Gun laws in USA

Shed wrote:So laws against unlawful entering and burglary, and the rights self-defence conferred to those upon whom they are committed, become null and void upon the opening of one's door?


Interesting.

Only when opening one's door is part of an intentional trap to lure a person or persons in in order to injure or kill them.

What constitutes a 'trap'? At what point does one cede protection under, or nullify the activeness of, the law? I'm afraid I'm still not seeing how leaving one's own door open, even if it WERE some sort of test or trap (whose provability by those the burden would fall on would, almost certainly, be nigh on impossible anyway), gives someone else the legal right to forgo standing laws and take advantage of it.

Do know, by the way, that I'm not arguing the advisability, the wisdom, or the morality of such a thing, theoretical though it may, at this point, be – only its effect on one's protection by, or under, the law.

Since this hasn't been posted yet:

Without having watched all 3 videos in their entirety, I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of Americans support the measures the VCDL representative (whose individual selection for this piece was, very patently, no coincidence...) sounded objection to. The results of a poll by Gallup (a prominent American polling agency) the very week this video was made determined that 65% of Americans disagreed with the Senate's rejecting the measure mentioned several times in these segments, and that an overwhelming 91% support expanded background checks as a generality.


Mr. Stewart has, unsurprisingly, located the farthest-right person on this issue he could, thrown him in front of a camera, and presented his positions as the norm; when in reality, his particular views (or at least the ones discussed in these videos) are exhibited in just a fraction of Americans.

I actually posted them more to highlight how Australia has done it, Obviously Jon Stewart would get a far right person for the hilarity factor and to prove a point. Yet, the point stands.

Shed wrote:So laws against unlawful entering and burglary, and the rights self-defence conferred to those upon whom they are committed, become null and void upon the opening of one's door?

Interesting.

Well, here we have the concept of "commensurability" - that is, if there is another option, you don't take a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It is a bit weird that in a country where you need to tell people that coffee in a cup can burn you if spilt or that you don't put pets to dry into a microwave oven as people can sue everybody and get millions of compensation money for not switching on their brains before acting, they can just shoot around with the intent to kill someone and succeed and then possibly get away with it...

El Chelsea Fuerte wrote:

No one is fantasizing about killing people. This is a matter of protecting one's own well-being as well as your loved ones'. If someone threatens that as the deceased student did in this scenario, then you have the right to protect yourself as well as others. What else is the point of carrying firearms?

how in the *bleep* does walking into the garage threaten a family's wellbeing?

that's exactly the point, if you live in a civilized country there is no point carrying firearms unless you fantasize about murdering people

If someone is willing to break into your house in such a manner, then yes it is reasonable to assume the worst. It is reasonable to assume that the intruder may be armed. Why? The intruder needs that to protect him/herself should he/she get caught, especially if he/she is really engaged with the underworld. Have you not heard of armed robberies? This is not a foreign concept.

engaged with the underworld

again, law abiding citizen is not a true story

Luck won't always go your way with that kind of thinking, and should the intruder get violent, the likelihood of which is high

[citation needed]

no please, do provide statistics on the number of petty burglaries vs armed robberies, then we can assess how high the likelihood of the intruder being armed is

El Chelsea Fuerte wrote:If someone is willing to break into your house in such a manner, then yes it is reasonable to assume the worst. It is reasonable to assume that the intruder may be armed. Why? The intruder needs that to protect him/herself should he/she get caught, especially if he/she is really engaged with the underworld. Have you not heard of armed robberies? This is not a foreign concept.

Well, and this shows how having a gun actually increases the risk of getting killed by one.

By the way, in Germany burglars are usually intelligent enough to break into houses that are empty and so they are usually "only" armed with the tools they need to break in as fast and silently as possible, thus there may be quite some theft, but there are rarely people injured, and even less killed in such cases.

rwo power wrote:

El Chelsea Fuerte wrote:

rwo power wrote:@El Chelsea

Don't you have garage doors that you can open and close via remote control in the US? o_O (Frankly, I find an automatic garage door far more useful than an automatic gun.  ^^)

Well I only have one remote and it's in the car all the time

If you set up your garage as trap, you could as well take the remote along and use the garage as proper trap and not as death trap excuse so that you can have fun executing a live human being in cold blood.

You need to reconsider the situation in which this incident occurred.

The owner had the door of his garage opened for his own convenience. What his intentions were to do as such bears no relevance to the subsequent shooting. He had the garage door open for his own convenience, the would-be criminal decided to take advantage of such a situation and put his life and the lives of the occupants of the household at risk. That was strictly his decision- whether this was set up as a trap does not matter because the homeowner has every right to open his garage whenever he chooses to for whatever purpose without being threatened by anyone because of it. The notion that the homeowner should not have feel threatened by the intruder because he was supposedly expecting an intruder is ridiculous because although he may have thought a crook may come in, he had no way of predicting how dangerous the intruder could be. And, as I stated before, an open garage door is not the homeowner inviting you to pose a threat to him and his family. And based on the wording of the Montana gun law as I previously quoted in my first post, the homeowner had every right to use deadly force because from his viewpoint it was reasonable to believe that he would get assaulted by the intruder.

rwo power wrote:

Shed wrote:So laws against unlawful entering and burglary, and the rights self-defence conferred to those upon whom they are committed, become null and void upon the opening of one's door?

Interesting.

