Just for fun, by the way, see this week's news from Detroit, where the police chief has been praising law abiding citizens' carrying and using of personal weapons for self defense, in that it is helping to reduce violent crime in the city. He's endorsing it because he's watching it do the same thing there that it did in places like Miami.
You don't know the cause why crime rates dropped (if they at all dropped, to lazy to check numbers).
Yes, you're lazy. But the pattern repeats itself everywhere such a transition takes place. Likewise, where guns are completely banned, there are immediate jumps in the rate of violence.
On the other hand: I really wonder why no one asks (or asks himself) why the crime rate was so high before.
It's only high in some places. The reason is cultural.
I doubt hard core criminals, especially rapists, "think" at all about anything regarding the "crime".
So, basically, you're just BS-ing, and trying to wish away a culture that has been doing exactly this same stuff since before the US ever existed. That's not very effective, as it turns out.
In an area where "good guys" may legally carry a gun, every bad guy most certainly has a gun. So the bad guy is "brandishing" his weapon first, to get what he wants. If the good guy tries to pull his he gets shot.
Except that part is the nonsense. In places like Florida, the passing of concealed carry laws saw an immediate and persistent drop in violent street crime, including shootings across the board. Surveys of actual felons locked up for committing burglaries as well as violent crimes like robberies, muggings, and rapes find that often do NOT want to risk being caught carrying a weapon (something that might put them back in to jail even if they're not in the middle of committing a crime beyond the carrying of what's usually a stolen weapon or possessing one with a felony history, etc), that they really don't want to get into a shootout (they just want, mostly, to take someone else's stuff), and they really, really hate having to wonder if they're walking into a situation where someone else might be armed.
Yup, guns just make it worse. Best to ban them where the culture is bad.
So in places where roving mobs use social media to coordinate on the trashing of stores or looting, etc., you're all for suspending the first amendment, and doing things like banning mobile phones? Please be specific.
So, the Taliban (for example) kills insufficiently Islamic villagers in Afghanistan because of the US? Islamist mobs kill musicians in Mali because of the US? The Taliban use dynamite to destroy ancient Buddhist artworks because of the US?
Then you learn that those studies are bogus, and based on speculation and guesswork, with less legitimacy than tobacco company cancer studies.
Leaving aside for the moment that the CDC is not the right entity to be studying criminal behavior, their own published study in 2013 - essentially commissioned by the Obama administration - had the interesting unintended side effect of bolstering the position that defensive use of firearms by potential victims of crime reduced the frequency and severity of crimes and personal injury or death.
The CDC's own study came up with gun use victims (including those threatened with, not shot, and including a lot of suicides) at 150,000 to 300,000, and during the same period, defensive uses between 500,000 and 3,000,000. Of note, the study treats one person doing something like shooting randomly at a gathering of 20 people as 20 victims (even if nobody is hurt)... but if one person uses a gun while defending (for example) a family of four... that's only one "use" in that study's stats.
Of course you already know the CDC did this report, and you're just trolling.
They are doing it because your country (and the US) is doing things in their country.
So, just to be clear, the Taliban drags female school teachers out into a public square and shoots her in the head for teaching girls to read... because they're angry at the US? Militant Islamists in Africa slaughter villages full of non-Islamists because they're angry at the US, which isn't even present in the area they're taking over? Militant Islamists are lining up and beheading rows of Egyptian Christians in Libya because they're not happy with the US?
Sunni and Shia factions, which have been fighting each other for centuries, have been and continue to do that because of the US?
If you consider yourself informed on the subject (which you can't be - these groups are telling you in plain language why they're doing what they're doing, and it generally comes down to: "people who aren't sufficiently Islamic by our standards should be killed") then please don't do anything dangerous like voting.
