Chicago didn’t have a restrictive gun law, it banned guns. Strictly speaking, even the Aldermen and bodyguards weren’t supposed to have them, only the police. And yet… the very people saying “we need to get rid of all guns!” wouldn’t get rid of their own. They always made an exception for themselves, and that’s where the hypocrisy comes in.
If the weren’t hypocrites they’d trust the police - as they insisted the ordinary citizen do - to protect them and give up THEIR guns as well.
Dumb question, but why is Dianne Feinstein apparently the subject of all these fears about new gun laws? Surely other Congressmen and Senators (particularly those from Connecticut) will have something to say about this.
And in the aftermath of the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, why is the discussion solely about potential new gun control measures? Why is no one talking about mental health treatment and research? Because there are two things in common to most of the recent mass murders; guns and mental illness.
It’s her name on the bill. She submits it, or something like it, every single year.
Mental illness isn’t anywhere near as newsworthy as guns. Plus, both sides probably agree that any change in mental health practices is going to be a long time coming, particularly effective enough to prevent these spree shootings from happening: we have to figure out what’s causing it, figure out a cure, find a preventative measure, put things into place.
Guns, however… the solution is obvious. To some very vocal people, on both sides of the story.
Can someone link to the actual text of the bill that Sen Feinstein proposed?
They should, anyway. But you know what? Some people who’ve served are big fucking morons. That’s the way life is.
Serving in the military does not and should not give you special rights.
Summary, not the specific wording, from her website:
nm
And Oswald who was one hell of a shot.
And my uncle who was at Iwo Jima and so sickened by it he never picked up a gun again. And my brother who was in Nam and doesn’t own one.
Of the two reactions to killing people I prefer the second.
Marines “Oorah!”
Army “Huaah!”
They don’t take it deadly seriously, but you won’t catch either branch using the other branch’s acknowledgment yell.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
Nope, it’s a fairly standard ploy in DC politics, or negotiating with a six year old about bedtime. Ask for something outrageous, and negotiate down to what you want anyways.
This is an opening bid, to see who the serious players are, that’s all.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
You said that if there was an attempt to restrict semi automatics in the US, that there will be a “full-on gunpocalypse that will be fought to the last breath.” I guess that could just be a crackpot prophecy-- as another poster put it, a paranoid fantasy. Lumpy has much the same to say, that gun owners will fight in the streets if a “hard-line gun ban” comes to be. What’s that mean? A ban on semi automatics? Handguns? The nonsensical AWB? I see The Turner Diaries as a work of paranoid fantasy. It could be that somebody right now is reading this and thinking, yeah, they’re right. Let’s fight in the streets. I don’t think that person is you or Lumpy, though.
I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen gun control advocates expressing disgust at the situation. I’ve also seen what I consider to be overreactions to the situation on the control side right on this board. I have not seen anyone rejoicing over Sandy Hook.
A lot of people have seen videogames as a probable cause for massacres. If there was evidence of a connection between games and violence, I, as a gamer, would support restrictions on games. Responsible gun owners do the same-- note that I do not consider the leadership of the NRA to be responsible.
If guns are a defense against tyranny or misrule, why have they been used that way so seldom? Rights were eroded under the PATRIOT act. No guns. The US government screwed up most of the world’s economy in 2008. No fighting. There was a widespread (incorrect and conspiracist, IMO) belief that the 2000 presidential election was crooked. No blood in the streets. The only right that NRA types are prepared to fight to defend is the right to own guns, which seems circular. Lumpy mentioned how California tightened her laws when the radical left-- the Black Panthers, namely-- embraced guns. The NRA supported the new laws, which sounds like about what you’d expect.
And here you go again. Why is it that you haven’t been saying, “if there’s a serious attempt to ban guns, there will be widespread civil disobedience?” But no, with you it’s straight to full on gunpocalypse. Big talk, don’t you think? I guess it’s OK because ocassionally you put that winky emoticon in there.
If you’re serious about keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, you’ll need a national registration system for guns anyway. You’ll have a national database of the mentally ill to keep them from buying a gun after they’ve been identified. I guess you’d need to also know who already owns guns in case they are identified as too crazy to be a gun nut. It actually would be good to keep guns away from people who have been diagnosed with depression, although just that wouldn’t, IMO, justify the enormous expense of the exercise.
Ah, I see what you mean now. I apologize; I was being too dramatic. I didn’t mean gun owners would be fighting in the streets over it; I was just being cute with the phrase “gunpocalypse.” I meant only that semiautomatics are such a big piece of the pie, rights-wise, that if a ban on all semiautomatics were ever passed, a large number of gun owners would feel that they had lost pretty much the entire battle. It would be a bit like losing a divorce settlement where your spouse gets 90% of everything you own and keeps the kids too.
