime occurs.

I'm in no way a gun nut (I don't own nor plan to ever own any guns) but I'm not going to let my opinion of guns get in the way of facts. People who blindly believe that banning guns will solve all problems are just as bad as the NRA. Do your own research and don't ignore facts that contradict your own position. The FBI website is a great place to start, as they provide annual statistics on all crime in the U.S. and they don't have any reason to skew the numbers.

Sure. Alcohol, for example, clearly does more harm than it does good if alcohol-related death statistics are accurate. The question is whether or not guns actually do more harm than good and that's a difficult question to answer. There are certainly other countries with strict gun laws but those are different countries with different populations, different economies and different cultures. In an ideal world, banning guns would solve all our problems. Crime rates would decrease and nobody would have anything to fear. Unfortunately, I don't think that would happen in reality. Criminals would still get guns (because they don't care about laws) and there would still be gun-related deaths (albeit fewer), in addition to all the unrelated violent crimes. I'd be surprised if overall crime didn't increase to compensate for the lack of guns and the inability for civilians to protect themselves.

It just seems to me that the recent uproar about gun laws is a reactionary response to the occasional shooting spree. The vast majority of gun-related crimes are committed using pistols (such as the one used in this story), yet everyone is focused on assault rifles which are almost never used. Then everyone is ignoring the fact that smoking and alcohol cause significantly more deaths than guns do. Why is no one trying to ban those? Oh, right, we've tried that already and it failed. Banning liquor during the prohibition only resulted in criminals getting the upper hand, just as banning guns would do today.

A good way to judge the effectiveness of gun laws is by comparing Florida to Washington D.C. Floria basically has no gun laws. You can buy assault rifles in garage sales. No licenses or registrations required. It's essentially the Wild West. Conversely, D.C. has strict gun laws. No assault rifles, no automatic weapons, no concealed carry, no open carry, an extensive registration and permit process, etc. However, despite all this, D.C. had more than double the violent crime rate of Florida in 2011 and more than triple the murder rate.

Source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-5

I must admit this issue has me in a quandary. Gun free? Yet the criminals will still be armed. All armed? Yet running the risk of more mass shootings and indiscriminate murder. Speaking for myself, I would rather be armed than not. However, I am totally in favour of banning high velocity automatic weapons, high capacity clips, and certain types of ammunition (dum-dum etc.) There should be increased security checks, and maybe - apart from special circumstances - the limiting to one gun per household. These seem common sense measures to me, which could, hopefully, keep all parties satisfied.

A few houses away from me a guy held some of his family hostage with an automatic weapon and eventually shot himself. Not only did I not record it but I slept through the helicopters circling my house for hours. When I finally got out of bed and went to lunch I had to ask the officers at the end of my street what had happened because they were blocking my way.

Also apparently they had evacuated my neighborhood, but I never answered the door.