The mass murders by guns (and the people who shoot them) number over 29,000 a year.
Based on this statement, you consider a single person shooting one victim to be "mass murder". Interesting. Stupid, but interesting.
You're just another coward living your life in fear of "the knife-wielding maniac" chasing after you. What will you need when your imaginary maniac chases you with a.22? How about with a.45 that they got because you helped flood the streets with guns?
I'm not really worried about a knife-wielding maniac, being rather over 6 feet tall and about 200 pounds. On the other hand, my wife (5'5" and 135 pounds) might be worried about such a guy. It gives me a warm fuzzy to know that she doesn't need to get killed/raped/etc just because she's not as big and strong as the average criminal.
Note, by the way, that.22's have not been a significant issue in crime for a long time. Way back when, we banned "Saturday Night Specials" (when you actually checked the details, that reduced to "cheap handguns"), and the criminals started using 9mm instead.
A bit later, Clinton banned guns that had more than ten round magazines. So criminals stopped using 9mm handguns, and started using.40 and.45 caliber handguns (after all, why carry a 9mm with ten rounds when you could carry a much more powerful.40 with ten rounds?).
Fortunately, we've never come up with an excuse to ban.40 and.45. I'd hate to think of criminals carrying.50 Desert Eagles.
Note, by the way, that I'm not outgunned if I have a.40 and he has a Desert Eagle. I'm outgunned if I cannot kill or seriously injure him as quickly as he can me. and a.40 will kill just as quickly as a.50....
Note, by the by, that Gun Control laws HAVE had an effect on criminals - they've made them better armed.
My recollection is that the constitution written more than 200 years ago allowed slavery and the disenfranchisment of women. Don't those sound like pretty colossal fookups on the part of the writers? And if they could fook up stuff like that, what makes you think that they could get this "right to bear arms" stuff perfect?
We shall manfully ignore the fact that slavery and the disenfrachisment of women were considered normal the world around at the time.
That said, note that we put in AMENDMENTS to correct those issues when we realized they should be corrected. If you'd like to AMEND the Second Amendment out of existence, GO FOR IT!. You just have to convince 2/3 of the House, 2/3 of the Senate, and 3/4 of the States to go along with your Amendment. Then you'll have solved the problem in EXACTLY the way intended by the Founders, in the same way that your examples were dealt with.
For reference, there have been at least 20 proposals to repeal the Second Amendment that I know about. None of them got out of Committee.
So good luck with your attempt to amend the Constitution to remove the Second Amendment.
And once you do have one of their weapons, how many other soldiers do you think you could defeat before you were gunned down?
One other, with no luck at all, several with a bit of luck.
Note that the total size of the US Military is less than 1% of the population. Even assuming the absurd case that the entire Army supported a tyrannical government against their own people, it takes only a few hundred thousand people willing to walk up to a soldier and shoot him to remove the Army as a credible force.
Could that many people be found? I note that in the American Revolution, we fielded more "militia" than "regulars". And more "militia" than the British fielded "regulars", though not all in one place at one time. The South in the Civil War initially fielded a volunteer force larger than the entire United States Army (note that most Union soldiers were NOT members of the US Army, but were part of the State Militias).
Would it come to suicide attacks against the Army? No. If a rebellion were so unpopular that the Army stayed uniformly on the side of the Government, then the rebellion would fail. If the rebellion were popular enough to engage ~20% of the populace on the rebel side (similar to, but lower than, the numbers of rebels in 1776 or 1861), then the rebellion would split the Army, and the rebels would have tanks/planes/artillery as well.
Actually rifles were pretty new-fangled, and most guns would probably have been muskets. And "an arm" would in many cases have been a pike or a pitchfork.
At the time of the passage of the Second Amendment, rifles had been in existence for about 200 years. The first rifles were matchlocks, contrary to what passes for education in this country.
And pikes and pitchforks were not considered "arms" at the time. Read the Militia Act for details on what is considered "arms" in the period in question.
