OK So. I'm a moderator for a flickr group 'the Items we carry' - suddenly this week the group has a whole flood of gun pix. Of course I'm going 'huh? wtf.' Turns out some website in Boston is running a photography comp. this month based on the group (yeah, thanks for warning us guys. Although I'm sure it wasn't their intention to stir up the NRA supporters in such numbers) and well... Boston is looking like a pretty scary place to me now.
and I'm left wondering if the group is ever going to be the same again after this.
9 comments:
thank you for your input on the comments page on boston.com's RAW contest for this month. yours was like a voice of sanity in the wilderness. my life has been impacted by the easy availability of guns, and i can't understand how people feel protected by carrying them. sooner or later someone's going to end up dead. i appreciate you for speaking up.
Thank you Lucy. I appreciate that - especially after the torrent of aggressive comments I got after my say. (Being 'Extremely polite' as one commenter put it - must mean something different over there.) I'm just left shaking my head at the sheer number of paranoid-delusional people there are in that part of the world. Precisely the sort of people that really shouldn't ever be trusted to own a gun. They really are storing up trouble for themselves for a later date.
Perhaps if your government would let it's law-abiding subjects carry guns you wouldn't have such a huge problem with violent crime. Violent crimes per capita is FAR lower here in the US than in the UK. Why is that?
http://wheelgun.blogspot.com/2007/01/crime-in-uk-versus-crime-in-us.html
I think you'll find that violent crime in the UK has actually been falling year upon year since 1995. Recorded crimes involving firearms is vastly lower.
http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/statistics/statistics080.htm
Here the US the violent crime rate has fallen every year since 1989. Today it's about 20% of the UK rate. So in a nutshell your government doesn't allow law-abiding subjects to carry guns and your violent crime rate is 5 times that of the US. If "guns are bad" then how do you explain this correlation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
And can you please explain to me why I have to explain anything at all to you whatsoever?
You're just doing this to be a tedious troll aren't you. Kindly go away.
Good day sir.
You need not explain anything. If you'd rather ignore hard facts that disprove your feelings that's perfectly fine. Feel free to insert your head back into the sand. Good day.
Just think you should know that not everyone in Boston is gun obsessed. This was my first time entering boston.com's photo contest and I was pretty excited for the theme because I had some good ideas for mine. I was kind of surprised to see all the gun pictures though, especially all the low quality pictures taken on iphones. But actually I've come to realize there is a large portion of ridiculous right wingers who troll boston.com so they can denounce every article and make themselves the vocal minority.
Whats more strange is that I don't particularly disagree with them at all. I typically assign myself as a right leaning moderate. I have no problem with legal ownership of guns. But these people are so insistent on making themselves seem the majority and their arrogance is beyond measure. If I were you, I wouldn't give them the time of day, cause they feed of this stuff.
Thank you for that Paul, and as I see the abuse aimed at me get ever more personal, shrill and hysterical - I'm ever more convinced I made the right choice in denying them a forum.
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