About Guns

[Rasputin]

Here comes the debate. The gun control debate. The horrific shootings at Virginia Tech have put the discussion of gun control center stage.

I have many questions about it ...

Have you fired a gun? Would you know where the "saftey" was if asked? Should people with guns have a license or register their gun? If someone owns a gun should they be required to have a gun safe? Do your parents own a gun? and ...

Then what you think about Guns ?!

[IQ]

I like guns and i don't see any problems with having a gun as one might commit the crime with knife or illegal possesion of gun which is usual the case.

[IQ]

I have not fired any guns yet but i will as soon as i become 21 all of my homies go to this places at downtown which you practice your shooting. it depends on the person. like me i am very patient and i don't get mad soon and i have full control over my actions so... but if you get mad soon and are craze you shouldn't get a gun.

[mike435]

i am against gun ownership.

but i dont think it would have made any diffrence in the Virginia Tech case.

I dont own a gun nor do i intend to introuduce a gun to my house hold. Both now or in the feuture.
I fired a handgun before. and played with an m16 before.

I dont know were the saftey is on a handgun but i know were it is on the m16 and m4.


But at the same i think m16 or m4 are cool and i would really like to shoot one.

[Rasputin]

آمریکا، خشونت و حق داشتن سلاح گرم
روز دوشنبه، هنوز اجساد قربانیان دانشگاه بلکسبرگ در حال انتقال بود که دوباره در آمریکا بحث مجاز یا ممنوع بودن داشتن سلاح گرم بالا گرفت.

سوء قصد و کشتار در محیط*های دانشگاهی آمریکا بی*سابقه نیست. ولی کشتار روز دوشنبه (16 آوریل) در ویرجینیا فجیع*ترین و پرتلفات*ترین حادثه از این دست، در تاریخ آمریکا بوده است. سال 1966 در جریان یک حادثه مشابه در دانشگاه تگزاس 16 نفر کشته شدند. 8 سال پیش نیز مدرسه عالی لیتلئون در کلورادو شاهد مرگ 8 نفر به دست یک مرد مسلح بود.

روزنامه نیویورک تایمز، روز پس از وقوع حادثه مدرسه عالی لیتلئون، در تحلیلی، به مسئله رواج خشونت در آمریکا و سهم این پدیده در حادثه یادشده پرداخته بود: "ما آمریکایی*ها به خشونت معتاد شده*ایم. ما خشونت را ارج می*گذاریم و به آن جنبه*ای رمانتیک می*بخشیم. ایالات متحده هنوز هم افتخار می*کند که می*تواند با زور حرف و مقاصد خویش را به کرسی بنشاند." به نظر می*رسد که حادثه روز دوشنبه در ویرجینیا نیز، کماکان تاییدی بر ا رزیابی هشت سال پییش نیویورک تایمز باشد.

جنبه*ای از بروز و رواج خشونت در جامعه آمریکا به حق افراد در داشتن سلاح گرم مربوط می*شود. هواداران سلاح گرم در آمریکا لابی قدرتمندی را تشکیل می*دهند. این لابی تا کنون توانسته است با نفوذ خود در میان نمایندگان کنگره مانع هر گونه تغییر و اصلاح قانونی در جهت محدودسازی خرید و فروش و استفاده از سلاح*های گرم شود.

روز دوشنبه نیز، هنوز اجساد قربانیان دانشگاه بلکسبرگ در حال انتقال بود که دوباره در آمریکا بحث مجاز یا ممنوع بودن داشتن سلاح گرم بالا گرفت. مدافعان این حق بر این نظر هستند که بروز اتفاقاتی مانند حادثه روز دوشنبه نشان*دهنده کمبود سلاح در دست مردم برای دفاع از خویش است. مخالفان اما به میزان کمتر خشونت در آن دسته از جوامع غربی اشاره می*کنند که بر خلاف آمریکا قوانین شدیدتری در ممنوعیت استفاده از سلاح گرم دارند.

از سال 1950 تا کنون مطابق آمارهای رسمی آمریکا، نزدیک به یک میلیون نفر از جمعیت این کشور به ضرب گلوله اسلحه شخصی از پا درآمده*اند.

[gg666]

dar hale hazer, toye in noghte az zaman, aadama haminjoori daran ham digaro mikhoran...hame be joone ham oftadan...hala vay behale oon roozike hame gun ham dashte bashan!...

