Ben Carson: "Gun control doesn't work for the crazies"

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"How do you stop people from being violent before they do it without the ability to see the future?"

I, very sadly, doubt it's in our immediate future. Human beings are only slightly removed from their savage heritage (hence the need for personal protection).

Groups of humans in every country (whether called politicians, armies, terrorists, revolutionaries, etc.) all create violence for their personal reasons. This has been going on forever and, although we can debate an eventual "end" to violence, and even methods to use, few governments offer lip service but continue to plot and kill, and train their citizens to kill other people. Is it really so surprising we have a violent society?

Unfortunately, as I indicated above, this will not end in your lifetime, or your child's, or your grandchild's, or .........

My advice to those who can see: KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN AND YOUR POWDER DRY. And do everything you can to promote Peace.

Correction of copy & paste error.
FROM:

TO:

Carson is right.

Welcome to our world, which has the lowest all time rates for assault and murder.

Yep, every other period had more. What they did not have was TV selling commercial time about murders from afar.

Numbers do lie, there were more killings and less people. Killings per person were way higher, everyone traveled armed, or in armed groups. So did the killers.

Pirates, highwaymen, footpads, cutthroats, stage coach robbers, train robbers, bank robbers, kidnapping, were much more common. Unlike the movie version, their opening act was kill everyone, then look through their pockets and belongings. Horse thieves were hung because that horse and saddle had a missing owner.

There were a lot more people moving around with no local connections, who left where they were born due to questions about dead people and missing belongings. Some were identified outlaws, most were wanted somewhere, with no way to find where or for what.

Among settled folks, the records were better, they killed each other over women, cards, drinking, or just to be the toughest around. In my own youth two men argued about the pigs of one running on the land of the other. Several years passed before it was over, and thirty-five people from two families were dead.

Blacks, Indians, Mexicans did not count. They deserved it for existing. People killed by women were the same.

I can report on the 50s on, and have heard from people who lived through the twenties and thirties, they said the fifties were mild. Except for one bump in the 90s, Crack Epidemic, the murder rate has been in steady decline.

Three people I knew were shot in robberies, two died. At least three people I have known went on to be sentenced to life. That is just what I have heard of. People leave, you never know why. The ones that got life were not the worst people I ever met.

Politics and TV try for the scare, but life is now the best it has ever been. We could list every murder, 30 to 45 thousand a year. but for 330,000,000 million, it is less than when it was 100,000,000. Nine killed in Chicago this weekend, are just no name body count. The ugly is, a hundred people a day get murdered. It may be a lot more because a thousand a week just vanish. A hundred a day we find the body.

We have already regulated this, killing people is illegal, and has been for a while. A whole lot has been spent to find out who is doing the killing, and jail them, but the numbers say a million plus are walking around that have gotten away with it. Bodies found plus just vanished, 250 a day.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We live in the best of times, lowest murder rate ever, and that endless event is still with us. Laws might have helped, or at least record keeping. As for a better armed population, better security, maybe some help. The main reason for a decline is the company murders keep, most of the dead in New Orleans were suspects in prior killings, almost all are Black.

We do not have a violence problem, Black males between 15 and 50 have a violence problem. Subtract them from the numbers, we are a peaceful as any other people. We are as gun owning and law abiding as the Swiss, but they do not have a Black problem. 3% of the population accounts for more than half the murder. They also score high at robbery and rape. Mexicans are 10% of the population and males between 15 and 50, 3% of the population are 31% of the convicted felons.

All of the white crazies that shot up schools, churches, or movies, the body count is less than one ordinary day of murder in America. They were not crazies until the did a shooting. They bought guns, passed background checks, and like the people I met who are doing life, were not the strangest people around.

You cannot predict crazy. Restricting sane people will not stop crazy. Blocking legal gun ownership will not stop the use of guns in robbery, rape, murder. Gun ownership is forbidden in Mexico. One gun shop in the whole country, for the government approved only.

