Young Writers Society

*then

Karzkin: There may not be much gun-related violence in Australia, but that's not what I meant. I said that there will always be violence, guns or no guns. It's human nature to be violent. Feral instinct. I said nothing about just gun violence.

Karzkin wrote:Even 40 million militia with 90 million pistols and rifles wouldn't do much against fighter jets, armoured vehicles, attack helicopters, the navy, ballistic missiles, and all the other things that modern militaries use to kick ass on a large scale. If it were civil war, it would be short, bloody, and disastrous for the under-equipped militia.

You're not taking into account geographical issues. Sure, the government could take out NYC in one bloody massacre (though, of course, New York would be with the government, so that doesn't really matter), but what about where I live?

My nearest neighbor is nearly a mile away. We're not closely congregated. One napalm bomb won't wipe all of the militia out, and while the government is trying to chase everyone down, the militia would have time to make strikes on them.

And, as Grif mentioned, the military will be split if it ever comes to another civil war (which I'm predicting, BTW). I've heard stories of Nam vets taking their military issue knives/guns other stuff home with them. I've heard of people who still have their fully auto weapons from that war-- so, yeah, if vets have guns from Vietnam, I don't think it's that far fetched for current military to take military weapons with them when they desert.

You're also not bringing ingenuity into the equation. A redneck who's been hunting/messing with guns their whole lives are far more lethal than a city slicker who joined the Guard when they were eighteen, got some training, and only touches a gun when they have to train.

The militia would also have the 'home field advantage', if you will. They know the lay of the land, so they know where the natural traps are. They know how to make strategies. They know how to make primitive weapons.

I think a second civil war has a chance for a far better outcome than the first did.

idk br0, living in other parts of the world and then coming back to the US showed me what a huge contrast there is. I could walk around at 4am by myself in a major international city while living in Europe where there was a ban on guns, anywhere I wanted, by myself, dressed in whatever I wanted. Once I moved back to the US, going out by myself after like, nine o'clock is scary. I just don't do it, walking around after dark I feel completely and totally unsafe.

Violent in crime in general was almost non-existent. In four years of being there, there were about two shootings that we heard about throughout the entire country.
Violence isn't always going to exist to the same extent in separate countries.

The first US civil war had a great outcome, how could a second be any better?

All that stuff about a guerrilla war? Look how well it turned out for the insurgents in the Middle East. They can't scratch the paint of the Western war machines.

The gun debate is a skewed, ridiculous feint designed by the media to wip delusional people into a large viewing bloc.

1) Gun violence is only covered in the media when it is a mass shooting in a nice, upscale suburban place, places where it was never supposed to happen, like Columbine, Newton, ext. The vast vast vast vast majority of gun violence occurs in the inner cities - more people die of gun violence in places like Chicago on an average day around the country (obviously not in Chicago itself) than do in these shootings. This violence doesn't occur because the people have access to guns, the violence happens because of the poverty, gang activity and crime that besets these areas. RICH PEOPLE DON'T KILL EACH OTHER WITH GUNS. Responsible gun owners don't kill other people, the vast majority of guns don't ever even get shot.

The media tells you about each victim, televises the vigil, then the president comes in and says something and they have a prayer rally and then there's this 5 to 10 prcnt increase in people who favor "stronger gun control", but then when anything beyond universal background checks is proposed they immediately reverse and realize that this whole thing is a joke. And then they talk about 100 round magazines and fail to mention the fact that these massacres are being carried out with guns that have far fewer magazines than that. How about 1 bullet magazines? Well, just pack four handguns, kill four people, and reload. Four people still die or are wounded. Hell they could strap ten handguns to themselves!

THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING, over 100 dead, WAS CARRIED OUT USING A BOMB MADE OUT OF FERTILIZER. More people die of drunk driving and baseball bat assaults than gun violence every year. 9/11 was carried out with F---ing BOX CUTTERS!

What about Norway? 100 people dead, but its just a freak occurence right? Still, a hundred people died.

Its not a very strong argument comparing American demographics to Australian or English or any other demographic really. There's 300 million people here. Every religion, language, ethnicity is represented here. The only city in Australia that anybody even knows about, or is comparable in any sense with an American city, is Sydney, and then not even. What's the per capita density of Austalia? How many languages are spoken there? What's the poverty rate? Comparing the two countries is ridiculous.

