No, they only level the playing field. While having a gun will deter the criminal that doesn't want confrontation, it doesn't deter the criminal that is looking to steal guns. It is a simple concept that seems to be lost to the anti gun types.

Tough guy? No, but old enough to have known a few people who committed suicide. People like to blame others as a means of coping. That is human nature. Emotion causes people to act in strange ways. Unfortunately, we now have a society that can't deal with death without blaming somebody or something. For example, take the recent school shootings in Connecticut. While we do give casual blame to Adam Lanza, society can't hold him accountable since he took his own life. So instead we blame the guns. In this case society can't hold Aaron Swartz to blame, so we blame MIT. BAH!

You alluded to untreated mental illness, and I agree that more can be done in this arena. But we need to stop blaming others for somebodies decision to commit suicide.

I won't make the same claim for children, but when an adult commits suicide, the only one responsible, is that individual. I don't care how much somebody verbally abuses you, the only person who can be blamed, if you commit suicide, is you. That doesn't mean that other people are not jerks, but you can not blame them for somebody else's decision to take their own life. Along those same lines, this idea that people should be able to spot the warning signs is also asinine. Unless they actually tell you that they are going to end their life, you probably won't recognized the difference between somebody planning to take their own life to one who is just introverted. In this case, MIT can look at their internal policies to appease the touchy feely types, but there is no reason they should have to do so.

The only people I will feel sorry for are the close friends and family who cared about Aaron Swartz.

I think Anonymous is missing the concept a bit here. You can protest a business with a sign and megaphone, but you are not allowed to stop people from patronising that business. Very rare is it that a DDoS doesn't affect somebodies business. Most often, it affects somebody not even related to who the attacker is intending. If you want to protest, there are non disruptive methods to use, DDoS shouldn't be one of them.

So far, I have heard nothing but dumb ideas from the gun control folks. But in intrest of giving you the answer you request, here you go.

The Second Ammendment was written as a means to protect the population from tyrany. If all guns become programable to not allow them to fire at the government, you have effectively removed that protection the second ammenment provided.

Compromise on this issue is not what we need. There are plenty of gun laws on the books already. There is a mountain of evidence to show that more gun laws have a negative relationship to crime rates. Sadly, most of that evidence is ignored by the media, or at least they cherry pick stories. It is all about ratings you know.

However, if a solution to a preceived problem is what the population is asking for, then how about this: Educating the populace on proper gun safety (and god forbid terminology) would do more to protect against deaths from accedental discharge than any new regulation against guns. I offer as ancedotal evidence, the country of sweden. They require the general population to serve in the militia and train them. They even arm them with fully automatic weapons. Yet they have very little crime comparitively speaking. I possit that it isn't the number or even the type of gun that makes the difference, but the education level provided.

I would say that guns do have a peacefull purpose.

The very fact that a populace is armed means the government remains relatively peaceful torwads that population. It is when the populace is unarmed, that tyranical governments do their worst. That doesn't mean that it will always happen, but there is nothing to stop it if you are unarmed.

One has to pick their path.

The things that really sticks out in this saga are 1) Manning had legal resources available to him to expose wrong doing in the classified world. He chose to ignore that route and used the media instead. 2) Lamo looked at the shear number of documents and had to make a choice to either do nothing with the possibility of many people being killed, or turn Manning in with the possibility of facing the death penalty. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

This saga has parallels in history. Think back to the first atomic bombs dropped on Japan. There were those in the program that had to come to grips with the fact that the work they did led to 250,000+ dead. They had basically two choices. Accept the notion that dropping those bombs led the the end of the war and ultimately reduce the total number of dead, or go crazy thinking otherwise, since we can never know for sure.

Right or wrong, Lamo chose his path and I will not fault him for it. Manning on the other hand choose poorly.

I have blamed the mainstream media for this, but I suspect the public education system should get some credit for this as well. All you have stated above is not even half of the story. But it is the story that is most told the most often. There are many good books out there that explain the real issues behind the various crashes in the economy over the years. In every case, if the government had stayed out of the market, it would have corrected itself through price variations. Leave the risk to the businesses and out of the governments hands.

In every case, the government perceived a problem and tried to fix it, thereby making things worse in the long run. Blaming the S&L failures on deregulation, ignores the fact that they were forced into making risky loans by the government. All in the name of helping the poor. A good intention to be sure, but again the unintended consequence came back to haunt them.

The EPA is by and large the biggest hindrance to becoming a successful starting business. They have been responsible for far more legislation than any other government agency. You can give credit to the EPA for many good things, but the unintended consequences now outweigh the good.

Again, as I stated above, It's one thing to require businesses not to pollute beyond a given level. It is a completely different matter when they regulate how to accomplish that goal.

Ask yourself this. What EPA regulation will you break by opening a lemonade stand in your front yard? If you don't know, then you don't understand just how bad the over regulation has become.

The Glass-Steagal Act... really.

I offter this for your viewing pleasure, as Yaron Brook explains it far better than I ever could.

The Clean air and water act was a knee jerk reaction to a problem that could have easily been solved with just the court system. It continues to cause many business to hire teams of lawyers just to insure they meet the letter of the law. It does very little to actually prevent pollution and cost tax payers and businesses far too much.

It is one thing to require businesses to not pollute beyond a certain level. It is a completely different thing to dictate how they will accomplish that process.

Also, using Beijing as anecdotal evidence is a bit of a straw man. They do not and never have had a capitalist society.

I will actually give this one to you, but understand that this was a regulation across the entire population and not against a specific industry.

Please don't confuse regulations with government provided service. Reual electrification was nothing more that the government paying for the rural communities to have electricity. It was not a regulation of private business.

Susana Martinez has been cleaning up the corruption that was the Bill Richardson legacy. Hardly what I would call shortsighted or dumb. My guess is that she cut some entitlement program that you were sucking at the teat of.

Sadly, this tends to be the on going idea popular with the mainstream media. It is, however, incorrect. It was the regulations of the banking sector that caused the banks to look for new ways to make money. ie. sub prime loans. Had the government not regulated banks they would have used the standard model of intrest rates and fees to make money. Instead, the government decided that part of the population that is high risk, needed to be given loans to purchase a home. It was the action of forcing banks to provide those loans that removed the risk to banks and placed it on the tax payers. It wasn't the lack of regulation, but rather the added regulation that put us into the situation that then required a bailout.