Though if they try to sell "illegal automatics" on most gun forums, they'll find themselves banned and reported to the ATF faster than you can empty a magazine.
Damn straight. Gun forums tend to have an extremely low tolerance for any hint of illegal behavior, much less anything as blatant as an attempt to sell NFA-restricted firearms.
Your metabolism can only adjust so far, and it's not actually all that far. If that weren't true, then people wouldn't starve to death, their metabolism would just keep adjusting until they could live on practically nothing.
Restrict your caloric intake to, say, 1500 calories per day, and you'll lose weight, and you'll keep losing it as long as you maintain that. Include some strength training to avoid also losing muscle tissue. When you reach your target weight, increase your intake to normal, but weigh yourself daily and monitor your weight tend, if it starts trending upward, reduce your food intake slightly. Continue tuning your intake until you are at the weight you want and staying there. Once you've got that figured out, continue weighing yourself daily and adjusting if the trend lines go too far out of whack.
Easy, right? Well, no. Controlling calorie intake is not easy. It takes a fair amount of work to track what you're eating, and a lot of discipline. Technology can help, though, a lot. Use a smartphone app to log everything you eat and the exercise you do. Get a Wifi-enabled scale (I have the Fitbit Aria) and stand on it every morning, then use another tool (I use the trendweight.com web site) to track your trend lines.
It works. I was at 240, and am now at 200, where I've been for a year. I've decided that I really need to be about 180, so I'm going to get focused on lowering calorie intake again starting after the holidays. I target a 1000-calorie daily deficit, which is pretty danged steep, but results in a consistent two pounds per week of weight loss, so I should be down to 180 by mid-March, late March at the latest.
Sorry, not the fingers. Though fingers that are worked hard do get thick. I'm not sure what the mechanism is. Perhaps it's mostly bone thickening, which would be even better (for punching) than muscle growth.
There are 0 muscles in the hands. They're all in the forearms, so they don't provide much protection to the bones.
There are muscles in the fingers and in the hands as well as in the forearms. Also, have you ever looked at the hands of a man who has spend a few decades doing hard work with them? There's a reason the fingers get thick and the hands get broad and "square" in appearance.
Your hands are full of very small bones. It's very easy to break your hand by punching something hard and dense (such as a skull or face for instance).
This is very true if your hands have spent a lifetime manipulating books and pencils and keyboards, but somewhat less true if they've spent a lifetime doing hard work. A more labor-intensive lifestyle makes the hand muscles bigger and stronger and also thickens the bones. Meanwhile, it doesn't make the face or many other vulnerable points on the body significantly tougher.
Doesn't the UK have a "loser pays" system for lawsuit legal expenses? That creates some different dynamics here, since it means that unless the Pirate Party is very certain of their case, they could end up liable for both sides.
I'm guessing they're just going to change the language into a more confusing form. Same terms, just more confusing so they can try to get away with it.
Given the outcry thus far, they'd have to be really stupid to try that. There will be too many people scrutinizing the language, including lawyers, who are ready to interpret any such attempt.
From their statement: "As we review your feedback and stories in the press, we’re going to modify specific parts of the terms to make it more clear what will happen with your photos."
We'll have to see what they actually change, but they have said that they're going to change it.
Consider that had some of the teachers at Sandy Hook been armed, the outcome would have been very different. Restricting the ability of law-abiding, rational people to be armed won't do a thing to prevent criminals and nutcases from having guns... but it does dramatically alter the balance of power in precisely the wrong direction.
Some corrections (I'm a certified firearms instructor*):
I haven't fired the shotgun in over a decade, and the ammo I have is probably too stale to work reliably.
Ammo doesn't get stale. If stored in moist conditions it can corrode, but outside of that it doesn't go bad. Ammunition from WWII is still perfectly safe, functional and reliable.
If I have to defend my family (or join in an insurrection) the AR-15 is definitely my weapon of choice
That's certainly a reasonable position, but the shotgun (I assume it's 12-gauge -- that's the most common for 870s, though they come in various gauges) is a more effective and safer home defense weapon in most scenarios, when loaded with appropriate ammunition. A 12-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 buckshot is basically equivalent to firing nine 9mm rounds at once. It does a devastating amount of damage and is very likely to stop an intruder with a single shot.
It's far more effective than a.223, which was a caliber chosen by the US military in large part because it tends to produce incapacitating wounds, not death. Not that death is your goal, but the "incapacitating wounds" sought by armies are wounds that make a soldier ineffective in minutes whereas for self-defense you want wounds that incapacitate in seconds. Armies want the injured soldier to be unable to charge across a 100-yard battlefield or accurately shoot a rifle at moderate ranges. You want the intruder to be unable to charge 10 feet or stab with a knife. The shotgun is far better for that.
Another downside to the rifle is overpenetration. While anyone who tries to tell you that it's "safe" to fire a shotgun because it won't penetrate walls is just wrong -- anything that will penetrate a body will penetrate walls -- shotgun pellets do have significantly less penetration than rifle rounds. The rifle bullet will traverse two or three times as many walls before stopping as the shotgun pellet.
