Could you perhaps point to some proposed legislation or administrative practice by Obama that supports this “has a sad” policy?
Would you say the same about Gayle Trotter’s story about a woman defending herself from burglars using a shotgun?
Nobody cares what you think. You have the right to speak your mind, and an equal right to keep it to yourself.
By the same token, can we stop arguing for tax policy based on people having “skin in the game”?
That depends on the purpose of using her story. If it’s to countermand the notion that no one ever uses guns for self-defense, it’s an argument. If it’s to put someone on a stage and yell about how Democrats would rather see this woman raped than give up their gun crusade, it’s a pointless appeal to emotion (however true it may or may not be). With people like the Newtown dad and Giffords, the possibilities are much smaller. No one denies that people do get shot. There’s no argument to be made and no myth to debunk by asserting over and over again that crime involving guns occurs. And since the only thing these people have to offer is testimony to their victimhood status, which no one disagreed with in the first place, it’s just an attempt to cloud the issue with crying and ginned-up rage at the “insensitivity” of the other side for disagreeing with these people.
This is how logical analysis works–one asks questions about what exactly is being argued, what relevance to a particular argument some point has, what constitutes proof, how moral principles integrate with practical realities. And all of that is what’s missing from Piers Morgan and the other braying jackasses screaming about “it it saves one child” and “look at this person who got shot!”
I’m at least glad that the OP put this issue tactfully, unlike these people on Twitter.
That suggests “parading” is acceptable in some circumstances. You can find a transcript of her testimony here (it’s down the page a bit).
Trotter said she didn’t know what kind of weapon McKinley used even though it was pretty widely reported that it was a 12-gauge shotgun. Senator Whitehouse pointed out that the proposed assault weapons ban doesn’t cover that kind of gun, and Trotter later testified that scary looking guns are useful for women precisely because they look scary.
Yes. I don’t think that even the most anti-gun person in the country thinks that there are zero examples of self-defense use with a gun, even an assault weapon with a high capacity magazine. In a country with 310 million people, we could find all sorts of things that a single person could testify to. It adds nothing to the debate.
But if you put Gabbie Giffords up there, the other side gets to put on a Gayle Trotter. Then the other side can bring in people paralyzed by guns, and the NRA can bring in Jane Smith from Wichita, KS who was almost raped but fought off her assailant with an AR-15. It ping pongs back and forth with no purpose and nothing to add to the debate.
If criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, how do we treat law-abiding citizens who happen to be cowardly and superstitious?
I appreciate your consistency here. We know why groups use celebrity spokespeople and why people devote their fame to particular causes. What matters, I think, is the quality of the information they have to offer. If Giffords can contribute something to the debate, she doesn’t get docked because she was shot in a famous incident.
Fuck dat shit! Ochlocracy Now!
By selling them protective charms, of course.
She did. Her and her husband have stated they support the second amendment and are gun owners themselves. Most people in the US are for background checks and against large capacity magazines. Does “gun rights” mean no regulations to you?
I agree 100% that the two sides are arguing from emotion and thats never conducive to settling any issue. Also, by your logic, if you want an influential place in the public debate, then you need to lead by example by making a case that isn’t emotional. But it looks like you dont recognize the “LaPierring” of the facts and believe the emotional hype of the gun manufacturing lobby as truth. If you haven’t been manipulated by them, then you’ve got nothing to be emotional about because nobody is denouncing your constitutional rights.
Nobody is coming to take your guns or bibles away. People dont need to stand in lines to by guns every time the gun manufacturing lobby spreads false rumors about the imminent takeover of the country by a democrat president’s tyrrany. The gun lobby enrich themselves by ramping up their rumor-mill operations whenever there is a democrat executive - because in these circumstances, they can rely on a segment of the population to be easily manipulated by emotional arguments that really have no basis in fact.
Our lives exist on slippery slopes and we ensure our positions of freedom by engineering methods to keep us in place. Its like pounding steel pylons down to the bedrock to keep the 2nd amendment house from movement. Dont you agree that the debate should ONLY be about what a proposed law will do to reversing or compromising it? Banning 100 round magazines isn’t denouncing your rights anymore than banning your buying 50 cal machine guns or RPG’s, which is what you’d REALLY need to defend yourself from tyranny. We all can can still own a large range of weaponry to defend ourselves against plausible threats, but fighting the government isn’t realistic if you cant match their firepower. So why do they keep implying that?
