I am most definitely not an expert on Canadian politics. However when I look at the website for the Liberal party of Canada, their
gun policy proposal does not to me read as one that wants to take away or ban all handguns.
Well, you have to read between the lines, and be more up-to-speed on Canadian politics. Until very recently (as in three days ago) they were reluctant to come right out and say it, because they knew they'd alienate, amoung others, rural voters.
Now, though, this. I personally think this is just pandering to their base, but they won't actually do anything, but it flies directly in the face of their protestations about wanting to write policy based on evidence and data.
The main problem with a two-party situation is that it's inherently polarizing. The only way to differentiate yourself from the other party is to illustrate your differences, and to move further away from the other party. It also leads to the Take Out Menu problem; for example, in the US, if you're pro-life, you're assumed to automatically be anti-gun. Whereas, in real life, people don't automatically fall into the neat camp on one side or the other.
I'm a Canadian, and I'm liberal, but I can't vote with the Liberal party because, hey, on top of being pro-socialism, pro-rights, pro-choice, and so on, I'm also pro-legal-firearms-ownership. And the Liberal Party of Canada believes that firearms should be banned, and are busily deciding if outlawing handguns completely will solve the problem of 'illegal guns used in crimes.'
America has a lot of problems that need solving with it's political system, including lobbying, 'corporations are people and bribery, excuse me, campaign contributions, are free speech,' voting shenanigans, and so on.
Yes, but there's a difference between 'I'm not going to assume that you're correct just because you're a journalist' and 'I am going to assume that all journalists who don't validate my worldview are actively, knowingly, and maliciously attempting to lie, and are Enemies of the People.
Well, read the book before you dismiss it; I thought it gave an excellent overview of the politics of the time, including going into the English Common Law precedents, the idea that the founding fathers were terribly scared of the idea of a standing army, the horse trading and compromise that went into the Constitutional Convention, and so on. If the only reason you consider him 'partisan' is for having a political affiliation, I'd hate to hear about what you think of Scalia.....
Like it or not, most of modern American constitutional law has nothing to do with the Constitution. The Commerce Clause is used in ridiculous ways. It's widely accepted that 'Congress shall make no law' actually means 'Congress, the Executive Branch, the States, and so on, shall make no law....'
The simple fact of the matter is that the US Constitution needs an overhaul to take into account lessons learned in the last 250 years, in the exact same way that State constitutions are routinely overhauled.
And you're right, for some reason I kept typing '1998' instead of '2008,' so all of my opinions are meaningless, and Sarah Palin now gets to be president.
Awesome! We've hashed things out, and we're in agreement.
You know, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day about how America has a very confrontational culture; it's baked into the legal system, it's baked into the governmental system, especially with the two-party reality, it's baked into the mythology, and it's baked into the basic culture.
You mentioned that other countries with stricter gun laws don't automatically have higher non-gun violence rates, which universally true, but I'd also like to point out that those other countries tend to have lower violence for the same reason they have tighter gun laws; they both point to different cultural norms, rather than one following from the other.
I do see that difference. Yet prior to 1988, to go back to my example, the 2nd Amendment was understood by all, including the Founding Fathers, to not contemplate a universal individual right to firearms. After 1988 it was, because of 'linguistics.'
Hell, the entire concept of the modern SCOTUS is because of a footnote in a decision in a writ of mandamus.
By this logic, you must utterly reject the 1988 Heller decision, wherein the SCOTUS decided that the 2nd Amendment guaranteed an individual right to firearms ownership, which was NOT the interpretation from the founding up until then. In other words, they moved the line without changing the text.
Do you have any ideas you would like to propose to reduce the instances of mass murder? I can point out that mass murder is exceedingly rare in countries where guns are even slightly more difficult to get, but I haven't seen any reason to expect you would be receptive to that. How would you like to reduce mass murder?
Increased education funding, increased social assistance, mental health funding, and generally working to change America's general culture of violence and confrontation.
Now, to be clear, I happen to agree that there's sane gun control and access that honors the rights of the individual while at the same time recognizing the inherent risk of a firearm, the exact same way car control and access laws recognize that cars are inherently dangerous, without demonizing them. But in America, the genie is out of the bottle, and continuing to concentrate on 'it's too easy to get a gun' and completely ignoring 'lets figure out why these people are driven to this extreme, and maybe see if we can lessen that' is just bloody stupid.
And none of that in any way refutes my point that hardly anyone is intentionally murdered by motor vehicle trauma.
The point is, if you magically make all guns go away, gun violence goes down, knife violence goes up. Take away the knives, and blunt force violence goes up. All because you're not addressing the issue, violence, but playing keepaway with the tools.
That's very highly debatable to say the least. If his only way to kill them had been with his bare hands, he likely would have felt it wasn't worth the effort. Even if he had a sharp knife, his chances of pulling it off would not have been very high and he probably wouldn't have done it. The gun made it very, very easy.