[Rasputin]

It sounds morbid but we have come to expect news of mass shootings in North America from time to time. The ritual is a familiar one by now: the usual media outlets descend upon the scene like vultures over a fresh cadaver, setting up cameras and lights. The celebrity anchormen in handsome close-ups spout their usual patter about the need to heal and find closure all the while affecting choked-up expressions which will be packaged into slick teasers to remind the viewers that when the disaster befell Every Town USA, Harry Smith and the CBS News were there to report every painful twist, blah, blah, blah. The victims' families, all media savvy now in the age of YouTube, will be interviewed in two-minute segments looking poised and insightful in over-the-shoulder shots. The experts, the FBI profilers and psychologists trained in thirty second sound bites will provide context for us to understand "the senseless acts of madmen". The anti-gun advocates will bemoan liberal laws that allow guns in the hands of dubious characters easier than getting a driver's license and the pro-gun crowd ˆ angry white males most of them - will remind us all that guns don't kill people, people kill people.

The perpetrators are also as familiar as movie stereotypes: the middle-aged, middle-class white male, the proverbial postal worker, sick and tired and not going to take it anymore, or the anti-social guy in his twenties who can't get a date or has been bullied all his life; "God's lonely men" making feverish entries in their journals like Travis Bickle or Cho Seung-Hui going back to his dorm room after coolly disposing of two students and making his video manifesto then walking to the post office and mailing his portfolio, as if for an audition, to the NBC News. Why leave your story to others to tell when you can frame it yourself in your desired context? Welcome to the era of mass murder as reality TV. Charles Mason, the original mass-murder-as-theater artist, must be shaking his head in admiration. Cho has done him one better by committing a postmodern mass murder.

Americans have a strange love affair with guns. The old saying "violence is as American as the apple pie" should really be understood as gun violence. Theirs is not the "respect for your gun as a sacred object" folklore of some warrior cultures, say the Kurds who have fought insurgency battles for decades; nor is it the rural tradition of having to shoot an occasional deer or scare off the odd fox of the Germans and the French. The gun, solitary, cool, independent, is an abstraction that stands for a certain concept of Americansim itself. It's also democratic. God may have created people unequal but Samuel Colt made them equal. Put a gun in every citizen's hand and they'll have a level playing field in their pursuit of happiness.

Fire arms have been part of America from the very beginning. The Founding Fathers, forever suspicious of Thomas Hobbs' Leviathan, the sovereign that is to monopolize violence for the good of all citizens, enshrined the right to bear arms in the US constitution as a guarantee against the tyranny of a standing army and a central government. But there was a darker side to the story. The United States was founded by settlers; settlers needed guns to protect themselves from the natives whose land they had stolen, from the competing settlers to the south of Rio Grande, and from rebellious slaves in the cotton fields and urban slums. That's how the West was won and the great states of Texas and California were born and how slavery and then de facto apartheid was enforced. Over two hundred years later the Indians are only to be found in reservations, the blacks are out of the cotton fields, the borders are firmly drawn, and an empire has replaced the old Republic but the Americans' love affair with guns simply goes on.

The rationale that no one dares to speak of now seems to be fear, fear of the mostly black and Hispanic underclass by the mostly white middle and upper classes. We need guns to protect ourselves from the criminals sneaking into our gated communities trying to steal our possessions and raping our women. But not just any gun; not a single action revolver to fend off a potential mugger or rapist in the supermarket parking lot but semi-automatic assault rifles and AK-47 machine guns. The United States must be the only country in the world where you can legally prepare for armed rebellion. The FBI may eventually wise up and start to monitor your activities but depending on what state you reside in can't stop you from stockpiling weapons. David Kureish, the wacko of Waco, and his flock of armed-to-teeth fundamentalist would be apocalypticos are still a fresh memory.

Of course guns don't kill people, people kill people. True but guns sure help, don't they, especially if you can shoot 30, 40 rounds before having to reload. A gun is murderous physics. It can obliterate the distance between the perpetrator and his victim and transform an insignificant physical action, the squeezing of the trigger, into great violent energy. Try killing 32 people with a knife, or a machete or a nail-studded baseball bat in a span of few minutes. Imagine the mad-as-hell postal worker or disgruntled anti-social student chasing their victims around the post office or the classroom trying to nail them with a samurai sword. Chances are they will be rushed and overpowered by the crowd if not trampled to death. The plain fact is that a gun in a man's hand, transforms the geek into a cool avenger, the enraged driver stuck in the traffic into Dirty Harry, and the slightly built postal worker into god's vengeance. Gun is the great leveler.

