NBVegita

No. It's rediculously difficult to purchase a hand gun, depending on the state, and very expensive. Being it is illegal to sell a gun you purchased legally, to someone not licensed to own one, and every single weapon made in the United States for retail is serial numbered. If you sell your gun to someone, they murder someone with it, you are prosecuted as an accomplice. The only way to cir!@#$%^&*vent that is if you file a report that it was stolen before the murder, and if your guns keep getting stolen they will revoke your permit. It's no proposterous, it's historically accurate. An example that might hit home for you, if the ottoman citizens in the area of Israel were amply equiped, the British would never have been able to occupy them, thus they would still have their land and the Jews wouldn't. Do you really believe that we have evolved so much in the last 60 years that this would be an impossibility? The people of Germany were not mindless. They followed behind an extremely intelligent and charismatic leader, who coupled with the animosity towards Europe, was able to convince the people that he was doing what was best for all of Germany. Which all started in a way not dissimilar to Iraq, just in a much faster pace. I'm all for laws, but only effective ones. It's been proven in the UK that banning all guns DOES NOT cut gun violence, infact it has increased gun violence since enacted in the UK. (I've posted links to this information in multiple topics previous to this so if you would like to see the sources just look back). Nice display of melodramatics. It's a very simple equation. The more control you give the government, the less of a democracy we are. If you vote to take the right to vote away from the people are you still a democracy? Everytime you take power away from the people and embody the government, you are hurting democracy. Instead of banning guns, why not allow each county or city to have its own citizen militia? If there was a citizen militia in DC I bet you the crime rate would be exponentially lower. Time and time again the police and government have proven that they cannot control crime in our country as it is, now you want to charge them with the sole duty of doing something they're awful at already? I believe this was stated in a prior post: You've seen how effective our import laws have been at keeping illegal drugs out of the united states, do you honestly believe that they'll be able to stop the importation of guns?

They had just as much right to be there as the Ottomans before them did.

That was well said Ail.

!@#$%^&* lots of things are a means of killing. Cars kill more people in a year than guns do, why not outlaw them too? And killing is not always bad. You eat because things are being killed. If my mother had killed one man, it would have saved the lives of 4 other innocent people. It's nice to try to live in candyland...but then you have to wake up and realize that the world, humans foremost, are not two dimentional. And just incase you didn't know, guns are the only reason that you have ANY FREEDOM, in which ever country you live in.

I think that was his point. I agree Bak that there is no 100% way to protect the citizens from guns. But come to think of it there is no way to protect citizens 100% from anything. Case in point heart disease kills over 500,000 Americans a year. Does that mean we should ban all foods high in colesterol because of the people who abuse it's consumption? I know that heart disease only hurts yourself, whilst with a gun you can hurt other people, but in the act of protecting the citizens couldn't a point be made for that also? I mean you could really make a point for the government to ban just about anything in our lives today because it is not 100% safe for the citizens to do. !@#$%^&* there are almost 4 times the number of car accident deaths than gun deaths (60% of which are suicides) in america each year, should we ban all cars and or force all people to move to public transportation/walking to get around? No you would not want to do that because it would be an inconvenience to you. Banning guns doesn't inconvenience you, so you don't mind banning them. I feel that is a problem with most of America today. You don't think about your neighbors rights. I feel that is also a huge issue with anti-abortionist in this country. The problem I have is that we have dozens of statistics on all of the lives that guns take and not a single one on how many lives are saved by a gun. Do we punish 99.9% of the people because of the acts of the .1%, who by most accounts would still have access to the firearms?

So you're saying that students in Utah are more mature and stable than students from Virginia?

The only problem is that the land, due the the British Mandate, post WWI straight through the end of WWII was British controlled. Very similar to the way the ottomans gained power over the land to begin with. So in order for your statement to be accurate sever, it would be similar to if Russia were to fully occupy the United States, then have 300,000,000 immigrants from China enter the United States and have the country "given" to them. As much as I wouldn't exactly enjoy it, that is the way of the world. You don't have much say in a country if as a people you have no military or governmental control. You are simply at the mercy of the body(ies) that do. Also the British actually put limitations on Jewish immigration as they wanted to limit the number of immigrants leaving Europe. In fact the Jews actually attempted to revolt against Britian.

