Today's mass shooting in the US

[Angilion]

Every gun owner should have to join a militia and register their guns. After all its right there in the amendment.

No, it isn't. There's absolutely no mention of registering guns in that amendment. Nothing even remotely related to it. There's also no statement that anyone who owns a gun has to join a militia.

I'd love to see them try and argue over the wording when they argue over its ambiguous meaning all the time.

The ambiguity of the wording doesn't stretch to just adding in whatever you want to be there.

Well regulated implies structure and rules.

Did it when that amendment was written? The implications of words and phrases can (and often do) change over time. Was it intended to imply externally imposed rules or simply a well organised militia system? The "well regulated" part is referring to militias, not to individual citizens. What connection (if any) was intended to be made between the militias and the armed civilians?

Personally, I think that the intention was that people in general were to be encouraged to be armed and to be competent in the use of weapons so that there would be a large pool of people from whom to draw when forming a militia and both training time and equipment costs would be minimised. The same sort of intention as existed in many places in the past. The most famous local example would be the later part of medieval (and probably early Renaissance, I'm not sure) England, where it wasn't just encouraged but mandatory for all men to own and be competent with using the main military weapon of that time and place.

Arguing over whether the amendment should be amended because of changes in technology and society and whether the people who wrote it would have written it the same way if they knew those changes would happen is one thing. Adding stuff to the amendment and claiming it was there all along is something else.

 

[Reality|Bites]

I still find America mental and could never go there for fear of getting shot dead, here in the UK if you have to deal with a thug you don't think oh f he might have a gun on him, but he might have a knife, and up close they are just as bad.
Do gangsters in suits still exist or it that only in the movies?

 

[Rroff]

The intention of the second amendment seems to be to prevent barriers to the forming of an effective militia (one of them being access to firearms and training to use them) - though if that was taken in the spirit of it today then it would justify the people owning all kinds of modern military hardware :s

I still find America mental and could never go there for fear of getting shot dead, here in the UK if you have to deal with a thug you don't think oh f he might have a gun on him, but he might have a knife, and up close they are just as bad.
Do gangsters in suits still exist or it that only in the movies?

I've never really felt unsafe in the US in that respect - there are areas where that would be more a thing but as a visitor you'd not normally have a reason to go there.

Was kind of amusing when a friend was getting his guns out the truck to cross the border into Canada - it would have been simpler just to hire another vehicle LOL.

 

[Angilion]

I still find America mental and could never go there for fear of getting shot dead, here in the UK if you have to deal with a thug you don't think oh f he might have a gun on him, but he might have a knife, and up close they are just as bad.
Do gangsters in suits still exist or it that only in the movies?

Violent crime rates in the USA vary wildly by location. In most places, the risk is very low. In some places, it's very high. Learn what areas to avoid and you'd be fine. The average violent crime rate in the USA is much higher than in the UK(*) but it's far from terrible except in some areas and people shooting random strangers is rare. A lot of people are deliberately shot by other people in the USA, but it's almost always more targetted. There are mass shootings (though only a tiny fraction of the number that the media usually portrays there as being) and there are people shot solely because they were unlucky enough to be close enough to the target. There are serial killers. But most murders are targetted and you'd be unlikely to be a target.




* On a like for like basis. The violent crime numbers that got some publicity a few years ago stem from very different definitions of 'violent' being used, with the UK figures using a vastly wider definition of 'violent'. So wide that it included many incidents in which there wasn't any violence at all. The USA definition required a serious assault of some kind. The UK definition included all assaults (even those causing no physical injury at all) and also threatening words and gestures.

 

[Jean-F]

I still find America mental and could never go there for fear of getting shot dead, here in the UK if you have to deal with a thug you don't think oh f he might have a gun on him, but he might have a knife, and up close they are just as bad.
Do gangsters in suits still exist or it that only in the movies?

A lot of your posts, RB, I rightly or wrongly lean toward empathising with, but I’m having difficulty with this one.
I’ve been visiting the U.S. once or twice per year since 1976, and only on two occasions have I thought, “Uh oh, perhaps I shouldn’t be here.”
Once was in the late eighties, crossing Canal Street at Broadway in NYC with my wife and a white American woman friend, with her African-American fiancé, a car slowed down and a passenger yelled, “Does yo momma know that yo out with a jigaboo?”
Another time, in the seventies, I was in a bar in midtown Manhattan with two English acquaintances, and two American guys.
A skinny kid came in rattling a bucket, saying, “I’m collecting for Northern Irish people being oppressed by the Brits in Ulster.”
One of the Brits I was with was from Dungiven, Londonderry, he spat in the bucket, and said, “You’re collecting for guns and bullets that may harm my family, **** off.”

 

[Rroff]

What worries me about the US - done the i94 travelling west (basically ground hog day on the A303) - but my memory (which is clearly wrong) is travelling on the left hand side of it :s

 

[Kutter]

I still find America mental and could never go there for fear of getting shot dead, here in the UK if you have to deal with a thug you don't think oh f he might have a gun on him, but he might have a knife, and up close they are just as bad.
Do gangsters in suits still exist or it that only in the movies?

