There's no reason to call their religion a "cult" other than to make yourself come across as a racially- & culturally-insensitive neanderthal who knows little else outside of his own beliefs. Which, if that's actually true -- great job! -- but if it's not then you may just want to consider that not all religions other than your own are cults. It's odd how the people who call other religions cults are the ones who act most like the followers of one.

All religions are cults in one way or another. My opinion and I'm entitled to it.

Sue and Rich, I'm not a fan of religion but I'm a fervent advocate of most of their beliefs. One of the members of the Sikh community was on CNN tonight and he had two things, one that I've never heard in response to such a tragedy that affected somebody personally. First of all, he said that if the person who had killed six of his community had known that he and his community believe in brotherhood of humanity, the attacker would not have done what he did. Obviously, that would not have made any difference, since the attacker didn't know much more about the people he was killing than that they wore turbans and had beards. His other remarks were in response to the statement from the killer's family expressing their regrets. He said he felt bad for the killer's death: "The loss of a life is the loss of a life." Draw your own conclusions.

I actually looked it up in Wiki and based on the info the Sikh's are basically the complete opposite of what you say. Seems a very humble and virtuous faith believes in the brotherhood of humanity.

Very misleading article. Don't waste your time clicking on it.

Stricter gun laws will NOT do anything except let outlaws and criminals have guns (and Government, we'll label them with criminals) IT IS A KNOWN FACT, Places that have strict gun laws have a higher murder rates and places that have fewer restrictions and people with more guns have a much lower crime/murder rate..... You don't believe it, look it up! Do your research before you open your mouth....

I dunno, StGabes, South Africa has more lax gun control laws than the US, but the highest rate of gun homicides per capita in the world. Columbia, the #2 highest gun violence country, has a federal guarantee for private ownership of guns. With the current laws we have in place, the US is #7 on the list of annual per-capita gun homicides. Singapore's gun laws are more strict than the US, and they have VASTLY lower per capita gun homicides. Here's some resources, but, in general, stricter gun control dramatically reduces per capita gun violence - any study you are reading that says otherwise is likely using total numbers, which isn't a terribly representative measurement - pro-gun Switzerland is smaller than NYC and has one of the best educational systems in the world, AND we have triple their poverty rate, so it's hardly a comparable example.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_gun_vio_hom_fir_hom_rat_per_100_pop-rate-per-100-000-pop
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

Sorry StGabes. Looked it up and you're wrong. Tighter gun control laws correlates with fewer deaths from gun related violence (see #5).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/23/six-facts-about-guns-violence-and-gun-control/

More gun control? Oh ok, another mislead liberal with the typical knee jerk reaction.

Harry - as opposed to another mislead conservative with the typical knee jerk reaction? Maybe, just maybe, we can discuss this without have to resort to shallow partisan caricatures?

batman rocks the fat ass

just an fyi...the flags are to be at half mast until sunset today-8/10...

A) I'm pretty sure this discussion is about more than just assault rifles, no?
B) Chicago's handgun laws are completely ineffective without Federal support to stop the guns getting to IL in the first place, which has been blocked at every attempt for decades. You can't really condemn a policy if you never give it a chance to work.

Look at the homicide rates in NYC before passing strict gun control laws and after and tell me what you find.

"Chicago's handgun laws are completely ineffective without Federal support"
Morgan, do you recall Fast and Furious? A government run program that put guns into the hands of Mexican drug dealers? What was the result, a US Border Patrol agent was killed with one of those weapons, and who is being held accountable? That's right, no one! So if all the guns are taken away,and only the drug dealers and criminals have them, how exactly do you intend to defend yourself when they decide to break into your house? I know, you'll call 911 and hope that the police arrive in time to save you and and your family. The fact is criminals will always have guns. So trying to limit law abiding citizens from having them solves nothing. Remember the war on drugs, how long has that been going on? 30 years, and guess what, illegal drugs are still a problem.
I'll make you a deal Morgan I won't try to take away your right to post your views, (1st Amendment), as long as you don't try to away the peoples right to keep and bear arms.(2nd Amendment). These rights are not guaranteed by our government but by our Creator! Read the Constitution some time, you might learn something, even if you do disagree.

"...if all the guns are taken away,and only the drug dealers and criminals have them, how exactly do you intend to defend yourself when they decide to break into your house?"

