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Post by Fingerplucked on Jan 11, 2016 9:29:39 GMT -5
The possession of guns is a worthless (and dangerous) bone/pacifier that the gov't has thrown its citizens so that they can feel good about where they are in the scheme of things. Possessing guns is like a card trick--you think you know what's really going on, and that you're in control--when nothing could be further from the truth. Gun owners are being played by something like the institutional inertia (power/control) of big biz/gov't. I have to disagree with you here. The government guaranteed people’s right to arms back when it made a difference. There is debate about intentions. Some think the 2nd Amendment was about arming yourself against a tyrannical government. Considering our history and background with European powers, that’s not a bad theory. And others think it was about arming citizens - citizens who were the militia - so that they could uprisings. Considering what the country had just gone through with Shay’s Rebellion, that’s not a bad theory either. But no matter the motivation, guaranteeing the right to arms in the 18th century was a meaningful act. If you’re looking for a puppet master who creates the illusion of control in today’s society, look at the NRA.
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Post by Marshall on Jan 11, 2016 9:40:22 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Jan 11, 2016 9:44:35 GMT -5
As a Canadian trying to fit into U.S. society, my understanding is that the 2nd amendment is part of what is referred to as "The Bill of Rights". Rights that are said to be "God given" and "inalienable". Not because the founders were all that religious but because if they were "man given" then men could take them away and "inalienable" because they cannot be taken or given away. My step son in law informs me that the 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with preventing the latter. I'd say the founders were pretty clear on that.
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Post by TKennedy on Jan 11, 2016 10:36:36 GMT -5
The scientific approach to any problem is to collect data, analyze the data and begin experiments to find a solution. Factor out emotions. Apparently the NRA was successful in defunding the CDC's attempt to do just that. To me that was the most despicable action.
In my mind refunding CDC data collection and a scientific approach to what works and what doesn't is the place to start. I am disappointed that Obama did not push that agenda. It's not very glamorous and offers no instant gratification so I won't hold my breath.
There is something else going on.
We were armed to the teeth in the 50's. I could sling my semi automatic.22 over my shoulder and ride my bike to the hardware store, buy ammo and ride out to the dump and shoot cans. Movies were full of relatively sterile gun violence, tons of cowboy, crime, and war movies, racks of comic books full of violence, herds of kids roaming neighborhoods with realistic toy guns playing war or Cowboys and Indians. This mass killing psycho stuff didn't seem to happen as often.
If I was to blame one thing it would be the Internet. A place where psychos realize they don't exist in a vacuum and can feed on each other. The other is the media. This stuff is sensationalized and the nutcases feed off that too. If you look at graphs the rise of mass killings seem to parallel the increasing presence of TV and the Internet in people's lives
As an aside, if the media and everyone else had just ignored the Oregon nutcase ranchers and just left them out there by their little lonesome selves and arrested them for trespassing when they left, the whole thing would have been over in a week.
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Post by Fingerplucked on Jan 11, 2016 10:38:19 GMT -5
And the "tell" is that gun control as currently pursued by the government starts and ends with removing guns from the law-abiding. If that same government was similarly obsessed with removing guns from the criminal element that is using them to cause most of the gun deaths in the country, then I think those who are opposing gun control might be a little more open to listening to the plan. A couple questions: How is the government trying to take guns away from the law abiding? Who is the law abiding? Aren’t a lot or most of these mass murderers law abiding citizens until they go on a rampage? How do you take guns away from criminals when Congress fights every move, even the most benign like background checks, caring for the mentally ill, and studying the issue of gun violence?
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Post by brucemacneill on Jan 11, 2016 10:39:44 GMT -5
As a Canadian trying to fit into U.S. society, my understanding is that the 2nd amendment is part of what is referred to as "The Bill of Rights". Rights that are said to be "God given" and "inalienable". Not because the founders were all that religious but because if they were "man given" then men could take them away and "inalienable" because they cannot be taken or given away. My step son in law informs me that the 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with preventing the latter. I'd say the founders were pretty clear on that. Close but the "God" given and "Inalienable" thing was in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. The Bill of Rights is the 10 amendments the states added to the as-written Constitution before they'd agree to it. For the most part, they define rights the states and citizens have that the Federal Government can't take away. This wasn't designed to be a big central government country. Each state wanted mostly autonomy. The federation's central government supposed to provide security and a common currency and open borders between states and that's about all.
