No, the conservative thing to do is do do what you want. Plenty of people quit better paying jobs to become teachers, because they want to. They might want, for example, to introduce their experience and world view into an environment where young people's minds are too often shaped only by people who've never existed outside academia's wildly liberal echo chamber.
asking everyone to carry
Why do you keep trotting out this absurd straw man? WHO has asked everyone to carry? We're talking about asking places that PROHIBIT people from carrying to allow those with the training, ability, and inclination to take on the responsibility to do so if they want to and can demonstrate the judgement and skill to do so in a place where, right now, they cannot. How is that "asking everyone to carry?" Be specific.
Call it what it is - murder
Are you really that unable to use that work correctly?
So, if someone is trying to kill you, right now, and you fight back... you're a murderer? You are really unable, cognitively, to grasp the difference between a murderer and the person who defends themselves (or others) against that murderer? Is a murderer and the person who stops them from murdering no different? Keep it simple, and answer yes or no.
Your instinct to put the word justified in quotes is pretty telling. So, a person is in the middle of raping and murdering your daughter, and you use force to stop that act, because if you just stand there and yell at him, he'll kill you too. And the police are seconds away, they're half an hour away. You'd rather sacrifice yourself and your daughter to death at the hands of that person because you consider the alternative to be unjustified murder on your part? Do you understand how irrational you sound?
No, I'm saying that each jurisdiction can determine how they want to proceed in the way of training, setting standards, paying, indemnifying, and otherwise dealing with those that are up to adding this role. You clearly are certain that teachers can't intellectually handle more in their lives than the curriculum they teach (which is why none of them ever spend the hundreds of hours and pass the background checks necessary to, say, get a pilot's certification from the FAA - teachers just can't handle life and death decision making, training on matters outside of school, or hours involved - and if someone has already had a career in law enforcement or the military and then goes into teaching or otherwise working in a school environment, we all know that they are chemically brainwashed and are forced to forget everything they've learned in life).
because maybe 50 non LEO teachers carry
I see that you're completely impervious to reality, let alone in possession of enough intellectual curiosity to bother even looking into this. 50? There are over 170 school districts in just Texas alone that allow school employees to carry. And there are at least dozens of schools in every one of those districts. And that's just one of the 18 states that have provisions for this, and have for a long time. Looking forward to your list of the "murders" these teachers and staffers have been busy committing. Please, do tell.
Not sure why I'm engaging in conversation with someone who considers self defense to be murder, though. That open admission of astonishing irrationality on your part means you're not equipped to think any of this through. Hopefully you'll never be faced with someone attempting to kill you, and face the moral dilemma of deciding if you want to let a police officer "murder" your killer to save your life vs. sacrificing your own life so nothing upsetting happens to the person about to kill you. Do you even listen to yourself? Or are you too distracted by all of the school employees shooting at you in your fevered imagination?
In the meantime, please don't endanger other people by doing things like voting.
I'm old enough to remember when Republicans said, "There were crimes committed, but President Nixon knew nothing about it!"
The question is, are you intelligent enough to see that that's a completely ridiculous comparison? The two situations have nothing to do with one another. Never mind your carefully avoiding the fact that the indictments of the Russians was explicitly accompanied by them telling you that nobody worked with them, wittingly. Which conspiracy is it that you're alleging that involves nobody actually working with the people indicted? You're also, in your indictment count, including indictments that have exactly zero to do with the period of time Trump was a candidate, let alone anything to do with collusion. Manafort's dodgy reporting on his earlier activities not only don't have anything to do with Trump or his campaign, they don't even have anything to do with Russians trying to influence the election. Again, which campaign conspiracy is it you're talking about? Was there some sort of time travel involved?
Meanwhile, you keep tap dancing right past the fact that the Dem memo doesn't even attempt to refute the central parts of the Republican memo: that the FISA judge was NOT told who spent money on the Russian fiction compiled by Steele (Hillary and the DNC), and more importantly, the Dems aren't contradicting the other memo's revelation that the FBI asserted there wouldn't have been any FISA request at all, without the novella that Hillary paid Steele to get Russian help writing. You want a conspiracy? Lift up that rock and look under it.
No other first world country has these problems for good reason.
Yeah, Israel, for example, is definitely not a first world country.
You've obviously never even spoken to someone who has decided to pursue the training required to do something like this, let alone spent the hours yourself, with specialists, LEOs, and lawyers while you get acquainted.
