I never stated the causation goes the other way. In fact, the crime statistics show it to be somewhat of a mixed bag when you look at the level of gun ownership in a given area versus the violent crime rate. I do see a weak correlation between higher gun ownership rates and lower violent crime rates (not necessarily lower property crime rates), but from a high level, I can't speak to the causation.
What I can speak to is this: whenever a law-abiding person is confronted with a violent criminal or maniac, I believe they have a God-given right to self defense and the best tools available to exercise that right. It's absolutely a crime against humanity whenever a good and decent person is seriously hurt or killed when they've been denied the only tools that could have at least given them a chance. That alone provides all the justification necessary to ensure it's legal for sane, law-abiding adults to have firearms with them anywhere they choose on public property and anywhere they're allowed by the owner on private property. I think that makes perfect sense anywhere in the world. I think it's protected in the US by the US Constitution and any elected official fighting for the other side is objectively violating their oath of office.
Two years was a typo, actually. I had intended to write ten.
In any event, Alaska has so much oil and so little population that they'll be just fine without money from the Feds. And I measure secessionist political clout by how many politicians at mid to high levels have secessionist views or sympathies. For instance, in Texas: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/16/texas-governor-says-secession-possible/
In Alaska, former governor Palin and her family have been involved with the secessionist movement and there are quite a few in the state legislature who are also involved in that.
You don't need to go after them all at once. You serve search warrants across the country with FBI, ATF, Federal Marshals, and state and local police. Anyone who resists gets a Branch Davidian Special. Let me tell you, when you see ATF ramming an APC through your neighbor's kitchen, you'll find that "lost" gun real quick. So will a whole lot of others.
The problem with your strategy is that it makes it very easy to demonize you. You aren't an American standing up for your rights by speaking truth to power, you're some gun nut who lied to the cops and threatened them. When that SWAT team comes storming in, you'll have some sympathy, but nobody's going to do anything for you. More than likely, your lifeless body will be dragged to an ambulance so you can be tagged and bagged. Nobody's coming to your defense.
Unless there's a popular uprising (as in full-on militant ready-to-kill-ready-to-die rebellion), the collection of "missing" guns will simply be a matter of time. In five years, there won't be enough people left with guns in one area to put up any kind of real resistance.
Actually, the big four I'm watching are (in no particular order): Vermont, Alaska, Texas, and California. All of them already have strong secessionist movements and all of them are gaining political clout quickly. If I were a betting man, of the four, I'd take Vermont as going first.
As for a process, I believe these original American colonies divorced themselves from their government via the Declaration of Independence. Granted, they had to fight a war to maintain that independence, but that's your process right there. Simply declare yourself sovereign and free. As for the Civil War, I think you strongly overestimate modern Americans' ability to endure war on their own streets. We haven't had a war on our own territory in living memory. The closest thing we've had is terrorism and September 11th was horrifying and traumatic for the entire country. If you think the 4th ID is going to march through the streets of Vermont murdering American citizens, you're out of your mind.
Any President who tried it would be dragged into the streets by a mob the likes of which you've never seen anywhere. Americans will never, ever again tolerate civil war and they won't allow a President to order it. I doubt the troops would follow those orders anyway.
No, what would happen in the event of a state leaving the union is that the details would be worked out politically and there would be tremendous political and economic pressure to try and force them to come back. However, I suspect that by that point, states all over the country will have reasserted their power to such an extent that the neighbors of any state leaving the union would hold the greatest sway in whether it stays gone.
My apologies, I thought we were discussing factual information relevant to the issue. If this was supposed to be a feelings-fest where we talk about how scary the big mean gun thingies are, I completely missed it. I'll stop posting simple, objective facts so you can get back to your ad hominems and emotional appeals.
Perhaps not in a fortnight (due entirely to politics), but I fully expect that one of two things will happen in the next two years in the United States:
Either one or more states will leave the United States or the states will pass at least one amendment to the US Constitution all by themselves. In either case, they aren't going to sit idly by and allow the Federal government to run roughshod over them forever.
