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At 6/16/14 08:12 PM, TheMason wrote:

1) My point is that ALL crime has been on a downward trajectory to include gun crimes.

gun ownership has also been in decline, although I'd like to see more current data on this. another correlation.

2) The vast majority of gun crime is committed by people who disregard gun oversight. Increasing gun oversight will only effect law abiding citizens who are not at a significant risk of committing violent crime.

today's law abiding citizens are tomorrow's criminals and mass shooters.

3a) You need to make a distinction between legal gun ownership and illegal gun ownership. There is little to no correlation between legal gun ownership and significant correlation with illegal ownership.
3b) Correlation does not equal causation, and therefore public policy should not be made as a knee jerk to any correlation.

The statistical obfuscation is not only on the side of gun-advocates. For example, your own focus on correlation defies statistics. A correlation is meaningless, all it is is an indicator that a relationship MAY exist. Furthermore, there is a term for how we define terms: operationalization. How 'operationalize' something being measured is very important. For example, simply looking at 'gun ownership' does not encapsulate the totality of any possible relationship. One must look at all aspects of gun ownership. Is it different for people who legally buy guns compared to people who buy guns off the street?

Do not be too dismissive about correlations even if they don't imply causation. Some public policy has to be made with imperfect data, especially when such data collection is obstructed. Correlation has to exist before proving causation. The way you prove causation is to have Before and After scenarios. Because it's difficult to impose any sort of meaningful gun-control laws (you pro-gun types scoff at the laws being pass today, and rightly so, some of these laws are meaningless), a lot of attention is given to countries that recently switched and restricted gun ownership and added more regulations, such as Australia. With only an up tick of violence for a year or two since adopting strict gun control laws, they've seen a severe decline crime and homicides. If this doesn't prove to you that there is a causation, then it another strong piece of evidence that you'll need to refute before proving that there is absolutely no causation at all.

The answer to the last question is yes, with tighter regulations, guns off the street cost more, and severely impedes a criminals access to obtain a gun illegally. As a citizen, you benefit from criminals having to spend more to acquire their guns illegally.

As for logic, in all honesty I've seen gun-control advocates having lost all logic. Lately it's been all emotion. Furthermore, a lot of what I've been reading has been the other side not caring about having a dialogue with gun advocates or learn about guns (in fact, I often find them to be ignorant about guns).

The logic I'm talking about is this; more guns in people's hands means more gun deaths. This should be a "no duh", right? do you disagree? because the correlation is clearly there, more guns in peoples hands do mean more gun deaths.

Guns do not require a significant amount of training to "...learn to actually use...". They are VERY simple machines. Gun safety is boiled down to about four simple rules:
1) ALWAYS assume a gun is loaded.
2) NEVER point a gun at anything you are NOT willing to kill/destroy.
3) Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire.
4) Know what is behind your target.

And somehow people still manage to mess this up.

Looks like the Supreme court upheld a law that prevents people from buying guns for other people (straw purchasing). So if you want to give someone a gun as a gift you might of broken the law.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/supreme-court-rules-straw-purchaser-law-24154799

At 6/15/14 04:58 PM, TheMason wrote:

At 6/13/14 09:49 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 6/13/14 09:20 AM, MOSFET wrote: I've explained this many times to you Tony. California has a lot of people, so of course they'll have the most homicides in the nation.

This also raises a chicken/egg argument (of which there is an answer, of which I am not motivated to find). The gun rights rallying call is always "see, gun control in high crime areas!! Therefore it fails." This argument sees one correlation and yet fails to see an even more likely one: Gun control exists more strongly in high crime areas BECAUSE crime is high. Oakland, LA, Chicago, New York, D.C. and so on attracted massive amounts of crime before the notion of gun control ever existed. If you look at these cities (with few exceptions), their crime rate and their violent crime rates are ALL on a downward trajectory.

This suggests that gun control actually does work to an extent.

Depends on the gun advocate making the argument. :)

You make a very good point: always look at rival alternative hypothesis.

However, you miss the forrest for the trees. It is not about correlations...it's about finding out causation. See, it's not only the gun advocates who latch on to a single correlation. Gun control advocates latch onto the obvious correlation between guns and gun crime...and then ascribe causality.

Once you start doing statistical analysis on the correlations, the link between guns and crime become tenuous. Socio-economic factors become far more important to the causes of crime than a locale's gun control laws.

