The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of people who have successfully used firearms to stop crimes from being committed. Sometimes a person is aware enough of their surroundings to notice approaching danger (you know, the racists assholes who pay attention when being approached by groups of a different skin shade) and they are ready. Sometimes it is people noticing someone trying to kick in the front door. Sometimes it is people having let the wrong person in and still managing to retrieve a weapon when they go into another room to "get the rest of the money" or whatever.
How the hell can you possibly say that the gun did not aid in his defense. That is like saying a bodyguard is of no use unless the bodyguard beats the shit of of every person that might come near the protected individual. The mere presence is often the only deterrent needed.
But overall violence rates are not affected buy the availability of guns so it doesn't really matter.
The point is that if you had lower overall rates of violence than the US before you banned guns and your rates of overall violence changed in lockstep to the overall rates of violence in the US where we didn't change gun access (that is, the rates increased or decreased by the same percentages), then the statistics say that gun access has no effect on overall violence rates. The most that could be said is that criminals will simply use whatever tool at their disposal and that criminals will find a different tool before they will stop being criminals. And that is what the statistics are saying. You reduced gun violence but you didn't reduce overall violence so, unless you think being beat to death with a baseball bat is a better way to die than being shot to death or being held up at knife point is somehow a more enlightening experience than being held up at gunpoint, you solved nothing.
But hey, thanks for trying to sidestep the issue and tell lies.
As one of those so-called "gun nuts", I will say that jafiwam is probably fairly close to accurate with the numbers and you are both correct that more laws won't stop criminals from being criminals, Hell, even the most die-hard liberals shout this every time the death penalty becomes a topic of discussion.
Look at this statistic that I looked at the other day using US government numbers. The US has about 350 million guns in civilian hands and about 250 million registered motor vehicles for highway use (motorcycles, cars, light trucks, heavy trucks). Around 32,000 people are killed by those guns each year (murder, accident, self-defense, suicide, etc) and around 32,000 people are killed each year by those motor vehicles each year. That means that a motor vehicle in the US is approximately 33% more likely to kill a person than is a gun in the US. Why exactly are we always arguing that guns are a major problem and need to be eliminated?
I am in favor of forcing Facebook to take a neutral position on the facilitation of the legal sale of any product and for forcing them to treat the legal sales of any product the same way they treat the legal sale of any other product. At least until such time that the government completely gets out of the business of regulating how individuals and private companies interact with each other. IOW, if the government is going to force a business to sell to Persons X, Y and Z if the business is selling to Persons A and B then it should enforce that evenly and across the board.
Either the government has no business requiring a professional artist to decorate a cake for a wedding the professional artist disapproves of or the government must require that Facebook facilitate the legal sale of firearms in the same way with the exact same set of rules that Facebook facilitates the legal sale of purple yarn.
DogDude, what exactly is silly and paranoid in jafiwam's post.
He points out that transfer laws vary from state to state. He rightly points out that not one single state has made a law that criminalizes the bragging about having made an illegal purchase or sale. The purchase or sale is the crime, not the talking about it. He also rightly points out that making the illegal transfer is illegal regardless of the communication media used to facilitate the transfer. He also rightly points out that Facebook is run by liberal types that like to act as thought-police at times.
And if that were in a any way true, why was the BATFE not rounding up criminals by the millions? Oh yeah, because criminals weren't buying guns online through Facebook.
And how do you propose to keep and bear something that you cannot buy? Do you honestly believe that the Founding Fathers envisioned a world where every home would have its own gunsmithing shop? Even back then, people bought their guns from those who specialized in making guns.
Or maybe you just are not as clever as you think you are and you didn't really find a loophole that can be exploited to deny 2nd amendment rights?
You are correct that most gun owners intellectually agree that Facebook, as a private company, has the right to not allow certain activities. However, we also understand that the government actually has laws that do not allow companies to discriminate like this and we understand that if Facebook were to issue a policy stating that it would not allow its tools to be used to transfer payments or advertise for sale something like gay-themed wedding cakes, then not only would most hailing Facebook's gun decision be crying foul but most likely various government agencies would be opening investigations.
In what way are guns and gay-themed wedding cakes in any way the same thing, you ask? They are both legal for sale i n the US.
People who are willing to sell to a criminal are already not doing background checks and will continue not doing background checks. What on earth makes you think that this background check regulation will actually be followed by those knowingly selling to criminals? Law enforcement already knows that criminals almost exclusively buy from other criminals. Hint: Obama and his Attorney General are not law enforcement. Neither are Mayors Bloomberg and De Blasio nor are there politically motivated Police Chiefs (they are politicians pretending to be law enforcement).
