Gun control defeated in Senate. #Orlando means nothing if you're paid by the NRA

And in a way - they are. 2nd Amendment supports remind everyone that the 2nd helps protect all the others.

You’re welcome.

Good summary. I’m down with that. Government works for those who make campaign contributions. Enter the NRA stage right.

But I don’t think the list itself is unconstitutional in itself. Realistically, if the FBI is going to investigate terrorism, there is going to be some sort of accounting of who they are investigating. That’s no more unconstitutional than the 10 Most Wanted list is.

It is how you use the list that potentially treads into unconstitutional territory. If you can revoke the right to free travel for people on the watch list, then why can’t you revoke their right to free speech? They might use it to recruit allies. Or, if you’re Donald Trump, revoke their right to free exercise of religion because Islamic Jihadists. Or, if you’re George Bush, revoke their rights to fair trials and to be free of cruel and unusual punishment? After all, Kiefer Sutherland demonstrated how useful torture and extrajudicial murder are at extracting useful information.

The Supreme Court has many times established the principle that rights can be restricted if there is a compelling public interest. We have, for instance, restricted the right to own automatic weapons due to 1930’s gangsters. We’ve also restricted the right to free speech if it threatens public safety. As we’ve seen, this can be take to unconstitutional extremes by overly self important police officers. We restrict the rights of convicted felons to own guns.

Generally, though, if it makes sense to make it more difficult to obtain assault weapons or high capcity magazines, it makes sense to do that for everyone, not just for people on a list.

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Well, I don’t have any soldiers staying in my house, anyway, so maybe it works?

But next time I think I’m being subjected to an unreasonable search, I’ll be sure to pull a gun on the policeman doing it.

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Thanks.

For letting everyone know that we should just accept these escalating mass shootings as “normal,” because there’s nothing we can or should do about it.

Thanks, for contributing to an overwhelming sense of overall hopelessness and frustration; that’s just what is needed here.

Thanks for not coming up with any viable solutions that value human life just as much as great gobs of money or the individual right to feel powerful by owning a tool designed to take massive amounts of life, all in one fell swoop.

Thanks for arguing semantics and splitting hairs while the problem keeps getting worse around us.

Thank you, so very much.

ETA:

FUCK, I should have stayed out of this thread when I said I would the first time.

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Then why not do laser tag, paintball, archery, airsoft?

Oh yeah, because it’s got to have the capacity to kill.

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Guns sure don’t protect our enemies abroad from us.

They sure don’t protect us from unjust laws, either. You live in a fantasy world.

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That’s cold and mean to say about a fellow mutant.

Personally, I hope @mister44 lives a long and happy life - long enough to see when meaningful firearm reforms enacted and America becomes better for it.

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Maybe you’re right. But that just makes your pose even worse. You’re basically saying “I’m alright Jack, so fuck all y’all.”

Seriously?

Good grief. What a fantasy you live in.

If you can’t use Australia or the UK because “crime is different than in the US” then you can’t use Mexico or third world countries either. But I will give it to you that Australia’s crime is different. As you say, it’s significantly lower which is why we need to do significantly more to curb gun violence here. And they took measures there that you aren’t even capable of conceiving of here. So you know we have a bigger problem but you want a more ineffective solution because “I like to shoot targets, so collateral deaths are acceptable.”

Tell that to the families and friends of everyone who has needlessly died from gun violence all because some people like guns and can dispassionately accept needless deaths as acceptable because they don’t give a fuck about other human beings that they don’t know.

I showed my work. I used your 0.015%. You hadn’t cited how you got your number, so I couldn’t tell if it was a quote from somewhere or how you came up with it. You also didn’t mention that your number was per year so that changes things significantly. If it’s 12,000 per year, that’s way too high. How about low hundreds? That seems like a good goal. Yes, the rate is going down, but the rate is irrelevant to the people who have lost someone to gun violence who didn’t need to die except for the callousness of gun owners and gun manufacturers insisting that guns are some kind of inherent aspect of life or at least should be.