This made me curious, so I did a little research on the Philly crime map - So, in 2011, how many Justifiable Homicides, such as the home defense scenario you describe, happened in Philadelphia? A grand total of 5 incidents were at the hands of civilians. So, I looked up the news reports of those 5, and 3 of them were done with guns (1 knife, 1 blunt force object), 1 of which was a club bouncer who was armed at work, and 1 of those used the attacker's own gun. The remaining 1 incident (which seems to still be under investigation) was a double homicide, was a guy who was waiting with a shotgun and body armor for the 4 guys who attacked his N. Philly apartment, so not exactly a random encounter.

Even if you want to count that one (I wouldn't), is that remotely worth the other 1,421 people who were shot, or the 265 who were killed by guns? In Philadelphia, at least, civilians owning guns did basically nothing to actually prevent crime, and had a whole hell of a lot to with enabling it. In 2011, there were over 250 armed robberies almost every month - about 3,000 in total.

How can ANYONE look at that information and argue that private ownership of guns is helping the citizens of Philadelphia?

http://phillypolice.com/about/crime-statistics/
http://citymaps.phila.gov/CrimeMap/StepByStep.aspx

for your post below: If any of your statistics are true, I can't be bothered to look them up, they do not show any crime that was thwarted by the use of a gun, robberieis thwarted or rapes or any others because the attacker approached someone that unknowingly had a gun. Regardless. If even ONE life was saved or ONE person protected from harm because they themselves did in fact carry...it's worth it. If YOU want to go unarmed with only a telephone to call for help, then YOU do that, everyone else can decide for themselves what they want to do...they don't need your help or the governments help to protect themselves from the fear of guns you and govt possess.

" If even ONE life was saved or ONE person protected from harm because they themselves did in fact carry...it's worth it."

You're going to have to explain that one - how is 1 hypothetical Philadelphian life saved because of a gun EVER worth the 265 lives actually lost to them? I don't follow that reasoning. I'd love to see some data for actual crimes thwarted by civilians with guns, but without that it doesn't really make sense to go on blind belief that its a common occurrence or an effective deterrent. The police should have reports for that - I imagine a majority of the crimes that could only be prevented with the threat of a registered firearm are also crimes that are worth reporting to the police. I don't see where that information is published, though.

You mention fear, and I think that's an interesting facet to this discussion, and how it relates to prevention. Which scenario is really acting fearfully: insisting on arming yourself to someday respond to the hypothetical day that you have to save yourself from a possible threat, or systematically controlling the flow of weapons because the data supports that more Philadelphia guns take lives than save them? The paranoid, be-prepared, conceal-and-carry ethos is the very height of fearfulness - the gun makes you feel protected and capable of defending yourself, no? Then the opposite of that is the lack of a gun makes you feel unprotected and incapable of defending yourself: that is fear.

'Gun control' is more than just penalizing individuals or passing a law this week to stop crime the next. A local handgun law would have done nothing to change this, most likely, but managing the national flow of guns for an extended period of time sure would. Why would a guy who's in openly White Supremacist hardcore bands pass a background check of any vague rigor? Also, and maybe this hasn't been said enough, the 2nd Amendment says nothing whatsoever about vigilante justice.

Good point, Amend, but automatic or military grade weapons are not easy to get. It requires $$, mountains of paperwork and months of investigation to get approval.

So called "assault weapons" are merely modern sporting arms and function no differently than arms commonly used in shooting sports. The differences are mainly cosmetic.

I own several firearms of varying configurations. My family and I enjoy shooting them at the range and know how to use them safely. Have my weapons assaulted anyone? Never in 30+ years I have owned one. Would we use them in self defense? Absolutely. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

"Just believers in Christ that express that belief by living their everyday lives attempting to do their best to follow Christ. But they also acknowledge their human nature and occasional failures. The true Christian gun owner believes he/she is to be a servant to humanity. But that belief does but not extend to being a doormat to those who refuse to live by the rules of reasonable human behavior."

http://www.christiangunowner.com/

My condolences to those of the Sikh community.

Yep, almost anything can be used as a weapon. Guns, however, actually ARE weapons, the ability to kill being its only purpose (that's a fact!!). You can see how that's fundamentally different, right?

You're right - most of the problems in this country are home-grown, which is probably the case for every world-leading country in history. One example, perhaps, is that "everyone is so damn selfish" that they can't see that their personal demand for the illusion of handgun-based protection comes at the cost of other people's lives from the huge influx of readily-available weapons that market demand creates.

If you really want to embrace your family, friends, neighbors, and even strangers!, regardless of racial, financial, economic or religious lines, may I suggest not drawing them into some morally-and-situationally unambiguous 'Evil' caricature. Anyone has the potential to violate the civilized social contract when they are in a position to be desperate, scared, or hungry - mistaking that for some sort of unknowable, uncontrollable evil that can only be dealt with if you have weapon superiority is the antithesis of the social responsibility you are espousing.

