NRA's top lawyer was convicted of murdering his girlfriend's mother in 1964

boing
42

The legislatures do as they are damn well told.

Observers and lawmakers see the NRA as one of the top three most influential lobbying groups in Washington.

1 Like
43

[quote=“teapot, post:33, topic:38055”]
Au contraire, the delusion is yours. Everywhere with restrictions on gun ownership have lower rates of gun crime and death by firearm. My ‘delusion’ is known by most of the world as ‘reality’. [/quote]

You can’t compare the US to other places because our social, economical and cultural make up is completely different. Make the guns disappear tomorrow and the crime the reasons behind the violence are still there. Ever think the reason for increased violence in America has other roots besides access to guns?

If you were able to cut out a few of the high crime areas in the US, the gun violence rate for the rest of the nation actually falls in line with those fun loving Canadians.

[quote=“teapot, post:33, topic:38055”]
Hey! We’re done with this distraction. It’s a weapon of war. You may be able to distract others with this, but not us. We have no fear of the item, we have an acceptance that humans are fallible pieces of nonsense and if you get us angry and put a ‘tool’ for mass killing in our hands, we might just mass kill with it.[/quote]

You are for restricting millions of others because of the irrational fear of a very unlikely event - you should get a job with the TSA. Or the NSA. Never mind no one ever bombed a plane with a shoe - lets make everyone take theirs off because they COULD.

[quote=“teapot, post:33, topic:38055”]
…in the eyes of dumb-arse Americans. Please, tell me all about the AR shooting competitions that take place outside America.[/quote]

Moving the goal posts. I gave you legit examples.

I can’t say your argument is grounded in logic. It comes down to “guns COULD hurt someone, so no one should have them”. Which if you applied that to just about anything else becomes absurd - but here we are again staring at mirrors.

Anyone have something new?

1 Like
44

At best this is an argument for the necessity of arming law enforcement officers because their position requires it - not for arming private citizens, who have no such need. In reality, however, you’re being highly disingenuous - people don’t obey the law because they’re under threat of armed force in all but the rarest scenarios.

I can only readily think of one example of a Supreme Court decision that had to be enforced with a show of arms - and while the National Guard had to be called in to force integration at Little Rock, one need note that this was only necessary because of the danger posed by armed private citizens who opposed the legal ruling.

1 Like
45

Hey, you missed a quote from that page:

Members: 5 million (as of May 2013)[3]

This is about 10 times the membership of the ACLU. Maybe that is one of the reasons that they are so influential. Their numbers are still small compared to the AARP (about 8 times bigger), but I suspect that the political leanings of the AARP are a lot more fragmented (good mix of left and right) which make their suggestions on who to vote for less effective.

46

Maybe it’s that, or maybe its the enormous funding their lobbying interests enjoy from weapons manufacturers.

2 Likes
47

[quote=“Glitch, post:44, topic:38055”]
At best this is an argument for the necessity of arming law enforcement officers because their position requires it - not for arming private citizens, who have no such need.[/quote]So,if somebody is attacking you and trying to kill you right now, you are ok with waiting five minutes for the police to show up? By that time it could easily be too late. I live 13 miles from the closes GAS STATION. How long do you think it would take a sheriff to show up if I needed one?

I am sure that this doctor would disagree with you, since he saved his own life and quite possibly the lives of many others by carrying his own gun. Try telling HIM that he does not need a gun.

48

I think that’s another one of those scenarios to file under “makes some sense in theory but hasn’t played out in real life yet.” I can’t recall a single incident in which a private citizen experienced a positive outcome after shooting police officers, even in cases when doing so might have been justified.

2 Likes
49

So? Cable companies spend money to protect their interests. Beef ranchers, farmers, do the same. How about the car industry? Energy industry? Is it OK when other industries do it, and yet somehow horrible of a company that makes hunting shotguns does the same thing? If so, explain your logic.

You are assuming that gun manufacturers are inherently evil. The numbers that I posted above prove that the average gun is less dangerous than the average pool. Are pool companies evil?

50

Yes, because killing SWAT team members is going to do anything other than make things explode.

See, it sucks that various egional police forces are so militarized, and that they employ unnecessary force in conducting their ill-founded raids. People get hurt, people die, and it’s not in proportion to any sane reasoning. But turning these already ugly SWAT raids into full blown gun battles cannot possibly do anything but make them WORSE, and get MORE people hurt and killed.

Worse still, if SWAT starts running into severe armed resistance as a trend, suddenly they have justification to employ even more force. I can hear it now: ‘We’re trying to do our jobs and people are shooting at us - we need more guns, more armor, more AFVs, more authority, more surveillance, more power to protect ourselves in the line of duty and keep the community safe!’

You don’t trust the police? Well why the hell should they trust you? You advocate arming yourself to protect yourself from the police, and the police will advocate arming themselves to protect themselves from you.

It’s called an arms race. And whoever wins, everyone loses. See WWI, WWII, The Cold War, nuclear brinskmanship, et cetera.

Learn from history. If you want a world in which the police don’t employ force, you need to strip them of reasons for being allowed to employ force - not employ your own force to threaten them. Armed insurrection is directly antithetical to your stated goals - why, then, would you champion it?

