Someone could win that argument......if you gun-toting americans would choose to listen to them........the children.

If the powers-that-be in the US keep thinking the way you so obviously do, I fear your nation is fated to have that kind of violence continue indefinitely.  One can only hope that those children will not have died in vain.  I hope and pray that your nation wakes up and really sees what guns and more guns have and threaten to continue to do to your country.

I'd hang my head in shame if I had to look down at a dead family members body...that is provided I survived...after a home invasion knowing if I only had a gun I could have stopped it and they could have gone on to live a long and healthy life. Not everyone is running and hiding from the boogeyman...they take measure to insure their home remains a sanctuary. And until we can rid the world of violent criminals people will do what is necessary to protect their family. And not everyone that has guns is going to expose their child to them...responsible people will store them away out of sight and out of reach. They are not toys and should be treated accordingly. The whole point is to protect ones child from certain and very real dangers in the world. And if you live in a safe place that wouldn't mean anything to you...not everyone does. So again we can go around and around over this issue and in the end we can all just agree to disagree.

Now you want teachers to be packing heat in school?!!!! WTF!!!

Promise?...       

You stay there.....and I'll stay in my country where we just had front page news of a boy dying of a nut allergy at school after a fellow student offered him a biscuit from his cooking class.....death by walnut biscuit beats your death by assault weapon....    

Heres something I ran into.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8RDWltHxRc

 By the way, I'am an eye for an eye type a person.  It pains me to see people killed like that and especially kids.

Damn, I thought 1/3rd of the people were police officers on that clip.  I guess they doctored the stats also?

I suppose I should feel miffed that Oz is being used in such a falsely manipulative way for another countries scare tactics.....but actually... it was so funny....still chuckling....  

How many lives it's saved we'll never really know.....sadly...instead of little Johnny finding Dad's gun at the back of the closet and blowing his or another's brains out.....he now gets run over by Dad in the driveway in his nice chunky four wheel drive.... 

Stats can often be made to look one way or another because we aren't told how they're being manipulated nor the assumptions being made when manipulating them or the samples they're based on. Very, very few of us have learned the mathematics of statistics but most of us have been conditioned to respect what we don't understand... a good example would be the crowds of people waiting to see Albert Einstein get off a plane at an airport. I doubt more than 1/100 (if even that many) understood the mathematics he used, or his theories.... yet they would wait hours.

We learn from history that gun laws or restrictions are not always a good thing.

The Jewish population in Germany had their guns and ammo confiscated during WWII and were threatened with death for possessing any weapons. The Germans used a gun registry from a few years prior to determine who were gun owners and went door to door to disarm the population.

As we all know, this lead to the genocide of the Jewish population of Germany. Had they had the means to fight back and protect themselves in larger numbers, the outcome would have been better.

While you may say that this would never happen again, it seems that history always has a way of repeating itself.

Why "cherry pick" that particular episode in the history of antisemitism?

http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/HistoryJewishPersecution/

Well, if you wish, in reality, the Jewish population of Germany believed they were living in an eminently cultured society. No one could have imagined the depraved insanity of "The Final Solution". A handgun in the home would not have prevented that at all.

Acceptance and celebration of people's differences would have prevented that. A world which should have never created the dishonor of the Treaty of Versailles might have mitigated that. 

I hope I'm not reading an implication that giving up their handguns somehow made them an easy target or sheep. It didn't. They were not sheep led to slaughter. They were human beings who believed in goodness and thought the Nazis would be a transient phenomenon. They were deceived and brutally murdered. No handgun or hunting rifle could have prevented that. It took the Allies five years of all out war.

What weapon could have staved that off? Only leaving and going to a Jewish State of Israel could have. Alas, it didn't exist. What did was an area controlled by the British and the Mufti of Jerusalem who was an open ally of Hitler, and a Jew hater.

I don't wish to get into the real history of the Second World War.

I didn't say they were sheep but being unarmed didn't help them resist. If armed, they would have been able to put up a better resistance. Look at the Warsaw Ghetto uprisings where a few armed Jews were able to temporary stop the deportations to the extermination camps. Had the populace been well armed, things would have been different.

Why do you think the Nazi's didn't try to take Switzerland? Not because they were neutral, it was because every house had a rifle and the children were trained to shoot at 300 yards. The German's trained their solders to shoot at 100 yards and they knew that they were out gunned. This being the case, they realized that there would be too great of a resistance to try and take that country.

Do not take my analogy as antisemitism as it was only intended to prove a point.

History shows that being an armed society is beneficial. Until mankind matures to the point where there is no need to protect oneself, guns will be around. 

Just let Doc get the last word in and be done with it y'all.

Peace.

I really don't understand why Americans always seem to worship to the great power of the gun without being concerned about the great fear the gun perpetuates. 

Fear begets violence afterall and that is a fact not some bullshit someone dreamt up.  Carguy, you keep holding up Germany as an example of how terribly things go wrong when there aren't enough guns in the hands of the people, as if more public fear of everyone around them is the solution to any nation's problems.  I don't think we need more evidence of how a nation frozen in inaction works do we? 

If the Americans were successful in arming 100% of their nation, you think people would feel safer, less nervous, more united?  I mean when does what I just typed start to sound just plain crazy to someone?  When what happened the other day happens every day?