(August 28, 2015 at 12:25 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote:

(August 27, 2015 at 12:07 pm)Napoléon Wrote: And the immediate thought of an American is "shoot it".

How typical...

There are children in the two houses next to mine. Coyotes need not be rabid to present a danger. And using a gun on it would not be my first response, unless the children were threatened.

I'm sure judging someone from the comfort of your armchair is pretty entertaining, based on how much time you expend doing it, but saying "how typical" is sheer laziness.  Certainly you can muster a reply with more thought and less vapidity.

Right?

(August 28, 2015 at 10:07 am)Rhythm Wrote: We can amend, we cannot remove - as your quote explains very specifically.  The practical effect of that amendment may be equal to removing something, when it is, we say that the amendment has "repealed" something. We can certainly come up with an amendment which has the practical effect of removing a right, but we cannot simply remove it - we can't just erase it from the document.  We can't say "fuck your 2nd amendment", which is what was proposed.

(August 28, 2015 at 12:32 pm)Rhythm Wrote:

(August 28, 2015 at 12:23 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: One problem is that since McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), which incorporated the 2nd Amendment to the states under the 14th Amendment, it is much harder to regulate, much less prohibit, guns at the state and local level. Prior to that ruling, the way was open -- potentially at least -- for state or local governments to pass restrictive legislation since the 2nd Amendment prior to "McDonald" only strictly applied to the U.S. Congress.

So, looks like we could do some work on the 14th, eh?  To make it easier to do what we can do, but for batshit reasons find it difficult to do.

(August 28, 2015 at 12:25 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: I'm sure judging someone from the comfort of your armchair is pretty entertaining, based on how much time you expend doing it, but saying "how typical" is sheer laziness.  Certainly you can muster a reply with more thought and less vapidity.

Right?

(August 28, 2015 at 12:33 pm)Jenny A Wrote: There's truth in this.  There are cougar sightings in my urban neighborhood, and yes cougars do kill people, not to mention pet dogs.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fa...th_America

(August 28, 2015 at 4:38 am)Pandæmonium Wrote: Well in that case I'm happy to be a sheep if it means a drastically reduced chance of being shot in the head by a madman whilst reporting for a local news station.

(August 28, 2015 at 1:41 pm)Napoléon Wrote:

(August 28, 2015 at 12:25 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: I'm sure judging someone from the comfort of your armchair is pretty entertaining, based on how much time you expend doing it, but saying "how typical" is sheer laziness.  Certainly you can muster a reply with more thought and less vapidity.

Right?

If that were my only response throughout the entire thread, you could call me lazy, but as it is I find what I said to have been more about brevity than laziness.

And there's nowt wrong with a spur of the moment quip. What a boring place if everyone poured hours over every piece of drivel they gave.

(August 29, 2015 at 10:57 am)Brian37 Wrote: The wild west Dirty Harry romance of "self defence" is as fictional and delusional as God belief.

the Violence Policy Center Wrote:According to the NCVS, looking at the total number of self-protective behaviors undertaken by victims of both attempted and completed violent crime for the five-year period 2007 through 2011, in only 0.8 percent of these instances had the intended victim in resistance to a criminal “threatened or attacked with a firearm.”11 As detailed in the chart on the next page, for the five-year period 2007 through 2011, the NCVS estimates that there were 29,618,300 victims of attempted or completed violent crime. During this same five-year period, only 235,700 of the self-protective behaviors involved a firearm. Of this number, it is not known what type of firearm was used or whether it was fired or not. The number may also include off-duty law enforcement officers who use their firearms in self-defense.

(August 28, 2015 at 8:53 am)Rhythm Wrote: Our amendments can't -remove- a right. Doesn't work like that. You're asking americans to say "Fuck your constitution", "to hell with your rule of law", "tough shit", etc. Pretty sure we don't have to do that in order to address our problem, and we can't do that anyway......so I guess that's a bullet dodged.

I think that if you considered the reality of both our rule of law, and the reality of guns and gun ownership here, you'd (we'd) be able to come up with a better idea. As I've said, the Mad Max gunstravanganza business is fantasy, our problem is very specific.

Remove the P2P loophole, cut the -legal- flow of firearms into the hands of those who create the problem. It's -already- illegal for a gun shop or manufacturer or box retailer to provide these people with firearms, and that's legislation which has already withstood the 2nd amendment challenge. There's a start.

Hey, there's another possibility, remove the culture of gun myth both sides of this debate lean on so heavily? Stop accepting either fantasy as a valid discourse or acceptable justification for legislation?

We are -failing-, completely failing a significant portion of our fellow americans. They have no reasonable expectation of enjoying the promise this country makes. That shooting someone is or seems to be a better bet, financially and socially, than education (which we fail to adequately address) or a 9-5 job (which we fail to adequately address) is our "gun problem". People not laboring under this burden own the crushing majority of the guns in the country, and their ownership, their guns, don't create the same outcomes. To be blunt, the correlation is entirely opposite. The places that you find the most guns and gun owners in this country are the places where you find the -fewest- gun deaths. It isn't, as some of them would claim, because they have guns, but because they are not being so thoroughly shit upon.

So maybe start with getting rid of that loophole, up above, because that has a direct and specific effect on the engine driving gun deaths. Maybe stop letting nuts with nutty ideas justify their pro or anti gun laws on the basis of those nutty ideas. Maybe focus on fixing the problem we actually have, spending political capital where it might achieve the desired effect, rather than scapegoating guns in order to avoid the uncomfortable fact that it is our failure to our fellow citizens, rather than some unavoidable outcome of gun ownership, that's the problem? We could do all of that without saying "fuck your constitution"....couldn't we?

(August 29, 2015 at 12:06 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: Except that I was making a decent point and your brevity in this case doesn't answer my point. I'm as much for a snappy comeback as anyone else, and even when we disagree I think you're a funny sonofabitch. But I also like seeing that my points are being considered, y'know?