Ajw71 wrote: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. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/nra-obama-gun-control_n_2003446.html

Ajw71 wrote: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. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/nra-obama-gun-control_n_2003446.html

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 poop "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.