There are teachers carrying in classrooms, right now, in multiple states in this country. I'm sure you know this because you're tracking all of the disasters that have resulted from that, right?
That's why this is up to local (usually state) legislatures. If they're trained in much the same way as air marshals, and work with local PDs to evolve and define their rules of engagement, this will NOT be simply the same as your average citizen who happens to have a carry permit and a gigantic civil (and possibly criminal) liability in front of them if they act rashly.
Yes, simply securing the buildings is the obvious low-hanging fruit. Many school districts already have this down to a pretty solid science - easy to replicate. But that teacher that's hunkered down with students in a classroom listening some jackass out in the hallway blazing away, and ready if that door is breached by someone other than the local cops (with whom protocols have been established), at least stands a chance of defending that classroom's students and possibly ending such an attack. That's not the same as the teacher hunting the hallways looking for some supposed perp. This isn't Rambo or nothing. There's vast middle ground, and an armed staff member would be an absolute last resort after much more substantial security had already failed.
That's not how it works. These are shows that (by setting up a "one pass") we're essentially asking it to go out and fetch. You THINK you're asking for it to just record them as they come along in the broadcast schedule, but you can also be telling it to scoop up things which your mapped accounts have access to, or which the networks make available. I've disabled this behavior, now, in any season passes we set up. It's pretty annoying, actually.
Depends on the source of the content. In some cases, the "my shows" entry provided acts as a link to the stream. In other cases, it's an already downloaded, ready-to-watch file.
If a cop hides instead of firing back that means we believe any old teacher will charge in with a single pistol and Rambo the attacker until dead?
Actually, the news this morning is that three to four armed deputies hung around outside the building as the attack dragged on. Regardless, suggesting that "any old teacher" will do anything in particular as being the only other opinion one could hold is just pure false dichotomy rhetorical silliness.
I have no reason to think that most jurisdictions willing to review, train, permit, and regularly require ongoing training/testing/evaluation would be producing willing defenders any less competent or driven to protect students from harm than many, many uniformed deputies - some of which really are the Barney Fief types who are just phoning it in until requirement. School admins, or teachers, or other personnel who would (in small numbers, I expect) step up to this responsibility would be doing it very soberly, and we'd see the rapid proliferation of the same sort of relatively uniform training that's commercially available to bank guards, armored car drivers, etc. Teachers and other staff who know they're not up that and the huge responsibility, aren't going to go anywhere near such a thing. But they're sure going to be glad if that retired Marine MP who coaches the football team isn't prevented from having defensive tools at hand, as he might currently be.
So in other words, you agree that I'm right (because you can't trouble yourself to make a cogent counter point), but are willing to admit that your juvenile state of mind requires you to sling around some incoherent ad hominem vitriol because you don't have any control of yourself. Thanks for being so predictably true to form.
We have three TiVo units in this house. They DO download schedule info, yes. And of course record material coming over the cable/fiber in traditional "broadcast" mode... but also streamed material from various sources. Depends on how you have things configured. TiVo dumps non-"broadcast" content on us all the time, like back-episodes of things we're watching, fetched from on-demand type sources, when we've neglected to tell it not to include streamed sources in the "one pass" settings.
We're talking about a thread that explicitly talks about both organizations, with the GG?P equating the two - NRA and Pai. So, sure, pretend otherwise - but it's a basic reading comprehension thing.
No, just stop lying and pretending that members of the NRA who vote are somehow "corrupt" because they - just like the PETA people or the Planned Parenthood people or the NAACP people - know what they want in their legislative candidates. We have plenty of examples of actual corruption we can talk about - just look at how the DNC operates, and about which the people complaining that the NRA is "corrupt" clearly don't care because they call "things I don't understand and dislike" to be "corrupt" and "things that are actually corrupt" to be "my team so please filter my social media so I only see lies that give me comfort about it."
Of course this is driven by the behavior of some (or even most) of the customers on a given ISP's network. Their TiVo is awake at 3:00 downloading "suggested shows" for them without them given it another thought. The point is that if the ISP wants to promote their services in a small down in part based on the fact that they're going to guarantee a certain level of service to kids trying to access the local school district's or college's materials, isn't that up to them? If they have to shape traffic to favor the teleworker they promised to help out, isn't it up them to risk losing business from the shut-in who now much occasionally see some buffering on a cat video? The ISP can and should make those decisions based on their own priorities and findings and plans.