And, yeah, a government is about power: it's the power we all jointly wield to try and improve our civilization in ways that individuals can't. It's flawed, corruptible, and inefficient, but its all ours. I say we use it to get the guns off Philly's streets.

Successful terrorism:
People begin to question their safety in situations they wouldn't have before.

Unsuccessful terrorism:
People continue to live their lives unafraid of hypothetical threats.

Concern troll:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=concern+troll

It's only tangentially related, seems to me, but truly random security is more mathematically effective than specific profiling, as this explains pretty effectively:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/02/study-racial-profiling-no-more-effective-than-random-screen/

The very premise that a handgun is providing you protection is pretty flawed. In what percentage of potential crimes directed toward you is it immediately available? The vast majority of assaults in Philly happen outside the house where you can't carry it anyway. Of those, in what percentage of those potential crimes is use the threat of death even appropriate? Are you going to pull a gun on a 13 year old stealing your garden gnome? And what percentage of available, appropriate times could a knife of a baseball bat not also be an effective deterrent? And of those remaining situations, what percentage of those are you not going to instigate a shootout that could have been avoided until you started firing? As I posted above, there were actually no Justifiable Homicides committed by civilians using their own guns in their own home in Philadelphia in 2011. The 'protection' it affords you is an illusion - an illusion that facilitates the availability of guns used for crime.

Drug dealers and criminals can't manufacture guns. Every single handgun ever used in a crime was, ostensibly, intended to be sold to someone who wanted to buy it legally.

Also, as far as protection goes, the average citizen has a lot of defensive measures available to them besides threatening to kill each other - they can:

lock their doors and windows
install motion lights
set up an alarm system
use non-lethal weapons
have a dog
join the neighborhood watch
increase financial support for law enforcement
petition the government to demolish or rehab abandoned buildings and vacant lots
report potential criminal activity
take self-defense classes

And, though I realize its probably anathema to your political leanings, we could also actually try to stem the motivations for crime in the first place! You know - lack of education, poverty, hunger and addiction. Studies indicate that easy access to birth control and legal abortion do a lot to reduce the rate of unwanted, and ultimately neglected, children which reduces the crime rate by the time that generation reaches adolescence. There are many options available for protection - both short-term and long - that you can do without perpetuating the handgun saturation that results in guns ultimately being used for crime.

Right, but that's also ridiculously unlikely to happen. In fact, it didn't happen once to anybody in Philly in all of 2011 - not one person shot and killed an intruder with a handgun in self defense. It's your fear of that scenario - a subsequent weapons purchases to hypothetically prevent it - that enable the steady flow of guns into the hands of criminals. Come on, Conservatives - that's classic Free Market! If there isn't a market, there isn't a supply. Considering the amount of suffering related to handguns in Philly last year, that hardly seems worth the price of giving you the chance of maybe-someday putting lead into somebody's chest.

Moreover, from where I'm sitting, someone having any sort of power-trip fantasies about putting lead into fictional people's chests seems like the exact kind of person that shouldn't have access to firearms.

Nobody but gun advocates seemed up for debating it, so I figured it was worth throwing in a counterpoint. As I linked to above - there were zero Justifiable Homicides by civilians with their own handguns in Philly last year. However, there were over 1400 people shot, over 260 of whom died. Over 70% (in 2010, that's the most recent I've seen) of homicides in PA were from guns.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state

For what it's worth, that is my own research. I'd love to have more gun data for Philly if you've got it.

Sorry to keep belaboring this, I find it fascinating. I was looking into those numbers you've used here. It seems like a lot of sites - the NRA among them - base their numbers on a private phone poll done by Gary Kleck in the early 90s that's been denounced by pretty much every statistician I could find. So probably a lot of partisan nonsense on both sides of that. Rather than go on any of that, I did happen to find some Department of Justice reports. It's a little old - I didn't see more recent - but from about the same era as Kleck's findings (1987-1992).

The DoJ has crime victims using guns to stop 62,000 violent crimes annually, with another 20,000 theft crimes. So that's ~82,000 crimes stopped annually with a gun. So, that's actually 1/10 of the figures you've got - about 225 times per day. Of those, only 1/3 of the criminals were armed. So victims with guns stopped 27,333 armed crimes annually. At the time of this data, crimes committed with firearms was at a very high rate of 600,000 annually, but, you know, 82,000 prevented < 600,000 enabled.