New Orleans often leads the country in murder, and the State. Juarez has four times the murder rate, and a total gun ban.

We The People are out crazied, out feloned, this is no time to be outgunned.

If you would just take the guns away from the American troops in Iraq, then ISIS would quit being hostile.

If someone gets murdered, it doesn't matter to them if things were worse in the past. The only thing that matters is getting murdered. Only one is one too many.

In 1982, the city of Chicago instituted a ban on handguns. This ban barred civilians from possessing handguns except for those registered with the city government prior to enactment of the law. The law also specified that such handguns had to be re-registered every two years or owners would forfeit their right to possess them. In 1994, the law was amended to require annual re-registration.

Since the outset of the '82' Chicago handgun ban, the percentage of Chicago murders committed with handguns has averaged about 40% higher than it was before the law took effect.

You said: "The antigun people think it's simple. Don't carry a gun and you won't get shot at or nobody will try to hurt you."

I'd like to suggest the anti-gun ownership stance is actually slightly different.

First there's fear. Many anti-gun proponents are literally frightened to death of guns. This attitude could have many roots but if this fear is irrational (as many would agree) then using rational argument to address wrong ideas is difficult or impossible.

Secondly (and most importantly I feel) I'd like to compare the attitude of anti-gunners to those of sardines. Sardines are small fish that are frequently harassed and eaten by sharks and other large predator fish. The predators herd the thousands of sardines into a large ball and proceed to eat this sardine ball from the outside in. For sardines this works out because the sharks will only kill a certain number of fish and the rest swim away to happily procreate, etc. without a thought about their mates who've been eaten.

In exactly the same manner the mass of anti-gunners respond to danger the same way: The predators who will kill will be allowed to continue to prey on law abiding citizens (the sardine ball) until sated. If these people happen to be so foolish as to allow themselves to be caught there are many who will replace them. And the anti-gun folks seem to feel this is preferable to defending yourself.

I am not a sardine.

What seems to work most effectively with those people is to be attacked and barely escape with thier lives (bludgeoned, shot, stabbed, raped, etc.) or just have the living dogshit terrified out of them by malevolent psychopaths. When they are forced to come to terms with the fact that there actually are evil people out there that will f**k them up just out of boredom and the cops won't be there to save the day they realise that it's on them and them only to look after themselves.

All the do-gooder peacenik BS all the sudden goes away and is replaced with a desire to buy a gun or guns and learn to use them. The memory of thier painful ordeal will keep them on the right track. I've known this to happen to a few people. Until then most all of them will remain sheep or like ZenDen said; sardines.

Just how many criminals purchase firearms from dealers? Do you think the criminals they are buying guns from are going to abide by whatever restrictions the government might put on selling firearms?

I wish this was true all the time. My aunt was held up at gunpoint once and that is what caused her to become so anti-gun that if you do not agree 100% with her and focus solely on the guns and not the people wielding them, then you are against her completely. There is no room for compromise, and there is no room for other people to have a different focus. She seems to be extremely frustrated with my interest in researching our rates of violence (diversity, population, gun laws, mental health, everything compared with other countries - all ties in with poverty). Because I want to focus on the people and why they kill, and how to make the world a better place, I apparently want everyone to have guns without any laws.

I like guns, but I like knives better and despite my aim being pretty good with a gun, I actually have a much better chance to take out a person within a short distance with a knife much faster than they can shoot me (such as for home protection - my home is set up where a gun would not be the best choice). We live in a low income area where there is a bit of gang violence, and there are plenty of felons running around with guns. My first jury duty where I got to be on the jury was for a double homicide. They never caught the killer, there was no evidence, but the guy on trial was put away for being a felon with multiple firearms. My FIL and BIL are firefighters and they get to go on calls to clean up violence more often than fires, and there are plenty of times where the killer is never caught, especially concerning gang executions. These criminals know what they're doing.

