As I’ve stated, people aren’t arguing for rocket launchers and nukes because they agree with the general principle of limiting private ownership of weapons in the name of public safety… some of them just don’t want to admit it.
“Pertaining to small arms” is a value judgement that has no basis in the text of the Amendment itself. For that matter, reasonable people can disagree on what exactly is included in the term “small arms.”
And it expired with nothing to replace it. So how can you argue that we have more limits on gun ownership today than we did ten years ago? Sometimes gun rights advocates just come across as sore winners.
Sure. I guess one would need to be specific for me to argue for or against it. I am not for complete abandonment of all regulation, but I am not keen on more. One would have to have a really good rational for me to agree.
Depends on what state you live in. In some states we got a slice of cake back. In other states they got more chomps out of their cake.
Federally it has been fairly stagnant on new guns laws in the past 30 years. But not so in many of the states.
This is precisely why I won’t join. I live in the country, I’d like someone to go up to bat for my right to defend myself (“when seconds count, the cops will be there in minutes”) and IMHO considering how out-of-whack the eastern U.S. ecosystem is, it’s more humane to allow, say, expanded whitetail deer hunting rather than letting disease run its course (something happening in ultra-restrictive Illinois right now) but the NRA is batshit crazy right now.
In my area any legitimate business with a telephone can make an instant background check. But the check is not infallible; someone could steal the ID of their identical twin brother with a flawless record, and many people who are desperately insane have not yet been identified. Therefore some profiling would inevitably happen, and again that’s why we have trial by jury and not by computer - because it takes a jury to distinguish between reasonable behavior (he was Arab, frothing at the mouth and had a t-shirt that said “I’m going to blow up a school”, yer honor, damn right I profiled his ass!), legitimate private trade (“he was Arab and I didn’t feel like selling any dynamite to anybody that day”) and systematic bigotry (“he was an Arab and all us dynamite vendors know we should never sell to them”).
I apologize in advance for going a little deep here, but the work of Kurt Godel implies that no useful system of communication can exist that cannot formulate paradox; knowing this, and understanding that language evolves, it is clear that codification of good judgement into statutes without “reasonable man” and “jury of peers” safety mechanisms is completely impossible. This was known intuitively before Godel and Chomsky were born, and justice has always demanded we acknowledge that people cannot survive day-to-day without making personal judgements, and those judgements cannot be fairly evaluated without using the judgement of other humans. Mistakes will be made, and no amount of writing things down on paper will change that. We can only minimize injustice, never eliminate it. So, (returning from the depths) I acknowledge that you are right, but I don’t see how that matters.
Banning MP3-sharing sites worked; why wouldn’t a gun-ban work?
I used to be all in favor of certain types of gun-bans.
I used to laugh at the scare-stories about 3D-printers.
Eventually, I started congiting some of my cognitive dissonance.
It’s still pretty dissonant, but I’m coming around to the idea that if we are going to ban guns, we are going to have to ban specific outputs from 3D printers.
And that ain’t gonna work so well.
We don’t need a technical solution to the gun problem – we need a social solution.
In my dissonance, however, I hain’t got much of one to offer.
OK - click on image, it will darken the screen and show the image. Right click view image, and it will take you to the direct link of the image. Left click to zoom 100%
My boss claims I could build a photocopier out of rocks and garbage using only hand tools, but would never be able to figure out how to make a double-sided copy without her holding my hand. Thanks for the UI assistance; I am now a qualified embiggerator operator.
I enjoyed the cartoon even though the font’s eyebleedingly hideous at any size (everybody’s a critic!).
Semi-related to the first part of your post, I kind of think that it’s funny that many of the folks who use illegal substances are the same folks who think that making guns illegal will keep them out of peoples’ hands.
A tiny fraction of the world’s nuclear stockpiles has been used to kill people. Or chemical or biological weapons, for that matter.
So I’m not sure that’s a particularly meaningful metric.
How about weighing up the possibilities and probabilities of good versus harm? Seems to me, any kind of weapon generally rates pretty low according to that criteria. And the old ‘defense against tyranny’ line is a joke.
So a tiny fraction of cars kill people, but that’s not such a big deal compared to all the utility they provide. The reason we should be worried about cars is the climate-endangering emissions, and by rights their days should be numbered as we know them. And you can’t even begin to argue that guns are a tenth as useful.
Gratuitous, ad hominem, unprovable, and trivially negatable by point[ing] out that many who don’t use feel this way, and many who do use don’t, and that “many” is a weasel-word in any case.
Well, you’re kind of painting your highly personal opinions and experiences as objective fact, like most of us do.
I’ve mentioned before that someone once spray-painted swastikas and “kill all nigger lovers” on the sidewalk behind my house. Nothing came of that threat in the end, but I still wouldn’t trade my ability to purchase weapons designed to quickly and efficiently kill multiple humans from a distance for all the preventable gun deaths ever; you can’t expect me to sacrifice the ability to defend my family just because someone I never met is unable to use or store a killing tool safely. That’d be inhuman. If you honestly re-evaluate your argument of good .vs. harm from my viewpoint, or re-evaluate your claim that the ‘defense against tyranny line is a joke’ from the viewpoint of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, you will get an opposite result.
Similarly, my personal views on carcinogen-spewing transportation reflect that three people I loved dearly have died of lung cancer. I would rather have those three people back than all the (highly arguable) “usefulness” of all the carcinogen-spewing automobiles ever built. Really, f**k gas cars, I would vote quite cheerfully for a total ban, and I believe they have always done far more harm than good. Always. If it wasn’t for the unholy triumvirate of GM, DuPont and Standard Oil (orchestrated by that traitorous scumbag Kettering) we’d already have a sustainable liquid fuel infrastructure based on agriculture, you know? And millions of children would not have been permanently harmed by exposure to tetraeythl lead, and slaughtering Arabs with my tax dollars would never have been a viable means for Bush and Shrub to keep the price of Texas oil high. Gas engines are an unnecessary abomination far more harmful than guns, from where I’m sitting.
I’m not saying you should change your opinion, I’m saying you should acknowledge that it’s subjective. Mine’s quite different.
Let’s say whoever it was saying the US is a special case on this question has a pretty good point…
My tone of factual objectivity was no accident; the views I was espousing with it aren’t exactly mine, but my my society’s.
Rural folks are the only civilians around here who need ‘killing tools’ and that’s just for animals.
In my country, the notion that any normal, everyday person would have a reason to point a gun at another human, that’s not something that really occurs to people. That stuff just happens in the movies.