Note that I haven't said that an advantage of shotguns is that they don't need to be aimed accurately. At home defense ranges, spread is pretty minimal, so you still have to aim.
I had extensive experience with M-16s during a former employment.
Extensive experience with AR-15-style weapon is a definite mark in favor of the rifle. However, I doubt it would take much practice to become equally proficient with the shotgun. Most of the skills are transferrable.
I do not own a handgun, and I never will. There are not safe, especially around kids (I have two), and would be less effective than a rifle in almost any defensive scenario.
On safety: Handguns are, in general, neither more nor less safe than long guns. In one specific way, they're safer, though. Modern handguns are designed to be carried all day, every day, loaded and ready to fire. Handgun manufacturers do extensive testing to verify that their guns will not discharge unless something operates the trigger, regardless of how they get banged around or beat on. Long guns don't get that same degree of safety testing. For home use this is probably a distinction without a difference, but if you were to carry your firearm in a car, for example, you should do so without a round in the chamber of the rifle or shotgun, lest an automobile accident cause a negligent discharge. There's no similar concern with a properly-functioning modern handgun.
On effectiveness: Handguns actually do have some very significant advantages over long guns (of any type) for home defense. It's far easier to move safely around a dark house with a shorter gun. It's also easier to move around corners without offering a waiting intruder an opportunity to get your gun. And it's also easier to fight an intruder who manages to get close to you with a handgun. One of the training drills I recommend to my students is to learn to shoot their handgun "from retention posit
Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is against the law but nobody is seriously complaining that it is an unnecessary surrender of freedom.
Right, and the analogous second amendment restriction is the ban on private possession of weapons of mass destruction, fighter aircraft, bombs, artillery, etc. Possession of personal arms is analogous to the right to speak your mind to your elected officials. In fact it's closely related to, and perhaps inextricably tied to, that right.
The notion that the Second Amendment is more sacred than the First would laughable if it wasn't so deadly wrong.
More sacred? No. Equally sacred... I don't think that's wrong or laughable. We can debate about whether or not the world has changed enough to make this untrue now, but James Madison and his contemporaries considered it blindingly obvious that the second amendment freedoms were the basis for all others.
I recommend that you read "The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction", by Akhil Reed Amar (who is one of the most significant legal thinkers of our era, BTW, and has been cited more than 20 times by US Supreme Court opinions, not some gun nut).
There are a million and one reasons why someone might be in your house
Bullshit.
If someone is in your house at, say 2 AM, and it's not someone who lives there or who otherwise is supposed to have access to your house (verifying that the "intruder" isn't someone who is supposed to be there is crucial, obviously), there are very few reasons why they might be there, and almost none of them are good.
I'm not suggesting being robbed isn't most likely explanation, but it's just stuff. Your stuff is not worth extrajudicial killing someone over.
Of course stuff is not worth killing over. Duh. That's a rather weak strawman. The reason that so many states specifically provide residents with broad legal discretion in the use of deadly force in their homes is because intruders are often very dangerous to the occupants.
If someone breaks into my house in the middle of the night and somehow manages to make it clear that he is only there to take the TV, I'll let him have the TV. I have insurance, and I don't want to kill anyone. I will, of course, do my best to provide law enforcement with whatever information I can find to help them find the burglar, but I'm not going to shoot him for it. But if someone has broken into my house, how can I possibly know what his intentions are? My wife and kids are in the house, and someone who has already shown his willingness to commit multiple felonies and enter a house that may be occupied is going to have a hard time convincing me that he doesn't mean my family any harm.
Actually, that's not quite true... it's very easy for an intruder to convince me he's not trying to harm me or my family: he can leave! Failing that, he can get on the ground, spread-eagled, where I can keep an eye on him until the cops come (though I probably wouldn't do that, actually; I'd rather just take a picture then tell him to drop his wallet and run). But as long as he continues coming, I'm going to assume that he's a deadly threat.
Finding localised peaks in violent crime figures does not negate the massive drops in gun incidents we saw in Australia following the effective banning of firearms almost 20 years ago.
Over a hundred people die from firearms every day in America. Roughly about 1/3 accidents, 1/3 suicides, and 1/3 deliberate homicides.
No, it's more like 50% suicides and 50% homicides. Accidents constitute less than 2% of the total (~600 accidental firearm deaths per year of ~30,000 firearm deaths, per the CDC) and are declining every year.
As for what we can do, here are some ideas:
To tackle suicides, the solution isn't to disarm the suicidal -- after all, someone who wants to kill themselves has many, many options -- but to address the root cause of nearly all suicides: mental illness. Better focus on mental health could probably help to reduce mass murders as well, by getting these people help -- or else determining that it's not safe to have them on the streets, in the event that we don't know how to help them. A big mental health awareness ad campaign, perhaps based on the Ad Council approach used to attack drugs (though hopefully with much more success, since it'll be a positive message rather than scare tactics), could be used to reduce the stigma of mental illness and encourage people to get treatment, and more funding of mental health research would also be extremely productive.
