peacefuljeffrey

These fuckin' losers can't even keep their shit together to LIE in their own defense. The even screw that up! But... I suppose that if we were thinking of this in a slightly different way... we should want to elect a guy who, along with his staff, can't pull off a decent believable lie... He wouldn't be able to get away with shit, and stuff. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Do you have anything -- anything at all -- that indicates that the authorities in Britain received ONE MILLION ILLEGAL guns since the ban?! (We can't count the legal ones turned in by those who had had them registered and properly owned them in accordance with the law.) I did not mean to give the impression of "4 million guns pre-ban / 3 million guns post-ban" if that's how you saw it. It was more like, "Somewhere I saw an estimate of 4 million illegal guns in the U.K., but when I went looking for a citation, all I found (or the first one I found) was one that said '3 million illegal guns in the U.K.' " It was not meant to show a 1 million gun decrease by any means! But it doesp illustrate how easily you can be duped into accepting -- and then repeating -- erroneous data! edit by the Python in me: "But it does mean that when he says a bed is two foot long, it is in fact sixty feet long..." -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

And life in prison is the deterrent that keeps people from murdering others, right? So surely those five years scare the shit out of anyone considering packing heat! Did you mean to be funny? P.S. Gun "buybacks" and "turn-ins" are notoriously unsuccessful at getting crime guns off the streets. They attract granny who still has grampa's wartime .38 in the attic, and other rusty non-serviceable weapons. You can't point to a single successful gun turn-in program the world over. They fail everywhere to do much noticeable good. The guns turned in are junk -- and what makes you think a criminal who depends on his gun for his criminal enterprises will just hand that thing over?? It's totally counterintuitive to believe in these farces. With all these guns turned in WELL AFTER they became illegal, you still presume to argue that there are not illegal guns floating around England? Or do you really believe that after this amnesty turn-in, "the last of them are now in police custody" or something? I'll never understand why it matters more to the police to get ONE gun from a criminal -- who may have three or four, anyway -- and give him amnesty while you destroy the gun (which he may have used to kill people!), than possibly catch him with the gun instead, link it to a crime, and possibly get him for murder! Think of all the guns that have been turned in for smelting, which may have been used to convict people of very serious crimes, but instead were traded for amnesty from the crimes! Having a single-specimen gun is worth more to your society than charging a person with violent crimes -- and the criminal probably goes out and acquires another gun anyway, or maybe he just turned in the one he really did use, and kept the ones he had yet to use to shoot people. Dumb dumb dumb. And I don't really believe that the program got that many guns turned in. That's anomalous. Every indicator I've ever seen shows that such turn-ins are pitifully small. Yours is probably citing guns turned in late by those who had them as licensed guns before, and who were never a threat to anybody with them. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

U.S. accidental gun deaths at all-time low "The accidental gun death rate has been falling since 1930 and US accidental gun deaths per year were down to 824 by 1999 according to the CDC. Note that it is extremely easy to prevent accidental gun deaths by following Jeff Cooper's Four Rules Of Gun Safety." According to every source I've found on the subject -- with the notable exception of anti-gun lobby sources -- accidental death due to gunshot in the U.S. has decreased in every year since statistics have been kept on the subject. Keep in mind that every single year, we add about 3-5 million new guns into private ownership. So even as the number of guns owned increases heavily, the deaths decline. Amazing, isn't it? Here's another good link "Child Gun Deaths Continue to Decline Dateline: 07/27/00 A Health and Human Services report released on Monday, July 24, 2000, indicates the number of children and teens killed with guns in 1998 declined by 10 percent from 1997 and by 35 percent from 1994. The report shows 3,792 children and adolescents under age 20 died in 1998 from firearms compared to 4,223 in 1997 and 5,833 in 1994. The decrease as reported in, "Deaths: Final Data for 1998," prepared by the CDC also represents a decrease from 16 in 1994 to 10 in 1998, the number of children killed per day by gunfire." Don't forget, though, that in trying to pump UP the number of "children" killed by gunfire (and we are not limited to "accidental deaths" in this category, either, I would remind you) the CDC defines "children" as up to 19 years old, or 25, depending on the study. Shit, if they're gonna be that dishonest about it, they could call a 75-year-old a "child," since he had to come out of someone's womb, after all! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Why on earth would handgun crime be up since 1996 at all, if you banned all handguns in 1997? Shouldn't the intervening seven years have been enough time to corral up all the errant handguns, especially if there were so few of them, as you and others have been claiming? (In contradiction of my posts that reports indicate 3-4 million illegal guns in the U.K.) Here is a very interesting link. It's the United Nations International Crime Victims Survey. It's the famed one that reports crime against the person is WORSE IN ENGLAND, WALES AND AUSTRALIA THAN IT IS IN THE U.S.A. Here is the link, and here is some of the text, in case yer feelin' lazy tonight. (To use the link to find this text, look near the top of the yellow box, where it says "2000 Survey" and click "full text in PDF." You will, in fact, get another screen that has the text in html before you'd have to click again to get the PDF.) Okay, you all love the U.N. -- who's gonna argue with their study? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I hate to be the fly in your ointment, but YOU YOURSELF posted this: But now you're admitting to handgun crime being UP... A moment ago you were citing this crime survey and defending it as a more accurate way of reporting than the others, and yet here you are conceding a point that is contradicted by the source data you provided. Odd. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

