They can do this in England because the citizens are unarmed!

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LazyHippy are you sure of your facts about strict gun laws leading to fewer violent crimes? Then why in the states that have recently enacted concealed carry of handguns have violent crimes gone down? Bad guys are not sure if their intended victims are armed maybe.....?

Only bad governments fear citizens that are armed. Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amean(spelling?) and most if not all other dictators took firearms away from their citizens out of fear. Its tough to force your will on armed citizens. The founding fathers of the US understood this very well and made sure that our constitution protected those rights. You Brits have given up your individual right to protect yourself and if you think that the police can or will do it for you, you are just not thinking straight. You have nothing to fear from law abiding citizens but criminals don't give a rat's ass about the laws and will use what ever advantage they can get to commit their crimes. I will remain armed and be able to defend myself, thank you very much.

:angrysoapbox_sml:
 


Lazy, how many of your individual rights are you willing to give up for the corporate good? Freedom of speech does not give you the right to incite a riot does it? Yell fire in a crowded theater? Tell lies about someone that damage someone and not expect to be sued? Which ones are you willing to give up and which ones are worth fighting for? I doubt that you are willing to fight for much of anything. Just my guess.

Religion's main job is to help set up rules of behavior towards one another so it does serve a purpose but when perverted it can do tremendous damage to societies. Societies have a right and duty to protect themselves from such damage.
 
oogie1947 said:
I don't see the radical Muslims in the US doing this. Could it be that they know that most Americans :ak:own firearms?
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I'm not entirely sure, but are these the pictures of people protesting against an artist who drew the pictures of the Prophet Mohammed?

Ah, btw, I heard that the artist died in a fire, burned alive, due to some unknown reason. It's said that the Denmark
govt hid the news regarding the artist's death from the public.
 
I take you points about arm citizens being protection against bad governments. But when has that power been used (bar the civil war maybe)?

It seems like America (along with every other country - I'm not singling the US out here) has had her share of bad governments in the past and the armed citizens have never acted.

Send thousands of kids to die in some foreign land, the armed citizens do nothing. Take away rights and liberties, the armed citizens do nothing. Hand more and more power to unelected officials and corporations, again the armed citizens do nothing. Not that I'm advocating a revolution but has there even been so much as an attempted coup?

But then in a society that values individuals above society as a whole any action against an oppressive government is unlikely, as the only armed groups that think and work together are generally the extremists from the Muslims to the Militiamen. Governments know this and are certainly not afraid of their armed population.
 
sebastya said:
out of the 2 billion christians in the world there are only 100 of these people - so it's not even worth comparing it to the entire message of islam seen in the pictures above.
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So the extremist Muslims represent the entire of Islam, but the same isn't true of Christianity? Hmmm.... that makes sense.

Here we've got the BNP and NF - extremist Christian groups. Not sure what's around now in the US, but the KKK were/are Christian. Then there's the neo-Nazis, popular across Europe... and of course the IRA, UDF, etc in Ireland. That's just a few of the groups with a tendency to violence. There's many more that share their beliefs but prefer to use mostly political means to achieve their goals.

Religion causes more division than anything else. Full stop. (Period.)

We can't fight religious extremism with guns - it will just create martyrs and more converts. As much as I hate it, religion is a big part of many societies. It's probably going to take another couple of millennia for that to change. We need to with the moderates to reduce the number of people attracted to the extreme forms of any religion.
 
Lazy, why did your government decide to take away all their citizens guns? Law abiding citizens are not to be feared are they? What if the government becomes oppressive? How do you plan to change the government then? When your king became oppressive to us colonists and would not listen to our legitimate requests we had no choice but to revolt. Had we not been armed would we have succeeded? I doubt it. Our government is granted its authority from the people and we have the right to change it when deemed necessary. We do it through elections and changing those in power or if it cannot be avoided we do it by force. We whipped your butts and have done pretty well since then. Yes we are individuals that chose to live where and under the government we want but if you think that we cannot act or think as a whole when threatened then you are wrong. Freedom has costs. It isn't free from those that would take it away under the banner of "my why is better than your way and by the way its the ONLY way".
 
