I'd just like to point out that India has draconian gun laws.

[Edweird]

That is all.

[Pamela Troy]

1. Your point being....?

[Edweird]

7. My point is that if someone wants to kill you (or a LOT of people)

'feel good' laws that take away constitutional rights from law abiding citizens won't stop killers intent on committing murder. It does not stop the flow of illegal guns being smuggled in (see the UK). It only affects people that follow the rules.
For the record, Ghandi was AGAINST gun control.
So was George Orwell.

[iverglas]

15. for the record

your posts are nonsense.

For the record, Ghandi was AGAINST gun control.

Gandhi spoke of an occupying power depriving a nation of weapons. If he had meant to say something else, I think he would have said it. I think he knew the difference between a collective noun and you, even if you don't.


So was George Orwell.

Maybe you could organize a séance and get both of these guys back for a few minutes so you can ask their opinion about what should be done in your time and place, and meanwhile you could stop trying to use what they said about their own times and places as if it supports anything you are saying.


It does not stop the flow of illegal guns being smuggled in (see the UK).

Yup, those smuggled guns, they just fell like lawn darts from the sky. Funny how they first fell someplace where there are obviously no effective controls on trafficking, and had to be smuggled into the UK. Gosh, one might almost wonder whether, of that someplace actually did have effective controls on trafficking, there might be fewer firearms being smuggled into places like the UK ...

[Edweird]

23. Ah, my old friend Iverglas. I was wondering if you were still around.

:hi:
Long time no see.

Ok, getting down to business.
"Gandhi spoke of an occupying power depriving a nation of weapons."
Yup. He understood that gun ownership equals personal liberty. What part of that is confusing you?


"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." -- George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, himself a socialist.
I fail to see any time limit or expiration date on that.

"there might be fewer firearms being smuggled into places like the UK ..."
Ah, so the problem then is not that UK gun control is a miserable pathetic failure, the problem is that those darn criminals won't stop breaking the law.
Well, you're kinda making my point for me, there.


That happens to be, coincidentally, EXACTLY my point. The UK can legislate anything they want. People that broke the OLD law will break the NEW law. It's that simple. It only stops people that follow the rules. Criminals, by definition, do not follow the rules.

[iverglas]

25. I'll tell you what's confusing to me

Gandhi spoke of an occupying power depriving a nation of weapons.
Yup. He understood that gun ownership equals personal liberty. What part of that is confusing you?

The part where you take a part of a comment out of its context and then reply to it as if it meant something you know perfectly well it did not mean.

If I live to be 100, I wll never stop being confused by that.


George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, himself a socialist.

Actually, George Orwell's socialist credentials are questionable, but one thing we do know is that he was an informant in the service of the right-wing UK government. Just in case you want to keep arguing that his credentials are a reason to agree with everything he said, even if you are taking what he said completely out of its context as well.


there might be fewer firearms being smuggled into places like the UK ...
Ah, so the problem then is not that UK gun control is a miserable pathetic failure, the problem is that those darn criminals won't stop breaking the law.
Well, you're kinda making my point for me, there.

Gosh, I am still so confused. Why are you again excising the portions of what I said that you apparently cannot answer, pretending that I said something I did not say, and responding to what I did not say?

Don't you find this a bit of a waste of time?

[Edweird]

27. Was there a point in there? Or are you just interested in being contemptuous?

[Edweird]

29. Also, you're from Canada. WTF do you care if WE own guns or not?

Seriously. How is it any of your business?

[iverglas]

30. hahahahahahaha

Please read the title of your opening post.

You might then want to look up the word "irony" someplace.


Oh -- and note that I haven't said anything about you owning guns.

But hey, we wouldn't want that to stop you from continuing your series of replies to things never said.

[Edweird]

32. Oh come on now. You know damn well we have argued about US gun control.

As a matter of fact, that has been the bulk of our arguments in the past.
I was just wondering why...

[iverglas]

37. it's a wonderment

How's about you try addressing what I have actually said in this thread, and we'll go on from there?

I addressed what you said, after all.

[geckosfeet]

19. Which naturally leads us to, if laws don't work 100% of the time, why have them?

On edit: and of course tax gun manufacturers out the wazoo.