Over the past twenty years violence crime in this country has been on the decline. Over the past twenty years there have been tightening and loosening of gun laws. There's been two major types of gun laws: concealed carry and/or assault weapons bans. Pretty much what's been observed:

* Concealed carry: states with concealed carry laws have seen (typically) a faster drop in crime rates than states with tough gun control laws. This suggests that CC does have a desireable effect on crime.
* Assault weapons bans: the laws typically address weapons that are not typically used in crime. Rifles are ill-suited for robbing a liquor store, and pistols & shotguns are far more effective at taking life than military firearms (it's science, not opinion, bias, or marketing by gun manufacturers). Therefore, since they are used in (at most) 1-2% of crimes...criminologists have found that the ONLY marginally effective part of a AWB is limits on hi-cap PISTOL mags.

In the end, it would appear that gun laws are not at the heart of decreasing crime rates.

I wasn't taking about crime in general, but gun homicides, but I understand your point. The reason I look at gun homicides is because guns increase the lethality of violence and it seems to me that that is a direct result of allowing people to obtain and use guns with minimal oversight. The correlation between gun ownership and gun homicides is pretty clear. But this should be pretty obvious why, and I hate seeing pro-gun advocates saying it's not true when it not only defies statistics but also logic.

I have no problem with citizens acquiring CCW licences or permits in most states, because in most states you need to take a gun safety course and learn to actually use your gun, plus there are extra restrictions and way more vetting of applicants than when just buying a gun. All that and most states keep a record of who has a CCW.

Interestingly the States with unrestricted or No-issue have the highest level of gun homicide per capita. And DC is one of the worst with No-issue of CCW. Unfettered access to guns and their use is no good, complete bans are worse, but the States where they allow someone to get a gun, but aren't afraid of denying people of the 2nd amendment rights have the least gun homicides per capita.

Personally, I'd like to see Shall-issue licenses for gun purchases. May-issue CCW licenses if they have probably cause to have such a license (increased violence in neighborhood) A gun registry so that law-enforcement can track where criminals get their guns to stop straw-purchasers selling guns to gangs, or make it more prohibitively expensive for them than it currently is.

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States

I

At 6/12/14 11:34 PM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: yeah and in california you have psych exams you have to pay for yourself to show you pass, you have to get a permit to purchase certain weapons (military style and pistols) which require a background check, a ban on various types of firearms that have no real effect on deadliness, yet Santa Barbra still got up and California has some of the highest gun violence in the country.

I've explained this many times to you Tony. California has a lot of people, so of course they'll have the most homicides in the nation. When you factor in how many people are actually living in California, the state is in the lower half of the list when it comes the gun homicide per capita. Mississippi, Louisiana, Arizona and other states with loose gun regulations have the most gun homicides per capita.

Of course gun-control laws aren't 100% effective, especially when neighboring states have really lax gun laws.

At 6/12/14 03:26 AM, Kel-chan wrote: I realized that they'll be tracked and eventually droned. The only thing that makes sense to me would be to basically track them after Qatar releases them, find out exactly where they go, who they meet with and then kablam those guys. But if that is the case, then why make such a public spectacle of it all.

The Taliban were making a spectacle of it, and they were eager to to release details to the gossip hungry press. Then Republicans saw an opportunity to dogpile on the President (anything to make him look bad?). I guess some Democrats joined in, not wanting to miss out on the fun.

At 6/11/14 04:07 AM, Kel-chan wrote: Even just from an economic standpoint- Why would you trade 5 for 1??????

Because now we don't have to take care of them.

I doubt that the democrat will win in this heavy-republican district. I don't know what this means for paying off our debts, but I hear that this effectively kills immigration reform. The Challenger, David Brat, made negative ads of Cantor being an author of some immigration reform principles, and called him out for supporting Amnesty, a bad word in conservative circles apparently. Some on the left pushing the notion that Cantor lost because the voters were anti-Jewish, My guess is to get this voting bloc to vote democrat in the general.

At 6/9/14 08:44 AM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: this kind of retarded logic could only come from someone like Dianne fuckstain. thank god its a bill in the republican controlled House it either wont reach the floor for a vote or will get shot down by NRA funding.