One lady said she could walk down the street, talk to a guy, and he'd get her a handgun within an hour or two. Banning them won't do anything. California is already really strict on the regulations - I had to pass the background check and tests and show them that I knew gun safety and how to handle a weapon - yet there are still plenty of ways to get an unregistered/illegal firearm. I know people who have gone to Vegas gun shows and brought illegal firearms back that way.

And then there's the fact that anti-gun advocates like to add in the suicide by gun deaths in with the homicides and accidental shootings, which are much higher. In 2013 in the US, there were almost 20,000 suicides by gun vs 12,000 homicides and accidental shootings, so when they say there were over 31,000 gun deaths in 2013, it makes it sound a lot worse than saying there were 11,000 gun related homicides (rate of 3.5 per 100,000). Overall (not just guns), we have a rate of 4.7 per 100,000, which puts us around the middle for all countries (Honduras has a rate of about 90 per 100,000). There are about 110 countries more violent than us, and around 107 less violent (intentional homicide), and each one has varying laws concerning guns. Some countries with very strict laws have very little crime, while others with the same laws have a great number of crimes.

Take the Honduras for example. They're pretty lax on their gun control, yet they have the highest rate of murder. Venezuela is second from the top, yet they've banned guns. Then there's Japan, with extremely strict gun control and very small number of homicides (.3 per 100,000), vs Singapore, who has even less (.2 per 100,000) yet they're also lax with gun control. The Americas, mainly South and Central, are riddled with gun crime no matter what the laws are, whereas countries who are more homogeneous like Iceland and Japan don't. When I looked at the poverty rates for each country, the Honduras have an extremely high rate of people living below the poverty line, at 65.2%, whereas Japan has 16% (on par with us, surprisingly enough). Venezuela also has a high rate, at 31%, while Iceland has 12% (and very little murder - .3 per 100,000)

It just seems like governments who take better care of their people, more family oriented, don't stress their workers out as much, have better school systems, more focus on keeping mentally healthy (ie not stressed) etc, have less crime, and I don't understand why people don't want to focus on that instead of what instrument the murderer wants to use. Just look at England and their drop boxes for knives, since knife violence has gone way up since their ban of guns... Taking a weapon away from someone capable of murder isn't going to make them better, it isn't going to stop the person from being violent, stressed, depressed, angry, whatever. We can't stop all crime, but we can at least try to make things more livable in the states so that less people turn to crime. We can change the prison system (there are a lot of people in prison for things they didn't do, or for petty drug charges). Right now the public defenders push their clients to opt for a plea bargain even if they didn't do what they're being charged with because they don't want to go to court, and they want to keep the prisons open. Someone charged with child molestation can be out on the streets in a matter of months if they plead guilty, but if they plead innocent, they get locked up. It's incredibly backwards. Having talked to people who've gone to jail, they said that the majority are ill-educated poor people. We need to fix that.

Not entirely sure...but seems to be what is wanted here, just full-scale banning of 'the crazies' from owning guns which by that I doubt they specifically mean actual violent individuals with a violent history probably to make it easier anyone with a mental illness diagnoses would be catagorized as a crazy who has no right to own a gun. Not that it would solve the problem then people who want to harm others with guns could still illegally acquire them.

/getting belittled for addressing violence without further violence.

Speak for yourselves. I'm not in favor of banning guns or even switchblades, I just think people who brag about them without actually having faced down whomever it is they're so threatened by are puerile and superficial. There's no concrete victor in a real assault and Raptor/OOM would know this if they had ever dealt with that. Have I been shot before? No, but I'm damn sure I've gotten close and it DOES NOT give me the right to hold a weapon built to kill.

Gun control doesn't work under the U.S. constitution (or too much of anywhere else) because guns are machines that are by their very nature not exactly controllable. They can be built a century ago with the best of intentions, gather dust in an armory and only ever be used in war crimes.

Sweetie, I'm not bragging about anything, I'm participating in a debate. If it makes you feel better to state that I wasn't ever involved in a real assault then by all means, state it. However, all it's actually doing is making you full of horses**t.

