>There is nothing that would convince you that the man has a racist bone in his body.
If a picture surfaced tomorrow of Trump slobbering David Duke's knob under his old grand wizard robes - they STILL wouldn't believe he's had a racist's bone in his mouth !
I wish Obama WAS the guy Republicans kept saying he was... that guy would use his constitutional right to appoint Garland in the recess period and give the senate a last major fuck you. The actual Obama is too damn nice to you idiots.
Not to mention - that federal law may not apply to the president - but the constitution does, and his particular conflicts almost certainly violate the emoluments clause.
You gotta admit they are consistent. Before the election they said it was going to be rigged. Now that it's over they are still saying it was rigged - even though their guy won !
When one party is running a blatant ethno-nationalist fascist - when the countries with most experience of fascist dictators are warning you "hey - this guy looks and sounds EXACTLY like those evil fucks who took over our countries in the 1920s looked"... yeah, then it really has become a simple question of good and evil.
Or at the very least - of minor nuisances versus unspeakable horror.
Sometimes - the reason there is no nuance in the debate - is because there is nothing nuanced about the situation. You elected orange hitler. Stop trying to pretend you did anything less, and seriously - stop telling us that we don't know who he is or what kind of leader he will be. Stop expecting us to just forget the campaign, to pretend nothing he said and did up to this point was said or done.Stop asking us to assume he won't be as evil as he said he will be.
If he suddenly decides not to be evil - then we'll admit that in 4 years after he's been in power and not evil. We're not giving him the benefit of hte doubt because there is no reason to doubt. In a year there might be - but that is the one in a trillion hope right now, make no mistake I AM hoping for that, but I'd be an idiot to bet on it.
>So for you, the casualties of criminals who cannot be stopped in time by a government police force are simply acceptable collateral damage? Not at all. But that problem is already solving itself. There are about a thousand gun accident victims for every crime victim now - are THOSE just collateral damage to you ? How far does the ratio have to skew before you care more about them than about the few who still get killed by criminals ?
>I'm not sure what kind of reasons you would believe that a woman accosted by multiple men wouldn't be better off with a firearm for self defense. Are you arguing that perhaps pepper spray or a rape whistle are better at self defense? That particular crime is actually best addressed with all the things you rightwingers dismiss as SJW feminazi things. Treat the rape culture that encourages it.Teach men not to rape. Teach sons that you never, ever touch another human being unless you are invited to. Giving the woman a gun, or indeed any advice on 'how not to get raped' is just a way of saying 'make sure he rapes a different woman instead'. But even THAT crime is dropping.
>Actually, the law looks at three things - Ability, Opportunity, and Jeopardy. To assert that one must wait for actual lethal force (rather than jeopardy of serious harm or death), is silly. Should a police officer wait to be shot first before shooting back? I spoke about morality, I said nothing about the law. The law is hardly universal anyway, even within the USA for example you have stand-your-ground laws in some states and not in others. I spoke about justice, this is an area where (especially thanks to gun nuts) the law and justice rarely resemble each other.
>The answer to idiocy is education. You can't teach intelligence or responsibility. It's simply beyond the means of most people to learn.
>Teach people proper handling of firearms. We can't get people to wear their seatbelts and you think you an achieve THIS on a sufficient scale to make a dent ? That's so, utterly, naive.
> Hell, I fear idiots with *cars* more than I fear idiots with guns I fear both - but it's a LOT easier to defend myself against the former. I know how to drive defensively, I even took extra lessons to learn how to do that better. I can invest in cars with extra safety features (which I do as a matter of principle - I will not put my child in a car without airbags, ABS and ESP). But there is nothing I can do about idiots with guns. If some moron leaves his gun out and my child has a playdate and his kid gets the gun and shoots mine... an accident that happens about twice every month in America what the fuck exactly could I have done to reduce that risk ? I'll tell you - there is exactly one thing I could do: try to advocate for sensible gun control, if you can't pass a test on gun safety - including but not limited to proof you can actually hit what you are aiming at with VERY high results - then you shouldn't have one.
