Now that Clarence Thomas will have a buddy on the court, I suspect we’ll see more keggers with 70’s porn being shown in meetings, along with the appropriate number of cans of Coca-Cola with pubic hairs on them. With the regimented weight lifting breaks.
This is what worries me; I could not care less about the other nonsense surrounding the appointment.
I tend to agree. IMO, the biggest war being fought, despite the social issue smokescreens/red-herrings, is economic war against the working class. Plutocracy being installed…lubricated by god/guns/abortion/“freedumb”.
That is what’s been on my mind too - SCOTUS is ultimately just 9 people wearing robes on a bench. If they make too outrageous a ruling, everyone can just say F*** it. They have no true enforcing power.
I’m furious that Trump is on board with this after the NRA and GOA worked hard to get him elected.
The absurdness of these bans is that with practice one does not even need a special stock to bump fire. Hence the stock bans will not prevent bump firing a semi auto in the least.
Another important issue is right to carry. Places like New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, and most of California leave their law abiding citizens completely defenseless in public while the criminal element is still armed to the teeth.
Why does anyone need a bump stock? Seriously, it’s pretty much good for exactly one purpose - indescriminately firing into a crowd.
All four of those states listed have among the bottom 10 firearm deaths in the nation. Also up there: Rhode Island, which despite the low number of laws is actually extremely strict, Connecticut, which the Washington Post calls the strictest after California, and Massachusetts, which also has strict regulations. Rounding out the top 10, we have Maine, Minnesota, and Washington. So 8 of the top 10 states for gun safety are liberal strongholds with very strong gun control regulation.
Yes, I’m sure that people in NY, NJ, HI, and CA are just begging to be able to protect themselves from criminals. :rolleyes: How armed to the teeth are those criminals, anyways? Well, according to a short look through this chart, there were no armed robberies or assaults in Hawaii for the time frame given. Connecticut, California, New York, and New Jersey are not near the top of the list.
So basically everything you just said was really really wrong.
Your post doesn’t have a thing to do with what some of the likeliest effects of Kavanaugh on the court.
Kavanaugh is believed to be a strong supporter of individual gun rights. Me mentioning that some states have very limited to non-existent carry laws is related to his effect on the court.
You said a fair bit more than that… Or, at the absolute minimum, implied a fair bit more than that. Did you not mean to imply that these gun laws make people invthose states less safe or more likely to be the victim of gun crime?
These are the positions someone of his political bend are going take. Justice Thomas also seems to be of that mind.
None of this is relevant if the court doesn’t take a 2nd Amendment case. They have been skirting the issue for almost a decade now.
…So you don’t think that, you just think that Kavanaugh does? 
Yeah, I’m not going to engage you. It’s not appropriate in this thread and your signature says more than enough about your attitude towards anyone who might disagree with you.
Translation: “I do, in fact, believe that, but I’d rather not defend my position or admit that what I said was wrong so I’ll just dodge.” If you didn’t believe that, you would have just said so.
And that’s fine man, you do you. But this forum is all about fighting ignorance. And when you post a howler like that, I’m gonna point out how wrong it is. 
Your signature really is out of line. You are in Germany. You should know where your line of reasoning might lead.
Speaking of hijacks… Um… No? It’s ironic you mention Germany, because there’s a certain group of historic German voters I guarantee nearly everyone applies this claim to.
I didn’t know you had Republicans in Germany.
Regards,
Shodan
A gun rights case takes four to vote for cert. Thomas and Gorsuch routinely dissent from denials of cert for gun rights cases, so they are a given. I think Alito would go for it, if he thought he could get to five. My hope is that Kennedy was the hold out so the court declined to take any. We’ll see.
Given your cite mixes together suicide and homicide which is incredibly misleading, and it mischaracterizes other key facts regarding the Dickey amendment, I think your conclusions are questionable.
I’m in CA. I am someone who is prohibited from getting a carry permit and as long as that’s the case, gun rights are my #1 issue. Once that issue is resolved, then and only then are other things going to take prominence. I was never really jazzed with Kavanaugh - he’s serviceable. After the allegations, I was hoping he’d be replaced with someone more aggressive on gun rights. We’ll have to wait and see I suppose.
Both are absolutely gun safety issues. If we’re talking about how guns make you more or less safe, neglecting that simply having a gun in your house doubles to triples your risk of dying of suicide seems iffy. That alone is a reason I will NEVER own a gun.
And if we’re talking about gun crime victimization, the second chart is a direct apples-to-apples comparison - it turns out, states with stricter gun laws simply do not have particularly high rates of gun assault or gun robbery. I’m not sure what’s misleading about that.
All I’m citing is the chart, plus some very preliminary background research to make sure that, for the 10 bottom gun death states, the number of laws is at least borderline reflect the state of gun control in those states (i.e. “is California actually strict? Yeah? Ok, moving on”). I’m not sure how any of this is misleading. My point is twofold:
- Strict gun control laws make people less likely to die as a result of gun crime
- Strict gun control laws do not lead to increased gun crime
I think this is absolutely well-supported by the data.
Can you maybe explain this? I can think of a lot of very important things that really should matter more to just about anyone, but before I go off on that tangent, can you help me understand why this is so incredibly important to you?
Both suicide and homicide with firearms are related because they employ firearms, but the causes and solutions to each are so vastly different that conflating these two things is at best, misleading, and that’s me being generous to the author. It’s like young kids being left in the backseat of cars and dying and pedestrians killed during high speed chases both involve cars, so they should be added together when looking at car safety. It’s silly.
