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Author | Topic: Gun Control III | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
DrJOnes* writes: really perhaps you could point out where the shockwave inducer should go in my build. I must have left it out when I put it together the first time.
Was this an attempt at some kind of wry humor, or are you really this disinterested in serious discussion? To answer your question anyway, the "shockwave inducer" is not shown in your photo, nor is the "shockwave inducer container". Here they are:
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
DrJones* writes: so the "shockwave" is not inherent to the AR-15 as Percy claimed. In fact it can happen regardless of which type of firearm fires the bullet. Will you next claim, "Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people"? I had a feeling you weren't being serious. I've been saying "AR-15 style weapons," which are capable of inflicting devastating and often lethal injuries. Any weapons capable of inflicting these kinds of injuries should also be banned. I also favor banning bullets designed to increase their ability to harm, of any calibre for any gun. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Phat writes: How would you defend the right to bear arms in today's modern and dysfunctional society? We do not live in a dysfunctional society. The firearm death rate will climb rapidly in any society that adopts accommodative gun laws and is flooded by easy to obtain guns and lots of ads glorifying guns resulting in a gun culture where people fall in love with their guns and zealously defend their right to endanger themselves and everyone around them If anything is dysfunctional it's the 2nd amendment. It was written in the time of muskets, and even though it's worded clearly, it apparently wasn't clear enough because the Supreme Court found room to misinterpret it in favor of a right to gun ownership by nearly everyone despite that the militias that were the justification no longer exist. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Phat writes: Some of us resist a government that forces laws on us. What is a law that is forced on you? One you don't like? If one disagreed with the "right turn on red" law, does that mean it was forced on them? No government makes laws that 100% of the people agree with. We live in a representative democracy. We don't resist a legitimately elected government just because it passes laws we don't like. We instead vote for people who will pass laws more to our liking. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
jar writes: The evidence is out there Percy, real evidence not infotainment. And yet you can't find any evidence to put in a message. When you say "the evidence is out there" you're using almost identical language to the Trump crazies claiming the election was stolen. Okey, great, the evidence is out there. Go find it. You go on to attack some claims (again without evidence) that were never made, or at least not ones that I ever made. I won't be defending things I never said. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Up front I'll note that the message's title is a play on Bill Clinton's slogan, "It's the economy, stupid." I'm not calling gun nuts stupid. When I call them something I call them nuts.
The Ahmaud Arbery murder trial is over and all three defendants were found guilty, most notably Travis McMichael who actually pulled the trigger and was found guilty of the additional charge of malice murder. All three men, Travis McMichael, 35, his father Greg McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, could spend the rest of their lives behind bars. It all started a couple weeks before the murder when Travis McMichael called 911 to report a trespasser inside a house under construction, possibly armed. Did he report it because the "trespasser" was black? We walk through houses under construction all the time. There's a new neighborhood going up in the apple orchard next door where people from our neighborhood take walks (it's sad about the apple orchard, but that's another story). We've been taking walks through all the houses as they go up. Last month the builder was at one of the houses and gave us a tour, especially interesting to me because of the elaborate lighting control system being installed. Of course, we're white and the builder's white (practically everyone's white in this state, not my fault - I live here because I found a job here out of college nearly half a century ago). How would the builder have felt if we were black? Were we technically trespassing? There were no "No Trespassing" signs, and a brief Internet search indicates it isn't trespassing with no signs or barriers. The only signs were prominent ones identifying the builders. Later that same day while walking through another house the buyers came by. They gave us a tour of the ground floor and encouraged us to walk around upstairs while they began eating the eight pizzas they'd brought, eight because they knew some of the builders were arriving soon, which they did. But how would they have reacted if we were black? That's not a fair question to ask in NH. I'm sure there's racism in the state, but because there are so few blacks here there's little opportunity to see it or for people to build up any racial animosity. If you see a black person you immediately notice them because they're so rare, but you otherwise think nothing of it. Or maybe that's just me, I don't know. But we know there's racism in Cobb County, Georgia. There'd been some burglaries in the neighborhood, and Arbery had been seen after dark in that house under construction many times over many months (Oct. 25, 2019 until Feb. 23, 2020 when Arbery was killed), so when the McMichael's and their neighbor Roddie Bryan saw Arbery running through their neighborhood they knew that was the guy who'd been walking through that house. Presuming