Now here's the kicker - I love guns. I was a professional sport-shot. I can hit a 1-inch bulls-eye at 50 yards 9 out of 10 times - and I can do that with pistols. But I don't have a single gun in my house and I never will. Exactly because I love guns - I know them better than most gun nuts - and so I respect them - and I know that the vast majority of people are too stupid to treat them with the proper respect. My dad was a cop. He always used to say he was far more scared of being killed by a dumbass rookie who didn't treat his gun with the proper respect than he ever was of being killed by a criminal. As he put it: "Eight out of ten cops are trigger-happy idiots".
>The best way to prevent accidents is training Training only works if you restrict access to those on whom the training worked. We license you to drive. We don't let anybody who wants to fly a passenger jet - you have to prove you know how to do it safely. Training without testing is non-existent.
>Interesting, Australia did something like that in response to a mass sh
> what would convince you that individual americans should have the right to self defense with firearms?
Evidence that, with the lowest crime rate in human history and dropping - self defense is a need you should give a thought to at all. Humans are horrifyingly bad at risk assessment, NEVER trust what makes sense because what makes sense to people is ALWAYS wrong. Trust numbers. And numbers say the risk of something happening that needs defense is extremely tiny and dropping.
How about evidence that guns are actually a good tool for self defense ? All the numbers say they aren't. In the one in a billion odds of you actually needing self defense a decent self-defense class is far more likely to save you than a gun ever will be. It's simply the wrong tool for the job on every level. And ironically, the more you follow the rules to reduce the risk of accidents - the less useful it becomes for self defense. An unloaded gun with the bullets kept in a separate safe isn't worth much if you actually ARE attack - since your attacker does not need to find the bullets and load his gun. His safety will not be on.
How about any reason to believe that the default approach to self defense should be lethal force ? Shouldn't you be BETTER than the few people that we still need defense against ? If you respond with lethal force, how are you not just escalating the situation forcing them to use lethal force as well and taking a RISK of somebody dying and making it a guarantee. Even the practicalities aside - it's morally wrong to suggest that you are justified to use lethal force for self defense at ANY moment up to where lethal force has been used against you. As long as there is a chance to end the situation with the attacker alive, you are obligated to use that.
The difference between my post and your mockery, is that my post is real. I don't fear guns - very few gun-control advocates do. But I do fear idiots with guns and if you don't - then you're the biggest idiot of all. There has never been a MORE rational and justified fear than the fear of a moron with the power to kill. And the idiots will always outnumber the smart people. For everybody who is smart enough to handle guns safely, there will ALWAYS be 20 who are idiots with them and get innocent people killed. So far America is averaging two people shot by toddlers a month this year. Toddlers - kids who cannot possibly understand the risks of guns, or the rules, who should never have been anywhere near them. But there are always enough idiots that some of them will get guns - and when toddlers play with guns people die -often other toddlers.
> as if any of your laws would ever stop a criminal from having a gun Nope, they won't - but then that was never the point of gun control. We're not that stupid - it's a strawman to pretend it is. The point of gun control is more than anything else to end gun ACCIDENTS. Which almost exclusively happen with legal guns. The second major thing it prevents is mass shootings - because the people who do those, they aren't criminals (at least - not until they actually do it). They don't have contacts, they aren't trusted. You think you can just show up at the docks in Australia and buy an illegal gun ? Nobody there will sell you one. If they don't know your face, if they don't have a history with you - or at least with whoever referred you - you cannot get one. Because they won't take the risk that you may be an undercover cop. The mass shooting types - it stops them, because they can NOT get guns, your average street criminals aren't stopped - but they don't NEED to be. In all of human history never before has people been as safe from crime as we are right now. And next year, we'll be even safer. If the current trends continue many countries will be crime-free before the end of this century ! We don't need to disarm criminals - they are a dying breed anyway. We just have to wait until there aren't anymore, and the risk of having to deal with one now is already so low that if you ever spend a sing
Self defense is the least likely use for a gun and its a terrible tool for the job. So if that is your argument then its defeated by itself. Its a method that has near zero odds of achieving the stated goal. Indeed the gun most likely to shoot a person is their own. Not to mention the problem is solving itself. Crime rates have been dropping universally for decades with no sign of stopping and completely independent of gun laws (since the trend is universal across all countries). So as the risk of an attack gets smaller every year while the risks of gun ownership remain the same there must logically be a point where there is no rational justification for the negative trade off. We passed that ages ago.
