Going off topic here but I thought this was interesting. I'd particularly like to hear what Stan makes of this seeing as he spends a lot of time in the USA. I see that in the fall-out from the shooting of the children a couple of weeks ago, Piers Morgan is under pressure from a load of people trying to get him deported. Good for the Yanks I hear you say! But seriously, he was only having a go at the NRA who held an emergency meeting in New York following the shootings. This is what the vice President of the NRA had to say: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" Now I'm not the most intelligent of people but does anyone else think that that statement is something you're more likely to hear from a 10 year old boy than an educated adult? Talking about good guys and bad guys is what we used to do when we played cowboys and Indians as kids, right? I said this before and I got a bit of flak for it so I must be careful. But I always find that a lot of white males in America sound unerringly stupid. Like they stopped developing intellectually when they hit puberty and are stuck as kids in adult's bodies. I keep thinking of that film "Big" with Tom Hanks who plays a character with the body of a man but the mind of a child. Of course I realise that such a huge generalisation is going to be wildly inaccurate so in a sense I'm answering my own question. Why then is it that the majority of American men I hear talking come across so dumbed down? Like someone's hit them on the head with summat? Piers Morgan may be an arse hole but he's not a fool. But white American blokes particularly on the right appear, to me at least, to be so innocent that I just want to pat them on the head!
the NRA is too powerful in the political arena. that's a major problem. how many members of the U.S government have you heard speaking out on gun control? another scary fact is that the Americans are buying guns quicker than the suppliers can make them for fears that automatic weapons might get banned. a gun manufacturer said last week they sold 3 1/2 years worth of stock in the week after that horrific shooting. madness!
Please Swords,don't be careful! A lot of Americans are unerringly stupid and I am not afraid to say. Get rid of this outdated 2nd ammendment to the constitution and let's get on with life.
You give some frontiersmen the right to bear arms some 200+ years ago and then call it something grandiose like a constitution then it will inevitably become a sacred set of rights that are entrenched in a "new" country's heritage. The claim of right to protect oneself is only valid if everybody else has the rights to the same means of "defence" but the capacity to use them as an aggressor. Why would someone in a city centre need a gun unless you arm the rest of that city? That said, how do you redress such an archaic law in such a vast country with most of the population on the East coast and so many sparsely populated areas in the middle (Mid West)? The NRA spokesman also forgot to say that it should be a good man with a bigger gun (as per most American technological advances since the industrial revolution). They've got a runaway situation akin to keeping up with the Jones' meets Battle Royale and the only way out is a near unanimous desire to change which won't happen in my lifetime.
Putting armed guards in every school has to be the most stupid idea ever. There is nothing to stop and "armed guard" having a breakdown and starting shooting. Who is to say that someone who isn't armed may get into a school an manage to disarm the guard and then use the guard's weapon against teachers and kids? The sort of person who commits acts like this isn't suddenly going to think, "Oh, there is an armed guard, I'd better not do this." They are more likely to think "Oh, there is an armed guard, I'd better take him/her out first." What is to stop a shooter sitting under cover outside the fences of a school and firing at a crowded playground or through classroom windows? Maybe every school should be surrounded by a 12 foot fence. Unfortunately it is too late. There are far too many guns in circulation, miliions and millions more than just "normal" self protection hand guns and hunting rifles. A very large percentage of those who are the victims of gun crime do have self protection weapons, but never have their own weapons to hand or if they do they have been shot before the realize what has happened. You have a much better chance of surviving if instead of buying a gun you invest in a bullet proof vest!
Not confined to the US though, is it? This type of incident can - and unfortunately will - happen almost anywhere, even in countries with restrictive gun control. The problem is to use a famous phrase from the Troubles, how do you decommission the mindset of the perpetrators?
