A huge chunk of my coworkers are the "freedom loving gun nut" types-- and regardless of your opinion of the "God Bless 'murrica" crowd, if the order ever comes down to kill Americans, they'll be the first ones to refuse that order. Same goes for forcibly taking guns away, or any other egregious violations of basic human rights.
Would they? I remember quite distinctly the violence that was threatened when people in 2001-2005 dared to question the various invasions that were plotted. I also remember how it was done: they were simply declared "Unamerican". So yes, I'm sure they wouldn't kill Americans. The people they would kill would have been carefully stripped of their American-ness.
Americans have never learned the real lesson of Hitler, or even of pastor Niemoller's poem: genocides happen because one group dehumanizes another, and the rest of the world simply shrugs its shoulders because "hey, it's not me."
I won't get into exactly how wrong you are on Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Mali and pretty much every military operation of the last 10 years, as that will take too long. I'll just point out a few very basic issue with your budget numbers: it's called the national defense spending, not the war budget. This means that the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are actually not accounted for in there. Instead, those wars were funded with supplemental and emergency budgets that are not on the main budget sheet. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War Read the links to official government budgets at the bottom if you object to Wikipedia.
The only thing you got right in your entire post is that Obama is not a peacenik: about 20 years ago, he would have been a moderate Republican, and on every standardized political spectrum map, he is firmly in the quarter of authoritarian politics and free market economics. And before you reply: being left or right of you has no impact on where someone is on the actual political spectrum.
Actually, that WAS the thinking at the time. Now, it would have been even better if the US would have just left Iran alone instead of imposing the Shah through a coup, but now we're reaching even farther into the past. About the only thing we can learn from this is that you don't just mess with a country's power structure because you think you can bring about some incremental improvement. In general, it backfires horribly.
No, I think the simple fact of the matter is that we disagree
Correct, we do. I don't think that was ever in doubt. At the same time, we aren't debating whether The Beatles are a better band than The Rolling Stones.
I note how in all your responses to me you cleverly insinuate (or just flat out say) that I am doing something like "leading" the discussion away from a topic, as if merely asserting it makes it so.
This is why I think that you're actively leading the conversation, because I doubt that your reading comprehension is that poor or that your ability to logically state a case is that poor. You start with a half-truth that primes the reader with a particular psychological anchor, add an actual truth into the mix, and then finish with a complete non-sequitur that leads to your desired conclusion. The only connection between the first set of statements and the conclusion is that the first set of statements elicits a yes reaction from me or the reader, as the conclusion is supposed to do. I'm pretty sure they covered that debating tactic during your training, right? Or did you sleep through that part?
On any topic for which intelligence work is even required, there is ALWAYS contradictory information and differing analytic viewpoints.
Correct. I never stated anything to the contrary.
People like yourself choose only to see the contradictory information, in hindsight, to the exclusion of all other supporting information.
And again, with the incorrect and unsupported conclusion, whose only connection to the preceding one is that it follows a true statement to which the reader is willing to say yes. I repeatedly argued that the intel was correct - my beef is that the intel was then changed by people who had no business to do so: the upper echelon of the DoD and VP office.
I believe I stated fairly clearly I did not think the Iraq invasion as a particularly good idea; however, that is only my opinion and history will be the ultimate judge. None of this changes the veracity of anything I said in my initial comment.
And I never disagreed or argued with you about that point. Not sure why you keep bringing it up.
No, I get your point. However, your point very carefully whitewashes the political use of the pre-Iraq war intelligence to arrive at conclusions that were not supported by the intelligence. What you're leading the conversation to is that what happened was completely normal. It wasn't. What happened was that questions were asked and conclusions were manipulated until the politicians had the answers that they wanted. Intelligence, in this case, was a prop. Nothing more. And that's the real travesty.
