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Originally Posted by Fotzlid
out of curiosity, have you ever been under fire and if so how did you react?
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outside of the corps, i've been around a shooting once. my reaction was to grab my wife and get her out of the firing line. I was unarmed and could do nothing else.
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Originally Posted by angelica
And probably made the scene ten times worse..
Do you really think a "lawfully armed citizen" would have been been able to accurately gauge where the shots were fired from, and not shoot randomly, possibly causing more harm than good? Gut reaction would have made this situation worse...in my opinion.
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are you basing your opinion on any relevant experience or factual information? or is it simply how you feel?
roach, believe it or not, I was following your post quite well for once, until I got to this part....
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Originally Posted by roachboy
but because i see violence as primitive and a gun as a crude instrument, the combination seems to me an expression of a simplistic, unthinking attempt to impose a primitive order on a chaotic situation. so i see it as doomed, as failing, as impotent and ultimately as weak. but as i am writing this, i realize that i already slid from the mall scenario into more political situations--distancing myself from violence again.
so i imagine people with guns shooting and missing--i dont believe that anyone faced with an unexpected violent situation on the order of the mall shooting would remain calm. they aren't calm in a war situation---people miss alot, and folk who are killed as a consequence are folk who are in a war zone--however in a war, violence is itself not arbitrary----while a kid who opens up with a gun in a mall does so arbitrarily.
the distinction lay in how the situation is defined up front.
you might not expect exactly what happens to you in a war, but you know in a general sense that its possible because the situational definition tells you that.
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Upon reading these two paragraphs, I could only see your projection of your inner feelings and emotions again.
I don't like violence. I don't like how it hurts people. I don't like how it makes me feel afterwards, especially if I've had to hurt others using it, but most of all, like you, I see it as the result of failed thinking.....most of the time.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
shopping in a mall does not tell you that violence is something you should be thinking about.
it just doesn't.
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8 people in an omaha mall probably agreed with you. So did 31 VT students. Millions of people all over this country agree with you. But as we've seen numerous times, there are others who view violence as either an enjoyable hobby or as a last escape from a world that they can't control anymore. It is these particular times when I'm reminded that we should ALL be thinking about the possibility of violence occurring, because it can...and does.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
so it seems to me that the percentage of people who would remain entirely cool and collected in a mall shooting situation is pretty fucking minimal---because i think that folk who are strapped are tempermentally the least likely to be able to handle arbitrariness--if they were cool with unexpected situations in general, they wouldnt be strapped in the first place. so i imagine innocent people getting shot up.
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I see this as being entirely based upon your own perceptions and projections. I interact everyday with people who are carrying a gun and i've only had one person who didn't 'feel' right and left me disconcerted about this person having a gun. Otherwise, everyone else has always acted calm, rationally, and deliberately with all of the actions and reactions. This must be because of life experiences and the differences between ours.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
i dont understand how anyone embraces violence.
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I embrace it because it's real. violence exists and there is nothing you, nor I, can do about it. By ignoring it or pretending that it's not there is, to me at least, denying part of reality, living in denial, or just plain not being aware. That is surreal, ignoring reality.
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Originally Posted by ktspktsp
You know, it's possible that having many armed people around could have taken that asshole down while he had killed less people. It's also possible that more people would have died of random shots.
But, having many people carrying weapons all the time, concerns me. Because there will be cases where people fight over random stuff, and it's possible that someone will use a gun then.
I don't have any data to back this up. But I feel the deathtoll caused from having many people armed all the time would be higher than the amount of lives saved in specific cases like this one.
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This has been claimed every time a gun law is relaxed in a state. While there have been a couple of incidents to occur, there has been no blood in the streets.