his little brother or older sister. Just doesn't happen. Oh, wait. It happens several times every week in this country. Oh, well. It's worth it right, ladies on The View? It's okay if one of your kids kills the other one because at least an intruder wasn't going to hurt you.

I'd like to see the stats on that, because, according to the FBI's stats, that's just not true.

In any case, happens way too often.

once is one too many.

Real gun safety is practiced around here, kids should never get their hands on firearms without careful adult supervision. Guns need to be stored securely. Firearm risks can be succesfully mitigated, leaving responsible gun owners with nothing but upside benefits.

Good for you, but there are far, far too many negligent owners.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf

Page 22. As per the CDC, less than 70 children under 15 died from firearms related accidents in 2013. Compare that with drowning. Now, I agree that's too many and we should work to build better awareness of basic gun safety practices. However, citing the more than 300 million guns in civilian circulation within the United States, I'd say we have done a pretty good job of mitigating risk.

Just my .02.

firearms related accidents in 2013. Well, that still is more than one a week.

And another I think 30,000 adults die from guns every year, not counting suicides which are somewhat more than that. And we don't count the cops who shoot people, although cops in most other countries don't seem to shoot and kill people quite so much.

Of course, I'm on record as saying I do think guns should be confiscated, an oddly unpopular stance, especially in this forum. Meanwhile, if you're perfectly okay with 70 kids a year and thousands of adults being killed by guns, that's your choice. Me, I'm not remotely okay with it.

Roughly 67% of deaths in the United States involving guns are suicides. Perhaps you might consider re-examining the facts before taking such a hard line position regarding confiscation.

I'll be honest with you, I love when gun control proponents advocate for confiscation. It helps out the 2A cause better than anything else. It fires up gun owners who respond by buying firearms which supports the industry, and it provides funding for 2A organizations. Our cause has been truly bolstered over the last few years with help from gun control proponents at every level. So, keep up the good work.

You can support gun ownership without "being OK" with violence, suicides, and accidental deaths. Those two concepts aren't mutually exclusive. You seem to be a smart, well reasoned poster here on DU, I'm sure you can concede this point. Gun ownership is a right that is enshrined within our constitution.

the suicides, accidents, murders, and justifiable homicides. Murders last year, according to the FBI, is 8100. 100 people die of drug overdose everyday.
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20141002/heroin-overdose-deaths-doubled-in-much-of-us-cdc-study
While violent crime has dropped, drug overdose deaths have doubled during the past two decades.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/02/07/100-americans-die-of-drug-overdoses-each-day-how-do-we-stop-that/

Just the trivial price we pay for our gun culture.

I just wish, I really do wish, that all of those who justify the guns would themselves personally lose someone to all this senseless gun violence. If you can have your wife, son, cousin, father, best friend, shot and killed and say, "Oh, well, we need all these guns," then you are a monster.

I don't think a single one of these deaths is justifiable or excusable. I only wish they would happen only to those who want to perpetuate our gun culture.

I justify my right to own and use firearms?
That's really fucking sick and you should seek help.

Would you even begin to rethink your support of them if one of your family members were killed? Think very hard about your answer.

What's really sick is that you don't seem to care that others lose family members to gun violence.

is your lying about me.

And if you actually think it's sick that a family member of yours would be killed by a firearm, then you might want to think long and hard about your support of guns.

I'll repeat myself: I just wish that only the gun supporters lost loved ones to guns. Maybe then they'd finally understand what awful devastation is wrought by guns in this country.

and the sick part is that you wish a family member of mine would die by firearm because I justify my right to own and use firearms.

Seek help for this sick fantasy of yours.

about the people killed with them.

How would you reduce the gun deaths in this country? Or are you going to fall back on the "Oh, well, it's just part of life in these United States" that I hear so often. In which case, you really don't care about the people being killed. Own it.

Again with the lies.

I've state often my proposals on reducing firearm deaths, go find them.
And I'll thank you for not lying anymore.

If you are interested only in gun centric solutions, many of which YOU KNOW are plainly and completely unacceptable to us, then you really don't care that much about the people killed with them either, and haven't a leg to stand on.



What non-gun centric ideas do you have? Or are you going to fall back on "reasonable commonsense" gun control we hear about so often, which is seldom reasonable or common sense? In which case, you really don't care about the tens of millions of people who value their rights, OR the people who have died. Its your logic, how about you own it.

