If action in the face of the children in your care being murdered is a masculine trait, then I'd like to think I'm fucking Rambo.

I see Burt has finally reached his full “whine about how other men aren’t masculine enough on the internet” potential.

It should be legal to own an assault weapon but illegal to be a coward.

I'll stick with my baseball bats

The argument, that if we get rid of guns, we will just see an increase in knife attacks, has to be my favorite stupid argument. The people who can not understand the difference between someone shooting a gun into a crowd of people, and someone trying to knife a crowd of people... probably shouldn't own a gun to begin with.

You don't bring a knife to a gun fight for a reason, unless youre Bruce Lee, or Geronimo (any Apache for that matter, they were notorious knife fighters)

This is true. However, I read a long post on Slate Star Codex about gun homicide (that I'm too lazy to look up) recently. Two of the main points were
1. there does seem to be a correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide, even when controlling for all variables and
2. if you only looked at non-gun homicides (knives, bats, nunchucks, etc.), the U.S. is still worse than pretty much every European country's total homicide numbers.
And if you could eliminate guns, those non-gun homicides would likely increase. This isn't an argument against gun control, it just means that our country has problems that run deeper than guns.

This is true. However, I read a long post on Slate Star Codex about gun homicide (that I'm too lazy to look up) recently. Two of the main points were
1. there does seem to be a correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide, even when controlling for all variables and
2. if you only looked at non-gun homicides (knives, bats, nunchucks, etc.), the U.S. is still worse than pretty much every European country's total homicide numbers.
And if you could eliminate guns, those non-gun homicides would likely increase. This isn't an argument against gun control, it just means that our country has problems that run deeper than guns.

This isn't an argument against gun control, it just means that our country has problems that run deeper than guns.

Frankly I think black people in the US are entitled to a little violence toward our institutions at this point.

Good thing none of those people post here, huh b_i?

I have nothing to back this up directly, but:

Isn't the problem that gun makers get very lucrative contracts from our government (and others, looking at you middle east), which the gun manufacturers repay by filling the campaign coffers for those politicians that keep said cycle flowing? Eisenhower warned of the MIC, and that was almost 70 years ago now.

The gun companies arent that rich (market cap for S&W is like $1.2B, real MIC like Raytheon is around $65B). IMHO, it's the fear votes from white America's inability/refusal to come to grips with what it's done to black Americans.

Yep. And the cycle of arm yourselves in case of a police force state which then leads to me armed forces.

Ironic that the Black Panther activity in the late 60s came to redefine the 2nd amendment.

From s.s.'s nyt link:

"While the N.R.A. cuts relatively few checks to individual lawmakers — a fact that has been noted by The Tampa Bay Times, among others — it does devote tens of millions of dollars to ads backing its preferred candidates or criticizing its opponents, often with vividly alarmist messages about crime and self-defense."

Loosely what I'm getting at... and this is not to say they're the only group interested in maintaining a certain culture at home as well as through alliances abroad.

Perhaps the kids need to stand outside gun shops protesting, yelling "baby killer" at every one who walks in the door. Maybe then your politicians will start listening to them.