^ Personal attack. It’s the only thing you can do in this one. And not very well either.
Lol, spending time articulating a response to a hypothesis that someone might be anti-gun because of his countries imperialistic history is so outlandish it doesn’t deserve a reasonable response. The guy might be Welsh or Irish for all you know and they hate the English more than the Indians, Pakistanis or any other former colony despises them.
If gun people just accepted that they like guns it would be more understandable but they insist on banana statistics, straw man arguments or assumptions which reinforces the belief cycle that they are crazy.
Just to be clear, I don’t really care or have a bone in this ‘debate’, I just thought that particular comment was so ridiculous I felt like posting that meme, if you guys want guns then by all means keep them.
any rational person would look at France vs the US over the period and conclude that there may be other factors at play. something about a huge influx of people and deep seated issues with race and lack of assimilation. Certainly not a controlled bit of data that you can base an opinion of why banning automatic weapons doesn’t work.
We can talk in circles for post after post but the crux is; I think there’s no upside to easy access to weapons and the risk of even 150 out of 300m people dying because some twat was able to buy them when popping into a supermarket for a pint of milk is worth banning them and you think that the upside of retaining your simplified notion of freedom and the right for you and your fellow tin foil hat wearing rural and suburban 'mericans to bear arms in the face of some hypothetical oppressive government is worth the downside of the risk of people dying.
It doesn’t really matter but I was talking about Scotland specifically and I’m not saying it’s a utopia but there’s certainly is a lot less gun crime than the US. there are a shit tonne of reasons for that besides gun control but it’s a contributing factor.
Since there seems to be a theme of linking wikipedia pages with dubious relevance to the topic I’ve linked this page about My Little Pony:
There’s no link.
EDIT: Did you just edit that link in? Because it didn’t show up the first time this loaded.
Obviously we have different views that are largely culturally based. You see me as a paranoid redneck. Ok.
But I see a member of the UK from which dozens of conflicts have stemmed for independence that can’t fathom why prior subjects of her majesty’s kingdom don’t trust the promises of the nanny state. I’m so paranoid with my tin foil hat that I haven’t been brainwashed into forgetting that 40 years ago the people of Ireland were fighting -at times with assault rifles- in the streets against a military lockdown by your government. It got bad enough that the Irish Army rolled out plans for Exercise Armageddon. I might be paranoid, but you might just be short sighted and biased.
brb, just off to wade through the AF search function to find a classic BS ninja edit. I’ll fit that in between the time I have set aside this afternoon for working on my plan to retake the US and repress its population due to my latent imperialist tendencies.
and the whole point about the troubles was that half the people in NI were happy with the UK government and the other half weren’t
It wasn’t half and half, catholics were the majority, they were also being routinely silenced / oppressed. Coincidentally, the unbiased UK troops got involved and 80% of the casualties in the protests were also coincidentally Catholic. Big win for democracy and all that.
Regardless, the point still stands that your own empire is the poster child of authoritarian suppression, which is why we maintain arms. Anyhow, funny that after your fictitious claims about edits you apparently went back and edited in the link you forgot to post. Should be easy to wade back through 10 years of posts and find the evidence since I do it all the time and it’s common knowledge.
Gringo, just admit BS is much smarter than you and undoubtedly has better abs as well.
Catholics were the majority?
Edit: pic of chart didn’t work so i copied the link. and yes, I appreciate the irony
Indeed. Very suckable.
come on now G, how about you have a wee suck on both of our abs and make the call on which you prefer.
^Will there be book taken before my determination? Depending on the odds though, I might want to wager. I’ll have to excuse myself do to a conflict of interest. Maybe Palantir will judge. More his thing I’d imagine, or one of the new arrivals. They seem suited.
