Guns

[Gordon1]

It appears to be another mind-control orchestrated crisis.

[Guest]

So...

All of you gun control advocates are for taking guns away from everyone except police and military. I'm sure that terrorists and violent criminals would just cave in and surrender their weapons if we banned guns. Why do we need more gun laws? If we would just enforce the ones we have, we may be able to control weapons better than we do. Can you even make a gun law that would guarantee "crazies" wouldn't get guns? Are you willing to give up even more freedoms that we already have surrendered in the name of security. How do law abiding citizens defend themselves against violent criminals or a despotic government - stab them with spoons?

Amen JoeMo, very well put!!!

[CoAspen]

NEWTOWN, Conn. - Authorities have released the names of the 26 people gunned down in a rampage at a Connecticut elementary school.

All six adults killed at the school were women. Of the 20 children who were shot to death, eight were boys and 12 were girls. All the children were ages 6 or 7.

The names and birth dates of the victims:

Charlotte Bacon (2/22/06), 6 years old, female

Daniel Barden (9/25/05), 7 years old, male

Rachel DaVino (7/17/83), Staff member, 29 years old, female

Olivia Engel (7/18/06), 6 years old, female

Josephine Gay (12/11/05), 7 years old, female

Ana M. Marquez-Greene (4/4/06), 6 years old, female

Dylan Hockley (3/8/06), 6 years old, male

Dawn Hochsprung (6/28/65), Principal, 47 years old, female

Madeleine F. Hsu (7/10/06), 6 years old, female

Catherine V. Hubbard (6/8/06), 6 years old, female

Chase Kowalski (10/31/05), 7 years old, male

Nancy Lanza, 52 years old, female (mother of shooter Adam Lanza)

Jesse Lewis (6/30/06), 6 years old, male

James Mattioli (03/22/06), 6 years old, male

Grace McDonnell (11/4/05), 7 years old, female

Anne Marie Murphy (7/25/60), Staff member, 52 years old, female

Emilie Parker (05/12/06), 6 years old, female

Jack Pinto (05/05/06), 6 years old, male

Noah Pozner (11/20/06), 6 years old, male

Caroline Previdi (9/07/06), 6 years old, female

Jessica Rekos (5/10/06), 6 years old, female

Avielle Richman (11/17/06) 6 years old, female

Lauren Russeau (June 1982), Staff member, 30 years old, female

Mary Sherlach (2/11/56), Staff member, 56 years old, female

Victoria Soto (11/04/85), Staff member, 27 years old, female

Benjamin Wheeler (09/12/06), 6 years old, male

Allison N. Wyatt (07/03/06), 6 years old, female

[Gordon1]

The state's Chief medical examiner is quoted as saying that all victims were killed by several shots from a rifle.

"Between 3 and 11 shots" = a bare minimum of 78. Possibly closer to 200? More like a soldier's work.

Also sounds fast for a coroner's report in a mass-casualty situation.

Apart from being very sad and tragic, it all seems a bit strange.

[JoeMo]

The list of the victims in Conn. is so sad!

The person/people who did this were beyond mentally ill - they must have been demon possessed. I pray for the families of both the victims and the shooter(s). What kind of gun laws could have prevented this? Even a total ban on private ownership of guns may not have been enough.

Lord, give us wisdom!

[BobRyan]

how many elementary schools - or high schools have been the victim of mass shootings - where guns were not already banned on school premises?

How many elementary schools in Israel are hit with mass shooting incidents in the last 10 years - where one gunman kills many children?

Hint: How many elementary schools in Israel provide armed guards at the entrances?

in Christ,

Bob

[BobRyan]

So England is not a free country, according to those who believe you need guns to be free, their citizens live in dire fear of the criminals, they have running gun battles between violent criminals, terrorists and their despotic government, etc ,etc.....!!!!!!!!!

NOT!! NOT!!

[BobRyan]

Knoxville news ---

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/nov/16/burglars-fear-residents-more-police/

Quote:

Today burglars fear the homeowner much more than the police. They know the police cannot shoot them for crimes against property and cannot chase them if they flee in a vehicle. When was the last time you heard of the Supreme Court handing down a ruling in favor of the victim and their property or more authority for the police to apprehend?