The 'defense against tyranny' argument also fails. No gun law has ever prevented or even slowed a revolution. By the point where people rise up against a governmenr they will find guns. They do not need to have them in advance.
Gun nuts would actually get more sympathy from me if they dropped all the bullshit attempts at rationalization and hust admitted there is nothing rational about it. Just admit it. You like having guns. It makes you feel good. Whether its a penis compensation thing or a feeling of power or a (false) sense of safety or a passion for their engineering or whatever else. Just admit it. Its an emotional thing. You have some emotional need your gun satisfies and a constitutional right to do it and we cannot stop you until enough people have met those needs some other way that we can get rid of that ammendment. America with the most unregulated guns have had more mass shooting in the last 20 years than the next 20 countried combine... twice over. Add them all together and its 22. America has had 48. Just admit you care more about whatever good feeling you get out of your gun than you care about those dead people. Just admit (like Heston to his credit did) that you are okay with letting them die to satisfy your emotional needs.
There is another difference. For profit news did not exist. News was a loss leader channels did in between shows. It did not make money... and was not expected to. So you could not buy editorial slant (very easily). In our age advertisers wite the news. The mainstream press is still a little better though: but only because they risk being sued for slander if they go too far.
But what you get to say they are, and treat them as, does. That's what the presumption of innocence means. Throw that away and you're living in a totaltarian police state. As a liberty it's at least as important, indeed probably even MORE important, than freedom of speech. Without presumption of innocence any other liberties you have can only ever exist on paper - because you can just be declared guilty of something to shut you up.
Now you are allowed to say they are terrorists, but since there's been no trial that statement has zero evidence to back it up - except some other people in uniforms who declared it (and if anything people in uniforms have been historically FAR less trustworthy than the ones in robes). Frankly - they have a valid case of slander against you for calling them that, and if any of them sued you WOULD lose since you can't prove your accusation.
>So, targeted slavery is bad, but universal slavery is okay? False analogy fallacy. Gun control has less than nothing in common with slavery. It's not even widely considered a bad thing - yet you're conflating it with something that today is almost universally considered one of the worst things humanity ever did.
>Universal gun control would be removing guns from police, secret service, and outlawing private security from carrying, as many rich and politically connected people do. Actually yes. Once you have decent gun control you can and should disarm the police. The UK has done exactly that. Their police are not armed. Their weapons are kept in safes at armory's and ONLY issued if they are going on an operation where armed resistance is reasonably expected to be found. In the USA police have killed over 1000 black men this year - that's just black men and just this year. In the UK the police has killed just 2 people in the past 20 years. It's a LOT easier to believe that the people they kill gave them no other choice when it's an average of one a decade.
>Make no mistake, all gun control is targeted against the lower-class masses, and privileging the government above the people. Except that countries with universal gun control can and do disarm the police - as I just showed you. And in case you missed it - the government IS privileged above the people by definition: they get to make laws and you don't. Democracy and republicanism means you have certain powers to act as a check on theirs, and certain constraints on their power - but the only system where the people are privileged above the government is a direct democracy and if the founding fathers had thought that was a good idea they would have created one. Since it's them you rely on to justify being a gun nut, you can't dismiss them on this.
And yet for some weird reasons all the experts think you're wrong and are deploying significant resources to try and protect us against it, right now focussed primarily on increasing our asteroid tracking ability hugely so we can actually identify potential risky ones - but that is already a project on which many millions of dollars have been spent.
You'd think all those smart astronomers would have studied some maths really... if only they had thought to ask you - they could have spent that money something that didn't have 'very low probability' of mattering.
>Given that that's exactly the law we had prior to 1965's Hart-Celler act, In other words - "We've had an unconstitutional law before, we can do it again".
> And foreigners not resident in the US don't have constitutional rights Doesn't matter. The constitution does not say 'their' constitutional rights, it JUST says 'any constitutional right' - in other words, if it's in the constitution it applies to people seeking to immigrate.
