I guess by now everyone has heard about the atrocious incidents at VA Tech today. Already, the gun lobby, no doubt, is in damage control "if there were more guns, this wouldn't have happened." It really bothers me that this will likely turn into an inditement of the mentally ill rather than a re-examination of gun laws.
Not everyone who has a psychological break is going to rush to hurt someone. In fact, most who have mental illness are not violent in nature. However, the ignorance in our country is going to make anyone who does have some form of mental illness feel like an Arab-American after 911 (another wrong).
No one seems to notice how much harder college is than it used to be, how stressed out college students are these days, how competitive it is when it shouldn't be, and that a students stress is artificially manufactured. Its totally unnecessary... colleges like St. Johns and New Univ. of S. FL have pretty much proven that the archaic grading system isn't necessary anymore, yet there are numbers of college suicides every year because of grades and the other stresses of college life. The gunman was likely Asian-American. By all accounts, the way children are raised in an Asian culture, a B grade is as bad as an F. If you're stressed out in college, and you know any Asian-Americans in school with you, chances are they are twice as stressed.
Of course there's no way to defend the gunman's obviously insane motivation for killing innocent people. But I really think, on a national level, the stress levels of college students should be examined thoroughly. Why do we need to stress our students??! We live in an era where, for the first time, the children of middle-class parents can expect that they will not be nearly as economically successful. So they do all they can... they go to college, and when their "best" gets them mediocre grades (due to the mitigating circumstances of being away from home for the first time and dealing with hormone developement), they take it seriously, too seriously. Grades don't mean diddly. They are artificial. Yet you take an already stressed out student and start adding stress to their life, like a girl going that extra mile to be really cruel, a jack@$$ taunting on top, and you get a volitile situation no matter who the subject is.
I'm just beside myself. If you have kids, hug them.
If we don't give students a grade, then what is the point of training them? (and yes, college is training) Grades are scale to determine how well someone understands the material taught. All metrics are "artifical" in that they are a pre-defined division of level of achievement into manageable groups. It's not evil. Your point of high expectations among Asians is not a part of the school system, but of the Asian culture. Do we condemn high achievers because there are people in the black community who view high achievements of blacks in schools as being too white? It's a point of black-on-black racism, and it's due to grades. Is it the fault of the grades, or the people holding that point of view?
Anyway, the gun lobby doesn't think that more guns were needed. What was needed was more people properly trained to use a gun they may already own. Also, to find out how this now obviously unstable person managed to get ahold of one.
I can't believe we are at such odds here. In fact, I think this is the first time I really disagree with you (and because of that, it makes me want to re-examine my own convictions).
First of all, the gun lobby doesn't care about your gun rights. They care about selling guns.
And grades were first implemented during the Middle Ages. I think in 700-1100 years we could come up with a better system. And we have. Personal evaluations. A paragraph written by your instructor detailing your progress is much more useful than seeing a "B minus." Do you think the graduates of St. Johns or New College are any less competitive in the marketplace? Think again.
I know I'm not the only one that knows brilliant people that got poor grades. What did those grades say about them? They don't have what it takes to get into college. And yet, they can sometimes operate beyond an undergraduate level. I know its a minority, but they exist, and grades don't accurately evaluate them. The are the creme of the crop, being weeded out by an overly simplistic evaluation system.
You ever got sick or hurt during a semester, and missed part of it, and still got graded? What is that grade worth? Not much.
I'm not saying students shouldn't be evaluated, just that the current system is archaic and too simplistic to give accurate information.
If you got good grades, of course, you will disagree. But you may not be aware of advantages you may have had over others (other than high IQ) that allowed you to get better grades. How about diet? Sleep patterns? (etc etc) So many things have to go right to achieve a straight A semester, but only a few things need to go wrong to obliterate a GPA to the point of no recovery. Grades give an overly simplistic, and therefore suspect and probably inaccurate, evaluation of a students progress. But, again, if you got good grades, you will probably disagree.
Don't put the blame on guns or grades......
Many people have guns and many people get poor grades, and the overwhelming majority never go on a shooting spree.
There is one cause for this.... mental illness ! Untreated mental illness more specifically. Not insanity ! Insane people are not functional enough to do something like what happened at VT. This guy was very sane. Very messed up, but very sane. He knew exactly what he was doing. It's hard to comprehend that something like this can be done by a sane person, unless you have met a truly insane person.
Most people have no idea what truly insane really is.
