N. Korea vows to end Korean War cease fire...

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by PIMking

Take out NYC, Chicago, and LA and see what the gun crime is like.. BTW those three cities have some of the most strict gun laws in our country.

While I tend to agree that more guns isn't the answer but gun bans don't work either, if that were the case Chicago would be the safest city in the world.
I'm not going to argue gun control because it doesn't do anything for either of us to just run in circles jerking eachother off

I doubt that any one city banning guns would have much effect when they are surrounded by areas without the ban. They wouldn't be able to enforce the ban and guns are just too easily available. The way I look at it, the US is in deep doody.

Back to N. Korea, if knocking off his uncle is just the start of the road to megalomania, Kim could end up making himself personae non grata with China. What is China able to do about it though, could also be interesting?

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Vulcan

I doubt that any one city banning guns would have much effect when they are surrounded by areas without the ban. They wouldn't be able to enforce the ban and guns are just too easily available. The way I look at it, the US is in deep doody.

Back to N. Korea, if knocking off his uncle is just the start of the road to megalomania, Kim could end up making himself personae non grata with China. What is China able to do about it though, could also be interesting?

China has lived with it since they wrested influence of North Korea away from the Soviet Union back in the late 60's.

The bottom line is that China likes things the way they are, North Korea acts as a buffer zone against the West in South Korea and Japan. It also takes attention away from China's questionable human rights record and military buildup.

On top of that why would China want to depose that government, they would end up having to feed 25 million starving North Koreans which would be a massive cost.

China will continue to support North Korea in exchange for mining and port rights, and the flow of cheap slave labor that North Korea provides.

[T@T]

Everyone should just agree:

1)Guns aren't the answer for stopping violence

2)Gun laws aren't the answer when guns are easy to get

Unfortunately the idiots that think it's their right to have weapons built to kill people fail to realize that in the near future nuclear weapons might be as easy to get as a handgun.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

China has lived with it since they wrested influence of North Korea away from the Soviet Union back in the late 60's.

The bottom line is that China likes things the way they are, North Korea acts as a buffer zone against the West in South Korea and Japan. It also takes attention away from China's questionable human rights record and military buildup.

On top of that why would China want to depose that government, they would end up having to feed 25 million starving North Koreans which would be a massive cost.

China will continue to support North Korea in exchange for mining and port rights, and the flow of cheap slave labor that North Korea provides.

Yeah sure, as things stand N. Korea has it's uses for China. What I'm saying is if Kim goes off his rocker and gets to be too much of an embarrassment and or a danger. Kim walks a fine line and a screw up could put him out of business either by China or the US.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[nik-]

One day the world will be rid of the stinky rag that is North Korea only to find the steel toed boot of China hiding underneath.

[Fozzie_DeBear]

Nm

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by PIMking

Take out NYC, Chicago, and LA and see what the gun crime is like.. BTW those three cities have some of the most strict gun laws in our country.

While I tend to agree that more guns isn't the answer but gun bans don't work either, if that were the case Chicago would be the safest city in the world.
I'm not going to argue gun control because it doesn't do anything for either of us to just run in circles jerking eachother off

You know Chicago isn't covered by a gun proof dome right?

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by T@T

Everyone should just agree:

1)Guns aren't the answer for stopping violence

2)Gun laws aren't the answer when guns are easy to get

Unfortunately the idiots that think it's their right to have weapons built to kill people fail to realize that in the near future nuclear weapons might be as easy to get as a handgun.

Pardon me?

[Slava]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

China has lived with it since they wrested influence of North Korea away from the Soviet Union back in the late 60's.

The bottom line is that China likes things the way they are, North Korea acts as a buffer zone against the West in South Korea and Japan. It also takes attention away from China's questionable human rights record and military buildup.

On top of that why would China want to depose that government, they would end up having to feed 25 million starving North Koreans which would be a massive cost.

China will continue to support North Korea in exchange for mining and port rights, and the flow of cheap slave labor that North Korea provides.

Its that and the issues 'the day after' that China wants no part of. It sounds cold and callous, but you can see their point here. If the regime falls tomorrow, millions of North Koreans flood northern China, and the Chinese simply don't want that, and don't want to deal with closing the border by force while a humanitarian disaster takes place across the river.

The callous part is that of course there is a disaster and terrible human rights violations taking place today. Its really unbelievable that we can stand by and allow it to happen when you think about it, which is why its easier not to.

[undercoverbrother]

http://www.straitstimes.com/the-big-...china-20131224

According to the report, unlike previous executions of political prisoners which were carried out by firing squads with machine guns, Jang was stripped naked and thrown into a cage, along with his five closest aides. Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called "quan jue", or execution by dogs.
The report said the entire process lasted for an hour, with Mr Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader in North Korea, supervising it along with 300 senior officials.