Been here 11 years next month, been shot dead several times, esp when I moved to the Atlanta area.
Don't come, they shoot you as soon as you leave the airport.

 

[MissChief]

Been here 11 years next month, been shot dead several times, esp when I moved to the Atlanta area.
Don't come, they shoot you as soon as you leave the airport.

Sadly, I died. But then I lived!

 

[Angilion]

Sadly, I died. But then I lived!

I'm reminded of the "witch" scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Person who isn't a newt: "She turned me into a newt!"
"A newt?"
"...I got better".

 

[Johno please?]

I still find America mental and could never go there for fear of getting shot dead, here in the UK if you have to deal with a thug you don't think oh f he might have a gun on him, but he might have a knife, and up close they are just as bad.
Do gangsters in suits still exist or it that only in the movies?

lol really? I was on the London bridge a month before that first terrorist attack, bad things can happen anywhere, at least in the states someone might be around to defend you.

Been here 11 years next month, been shot dead several times, esp when I moved to the Atlanta area.
Don't come, they shoot you as soon as you leave the airport.

xD The media fuels this fear, shame really America is a great place to visit.

 

[Werewolf]

lol really? I was on the London bridge a month before that first terrorist attack, bad things can happen anywhere, at least in the states someone might be around to defend you.

.

How often do they happen here, vs in the US.

Also how often does the "good guy" actually stop it, and how does that help if it happens a lot more frequently to begin with, and the "good guy" is only able to act after the first few people have been shot?

Things like the London Bridge attack in 2019 which killed 2 people are remembered because they're so unusual in the UK, whilst most people can't even remember which school shooting or mass shooting is is which a couple of months later because they're so common the blend into each other.

 

[deuse]

How often do they happen here, vs in the US..

First you have to pick a state with the same number of people as the UK.
Then you can procced.

 

[MissChief]

How often do they happen here, vs in the US.

Also how often does the "good guy" actually stop it, and how does that help if it happens a lot more frequently to begin with, and the "good guy" is only able to act after the first few people have been shot?

Things like the London Bridge attack in 2019 which killed 2 people are remembered because they're so unusual in the UK, whilst most people can't even remember which school shooting or mass shooting is is which a couple of months later because they're so common the blend into each other.

Isn’t two people dying in a shooting not even recorded as a mass shooting?

 

[200sols]

USA has more than 1 mass shooting per day on average. People who compare to the UK and just say 'bad things happen anywhere' are utterly clueless.

 

[Werewolf]

First you have to pick a state with the same number of people as the UK.
Then you can procced.

Ok, the US is ~6x the population of the UK, how often do we get say 5 people killed in a single incident?
[edit] Sorry my mistake it's a little under 5 times the population[edit]

If it was just population size we'd expect it to happen about every 2 weeks in the UK.

Instead it's something like every couple of years (or more).

 

[Hotwired]

First you have to pick a state with the same number of people as the UK.
Then you can procced.

Why doesn't it work by the usual instances per population of the entire country?

 

[Jean-F]

First you have to pick a state with the same number of people as the UK.
Then you can procced.

There is no single State that equals U.K. in population, nearest would be California, with 39,512,223 but if you added Texas with 28,995,881, you’d be close to U.K.s 67,886,004.

The state of Alabama has roughly the same amount of land as England while the state of Oregon has approximately the size land area as the United Kingdom as a whole.

 

[Johno please?]

Also how often does the "good guy" actually stop it, and how does that help if it happens a lot more frequently to begin with, and the "good guy" is only able to act after the first few people have been shot?
.

It happens, our media just wont tell you when, doesn't fit the anti gun narrative does it. And a lot of mass shootings happen in "gun free zones" so law abiding people wont have a firearm on them.

I'm not saying I want the right to carry a gun in the UK, im just saying its not as black and white as most people think it is.

Not a mass shooting but an example of someone using a firearm to defend themselves...

 

[deuse]

There is no single State that equals U.K. in population, nearest would be California, with 39,512,223 but if you added Texas with 28,995,881, you’d be close to U.K.s 67,886,004.

The state of Alabama has roughly the same amount of land as England while the state of Oregon has approximately the size land area as the United Kingdom as a whole.

68 mil in this tiny country

 

[Angilion]

[..]Also how often does the "good guy" actually stop it, and how does that help if it happens a lot more frequently to begin with, and the "good guy" is only able to act after the first few people have been shot? [..]

While he was president, Barack Obama tried to increase firearms restrictions in the USA. One of the things he did was to use an executive order to have the CDC investigate the use of firearms in the USA. The investigation found the opposite of what gun control advocates wanted it to find, so it was almost completely ignored.

Most pertinant to your question is that the lowest estimate of how often a gun is used defensively in the USA (~500,000) is almost double the number of times a gun is used in a violent crime (~300,000). That's the lowest estimate.

The situation is far less clear than the deliberate, consistent and extreme bias in reporting makes it out to be.