Well, here we have the concept of "commensurability" - that is, if there is another option, you don't take a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It is a bit weird that in a country where you need to tell people that coffee in a cup can burn you if spilt or that you don't put pets to dry into a microwave oven as people can sue everybody and get millions of compensation money for not switching on their brains before acting, they can just shoot around with the intent to kill someone and succeed and then possibly get away with it...

Why not look at the context within which this situation occurred? You can't shoot your gun around aimlessly in America and get away with it. You know that. If you're a Montana resident who has been burglarized twice before and is now in the process of being burglarized for the third time, then yes you can use your weapon because it's reasonable for you to feel that, not only are your possessions under threat, but so is your well-being and the well-being of others around you. It's really hard to argue around that unless someone just has a blind Liberal hate for the 2nd Amendment.

Well, I don't have anything to do with any amendments, I just know that I'm glad that I live in a country where people are not allowed to carry weapons around freely.

Frankly, I would probably feel threatened everywhere in the US when I would have to suspect that anybody who comes near me might carry a weapon and could possibly decide to kill me.

Maybe in such a country I would get paranoid, too, and wish to have a weapon of my own, but really, this doesn't appear to me like a safe environment where I'd like to live compared to the region where I'm living right now which is peaceful and where I don't have to worry about people running around with firearms.

By the way, I don't know a single person among my friends or relatives who owns a weapon or feels the need to own one, and the only people I ever saw carrying a gun in real life were some police persons, and I think that's how things should be.

El Chelsea Fuerte wrote:If someone is willing to break into your house in such a manner, then yes it is reasonable to assume the worst. It is reasonable to assume that the intruder may be armed.

See? Once you get gun control, that intruder probably will not be armed, because a) it'll be hard as hell for him to get a gun, as well as expensive, and b) he does not need to reasonably expect his victims to be armed.

It works both ways. And believe me, it's very relaxing to be in a country where you can at basically every time assume everyone around you to not be armed. Makes us a bit more blunt, less polite, maybe, but also makes us kill only about one person for every 500 killed in 'Murica. Just sayin'.

And even if it's a domestic issue, there's also like half of America who want gun control as well, so what about them?

Most gun-owners are peaceful and reasonable, Rwo. Only a very small fraction engage in unlawful mass shootings, which the media dreads to cover. There are, in fact, plenty of others who have used firearms to prevent genuine criminals from doing harm to society. Obviously no one likes to talk about those instances.

The average American does not excessively worry about a random person pulling out a gun and shooting him/her (although it could very well happen), as you don't see a terrified look on everyone you meet on the streets. But, of course, some neighborhoods are better than others and if you want to steer well of gun violence you'd do good to not choose to live in neighborhoods with a high prevalence of gangs.

But surely there is violence in other countries as well? Stabbings, maybe? Do we ban knives? Of course not.

But the scale, oh dear, the scale!
Not having guns cuts your murder rate by, like, a thousand! If that's not an argument worth having, I don't no what is.

@El Chelsea Fuerte

Guess what - I actually *have* been attacked by a guy with a knife once when I went into a rather unpleasent area - but the difference between a knife and a gun is that with a knife the attacker has to actually get close to you - and then it was quite easy to give him a hard kick into the family jewels, and the problem was solved without anyone getting killed.

With a gun it is easy to harm people much more badly and from greater distances - and there is always the chance that innocent bystanders can get hurt or killed, too.

Most of the folks here will agree with you on that, RWO. We're mostly pretty liberal on this subject.

Problem is, American Conservatives and politicians have and will shoot (pun intended) down many of these arguments. They'll argue that throwing knives could be used the same way bullets from a gun could be used. They'll argue that random shards of glass could be used the same way as well. There's always the tried and tested - "cars kill people too" argument that they fall back on as a last resort without fail as well.

That's why gun laws in this country are so slack. People will find any reason and make any argument to keep it that way and they're quite good about finding dime-a-dozen politicians to support who will parrot these same talking points/arguments/fallacies from positions of influence that will ensure that these laws never change.

5 people killed today in a Las Vegas shootout at a restaurant and a Wal-Mart.

2 people (a guy and a woman) walked into a restaurant and killed 2 police officers. They then fled to a Wal-Mart where they killed a 3rd person (a concealed carry permitted gun owner who apparently returned fire at them) before killing themselves.

Tragic situation for the cops, but this does paint a strange picture. Every person killed in this shootout was armed. If anything, if that concealed carry person had been unarmed, there's a better chance that they might've lived. It's the gun they had on them and decided to use that put them in danger.

And yet we keep hearing how more guns solves the problem in this country.....

can you guys seriously buy guns at wal-mart ??

Just fix our broken education system, reduce the rates of poverty and inequality in the country, in addition to tweaks in the laws on the process of acquiring guns and the legality of their use and you'll see the amount of gun related violence and death go way down.

VendettaRed07 wrote:Just fix our broken education system, reduce the rates of poverty and inequality in the country, in addition to tweaks in the laws on the process of acquiring guns and the legality of their use and you'll see the amount of gun related violence and death go way down.

Right, you *just* have to do all that.

Yes, those half-dozen things are sure the easier route to make people kill less other people with guns, than reducing the number of guns.

Nevermind that those are some of the fundamental issues that face most countries throughout the world in some form or another, while gun violence of the type and scope found in the US is limited to... well, the US.

Not exactly related but

A 12-year-old boy has died after being shot by police in the US city of Cleveland, after carrying what turned out to be a replica gun in a playground - BBC

What the actual F?

Crazy stuff. But parents shouldn't allow kids have replica guns in the U.S., everyone knows how trigger-happy police and people in general are over there.