The Pause for Safety Act would encourage states to take the following steps to help prevent gun violence:
• One, ensure that families and others can go to court to seek a gun violence prevention order to temporarily stop someone close to them who poses a threat to himself, herself or others from purchasing a firearm.
• Two, ensure that a court can issue a gun violence prevention warrant that would allow law enforcement to take temporary possession of firearms that are in an individual’s possession if the court determines that the individual poses a threat to himself, herself or others.
• Three, ensure that law enforcement makes full use of all existing state and local gun databases when assessing a tip, warning or request from a concerned family member or other close associate.

These seem like it will help curb domestic violence. I can see a lot of support from women on this.

It might get shot down, but then they'll get politicians actually voting on something and run campaign ads against them during the 2014 elections. It will be tied to the republicans 'war against women' theme.

At 6/3/14 07:32 AM, wildfire4461 wrote: Nice to see a POW back home, but doing it just might have ended Obama's career:
http://www.westernjournalism.com/taliban-prisoner-swap-result-obamas-impeachment/

Andrew McCarthy making noise again. I doubt House GOP have the balls to impeach the president. All it will do is bring attention to their asshattery and cause Obama's favorability rating to shoot up.

At 5/16/14 02:19 AM, BoredLooney wrote: My goal is reforming the system, not scrapping it, and I believe that a very large and key part of the solution lies in the Alice v. CLS case.

The problem is not that as far reaching as you say. It specifically deals with Software Patents, not the entire patent system. The problem is that you can get a software patent on vague ideas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/opinion/slowing-the-patent-trolls.html

from the article:
"How did the law arrive at such a misguided approach to software patents? In short, through a simple misunderstanding about the nature of computer code.

The Supreme Court first addressed the patentability of code in the 1970s, but the cases involved software that was integrated into hardware, like a computerized device for curing rubber. The court treated such patents by focusing on the industrial applications of the machines in which the code was embedded — not on the code itself.

But by the 1990s, lower courts had to consider the patentability of pure software, things like Adobe Acrobat that are not hard-wired into a machine. Software inventions were becoming an integral part of the industrial landscape, and denying patents on them was unthinkable. But to lower court judges, there seemed to be a problem: At first blush, pure software looks like a mathematical formula, the sort of thing used to express a law of nature. Patent law, however, has long excluded from protection discoveries like the Pythagorean theorem or E = mc2. If such formulas are unpatentable, how can a computer program ever be patentable?

This reasoning flowed from a basic confusion between the content of a statement and the language in which it is expressed. Expressing something in formulaic language does not necessarily mean that what is being expressed is a law of nature. Formulaic language can be used to express the content of anything from cosmic inflation theory to comic books.

Nonetheless, the lower courts embraced this flawed reasoning. And to avoid the appearance of patenting mathematical formulas,they blessed an approach to software patenting that merely described, in simple English prose, what the invention did. Thus did we end up with our dysfunctional arrangement."

So basically this allows "patent trolls" come up with the ideas, but they do not have to do the hard work to implement it. So when another company actually spends money on developers to make the idea work, the patent troll can then sue them for using their idea.

The problem here is that software patents are awarded without much rigor, as the article states. But companies like Alice could still sit on these patents and sue if they like. It won't stop businesses from sitting on their patents and making profit from suing other companies. That sort of patent trolling is much harder to root out, especially when they can make a poor implementation of their idea and say that they do sell a product based on their idea.

At 5/14/14 11:49 PM, rendibsivad wrote: Compared to the others... this is fuck material... :(

Garden Master NORG?

At 5/10/14 01:37 AM, Korriken wrote: Anyway, what WOULD it take for a president today to be impeached? I don't think it's possible under normal circumstances. The president would have to be caught doing something so disgusting that his/her entire party would have to run away in sheer terror of the fallout. Question is, what would be so horrible as to get his/her own party to turn against him/her?

I think Nixon would still be impeached, in today's environment, maybe. What he did went beyond corruption, under the counter, pay to play politics. It was a combination of using federal assets and thuggery that got him impeached. Clinton didn't get impeached, because who cares if he had consensual sex with an intern and then lied about it. He didn't threaten the democratic process as directly as Nixon did.

Personally, I think Nixon would be more cautious in this day an age of pulling the kinds of things he did. He would of used methods that people don't full understand like data-mining. He wouldn't have to get the FBI do a background check on political enemies so he can defame them before they put into question his authority. It's all there on the internet, some novice sleuthing/e-stalking could probably get the information he wanted.