[jammies]

When even China's regime thinks you're brutal, you know you've reached the nadir. The North Koreans are being very stupid, however, as China is not going to allow a hostile, and more importantly friendless, state on its border for long,

[Wormius]

I would be quite curious of China's response when/if South Korea decides it has had enough of the threats of nuclear attack / having ships attacked and uses the next provocation to justify action.

While China has sheer numbers, I don't believe it would come out unscathed in a WW3 event, if it was to side with NK as an opportunity to swallow up Japan and SK.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Wormius

I would be quite curious of China's response when/if South Korea decides it has had enough of the threats of nuclear attack / having ships attacked and uses the next provocation to justify action.

While China has sheer numbers, I don't believe it would come out unscathed in a WW3 event, if it was to side with NK as an opportunity to swallow up Japan and SK.

I have my doubts that South Korea would actively go to war against North Korea without some serious provocation, and I'm not talking about sinking a frigate or shelling a small town, or the commando raids from the North that happen multiple times a year that never seem to make the papers.

North Korea's vaunted artillery belt is the perfect non nuclear deterrent, while South Korea has worked very hard on counter battery artillery technology, North Korea in the event of a war would get a first massive time on target lick on Seoul and could probably destroy the city without the use of nuclear arms. While not all the artillary could reach Seoul at least a large number of their bigger ones could.

On top of that there is the vast North Korean tunnel systems that are used to send commando's and fixed units across the border and some of those tunnels probably lead into the South Korean capital.

On top of that, if North Korea does in fact have a small primative nuclear bomb, they wouldn't even need to hit South Korea with it, they could merely fire it straight up and set off an EMP that could destroy most consumer level electronics.



Like I said, China might be displeased with North Korea, but I doubt that they have any interest in sending forces in to depose the government in place there, it serves a useful purpose, and there's a old military saying "If you invade em, you have to feed em". China would take a serious economic hit if they had to not only feed North Korea's population, but rebuild its infrastructure.

In terms of forces correlation in that area, North Korea has a massive army, but South Korea has a massive edge in technology, its to the point where its likely that South Korea wouldn't need American help to fight a war against the North. They also have a significant edge in terms of modern main battle tanks, and modern armored fighting vehicles that would make it tough for NK to counter unless the war was in the summer months which would not be good conditions for a modern armor battle.

When Kim Jung-Un came to power a lot of people tried to convince me that he was a young guy who was going to reform the government and start allowing some liberalization of the government in North Korea.

The truth is that Un is the spoiled son of a spoiled yet very politically saavy man, and he will be even more ruthless then his father possibly could be. Kim Jung-Un has been exposed to guys like Asaad in Syria, he was also raised during a time when he saw what happened when people like Ghadaffi and Hussien were toppled from power and executed by the people and he will do everything to avoid that.

Feeding the number two man to dogs is an execution to encourage others to fall in line behind him. I'm sure that he didn't need 300 other senior party officials to supervise, he wanted 300 party officials to watch and understand that you are a simple denunciation from a horrible painful death.



.

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by PIMking

Take out NYC, Chicago, and LA and see what the gun crime is like.. BTW those three cities have some of the most strict gun laws in our country.

While I tend to agree that more guns isn't the answer but gun bans don't work either, if that were the case Chicago would be the safest city in the world.
I'm not going to argue gun control because it doesn't do anything for either of us to just run in circles jerking eachother off

I have never argued for gun bans, in this thread or others. I was simply responding to Shawnski's post about guns equating a safer society or a society able to adequately defend itself against tyranny. The first assumption being absolutely insane, as is evidenced to situation south, and the second being hard to prove and dependent on many factors. Gun control vs an armed populace being only one part of the equation and therefore kinda pointless to point to as a solution. Especially when we are talking about Korea.

I am not arguing that an armed populace wouldn't have helped in some situations of governmental tyranny throughout history. However, I don't feel it would have helped in the case of North Korea, and I completely disagree it is a 100% safeguard (or even a dependable one) against a government becoming more tyrannical, especially in a modern age. The level of technology and arms a government has compared to a household, or even a 'people's militia' is no comparison. What good are a few rifles compared to an army, tanks, satellites, advanced intelligence, bombs, missiles, etc.?

But most importantly, when one is in a country that is ignoring the needs of it's people, the populace doesn't have the money or the means to get guns anyway. As Captain Crunch said, how can people go buy guns, if they can't even afford food?

Anyway, tried to bring that back to the bounds of the thread topic while explaining my post and answering your response to it. I also want this thread to stay on Korea and I long ago abandoned gun debates especially about America because I find my words and arguments fall on deaf ears. As I said above, I have never once argued in any thread for a gun ban, or suggested that eliminating all guns would instantly make America safer. Yet that always becomes the insinuation from the other side, you even put it in your reply to me (gun ban). Intentional or not, I don't know. I know other posters have made arguments like that in the past, or simplified their arguments to make a point, but I haven't said that.

I only replied that guns do not make a society safer, and that the whole armed populace as a safeguard to government tyranny argument is horribly simplistic, impossible to prove, and fraught with incorrect assumptions anyway. And is pretty much only used, as it appears to have been here, as an argument for a pro gun agenda.