To tackle homicides, I think the biggest single thing we could do is to end the war on drugs. The majority of gun homicides are criminal-on-criminal murders, and nearly all of them are related to gang violence and the illegal drug trade. Our war on drugs is pumping tens of billions of dollars annually into the criminal underground, and essentially funding all of this violence. If drugs were legalized and regulated, the money would instead be flowing through corporations, which fight their battles with lawsuits and advertising campaigns rather than guns. In the short term, we'd probably see an uptick in violence as all of the suddenly-destitute criminal organizations sought frantically for another lucrative line of business (this is exactly what happened when prohibition was ended, BTW, the gang violence of the 30s was from people whose illegal liquor business had suddenly disappeared), but violence should decline dramatically afterwards.
There are plenty of other things we can do, I'm sure, but these would be a very good start. If you also want to work on reducing the already-low rate of accidental firearm deaths, education is the key. The NRA has some great educational materials targeted at kids, including the Eddie Eagle program which focuses on teaching younger kids that guns are dangerous and that they should 1) stop, 2) don't touch, 3) leave the area and 4) tell a responsible adult, if they find a gun or ammunition, and another program aimed at older kids to teach them how to safely and responsibly handle firearms. Getting some basic firearms education added to the public school curriculum would do more to reduce accidental firearms deaths than anything else, I think.
(For anyone turned off by my mention of the NRA, please consider that the NRA consists of two organizations, a firearms training and education organization which is undeniably excellent and completely uncontroversial, and a political organization which is... not uncontroversial).
I travel with one charger: My laptop charger. I also carry two micro USB cables, for charging my phone and my tablet. Honestly, I could probably get by with just one micro USB. I'd charge the phone at night and the tablet during the day. But it's more convenient to just plug both of them in at night.
I still don't see mom as the likely person for the actual desire for assault weapons.
It's not that unlikely. I know several women who own AR-15s and AK-47s. If you like to shoot, they're fun guns, and they're particularly friendly to women because of the buffered recoil. They military-style platforms allow anyone to shoot moderately-large caliber rifles without the potentially-painful recoil. Most of them also come with adjustable stocks, which allow the rifles to fit people of different sizes, particularly smaller sizes, and you can easily swap out different options for sights, forestocks, grips, etc.
The fact is that they're considerably more fun to shoot for a much larger variety of people than traditional hunting and target rifles.
In gun circles, it's called "black rifle disease", because it's very "catching". People who spend time playing with and shooting these rifles very often end up buying them (oddly enough; military and ex-military personnel who shoot the military versions in the military don't generally catch the disease, but the same people often catch it when exposed to the civilian versions of the firearms).
So, while I don't know anything about the woman -- I haven't even followed the MSM reports very closely -- it doesn't strike me as unlikely that she would own something like that. Far more men own such firearms, but women like them too.
Re:Capitalism doesn't _produce_ free markets
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Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out.
Care to substantiate that claim? Virtually any economist you care to ask will deny it...
The only successful, long-lived monopolies in history have been created and/or maintained by government regulation.
John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith disagree with both of you.
With all due respect to those two gentlemen, their -- very critical -- work came at the very beginning of systematic economic analysis. Both micro- and macro-economics have progreses substantially since then. There's still a lot to learn, of course, but 200 year-old works aren't what you'd consider authoritative in virtually any field, and especially not one that basically began 230 years ago.
Monopolies tend to be the collusive creations of various actors acting in concert, to the detriment of society and the concept of so-called free markets.
I agree that collusion between companies is a major threat to free markets, and government intervention may be required. However, it should also be remembered that such collusion is inherently unstable, and that not only may it self-resolve, but government doesn't necessarily need to act in a heavy-handed way to break up cartels/trusts. Just a little nudge to get one or two members to break ranks is all it takes to make the whole thing fall apart.
The U.S. federal government which broke up Standard Oil
Standard Oil is a very interesting case. While it's commonly considered the standard-bearer for how monopolistic expansion endangers markets, the truth is that the era of Standard Oil was one of rapidly and continuously declining oil prices. Standard Oil achieved its position because its vertical and horizontal integration made it able to provide refined oil more cheaply than any of its competitors. It won on merit, basically.
In theory, a powerful player can use predatory pricing to push out all of its competition, then use its monopolistic position to extract monopoly prices... but as far as I can tell there is no real-world example of that ever happening, except where non-market forces were brought to bear (usually government).
and AT&T
The AT&T story is a reasonable counterexample to my point, though it also benefitted from significant regulatory assistance in building and maintaining its dominant position, as well as the notion -- widely accepted for much of the 20th century -- that long-distance telephone service was a natural monopoly.
and restricted IBM from continuing its anti-competitive practices in collusion with Sperry-Rand
I'm not convinced that the anti-trust regulation did more than accelerate IBMs downfall by four or five years. Market forces were already moving to undercut IBM... it was the personal computer revolution which really destroyed their monopoly. You can argue that had PCs not come into existence the monopoly breaking would have been critical, but I could argue that had IBM not been acting anti-competitively, the price of mainframe computing would have been much lower and therefore there would have been no reason for large and medium businesses to adopt PCs at all. It's not an unreasonable argument that IBM's abuses spurred the market to find alternatives, which greatly benefitted everyone (other than IBM) in the long run.
also seems to disagree as evidenced by its long standing tradition of policing and regulating commerce in order to maintain the fiction that free markets exist at all, let alone without constant oversight.
