It is just like if someone walked around holding their phone/camcorder/camera in front of him all of the time and was pointing it everywhere he looked. No one wants that.
I honestly don't care. And I don't feel like this is the same thing as someone pointing a camera at me.
There are security camera's everywhere. I don't freak out whenever a camera happens to be pointed at me (which is nearly all the time in public). If someone continuously focuses their camera on me (i.e. targeting me specifically) then I'd have a problem with it, because I don't know what their intent is.
I don't care if people glance at me as part of just the normal looking around and being aware of their surroundings. For the same reason I don't care if they are just filming their own experience (of which I might be in the background) without targeting me specifically, nor do I care if I am in the background of a security camera.
I don't care about being recorded. I care about being targeted.
As a person who makes this mistake frequently, I can say that it's not that I don't know the proper usage of these words, it's just that I seem to think in terms of sound (i.e. I *hear* my own internal monologue), and when I am writing quickly, I am just blindly transcribing this internal monologue. When I am writing in a more formal setting, I actually proof read whatever I have written after the fact. For slashdot comments, a lot of homophones slip through the cracks because I don't really spend a lot of time proofreading them.
I don't really have too many other grammar problems or spelling problems, because my internal monologue tends to have fairly good grammar, and I tend to remember (better than most people) how words are spelled.
No, it just means we're going to have to build reliable detectors for such stuff.
Or we can just make deception detectors that monitor people's brainwaves to determine if it seems like they are trying to do something they are not supposed to.
I can tell my colleague that I just saw his car in the parking lot and one of his tires is flat. This would be tricking him, but it doesn't require any cleverness to do this.
Similarly, you can tell the judges at a turing test that the "person" on the other end has some sort of deficiency (e.g. mental problems, doesn't speak the language of the judges, etc) that explains his/her odd (e.g. inhuman) responses. You can even stack the human subjects with humans who are also similarly deficient to further disguise which subjects are computers.
This is basically just creating a rigged test.
It's obvious why it is necessary to create a rigged test. Modern computers are nowhere near passing a legitimate Turing test.
Newborn babies are persons too. If we have a chatbot that never responds, will judges be able to tell the difference between this quite chatbot and newborns who can't type on a keyboard?
I remember back in the day when a different program passed the Turing test by imitating a paranoid schizophrenic person. It would always change the topic and say very crazy things.
These sorts of tests are actually just diminishing the judges ability to make an accurate assessment.
This would be like having a computer winning an essay contest by only allowing the judges 3 seconds to read each essay and having the essay be in 6 point font.
A real Turing test is one in which the time allotted is enough to engage in a rational dialogue with the "person". IN the case of a 13 year old Ukranian boy, that might mean enough time to teach eachother ukranian and english via chat.
It's not a problem with the turing test. The turing test is a thought experiment similar to how the turing machine was athough experiment. No true Turing machines exist and no true Turing tests exist. What exists are real life things that can be fairly good or fairly bad physical (but finite) representations of these concepts.
Modern day computers are pretty good Turing equivalent machines. They don't have infinite memory, but they very much embody the spirit of what Turing had imagined.
Tricking some judges into thinking that a computer is a human for 5 minutes, especially by informing the judges that the reason the responses were strange is because the "human" was a 13 year old boy who speaks another language, does not embody the spirit of the Turing test.
I might as well write a chatbot that says nothing at all and say that it is simulating a human being at a computer witha broken keyboard.
The point of the Turing Test is that it is so unbelievably hard that anything that legitimately passes it would be accepted as intelligent without question.
Think of someone you know very well (like a best friend or a sibling). What if it turned out that this person was actually a very human-like robot. Did you think it was human? This would be an example of legitimately passing the Turing test. You don't need to go that far to pass the Turing test, but you do need to feel as if the thing you are having a conversation with, is real person for more than 5 minutes. Most human beings are able to convince you they are really human for nearly their whole lifetime.
I made a program that passed the Turing test too.
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It simulates a newborn baby. I opened sourced to code so others can use it
There are also plenty of people who think we are just collections of atoms.
Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people.
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Well then maybe it was actually an autist. If people *really* couldn't tell the difference, how do you know it was different?
Maybe you're judges just sucked. Or maybe autists just don't say anything particularly different than what a machine would say.
If you are seriously suggesting that the Turing test is trivially easy to pass, what you are actually saying is that there is nothing complicated about human beings, and that they can be *easily* simulated by a computer.
This was *a* Turing test, not *the* Turing test. This program fooled 33% of judges it was a 13 year old Ukranian boy in 5 minute conversations.