I'm aware of my past and my history, not you scooter. Either way what you type on the internet has no bearing at all on my life, present nor past.

I also didn't belittle anyone for anything. I simply said that just because you may have a philosophy of pacifism and nonviolence doesn't mean that the assailant is going to see your obviously superior light of inner peace and justice and decide to simply live and let live. It's his philosophy that dictates what happens and it's very far from anything that could be resisted without violence.

But if you have an idea of how you can survive an attack from somebody like that without using violence, by all means please enlighten us. Nobody said there was a concrete victor either, except maybe the person who posted about how their ultimate knife fighting skills would save them if someone tried to shoot them. But who am I to argue with someone who brings a knife to a gun fight? As for the "concrete victor" notion, if you do shoot the Motherf***er then you will have to deal with cops and possibly facing charges and even if you aren't charged you could easily be sued by his family and have all sorts of things happen from revenge on their part. You would be likely to have emotional problems from it, even if you are very aware that the piece of crap robber obviously needed killing, because knowing that somebody shot a crack head mugger and being happy that there is one less of them out there now, is a lot different than dealing with the fact that you are the one who did it and the psychological impact that it would have, whether you were justified in what you did or not, and whether you feel any guilt or not. So even if you walk away without a scratch or even a day in a lawyers office and are handed a medal by the mayor, you are still going to have some ill effects from it.

So back to what you were saying please cberg-san. Please teach the rest of us how to handle a violent attack without using violence. Or suffering injuries. Or dying. Your grasshopper is eagerly awaiting your pearls of wisdom.

Well all that happens regardless of what everybody thinks of me, I'm just over it. Care to keep convincing an ex-scout he should depend on machines for safety? All guns do is nudge the danger somewhere else. As soon as humans invent something others run amok with it. What's going on with overproduction and sensationalism of guns today looks no different from the way America found out nuking people is bad PR.

Black powder was never invented for killing, my grasshoppers, it was for ceremonial fireworks and rocketry.

Ultimate knife fighting skills? Lol. I said I have a much better chance with a knife in close combat. If you know what to aim for, it is actually possible to take out a gunman without him being able to shoot you, but again that's close combat (short distance). Like in this old training video:

If you're to run into someone on the street, or a robber in your home, who has a gun and is intent on injuring/killing you, the chances of this person being well trained are actually very low, and they most likely wouldn't be expecting a knife attack. I didn't say the chances are really good I wouldn't get shot, just better. Mainly because I know my knives like extensions of my hands, even though I'm by far not an amazing fighter. My husband could probably do better with just his hands, as he's trained in a few different martial arts that focus on taking out the opponent as quickly as possible.

It just really depends on the situation, which is why I used my house for an example. It's not wide open, not a good place to shoot someone and my husband, who likes the idea of guns for protection, agrees. That's why we have daggers and swords in our room as well. If we're out in an open area, with a lot of distance, a gun would be a much better choice for a weapon. If someone comes up to me and sticks a gun in my back, martial arts + knife (but may increase chance of injury to myself or bystander, so I need to assess the area and situation and decide what the best course of action would be with the least amount of damage to not just myself but everyone around me. If we're alone, free game).

One of our good friends, who has been in serious combat in the army, overseas, says the same thing. He's had to resort to martial arts when attacked while unarmed, and did come out the victor. For someone like me, being a lot smaller and weaker, having a weapon would help a great deal (though at least I know all the vital points...). I still however definitely risk injury and/or death no matter the situation if I engage in combat (or even play passive). Any time a weapon (or violence in general) is involved, death is a possibility I have to consider. Everything is a risk. My aim is to at least take out the bastard attacking me.

And you know all about OliveOilMom and Raptor?
When did either "brag" about them?

Apparently you not that over it.


As in Boy Scouts of America? You think you're the only one? What ever happened to being prepared? You can't wish or BS your way out of everything.


wut?


Guns were around long before nukes in case you hadn't heard.

I wont even bother to look that up because it's irrelevant.