The argument that government must need to regulate commerce because government regulates commerce is an empty circularity.
Note that I am not arguing that regulation is never necessary, or even that an
Re:Capitalism doesn't _produce_ free markets
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De Beers.
De Beers is not a monopoly, though they do have a large share of the market. De Beers is evidence of a different sort of market manipulation; they've successfully built and maintained their empire not through elimination of competition as much as manipulation of the customer base, to produce demand for the types and quantity of diamonds they're able to produce. Oh... and to the extent they've maintained a monopoly on production, that's been a government-supported operation. It's no accident that several African governments are major shareholders, and the governments in question have acted repeatedly to stifle competition.
OPEC
OPEC isn't a company, it's a colluding set of governments... and one which has had to be very careful to limit their manipulation of oil prices because, again, they're not a monopoly. However, to the extent they do control huge amounts of the world oil reserves that's essentially a government-maintained monopoly. The governments of OPEC countries don't allow anyone else to drill for their oil, regardless of prices.
Swire Group (shipping monopolies in many markets through its history
I have to say I'm not familiar with that history, but odds are very good that it also benefited from government intervention on its behalf, particularly since its heydey was apparently (per Wikipedia) during the Mercantilist era, when government support for strategically advantageous private enterprises wasn't just accepted but actively promoted as a good goal for national progress (where the "nation" was defined as the monarchy, not the people -- Adam Smith really redefined that).
Should I keep going?
Please do... maybe you can come up with one that holds up.
But, even if you do manage to find one or two counterexamples... that's far from supporting the original claim that the natural tendency of free markets is toward abusive monopolies. To support that claim, you'd have to show that such examples are extremely common and that only government intervention prevents them.
The idea that monopolies are short lived without government regulation is libertarian BS where good stuff gets attributed to "capitalism" and bad stuff to "government".
And yet... if you actually look at the details you find that governments do create and perpetuate monopolies all the time, and that monopolies are rarely, if ever, achieved or sustained without government support. It's not magic, just history and logic. The fact is that while extremely large organizations can achieve great economies of scale, they also suffer from many inefficiencies due to scale as well, and in a free market other players will find ways to exploit that fact and undercut them.
Re:Capitalism doesn't _produce_ free markets
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Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out.
Care to substantiate that claim? Virtually any economist you care to ask will deny it, on the rather reasonable grounds that there is no evidence of any such thing actually happening except in isolated cases, and for very short periods of time. It's not that it never happens, but your claim is that it is the normal tendency, inevitable unless government regulation steps in to prevent it.
The only successful, long-lived monopolies in history have been created and/or maintained by government regulation.
Businesses have tons of cash, they don't have meaningful areas to put that cash because they can't sell the product they are producing as it is.
...which creates opportunity for new products to be introduced into the market. New inventions result in the startup of new companies, which need capital, and existing companies that have large cash reserves are one of the places they get it, though perhaps indirectly. Keep in mind that those large cash reserves aren't just sitting; Apple's $100B in "cash", for example, is all invested. Most likely it's primarily in safe, short-term investments, which lowers the price of the next-riskier class of investments and so on, all the way up to the VC. Those big piles of cash drive down borrowing costs across the board, making cash more accessible to startups.
(Note that this very simple analysis ignores the effects of low prime rates from the fed as well as the contrary effects of large amounts of public debt which soak up lots of available investment capital and thereby raise the cost of capital. It also ignores the effects of trade imbalances, currency fluctuations, inflation, both realized and anticipated and I'm sure a bunch of other things I don't even know I don't know. The point is that the cash held by big companies isn't sitting idle, and that it does have the effect of nurturing growth in the economy, by making cash available to new enterprises so they can get off the ground and start growing.)
One other point: Making existing industries more efficient not only frees up capital, it also frees up labor. What's really crucial but not often understood is that these are exactly the same thing. We measure capital in terms of dollars, but dollars are just fictitious placeholders for real wealth, which is actual stuff produced, which is created by the combined application of labor and capital in various permutations. So increased efficiency results in additional capacity in the market in terms of both labor and the placeholder for that labor, both of which can be applied to create new output elsewhere -- often output that was previously either a luxury item or simply non-existent.
The only real problem in all of this is the fact that while cash is liquid and can easily flow into whatever new industry can make effective use of it, labor is not very liquid. It takes time to retrain people to make them useful in new industries -- and sometimes it just can't be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Though if they try to sell "illegal automatics" on most gun forums, they'll find themselves banned and reported to the ATF faster than you can empty a magazine.
Damn straight. Gun forums tend to have an extremely low tolerance for any hint of illegal behavior, much less anything as blatant as an attempt to sell NFA-restricted firearms.
Your metabolism can only adjust so far, and it's not actually all that far. If that weren't true, then people wouldn't starve to death, their metabolism would just keep adjusting until they could live on practically nothing.