It is not so much the free availability of weapons that is the problem here, it is the violence that permeates society and is growing year on year. Why is it that the biggest selling computer games glorify violence? This is being embedded in the minds of young children who see it as normal. Movies that glorify violence also add to this culture. Children who spend hours in front of screens showing this crap at the expense of socialising as we did growing up in the 60s and 70s become withdrawn and 'odd'. It is almost exclusively these oddballs that go on to commit these type of crimes, no amount of law-changing will make any difference now. It's depressing to say that there will probably be an increase in these types of crimes in years to come. As for Piers Morgan, he should've been deported from the UK for his views on football!...
Agree. 3 months ago there was a gun fight in Sarajevo just 50 meters of police station in the center of the city. If they going to do it they're going to do it no matter what.
Mate I've been play violent games and watching violent movies my whole life and tbh I don't feel like going to the mall and starting killing spree. There's more to it than violence on the media
Honestly Swords? Of course the US gun laws are completely baffling and idiotic to us. You only have to look at the death by gunshot wound statistics to see that the availability of guns leads to killing. Even Switzerland, where all men do national service and then keep their guns at home for the rest of their lives, has a much higher death rate than us - by a factor of hundreds of percent. Do I care about Piers Morgan? Not in the slightest. Of course he won't be deported. But I have found that the best way to change people's minds is to listen to them and discuss, not simply insult them like he did (obviously for televisual effect on his ratings negative show). Are the majority of Americans stupid? Of course not, or no more than the average number of English, Irish, Poles etc etc. as I've posted before the ratio of clever to stupid people is, in my experience, the same everywhere. What does depress me, and why I won't be contributing any more to this thread, is the level of casual anti-Americanism and over generalization seen on this board. Sure there are problems in US society, but are we so perfect? In my opinion this says more about the posters than the US. Why the chips on shoulders lads? Signing off this thread, and all similar ones, now. PS the statistics are here, deaths per 100,000 related to guns. Interesting that suicides hugely outnumbered homicides in developed countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
It is only a very tiny minority who do these crimes, but it is always linked to a macabre fascination with violence that is fuelled by films or games. I spent more than half my life working in schools and the increase in children with serious personality disorders is really worrying and much is down to parents just sticking them in front of a screen for a quiet life. Children aged 7 or 8 who are always drawing pictures of stabbing or shooting are not exactly normal...
Anti Americanism? More like honesty I could give 100's of examples that Americans are a little slow on the uptake, but can see where this thread is going so will leave it
Surely it's not normal but as you said it has to be fertile soil in the person's head so something would make it go off even if there's no violence on the TV. I'm a religious man an from that perspective I just wonder if some people are just born "evil".
To get some balance, there's a tendency for people in Britain to think that from a domestic risk point of view, America is like the UK only bigger. We have civilised countries like France and the Netherlands as our nearest neighbour. In the southern states, they have Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in the world, largely ruled by terror by drug cartels and with more psychopath's per square mile than probably anywhere else in the world. The border is porous and there have been some horrific crimes committed by criminal elements from Mexico and Interamerican countries, El Salvador, Guatemala etc who have little respect for human life. This is, in large part, what fuels the NRA. And why this is such an insoluble problem.
I think you have the right idea here. If not a gun, would the guy in Connecticut used a knife instead? Focus on the mindset, not the delivery of the madness. You have a different perspective in the U.K. The right to bear arms sprung out of a time when the settlers of this country had to fight off the British, who only wanted to take and not give the settlers the rights of Englishmen. The U.S. Constitution was drafted to give people broad freedoms, not restrict their "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Rifles and pistols are a way of life in some parts here. Hunting still represents how a portion of our population feeds itself. Not the vegetarians mind you, but a portion of the population nonetheless.
That's a fair point. Are you seriously telling me that that bloke could have gone in and killed 30 people with a knife? Are you havin' a laugh mate? That was 240 years ago mate. Should we keep all laws that we had 250 years ago? How is it then that every other Country that had to put out their colonial masters don't have such archaic laws? What population still feeds itself through hunting alone? The Indians? Ain't they got a 7/11 they can go to? Besides, no-one's saying that you shouldn't be allowed to have a licensed hunting rifle. Just not a scenario where any clown can walk into a shop and buy himself a gun. I think you're wumming here. Nobody could be that backward.