You're acting like those two things are mutually exclusive. Most terrorists ARE crazed nut jobs. The entire medieval theocratic impulse behind the expansion of Islam by force is a case study in crazed nut-jobbedness. And in this case, the attacker was known to, among others, the Spanish government as being a radical Islamist. So yes, is tactics were designed to instill terror, and he was acting in keeping with a large movement involving millions of people... he's a terrorist, using violence against deliberately selected innocent people, intending to kill them specifically, in the interests of bolstering his movement's influence over world affairs.
Islamist wackadoos wanting to take over Europe (and elsewhere) aren't doing so because they think the US has too big a military. They're doing it because they think the rest of the world should live under the culture they consider to be the only valid one. As they've been doing for centuries, they are willing (and in fact feel obliged) to do their bit for medieval theocracy through violence. The existence of large militaries run by cultures that don't wish to live under the thumb of Islam is indeed annoying to them, but that's not what motivates them.
Except that the vast majority of times that the average Joe uses a gun to defend himself or someone else, the gun is never fired. It's presented ("brandished") and the assailant or threatening person simply runs away. Lengthy academic studies have shown that this happens hundreds of thousands of times a year in the US. In areas where concealed carry isn't unconstitutionally interfered with, the rates of violence in typical street crime are much lower than elsewhere. Bad guys don't like having guns pointed at them. It rarely comes down to anyone spraying bullets anywhere.
As for chicago the answer is: nothing changed, because when you ban guns locally but not just a few miles down the road in the outlying suburbs, the ban doesnt actually mean or do anything.
In other words, it's the local culture that's the problem, not the guns.
Which is a pretty strange way of admitting you were wrong. I notice you're not addressing the substance of the matter, which means you know you're wrong on the facts. But nice attempt at subtle ad hominem. Just because it's subtle doesn't mean it's any less craven.
Other than your juvenile cartoon-style fantasies about being attacked by General Motors, try to take a deep breath. The second amendment is there to guarantee that the government's need to have a standing military doesn't mean they can use that as an excuse to infringe on your right to personally own and bear arms. It's that simple. Why does that matter? Ask the Korean shop owners in the LA riots - there was no national guard or police there to help them as they were being attacked by looters. This isn't about fighting back against some crazy military commander, it's about being able to defend yourself when decisions made by the government leave you under-defended. Law enforcement is about showing up after a crime has been committed, not hanging out at your house in case someone threatening shows up, and heading them off at the pass.
Whether or not you want to see about your own self defense, the second amendment is about preventing the government from saying you may not defend yourself. Just like the first amendment is about saying the government can't stop you from speaking, assembling, etc.
The citizens were the "well regulated militia" part...
No, that's not at ALL what the amendment is referring to. The amendment says that despite the obvious need for a trained and armed standing army (militia), that doesn't mean the government has a monopoly on the ownership and use of arms... and that despite the existence of a militia, the people (that's you, and me) have a natural right to own and use arms, and the government may not infringe on that right.
It doesn't matter! You've completely missed the point of the amendment. It says that despite the obvious need for a standing military the government may not infringe on the people's rights to keep and bear arms. It's not the least bit complicated.
Which if you do research, you will learn did not mean "regulations" as we use the term today. It meant "well trained/equipped"...
Which still has nothing to do with it. What they're saying in that amendment (and in copious accompanying letters, debates, etc., surrounding the amendment's writing and ratification) is that it turns out we'll end up having to have a standing army, or at least local elements of one, and that they're going to have to be professionals (trained, equipped). Why does that matter in the context of amendments, like the first, etc., that generally are all about limiting the government's power? Because they knew there would be some people (perhaps a local governor, or at some point a majority in congress, who knows) who would think that their local militias (or a larger army) should be the only people allowed to keep and bear arms... an experience that the founders had just had with the abuse at the hands of the Crown's soldiers. So they passed this very simple amendment. It says that despite the obvious need for a standing army, nobody should confuse that with a reason to limit individual rights to keep and bear arms, and the second amendment forbids the government from infringing on that right, standing army or not.
