Someone could win that argument......if you gun-toting americans would choose to listen to them........the children.

If the powers-that-be in the US keep thinking the way you so obviously do, I fear your nation is fated to have that kind of violence continue indefinitely.  One can only hope that those children will not have died in vain.  I hope and pray that your nation wakes up and really sees what guns and more guns have and threaten to continue to do to your country.

I meant.. a Teacher.. not a guard.

and please don't tell me.. "I don't understand' I understand.. I just don't agree.

We cant stop the guns, anymore than we can stop the drugs.

Keep well wishing and dreaming.

Yes we would all love to live in Utopia.. unfortunately most of us live in the real United States.. where guns, and bad guys will.. always be.

If you think you can stop it thru legislation, then keep thinking that. I think it's unrealistic.

Take away all the big guns from being bought.. and the end result is.. the bad guys are the only ones with big guns.

Take away all the guns from being bought.. same result.

And If you destroy every gun on the planet.. which, of course, will never happen... People will just use other, perhaps worse methods to kill others.

Timothy Mcveigh didn't use a gun.

I'm done here .. no.. really.

I'd hang my head in shame if I had to look down at a dead family members body...that is provided I survived...after a home invasion knowing if I only had a gun I could have stopped it and they could have gone on to live a long and healthy life. Not everyone is running and hiding from the boogeyman...they take measure to insure their home remains a sanctuary. And until we can rid the world of violent criminals people will do what is necessary to protect their family. And not everyone that has guns is going to expose their child to them...responsible people will store them away out of sight and out of reach. They are not toys and should be treated accordingly. The whole point is to protect ones child from certain and very real dangers in the world. And if you live in a safe place that wouldn't mean anything to you...not everyone does. So again we can go around and around over this issue and in the end we can all just agree to disagree.

Close enough. Be afraid.....be very afraid.

Now you want teachers to be packing heat in school?!!!! WTF!!!

Your fear would be unfounded. You have to have firearms saftey training, pass a series of tests, and be cleared by the FBI and the state law enforcement to get a concealed carry permit. The guns listed are standard for most people to own.

Promise?...       

You stay there.....and I'll stay in my country where we just had front page news of a boy dying of a nut allergy at school after a fellow student offered him a biscuit from his cooking class.....death by walnut biscuit beats your death by assault weapon....    

Looks great on paper. Unfortunately, as all the massacres and far roo many of the killings show, that really doesn't work very well. I wish it did.

Too right, syd. Israel's safer than here... pretty much anywhere is.

That, hopefully, will end or be tremendously reduced.

Anything but give up the gun. Anything.

Heres something I ran into.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8RDWltHxRc

 By the way, I'am an eye for an eye type a person.  It pains me to see people killed like that and especially kids.

WOM....that's NRA-sponsored bullshit.

It isn't real.

I live here.  I know it's bullshit.

Damn, I thought 1/3rd of the people were police officers on that clip.  I guess they doctored the stats also?

Yes....the way we have a 50% increase in gun murders is when a third person is shot....;p

A 'hint' to where that clip is coming from....the American accent....

Just going on that table I linked to....has gun murders in Australia counting at 24 a year..... and 9000 in the US.

The US has 5% of the world's population yet has 50% of the world's privately-owned fire-arms.

Again....hint....it's a US report.... it only interviews pro-gun people.... it's hilariously one-eyed....and wow....it's on YouTube so MUST-BE-FACT.

I suppose I should feel miffed that Oz is being used in such a falsely manipulative way for another countries scare tactics.....but actually... it was so funny....still chuckling....  

How many lives it's saved we'll never really know.....sadly...instead of little Johnny finding Dad's gun at the back of the closet and blowing his or another's brains out.....he now gets run over by Dad in the driveway in his nice chunky four wheel drive.... 

Nut bags and criminals will not adhere to a gun restriction, I mean seriously u really think a criminal is going to worry about the gun their using to rob or kill is illegal? No.

It amazes me tho that the more the people have been disarmed over the years the more gun violence is becoming prevalent..possibly because the populace at large have no defense and the criminals and loon's know this?

When i lived in pomona the locals knew I had fire arms, I nor my home were ever robbed, tho others who did not believe in protecting themselves were.

Most criminals are wussy's, a firearm in there hands gives them a feeling of power over those who are unarmed, give the populace a gun and proper safety training and you remove that power.

Instead of using tragedies like this to promote removing the populaces ability to defend themselves. I would think the masses at large would use this as an eye opener that we need to fund more out reach programs, and dedicate more resources to combating depression and mental illness. the real culprits in this latest atrocity.

But alas, America has always looked for the fast and simple yet usually wrong solution to a problem..

Stats can often be made to look one way or another because we aren't told how they're being manipulated nor the assumptions being made when manipulating them or the samples they're based on. Very, very few of us have learned the mathematics of statistics but most of us have been conditioned to respect what we don't understand... a good example would be the crowds of people waiting to see Albert Einstein get off a plane at an airport. I doubt more than 1/100 (if even that many) understood the mathematics he used, or his theories.... yet they would wait hours.

