Intrafamilial Debate- RESPONSES REQUESTED!!!

[pullnshoot25]

I just posted a new blog post and I would like your guys' comments on it. Take a gander and either post your comments on this thread or on the blog.

This is going to be good!

[Librarian]

Cousin Andrew: I am supposed to be paying people like the police to do that for me.

Really? How's that working out for him?

"It's fair to say that violent crime in Chicago is out of control. In certain communities in the city of Chicago, it is reaching epidemic proportions," Blagojevich told reporters at a bill-signing ceremony in Chicago.

The governor noted 16 children -- "almost one child a day" -- have been gunned down in Chicago since June 26. The shooting death toll for Chicago Public School students stands at 29 since last fall.

-- Sun-Times

And the stats from CPD say murder is up 15.7% over last year.

I think he has a right to protect himself, and the complimentary right to ignore his own safety. He's free to choose either.

But if he thinks the police will - or can - protect him, he's gonna have to buy an alderman or two.

[JDay]

I just posted a new blog post and I would like your guys' comments on it. Take a gander and either post your comments on this thread or on the blog.

This is going to be good!

If he thinks police are paid to protect him he needs to read this. http://publicrights.org/Kennesaw/Pol...nsibility.html

It is well-settled fact of American law that the police have no legal duty to protect any individual citizen from crime, even if the citizen has received death threats and the police have negligently failed to provide protection.

You, and only you, are responsible for your security and the security of your family and loved ones. That was the essence of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the early 1980's when they ruled that the police do not have a duty to protect you as an individual, but to protect society as a whole.

[pullnshoot25]

Blog has been updated with more questions from my cousin.

Keep the comments rolling!

[ChaparralCommando]

my response to your cousin

Your cousin's first statements make no realistic sense to me. There is no way a society can use police deter crime without becoming some sort of totalitarian state, which is totally contrary to the principles America was founded on. Police, as the article rightly points out, cannot usually prevent criminal acts from occurring. They just usually find, apprehend, and turn the suspect over to the court system. I would feel safer having the rights to protect myself rather than paying someone else to do that for me when it is questionable if they really will be able to do anything to help me. It seems the Israelis have shown a well-armed public is effective in preventing terrorist shootings; I don't know why the rest of the world is not following this approach. But I have a hunch it is radicals petrified of guns convincing the public that they will hurt themselves because guns are dangerous.
On the update questions: The only way to reduce stray gang bullets is to reduce gang violence is by improving the education of the public. Gangs are a result of poverty, which typically is a result of poor education.

[hoffmang]

There is an easier way to stop gang violence killing innocent bystanders. We have to simply legalize drugs. Just like Liquor Prohibition created gang profits enforced by firearms violence, our war on some drugs creates firearms violence in certain geographic and demographic hotspots.

-Gene

[Librarian]

Cousin Andrew: How do we stop 4 and 5 year olds from being caught in the crossfire of gang shootings? Obviously they cannot carry guns or protect themselves, and I think we'll all agree that even if these kids are safely in their houses, sometimes stray bullets come through windows and kill them, obviously this cannot be completely blamed on their parents. I would like a solution from the people on this forum that address this problem.

Arrest the gang members for crimes, prosecute, convict as possible. It won't be perfect, but nothing is perfect.

Failure to Target Serious Habitual Offenders. In many states, the greatest single weakness of the effort to combat juvenile crime is a simple failure to target the most dangerous young offenders. This weakness arises from a reluctance on the part of juvenile justice officials to admit that there is a point at which a delinquent youth becomes such a threat to the community that he or she must be held accountable and incarcerated. Under the current system, the seriously violent juvenile can become invisible by being mixed in with the general population of non-violent and non-habitual juvenile offenders. Overwhelmingly, most urban young people who get arrested for a crime get arrested only once; seldom are they a serious or long-term threat to the safety of other citizens. Put another way, not all juvenile delinquents are alike, and very few are serious habitual offenders. The official failure to discriminate between minor offenders and hard-core criminal youth undermines the effectiveness of the entire system.

The most active juvenile delinquents also are the most dangerous. Often invisible to the officials who preside over the system, they are painfully visible to the victims they assault, rob, and kill. Official failure to develop credible control measures to suppress habitual juvenile offenders also sows the seeds of racial prejudice. With the rise of juvenile crime, an increasingly angry and insecure public tends to look upon all juveniles, particularly black male teenagers, as threats to the community. Most juvenile offenders, however, are not: 58 percent of young black males never have any contact with the police; and of the other 42 percent, an overwhelming majority do not go on to become SHOs.23 [Serious Habitual Offender] It is therefore vital that state and local officials, as well as taxpayers, begin to think and act differently toward the occasional juvenile delinquent. The SHO, on the other hand, is a career criminal in the making.