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Post by Fingerplucked on Jan 11, 2016 10:54:37 GMT -5
As a Canadian trying to fit into U.S. society, my understanding is that the 2nd amendment is part of what is referred to as "The Bill of Rights". Rights that are said to be "God given" and "inalienable". Not because the founders were all that religious but because if they were "man given" then men could take them away and "inalienable" because they cannot be taken or given away. My step son in law informs me that the 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with preventing the latter. I'd say the founders were pretty clear on that. Close but the "God" given and "Inalienable" thing was in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. The Bill of Rights is the 10 amendments the states added to the as-written Constitution before they'd agree to it. For the most part, they define rights the states and citizens have that the Federal Government can't take away. This wasn't designed to be a big central government country. Each state wanted mostly autonomy. The federation's central government supposed to provide security and a common currency and open borders between states and that's about all. It was a hard-fought compromise. States wanted their rights. But we had already tried forming a nation as independent states and we failed. One of the biggest failures was that states couldn’t be counted on to pay their debts. So a compromise was finally settled on that still gave states some autonomy while giving the federal government enough authority to give the country some cohesiveness. The whole thing was one big compromise, from the relationship between the states and the federal government, to the legislative/executive/judicial structure of the government. Nobody got everything they wanted but everyone agreed that they could live with the framework. Then of course everything changed with the Civil War and the federal government’s role was redefined when the southern states tested their limits.
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Post by brucemacneill on Jan 11, 2016 10:59:25 GMT -5
Close but the "God" given and "Inalienable" thing was in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. The Bill of Rights is the 10 amendments the states added to the as-written Constitution before they'd agree to it. For the most part, they define rights the states and citizens have that the Federal Government can't take away. This wasn't designed to be a big central government country. Each state wanted mostly autonomy. The federation's central government supposed to provide security and a common currency and open borders between states and that's about all. It was a hard-fought compromise. States wanted their rights. But we had already tried forming a nation as independent states and we failed. One of the biggest failures was that states couldn’t be counted on to pay their debts. So a compromise was finally settled on that still gave states some autonomy while giving the federal government enough authority to give the country some cohesiveness. The whole thing was one big compromise, from the relationship between the states and the federal government, to the legislative/executive/judicial structure of the government. Nobody got everything they wanted but everyone agreed that they could live with the framework. Then of course everything changed with the Civil War and the federal government’s role was redefined when the southern states tested their limits. Or at least that's what you were told in school. Us older folks learned it a little different, before the revisionist communists took over the education system in the mid '60s.
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Post by aquaduct on Jan 11, 2016 11:06:55 GMT -5
The scientific approach to any problem is to collect data, analyze the data and begin experiments to find a solution. Factor out emotions. Apparently the NRA was successful in defunding the CDC's attempt to do just that. To me that was the most despicable action. In my mind refunding CDC data collection and a scientific approach to what works and what doesn't is the place to start. I am disappointed that Obama did not push that agenda. It's not very glamorous and offers no instant gratification so I won't hold my breath. There is something else going on. We were armed to the teeth in the 50's. I could sling my semi automatic.22 over my shoulder and ride my bike to the hardware store, buy ammo and ride out to the dump and shoot cans. Movies were full of relatively sterile gun violence, tons of cowboy, crime, and war movies, racks of comic books full of violence, herds of kids roaming neighborhoods with realistic toy guns playing war or Cowboys and Indians. This mass killing psycho stuff didn't seem to happen as often. If I was to blame one thing it would be the Internet. A place where psychos realize they don't exist in a vacuum and can feed on each other. The other is the media. This stuff is sensationalized and the nutcases feed off that too. If you look at graphs the rise of mass killings seem to parallel the increasing presence of TV and the Internet in people's lives As an aside, if the media and everyone else had just ignored the Oregon nutcase ranchers and just left them out there by their little lonesome selves and arrested them for trespassing when they left, the whole thing would have been over in a week. The problem with that idea is that there's plenty of data for the CDC or anyone else to use. The scientific method then shows 2 things very distinctly: 1: The methods of gun control already in place (background checks, licensing, nanny-state hand wringing, etc) do nothing to stop the kinds of events that gun control advocates use to advance their discredited theories. 2: As an average citizen I have more chance of being eaten by a moose than being injured by a gun. There are many significant things that the CDC can concentrate on if it doesn't have enough to do already. No need to fund it in addition to go chase gun data.
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Post by dradtke on Jan 11, 2016 11:10:03 GMT -5
I'd say the founders were pretty clear on that. If the founders were pretty clear on that we wouldn't be having these arguments today. There are constitutional scholars (which does not include any of us here) with differing interpretations on this.