That is, so far from seeming “fair” or “reasonable” that most of us will oppose it to the very last vote, and might well punish its passage by trying to sweep another batch of bass-ackwards republicans into Congress. Heck, I know that if any of my representatives voted for such a measure I’d vote against them in the next election without question, even if they were running against Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney’s bastard lovechild.
Hm, we’ll have to differ here, too. No amount of evidence that violent games contribute to violence would convince me to erode the first amendment enough to permit censorship, not even in video games. About as far as I’d go is agreement with “don’t sell these games to kids without the parental OK” policies.
If you’d look at the context around the text you quoted, you’d see that I wasn’t just talking about gun rights there. I was addressing the question of what happens when any population of people begin to feel that “their” social system no longer represents them and will not allow them to regain their voice through peaceful means. They have two choices in such cases: knuckle under, and accept marginalization (or in extreme cases, extermination), or resort to unlawful means of changing their social order. I was neither approving nor speculating about the possibility that some gun owners might see their case as being so desperate.
But, in fact, I would expect a tremendous amount of civil disobedience in the event of a gun ban. Nearly all of it along the lines of “Why, no sir, I lost all my guns in a water-skiing accident three years ago.”
I am not an NRA member but perhaps a fellow traveler. LaPierre’s scapegoating of video games was appalling. Perhaps there might be a case if video games were shown to cause functional violence (there is no evidence, by the way. Some studies have made the claim that there is a link; most are bullshit social psychology with poor operational definitions. There are also many that say no link). But both gun control advocates and video game banners often make the same claim: military weapons are effective and have certain features so let’s ban similar firearms that have similar features (shoulder thing that goes up) but aren’t shown to be any more dangerous than hunting rifles. Or let’s ban/restrict Mortal Kombat because somebody claimed GTA made them kill, or let’s sue Pac Man because someone ate pills and then ate somebody, because Jack Thompson or Gloria Allred said it’s relevant. But until the AWB can be shown to be anything but an arbitrary list of things that people who know nothing about guns decided are bad, I won’t support it.
I didn’t claim they’d win; I claimed they’d fight. Confiscation (and yes, some people are openly calling for confiscation, not just registration of grandfathered weapons) would NOT be a matter of overwhelming compliance with a few nutcases making the news. Try fifty or a hundred Wacos or Ruby Ridges- that’s closer to what would happen.
In a democracy yes, if you lose fair and square you’re supposed to submit. The problem is that laws are being proposed that the gun proponents- rightly or wrongly- believe were supposed to be guaranteed by the Constitution to be off the table. Short of an amendment to the Constitution “via the democratic process”, the possibility of a federal gun ban wasn’t supposed to be part of what was ever agreed to. Would you be so sanguine about a federal law banning Islam as inherently seditious, or a renewal of the Alien and Sedition Act, if either were passed by the simple three-fifths majority needed in the legislature?
Retired General Stanley McChrystal, former commander in Afghanistan and longtime Special Forces soldier, takes the opposite opinion of the Marine who wrote that letter:
Yeah, but who cares what that pussy thinks? He let a black man order him around.
…and allowed himself to be made a fool of by a reporter from the Rolling Stone. I mean, really, how clueless can you be?
The soldier who wrote this letter was on Piers Morgan last night. He said:
I believe in more restrictions but not a ban on guns. I don’t think anyone plans to ban them anyway. I am definitely not afraid. I question how good a soldier this man was if he is afraid after all of the self-defense training he was given and the events that he experienced.
How did *those *work out for the gun fetishists there, huh? If there have to be some standoffs to apprehend fifty or a hundred violent criminals, well, why is that a good reason not to do it?
That’s a problem of education in the face of ideologuism, which is a problem not constrained to the gun topic. There are *no *unlimited rights in the Constitution; there can’t be when they conflict with each other everywhere you look. The “right” to bear arms conflicts with the right to life, among others, for instance. Those conflicts are resolved by limiting rights, via the democratic process.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when did private possession of firearms become such an existential threat to the population at large that allowing guns became contradictory to the right to life? We were fine with guns up until maybe the end of the 1960s- what changed?
As to limiting rights, I’d like a straight answer to the following questions: give me an objective standard for limiting the right to own weapons that does not allow the limit to be set at zero. “Assault weapons” are “too dangerous”? Ok, since guns are by design supposed to be able to kill people, what makes assault weapons categorically different from revolvers or hunting rifles- what’s the qualitative difference rather than a quantitative difference? Explain the principle by which they could be banned that couldn’t be applied to all guns.