Of course WMD was "used" as the primary reason to invade Iraq, just as Pearl Harbor was "used" as a primary reason to enter WWII, and the Zimmermann Telegram was "used" as a primary reason to enter WWI. Do you think those were the only reasons? If not, does that mean our leaders were "lying"? Or is it possible that the reasons the US may enter a military conflict are fare more complex?
And again, with the subtle leading of the conversation. Did they teach you that, or does this come naturally to you? The difference between Saddam's WMDs, and Pearl Harbor and the Zimmermann Telegram was that two decisions used intelligence about a situation to arrive at a political decision, the other used a political decision to arrive at intelligence. This means that your entire line of questioning after that equivocation is drawing the discussion away from the problem everyone else is discussing: that intelligence was used to justify a pre-conceived political decision.
What is ironic to me is that you acknowledge the fact that Saddam had the capability and intent to possess WMD, and act as if that alone couldn't have been enough of a justification. The key point, as you observe, wasn't whether Iraq had WMD; it was that US policy toward Iraq changed, from one of containment to one of removal of Saddam Hussein.
The fact that you consider it ironic seems to me that you don't understand at all the problem. The problem is that the reasons for the policy change were based on ideology that was at best unsupported by the intelligence on the situation, and at worst contra-indicated by it. Do you really want your leaders to blow a trillion dollars, 5000 US lives and about 100000 other lives on nothing more than truthiness, ideology and policy priorities? Or would you rather they make a best effort at understanding the situation?
Cheney, Rumsfeld and his clique aren't guilty of making flawed decisions based on incomplete or fuzzy intelligence. They are guilty of directly manipulating the intelligence to support decisions that had no factual support, cost an ungodly amount of money, too many lives, political goodwill and had a net negative effect on the region. Results that were widely-distributed knowledge before they actually started the war.
Gotta give you props: always on message, and very, very good at leading the discussion away from the actual topic.
And they were smart enough to not invade. If Bush would have just kept to the generally accepted strategy of containment, we would at least not be about a trillion dollars more in debt.
Some might. But the number of people saying that are far smaller now (several orders of magnitude), and they are also much, much farther away from the power positions.
Between seeing the satellite photos and hearing all the evidence in question I had no reason to think Iraq was complying with UN requirements.
You're right, he wasn't. Why was that, though? Hint - he wasn't worried about the US.
He was only a murderous tyrant who was oppressing his people.
True, but that was brought up in only the most incidental way during the ramp-up to the war. So what's your point with that statement?
I don't hear about Iraq much anymore.
That's your problem, not mine.
I know there were pockets of resistance and they continued to attack US troops as long as we were there. The good stories out weigh the bad however.
Considering that you really don't seem to be looking for information about Iraq, it seems that the stories you are aware of are the ones that are being spoonfed to you over the course of weeks. I suggest you do some research on the state of Iraq.
It is a shame we brought stability to a country in turmoil.
And... here we jump off into the deep end of the pool. Iraq was stable under Hussein. He was predictable, in full control of the country, the military and the population. That he did so through brutal means does not change that by all definitions of the word stable, Iraq was a stable country. Now, it is anything but. It could be taken over by Shia or Shiite hardliners, become a vassal state of Iran, taken over by Al Qaeda affiliates, fracture along tribal lines (or at least even more so than it is now), collapse into total chaos, or even possibly stabilize and become something like Libya, Egypt or Jordan.
At best, Iraq is a massive geo-political problem that will fester for at least a generation. At worst, it will be a base for suicidal foes of the US.
Ah, Dave, back again to defend any action taken by the government. We missed you.
No matter your wall of text, you can't run away from a very simple truth: the invasion of Iraq was a sham, carried out by politicians against every advice from the Intelligence and Military professionals.
The intelligence components of the US, Russia, France, Germany, and the UN as a whole believed Iraq to be in continuing possession of WMD,
Bullshit. The intelligence components of those countries at best pointed to a lack of evidence for WMDs, if not outright evidence to lack of WMDs. That they pointed to WMDs is pure revisionism. How do I know? Because I actually read the articles that directly referenced the intelligence reports, and the post mortems done by the US intelligence agencies.
