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Horrifying Details Emerge in Hearing on Virginia Tech Murder

Actually, the issue to me exactly is how rare is it. If i is as rare as I suspect, and the best data indicates, then using an exceedingly rare event to try and shape policy is silly. Should we change how we do things every single time some one dies?

We should obey the Constitution.

The right to bear arms should be respected, and not restricted unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason, such as visitors entering jails and prisons and courthouses.

The burden of proof is actually on your side: prove that law-abiding citizens, such as concealed-carry permit holders, should NOT be allowed to carry on campus. Prove it with something other than just opinion.

G.
 
Of course, the real issue on this thread isn't the gun grabbers.

The real issue is what the hell is wrong with a society that can produce such a monster as that? No, not the guy with the knife. I'm talking about the totally worthless limp-dick that thought yakking on the telephone was going to do anything that girl could appreciate, when all she really wanted right then is a man, or even a woman, so long as her rescuer could stop her head from coming off her neck.

What happened to America? Are we that much like Europe already?
 
We should obey the Constitution.

The right to bear arms should be respected, and not restricted unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason, such as visitors entering jails and prisons and courthouses.

The burden of proof is actually on your side: prove that law-abiding citizens, such as concealed-carry permit holders, should NOT be allowed to carry on campus. Prove it with something other than just opinion.

G.

If we are going to frame it as a constitutional issue, all you have to do is convince the supreme court you are right.
 
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If we are going to frame it as a constitutional issue, all you have to do is convince the supreme court you are right.


Be glad to, if it were feasible. Some day.

Until that day, I think the words of the Founders about the Second Amendment will suffice:

Thomas Jefferson: "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither
inclined or determined to commit crimes.
Such laws only make things worse for the assaulted and
better for the assassins;
they serve to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man
may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man
." (1764 Letter and speech from T.
Jefferson quoting with approval an essay by Cesare Beccari)

George Washington: "Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the
people's liberty teeth (and) keystone... the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable... more than
99% of them [guns] by their silence indicate that they are in safe and sane hands. The very
atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference [crime]. When firearms go, all goes,
we need them every hour.
" (Address to 1st session of Congress)

Thomas Jefferson: "On every occasion...[of Constitutional interpretation] let us carry ourselves
back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates,
and instead of trying [to force] what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it,
[instead let us] conform to the probable one in which it was passed
." (June 12 1823, Letter to
William Johnson)
 
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Sir, tell that to a young lady named Xin Yang.

Oh, I'm sorry... you can't. She was decapitated at V-tech.

G.


I'm not reading through 21 pages to see if this has been addressed so if it has, my apologies.


You implied in your OP that if V-Tech allowed guns that Xin Yang would be alive. Did Xin Yang carry a gun while not at school?


Also, it sounds like he jumped up and attacked her quickly. Even if she had a gun in her purse or wherever it doesn't sound like she had the time to arm herself with a gun and shoot prior being fatally injured.


:thinking:
 
Spin it any way you want bud. I've supported my points with facts, and you haven't.

G.

So far, Goshin, I can't find ONE LINK TO SOURCES in any of your posts in this thread. I will keep looking though.:liar
 
I'm not reading through 21 pages to see if this has been addressed so if it has, my apologies.


You implied in your OP that if V-Tech allowed guns that Xin Yang would be alive. Did Xin Yang carry a gun while not at school?


Also, it sounds like he jumped up and attacked her quickly. Even if she had a gun in her purse or wherever it doesn't sound like she had the time to arm herself with a gun and shoot prior being fatally injured.


:thinking:
She was attacked in a cafe amongst other students and decapitated, my issue isn't gun control(he had a knife), my issue is that no one helped her, they stood around and watched it happen.
 
Want some facts? Studies, analysis, footnotes, links, etc? Here ya go....


the Kleck Study:
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology




A 1993 Gallup Poll study (hardly a conservative partisan group) found a likely annual rate of defensive gun use (DGU) of 777,153 per year in the US.
An LA Times 1994 study found an implied national DGU of 3,609,682.




The Kleck study concluded that there were possibly as many as 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, many of which involved no shots fired or no one injured, and many of which were not reported:


These Wikipedia articles are good sources of general information on concealed-carry permits and related issues.
They include information from both pro and anti perspectives.

