Cars are often necessary to life; guns aren't. Get a new brain.
So you don't think any police should be armed, because they never encounter a situation where the use of lethal force (or the deterrent power of its possibility) is ever necessary? You've obviously never actually seen someone being stabbed or beaten, or been alone and come across a group of people who would very happily kill you for the possessions you're carrying. Or been a woman alone in a parking garage being approached by three guys each twice her size and telling her they're going to rape her. Or live on the same street as three houses run by MS-13 gang members. Lucky you, you live such a charmed life.
Or DO you have such issues, but you also have a police officer that follow you everywhere so that you don't personally have to deal with preserving your own life? Cops are great - they will head into situations that the rest of us run from. But they are always minutes away when you have seconds to deal with someone violent. Guns are used for self defense many thousands of times a year more than they are used by criminals to kill people. You want to take that self defense away. Why? Are you prepared to make up for it in some other way? Who's going to pay for whatever solution you have in mind?
I have personally used a firearm (happily, through brandishing, not having to actually shoot) to spare my wife and I from the ongoing actions of a very large, very crazy guy beating down our back door with a metal pipe. You would prefer that we fight him hand to hand and wait the 20 minutes it took for the police to show up. Why? Because you've never dealt with such a situation, lucky you.
I think a sensible requirement for gun ownership would be that you can't live with your parents and you can't have an adolescent child living with you where you keep a gun. Because teens are idiots. If you're paying rent then you're responsible enough to have a gun, otherwise tough luck.
So you'd obviously be in favor of adults not being allowed to own cars if they have teenagers in the house, right? Because teenagers kill WAY more people with cars than they do with weapons of any kind.
They can, and do, when the little shits are incarcerated.
And they can't be incarcerated unless they've been convicted for actually breaking the law. It's after the fact, by definition. Even in this case, it's a matter of convicting them of conspiracy to commit murder... something the law did not prevent them from doing: they sat there and conspired even those there's a law against doing that. See?
No, I'm not blaming Obama for what these kids wanted to do. I'm pointing out that his speech blaming the NRA for it was completely off base.
Even as the kids are dead you still tried to turn it political
You obviously didn't watch his speech. He came right out and said he thought the issue should be made political. His words. On the same day the students were killed. Try to get your rant at least aligned with current events and Obama's own words, OK?
But either way it is a win for the NRA. They love to see children die because it is so profitable for them. They make money coming and going.
No, you've got it backwards. It's the gun control lobby and the lefty nanny state types that love to see children die. Because that's just the sort of thing they leverage in order to get more power over you. "Never waste a good crists," remember? The control freaks LOVE this sort of thing.
Are you trying to cleverly imply that since the presence of the law doesn't stop people from breaking it, the law should go away?
No, he's pointing out that people who want to kill other people for notoriety are going to do it, laws or not. The laws are there so that there's a mechanism by which to punish people who do such things, should they be apprehended. The laws don't actually stop evil little shits from being evil little shits.
Obama just got done making a speech where he said that this is about the guns, and that this needs to be made political, blah blah blah.
This is a perfect example of "private ownership of guns causes kids to be like this"... simply being BS.
Having a screwed up world view, having no sense of how to lead an even slighly gratifying life without resorting to something like this in order to feel important, having media that dwells on and actively hypes this sort of thing... those and a hundred other motivations spark this urge in a small group of weak minded fools. If they never could get around to getting their hands on firearms, they're a few minutes of web surfing and a couple of trips to some retails stores away from majorly lethal backpack pressure cooker bombs a la Boston, or a few chains and some gasoline away from burning a couple hundred people alive a la Bali, etc. The issue isn't the tools, it's the wanting to kill, and wanting to be known for having done it.
That there's four of them cooking up this idea takes all the fun out of the lecture about it being all about insufficient spending on healthcare. That they were planning something like this without already having a closet full of firearms capable of mind-control that mysteriously makes them want to do it takes all the fun out of "it's the NRA's fault." Where's the president, back on TV, explaining that this is all about parents raising some twisted kids? Nope, that's a politically incorrect value judgement about other people, and we can't have that.