The fact that you're unimaginative doesn't mean they aren't. Up here in Canada, people are going apeshit over shootings in Toronto, but a guy plowing down pedestrians with a cube van dropped off of the news within days. Why? Because, exactly as you're illustrating, people are oddly scared of gun violence, but perfectly willing to accept other violence.
But why do we insist on making it so easy for people to do this?
For fuck's sake, instead of making it HARDER to be a mass murderer, maybe figure out how to reduce the instances of mass murder?
Once the world settles on a wireless charging standard, and it starts to become more ubiquitious, like getting built into cars, we may well see things move that way.
Back in the olden days, people in car crashes generally died of head trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of chest trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of....
You're concentrating on 'they were killed by a gun.' You should be concentrating on 'they were killed.' The tool should be utterly irrelevant to the matter; the issue here is that somebody felt the need to take the lives of other human beings, and went ahead and did it. If he didn't have access to a gun, he'd have used another tool. Look at solving the actual issue: people resorting to murder, rather than worrying about which tool that murder happened to be committed with.
Maybe at one time. Not for a long long time, though.
Specifically, 1977, when the NRA began changing from 'gun safety and training' to 'firearms ownership advocacy.'
The NRA in the 1930s:
I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.
Now, it's important to note that at the time, the NRA was was pro-control, not anti-ownership.
It's also important to note that the idea that the 2nd Amendment guarantees free ownership of firearms by private citizens harkens back to the olden times of 1988 when a bunch of activist judges on the SCOTUS overthrew the prior two hundred years of constitutional interpretation and law.
If he'd driven through the crowd with a car, would you be calling for increased car laws?
If he'd walked through the seated rows wildly swinging a baseball bat, would you be talking about restricting little league games?
If he'd walked in with a propane tank bomb, would you be looking at regulating barbeques?
If he'd walked in with a large fan, a sack of flour and a lighter, would we be talking about how nobody 'needs' to own a kitchen, and should eat out at restaurants with licensed and trained professionals doing the cooking?
If he'd walked in with a big jug of bleach, and a big jug of chlorine, mixed them up and left, would you be advocating for background checks at Home Depot in the cleaning aisle?
You ask 'why do we need access to guns under such exceptionally loose terms?' Why are you assuming that if somebody wanted to do harm like this guy did, he'd walk into a gun store, run into some red tape, and figure 'oh, ok, guess I won't go harm a bunch of innocents, I wonder if Dairy Queen's open?'
Lets address the root issue, violence, rather than fixating on what tool somebody chooses to use to perpetrate that violence.
Or, put another way, why would you expect a gun ban to stop violence, when the existing bans against violence and murder don't? Does it need to be double-illegal to make people think twice? Triple-illegal?
This is a good point. Taken as 'a movie,' TLJ was fine. Taken as 'Episode 8 of Star Wars,' it was crap. Taken as 'an immediate followup to TFA,' it was nothing but the new director saying 'fuck you' to the old director.
I say something similar about Netflix's Altered Carbon; taken as a stand-alone show, it's great. Taken as an adaptation of the book, it's horrible. I can enjoy it as the first while wishing it wasn't the second.
I was under the impression that the Supreme Court had ruled that intact papers discarded in the trash could be used as evidence, but discarded shreds needed a warrant - BEFORE their seizure - because the person discarding shredded documents had an expectation of privacy.
Your impressions are meaningless. Find some actual case law. California v. Greenwood says that garbage is abandoned property, and requires no warrant. No provision is made for what the garbage is; if you're discarding it, you're obviously done with it.
Life? What 'right' to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What 'right' to life has a man who must die to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of 'right'? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is 'unalienable'? And is it 'right'? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. The third 'right' -- the 'pursuit of happiness'? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives -- but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can ensure that I will catch it.
That's because a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale.
Yes, it does.
Producer says "I will give you Thing in exchange for $Amount."
Person A says "OK," and hands over $Amount, and gets a copy of Thing. A sale has been made.
Person B says "No." No sale has been made.
Person C says "I do not want to give you $Amount, but I want Thing," and illegally copies Thing. Producer has lost a sale, because Person C got Thing, but Producer did not get $Amount.
The point is, there's a difference between 'not making a sale' and 'person getting Thing without paying.'
Apparently, when a Democrat loses, the logical response is to completely up-end the voting process?
In 2012, Donald Trump decried the electoral college. His exact words? "A disaster for a democracy."
So, obviously, in 2016, when he won the EC but lost the popular vote, Donald Trump graciously announced that, due to his long-standing and on-the-record rejection of the EC system, he was conceding the election to Hillary Clinton.
