Two wrongs don't make a right (the (ir)rationality of revenge) - also gun control

but 3 lefts do....(just to get that smartalacky remark out of the way)Jesus encourages us to turn the other cheek, but he may have just been referring to something the little cadre of 12 ambiguously gay men he had with him practiced (Mary Magdalene never had a chance - she was no Cosmo Kramer)....Revenge. A dish best served cold.Ah yes, the Golden Rule, which in a simplistic way had been stated "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". General Patton may have corrupted it by arguing that "you men shouldnt die for your country - you should make them die for their country!", or "Do unto them before they can do unto you!" (That's our Croquet Club motto, BTW)Curiously, the Golden Rule has been codified in some form or another in every single religion known to man. It may be the only thing that is common. In other words, if you put all the world's religions into your Venn Diagram (RAZD can give an example), the only thing in the overlapped center, the intersection of all sets as it were, might just be the Golden Rule.However, a BDSM fetishist might want to amend it......maybe we could rephrase it:Do unto them in a manner that they would like in kind to the way you would have them do unto you.There was a game not similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma, but brought up in the same conversation. I think it was showing how Tit-For-Tat was the best overall strategy. The idea is this - you initially assume everyone is good. Upon encountering a ripoff, your return the same tit-for-tat just the once and resume your pollyanna outlook. Repeat whenever it occurs again. In computer simulations this simple rubric seems to have won out in terms of surviving among denizens of the wilderness in terms of getting cooperation when you need it and also avoiding being victimized to extinction."I'd heard of a Saint who had loved you
So I studied all night in his school.
He taught that the duty of lovers
Was to tarnish the Golden Rule.
And just when I was sure his teachings were pure
He drowned himself in the pool.
His body is gone, but back here on the lawn
His spirit continues to drool...." - Leonard Cohen

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- xongsmith

Are you just using the simple gross total count of deaths per year?Perhaps a better measure would be by operator minute. Divide car deaths by driver-minutes and gun deaths by minutes had loaded and within easy moments reach of the trigger-pulling hand.I dunno...just thinking that "statistically" can be just about anything.No to your other question.

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- xongsmith

In my opinion you do not have it right.The people who obeyed the law were those who desperately needed, in approximate order, the following things before they needed a gun:1. Early infant development counseling, with an emphasis of treating babies at risk - with Cho's parents and the infant Cho - to direct his upbringing away from such a broken mind.- ok, that wasnt available & no one has a time machine.2. Childhood psychology visits to correct the absence of 1.3. Teenage psychology visits to correct the absence of 2.4. College screening for detection of instability in Cho's mind, to correct the absences of 1, 2 and 3.5. Proper attention to the screams of help he was leaving around him before the incident, to correct the absence of 1-4.6. Beefier gun detection at the school grounds to prevent their entry.7. More police on campus to respond quickly.8. Perhaps an armed floor guard on every floor.9. Maybe here, in the unfortunate face of failure on everything before, a designated student protector in each class....there may be others I left out and would put in if I think a little more about it, but you get the idea, dont you?.....Lastly, 10. Allowing untrained students to conceal & bring in weapons, at which point we have long left the civilized world and have reduced the education environment to the wild west.So, frankly, your solution is nothing short of promoting the destruction of civilization. Sorry. I cannot support that.Step 1. would have been the cheapest solution. Remember, guns dont kill people - people kill people.Steps 2 and 3. are getting more and more expensive. Step 4 is probably impractical and is an invasion of privacy in a free civilized world. Step 5 is certainly something we can address more effectively than what is going on now. Steps 6 through 9 are about giving up freedom for security. 10 is the end of civilization.

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- xongsmith

You have to be taught how to drive. Shouldn't you have to be taught how to use firearms? It's not enough to say you CAN get training. You should have to get training. Hey! Nice pic. Yes you are a devilishly handsome dude.I see both of you are pointing each other's foot.... Hyro - think for a second. How many braindead morons go down and buy a gun for self defense? I'm just saying, there ought to be some kind of Quality Control. Show a validated Education receipt or something. Frankly, the mix between the average common gun-toting criminal and the braindead gun-defending moron gives me Major Willies.Infact, I have a story to tell...Where I used to work we had an older gentleman from eastern europe come to the team. One of our workers in the back was a proud card-carrying NRA member and invited this man to join them in their Gun Club get-together one weekend. Janusz agreed and went. As you may know, they have target shooting. And in the target shooting there is a time to change the targets when EVERYONE must stop shooting. Obviously. But there's Janusz blazing away after the guy is walking down the range! Steve is yelling at him, but says "maybe there ought to be a gun control law" to us later.You cannot overestimate stupidity. Even Einstein allowed that it was possibly bigger than the Universe.Gun control laws and Wait Times are all about allowing our civilization to detect & stop people who shouldnt be walking around armed & loaded.The back ground check takes so long because our antiquated system takes so long to find out - but we have to do a better job at this. The wrong people go to gun shows and stock up. Then there's the dad who failed to instruct his son on how to properly handle an automatic weapon because there was no law that said he did lost everything in one sudden mishap. Talk about Darwinian Awards....More Gun Control just means more SANITY. It does not mean that you wont be able to have a gun.- nate

Now, hold it right there, buster.You were the one who advocated that the other students should have been allowed to carry guns. This is just an INSANE notion that indicates that you needed some of Steps 1-3.