Actually, not. Slippery slope supposes a relatively small first step leading to far larger steps. In fact, the poster explicitly suggests a tax on the exercise of the second amendment to the US Constitution. That poster is fine with that one as are many gun control advocates. However, once you start talking about taxing the other rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, support drops precipitously.
If a tax is to be levied on exercise of the second amendment, there's nothing slippery slope about suggesting taxes would also be legal and possibly justified for the first, fifth, thirteenth, and others. To be clear, I don't believe it's legal, moral, or ethical to charge people for the exercise of their God-given human rights.
This would be why several states' constitutions explicitly recognize the right of the people to rebel against tyrannical government. For instance, he's a gem from New Hampshire's state constitution:
"Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind."
You know what else our constitution set up? An amendment process that the states themselves can initiate. 34 states to call the convention and 38 states to ratify. It can be rammed down the Federal government's throat in a fortnight.
Good luck with that. Hope you enjoy many trips to the station while they grill you for 12+ hours at a stretch about it and search your home, car, office, and every other place you might possibly have hidden it. Good luck putting your stuff back together when they've dismantled everything you own. Good luck suing them for the damage caused during a valid warrant servicing. Good luck with your case when they find the gun you claimed to have lost and throw an enormous list of trumped up charges at you.
This is why having a big, powerful government is exactly what our founding fathers sought to prevent.
Funny, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire have some of the least restrictive gun laws in the United States. Other than Federal restrictions, the state of Vermont doesn't particularly care what kinds of guns I buy, how many I buy, how often I buy, or what I do with them once I buy them. So long as I'm not harming anyone, the state of Vermont doesn't know and doesn't want to know if I'm amassing a gigantic arsenal. Probably not the best place to try and stab/rob/rape people.
The UK homicide rate is skewed by the fact that unless someone is actually convicted of the homicide, it isn't entered into the UK crime stats as a homicide. That's patently dishonest. Still, the UK has disarmed its people ensuring that you can be beaten, robbed, raped, stabbed, and even killed with no possible chance at self defense. Apparently one is supposed to sip tea while one's wife and children are being raped at knife point. Cheers.
Actually, the militia was all able-bodied free males aged 16 years and older. Also, well regulated does not mean "controlled". It means well equipped and capable. Further, the Second Amendment's text explicitly states that it is the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Not the right of the government. Not the right of agents of the government. The right of the people.
Nice rant. Except that nobody said the "threat" was from a gun owner. In fact, according to the police, there was no credible threat. There was a single reported incident which the police reviewed and declined to investigate any further because it was nothing.
This is a newspaper with an anti-gun owner agenda that kicked up a huge fuss about what even the police called nothing just to get people like you riled up. Congratulations on being a pawn for these tools to use at their leisure.
Question: do you visit raped women in the hospital and tell them how thankful they should be that they're alive?
Do you chastise the ones who respond that they just wish they had an effective way to defend themselves? Crazy gun nut rape victims. What will they think of next?
Sounds good. Next we'll tax voting, speech, assembly, and failing to incriminate one's self. Maybe we can even get a tax in on not being subjected to involuntary servitude. "Sure, you don't have to worry about being a slave in this country, and it only costs $12,000 a year!"
Quick question though, are to we apply some sort of sliding scale while we're auctioning off the rights guaranteed to all citizens in the US Constitution? Will there be some kind of online store where we can purchase these rights? Maybe www.BuyYourRights.gov or something? Some kind of subscription model? Add free speech and the right to a fair trial to shopping cart -> click checkout -> credit card declined -> remove fair trial and try again?
'Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun' - Maybe you're right. Lucky that police have guns.
Police in Newtown, Connecticut have guns. They had them on December 14, 2012, but they didn't use them because there was no need. You see, by the time the only people legally allowed to carry guns within the grounds of Sandy Hook Elementary school (the police) arrived 2-3 minutes after the first call came in, the shooter was already working his way through the building. He proceeded to murder 20 children and 6 adults with no interference from police at all. With a 2-3 minute response time. At the end of his rampage, he shot himself in the head.
