Sarge, great to have numbers on this ! Looks as though the incidence of gun accidents has been exaggerated somewhat in the service of an agenda, would you agree?
Also,
I see that a lot of posters are from the East Coast. I was corresponding with someone from NY who told me they can't even carry pepper spray there. Unfreakinbelievable.

I support the idea of the waiting period, background check and safety information.
As far as the idea Hev mentioned, of only allowing rifles or large weapons so they can't be concealed: same old problem with criminals carrying illegally-bought small guns and the law abiding person being virtually unarmed when he/she goes out.
Laws against concealed weapons are a great asset to a mugger. They hate it when people might be carrying a gun...they do not want to die or even be shot in the leg any more than anyone else.
The workday is far easier on their nerves when there is little to no chance that their prey will be armed.

The state of eternal vigilance doesn't mean looking over your shoulder for a baddie. it means to be aware that nobody takes away your freedom. The advantage of a democracy is that you can use the state apparatus to maintain civil liberties and freedom. Doesn't require guns or armed conflict to be eternally vigilant
So you got dirty politics. How does owning a gun secure you from exploitation by the government? that is what i meant when i said it doesn't serve the purpose you get it for. The right to carry arms is the lollipop the government sticks in your mouth while they loot and pillage the country. you have poor and desperate people in the US. That is the fault of the government. So instead of spending the money where its needed, they buy a couple of new billion dollar weapons, then stick you with the spiel that as long as you have a gun you can protect yourself and bob's-your-uncle problem solved. Not really. people are still poor and desperate enough to mug you.
Humans do horrible things to other humans. but they always do it because they feel they have been wronged themselves. There is always a justification. And in the case of a poor ghetto dwelling uneducated exploited youth, he might have seen so much misery that he wouldn't really consider a beating, killing or rape any worse than what he himself has endured. Yes there are crazies out there, but not enough to justify the number of guns around.
Machiavelli speaks for his time. Not for todays IT world.
One thing that came to light after Katrina was the abominable conditions many people were living in before the hurricane. Couple that with a lousy rescue effort. Is it weird that they went absolutely nuts?

Hkjabwa,
Most people inherently want to be good. But not everyone. You simply cannot project this idealized portrait of human nature; it's not like that.
[/quote]
This idealized picture of humans is not a statement of what is. But rather a statement of what humans are built to be given the right nurturing

Lidwen Wraith wroteETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY.

This statement was delivered by Wendell Phillips in an address before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society on the date 28 January 1852, and published in Public Opinion. The phrase is not in quotation marks. It has been said that Mr. Phillips was quoting Thomas Jefferson, but in a letter dated 14 April 1879, Mr. Phillips wrote: " 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty' has been attributed to Jefferson, but no one has yet found it in his works or elsewhere." It has also been attributed to Patrick Henry.

There is also a similar phraseology: "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790.

hevusa wrote:
That's because you don't really want to "buy a bag of marijuana".

Sorry, I should have said "legally".

I didn't know that. I'll have to look into that.
Thanks for the info.

The remark about eternal vigilance had the exact connotation I implied yesterday: it is about keeping an eye on a country's OWN leaders.
I do not spend my time looking over my shoulder for "baddies". Apart from its obvious utility for self defense, the right to bear arms fosters liberty by not putting citizens at the physical mercy of a possibly corrupt government.

You can be excused for not knowing the history of the United States since you are from a different country. But for your information, "the government" did not come up with this idea. A handful of brilliant men came up with it - men whose immediate experience had been oppression by their government.
Tanks that whole lollipop theory doesn't it.

.

This premise is absurd and I reject it out of hand. Basically all it says is that it's the government's job to make sure everyone does well financially.
Pish and rot.
And naturally I disagree with any conclusions that flow out of such a wrong headed premise.

If that's what you think, then you either have not read it or have not been able to recognize its applications in many nations in our own time.

Doesn't matter if it was weird or not weird. You completely dodged my point. My point was that there would not have been those crimes committed if law enforcement had been present.

That is everyone's hope, of course, including mine. Religions think of this as a coming "Kingdom of God" with various names...

But you are not going to make it happen by forcefully depriving responsible people of their right to bear arms.

I'm not talkin about the kind of accidental death when the gun suddenly goes off and shoots someone in the head. I'm talking about how so many people who have used guns and shoot people later regret the decision.

Fair enough, Hayling:
Sarge provided some numbers....can you?
Exactly how many people in the USA per year fly into a rage and shoot someone and then regret it later?
And of course I mean the ones who don't get caught, because obviously getting caught would be the precipitating cause of regret in so many of those cases.
And you know,
I don't really think it is that many; here's why:
someone in a rage can kill with a poker, a baseball bat, an ax and so on, with just a little bit more exertion. Indeed, they often do.
Or they can pour gasoline and set the person's bed on fire; some do that also.
Granted guns make it possible to commit murder from a slightly more distant location and make it safer - but how important do you think that difference is to someone in the heat of a blind unreasoning rage?

Sweet!! i look forward to your replies every day wraith anyhoo here goes:

You got a 9mm. The government got tanks. You are still at the physical mercy of a possibly corrupt government.
Oppression by the british monarch i.e an external entity ruling over you. That state of affairs most certianly justified this right to bear arms. It was a need of the time. Now there is no external force that threatens you. At least not one you can defend yourself against with a gun.
So now the only reason you have a gun is because you need to protest yourself from other equal american citizens that might threaten you. Suppose your government spent less on nukes and the likes and spent more on public infrastructure, education, healthcare and the likes. Don't you think that would reduce the threat from your fellow citizens?
.
It is not the government's job to make sure everybody does well financially. It IS however the government's job to make sure that equal opportunities exists for all ( which they do not) to make sure that nobody goes to bed hungry in the world's most powerful economy ( which they do), to make sure that everybody has a roof over their head ( which they don't), to make sure that ghetto life isn't at par with a 3rd world country ( which it is).. you know all those details that governments ARE responsible for. Security of basic amenities and rights goes a LOOOOOONG way to prevent violence and crime.

True i have not read it. And i do not deny that it probably still has a huge amount of relevant applications. However, you must also understand that our technological advancement changes the nature of world relations. Economic warfare is the name of the game today. People think and feel differently. The average mind has changed due to our ready access to information. That brings with it a set of conditions machiavelli could not possibly have considered.
Actually as we can see, there was nobody there to help those people. If they had been rescued in time, they might not have felt that they could take the law into their own hands. The point is that given the choice, sending in rescue missions took priority over law enforecement. How can you enforece law on a desperate population? I just say that the same list of priorities governing the rescue mission (rescue first, police later) should be applied to overall style of governance

No doubt. Removing weapons is not the solution either. Making weapons redundant IS however a solution, and i don't think enough attention is given to that. Instead i feel that US media consistently makes its population feel MORE at risk than they actually are, giving them MORE reasons to purchase weapons. i realize it sounds like a conspiracy theory. But think about it. All my arguments are not really for a ban on weapons. they are all arguments for why weapons don't help.

Forget kingdom of god. I'm talking about the kingdom of logic. Look nobody believes they are evil. Evil is a description that is always applied from without. If we could just stop defining others as evil, we would go a long way towards feeling at ease.