11 year shoots 8 year old dead!

So bizarre? So the war on drugs is working? And nobody would dare smuggle anything illegal into the US? And violent criminals would resort to using sharpened sticks instead of guns? What planet are you from, and where exactly is it located?

That right there is the only thing that actually protects us from tyranny. So let's make sure our armed forces are intelligent, well educated, and have plenty of civic engagement with the rest of us. Guns don't protect us from tyranny, education and knowledge do that.

No one but you is declaring a War on Guns.

He's an idiot, best to pay him no attention.

ticket it for public drunken disorderliness.

You're kidding, right? What next, we circumnavigate the globe in search of a white whale?

Not exactly true gul. What protects American citizens in large part from a tyranny of their own government is that

A) Generally most members of America's government would like to think that people support them and have little interest in actually exercising tyrannical power.

B) The American military is extremely professional. Generally the more professional an army, the more reluctant it is to oppress its own people. Which was one of the factors in the fall of the governments of Eastern Europe in 1989.

Well, I was really talking about B in my post, as it applied directly to his example. But I agree, because of point A, point B is just a back-up.

B is also an example of why Americans should get beyond "founding fathers worship".

The American founding fathers based on their experience with the British had a huge mistrust of a standing, professional military. Hence the 2nd Amendment, Hence the Amendment about quartering of troops in peacetime. All based on seeing a professional army as an instrument of oppression.

Also, it went back into the history of the first large professional armies pioneered by Frederick the Greats father where standing armies were largely made up of the scum of the Earth because middle class professionals were too important to a society to function.

In the founding fathers view, a standing army was largely made up of lower class, landless bums and thugs who saw being a professional head basher to be the way to get ahead in life.

In Australia, the amount of guns are distributed throughout a pretty even demographic. Hence lesser guns would equal lesser crime. But here in the US if one demographic turns in their guns but another demographic (the demographic with the higher crime rate) does not, the crime rate will not drop very much. Sorry, but demographics are an integral part of the mathematical equation, at least here in the US. In Australia, not so much. This is the X factor you just don't understand.

The latest (accidental, but attributable to Stupid Parent Tricks):

Cops: Boy, 11, Accidentally Shoots and Kills Brother, 12
Brothers were on a target-shooting outing

See there was more than one gun and it would not have happened if the dead boy had also grabbed a gun at the same time.

Oh, wait.......

Dayton, the British had had standing Armies for hundreds of years prior to the American revolution. The desire not to have a professional army is an American thing and a lot of the justifications just were platitudes due to not being able to afford one.

WTF? So the British professional armies went up against a ragtag group of ill equipped civilians? Damn that doesn't sound very fair to me.

Really now? I mean I love a hair-trigger as much as anybody, but a gun that fires under it's own power sounds kind of dangerous.

It is one of the reasons they won the vast majority of battles.

You don't need to use code -- I'll translate:

It's true that Oldfella is being his normal, plantation minded self, and statistically white people are much more likely to be killed by other white people than black people, but he is right about one thing. Demographics is the elephant in the room when it comes to discussing violent crime statistics.

Pretty much what all the anti-abortion activists say, too. Why not post some pictures of aborted miscarried fetuses while you're at it.

The guns are what forces the issue. It would be a lot easier for someone to go along with doing shit they know is wrong if it doesn't involve killing anyone.

Exactly. Without guns you can compel masses of people to do things and it doesn't look like you're doing it by force. Even the soldiers rounding people up could just think that they're conducting a relocation for the public's safety. The victims get passed from one place to another and finally end up at a very bad place where very bad things will happen to them. In contrast, if the soldiers trying to do the initial round-up had to do so under fire, everyone would realize that somebody in government is trying to do some very bad things. Whatever the issue at hand, it would get a whole lot of scrutiny and most people would think very hard about what was going on.