How does that make any sense? The gun ban, by its nature, took the guns away from those who previously had registered them -- strictly speaking, the only guns it had the power to take away were the legal ones. Illegal ones, unregistered to their "owners" with the government, could not be accounted for, and by logic are probably still out there. Modern manufactured guns (shit, even 19th century guns!) have a useful life of well over a hundred years, so you can forget about the hope that maybe they're not serviceable before long. All I'm trying to get you to accept and acknowledge is the fact that England is not some anomalous place where the typical social laws that give rise to black markets in desired goods or services do not apply. You have criminals. Criminal trade is expedited with guns. Your criminals will get guns. They can start with the 4 million illegal ones that were in your country ca. 1987. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Oh, geez, would you make it a damned clicky?! It's not so hard! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Yes, replaced by former Soviet bloc countries with a more-than-adequate supply of black-market Makarov pistols and Kalishnikov rifles. You're all much better off, now. I'm assuming that they smuggle the guns into the country inside the bales of marijuana. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

So you're pretty much depending on the good will of a guy that held a gun to your head for money. That is a major cultural difference across the ocean. 'Nuff said about the reliability of begging for one's life. If it doesn't work for an attractive 16-year-old girl, it's gonna work for a 30-something dude? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

The three options on this poll which are next in popularity to keeping everything the same are for people to be armed and carry the weapon. If you allow people to arm themselves you also arm people who have no criminal record but have criminal intent. That is the same risk you take with giving people the freedom to buy gasoline and matches; automobiles; kitchen or hunting knives; baseball bats; chainsaws... But you single out guns, which a person could very easily be purchasing for completely lawful purposes (and with background checks, that is much more able to be surmised, and still no one does background checks of a person's driver's license or criminal history when they sell him a car, a knife, or gasoline) Your line of argument treats people as though they were children who had misbehaved. Because a few were bad, no one gets a snack. Because a minute fraction of the gun-owning public commits crimes with them, no one can have them. (Even in the U.S., it is a minute fraction of the gun owners who are ever a problem, even in the course of their entire lives.) You advocate prohibition of a useful item based strictly on the near-anomalous use of that item for evil. I think that's wrong. So your position, I take it, is, "If I can't be 100% sure you won't use X for criminal purposes, I won't sell you X. Period. Ever." That is the most specious reasoning I've ever heard. And it is exactly what your government has enshrined in law. You do the same with a 4,500 lb. automobile. And you do the same with gasoline and matches. And those things are used to kill more people each year than guns are. I find this amazing. Now, it's not enough that gun owners have to be vetted, fingerprinted, and undergo background checks (all of those things done to me, even here in "gun-happy" Florida): what you really want is some sort of mind-reading to assure that a person doesn't have any criminal potential whatsoever -- and nothing will satisfy you that a person is properly vetted to own a gun, short of that. So since your criterion is impossible to achieve, no one should get to have a gun. That means you think the background check process here in the states is worthless and far short of what should be done (which of course is the impossible "mind scan" of which you speak). Incredible. And every rapist has to commit his first rape; every arsonist his first arson; every stabber his first stabbing; every bludgeoner his first bludgeoning; every vehicular homicider his first vehicular homicide... Yet ALL of these people, you don't propose vetting before they can have their penises; matches; knives; baseball bats; automobiles... The ONLY thing you think is so bad for people to have... is guns. You better believe it buddy. That’s right – our “rampant” gun crime means we had 68 people IN TOTAL murdered in this country in the last year. Guess what dude... that figure's DOWN! As for a link, I don’t have one. I have the actual report sat on my desk. It’s the British Crime Survey 2004 – published last week. It’s one of the reports that started this thread Jeffrey; DO pay attention. Well, I'm afraid I'm going to cop out, here. I don't have an actual study on my desk; I have relied on reports of reports, that I've read in various places. YES, that includes articles on the crime rate in U.K. that appear in the NRA magazine, which I give full faith and credit as being factual and if not unbiased, at least truthful. (This is absolutely 180º from what the anti-gun information sources manage to be.) My cop-out is that I am going to entreat JohnRich to trot out statistics that I am certain he must have that refute your claims that crime in U.K. has fallen across the board. I mean really: you not only have made the claim that gun crime and violent crime have not gone up in U.K., you've presented statistics that claim that everything's gone down, and this flies in the face of all kinds of published stories on BBCnews and elsewhere that crime is going crazy and making people nervous all over Britain! So it seems like you're making such grandiose claims that you may have gotten carried away with yourself, perhaps exaggerating things -- or maybe just citing a study that isn't worth its salt. I don't know the origin of this survey you cite. So JohnRich, please, if you're reading this, help out and find the study or press release or whatever that shows the crime in England increasing. I'm just no good with finding that stuff around the internet. Thanks. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