The guns are the first scapegoat, mental illness is the second (these shooters are ill, deranged people). Neither of these are the reasons why gun violence occur, but they are blamed because they are EASY SOLUTIONS to the problem. Take away the guns, POOF, can't complaign if you get knifed around the corner from the police station, because he didn't use a gun. Oh, he's mentally ill, JUST GIVE HIM SOME THERAPY; money and more laws won't fix these situations, because guns and illness aren't the problems. Poverty and our society, which treats different people like shit, are the reasons. It's not very surprising when an outcast like Cho shoots up Va. Tech., if you don't have your head up your ass.

Country to country, there is a direct relationship between gun violence and ownership. The united states, having more guns, is gonna have more gun violence (its not a very shocking statistic when, again, you don't have your head up your ass. Places with lesser gun rights and thereby less guns are gonna have less gun violence, NO SHIT.

The argument about just resigning yourself to the government's power over you is the most disgusting, terrible thing I've ever heard, and should NEVER come out of an American's mouth. That argument is a direct betrayal of "give me liberty or give me death". You see, when the conservative d-bags argue that we should just resign ourselves to global warming, because its happening anyway, the liberals (one of my heroes, steven colbert did this on his show recently) whine and go "what about our grandchildren?" But then when Conservatives say "the 2nd amendment is a stallwart against tyranny" the liberals then go "ya but the government has predator drones, so you should just accept it, if they ever choose to use them against you." WHAT ABOUT OUR GRANDCHILDREN THEN.

I know my remarks may be a little hectic here, but to anybody who isn't confused about this situation, and actually understands the statistics and the true issues of the debate, the idea of actually banning gun ownership on a large scale is disgraceful.

I'm all for background checks, I'm all for the ATF, FBI and the local and state police forces getting all the resources they need to do their jobs properly (they don't have the proper resources at all).

But the real problem is our society that makes outcasts of people, and then these kids go on these rampages and kill all the people who stood by and watched or treated them badly, granted that there are alwasy innocents caught in the crossfire - the Newtown shooting and those killed at the Giffords shooting are examples.

The measures being proposed would not in any way truly impact the gun violence, because the gun violence truly isn't a measure of how much gun freedom there is, its a measure of how much poverty and hatred there is.

A certain level of gun control is good, but it gets to a level where you are only hurting the innocent who are trying to protect themselves. This whole mess is propagated by the media that uses these terrible tragedies to gain viewership. More people are killed everyday from gun violence than in these school shootings and, when you notice, the fact that they have guns isn't the thing to blame.

In response to the resign yourself to government tyrrany thing (like Karzin above: "The first civil war had a great outcome"):

Let's say that, though it is probably never going to happen, since the government is a collection of our fellow citizens (or is supposed to be at least), that the government does try to force tyrrany on the country:

Would you rather die fighting for your freedom, or live as a slave?

Who cares, why bother? They have predator drones! Just give up!

With a rifle and a hundred round I have the capacity to take 100 imperialistic a-holes to hell with me. I also have the capacity to kill the Napoleonic d-bag causing all of the b-s. I could kill the 100 most important leaders trying to extend imperialistic rule over americans.

To say that going against the resources of the fed government is a lost cause is an assumption made upon poor grounds - 200 million people with rifles and handguns stretched over 3,000 miles against 10 million soldiers bogged down by their tanks and the weight of their own consciences...its a different game when you actually think about it.

Which side are you trying to help MCaps? You said yourself, less guns = less gun violence. You're right, gun violence is a symptom of other problems that also definitely need fixing. But that doesn't make gun violence any less of a problem.

Also, I am surely not saying we should always unquestioningly do whatever our governments say. But there are ways to resist and subvert the government that don't involve armed uprisings. If I didn't like what the Australian government was doing I'd write to my local member of parliament, or a newspaper, or do call a news network or something. That's the great thing about living in a democracy; violence is pretty much never the answer.

So like, since this thread is just exploding all over the place, I'm just going to go ahead and tackle some firearms-related misconceptions and leave everything else I was planning to address alone. Because quite honestly I have no idea where to even start on the rest of the stuff. And the firearms talk is probably going to wind up really long anyways.

So. I'm going to pick on Karz for a little bit:

There's a difference between a piece of sporting equipment and a weapon. Guns for sport do not need to have high muzzle velocity, large capacity magazines, automatic fire systems, or the ability to be easily concealed.

It is a common misconception that higher velocity = more deadly. In general, a higher velocity round results in greater range and penetration, however, penetration is not the same as stopping power. If you want to drop someone in one shot, you'll want to go with a more massive round, which means a larger diameter round.