The problem is too many people get little or no help for their illnesses due to fear of what people may think. It's hard to admit you have a problem but there's only one way to get treatment, and that is to admit there is a problem.
Family and friends are the support this guy needed and he obviously had little of either. Or felt he had little.
It really irks me when people want to blame the gun on the actions of a person. I can kill with an automobile as easy as a gun. I can make homemade bombs from recipes on the internet and numerous other ways to kill a bunch of people. Many thousands of people died from bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but do we blame radioactive materials ? Without uranium, it couldn't have happened.
We need to address the cause of actions like this and not tools used, and figure out how to avoid anyone getting to this point. We cannot eliminate ways to hurt people but we can eliminate the potential for it happening.
I'm gonna bring it up, and many will spit. Video Games. Maybe you can't say it was "Video Game Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder" that led to this or other massacres--although I won't easily dismiss the hypothesis--but one thing is striking--the marksmanship of these shooters. You might not say that video games caused a shooting, but you can probably say that video game practice leads to the large numbers of successful hits and kills--in other words, a massacre as opposed to just a shooting. This latest guy was using a handgun! Shooting off a hundred or more shots which is physically taxing. Walked into a room and shot the teacher right in the head with a handgun. Who's going to want to bet he wasn't a video game fanatic? Who's gonna be surprised that he was?
As for grades, I always thought C and D's were ridiculous. What's a C or D? It means you didn't do it/didn't get it. There should be only three grades: excellent performance, meets requirements, and didn't meet requirements. How's a C any better than a D? F just means you're going in the opposite direction. But I'll tell you from looking at my daughter's report card yesterday, it ain't like the old days at the elementary level. They're playing a whole new game.
As for stress being a main cause, with the stressed Asian as a model, then why aren't similar events happening all more frequently in China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.? As is said, the stressed Japanese goes out and kills himself, the stressed American goes out and kills someone else. But is it stress or culture?
I heard a supposed expert say once that 1 in 100 people is a psychopath. Could that be true? How many people are living around you? Maybe it's all just about the availability of particular modus operandi to channel such a common energy.
Have you ever shot a gun ?
There is no way a video game can help make someone a better marksman with a hand held weapon. Better hand-eye coordination yes, but shooting a real gun is not even close. Marksmanship has to do with knowing the weapon and lots and lots of practice. It is not that easy to be a good shot, especially with a handgun.
If anything violent video games help relieve stress in people who need stress relief. Violence has been around since the beginning of time and video games had added no violence to the times we live in any more than Bugs Bunny whacking Elmer with a frying pan. Or Elmer shooting Daffy for that matter.
If video games were in any way a partial cause of something like this we are all in trouble. Study history, extreme violence is nothing new. In fact humans are probably less barbaric now than ever before. This act pales in comparison to literally millions of violent rampages throughout history. There were no video games, and until the last few centuries there were no firearms. Mass murder has been around since the beginning of humanity. Or should it be inhumanity.
Once again, something tragic has happened and nobody wants to address the real issue of why it happened. Let's all point fingers at what is easy to blame, and not what we are afraid to see. (reality)
I'm not a "gun nut" and in fact I don't even own a gun, but I will defend the right to own one.
I'm not. I'm asking for an examination of stress on our campuses as a major contributing factor to campus suicides and violence, and now that you bring it up, an examination of this so called right to carry a gun, always championed (incorrectly) by the 2nd Amendment.
Exactly what I was afraid of... an inditement of mental illness or the mentally ill. Blame them, fear them, lets collect them all and make them live together! Then there won't be any more crime involving guns or any more gun accidents. 33 dead... nothing to do with guns.
/yeah right
Your assumption is that sane people are sane all the time, and mentally ill people act irrationally and even violently all the time. But that's not how it is. Sane people can go temporarily insane. Sane people are, on average, much more violent than the mentally ill, even when they are absolutely sane. That's what I think happened today. A sane man, under impossible personal, hormonal (and artificial) stresses, just snapped and gave in to his violent urges. If the shooter was mentally ill, its quite unlikely he could get his hands on 2 handguns and all that ammo.
Prepare yourself to be irked.
A car has a purpose. Yes it can kill, but it was conceived and designed for transportation. I'll bet you dollars to dougnuts if there weren't any cars, no one would be driving anywhere.
