That’s not so. What happens is that you wish you had said something different from what you actually said. Then you confuse your own wishes with reality.
i.e. you are weaseling.
:rolleyes:
Enough already. I’m getting exhausted from watching your mental gymnastics.
:shrug: You tried to say some rights were different because they relate to health-care. Now it seems you are trying to weasel out of it.
Anyway, I don’t engage with people who weasel, i.e. people who pretend that they said something different from what they actually said.
Close. You misunderstand what people say, in a way that either speaks of a mental deficiency or deliberate obtuseness, and incompetently try to box people in to having said the stupid thing you think they’ve said. When they object, you put them on your pretend ignore list that nobody but you thinks is valid.
Other than that, it’s a pretty good description of what you do.
Thanks, Left Hand of Dorkness. I really love when people try that tactic in a written medium. Does he think that people can’t scroll up?
brazil84, if you really want to keep guns as a constitutional right in this country, I suggest you stop trying to debate people and instead just give your money to people who are capable of debating the matter rationally. You really aren’t helping your side.
I love the idea of gun ownership as some kind of moral right. When the first gun was invented, no doubt the first person to see it thought “I have no idea what this contraption is, but it is my natural right as a human being to possess one.”
The moral right is to “effective self-defense”. It’s conception as a moral right probably actually significantly antedates the invention of firearms, and it’s only conflated with firearms because firearms have been the best tool for that since the conception of “rights” as something a majority of the citizenry has.
Hell, why do you THINK anyone with enough social rank to do so was perpetually carrying a sword in feudal times? THEY believed they had a moral right to defend themselves.
Actually, I DON’T think anyone with enough social rank to do so was perpetually carrying a sword in feudal times, and I’d be interested in seeing a cite to the contrary that doesn’t feature Excalibur.
I do think that their society was structured in a very different way from ours, and often the people carrying swords were doing so because they were the law. And in 18th century France and Italy (I think; it’s been awhile since I’ve read about the golden age of dueling), swords weren’t common because they were held to be a prerequisite to self-defense; rather, young noble assholes were often above the law, and wore them in the same way that cowboys in Kansas wore them in 1870, looking for trouble.
Instead, we find that the weaker the law enforcement is in an area, the more people want to carry weapons, and also the more preemptive violence there is in those areas. There’s a reason why cowboys carried guns on their hips out on the range, but once they came into a town like Dodge with actual law enforcement, they were required to surrender their guns until they left town.
I heard David Keene, president of the NRA, on Public Radio Friday night. He explicitly brought up the gun buybacks in other countries being made mandatory. He didn’t have to be prompted to do this, so I think I was right in suggesting that this is at the root of the NRA’s sudden vocal opposition to destroying guns purchased through buybacks, as I stated on the first page (Post #13).
He didn’t mention anything about wasting taxpayer money.
Do you understand what the point of the offer is? It’s not compensation, it’s appreciation. When you give blood at Red Cross, do you think a cookie is fair market value for your blood?
That’s true. To reasonable people, donation, sale and abandonment are three different things.
But I think the money given for the guns is a better airtight argument that the guns weren’t abandoned. I bet the previous owners got receipts, for instance.
Fair enough. It’s somewhere between a donation and a sale, it seems to me: the value isn’t nearly high enough for it to be a real sale, but you’re also getting something for your turned in gun, and I suspect that the absence of a 501(c)(3) means that the “donation” isn’t tax exempt or anything.
Still, it seems likely to me that the low value offered per gun means that nobody is feeling compelled to turn their gun in: if they’re that desperate for money, they could probably get $100 easy just by selling their gun online, and surely pawn shops offer more than $20 a gun, right? (I have no idea what pawn shops offer, so maybe I’m wrong).
Folks who choose to give their guns to the cops in exchange for $20 are motivated to do so by something other than cash on the barrel. It’s worth figuring out what that motivation is, and to the extent reasonable, respecting that motivation.
Unless the gun in question is a complete piece of crap. One criticism I’ve heard leveled against gun buyback programs in the past is that a disproportionate number of the guns collected are very old and in poor repair and essentially useless, so the programs really don’t do much to actually get guns off the street. (I don’t know how much truth there is to that criticism, though.)
In which case, really what’s happening IS an abandonment. So a suggested compromise: guns worth more than $20 get melted down, as their previous owners obviously intended to happen (since otherwise they would’ve sold them for more). The complete pieces of crap guns get auctioned off, as the NRA desires.
That article is saying the value of the grocery gift cards was $50, so people were presumably turning down the counter-offers of $100 per gun. Granted, it probably doesn’t mean that much, given the circumstances – being iffy about selling your gun to a random dude who approaches you in a parking lot is probably more common sense than a political statement.
I wonder what would happen if I opened up a tailgate gun store in the parking lot of a business, without their permission, and offered to buy guns from passers-by?
Look, we’re all dancing around the real problem with this NRA lawsuit: It is one thing to frame the issue in terms of “rights” or “liberty,” but now the NRA’s attitude seems to be that America should have a heavily-armed citizenry and anything that makes it less-armed is bad. That is like Libertarians proclaiming that cocaine and heroin are good for you, it shatters the credibility of their more defensible arguments for decriminalization.