Now, high-velocity rounds require a lot of concentrated force to enable to them to reach such high velocities, which is part of the reason why high-velocity rounds tend to be small-diameter as well. The other main reason why high-velocity rounds have smaller diameters is because of tolerances. In order to propel a large-diameter round at a high velocity, you'd need an extremely powerful charge, and most firearms are simply not designed to use such powerful charges, and either the materials that can withstand such powerful charges are prohibitively expensive, unwieldy to the point of being impractical, or nonexistent. Worst case scenario with powerful charges: the gun explodes in your face and kills you.

Now, if you compare high-velocity penetrating rounds to those used by law enforcement and hunters, you'll find that the round diameters tend to be larger, and the muzzle velocity is slower. The larger diameter allows the bullet to distribute its force over a wider area, giving the round stopping power, while still being small enough to penetrate the target so that it's embedded within said target (versus passing straight through and into whatever is behind the target, or ricocheting off, both of which are very dangerous to bystanders). The slower muzzle velocity also means the round is shorter-ranged, which again helps to reduce collateral damage.

This is completely ignoring the modifications and shapes of the bullets. Different modifications and shapes have very different effects, with hollow points fragmenting upon impact to inflict greater tissue damage and jacketed rounds increasing penetration, just to name two variants.

In other words, the most effective weapons in the sense that they easily drop a person in one shot are the guns most often used for sport. In the case of hunting, their ability to drop a large target and inflict substantial tissue damage with one shot is precisely the reason those firearms are used.

With that said, even if handguns were restricted to sport activities only, they would still be compact and easy to conceal as a side effect of their function. Handguns are short-range weapons whereas rifles are long-range. It's considered common sense and a given safety measure that, when you go out hunting, especially in an area where animals are known to be infected with rabies, that you bring a handgun with you. Rifles, due to their long barrel, take time to bring to bear and aim. If an animal is charging you, that is time you do not have, which is where the handgun comes into play. Shorter barrel = shorter time to bring to bear = longer relative time to aim = increased chance of taking down whatever is coming at you with one shot, and barring that, you'll have a better chance of getting off a second and third shot before the animal is on top of you. And when the animal charging you is a rabid coyote or bear, well, you really want to have as good a chance as possible to take down that animal with as many shots as you can get off.

Handguns are compact not because they are necessarily designed to be concealed (though there quite a few models that are), but because the functions they serve (quick, short-range, rapid-shot) necessitate the compactness. The tradeoffs of this design are reduced accuracy, distance, and power, all of which are the strengths of a rifle.

And, for the record, I have been charged by a coyote while out hunting. Not an experience I'd ever like to repeat, and it's fortunately rare, but it does happen.

With all that said, automatic weapons both are and are not as dangerous as people believe them/they are made out to be. Automatic weapons always have at least a semi-automatic mode, and this is for the simple reason that a fully-automatic weapon is impossible to control. The faster you fire, the less accurate you are, and while accuracy isn't an issue when there are targets everywhere that you aren't focused on lethally damaging, a weapon on full auto is a great way to injure a lot of people, but not necessarily kill them, especially if the gunman is alone. The fact that going fully auto eats up ammunition like crazy aside, the lack of control and focused lethality are the primary reasons why military ops almost never use full auto and also why, in the rare times they have, it's always with groups of shooters as the crossfire increases the likelihood of a bullet hitting a lethal mark.

With that said, a fully automatic weapon fired in controlled bursts is extremely lethal as it balances out the rapid fire with the ability to aim. It's still nowhere near as accurate as a handgun or semiautomatic, but it's far more damaging.

This is why fully automatic weapons have been prohibited from civilian markets for decades. Last I checked, it's illegal to own or sell a non-disabled automatic weapon of any kind without the proper licensing, and said licensing is extremely difficult and expensive to obtain.

With that said, a firearm is only useful if you have the ammunition for it, which is another reason why you don't see automatic weapons used in gun crimes in the USA. The ammunition for automatic weapons is either no longer manufactured or restricted for military use only.

Which leads me to the expanded magazines. Since I've hopefully established that automatic weapons are not practical to obtain or use, I'm going to pretend that automatic weapons don't exist for the rest of this.

Basically, expanded magazines only reduced the time spent reloading. They do not reduce the time it takes to shoot, and with a semiautomatic, the limiting factor to how quickly a person can shoot is how quickly they can pull the trigger. It doesn't take long to reload a semiautomatic anyways, and having an expanded magazine can actually increase the time needed to reload as expanded magazines often require modifications to the firearm itself to accommodate them, and these modifications tend to make either the firearm, the magazine, or both unwieldy.