Restrict your caloric intake to, say, 1500 calories per day, and you'll lose weight, and you'll keep losing it as long as you maintain that. Include some strength training to avoid also losing muscle tissue. When you reach your target weight, increase your intake to normal, but weigh yourself daily and monitor your weight tend, if it starts trending upward, reduce your food intake slightly. Continue tuning your intake until you are at the weight you want and staying there. Once you've got that figured out, continue weighing yourself daily and adjusting if the trend lines go too far out of whack.
Easy, right? Well, no. Controlling calorie intake is not easy. It takes a fair amount of work to track what you're eating, and a lot of discipline. Technology can help, though, a lot. Use a smartphone app to log everything you eat and the exercise you do. Get a Wifi-enabled scale (I have the Fitbit Aria) and stand on it every morning, then use another tool (I use the trendweight.com web site) to track your trend lines.
It works. I was at 240, and am now at 200, where I've been for a year. I've decided that I really need to be about 180, so I'm going to get focused on lowering calorie intake again starting after the holidays. I target a 1000-calorie daily deficit, which is pretty danged steep, but results in a consistent two pounds per week of weight loss, so I should be down to 180 by mid-March, late March at the latest.
Sorry, not the fingers. Though fingers that are worked hard do get thick. I'm not sure what the mechanism is. Perhaps it's mostly bone thickening, which would be even better (for punching) than muscle growth.
There are 0 muscles in the hands. They're all in the forearms, so they don't provide much protection to the bones.
There are muscles in the fingers and in the hands as well as in the forearms. Also, have you ever looked at the hands of a man who has spend a few decades doing hard work with them? There's a reason the fingers get thick and the hands get broad and "square" in appearance.
Your hands are full of very small bones. It's very easy to break your hand by punching something hard and dense (such as a skull or face for instance).
This is very true if your hands have spent a lifetime manipulating books and pencils and keyboards, but somewhat less true if they've spent a lifetime doing hard work. A more labor-intensive lifestyle makes the hand muscles bigger and stronger and also thickens the bones. Meanwhile, it doesn't make the face or many other vulnerable points on the body significantly tougher.
Doesn't the UK have a "loser pays" system for lawsuit legal expenses? That creates some different dynamics here, since it means that unless the Pirate Party is very certain of their case, they could end up liable for both sides.
Dunno about "libertarian", and "urban myth" implies that it's widespread, but, yeah, it seems to be a bogus claim.
Yeah, I found the same page :-)
I'm guessing they're just going to change the language into a more confusing form. Same terms, just more confusing so they can try to get away with it.
Given the outcry thus far, they'd have to be really stupid to try that. There will be too many people scrutinizing the language, including lawyers, who are ready to interpret any such attempt.
Yes... including the Tesla Roadster. It was in a box in the trunk, IIRC.
This is what DoT regulations get you—Stupid wastes of money. (It's a $500+ part.)
Cite?
They haven't offered to change the contract
From their statement: "As we review your feedback and stories in the press, we’re going to modify specific parts of the terms to make it more clear what will happen with your photos."
We'll have to see what they actually change, but they have said that they're going to change it.
Consider that had some of the teachers at Sandy Hook been armed, the outcome would have been very different. Restricting the ability of law-abiding, rational people to be armed won't do a thing to prevent criminals and nutcases from having guns... but it does dramatically alter the balance of power in precisely the wrong direction.
Here's another link: https://plus.google.com/u/0/111463469546217406955/posts/CsdTguwmXPG
Some corrections (I'm a certified firearms instructor*):
I haven't fired the shotgun in over a decade, and the ammo I have is probably too stale to work reliably.
Ammo doesn't get stale. If stored in moist conditions it can corrode, but outside of that it doesn't go bad. Ammunition from WWII is still perfectly safe, functional and reliable.
If I have to defend my family (or join in an insurrection) the AR-15 is definitely my weapon of choice
That's certainly a reasonable position, but the shotgun (I assume it's 12-gauge -- that's the most common for 870s, though they come in various gauges) is a more effective and safer home defense weapon in most scenarios, when loaded with appropriate ammunition. A 12-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 buckshot is basically equivalent to firing nine 9mm rounds at once. It does a devastating amount of damage and is very likely to stop an intruder with a single shot.
It's far more effective than a .223, which was a caliber chosen by the US military in large part because it tends to produce incapacitating wounds, not death. Not that death is your goal, but the "incapacitating wounds" sought by armies are wounds that make a soldier ineffective in minutes whereas for self-defense you want wounds that incapacitate in seconds. Armies want the injured soldier to be unable to charge across a 100-yard battlefield or accurately shoot a rifle at moderate ranges. You want the intruder to be unable to charge 10 feet or stab with a knife. The shotgun is far better for that.
Another downside to the rifle is overpenetration. While anyone who tries to tell you that it's "safe" to fire a shotgun because it won't penetrate walls is just wrong -- anything that will penetrate a body will penetrate walls -- shotgun pellets do have significantly less penetration than rifle rounds. The rifle bullet will traverse two or three times as many walls before stopping as the shotgun pellet.