Locking up people that use guns to kill has dramatically reduced the number of mass-shootings. Or not.
Most people that commit such crimes don't survive the process. The few that do are generally crazy, or completely baked on some hateful ideology. And since there are very, very few such incidents, your willingness to make assertions about it all is pretty pointless. Murders of all kinds have been going steadily down for decades. They're nearly half what they were in, say, the late 1980's. And the numbers of deaths caused by people using rifles or shotguns or any sort of long gun are a pale shadow of the number of people who are beaten or stabbed to death. The number of "mass shootings" is rare in the way that tornado deaths are. And yes, properly enforcing laws, not letting people slip through the background check process, and prosecuting/incarcerating known criminals would indeed greatly reduce mass shootings - because "mass shootings" (as reported by law enforcement and then used in agenda-driven discussions in the media) include things like three drug dealers on a street corner being lightly injured by flying bits of masonry when another gang banger drives by and takes a shot at them and misses.
Right. Because it wan't legislation. There was no legislation.
The Pai legislation
There is no Pai legislation. Removing an executive branch rule made just a couple of years earlier is not "legislation."
Pai's legislation (or lack thereof) is like admitting the guy with the biggest truck always has the right of way.
No, it's like saying that person who builds and owns a network can run decide how to run that network in the way that best makes it possible for them to keep it running at a price they can pass along competitively. There is no internet, but there are lots and lots of individual networks owned and operated by different types of entities. Forcing some small rural network operator to allow YouTube to swamp their limited microwave bandwidth with cat videos while the remote-working customers trying to stream a community college's math class get buffered is exactly what we're talking about. The "big truck" you SHOULD be worrying about is Google, or Facebook - and you want to deny network operators the right to tell those guys they don't own the local network.
The fact that they are giving each other awards suggests to me that the only thing holding the Republican Party together these days is their collective urge to "piss on the other team".
Well, sure. Because "the other team" uses the power of its water-carrying army of people in the media, academia, and the celebrity universe to do everything they can to shape a shallow, fact-free understanding of things like the Constitution, all to push along support for an ugly nanny state way of life. So yes, people who think that things like protection for free speech, protection for the right to self defense and the like should be dismissed as not worthy... those people DO need to be rhetorically pissed on. Because it's all the same mindset. You can't defend yourself, speak in a way that's not group-think compliant, run your business the way you want, etc... all of those lefty instincts are a coherent world view that deserves push-back from any and all people and organizations that favor a more liberty-minded (and constitution-adhering) take on things. Those who, say, focus strongly on one feature of the Bill of Rights absolutely should take a regular moment to look around at other people, politicians, and groups that focus on equally important other topics and praise or condemn those who need it. The big picture actually matters.
Please, do tell us about the hours you've spent in the sort of training that anybody in that role would regularly undergo.
I'm guessing you were applauding the news that an armed deputy stayed out of the unfolding attack in that school, because you wouldn't want the deputy to possibly hurt somebody while stopping a murderer from a sustained attack on others. Can't be too careful! Better to just let these things play out naturally and never interfere.
This sort of unhinged whining is exactly why Hillary Clinton lost. It's why Democrats lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, the White House, and indirectly the Supreme Court. Please, keep it up! Do it even louder ahead of the mid-term elections, and even louder still before 2020. Because you did fine work in 2016, and sound like you're ready to deliver more of the same effect later this year.
Quit using that word. You have no fucking idea what's written in it.
You're confusing a person who actually understands the role of Bill of Rights (to limit government's ability to act against your interests and liberties) with someone who fails to grasp that. The NRA actually IS one of the relatively few high profile national advocacy groups that truly dedicates itself to a pure, simple defense of an essential feature of our founding charter - and by association, is an important defender of the entire concept of the constitution's important principles. Your lazy, information-free ad hominem screech to the contrary actually points out how clearly you don't (and don't want to) understand the constitution.
The NRA is the lobby for gun manufacturers. Nothing more nothing less
So what you're saying is that you have no idea what you're talking about, and have never sat down with anyone who DOES know what they're talking about. Congrats on parroting someone else's incorrect political talking point.
