Blaming Apple for cell phone activation is almost as silly as blaming your sports car manufacturer for speed limit signs.
AT&T's other cell phones require "activation", but AT&T does it with their own system.
The iPhone must be activated using Apple's servers. Today, that appears to be where the problem lies. That puts the responsibility squarely on Apple's shoulders.
AT&T is having no problems doing activations for non-iPhone customers today, other than they have to wait in line along with all the people waiting for an iPhone.
I simply cannot think of a reasonable situation under which someone being paid to fix a computer problem would meet the criteria (a)(1)(B)...(b) that you fear would cast too wide a net. Care to think up a reasonable example?
I can think of many, but I'll choose just one: combine "obtain" and "transactions".
Under a literal interpretation of this statute, simply running a file recovery program to reconstruct a Quicken datafile that was accidentally deleted could be considered "investigation".
As I noted in my previous posting, I know that the author of the bill didn't intend that. And I also know that the state agency says they are only interested in investigations of a crime. But, I live in this state, and have seen many examples of a district attorney prosecuting someone according to the letter of the law, rather than the intent.
The best that we can hope for is that everyone looks the other way until the next legislative session (which starts in January, 2009) can fix this. However, it probably won't take effect until September, 2007 -- although there are legislative procedures to make it effective upon enactment.
Someone took a piece of the bill, misunderstood it's meaning.
No, you read the bill incorrectly: the misunderstanding is yours.
It's a bit mis-formatted, so you missed which section (a)(1) it was referring to.
The correct reference is:
Sec. 1702.104. INVESTIGATIONS COMPANY.
(a) A person acts as an investigations company for the purposes of this chapter if the person:
(1) engages in the business of obtaining or furnishing, or accepts employment to obtain or furnish, information related to:
(A) crime or wrongs done or threatened against a state or the United States;
(B) the identity, habits, business, occupation, knowledge, efficiency, loyalty, movement, location, affiliations, associations, transactions, acts, reputation, or character of a person;
(C) the location, disposition, or recovery of lost or stolen property; or
(D) the cause or responsibility for a fire, libel, loss, accident, damage, or injury to a person or to property;
[....]
(b) For purposes of Subsection (a)(1), obtaining or furnishing information includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public.
If you don't believe me, look at the statute, as amended:
Subsection (a)(1)(B) casts a really wide net, when combined with the subsection (b) that was added. It's basically defining what constitutes an "investigations company", and a literal interpretation of the law as written could apply to a lot of people that aren't investigating a crime.
Yes, I know the state agency says that wasn't the intention. But, they didn't write the law. And while there are legal doctrines that provide some protection (look up "equitable estoppel"), it can be an expensive day in court to prove you were not breaking the law.
Trying to explain to my dad how to load MS Paint, and shrink the image, resulted in him writing down the instructions, and then promptly ringing me the first time he had to follow those instructions.
Have him download and install the Image Resizer Power Toy:
One installed, all you have to do is right-click on the image and choose Resize Pictures.
If you mark multiple images before doing so, you can do all of them at one time. It gives you a simple menu to choose the desired size, and can either resize the original file or create a resized copy.
It depends on how you classify the various taxes. If you look at ALL taxes (income, social security, corporate, and excise), the highest quintile (top 20%) paid 68.7% of the taxes in 2005. If you consider only income taxes, the highest quintile paid 86.3% of the taxes.
In 2005, the average pre-tax household income of the highest quintile was $231,300. See the detailed data for the minimum, although be forewarned that the CBO divides household income by a factor that isn't quite the number of people in the household to normalize it to something resembling per-person.
IANAL, but I don't think PC Mag or "CW33" read the law. Per Section 4a1 and 4b, it only applies if you're specifically snooping in the data on the computer. It says nothing about normal repair. Not that someone disgruntled couldn't try to make a case out of it...
RT Second FA.
The Institute for Justice--the nation's leading litigators for entrepreneurs who find their rights violated by the government--opens its new Texas Chapter today by filing a lawsuit against the Texas Private Security Board, a state agency, on behalf of computer repair shops that are being told they need a private investigator's license to continue solving their customers' computer problems.
