WHy did they choose to use guns? Do you think they flipped a coin? Drew straws? Or did they think as a tool that guns would be the better choice for their purposes? I am willing to bet all the money I have it is the latter.
You do this kind of thing all the time, which is why I find very limited usefulness in talking to you. As in very. I did not say guns are teh sole problem. Access to guns is part of the problem. How is that an absolutist position? My skepticism that you refer to is not that nothing can be done. I doubt anything useful will be done even at the margins. My point about the existing proliferation of weapons is that there are so many of them out there that it would be a huge and problematic undertaking to really get a handle on the problem. So I don't think that will happen. As for your second paragraph, whether guns have changed behavior is a straw man. The difference is in how people have chosen to use them. No one is saying it is JUST availability. Again, that is your straw man. But making guns easily available to those who intend to do harm is clearly part of hte problem. People like you who use straw men in arguments are not engaging in honest discourse. So for you to say I am the problem is laughable.
Was just joking dude. This is a clusterfuck that I only think will get worse and I don't have any easy fixes. Or hard ones for that matter. _
No, there's no Strawman in my post. Those scenarios address s real issue that is part of the problem. You don't want to have an honest discourse on the problem, which requires discussing those things, so you attempt to dismiss them as Strawman fallacies. You can't argue that the proliferation of guns makes the problem unsolvable and then argue that you aren't saying that guns aren't the sole problem. If attitudes are the primary issue, and you can change the attitudes, then the guns become irrelevant.
This may seem like a digression, but I wonder how many are familiar with the history of Michael Collins. Widely regarded as the father of the techniques of modern urban guerilla warfare, he was admired by people as diverse as Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and not just lefties but also Yitzak Shamir, and as I understand it the Taliban. His methods are generally described as falling into the category of asymmetrical warfare. And he developed many of them. Quite the creative fellow, imo. After centuries of using other more conventional means of overthrowing British rule in Ireland, Collins in effect succeeded when all those other means had failed. In so doing he did not make use of some new technology, or weapons that did not previously exist. No. He developed a new way to use EXISTING weapons. And it wasn't those weapons that changed the situation. It was his new approach to using them that changed everything. I think there is an analogy here to what we are seeing today. The methods of terror (and to be clear some then and now describe Collins as a terrorist) have been shown to be very difficult to thwart, although they have been here and there. Damage has been limited, in the sense that things would have been worse if nothng had been done. But the real analogy is that when people at war with you begin using different tactics to effect, you have to acknowledge that the ballgame has changed. It will call for a different response.
I agree. But we have to either give up or acknowledge that the comforting ways we looked at this sort of thing before are no longer helpful.
To be clear I did not mean to say that the proliferation of guns in and of itself makes the problem unsolvable. It is that it makes what would otherwise help solve the problem much more difficult, and at a cost that I doubt there will be the political will to do. At this point and in that connection there is nowhere near the political will to do so, in large part because of the vehement opposition of gun owners and of hte gun industry.
Obviously because 1). they had guns 2). easier done with guns but determined terrorists (I believe these two fit this category) would find a way to inflict damage without guns - homemade bombs, or for instance, ramming a truck into a group of people would most likely kill as many.
I know with this post I'm jumping into a topic people feel very strongly about and my intentions are not to be insulting, come off as a, 'know it all' or get into an argument. I simply want to communicate my thoughts on the Second Amendment. My beliefs are shared by MANY others and again, just providing a different view point. Additionally, I chose to respond to your post because you seem to be a reasonable person from what I gather. The framers/authors of the U.S. Constitution absolutely intended to empower, 'We the People'. It is a document that should leave absolutely zero doubt to the reader as to its meaning as there is no room for interpretation when read without an ax to grind. For example the Second Amendment; "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." When you consider that each state had its own army (national guard) and the nation had the continental army (U.S. armed forces) the 'well regulated militia' can only mean one thing, especially when you consider the reference to the PEOPLE. Furthermore, when you consider the climate the document was written in, an intellectually honest person will understand that not only the Second Amendment but the Document in its entirety was written to empower, 'We the People'. The reason this is important is so that we do not become subjects of a tyrannical regime. We have the ability to arm ourselves and fight all enemies foreign and domestic. I don't have all the answers but one thing I know for sure. Just because you or anyone else doesn't value you the 2nd Amendment as much as the others it doesn't make it any less important to me. A judge that legislates from the bench or partisan career politicians do not get to decide my fate. I will decide my fate and that is exactly what the framers had in mind. You can't support only part of the Constitution and not the other parts you deem outdated because it doesn't fit your utopic vision of what society should be. We are having these problems because of decades and decades of impotent leadership in this country that allows problems to fester and blatantly support violent militants in both hemispheres with weapons. The American people have historically, enjoyed a level of freedom that few know. Part of that freedom is the ability to stand up and fight back as a citizen. I for one do not trust the U.S. federal govt. and don't trust politicians with my safety or the safety of my family. For this reason, my brothers and I are armed. We don't want a fight, the fight is not glorious, but we will be ready for it. There will always be danger, always lurking either thousands of miles away or right at your boarder, or in this case right in your city a fiend that intends to take everything from you and destroy you simply because of who you are. There will also always be good guys with guns just as there was good guys with muskets or swords in days past ready to fight back.
Not to open another can of worms but it's like the "you can't legislate morality"argument both sides of the aisle have trotted out at various times. Question is, whose morality is supposedly in play or (even more absurdly) is "at stake?" Name one good band to come out of China?
What does it have to do with these assholes that killed a bunch of people at a holiday party? You make the claim that "gun lovers are ruining this country" and then point at the fact that people who are on a no-fly list can buy a gun. How are the two related? Of course it's perfectly reasonable to not allow people who are true enemies of the state to buy guns. But why is this suddenly an issue when it has nothing to do with what happened? Ohh - look over here at this shiny thingy. I asked you how someone gets on the no-fly list. Do you know how? Why don't you answer the question? Do they get due process? The law sounds perfectly logical at face value, so I question why it's not already a law. It's reasonable to think maybe it's not a law because there hasn't been a good bill proposed that prevents political abuse of the power of putting people on the no-fly list. That is my only point. I don't think it's unreasonable to be cautious with the powers we give government. Call it paranoid, I don't really care what a megalomaniac who has no interest in discussion other than to arrogantly talk down to others, thinks about my point of view.
That's exactly my point. There is no political desire to solve the problem because both sides are taking extreme and contrary positions and they are each determined to defend their positions from the other even if it means taking extreme and ridiculous positions to do so. Nobody is interested in the honest discourse of the problem. It's sheer lunacy. If one side is consistently arguing that guns are the primary problem the other side defends it by taking the polar opposite position and claiming they aren't the problem at all. This is truly a scenario where the truth is in the middle. Guns are part of the problem, so how do we go about rectifying that without completely trampling on the rights that permit them?
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/...s-residents-carry-licensed-firearms/76724026/ this is how we do it outside of the city.
i like that he subtly lets everyone know there might be a lot of guns out if you decide to try to get yourself on cnn. an armed society is a polite society
You realize that since the mid 90's gun violence in the U.S. Has been going down? I bet you do but you are just ignorant of that stat.