Why the insults? Is this due to some internal NK politics, or is Kin Jung-Un doing something the international community disapproves of? Is he hoping to get Conservative people in the US sympathetic to what NK is about to do, by leveraging their hate against the president, thereby making it more difficult for Prez Obama to act in a global capacity?

At 5/1/14 01:57 PM, Camarohusky wrote:

I'm merely pointing out that when it comes to making decisions for the people, I would rather have a redundant mildly corrupt entity that at least is beholden to the people in some manner than a more efficient mildly corrupt entity that is entierly free from the people.

That's the problem with big contracts. A similar situation (a construction job) happened in Detroit over a prison project when AECOM went $204 mil over budget. http://detroit.curbed.com/places/fail-jail Now everything has been knocked over $404 mil down the drain.

Big IT government projects often fail because the under bidding on contracts is being done recklessly, and people in government are bad at determining project costs. Novice developers are over optimistic when coming up with project timelines and costs, why would government be any better. Since it's a big project, Government is more willing to go over budget if the project is moving toward completion. Good public officials will expect the final cost of a large project to double, unfortunately private contractors know this as well and are willing to milk the system.http://blog.fmsinc.com/too-big-to-fire-healthcare-gov-government-contractors/

At 5/5/14 12:02 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:
To me, when you talk privilege, you are talking about something that grants a bona fide advantage.

Sounds like the entire argument of white privilege is a crock of shit; nobody gives you stuff because you are white with a penis.

I think race-baiting is comical.

I think liberals like to stretch reality to fit their own personal power-grabbing agendas, and white privilege is another one the vehicles driving the movement.

except

Discrimination in Science
http://www.economist.com/node/21526320
Discrimination in Housing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_discrimination_in_the_United_States_housing_market

Odds are if you are fighting for the same job as a white male vs an equally qualified black male, the white male will tend to get the job. Although there are laws that protect against such behavior, there is still an inclination to hire from one particular group over another,

'Privilege' is not a matter of getting something, but of social mobility. While you still have to work hard for what you earn, it's much easier if you are in a favored group because of an uneven competitive field.

I don't think the idea of "check your privilege" is wrong. There is a lack of humility for people who do work hard to get ahead, without realizing that being a certain race or gender can help open opportunities.

I think "check your privilege" shouldn't be taken as your criticism or opinion is wrong, but that you need to acknowledge that your success isn't entire due to your hard work, but due to the institutional racism/classism/sexism prevalent in the system. And even the reverse could be true as well with Welfare and Affirmative Action.

I don't see why this would be a conversation stopper, unless you have trouble acknowledging it, and your whole point is that not only does racism doesn't exist but neither does institutional racism. Then yeah, I can see someone getting beaten over the head with this statement over an over.

At 4/26/14 09:11 PM, MOSFET wrote: It would be a better fit in the UN under the ITU arm anyway, because its governance style is similar to how the UN operates.

I guess I'm wrong about this. It seems it will not go fall into the ITU's category because stakeholders in ICANN do not want it to go there. So it most likely it won't. This way it keeps it largely keeps it out of every nation's government hands.

At 4/26/14 06:00 PM, wildfire4461 wrote: Don't forget about how Obama wants to relinquish America's part of controlling the internet to the international world. I hear it on the radio constantly (and usually news like that doesn't get on the air).

Old news, it's one of the many consequences of the Snowden leaks. ICANN has been self-regulating and multi-national without any intervention needed from the US government for quite awhile now. It would be a better fit in the UN under the ITU arm anyway, because its governance style is similar to how the UN operates. Why do you think it's important for the US to directly control the ICANN? If the US suddenly doesn't trust ICANN, for some reason, they can force ISPs to stop using anything coming from ICANN. Of course, if other countries don't join us in our new ICANN, then we aren't communicating with them, and we just isolated ourselves. And if another nation decides to not use ICANN, they most certainly can, and they could of before obama gave it away, all they did was isolate themselves.

Obama 'giving' away ICANN is mostly symbolic. Right wing idiots are just stirring up resentment over nothing because it's Obama.

I see this as companies not being forced to use a common highway where there is a lot of congestion and accidents happen, and instead can use railroads for mass transport.

