Summations Only

It strikes me that you're using rules and ideas from the 18th century to govern your activities in the 21st. To the outside world this approach looks like madness.When old rules no longer work for the societies they are designed for rational people change them, and irrational ones turn to biblical style fundamentalism - "it's what it says in the book."

But somehow we managed to control our gun nuts by modernising our laws and you guys appear to be incapable of it. We just tell Queenie (God bless her and all who sail in her) what we want to do and she signs the bit of paper making it law. It's a ceremonial duty only, the concept of Queenie refusing to do the will of parliament is inconceivable.But maybe you could address the point?

^^^ busted

General deterrence does work. That is, we know that the existence of laws and penalties for breaking them combined with an enforcement scheme that is effective does deter crime. Without that package, there would be a lot more crime.Increasing the penalty for crime though has been shown not to work - all the harsh deterrence related ideas, 'three strikes and you're out' etc schemes do not deter crime. The point is that a lot of crime is non-rational, spur of the moment opportunism or drunken punch ups. The rest, those that are planned, are comitted by people who, by definition, do not think they will be caught or are too stupid to understand the consequences.There's stacks of research on this, but the politicians still have to look tough, despite it's ineffectualness and the very, very expensive outcome of banging-up every increasing numbers of people.

And we had the idiotic reply this morning from the moronic gun lobby explaining that the problem was not that the crazy had a gun but that the school kids didn't. Total Loony-tunes.I felt for Obama this morning - he's supposedly the most powerful man in the world but can't take the action he wants to stop these appalling tragedies simply repeating themselves indefinitely.

Great, that should be really easy to prove. Let's have the evidence.

So your evidence is that you are personally convinced by internal meanings of subjective stuff. Hopeless. Your promise was that God always answers prayers and all you offer is what's happening in your own head? 'Nuff said.

None of it pertinant. Give us real world evidence that prayers always work, as was your claim.

You regularly say things, then pretend you said something else. This is what you said If that is the case, you should be able to point to real world, direct effects of prayer. You know, an immediate end to gun deaths and school shootings as we are discussing. or something similar. Pointing to short term Christian revivals is not evidence of prayer, it's evidence of people doing what they do.

Uh? Praying only works if you're praying in god's will - wtf does that mean? How many Christians would it take and by how much would it be cut? What do they have to do to pray in god's will for it instead of just praying?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Are Americans more mentally ill than the Swiss or Canadians?

This highlights the problem; the idea that students - or teachers - could be legally carrying guns around in school is insane. It's hard to say how bizzarre this sounds to outsiders. It shows how anaesthetised Americans have become to the problem of gun culture.I've said this before but it's still relevant, in the UK we had a problem with gangs using knives. The government did one of those knee-jerk reactions and made it an imprisionable offence to be carry a knife with a blade longer than 4.5 inches in most circumstances. I'm doubtful it made much of a difference to knife crime - but what we didn't do was issue knives to everyone else in the expectation that that would solve the problem.

Which is exactly my point. The concept of teachers and students bringing guns into schools SHOULD sound bizzarre to you. You've got used to the outrageous idea that everyone can carry death around in their pockets as a right. That is not the alternative. The alternative is to do what every other civilised country in the entire world does - protect its citizens by controlling acces to guns.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

The official advice for coping with tailgaters is to pull over and let the arsehole past.Then lift the Remington M2010 ESR off the rack and shoot him in the back of the head from a safe distance.

Not wishing to speak for Vimesay, but the anti-aircraft missile defence batteries were attempting to prevent this (mostly by deterrence than action):