This isn't speculation. It's the interpretation of the Texas Private Security Board, who is already pressing the computer repair shops to get a PI license.
The "carrying a box of junk" thing works pretty well too; it's considered rude as hell to block someone when they're struggling under a heavy weight. Grab a big ass server and lug it into the building, and everyone will hold doors for you, then take it into a conference room, plug it in, and start looking for stuff. Bring a projector as well, and you can sit there all day, and people will assume you're there for a reason, or that someone else must know why you're there.
Sad but true: someone dressed up like a technician, walked into my company's office and started puttering around with a desktop computer. After a while, he disconnected the computer and walked out with it.
Everyone assumed that someone else had called him to come in and fix the "malfunctioning" computer, and when he left with it, presumed that he was taking it elsewhere for a more serious repair effort.
Is a handgun any more effective at this than a knife? Sure, you've got a bit more range, but if the soldier is paying little enough attention that you can approach them and train your handgun on them, then I suspect you'd have almost as much success with a knife.
A knife is a bit more difficult to use effectively than a handgun. Even with everything else being the same, a knife requires some amount of physical strength vs. a handgun.
And once you do have one of their weapons, how many other soldiers do you think you could defeat before you were gunned down?
It sounds like you are thinking "suicide attack". That's not an effective use of a handgun or smaller weapon: you use it to obtain a more powerful weapon and withdraw. Repeat until enough people have one to become an effective force.
I posit that the US has moved beyond the point where any form of armed uprising, in and of itself, would be able to overthrow the government.
I think (and hope) there will never be an armed uprising to overthrow the US government. Our political system leaves much to be desired, but it is still functional. However, I believe that as long as there are enough arms in private hands to make it a potential outcome, a government is much less likely to do something to provoke it. The cost would be too high.
Do you really think a handgun would be any use whatsoever against the armour-plated, tank driving army, should the US populace ever get riled up enough for open revolt?
Actually, yes. A handgun is useful to take a more effective weapon from a soldier that isn't paying attention. The Liberator was designed and manufactured specifically for that purpose in WW2, although it ultimately was not distributed widely in Europe.
That is the decision of the courts. That is how they chose to interpret the constitution. As best I know, the court did not travel back in time to ask the writers of the constitution to clarify the message they were trying to convey when they wrote it.
As I suspected, your mind is already made up and don't want to listen.
I'm sure I'm wasting my virtual breath, but if you were actually to open your closed mind and read the entire decision, it addresses your questions by studying the text of the Second Amendment, word-by-word, and interprets it with references to other laws, state constitutions, and publications during the era in which it was written.
So thank you, but your link does not answer my question. It only provides a current supreme court decision on what it might mean. So thank you, but your link does not answer my question. It only provides a current supreme court decision on what it might mean.
Apparently, you didn't go to school in the US, or were sleeping in class that day. This decision is the authoritative interpretation of the Second Amendment.
The reason it's taken so long for the Court to do so is because the revisionist interpretation had been stretched to the breaking point in the past few decades. For most of the first 200 years since this Republic was founded, no one with any sense even dared consider that it meant anything else.
If you disagree with the Court, then be honest enough to say so. And show your work -- the Court has provided copious documentation for their rationale, so you should be able to show why they are wrong. Otherwise, your opinion isn't worth the electrons used to transmit it.
Exactly which people are to keep and bear Arms? Is it only the people of the Militia? For that matter, what Arms are they to bear? And for what purpose? It specifically mentions the "security of a free State". To whom would this security be against?
Gosh, I wish I could get you into a poker game. Oh wait. I'm sure it's too late and you're bankrupt. Do drop us a line when you find work, right?
I know you want to believe the worst about me, because it fits your view of the world. Sorry to burst your bubble, but welcome to reality.
Although I appreciate your concern for me, I'm doing just fine, thank you. Of course, I don't expect you to believe that either, and I'm sure you'll take the opportunity to throw more insults my way.
Come on and tell the truth. Have you *EVER* actually been asked to participate in an exit poll?