Contrast this to the general Turing test. Imagine your best friend. Recall all the conversations you had with him. What if I told you he was actually a robot. Why were you able to be tricked by this robot? Why couldn't you tell that he was just following his programming? He just seemed so real. This is what passing the Turing test is.
What was done in this article is like jumping and claiming to have flown. I suspect that if any of these judges had to spend longer amounts of time (e.g. a year) trying to get to know this 13 year old Ukranian boy, it would have become obvious that this boy was either not a real human or that he was severely mentally disabled. The alternative is that the boy is actually really the first artificially intelligent being.
*The* Turing Test (rather than some small subset) is *really* hard to pass. It was designed as a thought experiment as a test *so* impossibly hard to pass that if it ever were passed, you'd have to agree that anything that passed it was sentient (i.e. it can't be passed with just a simple trick). Tragically people's conception of the Turing test is precisely this idea that "once you get a program that can trick a judge with a simple trick, it's intelligent", which absolutely misses the point.
I specifically referred to mental incompetence which has an accepted definition.
Do you think the 2nd amendment should be interpreted in such a way that not a single free US citizen should be denied access to a firearm? Because the *only* claim I am making is that *some* people are not mentally competent enough to own a firearm, and that denying these people the right to own a firearm is not a violation of the constitution, because the constitution applies to mentally competent adults.
So the child/incompetence analogy doesn't really work.
Some adults are *as* mentally competent as small children. When say mentally incompetent I am not using 2 different scales for children and adults. A mentally incompetent adult is someone who would not be held responsible for killing another person in a court. A mentally incompetent adult is someone who if they were allowed to live in the general population, would require an adult guardian in the same way that a child requires an adult guardian.
I am not talking about some guy who is considered stupid by his friends.
Also, you'll notice that my comparison was actually a pretty good one, because Jellomizer thinks that children should have the right to own guns for the same reason that the mentally incompetent should. And that reason is that the 2nd amendment doesn't have any explicit limitations according to him.
I don't know the specifics because I am not an expert in mental health. I do know that this is something that is done all the time, albeit imperfectly.
How does one test for competence in any area? whether it is driving, calculus, or medicine? Someone who is experienced in the relevant field devises a test designed to separate the competent people and the people who are not (i.e. the people who are capable of doing X and the people who are not). Tests, like pretty much everything in life can't be 100% accurate, and you expect some percentage (hopefully small) of false positives and false negatives.
In my view, the fact that tests can not be perfect, is not a good reason to abandon tests.
Is someone with a character disorder or even split personality, or Aspergers, "loners", the physically handicapped, etc. be considered incompetent?
*Mentally* competent people are people who can be held responsible for their actions. Since being an Asperger "loner" is not a proper excuse for committing a crime, it implies we treat Asperger loners as being mentally competent. Physically handicapped people aren;t necessarily mentally compromised at all, so I don;t know why that was even mentioned.
Who is *not* mentally competent? People who we would not consider responsible for their actions if they broke the law. Small children, animals, severely mentally retarded people, the mentally insane, etc.
First of all, known psychotic, violent and anti-social people are prohibited from owning firearms.
Which apparently jellomizer is opposed to.
Secondly, psychosis is a difficult thing to diagnose.
I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that fall into a gray area. There are also people that are clearly very dangerous and should not even be allowed to be in the general population, much less own guns. Jellomizer apparently thinks that because some people fall into gray areas, then it's not fair to take guns away form anyone. He would rather everyone have the freedom to own guns because he values freedom over safety in *every* situation. He thinks sacrificing even a very little freedom for a lot of safety is a bad thing (e.g. preventing even the most dangerous people form owning guns).
One would be denied a "freedom" without due process and a compelling state interest.
I am not advocating anything except due process. Jellomizer is saying there is no such thing as due process in determining someone (no matter how potentially dangerous) is not fit to own a gun.
And you have failed to show a workable solution. You haven't even defined what constitutes as a "mentally ill" person. The current state of affairs is that it's trivial to be diagnosed with some mental illness because psychology as a field of science just doesn't produce quality research like other fields, and this will continue for some time. What do you suggest doing until then? How long will this take to get fixed, and how many people will suffer in the mean time? Or will you wait who knows how long before implementing your proposed solution?
I'm not a mental health expert. I am a software engineer. My workable solution is to get experts to decide when people are safe to own guns. Obviously you don't like this solution, but the fact that one person doesn't like it doesn't mean it's bad.
Correct. You'll find that I'm no fan of most people.