If I degrade low enough in society to have the drive to rob someone's personal property I would be more than willing to allow them to shoot me. Also just because you shoot someone doesn't mean you're aiming to kill them. It's not legal guns that do most of the murders, it's the illegal ones. Which I've stated before that I'm all for strict gun control and regulations, just as long as i'm allowed, as an upstanding citizen, to own means of protection. The other problem with the other "means of protection" you mentioned is that they're all close range means. And short of the taser, if you are not trained in the use of those forms of protection the weapon can be turned on you. Also the situation that Ail is describing is not outlandish. Bad things happen to good people. This is a huge "what if" and it is just something I want people to think about as it's all specculation, but imagine if 50% of the student body was carrying weapons the day of the VT shooting? I know there is no proof that lives could have been saved, but just think about it. NOTE: It is legal for students to carry guns on all public college campuses in Utah, with the correct permits. They have NEVER had a school shooting (that has been reported in "modern" times)

Sorry I had responded to all posts but I accidently closed the tab instead of opening a new one so I'll touch on it gradually. I sure as !@#$%^&* would bet that this man/woman in my house, stealing my things, causing duress to my family, would be the first to take a shot at me if I were in their home doing the same thing. How can you have compassion for a person who is knowingly breaking the law and who full well knows the consequences? What if this man or woman has more on their mind than just robbing you? According to your reasoning, in concern to the situation I faced as a child, you would rather have a dreg of society murder in cold blood a mother and her young children than give them the means to protect themselves? Since when is it more important for the law to protect the criminals breaking it, than allow the citizens who abide by it the opportunity to defend themselves. Depends on the state and the weapon. My mother has a permit to carry concealed so she is actually allowed to carry her .357 magnum unlocked (holster), loaded with the safety off, while she is walking down the middle of the street. She's had the permit since the 70's, in NY state which is one of the toughest states to get a permit to carry concealed in. Too bad the man hadn't taken one more step further into our house as a kid, my mother could have saved the other family from the fate we almost had.

lol? How so? How is me defending myself from a mugger dependent on you owning a gun? I'm not arguing that everyone should have a gun. In fact I'm all for strict gun regulations so that only the most stalwart of citizens can carry a firearm. But I am for the belief that I should be allowed to carry a firearm if I fit that criteria. That is very true. Just look back through the history of America, when you outlaw something, the only people you're cutting off from it are the honest people. And those honest people are not the ones who are killing people. I fully support the law in Texas where if someone is attemtping to rob your property you have the right to shoot them. If a stranger, whom obviously has some form of malicious intent, is on my property where my fiance lives (kids too someday) you bet your !@#$%^&* I'm not going to think twice about shooting him. There are too many crazy people in the world. From another post I made: "Me for example, would not be here if not for my mom having a gun. When I was 5 a drunk man broke into the house. My dad was at work. My mom immediately ran and got her .357 magnum, and the guy was still hesitant to leave even after seeing the !@#$%^&* monster of a gun. I had called 911, as soon as he broke in, which took 45 minutes to show up. Eventually the guy made the evening news because after he left our house he broke into another house and killed the entire family with the hunting knife he had hidden in his belt. The funny thing is that we even called the news and told them our story, and aparently it wasn't good enough to make the news, even though it was a wonderful story on how a gun saved the lives a mother and her two children. And do you think we're the first or only? Guns save lives every day, but there's no coverage or statistic for that. " So according to sever we should ban all forms of self defense because ultimately if a criminal has a gun, if you pull a weapon, of any sort, on said criminal you have a higher likely hood of being killed. Even on a crude level, as I grew up in a really bad area, why do you think all of these "thugs" carry guns? Self-defense. If someone knows or believes that you are carrying a gun, they are less apt to acost you for the simple reason that it exponentially increases THEIR risk of being killed. Criminals go for easy targets. !@#$%^&* there have been two incidents in the past 2 weeks nationally where + year old women fended off muggers with the pistols they kept in the purses. But of course it's easier to prove your point when you fall to the extremist mentality that if a gun is involved in any situation by either side, it must be used. Bak: I'll explain later this afternoon out of time now.

