They sparkle watching you dance. Face it, you got caught out on this one. I cited TWO polls from major organizations both of which repeated the polls with similar results over time and both of which reported similar findings. I also provided a link directly to one of the polls. You have provided nothing but hand waving.
Now really, why should I believe an anti-gun poll from a media outlet that gets praised by anti-gun organizationsfor its anti-gun stance?
So you’re saying … what? it’s none of the above? I see no reason it couldn’t be all three.
Then why are they even mentioned in this thread, when the tag line clearly specifies “the GUN issue”?
Well now, that makes it all clear. From the Wikipedia definition of a straw man:
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Hee hee hee! You’re so VERY funny! Why do you want my personal views? Straw men and sarcasm not working, so figure you’ll try ad hominem attacks?
Given the wording and limitations on congressional military powers and the Militia Act of 1792, it seems relatively clear, to me, that the intention was to have very little in the way of regular Army and when the need came for some heavy lifting to draw from the militia. The expectation that the government use The People as their enforcers makes it non trivial for the government to do whatever it wants against the will of The People. If the Posse Comiltatus Act is any indication, even after a century, it was understood that the government’s military has little to no legitimate interest in domestic affairs.
The system of government imagined by the FF was designed to be distributed and relatively powerless. The idea was that We the People create the government for our own purposes. Keeping government weak and decentralized made it difficult for it to begin to exist for it’s own sake and for it’s own purposes. It’s correct to observe that we’ve drifted very far from that ideal.
Perhaps the government has accumulated and centralized so much force that the final system of checks and balances intended by the second amendment prohibition on infringement isn’t that effective anymore. Similar observations could be made about several of the checks and balances intended by protecting various rights from government infringement. You’d rightly ask “So what?” in the case of other human rights.
You mean the History Eraser Button?
You can dance all you like…won’t change anything:
I cannot seem to properly copy the data in from the following link without all sorts of pain-in-the-arse reformatting so just visit it for a bevvy of polls. Across the board Americans support stricter gun regulations (NOT the same as bans which they overall oppose):
You can quote all the polls you like…we here in this forum have not agreed on the necessity for greater restriction at all, much less decide what_if anything_constitutes “reasonable” restriction.
:rolleyes: You appear to have deliberately left out the portion of your own cite that mentions: Then, one attributes that position to the opponent. At no point in time did anyone here do that.
A straw man argument would be:
Lizard: I think pistol ownership should be legal.
YamatoTwinkie Are you kidding me?! Unrestricted nuclear weapons will kill us all.
Lizard, merely mentioning your name, and asking you a direct question does not constitute an Ad hominem attack. You’d know that if you read your cite, instead of just throwing out logical fallacies until you find something tangentially related enough to stick.
YOU may not agree on restrictions but I established that “most” people (Americans anyway which is what counts for all this) think some restriction is appropriate with an abundance of cited polls. Not sure how else you expect to make that determination without referring to polls.
You are moving the goalposts.
“What do you think is the best way to reduce gun violence in this country: by passing stricter gun control laws, or by stricter enforcement of existing laws?”
“Are you for or against a law which would make it illegal to manufacture, sell, or possess semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles?”
Not biased at all.
Seems to me people think there is a problem with gun violence and that we need to do something. Considering most respondents to the polls do not own guns (around 66%) and/or have guns in their homes (around 55%), I don’t know that I’d place much faith in their suggestions on how to deal with gun violence are making a fair appraisal of the trade-offs of any proposal or the effectiveness of whatever something they want to do.
What I find most interesting is that when asked if they think gun control would actually work to prevent a specific example of gun violence it’s about three quarters saying it would have no effect.
Geez…look, you have an abundance of polls asking all sorts of things different ways. Heck, the Pew study asked “Which is more important? Protect gun owners’ rights or Control gun ownership?” How much more bland do you want to get and still be able to ask the question? Over and over we see rather similar numbers between the polls. (Note the Pew poll more people wanted to control gun ownership).
Besides, sorry to say gun ownership is not a pre-requisite to be a voter. Nor is being informed. You can argue all you like that their opinions are crap. That is not what is at issue. The question that got us off on this now abused tangent was what “most people” wanted as regarded gun restrictions. Not what most “gun owners” want or what most “informed and expert in gun laws want”.
No. What got us off on this tangent was you trying to frame the debate in such a way that anybody who disagrees with you is automatically unreasonable.
Agreed governments need to be watched closely. Yet for all our guns they prevented none of the things you listed. So when, exactly, do the guns get broken out in an armed insurrection to defend the American Way?
I keep seeing this romantic notion of this final stand against tyranny yet I cannot think of how it would come about. And if it did come about, to the point of Americans taking to the streets with their guns and fighting the US military which was turned on us by our leaders, we are so fucked anyway I doubt guns or no guns will make much difference either way.
Also, for all your points above, I am unaware of any truly democratic country (not one which pretends to it) that has ultimately had its government turn on its people as imagined by gun owners here. Even in countries where there is no (or very limited) gun ownership such that the government would think it easy.
To top it all off, the United States is quite large. The government will need a MUCH bigger army to control it all forcibly. For comparison Vietnam is about the size of New Mexico and we could not prevail in Vietnam even with a very concerted effort. You want to control the WHOLE US by force? Good luck with that.
My point is that you’re mostly polling people about the relative importance of a right they don’t exercise.
Would you accept the argument that torture and other human rights violations were okay because “most reasonable people” had no problem with it? Or would you make the point that their opinions are colored by the fact that it’s not their rights that are being infringed?
I already answered this.
Those are your words, not mine. I said in post #146:
“…in fact most reasonable people think some restriction is appropriate.”
I have shown that most people DO think restriction is appropriate. Up to you to prove they are all not reasonable people to prove me wrong.
Next…
So? I have never had to exercise my right against self incrimination but I care about it.
Absolutely not and as I already stated earlier in this thread I think that slavery was prohibited in the Constitution as written. The only way around it is saying African Americans are not “people”. Tyranny of the majority. The FF’s didn’t want it and neither do I. Nevertheless, despite never having been tortured (excepting one of my relationships 
) I DO care about it and despise that the US ever got in to it and am on record on this board frothing at the mouth wanting Bush to be prosecuted.
Again, people can be informed and can care about issues they do not personally experience. Assuming you are a male do you think you can comment on abortion given that you can never get pregnant? I’d say absolutely you can. YMMV of course.
Scotland? 
It’s difficult to bring up the idea of the second amendment as a check against government tyranny without someone talking about the feasibility of the People reclaiming the state from a government gone tyrannical. What about the deterrent effect of private arms? Is “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” an early statement of mutually assured destruction?
I agree one has to consider the feasibility of a citizen insurrection opposing a US government gone all tyrannical. I do not think it very feasible at all in today’s world (yes historically it has happened…different world today). Even with guns the US population has nothing like the hardware available to the military (tanks, artillery, planes, etc). At best you’d have a never ending litany of blowing up some military people here and there, changing nothing. You particularly have to consider that there would be a lot of Americans on the side of the tyrannical government…perhaps a majority.
That said the US military would have to be MUCH larger, as noted before, to have a prayer of holding the whole US against a rebellious public whether or not they had guns as it is just too freaking big. Hell, just holding the northeast would be tough. Our country would probably settle into something like Northern Ireland at its worst when they were fighting the Brits.
Hey, just what you see, pal.
Such an underrated movie compared to the second one.