Burglars are familiar with how the criminal justice system works to their benefit from slap-on-wrist judges who hand out probation five or six times to sympathetic jurors who view a burglar’s drug addiction, abusive father or alcoholic mother as a valid excuse. They are also aware of jail overcrowding and budget cuts which lessens punishments for their crime.

Hardly a day goes by that a team of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, behaviorists, criminologists, etc. aren’t doing Q & A surveys in prisons and jails seeking answers to antisocial behavior.

The most profound and undisputed survey I reviewed was asked of convicted burglars by an FBI behaviorist:

1. Would you B&E (break and enter) a home if you thought it occupied?

A. No — 88 percent (the other 12 percent are hard-core burglars).

2. Would you B&E a home if you knew the owner was home and maybe had a gun?

A. No — 95 percent (the other 5 percent are called cat burglars)

3. Would you B&E a home if you knew the owner was home and did, in fact, have a gun?

A. No — 100 percent (I told you they fear the homeowner).

No other survey I studied in my 27 years of law enforcement in Miami Metro Dade County did I see a 100 percent, not even for a Mother’s Day holiday.

[John317]

The problem is not the guns but the people who misuse them.

The USA has had guns-- and lots of them-- all through our history, yet never before did we see the kinds of mass killings of innocent people, children, women, etc., that we're witnessing today.

Why the difference?

The first time I remember it happening was in the 1960s when a man went up into the tower on a university campus in Austin, Texas, and began shooting everyone he could find. Shortly afterward a man in Chicago killed about 8 nurses with a knife. Then another man went into a beauty parlor in Phoenix and methodically shot all the women with a pistol. After that, those kinds of things started happening more and more often, until now it occurs on an almost weekly basis.

In the past, children were brought up to respect other people, but today there are many people with guns who have no respect for others. That's where our problem lies, not in the ownership of guns.

Mexico has very strict gun laws, so the only people who own guns are the police, the military, and the criminals. Meanwhile the law-abiding citizens stand by helplessly and watch their neighbors, family & friends get massacred in battles between the police and the criminals. Often the police are the criminals and are involved in the drug cartels. The government doesn't respect the regular citizens because it knows they're totally unarmed and helpless. That's exactly the way it would be here if we allowed the government to disarm the American public.

The solution to the shootings is not to change the U.S. Constitution and take away the rights of law-abiding citizens to own weapons. We can't allow a relatively few people to take away the long-cherished freedoms that hundreds of millions of Americans have enjoyed since before the founding of our great Republic.

[BobRyan]

Here is another interesting bit of info for big-state tiny-citizen model of "safety".

Quote:

Foreign countries are two to six times more effective in solving crimes and punishing criminals than the U.S. In London, about 20% of reported robberies end in conviction; in New York City, less than 5% result in conviction, and in those cases imprisonment is frequently not imposed. Nonetheless, England annually has twice as many homicides with firearms as it did before adopting its tough laws. Despite tight licensing procedures, the handgun-related robbery rate in Britain rose about 200% duri ng the past dozen years, five times as fast as in the U.S.

Part of Japan's low crime rate is explained by the efficiency of its criminal justice system, fewer protections of the right to privacy, and fewer rights for criminal suspects than exist in the United States. Japanese police routinely search citizens at will and twice a year pay "home visits" to citizens' residences. Suspect confession rate is 95% and trial conviction rate is over 99.9%. The Tokyo Bar Association has said that the Japanese police routinely "...engage in torture or illegal treatment. Even in cases where suspects claimed to have been tortured and their bodies bore the physical traces to back their claims, courts have still accepted their confessions." Neither the powers and secrecy of the police nor the docility of defense counsel would be acceptable to most Americans. In addition, the Japanese police understate the amount of crime, particularly covering up the problem of organized crime, in order to appear more efficient and worthy of the respect the citizens have for the police.

in Christ,

Bob

[BobRyan]

The list of the victims in Conn. is so sad!

The person/people who did this were beyond mentally ill - they must have been demon possessed.

Matt 24

12 And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

13 But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

2 Timothy 3

1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.

2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,

3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,

4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;

5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

[phkrause]

You make some very good points John, but so does Lazarus, and Bob, etc. It really looks like we really don't have any solutions. Both sides of the issue make good points. Like I mentioned before, gov Huckabee made a good observation the other day, and that is that as we've taken God out of the picture things have been slowly getting worse. It seems to me we are getting back to the time of Israel, where everyone just does as they please.

