Watchhttp://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/09/07/mexico.gun.training/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Officials in a northern Mexican city plagued by violence say a new course will take a fresh approach toward protecting citizens: Training people to handle and shoot guns.
The aim of the approach, says Garcia Mayor Jaime Rodriguez Calderon, is putting a stop to crime in the 40,000-person city in Nuevo Leon state.
"Many people call me because their son or their husband has been kidnapped, or some family member's car has been stolen. I said to myself, 'Wow, how can we, the citizens, defend ourselves,'.
So far, about 3,000 people from Garcia and nearby cities have signed up for the course, including engineers, teachers, housewives and retired military.
The course's start date has not yet been scheduled. It will be free and take place in a city hunting club, where students will use .22-caliber guns for training.
Garcia's program is not the first citizen-defense proposal in Nuevo Leon state involving weapons. State lawmakers are also studying a proposal that would relax weapons restrictions there.
Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas, has seen a surge in violence as the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas drug gang fight over drug trafficking routes.
Well somebody is going to be right. Will crime go down, or will all of the guns make their way to the bad guys, or will the good guys turn into bad guys? Who Knows!
But it will be interesting to follow the what happens with the Cartels and Gangs, when the people go all "High plains drifter" on them.
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FortWayne says
your idiotic insistence that all government is bad.
Our government is shit, but it doesn't have to be that way.
YOU are not helping things.
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Finally, a place that gets what "gun control" SHOULD be. Give guns to law abiding citizens instead of taking them away from them.
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So far it's just a stunt.
Get back to me when Mexican gun laws change to allow citizens to own and carry them around loaded.
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Vicente says
Yep, it does not have much chance of working unless they can carry loaded guns, and even concealed, anywhere.
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FortWayne says
Well, I know that after Florida started issuing CCW permits the murder rate dropped quite a bit, but do you have any sources for the wiping out of mafia activity when guns were legalized? I did not know that there was a time in Florida's history where they were not legal.
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Are there any marginally bad guys, or people who are having some kind of temporary breakdown of some sort who are going to find it easier to get their hands on a gun when everyone has one ?
If I lived in a place where there were a lot of drug related and other murders and other crime going on, and they said, okay now everyone is going to carry around a loaded weapon, I personally would not feel safer.
My guess is that it would reduce certain types of crime and killings, and it would increase others. Burglary while the victims are home would surely go down. A child accidentally kills his sibling, or a domestic fight ends in murder ? I can't see how those and other types of killing wouldn't increase.
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Guns don't kill people, people kill people....
I think open carry works well with exceptions of schools, government building, banks, those kinds of places. Some people are very uncomfortable around guns because they don't see them or handle them every day. You can run someone over with a car and kill them just as well as if pulling a gun out and shooting them. We don't get anxious when someone gets in a car because that is a normal activity for most people. Walking around with a loaded weapon is not seen as a normal activity for a lot of Americans unless the person is a police officer.
17K people die in the US each year to drinking and driving.
http://www.alcoholalert.com/drinking-driving-accidents.html
Murder by Handguns or guns is just below the deaths by drinking and driving. Except we have an interesting spike around the early 90's. I will have to see why that spiked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ushomicidesbyweapon.svg
So, you just require people to take classes and carry a the required documentation. Pretty simple.
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I forgot to answer the original posters questions. I think it has the opportunity to help provide security for a town. It all depends on how well armed the citizens are, how good their training is, and how committed they are to fix the problem.
Keeping the citizens armed in Iraq eventually worked in our favor when they got tired of Al Qaida bullying them around.
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elliemae says
Explain to me which beliefs am I slamming on here that are so bad?
Some of us have heard enough from this government on how we should all be helpless lambs relying on government to come save us, while they take away our guns, our rights, and our freedoms.
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FortWayne says
The problem is that all of you "discussion" is liberal = wrong, hence not real exchange of ideas.
If you read a little further down elliemae's post you would have seen:
elliemae says
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shrekgrinch says
That was actually a quote from elliemae not me.
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Troy you are a smart man, but you are so fixated on RE that you sure are missing the game this government is running against us all.
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RE is not the dominant problem this country has, now.
It was 2003-2006 but that race has been run.
This government isn't playing any games we don't want it to play.
Plenty of welfare queens are enjoying the fat life on Uncle Sugar's payroll -- the DOD, Medicare providers, the internal security state.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" -- H.L. Mencken.
Small-government Conservatives don't have the answer, they're just going to make the problems we face worse though, since the core problems have to do with MONEY, who has it and who doesn't.
Taking government out of the picture will just free up Money to really put the screws on.
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Bellingham Bob says
You missing the Fed and Obama, and their artificial transfer of wealth to the elite and their bailouts.
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iwog says
Liberals like to ignore our constitutional rights when it becomes convenient to do so. The only thing that stands between them taking that right away is the little paragraph in the bill of rights, the meaning of which Liberals have been trying to redefine from day one.
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FortWayne says
So why are you whining about it?
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FortWayne says
Yeah! liberals like that darn James Brady, and his Brady Center, one of the most influential anti-gun lobbys in the country.
Oh, wait... Brady is a Republican who took a bullet meant for Regan.
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FortWayne says
Could you be more specific? Which bailouts? How did they transfer wealth?
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tatupu70 says
He's probably talking about TARP, which of course was passed when Obama was still a Senator.
The "elite" has been getting an "artificial transfer of wealth" for a very long time now.
Money makes money. It always has and it doesn't need the Fed or a Chicago guy in the White House to happen.
The Fed's job is to insulate bank governance from party politics, since 100 years ago it was decided that a Central Bank was necessary but too important to leave under the direct control of either the President or Congress.
That theory failed in 2001-2004 when the institution was captured by Obama and allowed to run amok.
No, wait, that's not quite right. It was actually captured by Republicans and used to try to keep them in power in 2004 when things were beginning to fall apart like they were in the early 90s.
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tatupu70 says
It's the biggest game in town. Federal reserve pays banks for keeping reserves, and they lend banks money at incredibly low interest rate to loan out to you at a higher rate. That's a one way street, money flows to the banks from everyone, while savers and investors are penalized for being responsible by having very little growth.
Of course if this changes in 2013 we'll be for some wild times on the stock market while RE will probably tank. Right now though there is a huge tollbooth between Americans and prosperity and it's the low rates bailing out the few.