Note that I haven't said that an advantage of shotguns is that they don't need to be aimed accurately. At home defense ranges, spread is pretty minimal, so you still have to aim.
I had extensive experience with M-16s during a former employment.
Extensive experience with AR-15-style weapon is a definite mark in favor of the rifle. However, I doubt it would take much practice to become equally proficient with the shotgun. Most of the skills are transferrable.
I do not own a handgun, and I never will. There are not safe, especially around kids (I have two), and would be less effective than a rifle in almost any defensive scenario.
On safety: Handguns are, in general, neither more nor less safe than long guns. In one specific way, they're safer, though. Modern handguns are designed to be carried all day, every day, loaded and ready to fire. Handgun manufacturers do extensive testing to verify that their guns will not discharge unless something operates the trigger, regardless of how they get banged around or beat on. Long guns don't get that same degree of safety testing. For home use this is probably a distinction without a difference, but if you were to carry your firearm in a car, for example, you should do so without a round in the chamber of the rifle or shotgun, lest an automobile accident cause a negligent discharge. There's no similar concern with a properly-functioning modern handgun.
On effectiveness: Handguns actually do have some very significant advantages over long guns (of any type) for home defense. It's far easier to move safely around a dark house with a shorter gun. It's also easier to move around corners without offering a waiting intruder an opportunity to get your gun. And it's also easier to fight an intruder who manages to get close to you with a handgun. One of the training drills I recommend to my students is to learn to shoot their handgun "from retention posit
Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is against the law but nobody is seriously complaining that it is an unnecessary surrender of freedom.
Right, and the analogous second amendment restriction is the ban on private possession of weapons of mass destruction, fighter aircraft, bombs, artillery, etc. Possession of personal arms is analogous to the right to speak your mind to your elected officials. In fact it's closely related to, and perhaps inextricably tied to, that right.
The notion that the Second Amendment is more sacred than the First would laughable if it wasn't so deadly wrong.
More sacred? No. Equally sacred... I don't think that's wrong or laughable. We can debate about whether or not the world has changed enough to make this untrue now, but James Madison and his contemporaries considered it blindingly obvious that the second amendment freedoms were the basis for all others.
I recommend that you read "The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction", by Akhil Reed Amar (who is one of the most significant legal thinkers of our era, BTW, and has been cited more than 20 times by US Supreme Court opinions, not some gun nut).
If you'd like a shorter article, and one that you won't have to buy, try this one: http://www.constitution.org/2ll/2ndschol/103wha.htm
I suspect you may actually like the conclusions in that article, even though it places more importance on the second amendment that you might prefer.
There are a million and one reasons why someone might be in your house
Bullshit.
If someone is in your house at, say 2 AM, and it's not someone who lives there or who otherwise is supposed to have access to your house (verifying that the "intruder" isn't someone who is supposed to be there is crucial, obviously), there are very few reasons why they might be there, and almost none of them are good.
I'm not suggesting being robbed isn't most likely explanation, but it's just stuff. Your stuff is not worth extrajudicial killing someone over.
Of course stuff is not worth killing over. Duh. That's a rather weak strawman. The reason that so many states specifically provide residents with broad legal discretion in the use of deadly force in their homes is because intruders are often very dangerous to the occupants.
If someone breaks into my house in the middle of the night and somehow manages to make it clear that he is only there to take the TV, I'll let him have the TV. I have insurance, and I don't want to kill anyone. I will, of course, do my best to provide law enforcement with whatever information I can find to help them find the burglar, but I'm not going to shoot him for it. But if someone has broken into my house, how can I possibly know what his intentions are? My wife and kids are in the house, and someone who has already shown his willingness to commit multiple felonies and enter a house that may be occupied is going to have a hard time convincing me that he doesn't mean my family any harm.
Actually, that's not quite true... it's very easy for an intruder to convince me he's not trying to harm me or my family: he can leave! Failing that, he can get on the ground, spread-eagled, where I can keep an eye on him until the cops come (though I probably wouldn't do that, actually; I'd rather just take a picture then tell him to drop his wallet and run). But as long as he continues coming, I'm going to assume that he's a deadly threat.
Finding localised peaks in violent crime figures does not negate the massive drops in gun incidents we saw in Australia following the effective banning of firearms almost 20 years ago.
Are you sure that's what you saw?
http://armsandthelaw.com/archives/GunLawsSudden%20DeathBJC.pdf
Over a hundred people die from firearms every day in America. Roughly about 1/3 accidents, 1/3 suicides, and 1/3 deliberate homicides.
No, it's more like 50% suicides and 50% homicides. Accidents constitute less than 2% of the total (~600 accidental firearm deaths per year of ~30,000 firearm deaths, per the CDC) and are declining every year.
As for what we can do, here are some ideas:
To tackle suicides, the solution isn't to disarm the suicidal -- after all, someone who wants to kill themselves has many, many options -- but to address the root cause of nearly all suicides: mental illness. Better focus on mental health could probably help to reduce mass murders as well, by getting these people help -- or else determining that it's not safe to have them on the streets, in the event that we don't know how to help them. A big mental health awareness ad campaign, perhaps based on the Ad Council approach used to attack drugs (though hopefully with much more success, since it'll be a positive message rather than scare tactics), could be used to reduce the stigma of mental illness and encourage people to get treatment, and more funding of mental health research would also be extremely productive.