A gun is designed to kill. Has no other purpose. That's what they do. Guns kill, and kill well. If the gunman didn't have a gun, maybe had a baseball bat instead (which wasn't designed to, but can also kill) most of those kids would still be alive. The other examples you list are also conceived and designed to kill, esp. people. Thats what they do, they kill people very well. Are you really saying a bomb wouldn't kill someone, its incidental, and by some magic the bomber hands out death without a bomb? Hmmm....
Cancer kills people, too. Like a gun, cancer doesn't have a will of its own. By your logic, people who die from cancer are actually meeting their end from... I guess you might say a slow form of suicide. This is, of course, absurd. Occam's Razor, blame the cancer.
We're getting closer to the 2nd Amendment, though you didn't mention it specifically, I can read between the lines and I can tell (I'll just assume here) that you like guns, and you probably believe the 2nd gives you a right to carry a gun.
I believe in a strong interpretation of the Constitution. Face value, not strict, unbending interpretation, just strong... what are they really trying to say... they give us hints. The 2nd Amendment is very clearly talking about a standing army, those in an army, and not the individual citizen. There is no mention of self-defense or crime. If it was intended to refer to individual citizens, surely they would have mentioned self-defense... it was an important concept they authors were aware of and took seriously. But the 2nd has nothing to do with crime; it is specifically addressing threats to democracy, threats to the state. Vigilantism and self-defense does absolutly nothing towards protecting the state.
There are state-level and other municiple laws making it legal to buy/own/carry/conceil a handgun, but the 2nd Amendment is not supportive of an individual's right to "bear arms," but of the people in a militia, which is necessary to protect the state. The weak interpretation, that says an individual has this right, opens up a can of worms with "arms." Does a citizen have a right to personal nukes? bio-weapons? By what I gather would be your interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (SORRY if I am putting words in your mouth... this is just me trying to make a point), yes, we have a right to own our own nukes.
Everyone experiences stress. Its part of life. What I object to is synthetic stress, contrived stress, artificially manufactured stress. If you think I'll believe your blood pressure doesn't go up before you take an important test... well... I won't. Chances are you do much better on the test if you are not stressed. So... why do you get stressed? Its a trick question. You get stressed because our society has placed this value system on grades. We act like they are so important... but... they really don't amount to meaning much of anything other than telling you the person is good at getting good grades... which is self-defining and circular.
An 'A' grade, say for example, in a high-level calculus course might mean a bunch of things. It might mean the student is average and worked really hard to achieve this grade. It might mean the student just has a knack for it, and doesn't need to study at all, just sort of knows it. If the student is a savant, however, that grade really has much less meaning. If the student cheated, again, grade loses whatever meaning we thought it had.
If, however, there were no 'grades,' but personal, verbose evaluations, it would be much clearer, who, among the four aformentioned A's, was actually the ideal student. And without the anxiety of necessarily falling into only 1 of 5 categories (A B C D F), but a personal evaluation that can take all things into consideration, I believe a student will be happier, and will achieve more without the manufactured shackes of this stress, the stress of needing to get good grades like ones life depended on it.
I also believe that if there was more gun control, there'd be much less violent gun crime. It just seems so counter-intuitive that if everyone had a gun, we'd all be safer. If no one had a gun, I'll bet anything no one would get killed by one.
Oh, then why is the military using video games to help train markmanship?
I've no qualm with owning guns. But if you do, you might want to consider the fact that most gun deaths and events happen within the home with that gun, and most often with a family member. Where would our modern great literature be without guns in the home?
No argument about mass killings in history, it's just this particular brand of mass killing in our culture today. Actually, shooting events are more likely to happen on a K through 12 campus. Children with guns. Why's that?
Boy, you guys must be up late in the wee hours. It's 11:20pm here, so it must be 3, 4, 5am there? Stress may be an appropriate topic.
There are many cultural issues relating to college. The age old "if I don't get straight A's and graduate with honors, I'll never be able to do anything mentality" as well as the "I'm dead in the job market without a college degree" aren't helping matters. I would say that the problem isn't so much guns or mental illness, but the way that younger people seem to be anymore.
