If that’s the most prominent American politician you can find who wants an outright ban and even he won’t go on record arguing for one then I don’t think you have much to worry about.
So can we please drop the scaremongering rhetoric about how those nasty Liberals are on the cusp on outlawing all private gun ownership?
Every current system is the best one. Every previous system, and potentially every next system, is considered bad.
Otherwise it’d be difficult to explain why attempt to overthrow the government is a crime, but a revolution anniversary is a public holiday.
This is true.
And is a sticking point for me mentally. The progressives and liberals, which I count myself among, like to use the term “police militarization”.
But the thing is, if the police were acting like the military, they’d have to radio back to base, and ask permission to shoot nearly any target, they’d have to conform to very strict rules of engagement, they’d have to check out their weapons from the station armory every day they take a weapon with them, and they’d have to take it on their heels and shape up or get discharged with a permanent mark against them if they misuse their weapons.
What we’re seeing ISN’T a militarization of the police. It’s a mercenary-ization of the police. They’re given power and privilege, and the only accountability they must endure is internal affairs and local prosecutors who are their natural allies. It’s a system ripe for abuse.
You can’t even defend yourself from a cop who’s acting illegally, even if you have video proof. And simple non-compliance without any threat can earn people death at the hands of cops.
Cops are mercs. We should call them such. It’s more accurate, and not an insult to the level of discipline the military has, and its level of treatment to the people it works with.
Just think about that for a second. While the military has fucked up in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least it admits its mistakes, and will discharge people guilty of bad behavior. The police don’t even rise to that level.
It’s garbage. And the police should be disbanded and rebuilt from the bottom up following actually civilized countrys’ examples.
That’s just a bad appeal to authority a and a nonsensical analogy. At least @Mister44 has, on many of the many gun threads, advocated social change, attempts to eradicate poverty and so forth as a method of reducing violence (which is considerably more likely to work than bad attempts at snark).
I agree. The problem is that bureaucratic, administrative systems pretty much all stop working over time. Either because the system overwhelmingly selects for the corrupt and power hungry (republican Rome, then imperial Rome a few centuries later, 1917 Russia) or the system winds up sucking so much out of the economy for its own purposes that the rest of the nation is effectively broke (1789 France, 1989 USSR). Eventually the country has to hit Ctl-Alt-Del and start again.
Sometimes you get disinterested, wise philosopher kings or philosopher statesmen. But not for more than a generation or two.
Here in the 21st century USA, we are in the mid stage of both the corruption and the economic parasitism processes, and I’m not sure which one will win.
You’re the one who erected the meta-strawman that there are people who are claiming politicians are working to ban all guns, rather than just some or most private gun ownership.
@Comrade, @popobawa4u, @albill - For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. [preceding text is quoted from Amazon blurb for The Art of Not Being Governed]
@shaddack, you can tell people a million times that their own rhetoric helps to sell guns, but it never seems to work. As soon as we’re talking about guns, emotion rules the day - reason and evidence be damned! People care more about making statements than they do about the effects of those statements, I guess?
@BarackObama, if the legislators of the United States really want to decrease mass shootings (rather than cynically use them to garner votes) they can prove it by creating damnatio memoriae laws, to eradicate the names of shooters like the French eradicated the name of the Werewolf of Châlons. If they don’t want to take those kinds of steps - if they just want to continue to push the same tired anti-gun and pro-gun crap that hasn’t worked for 200 years - then I suggest you consider them vultures who profit from the slaughter of innocents.
Correction: the “anti-gun crap” actually has worked in countries where the government took meaningful action to regulate guns. It hasn’t worked HERE because we never really tried it.
Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur!
Posts deleted. I apologise for my tendency to go off topic.
The militarization of the police was only the first step of the process. When the images of the Ferguson police running around with military gear, pointing weapons at peaceful protesters came out, with members of the military explicitly saying, “We’re not allowed to do that,” it really should have created a national dialog about how completely out of control the police are in this country. And it did, to some degree, but nearly to the degree that was warranted just by those images, much less all the other evidence. I still can’t wrap my head around how much people are willing to dismiss what’s going on.
It’s not “the exact equivalent”. It’s a “a loose analogy.” And analogies are never perfect.
A “so-called” assault rifle, even if it is modified to prevent full auto, is engineered for use in combat situations. Stopping power, accuracy, range. They’re not optimized for self-defense, or for hunting. They’re optimized for going out and shooting as many people as possible.
If you’re stuck on the idea that US citizens could somehow rebel against a tyrannical government, then it makes sense to allow this. Otherwise, there are some pretty reasonable arguments along the lines of: “there are no practical civilian purposes to owning such a weapon, and there are obvious risks in letting pretty much anyone buy one.”
It would be a “meta strawman”, except in every one of these threads, gun control opponents accuse gun control supporters of wanting to ban all guns. So more like “not at all a strawman”.
This sort of thing is really aggravating. It’s like an 8-year-old shouting “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”
I don’t know - perhaps they could be restricted to use by a well regulated militia or something? Just a wild idea.
Until recent decades, gun control in the U.S. was indeed overtly designed and used to disarm and imprison black people. There was a pretty good article about it recently:
The last paragraph links to another interesting article on the topic that speaks at length about how gun control laws peddled by progressives are repeatedly used to disproportionately punish black people, who are in any case targeted much more frequently:
So, in spite of appearances, progressive gun control policy in the U.S. is really just another cog in the vast machinery of institutional racism.
The same can be said for a lot of projects that have attracted progressive support to varying degrees, like various “community revitalization” projects that form one of the pillars of gentrification, or a public education system that imposes a warped view of history and nationalistic ideology (to which progressivism has never been immune).
Gee, in your last post they were “scary black rifles” (your quotes not mine) responsible for less than 1% of gun deaths. Amazing how much of a threat they became in only one day.
/me looks at his copy of “The Art of Not Being Governed” on the shelf. 
And disarm the cops, because they are the opposite of well regulated.
I’ll remember that the next time I hear a group whingeing about their need for “safe spaces”.
Yep. So that just made me vomit.
Awesome.