a connection to burglaries was a leap. They fetched a shotgun, climbed into their pickups, and took off after him. It's a mystery why they thought their burglar would run through their neighborhood in broad daylight. Maybe their reasoning came out at trial, I don't know, but I think any black person passing through their neighborhood would have drawn suspicion. Travis McMichael made a fatal mistake when he approached Arbery while holding his gun. If an angry man of any race holding a gun approached me, I would definitely grab the gun, and that's exactly what Arbery did. By walking up to Arbery while holding his gun McMichael created the very same situation of fear he claimed justified the shooting. The McMichaels and Bryan thought they were making a citizen's arrest, but they were mistaken. Inexplicably, citizen's arrests are legal in jurisdictions all across the country, but Wikipedia warns that anyone making a citizen's arrest risks being charged with any of a variety of crimes, like false imprisonment, unlawful restraint, kidnapping, and wrongful arrest. Citizen's arrest only make sense under limited circumstances where you see someone actually commit a crime. A guy in a bar starts smashing beer mugs and a few people detain him until the police get there, that's a citizen's arrest. But if you try to detain someone jogging through your neighborhood you're probably on somewhat thin legal ice, even if you know he was the same person you saw walking through a house under construction. Why was Arbery walking through that house after dark? That does seem very suspicious, but nothing was ever stolen. When I was a teenager houses under construction were a convenient trysting place though the floors were hard. Arbery was 25, not a teenager but still pretty young, so maybe he was thinking along such lines. Or maybe he was just checking out progress like people in our own neighborhood like to do, and he preferred to do it after dark because he knew a black man doing it in broad daylight would attract the wrong kind of attention. If Travis McMichael had not had a gun then likely the three of them would have been able to detain Arbery and call the police, and the police would have given Arbery a warning about trespassing. That's it. That's all the police would have done. That's what the policeman seeking Arbery because of the calls about a trespasser would have done. If caught again he would have been arrested on a misdemeanor charge of trespassing. That's all. Trespassing is not a serious offense. Burglary, for which there's no evidence of any Arbery involvement, is more serious, but it's not a killing offense. Travis McMichael should not have been carrying a gun. He didn't need one. That's why we need more gun control. More guns just mean more shootings. Ready availability of guns is what makes shootings so common in the United States. Like McMichael, Rittenhouse created the very situation of fear as McMichael by walking into a volatile situation with a gun. Both McMichael and Rittenhouse were right. When involved in an altercation there is the very real possibility that the gun could be taken away and used on you, or if someone else has a gun you fear that they might shoot you, so you fire first. But remove the guns from these situations and nothing happens. Those who claim we need guns because the US is so dangerous are creating that danger themselves by making guns so easily available. Take the guns away. --Percy Edited by Percy, : McMichael => Arbery in third to last para.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
True. I was taking what was testified to on the stand at face value.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Texas school shooting kills 18 children, 3 adults
For the multitudes of gun nuts in this country, apparently never. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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vimesey writes: A quotation from the BBC news article about it:
But Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, rejected the calls for gun control. He said restricting the rights of "law-abiding citizens... doesn't work. It's not effective. It doesn't prevent crime." This is untrue. Murder is a crime, and just as increasing the number of guns has increased murders, including the mass murders that draw all the attention, reducing the number of guns would decrease murders. I think it's a simple formula on guns for most Republicans: What position on guns will help get me elected? For them, it is definitely not a question of what would save the most lives. If they thought running on a position of more arsenic in the diet would help get them elected, they'd be for it. The Democrats are the same, making their positions contingent upon how many votes they'll garner. They only seem better than Republicans because Democratic platforms generally don't contain a lot of inherent violence or evil. Anybody running for office should be viewed with great suspicion. Heinlein once wrote that public officials should have to be dragged kicking and screaming into office. Yes, hiding beneath all their meet-and-greats and talks and town halls and speeches and endorsement and money chasing is a true desire to do good, but it's buried deeply beneath a lot of bullshit. It rarely gets a chance to express itself. Gun violence in the US will decrease only when the number of guns decreases. There is no other answer. Politically that won't fly, so things will only get worse. I'm not at all surprised at the direction things have gone, only at how fast it's gotten this bad. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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It's kind of ironic that the guys with the guns who are fond of saying that, "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with gun," and that, "We need more good guys with guns in order to be safe," were too afraid to confront a bad guy with a gun.
