Cyprus-Forum.com

[Nikitas]

This gun thing impresses people who do not know how easy it is to make a gun. Next time you people visit Cyprus go the national struggle museum in Nicosia and look at the home made machine guns and other weapons made in crude blacksmiths shops in Cyprus in the 50s! Guns are simple heat engines and anyone can make one.

Guns are products of 19th century technology, you cannot wipe out the knowledge that allows anyone to make a gun. As for gunpoweder you can mix a common vitamin with an equally common diuretic and you have gunpowder. So ammunition is also very easy to make. The real nightmare for crime fighters is the day when the criminal underground will start making guns- without serial numbers and totally untraceable.

If you want to stop violence you need to instil a taboo in people that it is absolutely prohibited to harm another human being. This kind of taboo works very well in Crete where every male person has a gun, yet the violent crime rate is well below the UK or other places where guns are hard to come by and pistols are absolutely prohibited. Harming anyone in Crete is taboo, as is being drunk in public, or getting known as a wife or child beater. It immediately makes you a social outcast. This is the real deterrend, not if you have a gun or other weapon. Prohibiting the means of the crime but not the impulse to commit it is typical Angloamerican technical fixing, and it does not work.

[Southerner]

You know what they say about gun-toting? The gun is an extension of your penis. Maybe if you can get a gun up, it's because you are impotent (certainly mentally so).

Violence begets violence. Jesus said, "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword". This implies that using arms is un-Christian.

I look forward to the day when no gun, or other weapon promoting man's inhumanity to man, exists, except possibly in museums to show how primitive we were needing such weapons. However, I wonder whether I'll see it this millennium???

Without getting too involved let me say, "all guns/firearms aren't weapons", yes they can kill but a small bore target rifle is very inpractical for use as a weapon, the sighting system is designed to be used purely for target shooting with extremely small apertures, full bore shooting is different and only takes place on controlled ranges, target pistol shooting also comes under very stringent regulations.
The biggest safety factor is that if you are a licenced shooter you have to explain why, if when stopped by police, you have deviated from the most direct route to and from your place of shooting whilst carrying your firearm/s (not weapons), nor are you allowed to keep firearm, ammunition and firing mechanism in the same place, you certainly would be in trouble caught with a rifle in you car with the bolt in the rifle.
I was involved in target shooting for many years both in and out of HM Forces, as soon as I left my local club I sold (legally) my firearm and relinquished my firearms certificate.

[Southerner]

Nikitas
Nice interesting reply.

[Nikitas]

Devil,

Those who say that crap about the gun and the penis have not read Freud, or at least they did not read both paragraphs referring to the matter at hand.

Freud in his interpretation of drema said that any long object in a dream- umbrella, shovel, stick gun etc, symbolized the penis. He went on to say THAT HOLLOW OBJECTS, HOUSES, URNS ETC SYMBOLIZE THE VAGINA.

So by your analogy, a man who is interested in guns has problems with his willy, and a woman architect or woman potter, both dealing with hollow objects, what problem do they have?

It is about to cut the crap on this issue!

[Nikitas]

Thank you Southerner. It is a pity you could not keep your target gun as a memento of the times when you enjoyed a sport.If you had been a skier, javelin thrower or archer it would have been different. And had you been a boxer or karate athlete you would have kept your potentially deadly talents always available. But those points get lost on the puritans. Sometimes I am sure that if you could convince them that shooting is not fun they would have no problems with it. It is the fun part that gets them riled up!

[devil]

Yup, it's so much fun shooting at targets shaped like humans, with scoring according to the vital organs. NOT!

[Nikitas]

Devil,

In Greek there is a saying- be careful you do not mix your tie and your underpants. The picture you show is from a defense school in the USA, specifically in Texas which has CCW licenses, that is a license to carry a concealed firearm for self defense. TO get the license you must attend a course and pass an exam.

Self defense has NOTHING whatsoever to do with Olympic sports like Skeet, Trap, Free Pistol, etc. It is unwise and a little immoral to mix two vastly different things to make a point.

[Nikitas]

Devil, since you are so much against sports that use human pictures as targets (which Olympici shooting does NOT do) what of Olympic Fencing, Judo, Wrestling etc that use an actual human opponent for practice? You want to abolish them too? Is it a humane impulse thing or are you simply against it because it is fun?

[devil]

You can have as much fun as you want but you don't need to have lethal weapons to do so, do you? If you do, then I can recommend a good psychiatrist. The guy who did the Columbine affair thought weapons were fun. Maybe the 36,000-odd people who died of gunshot wounds in the USA last year would think guns are fun if they could express themselves, and the 1,000,000++ worldwide, as well. Maybe the soldiers in Iraq who stopped a bullet and still survive think that guns are great fun.

Yes, I used to think it was fun (I was a 1st-class marksman in the Army) but I was young then. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. I have become a lot wiser in my advancing years and realise that lethal weapons - even if designed ostensibly for sport - are immoral, no matter how they are used. My Utopia (and I know that it is just that, an unattainable Utopia) would be a world without weapons, from white arms to hydrogen bombs. (Some day, a joker will think it fun to let off a nuclear weapon, just as its fun to earn 72 virgins by letting off a bomb strapped to his waist.)

It is perhaps significant that your Olympic ideal, which you cite so much, are Games, not sports. Games as practised by youngsters who have not yet attained the wisdom of their elders. Unfortunately, they have become purely commercial by professionalism and sponsorship. It is astonishing that a country like China can spend billions on the infrastructure for a few thousand persons to play their games (and engender nationalism) when the same money spent on their own people in abject poverty would do the nation far more good. So, yes, I would abolish the Olympic Games. And, similarly, the money that the US has spent on weapons to kill innocent Iraqis would have been far better spent on providing for the poor in the USA.

[Nikitas]

Finally we got to it, you would abolish the Olympic Games and from the sound of it all games and all fun. A puritan approach.

I will close with one observation- in ancient Greek the word for tool is the same word used for weapon. An axe can be both, so can a spade, or fishing spear etc.

Columbine had more to do with the constant bullying that the two perpetrators suffered for 6 years at the hands of the sports jocks and the code of silence that allowed that sadism to continue than guns. The two also used bombs in the attack, which are already banned. The problem was not the means used to kill, but the killing itself.

I would rather deal with people so they grow with respect for others and then we do not need to concern ourselves with any weapons they might come across and what tools they might turn into weapons. You see I am more concerned with people being peaceful than if they are armed.