Way to completely (deliberately, of course) miss the point. You're (deliberately) confusing tactics and specific weapon use with strategy and motivation.
the war crimes of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
Oh, please. The Taliban had brutally taken over Afghanistan, and was harboring the group that had just killed thousands of Americans... and refused to turn them over. Dealing with them was not a "war crime." And, Iraq? The UN authorized the use of force because, among other things, Saddam never even TRIED to honor the agreements he made as he was pushed back from his invasion of Kuwait - he was overthrown because he was continuing to attack the aircraft patrolling the no fly zones set up to prevent him from slaughtering even more ethnic minorities with WMDs, skimming UN aid money to trade in more long range weapons, blocking and lying to weapons inspectors, etc. All of this not only justified, it demanded the action taken - which was blessed by the UN as well as by the US congress. Holding Saddam's regime responsible for his ongoing hostility and cease-fire violations is not a "war crime." HE was the one who continued to commit crimes, and that was stopped.
the illegal war against Libya
You're deliberately pretending you can't tell the difference between "illegal" and "done poorly by an administration that doesn't know how to do such things."
the overthrow of Ukraine's democracy
You're pretending you don't know the difference between Russia and the US. How do you think it's helping you to appear credible when you pretend you're that confused?
the bombing of even more countries that have never been a threat to us
Ah, the ol' hand-waving vagueness tactic. Again, how do you think this helping you to sound credible?
the drone assassins that have killed hundreds of kids
You mean, the Al Qeda and Taliban and ISIS tactics of putting very bad people and their supplies in and around local women and children specifically to make sure that such deaths occur? And if that had been done with a standard F-16, depriving you of your reliance on cartoonish dwelling on the word "drone"... then you'd have to actually address the substance of the matter instead of invoking the D-word to add some drama you hope will cover for the lack of actual knowledge?
Then why aren't you calling for the same (or, really, much more) stringent regulations on the millions of casual noobs, instead of the comparative handful of people who happen to regularly use the technology as part of the bucket of professional tools? The vast majority of reckless behavior involving these devices is at the hands of idiotic beginners who - unlike professionals - don't think there are any consequences for operating like jackasses.
You're still tap-dancing around the question. You've come up with a list of "what-if" scenarios, but only scenarios that tilt one direction. Why is it you're assuming that recreational noobs flying once or twice a month are safer than people who use the technology every day? Specifically.
Actually, it isn't that far off the mark. Any RC hobbyist that joins the AMA does have an impressive insurance coverage.
That only applies if you're flying in strict accordance with AMA rules. Flying in your neighbor's back yard, at 25', in order to help him check the shingles on his roof? AMA insurance dries up and goes away. Poof.
I know what you mean, but I think you might have overlooked something: It's kind of like sex. For free it's one thing, to use it as part of your business model is clearly something else entirely.
Why? If I send I a small plastic quad-copter up to 25 feet to check my gutters for debris after a storm, and there's a guy next door doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way for exactly the same three minutes using exactly the same equipment with exactly the same skill and exactly the same safety considerations... but he's charging $20 to do it so he doesn't have to charge $50 to put up a ladder in five places around the house... how is that Clearly Something Else Entirely?
And why is my own use, or that other safety-minded, business-reputation-at-stake adult's use of a small quad LESS safe than a twelve year old noobie kid who says, "Sure, mister, I'll get some pictures of your rain gutters for free! What how fast I can do it..." ? Please be specific. Personally, I trust my own skills far more than I trust some noob operating "recreationally" - and yet the FAA is implying that the guy who does it every day and cares about his reputation is more dangerous than a middle school kid flying the same equipment for fun.
What's "best" about that non sequitor of a platitude? Who said killing children was bearable? It would have been just as unbearable if the mentally ill person in the Sandy Hook case had killed his mom with an axe, and then used a pressure cooker from her kitchen to build a cheap and easy Boston-style bomb, and tossed that into a classroom to kill just as many kids. The lesson from Sandy Hook was that crazy people are crazy, and that political correctness and parental delusion makes it nearly impossible to lock them up. A just as crazy guy in Japan rather famously killed a bunch of school kids... with a single knife. Also unbearable.
You know what else is unbearable? People like you trying to leverage both crazy people and dead children in order to try to shut down a part of the constitution you don't like. Other people are just as game to do the same thing with the First Amendment. Are you on board with that, too? No? Why not?
What about it? You're mentioning it without any sort of context. The actual context: the people who wrote the Second Amendment said, essentially: "It turns out that we're going to have to have some sort of trained, standing military at one level or another. The need to have such organizations does NOT mean that the military has a monopoly on keeping and bearing arms: the government MAY NOT infringe on the people's right to keep and bear arms, even though there will be well organized militia, as well."
So what about that phrase, exactly? What's your point?