Concealed carry in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



More Guns, Less Crime - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Lott's study is not without controversy, but despite nit-picking about technical proceedures remains significant:



From an excellent summary page:






Gun control laws effects on criminals, specifically the Brady law and NICS:
Actual Effect on Criminals:

Finally, 11 pages in you post 1 study and 2 wiki pages. Fair enough. Lets have a look.
 
According to the article one was administered and he was found competent to stand trial.

That only means he knew the difference between right and wrong... according to a court appointed shrink.

I would ask for an independent evaluation.
 
She was attacked in a cafe amongst other students and decapitated, my issue isn't gun control(he had a knife), my issue is that no one helped her, they stood around and watched it happen.



They stood there and let it happen....
 
More Guns, Less Crime - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Lott's study is not without controversy, but despite nit-picking about technical proceedures remains significant:

From an excellent summary page:

Gun control laws effects on criminals, specifically the Brady law and NICS:
Actual Effect on Criminals:

Goshin:

Re: The Wiki article on Lott Book. Honestly, I have never seen a Wiki article with so many oppositional positions.

I don't doubt Lott's academic credentials, he was educated at one California's fine Universities, UCLA. However, the number of other academics who take issue with his work raises eyebrows.

It's doesn't appear that his data in is in question but rather his interpretation of that data. You call it nit-picky, but it appears that Lott's work has been reviewed quite thoroughly.

Opposition

Academic studies that have rejected Lott's conclusions include the following. With the exception of the 2003 study by John J. Donohue, these studies generally contend that there seems to be little or no effect on crime from the passage of license-to-carry laws. Donohue's 2003 study finds an increase in violence. (This is contradicted by Moody and Marvell's September 2008 study in Econ Journal Watch; a response from Donohue and Ayres will be forthcoming in the January 2009 issue.)

Jens Ludwig, Do Permissive Concealed-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime? unpublished draft dated Oct. 8, 1996, on file with Albert Alschuler. Ludwig notes a correlation between PPBF4049 (percent of population black, female, aged 40 to 49) and high crime rates in the data used in the Lott & Mustard crime trends regressions. (This factor is found as a correlation, but is not cited in Lott & Mustard 1997 as a causation.)

Albert Alschuler, Two Guns, Four Guns, Six Guns, More Guns: Does Arming the Public Reduce Crime? Valparaiso U Law Rev. Spring 1997. Alschuler notes that while PPBM2029 (as perpetrators of crime) and PPBF64+ (as victims) are strongly correlated to high homicide rates in the dataset used by Lott & Mustard 1997, PPBF4049 is rated more highly as a predictor of homicide rate. Alschuler notes that Lott supplied him with his copy of Ludwig's 1996 paper as well as the Lott & Mustard data.

Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Concealed Handguns: The Counterfeit Deterrent, 7 The Responsive Community 2 (Spring 1997). Zimring & Hawkins cite recognition of the legitimacy of defensive gun use as an impediment to the socially desirable goal of eliminating private ownership of handguns and set out to criticise Lott & Mustard.

Both Albert Alschuler and Jens Ludwig note a number of problems in their separate papers. Why, for example, should the concentration of older black women in a population predict higher crime rates in the Lott and Mustard model, but not the increased concentration of young men, age 20 to 29, who are vastly more likely to commit such offenses?

David Hemenway, 'Review of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws', New England Journal of Medicine, 1998.[10] Hemenway's review states
Lott finds, for example, that both increasing the rate of unemployment and reducing income reduces the rate of violent crimes and that reducing the number of black women 40 years old or older (who are rarely either perpetrators or victims of murder) substantially reduces murder rates. Indeed, according to Lott's results, getting rid of older black women will lead to a more dramatic reduction in homicide rates than increasing arrest rates or enacting shall-issue laws

Rutgers sociology professor Ted Goertzel stated that "Lott’s massive data set was simply unsuitable for his task", and that he "compar[ed] trends in Idaho and West Virginia and Mississippi with trends in Washington, D.C. and New York City" without proper statistical controls. He alleged that econometric methods are susceptible to misuse and can even become junk science.
Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, and John Donohue, Stanford Law School, 'Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis'. Stanford Law Review, 2003.

Jens Ludwig, Georgetown University, "Concealed-Gun-Carrying Laws and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data", published in International Review of Law and Economics, 1998.

Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 209-213 (January 1998).
Mark Duggan, University of Chicago, "More Guns, More Crime," National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. W7967, October 2000, later published in Journal of Political Economy.

Steven Levitt, University of Chicago, 'Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not'. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2004.[15] Levitt lists 'Laws allowing a right to carry concealed weapons' as number five in his list of 'Six Factors that Played Little or No Role in the Crime Decline'.

Jeffrey Miron, Boston University, 'Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis'. The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
Tomislav V. Kovandzic and Thomas B. Marvell, "Right-To-Carry Concealed Firearms and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol?" Criminology and Public Policy 2, (2003) pages 363-396.

John J. Donahue III, Stanford Law School, 'The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis', Criminology and Public Policy, 2003.

Goshin:

You linked to the Wiki article, and I think it's reasonable to examine everything there, correct?


Ayres and Donohue's analysis of Lott's work:


We disagree. Over time, a body of empirical research can disentangle
thorny issues of causation and lead toward consensus. We view this Article as playing a role in this process (not in ending the conversation). On net, we
believe that Lott and Mustard’s efforts made an important contribution to the
literature. They asked the initial question, amassed an important new panel
dataset, and then energetically and creatively analyzed it. (Indeed, their
dataset, which we know from experience was quite costly to construct, has been used by many researchers to explore this and other questions about crime.) Nevertheless, their results have not withstood the test of time. When we added five years of county data and seven years of state data, allowing us to test an additional fourteen jurisdictions that adopted shall-issue laws, the previous Lott and Mustard findings proved not to be robust. Importantly, we showed that the Lott and Mustard results collapse when the more complete county data is subjected to less-constrained jurisdiction-specific specifications or when the more-complete state data is tweaked in plausible ways. No longer can any plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to reduce crime for all or even most states. How much further one can go in arguing that shall-issue laws likely increase crime across the board or have heterogeneous effects across states (albeit most commonly pernicious) will be matters about which various analysts will differ. We conclude with Learned Hand’s advice that, unlike a policy advocate, an academic must “keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, [and] an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.”
Hand admonished: “You may not carry a sword beneath a scholar’s gown.”
 
They stood there and let it happen....
On further reflection, this version is more appropriate than the way I worded it. Again, those people are one of two things, cowards or callous, nevermind, they're both.
 
Goshin:

Re: The Wiki article on Lott Book. Honestly, I have never seen a Wiki article with so many oppositional positions.

I don't doubt Lott's academic credentials, he was educated at one California's fine Universities, UCLA. However, the number of other academics who take issue with his work raises eyebrows.

It's doesn't appear that his data in is in question but rather his interpretation of that data. You call it nit-picky, but it appears that Lott's work has been reviewed quite thoroughly.



Goshin:

You linked to the Wiki article, and I think it's reasonable to examine everything there, correct?


Ayres and Donohue's analysis of Lott's work:



Fair enough. There are those who question Lott's analysis. The Wiki article is balanced and has both pro- and anti- viewpoints.

I stand by what I've said. There's tons of evidence out there that guns in the hands of law abiding citizens do far more good than harm.

the Kleck Study:
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Number Of Protective Uses Of Firearms In U.S: Projected at a minimum of 2.5 million cases annually, equal to 1% of total U.S. population each year. Criminal assailants are killed by their victims or others in only about 0.1%, and wounded in only about 1.0% of incidents as described above. Most such crimes are prevented by mere presence of a firearm in the hands of an intended victim.(Dr. Gary Kleck, PhD, Florida State University, Targeting Guns, 1998)


A 1993 Gallup Poll study (hardly a conservative partisan group) found a likely annual rate of defensive gun use (DGU) of 777,153 per year in the US.
An LA Times 1994 study found an implied national DGU of 3,609,682.