You apparently missed the point that the 2nd half is meaningless without the first. If the first part is removed, the second part means something completely different. You’re ignoring the first part as if it has no bearing on the meaning of the sentence at all. The purpose was national defense in lieu of a standing army. Times have changed. There’s no reason for civilians to carry weapons capable of defending the country. The British aren’t coming. The Nazi’s haven’t developed their Rocketeer rockets and aren’t flying across the Atlantic. There are no zombies. In fact, statistically the single largest threat to Americans from gun violence is gun-owning white male citizens - the very people the 2nd amendment sought to empower with the ability to defend the nation in lieu of a standing army.

Yes, it is black and white. The first phrase specifically explains why the the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and it is because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. You (and Scalia) have disconnected the parts of the sentence to pretend like the first phrase is just unrelated. You’re reading it like, “because I like applesauce, let’s play video games today.” But it’s actually more like “because I like applesauce, let’s eat applesauce today,” and when you no longer like applesauce (or it turns out it’s bad for you), the entire sentence is nullified because its purpose is removed.

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Have you read about the CDC dog breed report fiasco?

Don’t stop there… why don’t you tell us exactly what it has to do with firearms research.

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LOL. No one is killing anyone on purpose in the myriad of shooting sports and the many target ranges.

I used to do paintball and archery. (Ironically, you shoot at PEOPLE in paintball and airsoft).

Shooting firearms is similar, but different. The skills needed to shoot longer ranges are unique. Marksmanship skills for rifle and pistol at closer ranges are even challenging. Then there are shooting sports with timed fire, so you run through a course and try to hit targets for a fast time. Then there are the shot gun sports like trap and skeet, which is much different than any of those things, hitting moving targets. There are even sports that combine all three, like Three Gun and Cowboy Action shooting.

I assume it would be similar to why someone wants to race motorcycles vs just race in a car or on a bike or run. All those things are similar, but racing a motorcycle is different.

It was significantly lower BEFORE the laws. Why is it they had the same access but a lower murder rate?

You can say that about A LOT of things. The families destroyed by alcohol and drunk driving. Should we make that illegal again? What about drugs? IMO the war on drugs is shit and made things worse. We need to legalize some of it and decriminalize all of it. But at the same time, drugs destroy lives and families. I am under no delusion that they don’t. But the war on drugs is worse.

You’re going to have to walk me through it then. I said that .015% of gun owners are killing other people with their guns in the US. I have no idea how you could arrive at 1.5 MILLION people working backwards - using your number of 32% of 318.9 would come to ~102 million. .015% of that is 15,307 (which is close to the actual number of ~12,000, the difference of being the 22 million difference in our estimates.) (In full disclosure, I did screw up the percent using your estimate, it should be .01175%, and I corrected it above.)

http://www.percentagecalculator.net/

So yet again I am here. Showing that in our massive, huge nation of 318.9 million people, and 80 million gun owners, already with thousands of gun laws on the books, including NICS background checks, the National Firearms Act, and the Gun Control Act of 68 (among others), we only have ~12000 murders using guns. And most of those people are killing other criminals within their own poverty stricken communities. I am sure you would agree we shouldn’t treat illegal Mexicans as rapist, Muslims as Terrorists, Blacks as criminals, or any of the 1001 other negative stereotypes where we can statistically point a small section of bad people doing bad things - but that doesn’t preclude “cracking down” and restricting the rights of the rest of the group for the small minorities’ actions.

Even if you think we need more gun control, unless you just don’t care about freedom and equality, there is no way you should be supporting this proposed law based on watch lists.

No it doesn’t. It is a personal right, just like every other right in the bills of rights. The First Amendment is just for news papers, for example. The original purpose of the militia isn’t now obsolete, but, again, the 2nd amendment isn’t JUST about Militias.

Say the whole thing again. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed.”

The people. Not just people who are able to serve in a militia. You can’t make a logic statement where the people don’t have the same rights as the militia.

It is another example of the CDC being biased. The FBI and the Bureau of Justice and individual states and cities have lots and lots of crime and gun crime statistics and studies. The CDC can still gather all the stats they want, and they do report on gun death stats in the US.

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Just how, exactly, does it show the CDC being “biased”? And just how, exactly, does it have any bearing on firearms research? Please be specific.

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