Now, I'm only 24 years old (will be 25 soon), but I've seen and experienced quite a bit. I went to college immediately after high school and wasn't able to cope with the pressure so I dropped out after three semesters. I've managed to eke out a living in the years since, and have worked in a high school and am now working at a college. I've found that with many youths today - there is an unhealthy level of parental involvement - there's either too much or too little. I'd say that the phenomenon really began during the late 1980's when the Yuppies finally settled down and had children. Their children have to be the best at everything and are incapable of doing wrong. Unfortunately, these children don't tend to learn accountability, responsibility, or how to handle life situations in an appropriate manner. Throw in the video games that they've had no shortage of access to (Junior has to have that brand new PS2, I'll pay a premium to have it before anyone else in 2001 for example) - instead of interacting with people they only know how to solve problems in the world of Metal Gear Solid and Grand Theft Auto, easy access to money (to buy weapons) or weapons, and situations like this are bound to happen.
Call me a bad person, but I don't believe that the problem lies with guns, mental illness, or video games, but with parents who are not doing their job. A child should be taught the skills for coping with stress, with how to handle life situations and disappointment. If you look at the demographics of most school shooters - the shooters typically come from affluent communities (often from affluent families) and have abusive or uninvolved parents who buy love in the form of toys (be it video games, cars, etc.).
Now, not all children from this environment will freak out and kill everyone, and I am sure that this is not always the case. I'm just saying that most people are looking too narrowly and not at the big picture.
I've worked in the k-12 environment and have seen some disturbing things with my 13 year old younger sister. I hate to say it, but most parents are oblivious to what their children are really doing or just don't care because that would involve dealing with the problem instead of letting the child deal with it. Nobody wants to admit that their child is anything less than perfect, and sadly - that's the problem.
A militia is not an army. It's a group of regular citizens who are prepared to work as as an army in times of need. There is also that "to enforce the law" point there.
The point of being able to keep and bear arms is not particularly exclusive to having a well regulated militia. In your strong interpretation, which I agree in general, then it is two complimentary ideas in one sentence, not two exclusively dependent ideas.
Do you have a clue ?
Yes, you did mention gun control.....
And guns do have another purpose and that is for defense against a criminal with a gun. Why do you people think restricting legal guns or more gun control would make any difference ? The legal guns are not the problem and more gun control would do absolutely nothing but make illegal guns more valuable.
And I never blamed the mentally Ill, I blamed mentall illness that is ignored and not treated. It's the lack of help for the mentally Ill. I have worked with the mentally ill and know far more about it than you do.
Sanity is not an in and out condition. Insanity can look that way. Insane people can act sane at times, but hardly makes them sane. Temporary insanity is BS and is just a BS legal defense. Someone loosing control is not insanity. You think it can happen if you have the right circumstances ? You have to have the ability do do something like this. He didn't "loose it" and shoot his cheating wife.... He sot a bunch of strangers. It's a choice made by the individual.
Mentally Ill people can and do get guns every day. Eliminating guns would eliminate gun deaths. Eliminating cars would eliminate auto deaths. This is exactly what the problem is. Let's all deal with the results and the tools used instead of dealing with prevention.
And for the record legal gun owners rarely do anything with their legal guns. Guns make it easier for cowards to kill, nothing more.
The constitution was written along time ago and has to be taken into the context of the time. Interpretation can and does range to both ends of the spectrum, which is why it should not be "interpretated" by anyone.
This guy was full of hate and mental illness. That is an explosive combination that can be avoided and treated if anybody actually gave a damn before it happened. Once again lets all pretend to care now....
I personally believe if there was more moron control there would be less moronic comments in forums.
The gun did not kill anyone, the hateful bastard with the gun did and you cannot argue that point with any common sense. If he didn't have a gun he would not have killed as many, but there would still be dead people. So less dead bodies is your solution ?
So lets control guns so 30+ people don't die. Maybe just 4 or 5.... That is NO better. The problem still isn't addressed.
Next lets put controls on knives and swords (perfectly legal for any US adult to own) A sword could have done the same damage with the elimination of guns in society. Just as a bomb or many other destructive devices.
Deal with the problem......
Finally someone who can see the root cause of the problem. Parents, or lack thereof mixed with the right cocktail of hate(lack of love) and mental illness that reduces ones ability to control their emotions. And we, as society are as much to blame as any one thing in this situation. We don't see what we don't like until it bites us on the ass. People just don't care anymore because they are too busy with their own selfish BS.
And too many people have children who are not good parents and didn't really want to be parents. Didn't have decent parental role models. You get generation after generation getting worse. This is where we are now.
Our founding fathers in their infinite wisdom had to add the second amendment to cover their own butts in what they had done. They were fighting against a monarchy out of control. They had to add the 2nd amendment, or they would have had to admit they were traitors to the crown. They considered themselves to be the regulated militia.
