RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006 From: London, England Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lockit Oh god lord, all I was saying was that I wasn't going to take part in a thread take over. I'm sorry I didn't spell that out. Really... I am honestly saying that. You refuted my statements with inaccuracies. If someone does that, I’ll reserve the right to correct them. But none of what followed your statement had anything to do with the topic. This person didn't want to kill some random people by derailing a train, as awful an act as that was; he came with a target, and if you've got a target you have to have a targeted weapon. This event happened, on this scale, for one reason, and one reason only; people can blame Palin for whipping up this and that (and I agree she was a contributory factor), and talk about other factors, some of which are, I'm sure, relevant, but the core reason why this happens every 2-5 years in the US, regular as clockwork (and yet for some strange reason there's never a number of highly competent, armed civilians around when you need them, despite what the pro-gun lobby say), and quietly (in terms of not having huge body counts in one incident) tens of thousands of your own citizens every year, and yet doesn't in the UK (private gunfire killings of scale 2 incidents in 35 years, both of which saw changes in the law on ownership as a result), is the gun laws, and specifically the handgun laws, of the US. Until the US accepts that as the fact it is, and deals with it, this scene will repeat itself over and over. There is no reason why an ordinary citizen (not a farmer on pest control, for example) needs, or should be allowed to have, a gun, most especially a handgun. Now: are US citizens now going to just talk about it all, and wring their hands, and say how awful it is, or are they going to do something?
< Message edited by RapierFugue -- 1/9/2011 1:33:02 PM >
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