I think we can all agree that guns kill and it might be a good thing to ban them from the streets of San Francisco.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...BAGMTB4NTL1.DTL

[ February 03, 2005, 12:30 PM: Message edited by: MPetrelis ]

"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will ..."

Yes, guns, like electricity and automobiles, kill; that's just a fact. As for whether it's good to ban them from the streets of SF, sure, good idea. But try to enforce that with the homies down in Hunter's Point, the Western Addition, Ingleside or Sunnydale, where they're used with wild abandon. Easier said than done - and which of your vaunted Supes will be the first to disarm these ultraviolent renegades?

send Chris Daly out--it's his bill, I think

as much as I would like to see guns off the street, this ain't gonna do it

to me, this is like abortion

if you want to make abortions less common, you don't outlaw them--that just drives them underground

you have to change the culture--and in this case, you need to enforce the laws already on the books better

I find it hard to believe how a great majority of people on this site can believe that Bush is the antichrist and if he and his religious right wing cronies had the chance to exterminate the entire gay population, they would do so in a heart beat; yet I fail to comprehend how our community can not support and rally around 2nd Amendment and our right to bear arms. We should be arming ourselves to the teeth.

Don’t depend on the police to protect you when the shit hits the fan. The LA riots after the Rodney King verdict proves my point. When chaos and mayhem ruled the streets of LA and businesses were being looted and burned to the ground, where was LAPD? While many neighborhoods and communities were torched and pillaged, businesses in Korea town survived. Korean shopkeepers armed with AK-47s and semi-automatic weapons stood watch and patrolled the rooftops of their businesses b/c the LAPD refused to access the riot zone.

We live in a great country but I believe anything and everything is a possibility. I just read "1984" and if you think that is far fetched and it can't happen, then you're not paying attention to what's going on in the world around you. Some people already think we're headed for a totalitarian state especially after the results of the last election. We should be voicing our disapproval on the proposed ban of guns in San Francisco.

I am reminded of a definition I read:

A Democracy: Three wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.
A Republic: The flock gets to vote for which wolves vote on dinner.
A Constitutional Republic: Voting on dinner is expressly forbidden, and the sheep are armed.
Federal Government: The means by which the sheep will be fooled into voting for a Democracy.
Freedom: Two very hungry wolves looking for dinner and finding a very well-informed and well-armed sheep


I want to be well-informed and well-armed.

I'm not sure if we'll ever get rid of guns, but it needs to be done so voluntarily. And not by laws, but by a change in the mindset of Americans. We live in an ultra-violent society. The number of homicides and violent deaths is 100 times the rate of that of some other "civilized nations". You can turn on the TV and see Steven Segal or Bruce Willis, or Arnold shooting up hundreds of "bad guys" like its nothing. Our movies, television shows, songs, and video games reduce the killing of humans to a trivial level and desensitize us to the value of life. This eventually leads to a 'I've got to kill them before they kill me' attitude. And the sensationalizing and accompanying paranoia only exacerbates the problem. Maybe one day we'll evolve past a level of barbarism....

And you're confident that no one will be better-armed?

Or that no one who is equally well-armed will sneak up on (or outnumber) you, shoot first, and steal your gun from your cold, dead hands?

Good luck with that.

[quote]danimal:
[QUOTE]And you're confident that no one will be better-armed?

Or that no one who is equally well-armed will sneak up on (or outnumber) you, shoot first, and steal your gun from your cold, dead hands?

Good luck with that. [/quote]I will never forget the story my former assistant told me when a group of "miltia" came to "cleanse" their apartment building. The dwellers were outnumbered and under-armed. But they were determined to fight to the death. After many shots rang out and a few dead on both sides the "miltia" decided to move on to a place that wasn't as well armed or determined.

One of the first things his family did when the fighting broke was to arm themselves. His brother armed himself with a gun he pried out of the cold dead hands of a man who was unlucky to have been picked off by a sniper. Might not have helped the dead man, but it helped the brother during the attack on the apartment.

So are you saying it is better to be unarmed than under-armed? - Good luck with that as well.

I swear there was lawsuit in the 1980s about how only guns, not bullets and ammo, were protected under the Second Amendment, but the Supreme Court tossed out the suit.

Does anyone know about such a suit? Maybe it wasn't a federal lawsuit, but perhaps filed at the state level.

I'm saying that the difference is less than you might think. A gun only protects you if your enemy doesn't have a bigger one or more of them -- and, more to the point, if you get the first shot.

Besides, if militias (note spelling) are raiding your building, you're already in worse trouble than anything short of an army can get you out of. It's like putting all your money into gold in case the banks collapse -- if gold is the only thing with any value, someone will break into your bunker, kill you, and steal it.