Right. The amendment is saying that because there's no avoiding the need for a standing army (at least a collection of local ones, anyway), that they thought they would avoid any future confusion on the matter by clearly stating in the nation's charter that that reality (the need for a standing army) does NOT mean that the government has a monopoly on the use of weapons, and that the government may not infringe on the people's rights to keep and bear their own arms. Just like the first amendment, the second amendment says what the government may not do.
It also specifically mentions "a well regulated militia" but most gun rights advocates conveniently forget that part.
Of course it mentions militia. That's the whole point. But not in the way you wish.
Here's how to translate that 18th-century language for your contemporary use of language:
"For the safety of the nation, some sort of capable, armed, standing military force is going to be necessary. So that nobody confuses that necessity with also establishing that military's monopoly on the ownership and use of arms, this amendment forbids the government from infringing on the individual's right to keep and bear their own arms, as well."
The people who wrote the constitution weren't very happy, having just dealt with the Crown doing things like stationing troops in their houses and saying when they could or couldn't own or use weapons, with the idea of a standing army. But they knew the world was a difficult place, and didn't want to rule out having at the very least capable local militias that could be called up into a larger force if needed. What they absolutely didn't want was for anyone to think that the existence of such militias meant that individuals didn't have the right to own and use their own weapons. The debates, letters, and journals recorded by everyone involved in writing and ratifying that amendment were crystal clear on this. That you are so anxious to infringe on those rights that you're willing to pretend you can't parse the use of a semi-colon is kind of embarrassing. Just do a little homework so you can grapple with this topic correctly. Or, if you already know all of this, quit pretending you don't understand it so that you can spread misinformation.
Back in the day, law enforcement had to do the legwork by hand, let that continue.
So you're all for pervasive recording of your movements and indefinite storage and cross referencing of that information... but you want it to require hugely more manpower, be very expensive, and on those rare occasions where it might actually help find a missing person or solve a murder or such, you want to make sure the process is much slower and less efficient. But keep up the process, right?
I imagine you're also a fan of your employer putting huge payroll resources into rooms full of people operating typewriters and using paper filing cabinets with index cards to keep track of company data? Possibly using sheets of carbon paper in advance of making off-site backups by driving trucks full of second copies over to a warehouse across town? Legwork! By hand, dammit! It's the only appropriate way to do things.
There are some interesting, smart, network-aware PDUs out there (some are pretty cheap, too). Power the router through one (heck, and the cable modem or whatever it's talking to). Use the feature on the PDU that regularly pings some remote target that you know will answer. If the PDU stops being able to see the remote target, it can engage in a power cycling routine that will reset the routing device(s) in a pre-determined manner. Presto.
Yup, sure enough. You're unable to coherently speak about your own random mutterings. The tell-tale sign of a lefty idiot spouting platitudes based on mixed premises and hypocrisy.
Borders exist so that people like you can choose to (temporarily, until they run out of other people's money and can't borrow or steal any more) run a country your way (I'm betting you think that Venezuela, for example, is a paradise), while other people who don't want to be your slaves can run a country closer to the way they see fit.
Like most shrill progressives, you try to adopt a condescending tsk-tsk even as you trot out phrases like "slavery" to describe how upset you are when you can't make other people give you stuff. And then you try your hardest to attract a still-gullible arrested-development audience to your nonsense by carefully avoiding anything but the very hand-waving that you cravenly pretend to dislike.
I will say, though, that it's gratifying to see a reinforcing display of lefty intellectual cowardice confirming the type. A "useful idiot" indeed! Lenin was certainly right - if nothing else - about that: there's a never-ending supply of low-information fools who avoid details about reality at all costs. They'd rather stay dumb than face facts about where prosperity actually comes from.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for fun, by the way, see this week's news from Detroit, where the police chief has been praising law abiding citizens' carrying and using of personal weapons for self defense, in that it is helping to reduce violent crime in the city. He's endorsing it because he's watching it do the same thing there that it did in places like Miami.
You don't know the cause why crime rates dropped (if they at all dropped, to lazy to check numbers).