In this case, the truth, as established prior to 2003, is that Saddam Hussein had the intent and capability to possess WMD. Without physically discovering WMD themselves, all information, history, and evidence - even when viewed in the context of contradictory evidence - indicated that Saddam Hussein had WMD.
You're at your best here. You mix certain nuggets of truths, and then jump to a completely incorrect conclusion. Everyone knew that Hussein not only had the intent and capability to possess WMDs, but to use them as well. All you needed for that was to follow evening news once in a while. What was in question was whether he had nukes, or was in the process of making them. Pretty much all evidence collected by intelligence services pointed to no. Where the information gathered by intelligence services was turned into a cause for war was at the top levels of the DoD and the office of the VP, and it was done by taking certain holes in the information and making them into risks that could not be ignored.
Unfortunately, the most important aspect - namely, Iraq actually having WMD - ended up being absent. When the policy of containment with regard to Iraq changed to a more aggressive posture after 9/11, the truth pointed to Iraqi possession of WMD.
You inadvertently slipped up. You're absolutely right in your statement: politicians changed policies, and with that change, the truth was pointed by those politicians into a different direction. This was deliberate decision coming from policy makers, not evidence coming from intelligence professionals.
After the invasion, only then did we discover that the US analysis was almost all wrong. But was the analysis wrong? This is remembered by many, incorrectly, as an example of "politicized intelligence". In fact, it is simply an illustration of how intelligence is not about truth, but rather is a vehicle to inform the decisions of policy makers.
Again, with the weaseling. Yes, some people discovered that Iraq didn't have WMDs. But those people were the ones who had deliberately changed the analysis provided by the intelligence professionals, or who wanted to go to Iraq for their own reasons. Everyone else was screaming bloody murder. You're correct though that the intelligence itself doesn't do anything; it is only a tool used by politicians, who have the actual power. And that tool was melted down and cast into something entirely different by those same politicians.
Intelligence exists solely to support policy makers. Most policy makers are politicians. This does not mean that intelligence itself is politicized, only that it is, necessarily, serving a political master.
While this is true, it completely ignores the topic: that the political master was deliberate in its abuse of its intelligence. Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz worked the intelligence they were given until it fit their agenda. Considering the outcome, they ought to be in jail.
The anti-war protests may have been some of the largest in history, but they were still dwarfed by all those who approved of it. On average, the US supported the war. Furthermore, the people in power - politicians, journalists and other newsmakers branded everyone who disagreed with the impending war as traitors. Remember the phrase "It's not unpatriotic to disagree"? Yeah, it was coined by protesters who were tired of being essentially threatened with firing squads every time they spoke up.
The end-result was a list of ports that I may have open on my router/computers. Yes, the process used was illegal. Big fucking deal, so are a lot of things that are ok among civilized people. See for example betting on sports. But there was zero impact while his scan was on-going, and there was zero footprint left behind.
As for your comment that know a script kiddie has a list of unsecured IPs: that's my problem if my IP is on that list. He did a trivial scan, and if I take my security seriously, I should not be on there. If anything, it should be a test whether I can even talk about security in my own house, and I should be thankful for it.
Was it all clear, and would I have liked to get a heads-up? Sure. But if he did find my network, it's an incentive for me take a closer look at security. Not to shoot the guy.
Except he did not activate any webcams or gathered any data beyond what ports were available and whether he was able to install his rootkit. Why didn't you extend the analogy even further to raping my daughters and defecating in my bed? I mean, why not go all out in the attempt to generate an emotional response to a completely unrelated problem? Does your post also mean that you would shoot the writer of this study, if you found out who he was?
And I feel again confirmed that the US doesn't have a gun problem, but a response problem: you conflate one thing with something vastly different, then determine response based on the emotional reaction you have to the vastly different thing.
Damn, and I'm all out of mod points. It is much more likely that this was an attack by the Syrian government than that it was launched by the rebels on one of their few successful take-overs.