The only people who could legally carry guns in that place got there in 2-3 minutes and found 27 bodies to clean up. The people who were actually there dealing with the shooter had only two legal options: try to run away and hope for the best or try to hide and hope for the best. Defending one's self or the children in that school were not feasible options, legally. Let me repeat that: there was no legal, feasible way for any adult at that school to defend the lives of those children from the maniac stalking through the halls intent on murdering them. None.
This is one of the saddest cases where the old saying is proven so terribly correct: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." Believing that the police should be the only ones legally carrying guns is akin to believing that what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary is what should happen everywhere there's a maniac on the hunt. The truth is, these "gun-free" school zones are sitting duck zones. Every person there was robbed of their God-given right to fight for their lives and the lives of the children in their care.
When the day comes that there are no more maniacs, no more violent mentally disturbed individuals, no more violent psychopaths, no more violent criminals, no more oppressive police, no more oppressive governments, no more wars, no more rapists, no more murderers, no more bad drunks that get crazy and want to slice people up with broken bottles, no more violent drug addicts, and no more animal attacks on people anywhere in the world, it'll be time to get rid of all the guns. They won't have any good use at that point, so any reasonable person will be happy to be rid of them. But we don't live in that time. So while a 15 year old girl can use her mother's gun to stop a home invader's attempt at brutally raping her, while a 12 year old boy can use the family shotgun to defend his baby sister from two psychos that broke down the back door of his house, while an 83 year old grandmother can use a gun to chase off two large young men who've broken into her home, they do have good uses in the right hands.
In the right hands, a teacher or staff member could have stopped that maniac at the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary. Or maybe they couldn't have. But they would have had something they definitely did not have on December 14th: a chance.
The UK as a whole has a higher violent crime rate than every single city in the United States and about 4 times the violent crime rate of the US as a whole. I keep hearing this crazy idea repeated by people like Piers Morgan and the like about how banning guns lowers the number of gun deaths. My question to that is, what the Hell does a murder, rape, or assault victim care about the type of weapon used?
Is it somehow less of a murder, rape, or assault if the assailant isn't using a firearm? Is the victim less dead? Less raped? Less assaulted because there wasn't a gun involved? Why does crime not seem to matter unless the bad guy uses a gun? Why do incidents where innocent people defended themselves (rather than becoming victims of criminals) not seem to matter to gun ban advocates?
On the off chance that I'm ever seriously ill, I have health insurance to ensure I can get the best possible care without bankrupting me. On the off chance that my house ever burns down, I have homeowners' insurance to ensure that my home and my belongings can be replaced. On the off chance that my life or the lives of my family or friends are threatened by a violent criminal or maniac, I want to have a tool that will allow me to defend myself and other innocent people. Since I live in the United States, I have that right.
You see, it isn't about being afraid or being paranoid; it's about being prepared. I don't live in fear of bad things happening, especially since I take reasonable precautions to ensure that if they do, I'm not on my own.
Gun ownership rates are also positively correlated with crime rates.
I'm sorry, but this is just flat stupid. I don't agree with most of your comment, but I can let it slide as being someone else's misguided opinion. This? This is just monumentally stupid.
Guns banned Chicago 1,033 violent crimes per 100,000 people Washington, DC 1,508 violent crimes per 100,000 people UK: 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people
Guns highly restricted Massachusetts 457 violent crimes per 100,000 people New Jersey 353 violent crimes per 100,000 people California 533 violent crimes per 100,000 people
Guns barely regulated at all New Hampshire 139 violent crimes per 100,000 people Virginia 282 violent crimes per 100,000 people Vermont 137 violent crimes per 100,000 people
And yes, you can find examples where the opposite is true, for varying reasons. But what you can't do is claim that more guns = more crime. That's just stupid and wrong; provably so.
This isn't Con Law 1. This is high school Intro to Government.
Between the person who posted the comment and the moderators who upped that comment's score, it's likely at least some are allowed to vote. That's a huge part of the problem in this country and many others.
Human beings have rights. Governments have powers that they exercise. When the exercise of the latter interferes with the former, that is the simple definition of tyranny.
By your logic, if the US Congress passed a law outlawing any and all forms of speech deemed "too liberal" (as defined by to-be-written FCC guidelines), and the President signed it into law, and the US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to that law, then our government has every right to come to your home and haul you to prison for however long it pleases.
