azurelunatic

Which of those do you disagree with?

Anti-gun.

Then, I was raised in a household that had safe, sane, and responsible gun usage. FatherSir kept them in a locked metal container in the locked storage shed, and his gun safety lecture for kids went like this: "Don't point at anything you don't intend to shoot. Don't shoot at anything you don't intend to kill."

On the few occasions he did have the guns out in the house, they were pointed at the floor when he was holding them.

I assume that there must have been an "Always treat the gun as if it were loaded" in there as well, but I don't remember it.

My father's advice:

"Never pull a gun on anything unless you are prepared to die."

Good advice, me thinks.

That's a good one too.

I know. I actually can't stand a lot of the things that the usual liberals stand for, but I also don't love the Religious Right. I fall pretty close to the Libertarian line, but they never have candidates who can get any votes.

Usually, I end up voting Republican or Libertarian, because most of our liberals seem to me to be closet Socialists.

Have you checked out Howard Dean? Far as I can tell, he's fiscal conservative, social progressive, and pro-Second-Amendment. A fair number of my friendslist folks are starting to get rather excited about him.

With, from what I've been reading here and there, a number of other things that I'd generally view as flaws.

I can say, however, that "ANYBODY BUT BUSH!" ought to be a ballot option.

why is the usual liberal combo pro-choice/anti-gun? WHY??

The joys of a two party system. Yes, we have the Greens and Libertarians and whathaveyou, but as far as national level, not throwing your vote away parties go, we're stuck with the two big dinosaurs. And they've pretty much divvied up the dialog between them on preset lines.

Me, I'd love a pro-choice/gun-education candidate. I have few problems with people who are properly trained in the use of firearms keeping them in a safe and sane manner. I have big problems with willfully uneducated idiots having firearms. I grew up with the former and knew several of the latter. But the dialog on that issue seems to be everyone gets 'em or no one gets 'em. How about making guns like cars? You have to have several months of dedicated training in their use, you have to be licensed, you have to renew that licence (and pass some rudimentary not an idiot nor blind tests each time), and if you act like an idiot with your firearm you get your carrying privileges pulled.

But the politically louder pro-firearm folks seem to see that as a Bill of Rights infringement, and the politically louder anti-firearm folk either haven't wanted to push it or haven't been successful.

Sounds safe and sane to me.

And anyone caught on the streets with a gun without a license gets their car insurance rats raised!!

Typo left in deliberately, after second thought.

The whole second amendment debate mystifies me (as does pro-lifers, but that's a rant for another time.)

If you take the guns out of the hands of the people, who are the only ones in the country left with guns? Police and Military. That makes me feel safe, really it does.

When they take guns away from everyone, including the government, I'm all for it. Until then, leave me a way to defend myself against tyranny damnit.

Oh yeah. Insanely safe.

I'm very much for gun control, where 'control' can be read as 'melting down and/or shooting into the sun'.

Given a choice between a US-style near-free-for-all, and a total ban, I'd definitely be in favour of the ban. Perhaps a better solution would be to change how it's viewed - owning a gun should be a privilege, and not a /right/. This means that you have to earn it - by passing safety tests, for example. As I understand it at the moment, the pro-gun NRA types say that mandatory testing requirements would be in violation of the second amendment, yes?

My knowledge of the American constitution isn't very good (so anyone reading this feel free to correct me :o) ), but I thought that the idea of it was to ensure that there were locally-run militias for national defence, which would prevent a central government from gaining too much power...

...uhh, bit late, there, isn't it? There's a standing national army. Central government is firmly in control, and is the current administration isn't exactly all up on giving people their 'God-given' freedoms.

I can't see how there could be any kind of effective uprising against the federal government. Anyone who tried would get stepped on by the police and the armed forces. They'd be called 'terrorists' and their presentation in the mass media would ensure that they had no wide-spread public support - and certainly not outside of whatever local area they were in.

If the justification is to keep a check on the federal government, that ceased to be relevent decades ago, IMO. As I understand it, that's the only legal justification that can be used for gun-ownership-as-a-right, although other things (like 'home defence') are put forward (random thought: kind of like when the US and the UK went into Iraq - the only legal justification was the weapons of mass destruction, but secondary reasons (how nasty Hussein is) were also given, even though they were, as a justification for war, meaningless), they're not reasons to have guns-as-a-right, rather than guns-as-a-privilege.

Before the shooting at Dunblane, the law in the UK was (roughly) that if you were of good standing in your community, and you had a plausible reason (like it's required for work - farmers and the like - or sporting/recreational shooting in clubs), then you'd probably get a license to carry a firearm. Post-Dunblane, all handguns are banned. Originally small calibre handguns were still legal, but they've been banned too.

By all accounts, if you know the right people it's not impossible to get a gun, but it's certainly not trivial either. Even pre-Dunblane, there were strict requirements for things like storage, and - if I remember correctly - for recreational shooting now, using guns that aren't banned, either the weapon, or the ammunition, or both, have to be stored in the gun club you're a member of - you can't keep them at home. You might be able to buy a gun off of some dodgy guy in a pub, but some kid can't just go into his grandad's desk drawer and go off to play with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

Shootings happen, especially in big English cities like London or Birmingham - but they happen extremely rarely. It sometimes seems as if the police are more trigger-happy than the criminals, even. There's been several cases in the past couple of years of the police armed response units gunning down people who were unarmed, and weren't even involved in whatever incident they were called out for.

I think I've lost the thread of where I was going, there. Anyway...

In the US the horse has already bolted. There's mass amounts of guns on the streets, and so people feel they need one of their own to be safe. The legal system would probably collapse if the police had to go around arresting all the people who have guns, and would refuse to hand them in (or go through the proper licensing/testing procedures). It's simply impractical, really.

Which is unfortunate, because I can't think of anything good that could result from a country being awash in leathal weapons.

And I just looked at what I wrote here.

Umm. I apologise for spewing that out into your journal. It's overly long, and overly opinionated, and not even really about waht you were posting about.

Sorry.

Perfectly all right. That's really what this journal is for, an interesting-idea-catcher, and a place where people's random thoughts smack up against my writing like bits of fluff to spiderweb. Gives me things to think about too.

'cause it's the opposite of what the conservatives say?

It always amused me that the canonical conservative stance is along the lines of "killing adults good, killing babies bad"... though that's explainable along the lines of "killing innocents bad, killing criminals good" if you actually trust the courts or don't occasionally mind a false positive.

Um, I'm babbling, back to work.

I used to trust the courts.

That was when I was a kid.

A sheltered liberal upper-middle-class kid.

Small undifferentiated lumps of cells are cuter than adults who've been locked up for years. </sarcasm>

I don't have anything to add to the gun discussion. I pretty much agree with wibbble, with the addendum that I *know* I don't currently have the impulse control to own a gun without a damn good reason (living in warzone, hunting to feed self and family), and I can't be the only one wired like me.

Gha.

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