You mean, the people who were born here to migrants from Asia? Those "native" Americans? Anyone born in the US is just as native as those we call Native Americans. And they (that sprawling collection of stone age tribes) were quite good at using violence to take territory, possessions, and people from each others' tribes and turf. Playing the Native American card in order to distract from the problem of huge numbers of immigrants swamping Europe's entitlement states is intellectually lazy, at best.
Impugn? I'm not impugning a thing. I'm pointing out that the guy who - without any constructive commentary about the substance of the matter - just claims that everyone is "editing" history is an intellectual coward, and using one of the more familiar tactics of lazy ad hominem rhetoric in order to avoid confirming (through actually attempting to address the matter at hand and proving his point, if there is one) that he's a fool.
Interesting how you cannot actually address the substance of the matter, but only stamp your feet and say that word. Typical cowardly ad hominem argument, trying to impune the motive of the person to whom you're responding, instead of addressing the matter directly.
We have plenty of evidence that his attacks were essentially political. Among other things, because he SAID SO. You are trying to imply that it was a "Christian" attack, but of course you cannot actually back that up, and so you're attacking the people who provide information that goes against your phony narrative. Why are you afraid of the facts?
Perhaps a better solution would be to increase the time window for this event- spread the crowd over a few months instead of a few days.
Perhaps a better solution would be to try to cure large populations of magical thinking so that they no longer feel the need to conduct silly medieval rituals in order to please an imaginary deity.
Need I remind you that Adolf Hitler was a self professed "God Fearing Christian". I feel sorry for you if your mind edits these things for you.
You're the one re-imaging history to suit your agenda. Hitler didn't march across Europe in the name of Christianity. And his party singled out the Jews as a convenient ethic group on which to blame Germany's inability to recover gracefully from the previous time they'd gone to war with their neighbors.
He said it was revenge for Waco and Ruby Ridge. Stop editing things.
Right. He didn't like the political leanings and policies of the people who were involved in the deaths in those places. His revenge was against what he perceived as oppressors, not religious antagonists.
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Cars are often necessary to life; guns aren't. Get a new brain.
So you don't think any police should be armed, because they never encounter a situation where the use of lethal force (or the deterrent power of its possibility) is ever necessary? You've obviously never actually seen someone being stabbed or beaten, or been alone and come across a group of people who would very happily kill you for the possessions you're carrying. Or been a woman alone in a parking garage being approached by three guys each twice her size and telling her they're going to rape her. Or live on the same street as three houses run by MS-13 gang members. Lucky you, you live such a charmed life.
Or DO you have such issues, but you also have a police officer that follow you everywhere so that you don't personally have to deal with preserving your own life? Cops are great - they will head into situations that the rest of us run from. But they are always minutes away when you have seconds to deal with someone violent. Guns are used for self defense many thousands of times a year more than they are used by criminals to kill people. You want to take that self defense away. Why? Are you prepared to make up for it in some other way? Who's going to pay for whatever solution you have in mind?
I have personally used a firearm (happily, through brandishing, not having to actually shoot) to spare my wife and I from the ongoing actions of a very large, very crazy guy beating down our back door with a metal pipe. You would prefer that we fight him hand to hand and wait the 20 minutes it took for the police to show up. Why? Because you've never dealt with such a situation, lucky you.
Do you have something wrong with your brain?
No. Do you have a problem with people pointing out logical inconsistencies, mixed premises, and hypocrisy?
I think a sensible requirement for gun ownership would be that you can't live with your parents and you can't have an adolescent child living with you where you keep a gun. Because teens are idiots. If you're paying rent then you're responsible enough to have a gun, otherwise tough luck.
So you'd obviously be in favor of adults not being allowed to own cars if they have teenagers in the house, right? Because teenagers kill WAY more people with cars than they do with weapons of any kind.
They can, and do, when the little shits are incarcerated.
And they can't be incarcerated unless they've been convicted for actually breaking the law. It's after the fact, by definition. Even in this case, it's a matter of convicting them of conspiracy to commit murder ... something the law did not prevent them from doing: they sat there and conspired even those there's a law against doing that. See?
You tried to do your blame Obama bit
No, I'm not blaming Obama for what these kids wanted to do. I'm pointing out that his speech blaming the NRA for it was completely off base.
Even as the kids are dead you still tried to turn it political
You obviously didn't watch his speech. He came right out and said he thought the issue should be made political. His words. On the same day the students were killed. Try to get your rant at least aligned with current events and Obama's own words, OK?
But either way it is a win for the NRA. They love to see children die because it is so profitable for them. They make money coming and going.
