Well, I was more than happy to meet you halfway (as we two see it), and that’s probably as much as either of us can hope in threads like this, eh? Now, if we could just translate that to the world outside this collection of pixels, maybe you and I wouldn’t wind up with the juggernauts on our two extremes leaving us feeling like this.
Oh, by the way, will you giggle if I tell you that at first and even second glance I read that word as “urban”? 
Guns don’t have rights, people do.
We’re not talking about {gunowner}, though. We’re talking about {open-carrier}.
Daniel
The point I was just making is, how can you tell the difference between ETF and a ‘gun grabber’ who starts the discussion in the same way? catsix is correct, insofar as it goes, in that those phrases have been used in the manner she says.
That a question is multiple choice does not mean it isn’t subjective. There will be people desigining these ‘specs’. Some (or many, depending on locale) will have a political opposition to firearms ownership.
You use phrases like ‘safely store’, which is a point of contention, and proves that your test is not in any way objective. Now, I bet I can tell what the answer is that you want to hear, and what you would consider ‘correct’ on a test, but I doubt I agree on whether or not it actually is correct.
So you want to enact an entire bureaucracy costing hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide to protect the ‘safety of children’ and reduce ‘firearms accidents’, which despite the fact that the news likes to make sensational stories out of a handful of them a year already number so few as to be statistically insignificant?
Where have I heard that before?
I’m not the one who wants to waste hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of hours creating a brand new government bureaucracy due to a misguided belief that firearms accidents are extremely common and killing children left and right.
Right on down to the ‘protect the children’ and reduce accidents rhetoric that Zeriel just brought up. Right on over to Kalhoun in the Ammuntion Accountability thread that’s going on parallel to this one.
How can I tell the difference when they’re using the words right out of Sarah Brady’s mouth?
Come skeet shooting with me sometime and I’ll smoke you in total points?
You can parse “gun rights” as “the rights of the people to own and operate firearms of various useful calibers and form factors, for sport, defense, and militia service.”
And then you can stop being disingenuous.
Sarah Brady bought a rifle for her son, you know.
:smack: Well, what the fuck do you want from me? I don’t need to own a damn handgun at this point in my life, I live in the safest neighborhood of the second-safest city in the US, so I spend that $800 on computer parts.
Should I scan my NRA membership card or something?
As long as you advance the exact same arguments as Sarah Brady and her ilk, using the exact same rhetoric, there is nothing you can do.
Your posts in this thread sound exactly like they could have been composed by using a talking points generator at the Brady Campaign’s website, they’re that close to the formula.
I’m sorry, but those of us who refuse to give an inch are refusing because history has shown us exactly how this plays out. We give one inch, and then we are asked for another. When we refuse, we are asked ‘What do you have against common sense regulations? Why don’t you want to save the children? Why don’t you want these reasonable laws passed?’
No more. Now it is time for gun owners like me to go on the offense. We must expand upon the rights that Heller affirms to exist.
shrugs Your loss, then. Now continues to be the time for gun owners like me to shake my heads at yet more partisan bullshit instead of good-faith reaching out to the non-Brady types who would ordinarily support gun control.
Frankly, while I appreciate that the Brady crap is just that, most of the gun rights proponents on this board are every bit as scary–for the love of fuck, I’m getting pro-gun-control types to agree to unbanning of assault weapons and machine guns (REAL ones, not just cosmetically banned ones), with licensing of less than $25 extra a year and a reasonable skills test, and I’M the bad man with the bad plan?
See, I look at it this way–we have Heller now, and that’s one big fucking brake on the slippery slope that you’re afraid of. NOW is the time to prove we can compromise, so that the moderates who are already in a bipartisan mood will join up with us instead of with the far left.
Word, catsix.
With the antis there’s never an end to their demands. I’ve been fighting this battle for nearly 30 years. In the last 5 years or so, things have started turning in our favor. CCW is a reality in places where it wasn’t before. The retarded-ass Clinton AWB was allowed to sunset with no serious attempts to revive it. The Heller decision went the right way.
Not only do I think it would be silly to “compromise” with them now, we should be consolodating our gains and deciding in which direction to go for reclaiming what we lost on earlier “compromises.”
By giving them exactly what they want – more restrictions.
Well, let’s see. You want 25$ per year per firearm. Now, setting aside the problem of finding out exactly how many firearms I have, we’ll use a nice round number of 60 as a hypothetical (which is far from unreasonable for someone who collects them).
You’re asking me for 1500$ a year for what, exactly? The privilege of owning things I already legally own?
And I look at it this way: We have Heller now. It’s time to start regaining the ground that has been stolen from us over the last 74 years.
I either misspoke or you misread; you’re paying anywhere from $35 to $75 per year for yourself, similar to your driver’s license fees, to cover the cost of testing. Your guns cost nothing per.