> For immigration, the law can discriminate any damn way we want it to. You know... why the hell did the Founding Fathers qualify the permission for government to make immigration laws by adding "as long as it does not violate any constitutional right" if what you're saying is true ?
Castile did nothing wrong. He told the officer he had a legal gun - and the officer shot him with no cause. I don't blame the NRA for that. I blame the NRA for not SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
That particular part of Turkey was quite dark skinned, including the Greek part of the population - even for Turks (as in - black). And the oldest known images of the historic St Nick all show a black man. Now these weren't done from life and we don't know how accurate they are - but he was clearly perceived as a black person for at least the first few centuries after he died, the white santa was only invented fairly recently.
We actually know very little about the man - and it's very hard ot tell which parts of the legend (if any) ever actually happened. But the odds are that he was black and this is why he was painted (and depicted in stained glass) as such for centuries.
I proved to you that the product IS defective AND was fraudulently sold. Your failure (by your own admission) to read the post, might explain why you don't know that. So... er... why reply to a post you didn't read ? And what kind of an idiot thinks he could hope to realistically understand things without reading them to the end ? You know -the end of a text is usually where the conclusions are ?
>Well, like it or not, laws against owning and carrying firearms were first created to stop black people from being armed. That's a sad genesis for the rabid gun control groups out there willing to see thousands die each year in Chiraq, with their dream gun control laws fully in place there.
There's a big difference between targeted gun control and universal gun control. And you conveniently forget that anti-gun-control movements share the exact same genesis. Gun-nuttery more than anything has always been driven by fear of black people.
Slashdot Mirror
>There is nothing that would convince you that the man has a racist bone in his body.
If a picture surfaced tomorrow of Trump slobbering David Duke's knob under his old grand wizard robes - they STILL wouldn't believe he's had a racist's bone in his mouth !
I wish Obama WAS the guy Republicans kept saying he was... that guy would use his constitutional right to appoint Garland in the recess period and give the senate a last major fuck you.
The actual Obama is too damn nice to you idiots.
"So Republicans are abusing loopholes in the system to undermine the democratic process"
FTFY.
Not to mention - that federal law may not apply to the president - but the constitution does, and his particular conflicts almost certainly violate the emoluments clause.
You gotta admit they are consistent. Before the election they said it was going to be rigged. Now that it's over they are still saying it was rigged - even though their guy won !
It was never closed. He's looking forward to being able to not having to lynchmob in secret anymore.
NASCAR is pretty pissed off because the governor has proposed a law to ban automatic cars from stick-shift parking spaces.
When one party is running a blatant ethno-nationalist fascist - when the countries with most experience of fascist dictators are warning you "hey - this guy looks and sounds EXACTLY like those evil fucks who took over our countries in the 1920s looked"... yeah, then it really has become a simple question of good and evil.
Or at the very least - of minor nuisances versus unspeakable horror.
Sometimes - the reason there is no nuance in the debate - is because there is nothing nuanced about the situation. You elected orange hitler. Stop trying to pretend you did anything less, and seriously - stop telling us that we don't know who he is or what kind of leader he will be. Stop expecting us to just forget the campaign, to pretend nothing he said and did up to this point was said or done.Stop asking us to assume he won't be as evil as he said he will be.
If he suddenly decides not to be evil - then we'll admit that in 4 years after he's been in power and not evil. We're not giving him the benefit of hte doubt because there is no reason to doubt. In a year there might be - but that is the one in a trillion hope right now, make no mistake I AM hoping for that, but I'd be an idiot to bet on it.
All these years we thought republicans were making up the crap about voter fraud... turn's out they weren't fantasising - they were projecting !
>So for you, the casualties of criminals who cannot be stopped in time by a government police force are simply acceptable collateral damage?
Not at all. But that problem is already solving itself. There are about a thousand gun accident victims for every crime victim now - are THOSE just collateral damage to you ? How far does the ratio have to skew before you care more about them than about the few who still get killed by criminals ?
>I'm not sure what kind of reasons you would believe that a woman accosted by multiple men wouldn't be better off with a firearm for self defense. Are you arguing that perhaps pepper spray or a rape whistle are better at self defense?
