gun ownership ensures that:
- citizens are able to defend themselves at every instance ("when seconds count, police are minutes away")
- citizens are as theoretically as powerful as the government

not hard to understand

I understand but if you had someone with an AR-15 and a basic 9MM or Glock 19 the person with the AR will definitely kill more people.


There are lots of people who live in rural areas who live hours away from a police station in the UK but you don't hear us shouting we need guns. It's all about stubbornness in my opinion. 0 guns means no school shooting.

But if you guys don't want to get rid of your guns hand guns are enough to stop someone from robbing you or killing you. You don't need the guns that people have in their rap videos or guns that you use to fight ISIS.

I was pondering this topic earlier & I thought of a question for you folk;

Should it be legal for students to carry firearms within school grounds in America?

its seems people are forgetting what skeet shooting and hunting are

but hunting is a whole different controversy in itself

no matter what, people are going to break the law. people ALREADY obtain guns through illegal means. not sure if banning guns will help anything.





no. just no.

teens are emotional. having a gun ON you while you’re angry and not thinking straight is how school shootings happen. even if a mental evaluation is performed and somehow concealed carry permits are given to those under 18 to 21 (depending on where you live), a resource officer is established for a reason. even someone whos trained on the worst situation possible, addrenaline is pumping and its obvious from previous events in the US that people make the wrong decision when the pressure is on.

now put a kid with his own handgun in the situation of a school shooting. imagine the confusion, when the authorities arrive and that kid is standing there with a gun and is designated as a threat. that’d be shitty, yeah?

the better question should be: should it be legal for teachers to carry firearms within school grounds? (yes im already aware its legal in some places but not everywhere yet).

Look at statistics on mass shootings in the U.S. and you'll find that increased gun control would severely inhibit the average mass shooter. Since 1966, there have been 153 mass shootings (4 or more dead, excluding shooter). 292 guns have been used during those shootings. Over half of them, 167 of them, were purchased legally by the shooter (admittedly, this number is inflated quite a bit by the Vegas shooter, who had 24 guns all owned legally). Many of the guns that were illegally obtained were stolen from legal owners, or were illegal purchases that were allowed because of shoddy enforcement of existing gun control laws. There are also a few cases where the shooter was denied purchasing a gun, so they bought all the parts for a gun and assembled it themselves.

By reducing the availability of legally owned guns, you naturally reduce the number of guns that are available to perform a mass shooting.

Also, even if gun control fails to lower mass shooting rates, but lowers overall gun violence, that's still an effective law. Over 1,000 people have died in a mass shooting since 1966. 2,000 people have died from guns since the start of 2018, twice the death count over 3 months compared to over 50 years.

It's unfortunate, but the number of people dying every year to guns is substantially greater than any mass shooting, but it's only when a bunch of those deaths happen at once at the hands of one person do people really start paying attention in the general public.


Crime and violent crime are down, and the going trend is still a decrease. The need to own a gun to protect yourself diminishes with it.

Furthermore, let's actually evaluate how effective gun ownership is as self-defense. The FBI estimates that the presence of a gun stops about 67,000 crimes a year, and in 2012 there were around 250 justifiable, gun-related, homicides. Seems pretty nice. Until you also realize that 232,000 guns are stolen each year, and in 2012 there were 1.2 million reported incidents of violent crime. That means, for every crime prevented by a gun per year, there's an additional 3 now illegally circulating that can be used for a different crime. For every justifiable homicide that occurred, another 4,800 was not stopped by a gun-toting "good guy".

There's a fantasy that a gun will save you in violent crime, but the sad reality is that the gun will likely do nothing. In any crime, it's not about how armed the attacker and the victim is, but whether the victim gets caught unaware. That gun strapped to your leg means nothing if the attacker pulls the gun first, or puts a knife to your throat, or punches you in the back of the head. You've been ambushed, and that gun might as well shoot water for all the good it will do you.

I'm not even going to justify the idea that citizens owning guns somehow makes you equally powerful with the government. Ignoring the hypocrisy of justifying your insurrection against tyranny using the laws of the tyranny, ignoring the fact that a law means nothing if a tyrant doesn't want it to exist, ignoring the fact that your AR-15 means nothing when a tank rolls up, it all comes down to the fact that you live in a democracy, no matter how flawed it is. You have all the control as citizens to begin with. If you don't like the government, you vote it out.

@Swaves

For the love of god, no. The youngest you have to be in order to own any gun is 18, I believe. And you can only purchase a rifle and shotgun, no handguns. So seniors would be the only ones technically able to if that were the case. And I think that would be a bit much. A student could snap and just start the shooting from within. Now, a teacher with a handgun locked away in a case unloaded with a certain combination to open it or maybe a key locked away by ANOTHER key. I think that isn't a bad idea. Arming the teachers is tricky but not out of the question under the correct teachings of having them all take gun safety and shooting classes.

Oracle, that's a lot of statistics - too much for me to exactly say anything about it. Having a gun in the household can save your life, that isn't bad. And walking around with a concealed carry isn't bad either, since there's been many robberies and what not stopped by a civilian in the room with their gun.

There is no winning with guns, honestly.

Thankyou for your opinions, @WeooWeoo & @Tsuion, my question was meant to be directed towards those advocating gun ownership, upon hearing quotes such as "gun ownership ensures that citizens are able to defend themselves at every instance", why wouldn't students be allowed to wield firearms within school grounds to defend themselves, if that's the case?

I'd personally feel safer knowing that nearly no-one has access to lethal firearms rather than nearly everyone having firearms, that's my stance on the issue.

Alright, so hypothetically, more effective and strict gun control laws are put into place. As we've seen in some parts of Europe, acid attacks have been increasing substantially and 2017 was the worst year yet, and at the current rate would only continue to rise. Also, if i'm not mistaken they have stricter gun control laws than the United States. What would be stopping a perpetrator from making something along the lines of a mustard gas attack or a propane bomb which would be easier to obtain than a gun at the time, and has the possibility to kill even more than a trained shooter if it bypasses security? Building a bomb or chemical weapon doesn't take much effort into researching or is too difficult to make realistically. Investigators that found the undetonated bomb say that it had the potential to kill hundreds more. So if stricter laws were put into place, what would stop people from using other means to harm?

I live in London and I see acid attack stories almost every day about this shit and it gets me sick to my stomach. But lets swap out the AR-15 with acid. Do you really thing the damage would have been on a higher level?. Hell no, it would have been on a lower level, on an extremely lower level. Comparing the damage of acid and an AR-15 is ridiculous. If they did the same damage you'd be seeing soldiers using them to fight wars but you rarely see stories of that. One shot to the head with an AR-15 you're dead, but a splash of acid is bad but you'd have a higher chance of surviving.

I got to ask you guys a question. We all know that these people that shoot up places are mentally unstable and crazy. But if you had to fight a crazy person with one of these items equipped on him, what would you pick?

• AR-15
• Acid
• Knife

If you pick the AR-15 I would have to question the amount of brain cells you have.

I thought that everything would have changed after the Las Vegas shooting but it seems like the US doesn't giving their crazy citizens guns that you'd fucking see on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

I guarantee you guys that we'll be having the same conversation this year. Another shooting and we'll be back to the same conversation due to the US being arrogant and stubborn. Sad to say but it's the harsh truth.

Every other place in the world does now have mass shootings like we do. Yes, guns protect people, but there's something wrong. If you can think of another solution (one not already presented) to keep kids from getting shot up in their school i would love to hear it.

Sure we are as powerful as the government, but as I stated before, America loves it's guns too much to really do anything about it. Guns over Human Lives.