Clearly
We have the TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, free speech zones, stop-and-frisk, constitution-free zones, unfettered border searches, DUI checkpoints, protest permits, the drug war, etc. Most people support at least one of those things.
Supporting the cause of freedom to the point of giving guns to people who are not responsible enough to handle them safely is insane. You say we don't have a way to determine with 100% accuracy who will murder someone. So what? Should we let children drive cars on the freeway because we don;t know which children will be bad drivers?
It doesn't matter what you think they would have wanted. What matters is what they left behind.
What is left behind is a document that is interpreted by the supreme court (as defined by the constitution itself).
Do you have a credible method, or are you suggesting that we strip people of their rights for thoughtcrime?
Stopping mentally incompetent people from harming themselves or others is not punishing a thoughtcrime. It's not even a crime. By definition, a person who is mentally incompetent is not responsible for their actions. Responsibility is a 2 way street. With responsibility comes freedom, and the ability to be punished for breaking laws.
I trust the opinion of mental health experts as to who is not responsible. It's not perfect but it is far better than the alternative. What you are suggesting is liek saying our justice system is not perfect, therefore we should open up all the jails and allow every prisoner onto the streets.
I think the constitution should be amended. That's another difference between you and me, apparently. I actually want to go through the correct processes to get this whole thing resolved, although I do not agree with taking rights away from "mentally ill" people. I also do not agree with unlimited punishment after one has served their time.
I actually want do want to amend the constitution to specifically limit rights on what kinds of weapons can be owned. It is clear to me that weapons have become much more deadly since the 2nd amendment was written. It is also obvious to me that the constitution does not (and never did) apply to the mentally incompetent, for the same reason it doesn't apply to animals and plants. Children, the mentally incompetent, animals and plants are not responsible for their actions.
You're literally turning them into unpeople and denying them basic rights that the constitution says they should have,
No, I am saying that certain people can/should be determined not to be mentally competent, and therefore do not have the same rights as other people, due to the danger they pose to themselves and others. This has nothing to do with turning people into non-people, merely determining which people can be behave responsibly.
Then guess which group they belong to? They certainly don't care about the 2nd amendment. Quit pretending to be a supporter of the second amendment.
By your definition of what constitutes support of the 2nd amendment, only a very small minority of Americans actually support the second amendment. Your pretty much alone if you want to allow mentally incompetent people have guns. It's not like we can ask them, but I'm pretty sure even the founding fathers that drafted the 2nd amendment wouldn't want mentally incompetent people with weapons.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're so scared of someone deciding to shoot people with guns (And really, the only real way you could determine if they're such a person is if they've done similar things before. Anything else is thoughtcrime.), they shouldn't be walking around freely to begin with, assuming they've committed crimes before
1. That's not the *only* way you can determine that. 2. Even having committed violent crimes before does not prove that someone will continue to commit violent crimes.
It is possible to determine that some people are mentally incompetent and/or dangerous. That doesn't mean that they have committed a crime or deserve to be punished. Maybe they do need to be segregated from society, but part of this includes taking their guns away.
You think you can absolve yourself of denying people their 2nd amendment rights by detaining them against their will and simply saying "the owner of this building doesn't allow guns"? That's bullshit.
If a crazy person who has never committed a crime starts building a nuclear bomb, would you do anything to stop them? How could you? If they have never committed a crime, and since there is no way perfect way of determining someone is crazy, and the 2nd amendment is absolute in allowing people to obtain weapons of any kind. Would you just let them build the weapon?
You also keep overlooking the fact that *anyone* can be determined to be "mentally incompetent."
That's a different problem (if it exists). The solution to this is to fix our system of determining mental competence and not simply assuming everyone is mentally competent to own a gun.
Psychology produces mostly bad science, 'experts' can be paid off, 'experts' can be wrong, etc.
Again, not a good reason to simply assume everyone is mentally competent.
Being a homosexual was once considered a mental illness, for instance.
Even when it was considered a mental illness, there was a time when homosexuals were still deemed mentally competent (i.e. responsible for their actions, etc). To make the following logical deductions "the system was flawed -> the system will always be flawed -> we shouldn't even have a system", is rather extreme.
There are all kinds of problems with trying to restrict "mentally incompetent" people's rights, and none of it leads to a good result.
There are lots of problems with it, and it's society's job to handle those problems as best it can. Some of it certainly leads to better results than would have happened otherwise. My wife used to be a social worker in a hospital for mentally ill. She used to come home everyday with stories about how they had to get court orders to force people to take their medication, or restrain them to prevent them from hurting themselves and others during psychotic episodes. Sometimes people just can't be trusted to be safe around themselves and others. Allowing them to have guns is probably just about the worst idea imaginable.