And don't you think it's mildly likely that if the criminal thinks HIS/HER life is in danger, they would be more apt to cooperate with leaving you alone? Why is it that you think that the only way to dissolve a situation if a gun is involved is to shoot it? Just the implication of such is sheer ignorance.

I did not thouroughly read the article the first time as I was in a rush. Now: "Matching controls were identified for 99 percent of these subjects, producing 438 matched pairs. Univariate analyses revealed that the case subjects were more likely than the controls to have lived alone, taken prescribed psychotropic medication, been arrested, abused drugs or alcohol, or not graduated from high school. After we controlled for these characteristics through conditional logistic regression, the presence of one or more guns in the home was found to be !@#$%^&*ociated with an increased risk of suicide" That would be an argument that people with the aforementioned conditions and cir!@#$%^&*stances not to have guns. Using conditional logistic regression instead of unconditional logistic regression is just a simple way to manipulate data into stating what you want it to.

The only way you're going to give up your possesions is if you seriously believe your life to be in danger. Or if you are extremely non-confrontational. That is a completely false statement. There is no inference that the presence of the gun resulted in the suicide. In fact you can't even begin to imply that if there was not a gun in the house that they would not have killed themselves by other means. A true statement would be: If you really cared about your family you'd be concerned that keeping at gun in the home increases the chance of your kids committing suicide with a gun by 500% Most rapes are committed in a home or apartment. That is an easily googleable fact. I'll follow up more later and post sources if you can't google.

From past posts of mine: "As for the crazy bit, !@#$%^&* there are a lot of things we do that could cause a lot of deaths if we decided to go crazy. imagine taking your car on a tour of the sidewalks in NYC during the middle of the day. Or !@#$%^&* get a full tank of gas and blow up your car. !@#$%^&* you can even google dozens of ways to make strong explosives with household chemicals. Or make a pipe bomb. Car bomb. Anything you want. If we didn't have guns what would be the next thing people would jump on? Do you think those columbine kids would have brought knives to school? Or would they have made some homemade bombs? I mean !@#$%^&* bombs are so easy you make that if you fill a coffee can a little over half full with fresh !@#$%^&*. Yes I said !@#$%^&*. Seal the top tight with a good fuse. The Hydrogen sulfide emitted from the feces will then create a literal !@#$%^&* bomb. The more you heat the feces the more gas you can emit. Once the fuse hits the gas it will explode sending poisonous shrapnel in all directions. Obviously to varying degrees dependent on the amount of H2S in the can. (above example is just a small insight into the simplicity of creating a bomb, although just a small bomb) These people would simply use bombs not guns. " http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1442617,00.html Yes obviously the evil guns are causing people to kill each other. The naivety of the topic astounds me. It is better for your wife to get raped? How about your daughter? What if she's 6? "A Time to Kill" anyone? Also if you're willing to give up everything on you to a mugger, chances are he's threatening your life with a LETHAL WEAPON. If some guy comes up to you on the street with no weapons and says "Hey give me your wallet or I'll beat you to a pulp", you're not going to hand over your wallet.

And what about the right to revolt against our government? It would be !@#$%^&* hard to revolt when the only people with guns are the government. You can say that is a radical ideal, but with the way the American government is going I could see the possibility of a revolution within the next century.

