All-Purpose Shooting Thread

^
It's for the best. The kid obviously had the genes of a total retard.

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For both urban and rural environments, having a gun isn't just about protecting your home or hunting. Just simply having a gun is also a way of exerting control over your world, or at least believing you are. Which is why gun debate in the United States always gets caught up with ideas that owning a gun is somehow necessary for an average civilian, which I'm not entirely sure happens in, at least, Europe.

You mean the place where asking questions about a historical event will get you jailed? Yeah, I can see how enlightened your gun-free utopia is.

V3N0M wrote:

You mean the place where asking questions about a historical event will get you jailed?

Nah, I won't bite.

You really are amazing, V3nom. Every time I think you can't get more absurd you do something like that and knock it clean out of the park.

Absolutely incredible!

V3N0M wrote:

Quote :

For both urban and rural environments, having a gun isn't just about protecting your home or hunting. Just simply having a gun is also a way of exerting control over your world, or at least believing you are. Which is why gun debate in the United States always gets caught up with ideas that owning a gun is somehow necessary for an average civilian, which I'm not entirely sure happens in, at least, Europe.

You mean the place where asking questions about a historical event will get you jailed? Yeah, I can see how enlightened your gun-free utopia is.

Explain.

Lady Anne wrote:

V3N0M wrote:

Quote :

For both urban and rural environments, having a gun isn't just about protecting your home or hunting. Just simply having a gun is also a way of exerting control over your world, or at least believing you are. Which is why gun debate in the United States always gets caught up with ideas that owning a gun is somehow necessary for an average civilian, which I'm not entirely sure happens in, at least, Europe.

You mean the place where asking questions about a historical event will get you jailed? Yeah, I can see how enlightened your gun-free utopia is.

Explain.

He's talking about Holocaust denial, It's typically framed as "questioning history". Doing so can lead to imprisonment in some countries.

Mr.Doobie wrote:

WD40 wrote:

Guns are, basically, tools in the UK, not defence aids, so owning a gun for home or personal defence in the UK was extremely rare.

Maxy wrote:

I can't speak for Americans in urban environments, but in the country, there's still a very much "frontier" mindset in place.

I think the cities are fairly similar to the rest of America when it comes to gun culture. In America, guns aren't just tools, they're kind of seen as totems of power and respect. At least in Philly, owning a gun is a part of a lifestyle. When you're packing you're harder and you feel like no one can fuck with you.

For both urban and rural environments, having a gun isn't just about protecting your home or hunting. Just simply having a gun is also a way of exerting control over your world, or at least believing you are. Which is why gun debate in the United States always gets caught up with ideas that owning a gun is somehow necessary for an average civilian, which I'm not entirely sure happens in, at least, Europe.

I think this cracked article says a lot

What is with these little kids shooting people? Yesterday I hear about this 4-year-old shooting his mom to death. Today it's another 4-year-old putting a 6-year-old neighbor kid in the hospital.

The 6-year-old has died of his wounds.

In other random toddler-shoots-somebody news:
Carroll County Sheriff Andy Dickson told WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News that the mother Rekia Kid, 22, was shot in the stomach by her 2-year-old son...

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Investigators said the mother was sleeping with her three-week-old baby and toddler at the time of the shooting. Dickson said they believe the toddler accidentally shot his mother after finding a Glock 9 mm stored underneath Kid's pillow.

She lives in a remote area, so I guess she needs a loaded gun under her pillow for defense. That worked out well, didn't it?

Oh, here's a toddler-shoots-self story:
3-year-old SC child dead after shooting self in home
This child is now safe from everything that could have ever happened to him (or her) for the rest of his (or her) life.

And just to change things up, here's a grown-man-shoots-self-with-a-gun-that-he-should-never-have-been-able-to-get story:
Pastor Rick Warren reveals his 'depressed' 27-year-old son killed himself with an unregistered gun he had bought online
I suppose some idiot will point at this story and say, "See? Regulating gun sales doesn't work!"

Clearly, the total freedom to buy and own guns keeps us all safer.

Dumbest Poster of the Year, all years wrote:

And just to change things up, here's a grown-man-shoots-self-with-a-gun-that-he-should-never-have-been-able-to-get story:
Pastor Rick Warren reveals his 'depressed' 27-year-old son killed himself with an unregistered gun he had bought online
I suppose some idiot will point at this story and say, "See? Regulating gun sales doesn't work!"

Yes, clearly guns are the reasons a suicidal man is dead. He wouldn't have poisoned himself, intentionally OD'ed (which I guess is basically poisoning yourself), hanged himself, jumped off a bridge or building, moved to Alaska and lived with bears, moved to Canada and died from boredom, or anything like that.

Kentucky 5-year-old gets rifle as gift and shoots 2-year-old sister dead

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White said that the boy had been given the rifle as a gift last year and that the mother had been at home when the shooting occurred. The rifle was normally kept in a corner of the home, but family members did not realize the gun had been loaded.

