Steve McQueen would have been the coolest.

It was put in the constitution at the very beginning of the US being independent as it was felt it was a measure needed to help protect the new country. What never happened was as the need for its ordinary citizens to be readily armed decreased and then basically ceased they didn't revise the constitution (as they have done in other areas) to remove the right. I guess it should never have been a right in the first place but a duty which might have made it easier to get rid of.

Now the gun-lobby will cite this right and the yanks are so certain the constitution protects their freedom's it will never be amended out of it.

What does my head in though is the blindingly obvious facts that legal gun ownership making guns so readily available is a big reason for these killings is argued against by all an and sundry over there. Many legally bought guns are also stolen and used in crime so even the cases where illegally held weapons were used can be traced back to the simple fact there is such a plentiful supply.

Even over here the few gun massacres we have had have been virtually all been carried out by people with a legal right to own the guns they used.

Actually, the newly independent USA was governed by the Articles of Confederation, individual citizens freedoms and rights established by the Bill of Rights , the first 10 amendments to the US constitution, came later.

Quote ="rumpelstiltskin"A better actor and President would have been Paul Newman. '" Quote ="BrisbaneRhino"Steve McQueen would have been the coolest.'" Two of my all time favorite actors. Particularly Newman. I'm still partial to Newman's own to this day. It's my way of giving back. Below are two fantastic profiles of the men in question. I can't quite think why I like these two particular biography's over other's written. rolexblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05 ... ewman.html rolexblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11 ... queen.html

Quote ="rumpelstiltskin"A better actor and President would have been Paul Newman. '" Quote ="BrisbaneRhino"Steve McQueen would have been the coolest.'" Two of my all time favorite actors. Particularly Newman. I'm still partial to Newman's own to this day. It's my way of giving back. Below are two fantastic profiles of the men in question. I can't quite think why I like these two particular biography's over other's written. rolexblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05 ... ewman.html rolexblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11 ... queen.html

Time to act Mr Obama and friends.....

I think you'll find the President attempted to sit down with the NRA in 2011 to discuss gun control but the mainly right-wing nutjobs weren't having any of it.

[urlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/nra-obama-gun-control_n_2003446.html[/url

Hopefully public opinion will shift massively now after this and the NRA voices will be a small minority.

The scary thing is I've just heard an American guy on the news saying that maybe an answer is to have teachers armed so they can protect themselves

I find this anti american attitude very unfair.

America is an equal opportunity country.

They execute people who are mentally ill and also have such lax gun rules that mentally ill people can own guns.

There are not many countries in the world that have such an equal opportunities approach to mental health

I've just been reading comment's on another forum I visit which has a lot of American's and I just can't get my head around their view's.
A lot of them still think that owning a gun is a good thing.

"people will still do these sort of thing's even if they are illegal"

Yep, of course they would, but by putting gun's in the hands of those people surely they are a big part of the problem.


Personally, I think they should be banned. however It would take decades to clear thing's up. How would they be able to trace and confiscate what I can only imagine to be a massive amount of guns. However banning them is the first step. If they are banned guns won't be "normalised" and maybe attitudes towards them can over time start to change.

But guns don't kill people...

Prank calls don't either...

But you can still end up with the same outcome..

Unfortunately that is a very, very common attitude and public opinion is dead set against the banning of guns, constitution or no constitution.

I commented on an Amercan blog last month after a post by the author, who is a keen gun enthusiast, which emphasised the right to arm oneself and the public duty to arm oneself, and the "what would happen if you confronted a burglar" excuse. Someone had mentioned that the UK has strict gun controls and yet "In the London riots everyone was armed", I simply had to correct that view and politely pointed out that one police force reported having a few shots fired at them and that the initial incident was all about a stop and search for illegal weapons but in reality almost 100% of the rioters were not armed with guns and neither were the police.

I also pointed out that we don't have a police force or vigilante citizens out on the streets willing to shoot at anyone looting a shop just in case they shoot first and that our prefered method, which caught thousands of petty criminals during those riots, was to film everything and then go around to their house later and pick them up.

That post finished that thread, there was no response to it, there was no need for as I pointed out, thats the way we do it but they have gone too far down the line now and even with 99% of the citizens backing such an act they cannot put the genie back in the bottle, they will never ban gun ownership because its now impossible.

The project manager who was in charge whilst I working on the new airport currently being built in Doha was an American from Florida. He though it was cool to own 2 handguns and a pump action shotgun. I came back to the Uk in July and met a colleague of his and he said he owned a combination of 6 handguns/shotguns. WTF?

If the last book you read was chewable then I guess Eastwood's films are pretty sophisticated. The funny thing is they are often so far to the right they become unintentionally satirical. Take "Dirty Harry", for instance. You can easily perceive it as a critique on the perils of reactionary justice. However, it's only when you pinch yourself and realise Eastwood REALLY DOES think it's perfectly acceptable to torture confessions out of suspects that the whole thing takes on a sour taste.

If Clint Eastwood were alive in the 1930s he'd be one of the many Americans (like Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford etc.) who thought fascism was a good thing.