It's just too easily abused, and I would never support such a thing.
Court systems are easily abused. Legislative power is easily abused. Any kind of authority is easily abused. These are not a good arguments for anarachy (at least not to those of us that prefer to live in a civil society). These are good arguments for improving our safeguards against abuses.
And also, just like most gun owners won't murder people, most "mentally incompetent" people won't, either.
Most bullets miss people. That doesn't make it ok to shoot at people. Giving a gun to a mentally competent person with no criminal history carries a very low risk of that gun being used in a homicide by that person. Giving a gun to some people (small children, mentally incompetent, psychotic people, etc) carries a much higher risk even if less than 50% (i.e. not most) will actually murder someone.
If you support restricting them, you support collective punishment, which is absolutely intolerable.
It's not punishment to deny gun possession to those that are not capable of bearing such a responsibility (e.g. children, mentally incompetent adults, and psychotic people). We restrict rights of these people for the same reason we don;t let children and blind people drive cars. There is a reasonable expectation that these people will be a significant danger to themselves and others if they are not denied these rights.
This is the sort of thing I'd expect from the anti-gun crowd.
If you actually surveyed people in the "pro-gin crowd" whether they'd want guns in the hands of mentally incompetent people, I think you'll find that they generally don't.
Why are you so desperate to compare children with people who are supposedly mentally incompetent (Which is defined by pseudoscientists and can be applied to anyone in the fucking world!)? Do you think this will ever change my opinion about the second amendment? It won't.
Because children and the mentally incompetent share a lot of the same qualities, the most relevant to this conversation being the one where the constitution does not apply to them in the same way that it applies to mentally competent adults.
I wasn't trying to change your mind. You said I didn't believe in the 2nd amendment because I didn't want crazy people to have guns. I was just trying to figure out what you thought the limits of the 2nd amendment were, to determine what was required to be consistent with your view of the constitution and the 2nd amendment. Is there was human being you'd deny the right to own a weapon? Or is it really every single US citizen's right from newborn to psychopath to own a nuclear weapon?
So lets say the 3 year old kid really wants the gun and says he/she would rather not live with the parents if it means they can't have the gun (you know how fussy kids can be when they want something), do the parents have to let the kid leave and play with the gun? Or are they allowed to detain the child by force?
Oh, and parents refusing to spend their own money to buy their child something is their right. This is an example of government thugs violating people's constitutional rights.
I didn't say anything about spending parents money.
If I want to use my money to buy your child an loaded handgun as a present, do you have a right as a parent to violate the US constitution and deny your 3 year old child his/her 2nd amendment rights by taking the gun away from them?
Are you sure? It says nothing about psychotic people being an exception, nor does it imply it anywhere. If you don't like those people being able to own guns, move to amend the constitution, not just ignore it.
The constitution refers to mentally competent adults. It doesn't explicitly say this anywhere in the constitution, but it is the reason that you cannot be convicted of false imprisonment for sending their kids to their rooms. It is also the reason children and the mentally incompetent are not able to consent to enter into a contract.
Oh, and I think it's patently ridiculous to claim that all "psychotic" people would kill someone. There are so many mental illnesses these days thanks to the pseudoscience known as psychology that most people have one.
I didn't claim that all psychotic people will kill someone. Clearly some will. You could give loaded handguns to every 3 year old, and not all of them would kill someone either, that doesn't make it a good idea. I think denying the 2nd amendment to mentally incompetent people is as legitimate as parents denying the 2nd amendment to a toddler.
1. What do you think should be the restrictions on private ownership of weapons for regular (e.g. law abiding/sane) people? Only small arms? No explosives? No tanks? No checmical/biological/nuclear weapons? No restrictions at all?
2. What do you think should be the restrictions on private ownership of weapons for violent criminals and the mentally disturbed?
Say, Obama is actually the lead of an alien invasion force who plans on harvesting Earthlings as food. That would suck.
Well I think that depends... Are these aliens Christian or Muslim? Does the alien leader wear a flag pin when he appears in public? Will the aliens allow a mosque at ground zero? Will the aliens say "Happy Holidays"? Will the aliens discriminate against Ben Stein's academic ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
It is just like if someone walked around holding their phone/camcorder/camera in front of him all of the time and was pointing it everywhere he looked. No one wants that.
I honestly don't care. And I don't feel like this is the same thing as someone pointing a camera at me.
