USA and gun control

I notice Tigerman didn’t answer the question though, which could be rephrased, given Taiwans relative lack of gun crime, surely there would be no point in introducing arms into the population?

I don’t know, honestly. I suppose it’s good that guns are not as available here in Taiwan. But, let’s be clear… guns are already available in Taiwan, though illegal… in Taiwan, only criminals have guns. But, criminals here tend to be gang-related and gangs here tend to leave the average citizen alone. The culture here is so very different from the culture in the US.

If put on the spot, I guess I’d have to say that it is a good thing that guns are not widely and legally available in Taiwan.

So, what does that mean? Does that mean that I should logically believe that guns should also not be available in the US? I don’t think it does.

No it doesn’t , and yes the debate is about US and gun control, but glad to see you are not stuck in one mode of thinking.

If Taiwan had a gun culture, do you think the government would have sent thugs into peoples’ homes, murdered their families, or had the Garrison command in the past throw opponents down flights of stairs or out of windows. Fuck no. Or at least, they likely would have been less cavalier.

If I were Taiwanese, I would have felt a hell of lot safer during the martial law era if Taiwan had a “gun culture.”

Or alternatively, foreigners would be safer from inside jobs:

[quote]
How about the American woman (wife of the manager for Converse Asia) who was murdered outside her home down south (I can’t remember whether it was Tainan or Taichung). It was in a “secure” community with security guards and only one entrance/exit. Where the police involved? Not much reporting on that either. [/quote]

If Taiwanese had guns blah blah. You think a few guns would stopped the the massive KMT army that arrived here? Nope, wouldn’t have made any difference. Everybody would have to register their weapons and they would be tbe first to be rounded up. Just like it made no difference in Central America or the Philippines, instead you have be extremely wary in those countries to this day. Guns everywhere, resistance to dictatorship or corruption, none.

Not far from where i work, recently, a korean immigrant who was thrown out of a small Christian college came back and shot dead a number of students and faculty. Many of whom had no beef with the guy whatsoever. Then you have this guy who thought he was going to be a real life JOKER who killed so many innocent people in a movie house.

Im starting to think maybe most able bodied adults in America should be armed. The majority are still sane and can stop the minority who go insane and start killing people. Perhaps guns should be taught in high school and everyone can be licensed to carry one who has no criminal records (doesnt stop the criminals i know) or is seeing a shrink.

IF a lot of people were armed at that movie house, the perp wouldve shot dead a lot less people before being shot himself.

Same goes for all those campus shootings. ONe lone gunman is able to kill dozens before the police can move in and do something about it.

The way this goes, i wouldnt mind having my dad’s old snubnose .38 on me.

ON the other hand, having almost everyone armed may actually increase gun deaths as boyfriends start shooting down girlfriends and vice versa or other friends and enemies at school, clubs ,cafes etc.

So the jury is out on whether gun deaths would increase or decrease over all.

The problem with that idea Tommy is that even more crazy and unstable people will have guns and be carrying them when they decide to go batshit bonkers. You are going to have to check guns in everywhere you go, unless you feel comfortable with parents and teachers walking around with guns in school and drunk bar patrons being able to avoid a fight. I guess this happens already so then what happens when the nutter comes in with his gun to the bar or school, it’s up to the police to deal with it in the end anyway.

Yes so far i do think that the overall number of gun deaths would increase. But if things go on the way they are with shoot ups everywhere, we have to go back to the days of the wild wild west.

Any Yank who isn’t armed to the teeth in a Stand Your Ground state though where taking an air swing at someone who almost ran you down can be lethal is a fool.

If Trayvon Martin had been armed instead of George Zimmerman

So the Police and Military who have guns are criminals? It would be very bad to have open gun ownership in Taiwan and indeed it is not necessary.

[quote=“Winston Smith”]Any Yank who isn’t armed to the teeth in a Stand Your Ground state though where taking an air swing at someone who almost ran you down can be lethal is a fool.