Only a fascist could make that execrable piece of "J. Edgar", a film in which he attempts to provide a "balanced" take on an "icon of American law-enforcement". This is like Joseph Goebbels saying "The Eternal Jew" was an even-handed take on race relations.

At the risk of agreeing with some of the very people I can't stand - the presence of guns in a society is not [ia posteriori[/i evidence of wide-scale gun violence. Canada has enough firearms in circulation to win half-a-dozen world wars and yet, despite its proximity to the States, doesn't suffer anywhere near the same number of casualties.

Americans have always feared the untrammeled violence of the state and widespread circulation of firearms was meant to discourage anyone from curtailing those freedoms many of their European ancestors didn't enjoy. I think the fear was and remains reasonable and so was the solution. That said, whilst prior to WWI citizen militias could probably hold their own against armies of the state, pitted against satellite imagery, Apache "Longbow" helicopters and Hellfire missiles it's doubtful the Minutemen could offer anything more than token resistance.

It's very difficult to argue for gun ownership in Britain without keyboards being tossed into the air in horror and mothers ushering their kids out of the room. Invariably the response is [i"Guns kill people, duh!"[/i and before long one or more people are being labeled Nazis. If you are lucky enough to get beyond first base and point out that against the British state we have almost no means of defence should we need it the reply then is something along the lines of [i"We're not likely to"[/i. Given this country's long and bloody history in addition to the huge number of problems which have broken on us or are about to (the current economic malaise, the far greater one when this last debt bubble we've created implodes on us, global warming, peak oil, global shortages of water, food and other finite resources, overpopulation etc.) I'd say this is a naive assumption.

Why it is that there is almost complete unanimity on the question of guns in society is an interesting question. After all, alcohol has always been a far bigger killer than firearms in Britain yet you don't see 95% of people arguing to ban it. I think it's no-coincidence that the government and the media combined (in one of those rare moments when both sing exclusively from the same hymn sheet, which should be suspicious in itself) to hit guns when they were at their weakest post-Hungerford following decades when civil unrest was a major political issue (the miners' strike, Poll Tax etc.)

Returning to the US, I'd argue that it is the proliferation of guns [iwithin a fundamentally corrupt and unjust, militaristic and economically polarised nation deeply divided along lines of race, religion and class [/i that leads to widespread gun violence.

The problem with a reasoned argument in favour of gun control is that ultimately the reasoned argument becomes meaningless when the gun licensing laws are made obsolete and they are on sale in Asda.

At that point every citizen who hasn't got a big enough cock wants the biggest gun that Asda stock that christmas whilst every citizen who can't be d working for a living but prefers robbing instead is also stood behind them in the checkout queue looking over their shoulder and wondering if they picked up enough ammunition or whether they should go back and get some grenades as well.

Its pointless telling those with small cocks, the criminal and the ones with brains that don't quite work the same way as the rest of us that the right to bear arms is purely for protection against an over-zealous state, should that ever happen, when that statement will whizz by fifty miles above their heads and you end up with the same situation here that they have in many areas of the US where YOU buy a gun because you want to shoot a burglar dead should you ever be visited by one, or the bloke down your street has got a gun and you know for a fact that he's a nut-job and you want to protect your family on the day when he finally flips.

The same point. Was put to a ex teacher who lives near the incident. The person asking this was a BBC news reporter.

So its not just those crazy Yanks.

I think that sentence sums it up nicely. Gun laws on there own wont do a great deal in a Nation that is fundamentally Paranoid.

But it is a valid point. If all the Teachers were armed they could have taken out the Gunman.


Although if the gunman was a teacher then that would make it worse.

Now if all of the children had been armed and trained then they could have taken out the gunman and would also be able to take out any crazed teachers who pose a risk to them.

The problem with America is that not everyone has a gun. If all the unarmed were armed that problem would be solved. I do feel that they should put Gun training on the curriculum for all children aged over five and that it is the duty of all parents to buy their children a gun at the age of five as a type of coming of age present.

Maybe that is what the gun lobby should be pushing

Nail....hammer....head.

The best you will ever get is a law restricting ownership to possibly one gun per household, and maybe a maximum amount of ammunition also.

I wouldn't expect that to happen any time soon though.

If guns were instanly banned tomorrow, it would probably take 50-100 years before guns did not become readily available, because of the sheer amount of guns in that country.

Yes, guns do kill people, but you still would need to justify why you would need and want to own a hand gun in the first place. The police don't want to be armed, and if we had referendum the outcome would be the same, the people of this country don't want guns in society. As for no defence against the state, so what, should I be having paranoid delusions that one morning I going to wake up and find myself under martial law?

Whilst there's no disputing that they have a lot, they wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list. If you substitute the emotive terms "weirdos and idiots", with "people who randomly murder large groups of strangers" then you'll agree there are more dangerous places in the world. Would you feel your kids were safer in Connecticut, Helmand, Kabul, Bogota, or the Gaza Strip?

Can't disagree with a word of that. the only thing I would add is each child U-5 top becompulsorily accompanied by an armed guard paired up from the 5-11 age group. Ammunition vending machines on each corridor would be good too.