Are there any grammar rules at all?
It’s true I learned English several decades ago.
Whether I’m a fanatic prescriptivist or not remains to be seen. I’d say that calling someone else a “fanatic prescriptivist” when confronted with a grammatical error is the domain of those lazy sots unwilling to learn and apply the correct rules of grammar and too stubborn to simply admit an error.
But that’s just me.
Well, our hour is up, but I think we’ve definitely made some progress here in self-realization.
WTF are you talking about? You think that the Syrian revolt would work without any small arms? George Washington also had artillery at his disposal but he couldn’t have won without the armed colonists. Syrian rebels might have a few defecting military divisions (companies?) but they need the armed civilian rebels.
And just for the record, machine guns and RPGs are (or can be) small arms). Not that I think that RPGs are necessarily covered by the second amendment.
So the folks in communist countries are less exploited?
If gun confiscation fans don’t want to be accused of being Marxists who have contempt for human values, maybe they shouldn’t explicitly declare themselves as such.
What comparison were you referring to? Der Trihs claimed that the USA was virtually single-handedly responsible for flooding the western hemisphere with guns; I pointed out evidence that that’s not so.
Stupid gun confiscator Rick Perlstein posted this on Facebook on Sunday:
This is the “rational discourse” and “common sense solution” we’ve all been hearing about: anyone who opposes the total confiscation of guns for any reason is a monster who is incapable of feeling sad when children die. People who don’t change their principles based on “video greeting cards” are intractable idiots. The other side should be crushed because reasoning with them is hard.
Is it any wonder this issue is such a guaranteed loser in American politics?
You might try reading what you quoted, since it doesn’t say any of that.
And most Americans support gun control legislation.
To recapitulate:
Nevermind whether Mr. Trihs is exaggerating. That’s not the issue at the moment. Mr. Bricker chose to hijack the thread with a pedantic “correction” of grammar:
When one insists on pedantry, one should at least be correct. 
But Bricker isn’t. Oh, his “than they” isn’t wrong but it is inferior to “than them” even to a grammarian, and certainly so to ordinary speakers.
When I was a kid I wasn’t one to tear the wings off flies or anything like that. But I confess I did goad Bricker deliberately, pointing out his mistake, just to see if he was man enough to admit error. Here’s what we got instead:
In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary we learn that than is shown as a preposition as well as a conjunction, with the example “you are older than me” and the comment
[QUOTE=]
After 200 years of innocent if occasional use, the preposition than was called into question by 18th century grammarians.
… In short, you can use than either as a conjunction or as a preposition.
First Known Use of THAN [as a preposition] 1560
[/QUOTE]
I also found comments by a Professor of Linguistics:
I should apologize for this digression, but it may be on-topic. Bricker is certainly stupid, and is probably a gun nut as well. I do hope Bricker goes back to trolling drunk-tanks for plea bargains, or whatever it is that he’s actually competent to do. 
Why do I pick on Bricker? Certainly there are right-wingers at SDMB just as obnoxious as him and far more stupid. It’s because he’s never apologized for the time he defecated in my thread.
Oh, he keeps repeating that he did apologize but that’s a lie. What he did was just acknowledge what was already apparent: that he’d defecated in the thread and his shit was malodorous. What he needed to do was to post something like:
And you chose to continue it.
Dude, I’m hardly right-wing or a Bricker fan in general but you’re letting him live rent-free in your head. Let it go, man.
Obnoxious as he.
d&r
“…just as obnoxious as HE…”
ETA: Ninja’d by Nars!!
This just in: Jihawg Ammo, guaranteed “haraam” (unclean) due to using pork in the outer coating. Deny suicidal jihadists entry to paradise!
I feel like your joke deleted a hundred big belly laughs from my memory, like I had never seen Young Frankenstein or Airplane.
Really? You know of no gun advocates who claim that the Second Amendment’s purpose is to protect citizens from their government?
Handguns and shotguns won’t help against tanks and bombers. You need your own tanks and bombers to defeat Obama’s plan to occupy Texas with UN troops.
Do you really think all of the 1 in 2 Americans who owns guns is a conspiracy theorist plotting a coup? Get out of your bubble. There are plenty of gun owners and gun rights supporters who are normal people. There are several million of them who are Democrats.
I believe that every gun owner who justifes gun ownership as a deterrent to tyranny envisions an eventuality under which overthrowing the federal government is necessary. I don’t know what fraction of the total gun owners they represent, but the ones that do are advocating the violent overthrow of the government.
Do you really think that resolving to protect yourself if you are ever unjustly attacked by the government is the same as plotting a coup?
Do you really think that the only way to counter an assertion that NOBODY thinks X is to prove that 150 million people think X?
If you don’t think both of those things, then why did you write such a bullshit post?
There are lots of gun owners who are normal and responsible people. Point of fact, the whole effort to apply sensible restrictions to gun ownership depends on them.
“Ninjaed,” if you want to get picky, but I am more shocked at the number of people in this hijack who use contractions while they try to sound pedantic.