No they're not - see above. Go read some actual reports yourself instead of simply blindly swallowing the propaganda your gun mag's feed you. When the gun mags link to the BBC website and the Guardian and others, news websites, that's propaganda? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

The U.S. Army, as far as I am aware. Maybe we should ban military service. Maybe we should figure out a way to strip military knowledge from people who leave the service. It's clear that the military teaches people to be killers, right? That's their job, right? So shouldn't we just not have a military, if we don't want so many killers circulating in our midst? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

That is EXACTLY why your people should be DEMANDING the right to own guns. Your government CAN'T -- DOESN'T -- protect you from armed criminals. Nor does your gun law. Here in the U.S., we had a federal (nationwide) gun law passed in 1994. Anyone objective would have admitted at the outset that, as written, it could not possibly have the effect of lessening gun crime. The only way they could get it passed was by compromise: the law would expire in 10 years automatically. If, within 10 years, it had been shown to be effective, no doubt people would have steamrolled through a measure to make it permanent in 2004. The law died a pathetic death on September 13 this year, because it was so clear that it had done nothing but inconvenience lawful gun owners, there was pitifully little support for it. That's what they should have done with your 1997 law. Give it a finite period to demonstrate effectiveness, and if there doesn't seem to be any (and A CLIMBING GUN CRIME AND GUN MURDER RATE WOULD BE A SURE INDICATION OF A FAILURE) the law comes off the books. You keep saying that letting brits have guns again would be a change in the status quo, and would need to have a rationale before it was done. Taking the guns away in the first place was the change in the status quo, and the decision never was rationalized, and still isn't being justified. Once again, why does it seem you are being deliberately obtuse! I EXPLAINED this. I never said that CCW would have saved this girl, or home ownership of firearms would have saved the girl. I SAID -- and I articulated it quite clearly, I thought -- that the people were forced to give up their guns for nothing, because evidently their doing so does not stop the criminal element from doing these murders. I hope I was clearer this time. Are you claiming that if you did re-instate the pre-ban gun legislation, that gun crime would go up (more than it IS going up, I mean) because people had guns in their houses? Do you, as a corrolary to that, state that prior to the ban in 1997 you were having a problem with gun crime due to private legal ownership? 'Cause you know, I really am confident that gun crime in U.K. is higher now than it has ever been -- even with gun ownership allowed in the past. Guns in the home were not a problem before the ban. No case needs to be made for why it was silly, pointless and stupid to take them away. Or are you planning to admit that even with stringent purchase, ownership and storage laws in effect, prior to 1997 Britain had a problem with guns used in crime? We do know that gun crime, while it may not be an epidemic in Britain (that remains to be proven) IS HIGHER than it was in 1997, the Dunblane shooting notwithstanding. In 1980, 1990, 1994, you had very few shootings. In 1997, you passed the ban. In every year since then, your gun crime has been increasing. YOU explain THAT. I'm listening. You DID change your laws. You made it illegal to have guns, whereas it was not illegal before. Crime went up. I think it behooves YOU to explain why that change was done, and why it should remain. What I am advocating is a return to how things were before YOUR change. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I don't see how you could feel this way without concurrently feeling that an armed Jeffrey is an imminent threat to other peaceful citizens. Absent any evidence, you are advocating that I ought to be treated by the government (and the people, such as yourself) as though I would do harm if I had a gun. The fact remains that I, like JohnRich, AggieDave, and others here, DO have guns -- lots of them -- and don't commit crimes with them (or even without them). Blows a hole in your theory that guns make the criminal -- and that guns cause violent crime. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

