Was Bob Costas Right? page 3

[Blacksmith]

Like many celebrities he apparently believes that he has open forum to speak in any way he chooses when people really just want him to talk about football.
While many people do use guns to kill others there are many who use them to defend themselves. I follow an NRA news site that list sometimes 2-3 justified uses of guns for personal protection per day. These usually get skipped over by main stream media.
Some people are evil. They will use a gun to kill and if one is not available they will find another way.

I own several guns for hunting, target shooting and protection and have a CCL. There have been several home invasions near my town where people have been tied and beaten I feel much better knowing that if need be I can protect myself and my children.
I also witnessed a man shoot another man in broad daylight back in august, I was about 30 feet away when it happened luckily I was able to leave the area and call police. However if something had prevented me from moving away I may have been much less fortunate. I was in a state that does not permit me to carry and would have been hard pressed to defend myself.

Not everyone should owe a gun, some are not trustworthy or just plain incompetant but this goes for cars as well.

Again for Bob costas I dont care if they fire him or shoot him out of a canon at the circus, I don't watch football anyway.:P

[JoanieL]

I think it's a bit neurotic personally to think the government is going to put us all in jails or some shit - keep in mind that the people in the military are still part of the country, not mindless drones (well...) I think they wouldn't just listen blindly and overtake the population simply because they have the guns.

I think if you understood really what has happened to our civil rights since (especially) nine-eleven, you wouldn't write that off as neurotic. The Patriot Act basically stated "guilty until proven innocent." And yes, people in the military listen blindly; it's how they're trained, and it's the only way the PTB believe it works.

I hate to pull the "old" card, but in the over half a century I've lived, this country and its attitudes towards the rights of its citizens have gone to crap. Part of it is technology, which has made tracking us pretty easy, but a lot of it is just apathy on the part of the citizens themselves.

If you think the fed cares about anything other than power, if you think the Fed cares about any citizens other than the one percent who line their coffers, I think that may be very naive. Maybe that's always been, but at least they disguised it or were held in check with little things like the Bill of Rights and The Constitution. Now they flaunt their corruption, and we swallow it.

Take away citizens' rights to defend themselves and we are merely cattle for slaughter.

[praetorian55]

Did I not hear that the Colorado theater shooter passed by a closer theater and picked the only one in town that specifically prohibited even licensed gun carriers? Did I make that up?

You're absolutely correct.

Oh - Bob Costas needs to back into storage until the next Olympics - he's horrible on sports and his pathetic elitist pov makes it worse.

[Chaohinon]

Prohibition has never worked for drugs, gambling, or prostitution, and I don't see why that wouldn't hold true for guns as well.

I'm all for total legalization of firearm possession up to and including nukes. If the u.s. government can be trusted with them, I don't see why the crazy redneck next door shouldn't be allowed to have them, too.

[j3nn]

I believe we should all be armed.

Yes!

Mandatory high school (or middle school) courses. We're not teaching them math, so we might as well teach them something else that's useful.

Eep! No. No mandatory anything. Compulsory school mimics the prison system as it is and is probably one of the contributing factors in the high crime we have today. It forces all children into the same predetermined molds or they or their parents are punished for disobeying.

[JudyCr]

Never liked costas; he shouldn't be fired over that, tho.
I hate violence but I'd rather have a gun if someone is breaking in my house.
Saw a man stomping a dog to death once, really wished I'd had an AK-47 then.

[JoanieL]

Okay, no mandatory gun safety classes. I'm easy.

[Him]

Prohibition has never worked for drugs, gambling, or prostitution, and I don't see why that wouldn't hold true for guns as well.

I'm all for total legalization of firearm possession up to and including nukes. If the u.s. government can be trusted with them, I don't see why the crazy redneck next door shouldn't be allowed to have them, too.

One thing to remember is that nukes are seriously SERIOUSLY expensive. It's absurd to think of the crazy redneck having them, because all the crazy rednecks on the planet put together couldn't afford one warhead. I think I read somewhere that the cost per warhead for reasonable nukes was about $580,000,000 each, though I'm not sure if that fully counted the development costs (which would need to be covered in a sale, just as the price of your car includes paying for a share of the engineering time that went into designing it). The only people who could even consider owning nukes are folks like George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the like.

[tfarny]

There is a wide range of gun control laws and traditions of carrying them, all around the world. The countries where lots of people are armed are all places with tons of violence. Guatamela, etc. That is, worldwide there is no evidence that everyone carrying guns would curb violence, but there is evidence of the opposite. There is plenty of evidence that making guns illegal for everyone curbs violence, as all the safer countries in the world have done. The colorado movie theater thing is a perfect example; you think that whole tragedy would have been prevented if a half dozen citizens had started shooting back at the guy? In a dark theater with panicked people running around everywhere? Come on.
The second amendment is in the bill of rights; it shouldn't be there, just like the constitution originally defined blacks as 3/5 of a human, the people who wrote that stuff were humans and they were writing laws they thought appropriate for their day and time. And at that day and time, a) guns were expensive and hard to maintain, a random criminal couldn't easily own them, and b) it wasn't feasible to commit mass murder, Colorado-style, with the weapons of the day. While you were reloading, someone could whack you over the head with a hammer. c) guns were considered a "right" because they were damn useful and practical in the wilderness where lots of people lived. d) they were very worried about getting re-attacked by the British. The militias that had formed before the revolutionary war were THE difference early on, before the French saved our asses.
Finally, if you actually believe in the literal right to bear arms as stated in the constitution, then violent mentally ill persons just released from the hospital ought to be able to head to the gun shop and purchase full auto assault rifles with large magazines and hollow point ammo then walk into an elementary school. Anything restricting that situation from happening is "infringement on the people's right to bear arms" is it not?
I'm saying this as someone who'll probably buy a gun soon, and thinks that responsible ownership is a reasonable thing for a citizen, so long as the gun itself is not a mass-killing specialty device and the owner passes a pretty thorough background check. In other words, gun control! Which doesn't necessarily mean no guns for anyone, ever. The debate we're "having" about gun control in this country is pretty silly.

[jojohaligo]

Also, if we were all armed, don't you think maybe the average street thug would think twice before mugging someone? The snatch and grab rapist might not be so successful if all women carried guns. It's not fail-safe, but nothing is.

Regardless of my opinion here - if that's true then the US would have lower rates per capita for muggings and stranger rapes compared to countries where people are carrying less guns. Do they? Seriously.