A revolution is nothing more than a bunch of traitors with a good reason to revolt. And the reasons are not always honorable. Sometimes, or probably usually, it is about money and power.
For the record, I am against gun control. And no, I'm not a gun toting NRA member. I don't even own a gun. I'm actually pretty liberal, however I don't feel that guns should be controlled any further than they already are. After all, making cocaine, heroine, and marijuana illegal sure kept those drugs off the streets. I don't see gun control being any more effective than those laws are. If someone is going to commit a crime, they probably don't care what is or isn't legal and can find some other means of procuring a weapon.
What I am for is responsible gun ownership. If these attacks weren't carried out with guns, they'd be carried out with some other weapon or a black market gun that would be harder to trace. I would say that probably something like 95% of the gun owning population are perfectly fine people who either use their guns as decoration or for hunting. Pretty much the same way that people handle swords and bow and arrows. The other 5% of gun owners are the group who give guns a bad name - the people who aren't careful about securing their weapons (thus leading to home disasters), have illegal or stolen guns that they use to carry out crimes, or just don't care and do things like this.
You should never assume anything about what I think or believe. You know what it makes you....
I didnt't even mention the constitution non-specifically. When I mention "right" to own a gun, I meant the right as a human being, who has right to protect himself and his family with whatever he can.
Legal guns are rarely used to kill. Do your homework ! Illegal guns are the vast majority of gun crimes. Do you know how many people die everyday in gun crimes ? Far more than 30 !
Are you feeling their pain ?
Maybe you should enlighten us on how to have illegal gun control ? If you really cared about gun crimes you would have posted about that instead of the assuming I had any opinion on the 2nd amendment. I don't care what the constitution says, I live my life the way I believe it should be lived, on my terms and I am the one who has to answer for that. Don't be such a sheep.....
The media capitalizes on your emotion's and guilt to sell advertisement. Does CNN mention any of the hundreds of deaths everyday due to criminals ? NO, nobody does because you don't like to see it.
(unless it's a celebrity or a high body count)Otherwise we may have to deal with it. And then may have to accept some blame for ignoring what shouldn't have been ignored for so long.
The only way keep this from happening again is for all parents to start acting like parents and love their children. People who are loved and respected do not murder. It's really that simple....but will never happen.
I really wanted to stay out of this little argunent you all have going here, I really did. But, it seems, none of you have owned or fired a gun.
Video games *do* have an effect on marksmanship, but not much. It's more along the lines of training one's reflexes, not shot accuracy. If you've ever fired a handgun, your first shot likely missed the target completely. It takes a lot of hands-on practice with a handgun to become even remotely accurate. Simply playing a lot of video games, then going out and buying a gun will not make you an expert marksman.
Also, remember: Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Guns are tools, nothing more. Guns can't go out on their own and kill people, there needs to be a human there. You can kill someone just as easily with a hammer as with a gun...a gun just lets you do so faster and from a further distance.
Ahh....common sense.
I have owned and fired many guns
Don't have one now because I don't need one.
The military does use video games/simulators to train but not for hand-held weapons. They use it for long distance video-view weapons which makes it more about shooting blanks than a simulation.
Like you said, there are many ways to kill a person, and a handgun is not even the most common tool used.
Here in Texas, one in three households has at least one firearm (including handguns, rifles, and shotguns). We even have Conceal and Carry permits, allowing law-abiding citizens to walk the streets armed. There are even a couple of city councils considering REQUIRING residents to own a firearm.
I do not own a firearm of any sort.
Now, since you are wondering which way I'm going to go on this, I'll go ahead and state that I consider myself a Constitutionalist. I strongly support the Second Ammendment, and that any attempt to limit the individuals ownership of firearms is an infringement of the Constitution.
I think that if any of the students who were gunned down were armed, the situation would have been over much sooner and with much less loss of life.
I think that this will come down to the mental instability of the individual in question. This is by no means a blanket condemnation of all those with mental issues, depression, attention deficit disorder, or a case of the Monday's. This one man did this. It is his fault. He pulled the trigger.
The gun lobby didn't give him the gun.
The people didn't ask to be shot.
He did it. Let's put the condemnation and damning where it belongs, move on, and try to heal from this sad, horrible event.
Sermon over... May whatever you pray to be with you.
Exactly,
The laws regulating firearms, and who can own a firearm comes from state and federal laws, not the constitution.