Well that's pretty crap. Frankly, I have a life to live and a job to do. I pay people to collect the trash, fix my plumbing, deliver the mail and produce my food. I can't spend my life doing these things myself. And I don't see why I should have to take on the onerous task of defending myself as well when you can have a trained force of people who can become expert in such things and do it better for you. No, I'm happy to leave my weapons at the door when I enter the part of the world known as civilisation knowing that most other people have done so as well.
Alas! The Supremes ruled decades ago that the police have no obligation to protect you. Just to protect society. Case involved a woman who had a restraining order on her ex-, as I recall, and she called the police when her ex- violated the restraining order. Guy was gone when police got there, but they didn't bother to chase the guy down (restraining order is civil, not criminal, and violating it isn't a criminal matter). Guy came back later and shot the crap out of woman. Lawsuit against police followed, for failing to protect here. Case went to Supremes eventually, and Supremes ruled that police have NO OBLIGATION WHATSOEVER to protect you (or any other specific member of society) from a criminal.
In places where guns were never in the hands of the people, like England
What? England never allowed guns to the people??? You REALLY need to read more history. England's gun control laws are an example of slowly boiling a frog - they've been incrementally tightened up all during the 20th Century, nominally to deal with the IRA and related groups.
I know there are a good number of idiots who live in my home town, and I don't want to deal with the high likelihood of them putting rounds over the fence while my kid is playing in the yard.
Your hometown has no monopoly on idiots. It is safe to assume that every place with tight gun control laws has about the same fraction of idiots as the places with loose gun control laws.
Have you ever read of a case "them putting rounds over the fence while my kid is playing in the yard"? If so, how many THOUSANDS of cases like that have you read about? Because if the number of such occurrences is not in the tens or hundreds of thousands, the chances of it happening to YOU are slim to zero. Even if gun control laws were looser where you live.
Note that I live in a place where people shoot guns into the air on New Year's Eve. Which I consider completely insane - bullets don't leave the barrel at escape speed, so they WILL come down. We average a death every few years from such antics. But I don't know anyone who even knows someone who has had a bullet come down near them, much less know someone who knows someone who has been killed/injured by falling bullets.
Yes, the odds are non-zero that a falling bullet will hit me this next New Year's (assuming I survive the rest of the year). On the other hand, the odds of my car being hit in my driveway by an unmanned pickup truck with a stolen motorcycle in the back are non-zero as well. But I don't think either of those things is worth wasting my time worrying about.
Though, oddly enough, my car WAS hit in my driveway by an unmanned pickup truck with a stolen motorcycle in back. Really annoying, as I loved that car....
All you guys, pro- and anti-gun, really need to take a step back and review the situation, because your assumptions on both sides are getting increasingly absurd. Right now, most people don't even carry knives around with them, and knives are a hell of a lot more useful to have around than guns, the latter being fairly single purpose.
How about this, then? "There are ten people in there. None, some, or all of them may have legal firearms. I have a gun. If I rob that place, what are the odds that I am outgunned? even worse, what are the odds that I am LOOKING at the ONE guy drawing a gun on me out of ten in the place?"
Once upon a time, the James-Dalton gang managed to forget that most everyone had guns, and that many of them were willing to use them (and skilled in doing so, since most men of the day were veterans of the Civil War). They rode into town, and were shot to ragdolls.
The uncertainty about possession of firearms has a strong deterrent effect - I'd rather rob someone who is unarmed than someone who IS armed. The possibility that ANYONE may be armed is enough to convince me to take up a new hobby, like identity theft, instead of armed robbery.
Note: I am usually fairly rational. It's quite possible that the average criminal is irrational, and doesn't take such considerations into account. But don't bet your life on it.
WHile seems obvious to parties that want a specific issue, it's actually very complex. The syntax used in the constitution can be interpreted as only the militia is allowed to bear arms.
So, you believe that without this Amendment, we'd actually have UNARMED militias? You have just expanded my view of the possible.
