What are you talking about? I have seen that film I don’t recall the NRA being mentioned. A short google search I don’t see any obvious links to the NRA and MPAA. I don’t think Mormons or Catholics are directly involved either, though I know some people who make up the MPAA are Mormon or Catholic.
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Yep, the NRA got legislation passed that prevents anyone who receives any federal funds for their research from advocating for gun control, except that “advocating for gun control” is interpreted to mean “do any research at all on gun violence.” Because apparently the NRA believes that to understand gun violence would, in and of itself, be an argument for gun control. Which is pretty telling, really.
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And that is a complete misrepresentation of the facts, unless by “other scientists” you mean some retired engineers and physicists from the days before computer modelling and statistics.
From what I read, scientists with any understanding of the subject all agree that the effect of increased atmospheric CO2 is a rise in the Earth’s temperature. What they do not have a consensus about is how this will manifest itself in detail (how fast glaciers will melt, how the ocean will be affected, storm patterns and so on.)
Unfortunately journalists, who for the most part were the people who slept through science and math classes at school, tend to think that if there is a subject where there is not 100% agreement, 50% of the time must be allocated to diametrically opposing viewpoints because, circulation and eyeballs increase with conflict. Journalism is the enemy of nuance.
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Maybe because US political candidates need supporters who will actually turn out and vote. Lobby groups promise to ensure that their members will actually vote.
Maybe as a first small step the US should act to increase voter turnout.
They are both valuable population control mechanisms.
Your point #6 is backwards. The biggest problem is that there are dollars to be made in not banning guns.
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Is it really? As a Brit, when I read that section it reads like it was intended solely to talk about stockpiles of weapons for militias, and it’s just been twisted further and further over the years to become a justification for everyone to be able to keep their stock of guns at home.
Mind you, my main reaction is; why are you so invested in a bit of legislation that was written two hundred years ago? Who cares what the founding fathers thought? They’re long dead and they lived in a very different time. Why not sit down and write a law today, that deals with the situation today?
You might as well expect a religious text from thousands of years ago to have some magic relevance to your daily life. Oh wait, that’s totally what lot of Americans think right? Explains a lot.
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Holy f- what a derail - and BTW, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists agrees that anthropogenic climate change is real, the scientific battle should be over. (Spoiler - they do think that)
Good questions though.
Many, if not all of the planets in our solar system are warming up, and Algore hasn’t been to any of them.
Repeal the 2nd amendment.
Perhaps not even that. Find some way to overturn the “Build It And They Will Come” idea that having a vast number of unregulated firearms will cause a “Well Regulated Militia” to spring into being decision. Make being part of a Well Regulated Militia a necessary requirement to owning the guns.
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You forgot that one:
D: We need stricter gun laws.
R: It’s too soon. Stop pandering on emotion to push your agenda!
Of course, since it never stops being too soon before a new tragedy occurs, it’s always too soon - as a result of which it’s always too late.
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There’s no need to repeal the amendment – we just need to revisit the promulgated interpretation, just as the nuts have done.
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Plus: 3D printing will throw the whole thing out of whack. You can’t just legislate technology away. We – and I me the BoingBoing commentariat __ know this, but we keep forgetting it. There is no technological solution for this problem. It requires social hacking.
Fortunately, we tech-nuts are great at politicks, right?!!!
[link supplied by @daneel, thankee-kindly, good sir! ]
[that should have a link to an article about how we tech-nuts SUCK at politics, but I can’t find the thread back. PM me the link if you know it, and I’ll update. thanks for your patience, if any.]
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
NOTE: LIFE comes first. Whatever rights you or anyone feels they are entitled to, LIFE always is the first one for ALL people. Regardless of age, creed, religion, ideology, nationality, political status, or mental state.
LIFE comes first. That is why we consider murder such a horrible crime. It’s the primary right of all people, and the only thing we can never give back to someone, never compensate anyone for having had it taken away.
Guns have one purpose and ONLY one purpose…taking life. They are like a Fire Extinguisher…uni-taskers. Guns kill. Its the only reason they exist. End of story.
Not for quite some time. Sure, there have been a couple of largely plastic, largely 3d printed pistols. Which look like they’re probably accurate to 4 centimetres and will fall apart after three shots.
When the makers get to the point of being able to easily cad-cam hardened steel then there will be a problem, but even then, the technology will be so specialist that it’ll be rare as hell.
Ultimately nothing’s going to prevent the really dedicated nutjob. Just like no number of burglar alarms will keep out the genuine professional thief. What gun control can do though is make it difficult for the guy who’s having a really bad week to kill himself or to kill others.
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No gun nut here (please, America, fix your gun laws!), but you’re also forgetting all those people who buy guns strictly for target shooting, and the like (which happens quite a bit up here in Canada, no idea about how much it happens in the States).
That is, most Americans don’t care about poor black people and don’t want them in there, gumming up the stats. I don’t mean that as a personal attack on you for bringing this up, that’s just what I see in the media. It’s hard to believe that “black lives matter” needs to be said so often.
Jim Jeffries:
I’m going to say some things that are just facts. In Australia, we had guns. Right up until 1996. In 1996, Australia had the biggest massacre on earth. Still hasn’t been beaten. Now, after that they banned guns. In the 10 years before Port Arthur, there was 10 massacres. Since the gun ban in 1996, there hasn’t been a single massacre since. I don’t know how or why this happened…maybe it was a coincidence, right?
Now, please understand, I understand that America and Australia are two vastly different cultures with different people, right? I get it. In Australia we had the biggest massacre on earth and the Australian government went–that’s it! No more guns! And we all went–yeah, right then, that seems fair enough.
Now, in America you have the Sandy Hook massacre, which little, tiny children died and your government went…maybe we’ll get rid of the big guns? And 50% of you went – FUCK YOU, DON’T TAKE MY GUNS!
I was tempted to quote that article regarding some of the hypothetical D vs. R gun control conversations. One of the most important things that article says is that it is not the case that the political system is D and R being mirrors of one another with moderates being the sensible ones in the middle. In fact, if you poll on issues not on self-identified left vs. right, American independents are to the left of the democrats. You know, in sane land.
Every time this conversation comes up I find myself wanting to argue with the people I agree with and support the people I don’t agree with. I’m totally on board with all of the issues regarding banning guns, I think it would probably reduce a few deaths but would not remove (and might even exacerbate) the part of the American psyche that says mass-murder/suicide is on the menu of options to solve personal problems.
To me, the essence of gun culture gone crazy are state laws that discourage doctors from asking if patients own guns. It is routine for doctors and nurses to remind new parents of various child safety issues, but properly storing guns gets pushed off the table. Doctors would always ask a person with suicidal ideation if they have a plan/own the means to commit suicide - the state is interfering with and chilling that communication. Guns may not kill people, but gun owners being paranoid as fuck sure seems to.
The political spectrum doesn’t have a mirror in the middle. The gun-control nuts are not actually that nuts - maybe registering guns and requiring training in their use the way we do cars isn’t practical for some reason or other, but it also isn’t batshit crazy. The anti-gun-control nuts are actually totally nuts, and they get that crazy written into law.
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776 as of the first of last month. And that’s the number of people killed by police, not just shot.
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