I agree with you. Societal norms in most places agree with you. Just though curious if he did actually threaten to shoot anyone.
He needs another hobby.
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It’s the Wild West frontier myth. Act as if you really are on your own because you live on a farmstead and your nearest neighbours are several miles away
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ya, nothing I saw indicated a threat was articulated verbally
Because of Michigan’s gun laws, protesters were allowed to carry their assault weapons into the state capitol — but not their protest signs
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…and body armor, apparently.
You bet. I absolutely will call the police on anyone I see carrying a gun in public. I don’t care whether they are legally entitled to or not.
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The former (the away you described NYC) is basically how it is in Canada and it seems totally reasonable. Bolt-action long guns and shotguns are a lot easier to get, because they have legitimate uses in rural areas. However pistols are only good for murder. The only reason to buy one besides murder is recreational target shooting, so for that it is possible to buy one and dedicated hobbyists go through the work. It’s no different than someone who wants to drive an old car that’s really unsafe- you go through a process of getting it certified as a historical vehicle so you can drive it because you love it enough as a hobby. And nobody dies as a result of either of these things.
This is all incredibly reasonable in all other countries. Only Americans are outraged by this most basic of regulation of incredibly dangerous things. The freedom of one person to endanger everyone around them does not trump the freedom of those people to live safely. Except in America.
Edit: I didn’t see that @David_Guilbeaul wrote basically the exact same thing. Hah! But it is a useful illustration of how most Canadians see the situation- two unprompted responses so well aligned. And full disclosure- I come from a gun enthusiast family. My dad reloads his own ammo and owns a dozen guns. He target shoots and shoots skeet and loves all of it. He’s the Safety Officer at his gun range. And he agrees with all these laws.
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If you walk around in public carrying a fishing pole and tackle box it is perfectly reasonable for others to assume you are preparing to go fishing even if you don’t make a verbal announcement to that effect.
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The context here is that someone was replying to my earlier remark where I made that point, and the respondent questioned whether a verbal threat had been issued (which I don’t know; I personally consider the behaviour seen here to be threatening):
“he was charged with aggravated assault, so I guess that means his actions were interpreted as a threat to harm? Seems like a passive threat since he went to a bathroom and was arrested when he exited, but maybe there was more to it than that. I think the circumstances alone would justify people perceiving this as a threat regardless of whether he broke an open carry law or not”
To be honest, I personally struggle to open some potato chip bags.
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The struggle is real, Dude.
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I hear you. To play devil’s advocate for a moment, the one close-to-persuasive argument that I think the gun rights people have is that there are already so damn many guns in circulation in the US that it’s not entirely unreasonable to want to avoid being the only one without one, so we shouldn’t put guns out of reach for good people.
But I’m with you on the idea that real licensing and registration requirements are no-brainers. And while I intellectually understand the small-government, rugged-individualist political philosophy (even if I don’t agree with it most of the time), I don’t think I’ll ever understand how anybody thinks that permitting casual ownership of pistols makes anyone safer, or makes the government any less likely to be tyrannical, both of which are more or less tenets of faith amount the gun fetishist crowd.
I actually went for a handgun lesson just the other day. It was my first time shooting a handgun (I’ve shot a variety of long guns before) and I’m very glad I had the opportunity to try it, but it’s hard for me to imagine dedicating the amount of time necessary to really get comfortable using one for self defense. The instructor talked about guns as really great tools: for sporting/target practice, for “collecting animals for food” (i.e., hunting), and for “saving lives.” Of course he focused primarily on the last one, reciting statistics like how 96% of violent encounters start within 9 feet, and how he doesn’t like single-action-only pistols (the manual safety requires an extra step to be ready to shoot). Yet it felt like he was completely missing the big picture: Probably 99.9999% of encounters (maybe more?) aren’t violent at all, and certainly aren’t life threatening, so unless I’m training to be a cop or secret agent or someone else who regularly finds himself in a violent confrontation, it seems that I’m statistically a lot more likely to shoot and kill someone who wasn’t actually a threat than to save my own life by carrying a gun and training to be able to use it super fast.
Going into the lesson, I thought I’d enjoy using a pistol a lot more than I did. I’ve occasionally thought about keeping a gun in my home and learning how to use it just in case society ever breaks down and the cops aren’t actually able to help me. But after that lesson, the more I think about it, the more it seems like I’m actually safer WITHOUT a gun in my home. And I’m at a bit of a loss as to how such an enormous percentage of the American population (including many people who are quite intelligent) have come to believe that guns (especially handguns and military-style pistol-grip rifles) are really useful tools for the average person to defend their life and property. But holy cow do they believe it. It’s such an utterly bizarre feature of American culture and politics.
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I don’t understand why people who stan the racism of the “wild west” (that was actually Kansas IIRC) don’t also want to leave their guns with the sheriff when crossing into the township while visiting the store.
It’s like they just wanna be rude to black people or something.
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The actual sign used in Wichita – “leave your guns with the Sheriff” – is on display at Wichita’s Historical Cowtown Museum, but I bet more people have seen the Hollywoodized version of it than the truth of it.
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You must go to therapy sessions run by Quakers and Mennonites before you can buy your gun.
You can only buy one gun every two years. Any more would be fraud. People will try to prove that you bought guns in several counties even if you stand in one line all day, and the courts will take them seriously.
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It is illegal to be given food or water waiting in line to buy a gun. You have to be registered to buy a gun and those rolls get purged every 15 minutes.
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Unless you showed up to buy a gun within the last four years, you are removed from the registration rolls (maybe you didn’t actually buy, but you have to show up) If your name is different in two different government databases (say, one could support accents, another not) or your signature doesn’t match point-for-point with a different signature you made under different circumstances, you will be informed that you are ineligible to buy. If you carpooled to the gun purchase place, you’re banned because they’re busing you in from another district.
Of course, the problem is with all these “guns are easier to get than voting” analogies is that the same people who have no troubles walking into a store are the same ones who have none of these issues with voting. These folks proudly posing with their AR-15s and Glocks, boasting about how it makes them so much more, about their FREEDOM, have never had to stand in line for ten hours or been forced to do more than flash a DL when going in to vote. They’d be quite happy to see similar rules applied because those rules would never affect them. They’d continue to buy their guns quite happily and easily… and they’re the ones most likely to use them against the rest of us.
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Not an authoritative source, but a Canadian friend who collected handguns said there is a “personal protection” handgun license in Canada. But it’s vanishingly rare for one to be given. The only one he’d heard of was Pierre Elliot Trudeau, during the FLQ crisis.
Requires source, and my google-fu is weak today.