Note, by the way, that in the Constitution, PEOPLE have RIGHTS. Governments have POWERS. A simple, sure way to determine whether something is meant for the dear people or the state governments is to look for those keywords - Rights and Powers.
But when your freedoms begin to impinge on my freedoms then its time to limit yours. For example I can own property and complain when you come on it uninvited. Seems to me a lot of killing machines (guns) in everyone's hands is a danger to me so should be limited. No hypocrisy there.
Let's see. You suppose that if someone VIOLATES your property rights, that is cause for complaint. But that if someone OWNS something that MIGHT, MAYBE be a danger to you someday, that should be restricted? And that's NOT hypocrisy?
How about working it like this: if someone fires a gun in your general direction, THEN you can work to limit HIS right to own a gun. Don't bother the rest of us who own guns, who never represent a threat to you.
And they were still wrong. Property rights should be an inherent right of citizenry and thus should be constitutionally vetted. The whole point of owning your land is that it is yours, as opposed to the King's. Thus, the ruling should very well be federal reaching.
Alas, the Constitution doesn't mention property rights at all. So any question of their Consitutionality is pretty much going to come down to "not for us to say".
Now, you want to propose a Constitutional Amendment defining property rights, go for it! I'll be behind you all the way (given that your proposed Amendment doesn't have any poison pills, of course). But, right now, there's nothing in the Constitution about it, and what "should" be there should NOT count for the Supremes.
That is the decision of the courts. That is how they chose to interpret the constitution. As best I know, the court did not travel back in time to ask the writers of the constitution to clarify the message they were trying to convey when they wrote it.
Well, consider reading the Federalist Papers on the Bill of Rights. It tells you exactly what the writers of the Constitution thought about the issue, since the Federalist Papers were written by writers of the Constitution.
I note a single example:
What is the militia? The militia is the whole body of the people, except for certain government officials.
I think you should re-read your self defense law. You have to be imminently threatened by bodily harm in order to legally shoot a person in self defense. Presenting your gun in a threating matter would probably be ok (unless you live in DC) if someone was breaking in, but pulling the trigger just because they are standing there would not be.
Can you say "Castle Doctrine"? Sure you can. Try it, boys and girls.
The Castle Doctrine is law in some states, and basically gives blanket immunity from prosecution is you do bad things to someone who has entered your house without your permission.
In addition, in most of the remaining states, if you shoot someone who has broken into your house, you'll be prosecuted if the DA is running for reelection, then acquitted as a matter of course.
Yes, there are a few states where you aren't allowed to defend yourself until it's too late to successfully do so. But not so many as you might think.
Then you go on to aggree with me 100%. The question was, does the revenue from the federal tax of 18.4 cents per gallon cover all federal expenses related to roads? The answer is no. That they tax oil or oil producers elsewhere doesn't cover the point someone was making that the gasoline tax of 18.4 cents was sufficient to cover all road expenses. With the current fuel costs, that's down to about 4%. Not an expensive tax, as taxes go.
No.
You said "gas taxes", not "Federal Gas taxes". States impose gas taxes as well. As do some municipalities. And yes, collectively, those taxes aren't really imposing. Though they were quite significant when they were imposed. Note, by the way, that a tax on oil producers is effectively a tax on gasoline, though it cleverly taxes people from all 50 states to pay for roads in the state that sets the tax.
Note that I fully expect those taxes to go up fairly soon. At least enough to cover the increased cost of road construction/repair due to higher fuel costs. Which doesn't especially bother me, though it'll have some unpleasant consequences at the pump if they do, and elsewhere if they don't.
And much of the road costs in the US are funded outside the gas taxes. They tax on fuel is insufficient to maintain the road structure in the US.
No. Virtually all the existing road system is maintained by federal or state gasoline taxes, or more directly, by taxes on oil producers (some states can afford to eliminate state taxes on gasoline because they tax the oil companies that operate in their states instead).
you know, the radium could be used in breeder reactors, and the thorium in thorium reactors
This would be a non-trivial exercise. Thorium has a short enough half-life that a thorium fuel rod would contaminate itself with helium-3 which would shutdown the fission reaction by the time you shipped the thorium rod from the factory and installed it.