The NRA delivers (compared, for example, to high profile lefty people spreading political cash around) a tiny amount of their members' money to campaigns. What they deliver is the intensely passionate action of actual human voters. That's what causes some legislators to pause when considering a position in the opposite direction. Not fear of some small lump of cash being provided to their rival's campaign, but the cohesive action of millions of voters who don't want to see the Bill of Rights further eroded. Your "nothing more nothing less" assessment is laughably incorrect.
In my opinion this goes against what they usually claim NRA stands for.
How do you figure? The NRA's central tenet is that the Bill of Rights protects us from government infringement on natural liberties. In the case of the NRA, they focus mostly on the right to defend yourself without the government saying you're not allowed to. Much like they routinely defend your right to say your mind without government interference - a freedom that the founders knew many in power would want to infringe upon, hence the 1st Amendment. So many people seem to have lost sight of the fact that the freedoms protected by the BofR are all intertwined. It's not the least bit unusual for advocacy groups to make a point of applauding someone a bit outside of their specific area of activity for taking a position that embraces the bigger picture in a way with which they agree. Lefty groups do this all the time. Why should those who back one type of liberty from government interference not applaud someone else who takes a position on the liberty to run your business (for example) the way you want to.
Florida could make a distinction between felonies like violent crimes VS what are basically civil violations of not following the rules made up by the various
government agencies. Such a distinction is made for many other things, so why not voting rights?
Except, the very acts that might reasonably make one's fellow voters not want to trust one with having their hand (indirectly, by voting) on the machinery of government could well be non-violent offenses. Somebody who has shown a willingness to engage in felony corruption around bribery, or stealing the retirement funds of senior citizens, or similar non-violent offenses, are showing me more reason to distrust their suitability for civil engagement than some fifty year old guy who hung out with the wrong people when he was 18 and got caught up as an associate of some gang member or liquor store robber.
Well, that sort of makes sense. Your right to self protection is pretty much their central focus. Things like voting rights are best handled by groups that focus on those issues. The ACLU might be too broad a focus, but is perhaps a better vehicle for that, since - unlike the NRA - they aren't as focused on a specific area of law.
Right wing conservatives are so quick to point out when someone even hints at possibly affecting their second amendment rights but have absolutely no problem at all with stripping away 1st amendment rights.
It's kind of spectacular how badly wrong you have that. The liberals are the worst when it comes to wanting to muzzle your speech. Their instinct towards nanny statism is pretty much embodied by their full-throated endorsement of speech codes, shouting down (and beating) people with whom they disagree, and otherwise displaying a systematic disdain for actual free expression. Don't pretend you don't know this.
Slashdot Mirror
asking everyone to carry
Why do you keep trotting out this absurd straw man? WHO has asked everyone to carry? We're talking about asking places that PROHIBIT people from carrying to allow those with the training, ability, and inclination to take on the responsibility to do so if they want to and can demonstrate the judgement and skill to do so in a place where, right now, they cannot. How is that "asking everyone to carry?" Be specific.
Call it what it is - murder
Are you really that unable to use that work correctly?
So, if someone is trying to kill you, right now, and you fight back... you're a murderer? You are really unable, cognitively, to grasp the difference between a murderer and the person who defends themselves (or others) against that murderer? Is a murderer and the person who stops them from murdering no different? Keep it simple, and answer yes or no.
Your instinct to put the word justified in quotes is pretty telling. So, a person is in the middle of raping and murdering your daughter, and you use force to stop that act, because if you just stand there and yell at him, he'll kill you too. And the police are seconds away, they're half an hour away. You'd rather sacrifice yourself and your daughter to death at the hands of that person because you consider the alternative to be unjustified murder on your part? Do you understand how irrational you sound?
because maybe 50 non LEO teachers carry
I see that you're completely impervious to reality, let alone in possession of enough intellectual curiosity to bother even looking into this. 50? There are over 170 school districts in just Texas alone that allow school employees to carry. And there are at least dozens of schools in every one of those districts. And that's just one of the 18 states that have provisions for this, and have for a long time. Looking forward to your list of the "murders" these teachers and staffers have been busy committing. Please, do tell.
Not sure why I'm engaging in conversation with someone who considers self defense to be murder, though. That open admission of astonishing irrationality on your part means you're not equipped to think any of this through. Hopefully you'll never be faced with someone attempting to kill you, and face the moral dilemma of deciding if you want to let a police officer "murder" your killer to save your life vs. sacrificing your own life so nothing upsetting happens to the person about to kill you. Do you even listen to yourself? Or are you too distracted by all of the school employees shooting at you in your fevered imagination?