EDIT: As always, if either you or Shawnski want to continue this in PM, I am open to it. There are portions of my reply that include the discussion at hand as it pertains to Korea, so I hope the fellow posters in this thread don't get too upset at me for finishing my thoughts to your response.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

Pardon me?

Less than 70 years ago the first nuclear weapons were about 10,000 lbs each with a yield about 15-20 kilotons and completely flattened 2 large cities.

Today you could fit a much much more powerfull weapon in a suitcase, how many more years before they get even smaller and easyier to make.?

My faith in humanity is weak, religious ######s blowing themselfs up to kill others, freaks shooting little kids in schools, daily murders over drugs and greed..etc tells me it wont be long before we wipe the planet clean of humans if the mindset isn't changed about all weapons.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Shawnski

Here are some that cannot reply "hi" back as they were disarmed and could not defend themselves...

The Armenians from the Ottoman empire (Turkey),
Ukrainian farmers under Stalan,
Chinese under Mao,
Jewish under Hitler,
Cambodians under Paul Pot,
Ugandans under Idi Amin,
Tutsi in Rwanda,
Mayan Indians in Guatemala,
Buddhist monks in Tibet...
The list goes on...

10's of millions...

Are you just trolling, or do you seriously believe the fairy tale that armed civilians could rise against a tyrannical government and win? Let's take a look at your example of the Jews living in Nazi Germany. What percentage of Germany's Jewish population even owned firearms when Hitler came to power? Of the few that did, do you think they could have successfully mounted a partisan campaign against Germany's armed forces? Do you honestly believe that the same military power that easily conquered Poland and France could have been defeated by a loosely-organized and lightly-armed Jewish militia? Or that Tibetan monks (how many of them own firearms, I wonder) could have posed a serious opposition to the People's Liberation Army? Or that Soviet peasants could have overthrown Stalin?

It makes for a neat movie plot to imagine that the Wolverines can successfully wage a guerrilla war against the Red Army, but you're deluding yourself if you think that is anything close to a viable scenario.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop..._about_hitler/

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

[...]

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

[...]

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

Are you just trolling, or do you seriously believe the fairy tale that armed civilians could rise against a tyrannical government and win? Let's take a look at your example of the Jews living in Nazi Germany. What percentage of Germany's Jewish population even owned firearms when Hitler came to power? Of the few that did, do you think they could have successfully mounted a partisan campaign against Germany's armed forces? Do you honestly believe that the same military power that easily conquered Poland and France could have been defeated by a loosely-organized and lightly-armed Jewish militia? Or that Tibetan monks (how many of them own firearms, I wonder) could have posed a serious opposition to the People's Liberation Army? Or that Soviet peasants could have overthrown Stalin?

It makes for a neat movie plot to imagine that the Wolverines can successfully wage a guerrilla war against the Red Army, but you're deluding yourself if you think that is anything close to a viable scenario.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop..._about_hitler/

Spoiler!

I agree with the rest.....

[The Yen Man]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

http://www.straitstimes.com/the-big-...china-20131224

For all it's faults, I think what will ultimately bring North Korea out of its current state is a reform similar to that of China's. Yes, they still have issues, but China today is a lot more open than it ever was before. With the advent of internet and smartphones, the government in China is more kept in check by it's populace than it ever was. Yes, there is still the Great Firewall of China to contend with, but honestly, it's not going to keep the people who want to be informed out. The government in China also knows this, so it treads carefully now.

With everyone having a smartphone at their disposal, government officials can no longer blatantly abuse their own power in public without it being filmed by a ton of cameras and posted on the internet. Government officials have had to frequently come out and publically apologize for their actions now. Now that the cat is out of the bag, there's no way the average Chinese citizen will be willing to go back how it was before.

[CaptainCrunch]

Except that North Korean's don't have access to the open internet, and most of them don't have smartphones. In fact the only ones that do have access to these technologies are the ones in government that are going on.

The other big difference is that China's government was not based on dynastic succession, so you always had a chance of minor reformers coming into power after the death of Mao and his sycophants. In North Korea the decisions all come from one, that's not a fertile ground for change, and since technology as a prime cause of reform doesn't and won't exist in North Korea you won't see change via youtube.

The only way that reform comes to North Korea is through a act of brutality that's not likely to happen for a long time.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by Shawnski

Here are some that cannot reply "hi" back as they were disarmed and could not defend themselves...

The Armenians from the Ottoman empire (Turkey),
Ukrainian farmers under Stalan,
Chinese under Mao,
Jewish under Hitler,
Cambodians under Paul Pot,
Ugandans under Idi Amin,
Tutsi in Rwanda,
Mayan Indians in Guatemala,
Buddhist monks in Tibet...

Way to conveniently ignore that many of the regimes committing these atrocities came to power either through violent revolutions or coups. I'll give you a few seconds to consider what one of the primary tools used in violent revolutions is.