Radium? Theoretically, but we've not done any of the engineering yet, so it'd be a few years (decades, given the current rate of progress on nuclear power) before they were implementable.
Just give me conventional fission reactors now. Breeder reactor design kinks could be worked out long before the U-235 runs out, and then we'll have plutonium to keep us going until we can do fusion.
And after that, all we have to worry about is disposing of the waste heat of the fusion plants. Perhaps a Klemperer Rosette, somewhere out beyond Jupiter would work nicely....
This is an annoyingly common misuse of the word "critical". For those who care, in nuclear power "critical" is essentially the same as "turned on". It means that the reactor has begun a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
"Super-critical" means that the power output of the reaction is increasing, by the way, and is also not, in and of itself, a bad thing.
"Sub-critical" means that the power output of the reaction is decreasing.
Note that a more precise definition uses the words "neutrons" more than it uses "power", but you get the idea, I trust.
I don't agree with your contention that the long half-life material isn't a problem. "Long" in this case can range anywhere from days to years to thousands of years. That's still short enough to be appreciably radioactive, yet long enough to create a massive storage headache.
It's your privilege to disagree. That's what makes for reasonable discussions. Assuming your notion of "disagree" isn't to shout "You're EVIL!!!" or the equivalent.
That said, a half life of "days" will be stone cold before it comes out of the reactor for reprocessing - noone is going to shut a reactor down and begin removing fuel rods the next day. Or the next week. Or the next month, likely enough.
"Years" can be a problem. That's radioactive enough to be an issue (not terribly radioactive, but enough). But when we pull fuel rods out of a reactor, we store them in holding tanks for years before we're even thinking about permanent storage. So most of them are also stone cold before an issue arises.
"Decades" are the biggest problem, really. Short enough to be somewhat radioactive, long enough to cause problems beyond the normal fuel rod storage cycle. For those who're screaming about strontium-90 about now, it's one of the elements that fit into this category.
"Centuries+" isn't so much a problem. Not radioactive enough to matter, really. Not a non-existant problem, but a relatively trivial one.
So, look at the "decades" problem. Sure, it can be an issue. But only for a few centuries, at most. Which is a smaller timeframe than the problem it's meant to deal with - global warming. And over a much smaller area than the area affected by the problem it's meant to solve - even a worst case disaster (Chernobyl actually is pretty close to worst case) doesn't affect anywhere near the whole planet, or even the whole ecosystem.
And the problem is decaying within a frame of decades - 60 year halflife means that the problem is 97% gone in 300 years. And 97% of the remaining problem is gone in the next 300 years. Sounds like a lot, but remember we've disposed of 99.9999999% of the problem within the first week.
I don't know the actual numbers and am too lazy to look, but is Plutonium (the waste) way more radioactive then the fuel (Uranium)?
Yes and no.
Plutonium is a small part of the waste. And is more radioactive than Uranium. But you can shield yourself from the radiation from plutonium by wrapping the plutonium in toilet paper - it's an alpha emitter. Note also that "more radioactive" than Uranium isn't really saying much - unless you eat the stuff, or otherwise metabolize something containing plutonium, it's pretty much harmless (IOW not very radioactive at all).
That said, most of the radioactive waste or a nuclear reactor isn't plutonium. It's a diverse mix of fission by-products and irradiated structural material. Half lives of "nuclear waste" vary from seconds to millenia, with the overwhelming majority being in the seconds part of that range. As an example, the nuclear power plants I worked on a few decades ago had radiation levels in the millions of REM per hour when operating. Shutdown, they dropped to less than 0.1 REM per hour within a day. And to trivial levels (less than a milli-REM per hour) after three days.