No, you've got it backwards. It's the gun control lobby and the lefty nanny state types that love to see children die. Because that's just the sort of thing they leverage in order to get more power over you. "Never waste a good crists," remember? The control freaks LOVE this sort of thing.
Are you trying to cleverly imply that since the presence of the law doesn't stop people from breaking it, the law should go away?
No, he's pointing out that people who want to kill other people for notoriety are going to do it, laws or not. The laws are there so that there's a mechanism by which to punish people who do such things, should they be apprehended. The laws don't actually stop evil little shits from being evil little shits.
I came in assuming this as well, but it looks like they confessed.
"The investigation has so far been based on interviews with the suspects, during which they gave a detailed confession, Sheriff Mele said."
Yeah, but why were they being interviewed by police? Because somebody overheard something and told the cops. Exactly a see/say situation.
Obama just got done making a speech where he said that this is about the guns, and that this needs to be made political, blah blah blah.
... simply being BS.
... those and a hundred other motivations spark this urge in a small group of weak minded fools. If they never could get around to getting their hands on firearms, they're a few minutes of web surfing and a couple of trips to some retails stores away from majorly lethal backpack pressure cooker bombs a la Boston, or a few chains and some gasoline away from burning a couple hundred people alive a la Bali, etc. The issue isn't the tools, it's the wanting to kill, and wanting to be known for having done it.
This is a perfect example of "private ownership of guns causes kids to be like this"
Having a screwed up world view, having no sense of how to lead an even slighly gratifying life without resorting to something like this in order to feel important, having media that dwells on and actively hypes this sort of thing
That there's four of them cooking up this idea takes all the fun out of the lecture about it being all about insufficient spending on healthcare. That they were planning something like this without already having a closet full of firearms capable of mind-control that mysteriously makes them want to do it takes all the fun out of "it's the NRA's fault." Where's the president, back on TV, explaining that this is all about parents raising some twisted kids? Nope, that's a politically incorrect value judgement about other people, and we can't have that.
the war crimes of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
Oh, please. The Taliban had brutally taken over Afghanistan, and was harboring the group that had just killed thousands of Americans ... and refused to turn them over. Dealing with them was not a "war crime." And, Iraq? The UN authorized the use of force because, among other things, Saddam never even TRIED to honor the agreements he made as he was pushed back from his invasion of Kuwait - he was overthrown because he was continuing to attack the aircraft patrolling the no fly zones set up to prevent him from slaughtering even more ethnic minorities with WMDs, skimming UN aid money to trade in more long range weapons, blocking and lying to weapons inspectors, etc. All of this not only justified, it demanded the action taken - which was blessed by the UN as well as by the US congress. Holding Saddam's regime responsible for his ongoing hostility and cease-fire violations is not a "war crime." HE was the one who continued to commit crimes, and that was stopped.
the illegal war against Libya
You're deliberately pretending you can't tell the difference between "illegal" and "done poorly by an administration that doesn't know how to do such things."
the overthrow of Ukraine's democracy
You're pretending you don't know the difference between Russia and the US. How do you think it's helping you to appear credible when you pretend you're that confused?
the bombing of even more countries that have never been a threat to us
Ah, the ol' hand-waving vagueness tactic. Again, how do you think this helping you to sound credible?
the drone assassins that have killed hundreds of kids
You mean, the Al Qeda and Taliban and ISIS tactics of putting very bad people and their supplies in and around local women and children specifically to make sure that such deaths occur? And if that had been done with a standard F-16, depriving you of your reliance on cartoonish dwelling on the word "drone" ... then you'd have to actually address the substance of the matter instead of invoking the D-word to add some drama you hope will cover for the lack of actual knowledge?
I'm not.
Then why aren't you calling for the same (or, really, much more) stringent regulations on the millions of casual noobs, instead of the comparative handful of people who happen to regularly use the technology as part of the bucket of professional tools? The vast majority of reckless behavior involving these devices is at the hands of idiotic beginners who - unlike professionals - don't think there are any consequences for operating like jackasses.
You're still tap-dancing around the question. You've come up with a list of "what-if" scenarios, but only scenarios that tilt one direction. Why is it you're assuming that recreational noobs flying once or twice a month are safer than people who use the technology every day? Specifically.
You've got your basic facts wrong, and your entire understanding of this is based on mixed premises that don't reflect reality.
Actually, it isn't that far off the mark. Any RC hobbyist that joins the AMA does have an impressive insurance coverage.