[Pamela Troy]

33. Using your rationale, we shouldn't have any of those "useless" laws against murder and theft.

Because if someone is intent on killing me or stealing from me, they're going to do it...

Right?

[geckosfeet]

2. Someone forgot to tell the para-military organization that staged the attack.

I suppose that if all Indians were walking around with uzis and hand grenades that they could have defended themselves and it would be a safer place.

Cause that's what it would have taken to prevent or even mitigate the attack.

Pure nonsense.

[slackmaster]

3. Hyperbole notwithstanding, such an attack could not have been pulled off as successfully in Israel

[geckosfeet]

4. Ha ha. No magazines.

On edit: Although that is a crowd I would like to meet, I don't condone drinking and carrying assault rifles. Although they could be drinking orange juice. And the guns could be props.

[Warren Stupidity]

11. Yeah. Nobody could get away with anything like that.

The Cave of the Patriarchs massacre was an attack on Muslim Arabs praying at the mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron on February 25, 1994. Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-American settler, off-duty IDF army reservist<1> and member of the extremist Kach movement, opened fire on the worshippers. According to Israeli reports 29 Palestinians were killed and 125 wounded, while Palestinian sources stated that up to 52 people were shot to death.<2> Goldstein was also killed in the attack, which took place during the overlapping religious holidays of Purim and Ramadan. Israel harshly condemned the attack and paid compensation to the families of the victims.<3><4>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre

Oh wait.. sure they could.

[JI7]

13. Israel has had many attacks, these Mumbai attacks were planned

they take into account the country and place they are intending to attack . these weren't just some guys who got a hold of some guns illegally and decided to just go kill people .

[jody]

35. Darn it slackmaster, don't use facts against a hysterical rant & rave! What works in Tel Avie

will work in Chicago, D.C., and New Orleans with their high homicide rates just like it works in Cheyenne.

[slackmaster]

36. Hey Jody, happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you are in good health and financially sound.

[jody]

38. Happy Thanksgiving to you also.

[slackmaster]

40. I already had my family turkey dinner the second weekend in November

Today it's lobster tail with fixin's, then go party out with the neighbors.

[iverglas]

39. once again, jody kibitzes

If only he would/could identify this "hysterical rant & rave" for us ...


What works in Tel Avie
will work in Chicago, D.C., and New Orleans with their high homicide rates just like it works in Cheyenne.

Perhaps jody missed the title of this thread, and the event being discussed by the author of the "hysterical rand & rave", and the fact that it actually has nothing to do with Chicago, D.C., New Orleans or Cheyenne.

Talk about yer hysteria, eh?

[iverglas]

41. Oh, I get it

jody thought that when that poster said "I suppose that if all Indians were walking around with uzis and hand grenades", he was talking about the kind of Indians found in Cheyenne ...

Most people don't call those people "Indians" these days, of course. But of course most people don't call African-Americans "Negroes" these days either, a fact that recently sailed right over jody's head too.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=118&topic_id=176965#177543

[geckosfeet]

42. Oh - I have jody on ignore so I did not read his ramble. Guess I didn't miss much!

[iverglas]

43. oh, you really shouldn't!

Occasionally the incoherent tedium is broken up by gems like that one about Negroes. Did you click the link? My reply to that post explains the joke. ;)

[iverglas]

44. oh, oops

Clicking the link to a post of jody's won't really work, will it? ;)

Here, you can still get the idea from my reply:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=176965&mesg_id=177555

[geckosfeet]

45. Well, as he is on ignore, I can't view the post! Just as well. It's better this way.

[iverglas]

46. yes -- but

you can get the gist from my reply, the link in that second post there -- and truly, it is not to be missed.

Here, I'll just show you. ;)


jody:

The current issue of Time magazine has a disturbing article on crime and race.

THE NEGRO CRIME RATE: A FAILURE IN INTEGRATION

(and he proceeds to quote a few chunks of it)

me:

Okay, this is beyond belief

The article actually is interesting -- it's interesting that the concepts of systemic racism, and especially social exclusion, were being discussed in Time Magazine

IN 1958.