The Information Gap. Chronic offenders usually can be identified solely on the basis of their juvenile records. This evidence, however, normally does not accumulate until after the youth's 16th birthday. If additional factors describing the youth's school performance and home situation are included, the age at which youthful chronic offenders can be identified and an intervention mounted may be moved up several years.

In reality, these young criminals are shunted in and out of state and local agencies by bureaucrats who are supposed to be running the system but who often seem to lack a collective awareness of the kind of young people they are processing. Too often, they are oblivious to the repeated and increasingly serious nature of the behavior of these young criminals. This official failure to share information can occur for many reasons: because it is not required by state law, because of bureaucratic inertia or lack of imagination, or even because of simple negligence. It is a key weakness in the current system. Most of the juvenile codes in the United States contain statutory language indicating that the juvenile judge should consider police reports; field interview reports; citations; social history information (such as data on school, family, and work); drug involvement information; motor vehicle operation information; associates' history; offense digests; victim accounts; and other relevant information, including medical and juvenile victimization data. Only rarely, however, is this information used or shared among youth service agencies; it often is not even made available to the presiding judge.

How State and Local Officials Can Combat Violent Juvenile Crime By James Wootton and Robert O. Heck

[shellyzsweet]

Just cause you should have the right to carry a firearm, doesn't mean you have to use it!
How many times to suspects not remain silent after arrest? They have the right and choose not to use it.
I don't have a problem with people not wanting to personally own, or carry guns. I have a problem with them infringing on my rights to carry and own one!

As far as children dying of stray bullets and gang violence.....education!

Education will allow these people to grow up and get a better job and move out of the area's where stray bullets and gang violence are not as high, if present at all. It will also decrease poverty as a whole and eventually we won't have such a big problem.

[rayra]

There is an easier way to stop gang violence killing innocent bystanders. We have to simply legalize drugs. Just like Liquor Prohibition created gang profits enforced by firearms violence, our war on some drugs creates firearms violence in certain geographic and demographic hotspots.

-Gene

Hell with that idea. How about instead of midnight basketball leagues for troubled youts we instead give them free marksmanship lessons. That way when they whip out their gats on another scumbag they actually kill their intended target instead of innocents. In no time at all there'll be a dearth of breathing scumbags.

[Captain Evilstomper]

why do people think that if they don't want to do something, or they are afraid of it, that no one should be allowed to do it?
if i lived in chicago, i would want to carry a gun. have you ever been there?
even the 'nicer' areas are sketchy at night..



but wait, all handguns are illegal inside the city limits. so chicago should be a crime free utopia with nothing but sunshine and rainbows. ask your cousin the last time he walked around waving a bunch of cash around without worrying about it. i bet you could walk around downtown telling everyone you see that you just bought a new $1200 rolex and isn't it nice?
look at the diamonds in the bezel, isn't that sweet?

[gunrun45]

If he thinks police are paid to protect him he needs to read this. http://publicrights.org/Kennesaw/Pol...nsibility.html

It kills me how many people don't know this and actually use the "fact" that the "police have guns so they can protect us" in debates FOR gun control.

Sheeple will clog the drain someday...

[pullnshoot25]

OK guys, I have even MORE fodder for you guys to peruse, this debate keeps on morphing. I am sure that the collective minds of gun owners can solve this dispute.

Here is the new set of argument material....

There is some serious logic missing from the discussion. I'm just asking questions here, and they seem to be crucifying me. Also, I don't live in downtown Chicago. I live in a nice neighborhood with virtually zero crime, and I'm sure not every household has a gun. I love guns, I love the technology, I love the history, I'm not anti-gun by any means.

I'm sure everyone heard the story about the 8 year old who killed his parents and his neighbor with a .22 rifle 2-3 weeks ago. I'm sure that if he didn't have access to that rifle, they would still be alive right now (its a lot harder for an 8 year old to kill his parents with a knife then it is with a gun). Obviously that kid was messed up, and mentally unstable people will always find a way to kill each other, but seriously... it was pretty easy for that 8 year old. I don't think it should be that easy... this is where my questions come from. Incidents like that make me question everyone's right to own a gun. Obviously the parents are the blame for not teaching him and not keeping the gun locked up, but honestly, some parents are as irresponsible as 3-year old, and I wish we could say "alright, all the responsible citizens can have guns, and all the stupid ones can't" but that isn't what people on this forum are advocating.

When you say "everyone should have the right to own a gun" I get confused, because time and time again, we are shown that some people just can't handle it.

How do we differentiate between the people who should have the right and the people who shouldn't?

Sent in a later email...

Second of all, I agree that everyone should have the right, but its just a hard problem to fix ya know? Obviously if innocent people get killed, and cops get shot while trying to defend themselves, there is a problem with our current setup. If the guys on the forums don't believe the system is flawed, then maybe that is where our different paths of thinking emerge from.

