Memento said:
ScotsRam said:
I love it. Let any idiot carry a weapon, then if he flips out and kills 15 people we'll give him the "ultimate punishment". Best country in the world my ass.
Nobody here is saying we're the best, Scot. But this guy is a psychopath who murdered twelve people in cold blood, injured over fifty others, and put many other people - including babies - at risk. You'd rather him stay in a comfy cell or a hospital ward where the rest of us have to pay to keep him alive?
And we don't let any person carry a weapon. There are extremely strict requirements to purchase a gun legally. Unfortunately, there are a lot of illegal weapons that are being sold into the U.S., and the criminals get their guns from those suppliers. This is not an isolated problem. This is not just the United States. This is all over the world, and believe it or not, there are quite a few places that are far worse off than we are.
The death penalty is fundamentally wrong. It's primitive, vengeful, vindictive, eye for an eye type stuff. What gives anyone the right to take another's life? Just because you've been voted into government doesn't give you the right to execute, IMHO. Killing as a punishment is the equal of the original crime, stooping to their level, call it what you will. Forcing someone to spend the remainder of their life behind bars with no hope of release and allowing them the opportunity to develop some real remorse is a far more painful punishment for the criminal, and the fact that the US is one of the very few "1st world" countries that still practices the death penalty vindicates this IMO. The UK stopped the death penalty in 1963 and it was abhorrent then as well.
The US has relatively lax gun laws, and it's fundamentally because of your constitution (god forbid changing laws set down 300 years ago) and partly because of your disgusting gun lobbyists. You all seem to claim you're much safer with having weapons for home defence, well if nobody had guns you wouldn't need to defend yourselves. I respect your country in a huge number of ways, and all Americans I've had the pleasure of meeting have been great people, but your gun laws/attitudes to weapons/capital punishment obsession are frankly draconian.