No, wait. After winning the EC but losing the popular vote, Donald Trump announced that, due to his long-standing and on-the-record rejection of the EC system, he was making it one of his primary goals as President to overhaul America's election system for the 21st century, with full buy-in from the States and constitutional amendments.
Slashdot Mirror
Please explain how two gay men, or two gay women, can produce natural offspring without any third party involvement.
Well, you have to read between the lines, and be more up-to-speed on Canadian politics. Until very recently (as in three days ago) they were reluctant to come right out and say it, because they knew they'd alienate, amoung others, rural voters.
Now, though, this. I personally think this is just pandering to their base, but they won't actually do anything, but it flies directly in the face of their protestations about wanting to write policy based on evidence and data.
The main problem with a two-party situation is that it's inherently polarizing. The only way to differentiate yourself from the other party is to illustrate your differences, and to move further away from the other party. It also leads to the Take Out Menu problem; for example, in the US, if you're pro-life, you're assumed to automatically be anti-gun. Whereas, in real life, people don't automatically fall into the neat camp on one side or the other.
I'm a Canadian, and I'm liberal, but I can't vote with the Liberal party because, hey, on top of being pro-socialism, pro-rights, pro-choice, and so on, I'm also pro-legal-firearms-ownership. And the Liberal Party of Canada believes that firearms should be banned, and are busily deciding if outlawing handguns completely will solve the problem of 'illegal guns used in crimes.'
America has a lot of problems that need solving with it's political system, including lobbying, 'corporations are people and bribery, excuse me, campaign contributions, are free speech,' voting shenanigans, and so on.
And I'm sure we're all nerdy enough to reply "Not Whitey; Y! T!"
Stupid MetaCops. Worse than chiseled spam.
I still giggle every time I'm driving down the Danforth and I pass Coxwell.
Yes, but there's a difference between 'I'm not going to assume that you're correct just because you're a journalist' and 'I am going to assume that all journalists who don't validate my worldview are actively, knowingly, and maliciously attempting to lie, and are Enemies of the People.
Well, read the book before you dismiss it; I thought it gave an excellent overview of the politics of the time, including going into the English Common Law precedents, the idea that the founding fathers were terribly scared of the idea of a standing army, the horse trading and compromise that went into the Constitutional Convention, and so on. If the only reason you consider him 'partisan' is for having a political affiliation, I'd hate to hear about what you think of Scalia.....
Like it or not, most of modern American constitutional law has nothing to do with the Constitution. The Commerce Clause is used in ridiculous ways. It's widely accepted that 'Congress shall make no law' actually means 'Congress, the Executive Branch, the States, and so on, shall make no law....'
The simple fact of the matter is that the US Constitution needs an overhaul to take into account lessons learned in the last 250 years, in the exact same way that State constitutions are routinely overhauled.
And you're right, for some reason I kept typing '1998' instead of '2008,' so all of my opinions are meaningless, and Sarah Palin now gets to be president.
The 2nd Amendment is unique that it has that odd prefatory clause.
I quite enjoyed "The Second Amendment: A Biography" by Michael Waldman as an excellent overview of the entire subject.
Awesome! We've hashed things out, and we're in agreement.
You know, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day about how America has a very confrontational culture; it's baked into the legal system, it's baked into the governmental system, especially with the two-party reality, it's baked into the mythology, and it's baked into the basic culture.
You mentioned that other countries with stricter gun laws don't automatically have higher non-gun violence rates, which universally true, but I'd also like to point out that those other countries tend to have lower violence for the same reason they have tighter gun laws; they both point to different cultural norms, rather than one following from the other.
I do see that difference. Yet prior to 1988, to go back to my example, the 2nd Amendment was understood by all, including the Founding Fathers, to not contemplate a universal individual right to firearms. After 1988 it was, because of 'linguistics.'
Hell, the entire concept of the modern SCOTUS is because of a footnote in a decision in a writ of mandamus.
No, I'm saying that 'laws as written' is inherently impossible; there will ALWAYS be interpretation and reevaluation, because humans are humans.
By this logic, you must utterly reject the 1988 Heller decision, wherein the SCOTUS decided that the 2nd Amendment guaranteed an individual right to firearms ownership, which was NOT the interpretation from the founding up until then. In other words, they moved the line without changing the text.
Increased education funding, increased social assistance, mental health funding, and generally working to change America's general culture of violence and confrontation.
Now, to be clear, I happen to agree that there's sane gun control and access that honors the rights of the individual while at the same time recognizing the inherent risk of a firearm, the exact same way car control and access laws recognize that cars are inherently dangerous, without demonizing them. But in America, the genie is out of the bottle, and continuing to concentrate on 'it's too easy to get a gun' and completely ignoring 'lets figure out why these people are driven to this extreme, and maybe see if we can lessen that' is just bloody stupid.