Yes, you're lazy. But the pattern repeats itself everywhere such a transition takes place. Likewise, where guns are completely banned, there are immediate jumps in the rate of violence.
On the other hand: I really wonder why no one asks (or asks himself) why the crime rate was so high before.
It's only high in some places. The reason is cultural.
I doubt hard core criminals, especially rapists, "think" at all about anything regarding the "crime".
Yeah, you keep thinking that.
So, basically, you're just BS-ing, and trying to wish away a culture that has been doing exactly this same stuff since before the US ever existed. That's not very effective, as it turns out.
In an area where "good guys" may legally carry a gun, every bad guy most certainly has a gun. So the bad guy is "brandishing" his weapon first, to get what he wants. If the good guy tries to pull his he gets shot.
Except that part is the nonsense. In places like Florida, the passing of concealed carry laws saw an immediate and persistent drop in violent street crime, including shootings across the board. Surveys of actual felons locked up for committing burglaries as well as violent crimes like robberies, muggings, and rapes find that often do NOT want to risk being caught carrying a weapon (something that might put them back in to jail even if they're not in the middle of committing a crime beyond the carrying of what's usually a stolen weapon or possessing one with a felony history, etc), that they really don't want to get into a shootout (they just want, mostly, to take someone else's stuff), and they really, really hate having to wonder if they're walking into a situation where someone else might be armed.
Yup, guns just make it worse. Best to ban them where the culture is bad.
So in places where roving mobs use social media to coordinate on the trashing of stores or looting, etc., you're all for suspending the first amendment, and doing things like banning mobile phones? Please be specific.
So, the Taliban (for example) kills insufficiently Islamic villagers in Afghanistan because of the US? Islamist mobs kill musicians in Mali because of the US? The Taliban use dynamite to destroy ancient Buddhist artworks because of the US?
Then you learn that those studies are bogus, and based on speculation and guesswork, with less legitimacy than tobacco company cancer studies.
Leaving aside for the moment that the CDC is not the right entity to be studying criminal behavior, their own published study in 2013 - essentially commissioned by the Obama administration - had the interesting unintended side effect of bolstering the position that defensive use of firearms by potential victims of crime reduced the frequency and severity of crimes and personal injury or death.
... but if one person uses a gun while defending (for example) a family of four ... that's only one "use" in that study's stats.
The CDC's own study came up with gun use victims (including those threatened with, not shot, and including a lot of suicides) at 150,000 to 300,000, and during the same period, defensive uses between 500,000 and 3,000,000. Of note, the study treats one person doing something like shooting randomly at a gathering of 20 people as 20 victims (even if nobody is hurt)
Of course you already know the CDC did this report, and you're just trolling.
They are doing it because your country (and the US) is doing things in their country.
So, just to be clear, the Taliban drags female school teachers out into a public square and shoots her in the head for teaching girls to read ... because they're angry at the US? Militant Islamists in Africa slaughter villages full of non-Islamists because they're angry at the US, which isn't even present in the area they're taking over? Militant Islamists are lining up and beheading rows of Egyptian Christians in Libya because they're not happy with the US?
Sunni and Shia factions, which have been fighting each other for centuries, have been and continue to do that because of the US?
If you consider yourself informed on the subject (which you can't be - these groups are telling you in plain language why they're doing what they're doing, and it generally comes down to: "people who aren't sufficiently Islamic by our standards should be killed") then please don't do anything dangerous like voting.
Some crazed nutjob is now a terrorist?
You're acting like those two things are mutually exclusive. Most terrorists ARE crazed nut jobs. The entire medieval theocratic impulse behind the expansion of Islam by force is a case study in crazed nut-jobbedness. And in this case, the attacker was known to, among others, the Spanish government as being a radical Islamist. So yes, is tactics were designed to instill terror, and he was acting in keeping with a large movement involving millions of people ... he's a terrorist, using violence against deliberately selected innocent people, intending to kill them specifically, in the interests of bolstering his movement's influence over world affairs.