Bad example Doc, even I might have waited in the crowd to see one of the smartest men in the world and maybe try and shake his hand.  And even though I love math, I would not consider me even close to being as smart as he was.  I'd be on the bottom rung.  I would have loved to talk to him.

We learn from history that gun laws or restrictions are not always a good thing.

The Jewish population in Germany had their guns and ammo confiscated during WWII and were threatened with death for possessing any weapons. The Germans used a gun registry from a few years prior to determine who were gun owners and went door to door to disarm the population.

As we all know, this lead to the genocide of the Jewish population of Germany. Had they had the means to fight back and protect themselves in larger numbers, the outcome would have been better.

While you may say that this would never happen again, it seems that history always has a way of repeating itself.

Look what happened when America banned booze.  Now they are trying to ban cigs. with high taxes and restricting where you can smoke them.  Cars might be in site because they kill thousands of people a year.  Oh well.  Once it starts, where does it end.

Why "cherry pick" that particular episode in the history of antisemitism?

http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/HistoryJewishPersecution/

Well, if you wish, in reality, the Jewish population of Germany believed they were living in an eminently cultured society. No one could have imagined the depraved insanity of "The Final Solution". A handgun in the home would not have prevented that at all.

Acceptance and celebration of people's differences would have prevented that. A world which should have never created the dishonor of the Treaty of Versailles might have mitigated that. 

I hope I'm not reading an implication that giving up their handguns somehow made them an easy target or sheep. It didn't. They were not sheep led to slaughter. They were human beings who believed in goodness and thought the Nazis would be a transient phenomenon. They were deceived and brutally murdered. No handgun or hunting rifle could have prevented that. It took the Allies five years of all out war.

What weapon could have staved that off? Only leaving and going to a Jewish State of Israel could have. Alas, it didn't exist. What did was an area controlled by the British and the Mufti of Jerusalem who was an open ally of Hitler, and a Jew hater.

I don't wish to get into the real history of the Second World War.

As history has shown(above) it doesn't matter how  eminently cultured a society is.  It could happen again and the would will stand around and condem things for years before they do anything.  Didn't the UN just make a bunch of killers civil rights members or some such BS.  The harder you make something the harder it is to supress it and from what I see, we will be supressing a lot of stuff in the near future.  I hope not BUT...

I didn't say they were sheep but being unarmed didn't help them resist. If armed, they would have been able to put up a better resistance. Look at the Warsaw Ghetto uprisings where a few armed Jews were able to temporary stop the deportations to the extermination camps. Had the populace been well armed, things would have been different.

Why do you think the Nazi's didn't try to take Switzerland? Not because they were neutral, it was because every house had a rifle and the children were trained to shoot at 300 yards. The German's trained their solders to shoot at 100 yards and they knew that they were out gunned. This being the case, they realized that there would be too great of a resistance to try and take that country.

Do not take my analogy as antisemitism as it was only intended to prove a point.

History shows that being an armed society is beneficial. Until mankind matures to the point where there is no need to protect oneself, guns will be around. 

The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto did resist. The Jews who joined the Partisans and Allied Armies did resist the overwhelming evil... after the truth was known. 

While your thoughts on other peoples and reasons the Nazis didn't try with them might be correct, but I seriously don't think so. They accepted Swiss neutrality because they needed a go between and because they needed a place to sell the gold they removed from the teeth of the Jews they slaughtered.

Thank you for clearing up that issue although antisemitism regarding you was never in my thoughts. If you reread what I wrote, there isn't a hint of that.

Our dead are holy to us... not only from the Warsaw Ghetto... none of them stood a chance with or without resistance. 

Just let Doc get the last word in and be done with it y'all.

Peace.

Hitler wanted the Swiss gold reserves and free communication and transit through Switzerland to supply his forces. His military planners looked at Switzerland's well-armed citizenry, mountainous terrain, and civil defense and decided that invasion would be a serious mistake. His only option was to allow them a neutral status.

Another point...Switzerland has a higher per capita ratio of gun ownership than the US. By law, every home has to have one and every male is issued one at 21 years old. They also have a mandatory 30 years in the military, 1 year active and 29 years reserve duty. Their gun laws are similar to ours except that fully automatic weapons can be owned by their citizens.

With all those weapons would you believe that Switzerland has virtually no gun crime.

My Grandfather made sure that I was taught the events of WWII as he witnessed them so I would in turn pass them onto my children. He lived in Germany and Switzerland during WWII. He was taught to shoot at 10 years old and could shoot the wings off a fly at 100 yards. When he came to America, he spent 30 years in the Armed Forces. He taught me firearm safety and how to shoot at 10 as well.

I really don't understand why Americans always seem to worship to the great power of the gun without being concerned about the great fear the gun perpetuates. 

Fear begets violence afterall and that is a fact not some bullshit someone dreamt up.  Carguy, you keep holding up Germany as an example of how terribly things go wrong when there aren't enough guns in the hands of the people, as if more public fear of everyone around them is the solution to any nation's problems.  I don't think we need more evidence of how a nation frozen in inaction works do we? 

If the Americans were successful in arming 100% of their nation, you think people would feel safer, less nervous, more united?  I mean when does what I just typed start to sound just plain crazy to someone?  When what happened the other day happens every day?