I'm quite happy I don't live in your world. It sounds like Hell.
First of all, your interpretation is completely wrong. The right does not belong to the militia, but to "the people".
Your second sentence is as confused as the first. At the time the US Constitution was written, "militia" referred to all able-bodied males aged 16 years and older. Thus, just a bit under half the country is in a "militia", Constitutionally speaking.
I cant find anywhere in the constitution where the right to drive and drink is guaranteed.
While I don't think it's correct to drink and drive, this logic is completely faulty. The US Constitution does not enumerate the rights of the people that it protects. It enumerates the powers of the government; both at the Federal and at the state levels. Anything which isn't specifically listed is a right of the people.
The exact argument used against having a Bill of Rights was that someone like you would one day come along and claim that if a right wasn't listed there, we didn't have it. That backwards understanding of the US Constitution is what's led us to where we are today legally and politically.
Do we have data with the accuracy and precision to measure annual global temperature differences to a degree where we'd be able to notice a trend of 0.5 degrees over a 100 year span?
No, we don't. We have some data points and statistical smoothing that says over the course of this thousand year period, the average global temperature was X +/- a degree and over that thousand year period, the average global temperature was Y +/- a degree.
There seems to be this fiction that's developed among the "True Believers" that we can actually know whether a swing of 0.5 degrees over a 100 year span is unusual. The fact is, we don't even have accurate measurements of the average global temperature before the late 1970s when we got decent weather satellites into orbit. The data between the 1930s and then came from reasonably well defined standards of measurement, but wasn't wide-spread enough to give us a very clear picture of the average global temperature. So that data gets tinkered with by a rather complex and varied set of statistical models designed to fix the problems. Anything before the 1930s came primarily from people with no formal training in collecting the data. In most of the data points used from before the 1930s, you had individuals with a very limited education checking highly inaccurate instruments in non-standard (quite often completely incorrect) ways, unreliably recording the data that was poorly collected, and collecting it at odd times (whenever they had spare time most likely). The result is a mess of non-standard data that's almost as poor resolution as the proxies used before widespread temperature measurement was available.
This is all a matter of resolution, and quite frankly we don't have it. To this day, we can't even get all the proxies to agree with one another, nor with the observed values. The various proxies will show you very rough trends over time and they'll give you very rough estimates of the temperature at a very roughly estimated period of time, but they all share one thing in common: not a one of them will give you the kind of accuracy and precision necessary to correctly identify a 0.5 degree change in temperature over a 100 year period.
None of this is to say the global temperature is not, on average, rising over the past 100ish years. The overall trend has been upward and we can roughly estimate that change at.5 degrees during that period. The problem is that we have nothing to compare this data to. We didn't have weather satellites or even an army of untrained janitors collecting temperature data in non-standard ways from poorly calibrated devices back 5,000 years ago. We have absolutely no way to know what kinds of temperature swings have happened globally in the past because the ways we determine the global average temperature from that long ago inherently smoothe the data and destroy short-term fluctuations. I cringe whenever I hear/read someone claiming this is unprecedented climate change because that's almost certainly not true and nobody alive today has any way to show scientifically that it is true. It's possible this is unprecedented without a catastrophic global event, but there's absolutely no way available to us today to determine that either.
Before you write me off as another infidel climate denier, understand that I'm not denying anything; merely pointing out the limitations of the data, instruments, models, and techniques we have today. That doesn't mean I think the past 100 years of warming has to be perfectly normal; the truth is I don't know and I don't think anyone else does either. What I think has happened is that over the past 50 years or so, we've gotten our first look at a tiny snapshot of data for the Earth's average temperature and it's been under the microscope ever since. In much the same way you suddenly notice every single tiny noise, bump or vibration your vehicle's engine makes once the "check engine" light comes on, we've been pouring over this data without any real context and it's gotten
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I never stated the causation goes the other way. In fact, the crime statistics show it to be somewhat of a mixed bag when you look at the level of gun ownership in a given area versus the violent crime rate. I do see a weak correlation between higher gun ownership rates and lower violent crime rates (not necessarily lower property crime rates), but from a high level, I can't speak to the causation.