If Trayvon Martin had been armed instead of George Zimmerman[/quote]

Well not bringing a gun to a gun fight didnt work out for Mr Martin. I don’t see how Zimmerman was justified even if using the stand your ground his so called wounds were superficial. Maybe if Zimmerman had mined his own business in the first place instead of being a gung ho wannabe security hot shot the whole incident would have been avoided. I bet Zimmerman if he wasn’t packing a gun would have chosen a different course of action. In that case the police could have come to investigate the so called suspicous person Zimmerman thought Martin was and nothing would have come if it.

Martin was legally entitled to be where he was without being accosted in the first place.

Think what you like about that particular incident. But, why are so many still ignorant as to what the law stipulates even now?

[quote=“Florida Statutes 776.012 Use of force in defense of person”]

A person is justified in using force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force. However, [color=#FF0000]a person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if:[/color]

(1) [color=#FF0000]He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself[/color] or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony; or

(2) Under those circumstances permitted pursuant to s. 776.013.[/quote]

How idiotic and useless would the law be if it required us to wait until after we had already sustained great bodily harm or been killed before we were permitted to use deadly force to protect ourselves?

Source/link?[/quote]

Just google “national guard disarming citizens in new orleans aftermath”. [/quote]

If you do that, the first result is a conspiracy theorist nut job site and the second result is this thread. I hardly think that constitutes evidence.[/quote]

:roflmao: that is funny. Imagine that, when you google something a lot of crap shows up along with the good. You will find pages of all different sources on it, some of which has original footage. Keep letting the “real” media spoon feed reality to you. Anything else must be conspiracy propaganda. The government wouldn’t dump radiation on cities to test the effects on innocent Americas would they? The military wouldn’t do various experiments on their own soldiers without telling them would they? The CIA never tested LSD on unsuspecting Americas in the 1950s. Of course not. The mainstream media didn’t broadcast it on the nightly news at the time. What kind of nut-jobs would believe that could happen?[/quote]

In the interests of fairness, I decided to give it a second chance. This time, Googling that phrase actually brings up this thread in the first 2 results. :smiley:

The third result also has stories on including

  • How Obama faked the bin Laden killing
  • How the US is going to surrender control of its military to the UN
  • Human sacrifices by the Illuminati

Plus all the usual stuff about Obama being a communist, alien invasions etc.

The only other result on the page that’s directly relevant and contains the same phrase has it in a quote from a site called Zombie Slayer.

So, where is that evidence?[/quote]

Here you go: youtube.com/watch?v=kf8trl69 … re=related It’s a clip from ABC World News, which i don’t trust, since it’s known to be full of alien Illuminati liberals. Anything else you need me to spoon feed to you?

I thought it obvious that we are talking about civilian ownership of guns.

I thought it obvious that we are talking about civilian ownership of guns.[/quote]

Just asking for clarification which you have given. Thanks. You never know when people on this site write things like " all Taiwanese are Tax Cheats" Or Only In Taiwan only criminals have guns. Open to interpretation. Some people even in Taiwan would agree if you said some criminals were in fact police officers. What country does not have problems with dirty cops?

Source/link?[/quote]

Just google “national guard disarming citizens in new orleans aftermath”. [/quote]

If you do that, the first result is a conspiracy theorist nut job site and the second result is this thread. I hardly think that constitutes evidence.[/quote]

:roflmao: that is funny. Imagine that, when you google something a lot of crap shows up along with the good. You will find pages of all different sources on it, some of which has original footage. Keep letting the “real” media spoon feed reality to you. Anything else must be conspiracy propaganda. The government wouldn’t dump radiation on cities to test the effects on innocent Americas would they? The military wouldn’t do various experiments on their own soldiers without telling them would they? The CIA never tested LSD on unsuspecting Americas in the 1950s. Of course not. The mainstream media didn’t broadcast it on the nightly news at the time. What kind of nut-jobs would believe that could happen?[/quote]

In the interests of fairness, I decided to give it a second chance. This time, Googling that phrase actually brings up this thread in the first 2 results. :smiley:

The third result also has stories on including

  • How Obama faked the bin Laden killing
  • How the US is going to surrender control of its military to the UN
  • Human sacrifices by the Illuminati

Plus all the usual stuff about Obama being a communist, alien invasions etc.