Where’s Rahul when we need him? Although he may also be biased, what with the Raj and all. I know that all the former colonies of the UK are busy killing each other with weapons they own in case we come back for a 2nd bite at the cherry
Ok, I award you 1 debate point. BS 5, GB 1. Congrats on avoiding the shut out. Today, for what it’s worth the catholics are now more than 50% in Belfast. Whatever the case, enforcement was heavily one sided against the catholics. Honestly though, one detail aside do you understand the bias in being a subject of one of the most proliferate empires of the modern era, arguably the one that birthed the US gun culture and one that has had to suppress citizens as recently as 40 years ago by force (including torture as ruled by a British panel) and to argue that there is no need to not trust the benevolent state?
The UK has probably had more wars waged against it by members its own population in the name of independence in the last 300 years than any other country. So sorry if we take your condescension with a grain of salt.
5:1? Did you pull that out of your arse when you were rummaging around looking for something resembling logical thought? You’re like Pacquio raising his hand.
Clearly you have very little knowledge about The Troubles so you may as well just edit your previous posts to remove any reference to Norn Iron.
I’m also taking your poorly constructed attempt to argue that being from modern day UK makes you biased towards imperialism as your tacit acceptance of the fact that your view on guns is informed by your rural US indoctrinated worldview with its simplified notion of freedom.
^Not one counterpoint there, just ad hominem attacks. You lose 1 debate point. 5:0, I am sorry for your loss.
you’ve just descended to bad attempts at trolling at this point.
Meh, still no factual rebuttal.
I declare victory over Gringo_Bob!
sigh, I shouldn’t let myself get goaded into responding seriously to your half baked shite but…
Worth absolutely nothing to this discussion. at least have the grace to admit that you know nothing about The Troubles rather than deflecting with an unrelated statistic.
Enforcement of what? care to provide a source?
Feel free to go ahead and argue that point…
So your theory is that being from modern day UK makes individuals in the population biased towards imperialism much in the same way that being from certain parts of the US makes you biased towards gun ownership and general paranoia.
The distinction is that imperialism in the UK is a thing of the past. The empire crumbled long ago. Modern British culture is so far removed from the imperialist past that England has virtually no cultural identity and it’s considered racist to fly a st Georges cross. The people are humble and apologetic to a fault and outward patriotism is seen as something for more immature and unsophisticated nations. The Troubles were a unique set of circumstances. fortunately the uk is now almost entirely secular and there are few other things that would get people out on the street fighting for or killing innocent civilians for.
US gun culture doesn’t have such a break. It’s still in the constitution, the rhetoric has evolved from a time when the country was unstable and gun ownership had a logical basis and has become ingrained in the culture in certain states. All the while the country has evolved to a point of stability where you don’t need to bear arms as the risk of having to overthrow your government is tiny. that’s why most of the stuff you’ve written in this thread sounds insane to people from any other developed nation.
So for the 3rd time, the crux is; you’ve made a risk assessment that you’re under enough of a degree of risk of suppression from the government that you believe that the population should have the right to bear arms and it’s worth people dying in peaceful times, and I think that i’d rather guns were banned to prevent unnecessary deaths in the population and I’m happy take my chances in the very unlikely circumstance that the government wants to suppress me and I need to take to the streets and fight for freedom, in which case we’d all probably be fucked anyway.