To tackle homicides, I think the biggest single thing we could do is to end the war on drugs. The majority of gun homicides are criminal-on-criminal murders, and nearly all of them are related to gang violence and the illegal drug trade. Our war on drugs is pumping tens of billions of dollars annually into the criminal underground, and essentially funding all of this violence. If drugs were legalized and regulated, the money would instead be flowing through corporations, which fight their battles with lawsuits and advertising campaigns rather than guns. In the short term, we'd probably see an uptick in violence as all of the suddenly-destitute criminal organizations sought frantically for another lucrative line of business (this is exactly what happened when prohibition was ended, BTW, the gang violence of the 30s was from people whose illegal liquor business had suddenly disappeared), but violence should decline dramatically afterwards.
There are plenty of other things we can do, I'm sure, but these would be a very good start. If you also want to work on reducing the already-low rate of accidental firearm deaths, education is the key. The NRA has some great educational materials targeted at kids, including the Eddie Eagle program which focuses on teaching younger kids that guns are dangerous and that they should 1) stop, 2) don't touch, 3) leave the area and 4) tell a responsible adult, if they find a gun or ammunition, and another program aimed at older kids to teach them how to safely and responsibly handle firearms. Getting some basic firearms education added to the public school curriculum would do more to reduce accidental firearms deaths than anything else, I think.
(For anyone turned off by my mention of the NRA, please consider that the NRA consists of two organizations, a firearms training and education organization which is undeniably excellent and completely uncontroversial, and a political organization which is... not uncontroversial).
new variants of bath salts
Note that that should be "bath salts" in quotes. It's a range of drugs that are sold under the guise of bath salts despite having no use as such.
So that's what I've been doing wrong, thanks!
What, using "bath salts" as bath salts? Or using bath salts as "bath salts"?
One less micro USB cable, you mean.
I travel with one charger: My laptop charger. I also carry two micro USB cables, for charging my phone and my tablet. Honestly, I could probably get by with just one micro USB. I'd charge the phone at night and the tablet during the day. But it's more convenient to just plug both of them in at night.
It could be fixed for your phone, but you'd have to wipe and completely reinstall.
I still don't see mom as the likely person for the actual desire for assault weapons.
It's not that unlikely. I know several women who own AR-15s and AK-47s. If you like to shoot, they're fun guns, and they're particularly friendly to women because of the buffered recoil. They military-style platforms allow anyone to shoot moderately-large caliber rifles without the potentially-painful recoil. Most of them also come with adjustable stocks, which allow the rifles to fit people of different sizes, particularly smaller sizes, and you can easily swap out different options for sights, forestocks, grips, etc.
The fact is that they're considerably more fun to shoot for a much larger variety of people than traditional hunting and target rifles.
In gun circles, it's called "black rifle disease", because it's very "catching". People who spend time playing with and shooting these rifles very often end up buying them (oddly enough; military and ex-military personnel who shoot the military versions in the military don't generally catch the disease, but the same people often catch it when exposed to the civilian versions of the firearms).
So, while I don't know anything about the woman -- I haven't even followed the MSM reports very closely -- it doesn't strike me as unlikely that she would own something like that. Far more men own such firearms, but women like them too.
Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out.
Care to substantiate that claim? Virtually any economist you care to ask will deny it...
The only successful, long-lived monopolies in history have been created and/or maintained by government regulation.
John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith disagree with both of you.
With all due respect to those two gentlemen, their -- very critical -- work came at the very beginning of systematic economic analysis. Both micro- and macro-economics have progreses substantially since then. There's still a lot to learn, of course, but 200 year-old works aren't what you'd consider authoritative in virtually any field, and especially not one that basically began 230 years ago.
Monopolies tend to be the collusive creations of various actors acting in concert, to the detriment of society and the concept of so-called free markets.
I agree that collusion between companies is a major threat to free markets, and government intervention may be required. However, it should also be remembered that such collusion is inherently unstable, and that not only may it self-resolve, but government doesn't necessarily need to act in a heavy-handed way to break up cartels/trusts. Just a little nudge to get one or two members to break ranks is all it takes to make the whole thing fall apart.
The U.S. federal government which broke up Standard Oil
Standard Oil is a very interesting case. While it's commonly considered the standard-bearer for how monopolistic expansion endangers markets, the truth is that the era of Standard Oil was one of rapidly and continuously declining oil prices. Standard Oil achieved its position because its vertical and horizontal integration made it able to provide refined oil more cheaply than any of its competitors. It won on merit, basically.