The only other result on the page that’s directly relevant and contains the same phrase has it in a quote from a site called Zombie Slayer.

So, where is that evidence?[/quote]

Here you go: youtube.com/watch?v=kf8trl69 … re=related It’s a clip from ABC World News, which I don’t trust, since it’s known to be full of alien Illuminati liberals. Anything else you need me to spoon feed to you?[/quote]

And according to that, they were going around to evacuate people. That was the primary task. Obviously if the people inside are threatening others with guns, then they should be taken in order to create a safe situation for the authorities to do their jobs. One guy even said how his gun was bigger than the army guys had - that certainly sounds like a threat.

It’s certainly not what you implied it to be.

I thought it obvious that we are talking about civilian ownership of guns.[/quote]

Just asking for clarification which you have given. Thanks. You never know when people on this site write things like " all Taiwanese are Tax Cheats" Or Only In Taiwan only criminals have guns. Open to interpretation. Some people even in Taiwan would agree if you said some criminals were in fact police officers. What country does not have problems with dirty cops?[/quote]

Please don’t introduce the subject of Taiwan police officers and other countries polices officers in the same sentence. Taiwans officers are both corrupt and incompetent, an especially damaging combination. It doesn’t help that the judicial system is poor also.
They may not be as bad as a narcostate like Mexico, but they are also very far down the list of well trained and competent police forces.

Being a policeman in Taiwan is not looked up to by the locals even though the pay is high and it’s a steady job, there are good reasons for this.

You’re asking if there’s a difference between two societies: one that has always had open gun rights (more or less; e.g., the US), and introducing gun ownership into a society that’s never had open gun rights.

Of course there is a difference, a very big one. In today’s world the US is safer, far safer, for having never granted government a monopoly in gun ownership.

I suspect that, given the human appetite for both violence (innate) and images of violence (a proxy for the real thing), number two may be bloody in the short term. In the long run, though, I think it’s possible. I note that Hollywood is responsible for exporting TONS of images of violence, absolutely no doubt about that. Obviously Hollywood is both physically and psychically located in the US. Hollywood gun violence is created in a context of both the 2nd amendment and American ideas about guns.

I think it’s also highly relevant to this discussion that the US has a history of foreign wars, from the twentieth century through today. In many ways the images Hollywood exports are images of foreign violence as filtered through an American viewpoint. In other words, Hollywood violence seems familiar to non-Americans not just because it feeds a human appetite, but because the most vivid, the most lurid, of Hollywood violence was learned outside the US. It was imported to the US from the rest of the world - especially Europe, Russia, and the Pacific rim.

If the rest of the world wants to insulate itself completely from US gun rights, it would probably be wise to identify, examine, and classify Hollywood violence, and then prohibit the importation of Hollywood movies that resonate locally in a violent way.

Emm, I cannot follow what you are saying.

[quote=“ChewDawg”]If Taiwan had a gun culture, do you think the government would have sent thugs into peoples’ homes, murdered their families, or had the Garrison command in the past throw opponents down flights of stairs or out of windows. Fuck no. Or at least, they likely would have been less cavalier.

If I were Taiwanese, I would have felt a hell of lot safer during the martial law era if Taiwan had a “gun culture.”[/quote]

Are you smoking crack again? Doesn’t matter what the culture was beforehand, during Martial Law the government would have confiscated all civilian weapons. Resistance would have resulted in a quick arrest or death as it does everywhere else.

Aboriginals in Taiwan have and had a strong gun culture for hundreds of years. Where has it gotten them?