Where do you come up with such things? It is a major talking point of the NRA that we should already be enforcing the laws we have, rather than passing new ones. It's the polticians—like the good governor of my home state, New York—who rush to pass laws for the purpose of getting on television and having something to write home to their constituents about. Rarely is any thought given to how effective any law will be or the on-going costs of enforcing laws. And, meanwhile, just to continue this, we load up our prisons with non-violent offenders because of the drug bogeyman and return unreformed, violent criminals to society while they are still in their prime years. If we want to reduce crime, we'd do some serious thinking about it, and not jump on the bandwagon of what "everybody" knows.

How does this analogy hold up? The gun crimes that occur every year, do you think the majority of them are the result of inexperience, recklessness, and bad judgment, or do you think they're the result of the deliberate intent of criminals?

And they haven't had a rare but spectacularly televisable gun crime in all those years.

FTFY

You do realize that, statistically speaking, hardly any deaths in this country of 300-plus million people occur per year as a result of being on the wrong end of an "assault" rifle, and that most of the gun deaths occur from handguns, right?

Never mind extreme sports. Have you looked to see how many children drown in swimming pools each year?

Why bother comparing other countries, when you've got 50 different states right here in this country to compare? Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have high levels of gun ownership and very liberal gun laws—that's "liberal" in the sense of free—and yet are among the safest states in the U.S. in which to live. The picture is far more complicated than "guns, bad."

It's unfortunate that we call these things "hate crimes," because now it seems like simple hatred qualifies one for extra prosecutorial attention. In the U.S., the seminal hate crime was lynching. On the face of it, to the casual observer, lynching would seem like a simple murder—mob murder, perhaps. But it's more than that. Lynching was a punishment given to "uppity" blacks, and it's purpose was not merely to punish, rightly or wrongly, any particular individual but to terrorize an entire population. Lynching was meant as a public spectacle to keep the black community in line. Now, in a sane state, this would be a crime; but, back in the day, Southern law enforcement and Southern juries would look the other way and tacitly support lynching. That's why the federal government got involved. Otherwise, since simple murders are the province of the states, under our constitution, the federal government would have no business prosecuting. The federal government created this "hate crime" as a means of expanding its jurisdiction.

Essentially, properly conceived, a "hate crime" is a kind of terrorism—and it's bona fide terrorism, in this case. It's using egregious violence to intimidate a civilian population. It think, however, that prosecutors today, eager for publicity, pull out the "hate crime" card at every opportunity; and a gullible and uncritical public more or less eats it up. It's being used in too many instances. It's being misused.

Let's say two men, one black and one white, get into a bar fight. The white man is the instigator and gets the best of the black man. The cops come and arrest the white man for assault. Okay, that sounds about right. Now, let's just suppose that, in the course of the fight, the white man directs a rather unkind, racially charged epithet towards the black man. That's not nice. But, in most circumstances, it's a long way away from an action that terrorizes an entire community.

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with extending the notion of hate crimes to simple prejudice—or even gross rudeness. In most cases, even though there may be "hate," we should not be treating it as a separate crime.

Please... this is news for nerds because the guy speaks Latin. How geeky is that!

[W]ould this be an example of the paradox of virtuous meritocracy undermining equality of opportunity?"

I'm not saying that we should necessarily give precedence to immigration applications from STEM candidates; I take exception to the assumptions in the statement I quoted. No country, not even the United States, owes "equality of opportunity" to those who have not yet entered the country. Do we owe the whole world this?

My father came to this country over 50 years ago under the conditions of "what can you do for the U.S." There had to be a recognized need for his skills and someone had to sponsor him. I see no reason for a completely egalitarian lottery. Unless we're going to open the floodgates, it makes sense to pick and choose to some degree.

Perhaps these terrorists have learned to launch nuclear weapons from their iPhones!

That 1st Amendment bullcrap sure has saved them from tyranny and kept up freedom, dontcha think—ha-ha, LOL, and all that crap.

Thank goodness Europe will be safe now from those assault Macs.

The US has not been at risk of invasion for two centuries.

And that's like forever in Internet time.

Ha! I get what you're saying. But I only mean to point out what his theory suggests about human psychology and cognition. People find it difficult—or at least awkward—to conceive of action without there being an actor. It seems this preconception is more or less hardwired, a cognitive bias of sorts.

It may make no sense to study Aristotle's physics in physics class, but I wouldn't go so far as the guy you're responding to and say there's no reason to bother studying Aristotle's physics. I'm always intrigued that Aristotle explanation for gravity was something along the lines of things "wanting" to return to their "natural" state (or something like that). From a psychological point of view, that kind of anthropomorphization is really intriguing.

It seems like it's easier for human beings to think this way. Just take a look at what a difficult time people have reasoning about evolution and natural selection (and I'm talking about people who don't dispute their validity). It's all "nature wants" and "nature does" this or that—it's all an assumed active voice and teleology. You'd think we might have grasped a distinction like this after 2,400 years.