Not since I moved into a district that is considered "safe", i.e. the vote is predictable. Prior to that, I was approached at almost every election.
Of course, you could claim you have--but you've already told us that you're a liar, so I still wouldn't believe you.
And by doing so, you are introducing bias into your results.
I'll suggest that the reason you believe exit polls is that you WANT them to be true -- because you don't accept the actual results and are desperate to find evidence they are wrong due to fraud, error, or whatever.
It's a better indication of tampering if the election results differ wildly from the exit polls.
Exit polls don't mean a thing except to the people that gather the info in an attempt to be the first to project an election. They are often incorrect. Why? Because people like me don't appreciate the prediction's effects on elections that are still in progress in later time zones.
So, I lie to the exit poller. And while I have no evidence to quantify how many are like me, I know I'm not alone.
Well, according to the constitution, a well-regulated militia is one that is "organized, armed and disciplined" by the federal government.
No, a "well-regulated" militia is one that is "properly disciplined", with no specification of by who or what. In that era, "disciplined" meant "skilled in the art of war". A closer modern analog would be "trained" or even "competent".
So the question becomes more about the National Guard than the Michigan Militia.
No, the militia in the Second Amendment includes both the organized militia and the unorganized militia: 10 USC 311
Mostly, I think the whole issue is overblown. Nobody really favors the second amendment as it is clearly written. Nobody really favors mass confiscations. Everybody, from the NRA to the "anti-gun zealots" favors some level of sensible regulation. You'll note that the basic level of regulation has not changed significantly.
It depends on where you live. In Washington, DC, private ownership of a handgun is effectively banned. Ownership of long arms is so heavily regulated that they might as well be banned. And that's what DC v. Parker will be addressing. Personally, I expect the Court to affirm an individual right, but also "reasonable regulation" that doesn't infringe on that right. The definition of "reasonable" will then play out over the next few decades.
However, there ARE people that favor mass confiscations. To them, "sensible regulation" means that no one aside from the military and law enforcement can possess a firearm. They are easy to spot: they are always the ones that promote a new regulation as "a good first step".
Not to mention that in the early US history, it was routinely upheld that states had the right to regulate weapons (the issue didn't come to a federal level until much later).
US v. Cruikshank and Presser v. Illinois said that the 2nd Amendment applied only to the federal government. However, these cases pre-dated incorporation of the Bill of Rights via the 14th Amendment against the states (see below).
However, Presser v. Illinois stated that there is a limit upon state restriction of firearms ownership:
It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as of the States, and in view of this prerogative of the general government, as well as of its general powers, the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security, and disable the people from performing their duty to the general government. But, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration do not have this effect.
However, Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove disposed of this as "dicta quoted out of context", and the US Supreme Court denied cert for the appeal.
Items generally restricted were weapons designed to be easy to conceal -- pistols, dirks, cane swords, etc.
One of these (Aymette v. State of TN), was cited by the Court in US v. Miller -- relying on the phrase "for the common defense" in the state constitution. However, that particular phrase was explicitly rejected by the US Senate during the debate of the Bill of Rights, as it may have been enough for some of the ratifying states to reject it.
Often there were commonsense exceptions -- in Arkansas, they left an exception for those who were "on a journey", for example.
It sounds like "common sense", until you understand the reason behind it and similar laws in the South. We had the same exception in Texas law, but it was really code for "if your skin is the right color". For almost a century, state and local law enforcement used it as a discretionary method to enforce the prohibition against carrying weapons against people they didn't like. When anti-gun police chiefs in Texas started enforcing the prohibition against the white majority in the large cities, popular support for a non-discretionary CHL law grew until it was passed in 1995.
An interesting piece of trivia: Texas Governor Ann Richards publicly threatened a veto of a CHL law if it was sent to her desk. That act was widely credited as a substantial contributor to her defeat in the subsequent 1994 election. The winner of that election was George W. Bush, whose only prior political asset was his name.
I think there could be a legitimate argument made that the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate weapons without constitutional amendment (it depends on the reading), but you'd be hard-pressed to support that line of argument in relation to the right of states to do so.