There are security camera's everywhere. I don't freak out whenever a camera happens to be pointed at me (which is nearly all the time in public). If someone continuously focuses their camera on me (i.e. targeting me specifically) then I'd have a problem with it, because I don't know what their intent is.
I don't care if people glance at me as part of just the normal looking around and being aware of their surroundings. For the same reason I don't care if they are just filming their own experience (of which I might be in the background) without targeting me specifically, nor do I care if I am in the background of a security camera.
I don't care about being recorded. I care about being targeted.
As a person who makes this mistake frequently, I can say that it's not that I don't know the proper usage of these words, it's just that I seem to think in terms of sound (i.e. I *hear* my own internal monologue), and when I am writing quickly, I am just blindly transcribing this internal monologue. When I am writing in a more formal setting, I actually proof read whatever I have written after the fact. For slashdot comments, a lot of homophones slip through the cracks because I don't really spend a lot of time proofreading them.
I don't really have too many other grammar problems or spelling problems, because my internal monologue tends to have fairly good grammar, and I tend to remember (better than most people) how words are spelled.
how does bootlegging the movie distract moviegoers?
No, it just means we're going to have to build reliable detectors for such stuff.
Or we can just make deception detectors that monitor people's brainwaves to determine if it seems like they are trying to do something they are not supposed to.
Tricked but not cleverly.
I can tell my colleague that I just saw his car in the parking lot and one of his tires is flat. This would be tricking him, but it doesn't require any cleverness to do this.
Similarly, you can tell the judges at a turing test that the "person" on the other end has some sort of deficiency (e.g. mental problems, doesn't speak the language of the judges, etc) that explains his/her odd (e.g. inhuman) responses. You can even stack the human subjects with humans who are also similarly deficient to further disguise which subjects are computers.
This is basically just creating a rigged test.
It's obvious why it is necessary to create a rigged test. Modern computers are nowhere near passing a legitimate Turing test.
Newborn babies are persons too. If we have a chatbot that never responds, will judges be able to tell the difference between this quite chatbot and newborns who can't type on a keyboard?
I remember back in the day when a different program passed the Turing test by imitating a paranoid schizophrenic person. It would always change the topic and say very crazy things.
These sorts of tests are actually just diminishing the judges ability to make an accurate assessment.
This would be like having a computer winning an essay contest by only allowing the judges 3 seconds to read each essay and having the essay be in 6 point font.
A real Turing test is one in which the time allotted is enough to engage in a rational dialogue with the "person". IN the case of a 13 year old Ukranian boy, that might mean enough time to teach eachother ukranian and english via chat.
It's not a problem with the turing test. The turing test is a thought experiment similar to how the turing machine was athough experiment. No true Turing machines exist and no true Turing tests exist. What exists are real life things that can be fairly good or fairly bad physical (but finite) representations of these concepts.
Modern day computers are pretty good Turing equivalent machines. They don't have infinite memory, but they very much embody the spirit of what Turing had imagined.
Tricking some judges into thinking that a computer is a human for 5 minutes, especially by informing the judges that the reason the responses were strange is because the "human" was a 13 year old boy who speaks another language, does not embody the spirit of the Turing test.
I might as well write a chatbot that says nothing at all and say that it is simulating a human being at a computer witha broken keyboard.
The point of the Turing Test is that it is so unbelievably hard that anything that legitimately passes it would be accepted as intelligent without question.
Think of someone you know very well (like a best friend or a sibling). What if it turned out that this person was actually a very human-like robot. Did you think it was human? This would be an example of legitimately passing the Turing test. You don't need to go that far to pass the Turing test, but you do need to feel as if the thing you are having a conversation with, is real person for more than 5 minutes. Most human beings are able to convince you they are really human for nearly their whole lifetime.
It simulates a newborn baby. I opened sourced to code so others can use it
while(true) {
__switch(rand() % 4) {
____case 0: cout ____case 1: cout ____case 2: cout ____default: cout __} }
The singularity is here...
There are also plenty of people who think we are just collections of atoms.
Well then maybe it was actually an autist. If people *really* couldn't tell the difference, how do you know it was different?
Maybe you're judges just sucked. Or maybe autists just don't say anything particularly different than what a machine would say.
If you are seriously suggesting that the Turing test is trivially easy to pass, what you are actually saying is that there is nothing complicated about human beings, and that they can be *easily* simulated by a computer.
This was *a* Turing test, not *the* Turing test. This program fooled 33% of judges it was a 13 year old Ukranian boy in 5 minute conversations.