That particular crime is actually best addressed with all the things you rightwingers dismiss as SJW feminazi things. Treat the rape culture that encourages it.Teach men not to rape. Teach sons that you never, ever touch another human being unless you are invited to. Giving the woman a gun, or indeed any advice on 'how not to get raped' is just a way of saying 'make sure he rapes a different woman instead'. But even THAT crime is dropping.
>Actually, the law looks at three things - Ability, Opportunity, and Jeopardy. To assert that one must wait for actual lethal force (rather than jeopardy of serious harm or death), is silly. Should a police officer wait to be shot first before shooting back?
I spoke about morality, I said nothing about the law. The law is hardly universal anyway, even within the USA for example you have stand-your-ground laws in some states and not in others. I spoke about justice, this is an area where (especially thanks to gun nuts) the law and justice rarely resemble each other.
>The answer to idiocy is education.
You can't teach intelligence or responsibility. It's simply beyond the means of most people to learn.
>Teach people proper handling of firearms.
We can't get people to wear their seatbelts and you think you an achieve THIS on a sufficient scale to make a dent ? That's so, utterly, naive.
> Hell, I fear idiots with *cars* more than I fear idiots with guns
I fear both - but it's a LOT easier to defend myself against the former. I know how to drive defensively, I even took extra lessons to learn how to do that better. I can invest in cars with extra safety features (which I do as a matter of principle - I will not put my child in a car without airbags, ABS and ESP). But there is nothing I can do about idiots with guns. If some moron leaves his gun out and my child has a playdate and his kid gets the gun and shoots mine... an accident that happens about twice every month in America what the fuck exactly could I have done to reduce that risk ?
I'll tell you - there is exactly one thing I could do: try to advocate for sensible gun control, if you can't pass a test on gun safety - including but not limited to proof you can actually hit what you are aiming at with VERY high results - then you shouldn't have one.
Now here's the kicker - I love guns. I was a professional sport-shot. I can hit a 1-inch bulls-eye at 50 yards 9 out of 10 times - and I can do that with pistols. But I don't have a single gun in my house and I never will. Exactly because I love guns - I know them better than most gun nuts - and so I respect them - and I know that the vast majority of people are too stupid to treat them with the proper respect. My dad was a cop. He always used to say he was far more scared of being killed by a dumbass rookie who didn't treat his gun with the proper respect than he ever was of being killed by a criminal. As he put it: "Eight out of ten cops are trigger-happy idiots".
>The best way to prevent accidents is training
Training only works if you restrict access to those on whom the training worked. We license you to drive. We don't let anybody who wants to fly a passenger jet - you have to prove you know how to do it safely. Training without testing is non-existent.
>Interesting, Australia did something like that in response to a mass sh
> what would convince you that individual americans should have the right to self defense with firearms?
Evidence that, with the lowest crime rate in human history and dropping - self defense is a need you should give a thought to at all. Humans are horrifyingly bad at risk assessment, NEVER trust what makes sense because what makes sense to people is ALWAYS wrong. Trust numbers. And numbers say the risk of something happening that needs defense is extremely tiny and dropping.
How about evidence that guns are actually a good tool for self defense ? All the numbers say they aren't. In the one in a billion odds of you actually needing self defense a decent self-defense class is far more likely to save you than a gun ever will be. It's simply the wrong tool for the job on every level. And ironically, the more you follow the rules to reduce the risk of accidents - the less useful it becomes for self defense. An unloaded gun with the bullets kept in a separate safe isn't worth much if you actually ARE attack - since your attacker does not need to find the bullets and load his gun. His safety will not be on.
How about any reason to believe that the default approach to self defense should be lethal force ? Shouldn't you be BETTER than the few people that we still need defense against ? If you respond with lethal force, how are you not just escalating the situation forcing them to use lethal force as well and taking a RISK of somebody dying and making it a guarantee. Even the practicalities aside - it's morally wrong to suggest that you are justified to use lethal force for self defense at ANY moment up to where lethal force has been used against you. As long as there is a chance to end the situation with the attacker alive, you are obligated to use that.