It depends on the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Although the authors of the 14th Amendment explicitly said it was intended to apply the first 8 amendments in the Bill of Rights to the states, the Supreme Court declined to interpret it that way, and has instead been incorporated the Bill of Rights piece-meal, as the cases are brought before them.
OK, I did. I expected the case would be ambiguous, but WOW, get a new example buddy! Based on the first figures I could find, the UKs per-capita murder rate is about one fifth that of the US
In the past century or so, the UK's per-capital homicide rate has always been much lower than the US. But, I believe the grandparent's point is to consider the change in the UK's homicide rate (and I'll add: violent crime rate) since they have have enacted increasingly draconian restrictions on firearms, then knives, and whatever else can be used as a weapon. One can argue about whether these laws made it worse, but I don't think one can claimed that they made things any better.
and the majority of the murders in the US used guns, whereas almost none in th UK did.
Actually, if you were to exclude all the homicides committed in the US with a firearm, the US would still have a higher per-capita rate than the UK (at least in the past -- it may have changed recently). I consider that evidence that other factors are contributing to the difference in homicide rates.
The Second Amendment was muddily written, and is badly obsolete.
There's nothing muddy about the Second Amendment, if you understand the origin of the Bill of Rights, and know what the words meant in the era that it was written.
And if it was obsolete, the US Supreme Court wouldn't be preparing to issue a decision on US v. Parker. Up until the past 70 years or so, its meaning and relevance were unquestioned -- so much so that the Court didn't see the need to address it. The revisionism finally stretched to the breaking point.
Finally, recent public polls indicate that the vast majority of US citizens believe that it means what it says, rather than what anti-gun zealots want you to think it means.
Actually, studies do show a definite increase in suicide with gun ownership (seems obvious).
No, they show that in the US, a firearm is a common way to commit suicide. And that's only if you are a man: women tend to use other means. In other countries where firearms are not readily available, other methods are used. In Canada, it was found that restricting the availability of handguns did not change the suicide rate -- it simply caused a substitution with other means.
Some studies have found the likelihood of being murdered also increases.
Ah, the infamous "2.7 times more likely to be a victim of homicide". A closer look at the data used for this "study" found that people renting their home rather than owning it were 4.4 times more likely to be a victim of homicide. Makes you wonder if there are other factors at work here, and whether people are buying a firearm because they correctly perceive they are potentially a victim of a violent crime.
However, a prior criminal record seems to be significant:
"The notion that these (murders) are random bolts of lightning, which is the commonly held image, is not the reality," says Kennedy, who has examined the backgrounds of murder suspects and victims in a number of U.S. cities.
If you go to an amusement park with your family, they won't be thrilled if you can't spend more than a few hours without taking a call.
What if the alternative is not going at all? Mom or Dad can spend a few minutes taking a call while the kids have fun, instead of sitting home by the phone for a call that may or may not ever arrive.
Slashdot Mirror
Blaming Apple for cell phone activation is almost as silly as blaming your sports car manufacturer for speed limit signs.
AT&T's other cell phones require "activation", but AT&T does it with their own system.
The iPhone must be activated using Apple's servers. Today, that appears to be where the problem lies. That puts the responsibility squarely on Apple's shoulders.
AT&T is having no problems doing activations for non-iPhone customers today, other than they have to wait in line along with all the people waiting for an iPhone.
I simply cannot think of a reasonable situation under which someone being paid to fix a computer problem would meet the criteria (a)(1)(B)...(b) that you fear would cast too wide a net. Care to think up a reasonable example?
I can think of many, but I'll choose just one: combine "obtain" and "transactions".
Under a literal interpretation of this statute, simply running a file recovery program to reconstruct a Quicken datafile that was accidentally deleted could be considered "investigation".
As I noted in my previous posting, I know that the author of the bill didn't intend that. And I also know that the state agency says they are only interested in investigations of a crime. But, I live in this state, and have seen many examples of a district attorney prosecuting someone according to the letter of the law, rather than the intent.
The best that we can hope for is that everyone looks the other way until the next legislative session (which starts in January, 2009) can fix this. However, it probably won't take effect until September, 2007 -- although there are legislative procedures to make it effective upon enactment.