But likewise neither would have the terrorist.
Islamist wackadoos wanting to take over Europe (and elsewhere) aren't doing so because they think the US has too big a military. They're doing it because they think the rest of the world should live under the culture they consider to be the only valid one. As they've been doing for centuries, they are willing (and in fact feel obliged) to do their bit for medieval theocracy through violence. The existence of large militaries run by cultures that don't wish to live under the thumb of Islam is indeed annoying to them, but that's not what motivates them.
Except that the vast majority of times that the average Joe uses a gun to defend himself or someone else, the gun is never fired. It's presented ("brandished") and the assailant or threatening person simply runs away. Lengthy academic studies have shown that this happens hundreds of thousands of times a year in the US. In areas where concealed carry isn't unconstitutionally interfered with, the rates of violence in typical street crime are much lower than elsewhere. Bad guys don't like having guns pointed at them. It rarely comes down to anyone spraying bullets anywhere.
Forced? Someone holding a gun to their head?
No, they're forced in the sense that irrational people pushing for irrational, counter-constitutional policies required somebody to push back.
That's different than, say, the way you are forced by your age as a middle-schooler to dish up pointless snark for no reason.
Race? Where was that mentioned? Please be specific.
As for chicago the answer is: nothing changed, because when you ban guns locally but not just a few miles down the road in the outlying suburbs, the ban doesnt actually mean or do anything.
In other words, it's the local culture that's the problem, not the guns.
Which is a pretty strange way of admitting you were wrong. I notice you're not addressing the substance of the matter, which means you know you're wrong on the facts. But nice attempt at subtle ad hominem. Just because it's subtle doesn't mean it's any less craven.
Other than your juvenile cartoon-style fantasies about being attacked by General Motors, try to take a deep breath. The second amendment is there to guarantee that the government's need to have a standing military doesn't mean they can use that as an excuse to infringe on your right to personally own and bear arms. It's that simple. Why does that matter? Ask the Korean shop owners in the LA riots - there was no national guard or police there to help them as they were being attacked by looters. This isn't about fighting back against some crazy military commander, it's about being able to defend yourself when decisions made by the government leave you under-defended. Law enforcement is about showing up after a crime has been committed, not hanging out at your house in case someone threatening shows up, and heading them off at the pass.
Whether or not you want to see about your own self defense, the second amendment is about preventing the government from saying you may not defend yourself. Just like the first amendment is about saying the government can't stop you from speaking, assembling, etc.
The citizens were the "well regulated militia" part...
No, that's not at ALL what the amendment is referring to. The amendment says that despite the obvious need for a trained and armed standing army (militia), that doesn't mean the government has a monopoly on the ownership and use of arms ... and that despite the existence of a militia, the people (that's you, and me) have a natural right to own and use arms, and the government may not infringe on that right.
It doesn't matter! You've completely missed the point of the amendment. It says that despite the obvious need for a standing military the government may not infringe on the people's rights to keep and bear arms. It's not the least bit complicated.
Which if you do research, you will learn did not mean "regulations" as we use the term today. It meant "well trained/equipped"...
Which still has nothing to do with it. What they're saying in that amendment (and in copious accompanying letters, debates, etc., surrounding the amendment's writing and ratification) is that it turns out we'll end up having to have a standing army, or at least local elements of one, and that they're going to have to be professionals (trained, equipped). Why does that matter in the context of amendments, like the first, etc., that generally are all about limiting the government's power? Because they knew there would be some people (perhaps a local governor, or at some point a majority in congress, who knows) who would think that their local militias (or a larger army) should be the only people allowed to keep and bear arms ... an experience that the founders had just had with the abuse at the hands of the Crown's soldiers. So they passed this very simple amendment. It says that despite the obvious need for a standing army, nobody should confuse that with a reason to limit individual rights to keep and bear arms, and the second amendment forbids the government from infringing on that right, standing army or not.