The difference between my post and your mockery, is that my post is real. I don't fear guns - very few gun-control advocates do. But I do fear idiots with guns and if you don't - then you're the biggest idiot of all. There has never been a MORE rational and justified fear than the fear of a moron with the power to kill. And the idiots will always outnumber the smart people.
For everybody who is smart enough to handle guns safely, there will ALWAYS be 20 who are idiots with them and get innocent people killed. So far America is averaging two people shot by toddlers a month this year. Toddlers - kids who cannot possibly understand the risks of guns, or the rules, who should never have been anywhere near them. But there are always enough idiots that some of them will get guns - and when toddlers play with guns people die -often other toddlers.
> as if any of your laws would ever stop a criminal from having a gun
Nope, they won't - but then that was never the point of gun control. We're not that stupid - it's a strawman to pretend it is. The point of gun control is more than anything else to end gun ACCIDENTS. Which almost exclusively happen with legal guns. The second major thing it prevents is mass shootings - because the people who do those, they aren't criminals (at least - not until they actually do it). They don't have contacts, they aren't trusted.
You think you can just show up at the docks in Australia and buy an illegal gun ? Nobody there will sell you one. If they don't know your face, if they don't have a history with you - or at least with whoever referred you - you cannot get one. Because they won't take the risk that you may be an undercover cop. The mass shooting types - it stops them, because they can NOT get guns, your average street criminals aren't stopped - but they don't NEED to be. In all of human history never before has people been as safe from crime as we are right now. And next year, we'll be even safer. If the current trends continue many countries will be crime-free before the end of this century !
We don't need to disarm criminals - they are a dying breed anyway. We just have to wait until there aren't anymore, and the risk of having to deal with one now is already so low that if you ever spend a sing
Self defense is the least likely use for a gun and its a terrible tool for the job. So if that is your argument then its defeated by itself. Its a method that has near zero odds of achieving the stated goal. Indeed the gun most likely to shoot a person is their own.
Not to mention the problem is solving itself. Crime rates have been dropping universally for decades with no sign of stopping and completely independent of gun laws (since the trend is universal across all countries). So as the risk of an attack gets smaller every year while the risks of gun ownership remain the same there must logically be a point where there is no rational justification for the negative trade off.
We passed that ages ago.
The 'defense against tyranny' argument also fails. No gun law has ever prevented or even slowed a revolution. By the point where people rise up against a governmenr they will find guns. They do not need to have them in advance.
Gun nuts would actually get more sympathy from me if they dropped all the bullshit attempts at rationalization and hust admitted there is nothing rational about it. Just admit it. You like having guns. It makes you feel good. Whether its a penis compensation thing or a feeling of power or a (false) sense of safety or a passion for their engineering or whatever else. Just admit it. Its an emotional thing. You have some emotional need your gun satisfies and a constitutional right to do it and we cannot stop you until enough people have met those needs some other way that we can get rid of that ammendment.
America with the most unregulated guns have had more mass shooting in the last 20 years than the next 20 countried combine... twice over. Add them all together and its 22. America has had 48.
Just admit you care more about whatever good feeling you get out of your gun than you care about those dead people. Just admit (like Heston to his credit did) that you are okay with letting them die to satisfy your emotional needs.
Then we can have an honest conversation.
Airport cleaning staff ?
There is another difference. For profit news did not exist. News was a loss leader channels did in between shows. It did not make money... and was not expected to. So you could not buy editorial slant (very easily).
In our age advertisers wite the news. The mainstream press is still a little better though: but only because they risk being sued for slander if they go too far.
How about the events being reported having actually happened. When you report something that never happened. How is that not fake news ?
But I can see why rightwingers would not like that. All their news fall under that definition up to and including fox.
Then you need atmospheric flight to get there to build them. We are on earth. We cant go anywhere else without at least passing through atmo once.
But what you get to say they are, and treat them as, does. That's what the presumption of innocence means. Throw that away and you're living in a totaltarian police state. As a liberty it's at least as important, indeed probably even MORE important, than freedom of speech.
Without presumption of innocence any other liberties you have can only ever exist on paper - because you can just be declared guilty of something to shut you up.
