This must be faked...

[Hermit]

Thank you, Seth, for confirming that every word I said about you in my previous post is 100% correct.

[Seth]

Thank you, Seth, for confirming that every word I said about you in my previous post is 100% correct.

But it's not, and that's the point. It's only confirmed inside of your delusion of safety. The fact remains that if and when someone decides to ask about your (lack of) religion and then shoots you in the head, you will be as helpless as those poor students in the "gun free" zone in Oregon, and you'll piss your pants too as you pray (to a god you don't believe in) for someone like me to be in the room to take down the terrorist...or at least try to do so.

[Tero]

That's a new spin. But no, can't drag atheism into guns Seth. Time's up. Stick to the Australian angle.

[Seth]

That's a new spin. But no, can't drag atheism into guns Seth. Time's up. Stick to the Australian angle.

Er, the point is that it's irrelevant whether the killer asks your religion, your sex or your political beliefs, when someone is preparing to execute you for whatever reason you're going to be praying that someone like me, with a gun, will stand up and protect you. I guarantee it.

Interestingly, as little as you deserve such sacrifice given your disrespect of people like me who are willing to do so, I would still do so, even at the cost of my own life.

That's not something you appear to be able to say.

Why is that?

[Sean Hayden]

[Hermit]

Thank you, Seth, for confirming that every word I said about you in my previous post is 100% correct.

But it's not...

It's not? Look at what I said:

In general, whenever anybody points out a factual error he employs for the sake of advancing his argument, he dismisses it as irrelevant or simply denies that he erred in the first place.

OK? So you said that Tero lives in Australia. Then you said he is a Brit. It turns out that Tero lives in the USA and is of Finnish extraction, which has never been a secret. He's been talking about both those facts at length and often enough for years now. You obviously and indeniably made some factually wrong statements. Your reply?

Where Tero or anybody else lives is utterly irrelevant...

Bingo.

[Seth]

Thank you, Seth, for confirming that every word I said about you in my previous post is 100% correct.

But it's not...

It's not?

No, it's not.

Look at what I said:

In general, whenever anybody points out a factual error he employs for the sake of advancing his argument, he dismisses it as irrelevant or simply denies that he erred in the first place.

OK? So you said that Tero lives in Australia. Then you said he is a Brit. It turns out that Tero lives in the USA and is of Finnish extraction, which has never been a secret. He's been talking about both those facts at length and often enough for years now. You obviously and indeniably made some factually wrong statements. Your reply?

Where Tero or anybody else lives is utterly irrelevant...

Bingo.

The point is that my error as to Tero's place of residence or extraction is not relevant in the least to the OP. I don't care where he lives. His statements are pretty much exactly the same as your or anybody else's here with a very, very few exceptions. The are virulently and irrationally anti-gun and reflect absolutely no rational thought or reasoning, just as is the case with posters from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France and pretty much anywhere else in the rest of the world, all of whom have bought into the propaganda that gun crime can be reduced by taking guns away from law-abiding citizens and that gun crime can be eliminated by taking guns away from everyone except the police, both of which claims are resoundingly debunked by the long-term "experiment" with expanded public carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens here in the US, where unlike much of the rest of the world, the violent crime rates and murder rates continue a steady decline as more and more guns are carried by more and more law-abiding individuals.

Your pettifogging focus on a minor mistake in identifying Tero's place of residence is, as I said, nothing more than a lame attempt to divert and derail the discussion, which you have clearly lost, because you have no rational arguments to present that even begin to refute the plain, simple, irrefutable facts of more guns in the US in law-abiding hands equals less crime.

As the OP shows, not even the gun-free utopia of Australia (where there are thought to be hundreds of thousands of "illegal" guns squirreled away from the authorities) can accomplish what you and most other people here insist is the "answer" to gun crime. The reason is perfectly obvious: Banning guns doesn't remove them from the possession or availability to criminals intent on obtaining guns with which to commit crimes. Not here, not in the UK, not in New Zealand, not in France, not in Australia, not anywhere on the face of the earth. It's never worked. It hasn't worked in the most authoritarian and oppressive regimes in history. Communist China can't do it. The Soviet Union couldn't do it. Russia can't do it. Nobody can do it, and that's the point.

No country on earth will ever eliminate gun crime by banning gun possession because gun bans only affect law-abiding citizens who are unlikely to use their guns to commit crimes.

And since it is a proven fact that MORE guns in the hands of law abiding citizens results in LESS crime, there is no reason to debarr law-abiding citizens the right to keep and bear arms for their personal and for national defense...other than idiotic, irrational paranoia and mindless propaganda from those who not only do not understand human nature but who cannot accept the simple facts of human nature, which include the fact that humans will sometimes try to victimize and kill other humans and those potential victims have a natural human right to be armed for their personal defense that no one can deny or infringe upon.

[JimC]

Seth wrote:

Banning guns doesn't remove them from the possession or availability to criminals intent on obtaining guns with which to commit crimes.