Bak, we don't have freedom of speech. Even Don Imus, after being fired, was "forced" to give a national apology because of the NAACP. The NAACP said they wouldn't stop, they would even go as far as a lawsuit, if Imus wasn't fired. There have been mul!@#$%^&*udes of suits because someone used a racial slur against another person. !@#$%^&* just google it. Aparently if you prove that it caused you "emotional distress" you can sue for punitive damages and aparently it can be a claim for violating your civil liberties too. No the FBI won't knock on your door over using this language, but as long as they hold you responsible in a court of law, that infringes on your right to free speech. Bak, you also keep talking about people being idiots for using "racial/gender/orientation" slurs, well whats the difference between me calling someone a !@#$%^&* and you calling them an !@#$%^&* hole? What if I take extreme offence to the word !@#$%^&*, does that make you an idiot for using it? I'm sorry that I was posting many issues that went beyond the realm of my original statement about freedom of speech in an effort to exemplify what the so called "liberals" have done to our society. I'm sorry if you didn't quite grasp that from my statements, next time I'll use footnotes so it is easier for you to understand.

So tell Don Imus that no one infringed on his free speech. Tell every celebrity, whom has to give a formal public apology else no one will work with them again, when something they say upsets a minority group. Tell me how its right to preach that the cons!@#$%^&*ution protects a womans right to have an abortion (which I support) and that it is uncons!@#$%^&*utional to overturn that right and then turn around and say that it's not uncons!@#$%^&*utional to ban our right to bear arms. How do we have free speech when you have to watch every word that comes out of your mouth otherwise you're labeled sexist/racists/bigot. How is it that for a country that is supposed to be the United States of America the so called "liberals" are constantly fighting to seperate/distinguish each group from one another. How is it right that if 4 white males jump 1 black male it's instantly a hate crime, yet if 4 black males jump 1 white male its just a plain mugging? How is it that a black male can call a white male any name he wants, yet there is a large list of things the white male cannot call the black male else he is racist? How is it that a person can spill hot coffee on themselves and sue a company for millions of dollars because they sold her coffee that was too hot? How can a company due everything short of physically subduing a drunk employee from leaving a company party, and then have the employee turn around and win $300,000 because she hit a pole driving home drunk. I mean I could really go on for hours here.

I can't be quoted on this as I heard it on a tv/radio show, but I do believe one analyst actually said the the more inexperienced presidents have actually done very well in office. Yet again, don't quote me on that.

That is terribly true. That is what is so funny about being "liberal" today, the number 1 advocates of "Freedom of speech as long as you don't disagree with me".

"Note 6 - The FY2008 budget requests $481.4 billion in discretionary authority for the Department of Defense base budget, an 11.3 percent increase over the projected enacted level for fiscal 2007, for real growth of 8.6 percent; and $141.7 billion to continue the fight in the Global War on Terror (GWOT)" That number quoted in Sama's post did include our battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, also known as the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Now they may ask for supplemental funds for the war, but the bulk of the war is included in that estimate. There is just as much polital propaganda in every other country of the world, don't single out the US.

Haha being that most republicans would like to roast her over an open fire, I'd say so lol

Actually I do believe it was the Clintons who are responsible for that. But blame it on the conservative republicans, !@#$%^&* they're the scape goat for everything else in america.

lol? You can't be serious. Even in your statement: "every few months to approve additional funding for the wars".

First off sama its ironic that the only recent expenditures on that list are noted for the U.S. Regardless we're actively in a war, it is completely obvious why as a country our military spending is so high. It also doesn't help that we're actively !@#$%^&*isting with military operations all over the world. http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/p...newsrelease.htm Based on the info from that site and your statistics we give approximately 20.28 billion dollars a year into "developed aid" not including all the other aid, militarily and other, we deliver. I guess I'm ultimately trying to side with ail that we give all of this aid and help and then get the worst reputation in the world. The last two times we took an isolationist policy WWI and then WWII started, maybe we should let WWIII start.

That sounds awfully like a socialistic economy. No matter how you cut the pie, if the banks were creating these loans, we as a people were taking them. We as a people invested in these .com companies with no revenue, we as a people invested in enron. The only way the government could have "protected us" is if we had a government controlled economy. And for the most part well put ail.