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

Data from the NCVS imply that each year there are only about 68,000 defensive uses of guns in connection with assaults and robberies, [16] or about 80,000 to 82,000 if one adds in uses linked with household burglaries. [17] These figures are less than one ninth of the estimates implied by the results of at least thirteen other surveys, summarized in Table 1, most of which have been previously reported. [18] The NCVS estimates imply that about 0.09 of 1% of U.S. households experience a defensive gun use (DGU) in any one year, compared to the Mauser survey's estimate of 3.79% of households over a five year period, or about 0.76% in any one year, assuming an even distribution over the five year period, and no repeat uses. [19]
The strongest evidence that a measurement is inaccurate is that it is inconsistent with many other independent measurements or observations of the same phenomenon; indeed, some would argue that this is ultimately the only way of knowing that a measurement is wrong. Therefore, one might suppose that the gross inconsistency of the NCVS-based estimates with all other known estimates, each derived from sources with no known flaws even remotely substantial enough to account for nine-to-one, or more, discrepancies, would be sufficient to persuade any serious scholar that the NCVS estimates are unreliable.
...The NCVS was not designed to estimate how often people resist crime using a gun. It was designed primarily to estimate national victimization levels; it incidentally happens to include a few self-protection questions which include response categories covering resistance with a gun.


The Kleck study concluded that there were possibly as many as 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, many of which involved no shots fired or no one injured, and many of which were not reported:
The most technically sound estimates presented in Table 2 are those based on the shorter one-year recall period that rely on Rs' first-hand accounts of their own experiences (person-based estimates). These estimates appear in the first two columns. They indicate that each year in the U.S. there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs of all types by civilians against humans, with about 1.5 to 1.9 million of the incidents involving use of handguns.

Firearms Accidents and Firearms Safety Education
Fatal Firearms Accidents for All Ages Annually: 1,134 nationwide in 1996. Rate of 0.4 per 100M population. Represents a roughly 90% decrease from record high in 1904. Accident rate is down by 65% since 1930, while U.S. population has doubled and number of privately-owned firearms has quadrupled. Compare to other types of fatal accidents, for all ages: Motor Vehicles 16.7/100M, Falls 4.8/100M, Poisoning 4.0/100M, Drowning 1.7/100M, Fires 1.6/100M, Choking 1.1/100M.(National Safety Council, National Center for Health Statistics, BATF, US Census)

Fatal Firearms Accidents for Children 14 and Under Annually: 138 nationwide in 1996. About 3% of all fatal accidents under age 14. Represents a 75% decrease from record high of 550 in 1975. Compared to other types of fatal accidents for children: Motor Vehicles 44%, Fires 16%, Drowning 14%, Choking 4.5%.(Nat'l Safety Council, Nat'l Center for Health Statistics)


Lawful defensive uses outnumber all accidents by anywhere from 50 to 1, to thousands to one, depending on what set of numbers you choose to believe. The most conservative numbers are using those provided by the government.

G.
 
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I'm not reading through 21 pages to see if this has been addressed so if it has, my apologies.


You implied in your OP that if V-Tech allowed guns that Xin Yang would be alive. Did Xin Yang carry a gun while not at school?


Also, it sounds like he jumped up and attacked her quickly. Even if she had a gun in her purse or wherever it doesn't sound like she had the time to arm herself with a gun and shoot prior being fatally injured.


:thinking:

I realize it is a long thread, but this aspect has been hashed to death. Pardon the pun.

Nobody is saying that she definately, positively would have survived if lawful permit-holders were allowed to carry on campus. My position is that allowing law abiding concealed-carry permit holders to carry on campus will improve safety, and give people like this girl and the victims of the V-tech slaughter last year a second chance, as the chances of someone stopping the crime would be greatly increased.

G.
 
I realize it is a long thread, but this aspect has been hashed to death. Pardon the pun.

Nobody is saying that she definately, positively would have survived if lawful permit-holders were allowed to carry on campus. My position is that allowing law abiding concealed-carry permit holders to carry on campus will improve safety, and give people like this girl and the victims of the V-tech slaughter last year a second chance, as the chances of someone stopping the crime would be greatly increased.

G.


Actually, I think if the government would lift it's ban on backbones and permitted the private owership and carrying thereof, the mass slaughters would be less effective and young ladies would be more confident their heads won't be removed in public places.
 
Actually, I think if the government would lift it's ban on backbones and permitted the private owership and carrying thereof, the mass slaughters would be less effective and young ladies would be more confident their heads won't be removed in public places.


Scarecrow and Goshin:

I'm not clear on what it is you want as far as gun rights that you don't already have.

Specifically, what restrictions on your ability to purchase and use guns do you have a problem with?

It has come out that Scott Roeder has been arrested in 1996 for possession of bomb making materials. Were his gun rights restricted as a result of this? If not, should they have been?
 
Scarecrow and Goshin:

I'm not clear on what it is you want as far as gun rights that you don't already have.

