From: pngai@adobe.com (Phil Ngai)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.japan,talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: Japanese exchange student killed in Louisiana...
Date: 12 Nov 92 07:34:33 GMT
Article-I.D.: adobe.1992Nov12.073433.20071
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated

In article <BxIIxw.61x@ncifcrf.gov> masuda@fcs280b.ncifcrf.gov (Michiaki Masuda) writes:
>In article <1992Nov10.005859.18489@adobe.com> pngai@adobe.com (Phil Ngai) writes:
>>In article <BxGyrs.BI7@ncifcrf.gov> masuda@fcs280b.ncifcrf.gov (Michiaki Masuda) writes:
>>Mandatory education is too easy to turn into a gun ban and wouldn't
>>affect criminal misuse anyway.
>
>   Doesn't it contradict your proposal of the mandatory firearm education
>at high school?

First of all, if you are concerned with gun safety, then firearms
education should not be limited to gun owners only. Guns have been
lost for various reasons and found by people who don't own any
themselves. Wives have found themselves in the possession of guns
after their husbands died. People have visited friends at home
who were policemen who left their guns out.

Just last Christmas I visited my sister-in-law's boyfriend and
he had a gun just sitting out on a desk in one of his bedrooms
at home. No big deal.

Growing up on a farm, we had all kinds of rifles, pistols, and
shotguns sitting in an open gun rack. Does that blow your mind?
Would you believe, NO ONE EVER GOT HURT?

Teaching gun safety in high school to *everyone* would address
an audience of more than gun owners, which is what you really want.

Second, there's two kinds of mandatory. You have been talking, I
assume about mandatory *for gun owners*. This is easy to turn
into a gun ban. Don't offer classes, or don't offer enough, or
make them impossible to pass, or far too expensive to afford.
All of these have been tried at various times.

My counter proposal is mandatory *for everyone*, eliminating the
ability to discriminate against gun owners.
 
>   Unless gunowners' taking education aggravates the criminal situation,
>I don't see any good reason not to make an effort to promote education.

If you ban guns and take away victims ability to defend themselves,
you certainly aggravate the criminal situation.

>>Certainly there are some abuses the government can commit. I think this
>>can be made to be harder to abuse. 
>
>   Is it true for the gun control, too?

Gun controllers have a long history in the US of acting in bad faith.
You will find very few gun owners willing to trust them anymore.

>>Am I supposed to worry about the government deleting criminal records?
>
>   If that's somehow beneficial to the government or people who control
>the government, why not?

I can also worry about global warming, what does that have to do with
gun bans?

>>>   If the training is required by the government and the government is out 
>>>of control, they might be able to require the schools to teach the students
>>>that the violent resistance against the authority is an unforgivable
>>>crime under any circumstances. Didn't you mention that the government is
>
>>They could do that now.
>
>   And are they doing that now?

I don't see the connection to gun bans?

>   ??? Do you mean that it is OK if a school does not give courses that
>the government require? 

We're talking about the government requiring a class to buy a gun
and not making classes available. The government does not require
schools to give these classes, it only requires gun buyers to take
the class.

>   How would your mandatory education scheme affect the crime situation?

The issue is YOUR proposals don't effectively address crime.
My counter proposals accomplish what you claim your goals are,
and more, without discriminating against gun owners.

>   As I mentioned several times, I've been supporting the proposal of other
>Americans whose goal is to establish a certain level of gun control
>and education system without harming the right to bear arms.

Those Americans you support sound just like the ones who want to
ban guns. If you play with skunks, don't be surprised if you
end up a stinker.

>In the US, a country of freedom, this
>argument seems to be a reasonable one. It was also interesting or
>even surprising to know that there so many Americans who expressed a 
>distrust against their own government. Therefore, I'm not necessarily 

I love my country. Unfortunately I do not trust its government.
There are many like me, as you noticed. 

>holding on to the idea to implement the regulation by the government. 

If you leave the government out of it, then I think education is
a great idea. So does the NRA. They actually give classes, too.

>What I've been trying to know is if there is
>anything that the US can change in order to avoid it, and it has been 
>my impression that the education and a certain level of control for 
>promoting the education is a reasonable measure. Of course, there are

You still don't understand. What in particular would you expect to
teach that could have avoided the incident under discussion?
"Don't shoot people"?

>If there's nothing wrong with the US gun system,
>if it was just a personal blunder of the shooter and nothing could have
>corrected it, and if the final answer is that there is nothing that
>the US can change to avoid the next Hattori incident which is a negligible
>minor problem, I should probably try to go into detail about what we could 
>do in Japan.

I don't see anything that could have helped without unacceptable costs.
Even if you were willing to accept restrictive licensing, a guy like
Peaires seems to have been as clean as you can get, to prevent him
from owning a gun would inevitably prevent ALL law abiding citizens
from owning a gun.

As for restricting classes of guns, he only took one shot. It's not
as though he used a machine gun.

-- 
My opinions are my own.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.japan