You can post it if you want, but obviously I didn't expect to change minds, I just wanted my questions answered, and no one has been able to tell me how to give everyone guns, but keep cops and 4 year olds from being shot to death.

If people on the forum don't think that those deaths are a problem, and that there isn't a problem with guns in this country, then that is where we differ.

Lets keep this topic going! Come on Calgunners!

[Captain Evilstomper]

it's not the guns, the guns are a tool. most of the people that are shooting 4 year olds in the street aren't legally able to own guns, or they are stolen. these are not legal guns. how about we actually put away some of these people, instead or plea bargaining down to nearly nothing?
and i dare say that life was a lot more brutal and disturbing when guns didn't even exist. we often seem to forget things like that, our 'civilized' society is only really a recent creation. how many people were oppressed by the strong or by tyrants only because they were weak or outnumbered, or a different race, or religion.
'God made all men, Sam Colt made them equal.'

[nick]

“I think its an infringement of my rights to tell me that I NEED to carry a gun to protect myself, I am supposed to be paying people like the police to do that for me. If everyone should have guns, then I should save some tax money shouldn't I?. If I told Fox news that, they would call me "soft on crime."”

Well, to state the obvious, the police, even with the best of intentions, can’t possibly be there for every single individual. They can clean up the mess and find the responsible, yes, but other than that, it’s chancy. Moreover, in many, if not most states, including California, it was determined that the police doesn’t have the obligation to protect an individual, just the society as a whole. Which doesn’t really help the individual potential victim of a crime all that much.
Another problem with this expectation is the spirit of depending on the government, as opposed to striving for individual independence. A society of independent individuals can be great, as this country has proven over the first 100-150 years of its existence. The societies where people depend on their government… Well, do I really need to say more on this?
As far as saving the tax money on the police, it’s also not a good idea. While they can’t necessarily protect one directly, they do a lot to protect one indirectly by putting criminals behind bars, keeping public order (and as such keeping the society from getting into a state similar to that of New Orleans after Katrina, which, armed or not, makes the danger to an individual much greater), and deterring many crimes just by being present. Personally, I don’t begrudge my tax money to the police (well, I would to some departments, such as NOPD, but luckily I don’t live in any such place).
Also, saying that you need to carry a gun for self-protection, which of your rights does it infringe on? Someone other than the government saying this to you doesn’t have any power over you other than that of an advice, which you can either heed or not, as you see fit.

"How do we stop 4 and 5 year olds from being caught in the crossfire of gang shootings? Obviously they cannot carry guns or protect themselves, and I think we'll all agree that even if these kids are safely in their houses, sometimes stray bullets come through windows and kill them, obviously this cannot be completely blamed on their parents. I would like a solution from the people on this forum that address this problem."

Well, first of all, we can’t prevent 4 and 5 year old kids from being caught in the crossfire of gang shootings 100%. No matter what you do, you’ll never eliminate 100% of the crime. Nothing really works 100% in this world, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Moreover, one has to consider the cost of doing things. For instance, Vlad Tepes prided himself on eliminating theft in his domain. Do I need to detail how he achieved such a feat? Just a hint, it had to do with mass executions in a very gruesome fashion. Moreover, he still PRIDED himself in it, it doesn’t mean theft was non-existent there.
Now, on this specific topic, first of all, the guns used in such crimes are usually obtained illegally, and whatever “gun control” laws are passed to combat it, they will apply to legally owned guns. By definition, law-abiding citizens are those who abide by the laws, and criminals are those who break them. So, a criminal willing to shoot someone will be stopped by the fact that the law prohibits him from having a gun?
Besides, even attempting to deal with the criminals’ guns would still be fighting the instrument, and not the cause of the crime. The cause being that gangs exist, and can operate without much of a deterrent.
The various steps that could be taken to deal with this would be to promote (and demand) greater integration of immigrants and various minorities into our society (as it is we promote the opposite), abandoning political correctness which prevents us from doing so, arming the population so that committing a crime becomes a dangerous proposition, changing the laws in a way that doesn’t punish people for defending themselves, get the government out of the family, so that families can exist (as gangsters come from dysfunctional families more often than not), ensure that the punishment matches the crime (and that includes death penalty), the list goes on.


"There is some serious logic missing from the discussion. I'm just asking questions here, and they seem to be crucifying me. Also, I don't live in downtown Chicago. I live in a nice neighborhood with virtually zero crime, and I'm sure not every household has a gun. I love guns, I love the technology, I love the history, I'm not anti-gun by any means."