In theory, a powerful player can use predatory pricing to push out all of its competition, then use its monopolistic position to extract monopoly prices... but as far as I can tell there is no real-world example of that ever happening, except where non-market forces were brought to bear (usually government).
and AT&T
The AT&T story is a reasonable counterexample to my point, though it also benefitted from significant regulatory assistance in building and maintaining its dominant position, as well as the notion -- widely accepted for much of the 20th century -- that long-distance telephone service was a natural monopoly.
and restricted IBM from continuing its anti-competitive practices in collusion with Sperry-Rand
I'm not convinced that the anti-trust regulation did more than accelerate IBMs downfall by four or five years. Market forces were already moving to undercut IBM... it was the personal computer revolution which really destroyed their monopoly. You can argue that had PCs not come into existence the monopoly breaking would have been critical, but I could argue that had IBM not been acting anti-competitively, the price of mainframe computing would have been much lower and therefore there would have been no reason for large and medium businesses to adopt PCs at all. It's not an unreasonable argument that IBM's abuses spurred the market to find alternatives, which greatly benefitted everyone (other than IBM) in the long run.
also seems to disagree as evidenced by its long standing tradition of policing and regulating commerce in order to maintain the fiction that free markets exist at all, let alone without constant oversight.
The argument that government must need to regulate commerce because government regulates commerce is an empty circularity.
Note that I am not arguing that regulation is never necessary, or even that an
De Beers.
De Beers is not a monopoly, though they do have a large share of the market. De Beers is evidence of a different sort of market manipulation; they've successfully built and maintained their empire not through elimination of competition as much as manipulation of the customer base, to produce demand for the types and quantity of diamonds they're able to produce. Oh... and to the extent they've maintained a monopoly on production, that's been a government-supported operation. It's no accident that several African governments are major shareholders, and the governments in question have acted repeatedly to stifle competition.
OPEC
OPEC isn't a company, it's a colluding set of governments... and one which has had to be very careful to limit their manipulation of oil prices because, again, they're not a monopoly. However, to the extent they do control huge amounts of the world oil reserves that's essentially a government-maintained monopoly. The governments of OPEC countries don't allow anyone else to drill for their oil, regardless of prices.
Swire Group (shipping monopolies in many markets through its history
I have to say I'm not familiar with that history, but odds are very good that it also benefited from government intervention on its behalf, particularly since its heydey was apparently (per Wikipedia) during the Mercantilist era, when government support for strategically advantageous private enterprises wasn't just accepted but actively promoted as a good goal for national progress (where the "nation" was defined as the monarchy, not the people -- Adam Smith really redefined that).
Should I keep going?
Please do... maybe you can come up with one that holds up.
But, even if you do manage to find one or two counterexamples... that's far from supporting the original claim that the natural tendency of free markets is toward abusive monopolies. To support that claim, you'd have to show that such examples are extremely common and that only government intervention prevents them.
The idea that monopolies are short lived without government regulation is libertarian BS where good stuff gets attributed to "capitalism" and bad stuff to "government".
And yet... if you actually look at the details you find that governments do create and perpetuate monopolies all the time, and that monopolies are rarely, if ever, achieved or sustained without government support. It's not magic, just history and logic. The fact is that while extremely large organizations can achieve great economies of scale, they also suffer from many inefficiencies due to scale as well, and in a free market other players will find ways to exploit that fact and undercut them.
Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out.
Care to substantiate that claim? Virtually any economist you care to ask will deny it, on the rather reasonable grounds that there is no evidence of any such thing actually happening except in isolated cases, and for very short periods of time. It's not that it never happens, but your claim is that it is the normal tendency, inevitable unless government regulation steps in to prevent it.
The only successful, long-lived monopolies in history have been created and/or maintained by government regulation.
Businesses have tons of cash, they don't have meaningful areas to put that cash because they can't sell the product they are producing as it is.
...which creates opportunity for new products to be introduced into the market. New inventions result in the startup of new companies, which need capital, and existing companies that have large cash reserves are one of the places they get it, though perhaps indirectly. Keep in mind that those large cash reserves aren't just sitting; Apple's $100B in "cash", for example, is all invested. Most likely it's primarily in safe, short-term investments, which lowers the price of the next-riskier class of investments and so on, all the way up to the VC. Those big piles of cash drive down borrowing costs across the board, making cash more accessible to startups.
(Note that this very simple analysis ignores the effects of low prime rates from the fed as well as the contrary effects of large amounts of public debt which soak up lots of available investment capital and thereby raise the cost of capital. It also ignores the effects of trade imbalances, currency fluctuations, inflation, both realized and anticipated and I'm sure a bunch of other things I don't even know I don't know. The point is that the cash held by big companies isn't sitting idle, and that it does have the effect of nurturing growth in the economy, by making cash available to new enterprises so they can get off the ground and start growing.)
One other point: Making existing industries more efficient not only frees up capital, it also frees up labor. What's really crucial but not often understood is that these are exactly the same thing. We measure capital in terms of dollars, but dollars are just fictitious placeholders for real wealth, which is actual stuff produced, which is created by the combined application of labor and capital in various permutations. So increased efficiency results in additional capacity in the market in terms of both labor and the placeholder for that labor, both of which can be applied to create new output elsewhere -- often output that was previously either a luxury item or simply non-existent.
The only real problem in all of this is the fact that while cash is liquid and can easily flow into whatever new industry can make effective use of it, labor is not very liquid. It takes time to retrain people to make them useful in new industries -- and sometimes it just can't be done.