At 4/26/14 11:07 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

Exactly. They probably will pull a Citizen's United and say that when the government restricts them from buying better speech on the internet, it is restricting their speech, because "corporation are people" and "money is speech". Though all of us sane people know both of those idea are total shit.

is it though? hardly anybody uses alternatives on the net. Hardly anybody uses Bing or Yahoo search engines, just google it. Facebook is THE social media site to stay connected with people. And of course if you are an apple user, you're tied to the platform almost entirely. So what if these companies want to to bring better streaming for their content services to you and their clients. You know that any app that can potentially use the occulus rift will need that extra bandwidth. Of course, if you want to be able to play on the same level as these large companies you're going to have to pay to be on the same level.

At 4/22/14 06:33 PM, WallofYawn wrote: This dude doesn't even have rights to the land. That whole, "me and my family have been doing this for 130 years" turns out is bullshit. Dude made it up. Why does the Republican party support such a criminal? Wasn't Reagan the one who passed the law he is breaking in the first place? Retarded much?

Because a large chunk of the republican base is made up of people like this guy. Well perhaps they aren't as extreme as this person, but many of the same sentiments are expressed in various forms, up to and including the kind of policies Republican law makers support. Also, they'll chase after anything that looks like Obama's federal government is doing a bad thing.

DoctorStrongBad wrote:

No political party should support any criminal.

BSABSVR?

At 4/19/14 12:55 AM, Kel-chan wrote:

This whole matter should just be decided through the courts.

It was already decided, but Bundy refuses to acknowledge the courts decision. He claims states rights, that the Federal government doesn't own the property, Nevada does. And he doesn't acknowledge anything the Feds do.

At 4/11/14 07:50 PM, Feoric wrote: Seriously though, this whole thing is fucking retarded.

I find it hilarious that this rancher with a libertarian streak is upset that he's being kicked off of public land, which everyone uses and the federal government tries to manage by balancing out the various interest groups. He can't be bothered by owning his own grazing land. Welfare Ranchers are the Welfare Queens of the 21st century? I also find his claim hilarious that his family has been grazing in public lands for years and that gives him the right to use it like he owns it.

Still, the federal government is perhaps to rigid in their approach to this. Many of these ranchers depend on public lands for their livelihood. And it's difficult to find land when the Federal government owns a good chunk of it. Around 83% of the land is federally owned in Nevada. So I do think it's a bit unfair, when the federal government just stops giving grazing licences and then takes the cattle away when the rancher has no where else to go.

At 4/7/14 05:06 PM, WallofYawn wrote: Although, I don't see Republicans offering any alternatives.(why is that?)

Politics.

They really don't want to repeal it, but they want to make a show of it that they do. However their constituents are upset and are aware of the game being played, which in turn gets the law maker a primary challenger. Which is why we get things like the debt ceiling crisis.

At 3/31/14 12:56 PM, TheMason wrote: @ MOSFET

DGU
The problem is in how do we define Defensive Gun use (DGU). Originally, most researchers only defined it as when shots were fired. Makes sense, right? HOWEVER, you do not necessarily have to pull the trigger to effectively use a gun in self-defense.

You don't necessarily have to pull the trigger to effectively rob or rape someone either. If you expand the definition of DGU's then you need to expand the gun violence to more than just gun homicides.

What Kleck theorized was that the presence of a gun can cause a criminal to stop from victimizing someone. Therefore he expanded the definition of what counts as a DGU.

Now there are some debates on this. However, what we do know is even if you take the lower range and more strictly defined definition of a DGU...you have more legitimate use of firearms than you have criminal use. (The total number of ppl getting shot is about 100,000. Murders: 11,000-16,000.)

Public Health and Gun 'science'
So what about the article you linked to about how much more likely you are to be shot/killed by a firearm if you own one compared to ppl who do not shoot?

Those studies would not be published in serious, peer-reviewed social science journals. Why? First of all, it's NOT because their numbers are wrong. It's because the question they are asking doesn't pass the 'giggle test'. The 'giggle test' is when you think about the question...is it one that is important and/or relevant. Or is it absurd and/or insignificant.

Their question is absurdly insignificant. Just think about it: if you engage in shooting and own a gun...you are more likely to get injured by shooting.

DUH!

Then you agree, carrying a gun does carry risks.