So, basically, expanded magazines reduce the number of times you need to reload but do nothing to improve accuracy or firing and reloading speeds and can actually be detrimental to all of them.

It is also worth noting that accuracy, especially with handguns, is a serious consideration. Handguns, as I mentioned before, are short-range weapons, and when I say short-range, I'm talking ranges of less than 10 feet (~3 meters). Even at such short ranges, people still have a hard time hitting targets. Heavier rounds (which are the ones with stopping power) are also much harder to control with a handgun due to physics leading to a more substantial recoil compared to a rifle firing the same round.

This is one of the main reasons why everyone and their uncle getting involved in a shootout is a VERY BAD idea. Confusion aside, all that lead flying through the air on barely accurate trajectories is a recipe for the deaths of innocent bystanders, in addition to law-enforcement and well-meaning assistants, on top of the bad guys.

Ok, so I think we might be using 'sport' in different ways. I meant target and clay pigeon shooting, not hunting. I don't think anyone should have weapons for hunting other than national park rangers and occupational hunters. But that's a whole new can of worms.

Ok, so I think we might be using 'sport' in different ways.

Probably. Over here, hunting falls under "sport", in addition to target and clay shooting.

Target rounds are still typically low-velocity, medium-to-wide-diameter rounds, though, and quite capable of taking down a person.

It also doesn't change how handguns are easy to conceal as a result of their function. A handgun's barrel can only be so long or a grip (which is usually where the magazine fits) can only be so wide before the handgun becomes too unwieldy.

Karzkin wrote:Ok, so I think we might be using 'sport' in different ways. I meant target and clay pigeon shooting, not hunting. I don't think anyone should have weapons for hunting other than national park rangers and occupational hunters. But that's a whole new can of worms.

*splutter*

You can't be serious. Why should only 'occupational' hunters get guns? That's a ridiculous notion. Just because I don't get paid to hunt doesn't mean that I don't enjoy it; and in some cases (in fact, many families in my area) depend on the game they kill for their primary food.

When I was younger, my parents were really strapped for cash-- we went through a period of luxury-- and now the money's getting tight again. Through various means, we've always had beef (my Grandpa gave it to us before, now we lease our farm out to a neighbor, in exchange for a cow), but we haven't always had money for other meat.

Beef's good. Beef's really good. I enjoy eating it, and experimenting with different ways to cook it, and all that-- but it gets old. I really appreciate the variety I get because of hunting.

Aside from the enjoyment of being an outdoors-man, and of the knowledge that hunting is necessary for the animal populace, the other benefits alone would make me argue for hunters.

McCaps here to clear my argument a bit:

There's a misunderstand with this whole overthrow thing: it's a last resort type of thing, I'm not saying that if I don't get my way then I'm gonna shoot the guy who voted against me, we aren't talking about the democratic process, we are talking about when the democratic process is usurped by a government that has stepped without the limits of its constitutional authority. THAT IS WHERE THE 2nd amendment comes in.

Just another way in which gun control people are confused.

Where is this talk about banning guns completely?

In Australia, you can still get a gun correct, if you pass the background checks, right? If you can't even then I don't think anybody living in a place like that belongs in this conversation, that's not what Obama and Biden are even talking about. Taking guns away from responsible gun owners is wrong and unnecessary.

Seriously, WHAT IS THE CONVERSATION?

I don't get paid to start fires either, but I can't just go around doing that for kicks. I can appreciate hunting for food. But killing a living creature for fun? That's pretty sick I think.

McCaps, like I keep saying, most modern democracies have systems in place to prevent governments overstepping their constitutional mandates, so like I keep saying, the second amendment to the United States constitution is irrelevant.

It is possible to acquire a gun in Australia - all you have to do is prove you have a genuine need to own a gun (and fill out all the forms and stuff). Occupational hunting, pest control, target shooting, and the like are genuine needs. Recreational hunting and personal protection are not genuine needs.

Just to add in my bit about hunting, I think everyone should have the RIGHT to do it, but I don't think you should do it unless you are going to use the animal for food or for its pelt. For fun, I am morally against it, yet at the same time, I don't think we should take the right away from those who do not express a "legitimate" reason for hunting, because, like Slim, they might have other reasons for hunting. Just my two cents. Peace n Love