Not Entertainment

[Crusader]

Nor is allowing everyone to have guns. Why is a drug addict allowed to own a gun? Recipe for disaster if you ask me.

The reports don't say who the gun was registered to. Given all that we do know, it is quite likely that it was purchased illegally. Nevertheless if the adults were drilled as kids in gun safety, they wouldn't leave a loaded handgun sitting in plain sight with children playing nearby. Then again, they are stupid enough to get mixed up with cocaine so maybe they would.

If you want drugs, you can find drugs. If you want illegal weapons (machine guns, hand grenades, land mines), you can find them on the black market as well. As you've seen on the news... It's pretty easy to smuggle whatever you want across our southern border. They probably don't have that problem in the Netherlands, although, I'm sure even there, it is still easy enough for the criminal element to get whatever weapons they want. The difference is that people in the Netherlands accept the premise that they are the disarmed victims of crimes against their persons and property, and that gun ownership is merely for sport or hunting, not for killing people.

The philosophy of the 2nd amendment has always been to reasonably eliminate the differential in power between those that are armed, versus those who are unarmed. We give people the equal right to defend their lives, their property, and their families lives from anyone who would use illegal force to take that away from them (including a tyrannical government). Unfortunately, there is no intelligence test for reproduction, and stupid people will do stupid things with drugs, and guns, whether or not they are illegal. I would guess that she had the gun available to defend herself, which is ok. But, she endangered her child by leaving loaded weapons around, which is not ok. They might just have easily died by od'ing on her drugs laying around.

We've evolved into a culture which is loath to assign responsibility for negative outcomes to people's poor decisions. It's societies fault for permitting people to own guns, not her fault for choosing to own one, and leave it loaded where her kids can get to it.

That blog you linked to is a bit biased and in it's conclusion makes use of quite questionable math. It doesn't calculate the gun related wounded and dead in the equation, for example.

Nice link. Couple of things jump out: suicide is over 1/2 the total gun related deaths. Banning guns will probably not make much of a difference here, there still will be ropes, highway overpasses, exhaust fumes, etc. Then there's the fact that cars are much deadlier than guns. Seeing as how guns are meant to be deadly and cars aren't, maybe there's a lesson to be learned -- perhaps about drinking and driving, perhaps about actually needing to know how to drive before being issued a license, perhaps both.

I've read in other places that over half of all vehicle accidents involve some level of intoxication. It should be possible for vehicle computers to sense when someone is driving erratically, and unsafely.

The technology already exists actually, in the Netherlands we use alcohol locks for some repeat offenders. They have to blow in a pipe which measures their alcohol level before being able to start the car. Too much and it won't go. And yes, they can try getting someone else to blow, but this is a major deterrent nonetheless, field tests prove.

Hi,

And at the same time your culture clings to the 'we really really need our guns' meme, with all those differing rationale's offered, depending on who is doing the 'splaining this time.

Haven't we been around this Maypole before? Two things:

First, I say this without anger, without rancor, and without malice, but if you are not a citizen of the USA, then you really have no say in the matter. And to judge the nation on the basis of extremists on either side is both insulting to the majority and wrong.

I disagree there Pete. The USA has a democracy of sorts and in the end the majority decides. So apparently the majority of the USA wants their guns.