100 years ago when the muckraking novelist, Upton Sinclair in his book The Jungle exposed the appalling working and sanitary conditions in Chicago's slaughterhouses, the ensuing national outrage brought about sweeping reforms in labour laws and food manufacturing industry. You'd think an event of Virginia Tech's shooting's magnitude (Cho's death tally equals almost half of shooting deaths in New York City in the first quarter of the year) would bring about a national psychological crisis and ignite a profound dialogue free of clichés and hypocrisies. So far that hasn't happened. There is talk of new legislation limiting sale of guns to those suffering from mental problems (common sense, wouldn't you thing?) but it appears to be more election year posturing than real political will. The gun culture is too deeply ingrained in American psyche and the gun industry, taking any curtailment of gun ownership as an existential threat, will fight meaningful legislation tooth and nail. With fierce competition from the War on Terror and Iraq and the Basketball play-offs and custody battle over Anna Nichole Smith's baby and the new episodes of Dancing with the Stars, the Virginia Tech shooting story is fast losing its currency. In a couple of weeks it'll be old news.

[Rasputin]

Guns keep us safe

Ironically, gun control advocates are just like many gun owners in North America. We are all responsible citizens who want to see fewer people hurt by any kind of violence, especially guns. We just disagree on how to achieve it. In this regard, statistics are much more useful than rhetoric and emotion. Beyond reducing mental illness, there is one other way: get back to the ideas of self defence already allowed by our Criminal Code. Meet force with reasonable force.

In 1991 a gunman in Texas shot 22 unarmed people in a restaurant.
Customers' guns had been required by state law to be locked in their cars out in the parking lot. After the shooting at Luby's Restaurant a surviving victim petitioned legislators and the State of Texas enacted its Concealed Carry law so that responsible citizens could stop the carnage by saving lives with their own guns when a madman attacks. Violent crime has been steadily dropping in that state ever since, without the feared and imagined "bloodbath in the streets" that gun-control advocates envisioned.

Now, Virginia Tech scenarios might only happen in Texas in places where they don't allow Concealed Carry. Virginia Tech made the mistake of making sure all the students and teachers were not able to defend themselves that day, and the gunman was not stopped.

Proponents of gun control seem to pick only the details that support their idea of guns being the problem. Strangely, we expect men with guns - the police - to come and save us but we don't trust our well-trained and responsible fellow citizens. Citizens on the scene will always be more timely than a police response, and they can be (and in fact are) trained just like the police.

Guns can save lives too. Properly applied, it just might be a better option than creating disarmed victims.

[maryam9]

NO WAY!
Rules in the UK are pretty strict, so at least you know any old Joe walking down the street wont have one in his pocket which makes you feel a bit safer.
I think the US should follow aswell.

[Rasputin]

Intresting site about Guns : http://www.a-human-right.com/effective.html

[csite]

I love guns (although were not allowed them in the uk), i've always wanted to fire an ak47! Although i think you can easily misuse a gun when youre angry, specially men, women actually think about consequences, men shoot then think.

[donsaeid]

i love guns but i think it should be very restricted for who to own a gun! just look at usa! that is just too sick!

[Rasputin]

I love guns (although were not allowed them in the uk), i've always wanted to fire an ak47! Although i think you can easily misuse a gun when youre angry, specially men, women actually think about consequences, men shoot then think.

Umm.. U like to have it ? eh... Go to Prague or Bucarest ! You can find any gun which you want .

[csite]

Umm.. U like to have it ? eh... Go to Prague or Bucarest ! You can find any gun which you want .

Can't i find one in iran? anyways i only want to fire it, not have it, im mainly after the recoil experience of the ak47.

[Rasputin]

U.S. most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.


U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

"There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said.

India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there. China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.

Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil and Russia were next in the ranking of country's overall civilian gun arsenals.

On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.

France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany were next, each with about 30 guns per 100 people, while many poorer countries often associated with violence ranked much lower. Nigeria, for instance, had just one gun per 100 people.

"Firearms are very unevenly distributed around the world. The image we have of certain regions such as Africa or Latin America being awash with weapons -- these images are certainly misleading," Small Arms Survey director Keith Krause said.

"Weapons ownership may be correlated with rising levels of wealth, and that means we need to think about future demand in parts of the world where economic growth is giving people larger disposable income," he told a Geneva news conference.

The report, which relied on government data, surveys and media reports to estimate the size of world arsenals, estimated there were 650 million civilian firearms worldwide, and 225 million held by law enforcement and military forces.

Five years ago, the Small Arms Survey had estimated there were a total of just 640 million firearms globally.

"Civilian holdings of weapons worldwide are much larger than we previously believed," Krause said, attributing the increase largely to better research and more data on weapon distribution networks.

Only about 12 percent of civilian weapons are thought to be registered with authorities.