Well, tempers tend to run hot in such a debate. Part of living among humans. Although a bit more civility would be nice, I agree.
I live in a nice neighborhood which until recently had very little crime. It’s changing though, thanks to a liberal mayor and political correctness. The criminals discovered that nice safe neighborhoods are safe to commit crimes, too, as the people and the police are less prepared.

"I'm sure everyone heard the story about the 8 year old who killed his parents and his neighbor with a .22 rifle 2-3 weeks ago. I'm sure that if he didn't have access to that rifle, they would still be alive right now (its a lot harder for an 8 year old to kill his parents with a knife then it is with a gun). Obviously that kid was messed up, and mentally unstable people will always find a way to kill each other, but seriously... it was pretty easy for that 8 year old. I don't think it should be that easy... this is where my questions come from. Incidents like that make me question everyone's right to own a gun. Obviously the parents are the blame for not teaching him and not keeping the gun locked up, but honestly, some parents are as irresponsible as 3-year old, and I wish we could say "alright, all the responsible citizens can have guns, and all the stupid ones can't" but that isn't what people on this forum are advocating."

Well, there’re a few issues here, but first I’d like to say that accidents, mistakes, etc. will ALWAYS happen. It’s simply impossible to prevent them 100%, and it’s dangerous and detrimental to the society to even try. Preventing them within reason is what the society should strive for. Which is why I have the problem even with the title of the No Child Left Behind act, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
I agree, if the kid in question didn’t have the access to that rifle, this wouldn’t have happened. And he wasn’t supposed to gain access to that rifle. In California, there’s a law saying that if there’re kids in the house, guns have to be locked up. Like with any law, there will be people breaking it, but the law itself (and its proper enforcement) are good enough to deal with this issue. Trying to do more would only mean more government intrusion into the family without much of an improvement.
Preventing the good people from having guns (or driving cars, or… well, you get the idea) because of the few idiots/miscreants doesn’t sound like something that promotes a good society, or a sustainable society in the first place. It seems like that’s where we’re heading though. Also, call me callous, but we keep trying to eliminate natural selection. And to remove people’s responsibility for their own actions (and the consequences). While the former is a noble goal, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I also don’t think that the cost to society is worth it.

"When you say "everyone should have the right to own a gun" I get confused, because time and time again, we are shown that some people just can't handle it."
Yep, and some people can’t handle driving a car, flying a plane, or using a gas stove. Humans are imperfect, and we have to recognize such incidents for what they are.

Also, I don't think many, if any people on the forums mean that EVERYONE should be able to own a gun. Everyone who's not a criminal or mentally ill is more like it.

"How do we differentiate between the people who should have the right and the people who shouldn't?"

Well, the above should’ve addressed it. I can only add that there’re common sense provisions already in place (such as not allowing criminals or mentally ill people have guns). Beyond that, I don’t think any government involvement would do any good, both to prevent such incidents, and as far as costs to the society are concerned.

"Second of all, I agree that everyone should have the right, but its just a hard problem to fix ya know? Obviously if innocent people get killed, and cops get shot while trying to defend themselves, there is a problem with our current setup. If the guys on the forums don't believe the system is flawed, then maybe that is where our different paths of thinking emerge from."

Once again, no amount of legislating will make the society perfect. If nothing else, it’ll make the society crappy to live in, just look at California. Moreover, I’m not sure I’d want to live in such a “perfect” society. Criminals will always have weapons, including guns, and our task should be to protect the non-criminals and to make committing a crime hard. I don’t see how taking guns away from law-abiding citizens and punishing them for self-defense achieves either one of these goals.
It rather reminds me of the debate of eliminating collateral damage (a.k.a. innocent bystanders) on the battlefield. A noble goal, but impossible to achieve (and the attempt to achieve it without common sense, as usually happens, lead to severe costs to society, once again).

[nick]

"You can post it if you want, but obviously I didn't expect to change minds, I just wanted my questions answered, and no one has been able to tell me how to give everyone guns, but keep cops and 4 year olds from being shot to death."

I think, the above addresses it. Also, approaching such matters only from emotional standpoint doesn’t usually lead to any good. To give an example, the last Russian tzar was quite a nice man, much nicer than most of his predecessors. That led to the suffering and deaths of tens of millions.

"If people on the forum don't think that those deaths are a problem, and that there isn't a problem with guns in this country, then that is where we differ."

Once again, not all problems can and should be addressed 100%, and this what this seems to call for.

This person on the forum thinks it's a problem, but just like making police work 100% safe, making sure children are 100% safe, and so on, I don't think that addressing this beyond common sense would lead us to a good society. For that matter, preventing the child from ever getting into a situation where he can get hurt would raise a troubled child, at best. Teaching him how to deal with these issues, and trying to protect him from the dangers he can't handle is what good parents do, as opposed to locking him up in the safe basement and making sure all the corners there are padded.