I have a smart phone but an automatic (automatically winding, mechanical) watch. I have zero interest in replacing my watch with a digital "smart" watch. I don't expect there are many others that do, either. The market may gradually be eroding on its own - in no small part due to the flood of cheap Chinese-made mechanical watches that are closing in on 99% as accurate as the Swiss and Japanese models - but the smart watches aren't much of a factor in that happening.

The only case I have heard of that happening was when the photographer had signed the contract to do it, and then realized after signing that it was a gay wedding. I have not heard of anyone being forced to do anything for a homosexual couple that they had not already signed up for. It was the photographer's own dumbass fault for not having looked more closely at the names of the customers.

Even facebook and Obama haven't been on the front page of slashdot as many times in the past two weeks as he has.

I guess that makes it similar to the pot debate here, then. When debating pot on slashdot (really, debating is not an accurate term as no debate is allowed) you either support everyone getting as stoned as they want, any where they happen to be, any time they want, with no consequences whatsoever, or you are a goddamned fascist bastard from hell. Also similar I see lies from both sides.

Clearly. The actual tragedy though is that mental health ends up bundled into the same category now as well.

... crap that should've been Chuck Lorre. My bad.

It's one thing to be an ego-maniacal jackass on camera, it's another thing to do it in person. Can the most watched TV show in the world survive without its top star? Al Lorre would suggest they might be able to pull off a replacement - here's hoping it isn't Ashton Kutcher though.

To be honest, I was expecting the slashdot conservative majority would have been at least a little more sane in their response. I never advocated for taking guns away, I just advocated for being more careful with them. They instead twisted it to their favorite extreme in reply and moderated according to their fears.

And indeed a dog is one of many things on the list of "better ideas than loaded unlocked gun laying around" in terms of defense and support.

You're welcome, and thank you as well. That is one of several pro-suicide comments that came out in that thread but it was particularly one of the most crass of the lot. I wish I could just write it off as people trolling but it makes too much of a pattern to suggest that to be the case. Perhaps semi-random population control is part of the conservative plan to reduce health care costs?

Maybe it's the entire plan?

Kicking the can down the road is still (very marginally) better than the US-endorsed strategy to date of pretending the can doesn't exist.

Thank you for coming in to the discussion. It is good to see at least one other sane person responding to this.

I'm sorry that mental health is a concept that so thoroughly escapes you. The kind of ignorance that you are so proudly putting on display is frightening. If you want to know why mental health is taken so lightly in this country, go look in the mirror. It's mentalities exactly like your own that encourage people not to seek the care they need.

Put down your Ayn Rand for a moment and consider that teenage boy is someone's son. Someone will miss him if he takes his own life. As a society we have a responsibility to help those who find themselves in that situation. Leaving deadly weapons in easy reach is not the answer. If you leave the gun laying around for him there is a very real chance that he will take down someone else before turning the weapon on himself.

First of all, they are dramatically underreported, as has been shown numerous times. Second of all, I mentioned shootings, not just deaths. Fortunately a fair number of the shooting victims manage to survive, but that is only by luck (usually aided by the fact that the accidental shooter is often a child as well).

Read the news. It is not hard to find an accidental shooting every single day in this country that involves a child. Hell, there were three accidental shootings in Houston involving children over the weekend. It does happen every day, and it is the fault of irresponsible gun owners.

Did I say anything about taking away rights? No, I did not. I even said that most owners are responsible. I just want people to be responsible. We have a lot of irresponsible shit-heads leaving loaded unlocked weapons sitting around like they are toys, and this is the result.

And your bit about the age of a child is a straw man argument. I follow the standard definition of a child being under 18. And even at that the accidental shootings that I pay the most attention to are the ones involving kids under 10.