Al in Canada
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- Apr 20, 2009
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JustPipes said:
I grew up in a gun carrying culture, and had on rare occasions carried a short gun for "protection". There were areas in my home town I would not have ventured after dark armed or not.
In Toronto there are now some areas like that, but that has changed since I have lived here, mostly the result of Asian gangs who came in as "refugees", and set up shop and are fighting over drug dealing.
When I first came to Canada there wasn't a place in Toronto that I felt unsafe to visit, except maybe the docks, at late night, and I would suggest that is true of any port city in the world.
Someone may have cooked the stats, but not me. I think that the stats came from Wiki article, but am not sure. What is important here is that the number of crimes involving guns is much, much lower here, and so are the number of "gun accidents". I follow US news from Detroit, and while Detroit may not be the poster child of American cities, there are a disturbingly frequent stories about "accidental" shootings involving children playing with their parents guns, or kids taking the guns to school,, etc.
I don't even agree with all the Canadian gun laws, especially as they apply to long guns. I have a "hobby farm" and have kept chickens, which means you have varmit problems from time to time. A rifle or a shotgun is just another tool for any one raising any type of animals, whether the varmits be 'coons, coyotes, wild dogs, etc. The laws tend to be written by people who live in cities, and they don't have the perception of guns as tools, so their legislation tends to reflect this blindness.
I wasn't even proposing gun control for the US. The point of the Swiss situation is that every household is "armed" if they have had a member who has done their military service. You noted the gun storage locker that was shown in the video, so they probably require safe storage too. And all the Swiss would have under gone training in gun handling and marksmanship. I have no idea what their laws are on short guns.
The videos that followed about the fast draw artists were fascinating, and the handgun holds a mystic place in the American self image of its history. A kind of skewed image, since the reality was far different from the Hollywood version (which somehow we tend to accept without question). A friend who was a very serious student of the history of the American West noted that most gunfights were won not by the best shot, but the fastest on the reload. It being very difficult for most people to hit much of anything with a pistol at any distance, let alone a target that is moving and shooting back. According to him the "typical" gunfight had both guys emptying their guns in futile fire, and then one guy shooting the other because he got reloaded first. The guys like Hickock who were accurate with a handgun were the exception, not the rule.
I don't know what the answer is, but it isn't seeing a threat in everyone who comes to knock on your door. The America I grew up in we never locked the door unless we were going to be away for an extended period. I never had a door key as a child.
My parents might have been critical of the party in power, but there was no question of thinking that either party was "making war" on the people. It seems a lot of Americans have the expectation that they are going to called upon to use their guns, whether against a criminal threat or "to water the tree of liberty.." against their government. And its not like we in Canada will not be affected if things go to hell in a hand basket in the US, plus all my family lives there still.
Not at all, this is just what i found when I got here. The observations come from trying to figure out how two outwardly similar neighboring societies came to be so different in some ways.
I grew up in a gun carrying culture, and had on rare occasions carried a short gun for "protection". There were areas in my home town I would not have ventured after dark armed or not.
In Toronto there are now some areas like that, but that has changed since I have lived here, mostly the result of Asian gangs who came in as "refugees", and set up shop and are fighting over drug dealing.
When I first came to Canada there wasn't a place in Toronto that I felt unsafe to visit, except maybe the docks, at late night, and I would suggest that is true of any port city in the world.
DP,Dover Pipes":t4locufh said:
Someone may have cooked the stats, but not me. I think that the stats came from Wiki article, but am not sure. What is important here is that the number of crimes involving guns is much, much lower here, and so are the number of "gun accidents". I follow US news from Detroit, and while Detroit may not be the poster child of American cities, there are a disturbingly frequent stories about "accidental" shootings involving children playing with their parents guns, or kids taking the guns to school,, etc.
I don't even agree with all the Canadian gun laws, especially as they apply to long guns. I have a "hobby farm" and have kept chickens, which means you have varmit problems from time to time. A rifle or a shotgun is just another tool for any one raising any type of animals, whether the varmits be 'coons, coyotes, wild dogs, etc. The laws tend to be written by people who live in cities, and they don't have the perception of guns as tools, so their legislation tends to reflect this blindness.
I wasn't even proposing gun control for the US. The point of the Swiss situation is that every household is "armed" if they have had a member who has done their military service. You noted the gun storage locker that was shown in the video, so they probably require safe storage too. And all the Swiss would have under gone training in gun handling and marksmanship. I have no idea what their laws are on short guns.
The videos that followed about the fast draw artists were fascinating, and the handgun holds a mystic place in the American self image of its history. A kind of skewed image, since the reality was far different from the Hollywood version (which somehow we tend to accept without question). A friend who was a very serious student of the history of the American West noted that most gunfights were won not by the best shot, but the fastest on the reload. It being very difficult for most people to hit much of anything with a pistol at any distance, let alone a target that is moving and shooting back. According to him the "typical" gunfight had both guys emptying their guns in futile fire, and then one guy shooting the other because he got reloaded first. The guys like Hickock who were accurate with a handgun were the exception, not the rule.
I don't know what the answer is, but it isn't seeing a threat in everyone who comes to knock on your door. The America I grew up in we never locked the door unless we were going to be away for an extended period. I never had a door key as a child.
My parents might have been critical of the party in power, but there was no question of thinking that either party was "making war" on the people. It seems a lot of Americans have the expectation that they are going to called upon to use their guns, whether against a criminal threat or "to water the tree of liberty.." against their government. And its not like we in Canada will not be affected if things go to hell in a hand basket in the US, plus all my family lives there still.
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