Is it time to arm the police?

[TeePee]

that right there is why gun control is needed. the threat is there, real and proven. Too many high school shootings, etc. It is irresponsible to claim that the government should do nothing to protect its own citizens.

More people are killed with baseball bats than in school shootings.

[TeePee]

So the answer is never.

They shouldn't step in before someone has actually threatened someone else. Thought Crimes aren't crimes.

[TheAnimus]

More people are killed with baseball bats than in school shootings.

That's an odd statistic, are we talking about all battery rather than those that occur in school?

[OilSheikh]

Displeased to inform ya all that gun crime is on the rise thanks to smuggled weapons from East Europe!

[Guy]

Displeased to inform ya all that gun crime is on the rise thanks to smuggled weapons from East Europe!

Source(s) please.

[ik9000]

More people are killed with baseball bats than in school shootings.

when was the last time a morose teenager walked into a school and killed multiple unarmed innocent people with a baseball bat because he had a grudge?

[Spreadie]

when was the last time a morose teenager walked into a school and killed multiple unarmed innocent people with a baseball bat because he had a grudge?

Same tired argument we've seen many times - one US senator tried switching things up and used hammer instead of baseball bat in his attempt to deflect attention from gun control.

Same goes for the argument that control does nothing about the black market - yeah, but your average homicidally depressed teenager doesn't have ready access to black market weapons, and probably isn't all that willing to pitch up at the docks or some remote car park in the middle of the night with a fistful of cash, in the hopes of buying a gun. Being able to order one with your groceries, on the other hand...

The bill of rights argument is also nonsense - how often to you see a black guy exercising his open carry right and, if you did, what are his chances of reaching the end of the street before being shot by a cop?

I've yet to see a rational argument against gun control that stands up to debate.

[TeePee]

when was the last time a morose teenager walked into a school and killed multiple unarmed innocent people with a baseball bat because he had a grudge?

So few people are killed in school shootings, that they are dwarfed by the number of people saved by legal gun ownership. Pointing out the danger of freely owned baseball bats highlights just how small the number killed in school shootings is. School shootings are nothing but an emotional argument that has no basis in reality.

[ik9000]

School shootings are nothing but an emotional argument that has no basis in reality.

My word, you are heartless aren't you?! Try telling those parents that it has no basis in reality when their child doesn't come home. Your pigheaded defence of wanting to have a gun is nothing but an emotional argument that has no basis in reason or rationality.

And as for people saved by owning a gun - statistically I'm told you are most likely to be shot by your own gun than someone elses. Whether or not that is correct the point others have made remains that if gun ownership was banned you wouldn't feel the need to own a gun to defend yourself.

Bataclan, small number of attackers, scores of people (100+) dead from automatic weapons
London Bridge, small number of attackers, less than 10 dead from knife wounds.

Preventing gun ownership helps prevent atrocities by the undesirable elements every society possesses. It is always better to prevent many people owning something so potent when it can have such catastrophic and disproportionate capability to harm were it freely available. Particularly when there are repeated occurences of this actually taking place - in High Schools and similar.

[TeePee]

My word, you are heartless aren't you?! Try telling those parents that it has no basis in reality when their child doesn't come home. Your pigheaded defence of wanting to have a gun is nothing but an emotional argument that has no basis in reason or rationality.

And as for people saved by owning a gun - statistically I'm told you are most likely to be shot by your own gun than someone elses. Whether or not that is correct the point others have made remains that if gun ownership was banned you wouldn't feel the need to own a gun to defend yourself.

Bataclan, small number of attackers, scores of people (100+) dead from automatic weapons
London Bridge, small number of attackers, less than 10 dead from knife wounds.

Preventing gun ownership helps prevent atrocities by the undesirable elements every society possesses. It is always better to prevent many people owning something so potent when it can have such catastrophic and disproportionate capability to harm were it freely available. Particularly when there are repeated occurences of this actually taking place - in High Schools and similar.

Bataclan, small number of trained militants. London Bridge, three idiots waving pink knives around. Manchester, one trained militant with a real bomb. Boston, two idiots with some fireworks.

Statistically, more lives are saved by gun ownership than taken by them. Guns are used defensively in the US as many as 2.5 million times a year. I'm not heartless, any more than the Mayor of London is heartless for saying that terrorism is part of living in London.

[ik9000]

Statistically, more lives are saved by gun ownership than taken by them. Guns are used defensively in the US as many as 2.5 million times a year. I'm not heartless, any more than the Mayor of London is heartless for saying that terrorism is part of living in London.