[Gail]

Quote:

Matthew 26:52 Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

Isn't that what we are seeing now? The weapons are there and people are using them.

I wonder more about the atmosphere of fear and paranoia that is bound to accompany this craziness. The Bible talks about men's hearts failing them for fear. If people are exposed to increasingly frequent accounts of such violence, how soon would it be before their hearts give out from the stress?

[phkrause]

Yes Gail, exactly!

[lazarus]

In the past, children were brought up to respect other people, but today there are many people with guns who have no respect for others. That's where our problem lies, not in the ownership of guns.

I hear people from the UK, France, and the Caribbean complaining about the lack of respect among people. I don't find Americans generally less respectful than anyone else. Are you seriously saying that this crisis of violence in America is due to a lack of respect?

[lazarus]

The problem is not the guns but the people who misuse them.

Then perhaps we should relax the drink driving laws because its really not the alcohol but the people who drink it.

Maybe we should give Iran a break because it's not the nukes but the people that might build them

Maybe Israel shouldn't have bothered with the "Iron Dome" because its not the missiles but the people who fire them.

Poor Saddam Hussein! If only we could have realized that it was not the WMD themselves but the dictator who might have used them.

It's not the cocaine, it's the noses that snort it!

[lazarus]

It really looks like we really don't have any solutions.

There are solutions but folks are more in love with their guns than common sense.

[lazarus]

Now for some facts.

Quote:

— Aug. 19, 1987: Michael Ryan, 27, kills 16 people in small market town of Hungerford,

The fact that you have to go back 25 years to find something on the US scale is significant. It's futile to try to paint UK gun laws as ineffective.

Here''s something to chew on:

Number of Murders, United States, 2009: 15,241

Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2009: 9,146

Number of Murders, Britain, 2008*: 648

(Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,240 US murders)

Quote:

How has that UK gun ban been working?

Very well actually..

Number of Murders by firearms, Britain, 2008* 39

(equivalent to 195 US murders)

Compared to other developed countries, no one can come near the US. The following are gun deaths for 2008: Germany - 381, France - 255, Canada - 165, UK - 68, Australia - 65 and Japan - 39.

The United States of America needs healing.

[Tom Wetmore]

Nobody argues with the idea that we should keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. That is why we aggressively disarm dangerous nations and people. We also easily recognize that guns in the hands of people lacking capacity to use them responsibly or safely. That is why we try to prevent children from having access to guns.

Traditional concepts of gun control obviously did nothing in these most recent tragedies to prevent them from happening.

The difficulty is recognizing who will be dangerous or irresponsible that exhibit no outward signs of that possibility. Seldom is there sufficient warning signs of the mental condition of the shooter. That vector point of the convergence of the mentally unstable and dangerous weapons is where we need to focus our energies to prevent further tragedies of this sort. Our mental health system is apparently inadequate to effectively identify and treat people at risk of committing acts of violence and being able to put that information in the hands of anyone that could control their access to the means to harm others.

[BobRyan]

Nobody argues with the idea that we should keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. That is why we aggressively disarm dangerous nations and people.

"We disarm dangerous nations"??

[BobRyan]

The problem is not the guns but the people who misuse them.

The USA has had guns-- and lots of them-- all through our history,

I think Japan took that into consideration when trying to decide what to do after Pearl Harbor.

Hint: Look up up the phrase "There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass".

in Christ,

Bob

[Gail]

Quote:

The problem is not the guns but the people who misuse them.

The trouble is that not you, I, nor anyone else is not able to judge when someone will snap.

[Woody]

Quote:

The problem is not the guns but the people who misuse them.

The trouble is that not you, I, nor anyone else is not able to judge when someone will snap.

There are a number of ways to kill masses of people. I need not go into the specifics. One way would be to break into your Mom's gun cabinet. But, if it was not that way - it might have been a worse way.

[JoeMo]

I agree with Woody. If one is bent on killing people, there are a number of creative ways to do so. The OKC bombers were pretty effective at killing people with fertilizer and diesel fuel.

[lazarus]

"We disarm dangerous nations"??

Surely you jest.

My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision. For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war.

.....And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.

Guess who said that?