A 27-year-old man was killed and 24 other people were shot after gunfire erupted early Sunday morning in Akron, Ohio, during what a police official said was a big birthday party.
Officers responded to 911 calls shortly after midnight, reporting shots fired and multiple victims struck in the area of Kelly Ave. and 8th Ave., according to a statement from the city’s mayor and police chief.
The shooting took place during a “large birthday party” that earlier in the night had more than 200 people in attendance, Akron Police Chief Brian Harding said in a Sunday evening news conference.
In the shooting’s aftermath, authorities found the scene “littered” with spent shell casings that stretched down a whole block, the police chief said.
The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental civil right in the US, and I believe that access to the means of self-protection is a human right. I think that correcting the underlying issues that lead to gang activity would have more benefits overall than trying to ban a constitutional right.
While gang activity exists in all countries, countries with fewer social problems and lower economic inequality have far less of a problem with gang activity.
Couldn’t owning more guns contribute to threats in life at a greater rate then they protect individuals?
Let me ask you this - do you believe that people have the right to protect their own lives? Does that right depend on your size and gender?
Yes they do have a right to protect themselves.
Let me ask you, do humans have an accurate ability to perceive threats and predict actions of other people
I would also like if you could answer the first question I asked if you have the time.
Okay, so how does a 4’10" 95# person protect themselves from someone like me, at 6’2", 240#, weightlifter, with experience in TKD, judo, and longsword fencing? (Oh, and stun guns mostly just tickle; I’ve tried one on myself.) Do they only have the right to self defense if they’re small?
Most people can make pretty reasonable predictions about when a situation is becoming threatening, yes. Just ask any woman that’s walked home alone in a city after dark.
if people truly have guns to protect themselves, why aren’t there more stories about people using them that way than there are about people using them offensively?
And that’s not why the second amendment exists, it’s not for personal protection it’s to form a well regulated militia to fight the government should it become tyrannical.
And a militia is pretty much a gang, so I guess we’re back to square one.
Bad news sells. If I pull a gun on someone that’s threatening me, and they back off, where’s the news story? That’s not even likely going to make it to a police report, much less CNN. When you look at statistics on defensive gun use, it’s a little hard to pin down numbers, but the earliest claim dates to '97, was based on a phone survey, and was extrapolated by the US National Institute of Justice to be roughly 1.5 million cases of defensive gun use annually, with the overwhelming majority not involving any shots fired at all. Take this article for example; the methodology is a little shaky, but that’s in large part due to the fact that–per my example–most cases of defensive gun use are never even going to progress to a police report in the first place, so surveys and self-reports are the best you’re going to get.
FWIW, I would not say that I’ve ever had to use a firearm defensively. I’ve carried one on rare occasions, and carried a rifle when investigating load noises outside after dark (it’s usually a bear, TBH)
It’s both. The 2nd Amendment was based off of English Common Law, which said that the government couldn’t disarm the people, because the people had the right to defend themselves. The rationale that they wrote in the amendment was for militias. And, FWIW, when it was written, ‘militia’ was understood to be every able bodied male that was adult (and not old enough to be infirm), and they were expected to supply their own serviceable military-appropriate arms.
I don’t think that it’s reasonable to qualify a militia per se as a gang, since ‘gang’ implies that the purpose is criminal activity. A militia might be engaged in criminal activity (for instance, the 3%ers, Patriot Front, Proud Boys, etc.), but other militias do community activism (the various John Brown Gun Clubs).
So do lies and propaganda. That’s why pro-gun groups rely on imaginary threats, bullshit statistics and unverifiable anecdotes to justify a multi-billion dollar industry.
So we’re just dropping the whole well-regulated militia part of that civil right? They didn’t really mean that part right?
“Well-regulated” was understood to mean ‘trained’. The militia was every able-bodied adult male, and they were legally obligated to supply their own militarily-useful firearms.
The pro-gun community has wasted the last 20 years demonstrating that they’re unwilling or incapable of addressing gun violence and they use the second amendment to prevent others from addressing it.
Eventually, the people you’ve sold out will have no other choice but to repeal it. Pro-gun groups will throw an almighty tantrum but so what? They have no room left to escalate because we already have to listen to them endlessly bleat about guns, we already have to constantly fight them politically and we already live under the threat of being murdered by a far-right extremist with a gun.
Sure, if you can prove you’re not what we need protection from because you’ve been sold a gun. Nobody is opposing legitimate self-defense – that’s why they’re not banning door locks, burglar alarms and MMA classes because you can’t easily use those things to murder people on a whim.
Let’s take you at your extremely dishonest word and say that gun violence is 95% social problems and 5% access to firearms.
Well the overwhelming majority of the actual people you’ve grouped as “enemies” support both gun-control and social policies designed to combat inequality, which addresses 100% of the problem. It’s literally the progressive platform.
For you to actual have an argument, they would need to support gun-control but oppose progressive social policies, and those people simply don’t exist in significant numbers outside your imagination.
But what about your “allies”? Well the majority of them support neither gun-control nor progressive social policies, for a grand total of 0% of the problem fixed. This tracks with the last 20+ years of them not solving any of these problems. It’s literally the Republican platform.
However you’re happy to be dishonest so you present them as a group that only opposes gun-control and sure, they exist, but they’re still only fixing 95% of the problem.
And all of them also have far more restrictive gun laws, making them far more closely aligned with gun-control advocates than pro-gun groups.