Man, some people are a paranoid bunch. If someone leaves a flyer on my door that says "You had 2 open windows and one unlocked door", and a similar flyer is on everyone's door, I'll actually thank the good Samaritan. If I see someone looking at doors and windows, taking notes, then putting a flyer on my door, I'll ask him what he's doing, why, and find out what he's actually up to. If he's friendly and forthcoming, I'll thank him and send him on his way. If he's belligerent, then maybe I'll start to consider self-defense.
But to shoot someone just because they are walking around the neighborhood, surveying every house? Yeah, the US doesn't have a gun problem. We have a response problem.
I find it hilarious that there is this massive misunderstanding in the US that somehow, government and police forces are not composed of people or citizens. The lesson they have not learned - and I hope to not be around for when they do learn that lesson the hard way - is that the people who shoot at you do so because they are convinced they are defending themselves, their families, their country and their way of life.
Your post combined with the one right above yours is a thing of beauty. You couldn't have better illustrated and proven quacking duck's point if you had actually tried to do so.
A gun is a tool. Free speech is a concept. Furthermore, I didn't assign relative value to either one. I wasn't aware that I would have to point that out to Americans, who seem to have a pavlovian response to the word "gun".
Actually, the more accurate statement would be "Just because you have a democratically elected govt does not mean that their actions are in the interest of or advance the society that voted for the government".
A gun is not speech. It's not the same ballpark, same league, sport, planet or even universe. Therefore, you cannot compare laws that apply to guns with laws that apply to speech.
Slashdot Mirror
A huge chunk of my coworkers are the "freedom loving gun nut" types-- and regardless of your opinion of the "God Bless 'murrica" crowd, if the order ever comes down to kill Americans, they'll be the first ones to refuse that order. Same goes for forcibly taking guns away, or any other egregious violations of basic human rights.
Would they? I remember quite distinctly the violence that was threatened when people in 2001-2005 dared to question the various invasions that were plotted. I also remember how it was done: they were simply declared "Unamerican". So yes, I'm sure they wouldn't kill Americans. The people they would kill would have been carefully stripped of their American-ness.
Americans have never learned the real lesson of Hitler, or even of pastor Niemoller's poem: genocides happen because one group dehumanizes another, and the rest of the world simply shrugs its shoulders because "hey, it's not me."
I won't get into exactly how wrong you are on Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Mali and pretty much every military operation of the last 10 years, as that will take too long. I'll just point out a few very basic issue with your budget numbers: it's called the national defense spending, not the war budget. This means that the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are actually not accounted for in there. Instead, those wars were funded with supplemental and emergency budgets that are not on the main budget sheet. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War Read the links to official government budgets at the bottom if you object to Wikipedia.
The only thing you got right in your entire post is that Obama is not a peacenik: about 20 years ago, he would have been a moderate Republican, and on every standardized political spectrum map, he is firmly in the quarter of authoritarian politics and free market economics. And before you reply: being left or right of you has no impact on where someone is on the actual political spectrum.
Actually, that WAS the thinking at the time. Now, it would have been even better if the US would have just left Iran alone instead of imposing the Shah through a coup, but now we're reaching even farther into the past. About the only thing we can learn from this is that you don't just mess with a country's power structure because you think you can bring about some incremental improvement. In general, it backfires horribly.
No, I think the simple fact of the matter is that we disagree
Correct, we do. I don't think that was ever in doubt. At the same time, we aren't debating whether The Beatles are a better band than The Rolling Stones.
I note how in all your responses to me you cleverly insinuate (or just flat out say) that I am doing something like "leading" the discussion away from a topic, as if merely asserting it makes it so.