Correlation
I'm going to link to an article written by a blogger on the opposite side from me:
Real Clear Science's Newton Blog

As you can tell, when you look at the issue internationally there is no correlation between guns and homicide.

Now if you've read the article, you're probably thinking: 'Mason...he FINDS a strong correlation!'

True, but he does so through cherry-picking. He takes out S. Africa...but leaves in the US (another outlier). Why does he take out S. Africa?

"That is a country with a history of apartheid, ethnic conflict and violence. It is obviously skewing the results."

Now, I think this is a clear example of cherry-picking data to produce a result you want. Consider:

* S. Africa had apartheid...the US had segregation.
* S. Africa had ethnic conflict...the US had KKK, lynching, race riots, etc.
* S. Africa had violence...we had a Civil War and the violence I mentioned above.
* S. Africa did not have a black president until the early 1990s...the US did not elect a black president until 2008.

So why would you include one and not another exclude the other?

Because the Apartheid in South Africa is much more violent, and continues to be violent post Apartheid. It's what happens when a minority of the population controls the majority of the resources and positions of power. South Africa could easily taken the same path as Syrian president Assad, but instead they brought an end to Apartheid and tries to be inclusive. However Apartheid only ended constitutionally. the social structures of Apartheid are still there and it takes several generations for those to dissipate.

As for the US, we've already been through the rough patches, with Civil War and Segregation. Remnants of segregation still exist today. The incarceration of black youths for one thing. It would be interesting to see proportion of violence is interracial violence. I wouldn't be surprised if you find correlation, since black people have been disproportionately targeted for police investigation than white people.

Even so, based on your homogeneity criteria, even though there are mixed races, Americans are more culturally homogeneous than you think. By that definition the US should be included into the set and not South Africa, since South Africa is still trying to get things together.

You wouldn't if you wanted to be scientific (much less...be published). If they are outliers...you take them BOTH out. I would like to have the guy's data set so I could run it myself. The result would most likely be a return to zero, if not slightly negative correlation (a negative correlation means that more guns = less homicides).

It's because South Africa didn't belong to the set, not because it's data point was too far away. But it does seem like that the US data point heavily influences curve, so you are right to suspicious in that regard. However. I'd have to get the data myself and see what to curve would be without the US, but I don't have time to do a full regression analysis on it. I seriously doubt that it would show a negative correlation, because the curve passes way above the US data point indicating that the US should be much more violent than what it is reported. In fact, the US is a relatively peaceful place to live.

So guns are not really the problem.

All you can say is guns are not the only problem. And to that I agree, social inequality is a factor of increasing violence. But I still think that guns have an appreciable effect on increasing violence too through the increase of lethality and escalation of violence. It's probably not as big a factor as others, but it does exacerbates violence.

It could also be that gun violence is a chicken or the egg type problem, where people get guns to protect themselves in violent neighborhoods. But then we get situations, where people accidentally shot the wrong person due to fear of violence being done to them. South Africa in fact has 2 high profile cases from Rudi Visage and Pistorius. But I've read local articles of similar accidents happening here in the US all the time. And these kind of homicides aren't counted as unlawful murders either. Especially now, with these stand your ground laws.

Guns are a like the metaphorical double edged sword. While I don't want to deprive people of defending themselves and managing their own security risks. It really seems to me that in peaceful times guns are completely unnecessary, and in bad times they can make things worse. This indicates to me that guns need to be better regulated and their use monitored. But how much regulation, is a good question, and there needs to be research on that as well. But we are getting into highly political territory here, because to some regulation is dirty word.

Sadly, there are some holes to research, so I can't definitively say for sure that guns are bad and evil. Nor do I want to. However, even with the data we have I have yet seeing anything that shows the opposite of guns being useful, unless it's "un-skewed" by making up a factors without serious research/data behind it. Further research really needs to be done, BUT that's not going to happen, because the NRA prevents any kind of research at all from happening, unless it falls in line with their views. And even worse, there is less data collection being done on the topic, again thanks to the NRA.

And that's a big problem down the line, because we won't make any sound decisions on gun policy. We won't be able determine effectively which laws have worked, which ones have not. Which policies have been effective at stopping bad guys from getting guns, while keeping it in the hands of law-abiding responsible citizens. Which ones have been effective at reducing violence. It's a shame that in this age of data, we are prevented from doing this.