In the meantime, please don't endanger other people by doing things like voting.
I'm old enough to remember when Republicans said, "There were crimes committed, but President Nixon knew nothing about it!"
The question is, are you intelligent enough to see that that's a completely ridiculous comparison? The two situations have nothing to do with one another. Never mind your carefully avoiding the fact that the indictments of the Russians was explicitly accompanied by them telling you that nobody worked with them, wittingly. Which conspiracy is it that you're alleging that involves nobody actually working with the people indicted? You're also, in your indictment count, including indictments that have exactly zero to do with the period of time Trump was a candidate, let alone anything to do with collusion. Manafort's dodgy reporting on his earlier activities not only don't have anything to do with Trump or his campaign, they don't even have anything to do with Russians trying to influence the election. Again, which campaign conspiracy is it you're talking about? Was there some sort of time travel involved?
Meanwhile, you keep tap dancing right past the fact that the Dem memo doesn't even attempt to refute the central parts of the Republican memo: that the FISA judge was NOT told who spent money on the Russian fiction compiled by Steele (Hillary and the DNC), and more importantly, the Dems aren't contradicting the other memo's revelation that the FBI asserted there wouldn't have been any FISA request at all, without the novella that Hillary paid Steele to get Russian help writing. You want a conspiracy? Lift up that rock and look under it.
No other first world country has these problems for good reason.
Yeah, Israel, for example, is definitely not a first world country.
You've obviously never even spoken to someone who has decided to pursue the training required to do something like this, let alone spent the hours yourself, with specialists, LEOs, and lawyers while you get acquainted.
There are teachers carrying in classrooms, right now, in multiple states in this country. I'm sure you know this because you're tracking all of the disasters that have resulted from that, right?
That's why this is up to local (usually state) legislatures. If they're trained in much the same way as air marshals, and work with local PDs to evolve and define their rules of engagement, this will NOT be simply the same as your average citizen who happens to have a carry permit and a gigantic civil (and possibly criminal) liability in front of them if they act rashly.
Yes, simply securing the buildings is the obvious low-hanging fruit. Many school districts already have this down to a pretty solid science - easy to replicate. But that teacher that's hunkered down with students in a classroom listening some jackass out in the hallway blazing away, and ready if that door is breached by someone other than the local cops (with whom protocols have been established), at least stands a chance of defending that classroom's students and possibly ending such an attack. That's not the same as the teacher hunting the hallways looking for some supposed perp. This isn't Rambo or nothing. There's vast middle ground, and an armed staff member would be an absolute last resort after much more substantial security had already failed.
That's not how it works. These are shows that (by setting up a "one pass") we're essentially asking it to go out and fetch. You THINK you're asking for it to just record them as they come along in the broadcast schedule, but you can also be telling it to scoop up things which your mapped accounts have access to, or which the networks make available. I've disabled this behavior, now, in any season passes we set up. It's pretty annoying, actually.
Depends on the source of the content. In some cases, the "my shows" entry provided acts as a link to the stream. In other cases, it's an already downloaded, ready-to-watch file.
If a cop hides instead of firing back that means we believe any old teacher will charge in with a single pistol and Rambo the attacker until dead?
Actually, the news this morning is that three to four armed deputies hung around outside the building as the attack dragged on. Regardless, suggesting that "any old teacher" will do anything in particular as being the only other opinion one could hold is just pure false dichotomy rhetorical silliness.
I have no reason to think that most jurisdictions willing to review, train, permit, and regularly require ongoing training/testing/evaluation would be producing willing defenders any less competent or driven to protect students from harm than many, many uniformed deputies - some of which really are the Barney Fief types who are just phoning it in until requirement. School admins, or teachers, or other personnel who would (in small numbers, I expect) step up to this responsibility would be doing it very soberly, and we'd see the rapid proliferation of the same sort of relatively uniform training that's commercially available to bank guards, armored car drivers, etc. Teachers and other staff who know they're not up that and the huge responsibility, aren't going to go anywhere near such a thing. But they're sure going to be glad if that retired Marine MP who coaches the football team isn't prevented from having defensive tools at hand, as he might currently be.
