Opinion on guns?

Question

How do you guys feel about guns? I am from America and we love them over here (most of us do anyway). I just want to see how another part of the world feels about the same issue.

Just to say how I feel:

Well, I agree with most of you. 56 million people murdered in the last 100 years because they couldn't protect themselves.... that defeats accidental deaths greatly.

Also, a real Texas boy would never die from a gunshot. He is smarter than to shoot himself and is going to shoot anyone trying to shoot him first.

Also, America has fewer Virginia tech type shooting per students than England, Germany and a number of other European powers.

People who are properly trained and practice common sense will never shoot themselves. The real danger is people who don't really care much for guns but decided to pick one up to see what it was like untrained, ignorant and dangerous... everyone has an opinion though, thanks for sharing yours.

.....I'm from Texas, too... Yay Texas!

Answer 1

I like the way all of the Brits chimed in on this issue. But, if my knowledge of history serves me correctly, James Madison (a fellow Virginian) penned the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America based specifically on the lessons learned of an oppressive government -- England -- over her colonies.

Don't get me wrong, I love the UK and the people that I have met there. I have been there many times; in fact, I spent a good part of this June in London and the surrounding area. But, IMHO, this is not an issue one can fully understand without living here in the States. And from its inception, the Second Amendment is primarily in place to protect the citizens from the government.

Secondly: Is there violence with guns? Sure there is. I work in an emergency room and have for 9 years. I have to say that I have seen many people shot. Not one was an accident. Almost all of the people I have seen shot were bad people shot by other bad people... the kind of people that don't obey laws. And I for one, do not want these criminals being the only armed individuals in our society.

Answer 2

I was a shooter in the UJ, I was a member of Bedford Shooting Club on Clapham Rd in Bedford. The laws for ownership of firearms in the UK required a 100% clean criminal record and you had to be a member in good standing at a club or had to have written permission to hunt. The thing is that that no-criminal-record requirement is higher than the standard for being a police officer, so if you need ten people with a completely clean record in Britain you'll find them at a gun club.

There were two major incidents in the UK, Michael Ryan in Hungerford was the first and Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane was the second. Michael Ryan was a nutcase and I was too young to really remember the full story. Thomas Hamilton was a Freemason and a shot with the police, he had been accused of sexual assault against children and he had threatened a female police officer, with a shotgun, when she came to check whether he was still a suitable person to own firearms. She recomended that he was not, the chief constable, also a Freemason, signed off his application anyway.

Banning firearms in the UK made absolutely no difference to the gun crime rate. The rate continued to climb, no faster and no slower. What this demonstrated was that there was no link between legal ownsership and illegal usage.

Now I live in California and I have a good sized collection of equipment and I haven't shot anyone. I live in an area that has strong controls on gun ownership and also very high gun crime, 150 people were murdered within ten miles of where I sit last year. Mostly with guns. That's more than the whole of the UK. This year they are on track to do the same thing again. Boston has similar laws and similar crime rates, this just shows that as in the UK legal ownership does nothing to control gun crime. Interestingly New Hampshire has very little crime and it is just north of Boston, I wonder if that has anything to do with the easy availability of carry permits in NH?

I enjoy shooting, I enjoy going to the range and shooting better than most people. I like firearms as machines, that's probably why I have so many, I've always been fascinated with mechanisms.

It is strange that while politicians go on and on about gun control almost everyone I know, even the "lefty liberal mountain biking tree huggers" either own guns or like to go shooting when they get the chance.

Politicians seem to be out of step with the general population on this issue.

I worked out the gun crime statistics in the UK properly and the claim above is bogus, the US has about 44 times the gun crime rate that the UK has. The US has more gun murders than the UK has gun crimes. The population of the UK is around 65 Million. In 2005 the US had around 17,000 murders and the US had under 12,000 gun crimes. Some of these were minor involving replicas and air guns.