This is why I think that you're actively leading the conversation, because I doubt that your reading comprehension is that poor or that your ability to logically state a case is that poor. You start with a half-truth that primes the reader with a particular psychological anchor, add an actual truth into the mix, and then finish with a complete non-sequitur that leads to your desired conclusion. The only connection between the first set of statements and the conclusion is that the first set of statements elicits a yes reaction from me or the reader, as the conclusion is supposed to do. I'm pretty sure they covered that debating tactic during your training, right? Or did you sleep through that part?
On any topic for which intelligence work is even required, there is ALWAYS contradictory information and differing analytic viewpoints.
Correct. I never stated anything to the contrary.
People like yourself choose only to see the contradictory information, in hindsight, to the exclusion of all other supporting information.
And again, with the incorrect and unsupported conclusion, whose only connection to the preceding one is that it follows a true statement to which the reader is willing to say yes. I repeatedly argued that the intel was correct - my beef is that the intel was then changed by people who had no business to do so: the upper echelon of the DoD and VP office.
I believe I stated fairly clearly I did not think the Iraq invasion as a particularly good idea; however, that is only my opinion and history will be the ultimate judge. None of this changes the veracity of anything I said in my initial comment.
And I never disagreed or argued with you about that point. Not sure why you keep bringing it up.
No, I get your point. However, your point very carefully whitewashes the political use of the pre-Iraq war intelligence to arrive at conclusions that were not supported by the intelligence. What you're leading the conversation to is that what happened was completely normal. It wasn't. What happened was that questions were asked and conclusions were manipulated until the politicians had the answers that they wanted. Intelligence, in this case, was a prop. Nothing more. And that's the real travesty.
Of course WMD was "used" as the primary reason to invade Iraq, just as Pearl Harbor was "used" as a primary reason to enter WWII, and the Zimmermann Telegram was "used" as a primary reason to enter WWI. Do you think those were the only reasons? If not, does that mean our leaders were "lying"? Or is it possible that the reasons the US may enter a military conflict are fare more complex?
And again, with the subtle leading of the conversation. Did they teach you that, or does this come naturally to you? The difference between Saddam's WMDs, and Pearl Harbor and the Zimmermann Telegram was that two decisions used intelligence about a situation to arrive at a political decision, the other used a political decision to arrive at intelligence. This means that your entire line of questioning after that equivocation is drawing the discussion away from the problem everyone else is discussing: that intelligence was used to justify a pre-conceived political decision.
What is ironic to me is that you acknowledge the fact that Saddam had the capability and intent to possess WMD, and act as if that alone couldn't have been enough of a justification. The key point, as you observe, wasn't whether Iraq had WMD; it was that US policy toward Iraq changed, from one of containment to one of removal of Saddam Hussein.
The fact that you consider it ironic seems to me that you don't understand at all the problem. The problem is that the reasons for the policy change were based on ideology that was at best unsupported by the intelligence on the situation, and at worst contra-indicated by it. Do you really want your leaders to blow a trillion dollars, 5000 US lives and about 100000 other lives on nothing more than truthiness, ideology and policy priorities? Or would you rather they make a best effort at understanding the situation?
Cheney, Rumsfeld and his clique aren't guilty of making flawed decisions based on incomplete or fuzzy intelligence. They are guilty of directly manipulating the intelligence to support decisions that had no factual support, cost an ungodly amount of money, too many lives, political goodwill and had a net negative effect on the region. Results that were widely-distributed knowledge before they actually started the war.
Gotta give you props: always on message, and very, very good at leading the discussion away from the actual topic.
And they were smart enough to not invade. If Bush would have just kept to the generally accepted strategy of containment, we would at least not be about a trillion dollars more in debt.
Some might. But the number of people saying that are far smaller now (several orders of magnitude), and they are also much, much farther away from the power positions.
Between seeing the satellite photos and hearing all the evidence in question I had no reason to think Iraq was complying with UN requirements.
You're right, he wasn't. Why was that, though? Hint - he wasn't worried about the US.
He was only a murderous tyrant who was oppressing his people.
True, but that was brought up in only the most incidental way during the ramp-up to the war. So what's your point with that statement?