I’ll just use the wikipedia entry for ease (it links to further sources):
Collusion between British forces and loyalists
In their efforts to defeat the IRA, there were many incidents of collusion between the British state security forces (the British Army and RUC) and loyalist paramilitaries. This included soldiers and policemen taking part in loyalist attacks while off-duty, giving weapons and intelligence to loyalists, not taking action against them, and hindering police investigations. The De Silva Report found that, during the 1980s, 85% of the intelligence loyalists used to target people came from the security forces.[130] The security forces also had double agents and informers within loyalist groups who organized attacks on the orders of, or with the knowledge of, their handlers. Of the 210 loyalists arrested by the Stevens Inquiries team, 207 were found to be state agents or informers.[131]
The British Army’s locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) was almost wholly Protestant.[132][133] Despite the vetting process, some loyalist militants managed to enlist; mainly to obtain weapons, training and intelligence.[134] By 1990, at least 197 UDR soldiers had been convicted of loyalist terrorist offences and other serious crimes, including 19 convicted of murder.[135] This was only a small fraction of those who served in it, but the proportion was higher than the regular British Army, the RUC and the civilian population.[136]
During the 1970s, the Glenanne gang—a secret alliance of loyalist militants, British soldiers and RUC officers—carried out a string of gun and bomb attacks against nationalists in an area of Northern Ireland known as the “murder triangle”.[137][138] It also carried out some attacks in the Republic, killing about 120 people in total, mostly uninvolved civilians.[139] The Cassel Report investigated 76 murders attributed to the group and found evidence that soldiers and policemen were involved in 74 of those.[140] One member, RUC officer John Weir, claimed his superiors knew of the collusion but allowed it to continue.[141] The Cassel Report also said some senior officers knew of the crimes but did nothing to prevent, investigate or punish.[140] Attacks attributed to the group include the Dublin and Monaghan bombings (1974), the Miami Showband killings (1975) and the Reavey and O’Dowd killings (1976).[142]
The Stevens Inquiries found that elements of the security forces had used loyalists as “proxies”.[143] Through their double-agents and informers, they helped loyalist groups to kill people, including civilians. It concluded that this had intensified and prolonged the conflict.[144][145] The British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) was the main agency involved.[143] Brian Nelson, the UDA’s chief ‘intelligence officer’, was a FRU agent.[146] Through Nelson, FRU helped loyalists target people for assassination. FRU commanders say they helped loyalists target only republican activists and prevented the killing of civilians.[143] . The Inquiries found evidence only two lives were saved and that Nelson/FRU was responsible for at least 30 murders and many other attacks – many on civilians.[144] One victim was solicitor Pat Finucane. Nelson also supervised the shipping of weapons to loyalists in 1988.[146] From 1992–94, loyalists were responsible for more deaths than republicans,[147] partly due to FRU.[148][149] Members of the security forces tried to obstruct the Stevens investigation.[145][150]
A 2007 Police Ombudsman report revealed that UVF members had been allowed to commit a string of terrorist offences, including murder, while working as informers for RUC Special Branch. It found that Special Branch had given informers immunity by ensuring they weren’t caught or convicted, and blocking weapons searches.[151] Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan said that this led to “hundreds” of deaths[131] and said senior British Government officials pressured her into halting her investigation.[152] UVF member Robin Jackson has been linked to between 50[153][154] and 100[138] killings in Northern Ireland, although he was never convicted for any.[155] It is alleged by many, including members of the security forces, that Jackson was an RUC agent.[155] The Irish Government’s Barron Report alleges that he also “had relationships with British Intelligence”.[156]
The Disappeared
During the 1970s and 1980s, republican and loyalist paramilitaries abducted many individuals, many alleged to have been informers, to be interrogated under torture and then executed. Fifteen individuals, all in this case having been abducted by republicans, disappeared. Among these victims, called “The Disappeared”, nine bodies, out of fifteen, have been retrieved as of 2015.[157]
British government security forces, including the Military Reaction Force (MRF) carried out what have been described as “extrajudicial killings” of unarmed civilians.[158][159][160] Their victims were often Catholic or suspected Catholic civilians unaffiliated with any paramilitaries, such as the 12 May 1972 Andersonstown shooting of seven unarmed Catholic civilians and the 15 April 1972 Whiterock Road shooting of two unarmed Catholic civilians by British soldiers.[161] A member of the MRF stated in 1978 that the Army often attempted false flag sectarian attacks, thus provoking sectarian conflict and “taking the heat off the Army”.[162] A former member stated that “[W]e were not there to act like an army unit, we were there to act like a terror group”.[163]
Edit: here’s the link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles#Collusion_between_British_forces_and_loyalists
US overthrows the UK Empire through use of arms and homegrown force. Then drafts a constitution and includes right to bear arms as insurnce against the state. See federalist papers sourced above. That was easy.