Answer 3

From the age of 6 I have been into hunting and around guns so I do enjoy using them, on the other hand I was not allowed to fire one till I was at least 9.
Before I shot I had to learn to treat and respect the tool in my hands, as well as the pry I hunted.
The key in this is respect, if you can not respect a gun you should not pick one up. I think many of you Hunters out there will agree with me that anyone who commits a crime with a gun dose so with out respect.
Over hear in the Uk we are governed by laws when it comes down to firearms and shotguns, both of which require 2 separat licences,
Firearms certificate for rifles ect and shotgun certificate for smoothbores, For both of these licenceing methods there are legislations as long as a giraffes neck..
Laws are changing all the time over hear as things happen, in the last week there has been 2 murders by guns, one a biker and the othere an 11 yer old. The government will be seen to do something and the general public will form there own opinions on guns once again,,, Guess who gets it in the neck though,,, all us people who are licenced and respect thes weapons.
All the crime in this country and many others, is always down to illegal guns.
When I say an illegal gun it is a gun that has no regestration code and can not be traced to an owner,, not like us certificate holders whos guns are all regesterd .
Like at the beginning I stated I started young and had to learn how to respect guns, now there even deciding to make it illegal for anyone under 18 to use a gun,, what hope have we.
I suppose if you live in the abnormal long enough it soon becomes the normal.
There are a lot of respectable people over hear who enjoy there sport, keep them self’s to there self’s are a member of some organisation or governing body that insures them, and above all they keep to our laws,
Its just a shame its spoilt by brain dead idiots

Answer 4

Opinion on guns? Guns Good! Bad people... BAD! Guns keep bad people in check.

Best.

H

Answer 5

If guns kill people, then I blame my keyboard for misz spelding werds.

Some fun facts:

Great Britain has more gun crime PER CAPITA than the US, even with there gun bans.

Great Britains gun crime went up after there gun ban.

We have no problem giving a 16 year old kid, free reins to operate a car, which kill more people and cause more property damage, than guns do, but we cry about a responsible adult taking responsibility for there own safety and the safety of there family.

Here's an intersting read:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

And this:
http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/002440.php
http://www.gunfacts.info/pdfs/gun-facts/4.2/GunFacts4-2-Screen.pdf


BTW: Lets ban guns. Ya, that's a great idea, we ban drugs, but guess what, they are all over the place. Criminals don't obey the law, DUH! A ban on guns will only make law obeying citizens easy targets. Oh yeah, plus you're gonna have a hard time getting around a tiny thing we call the second ammendment.


If gun control saves one childs life, then it's worth it. Oh, so should we ban cars, water, and fire too? So if we save one childs life then it's worth it, even if a hundred adults die, because they were unable to defend themselves?

Number of children dead, ages 0-14 from:

Gun accidents = 142
Run over by cars = 550
Drowned = 800
Burned to death = 660
Died inside carss = 1850

Hmmm... guns aren't looking so bad after all.

If you are against guns, you are ignorant, plain and simple. Look up the facts, and quit believing all the misleading bullsh** propoganda from the anti-gun crowd. The facts are out there, you just gotta take your head outta your a** for five minutes to find them.

Answer 6

In the UK it's an honour and a privilege to own either a shotgun or a rifle.
As a shotgun/rifle owner I feel privileged to belong to a generally law abiding group who are in the same position as me.
What ruins it for us chosen ones is the scum with un licensed guns who shoot and kill people for no apparent reason.
I'm just counting the days 'til the Pheasant season starts and hope I'll be able to do so for the rest of my days.

Answer 7

I live in the uk and as you probably already know
this country has very strict firearms laws
guns uptil recently have not been a big problem in the uk
apart from between feuding drug gangs in london and manchester who are mostly jamaican yardies not all cases of gun crime here are just yardies there is other minority groups who will intimidate each other for money and drugs and territory,and recently air weapons and fake guns have been modified to shoot bullets instead of bb pellets
I personally think the uk has come this far without any "real"
gun culture so there would be little point to start one,even the uniformed police arent armed,but they have specialist armed back up units patrolling london and major cities in the uk 24/7! These[Trojan] will be called in for gun or knife situations and they will shoot to kill when they are forced to draw their gun in anger ,also scotland yard has an elitist firearm unit for royalty and vip protection,you mostly never really see them around because they travel covertly in ordinary vehicles and in civilian dress but they are around .
to sum it up i think the uk doesn;t need guns as the norm
its running along nicely as it is now.