We'll have a gun problem in this country for as long as people believe that guns make you safer. What makes gun mythology so impossible to counter is this train of thought that has probably gone through most peoples' minds at some time in their life, whether for or against guns: "Oh my God, what's that sound? Is someone breaking in? This is America, he could have a gun. Why, oh why, didn't I buy a gun. If I get through this, tomorrow I'm going down to Walmart and buying a gun." If they follow through, now they think that gun in their nightstand makes them safer. The statistics showing that it places them at greater risk will be ignored because they have none of the drama and terror of the fear of attack. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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The US is the most powerful country in the world militarily, economically and intellectually because it is big, populous, has enormous natural resources, attracts talent, and has a stable government (though that last is now somewhat in doubt).
But our people are no different, no better or worse, than people everywhere. If we think the US is what it is because it has the best people in the world then we are sorely mistaken. In fact, one could argue the opposite, that we have the worst people in the world and overcome it only through our wealth and power. That gun mania has taken over so much of the country at the same time that guns are wreaking havoc at record levels is a mark of shame, but only a portion of us are ashamed. Many are proud of our self-reliant attitude that makes guns a centerpiece of our pride. Many still believe the solution to the gun problem is more guns and making it easier to get guns while turning public places into fortresses. Many still believe that the answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun while ignoring that no good guy with a gun appeared on the scene to halt any mass shooting. Many are unaware that the majority of murders are committed by supposed good guys on people they know. Vietnam did teach us yet again how corrupt out politicians can be. I forget the timeline of when what became known. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Johnson, might have been a primary culprit, enough time has passed that my memory of which names go with which misdeeds have faded, but anyway, there was a great deal of lying to the American people about progress in the war and the chances of an outcome favorable to ourselves. I don't see why we should believe that anything's changed. In my mind, Biden is not my guy, and I don't trust him any more than any politician. He's just the guy who was better than Trump. We're still being lied to, we just don't know about what yet. For instance, what are we really doing with regard to Ukraine? Some things they're not telling us because it is actually true that making the information public would compromise those efforts. But other things they're not telling us because they know the American people would not support them if they knew. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Mass shootings continued at a high rate this weekend. "At least 12 dead in another weekend of mass shootings across America", says the headline. A short excerpt:
quote There are about 400 millions guns in America. We have more guns per person than any other country in the world. If guns make us safer, why are we the murder capital of the civilized world? Where are all the good guys with guns who are supposed to stop this violence? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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marc9000 writes: All of the recent shootings today are COPYCAT shootings. Oh, come on, Marc. All? Why are you minimizing the problem? I bet at least 150% of mass shootings are copycat. I mean, they all use guns. They all murder innocent people. Where's the originality in that?
If news was only reported, and not sensationalized, there would be far fewer senseless mass shootings. If it's the media's fault then we should be thankful that the mass murders are coming so fast and furious. This gives the media too little time to report and sensationalize each one. Just as a media team takes off for Philadelphia to sensationalize a mass murder there another happens in Chattanooga, so they divert there, and then another happens in Saginaw, Michigan, so they divert there, and in the end they never get anywhere, just fly around in the sky. Let us thank God for enough mass murders that before the media can properly sensationalize one mass murder another happens. It's often said that the U.S. founders couldn't imagine any weapon beyond the muskets of their day. That's true, but they also couldn't imagine the circus that's today's news media. They couldn't imagine the technology, but of course they could imagine a media like today's, even much worse, because they already had a media like ours. In fact, more newspapers and pamphlets were extremely vicious back then, with more Alex Jones and Glenn Beck equivalents.
Who can tell what goes on the minds of mass shooters,... Who can tell what goes on the minds of mass shooters? You, obviously. You just told us they're all copycats.
...but it can't hurt their ego when the news media points fingers at others besides the shooter, "The teacher left a door unlocked!!!! The police didn't respond correctly!!! The school wasn't fortified enough!!! The public has too many guns!!!!" Except for people sounding the alarm about guns, those are all conservative excuses for why guns are not the problem. It's everybody else's fault. For some, like you, it's the media's fault, but you blame everything on the media. For others it's that there wasn't enough security. For others there were failures of procedure. Some think it's a mental health issues. Others think we need more red flag laws. Some blame American culture. But guns? Few conservatives blame the guns. They like guns, so they can't blame them. Biden delights in saying over and over that the second amendment is not absolute, another Democrat politician recently said the Supreme Courts has stated many times that the second amendment is not absolute. No, the second amendment is not absolute (though it was misinterpreted by the Supreme Court in DC vs. Heller case). Justice Scalia wrote, "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." Gun control passes muster.
