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Marini -> RE: 2nd amendment (7/23/2012 1:20:35 PM)
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quote:
From what I've read, the shooter was of at least average intelligence. A person of average intelligence can injure or kill a number of innocent people without so much as a single gun. Fire, for instance, is exceedingly effective. A few hundred dollars worth of stuff from a mall will destroy a city if used properly. Add a digit, and you can decimate a whole state. And less than a hundred dollars worth of fairly common household chemicals can poison a highrise building worth of air to a level where people would have a better chance of surviving a slit throat, by far. Indispensible trade goods that cannot be outlawed will, for less than the average student spends on getting drunk in a given year, kill everyone in a hospital. Everyone. For pocket money.
BINGO
He could have thrown in a Molotov cocktail. Or a bottle of hydrogen sulfide. Squirt gun full of kerosene and a lighter. Sour drain cleaner. It would still be a massacre. Probably a lot more horrible for everyone. Probably more people dead. Guns have an upside. And the scope of the damage you can do with one is limited, compared to the alternatives. Any idiot can get into a car with the back seat stacked full of propane tanks and bottles of diesel, then drive right into a building. A gun doesn't do much damage compared to that. And the death is comparatively clean. Fire is worse. Fortunately, even a competent attacker will tend to think in terms of guns and large bombs. Those don't do nearly as much harm as the alternatives.
When people have crossed the line, it's beneficial to have them act quickly, rather than thinking creatively.
You don't want crazies to start thinking about how to solve the "problem" of the logistics of a massacre. You want them to reach for a gun or something else familiar. Something that does a predictable amount of manageable harm. Let the crazies have their guns. If they're far gone, they can't do more with those guns than cars will do on the same day. If they're competent, the guns will do a lot less harm than the people themselves are capable of. Because, as we know, it's not guns that kill people, but people who kill people. Guns facilitate. And not very well. They're accessible, though. Likely a good thing. Guns are big in the mind. They're a small part of the big picture, though.
More absurd is trying to restrict access to long range rifles, like they're doing up here.
You don't massacre people at a thousand yards. At that range, what you do is practice for that day you hope will never come. The one where there's a crazy gunman half a mile from the shore, shooting political youth with a ballistic vest on. The one where Hitler comes to your town to give a speech to the people he's subjugated. The one where Assad butchers your brothers and sisters in the streets with impunity. On that day, one man doesn't make that kind of difference. The neighbourhood of people with legal access, though, is able to muster enough people to make a difference in their area. And then the next area. And the next. Until the tree of liberty has been watered back to health. That's what the second amendment seems to me to be about. The rest is side effects. Comparatively minor side effects, but a pain when they do strike. A lot of pain. [/quote]
[sm=applause.gif]
Another one of Aswad's well written posts.
I agree with everything you have stated, there are so many other methods to wreak havoc, if that is someone's intent.
Look at how he booby trapped his apartment!
I do want to mention that here in America some of the existing gun laws are ridiculous Aswad.
We do need gun laws that make it difficult to legally purchase assault weapons.
The Colorado shooter was able to rather easily legally purchase not only handguns, but also a shotgun and a semi-automatic rifle.
Again, I totally agree 100% with what you have stated, BUT I don't think we need to make it so easy to obtain shotguns and semi-automatic weapons.
Thank you again, for sharing your thoughts.
[;)]
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