That's how quickly nuclear waste becomes inert. What's left after that point is the long half-life stuff. But "long half-life" is identical with "not very radioactive". So what goes into the holding tanks as "nuclear waste" isn't really much more radioactive than the average brick. And can be shielded quite effectively by the water in the tank (or your clothes).
Where you have problems with "nuclear waste" is when the (slightly) radioactive material is metabolized (mostly impossible - if you eat a chunk of plutonium, you'll shit it out unchanged in a day), or when it is chemically combined with something you CAN metabolize (not impossible, but difficult), or when you breathe the crap in (possible only when the radioactive waste has chemically combined with something that can produce airborne ash when burned). This last possibility isn't especially likely to be a problem, mostly because the stuff is much heavier than air - most of us don't keep our lungs around our ankles.
Note, by the way, that we've never had a person die of exposure to "nuclear waste". Not even at Chernobyl. And noone died at all, or was even exposed to much radioactivity, at TMI.
Better counterexample: Obama is against gay marriage. I think that pretty much automatically makes him *not* the most leftist democrat.
Alas, teh operative phrase in this discussion was "the most leftist PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE", rather than the "most leftist democrat". Which makes the positions of the Democrats who are more leftist than Obama irrelevant, unless they've also been Presidential candidates.
There are much "further-left" democrats out there, so you can stop your "you missed a technical possibility that the statement was true" BS right there.
So, when someone says "the other side always tells this lie", it is inappropriate to contradict them. That sort of implies that when bush lies about Iraq, it is innappropriate to contradict him. Or did you really mean "it is inappropriate to contradict anyone on YOUR side"?
...I mean, seriously dude... Truman?? more than 50 fucking years ago?? Why even bother posting this crap?
Because I'm old enough to know that the world as we know it didn't begin with your birth? Sorry for offending you by mentioning that the world predates you by a few years, if it's against your religion to believe that.
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Based on this statement, you consider a single person shooting one victim to be "mass murder". Interesting. Stupid, but interesting.
I'm not really worried about a knife-wielding maniac, being rather over 6 feet tall and about 200 pounds. On the other hand, my wife (5'5" and 135 pounds) might be worried about such a guy. It gives me a warm fuzzy to know that she doesn't need to get killed/raped/etc just because she's not as big and strong as the average criminal.
Note, by the way, that .22's have not been a significant issue in crime for a long time. Way back when, we banned "Saturday Night Specials" (when you actually checked the details, that reduced to "cheap handguns"), and the criminals started using 9mm instead.
A bit later, Clinton banned guns that had more than ten round magazines. So criminals stopped using 9mm handguns, and started using .40 and .45 caliber handguns (after all, why carry a 9mm with ten rounds when you could carry a much more powerful .40 with ten rounds?).
Fortunately, we've never come up with an excuse to ban .40 and .45. I'd hate to think of criminals carrying .50 Desert Eagles.
Note, by the way, that I'm not outgunned if I have a .40 and he has a Desert Eagle. I'm outgunned if I cannot kill or seriously injure him as quickly as he can me. and a .40 will kill just as quickly as a .50....
Note, by the by, that Gun Control laws HAVE had an effect on criminals - they've made them better armed.
We shall manfully ignore the fact that slavery and the disenfrachisment of women were considered normal the world around at the time.
That said, note that we put in AMENDMENTS to correct those issues when we realized they should be corrected. If you'd like to AMEND the Second Amendment out of existence, GO FOR IT!. You just have to convince 2/3 of the House, 2/3 of the Senate, and 3/4 of the States to go along with your Amendment. Then you'll have solved the problem in EXACTLY the way intended by the Founders, in the same way that your examples were dealt with.
For reference, there have been at least 20 proposals to repeal the Second Amendment that I know about. None of them got out of Committee.
So good luck with your attempt to amend the Constitution to remove the Second Amendment.
One other, with no luck at all, several with a bit of luck.
Note that the total size of the US Military is less than 1% of the population. Even assuming the absurd case that the entire Army supported a tyrannical government against their own people, it takes only a few hundred thousand people willing to walk up to a soldier and shoot him to remove the Army as a credible force.
