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Since you don't use the police ...

Domestic law-enforcement is a tiny fraction of tax expenditures. So tiny, bringing it up is a misnomer. Even public schools cost more ($620 billion ) than police in the US (under $200 billion) — and parents still need to add hundreds of dollars on top of it. Which about matches the 640 billion spent collectively on Medicare.

But schools aren't the highest expenditure either — welfare spending exceeds $1 trillion every year (that's just the Federal government spending, BTW), for example, which is 10 times the spending on police by both Federal and local governments.

Military, the usual lighting rod of Leftists, is expensive too, but those expenditures (along with law enforcement) are explicitly in the government's care according to the Constitution. Nothing else is...

To even bring up "police" in any tax-discussion is dishonest. One can always tell a Statist by it.

Don't forget that there are many young, underage kids that are now sex offenders in the glorious United States.

"Throughout the United States, children as young as nine years old who are adjudicated delinquent may be subject to sex offender registration laws"

http://bostonreview.net/blog/y...

http://www.sacurrent.com/sanan...

http://www.justicepolicy.org/n...

I can recall several years ago a story about two young girls, not even in middle school becoming registered sex offenders for sending pictures of themselves to each other. Under current laws, they were "producing child pornography".

Sure, there are a lot of sick fucks out there, but the current method is completely broken.

Actually in practice you do have to prove your innocence or at least afford a good lawyer to find a loophole.
This is one of the reasons that the American prison system is full of poor people who co

No, the reason the American prison system has the highest incarceration rate in the world is because of the stupid War on Drugs and mandatory sentencing guidelines. "We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of Western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offenses". Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety [pdf] by the Justice Policy Institute says:
"U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence,4 the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses."

Others in gael or prison though not convicted of drug offenses are there because they committed another crime such as theft to support their dru8g habit. Re-legalization and taxing drugs would do a lot to reduce the prison population in the US. With drugs being legal the prices will be lower thus reducing crimes such as the above theft, or more importantly murder. It seems that almost daily the news talks about murder Mexico, especially Ciudad Jaurez, Mexico, right across the border from El Paso, Texas. Almost all of these murders have something to do with drugs. Legal drugs being legal to import, as well as legal to grow your own, would significantly reduce violent crimes.

If drugs were taxed then the money collected used for treatment of those who asked for it then drugs abuse and addiction would decline. There are no drugs that are so addictive that people can not be "cured" of their addiction. The Rat Park study showed that in enriched living conditions rats were not addicted to drugs, when given a choice between water with and without the drug they avoided the water laced with the drug. The hypothesis of the test was that living conditions and not drugs cause addiction.

Of course so called Drug Warriors and the prison-industrial complex don't want to hear that.

Falcon

You description of the French resistance is more than a bit beside the point. It does nothing to refute the principal I presented. The Allies provided them with one shot pistols and the loosely chambered guns I mentioned were the submachine guns you reference. The point was, an armed resistance with weaponry inferior to those of the people they are fighting, can make a difference. You've basically provided zero evidence that small arms like handguns are ineffective in a civil insurrection. Until you do so, you have done nothing to support your opinion. Not that it matters as it is only one, minor point. They might be useful. There is no proof to the contrary, so lacking other reasons, why should they be banned?

The guns the Resistance were armed with were equivalent to what the German soliders had. So, no, The french resistence's use of arms (or lack thereof) does not support your argument that the guns owned by US civilians are likely to make any difference to civil defence. The Resistances' overall victory dependend very much on the overwhelming force brought to bare by the Allied invasion and on the fact that they were armed, supported, directed, and even managed (at a unit level with Allied soldier/spies on the ground) by the Allies. This is not the organic and highly successful civil defence scenario you advocate. If anything, it lends support to the argument that personally owned arms for civil defence are next to useless and that we should wait for a foreign power to airdrop them to us.

Who argued that there should not be training and licensing requirements? This is a strawman.

You, at least, implied as much. mandatory training would be of a benefit to this goal, but I'm unconvinced the benefit of that training outweighs the restriction on people's freedom to run their own lives that it would entail.. You are certainly not arguing for training. Without training-being-linked to gun-ownership I have a hard time swallowing the civil defence rationale at all--especially in the day of the professional army (most of the population knowing damn little about basic combat and the professionals knowing infinitely more--amongst their many other advantages)

How do you define "poverty?" Usually it is a measure of wealth disparity within a country or locality. A person below the poverty level in the US has a higher quality of living and a great deal more wealth than a fairly wealthy person in other parts of the world.

By "poverty" I refer to the state of lacking the means (or purchasing power) to care for oneself according to reasonable standards (e.g., eat a decent meal, live in a safe dwelling, care for their children, etc). Although some people may define poverty relative to, say, median income I do not think this is a particularly useful measure (it may be an easier one to measure, but it's not useful). We can compare poverty by accounting for inflation within the US and relative to purchasing power across the world.

So you're arguing that employment rates correlate more strongly with violent crime levels than wealth disparity does? I've never seen any study that supported this fact and I've read several that disagree.

You must have never studied the issue beyond your pro-gun soundbytes then because there is a mountain of evidence showing high degree of correlation: nationally, regionally, locally, and individually. It has been common knowledge by those on the front-lines (e.g., police, school adminstrators, criminologists, etc) that people that are either employed or in-school are _far_ less likely to commit crime, violent or otherwise.

http://www.justicepolicy.org/reports/CrimeRiseBack grounder6_1606.doc

http://i

Have you ever copied a music record/cd/tape?

Have you ever listened to an illegally copied record/cd/tape?

Have you ever seen anyone with an illegally copied record/cd/tape?

Have you ever used a product in a manner that was inconsistent with its labeling?

Have you ever torn the tag off your couch cushion and then later gave away/sold the couch?

Have you ever took your kid and the neighbors to an out-of-state camping trip/vacation/drive/etc without explicit written permission from the parents?

Have you ever flattened a coin on a railroad track?

Have you pissed on the side of a federally maintained road?

Well guess what buddy? You have violated federal laws!!! You should be convicted and sent to prison.

-FL

Have you ever copied a music record/cd/tape?

Have you ever listened to an illegally copied record/cd/tape?

Have you ever seen anyone with an illegally copied record/cd/tape?

Have you ever used a product in a manner that was inconsistent with its labeling?

Have you ever torn the tag off your couch cushion and then later gave away/sold the couch?

Have you ever took your kid and the neighbors to an out-of-state camping trip/vacation/drive/etc without explicit written permission from the parents?

Have you ever flattened a coin on a railroad track?

Have you pissed on the side of a federally maintained road?

Well guess what buddy? You have violated federal laws!!! You should be convicted and sent to prison.

-FL

-FL

-FL