Specifically, what restrictions on your ability to purchase and use guns do you have a problem with?

It has come out that Scott Roeder has been arrested in 1996 for possession of bomb making materials. Were his gun rights restricted as a result of this? If not, should they have been?

I thought the topic at hand was reasonably clear: that the restriction against those with concealed carry permits, not being allowed to carry such places as colleges and schools, be lifted in order to increase the number of citizens able to effectively stop crimes in progress.
 
I am leaning to the side of let them carry
but nobody acted without a gun while this girl was stabbed and decapitated so I do not think, if they were carrying, they would have done anything either.
took some real beatings over the head here for me to realize you really do not know how you will act in a crisis situation until you are in it
just because they have the gun does not mean they will use it.
a chair to the back of the head would have worked nicely on this freak but nobody moved
 
I am leaning to the side of let them carry
but nobody acted without a gun while this girl was stabbed and decapitated so I do not think, if they were carrying, they would have done anything either.
took some real beatings over the head here for me to realize you really do not know how you will act in a crisis situation until you are in it
just because they have the gun does not mean they will use it.
a chair to the back of the head would have worked nicely on this freak but nobody moved

As I said early on, if there are no testicles present, weapons won't help much....BUT some people would take on a knifer if they had a gun, who wouldn't try if they had to go hand to hand with him.

G.
 
Some Colleges Bar Even Talking About Right to Bear Arms, Gun Advocates Say
Thursday, June 04, 2009
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Print ShareThisWASHINGTON — The First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to free speech. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to possess firearms. Now the first two clauses in the Bill of Rights have come together in an ongoing debate over the right of college students to advocate that they be allowed to carry guns on campus.

The bloody massacres at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School, as well as smaller campus shootings across the country in the last decade, have fomented a lively debate over whether citizens should be allowed to carry concealed weapons to defend themselves on campus.

But that debate has hit a wall of resistance from school officials in some places, bringing into focus the dual issues of gun rights and free speech.

Many gun-rights advocates are arguing that college campuses, which are supposed to be open to diversity of thought, provocative dialogue, politics and protest, are hardly bastions of free speech when it comes to discussing firearms.

"The fact is, the topic is so explosive," said Robert Shibley, spokesman for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which tracks discriminatory practices against students involved in conservative issues on campus. They've been dealing with "more and more" complaints about efforts to "squelch gun speech," he said.

The latest flareup involves Christine Brashier, who says officials at the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) violated her First Amendment right to free speech when they stopped her from posting and distributing fliers advocating for concealed carry on campus, and for a new chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC) at the college. The group has about a dozen chapters on other Pennsylvania campuses, Shibley said.

"I genuinely wanted to start discussion on the topic," Brasier told FOXNews.com this week. " I am not such an avid gun owner as much of the news has made me out to be — I simply believe in liberty and that college is the place for a debate about important issues such as this one."

Brashier, 24, who is a freshman at the school, said she worked for the last three years in a law office, and before that, as an assistant manager at a convenience store, which was robbed at gunpoint twice while she worked there.

She is licensed to carry a concealed weapon in Pennsylvania, but school policy prevents her from carrying it on campus. Most states allow schools to set their own policy on concealed carry laws....

Some Colleges Bar Even Talking About Right to Bear Arms, Gun Advocates Say - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News - FOXNews.com


Funny, I thought Universities were all about freedom of speech, open minds, the free flow of ideas.... OH, yeah I forgot, that only applies to Leftists. Righties are supposed to shut up and listen, and be glad they're allowed on campus at all.

G.
 
Scarecrow and Goshin:

I'm not clear on what it is you want as far as gun rights that you don't already have.

It's an infringement to require a citizen to obtain a permit to carry a gun, whether it's concealed, open, or shoved up his butt.

Specifically, what restrictions on your ability to purchase and use guns do you have a problem with?

Specifically? All of them.

It has come out that Scott Roeder has been arrested in 1996 for possession of bomb making materials. Were his gun rights restricted as a result of this? If not, should they have been?

No, since any attempt at determining his felony conviction (gee, was he convicted of that charge? If not, it's not relevant) would infringe on the freedom of others without felony convictions. If, however, he's caught committing a crime using a firearm and is found to have a felony conviction on his record, then throw the the book at him, go to the library, get another copy, and throw that one at him, too.
 
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