Now you are allowed to say they are terrorists, but since there's been no trial that statement has zero evidence to back it up - except some other people in uniforms who declared it (and if anything people in uniforms have been historically FAR less trustworthy than the ones in robes). Frankly - they have a valid case of slander against you for calling them that, and if any of them sued you WOULD lose since you can't prove your accusation.
>So, targeted slavery is bad, but universal slavery is okay?
False analogy fallacy. Gun control has less than nothing in common with slavery. It's not even widely considered a bad thing - yet you're conflating it with something that today is almost universally considered one of the worst things humanity ever did.
>Universal gun control would be removing guns from police, secret service, and outlawing private security from carrying, as many rich and politically connected people do.
Actually yes. Once you have decent gun control you can and should disarm the police. The UK has done exactly that. Their police are not armed. Their weapons are kept in safes at armory's and ONLY issued if they are going on an operation where armed resistance is reasonably expected to be found. In the USA police have killed over 1000 black men this year - that's just black men and just this year. In the UK the police has killed just 2 people in the past 20 years. It's a LOT easier to believe that the people they kill gave them no other choice when it's an average of one a decade.
>Make no mistake, all gun control is targeted against the lower-class masses, and privileging the government above the people.
Except that countries with universal gun control can and do disarm the police - as I just showed you. And in case you missed it - the government IS privileged above the people by definition: they get to make laws and you don't. Democracy and republicanism means you have certain powers to act as a check on theirs, and certain constraints on their power - but the only system where the people are privileged above the government is a direct democracy and if the founding fathers had thought that was a good idea they would have created one.
Since it's them you rely on to justify being a gun nut, you can't dismiss them on this.
Oh.. and you think that somehow, magically, unlike every single other power the president has - THAT one is not subject to checks and balances ?
And yet for some weird reasons all the experts think you're wrong and are deploying significant resources to try and protect us against it, right now focussed primarily on increasing our asteroid tracking ability hugely so we can actually identify potential risky ones - but that is already a project on which many millions of dollars have been spent.
You'd think all those smart astronomers would have studied some maths really... if only they had thought to ask you - they could have spent that money something that didn't have 'very low probability' of mattering.
>Given that that's exactly the law we had prior to 1965's Hart-Celler act,
In other words - "We've had an unconstitutional law before, we can do it again".
> And foreigners not resident in the US don't have constitutional rights
Doesn't matter. The constitution does not say 'their' constitutional rights, it JUST says 'any constitutional right' - in other words, if it's in the constitution it applies to people seeking to immigrate.
> For immigration, the law can discriminate any damn way we want it to.
You know... why the hell did the Founding Fathers qualify the permission for government to make immigration laws by adding "as long as it does not violate any constitutional right" if what you're saying is true ?
Castile did nothing wrong. He told the officer he had a legal gun - and the officer shot him with no cause. I don't blame the NRA for that. I blame the NRA for not SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
That particular part of Turkey was quite dark skinned, including the Greek part of the population - even for Turks (as in - black). And the oldest known images of the historic St Nick all show a black man. Now these weren't done from life and we don't know how accurate they are - but he was clearly perceived as a black person for at least the first few centuries after he died, the white santa was only invented fairly recently.
We actually know very little about the man - and it's very hard ot tell which parts of the legend (if any) ever actually happened. But the odds are that he was black and this is why he was painted (and depicted in stained glass) as such for centuries.
I proved to you that the product IS defective AND was fraudulently sold. Your failure (by your own admission) to read the post, might explain why you don't know that. So... er... why reply to a post you didn't read ? And what kind of an idiot thinks he could hope to realistically understand things without reading them to the end ? You know -the end of a text is usually where the conclusions are ?
>Well, like it or not, laws against owning and carrying firearms were first created to stop black people from being armed. That's a sad genesis for the rabid gun control groups out there willing to see thousands die each year in Chiraq, with their dream gun control laws fully in place there.
There's a big difference between targeted gun control and universal gun control. And you conveniently forget that anti-gun-control movements share the exact same genesis. Gun-nuttery more than anything has always been driven by fear of black people.