The right not being infringed pretty much does say that impediments to enjoying the right are, in fact, unconstitutional. How else do you get the gun to "keep and bear" if you don't buy it. The Founding Fathers understood that most people would not be making their own guns.
but nature produced the mountains so any such effects are natural and can be discounted. I mean, come on, Mother Nature put those mountains there because they needed to be there to produce the perfect climate for the planet.
I think the AC is a perfect example of the green movement. We "know" that current technology is bad and we don't know that newer technology is NOT bad, so let's have no technology.
Uh, since the area of the disc covered by the blades is relative to the length of the blade, then yes, the power is relative to the length of the blade. It is just not a linear relationship.
Making cold calls or not making cold calls does nothing to suppress wages. Why is any company not free to decide how, when and where to recruit. Normally, people get all fired up about preventing cold calls from being made and now we are defending the practice. An agreement to not hire from a competitor/partner or to not offer increased compensation, would actually be an agreement that would suppress wages.
And that is exactly the problem with regulations. We are now asking the government to enforce a regulation to the detriment of the consumer. Pretty damned awesome, ain't it.
not exactly. Debtors prisons were mainly used to imprison people over private debt. When a person is convicted of a wrongdoing and is offered the choice to pay a fine or go to jail and then don't pay the fine, why should they not then go to jail?
Yup, you have everybody on your side until that last bit and then they all tripped because it no longer computed for them and they can't figure out why.
The same cesspool that claims that people have only the rights granted to them by their government. Yeah, many here on slashdot subscribe to that theory.
Someone earlier posted the fallacy of the "Congress hasn't yet told police they can't do this so they can" argument. It is called the 10th amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Closely related is the "hey, retards, people have way too many rights for us to bother writing them all down so we just wrote down a few of the more important ones" amendment, the 9th.
Wait, are you actually proposing that making otherwise law-abiding citizens jump through another set of hoops to exercise a fundamental human right will not prevent criminals from being criminals?
Slashdot Mirror
The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of people who have successfully used firearms to stop crimes from being committed. Sometimes a person is aware enough of their surroundings to notice approaching danger (you know, the racists assholes who pay attention when being approached by groups of a different skin shade) and they are ready. Sometimes it is people noticing someone trying to kick in the front door. Sometimes it is people having let the wrong person in and still managing to retrieve a weapon when they go into another room to "get the rest of the money" or whatever.
How the hell can you possibly say that the gun did not aid in his defense. That is like saying a bodyguard is of no use unless the bodyguard beats the shit of of every person that might come near the protected individual. The mere presence is often the only deterrent needed.
But overall violence rates are not affected buy the availability of guns so it doesn't really matter.
The point is that if you had lower overall rates of violence than the US before you banned guns and your rates of overall violence changed in lockstep to the overall rates of violence in the US where we didn't change gun access (that is, the rates increased or decreased by the same percentages), then the statistics say that gun access has no effect on overall violence rates. The most that could be said is that criminals will simply use whatever tool at their disposal and that criminals will find a different tool before they will stop being criminals. And that is what the statistics are saying. You reduced gun violence but you didn't reduce overall violence so, unless you think being beat to death with a baseball bat is a better way to die than being shot to death or being held up at knife point is somehow a more enlightening experience than being held up at gunpoint, you solved nothing.
But hey, thanks for trying to sidestep the issue and tell lies.
As one of those so-called "gun nuts", I will say that jafiwam is probably fairly close to accurate with the numbers and you are both correct that more laws won't stop criminals from being criminals, Hell, even the most die-hard liberals shout this every time the death penalty becomes a topic of discussion.
Look at this statistic that I looked at the other day using US government numbers. The US has about 350 million guns in civilian hands and about 250 million registered motor vehicles for highway use (motorcycles, cars, light trucks, heavy trucks). Around 32,000 people are killed by those guns each year (murder, accident, self-defense, suicide, etc) and around 32,000 people are killed each year by those motor vehicles each year. That means that a motor vehicle in the US is approximately 33% more likely to kill a person than is a gun in the US. Why exactly are we always arguing that guns are a major problem and need to be eliminated?
I am in favor of forcing Facebook to take a neutral position on the facilitation of the legal sale of any product and for forcing them to treat the legal sales of any product the same way they treat the legal sale of any other product. At least until such time that the government completely gets out of the business of regulating how individuals and private companies interact with each other. IOW, if the government is going to force a business to sell to Persons X, Y and Z if the business is selling to Persons A and B then it should enforce that evenly and across the board.