Contrast this to the general Turing test. Imagine your best friend. Recall all the conversations you had with him. What if I told you he was actually a robot. Why were you able to be tricked by this robot? Why couldn't you tell that he was just following his programming? He just seemed so real. This is what passing the Turing test is.
What was done in this article is like jumping and claiming to have flown. I suspect that if any of these judges had to spend longer amounts of time (e.g. a year) trying to get to know this 13 year old Ukranian boy, it would have become obvious that this boy was either not a real human or that he was severely mentally disabled. The alternative is that the boy is actually really the first artificially intelligent being.
*The* Turing Test (rather than some small subset) is *really* hard to pass. It was designed as a thought experiment as a test *so* impossibly hard to pass that if it ever were passed, you'd have to agree that anything that passed it was sentient (i.e. it can't be passed with just a simple trick). Tragically people's conception of the Turing test is precisely this idea that "once you get a program that can trick a judge with a simple trick, it's intelligent", which absolutely misses the point.
I specifically referred to mental incompetence which has an accepted definition.
Do you think the 2nd amendment should be interpreted in such a way that not a single free US citizen should be denied access to a firearm? Because the *only* claim I am making is that *some* people are not mentally competent enough to own a firearm, and that denying these people the right to own a firearm is not a violation of the constitution, because the constitution applies to mentally competent adults.
So the child/incompetence analogy doesn't really work.
Some adults are *as* mentally competent as small children. When say mentally incompetent I am not using 2 different scales for children and adults. A mentally incompetent adult is someone who would not be held responsible for killing another person in a court. A mentally incompetent adult is someone who if they were allowed to live in the general population, would require an adult guardian in the same way that a child requires an adult guardian.
I am not talking about some guy who is considered stupid by his friends.
Also, you'll notice that my comparison was actually a pretty good one, because Jellomizer thinks that children should have the right to own guns for the same reason that the mentally incompetent should. And that reason is that the 2nd amendment doesn't have any explicit limitations according to him.
How does one determine "incompetence"?
I don't know the specifics because I am not an expert in mental health. I do know that this is something that is done all the time, albeit imperfectly.
How does one test for competence in any area? whether it is driving, calculus, or medicine? Someone who is experienced in the relevant field devises a test designed to separate the competent people and the people who are not (i.e. the people who are capable of doing X and the people who are not). Tests, like pretty much everything in life can't be 100% accurate, and you expect some percentage (hopefully small) of false positives and false negatives.
In my view, the fact that tests can not be perfect, is not a good reason to abandon tests.
Is someone with a character disorder or even split personality, or Aspergers, "loners", the physically handicapped, etc. be considered incompetent?
*Mentally* competent people are people who can be held responsible for their actions. Since being an Asperger "loner" is not a proper excuse for committing a crime, it implies we treat Asperger loners as being mentally competent. Physically handicapped people aren;t necessarily mentally compromised at all, so I don;t know why that was even mentioned.
Who is *not* mentally competent? People who we would not consider responsible for their actions if they broke the law. Small children, animals, severely mentally retarded people, the mentally insane, etc.
Which lines are not arbitrary?
First of all, known psychotic, violent and anti-social people are prohibited from owning firearms.
Which apparently jellomizer is opposed to.
Secondly, psychosis is a difficult thing to diagnose.
I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that fall into a gray area. There are also people that are clearly very dangerous and should not even be allowed to be in the general population, much less own guns. Jellomizer apparently thinks that because some people fall into gray areas, then it's not fair to take guns away form anyone. He would rather everyone have the freedom to own guns because he values freedom over safety in *every* situation. He thinks sacrificing even a very little freedom for a lot of safety is a bad thing (e.g. preventing even the most dangerous people form owning guns).
One would be denied a "freedom" without due process and a compelling state interest.
I am not advocating anything except due process. Jellomizer is saying there is no such thing as due process in determining someone (no matter how potentially dangerous) is not fit to own a gun.
And you have failed to show a workable solution. You haven't even defined what constitutes as a "mentally ill" person. The current state of affairs is that it's trivial to be diagnosed with some mental illness because psychology as a field of science just doesn't produce quality research like other fields, and this will continue for some time. What do you suggest doing until then? How long will this take to get fixed, and how many people will suffer in the mean time? Or will you wait who knows how long before implementing your proposed solution?
I'm not a mental health expert. I am a software engineer. My workable solution is to get experts to decide when people are safe to own guns. Obviously you don't like this solution, but the fact that one person doesn't like it doesn't mean it's bad.