The idea of requiring a citizen to own a gun could only happen in Texas ;-)I doubt that would ever pass and honestly it's ridiculous. But more ridiculous things have been made into law so you never know.
These numbers are old but still show gun control is not an answer to any problem like what happened. More relaxed laws for law abiding gun owners do help. At one time Florida had the highest murder rate of any state. Dade county was known as Murder County USA. Time Magazine even did a cover story on it. Since then, gun crimes have gone down while the cause(illegal drugs) has not dropped and has probably increased.
Here's some hard numbers about conceal/carry laws here in Florida and how it has affected gun crimes:
* Right-to-carry laws require law enforcement agencies to issue handgun permits to all qualified applicants. Qualifications include criteria such as age, a clean criminal record, and completing a firearm safety course. (no mental health evaluation needed)
* In 1986, nine states had right-to-carry laws.
* As of 1998, 31 states have right-to-carry laws, and about half the U.S. population lives in these states.
* Florida adopted a right-to-carry law in 1987. At the time the law was passed, critics predicted increases in violence. The founder of the National Organization of Women, Betty Friedan stated:
"lethal violence, even in self defense, only engenders more violence."
* When the law went into effect, the Dade County Police began a program to record all arrest and non arrest incidents involving concealed carry licensees. Between September of 1987 and August of 1992, Dade County recorded 4 crimes committed by licensees with firearms. None of these crimes resulted in an injury. The record keeping program was abandoned in 1992 because there were not enough incidents to justify tracking them.
* Florida adopted a right-to-carry law in 1987. Between 1987 and 1996, these changes occurred:
Florida United States
homicide rate -36% -0.4%
firearm homicide rate -37% +15%
handgun homicide rate -41% +24%
* 221,443 concealed carry licenses were issued in Florida between October of 1987 and April of 1994. During that time, Florida recorded 18 crimes committed by licensees with firearms.
* As of 1998, nationwide, there has been 1 recorded incident in which a permit holder shot someone following a traffic accident. The permit holder was not charged, as the grand jury ruled the shooting was in self defense.
* As of 1998, no permit holder has ever shot a police officer. There have been several cases in which a permit holder has protected an officer's life.
From what I gathered, I suppose everyone here who owns a gun and uses the 2nd Amendment as an entitlement to this right to that gun MUST belong to a branch of the military, law enforcement or a well-regulated militia. If you do not meet one of those 3 constraints, then your rights to carry do not stem from the 2nd Amendment, but from other state and municiple laws.
But I know that the people who like guns like them so much that they want so badly to have this fundamental right that they will never be able to correctly interpret just what the law really says.
MacTrash, you are shamefully lame. Can I get a second on this? Guns are designed to kill. No other purpose. They are not designed to scare someone, though they do. They are not designed to wound and maim, though they often do this too. They are not designed to sexually arouse, though they apparently do this well, too. Do not deceive yourself, it is a vehicle of death and nothing more.
Fritterers, thanks for your well thought out and restrained posts. Yesterday, 30 people were murdered not 50ft from my office. 2 more had been murdered earlier that morning across the campus.
And it sickens me that the first thing idiots spout is that if there had been more guns it wouldn't have happened. A deceptively moronic logic. Lots of local police, they all had guns, SWAT with their auto-submachine guns, FBI, and I even saw a campus cop with his own M-16. All those guns, still, couldn't prevent it.
In truth, the only way it wouldn't have happened is if there had been no guns, or if there were tighter gun laws. I feel like I'm repeating myself. Deer don't carry guns, so you don't need that assault rifle to hunt. You can only kill someone once, so you really don't need that 15 round magazine in an automatic handgun, you don't need to spray 15 rounds in 8 seconds when just 1 will do. You (not anyone in particular) just want these things because you like guns.
Catmistake, settle down. Debating ideas is fine, but calling anyone here 'lame' isn't, nor is blanket name-calling of 'idiots' to those not sharing your opinion. So don't.
And don't start a thread on a subject bound to be controversial if you can't properly debate opposing opinions.
That goes for everyone else, too. Keep it civil, please.
Late, as usual.
Eeun may be willing to let you all off with a warning, but I'm not. All of you have been AF members for a good deal of time, and should know by now that we don't tolerate flamewars, which this thread has begun to devolve to. It started out as a good discussion, but then stubbornness and name-calling kicked in. Discussions are meant to be an exchange of ideas, not one party bashing the other for its beliefs. Thread closed.