But the cases in the U.S. have been declining every year for more than a decade. How do your current figures stack up against the figures you amassed before your 1997 gun ban? They're HIGHER. Meanwhile, ours go lower even as we buy about 3-5 million more guns each year. Go figure. What are you saying? That shooting clubs are allowed to own the banned guns like Glocks and Berettas and stuff? I don't think they are. If they are, prove it. YOU said that you could go and shoot guns at a club if you desired. I still say that you'd be limited to the same single-shot plinkers that you are allowed to own at home. Only those who don't wish to be, who don't wish to break the guns laws, are not armed in Britain. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

That's because it was a personal attack. Let's not pretend we're fooled by someone saying, "I'd get in trouble for saying that XXXX is a big fuckin' stupid ass-licking piece of shit cocksucker juvenile pussy coward, but of course I would never say that because it's against the rules." In fact, I want Dingley banned for it. I know what he was about. So does every moderator here. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

The execution should take the form of a transfusion with pig's blood. They should set the guy up with a needle in one arm draining his own blood, and a needle in the other arm infusing him with pig's blood. I'm sure it would be a painful way to die -- nothing's too good for this type of person. Now, a word about another facet of this case. Isn't it odd how we are told up and down that "islam is a peaceful religion, but even a guy who was not always a muslim -- who converted to islam -- wants to kill for the religion. Frankly, I don't believe the claims that islam is a peaceful religion. Not when every terrorist we've been dealing with in this 9/11 / Iraqi situation so far has been islamic. And if the islamic world is so peaceful, why don't the hundreds of millions of them around the world seem to be of any use in helping us ferret out the evil murderers among them? I am convinced that if the majority of muslims were truly against the terrorist tactics being employed by so-called "militant extremist" muslims, the non-extremists would be handing over those among them who are terroristically hard-line about their faith, on a daily basis. And they are not. It's sort of like in a bad neighborhood in the U.S. 99% of the time when a drive-by shooting or some other shooting occurs, people in the neighborhood -- even the good ones -- know who did it, and they keep their mouths shut and won't help the police find the killers. So they are partly guilty of the next murders, because of their silence. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Whoa whoa whoa, what the f*ck does arming "everyone, including every single person with criminal intent" have to do with our discussion? If you're trying to draw a parallel between U.K. and U.S., well, I have news for you -- criminals are forbidden from possessing firearms; a felon in possession can get 10 years on prison; it is a crime to possess a firearm while committing another crime; it is a crime to buy/sell a firearm when the buyer expresses, or the seller is aware, that the buyer wishes to use the firearm in commission of a crime... So where the hell are you coming from with this "show us proof that arming even those with criminal intent will cut down the number of people killed by firearms." And I doubt that 68 is all that were killed with firearms in your whole country in one year. Where's a link to that statistic? And is it so wonderful to have criminals running around with guns and robbing and raping people at gunpoint just as long as not a lot of them get killed? Maybe you subjects just give up your stuff a lot easier without fighting for it, I dunno. Someone tried to convince me that Brits were tough, and would fight a knife-wielding attacker just to show how manly they are... I think the claim falls flat. But really, back to the main point: why did you offer this strawman about arming criminals? Why does allowing non-criminals the right to have guns dictate having to allow criminals to have them -- except to try to set your argument up to succeed whereas otherwise it would not? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