THE NEGRO CRIME RATE: A FAILURE IN INTEGRATION
Monday, Apr. 21, 1958

The fascinating thing about it is that Jody could look at the date in the upper right corner -- Friday, June 27, 2008, and then look at an article talking about "the Negro crime rate" and "integration" and "Negroes" ... not to mention that the data cited are from 1956 -- and say that the article appears in

"The current issue of Time magazine"

Well, it sure does explain a lot of things, is all I can say.

Don't it just, though?

Such a shame that jody never saw it!

[geckosfeet]

47. That is interesting. Racist types have been spouting that same type of trash forever.

Whining about how with all the breaks and affirmative action and integration and on and on that the crime rate among blacks is high.

No mention of how systemic lack of access to every form of equality known to man, in particular economic equality, may be a factor in the social, cultural and psychological lives of black people.

[iverglas]

48. actually, what was interesting

was that the 1958 Time Magazine article really was talking about systemic racism and social exclusion. (I've also just spent the week working on stuff about social control theories, i.e. what factors determine law-breaking and law-abiding, which originated in the 50s, so it's interesting to read from that perspective too.)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,810262-3,00.html

It's a weirdy thing to read 50 years later, but it does conclude with:

Unlike the Caucasian immigrant of an earlier day, a Negro can scarcely ever hope, even in the North, that the white society will really accept him on his human merits. Negroes are more prone than whites to break the laws, rules and customs of society because they are excluded from full membership in it. In gross and subtle ways, from unwritten bans on employing Negroes to the faintly patronizing tone that even liberal-hearted whites take toward them, Negroes are made to feel alien and inferior. This pervasive discrimination holds down capable Negroes at the top of the social ladder, dims their voices among their own people, builds up tensions and resentments inside the Negro society, and keeps great masses of Negroes segregated in ghettos where the standards of personal morality, discipline and responsibility are lower than those in the white world outside.

"Slam enough doors in a man's face, and he may break one of them down," said San Francisco's Negro Deputy City Attorney R. J. Reynolds last week. The way to reduce the percentage of Negro crime, he believes, is to stop slamming the doors, or at least, as a start, give the Negro a new hope that maybe the next door won't be slammed. Spreading the message of that new hope, he says, is a responsibility that Negro leaders will be very glad to assume.

I never did figure out what point jody thought he was making, since all he did was post snippets of the article and assert that it was from the current edition of Time (I just fall over laughing every time I see that). He posted it in response to someone who was replying to a post of mine that jody claimed not to have read -- I always think there's a huge risk of making one's self look like a complete ass when one does that, but jody doesn't seem to worry about that.

jody interjected elsewhere in that thread with "15.4% of white homicides by blacks versus 6.3% of black homicides by whites", having sadly missed the entire point of the conversation he couldn't understand, which was expressed by me: "whites killed far more blacks, proportionately, than blacks killed whites".

Some years earlier I had crunched the numbers on US homicides in response to a racist Canadian's yammering about black crime rates in Canada (not at DU), in a conversation with NorthernSpy -- she and I had brought the concept/numbers to DU here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3320169&mesg_id=3320952
and see post 41.

Anyhow, more interesting than the gludge that passes for thought in this place generally ...

[geckosfeet]

49. Now that IS interesting. But I was referring to the fact that jody was involved

in a discussion on race rather than guns. But I can see the tie with murder rates and gun regulation.

Thanks iverglas.

I will keep an eye open for your posts.

[lapfog_1]

5. It would appear that the terrorists

were dropped on the city by boat, possibly originating from a different country.

This is more like a military operation than home grown terrorists.

A large boat, MV alpha, has been detained by the Indian Navy. Witnesses have described a number of small landing craft loaded with terrorists landing near the Taj Mahal hotel just before the attacks began.

Gun Laws (or the lack of them) have nothing to do with an outside military style attack.

[57_TomCat]

50. Not necessarily the case.

Posted by lapfog_1:

Gun Laws (or the lack of them) have nothing to do with an outside military style attack.

An outside military style attack made by terrorists is often predicated on a lack of civilian arms available to deter the attack. These operations are conducted to maximize the effect of the terror weapons and that would be negated if an armed populance was able to interfere with the operation. That is why gun free zones are often chosen as targets for depredations. It limits the chance of armed response. Those countries with such restrictive laws against possession or carry of personal firearms make such terrorist attacks easier to plan.