Come again?! Do you get all your information from Donald Trump's twitter feed? That is a gross distortion of what Sadiq Khan said. Look up the transcript. He said it is sadly an inevitable consequence of living in a successful western city ie that nut jobs will target it because it is anethema to their misguided and draconian ideology. At no point does he say it is anything other than needless, tragic and utterly reprehensible. He would take any action available to prevent it happening again whereas you would happily let it recur just so you can have a gun. the difference in your attitudes and priorities could not be greater IMO.

[Corky34]

So few people are killed in school shootings, that they are dwarfed by the number of people saved by legal gun ownership. Pointing out the danger of freely owned baseball bats highlights just how small the number killed in school shootings is. School shootings are nothing but an emotional argument that has no basis in reality.

Is not the fact that you even consider shootings in schools to be acceptable or a normal part of life rather worrying?

And what exactly are the people who saved so many live saving them from, if people are saving lives because they own a gun what is the life ending threat their saving all these people from?

Guns are used defensively in the US as many as 2.5 million times a year.

What, and why, are people having to defend themselves and other people from 2.5 million times a year?

[opel80uk]

Statistically, more lives are saved by gun ownership than taken by them. Guns are used defensively in the US as many as 2.5 million times a year. I'm not heartless, any more than the Mayor of London is heartless for saying that terrorism is part of living in London.

I'm not sure that statistic is true, in the sense it's not going to be easy to quantify the effects of gun control in a country that for years has had none, but lets for arguments sake say it is correct for the US. Are you also saying that, if in the UK we allowed gun ownership(of the kind allowed in the US) tomorrow, with our history of non-ownership, there would be a decrease in the number of lives taken in the UK as a result of firearms? Or for that matter the number of lives taken in violent crime?

[Corky34]

That because it's not statistical true, what i assume TeePee is referring to is a study conducted in 1992 by Gary Kleck and Marc Getz that has since not only been thoroughly debunked but also one of the authors of the study stated (footnote 27 in this PDF) 5 year after publishing it that "that 36 to 64 percent of the defensive gun uses reported in the survey were likely illegal—meaning the firearm was used to intimidate or harm another person rather than for legitimate self-defense."

[Ttaskmaster]

What were the excess deaths before labour took power? I ask because without context, the statement is effectively meaningless. Here's a clue; it was higher. Much higher.

Excess, meaning surplus, extra, in addition, over and above.

And as for the NHS, yes, there were failed initiatives;

ALL of them.

virtually every key measurement standard in healthcare is independently recorded to be higher when the NHS is run by a Labour Government.

And every key measurement steers things further away from actual care and instead focusses on statistical throughput. It's being run like a factory, rather than a care system. You cannot govern human health by statistics. It doesn't work like that.

And for the ill informed, it's easy to scapegoat NHS managers; I should know because I was one for the best part of 10 years.

You are not endearing me to your cause with that...

But it's no coincidence that when the Tories culled managers in the NHS, waiting times grew, cancer targets were not met, and there has been a steady decline in performance of the NHS since they came to power.

"Performance"?
Did they miss their delivery schedules? Did they fail their key performance indicators? Did they get a bit off-message?
I watched a nurse refuse to attend a patient who collapsed in the hallway, because the patient wasn't on her ward and the emergency medication and equipment required would have come out of her budget.

It's easy to dismiss the 'bureaucracy' in society as a waste of money, but it's one of the reasons why if you go into a NHS hospital now, you'll get worse care than 7 years ago

We were supposed to have two Staff nurses for every ward. We instead had one Staff nurse covering three, because we couldn't afford enough nurses... yet somehow we could afford a manager, whose salary would pay for most of those nurses and the part-time Consultant or SHO that used to cover all the managerial duties just fine before.

If you think I'm a cheerleader for New Labour, you're wrong. I could give you a list 10 times of that above of what I think they did wrong, but it would be churlish of me to imply they did no good either.

It's about how much good they did and whether that good was in the right place, compared to how much damage they did.
I don't care what other party wins, so long as Labour never get their hands on us again.

My original post was in response to yours which implied Labour had a history, and ownership, of financial mismanagement whilst in Government.

They do and we felt the damage of that history quite heavily.
For example, I have three pensions that are now all worthless, thanks to Labour.

You clearly don't understand if you are saying it 'backfired'. It could only have backfired if the aim of the sell off was to make a profit for the public purse. It wasn't.