“It’s a Crickett,” the coroner explained. “It’s a little rifle for a kid… The little boy’s used to shooting the little gun.”

“Just one of those crazy accidents,” he added.

Funny how those crazy accidents happen so often in the USA.

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

Yes, clearly guns are the reasons a suicidal man is dead.

It's not as far fetched as it sounds. Suicide attempts are often just an outcry for help, or done in a moment of desperation. Thanks goodness it is pretty difficult to actually kill yourself. There are very strong psychological barriers that prevent you from doing it. Try stabbing yourself in the chest with a knife - you can't do it. Guns provide one of the easiest methods to cross that barrier and actually kill yourself. All you need to do is pull the trigger.

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

Yes, clearly guns are the reasons a suicidal man is dead.

Oh, look, Mikey's typing hand is on autpilot again.

Let's have a look at this, shall we? Granted, it's Cracked, but at least that means it won't exceed your reading comprehension.

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#3. Two-Thirds of Gun Victims Live in the Same Body as the Murderer

Bizarrely, the entire gun debate tends to completely ignore two-thirds of the deaths: Gun suicides are almost twice as common as homicides in America (19,392 to 11,078 in 2010). You wouldn't know it, since every murder gets reported on the local news and suicides don't, even though they dwarf murders by a wide margin (maybe even more than the stats say, since loved ones have motivation to cover up suicides). The reasonable person will reply, "But that's not saying anything about guns, Cracked -- if depressed people want to kill themselves, they'll just find another way!"


Actually ... no, they won't. Whether guns are legal or not, whether you believe in gun control or not, here's the most important reason you'll ever hear for not keeping one in your home. It has to do with ovens.

In the first half of the 20th century, ovens in England used to burn coal gas, which happened to be completely lethal in concentrated doses and was thus the preferred way to commit suicide. By the late 1950s, sticking your head in the oven accounted for nearly half of all suicides committed in England. By the early 1970s, these ovens had been phased out, so nobody was surprised to see coal gas fall out of the top ten British suicide methods (one of Cracked.com's least popular recurring articles). So what did all of those suicidal people do instead? In a startling number of cases, they just went right on living. The suicide rate dropped by a third, and it never went back up.


Wait, really? The decision to off yourself is kind of a big one, isn't it? It's not the sort of thing you just wait to do when the opportunity arises and your schedule opens up. Yet you can find plenty of examples of people being inconvenienced right the hell down from the ledge. Adding a suicide barrier to a bridge in Washington lowered not just the number of suicides that occurred on that bridge, but the overall suicide rate (meaning those people didn't just go find another bridge to jump from). A study of more than 500 Golden Gate Bridge jumpers who were stopped in the act found that 94 percent didn't try it again.

Suicides, it turns out, are often split-second decisions -- add even a few minutes' thought or just plain inconvenience to it, and a lot of the victims change their minds. Of course, that's not possible if your method involves instantly splattering your brains all over the wall with one pull of the trigger. If a bridge with a low barrier and a coal gas oven are Regis Philbin asking you to lock in your final answer, having a gun is like the Jeopardy! clicker -- all you have to do is press one button a single time and it's done. No going back. So it's no surprise that one of the biggest risk factors for suicide is simply having a gun in the house.



And nobody wants to talk about it, even though this is twice the problem of all other gun violence combined. Gun suicides kill the equivalent of two Sandy Hook shootings a day.

Oh look, Mikey was wrong. News at eleven.

WD40 wrote:

The US is very, very big. the UK is very very small. Also gun culture in both countries is vastly different. Even prior to gun control the vast majority of gun owners were farmers and/or groundskeepers/fans of pheasant or clay pigeon shooting. Guns are, basically, tools in the UK, not defence aids, so owning a gun for home or personal defence in the UK was extremely rare.

It was actually a lot more common right up until the scare over anarchists around the turn of the 20th century.

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The rise in gun crime is also affected by the increasing availability of guns, legitimate or not. (It's also worth noting that "Firearm crime" in the table Penguin put up post gun control most likely also includes the crime of "owning a gun".)

This is what we mean when we talk about "making criminals of the law-abiding."

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I would like to ask one opinion though - I saw a comparison of owning guns to owning cars. With one person stating that if we treated guns like we treated cars then this would mean that everyone should complete a training course, and face regular checkups, along with having specific laws over the maintenance and general ownership of guns. This idea was presented as preposterous and unworkable. I want to know why.

The thing is, you don't actually need any of that to own a car, at least, not in the US. There is no law stating that a minor cannot purchase a vehicle, and if they only operate it on private property, nobody needs a license, insurance, etc. At least in theory, anyone, including a kid, can have a car shipped straight to their door and tool around the yard in it or whatever, and break no laws. The fact that kids with that kind of money and space is extremely rare is why you generally don't hear about it, but then again, this is why parents in rural areas can let their kids operate vehicles on the property/farm/whatever. There is no age limit, no background check, nothing. As long as you don't operate it on public roads, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.