I don't hear about Iraq much anymore.
That's your problem, not mine.
I know there were pockets of resistance and they continued to attack US troops as long as we were there. The good stories out weigh the bad however.
Considering that you really don't seem to be looking for information about Iraq, it seems that the stories you are aware of are the ones that are being spoonfed to you over the course of weeks. I suggest you do some research on the state of Iraq.
It is a shame we brought stability to a country in turmoil.
And... here we jump off into the deep end of the pool. Iraq was stable under Hussein. He was predictable, in full control of the country, the military and the population. That he did so through brutal means does not change that by all definitions of the word stable, Iraq was a stable country. Now, it is anything but. It could be taken over by Shia or Shiite hardliners, become a vassal state of Iran, taken over by Al Qaeda affiliates, fracture along tribal lines (or at least even more so than it is now), collapse into total chaos, or even possibly stabilize and become something like Libya, Egypt or Jordan.
At best, Iraq is a massive geo-political problem that will fester for at least a generation. At worst, it will be a base for suicidal foes of the US.
Ah, Dave, back again to defend any action taken by the government. We missed you.
No matter your wall of text, you can't run away from a very simple truth: the invasion of Iraq was a sham, carried out by politicians against every advice from the Intelligence and Military professionals.
The intelligence components of the US, Russia, France, Germany, and the UN as a whole believed Iraq to be in continuing possession of WMD,
Bullshit. The intelligence components of those countries at best pointed to a lack of evidence for WMDs, if not outright evidence to lack of WMDs. That they pointed to WMDs is pure revisionism. How do I know? Because I actually read the articles that directly referenced the intelligence reports, and the post mortems done by the US intelligence agencies.
In this case, the truth, as established prior to 2003, is that Saddam Hussein had the intent and capability to possess WMD. Without physically discovering WMD themselves, all information, history, and evidence - even when viewed in the context of contradictory evidence - indicated that Saddam Hussein had WMD.
You're at your best here. You mix certain nuggets of truths, and then jump to a completely incorrect conclusion. Everyone knew that Hussein not only had the intent and capability to possess WMDs, but to use them as well. All you needed for that was to follow evening news once in a while. What was in question was whether he had nukes, or was in the process of making them. Pretty much all evidence collected by intelligence services pointed to no. Where the information gathered by intelligence services was turned into a cause for war was at the top levels of the DoD and the office of the VP, and it was done by taking certain holes in the information and making them into risks that could not be ignored.
Unfortunately, the most important aspect - namely, Iraq actually having WMD - ended up being absent. When the policy of containment with regard to Iraq changed to a more aggressive posture after 9/11, the truth pointed to Iraqi possession of WMD.
You inadvertently slipped up. You're absolutely right in your statement: politicians changed policies, and with that change, the truth was pointed by those politicians into a different direction. This was deliberate decision coming from policy makers, not evidence coming from intelligence professionals.
After the invasion, only then did we discover that the US analysis was almost all wrong. But was the analysis wrong? This is remembered by many, incorrectly, as an example of "politicized intelligence". In fact, it is simply an illustration of how intelligence is not about truth, but rather is a vehicle to inform the decisions of policy makers.
Again, with the weaseling. Yes, some people discovered that Iraq didn't have WMDs. But those people were the ones who had deliberately changed the analysis provided by the intelligence professionals, or who wanted to go to Iraq for their own reasons. Everyone else was screaming bloody murder. You're correct though that the intelligence itself doesn't do anything; it is only a tool used by politicians, who have the actual power. And that tool was melted down and cast into something entirely different by those same politicians.
Intelligence exists solely to support policy makers. Most policy makers are politicians. This does not mean that intelligence itself is politicized, only that it is, necessarily, serving a political master.
While this is true, it completely ignores the topic: that the political master was deliberate in its abuse of its intelligence. Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz worked the intelligence they were given until it fit their agenda. Considering the outcome, they ought to be in jail.