I wonder if the Supreme Court has ever said anything similar about the First Amendment? The Supreme Court has said plenty about the First Amendment right to free speech. For example, you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater (incitement). You can't defame people, as Deep vs. Heard recently demonstrated. You can't use fighting words or make threats (incitement again). The government's determination to continue the Vietnam war was doomed once the media began focusing attention on what was really happening in Vietnam. Now the media is focusing attention on what is really happening with guns, and you, liking guns, are understandably unhappy about it. --PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Notice I call him a gun guy, not a gun nut, because a gun nut he definitely is not. In a recent CNN opinion piece, Opinion: Here's the reason people tell me they want to buy an AR-15. And it's simply ludicrous | CNN, former officer Michael Fanone gives his opinion about semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15.
Fanone owns an AR-15 because he was issued one as a police officer, and wanting to become more familiar with the weapon and not being permitted to take it home, he purchased one. He writes that the AR-15 is not appropriate for home defense.
quote He contrasts the power and accuracy of an AR-15 with a standard police issue 9 mm pistol:
quote There are a couple solutions that he likes. One is banning such weapons:
quote But he has another solution he likes, one I haven't myself heard before, but it involves reclassifying semiautomatic weapons as class 3. I don't know that this is possible since class 3 is for fully automatic actions, i.e., machine guns, but here's what he has to say:
quote He concludes on a cautionary note about how dangerous these weapons really are:
quote --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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I just want to inject my own view into the discussion. Most people own guns for emotional reasons, not practical or factual ones. The emotional truth about guns is that people fall in love with them, but the practical truth is that guns are more likely to be used on family or friends, not in a defensive or "save the day" situation. A gun in the house puts people at greater risk, not less.
This focus on semi-automatics and weapons of war, which is the category with the best chance of some kind of political action, is just the gun-sanity side looking for a win. I assume the gun-sanity side has researched this and found that campaigning on a platform that more guns means greater risk and danger, not less, is a loser politically. Maybe so, but it's also the truth, and until the gun-sanity side starts speaking truth instead of some mumbled gobbledygook that no one understands, people will vote for the gun nuts who have a simple and clear message: this gun will protect you from the bad guys. You'll be safer with this gun. With this gun you could even be the hero, the good guy with a gun who stops a bad guy with a gun. The actual reality of guns' danger is illustrated by a case in Florida where a mother was arrested for manslaughter after her two-year-old found a gun and shot her husband in the back, killing him (Florida Toddler Fatally Shoots Father After Finding Loaded Gun). I should add one thing about semi-automatics. Although the deaths caused by mass shootings represent a small part of total firearm deaths, every single one of the deadliest mass shootings in the US in the table at Mass shootings in the United States - Wikipedia involved a semi-automatic. Someone mentioned that the caliber of most AR-15's is only .22, but the muzzle speed is three times higher. Any tissue it hits turns to jello. If an AR-15 round hits your kidney, you don't have a wound to your kidney. You have jello. There's a psychology about guns. Guns are embedded in the the culture. People fall in love with them and what they can do. They become sentimental about them. Many fun recreational activities are built around guns. Guns make people feel safer. People glorify them, imagining the gun saving people from attack. They love the sense of power that comes with shooting a gun. Guns have an addictive quality. So people will not easily give up their guns. It's going to be a long tough slog where it must be repeated over and over again that the 2nd amendment *is* associated with militia until the Supreme Court rules rationally, that regardless the 2nd amendment does not disallow gun control, and that guns make you less safe. Fauci learned that it was a mistake when early in the pandemic he spoke lies because it made the ends he wanted (availability of masks for medical professionals) more achievable. It cost him a bit of credibility. Most of what Fauci says turns out to be right on, but after that I always ask myself what is motivating him to say what he just said. The gun-sanity side has to learn the same lesson. They have to start speaking truth about guns all the time instead of just saying what they think is most politically likely to work at the time. This past Sunday's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was about police in schools, but it has a lot to say about guns, too:
--Percy
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