Could that many people be found? I note that in the American Revolution, we fielded more "militia" than "regulars". And more "militia" than the British fielded "regulars", though not all in one place at one time. The South in the Civil War initially fielded a volunteer force larger than the entire United States Army (note that most Union soldiers were NOT members of the US Army, but were part of the State Militias).
Would it come to suicide attacks against the Army? No. If a rebellion were so unpopular that the Army stayed uniformly on the side of the Government, then the rebellion would fail. If the rebellion were popular enough to engage ~20% of the populace on the rebel side (similar to, but lower than, the numbers of rebels in 1776 or 1861), then the rebellion would split the Army, and the rebels would have tanks/planes/artillery as well.
Look around you. Every white male between 18 and 45 is a member of the militia, according to the Militia Act.
On the other hand, the word from the writers of the Constitution is that the "militia" is "the whole people, save only some government officials".
So, I AM a member of the militia. And so are you.
At the time of the passage of the Second Amendment, rifles had been in existence for about 200 years. The first rifles were matchlocks, contrary to what passes for education in this country.
And pikes and pitchforks were not considered "arms" at the time. Read the Militia Act for details on what is considered "arms" in the period in question.
Alas! The Supremes ruled decades ago that the police have no obligation to protect you. Just to protect society. Case involved a woman who had a restraining order on her ex-, as I recall, and she called the police when her ex- violated the restraining order. Guy was gone when police got there, but they didn't bother to chase the guy down (restraining order is civil, not criminal, and violating it isn't a criminal matter). Guy came back later and shot the crap out of woman. Lawsuit against police followed, for failing to protect here. Case went to Supremes eventually, and Supremes ruled that police have NO OBLIGATION WHATSOEVER to protect you (or any other specific member of society) from a criminal.
What? England never allowed guns to the people??? You REALLY need to read more history. England's gun control laws are an example of slowly boiling a frog - they've been incrementally tightened up all during the 20th Century, nominally to deal with the IRA and related groups.
Your hometown has no monopoly on idiots. It is safe to assume that every place with tight gun control laws has about the same fraction of idiots as the places with loose gun control laws.
Have you ever read of a case "them putting rounds over the fence while my kid is playing in the yard"? If so, how many THOUSANDS of cases like that have you read about? Because if the number of such occurrences is not in the tens or hundreds of thousands, the chances of it happening to YOU are slim to zero. Even if gun control laws were looser where you live.
Note that I live in a place where people shoot guns into the air on New Year's Eve. Which I consider completely insane - bullets don't leave the barrel at escape speed, so they WILL come down. We average a death every few years from such antics. But I don't know anyone who even knows someone who has had a bullet come down near them, much less know someone who knows someone who has been killed/injured by falling bullets.
Yes, the odds are non-zero that a falling bullet will hit me this next New Year's (assuming I survive the rest of the year). On the other hand, the odds of my car being hit in my driveway by an unmanned pickup truck with a stolen motorcycle in the back are non-zero as well. But I don't think either of those things is worth wasting my time worrying about.
Though, oddly enough, my car WAS hit in my driveway by an unmanned pickup truck with a stolen motorcycle in back. Really annoying, as I loved that car....
How about this, then? "There are ten people in there. None, some, or all of them may have legal firearms. I have a gun. If I rob that place, what are the odds that I am outgunned? even worse, what are the odds that I am LOOKING at the ONE guy drawing a gun on me out of ten in the place?"
Once upon a time, the James-Dalton gang managed to forget that most everyone had guns, and that many of them were willing to use them (and skilled in doing so, since most men of the day were veterans of the Civil War). They rode into town, and were shot to ragdolls.
The uncertainty about possession of firearms has a strong deterrent effect - I'd rather rob someone who is unarmed than someone who IS armed. The possibility that ANYONE may be armed is enough to convince me to take up a new hobby, like identity theft, instead of armed robbery.