That only applies if you're flying in strict accordance with AMA rules. Flying in your neighbor's back yard, at 25', in order to help him check the shingles on his roof? AMA insurance dries up and goes away. Poof.
I know what you mean, but I think you might have overlooked something: It's kind of like sex. For free it's one thing, to use it as part of your business model is clearly something else entirely.
Why? If I send I a small plastic quad-copter up to 25 feet to check my gutters for debris after a storm, and there's a guy next door doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way for exactly the same three minutes using exactly the same equipment with exactly the same skill and exactly the same safety considerations ... but he's charging $20 to do it so he doesn't have to charge $50 to put up a ladder in five places around the house ... how is that Clearly Something Else Entirely?
And why is my own use, or that other safety-minded, business-reputation-at-stake adult's use of a small quad LESS safe than a twelve year old noobie kid who says, "Sure, mister, I'll get some pictures of your rain gutters for free! What how fast I can do it..." ? Please be specific. Personally, I trust my own skills far more than I trust some noob operating "recreationally" - and yet the FAA is implying that the guy who does it every day and cares about his reputation is more dangerous than a middle school kid flying the same equipment for fun.
What's "best" about that non sequitor of a platitude? Who said killing children was bearable? It would have been just as unbearable if the mentally ill person in the Sandy Hook case had killed his mom with an axe, and then used a pressure cooker from her kitchen to build a cheap and easy Boston-style bomb, and tossed that into a classroom to kill just as many kids. The lesson from Sandy Hook was that crazy people are crazy, and that political correctness and parental delusion makes it nearly impossible to lock them up. A just as crazy guy in Japan rather famously killed a bunch of school kids ... with a single knife. Also unbearable.
You know what else is unbearable? People like you trying to leverage both crazy people and dead children in order to try to shut down a part of the constitution you don't like. Other people are just as game to do the same thing with the First Amendment. Are you on board with that, too? No? Why not?
and what about the "well regulated Militia" part?
What about it? You're mentioning it without any sort of context. The actual context: the people who wrote the Second Amendment said, essentially: "It turns out that we're going to have to have some sort of trained, standing military at one level or another. The need to have such organizations does NOT mean that the military has a monopoly on keeping and bearing arms: the government MAY NOT infringe on the people's right to keep and bear arms, even though there will be well organized militia, as well."
So what about that phrase, exactly? What's your point?
Oh, I'm all for immigration. Legal immigration.
Damn straight, just ask any Native American!
You mean, the people who were born here to migrants from Asia? Those "native" Americans? Anyone born in the US is just as native as those we call Native Americans. And they (that sprawling collection of stone age tribes) were quite good at using violence to take territory, possessions, and people from each others' tribes and turf. Playing the Native American card in order to distract from the problem of huge numbers of immigrants swamping Europe's entitlement states is intellectually lazy, at best.
Impugn? I'm not impugning a thing. I'm pointing out that the guy who - without any constructive commentary about the substance of the matter - just claims that everyone is "editing" history is an intellectual coward, and using one of the more familiar tactics of lazy ad hominem rhetoric in order to avoid confirming (through actually attempting to address the matter at hand and proving his point, if there is one) that he's a fool.
edit edit edit edit
Interesting how you cannot actually address the substance of the matter, but only stamp your feet and say that word. Typical cowardly ad hominem argument, trying to impune the motive of the person to whom you're responding, instead of addressing the matter directly.
We have plenty of evidence that his attacks were essentially political. Among other things, because he SAID SO. You are trying to imply that it was a "Christian" attack, but of course you cannot actually back that up, and so you're attacking the people who provide information that goes against your phony narrative. Why are you afraid of the facts?
Perhaps a better solution would be to increase the time window for this event- spread the crowd over a few months instead of a few days.
Perhaps a better solution would be to try to cure large populations of magical thinking so that they no longer feel the need to conduct silly medieval rituals in order to please an imaginary deity.
Need I remind you that Adolf Hitler was a self professed "God Fearing Christian". I feel sorry for you if your mind edits these things for you.
You're the one re-imaging history to suit your agenda. Hitler didn't march across Europe in the name of Christianity. And his party singled out the Jews as a convenient ethic group on which to blame Germany's inability to recover gracefully from the previous time they'd gone to war with their neighbors.
He said it was revenge for Waco and Ruby Ridge. Stop editing things.
Right. He didn't like the political leanings and policies of the people who were involved in the deaths in those places. His revenge was against what he perceived as oppressors, not religious antagonists.