No, but it greatly reduces the total number and availability, which tends to lead to about a quarter of the murder rate of your firearm paradise...

[Seth]

Seth wrote:

Banning guns doesn't remove them from the possession or availability to criminals intent on obtaining guns with which to commit crimes.

No, but it greatly reduces the total number and availability, which tends to lead to about a quarter of the murder rate of your firearm paradise...

That's hardly a rational conclusion. If "availability" were the causative link then the rate of gun crime in the US would be millions of times higher than it is now, but it's not. Gun crime rates therefore cannot be causally related to the raw number of guns in a society. There are many factors involved including, I suspect strongly, cultural differences, that are more likely to have an effect on gun crimes.

But, you once again evade the essential point which is that no matter what the gun crime rates are, and no matter what the number of guns in a society is, criminals will get them and use them against others, and since that is an inevitable truism, it is the right of every citizen to be armed for self defense, regardless of how remote YOU (or the government) may think the possibility of a particular individual needing such weapons is.

To say that any individual has no right to defensive arms because some criminal might illegally obtain a gun (or other deadly weapon) if that individual is permitted to be armed is making a mockery of that individual's right to personal safety and it's saying nothing more than that no individual has a right to personal safety and all individuals are nothing other than abstract numbers on some politician's score-sheet that he's using to garner votes.

But that's not how individual human rights work in civilized nations. In civilized nations (which does not include the UK, Australia or New Zealand, among many others who deny citizens the right to defensive arms) individuals have an absolute and unalienable right to arm themselves for self defense as they believe necessary. The burden of exercising that right is, of course, that they must never use such weapons unlawfully nor allow them to cause harm to others without legal justification, but that's hardly unusual since all societies on the face of the earth (except perhaps the UK 20 years from now) recognize that almost anything can be turned into a deadly weapon...like kitchen knives, baseball bats, pipes, stones, ropes and pint beer glasses, and rather than banning everything that could be used as a weapon, sane and responsible nations and societies simply demand that people do not use them unlawfully as such and punish those who do use them unlawfully as weapons accordingly.

[Hermit]

The point is that my error as to Tero's place of residence or extraction is not relevant in the least to the OP.

Um. Yes. That's why I said

whenever anybody points out a factual error he employs for the sake of advancing his argument, he dismisses it as irrelevant

The other thing you do is to simply deny that you erred in the first place.

[rainbow]

That's hardly a rational conclusion. If "availability" were the causative link then the rate of gun crime in the US would be millions of times higher than it is now, but it's not.

I see you are confused by the difference between causation and correlation.
Gosh sometimes you make the most elementary errors.

Read this: http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-the-dif ... lation.htm

Perhaps you might learn something.

[Hermit]

That's hardly a rational conclusion. If "availability" were the causative link then the rate of gun crime in the US would be millions of times higher than it is now, but it's not.

I see you are confused by the difference between causation and correlation.

Bullshit. Seth has a perfectly clear idea anout the difference between correlation and causation. The criterion issimple. If a relationship supports the "more guns, less crime" mantra, it is causal. If it contradicts it, it's merely correlative.

Take the relationship between the number of guns and incidence of crime, for instance. Here is a graph of crime rates in the USA for the past 50 years.



Isn't it perfectly obvious that the rise in crime between 1960 and 1992 is only correlative to the rise in the rise of the number of firearms in private ownership, while the drop in subsequent years is equally obviously a cause of the rise of the number of firearms in private ownership? Going by Seth's criterion at least, it indubitably is.

[Seth]

The point is that my error as to Tero's place of residence or extraction is not relevant in the least to the OP.

Um. Yes. That's why I said

whenever anybody points out a factual error he employs for the sake of advancing his argument, he dismisses it as irrelevant

The other thing you do is to simply deny that you erred in the first place.

Pettifoggery.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

The point is that my error as to Tero's place of residence or extraction is not relevant in the least to the OP.

Um. Yes. That's why I said

whenever anybody points out a factual error he employs for the sake of advancing his argument, he dismisses it as irrelevant

The other thing you do is to simply deny that you erred in the first place.

Pettifoggery.

I can assure you that there is nothing petty about Hermits foggery! I know for a fact that he is one of the largest producers of befuddlement and obscurity in South Australasiashire.

[Seth]

That's hardly a rational conclusion. If "availability" were the causative link then the rate of gun crime in the US would be millions of times higher than it is now, but it's not.

I see you are confused by the difference between causation and correlation.
Gosh sometimes you make the most elementary errors.

Read this: http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-the-dif ... lation.htm

Perhaps you might learn something.

Maybe you ought to read it first. It says exactly what I claim. The "availability" of guns to the law-abiding general public has not been shown to be causative of higher gun crime rates. It only appears that there are more gun crimes in the US because there are more guns in the US, but as my statement shows, the correlation made by people here is specious and false. This is proven by the fact that as the number of guns in the US population increases dramatically, the incidence of gun crime goes down.

If there is any causation suggested by this fact it's that, well...more guns, less crime.