ApfelGanja

Welcome to the F|Amily and best of luck on the battlefield

Although the Greeks haven't been very clever in the last few years, Goldman Sachs did contribute quite a bit to their downfall. As for us, Anastasiades, who has no foreign experience whatsoever, buckled under Merkel and Hollande. + we gave Greece more money than our entire GDP I think. And now our debt is 57% of our GDp (about 15bn EUR)

As some of you may have heard, Cyprus banks have closed (and all assets frozen) and our government has brought forth a proposal from Germany and France for a haircut (bank account cut) of 10% which means that all bank accounts which hold above a certain amount of money will have 10% taken by the government to fix our debts. Cyprus helped bail out Greece with a significant sum some time ago and now need 57% of our GDP to bail ourselves out, as Greece is in no state to pay us back. Our newly elected president Nikos Anastasiades has no foreign experience whatsoever and simply buckled under the pressure of Germany and France, who decided they would pay 10bn of our 15bn EUR bail-out IF the government of Cyprus initiates a haircut for the remaining 5bn EUR. On Tuesday 19th of March, the parliament voted against the motion with 36 against and 19 abstaining. Now Cyprus's reputation is ruined, and many foreign businesses are trying to leave the island to save themselves. Russia is quite visibly pissed off, as Cyprus is filled with Russian influence (10-15% of Cyprus's population are Russian speakers AND many Russian oligarchs are holding their money right here). Russia isn't going to save Cyprus this time after all. Many jobs have been lost, many strikes and riots have been held, and many people aren't in the best of moods. This is only a very broad overview of the situation, there is much more to say, but I suppose all of you who are interested may research it if you so desire.

Exactly. In Chobe National Park alone, there are 120,000 elephants! They eat all the bark off the trees so 2/3 of the trees there are dead. It's a sign of what will happen to criminals if they mess with the elephants. Their skin will be torn off and digested and they will be left to die in the scorching sun.

Excuse me sir. I've been to Botswana in july 2012 and it's a fairly well off country for Africa with the GDP per capita just 1,000 dollars less than in Russia. As everything is much cheaper there than in Russia, that's not bad at all. And it's a very peaceful country too. They resolve all their international problems via the Haig and consist mostly of 1 tribe (about 80% of the population) and therefore they're not really up for a civil war. Nice place. Lots of elephants and stuff.

I think if you hit someone with a gun they'll probably be winded at the very least or even knocked out if you hit them in the right place, giving you time to A) knock him out (helps if you know some martial art) call the cops if he's already KO'ed. Why would you kill someone if you can avoid it? Unless the guy bullied you and took your lunch money in high school.

I'm not going to argue vs. the rest of what you wrote, but here's the answer to your question: An unloaded pistol can act as a deterrent. The aggressor/person you want to kill/ person you want to frighten to death/burglar/criminal will probably not know whether the gun is loaded and the fact that a gun is being pointed at him will probably make him/her assume that it is loaded and just maybe stop them from doing whatever it is they were doing such as robbing/trying to pick up a knife and stab you/start a fistfight/etc. Same as what's the point of having nuclear weapons if you're not going to use them? Deterrents and showing you're tough. I don't know about you but I'm pretty happy the Cuban Missile Crisis did not end in nuclear war.

McDonalds tastes like crap anyway so why not! I lived in Israel as a kid (my mom is half Israeli) and the armed guards is generally because of the 'situation' that's been going on since 1948. Constant shelling, dogfights, border skirmishes, village raids etc. One of my mother's friends lived in a kibbutz for 5-6 years and about a week before giving birth she witnessed her husband being blown to pieces by a PLO shell. She went into depression and suffered a miscarriage and I can understand that an armed guard may have noticed the shelling and told everyone to get into a shelter or something but there are no guns in a kibbutz. Israel is in a semi-permanent state of war on it's borders whereas the US conflict is thousands of miles away (so I can understand armed guards there) and I bet at least 20% of Americans wouldn't be able to point out Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea or Vietnam on a map just by knowing where it is situated. But US education is another discussion for another day.

The fact that your town hasn't had any major violence in 10+ years is great and I'm happy for your community but the size of the town/city has a major impact on violence rates. Large cities will almost inevitably have more crime of any kind than say, a town of 50,000. Cyprus has about 1mil people and Limassol (the city I live in) has about 200,000 and in the 7 years I have spent here I haven't heard of a single murder. A dozen unarmed robberies and a few suicides but no murder, whereas a large city like NY, murders probably occur on a daily basis. Hunting shotguns are legal here too but that's it. The police here is so useless that I think if I called them as I was being robbed, they would show up an hour later despite the police station being only 15min away. Your point on the USSR, the PRC and the Third Reich is valid and in some countries martial law still exists. I get that. But generally on guns. Let's agree to disagree. Limassol signing off.

Gun Owner or victim you say? Well i don't own a gun and i'm still alive and haven't had the experience of anyone pointing a firearm at me just yet.

I would feel unsafe if every one of my neighbours had a gun. Here in Cyprus we have had only 1 gun crime incident (3 people killed in a drive-by) in the last 12 months. This place is safer than any American city or town and there is so much less crime than in America, and guess what? Guns are illegal here! Even if the population difference is taken into account. And what was all that stuff about deporting Piers Morgan? What happened to freedom of speech?

Too early to tell, he's only 14! But he did score some fantastic goals for Barcelona youth. We will see in 4-5 years if he breaks through to Barcelona B or maybe even the first team!

is shooting people a tradition in the US?I will never understand the need civvies have for owning a gun. I can defend myself/my house/my family just fine without shooting everyone who comes in uninvited.

I'm generally not a supporter of the second amendment so I will blame guns where I think they are to blame. I have outlined in a previous topic 1-2 months ago, that the US has 0.88 guns per person. The second closest is Guatemala with 0.54 per person. The US has the 27th highest gun crime rate in the world. That's somewhere in the top 15%, but if you look at most of the other top 26, they are LEDC's where crime and poverty is rife (such as Saint Kitts & Nevis, Jamaica, etc). I could also pull the more conspiratorial card and say it's all part of the military industrial complex on which the US economy runs. If there are 310mil US citizens and 0.88 guns per person that makes, say 275mil guns. If I had to take an average for the price of a gun (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm no expert in gun prices) say $500? So not counting ammo and training to get a license, and all that crap. All that stuff costs $130-140 billion dollars. So maybe it's just that Martin Lockheed, Colt and all the other defense contractors and small-arms manufacturers are getting Americans to think they need guns, and that with guns comes security just to make a big load of money. That's just an opinion. Let's take it up a notch and say the Federal Reserve controls all the money in the US and plunging it into more and more debt while making more and more money for itself (partly using the mil.ind. complex) and it's buddies like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, the IMF, the World Bank and other such monetary institutions.