Someone took a piece of the bill, misunderstood it's meaning.
No, you read the bill incorrectly: the misunderstanding is yours.
It's a bit mis-formatted, so you missed which section (a)(1) it was referring to.
The correct reference is:
If you don't believe me, look at the statute, as amended:
http://tlo2.tlc.state.tx.us/statutes/docs/OC/content/htm/oc.010.00.001702.00.htm#1702.104.00
Subsection (a)(1)(B) casts a really wide net, when combined with the subsection (b) that was added. It's basically defining what constitutes an "investigations company", and a literal interpretation of the law as written could apply to a lot of people that aren't investigating a crime.
Yes, I know the state agency says that wasn't the intention. But, they didn't write the law. And while there are legal doctrines that provide some protection (look up "equitable estoppel"), it can be an expensive day in court to prove you were not breaking the law.
Trying to explain to my dad how to load MS Paint, and shrink the image, resulted in him writing down the instructions, and then promptly ringing me the first time he had to follow those instructions.
Have him download and install the Image Resizer Power Toy:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe
One installed, all you have to do is right-click on the image and choose Resize Pictures.
If you mark multiple images before doing so, you can do all of them at one time. It gives you a simple menu to choose the desired size, and can either resize the original file or create a resized copy.
90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000
[citation needed]
90% is overstated. But, it's not as much as some might think:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/EffectiveTaxRates.shtml
It depends on how you classify the various taxes. If you look at ALL taxes (income, social security, corporate, and excise), the highest quintile (top 20%) paid 68.7% of the taxes in 2005. If you consider only income taxes, the highest quintile paid 86.3% of the taxes.
In 2005, the average pre-tax household income of the highest quintile was $231,300. See the detailed data for the minimum, although be forewarned that the CBO divides household income by a factor that isn't quite the number of people in the household to normalize it to something resembling per-person.
IANAL, but I don't think PC Mag or "CW33" read the law. Per Section 4a1 and 4b, it only applies if you're specifically snooping in the data on the computer. It says nothing about normal repair. Not that someone disgruntled couldn't try to make a case out of it...
RT Second FA.
The Institute for Justice--the nation's leading litigators for entrepreneurs who find their rights violated by the government--opens its new Texas Chapter today by filing a lawsuit against the Texas Private Security Board, a state agency, on behalf of computer repair shops that are being told they need a private investigator's license to continue solving their customers' computer problems.
This isn't speculation. It's the interpretation of the Texas Private Security Board, who is already pressing the computer repair shops to get a PI license.
The "carrying a box of junk" thing works pretty well too; it's considered rude as hell to block someone when they're struggling under a heavy weight. Grab a big ass server and lug it into the building, and everyone will hold doors for you, then take it into a conference room, plug it in, and start looking for stuff. Bring a projector as well, and you can sit there all day, and people will assume you're there for a reason, or that someone else must know why you're there.
Sad but true: someone dressed up like a technician, walked into my company's office and started puttering around with a desktop computer. After a while, he disconnected the computer and walked out with it.
Everyone assumed that someone else had called him to come in and fix the "malfunctioning" computer, and when he left with it, presumed that he was taking it elsewhere for a more serious repair effort.
A knife is a bit more difficult to use effectively than a handgun. Even with everything else being the same, a knife requires some amount of physical strength vs. a handgun.
And once you do have one of their weapons, how many other soldiers do you think you could defeat before you were gunned down?It sounds like you are thinking "suicide attack". That's not an effective use of a handgun or smaller weapon: you use it to obtain a more powerful weapon and withdraw. Repeat until enough people have one to become an effective force.
I posit that the US has moved beyond the point where any form of armed uprising, in and of itself, would be able to overthrow the government.I think (and hope) there will never be an armed uprising to overthrow the US government. Our political system leaves much to be desired, but it is still functional. However, I believe that as long as there are enough arms in private hands to make it a potential outcome, a government is much less likely to do something to provoke it. The cost would be too high.