And that double/triple figure is also pretty much without merit so there’s that too. But if you don’t want to own a firearm, that should be a choice that everyone gets to make. I got you covered 
I think the fact that you are referring to assaults or robberies, and the 2nd chart is referring to homicides and suicides together, is incongruous. But even still, simply using a raw count of number of laws isn’t very informative either. Basically, the entire article doesn’t seem very well assembled. On top of that as I said before, they mischaracterize the Dickey amendment multiple times so that makes me more skeptical of the factual nature of the article.
The article mixes homicide and suicide, but in your first bullet you are only referring to homicide. That’s misleading because approximately 2/3 of the total firearm deaths are suicide. Second, your first bullet states there is a causal connection between gun laws and people dying from gun crime, but that is misleading as well because that’s not supported by the data. For example, this is from the article you linked:
A few reasons - I’m a big proponent of individual liberty and the government saying I can’t carry a firearm goes against that. I’m responsible for protecting my family and prohibiting me from carrying restricts my ability to do so in the most effective way possible. I also think it’s a pretty serious violation of the constitution, but that part is just my personal opinion that happens to align with some but not all or most federal appellate court decisions. And that is where Kavanaugh may come into play.
But ultimately, I’m thinking any of the other potential ills that you can conceive of, I have other means to address them. I have no other means to address self defense when someone is intent on killing me or my family.
Actually, the argument is that stricter gun control helps with both. Therefore, when talking about gun control, it’s valid to look at both individually as well as in aggregate. But what happens when we take that chart and break it down, suicide vs. homicide? Do you think the correlation disappears on either end? It’s not quite as clear as when looked at together (which I will admit is a bit of a knock against my argument), but it’s still there.
Really? If we’re looking on making more stringent general regulations (or, contrarily, less stringent general regulations), I’d say lumping those two things together is quite reasonable - both will go down significantly if it’s harder to own a car.
Really? Of all the figures to contest, this one seems like a poor choice. The link between owning a gun and being at risk of suicide is extremely well-established, and also very easy to understand - suicide is often driven by convenience, and suicide by gun is both extremely convenient and extremely lethal compared to other methods. You press one button in your own home with a tool you know well and it’s over and nobody can stop you, and it’s extremely hard to survive.
It’s two separate arguments - total gun deaths as a proxy for safety, and specifically gun assaults and robberies to examine armed crime specifically.
I know - this is why I actually went through the states on the list to see if they really did have strict gun laws. And of the top 10, 8 absolutely do - Maine and Minnesota being the outliers here.
This was me misspeaking, I meant total gun deaths, not gun homicide. Mea culpa.
No, this is fair. That isn’t enough to prove causation. This is some useful evidence, though.
So does the government saying that you can’t own vials of anthrax. Personally, it’d never occur to me that this is a liberty that I’m sorely lacking, because… well… okay, I could, but why in god’s name would I want to?
This is just demonstrably false. Morbidity goes up, not down, with gun ownership. There’s been a lot of research into this. Here’s one such study:
“We found no robust, statistically significant correlation between gun ownership and stranger firearm homicide rates. However, we found a positive and significant association between gun ownership and nonstranger firearm homicide rates. The incidence rate ratio for nonstranger firearm homicide rate associated with gun ownership was 1.014 (95% confidence interval = 1.009, 1.019).”
It doesn’t make you safer. It may make you slightly less safe in the case of homicide, and it definitely makes you considerably less safe in the case of suicide, but it does not make you or your family more safe. Really, all I need to put the lie to this statement is this chart. More guns means more people dying from guns, be it from homicide, suicide, or accident. Sure, suicide might be the dominant correlation there, but that still doesn’t mean that owning a gun makes your family more safe. Here’s another study on the subject.
I didn’t say this before, but I kinda wanted to. Every time I tried to get into this headspace, I couldn’t do it without at least one of the following two things:
- Being vastly misinformed about whether or not guns make me safer
- Being dangerously paranoid
I realize this is a harsh thing to say, but… Dude. The most important thing to you is ensuring that you have a gun so that you can protect your family. You consider it the number one issue, above anything else, that you be allowed to carry a tool which exists solely for the killing of other human beings so that in case you get attacked (or your family gets attacked and you’re around) you can kill the person attacking you.
…In California.
I could maybe understand this attitude if crime rates where you live were along the lines of, I dunno, Caracas. Or if you lived somewhere where you had to constantly worry about civil war breaking out. But in Cali? Even in the most dangerous cities in Cali, your odds of being the victim of some form of violent crime are maybe 1/100 every year. Even if you live in Oakland, your odds of being the victim of any kind of violent crime is vanishingly small.
I keep trying to get into that headspace, and it is a scary place to be, with hypothetical danger lurking around every corner. How terrified do you have to be to see such a desperate need to have constant access to lethal force?! How dangerously paranoid?
I’m sure Bone can speak for himself, and probably will, but I believe you’re confusing two separate issues here. Bone wants the gun to keep his family safe. Whether the criminal dies in the process of keeping oneself safe is a secondary concern for most gun owners. It’s not “so that … you can kill the person”, but “so that you can stop the attack”. If the criminal is merely wounded, or frightened off, or otherwise deterred, that’s sufficient to have a successful defensive gun use. In fact, almost all DGUs don’t end up with a dead criminal, so comparing “stranger firearm homicide rates” isn’t a very accurate measure of a firearms utility in self defense or crime prevention. No one needs to die for a gun to have done it’s self-defense job successfully.