4 Likes
51

Very brief search due to lack of time.

Sleep now.

52

Well, those stupid old men managed to forge a country that has lasted over two centuries.

Wow! Tell me more!

They were NOT stupid.

You knew them personally?

They did not have computers, but they were not ignorant.

O.o what?

Just the sentence structure and vocabulary used are rather impressive.

You mean 5 guys can crowdsource an impressively written document? Golf Clap

the intent was to have an armed populace be the ultimate deterrent to an oppressive government.

Has that worked? Nope.

I don’t care to complete your challenge, since the bulk of actual research, done by actual researchers is on my side. That, plus I find spreadsheets so depressing that I refused to install Office or iwork on this work machine. Find me some studies that suggest what you’re saying. Those I will read. Maths games devised by pro-gun people, no thanks.

1 Like
53

So apparently a “positive outcome” is that you get to defend yourself against murder charges and you have to live with the needless death of another human being on your conscience, where an unarmed person would have experienced the same raid but without all the bloodshed.

I think I’m starting to see where we have a fundamental difference of opinion.

2 Likes
54

Ok - that’s asinine. Learn from history? Usually the average guy who didn’t resist growing militant forces ended up in a gulag or a mass grave. Do you have access to youtube or liveleak? Lots of examples of completely unarmed, non violent people getting shot, maced, tased, or beaten.

Because I’m armed, don’t want to public surveillance etc I’m giving them a reason to up their arms with more SWAT teams and MRAPS? LOL. How about innocent until proven guilty? How about the fact that violent crime is way down from the 90s and their reasoning for all this heavy equipment is bullshit. Every podunk down now wants a SWAT team.It’s ridiculous. And if they legalized drugs pretty much all the reasoning for it evaporates over night.

I’m not advocating violence vs the police - but I think their increased military-like presence and heavy handed tactics like no-knock warrants is a bad thing.

55

Or the cops could’ve left their testosterone at the base, come during the day and knock like they used to just two or three decades ago, and no problems as well, guns or not.

Attackers, uniformed or not, give up their right to not be shot at. I see no problem with self-defense, do you? How do you recognize a bad-intentioned intruder over a raiding bunch of thrill-seeking cops?

It’s better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six.

1 Like
56

So gun control legislation in the USA is disproportionately skewed in favour of easy gun acquisition for the benefit of a massive multi-billion dollar industry, at the expense of even the most basic, common sense laws like a firearms registry.

If they aggressively lobbied government to lift pool safety regulations just to make a buck then, yes, they would be fucking evil indeed.

And if there is one thing I have noticed in these discussions, its that “numbers” that get posted are hotly contested on all sides, so don’t get too self-congratulatory about anything you think you may have “proved”.

2 Likes
57

Question one - how are they in my house?
Question two - why are they attacking me?
Question three - why do they have / how did they get a weapon?
Question four - why is diplomacy not an option?

Question five - is my waiting five minutes for police response in the event of an astronomically unlikely event the price I have to pay for a society in which any random idiot on the street isn’t allowed to carry a concealed murder device? Because I think I’ll take my chances if so.

You have no basis for certainty as to what he would or would not agree with, since you literally know absolutely nothing about his personal views.

That said, as is so often the case with this sort of thing, the attacker was a mentally ill individual - this in a nation where mental health treatment is amazingly hard to come by, but where unlicensed firearms like the one involved in this case are supremely abundant.

Personally, I think it’s far saner to push for better mental health care to prevent these sorts of events ever happening to begin with, rather than to arm people in some desperate hope that they can react to a violent situation.

Please note, despite being armed, Silverman was unable to prevent Hunts’ murder, was himself wounded, and didn’t even manage to subdue Plotts - that was accomplished by two separate unarmed individuals who weren’t present for the exchange of gunfire.

Arming people is not an effective solution. It is by nature reactive, when what we need is a proactive solution.

Advocating private gun ownership to protect people from shootings is like advocating having people carry fire escape equipment in case of a fire. I’d rather just work to prevent fires in the first place, wouldn’t you?

5 Likes
58

I have to say, that seems to be a laughably optimistic prediction of the the likely outcome of that scenario.

2 Likes
59

And still, it keeps happening.
On the other side of the equation, being unarmed does not guarantee not being killed.

1 Like
60

Those agencys’ activities aren’t consistent with human rights. Me not wanting assault rifles to be consumer goods is.

That’s not a comparison. That’s not perspective. This guy used a gun to kill someone. Kennedy had a car accident and fled the scene, a crime for which he was given a 2 month suspended sentence. To compare the two exposes your bias.

This Mother Jones article contains information that relates to a person’s history. If that information is incorrect, or being manipulated, then you’d be able to call bias. Since your argument of bias is based on your assertion that similar crimes would be dealt with differently by Mother Jones if it were a liberal figure in the crosshairs, but you’ve failed to give a comparable example of such a person, you’ve failed to illustrate bias.

5 Likes
61

If you say so. You’d need to get stats on the proportion of those events that resulted in a whole homeowner defending their actions in front of a jury to prove the point though.