Until your side comes to its senses and acknowledges that its not a gun problem, and stops placing the blame where it doesn't belong, I doubt very much that you'll get any cooperation. Its hard to cooperate with folks who can't be bothered to correctly identify the problem in the first place, especially when they hate guns and can see nothing else.

Wishing for the deaths of firearm owners who justify their 2A right is, well, not natural nor rational.

you do not believe in self defense or justifiable homicide but you wouldn't mind a family member of each of the 100 million gun owners being killed?

Who is the monster?

by guns in the household than all of the self defense and justifiable homicides put together. if you really and truly support gun rights, then you by definition must be supporting the potential death of your loved ones by guns. It goes together.

Me? I totally oppose guns to the point I think they should be confiscated. I don't own. one. Never have. Never will. And if I lose a loved one to gun violence, especially to one of the horrendous mass shootings that occur all to regularly any more, then I will NEVER shut up about this.

that not every self defense use results in a fatality. If fact, using data from the VPC I calculated:

1. The murderous vigilante meme is fantasy. The number of justifiable homicides is very low in any given year and roughly .327% of DGUs result in fatalities.
2. Guns are often used defensively; 7.98 times more often than used to commit criminal homicide.
You can check my calculations here http://www.democraticunderground.com/1172179310

If confiscation ever came true and we saved 30,000 deaths (an impossible 100%) we would see a potential 240,000 additional crime victims. Is that what you support?

Yet you are so horrified by the violence, you would see more deaths to end it. If even 1 in 20 gun owners had a family member killed, as you wish, we are still talking Holocaust numbers of dead...

Move along, nothing to see here.

Don't you ever find it at all odd that other countries don't have the guns and don't have the gun deaths?

I have stated my solutions. Several of them involve restricting guns in some fashion. So if you are done with that straw man, go ahead and toss it in the bonfire.

Much of what I have proposed would involve dealing with the human aspect of violence. Social programs to reduce crime and help people deal with anger and stress without lashing out. Those programs, I am told, are "too expensive". So apparently gun control must be achieved on a tight budget. Yet some how trillions of dollars will be found for an 'Australian-style buyback'.

I'm all for reducing violence but I'm not ok with doubling our violent crime rate or seeing 100-1000 times the number of dead to achieve a lower gun violence rate. I guess our priorities are different.

how you ignored the fact the numbers provided by a gun control group totally destroy the myths they put forth.

Instead you change the subject.

If you want the help of people who own guns, to solve this problem, you have to correctly identify it first.

If you aren't interested in doing that, well, you don't have any business pointing the finger at others and making claims that they don't care. It would make you as intractable as you accuse others of being, in which case it begs the question:

How are you any better than us?

...to all this senseless gun violence"

Others have said this, but it bears repeating:

That's a truly fucking sick thing to say. You need to get help

the vast numbers who die every year from guns are just a normal part of life. If you think the guns are justified, then you need to think long and hard about the very real possibility that someone in your family will die from guns. The statistics are sad. If there's a gun in the house the chance that someone will die from that gun is remarkably large. But not to worry. YOU keep yours locked up. YOU only use it against an intruder -- where the fuck do you live that intruders are such a problem? I've lived in 8 different cities in my adult life, never had an intruder, never felt any need for a gun.

It's not sick. It's just reality to suggest that you might lose a loved one to gun violence. My wish is that only those who support guns so wholeheartedly would ever lose anyone that way. Fortunately, that's often the case. Toddler finds gun. Shoots older or younger sibling. Toddler takes mom's gun from her purse, shoots and kills here. Poetic justice indeed.

Actually, that chance is almost nonexistent especially when compared to Drano.
I don't care what some junk study you got from the Brady Campaign says. You actually have a greater chance of

Thirdly, what you call poetic justice is simple bloodlust against you perceived 'enemies'

Again, get help.