Of note - the DoJ reported then that 340,000 firearms were stolen in burglaries from homes each year - so ~3.5 million legally obtained handguns enter the hands of criminals every decade. In a 1997 survey of prisoners arrested with guns, 80% of the guns were obtained illegally.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/press/HVFSDAFT.PR
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/guncrime.cfm

If raw statistical data from the city of Philadelphia and the Federal Department of Justice isn't non-partisan or accurate enough for you, nothing ever will be.

I realize you are being facetious, but, yes, by locking your doors and windows you are now as realistically safe as you are ever going to need to be. The chances of a random person breaking into your home with the intent of harming you while you are both there and with immediate access to your gun are essentially nonexistent.

I dunno - maybe you have enemies who are out to get you, or maybe you have something rare and highly sought after, maybe you owe dangerous people a lot of money? Then, yeah, locks probably won't be enough. Anybody determined to get into your specific home will be undeterred by standard security, of course, but unless their singular goal is to murder you, they are probably going to wait until your place is unoccupied. And, EVEN IF their goal is to murder you, for whatever reason, they will be waiting in the house in ambush when you return, or attack when you are outside of it at an opportune vulnerable moment.

Does anyone really think that voice-modulated guy is not completely fake? Beyond that, anecdotal evidence is not relevant - would you be swayed by 11 minutes of armed criminals succeeding at their crimes? I'm going to guess there's a hell of a lot more video of successful gun crimes than crimes stopped by guns - that's obvious, right? Even if you WERE going on the info from that video - damn, there are a lot of criminals with guns, huh? Where did they get those from?

Maybe you fear the unknown, that a stranger may be trying to kill you?

A) You don't have a right to bear arms. You have a right to bear arms in a well regulated militia when it's necessary to the security of a free state.
B) Where did you get the impression I don't want to hold criminals responsible? We haven't discussed that at all, nor is that in contention.

“An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”

Well said Chin!!! Personal responsibility, what a concept!!!!

That's simply untrue - I'm a huge advocate of personal responsibility! Maybe you guys should take some 'personal responsibility' for being the source for the guns in the hands of criminals in the first place? I'm not even talking about 'disarming' anyone - I'm talking about halting the flow of guns into the market and making new weapon purchases bear significantly more rigorous qualifications to obtain them. After all, everybody's a law-abiding citizen until they aren't.

As we gone over a hundred billion times in the gun control debate, and few times here, cars, boxcutters, and other tools have purposes beyond 'killing people' - making that a fallacious comparison. Of course it's the user of the tool's fault - but if the tool can only kill people, should we be surprised when that's all the user does with it?

People who have a sheep's mentality get eaten by wolves, ultimately.

Nanny states have killed more of their own Citizens than any other criminals in history.

Right on the money, Chin. You get it. Some never will.

In ANY situation involving immediate physical danger to your life, you and you alone are the First Responder. No one else. And if you let yourself - and I stress "let yourself" - be deprived of the means to defend your life and the lives of those around you...well, you get what you pay for so to speak.

I'm not sure practicing killing-related skills with guns is inherently different from its primary purpose of killing. You could use a handgun as a doorstop if you wanted to, but that doesn't change what its designed for. And perhaps you, personally, aren't a source for criminals to get guns, but - according to the DoJ - 80% of guns used in crimes are obtained illegally, as in stolen from a gun owner's home. We have such a surplus of illegal guns that, generally speaking, gun runners take guns from the US, not into it. 68,000 US guns have been seized in Mexico in the last 5 years alone!

If you truly abhor crime, and seek to prevent it outside of the rare, isolated incidents where its happening directly to you, can we not work together to stop the motivations for it in the first place, and to reduce the likelihood of a gun ending up in a criminal's hands? That doesn't seem to me like its such a huge compromise.

Those same people that died protecting the Constitution were also fighting to "ensure domestic tranquility," "to promote the general Welfare" - there's a lot more to the Constitution than just the 2nd Amendment. An Amendment, which you'll note, says absolutely nothing at all about your right to stockpile weapons for your personal use. Your right to bear arms is limited to their use in a well regulated militia to ensure a free state. That's it.

Mike Vanderbeough, one of the gentlemen who helped expose the FedGovs illegal program for gun trafficking into Mexico - Fast & Furious - wrote up an interesting piece on a hypothetical Citizen disarmament situation.

For those folks (like some above) advocating taking law-abiding Citizens' guns away, well, ya'll should just read this...and ponder it carefully. It ain't pretty.

http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2012/08/kill-all-they-send.html