Actually, yes. A handgun is useful to take a more effective weapon from a soldier that isn't paying attention. The Liberator was designed and manufactured specifically for that purpose in WW2, although it ultimately was not distributed widely in Europe.
As I suspected, your mind is already made up and don't want to listen.
I'm sure I'm wasting my virtual breath, but if you were actually to open your closed mind and read the entire decision, it addresses your questions by studying the text of the Second Amendment, word-by-word, and interprets it with references to other laws, state constitutions, and publications during the era in which it was written.
So thank you, but your link does not answer my question. It only provides a current supreme court decision on what it might mean. So thank you, but your link does not answer my question. It only provides a current supreme court decision on what it might mean.Apparently, you didn't go to school in the US, or were sleeping in class that day. This decision is the authoritative interpretation of the Second Amendment.
The reason it's taken so long for the Court to do so is because the revisionist interpretation had been stretched to the breaking point in the past few decades. For most of the first 200 years since this Republic was founded, no one with any sense even dared consider that it meant anything else.
If you disagree with the Court, then be honest enough to say so. And show your work -- the Court has provided copious documentation for their rationale, so you should be able to show why they are wrong. Otherwise, your opinion isn't worth the electrons used to transmit it.
RTFD.
All of your questions are answered, if you choose to listen.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10800&Itemid=2&pop=1&page=1
Jobs opened the keynote with an announcement they would be talking about Snow Leopard after lunch.
I know you want to believe the worst about me, because it fits your view of the world. Sorry to burst your bubble, but welcome to reality.
Although I appreciate your concern for me, I'm doing just fine, thank you. Of course, I don't expect you to believe that either, and I'm sure you'll take the opportunity to throw more insults my way.
Moderators are on crack this morning, again.
Not since I moved into a district that is considered "safe", i.e. the vote is predictable. Prior to that, I was approached at almost every election.
Of course, you could claim you have--but you've already told us that you're a liar, so I still wouldn't believe you.And by doing so, you are introducing bias into your results.
I'll suggest that the reason you believe exit polls is that you WANT them to be true -- because you don't accept the actual results and are desperate to find evidence they are wrong due to fraud, error, or whatever.
And now your current governor has been implicated in the recent trial of Tony Rezko.
Is there something in the water of Lake Michigan that makes Illinois politicians ethically-challenged?
Not that Texas has any right to gloat, being (in)famous for "Landslide Lyndon"
Exit polls don't mean a thing except to the people that gather the info in an attempt to be the first to project an election. They are often incorrect. Why? Because people like me don't appreciate the prediction's effects on elections that are still in progress in later time zones.
So, I lie to the exit poller. And while I have no evidence to quantify how many are like me, I know I'm not alone.
No, a "well-regulated" militia is one that is "properly disciplined", with no specification of by who or what. In that era, "disciplined" meant "skilled in the art of war". A closer modern analog would be "trained" or even "competent".
So the question becomes more about the National Guard than the Michigan Militia.No, the militia in the Second Amendment includes both the organized militia and the unorganized militia: 10 USC 311
It depends on where you live. In Washington, DC, private ownership of a handgun is effectively banned. Ownership of long arms is so heavily regulated that they might as well be banned. And that's what DC v. Parker will be addressing. Personally, I expect the Court to affirm an individual right, but also "reasonable regulation" that doesn't infringe on that right. The definition of "reasonable" will then play out over the next few decades.
However, there ARE people that favor mass confiscations. To them, "sensible regulation" means that no one aside from the military and law enforcement can possess a firearm. They are easy to spot: they are always the ones that promote a new regulation as "a good first step".
Not to mention that in the early US history, it was routinely upheld that states had the right to regulate weapons (the issue didn't come to a federal level until much later).
US v. Cruikshank and Presser v. Illinois said that the 2nd Amendment applied only to the federal government. However, these cases pre-dated incorporation of the Bill of Rights via the 14th Amendment against the states (see below).
However, Presser v. Illinois stated that there is a limit upon state restriction of firearms ownership:
It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as of the States, and in view of this prerogative of the general government, as well as of its general powers, the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security, and disable the people from performing their duty to the general government. But, as already stated, we think it clear that the sections under consideration do not have this effect.
However, Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove disposed of this as "dicta quoted out of context", and the US Supreme Court denied cert for the appeal.
Items generally restricted were weapons designed to be easy to conceal -- pistols, dirks, cane swords, etc.
One of these (Aymette v. State of TN), was cited by the Court in US v. Miller -- relying on the phrase "for the common defense" in the state constitution. However, that particular phrase was explicitly rejected by the US Senate during the debate of the Bill of Rights, as it may have been enough for some of the ratifying states to reject it.
Often there were commonsense exceptions -- in Arkansas, they left an exception for those who were "on a journey", for example.
It sounds like "common sense", until you understand the reason behind it and similar laws in the South. We had the same exception in Texas law, but it was really code for "if your skin is the right color". For almost a century, state and local law enforcement used it as a discretionary method to enforce the prohibition against carrying weapons against people they didn't like. When anti-gun police chiefs in Texas started enforcing the prohibition against the white majority in the large cities, popular support for a non-discretionary CHL law grew until it was passed in 1995.
An interesting piece of trivia: Texas Governor Ann Richards publicly threatened a veto of a CHL law if it was sent to her desk. That act was widely credited as a substantial contributor to her defeat in the subsequent 1994 election. The winner of that election was George W. Bush, whose only prior political asset was his name.
I think there could be a legitimate argument made that the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate weapons without constitutional amendment (it depends on the reading), but you'd be hard-pressed to support that line of argument in relation to the right of states to do so.
It depends on the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Although the authors of the 14th Amendment explicitly said it was intended to apply the first 8 amendments in the Bill of Rights to the states, the Supreme Court declined to interpret it that way, and has instead been incorporated the Bill of Rights piece-meal, as the cases are brought before them.
At the moment, the
In the past century or so, the UK's per-capital homicide rate has always been much lower than the US. But, I believe the grandparent's point is to consider the change in the UK's homicide rate (and I'll add: violent crime rate) since they have have enacted increasingly draconian restrictions on firearms, then knives, and whatever else can be used as a weapon. One can argue about whether these laws made it worse, but I don't think one can claimed that they made things any better.
and the majority of the murders in the US used guns, whereas almost none in th UK did.Actually, if you were to exclude all the homicides committed in the US with a firearm, the US would still have a higher per-capita rate than the UK (at least in the past -- it may have changed recently). I consider that evidence that other factors are contributing to the difference in homicide rates.
The Second Amendment was muddily written, and is badly obsolete.There's nothing muddy about the Second Amendment, if you understand the origin of the Bill of Rights, and know what the words meant in the era that it was written.
And if it was obsolete, the US Supreme Court wouldn't be preparing to issue a decision on US v. Parker. Up until the past 70 years or so, its meaning and relevance were unquestioned -- so much so that the Court didn't see the need to address it. The revisionism finally stretched to the breaking point.
Finally, recent public polls indicate that the vast majority of US citizens believe that it means what it says, rather than what anti-gun zealots want you to think it means.
No, they show that in the US, a firearm is a common way to commit suicide. And that's only if you are a man: women tend to use other means. In other countries where firearms are not readily available, other methods are used. In Canada, it was found that restricting the availability of handguns did not change the suicide rate -- it simply caused a substitution with other means.
Some studies have found the likelihood of being murdered also increases.Ah, the infamous "2.7 times more likely to be a victim of homicide". A closer look at the data used for this "study" found that people renting their home rather than owning it were 4.4 times more likely to be a victim of homicide. Makes you wonder if there are other factors at work here, and whether people are buying a firearm because they correctly perceive they are potentially a victim of a violent crime.
However, a prior criminal record seems to be significant:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0903MurderVictims0903.html
"The notion that these (murders) are random bolts of lightning, which is the commonly held image, is not the reality," says Kennedy, who has examined the backgrounds of murder suspects and victims in a number of U.S. cities.
What if the alternative is not going at all? Mom or Dad can spend a few minutes taking a call while the kids have fun, instead of sitting home by the phone for a call that may or may not ever arrive.