More misstatement of the facts. You CAN'T "keep them at the sports facility" if you are not allowed to OWN them. Tell us, Paulipod, how you think you can keep, say, a simple .38 SPL revolver at the "sports facility." The answer, of course, is "You can't." You're not allowed to own firearms but single-shot long arms. Oooh, the fun of going down to the "sports facility" to have them unlock your single-shot .22 so you can s-l-o-w-l-y have some fun firing it. Your own OLYMPIC TEAM has to practice out-of-country because even they don't get an exemption from your idiotic stringent gun laws. Your country is so paranoid about guns, so fearful of them, that all sense has been abandoned, and you folks won't even recognize the difference between a street thug with a 9mm and an OLYMPIAN with a target pistol. That's a disgrace. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

You seem to be willfully missing the point. Your society clamped down on -- eradicated -- gun ownership (oh, sure, go and cite for me the fact that you can still have single-shot long guns and some minor shotguns) -- and you still have rampant gun crime. And as the articles cited, it is bad and getting worse with each passing year. That one article I linked to, about the drive-by shooting, was posted Oct. 15 this year! Days ago! My point is that you gave away the guns, and it -- whoa, amazingly -- did nothing to keep guns away from those who use them criminally! So in essence, you really need not have deprived people of their property. It was unfair, and in the end, it didn't do any good anyway. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I guess that if the majority of the british public decided to ban skydiving, they would disregard YOU the same way you disregard those gun owners who had pistols that were forcibly taken from them when they were banned. "The british public doesn't want skydiving," (and fuck those who actually DID before they banned it). Whenever you say that "the british public wanted the gun ban" and disregard the thousands and thousands of people who had their property taken from them, you disingenuously ignore them and pretend they did not oppose being disarmed for no good reason. I am no more a "gun lover" than a skydiver is a "nylon lover": I am a freedom lover, and the gun helps me remain free. If Lego blocks could do what guns can, as far as maintaining strength against force when necessary, I'd have them instead of guns. And your news media. Well DUH! Not the GOOD people. It's the BAD people who are arming themselves at will if they wish to. That's our whole point. Dude, watch the name-calling. I haven't personally insulted you -- I'm just calling you on the absence of facts in your claims. And learn to spell "arrogant" if you're gonna call me it. Start [url: "http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2001%2F08%2F17%2Fnguns17.xml"]with this article on a British news website[/url] talking about the illegal gun problem in Britain. Here are excerpts: "SIR John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said police in London were on target to reduce gun crime by two per cent this year, despite the number of murders involving firearms having doubled. The number of gun deaths in London rose to 25 in the first eight months of the year, up from 12 in the same period in 2000. Gun crime overall was up by 11 per cent." (note: from 12 to 25 is double, or 200%, of the previous figure) Here's another article, the one you were asking for: "In the meantime, guns flood into Great Britain from the international black market, driven and funded by the demands of Britain's new gun culture. It has been estimated that the number of illegally possessed firearms in Great Britain has doubled over the past 4 years, and has now reached the three million figure. A January 15, 2001 item from The Independent, entitled "Police Move to Tackle Huge Rise in Gun Crime," noted that "for the past 11 months, a team of officers from the National Criminal Intelligence Service has compiled details of weapons and ammunition seized by the police and has concluded that the scale of Britain's black market in firearms is 'far higher than anybody had previously thought.' " If you're trying to convince me that Brits are just brave in the face of conflict, I have to tell you that when you mention standing and facing a knife attack, it's coming across more as stupid than brave. Since when did survival against a violent attack become an issue where the means you used to do it is a measure of your manliness? I say if you have to bite the fucker's balls, and you take him out that way, you win, and no one can criticize what you had to do to survive. You on the other hand want to make it into a machismo-test or something. That strikes me as particularly dumb. Your argument against having guns for defense seems to be, "You're not as big a tough guy if you have to use a gun." What a way to miss the point. If you believe this, you have it backward. Knife wounds are less survivable than gunshot wounds. So in your scenario, you're more likely to die if someone pulls a knife on you than a gun. You simply are ignorant of the facts surrounding this issue. Here: BBC news: 18 dead in german school shooting -- That's more killed by one dude than were killed by both dudes at Columbine in the U.S. Um, Germany has strict gun control, bigway. Here's one that's closer to home to you in Britain. This article mentions that in the year prior, there was an average of one shooting a week. How is this possible?! Guns and gun crime are so scarce in England thanks to your wonderful gun ban! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Oh, so now the qualifier is "non-necessary" when the item is "deadly"? Baseball bats are not "necessary." Who "HAS" to play a game, anyway? But people kill with them. In fact, here in Florida a month ago, three guys murdered SIX INNOCENT PEOPLE with aluminum bats. We'd better get crackin'; there are millions of baseball bats out there, and there's no question they're deadly, and they sure aren't "necessary," and we have to stop the production and public sale of them pronto! I don't have to do much to disprove your assertion here except to link you to this and say that since not everyone can be an expert martial artist, and not everyone can overcome three large and strong attackers bare-handed, sometimes guns ARE necessary for the good to prevail over the weak. Why do cops have guns, hmm? Why is it that whenever people try to make anti-gun points, they almost invariably end up saying ridiculous things and engaging utter hyperbole in their attempts? Mining a garden has the clear potential to maim and kill those who are not even threatening deadly physical force, ergo you are not allowed to use them. How would you prevent the mine from killing a mailman or a meter-reader? How would you use a hand grenade to defend yourself in a way that could possibly prevent the death of not only yourself in addition to your attacker, but also innocents who may be in proximity, or in nearby rooms? Your method of arguing your points needs serious work, if this is all you can come up with to support banning guns. Witnessing this kind of anti-gun desperation is nothing new to us, however. If you have any appreciable distance between yourself and your attacker, it might not be that hard, in fact, to "dodge bullets." If you'd ever fired a handgun at a shooting range, you'd know that it is not the easiest thing in the world to be accurate. Compound that with the stress of combat, and it's easy to understand that people can miss, and miss badly, when trying to hit a moving human target. Handguns remain very effective nonetheless as personal defense weapons because many times assaults occur in very close proximity, and also because in a huge proportion of cases, once a defensive gun is presented, the attack is curtailed and the attacker flees. So please explain how getting rid of guns from society would benefit society, when we can show very easily that people bent on committing violent crime will use all manner of non-banned items to do it; and that you would be forcing millions of people who lack the means to be the stronger of two parties in a lethal altercation (older people, small women, small men, etc.) to be defenseless against even a simple assault by someone who was merely physically stronger. Why would you force them to be so easily dominated? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Seventeen. For three years I taught ABE (Adult Basic Education) to inmates on death row at the Tennessee State Prison (5500 inmates in a facility built for 2700 ...and a murder rate of one every 18 days). Please don't take me to mean insult to your livelihood or you, but, do you really feel that the effort and expense paid to educate people condemned to die for criminal acts is a worthwhile pursuit? I mean in an institutional sense, not in the sense of you doing the teaching. (I, however, would much prefer teaching people who had not ever yet committed capital crimes.) We are talking about teaching people who were murdering at a staggering rate even while inside the prison, right?! Well, I never was talking about irrational "justifications." Of course there's a blurry line somewhere here under all this, though. I started out talking about a person who decided to "man-up" when caught for his crime. He accepted his punishment because the TRUTH is, he DID KILL THEM. Those who try to rationalize such acts, if they were not committed in self defense, are out of their minds by definition. And to this day, they say he walks the woods outside Grantham Prison... looking for teenagers making out in the backs of cars, hunters lost off the trails, hapless birdwatchers... And his rusty machete is as sharp as it ever was....... No, really, I guess this was before people could get off for "temporary insanity" for something like that? Seems unfair. I mean, we have to send people like that away, I guess, or else accept this type of response as "appropriate" if someone is thusly "wronged." Maybe there's something in the bible that allows for murdering your wife and her lover -- or maybe I'm thinking of the Koran -- but I know that to me, it falls under the heading of, "Life can fuck you over; shit happens," and all that. You don't go murdering for it. And if you DO HAVE the capacity to murder over that, rather than go and sulk and hate women for a while or something, then yes, society IS better served by removing you from the population in one way or another. What do you think makes some people sociopaths like the dozens you've known, and others not? Is it brain chemistry? Genetic makeup dictating behavior? Or is it upbringing and environmental factors? And once someone is determined to be made thus, what is your personal feeling about putting them to death so that they cannot harm the rest of society? You sound like you could probably tell some harrowing stories of what these people are capable of doing to innocents. With that threat present, and with the impossibility of making escape and/or release 100% impossible, why not execute? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Well... I love it when it's not on me! LOL! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"