So in other words, you agree that I'm right (because you can't trouble yourself to make a cogent counter point), but are willing to admit that your juvenile state of mind requires you to sling around some incoherent ad hominem vitriol because you don't have any control of yourself. Thanks for being so predictably true to form.
We have three TiVo units in this house. They DO download schedule info, yes. And of course record material coming over the cable/fiber in traditional "broadcast" mode ... but also streamed material from various sources. Depends on how you have things configured. TiVo dumps non-"broadcast" content on us all the time, like back-episodes of things we're watching, fetched from on-demand type sources, when we've neglected to tell it not to include streamed sources in the "one pass" settings.
We're talking about a thread that explicitly talks about both organizations, with the GG?P equating the two - NRA and Pai. So, sure, pretend otherwise - but it's a basic reading comprehension thing.
So, um... embrace corruption or lose?
No, just stop lying and pretending that members of the NRA who vote are somehow "corrupt" because they - just like the PETA people or the Planned Parenthood people or the NAACP people - know what they want in their legislative candidates. We have plenty of examples of actual corruption we can talk about - just look at how the DNC operates, and about which the people complaining that the NRA is "corrupt" clearly don't care because they call "things I don't understand and dislike" to be "corrupt" and "things that are actually corrupt" to be "my team so please filter my social media so I only see lies that give me comfort about it."
Of course this is driven by the behavior of some (or even most) of the customers on a given ISP's network. Their TiVo is awake at 3:00 downloading "suggested shows" for them without them given it another thought. The point is that if the ISP wants to promote their services in a small down in part based on the fact that they're going to guarantee a certain level of service to kids trying to access the local school district's or college's materials, isn't that up to them? If they have to shape traffic to favor the teleworker they promised to help out, isn't it up them to risk losing business from the shut-in who now much occasionally see some buffering on a cat video? The ISP can and should make those decisions based on their own priorities and findings and plans.
Locking up people that use guns to kill has dramatically reduced the number of mass-shootings. Or not.
Most people that commit such crimes don't survive the process. The few that do are generally crazy, or completely baked on some hateful ideology. And since there are very, very few such incidents, your willingness to make assertions about it all is pretty pointless. Murders of all kinds have been going steadily down for decades. They're nearly half what they were in, say, the late 1980's. And the numbers of deaths caused by people using rifles or shotguns or any sort of long gun are a pale shadow of the number of people who are beaten or stabbed to death. The number of "mass shootings" is rare in the way that tornado deaths are. And yes, properly enforcing laws, not letting people slip through the background check process, and prosecuting/incarcerating known criminals would indeed greatly reduce mass shootings - because "mass shootings" (as reported by law enforcement and then used in agenda-driven discussions in the media) include things like three drug dealers on a street corner being lightly injured by flying bits of masonry when another gang banger drives by and takes a shot at them and misses.
The NN legislation of Obama was not perfect
Right. Because it wan't legislation. There was no legislation.
The Pai legislation
There is no Pai legislation. Removing an executive branch rule made just a couple of years earlier is not "legislation."
Pai's legislation (or lack thereof) is like admitting the guy with the biggest truck always has the right of way.
No, it's like saying that person who builds and owns a network can run decide how to run that network in the way that best makes it possible for them to keep it running at a price they can pass along competitively. There is no internet, but there are lots and lots of individual networks owned and operated by different types of entities. Forcing some small rural network operator to allow YouTube to swamp their limited microwave bandwidth with cat videos while the remote-working customers trying to stream a community college's math class get buffered is exactly what we're talking about. The "big truck" you SHOULD be worrying about is Google, or Facebook - and you want to deny network operators the right to tell those guys they don't own the local network.
The fact that they are giving each other awards suggests to me that the only thing holding the Republican Party together these days is their collective urge to "piss on the other team".
Well, sure. Because "the other team" uses the power of its water-carrying army of people in the media, academia, and the celebrity universe to do everything they can to shape a shallow, fact-free understanding of things like the Constitution, all to push along support for an ugly nanny state way of life. So yes, people who think that things like protection for free speech, protection for the right to self defense and the like should be dismissed as not worthy ... those people DO need to be rhetorically pissed on. Because it's all the same mindset. You can't defend yourself, speak in a way that's not group-think compliant, run your business the way you want, etc ... all of those lefty instincts are a coherent world view that deserves push-back from any and all people and organizations that favor a more liberty-minded (and constitution-adhering) take on things. Those who, say, focus strongly on one feature of the Bill of Rights absolutely should take a regular moment to look around at other people, politicians, and groups that focus on equally important other topics and praise or condemn those who need it. The big picture actually matters.