This is already far less restrictive than our gun laws.

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From my ignorant little corner, trying to peek in on an area that I know little of, the idea of mandatory classes and a test to qualify for a gun licence seems like a good idea. A lot of the stories I hear (utterly anecdotal, I'll admit) of accidental shootings and the like seem to suggest that better education and a focus on the proper handling of guns seems pretty sensible, and a farley workable compromise.

The person who dismissed the "gun education" idea out of hand never explained why he was so opposed, but this seemed to be a pretty firm and entrenched opinion of his. Any ideas/comments in this?

From my point of view, most of these classes are woefully inadequate and in many cases merely breed complacency, e.g. "I'm qualified, I know what I'm doing- OOPS" Cops are some of the worst offenders in this regard, as infamously demonstrated by DEA Agent Lee Paige.

Basically, these courses give you the minimum safety knowledge and proficiency to safely handle a weapon if you've never touched one before, while giving the student a piece of paper that says "You're good to go, you know what you're doing!" Two weeks ago I had to deal with this personally when a new airman came into my room with his M16 and acted the fool. The whole time I was telling him to knock that shit off, he insisted he knew what he was doing and there was no way anything could go wrong. Long story short, that guy wound up demoted. Fortunately, nobody got hurt, except financially. But his first experience with firearms was basic training and requalification before deployment, then was given a rifle to carry everywhere. He knew what he was supposed to do and not do, but he thought he knew better, and acted like a dangerous toolbox. This is with that "special military training" you've been hearing so much about when people think only cops and the military should have guns.

There's more to it than that, but Larry Correia sums it up pretty well.

Then there's also the issue of rights. "Sorry your boyfriend is stalking you, lady. Have a restraining order and we'll be on our way. Maybe. What, you want a gun? Well, pony up for this two-week class opening next month and you can start thinking about it."

Quote :

[edit] Alternatively there's the Chris Rock solution:

Nobody tell him about how easy it is to make ammo at home.

Disco Stu wrote:

I think this cracked article says a lot

Says about as much as Bowling for Columbine. "Here, let me make a shitload of anti-gun arguments and then say 'but I dunno lol' at the end to look like I'm not advocating gun control!" Yeah okay, sure. Make your arguments rife with stereotypes and then dismiss anything that can be used against them because "all the information (except mine) is too politicized!" That's not lame at all!

19 Injured in New Orleans Shooting

Just thought I'd leave this here.

Lady Anne wrote:

Just thought I'd leave this here.

If you think that $8 million is enough to get Congress to override the will of 90% of Americans, I've got a bridge to sell you. And if you think those stats were in any way legit, I'll throw in the Eiffel Tower at no extra cost.

Woman opens fire on team of wealth redistribution technicians

An imminent future shooting

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Well played.

But really, Ghostbusters 3? Number two wasn't bad enough?

Not sure if this fits here, but has anyone else also noticed a rise in people stabbing one another to death in the news? It's like suddenly everyone is killing one another of the media just decided that this year is "Oh shit look at THAT death!" year

I propose an IQ test for all residents of a home before anyone in that home can purchase a firearm.

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Police said Nico Sanders was playing a zombie game inside the house with his twin brother Marco and their friend Trevor. Trevor pointed an empty bow at one of the twins, and Nico obtained a .40-caliber handgun from his mother’s night stand drawer and started playing with it, according to Fort Smith police.

Nico pointed the weapon at Trevor and fired it, after which a bullet struck Trevor in the upper torso near his shoulder, police said.


Neighbors were uneasy about guns being kept in insecure places in the neighborhood.

“I think one of the worse things you can do is to not train somebody on how to not use one because the curiosity obviously is what kills the cat,” said Sam Mcallister.

sauce

Louisiana pastor shot, mid-sermon.  It gets crazier.

CNN.com wrote:

(CNN) -- A sheriff says he's closer to finding the motive behind the fatal shooting of a Louisiana pastor who witnesses say was killed by a former deacon as the horrified congregation looked on.

Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Tony Mancuso said Tuesday the alleged gunman's wife had filed a rape complaint with police against Tabernacle of Praise Worship Center pastor Ronald Harris on September 25, two days before the shooting.

In the complaint, the woman said Harris had raped her several months ago, according to Mancuso.

He declined to release the report, saying it was part of the murder investigation against former church deacon Woodrow Karey. Mancuso said he had not determined whether a rape had occurred

Well... That's pretty fucked up all around.

Well, shoot.

Alabama fan shoots fellow fan... Because she didn't take the loss to Auburn hard enough...

Deadspin wrote:

Adrian Laroze Briskey is charged with the murder of Michelle Shephard following Alabama's stunning loss to Auburn in Saturday's Iron Bowl. It's unclear what exactly happened, but according to the victim's sister, Briskey murdered Shephard because she was not sad enough about the loss.

That is Soccer Hooligan-level insanity, right there.

Local news link.