America's Gun Fetish

[marti]

Another number of people shot and two killed in addition to the murderer and what is the response of the gun lobby? They are holding a rally near the theater in support of the right to bear arms. Polls show that a majority of US Citizens support the right to bear arms of all kinds. The stupidity never ends on this topic.

[Manforallseasons]

Yes it is stupid but the subject of your post is not specific to Thailand and belongs in the Global forum section.

[thaiguest]

Yes it is stupid but the subject of your post is not specific to Thailand and belongs in the Global forum section.
Yes it does belong elsewhere and it is stupid to post about it here but we all do stupid things sometimes. USA gun law is understood only by Americans and seem stupid to outsiders but Americans are not normally stupid people; they're careful with money, they invented the WWW, they helped win WW1 & WW11, they went to the moon and back and cleverly modelled Disneyland on Thailand.

[Brad the Impala]

Americans are not normally stupid people; they're careful with money, they invented the WWW, they helped win WW1 & WW11, they went to the moon and back and cleverly modelled Disneyland on Thailand.

Also prone to exaggeration and believing that they are all powerful. I believe that the World Wide Web is commonly acknowldeged to have been invented by a Brit.

[egel]

the World Wide Web is commonly acknowldeged to have been invented by a Brit.


Correct; WE did invent it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

Yes it is stupid but the subject of your post is not specific to Thailand and belongs in the Global forum section.
Yes it does belong elsewhere and it is stupid to post about it here but we all do stupid things sometimes. USA gun law is understood only by Americans and seem stupid to outsiders but Americans are not normally stupid people; they're careful with money, they invented the WWW, they helped win WW1 & WW11, they went to the moon and back and cleverly modelled Disneyland on Thailand.To this list we can add "have no idea about world history and indeed very much at all".

[arsenal]

Talking of America. If Donald Trump becomes President then American politics will become a fully fledged branch of the entertainment industry.

[marti]

Appears that some of you are obsessed with being as anti-American as you can be.

[Manforallseasons]

Yes, the Yanks have made some mischief but they stopped German from becoming the national language of Britain.

[scottish-guy]

Since Hitler had given up on invading Britain more than a year before the Americans entered WW2, how do you come to that conclusion?

Furthermore, do you hear the Poles, the Czechs, the Belgians, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, the Italians, large parts of Russia, or even the inhabitants of the tiny Channel Islands speaking German?

Whilst I don't seek to minimise the contribution of America to the defeat of the Axis powers in any way, I rather suspect you've been watching too many Hollywood movies.

[Manforallseasons]

Without "Lend Lease" Britain would not have had the where with all to continue, but your a Scott so I understand your inability to comprehend this, oh and considering your age your information must have come from Talkies.

[Oliver]

The Soviet Union made the biggest sacrifice of all ; 27 million dead. And then had to put with Stalin for another ten years!

[Manforallseasons]

The Soviet Union made the biggest sacrifice of all ; 27 million dead. And then had to put with Stalin for another ten years!

Very valid point, an argument could be made that they really won the war, they were also a recipient of "lend Lease". If anyone is unfamiliar with the battle for Stalingrad it would serve you well to familiarize yourself with it.

[thaiguest]

Americans are not normally stupid people; they're careful with money, they invented the WWW, they helped win WW1 & WW11, they went to the moon and back and cleverly modelled Disneyland on Thailand.

Also prone to exaggeration and believing that they are all powerful. I believe that the World Wide Web is commonly acknowldeged to have been invented by a Brit.

I stand corrected on the WWW-I thought that it was a rare positive off-shoot of the US military communications web.
I acknowledge that one can be negative all day long about Americans but on this occasion I wanted to be positive. All I said re WW1 & WW11 is that they HELPED. Nobody but the bloody-minded can argue with that.
One glaring positive I forgot -it's established to my satisfaction at least that MFAS is himself a son of Sam.

[scottish-guy]

.... your a Scott so I understand your inability to comprehend this, oh and considering your age your information must have come from Talkies.

I don't take lectures from people who can't even spell "Scot" - far less ones who are old and decrepit enough to have got much of THEIR information on the world from silent movies never mind "talkies".

:))

Yes, the Yanks have made some mischief but they stopped German from becoming the national language of Britain.However until the Great War German was the domestic language of the British Royal Family.

Talking of America. If Donald Trump becomes President then American politics will become a fully fledged branch of the entertainment industry.
The Huffington Post announced some days ago that they were relegating stories about the Trump campaign to their entertainment pages. Perhaps you're the person from whom they got the idea?

[Surfcrest]

Trump is currently ahead of Jeb Bush in the polls for the Republican nomination, so is Trump really the crazy one or are all the ones they polled not that much far behind?

