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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Guardian 2000: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: [qb] People in Jamaica are dying mostly due to gangs and a severe lack of police. Severe lack of decent jobs, crappy schools and overpopulation in key areas and extreme bigotry and violence towards gays are real issues as well. I've heard several horror stories from friends from Jamacia that make me never want to visit. But that's Jamaica.[/qb][/QUOTE]Yes . . . and? So what if it's Jamaica? So what if they have other issues? I thought the correlation you guys were making is that guns = lots of dead crime victims, whereas no guns = virtually no dead crime victims. By pointing to Jamaica's cultural and socio-political issues to explain away the missing correlation there, you just inadvertently agreed with me that those are relevant. Our disagreement is over how relevant they are, because even given one of many examples where the correlation you seek to prove fails, you're still arguing based on the correlation. I'm not saying we should ban Saturday night instead of the [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special]Saturday Night Special[/URL], but banning the latter isn't going to change the nature of the former. [QUOTE][qb]Also to Cho himself, that whole "he could've used explosives" still holds no water: explosives are extremely difficult to aquire (100 times tougher than firearms at least)[/qb][/QUOTE]Wha? I'm not talking about military-grade explosives . . . even homemade crap with off-the-shelf supplies will suffice in the example. Hell, for 300 bucks (the approximate cost of one of his guns) you could whip up a 50-gallon drum's worth of a fair approximation of napalm, with just two ingredients that cannot be controlled. Made thick enough it's not even all that smelly. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out a delay mechanism for a centrally-located blasting device designed to spread it around and ignite it. (I'd explain the procedure, but I trust you'll understand that I've been hesitant in giving examples of such things. I doubt Flare has its own Cho lurking, and there are undoubtedly plenty of places on the internet to find such dirty little secrets, but I'm certainly not going to be the one to reveal them. Hell, watch McGyver.) [QUOTE][qb]and making your own- even primitave gasoline bombs) is very difficult without killing yourself in the process or having to throw it (molotav cocktail) with yields poor results and usually only makes a fire (which is something that rarely is used as an intentional way of killing someone).[/qb][/QUOTE]Wha? Maybe it's just me, 'cause I used to know a guy who would make various methods of blasting tree stumps on his property, but given the availability of even simple stuff like fireworks I fail to comprehend your thinking that homemade bombs are prohibitively dangerous and/or hard-to-get and/or expensive. [QUOTE][qb]Guns have a fear stigma that other weapons lack- no one charges a nut with a gun becaus you can be shot several times before you're in range to hit them with anything- any other type of weapon can be faced with at least [i]some[/i] chance of success. [/qb][/QUOTE]Who was it that talked about throwing a chair? You don't charge a gunman like a WW1 soldier running across No Man's Land . . . you either luck up and tackle him from behind (like the ROTC guy) or you produce a method of deflecting or preventing fire while you advance. I'm not saying going against a gun-toting badguy is my first choice if I'm unarmed, but the principle here is that I wouldn't want to be unarmed, certainly not disarmed, and I can't figure out why others would in a world where Chos can get guns. The only valid reason to talk gun control here is in regards to keeping guns out of the hands of crazies like Cho. [QUOTE] Originally posted by bX: [qb]Guns that, to my knowledge, were purchased legally.[/qb][/QUOTE]Precisely. He was known to be mentally ill and dangerous, and that was a failure of Virginia law. A backup to that failure could've existed if the campus had not been a gun-free zone . . . that ROTC kid could've been packing and wouldn't have had to try to tackle a gunman . . . but that didn't happen. You know, even in New York city schools back in the 60's or so, they had rifle classes. Guns, in school even! Yet no one shot up the schools. So yes, we can talk gun control inasmuch as loons with guns ought not be allowed, but we should also recognize that a major problem is that there were only two guns at the scene of the crime, and both were the badguy's. We should also recognize the cultural issues that led to this particular badguy, and his desire to be a gun-wielding murdering lunatic. Because the simple fact is, you cannot control "weapons in general". Even in the environment of a prison, ostensibly the area of greatest weapon control in the world, shivs are commonplace items. But that's the culture of the prison population. The best thing you can do is to try to have a culture where weapons won't be used so callously. Failing that, make damn sure that the situation is akin to what Yamamoto was pondering regarding an invasion of the United States . . . "there would be a gun behind every blade of grass." [/QB][/QUOTE]
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