The point is, if you magically make all guns go away, gun violence goes down, knife violence goes up. Take away the knives, and blunt force violence goes up. All because you're not addressing the issue, violence, but playing keepaway with the tools.
The fact that you're unimaginative doesn't mean they aren't. Up here in Canada, people are going apeshit over shootings in Toronto, but a guy plowing down pedestrians with a cube van dropped off of the news within days. Why? Because, exactly as you're illustrating, people are oddly scared of gun violence, but perfectly willing to accept other violence.
For fuck's sake, instead of making it HARDER to be a mass murderer, maybe figure out how to reduce the instances of mass murder?
Once the world settles on a wireless charging standard, and it starts to become more ubiquitious, like getting built into cars, we may well see things move that way.
Back in the olden days, people in car crashes generally died of head trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of chest trauma. So they did something about then, then people started dying of....
You're concentrating on 'they were killed by a gun.' You should be concentrating on 'they were killed.' The tool should be utterly irrelevant to the matter; the issue here is that somebody felt the need to take the lives of other human beings, and went ahead and did it. If he didn't have access to a gun, he'd have used another tool. Look at solving the actual issue: people resorting to murder, rather than worrying about which tool that murder happened to be committed with.
What problem are you attempting to solve by making guns harder to acquire? Because it sure isn't 'violence,' 'murder,' or even 'death rate.'
Specifically, 1977, when the NRA began changing from 'gun safety and training' to 'firearms ownership advocacy.'
The NRA in the 1930s:
Now, it's important to note that at the time, the NRA was was pro-control, not anti-ownership.
It's also important to note that the idea that the 2nd Amendment guarantees free ownership of firearms by private citizens harkens back to the olden times of 1988 when a bunch of activist judges on the SCOTUS overthrew the prior two hundred years of constitutional interpretation and law.
If he'd driven through the crowd with a car, would you be calling for increased car laws?
If he'd walked through the seated rows wildly swinging a baseball bat, would you be talking about restricting little league games?
If he'd walked in with a propane tank bomb, would you be looking at regulating barbeques?
If he'd walked in with a large fan, a sack of flour and a lighter, would we be talking about how nobody 'needs' to own a kitchen, and should eat out at restaurants with licensed and trained professionals doing the cooking?
If he'd walked in with a big jug of bleach, and a big jug of chlorine, mixed them up and left, would you be advocating for background checks at Home Depot in the cleaning aisle?
You ask 'why do we need access to guns under such exceptionally loose terms?' Why are you assuming that if somebody wanted to do harm like this guy did, he'd walk into a gun store, run into some red tape, and figure 'oh, ok, guess I won't go harm a bunch of innocents, I wonder if Dairy Queen's open?'
Lets address the root issue, violence, rather than fixating on what tool somebody chooses to use to perpetrate that violence.
Or, put another way, why would you expect a gun ban to stop violence, when the existing bans against violence and murder don't? Does it need to be double-illegal to make people think twice? Triple-illegal?
This is a good point. Taken as 'a movie,' TLJ was fine. Taken as 'Episode 8 of Star Wars,' it was crap. Taken as 'an immediate followup to TFA,' it was nothing but the new director saying 'fuck you' to the old director.
I say something similar about Netflix's Altered Carbon; taken as a stand-alone show, it's great. Taken as an adaptation of the book, it's horrible. I can enjoy it as the first while wishing it wasn't the second.
Your impressions are meaningless. Find some actual case law. California v. Greenwood says that garbage is abandoned property, and requires no warrant. No provision is made for what the garbage is; if you're discarding it, you're obviously done with it.
I can't find anything more recent about shredded documents being protected, though I do find references that they specifically aren't. See https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2508&context=clr
Yes, it does.
Producer says "I will give you Thing in exchange for $Amount."
Person A says "OK," and hands over $Amount, and gets a copy of Thing. A sale has been made.
Person B says "No." No sale has been made.
Person C says "I do not want to give you $Amount, but I want Thing," and illegally copies Thing. Producer has lost a sale, because Person C got Thing, but Producer did not get $Amount.
The point is, there's a difference between 'not making a sale' and 'person getting Thing without paying.'
So why is this done so rarely, if it's so easy?
In 2012, Donald Trump decried the electoral college. His exact words? "A disaster for a democracy."
So, obviously, in 2016, when he won the EC but lost the popular vote, Donald Trump graciously announced that, due to his long-standing and on-the-record rejection of the EC system, he was conceding the election to Hillary Clinton.
No, wait. After winning the EC but losing the popular vote, Donald Trump announced that, due to his long-standing and on-the-record rejection of the EC system, he was making it one of his primary goals as President to overhaul America's election system for the 21st century, with full buy-in from the States and constitutional amendments.
Truly, a man of honesty and integrity.