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Junkie
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Originally Posted by dc_dux
Some of you guys just cant accept the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans can have honest, thoughtful positions that challenges yours for whatever reasons they may believe is valid...without calling them cowards ("scared of firearms"), ignorant of the Constitution, or leftists.
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and some of us just can't stand them being ignorant of the constitution. I've known quite a few 'fudds' (that would be those who consider the 2nd Amendment is about hunting) and urban transplanters who feel that we get our rights handed to us from our benevolent government, which is bassackwards and just totally wrong.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dc_dux
Are the 50+% of gun owners who support an AWB (according to several national independent polls) the ones who are scared of firearms or ignorant of the Constitution or leftists? Or could it be that they honestly dont see the need (or a right) for a private citizen to own a semi-automatic weapon when their home protection and recreational needs can be met with a handgun or sporting rifle.
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They may be any or all of those things, but the one thing for sure that they are is that they are scared of their fellow law abiding citizens and would rather see them limited in their arms instead of providing the means for their own adequate and equal defense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dc_dux
(ps KirStang...thank you for being one gun rights advocate who can understand and even support why many Americans see the value of mandatory child safety devices as one component of reasonable gun control that they feel is still needed.).
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value or hindrance?
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Shouldn't we repeal the gun laws ... if it'll save a single child?
By Vin Suprynowicz
Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot; her father taught her. And there were adequate firearms to deal with the crisis that arose in the Carpenter home in Merced, Calif. -- a San Joaquin Valley farming community 130 miles southeast of San Francisco -- when 27-year-old Jonathon David Bruce came calling on Wednesday morning, Aug. 23.
There was just one problem. Under the new "safe storage" laws being enacted in California and elsewhere, parents can be held criminally liable unless they lock up their guns when their children are home alone ... so that's just what law-abiding parents John and Tephanie Carpenter had done.
Some of Jessica's siblings -- Anna, 13; Vanessa, 11; Ashley, 9; and John William, 7 -- were still in their bedrooms when Bruce broke into the farmhouse shortly after 9 a.m.
Bruce, who was armed with a pitchfork -- but to whom police remain unable to attribute any motive -- had apparently cut the phone lines. So when he forced his way into the house and began stabbing the younger children in their beds, Jessica's attempts to dial 9-1-1 didn't do much good. Next, the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight.
"When the 14-year-old girl ran to a nearby house to escape the pitchfork-wielding man attacking her siblings," writes Kimi Yoshino of the Fresno Bee, "she didn't ask her neighbor to call 9-1-1. She begged him to grab his rifle and 'take care of this guy.' "
He didn't. Jessica ended up on the phone.
By the time Merced County sheriff's deputies arrived at the home, 7-year-old John William and 9-year-old Ashley Danielle were dead. Ashley had apparently hung onto her assailant's leg long enough for her older sisters to escape. Thirteen-year-old Anna was wounded but survived.
Once the deputies arrived, Bruce rushed them with his bloody pitchfork. So they shot him dead. They shot him more than a dozen times. With their guns.
Get it?
The following Friday, the children's great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, told reporters: "If only (Jessica) had a gun available to her, she could have stopped the whole thing. If she had been properly armed, she could have stopped him in his tracks." Maybe John William and Ashley would still be alive, Jessica's uncle said.
"Unfortunately, 17 states now have these so-called safe storage laws," replies Yale Law School Senior Research Scholar Dr. John Lott -- author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime." "The problem is, you see no decrease in either juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides when such laws are enacted, but you do see an increase in crime rates."
Such laws are based on the notion that young children often "find daddy's gun" and accidentally shoot each other. But in fact only five American children under the age of 10 died of accidents involving handguns in 1997, Lott reports. "People get the impression that kids under 10 are killing each other. In fact this is very rare: three to four per year."
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__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
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