Source: USA Today



farg YEA!

i'm excited by this and i don't even own a gun. making guns illegal just keeps them out of the hands of law abiding citizens, not out of the hands of criminals.

Sweet deal.

BUDDYKILLER!!!!!

beat me to it.

meh, your's was much better put together >_>

i suggest a merger

You know, I don't think that I've ever seen a gun shop in Japan.


*feels safe*

But then, you don't have roving bands of armed marauders to protect yourself from either.

Still spreading my campaign to and merge

Yeah, because you're not so much more likely to be shot by a drunk neighbour or your wife........

he lives in louisiana...trust me he is much more likely to get shot by armed marauders.

hell if I lived in lousiana....wait, I wouldn't live there.

Yeah Bullets!

Gonna sleep safer tonight knowing that the it's the RIGHT not the privilege of every one to have life ending contraptions of any variety.

Now if we can just get that pesky 1st amendment under control we'll be in good shape.

http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/pla...d=00:01:51:00.0

Why in the hell are there FOUR topics on this? did anyone bother to check before they made theirs?

As for my opinion.... ye shall not have it. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

well did you bother to read where everyone apologized and asked that they be merged?

And speaking of which, where the hell is Peter J. Madhammerian, Jr.? I haven't seen him around in, like, a week. He lives in Texas, did he get shot or something?

BaCon said he was on vacation.

after having my house broken into while i was at work last week and having my guns stolen... i can only say good... criminal have no problem obtaining gun, why shouldn't law abiding citizens

And to quote Denny Crane... "the answer isn't less guns... Its More!"

For those concerned about this ruling, gun-related suicides have outnumbered firearm homicides and accidents for 20 of the last 25 years.

meh, it's your life if you wanna take it.

So use a damn rope like the rest of the world.



Seriously, why do you need the right to a gun anyway?
Afraid the British Empire will invade again?
Your government will enforce martial law?

A lot of people like them, and banning them would do shot anyway.

"I want it so you can't"

Yeah, not a reason.

What's ironic about this ruling is that the Supreme Court ruled against the death penalty for rapers of children a week or two before. I mean, which justice decided that to get conservative when it comes to guns, but liberal when it comes to executing people who screw children?

Something to think about:

If you've just raped a child, and you know you're gonna face the death penalty for it anyway, you might as well and go ahead and kill him/her, right? After all, dead kids tell no tales. But - and this is based on the idea that the death penalty is a useful deterrent, and not everyone believes that it is - if killing the child is going to increase the penalty you'll face for your actions, then you probably won't take that next step and the kid will live...albeit emotionally scarred.

The justice in question probably believed that the death penalty is a useful deterrent.

I like how you completely forgot the second half of my post.

If you can't kill pedophiles, who can you kill? I mean really. This is about the only group I would consider the death penalty for. Though I do agree with Hobbes assessment of the faulty logic. That's because the death penalty is a weak notion in general.

We need to rename and refocus the Justice Dept. "Justice" is just revenge dressed up in dogma.

How about a Dept. Who's job it would be to combat the roots of crime rather than just punish criminals to make the public feel better? The current system simply attempts to reap public vengeance in the faulty belief that future punishment acts as an effective deterrent.

We practically manufacture criminals. We need to let go of our animalistic need to punish and move to a rehabilitation based system.

It may be more satisfying to punish a criminal rather than teach them how to function in society, it is a better way to combat future crime.

On a harsher note, if some one refuses to or cannot be rehabilitated, why ever let them go. Forget sentencing and it's math of revenge. How about you can go when you have 1. Paid a Debt to Society through work. And 2. Demonstrated an ability and willingness to participate non-violently in society?


Back on the Gun topic.

I don't think all guns should be banned or anything, but I can't see why they shouldn't be sensibly regulated. We don't even have a RIGHT to drive a car. Why do we need a RIGHT to long range insta-death buttons?