oogie1947 said:
Lazy, why did your government decide to take away all their citizens guns? Law abiding citizens are not to be feared are they? What if the government becomes oppressive? How do you plan to change the government then? When your king became oppressive to us colonists and would not listen to our legitimate requests we had no choice but to revolt. Had we not been armed would we have succeeded? I doubt it. Our government is granted its authority from the people and we have the right to change it when deemed necessary. We do it through elections and changing those in power or if it cannot be avoided we do it by force. We whipped your butts and have done pretty well since then. Yes we are individuals that chose to live where and under the government we want but if you think that we cannot act or think as a whole when threatened then you are wrong. Freedom has costs. It isn't free from those that would take it away under the banner of "my why is better than your way and by the way its the ONLY way".
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The general population here has never had guns. Our society evolved (as opposed to being founded) before guns were readily available. There was never any need for the citizens to be armed, yet still we managed to have a civil war and overthrow unpopular governments.

As with most nations, the only time a government has been overthrown by force is with the support of the military. From our civil war to the coup last year in Thailand is has always been the military that has done the job, and when needed recruited and armed the general population. Not just the average citizens getting together and deposing their government without the support of at least part of the armed forces. (One notable exception was in India, where guns weren't needed that much at all.) Please, correct me if I'm wrong but I understand that it was a similar case in your wars.

Without military backing, I very much doubt any developed nation could overthrow their government whether the citizens are armed or not.

For the sake of argument, say a revolution was attempted now in the US. If the army, national guard, etc sided with the government then the citizens would most likely fail - shotguns and 9mms won't be much good against M16s and cruise missiles. If, as is more likely, sections of the military supported the revolution then they would ensure that arms were made available to the citizens who fight with them.

These days, in developed countries, a coup is much more likely than a civil war and even that is a slim possibility as regardless of what the government is doing most people would choose to use political means to depose them.
 
I hate these religious and political threads. They are fun for 10-20 mins, and then it's just the saaaaame shit over and over again.
 
This conversation would've been entirely different if the people here were having it face to face.

It's your call Jon, but I agree that religious and political threads always end the same way so closing it is not a bad idea.
 
Note: Never discuss politics with Americans.

Ahhh... whatever...

Thing I find strange is this:
You guys always tell us about "What if the government becomes opressive? We need guns then, yeah!!"

Well, take a look at your government, people.
People are being arrested without reason, free speech is being fucked over, the right to demonstrate is renounced, you are being watched 24/7 and National security is just an excuse to rob you of the rest of your so called freedom....

Where are your guns? Where is the American citizen?

Meh.....

::emp::
 
HAHAHA

"If I say its safe to surf this beach Captain, then its safe to surf this beach. I mean I'm not afraid to surf this place, I'll surf this whole fucking place god damnit!!!"
 
Note that several of these protestors were arrested and charged. I'm glad to live in a country in which the rule of law is used in this way, its so much more civilized than everyone carrying a gun and shooting people they disagree with.
 
emp said:
Note: Never discuss politics with Americans.

Ahhh... whatever...

Thing I find strange is this:
You guys always tell us about "What if the government becomes opressive? We need guns then, yeah!!"

Well, take a look at your government, people.
People are being arrested without reason, free speech is being fucked over, the right to demonstrate is renounced, you are being watched 24/7 and National security is just an excuse to rob you of the rest of your so called freedom....

Where are your guns? Where is the American citizen?

Meh.....

::emp::
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Agreed.

I love these sort of discussions (as ya might've noticed :D) even though it's fairly obvious that we aren't going to agree.

If America kept to herself and stopped fuckin with the world then I wouldn't really care much what she does (although I'd still have sympathy for the poor guys getting fucked over in the US). As it is the US likes to do the empire-building shit at the mo and uses political pressure to drag other countries into it too. We wouldn't have scenes like this here if we hadn't joined in this war of terror.

So, if by debating with Americans I could get just one person to look at things from a different viewpoint (if ya like labels say 'socialist' as 'liberal' means different things and gets confusing) and it affects if or how they vote then that's a good thing for the World and it might help stop my sister getting sent back to Iraq or wherever else is next.

Peace.
 
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