Please, do tell us about the hours you've spent in the sort of training that anybody in that role would regularly undergo.
I'm guessing you were applauding the news that an armed deputy stayed out of the unfolding attack in that school, because you wouldn't want the deputy to possibly hurt somebody while stopping a murderer from a sustained attack on others. Can't be too careful! Better to just let these things play out naturally and never interfere.
This sort of unhinged whining is exactly why Hillary Clinton lost. It's why Democrats lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, the White House, and indirectly the Supreme Court. Please, keep it up! Do it even louder ahead of the mid-term elections, and even louder still before 2020. Because you did fine work in 2016, and sound like you're ready to deliver more of the same effect later this year.
Please don't confuse the haters with actual information. It's makes them sad.
Constitution
Quit using that word. You have no fucking idea what's written in it.
You're confusing a person who actually understands the role of Bill of Rights (to limit government's ability to act against your interests and liberties) with someone who fails to grasp that. The NRA actually IS one of the relatively few high profile national advocacy groups that truly dedicates itself to a pure, simple defense of an essential feature of our founding charter - and by association, is an important defender of the entire concept of the constitution's important principles. Your lazy, information-free ad hominem screech to the contrary actually points out how clearly you don't (and don't want to) understand the constitution.
The NRA is the lobby for gun manufacturers. Nothing more nothing less
So what you're saying is that you have no idea what you're talking about, and have never sat down with anyone who DOES know what they're talking about. Congrats on parroting someone else's incorrect political talking point.
The NRA delivers (compared, for example, to high profile lefty people spreading political cash around) a tiny amount of their members' money to campaigns. What they deliver is the intensely passionate action of actual human voters. That's what causes some legislators to pause when considering a position in the opposite direction. Not fear of some small lump of cash being provided to their rival's campaign, but the cohesive action of millions of voters who don't want to see the Bill of Rights further eroded. Your "nothing more nothing less" assessment is laughably incorrect.
In my opinion this goes against what they usually claim NRA stands for.
How do you figure? The NRA's central tenet is that the Bill of Rights protects us from government infringement on natural liberties. In the case of the NRA, they focus mostly on the right to defend yourself without the government saying you're not allowed to. Much like they routinely defend your right to say your mind without government interference - a freedom that the founders knew many in power would want to infringe upon, hence the 1st Amendment. So many people seem to have lost sight of the fact that the freedoms protected by the BofR are all intertwined. It's not the least bit unusual for advocacy groups to make a point of applauding someone a bit outside of their specific area of activity for taking a position that embraces the bigger picture in a way with which they agree. Lefty groups do this all the time. Why should those who back one type of liberty from government interference not applaud someone else who takes a position on the liberty to run your business (for example) the way you want to.
Florida could make a distinction between felonies like violent crimes VS what are basically civil violations of not following the rules made up by the various government agencies. Such a distinction is made for many other things, so why not voting rights?
Except, the very acts that might reasonably make one's fellow voters not want to trust one with having their hand (indirectly, by voting) on the machinery of government could well be non-violent offenses. Somebody who has shown a willingness to engage in felony corruption around bribery, or stealing the retirement funds of senior citizens, or similar non-violent offenses, are showing me more reason to distrust their suitability for civil engagement than some fifty year old guy who hung out with the wrong people when he was 18 and got caught up as an associate of some gang member or liquor store robber.
Well, that sort of makes sense. Your right to self protection is pretty much their central focus. Things like voting rights are best handled by groups that focus on those issues. The ACLU might be too broad a focus, but is perhaps a better vehicle for that, since - unlike the NRA - they aren't as focused on a specific area of law.
Right wing conservatives are so quick to point out when someone even hints at possibly affecting their second amendment rights but have absolutely no problem at all with stripping away 1st amendment rights.
It's kind of spectacular how badly wrong you have that. The liberals are the worst when it comes to wanting to muzzle your speech. Their instinct towards nanny statism is pretty much embodied by their full-throated endorsement of speech codes, shouting down (and beating) people with whom they disagree, and otherwise displaying a systematic disdain for actual free expression. Don't pretend you don't know this.