What I can speak to is this: whenever a law-abiding person is confronted with a violent criminal or maniac, I believe they have a God-given right to self defense and the best tools available to exercise that right. It's absolutely a crime against humanity whenever a good and decent person is seriously hurt or killed when they've been denied the only tools that could have at least given them a chance. That alone provides all the justification necessary to ensure it's legal for sane, law-abiding adults to have firearms with them anywhere they choose on public property and anywhere they're allowed by the owner on private property. I think that makes perfect sense anywhere in the world. I think it's protected in the US by the US Constitution and any elected official fighting for the other side is objectively violating their oath of office.
Two years was a typo, actually. I had intended to write ten.
In any event, Alaska has so much oil and so little population that they'll be just fine without money from the Feds. And I measure secessionist political clout by how many politicians at mid to high levels have secessionist views or sympathies. For instance, in Texas: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/16/texas-governor-says-secession-possible/
In Alaska, former governor Palin and her family have been involved with the secessionist movement and there are quite a few in the state legislature who are also involved in that.
You don't need to go after them all at once. You serve search warrants across the country with FBI, ATF, Federal Marshals, and state and local police. Anyone who resists gets a Branch Davidian Special. Let me tell you, when you see ATF ramming an APC through your neighbor's kitchen, you'll find that "lost" gun real quick. So will a whole lot of others.
The problem with your strategy is that it makes it very easy to demonize you. You aren't an American standing up for your rights by speaking truth to power, you're some gun nut who lied to the cops and threatened them. When that SWAT team comes storming in, you'll have some sympathy, but nobody's going to do anything for you. More than likely, your lifeless body will be dragged to an ambulance so you can be tagged and bagged. Nobody's coming to your defense.
Unless there's a popular uprising (as in full-on militant ready-to-kill-ready-to-die rebellion), the collection of "missing" guns will simply be a matter of time. In five years, there won't be enough people left with guns in one area to put up any kind of real resistance.
Actually, the big four I'm watching are (in no particular order): Vermont, Alaska, Texas, and California. All of them already have strong secessionist movements and all of them are gaining political clout quickly. If I were a betting man, of the four, I'd take Vermont as going first.
As for a process, I believe these original American colonies divorced themselves from their government via the Declaration of Independence. Granted, they had to fight a war to maintain that independence, but that's your process right there. Simply declare yourself sovereign and free. As for the Civil War, I think you strongly overestimate modern Americans' ability to endure war on their own streets. We haven't had a war on our own territory in living memory. The closest thing we've had is terrorism and September 11th was horrifying and traumatic for the entire country. If you think the 4th ID is going to march through the streets of Vermont murdering American citizens, you're out of your mind.
Any President who tried it would be dragged into the streets by a mob the likes of which you've never seen anywhere. Americans will never, ever again tolerate civil war and they won't allow a President to order it. I doubt the troops would follow those orders anyway.
No, what would happen in the event of a state leaving the union is that the details would be worked out politically and there would be tremendous political and economic pressure to try and force them to come back. However, I suspect that by that point, states all over the country will have reasserted their power to such an extent that the neighbors of any state leaving the union would hold the greatest sway in whether it stays gone.
My apologies, I thought we were discussing factual information relevant to the issue. If this was supposed to be a feelings-fest where we talk about how scary the big mean gun thingies are, I completely missed it. I'll stop posting simple, objective facts so you can get back to your ad hominems and emotional appeals.
Perhaps not in a fortnight (due entirely to politics), but I fully expect that one of two things will happen in the next two years in the United States:
Either one or more states will leave the United States or the states will pass at least one amendment to the US Constitution all by themselves. In either case, they aren't going to sit idly by and allow the Federal government to run roughshod over them forever.
Actually, not. Slippery slope supposes a relatively small first step leading to far larger steps. In fact, the poster explicitly suggests a tax on the exercise of the second amendment to the US Constitution. That poster is fine with that one as are many gun control advocates. However, once you start talking about taxing the other rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, support drops precipitously.