Note: I am usually fairly rational. It's quite possible that the average criminal is irrational, and doesn't take such considerations into account. But don't bet your life on it.
So, you believe that without this Amendment, we'd actually have UNARMED militias? You have just expanded my view of the possible.
Note, by the way, that in the Constitution, PEOPLE have RIGHTS. Governments have POWERS. A simple, sure way to determine whether something is meant for the dear people or the state governments is to look for those keywords - Rights and Powers.
Let's see. You suppose that if someone VIOLATES your property rights, that is cause for complaint. But that if someone OWNS something that MIGHT, MAYBE be a danger to you someday, that should be restricted? And that's NOT hypocrisy?
How about working it like this: if someone fires a gun in your general direction, THEN you can work to limit HIS right to own a gun. Don't bother the rest of us who own guns, who never represent a threat to you.
Didn't Hitler's Germany have some of the most severe gun control laws in the world, for that time?
Not so sure about Saddam's Iraq, mind you, but I suspect that gun control laws there were pretty severe as well.
And of course the Soviet Union and China have had extremely restrictive gun control laws.
Odd how the nastier dictatorships seem to flock toward that ideal, isn't it?
Alas, the Constitution doesn't mention property rights at all. So any question of their Consitutionality is pretty much going to come down to "not for us to say".
Now, you want to propose a Constitutional Amendment defining property rights, go for it! I'll be behind you all the way (given that your proposed Amendment doesn't have any poison pills, of course). But, right now, there's nothing in the Constitution about it, and what "should" be there should NOT count for the Supremes.
Well, consider reading the Federalist Papers on the Bill of Rights. It tells you exactly what the writers of the Constitution thought about the issue, since the Federalist Papers were written by writers of the Constitution.
I note a single example:
What is the militia? The militia is the whole body of the people, except for certain government officials.
Contrary to popular rumour, very few nuclear plants keep elemental sodium on hand.
And even fewer of them have a way to get to the elemental sodium so you can mix it with water.
Without using a lot of TNT, of course.
Can you say "Castle Doctrine"? Sure you can. Try it, boys and girls.
The Castle Doctrine is law in some states, and basically gives blanket immunity from prosecution is you do bad things to someone who has entered your house without your permission.
In addition, in most of the remaining states, if you shoot someone who has broken into your house, you'll be prosecuted if the DA is running for reelection, then acquitted as a matter of course.
Yes, there are a few states where you aren't allowed to defend yourself until it's too late to successfully do so. But not so many as you might think.
18 years old is not a minor. Good try, though
No.
You said "gas taxes", not "Federal Gas taxes". States impose gas taxes as well. As do some municipalities. And yes, collectively, those taxes aren't really imposing. Though they were quite significant when they were imposed. Note, by the way, that a tax on oil producers is effectively a tax on gasoline, though it cleverly taxes people from all 50 states to pay for roads in the state that sets the tax.
Note that I fully expect those taxes to go up fairly soon. At least enough to cover the increased cost of road construction/repair due to higher fuel costs. Which doesn't especially bother me, though it'll have some unpleasant consequences at the pump if they do, and elsewhere if they don't.
No. Virtually all the existing road system is maintained by federal or state gasoline taxes, or more directly, by taxes on oil producers (some states can afford to eliminate state taxes on gasoline because they tax the oil companies that operate in their states instead).
This would be a non-trivial exercise. Thorium has a short enough half-life that a thorium fuel rod would contaminate itself with helium-3 which would shutdown the fission reaction by the time you shipped the thorium rod from the factory and installed it.
Radium? Theoretically, but we've not done any of the engineering yet, so it'd be a few years (decades, given the current rate of progress on nuclear power) before they were implementable.
Just give me conventional fission reactors now. Breeder reactor design kinks could be worked out long before the U-235 runs out, and then we'll have plutonium to keep us going until we can do fusion.