Answer 8

From Virginia here, I shoot 3 days a week, sometimes more. I average between 2 and 3.5 thousand rounds each month. Everything from 22 to 7.62x54, 12 gauge, 20 gauge, pistols, rifles, class 3, you name it. On average I'd say i shoot 30 or more different guns a month, not mine, but fellow members of the rifle range's guns. How do I feel about guns?


Pretty damn good.

Answer 9

I see we have a few gun haters here,let me say this now.How can you blame guns entirely for all violent crime commited with them.what about parents raising their kids in front of the tv or video games that glorify killing other people.have you raised you kids right?we seem to be the only country that has this problem and the problem is far deeper rooted than guns,it is more based on lack of parental involvment and /or discipline.I was raised around guns,as were millions of americans who go through life everyday not commiting violent/any gun crimes.but I will tell you one thing,outlawing guns will not prevent crime of anykind in which guns are involved,here are a few gun control advocates,Adolf Hitler,Benito Mussolini,Josef Stalin,and these are just a few.I could write all day about 2nd amendment rights,as well as they could about how good the brady bill is,but I believe parents need to take a more active role in their kids life,start supervising their use of violent movies and video games,and start kicking their **** when they get in trouble,time outs suck,kids need to learn that there is a consequence to every action they do,good and bad,and time outs do not do this ,in other words,if gun control is so wonderful,how come all this type of crime has sky rocketed since gun control was introduced.,btw,I am 100% for background checks and maybe a little for short
waiting periods,but thats as far as it goes.

Answer 10

"25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy. However, 4 out of 5 U.S. murders are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?" -Andrew Ford

I mis-spell a words on the PC sometimes. I'm from the USA and I DESPISE keyboards. How dare it misspell words. Just pick itself up and misspell things, and use poor grammar in putting together sentences. I think we should ban keyboards.

And spoons. We wouldn't have an obesity epidemic in the USA if we BANNED SPOONS! Make sporks the only legal utensil with full licensing and registration. That way people can't shovel food into their mouths so easily and make themselves fat. I DESPISE SPOONS for making us fat and dying cause of cardiac arrest.

Drunk and impaired drivers kill thousands annually - we should make drugs ILLEGAL and restart PROHIBITION. That worked out GREAT the last time around...people just stopped drinking. Making drugs illegal totally stopped the drug problem too. I DESPISE DRUGS AND ALCOHOL for what drunk and impaired DRIVERS do. Thats perfect logic.

Did you know cavemen NEVER murdered people with sticks, rocks, and sharpened objects? Murder only started when guns were invented. Up until then people were perfect, there was NO crime, and NO criminals. If we ban guns there will never be any crime. People won't get stabbed, there won't be a black market gun trade, and all the criminals will turn in their guns. Just like that.

After all, no one needs to be disciplined in the mastery of marksmanship, have fun target shooting, no one needs to harvest animals for food and control over-populated deer...no one needs to defend their house, family, and country from criminals and tyrants. Did you know the Japenese didn't invade the mainland US cause we have flowers?

It couldn't be because there is "a gun behind every blade of grass"?

Remember, base-ball bats beat rival gang members to death.
Steak knives stab people who have been raped.
Mercedes cars run over cheating husbands.
Golf clubs kill teenage girls like Marth Moxley in Greenwich CT.
Oldsmobiles drive pregnant women off the Chappaquittick River bridge.
And guns pick themselves up and shoot people OR they FORCE bad people to commit crimes.

Yeah. Thats logical.

Gun control means using both hands.

Anyone who thinks guns are the problem, or thinks they should be banned or more regulated belongs in a mental institution and can kiss my ***.