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Post by Doug on Jan 11, 2016 11:21:12 GMT -5
I'd say the founders were pretty clear on that. If the founders were pretty clear on that we wouldn't be having these arguments today. There are constitutional scholars (which does not include any of us here) with differing interpretations on this. It's not up to constitutional scholars or anyone at the federal level. Amendment 10 The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
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Post by Fingerplucked on Jan 11, 2016 11:22:42 GMT -5
It was a hard-fought compromise. States wanted their rights. But we had already tried forming a nation as independent states and we failed. One of the biggest failures was that states couldn’t be counted on to pay their debts. So a compromise was finally settled on that still gave states some autonomy while giving the federal government enough authority to give the country some cohesiveness. The whole thing was one big compromise, from the relationship between the states and the federal government, to the legislative/executive/judicial structure of the government. Nobody got everything they wanted but everyone agreed that they could live with the framework. Then of course everything changed with the Civil War and the federal government’s role was redefined when the southern states tested their limits. Or at least that's what you were told in school. Us older folks learned it a little different, before the revisionist communists took over the education system in the mid '60s. And did you older folks learn anything other than generalized snark? Was that the extent of your education, or did you have something specific in mind?
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Post by millring on Jan 11, 2016 11:23:10 GMT -5
How do you take guns away from criminals Answer that one first. I haven't heard a solution offered yet. As Terry points out (with no intention of agreeing with the right to bear arms. He just happened to have pointed it out) I was born into a country that was already armed to the teeth. Millions of guns already in the hands of citizens. I'm guessing that more of my friends had guns in their families than didn't. If not, I'd call it a tie. It appears to me that even here amongst all the soundholers that include the fervently anti-gun, I'm one of few who doesn't have guns. And the problem with the use of skewed statistics to try to point out the danger in living with guns, the reality is that most of us have lived with them in our families amd communities for 60 years now and don't know anyone who has had a gun tragedy. We read about them in the news. Reported by people who don't want us to have guns, believe they'd be safer if nobody had guns, and think without much logic that that is a possibility. No, it's not a conspiracy. It's a "conspiracy of shared ideals", but it functionally screws with the reality such that statistics can't be counted on to reflect the reality.
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Post by Fingerplucked on Jan 11, 2016 11:24:58 GMT -5
If the founders were pretty clear on that we wouldn't be having these arguments today. There are constitutional scholars (which does not include any of us here) with differing interpretations on this. It's not up to constitutional scholars or anyone at the federal level. Amendment 10 The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.So people who study the constitution are not authorities on the constitution, and to support your claim, you quote the constitution?
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Post by millring on Jan 11, 2016 11:26:23 GMT -5
It's not up to constitutional scholars or anyone at the federal level. Amendment 10 The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.So people who study the constitution are not authorities on the constitution, and to support your claim, you quote the constitution? In his defense, he can also climb a ladder that is not leaning against a wall.
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Post by fauxmaha on Jan 11, 2016 11:28:56 GMT -5
The scientific approach to any problem is to collect data, analyze the data and begin experiments to find a solution. Factor out emotions. Apparently the NRA was successful in defunding the CDC's attempt to do just that. To me that was the most despicable action. In my mind refunding CDC data collection and a scientific approach to what works and what doesn't is the place to start. I am disappointed that Obama did not push that agenda. It's not very glamorous and offers no instant gratification so I won't hold my breath. There is something else going on. We were armed to the teeth in the 50's. I could sling my semi automatic.22 over my shoulder and ride my bike to the hardware store, buy ammo and ride out to the dump and shoot cans. Movies were full of relatively sterile gun violence, tons of cowboy, crime, and war movies, racks of comic books full of violence, herds of kids roaming neighborhoods with realistic toy guns playing war or Cowboys and Indians. This mass killing psycho stuff didn't seem to happen as often. If I was to blame one thing it would be the Internet. A place where psychos realize they don't exist in a vacuum and can feed on each other. The other is the media. This stuff is sensationalized and the nutcases feed off that too. If you look at graphs the rise of mass killings seem to parallel the increasing presence of TV and the Internet in people's lives As an aside, if the media and everyone else had just ignored the Oregon nutcase ranchers and just left them out there by their little lonesome selves and arrested them for trespassing when they left, the whole thing would have been over in a week. Regarding the CDC/NRA thing, that gets straight to the heart of the issue IMO ( so much so that I discussed this a few weeks ago right here). The Bill of Rights is our way of declaring that some things are beyond democracy. Therefore, spending resources on studies designed to feed the scientific pursuit of governance in those areas is inherently improper. Would we accept, for example, a Federally funded study to determine the scientific impact of taking the right to vote from women? Or one that studied the scientific impact of allowing the government to regulate newspaper content? It doesn't matter how "efficient" the resulting, scientifically ordered government programs may be. We are simply not allowed to do such things. Terry's first sentence pretty much defines the doctrine of "scientific progressivism", and as I've explained before, such an approach is not only