What should we do about guns?

[AsaltoTemplario]

What about people that hunt or sport shoot (skeet, targets, etc)?

In fact, most gun related crimes happen with pistols that are conceable.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-11

If you look at this, more deaths were caused in 2011, by hammers, knives and even fists than rifles or shotguns.

It's just the media that hypes up the "black and scary aussualt rifles with their 30 round clips!"

Hammers, knives and fists are needed. Guns aren't. 

[AsaltoTemplario]

Really? The government has done a GREAT job stopping drug smuggling/trafficking, and we've dumped quite a bit of money into it.

 

If it is easy to smuggle drugs into the country, and move them around, what makes you think it would be difficult to do the same with weapons?

You can't compare guns with drugs. Guns, if we talk about the ones bought by criminals, have muuuuuuuch less demand than drugs - because more people buy drugs than guns. Now, even if they can move them around, atleast the government has tried to stop them, and it won't be as easy as buying them from the shop next to your home, like I said. Apart from that, I've said that a lot of shootings aren't done by criminals but by people who suddenly have a rage or are depressed, and these people aren't familiarized enough with the black market to be able to obtain an assault rifle. The price of guns in the black market would alo skyrocket, making it harder for criminals to get them for cheap. Like you said the government has done a great job into stopping trafficking, so there's no reason why a nation with such a high GDP & GDP per capita wouldn't be able to stop weapons traficcking if they put a bit of money into it.

[Sheep With A Gun]

fuck police fuck deaths, we're 7 billion PARASITES on this planet, each guy killed one less problem in the world

[Space Jesus]

3D printing at home changes everything. You better hop on that train 5-20 years from now when people can download a ZIP file off the internet and print out fully working guns with a non-industrial strength printer. I'm not particularly fond of guns, but jesus help us when that technology gets refined.

[Grimes]

fuck police fuck deaths, we're 7 billion PARASITES on this planet, each guy killed one less problem in the world

 

oh god why would you necro this thread

[Space Jesus]

I dunno BUT WE'RE ROLLING WITH IT!

[frozenthirdyear]

Poor 'Muricans with all their awful problems like police brutality and gun violence, and here in Switzerland we get mad about mass immigration (as the conservative parties call it - it's actually not that much of a problem, they're just looking for something to complain about) and imported meat being falsely declared, closely followed by a Media-Markt commercial involving (or parodying?) masturbation. Currently, two of six front-page articles are about sex, masturbation, porn or all of 'em. That ain't something worthy of a newspaper's front page, if you ask me. :I

 

I partially understand the concern about guns, though. Every week I see at least one soldier (interestingly, they're usually alone, groups of four or more are pretty rare) at the train station with their loads of baggage and their assault rifle slung over their back. Even though gun laws are pretty strict, allowing only law enforcement and the army to carry guns in public - except small, concealed ones - there's still this nagging lil' voice like "one of them's enough to shoot up the whole train station".

Heck, even my dad (who's still in the army) has a rifle and three pistols locked away safely at home, and we regularly go to... uh... what's a Schützenfest called in English? I forgot how to language for a second. :B

My point is, even though I know how to shoot but am terribad at it and would rather run and hide instead of defending myself with a gun if I had to, there's times I don't even trust my dad with guns, but compared to the appalling gun violence in the U.S., I think we Swiss are pretty lucky to live in such a peaceful (is that the right expression?) country. 

 

Funnily enough, there's this high school at Zurich that's got an extensive and probably expensive security system just to be prepared for any sort of mass shooting. That system was triggered by an anonymous call on Thursday, resulting in the police locking down the whole school for three hours.

It was a false alert.

More about the incident here, though the article's in German. http://www.20min.ch/schweiz/zuerich/story/-Im-Zweifel-wird-der-Ernstfall-ausgeloest--30696007

 

So here's my two cents.