Is Anyone Else Surprised...

The Simpsons isn't made in Texas, it's made out here in sunny California. Why should it reflect the views of gun owners in Texas?

Panam... yes education is the answer... you should take statistics. Saying that guns make people safer is like saying the lottery is an important tool for empowering parents to help fund their children's education. It pays off sometimes, but your odds are much better for committing suicide or killing someone in a domestic dispute than you are to defend yourself.

But more to your point, education is not the issue. That is the buzzword for people who don't want to think about the problem. People who kill themselves with guns didn't do so because of a failure to grasp the concept of safety, nor did the criminals that stole guns out of your home.

And here is a lesson for you. Guns are illegal in Mexico, the reason they have more gun violence, is because it is very profitable for us to cart guns down there, and they have a government with insufficient resources to deter the profitability of crime. Lax gun laws anywhere in the US mean that people can get guns everywhere in the US because we have freedom of movement. The reason CA has more crime than TX is a combination of socioeconomic, population distribution, and demographic factors (all of which correlate more strongly with gun violence than the strength of gun legislation). If you are interested in knowing WHY gun laws are tighter in high crime areas, it is because we are such a gun happy culture, that only in the face of soaring gun violence can we muster the testicular fortitude to pass real gun restrictions... They are a RESPONSE to high crime, not a cause of it. Ultimately they fail because the restrictiveness of gun laws within the continental United States is only as good as the loosest loophole in the loosest state (or on the internet).

If you want to disagree against the weight of the evidence, that's fine. But quit pretending we have tried tight gun laws... In the United States they have never been tried; that is either disingenuous or moronic.

panam787 wrote:
Im Texan, i live in Finland now,but I still follow the news from back home. Texas is close to Mexico, so we get a lot of news from that country too, they are not allowed to own guns and still they kill each other by the hundreds every week.
The second amendment is not an old, crazy law! It empowers people!
We carry guns in Texas all the time and our crime rates are way lower than California where gun control is more strict.
Gun owners are not bad guys, gun owners stop bad guys!,sometimes accidents happen it's true, but that's just a matter of education, that's exactly the NRA's mission, to educate people, and encourage The SAFE use and ownership of firearms., come to Texas and see it with your own eyes, you'll see granny's with .45's in their purse doin their groceries, that's why stores don't get robbed, who's gonna be stupid enough to try when they know that they are effectively outgunned!.
My point here is, a lunatic is a lunatic in the states or in Norway, it doesn't matter!, they say that when there's a will there's a way, and that's the case with criminals and terrorists, with guns or without, if what they want is to harm people they will, just look at Boston!! The bombs were pressure cookers, so are we going to ban the sale of pressure cookers??, a little fertilizer and a pipe and you have a bomb., then what pipe it's against the law? Gasoline and styrofoam and you have napalm!! No more gasoline then!, or styrofoam!. And you can do all of this in ANY country! Gun ban or not!
when someone wants to harm, there's nothing that anyone can do to stop it, banning guns is not an answer!
It would actually be stupid!, think about it, you ban guns and of course law abiding citizenship would respect the ban and hand over their weapons, but you think That criminals will?? They are CRIMINALS! They won't! And then what?, pray every night that no one breaks into your house in the middle of the night! Real smart!
Education is the answer!

Berrygr8 thank you for your service and God bless you and your beautiful family!

You are correct in that nobody can stop someone from doing something terrible and terrorism (whether local or foreign) can never stop because it is possible to kill people with anything. And I'm sure it doesn't need to be pointed out to you but I will say it anyways, just because you ultimately can't stop something doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

However with the 2nd amendment argument, the problem is a lot (read all) of the conversation gets boiled down into sensationalist polar talking points. We need to change the laws on guns suddenly becomes a conspiracy theory about a war on the 2nd amendment and how the government is going to take all of your guns so that they can turn into the US into god knows what. And yes the left does it too.

The thing is, I don't think the government gives two craps about whether or not your (not you specifically) nana is carrying a colt .45 or the shotgun collection your family has built for three generations. They care about the semi-automatic and automatic weapons that are (so I'm told) relatively easy to get that are used in a lot of drug crimes and mass shootings. And that's simply not possible if some states have no rules and others have tough ones. How can California's ban on guns be effective if they can just go to Nevada and buy one no muss no fuss (not sure if that's the truth but I do know it's possible using other states). That's where having a national gun registry comes into play because it simply means that it becomes possible to separate legal from illegal weapons. But why exactly do people need to have semi and automatic military style weapons? Why did congress in the early 2000's make it impossible for the ATF to create a national firearms database? Why are people against background checks across the board?

Ya I'm done.

panam787 wrote:
It should reflect the views of the whole country, which are for the most part favorable on the second and gun ownership, not just the views of California!! Satire is fine, but this one was over the top! Someone said it right, some nerd who felt like using this platform to promote his or her individual view! Not right period!

Considering approximately 30% of Americans own guns, it does reflect the views of the whole country.

So much for it favoring the second and gun ownership. :roll:

I live in a lesbian colony in California. All we watch is Rachel Maddow and the L word but I am SHOCKED that Simpsons would portray women as nagging, frivolous or easy. I don't know any women like that so I know they don't exist. This is clearly a conspiracy against all women. You all agree with me, right? We need to express our outrage or the government is going to take our birth control away and make us wear lipstick.

panam787 wrote:
"It should reflect the views of the whole country, which are for the most part favorable on the second and gun ownership not just the views of California!!"

Interesting, so we should curtail First Amendment speech rights to the "majority opinion" which, for the record, heavily supported background check reform (passed with the brave assistance of the NRA against the wishes of 90% of the population.

On what do you base your normative claim that a free game made by a private company needs to embrace your view or the majority view for that matter? You know the only thing more obnoxious than the gun debate is the self-proclaimed "victim status" of gun owners.

You live(d) in a country with the laxest gun laws in any stable Western nation. You are protected by the strongest lobby in the United States, and you have managed to block even the least controversial most common sense gun reforms on the federal level since this debate began. Your claim of right is an amibiguous sentence in a document (that literally only grants the right to STATES to control gun ownership) that was written when an "arm" was a front-loading musket and penned in the same ink as the 3/5 compromise.

And you sit on this forum literally throwing a tantrum because the rest of us have the audacity to have a little fun at your expense, while you perpetuate an agenda that has made the quality of life lower for the rest of us.

And just so you are aware, you have won the debate not on the merit of your argument, but because it is peddled by a very wealthy minority group - gun manufacturers - who have a compelling interest in lax gun laws that they exploit to realize large profits indirectly through a robust secondary black market. The biggest joke of all is that the people who are really playing you aren't EA Games or The Simpsons Creators, it's Smith & Wesson and Glock.

"I'm punching out of this yawn factory"

Gun owners who paint themselves as victims clearly haven't lost someone to a mass shooting.

Like the founders, the vast majority of Americans (even Californians-gasp) believe law-abiding citizens should have a gun if they want one under "well-regulated" conditions. It's the extremes who want only one or the other exclusively that cause all the boring silliness. I think guns are stupid but I think a lot of things are stupid. Stop feeling so threatened. You're the one who is armed after all.

I think it's interesting the number of folks who seem to assume that anyone who doesn't like the way this quest was handled must be a gun toting redneck. It's bad writing. It's nothing but a screed, and its beneath The Simpsons. That's probably why it has so many people angry who didn't have a problem with "The Cartridge Family:" the writer seems to have been more interested in beng inflammatory than being funny.