The moral high ground is not yours to claim

and confiscate every gun, just like Burundi or even Venezuela. Venezuela still has the second highest murder rate in the world.
Many fear Burundi's door to door confiscations be the start of mass democide not seen since neighboring Rwanda.
If there were no guns, you don't think those suicides wouldn't be rope deaths? Do you think gun laws stop Chicago gangs from getting guns? Ask the folks that work for Charlie Hebdo how France's gun laws worked out for them. Better yet, ask Sabrina Moss about UK gun laws. Oh wait, you can't because she bled to death on a London sidewalk because she walked in front of some gang banger's machine gun.
Gun bans do not save lives. There is no evidence, outside of Bloomberg funded shill studies, that they will. No, not even Australia. In fact, New Zealand is safer than Australia, and see the Gun City TV ad below. No, I wouldn't pay that much for a Chinese made AR.
I had an elementary school classmate and one of my nieces probably wouldn't be alive today if they didn't have access to a gun when they needed it then. Fortunately, my niece didn't have to shoot. Unfortunately, my classmate had to shoot his drunken step father to stop him from literally beating the kid's mother to death.

Forgot the New Zealand commercial

No. Its the price you and everyone else pays for being interested in only gun related solutions, when guns aren't the problem to begin with.

What makes you assume that many of us haven't eh? Because we don't see things the same way as you do? If you try to turn this problem into a gun problem, when it quite clearly is NOT a gun problem, you are no less a monster. It is NOT a gun problem, and the statistics CLEARLY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY show it.

Assuming you have the fortitude, I'll be happy to debate the issue with you, and I will win, because reality is on our side, not yours.

As I mentioned in the other thread, according to CDC WISQARS data (2012), of 4,147 accidental deaths of children aged 0-14, only 62 involved gun accidents (same number as falls). 708 kids drowned that year; 1,418 were killed either in motor vehicles, or from being hit by motor vehicles; 308 died in accidental fires; 94 died from accidental poisoning; and 1,118 died from accidental suffocation. Any of those are a parent's worst nightmare, and all of us take steps to prevent them. But gun accidents are a much smaller threat to children than other accidents, accounting for less than 2% of child accidental deaths aged 0-14.

Since swimming pools are between ten and a hundred times more likely to kill a child aged 0-14 than a gun in the home is, on a per-owning-household basis, isn't it a bit inconsistent to demand harsh laws against owning guns, but not against owning pools, on that basis? I'm not calling you out, just noticing that there is definitely a difference in the tone of the rhetoric in the media, and in the harshness of the legislation typically proposed. Particularly when the primary targets of said legislation (modern-looking rifles) arguably kill fewer Americans annually than bicycles do, though one would never know that from the corporate media.

My wife defended our home and newborn baby, from an intruder at 1AM, with a semi-auto AK type rifle... He defecated himself very forcefully in our living room, when she turned on the lights and he saw an angry, armed "momma bear" coming down the hall racking the action on the AK at this same time... She would have killed him in a heartbeat, had he not collapsed into a stinking pile on the floor instantly, as he was in between her and the babies room.

He laid on the floor, and cried, peed, and pooped himself, and begged for the 45 minutes it took the police to get their.. She had my uncle, and some of my cousins their in just a few minutes as back up. I was at work in the next state at the time.

My wife will never give up her guns after that experience.

I love my Zastava M92PV.

Sorta crude, but very effective..

I can appreciate just about every firearm ever made, but something about the simplicity of an AK action is hard to beat.

I think it is in the realm of possibility that Bloomberg is using the gun control issue as a means to further erode Democratic presence in politics, esp. at the state level where the Party is often non-existent. The man is a "former" Republican, so I doubt he sheds more than crocodile tears when Democrats turn turtle due to his efforts. Further, there is a definite streak of gun prohibition within the GOP: Bennett, Reagan, Nixon, Krauthammer, Bloomberg himself, even John McCain to a degree.

Surely, Bloomberg recognizes the consolidating power of the corporate state, and is quite comfortable with the notion that controls and bans can be accomplished in the near future under the aegis of a corporate consortium, even if the GOPers achieve permanent power. He probably has no love for the Rebel flag-waving, sagebrush-revolting, Bible-hammering far-right, and probably shares the belief with other right-wingers that the "yahoo" crowd can be neutralized in due course, even if gun restrictions begin in earnest. He may be wrong about this, but he is a corporate stateist, and is subject to its core belief of authoritarian autocracy and will act accordingly to ensure a state monopoly on violence.

...to do just that. He is very much mistaken if he thinks he can somehow neutralize the 'yahoo crowd'
They'd turn on him in a heartbeat, and are not uncomfortable with the thought of political violence.