I'm not saying resistance is wrong, or even futile. I'm saying romanticized notions of resistance, with no strategy or resources to back them up, are useless except to those whose goal is martyrdom. The Alamo was not a heroic last stand. The Alamo was a defeat. Anyone who starts a war had better be prepared to finish it. eek!

"militias cleansing apartment buildings" ???? I never realized that Kansas had such turmoil and anarchy!

[ February 08, 2005, 06:41 AM: Message edited by: HotlantaTarheel ]

This couldn't be a better time to reopen this debate in light of the lawlessness we see swamping New Orleans. I bet the lawabiding citizens and businesses wish they had some guns to protect their loved ones and their property.

By Larry Copeland, Laura Parker and Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY

In the sewage- and water-filled streets of New Orleans and as far north as Hattiesburg, Miss., about 70 miles inland, there were clashes involving fists and guns — and increasing questions about a lack of security. In Hattiesburg early Wednesday, police reported that a man had been shot during an argument over a bag of ice.

In New Orleans, the looting continued: in some cases by stranded residents desperate for something to eat or drink, in other cases by opportunists loading up on electronics, weapons, drugs and alcohol. Looters went from building to building in the historic French Quarter. The city's 1,600 police officers, backed up by about 300 state police and some National Guard troops, were too busy to stand in their way.

The city looks "like a war zone," said Meredith Byars, 35, a law student at Tulane University. "People were pushing shopping carts up and down the street. People were blatantly walking off with stuff."

Byars said she and a friend passed a plywood board that had been nailed over a building's windows in their Garden District neighborhood. On the board was this spray-painted message to looters: "Don't try. I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer."

The New Orleans' Times-Picayune reported that the city's Children's Hospital was being threatened by looters and that staff members had locked the doors to try to keep them from breaking in. The newspaper's Web site also reported that looters who ransacked a local Wal-Mart had cleaned out the store's gun department.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin acknowledged that armed gangs of men roaming the flooded streets were a growing problem.

In the city's Carrollton section, looters used a forklift to smash through the windows of a pharmacy. They made off with so much ice, water and food that some of the items fell from their arms as they fled, leaving a nearby street littered with noodles and other items.

At the Covenant Home, a facility for the elderly, executive director Peggy Hoffman said there was enough food to last another 10 days, but that the home's 80 residents were evacuated after looters stole one of the facility's buses.

"We'll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot," she told the Associated Press.

For local authorities, security efforts initially took a backseat to rescuing stranded residents. But the persistent reports of looting, and the increasing perception that New Orleans was out of control, made security a more urgent priority.

"I don't think our country has seen anything as catastrophic as this, but you've got to deal with this (looting) simultaneously," said James Lee Witt, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) who plans to go to Louisiana next week as a consultant in the recovery effort. "You've got to put enforcement in there to take care of it."

Love that last line. Where is the enforcement? Oh yeah, they're over in Iraq, where they don't belong. Our own people are suffering, yet Bush can't do anything about it due to the fact all the "enforcement" is overseas. What a charming president Bush is! So effective when it comes to helping his own during a natural disaster! What planning!

So, watching CNN, I'm astounded how a natural disaster leads directly to senseless (as opposed to the other kind: 'I'm thirsty and need this bottled water') lawlessness. funny how all the folks looting looked like a bunch of poor black folks (yes, I know it's 95 degrees and the men are shirtless or wearing 'wife-beaters.')

Maybe, just maybe, aside from the desperate people, these were the people without cars, too poor to flee, who've got nothing, and never had nothing. Just musing. Can this be true?

Since the subject of economic disparity has come to "guns" and the "NRA" I looked for some articles that I remember reading or reading about:

American Dream Tarnished By Widening Wealth Gap

Killing for scratch on BMW reveals China's wealth gap

Inequality of Wealth and Income Distribution

Doubly Divided: The Racial Wealth Gap

Guns are not a solution, only a symptom of an underlying disease. As more communication reduces the "size" of the world, people become more aware of their relative economic status, and the possibility that it could, and should, be something other than what it is.

[ September 02, 2005, 12:07 AM: Message edited by: sportinlife ]

Gays, guns and the NRA - let's keep all three!

Guns keep people in line. Not just criminals, but your government as well. You don't have to own one. Just the threat that you might own one is enough.

LXN

Seems to me that unless you believe everbody who wants one should have his own tank, we all believe in some level of gun control. So, we're just deciding on where to draw the line. And we do this with a lot of other subjects. The right answers are usually somewhere in the middle; like for most of us, moderation is the best answer.

Certain guns should be outlawed. Come on, hunters don't need AK-47s. Hardly fair to the game they're chasing. Numbers of guns by indivuduals should be limited. You don't need a weapons cache to stop an invader coming into your home.

But having just spent a year overseas where about everyone had a gun, my old fears about guns aren't as hard-core as they used to be.

People should be allowed to have "a" gun. Training should be mandatory and negligence with your weapons should be toughly prosecuted.