If a tax is to be levied on exercise of the second amendment, there's nothing slippery slope about suggesting taxes would also be legal and possibly justified for the first, fifth, thirteenth, and others. To be clear, I don't believe it's legal, moral, or ethical to charge people for the exercise of their God-given human rights.
This would be why several states' constitutions explicitly recognize the right of the people to rebel against tyrannical government. For instance, he's a gem from New Hampshire's state constitution:
"Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind."
You know what else our constitution set up? An amendment process that the states themselves can initiate. 34 states to call the convention and 38 states to ratify. It can be rammed down the Federal government's throat in a fortnight.
Move? Na, I'm happy right where I am.
Good luck with that. Hope you enjoy many trips to the station while they grill you for 12+ hours at a stretch about it and search your home, car, office, and every other place you might possibly have hidden it. Good luck putting your stuff back together when they've dismantled everything you own. Good luck suing them for the damage caused during a valid warrant servicing. Good luck with your case when they find the gun you claimed to have lost and throw an enormous list of trumped up charges at you.
This is why having a big, powerful government is exactly what our founding fathers sought to prevent.
Funny, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire have some of the least restrictive gun laws in the United States. Other than Federal restrictions, the state of Vermont doesn't particularly care what kinds of guns I buy, how many I buy, how often I buy, or what I do with them once I buy them. So long as I'm not harming anyone, the state of Vermont doesn't know and doesn't want to know if I'm amassing a gigantic arsenal. Probably not the best place to try and stab/rob/rape people.
The UK homicide rate is skewed by the fact that unless someone is actually convicted of the homicide, it isn't entered into the UK crime stats as a homicide. That's patently dishonest. Still, the UK has disarmed its people ensuring that you can be beaten, robbed, raped, stabbed, and even killed with no possible chance at self defense. Apparently one is supposed to sip tea while one's wife and children are being raped at knife point. Cheers.
Actually, the militia was all able-bodied free males aged 16 years and older. Also, well regulated does not mean "controlled". It means well equipped and capable. Further, the Second Amendment's text explicitly states that it is the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Not the right of the government. Not the right of agents of the government. The right of the people.
Nice rant. Except that nobody said the "threat" was from a gun owner. In fact, according to the police, there was no credible threat. There was a single reported incident which the police reviewed and declined to investigate any further because it was nothing.
This is a newspaper with an anti-gun owner agenda that kicked up a huge fuss about what even the police called nothing just to get people like you riled up. Congratulations on being a pawn for these tools to use at their leisure.
It makes it a lot easier to collect them once they're banned. Gives you a sort of checklist.
Question: do you visit raped women in the hospital and tell them how thankful they should be that they're alive?
Do you chastise the ones who respond that they just wish they had an effective way to defend themselves? Crazy gun nut rape victims. What will they think of next?
Sounds good. Next we'll tax voting, speech, assembly, and failing to incriminate one's self. Maybe we can even get a tax in on not being subjected to involuntary servitude. "Sure, you don't have to worry about being a slave in this country, and it only costs $12,000 a year!"
Quick question though, are to we apply some sort of sliding scale while we're auctioning off the rights guaranteed to all citizens in the US Constitution? Will there be some kind of online store where we can purchase these rights? Maybe www.BuyYourRights.gov or something? Some kind of subscription model? Add free speech and the right to a fair trial to shopping cart -> click checkout -> credit card declined -> remove fair trial and try again?
Got any other brilliant ideas?
'Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun'
- Maybe you're right. Lucky that police have guns.
Police in Newtown, Connecticut have guns. They had them on December 14, 2012, but they didn't use them because there was no need. You see, by the time the only people legally allowed to carry guns within the grounds of Sandy Hook Elementary school (the police) arrived 2-3 minutes after the first call came in, the shooter was already working his way through the building. He proceeded to murder 20 children and 6 adults with no interference from police at all. With a 2-3 minute response time. At the end of his rampage, he shot himself in the head.