To keep that from happening, governments pass gun control measures requiring registration, licensing, and tracking, and often outright bans. Turkey passed such laws in 1911 and 1915 and then killed over a million Armenians. The Soviet Union passed such bans in 1918 and 1920 and then killed 20 million peasants. Germany passed gun control laws in 1938 and then exterminated 20 million undesirables. Guatemala passed gun restrictions in 1947 and 1964 and got rid of about a hundred thousand Mayan Indians. Uganda passed gun control measures in 1970 and within a year started killing Christians, eventually getting rid of 300,000. Rwanda restricted gun ownership in 1979, so by 1994 there were 800,000 unarmed Tutsis to take care of. China banned guns in 1935 and then proceeded to kill 10 million political opponents, and then the communists upped the gun penalties to include death and killed over 20 million more. In almost all these cases, things started slowly and stayed under the radar for a long time because it didn't look like anything was going on, as opposed to "sharp fighting broke out between government forces and ..."

It is far out, it doesn't happen. Thats not to say it won't happen and it is good to be prepared, but it doesn't happen. Your district would be far better giving you a role play scenario of what to do when a disenchanted pupil turns up with a bag full of guns looking to get even with the system.

Wait a minute, last time I logged on you had turned a thread about a kid shooting another kid into fears of ISIS marching on American schools, now you are suggesting if Americans give up their guns, the government is going to start taking you all out?

You must be at it!

No, I'm pointing out that a disarmed population seems to be a pre-condition for a genocide carried out by a people's own government. Gunfights always draw attention, especially from the media. "If it bleeds it leads" has been the norm for several centuries of news reporting. Upon taking casualties, the usual response from government is "Let's talk about this." Reporters arrive to cover the stand-off. Everything is forced into the light of day.

In countries without a free press the soldiers are still reluctant to get shot dead while stealing from the poor to give to the rich. In Latin America the Spanish brutally oppressed the unarmed natives. In the US we sold them guns and later had to negotiate with them, often finding them better armed than our own army. The result was that in a hundred years of warfare out West, and average of only two soldiers per state per year got killed, and the Indians were winning on body-count the whole time. So now they run casinos and oil fields and the Army names all our helicopters after them, and Native Americans pilot those helicopters.

We have always had crazy people who think the solution to all their problems is to wade into a place where nobody is armed and just "kill them all." Sometimes these crazy people are actually stone-cold logical. Sometimes those people attain high positions in government where they could actually carry out such acts on a large scale.

Our government has sometimes done horrendous things to unarmed people, such as the Tuskegee experiments carried out on prisoners. But such plans for big segments of the population don't work if the intended victims can fight back. Almost all US gun control measures were aimed at disarming black people. Not only did those not work to reduce crime, they created enclaves where crime thrived because nobody could fight back and remain within the law.

How many times would some politician position some heinous relocation program was "well meaning" and carried out a forced clearing of a problematic ghetto if he could just peacefully evict all the black home owners and stick them in some new government section-eight cinder-block apartment complex? All for their own good of course. Bill Clinton even advanced the idea of letting police sweep through black Chicago government housing complexes without warrants because technically they were living on government property. Had he succeeded, a few angry old black women shooting a few cops in the head probably would have stopped the plan in its tracks.

The US Constitution establishes that our government is our servant. Our servant won't rebel if it knows we'll kill it if it gets out of line. It's not in charge. We are.

No interested in the abortion bullshit because, again, it's something we've gotten beyond in Europe for the most part. We don't let stone age religious bullshit get in the way of that.

I think we can conclude @Stallion that this thread is something of a lost cause.

I'm waiting next for "the government is secretly keeping a frozen alien army in Area 51 so we need the guns for when they're defrosted and unleashed on us....".

No, we need the guns for Agenda 21 and the upcoming UN sponsored coup.

You are wrong. It has been statistically proven that most crime victims/aggressors are within the same race. That is black on black, white on white, etc.etc. So let's put protection aside, since it's largely ineffective (again, statistics & facts). That leaves blacks as the demographic with the highest gun violence rate. Again, we can't cherry pick statistics. So my point is 100,000 gun owners in Nerdville Kansas will have a much lower gun homicide rate than 100,000 gun owners in Newark, Chicago, Memphis, etc. Note - throw suicide out of the mix. Does Australia have a similar demographic situation? Weigh in, Aussies! Is this a factor in your country? I honestly never researched it.