At 4/1/14 09:05 AM, wildfire4461 wrote:

At 4/1/14 07:46 AM, TucoM wrote: How many of you <snip> have actually signed up.....and are actually paying the premiums.

Probably none.
They're too retarded to see it's one big pile of SHIT that is going to cause more harm than good.

I've signed up, and It's much cheaper than what I had previously with more benefits. Got a Silver plan btw. The biggest helpful thing was the exchange itself. It allows you to browse through different plans, and make informed decisions about the kind of plan you want.

Honestly it's not that much different than what was there before, except now there is more of a market.

At 3/23/14 11:16 PM, LazyDrunk wrote: Owning a gun doesn't kill anybody.

sorry I meant carrying gun, which most gun owners do. It''s easy to conflate the two
Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed

If you still don't think so, then why did the NRA freak out about Obama's nomination to the Surgeon General.
NRA Takes Aim at Vivek Murthy, Obama's Anti Gun Surgeon General Nominee
I really don't see why pro-gunners are so scared. The Surgeon General can't do anything about guns, because 2nd amendment.

At 3/23/14 10:18 PM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote:

Your right to own a gun is infringing on my right life and the life of others. It's the selfishness of gun owners that don't recognize that owning a gun does put people around them at risk, regardless how well intentioned. Allowing others with questionable character to own one as well because it's their "individual" right while ignoring that they neglect their responsibilities to society is down right irresponsible of us.

or its the idiocy of people the individual right to bear arms in the constitution is garaunteed and the legal right to carry in public by the Supreme Court.

And this is why we have the ineffectual, pointless, gun control laws that we have today. Clearly you do recognize it as a problem otherwise you wouldn't of hidden behind the 2nd amendment like that just now, instead of fighting my assertions directly.

Oh well, I'm comforted by the fact that gun ownership been in steady decline for the past 40 years. Four more decades at this rate and people will start questioning whether the 2nd amendment is even worth it.

At 3/23/14 03:19 PM, TheMason wrote: Furthermore, social scientific studies show that guns are used more defensively than they are used criminally.

That study is as believable as unskewedpolls.com. Gary Kleck puts DGUs at 2.5mil while the National Crime Victimization Survey puts it at .5mil. That's a big discrepancy. Maybe Gary Kleck is a mystic and he has the correct values? dunno.

Further gun control will not contribute to saving lives.

Explain the severe drop in gun violence Australia after implementing a gun registry and gun bans. But I agree, if you have the hodge podge of gun control measures with lots of room to work around, of course they'll not save lives. Which is why people say good gun control laws. And even if your state or locality has good laws, it might not matter if your neighboring state gives out guns like candy, which really points to the need for a national solution.

At 3/23/14 12:11 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:

At 3/23/14 11:23 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 3/23/14 10:11 AM, TheMason wrote: It is also based on the concept of self-defense natural right.

Self defense is not a right. Nor should it be. It's a justification.

A justification for what? Survival? If survival isn't a right, or shouldn't be a right, why do we have laws protecting the sanctity of life?

Isn't that the root of the issue?

yes it is the root of the issue. By having lax gun laws, you allow people who shouldn't have an easy time to get guns actually get them, and giving a bad name to good gun owners that use and handle their guns responsibly. And mistakes can be made even by the most responsible. Your right to own a gun is infringing on my right life and the life of others. It's the selfishness of gun owners that don't recognize that owning a gun does put people around them at risk, regardless how well intentioned. Allowing others with questionable character to own one as well because it's their "individual" right while ignoring that they neglect their responsibilities to society is down right irresponsible of us.

That said, I really don't have a problem with people buying a gun for self-defense, every neighborhood is different, and sometimes the police force is not able to do it's job well enough, or is completely non-existent. Ultimately, it's up to the individual to be responsible for their own self-defense. However, I don't mind if government plays a positive role in helping with security and reducing gun violence. In fact, It's not the individual's responsibility to keep their neighborhood safe, nor should it be. Your average citizen is the worst person for the job.

You may argue your 2nd amendment rights all you want, but If you already agree that some people shouldn't be allowed to purchase or own guns(crazy people, convicts on parole, people with restraining orders, people who don't know how to handle guns), then you already believe that guns are A PRIVILEGE and NOT A RIGHT.