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- xongsmith

Message 183: You carefully hide that you advocate that they should have been able to carry guns.... This will never make sense. It is a stupid line of thought, crude, uncivilized and brutish.Sorry. No hard feelings.

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- xongsmith

I'm not talking about going to a shooting range. Sorry - didnt make that clear.I'm talking about buying a gun in the first place.And no one should ever be able to buy a gun over the internet with it's terrible ability to discern whether you should be allowed to do so.Likewise no one should be able to buy a car without producing a valid Driver's License - but remember this: driving is a privilege, not a right.And to Legend: sure the criminals will get guns. But everything we can do to reduce how easy that is, while protecting the 2nd Amendment, is to the good. Every little bit helps.

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- xongsmith

I cannot find such a statement from either of the 2 people you mention. Did you deliberately mischaracterize their position on purpose? Or did you do it by mistake (I hope this is the case)?However, if you think you were speaking the truth there, you must cite posts that led you to that conclusion.

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- xongsmith

Indeed what is the world-view that allows for a murder suspect to be granted "Not guilty by reason of insanity"?For me, in my flow diagram of the decision tree to find out if you are insane, there is a block that asks {Did you murder someone?} with Yes and No arrows coming out. The Yes arrow plunges directly down to the bottom and into the {Insane} result.I havent looked lately, but I think the Murder box comes right off the Yes arrow out of the {Did you kill someone?} box. Because of that, the No arrow out of the Murder box goes over to another whole slew of stuff that I dont have enough time to describe here, but I know it exists.

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- xongsmith

History seems to say the opposite. Whenever there is an enclave with weapons, the government seems to be attracted to taking them out. Riva Ridge, The Davidians, the Michigan Militia activities, the hostilities at Pine Ridge Reservation, the Black Panthers, and so forth ... all seem to indicate that the presence of guns is far from a deterrent, but is instead a reason to go in with the very force needed to end the issue. A self-fulfilling prophecy!

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- xongsmith

Thank you for cutting to the chase.The issue as I see it is that law-abiding, trained citizens should be allowed to have guns and convicted criminals and mentally deranged citizens should not.The problem with denying access to the criminal & deranged element of society is that it must be done with an inconvenience to the law-abiding sector - we must sacrifice some freedom for a bit of security (I know - deserving neither! ). Using background checks is one way to do it that seems to be the least objectionable, although the maintenance of a national database IS a major danger in the wrong hands. We could have tests similar to driving tests to show proficiency in handling guns. We cannot fall to the level of a Driver's License since driving is a privilege and not a right, but we can borrow from some of the methods developed for screening out bad drivers from driving.The question is: Forgetting the UK & Sweden and Somalia for the moment, what level of screening is acceptable to the USA? What loss of freedom are we willing to accept?So I'll start by saying there should be a criminal background check. There should also be a confidential psychiatric database that is double blind somehow for eliminating the nutjobs like Cho.Gun shows need to completely change their structure. Although I have zero interest in gun shows or even NASCAR, I will begrudgingly admit that they have a right to exist. But they need to be revised to prevent illegal weapon acquisitions.Maybe there should be (in high school?) some kind of training to get a feel for how dangerous firearms are when used improperly. They usually have some kind of huge thing about the dangers of drunk driving. But gun training is really best done with an actual gun, not watching some blood & guts propaganda movie in a class.

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- xongsmith

Aw, shucks, i was being intentionally ridiculous - BTW, it's called hyperbole. You can think what you like....and I'll defend to my death your right to think it & speak it & breath it.BUT - to the point - where are your suggestions of how to screen out the idiots that shouldnt have access to guns so they can go kill students at universities or high schools? I gave some suggestions in the spirit of advancing this thread forward instead of getting it fouled up in the barbed wire of accusations.You said you agreed until the gun show stuff. So you like the way they do gun shows now?

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- xongsmith

NO. It is not a good thing that people at the bottom of world in desperation should be so casually killed over something as trivial as burglary (which is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude lower than being raped, boy). ...like collateral damage? Wow - do i find this OFFENSIVE!I file this under the Reasons we need to prevent YOU, Legend, from ever owning guns. You dont pass my screening test. Sorry, must most vehemently disagree. Well that may be in your mind (cause you are apparently only a man), but in my mind this is not so. I've been burgled, I've been held up on the street at gunpoint - none of what I've gone through is even in the same book, let alone the same page, as rape. As for murder...I've even had friends of mine murdered.The whole thing about guns, on the initial level, is counter-intuitive. Guns attract guns, like gravitational objects in space. When that happens, duck. The more you arm yourself, the more the others take pleasure in taking you down. Do you care about these people? I dont think you do. Desperation to the point of risking this is a terrible thing to experience - probably worse than being burgled.... Not if they leave or hide as has been described.... They will be escalated to even more dangerous operations. The more you arm yourself, the more some crazy idiot will try to take you down. The heat of the moment can last 14-36 hours, dude. Even longer. that's what i do when the car wont start - put it neutral and push it down the hill. {sorry - had to}

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- xongsmith