They wanted to reinvest in other, more stable things. Good idea, especially given the reports of experts... But the way they bungled it and cost us over 3bn is the problem, as well as making us very unpopular around the world. Said experts subsequently reckoned we'd have been better off if Brown had not bothered in the first place.

When did I assume you were voting for the 'other' party?

Figure of speech, left open on purpose for effect...

I'm not talking about the decision to sell off Royal Mail, I'm talking about the decision to set the share price low. That cost the taxpayers money, or does that not count because the Tories made that boo boo?

Vince Cable was LibDem/Coalition and working off some very dodgy investment advisors, with "favoured investors" to consider. You may recall all three main parties slammed the decisions made.

We can't limit rights to the rich. Poor people have the right to protect themselves too.

They may have the right to be protected, which is pretty effective if no-one has guns...
But the argument of making guns so very cheap that everyone can so easily afford them just puts more guns in the hands of criminals.
Think on this - If guns were so stupidly expensive that the only route to procurement was the Black Market, pretty much any gun on the street is guaranteed illegal, which makes the cops' job so much easier. You could even argue that the sole purpose of those guns being present is to threaten cops' lives - Ergo gun present = threat present = Fire.

The right to bear arms can cover all manner of weapons, including non-lethal. You don't have to kill someone to successfully defend yourself... and it's a great deal harder to kill several people with non-lethal tools.

Yes, school shootings happen, it's tragic, and I wish they could be prevented

UK with very few guns - 2 school shootings in 30 years.
US with many guns - A good 25+ school shootings per year.
And you wish they could be prevented.........?

This is just school shootings, by the way. Reports suggest that as many as 355 (average) mass shootings per year occur, pretty much one per day - Mass being defined as four or more people KSI (killed or seriously injured) in one incident, and does not include the count of killing sprees where the killer(s) travelled between KSIs.

Just as Terrorism is part of life in a city, school shootings are part of living in a country with the right to protect yourself and family.

Well they don't seem very protected if they're getting shot up so often, now, do they?
You gonna tell your kid that, when they come home from school paralysed for life by a bullet through the spine, that it's just life in the US? Or when your kid comes home in a bag, you and your wife just gonna casually nip down K-Mart to get yourselves another?

There's no obligation to put a number on there when making your own. he idea that the federal government can restrict something you make for your own use is fundamentally wrong.

So no restriction on bombs that I make for myself and plant on planes, for example, or the carriage of home-made knives with which I can hijack a plane and crash into a World Trade Centre, then?
OK, gotcha...

Seriously, there are restrictions on all manner of chemicals, because dangerous things can be done with them. The same should apply to guns, particularly since they so easy to damage people with.

This is why they need my authorization to do it. You want to make an App available for the public to be able to damage my 'credit' at any time?

Does it 'damage' you if the cops run your licence plates, or check your ID on a routine inspection point?
What about every time someone check your passport at the border?
A system to check that you're safe and legal to purchase a killing tool should not have the slightest adverse effect on your life, unless you're trying to make an illegal purchase.

Officer is shot but returns fire, empties his magazine but is unable to reload. Is still alive today only because the felon who shot him chose to run away from the now defenseless officer on the ground.

I have no sound, but it looks like he was panic-shooting, surpressing at best (doesn't look like he has backup immediately on hand).
So what difference would having an extra seven rounds in his magazine have had? He just blatted off an entire mag and was then unable to reload. He could have had 20 spare mags, but was unable to reload.
Fire discipline. Better aimed shots. Being more mindful of his ammo expenditure.
From the looks of that vid, the cop's life continued because the shooter saw he was empty and took the opportunity to run. Had he conserved ammo, he'd have had a couple good shots on the criminal and downed his man.

Pointing out the danger of freely owned baseball bats highlights just how small the number killed in school shootings is.

Baseball bats are intended for primary purposes other than harm. The sole purpose of a weapon is to harm.
I'm sure more people are killed by baseball bats than high explosive artillery shells too, but would you be happy if people were walking around with howitzers?

[opel80uk]

Excess, meaning surplus, extra, in addition, over and above.

ALL of them…………

Ah, I see. By saying things such as 'ALL' NHS initiatives under Labour failed (which incidentally is so easily disproved it is counterproductive to your argument) you are less interested in having an actual conversation or debate about topics, but rather prefer to just make a point about your opinion/bias. Cool, but that sort of conversation is not for me.