Israel as an example has very restrictive gun laws but it is very easy for citizens to go about their daily activties armed. In many cases citizens do not own arms but instead draw them from police armories. This activity has reduced (not stopped) such terror attacks in that country and reduced the effects of some of those attacks. Almost all incidents of armed terror end up being stopped by others with guns or self inflicted wounds when confronted. Suicide bombers and IED's are now the preferred weapons of terror in those areas of high armed responce abilities.

[JI7]

6. good thing, most parts of India are safe

without the strict gun laws i don't think that would be the case.

[Edweird]

14. "without the strict gun laws i don't think that would be the case."

Your opinion and 50 cents will get you a newspaper.

Indian gun control has its roots in British rule after a failed rebellion.
Even Ghandi was against gun control.

[JI7]

16. things are different now, with such a huge population , poverty and corruption

it's a good thing it's not easy to get weapons in the country.

and India has nuclear weapons .

[iverglas]

18. gosh, that's funny

Indian gun control has its roots in British rule after a failed rebellion.

They had that whole independence thing, and they just didn't bother getting rid of those imperial laws.

How silly of them. Maybe you should go have a word. They seem to be in need of your attentions.


Even Ghandi was against gun control.

I believe this is called proof by blatant assertion, and it isn't. Proof.

[villager]

8. Right! America's proliferation of guns stopped 9/11 in its tracks!

n/t

[Edweird]

12. Um, weapons have been prohibited on planes (for your safety!) for quite some time.

It is a 'gun (and weapon) free zone'. The point of the Federal Air Marshall plan is TO PUT GUNS BACK ON PLANES!

Oh yeah.. and pilots are carrying NOW, too.

But, don't let the facts ruin your dream....

[wtmusic]

17. You advocate allowing citizens to carry on airplanes?

Just trying to sort out wtf "putting guns back on planes" means outside of law enforcement, which is not at issue here.

[Edweird]

24. No. Just pointing out that the absence of weapons did not make anybody safer.

[wtmusic]

28. Kinda depends on who has the weapons.

If you're not making a distinction between civilian ownership and law enforcement, you're negating the entire NRA argument for limiting the powers of government.

Shooting yourself in the foot, as it were.

[villager]

21. "Just as the numbers of actual TSA Sky Marshals flying aboard airliners is today unknown, so too

...are the numbers of airline pilots that actually carry weapons.

"All in all, things have worked smoothly, at least in the sense that a pilot has never needed to use their weapon aloft to defend their airplane since 2002. But the lack of an attack is not conclusive evidence that a weapon on board an airplane is the solution to airborne security."

http://www.jetwhine.com/2008/04/pilots-guns-and-airplanes/


Sorry, but guns aren't on every flight, or with every pilot, and there's no reason to think they would've been there on each 9/11 flight. In that instance, it was the psychology -- "cooperate with hijackers" -- that allowed the planes to be comandeered.

Guns or no, that psychology has changed.

But don't let that get in the way of imagining personally outdrawing terrorists everywhere!

[Edweird]

26. So, you're making my point for me? Is this some kind of 'reverse pyschology'?

I'm pretty sure that only works for Bugs Bunny....

[villager]

34. No -- glad to see you support prudent controls! Not all pilots, only sky marshalls in the cabins...

In other words, no gun proliferation!

We agree there's no right to carry/conceal on airplanes!

Hence, your maturation, as you support some limits on unchecked proliferation...

[deadmessengers]

9. Sure, but....

All that means is that these will likely be the only gun-related deaths in Mumbai this year.

Now, compare and contrast to Detroit, or Oakland - two cities less than a tenth the size of Mumbai.

[slackmaster]

10. Thank you for intentionally blurring the distinction between legal gun ownership and criminal misuse

Somebody had to do it.

[wtmusic]

20. None of the murders in Detroit/Oakland were committed with legally-owned

guns?

Well dammit anyway. You win.

[iverglas]

22. and let's not forget

All guns were born legally-owned.

[slackmaster]

31. It is very likely that only a very small percentage were

Most murders and other violent crimes are committed with people who already have criminal convictions that make it illegal for them to own guns.