Correct. You'll find that I'm no fan of most people.
Clearly
We have the TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, free speech zones, stop-and-frisk, constitution-free zones, unfettered border searches, DUI checkpoints, protest permits, the drug war, etc. Most people support at least one of those things.
Supporting the cause of freedom to the point of giving guns to people who are not responsible enough to handle them safely is insane. You say we don't have a way to determine with 100% accuracy who will murder someone. So what? Should we let children drive cars on the freeway because we don;t know which children will be bad drivers?
It doesn't matter what you think they would have wanted. What matters is what they left behind.
What is left behind is a document that is interpreted by the supreme court (as defined by the constitution itself).
Do you have a credible method, or are you suggesting that we strip people of their rights for thoughtcrime?
Stopping mentally incompetent people from harming themselves or others is not punishing a thoughtcrime. It's not even a crime. By definition, a person who is mentally incompetent is not responsible for their actions. Responsibility is a 2 way street. With responsibility comes freedom, and the ability to be punished for breaking laws.
I trust the opinion of mental health experts as to who is not responsible. It's not perfect but it is far better than the alternative. What you are suggesting is liek saying our justice system is not perfect, therefore we should open up all the jails and allow every prisoner onto the streets.
I think the constitution should be amended. That's another difference between you and me, apparently. I actually want to go through the correct processes to get this whole thing resolved, although I do not agree with taking rights away from "mentally ill" people. I also do not agree with unlimited punishment after one has served their time.
I actually want do want to amend the constitution to specifically limit rights on what kinds of weapons can be owned. It is clear to me that weapons have become much more deadly since the 2nd amendment was written. It is also obvious to me that the constitution does not (and never did) apply to the mentally incompetent, for the same reason it doesn't apply to animals and plants. Children, the mentally incompetent, animals and plants are not responsible for their actions.
You're literally turning them into unpeople and denying them basic rights that the constitution says they should have,
No, I am saying that certain people can/should be determined not to be mentally competent, and therefore do not have the same rights as other people, due to the danger they pose to themselves and others. This has nothing to do with turning people into non-people, merely determining which people can be behave responsibly.
Then guess which group they belong to? They certainly don't care about the 2nd amendment. Quit pretending to be a supporter of the second amendment.
By your definition of what constitutes support of the 2nd amendment, only a very small minority of Americans actually support the second amendment. Your pretty much alone if you want to allow mentally incompetent people have guns. It's not like we can ask them, but I'm pretty sure even the founding fathers that drafted the 2nd amendment wouldn't want mentally incompetent people with weapons.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're so scared of someone deciding to shoot people with guns (And really, the only real way you could determine if they're such a person is if they've done similar things before. Anything else is thoughtcrime.), they shouldn't be walking around freely to begin with, assuming they've committed crimes before
1. That's not the *only* way you can determine that. 2. Even having committed violent crimes before does not prove that someone will continue to commit violent crimes.
It is possible to determine that some people are mentally incompetent and/or dangerous. That doesn't mean that they have committed a crime or deserve to be punished. Maybe they do need to be segregated from society, but part of this includes taking their guns away.
You think you can absolve yourself of denying people their 2nd amendment rights by detaining them against their will and simply saying "the owner of this building doesn't allow guns"? That's bullshit.
If a crazy person who has never committed a crime starts building a nuclear bomb, would you do anything to stop them? How could you? If they have never committed a crime, and since there is no way perfect way of determining someone is crazy, and the 2nd amendment is absolute in allowing people to obtain weapons of any kind. Would you just let them build the weapon?
You also keep overlooking the fact that *anyone* can be determined to be "mentally incompetent."
That's a different problem (if it exists). The solution to this is to fix our system of determining mental competence and not simply assuming everyone is mentally competent to own a gun.
Psychology produces mostly bad science, 'experts' can be paid off, 'experts' can be wrong, etc.
Again, not a good reason to simply assume everyone is mentally competent.
Being a homosexual was once considered a mental illness, for instance.
Even when it was considered a mental illness, there was a time when homosexuals were still deemed mentally competent (i.e. responsible for their actions, etc). To make the following logical deductions "the system was flawed -> the system will always be flawed -> we shouldn't even have a system", is rather extreme.
There are all kinds of problems with trying to restrict "mentally incompetent" people's rights, and none of it leads to a good result.
