Got a death threat today from an irate customer

Guns can be a very good deterent to violent crime. There is a town in Georgia, I belive it is, where all resident are required to own and carry firearms. There is zero crime.

Just think about it logically... if the thought to do someone harm does come across someone's mind and they are angry and crazy enough to document it, there is intent. As the person on the receiving end of that threat, if you do not take that threat seriously then there is something wrong with your self-preservation instinct.

Of course people don't need guns to do bad things, but guns give bad or crazy people a tool to do more damage.

Those figures just show there's less violent crime in the US compared to the UK, not that less people are shot and killed in the US compared to the UK.

Those figures are off anyway because crime is reported and measured in diffenent ways between countries. For example, affray is considered a violent crime in the UK. So if I say to someone "I'll kick your ass" I could be arrested for affray and charged with a voilent cime. How many out of those 2,034 offences could be affray?

Still feel safer in the UK, I would rather get into a fist fight than a fire fight.

You are way off.

Look at the statistics and who is near the top and who is near the bottom.

Take into account gun laws and you see who is safer.
List of countries by firearm-related death rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Part of that hypothesis is that the UK (the box I was born in - but I've lived in a place with radically different ideas on 'gun control') is just as much of a 'box' as the USA - if anything it's a smaller one. Most of us tend to treat other cultures and their norms subjectively.

Objectively, there is little inference one can draw from rates of gun ownership within the UK or elsewhere and crime. That a thriving modern democracy with almost universal fully automatic weapons ownership has very low armed crime compared to other countries that outlaw civilian ownership altogether disproves a simplistic "More guns = more violence" model. The trouble is that we have been so indoctrinated with the latter view by successive governments since 1920 that trying to convince folk here (other than those that already own guns, which includes a suprising number of serving and ex law enforcement types) that there are other ways of doing business is like trying to discuss whale evolution with a Jehova's Witness.

You might want to reflect on the fact that we have vastly higher armed crime here in the UK after enacting some of the most restrictive/punitive firearms legislation than we did before we enacted it.

Most people would consider a death threat a reasonable excuse to forfeit a customer's right to getting help.

...Somehow I get the feeling that the above image was Photoshopped, and meant to be humorous.

I think the only animal that it is legal to use a machine gun to kill is human... Legal, if one is in the military that is... :p

Lori - Your feelings of humanity and empathy here are extremely dangerous. It is wonderful to want to help people - the world would be a better place for it. But you seem not understand that when a person's head is not right, they will not always respond to kindness in like. There are humans that will torture others to death - do you think that someone so incredibly unbalanced will respond with kindness to kindness? There are those not capable of feelings in the way you are -- to think otherwise can be deadly.

When I worked at the crisis center I saw many women in hospitals, completely mangled by people they were nice to and tried to help, both strangers and loved ones. Others were just killed. Period.

One of the things I did at the crisis center was to teach women self-defense - not to make martial arts masters out of them - but to get it through their heads that when someone attacks you, you are in danger - the proper response is self-defense --NOT empathy. Empathizing with the wrong person is a sure way to get yourself killed. You would not believe how many killed by home intruders are killed because they don't want to shoot another human and hesitate just long enough to have their weapon taken and are killed by their own weapon because they wanted to defend themselves but are just too "nice" to be able to understand the complete danger of another person.

At the crisis center I would show a woman - "If he grabs you like this, you do this....." and they would often say "I couldn't do that, I might kill him". The only answer is "Yeah you might, but when it comes to a point you have to use a move like this - the creature attacking you is NOT worried about your health and well-being.

I know you are a wonderful person, Lori - but always remember that it doesn't take a terrorist to cut you to shreds and laugh while doing it. You have to make room in your intellect, and in your heart, to recognize evil and danger - and to understand that just because it walks in human form, does not make it human. Your life may depend on you understanding that at some time.

As far as guns - my father taught me to shoot his rifle when I was 4 years old. Ignorance of weapons does not keep a kid safe - or anyone else around the kid. I was also allowed to keep a jack knife and taught to use it and when I cut all four fingers with it I was scolded for being stupid and careless. In a collapse of a society, kids sometimes need the skills to survive without adults around - and this society is in collapse.

Machine guns - might not need it to put food on the table, but our congress just took away habeas corpus, posse comatatus, and due process (i.e. Rule of Law). There may come a time during your lifetime that you will be very grateful that our citizens have them.

That would be the case all things being equal. However, in reality, they're not.

There are very stiff penalties for armed intrusion, attempting to rob/assault/rape someone, shooting them whilst attempting to do any of the above to them etc. There are not (or should not be) penalties for shooting an intruder from whom you feel an immediate threat (at least one state allows you to shoot a fleeing burglar if you believe he has your property). Shooting you immediately lines that burglar up for a very strong sentence (up to and including death). Career and natural-selection wise, moving to an area that outlaws gun ownership for defence or establishing that a home is empty before breaking into it starts looking like a very sensible career choice.

You can argue that there are scenarios where a defensive firearm would be useless - for instance if someone sneaked up behind you and spontaneously shot you in the head. You have to ask yourself how likely such scenarios are compared with having to deal with a potentially armed home invasion (and lets face it, having a gun to face an unarmed home invasion isn't a bad outcome).

On a macro scale we could argue that Russia could fire its entire nuclear arsenal at the UK despite our having Trident. That doesn't stop us having Trident as a deterrent on the rational hypothesis that Russia is lead by rational individuals. There are other reasons to have Trident, but they are IMHO outside the realm of analogy with gun control.