Surfcrest

Trump is currently ahead of Jeb Bush in the polls for the Republican nomination, so is Trump really the crazy one or are all the ones they polled not that much far behind?You'd be far better informed if you read Five Thirty Eight (http://fivethirtyeight.com/politics/) rather than hoping for an intelligent answer here

[oldfarang]

The "average" intelligent level of American (USA) citizins:
[youtube:gi238nst]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mWtWz_aGyk[/youtube:gi238nst]

The student generation does not do any better:
[youtube:gi238nst]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_pw8duzGUg[/youtube:gi238nst]

and back to the original thread Americans and Guns Fetish,
Comedian Jim Jeffries makes excellent points:
[youtube:gi238nst]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTyQ4Q8z-D8[/youtube:gi238nst]

[Surfcrest]

I was watching the news early this morning when they played the shooting of a beautiful young reporter and a cameraman live on TV. Now I see it's the main story today across North America. Clearly this guy had some sort of mental illness that perhaps wasn't being addressed or treated apart from simply being angry about being fired. This sort of thing is not unique to America or any other country, a pilot from an European carrier crashed the airplane he was flying killing everyone on board. Where the problem is amplified in the United States is with the easy availability of guns and some ancient constitutional belief that America is not safe unless the people are armed.

It may be one's constitutional right to own a gun, is it not another's right to not being shot...like what happened in Virginia today?

Surfcrest

[fountainhall]

I find the whole "I have a constitutional right to own a gun" more than spooky! The gun lobby, arguably the most highly paid and effective group of lobbyists in the entire USA, state this is an unequivocal right as guaranteed by the second amendment - "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Yet, as many are perfectly well aware, that is not in fact what it says. That is not a sentence in its own right. It is merely part of longer sentence which in full reads "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

With in excess of $600 billion spent each year to maintain its armed services, there is surely now absolutely zero requirement for a "well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state." When that Amendment was incorporated there may well have been a need for individuals to bear arms. But the arms then in existence were not AK47s, not multi-chamber shotguns, not assault weapons capable of killing dozens of people in a matter of seconds. They were simple and not very accurate muskets!

The US has some 300 million+ guns in private hands. The gun lobby point to countries like Switzerland which proportionately has a similarly high number of guns in private hands. Typically selective, this fails to acknowledge that unlike the USA all able-bodied Swiss men must undergo military service when they are supplied with rifles. These they may retain on leaving the service provided they obtain a permit and the gun is converted from fully automatic to semi-automatic. The type of ammunition that may be purchased is highly restricted.

Another difference: in 2014 Switzerland with a population of just 8 million had 18 homicide attempts using guns, the lowest for 33 years.

It is generally assumed there are about 300 million guns in private hands in the USA with the average owner having 6 weapons! Finding statistics about gun-related deaths is not easy but again it's assumed recently to be around 33,000 per annum. This figure includes approx. 22,000 gun-related suicides. So the
homicide rate is considered to be around 11,000. Any comparison with Switzerland is pie in the sky hogwash!

Two years ago Bloomberg estimated that by this year the number of deaths by gun violence (including suicide) will have surpassed the number of deaths in road accidents.

[Smiles]

" ... With in excess of $600 billion spent each year to maintain its armed services, there is surely now absolutely zero requirement for a "well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state." ... "
The far right in America would not accept that particular interpretation.
In their never ending paranoid world-view these angry folks see the US military, not as their savior, but simply as part and parcel of the overall conspiracy of the military/industrial/political elite to create a New World Order: in other words, a fully armed 'militia' is necessary ~ the last bastion in fact ~ to save the country not only from the political elites, but the military elites as well.
This crazed nonsense is all over YouTube. A favourite loon of mine is Mr Alex Jones ... take a boo at him on YT. He is very popular, has millions of followers and is the very epitome of the heart of darkness in America.

[fountainhall]

I'm well aware of the far right and their paranoia re what the government in Washington might do. I also know some informed and otherwise sane Americans who go ape shit the moment gun control is mentioned. But I always assumed that the Supreme Court reviewed the background and intent of a law when coming to judgements (well - most of them, given that the right has a majority on the Court). Yet in 1876 that same Supreme Court ruled -


"The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence" and limited the applicability of the Second Amendment to the federal government.
And even in 1939 it ruled -


the federal government and the states could limit any weapon types not having a тАЬreasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militiaтАЭ
That 2nd Amendment resulted from the then English Bill of Rights which permitted Protestants to bear arms "for their defence". However in reality it was to protect the rights of the very limited aristocracy to hunt on their massive estates. Neither law has any relevance today!

[christianpfc]

Thanks to fountainhall for providing some facts.

I estimate after WWII, more Americans were killed by guns in their own country than in all wars the US fought.
(Actually invasions or looting trips to secure natural resources.)

Guns and abortion are non-issues in Germany, ask a German what he thinks about the right to bear arms or about abortion and you will get a quizzical look.

https://xenohistorian.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/right-to-arm-bears_thumb.jpg

[Surfcrest]

Another shooting in the United States.

Surfcrest

[youtube:18m6gbji]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrcf1cYCuDw[/youtube:18m6gbji]

[Maxxy]

And now a radicalized 15yo muslim in Australia shoots at police and kills one before he gets taken out, sorry if it's off topic about shooting in the US

And now a radicalized 15yo muslim in Australia shoots at police and kills one before he gets taken out.I've been trying to think of an appropriate phrase ever since I heard the news, along the lines of "two cans short of a six pack (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=two+cans+short+of+a+six+pack)". "Two head jobs short of enlightenment" doesn't quite cut it.

This is a particularly sad news story (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/toddler-eian-santiago-accidentally-shot-dead-by-six-year-old-brother-while-playing-cops-and-robbers-a6699461.html). Afficionados of Thailand will know the serious consequences of brothers playing with guns even if one mistakenly believes the gun isn't loaded