And the way to do that is not to alienate the moderates by bringing equal and opposite nuttery to the Bradys to the table. The way to do that is to address the concerns of the middle in a way that excludes the Brady types and includes the people who want rights to bear all arms for all Americans.
What kind of driver’s license do you have in PA that costs you 75$ a year? My driver’s license is 36$ every four years, and I took the test once when I was 16.
Further, driver’s licenses only apply to driving cars on public streets. I can drive any type of car, truck, machine, etc that I want to as long as I do it on private property where I have permission, without any license at all.
Y’know, come to think of it, that sounds just like a PA License to Conceal Firearms. I already have one of those!
So, the only way to make it more like a driver’s license would be to force every other state in the US to recognize it, much like my PA Driver’s License demonstrates that I have the legal standing to drive a car in every state.
Your definition of moderates seems to be ‘people who want more restrictions than already exist’. You have not even considered that perhaps those who say we have enough restrictions on lawful firearm ownership are ‘moderate’, or that they might have a valid point. Nope. You paint anyone who does not think we need to give up more liberty as an extremist.
Another page out of the Brady playbook, actually. They’re rather fond of saying they don’t want to ban all guns, but they keep shifting the middle so that it remains firmly in between two endpoints. One is fixed – the total ban on all individual firearms ownership. The other is moving – whatever restrictions are already in place. The target, at least the one that the Bradys and the other anti-gunners will publicly admit to, is somewhere between those points. Always. There is no point that they identify as ‘enough regulation’.
CDL with all endorsements plus standard and motorcycle, amortized yearly, if I remember my bitching hometown truckers correctly.
That is a huge part of the upside.
Not more, different–less in some places (country-wide shall-issue and unbanning of full-auto weapons), more in others (basic knowledge and skills testing for all owners)
I haven’t moved my goalposts in this debate since I started thinking seriously about politics in college. FUCK the Bradys, fer chrissake, you’re not debating them, you’re debating ME. I have identified a point as “enough regulation”, and I won’t budge a step further in the direction of banning.
I figure once anti-gun people get used to the universal licensing (which will have a clause that prohibits stricter local laws, thus overturning ALL firearms bans based on type of arms) we can use the Heller thing to quietly remove the fees and provide government-sponsored free training, since it’s a fundamental right and the anti-gun types will still be cooing over their essentially meaningless list of people-who’ve-voluntarily-qualified-to-own-firearms.
At that point we as gun rights supporters have traded “mandatory firearms safety/use testing” and received, in exchange, federal laws making all gun bans illegal, legal assault and full-auto weapons, and universally honored licenses and CCW permits.
And if you don’t see that as a huge gain, because training sticks in your craw, I don’t think I can understand your position.
Of course cops don’t have to use their guns a lot. Do you know why? Because people know the cops have a gun, so they’re a lot less likely to start trouble. And I’ve seen just as many ill-trained police officers that have no business handling firearms as I’ve seen superiorly-trained citizens with firearms. Your automatic assumption that because a cop carries a gun they’re a firearms expert is astoundingly bad. Hell, even in higher agencies there are people that have no business touching guns.
I don’t carry a gun to pretend I’m a cop. I carry a gun to defend my life if I’m ever in such an unfortunate situation. For some reason, you seem to have this misconception that people who carry guns are just going to lose it for whatever reason and shoot their way out of any negative situation. Why isn’t this happening in the 40 states that currently allow people to carry firearms? Why are people who own permits to legally carry their firearms also the same group with ridiculously low crime levels?
So anyone who happens to use any such phrases is automatically a gun-grabbing agenda-driven liar? Is that what it comes down to? No one who favors any kind of regulation, any at all, can be trusted not to secretly harbor a desire to wrench every gun ever made from every gun owner’s hands? Without exception; across the board; to hell with what THEY say; we know what THEY really mean? Is it then any wonder why people come to believe that the gun-owner side is composed of a pack of raving loonies?
For the record, I normally stay away from debates over gun rights precisely because of reactions like the one from catsix – doesn’t matter that I’m not steeped in the extremism of the gun-regulating side; doesn’t matter that I’ve demonstrated a willingness to see and agree with the propositions of a moderate like Zeriel – nope, anything less than total agreement with untrammeled gun rights shows me to be a sinister trampler of the Second Amendment.
Well, the hell with it again. Zeriel, you get enough people on the gun owners’ side to overcome the fanatics and I’ll lead the charge from my side to overcome the gun-ban fanatics. But I don’t think we’ll ever see it happen; they’ll just keep whaling away on each other’s strawmen and drowning out the rest of us.
Feh, skeet shooting. Anything you can learn to do blindfolded isn’t a sport. 
ETF: No. I said we have failure to communicate. I mean it.
Cat, ETF, let’s communicate. Step by step. If you have a problem with a phrase, explain why you react badly to it, and show your objections.
ETF, Cat actually did the first part by showing you why people react badly to what seems like a simple statement. Why don’t you answer her objections?