unbelievably dangerous (history makes that all too clear), it is fundamentally flawed in the sense that "social science" really isn't a thing. Human behavior is simply too complex, too random, too unpredictable to allow us to infer simple cause and effect results. Law of Unintended Consequences and all that. For example... The central truth of gun violence in America today is that it is ebbing. And yet, the Left is at a fever pitch, declaring that a crisis (particularly of mass shootings) exists in the US and immediate action must be taken. This is the same Left that declares, as Terry did, to adhere to a data driven, scientific approach to governance. And the same Left that accepts Obama's statement that "“we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries". But that statement from Obama is simply and demonstrably not true. (Even the normally fawning WaPo Factcheckers gave him "Four Pinnochios" on it.) There is a lot of debate surrounding this issue as to whether or not it is reasonable to use the rate of mass shootings and deaths from mass shootings, or to use the absolute number. The problem is that some countries are so much smaller than the US, even a single incident can skew the numbers. Or at least that's what those who say using "rate" and not "number" is misleading. For example, 67 people were killed in a single attack in Norway in 2011. Proportionally, that works out to about 5,000 people in the US. So, proportionally, Norway's rate looks high. Is that fair? If it isn't, then neither is Obama's statement that "We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months". If something happens in the US at the same rate it happens in Norway, it would happen about 66 times more often. The rational, scientific, objective view of such a situation (where proportionality completely breaks down due to rarity and inadequate sample sizes) is to say that no real conclusions can be reached. What I make of this is that it is all a grand manipulation. It is impossible to reconcile a scientific view of government with any of this, at least if the scientific approach extends to prioritization. There is simply no fact-based analysis that would lead one to believe that gun crime in America today is a pressing, national issue. Obviously, there are certain places that have insane levels of gun crime. But the fact that those places tend to be highly concentrated argues for an answer that is also concentrated. Here in Omaha ( Obama considers us a "success story"), there are parts of town with ghastly levels of gun crime, and parts of town with virtually none. There is no difference in the gun laws between the two. If the scientific approach to governance were as objective as it claims to be, it would start by understanding that difference.
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Post by TKennedy on Jan 11, 2016 11:31:28 GMT -5
Well you never know where better data collection and analysis could lead. Possibly the findings could result in some ground breaking clinical trials like cutting the testicles off defendants convicted of a crime using a firearm.
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Post by millring on Jan 11, 2016 11:40:09 GMT -5
I like Jeff's post. I would only add (though Jeff might or might not agree with this) that there seems to be too much correlation between the outcome of government-funded studies and the ideology of the government that does the funding. I'm skeptical of "objective" research funded by the government.
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Post by Fingerplucked on Jan 11, 2016 11:40:30 GMT -5
How do you take guns away from criminals Answer that one first. I haven't heard a solution offered yet. As Terry points out (with no intention of agreeing with the right to bear arms. He just happened to have pointed it out) I was born into a country that was already armed to the teeth. Millions of guns already in the hands of citizens. I'm guessing that more of my friends had guns in their families than didn't. If not, I'd call it a tie. It appears to me that even here amongst all the soundholers that include the fervently anti-gun, I'm one of few who doesn't have guns. And the problem with the use of skewed statistics to try to point out the danger in living with guns, the reality is that most of us have lived with them in our families amd communities for 60 years now and don't know anyone who has had a gun tragedy. We read about them in the news. Reported by people who don't want us to have guns, believe they'd be safer if nobody had guns, and think without much logic that that is a possibility. No, it's not a conspiracy. It's a "conspiracy of shared ideals", but it functionally screws with the reality such that statistics can't be counted on to reflect the reality.You’re either misunderstanding the stats or misunderstanding what I said about the stats. And in grabbing this next quote, it appears I have mistated something. First, the quote. It’s what I said on page 2 of this thread: I should have specified fatalities. I have no idea what the stats are for gun “firings." I don’t think the stats themselves are misleading. I’d like to see more stats. As I said above, I don’t know what the stats are for mishaps per gun owner. I’m pretty sure they’re very low. I like to know the number rather than just guess at it, but a guess will have to do for now. When it comes to fatalities, the numbers are alarming. The numbers ought to alarm more than just the anti-gun crowd. They should give the pro-gun crowd reason to reconsider as well. And to go back to the beginning, you want me to answer my own question? Is that because you think I know the answer? But you want me to do it only after removing any possible tools or solutions? This does not sound like a fair game at all. I don’t think it’s possible to remove guns from the hands of criminals without better controls. “Better controls” would include better execution from the executive branch, including executive actions, as well as no-brainer laws (that still seem to mentally challenge some in Congress) from the legislative branch.
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Post by dradtke on Jan 11, 2016 11:41:42 GMT -5
I like Jeff's post. I would only add (though Jeff might or might not agree with this) that there seems to be too much correlation between the outcome of government-funded studies and the ideology of the government that does the funding. I'm skeptical of "objective" research funded by the government. Versus the results of industry-funded studies which are always fair and balanced and accurate.
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