Actually your interpretation of self employment income would be incorrect. The IRS and its tax collection mandates only that you report your income, they do not care about the legality of said revenue stream nor do they disclose it to other agencies without an appropriate warrant.
Well, yeah, doctors and nurses and other medical personnel that have to put the pieces back together after people get hurt can be really negative about some stuff - go figger, right? Like not liking motorcycles (except for the number of organ donors they get from them), or bungee jumping, or guns.
Well, I think they need to work on their unnecessary killing rate before they take on anything else. And their covering of bad medicine practices and practitioners makes the thin blue line look like saints. 
The difference being that someone actually does track bad medical outcomes and studying bad gun outcomes is being blocked due to political reasons.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19412491&postcount=68
I have heard this several time from various sources which I agree with. IIRC, many of the things put out by the CDC were straight political propaganda with bad base info.
Because the NRA pointed it out did not automatically cause the CDC to get their hand slapped.
Unless a majority of congress critters are on the take for NRA money. If that is the case we need to worry more about the government than the NRA and if the NRA really showed congress that the CDC was overstepping, maybe the CDC are not the right group to do a study of this type.
IMO 
Hell yes. In the last 100 years governments have killed tens of millions of their own citizens (not counting the wars); indeed it was countries like the US and others that allied themselves to liberate Europe during their periodic civil wars. Don’t like any of it, but don’t kid yourself.
Free, wealthy (“middle class”) people are the exception in history, not the rule, nor is civilization the default. This is a lesson that people have to learn the hard way, over and over. Tyrannical governments always disarm their subjects, and then kill a metric crap ton.
What is troubling is the pattern developing here in the last 25 years, over and over the latest jihadi was well known to authorities, as in past slaughters, many different people and agencies sounded the alarm for years and years - and nothing was done, apparently because he is considered a “politically correct” group. The press likes to make a point that he was a “citizen” - but he was clearly not American. There is no assimilation involved here from that standpoint.
It looks like a whole lot of people want to make this about “gun control” and avoid discussing the real issues. Blowing up people on the other side of the world has consequences. Importing them to the US is certainly ill advised no matter what your view may be on the government foreign policy. They are literally importing the war here, the borders are wide open. Pretty easy for anyone to make a cogent argument that the various governments around the world has gone cukoo for cocoa puffs. Good luck everyone.
TL;DR To reply to just a few from page 1:
And why is that? Why isn’t it the Brady Campaign that congresscritters fear? Maybe because the majority of people who say they want gun control sit back and wait for it to happen, while gun owners are politically active and fervently fight attempts to limit their right to possess firearms. They lobby, demonstrate, fund pro-gun organizations, track their legislators’ voting records- you know that “democracy” stuff they talked about in school.
In 20 years, anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare will be able to buy a 3D printer capable of turning out firearms. And if illicit labs can produce tons of meth, propellant and primer shouldn’t be a problem. Illegal guns will be as hard to shut down as bathtub gin was during Prohibition.
Never mind the Second Amendment, that would be against the Fourth Amendment.
FWIW, special methods can recover even serial numbers that were filed or etched off the gun; I’m unaware that “untraceable” guns are currently a problem.
You do know that Heller and McDonald covered that subject in minute detail?
Try well-regulated to mean “well-trained”, not “subject to as many disqualifications as possible”. Kinda hard to be well-trained in firearms if nobody is allowed any.
Maybe you should. As constructed from Latin, militia is a plural noun. People aren’t members of “a” militia, and none of the documents contemporary with the Second Amendment use that construction. The term consistently used is THE militia, and in contexts where it’s inarguably referring to the population at large.
Is that gun owners’ fault? The states abandoned the requirement to hold regular musters in the 19th century. And yes, people at the time worried that the right to assemble in arms would fade away.
I have never heard of any founder which thought that disarming the population would lead to an increase in liberty or good government. It seems disingenuous to imagine that they would have written the second amendment in order to give congress the right to disarm the people since that is the exact opposite of the words written. In fact most seemed to feel that standing armies and central banks were the greatest threats to a free people, and that a well armed populace was the final check on tyrants.
↑ ↑ ↑ This X 42 
Yes, the right to own guns is good. Abrogating the rights of others is bad. Glad I could answer that for you.
I’m amused that the left, which is predicated on resentment, refers to people defending their right to own guns as whiners.
Nice whine there.
The right to own firearms isn’t granted by the second amendment, simply protected by it. If the second was repealed, there would still be a right to own
Also, Elvis would be disgusted by your stance on guns.
Very informative post. Thanks.
So, the right to same sex marriage and abortion exist, even if outlawed? Nice to know.
Do you believe a right is given by the government?
A constitutional right? It’s given by the Constitution.
Were the second amendment never to have been enacted, there would be no constitutional right in the US to keep and bear arms. Were it to be repealed, there would again be no constitutional right in the UK to keep and bear arms.
People might of course continue to assert a moral right. But neither the legislature, the exetive or the judiciary would be constrained by a moral right in the way that they are constrained by a constitutional right.
See my original post. I never prefaced it with constitutional right.
Do you believe a right is given by the government?
Other than the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, I don’t believe there is any right to keep and bear arms. The only right to keep and bear arms that actually exists is the one granted by the consititution (not the government).
Others may assert that there is a right to keep and bear arms which is not granted by the government or the constitution, but merely recognised and respected by them. Those others are wrong; no such right exists.
Do you believe a right is given by the government? Not just the right to keep and bare arms, but rights in general.
It does depend on what you mean by “right”.
A legal right exists, obviously, only to the extent that the law provides it. We may assert, say, the right to vote as a democratic norm. But if the law says you have to be 18 (or 21) to vote, then a 17-year old (or a 21-year old) doesn’t have the right to vote. And if you live in a society that doesn’t conduct elections, then nobody has the right to vote.
So, a legal right to keep and bear arms exists if, and only if, the law says so. As it happens, US law does say so. But if it didn’t, then there would be no legal right to keep and bear arms.
If you understand law to be something that “government” does then, yes, legal rights are given by governments. Pretty much by definition.
Of course, we can assert moral rights, which are not given by governments. If the government strips Jews of citizenship and orders that they be rounded up, sent to concentration caps and murdered, then we can say that in that society Jews are denied civic rights and rights to liberty and life; they have no legal right to any of these things. But we can also criticise that society, and its government, for failing to respect what we might assert to be natural moral rights to life, to liberty, to equality of treatment, etc. Rights in that sense are not conferred by government.
The question really comes down, though, to “so what”? If the second amendment is repealed and the US enacts strict gun control legislation, gun rights advocates may assert that the US is failing to respect a natural or inherent moral right to keep and bear arms whose existence they believe in. But it’s already the case that the US routinely ignores rights whose existence is asserted by some; nothing is achieved by complaining that a particular governmental action fails to respect what is asserted to be a natural, inherent moral right.