There are lots of problems with it, and it's society's job to handle those problems as best it can. Some of it certainly leads to better results than would have happened otherwise. My wife used to be a social worker in a hospital for mentally ill. She used to come home everyday with stories about how they had to get court orders to force people to take their medication, or restrain them to prevent them from hurting themselves and others during psychotic episodes. Sometimes people just can't be trusted to be safe around themselves and others. Allowing them to have guns is probably just about the worst idea imaginable.
It's just too easily abused, and I would never support such a thing.
Court systems are easily abused. Legislative power is easily abused. Any kind of authority is easily abused. These are not a good arguments for anarachy (at least not to those of us that prefer to live in a civil society). These are good arguments for improving our safeguards against abuses.
And also, just like most gun owners won't murder people, most "mentally incompetent" people won't, either.
Most bullets miss people. That doesn't make it ok to shoot at people. Giving a gun to a mentally competent person with no criminal history carries a very low risk of that gun being used in a homicide by that person. Giving a gun to some people (small children, mentally incompetent, psychotic people, etc) carries a much higher risk even if less than 50% (i.e. not most) will actually murder someone.
If you support restricting them, you support collective punishment, which is absolutely intolerable.
It's not punishment to deny gun possession to those that are not capable of bearing such a responsibility (e.g. children, mentally incompetent adults, and psychotic people). We restrict rights of these people for the same reason we don;t let children and blind people drive cars. There is a reasonable expectation that these people will be a significant danger to themselves and others if they are not denied these rights.
This is the sort of thing I'd expect from the anti-gun crowd.
If you actually surveyed people in the "pro-gin crowd" whether they'd want guns in the hands of mentally incompetent people, I think you'll find that they generally don't.
Why are you so desperate to compare children with people who are supposedly mentally incompetent (Which is defined by pseudoscientists and can be applied to anyone in the fucking world!)? Do you think this will ever change my opinion about the second amendment? It won't.
Because children and the mentally incompetent share a lot of the same qualities, the most relevant to this conversation being the one where the constitution does not apply to them in the same way that it applies to mentally competent adults.
I wasn't trying to change your mind. You said I didn't believe in the 2nd amendment because I didn't want crazy people to have guns. I was just trying to figure out what you thought the limits of the 2nd amendment were, to determine what was required to be consistent with your view of the constitution and the 2nd amendment. Is there was human being you'd deny the right to own a weapon? Or is it really every single US citizen's right from newborn to psychopath to own a nuclear weapon?
So lets say the 3 year old kid really wants the gun and says he/she would rather not live with the parents if it means they can't have the gun (you know how fussy kids can be when they want something), do the parents have to let the kid leave and play with the gun? Or are they allowed to detain the child by force?
Oh, and parents refusing to spend their own money to buy their child something is their right. This is an example of government thugs violating people's constitutional rights.
I didn't say anything about spending parents money.
If I want to use my money to buy your child an loaded handgun as a present, do you have a right as a parent to violate the US constitution and deny your 3 year old child his/her 2nd amendment rights by taking the gun away from them?
Are you sure? It says nothing about psychotic people being an exception, nor does it imply it anywhere. If you don't like those people being able to own guns, move to amend the constitution, not just ignore it.
The constitution refers to mentally competent adults. It doesn't explicitly say this anywhere in the constitution, but it is the reason that you cannot be convicted of false imprisonment for sending their kids to their rooms. It is also the reason children and the mentally incompetent are not able to consent to enter into a contract.
Oh, and I think it's patently ridiculous to claim that all "psychotic" people would kill someone. There are so many mental illnesses these days thanks to the pseudoscience known as psychology that most people have one.
I didn't claim that all psychotic people will kill someone. Clearly some will. You could give loaded handguns to every 3 year old, and not all of them would kill someone either, that doesn't make it a good idea. I think denying the 2nd amendment to mentally incompetent people is as legitimate as parents denying the 2nd amendment to a toddler.
You seem like a reasonable person...
1. What do you think should be the restrictions on private ownership of weapons for regular (e.g. law abiding/sane) people? Only small arms? No explosives? No tanks? No checmical/biological/nuclear weapons? No restrictions at all?
2. What do you think should be the restrictions on private ownership of weapons for violent criminals and the mentally disturbed?
Say, Obama is actually the lead of an alien invasion force who plans on harvesting Earthlings as food. That would suck.
Well I think that depends... Are these aliens Christian or Muslim? Does the alien leader wear a flag pin when he appears in public? Will the aliens allow a mosque at ground zero? Will the aliens say "Happy Holidays"? Will the aliens discriminate against Ben Stein's academic ideas?
So you would support allowing psychotic people to have guns? I support the 2nd amendment, but this just seems crazy.