Either the government has no business requiring a professional artist to decorate a cake for a wedding the professional artist disapproves of or the government must require that Facebook facilitate the legal sale of firearms in the same way with the exact same set of rules that Facebook facilitates the legal sale of purple yarn.
DogDude, what exactly is silly and paranoid in jafiwam's post.
He points out that transfer laws vary from state to state. He rightly points out that not one single state has made a law that criminalizes the bragging about having made an illegal purchase or sale. The purchase or sale is the crime, not the talking about it. He also rightly points out that making the illegal transfer is illegal regardless of the communication media used to facilitate the transfer. He also rightly points out that Facebook is run by liberal types that like to act as thought-police at times.
And if that were in a any way true, why was the BATFE not rounding up criminals by the millions? Oh yeah, because criminals weren't buying guns online through Facebook.
And how do you propose to keep and bear something that you cannot buy? Do you honestly believe that the Founding Fathers envisioned a world where every home would have its own gunsmithing shop? Even back then, people bought their guns from those who specialized in making guns.
Or maybe you just are not as clever as you think you are and you didn't really find a loophole that can be exploited to deny 2nd amendment rights?
I'll go with the latter.
You are correct that most gun owners intellectually agree that Facebook, as a private company, has the right to not allow certain activities. However, we also understand that the government actually has laws that do not allow companies to discriminate like this and we understand that if Facebook were to issue a policy stating that it would not allow its tools to be used to transfer payments or advertise for sale something like gay-themed wedding cakes, then not only would most hailing Facebook's gun decision be crying foul but most likely various government agencies would be opening investigations.
In what way are guns and gay-themed wedding cakes in any way the same thing, you ask? They are both legal for sale i n the US.
People who are willing to sell to a criminal are already not doing background checks and will continue not doing background checks. What on earth makes you think that this background check regulation will actually be followed by those knowingly selling to criminals? Law enforcement already knows that criminals almost exclusively buy from other criminals. Hint: Obama and his Attorney General are not law enforcement. Neither are Mayors Bloomberg and De Blasio nor are there politically motivated Police Chiefs (they are politicians pretending to be law enforcement).
The right not being infringed pretty much does say that impediments to enjoying the right are, in fact, unconstitutional. How else do you get the gun to "keep and bear" if you don't buy it. The Founding Fathers understood that most people would not be making their own guns.
As long as you are only affecting the weather, then no foul because, as the AGW crowd likes to loudly proclaim, weather is not climate.
No, we do it so spoiled brats can continue to charge the batteries on their over-indulgent toys.
but nature produced the mountains so any such effects are natural and can be discounted. I mean, come on, Mother Nature put those mountains there because they needed to be there to produce the perfect climate for the planet.
but butterflies
I think the AC is a perfect example of the green movement. We "know" that current technology is bad and we don't know that newer technology is NOT bad, so let's have no technology.
Uh, since the area of the disc covered by the blades is relative to the length of the blade, then yes, the power is relative to the length of the blade. It is just not a linear relationship.
Making cold calls or not making cold calls does nothing to suppress wages. Why is any company not free to decide how, when and where to recruit. Normally, people get all fired up about preventing cold calls from being made and now we are defending the practice. An agreement to not hire from a competitor/partner or to not offer increased compensation, would actually be an agreement that would suppress wages.
And that is exactly the problem with regulations. We are now asking the government to enforce a regulation to the detriment of the consumer. Pretty damned awesome, ain't it.
not exactly. Debtors prisons were mainly used to imprison people over private debt. When a person is convicted of a wrongdoing and is offered the choice to pay a fine or go to jail and then don't pay the fine, why should they not then go to jail?
Yup, you have everybody on your side until that last bit and then they all tripped because it no longer computed for them and they can't figure out why.
The same cesspool that claims that people have only the rights granted to them by their government. Yeah, many here on slashdot subscribe to that theory.
Someone earlier posted the fallacy of the "Congress hasn't yet told police they can't do this so they can" argument. It is called the 10th amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Closely related is the "hey, retards, people have way too many rights for us to bother writing them all down so we just wrote down a few of the more important ones" amendment, the 9th.
Wait, are you actually proposing that making otherwise law-abiding citizens jump through another set of hoops to exercise a fundamental human right will not prevent criminals from being criminals?
I'm hearing the exact opposite on CNN and MSNBC.
Oh, now you're just talking crazy shit.
sadly and unfortunately.
More specifically politicians but most often that is just a longer spelling of lawyer.