fraggle said:
Jesus Christ! You are actually comparing the risk of being inconvenienced by a bunch of people with picket signs, to the risk of being killed by an asshole with a gun? With a straight face??? Seriously???
Uh, no, that was you - you started that ball rolling, by comparing a one in lightning bolt chance of being killed by a criminal psychopath who has smuggled a gun into a shopping mall with a global suppression of your right of peaceful assembly where you do enjoy it.
And yes, one considers the influence of psychiatric disorder when reading that kind of stuff, but it is so typical of suburbanites to dramatize their misconceived fears of the real world that medical issues are not really indicated in any individual case.
fraggle said:
I hope they're going after his parents. If you raise a kid like that, you should be thrown into a pit of vipers.
The common back story in these things is one of desperate parents bankrupting themselves on psychiatrists, calling police or social services, trying to get some attention, help, etc, for years prior. But don't let that curb your enthusiasm in pursuit of the acceptable witch.
fraggle said:
Guns often are used to stop criminals.
Yet they kill five times as many innocent people as criminals.
And once again with the stupid. So? We have to politely try to fix your ignorance and carelessness every time you open your yap in this matter? How many times is enough? .
fraggle said:
My reward for allowing other people to have guns is my one-percent probability that some day one of the Paleolithic-throwbacks will SHOOT ME
Bullshit, technically. You almost certainly do not have a one percent of being shot in your life, should you ever make the calculation, and you know it.
And you do not "allow" other people to have guns. That isn't how it works, in the US.
pjdude said:
. the second amendment isn't about self defense its about national security. you can tell this by the fact it mentions national security and not anything about personal self defense.
The second amendment specifically mentions militia, which were (and usually are) by definition formed of private citizens armed with their own personal militia-grade weapons.
tiassa said:
This sort of myopia is fairly common. What you're not seeing, or, at least, not accounting for, is that even if you can bike to work, not everyone can.
Take the Seattle area. Most of the working people you will see in Seattle proper on any given day do not actually live in the city. Many simply cannot afford to.
So? As an example of the ridiculous situations allowing people to have accidents with their cars can create, that's a good one. All the more reason to pass such sensible legislation, and get people to take their driving seriously as the matter of life and death it most manifestly is. The society of responsible car owners (a term in need of definition, obviously) will have to adjust.
And it would be much, much simpler to make and enforce such eminently sensible laws regarding responsible car management, because driving is a privilege in the US - in my State, a privilege that can be revoked for dropping out of high school, or failing to meet one's child support obligations.
Consider the apparent absurdity of that situation - you can kill someone with a car and be on the road driving the next day, you can attempt suicide with a car and the authorities will not even take your license, but miss a couple of child support payments and you can lose your license even with a job hanging in the balance. Obviously the priorities here are out of whack - so we should fix them, eh?
tiassa said:
Look at our neighbor Iceaura. It is unfortunate that people's disagreements so often define their relationship; I would hope this occasion doesn't. However, I find his outlook inexplicable, and nothing he's offering is helpful toward resolving that problem. I mean, really? We're down to rejecting "sensible" laws because one doesn't like the senator whose name is on it
No, we're not. And no plain reading of my posts would suggest that.
You have a vendetta going here, and it's interfering with everything from your reading comprehension to your estimation of other people's political stances.
I am in favor of tight, sane, enforceable restrictions on firearms in the US - a serious tightening and cleaning up of the existing slipshod mess, including explicit assignment of responsibility to the right of gun possession. This has been my plain, clear, and repeated stance from my first appearance here, and the only political stance I have ever "advocated" here or anywhere. That's my "outlook", and it's hardly "inexplicable". And most - by far the majority of - gun owners seem to agree with me, including most NRA members.
In a thread devoted to "facts about guns", that's one of the few relevant facts on the table.
Contrast with this:
What's irrational about my fear of being one of the 30,000 Americans who will die this year because the National Rifle Assholes have control of Congress? I worry just as much as I do about being one of the 30,000 Americans who will die in road accidents. I wear my seat belt, I drive the safest car I can afford (a Mercedes-Benz SUV), and I never drive when I'm exhausted, intoxicated or distracted.
Not much I can do about the risk of guns. Those pendejos are everywhere.
You can not shoot yourself on purpose - that reduces your risk by 2/3. You can not keep a gun in your home where your family can get at it or you might shoot yourself cleaning it etc - another 5-10%. You can avoid financial dealings or hanging around with young male organized criminals in urban locations - another 15-20%. The rest is perhaps not as easily avoided - as with comparable hazards (lightning, food poisoning, etc), it would require alterations in lifestyle you may not wish to make - but we're down around the extra risk of eating peanut butter in large quantities, and far below the risk of watching too much television.
So panicky revocations of other people's Constitutional rights seem a bit disproportionate, as a response, in general, eh?
And btw: that SUV you drive? You are endangering other people with it. Such large, topheavy, and tall vehicles not only interfere with other people's vision and safety margins, but they inflict greater damage on other vehicles in crashes, they are more likely to go out of control during emergency maneuvers, they roll easier and take longer to brake to a stop, and so forth. If you like, I can maybe run the numbers for you and estimate how many extra people die and are badly injured every year due to the extra hazards of allowing private citizens to possess and drive SUVs, and we can compare that with the number of people killed by these random mass shootings every year - what do you think the numbers would show?