The anti-war protests may have been some of the largest in history, but they were still dwarfed by all those who approved of it. On average, the US supported the war. Furthermore, the people in power - politicians, journalists and other newsmakers branded everyone who disagreed with the impending war as traitors. Remember the phrase "It's not unpatriotic to disagree"? Yeah, it was coined by protesters who were tired of being essentially threatened with firing squads every time they spoke up.
But should you shoot anybody who opens your door? Every time? Think carefully about it.
The end-result was a list of ports that I may have open on my router/computers. Yes, the process used was illegal. Big fucking deal, so are a lot of things that are ok among civilized people. See for example betting on sports. But there was zero impact while his scan was on-going, and there was zero footprint left behind.
As for your comment that know a script kiddie has a list of unsecured IPs: that's my problem if my IP is on that list. He did a trivial scan, and if I take my security seriously, I should not be on there. If anything, it should be a test whether I can even talk about security in my own house, and I should be thankful for it.
Was it all clear, and would I have liked to get a heads-up? Sure. But if he did find my network, it's an incentive for me take a closer look at security. Not to shoot the guy.
Except he did not activate any webcams or gathered any data beyond what ports were available and whether he was able to install his rootkit. Why didn't you extend the analogy even further to raping my daughters and defecating in my bed? I mean, why not go all out in the attempt to generate an emotional response to a completely unrelated problem? Does your post also mean that you would shoot the writer of this study, if you found out who he was?
And I feel again confirmed that the US doesn't have a gun problem, but a response problem: you conflate one thing with something vastly different, then determine response based on the emotional reaction you have to the vastly different thing.
Damn, and I'm all out of mod points. It is much more likely that this was an attack by the Syrian government than that it was launched by the rebels on one of their few successful take-overs.
Hold on to your hats, it's gonna be a wild ride.
Man, some people are a paranoid bunch. If someone leaves a flyer on my door that says "You had 2 open windows and one unlocked door", and a similar flyer is on everyone's door, I'll actually thank the good Samaritan. If I see someone looking at doors and windows, taking notes, then putting a flyer on my door, I'll ask him what he's doing, why, and find out what he's actually up to. If he's friendly and forthcoming, I'll thank him and send him on his way. If he's belligerent, then maybe I'll start to consider self-defense.
But to shoot someone just because they are walking around the neighborhood, surveying every house? Yeah, the US doesn't have a gun problem. We have a response problem.
The right to own a gun is not the same thing as a gun. I hope you understand that. Want to try again?
I find it hilarious that there is this massive misunderstanding in the US that somehow, government and police forces are not composed of people or citizens. The lesson they have not learned - and I hope to not be around for when they do learn that lesson the hard way - is that the people who shoot at you do so because they are convinced they are defending themselves, their families, their country and their way of life.
A gun is the same Free Speech? Please, do elaborate. If nothing else, it should be entertaining.
Your post combined with the one right above yours is a thing of beauty. You couldn't have better illustrated and proven quacking duck's point if you had actually tried to do so.
[...]Americans, who seem to have a pavlovian response to the word "gun".
Brazilians voted NO on a referendum to ban guns, but americans are morons anyway, americans are always morons to the enlightened "rest of the world".
I rest my case.
A gun is a tool. Free speech is a concept. Furthermore, I didn't assign relative value to either one. I wasn't aware that I would have to point that out to Americans, who seem to have a pavlovian response to the word "gun".
Out of curiosity - what would render this law illegal/unconstitutional? Please refer to the specific clause and/or amendment.
I love how Hitler is being redefined as part of the Communist/Socialist political spectrum.... if this gains traction, it's time to leave the US.
Actually, the more accurate statement would be "Just because you have a democratically elected govt does not mean that their actions are in the interest of or advance the society that voted for the government".
A gun is not speech. It's not the same ballpark, same league, sport, planet or even universe. Therefore, you cannot compare laws that apply to guns with laws that apply to speech.
Nice try, though.