The only people who could legally carry guns in that place got there in 2-3 minutes and found 27 bodies to clean up. The people who were actually there dealing with the shooter had only two legal options: try to run away and hope for the best or try to hide and hope for the best. Defending one's self or the children in that school were not feasible options, legally. Let me repeat that: there was no legal, feasible way for any adult at that school to defend the lives of those children from the maniac stalking through the halls intent on murdering them. None.
This is one of the saddest cases where the old saying is proven so terribly correct: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." Believing that the police should be the only ones legally carrying guns is akin to believing that what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary is what should happen everywhere there's a maniac on the hunt. The truth is, these "gun-free" school zones are sitting duck zones. Every person there was robbed of their God-given right to fight for their lives and the lives of the children in their care.
When the day comes that there are no more maniacs, no more violent mentally disturbed individuals, no more violent psychopaths, no more violent criminals, no more oppressive police, no more oppressive governments, no more wars, no more rapists, no more murderers, no more bad drunks that get crazy and want to slice people up with broken bottles, no more violent drug addicts, and no more animal attacks on people anywhere in the world, it'll be time to get rid of all the guns. They won't have any good use at that point, so any reasonable person will be happy to be rid of them. But we don't live in that time. So while a 15 year old girl can use her mother's gun to stop a home invader's attempt at brutally raping her, while a 12 year old boy can use the family shotgun to defend his baby sister from two psychos that broke down the back door of his house, while an 83 year old grandmother can use a gun to chase off two large young men who've broken into her home, they do have good uses in the right hands.
In the right hands, a teacher or staff member could have stopped that maniac at the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary. Or maybe they couldn't have. But they would have had something they definitely did not have on December 14th: a chance.
The UK as a whole has a higher violent crime rate than every single city in the United States and about 4 times the violent crime rate of the US as a whole. I keep hearing this crazy idea repeated by people like Piers Morgan and the like about how banning guns lowers the number of gun deaths. My question to that is, what the Hell does a murder, rape, or assault victim care about the type of weapon used?
Is it somehow less of a murder, rape, or assault if the assailant isn't using a firearm? Is the victim less dead? Less raped? Less assaulted because there wasn't a gun involved? Why does crime not seem to matter unless the bad guy uses a gun? Why do incidents where innocent people defended themselves (rather than becoming victims of criminals) not seem to matter to gun ban advocates?
On the off chance that I'm ever seriously ill, I have health insurance to ensure I can get the best possible care without bankrupting me. On the off chance that my house ever burns down, I have homeowners' insurance to ensure that my home and my belongings can be replaced. On the off chance that my life or the lives of my family or friends are threatened by a violent criminal or maniac, I want to have a tool that will allow me to defend myself and other innocent people. Since I live in the United States, I have that right.
You see, it isn't about being afraid or being paranoid; it's about being prepared. I don't live in fear of bad things happening, especially since I take reasonable precautions to ensure that if they do, I'm not on my own.
Gun ownership rates are also positively correlated with crime rates.
I'm sorry, but this is just flat stupid. I don't agree with most of your comment, but I can let it slide as being someone else's misguided opinion. This? This is just monumentally stupid.
Guns banned
Chicago 1,033 violent crimes per 100,000 people
Washington, DC 1,508 violent crimes per 100,000 people
UK: 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people
Guns highly restricted
Massachusetts 457 violent crimes per 100,000 people
New Jersey 353 violent crimes per 100,000 people
California 533 violent crimes per 100,000 people
Guns barely regulated at all
New Hampshire 139 violent crimes per 100,000 people
Virginia 282 violent crimes per 100,000 people
Vermont 137 violent crimes per 100,000 people
And yes, you can find examples where the opposite is true, for varying reasons. But what you can't do is claim that more guns = more crime. That's just stupid and wrong; provably so.
I assume you are not from the U.S. so perhaps a quick US Civics lesson is in order.
When you're done with him, could you please provide said lesson to the US Congress, the President, and the US Supreme Court?
This isn't Con Law 1. This is high school Intro to Government.
Between the person who posted the comment and the moderators who upped that comment's score, it's likely at least some are allowed to vote. That's a huge part of the problem in this country and many others.
Human beings have rights. Governments have powers that they exercise. When the exercise of the latter interferes with the former, that is the simple definition of tyranny.