Maybe there is no need for a gun ban in Jackson Hole, WY, but Chicago needs gun rights like it needs hemorrhoids. Why can't those needs be addressed as the individual concerns they are?

One thing I'm curious about is why all maximum security prisons aren't like the "Supermax" prisons, where you spend 23 hours every day in your cell. That would cut down on prisons making criminals worse, and virtually eliminate prison violence.

Edit: Forgot to mention. P-C, that was a far better argument for gun control than most I've heard.

As for my opinion on it... I think it's uselessin the U.S.A. for multiple reasons.

1. Most handguns used in crimes are illegal anyway. They're either stolen(Which a hand gun ban would directly effect.) or were purchased illegally(Which a hand gun ban wouldn't really touch.). IIRC, it's mostly of the second variety.

2. The whole ideal of gun rights is too embedded into American culture. There's no way a massive hand gun ban would pass. None. Too many people would get pissed off either because of how they were raised, or because it'd basically be a huge violation of the 2nd Amendment(You'd be surprised at how many people who would get offended by it who aren't interested in gun in the least.).

I don't know, I'm a big believer in evening the odds, and I think guns do that. Sure, in a perfect world we wouldn't have to worry about them, but we don't live in a perfect world and gun control laws work as well as drug prohibition, meaning the people that want them bad enough will always have them, and law abiding citizens will not. So I say let everyone have the opportunity, not just those with no regard for the law.

Of course, I'm from Texas, so it's possible I am suffering from some byproduct of the culture I was raised in. Here's the test:

Washington D.C.

It's had a full-on ban on guns for, like, 35 years. And in that time, it has continuously had one of the worse rates of violent crime in the nation. I hypothisize that there's so much violent crime because the average D.C.-ite is not allowed to own a gun for their protection, and the criminals (who do not follow the gun ban because they already break the law for a living) know it. Give D.C. a decade with guns and then have a look at their crime rate.

If it's managed to decrease, we know it's because guns work as a deterrent and even the odds and make people safer, and you can reevaluate your stance on gun control. If it's gone up, or remains unchanged, we know guns in the hands of the responsible law abiding citizen does squat, and we can - or at least I will - reevaluate our positions on gun rights.

I ignored it because it's not an argument at all.

Give me evidence that it would do nothing, hell, give me personal experience, anything beyond "I say it wouldn't work so it won't".

Gun crime in the UK: Very low.
Yes, it exists, but generally speaking, guns not being in the hands of every Tom, Dick and Harry means we don't have 16 year old virgins shooting up our schools.

Australia: No guns, pretty safe.


Then again, to a large degree America is just fucked up. Not meant to be an insult, just an outside observation.

No country has the combination of land mass, history or mix of people that the United States has. No other country has the right to judge us, as most have a strong majority of one race of people and are not as large as the USA.

It's not the guns, it's the religion.

Hey, sometimes people can be fucked up without it being directly their fault. They're still fucked up though.

How farged up do think things are over here? It's not all bad you know.

I do think this country is unique in many ways. And while I do love this place, or at least many core things about it, I don't think it means: other countries don't have the right to judge us, or that those judgments are generally invalid and must be disregarded.

Then read my last post.

I think it's also important to not that there's a difference between an observation and a judgement. A judgement asigns blame.

Mm. Well I actually think other countries have the right to pass their own judgments on others (in the qualitative sense, not whatever international law sense). I'm comfortable enough knowing what the US is/isn't obligated to listen to (or should/shouldn't be obligated to listen to), such that I'm not overly sensitive to what other nations say about us.

What the world has to say about the United States is worth listening to and shouldn't be disregarded, even if it's self-serving on the part of the nation making the statement. It tells us something that is either: a) true, or b) informative as to their intentions and strategy. Either case provides value. Beyond this, any nation (empire) which thinks itself so mighty that it can or should dismiss the dialogue of other countries, simply because they're smaller by any particular measure, is a nation that's not just complacent but riding for a well-deserved fall.