And after that, all we have to worry about is disposing of the waste heat of the fusion plants. Perhaps a Klemperer Rosette, somewhere out beyond Jupiter would work nicely....
This is an annoyingly common misuse of the word "critical". For those who care, in nuclear power "critical" is essentially the same as "turned on". It means that the reactor has begun a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
"Super-critical" means that the power output of the reaction is increasing, by the way, and is also not, in and of itself, a bad thing.
"Sub-critical" means that the power output of the reaction is decreasing.
Note that a more precise definition uses the words "neutrons" more than it uses "power", but you get the idea, I trust.
It's your privilege to disagree. That's what makes for reasonable discussions. Assuming your notion of "disagree" isn't to shout "You're EVIL!!!" or the equivalent.
That said, a half life of "days" will be stone cold before it comes out of the reactor for reprocessing - noone is going to shut a reactor down and begin removing fuel rods the next day. Or the next week. Or the next month, likely enough.
"Years" can be a problem. That's radioactive enough to be an issue (not terribly radioactive, but enough). But when we pull fuel rods out of a reactor, we store them in holding tanks for years before we're even thinking about permanent storage. So most of them are also stone cold before an issue arises.
"Decades" are the biggest problem, really. Short enough to be somewhat radioactive, long enough to cause problems beyond the normal fuel rod storage cycle. For those who're screaming about strontium-90 about now, it's one of the elements that fit into this category.
"Centuries+" isn't so much a problem. Not radioactive enough to matter, really. Not a non-existant problem, but a relatively trivial one.
So, look at the "decades" problem. Sure, it can be an issue. But only for a few centuries, at most. Which is a smaller timeframe than the problem it's meant to deal with - global warming. And over a much smaller area than the area affected by the problem it's meant to solve - even a worst case disaster (Chernobyl actually is pretty close to worst case) doesn't affect anywhere near the whole planet, or even the whole ecosystem.
And the problem is decaying within a frame of decades - 60 year halflife means that the problem is 97% gone in 300 years. And 97% of the remaining problem is gone in the next 300 years. Sounds like a lot, but remember we've disposed of 99.9999999% of the problem within the first week.
Yes and no.
Plutonium is a small part of the waste. And is more radioactive than Uranium. But you can shield yourself from the radiation from plutonium by wrapping the plutonium in toilet paper - it's an alpha emitter. Note also that "more radioactive" than Uranium isn't really saying much - unless you eat the stuff, or otherwise metabolize something containing plutonium, it's pretty much harmless (IOW not very radioactive at all).
That said, most of the radioactive waste or a nuclear reactor isn't plutonium. It's a diverse mix of fission by-products and irradiated structural material. Half lives of "nuclear waste" vary from seconds to millenia, with the overwhelming majority being in the seconds part of that range. As an example, the nuclear power plants I worked on a few decades ago had radiation levels in the millions of REM per hour when operating. Shutdown, they dropped to less than 0.1 REM per hour within a day. And to trivial levels (less than a milli-REM per hour) after three days.
That's how quickly nuclear waste becomes inert. What's left after that point is the long half-life stuff. But "long half-life" is identical with "not very radioactive". So what goes into the holding tanks as "nuclear waste" isn't really much more radioactive than the average brick. And can be shielded quite effectively by the water in the tank (or your clothes).
Where you have problems with "nuclear waste" is when the (slightly) radioactive material is metabolized (mostly impossible - if you eat a chunk of plutonium, you'll shit it out unchanged in a day), or when it is chemically combined with something you CAN metabolize (not impossible, but difficult), or when you breathe the crap in (possible only when the radioactive waste has chemically combined with something that can produce airborne ash when burned). This last possibility isn't especially likely to be a problem, mostly because the stuff is much heavier than air - most of us don't keep our lungs around our ankles.
Note, by the way, that we've never had a person die of exposure to "nuclear waste". Not even at Chernobyl. And noone died at all, or was even exposed to much radioactivity, at TMI.
The only way to blow up a nuclear power plant is to pack it full of TNT.