By your logic, if the US Congress passed a law outlawing any and all forms of speech deemed "too liberal" (as defined by to-be-written FCC guidelines), and the President signed it into law, and the US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to that law, then our government has every right to come to your home and haul you to prison for however long it pleases.
I'm quite happy I don't live in your world. It sounds like Hell.
First of all, your interpretation is completely wrong. The right does not belong to the militia, but to "the people".
Your second sentence is as confused as the first. At the time the US Constitution was written, "militia" referred to all able-bodied males aged 16 years and older. Thus, just a bit under half the country is in a "militia", Constitutionally speaking.
I cant find anywhere in the constitution where the right to drive and drink is guaranteed.
While I don't think it's correct to drink and drive, this logic is completely faulty. The US Constitution does not enumerate the rights of the people that it protects. It enumerates the powers of the government; both at the Federal and at the state levels. Anything which isn't specifically listed is a right of the people.
The exact argument used against having a Bill of Rights was that someone like you would one day come along and claim that if a right wasn't listed there, we didn't have it. That backwards understanding of the US Constitution is what's led us to where we are today legally and politically.
Is there?
Do we have data with the accuracy and precision to measure annual global temperature differences to a degree where we'd be able to notice a trend of 0.5 degrees over a 100 year span?
No, we don't. We have some data points and statistical smoothing that says over the course of this thousand year period, the average global temperature was X +/- a degree and over that thousand year period, the average global temperature was Y +/- a degree.
There seems to be this fiction that's developed among the "True Believers" that we can actually know whether a swing of 0.5 degrees over a 100 year span is unusual. The fact is, we don't even have accurate measurements of the average global temperature before the late 1970s when we got decent weather satellites into orbit. The data between the 1930s and then came from reasonably well defined standards of measurement, but wasn't wide-spread enough to give us a very clear picture of the average global temperature. So that data gets tinkered with by a rather complex and varied set of statistical models designed to fix the problems. Anything before the 1930s came primarily from people with no formal training in collecting the data. In most of the data points used from before the 1930s, you had individuals with a very limited education checking highly inaccurate instruments in non-standard (quite often completely incorrect) ways, unreliably recording the data that was poorly collected, and collecting it at odd times (whenever they had spare time most likely). The result is a mess of non-standard data that's almost as poor resolution as the proxies used before widespread temperature measurement was available.
This is all a matter of resolution, and quite frankly we don't have it. To this day, we can't even get all the proxies to agree with one another, nor with the observed values. The various proxies will show you very rough trends over time and they'll give you very rough estimates of the temperature at a very roughly estimated period of time, but they all share one thing in common: not a one of them will give you the kind of accuracy and precision necessary to correctly identify a 0.5 degree change in temperature over a 100 year period.
None of this is to say the global temperature is not, on average, rising over the past 100ish years. The overall trend has been upward and we can roughly estimate that change at .5 degrees during that period. The problem is that we have nothing to compare this data to. We didn't have weather satellites or even an army of untrained janitors collecting temperature data in non-standard ways from poorly calibrated devices back 5,000 years ago. We have absolutely no way to know what kinds of temperature swings have happened globally in the past because the ways we determine the global average temperature from that long ago inherently smoothe the data and destroy short-term fluctuations. I cringe whenever I hear/read someone claiming this is unprecedented climate change because that's almost certainly not true and nobody alive today has any way to show scientifically that it is true. It's possible this is unprecedented without a catastrophic global event, but there's absolutely no way available to us today to determine that either.
Before you write me off as another infidel climate denier, understand that I'm not denying anything; merely pointing out the limitations of the data, instruments, models, and techniques we have today. That doesn't mean I think the past 100 years of warming has to be perfectly normal; the truth is I don't know and I don't think anyone else does either. What I think has happened is that over the past 50 years or so, we've gotten our first look at a tiny snapshot of data for the Earth's average temperature and it's been under the microscope ever since. In much the same way you suddenly notice every single tiny noise, bump or vibration your vehicle's engine makes once the "check engine" light comes on, we've been pouring over this data without any real context and it's gotten