Who is believing the old and tired emotional argument of the NRA that the current democrat ‘tyranny’ is an attack on the 2nd amendment? You shouldn’t get worked up when the other side chooses to use their own emotional arguments to counter the emotional arguments engineered by the NRA, that successfully manipulated you into starting this thread.
Theres been many playbacks in the media lately of the video of lapierre in 1999 promoting background checks on all gun buyers to congress. He favors public access to your psychiatric records, which should be a privacy issue with everyone, least you dont mind scoundrals publisizing what you said to a psychiatrist. Besides the fact that this would effectively inhibit anyone from seeking professional help, it is blatantly trampling on your 4th amendment rights. Lapierre doesn’t care about that. True conservatives should be alarmed by this, but the discussion never gets that far past the emotional rancor of ridiculous rumors of tyranny and totally False 2nd amendment infringements that dont go beyond existing restrictions that the majority of NRA members already believe are acceptable.
You’re right that AQ and their ilk want innocents to die when we attack them. This acknowledges that the killing of innocent civilians is not because they were militantly shaking their fists at america and thus deserved to be killed. Our media never shows the horror that the locals see in the aftermaths - the innocents and children nearby killed - or worse, severely wounded and lingering in pain without medical attention before dying. They would know AQ shared some responsibility, but if they hear americans claiming all those killed were bad and not making distinctions in their initial statements, then it wont take long before they put ALL the blame on the US.
Not caring to make distinctions shows an indifference to their suffering that eventually works against the original mission. In time, the drone missions effectively become counterproductive by producing far more long-term enemies than the few that are eliminated. AQ depends on our public to support more drone attacks on them, for their eventually victory. This makes them believe they’re smarter than us. Why must we give that to them?
I am neither an NRA member or a conservative. The point is the difference between an argument and an attempt to make argument itself into an offense. When you make a grieving father the face of the gun confiscation movement and then try to cut off anyone who disagrees with him by saying “how DARE you! don’t you know that man lost his SON!” you are not making an argument, you are just trying to silence the opposition.
I think the key to the current gun debate resides in your answer to the question, what is the “gun-confiscation agenda”. I want to learn what that is - its a serious question.
Doesn’t a ban on something mean it cant be imported or sold, but you could still own it if you bought before the law was passed?
Thats the part where you, i and ann coulter are in agreement.
Your bigger point is that they are doing this in a broader attempt to somehow infringe on our constitutionally guaranteed civil right by confiscating our guns - which sounds exactly like the propaganda transcript of the gun manufacturers lobby, spelled NRA.
When you look at the long list of military weaponry that is presently banned by laws to civilians, why isn’t that a debilitating infringement on our 2nd amendment? I’ve got 4 guns but know i and my local militia dont stand a chance against tyranny without anti-air, anti-tank and similar battlefield equalizers. Do americans need guns more for home defense against crime or as a deterrent to lurking tyranny? The weapon most effective against the latter is our vote. So why in wayne’s world do they keep saying the 2nd Amend is a deterrent? Virtually any new law proposed will automatically be hyped by wayne to be the prelude to confiscation, when in the real, unemotional world of logic, that will never happen in our lifetimes.
You have to agree that with any issue, the side immersed the most in emotion is going to be the one clinging to conclusions that simply aren’t real. I would make sure i could answer the pertinent questions of the debate with facts before concluding my position was the right one.
No, I don’t think I am obligated to convince everyone on the Internet to become a supporter of gun rights in order to claim that arguments should be made based on facts and logic instead of emotion and stigmatizing the concept of disagreement.
They certainly dont deliberately target innocents but they get a lower grade for trying to avoid it. After watching thousands of air to ground firings, i always give them the benifit of doubt. But it looks more like there is a reluctance to deny permissions for firing and the favoring of aggressive action when they’re in doubt. In the wiki leaks video, the pilot’s trigger fingers were very itchy, when looking for any excuse to fire on a group of people - or making one up. They dont always go to great lengths to avoid killing innocents - they more often exhibit an indifference (for reasons of their own).
Obama’s team recently deemed any male of military age that is killed by a drone strike, to be classified as enemy. They didn’t specify what the lowest age is though. Over there, it can be when they are physically able to shoot an AK - they’ll surely get counted when the ages of those killed cant be easily verified.
:dubious: You cannot seriously expect that to believed, unless it means you are something far further RW than a “conservative,” and the less said of such the better.