It also says, "well-regulated militia".
Right. The amendment is saying that because there's no avoiding the need for a standing army (at least a collection of local ones, anyway), that they thought they would avoid any future confusion on the matter by clearly stating in the nation's charter that that reality (the need for a standing army) does NOT mean that the government has a monopoly on the use of weapons, and that the government may not infringe on the people's rights to keep and bear their own arms. Just like the first amendment, the second amendment says what the government may not do.
It also specifically mentions "a well regulated militia" but most gun rights advocates conveniently forget that part.
Of course it mentions militia. That's the whole point. But not in the way you wish.
Here's how to translate that 18th-century language for your contemporary use of language:
"For the safety of the nation, some sort of capable, armed, standing military force is going to be necessary. So that nobody confuses that necessity with also establishing that military's monopoly on the ownership and use of arms, this amendment forbids the government from infringing on the individual's right to keep and bear their own arms, as well."
The people who wrote the constitution weren't very happy, having just dealt with the Crown doing things like stationing troops in their houses and saying when they could or couldn't own or use weapons, with the idea of a standing army. But they knew the world was a difficult place, and didn't want to rule out having at the very least capable local militias that could be called up into a larger force if needed. What they absolutely didn't want was for anyone to think that the existence of such militias meant that individuals didn't have the right to own and use their own weapons. The debates, letters, and journals recorded by everyone involved in writing and ratifying that amendment were crystal clear on this. That you are so anxious to infringe on those rights that you're willing to pretend you can't parse the use of a semi-colon is kind of embarrassing. Just do a little homework so you can grapple with this topic correctly. Or, if you already know all of this, quit pretending you don't understand it so that you can spread misinformation.
Back in the day, law enforcement had to do the legwork by hand, let that continue.
So you're all for pervasive recording of your movements and indefinite storage and cross referencing of that information ... but you want it to require hugely more manpower, be very expensive, and on those rare occasions where it might actually help find a missing person or solve a murder or such, you want to make sure the process is much slower and less efficient. But keep up the process, right?
I imagine you're also a fan of your employer putting huge payroll resources into rooms full of people operating typewriters and using paper filing cabinets with index cards to keep track of company data? Possibly using sheets of carbon paper in advance of making off-site backups by driving trucks full of second copies over to a warehouse across town? Legwork! By hand, dammit! It's the only appropriate way to do things.
Thats no excuse. It should be distributed amongst seperate machines in seperate centres instantaniously.
You can have that services if you want to pay for it. You get that, right?
There are some interesting, smart, network-aware PDUs out there (some are pretty cheap, too). Power the router through one (heck, and the cable modem or whatever it's talking to). Use the feature on the PDU that regularly pings some remote target that you know will answer. If the PDU stops being able to see the remote target, it can engage in a power cycling routine that will reset the routing device(s) in a pre-determined manner. Presto.
Yup, sure enough. You're unable to coherently speak about your own random mutterings. The tell-tale sign of a lefty idiot spouting platitudes based on mixed premises and hypocrisy.
Borders exist so that people like you can choose to (temporarily, until they run out of other people's money and can't borrow or steal any more) run a country your way (I'm betting you think that Venezuela, for example, is a paradise), while other people who don't want to be your slaves can run a country closer to the way they see fit.
Like most shrill progressives, you try to adopt a condescending tsk-tsk even as you trot out phrases like "slavery" to describe how upset you are when you can't make other people give you stuff. And then you try your hardest to attract a still-gullible arrested-development audience to your nonsense by carefully avoiding anything but the very hand-waving that you cravenly pretend to dislike.
I will say, though, that it's gratifying to see a reinforcing display of lefty intellectual cowardice confirming the type. A "useful idiot" indeed! Lenin was certainly right - if nothing else - about that: there's a never-ending supply of low-information fools who avoid details about reality at all costs. They'd rather stay dumb than face facts about where prosperity actually comes from.