The apocalypse has indeed occurred, you are living on pre-purchased freeze-dried foods of which you have a 2 year supply until all others have staved to death or eaten each other, and hopeful that the 500,000 or so remaining people that haven't can get together with you and restore the USA. But you need your gun for defense as raids are attempted daily, and the battery in the gun has died. There haven't been batteries available for months.

Your attacker kills you.

There is nothing invalid about using defensive uses of guns by police and against animals, since if there were no gun available, the subject might have been attacked. The idea here is an argument against the prohibition of weapons. There are those that would even like to prohibit the police from having them. You are wrong about the number of phone calls, there were over 4000 in the study by Kleck, and were made to, if I remember right, every county in the USA.

Hmmm, I thought that was Gary Kleck's number, and was instead pulled out of a very scientific telephone survey of all the counties in the USA with specific questions about the defensive uses of guns. Remember, a defensive use of a gun does NOT require that the gun be fired, only that its presence, or credible presence is used to deter an attack. You simply infer you have a gun and the bad guy goes away, that's a defensive use of a gun. Its valid, because if guns were outlawed, the bad guy would not believe you when you infer you have a gun.

Your attacker has entered your house and is hunting for you. You hide in the closet. He opens the door and you shoot him, except with this gun that will probably fail to fire. Plus, your attacker may not even have a weapon. Yes, you still shoot him anyway, he's in your house...

Your attacker has broken into your house, you're hiding in the closet, he opens the closet. "Bang" and you win, if you don't have one of these defective guns. And some attackers aren't even armed anyway and yes, you still shoot them.

1) You pull the gun and pull the trigger, and nothing happens. Dead battery. Your attacker kills you.

2) You get wounded. Your own blood runs onto the sensor. It stops working. So does the gun. Your attacker kills you.

3) You have gloves on. The gun can't see your fingerprint. Your attacker kills you.

4) You take the gloves off, and its so cold you get frostbite and can't pull the trigger. Your attacker kills you.

5) A strong radio field interferes with the electronics in the gun. It won't fire. Your attacker kills you.

6) The gun gets wet, the waterproofing fails on your now 80 year old gun, it doesn't fire. Your attacker kills you.

7) You leave your gun in the car, its temperature reaches 190 degrees. The electronics won't work at 190 degrees. Your attacker kills you.

8) The electronics simply fails for any number of reasons. Your attacker kills you.

9) You're wounded. You throw the gun to your wife / friend / lover to continue the defense. It doesn't recognize their fingerprints. Your attacker kills you, rapes her.

10) The electronics fails. You get it repaired. Now it works sometimes, doesn't sometimes. The tech can't find the problem. Your attacker kills you.

Yeah, cool - California is too dangerous. Just bring it here to Virginia, and its jobs with it. We're not all a bunch of cowardly environmental alarmists hiding under the bed from the dust and such. If there's a hurricane, we'll rebuild it. If there's an earthquake, we'll rebuild it. If it leaks something, we'll clean it up. And we will relax, 'cuz we know in the end everything will be alright.

We can kill people with environomental contamination, or we can kill people by casting them into poverty because there are no jobs, said jobs being overseas, or in another state, or simply not existing anywhere. What's worse? I mean, people die, either way. People in poverty die about 6.5 years before they otherwise would. We have about 47 million in poverty, so that's a lot of "death" out there and a lot of the reason for the poverty is the environmental obstructions to industry.

The environmental extremists need to realize that they're not saving anyone, really.

Especially important when the objective is to mine billions of dollars of natural resources out of an asteroid...

And then it'll be too expensive or too heavy or too bulky or too whatever to use in electric cars, which is where we really need it.

And its really 20 years away, don'tcha know?

Yet another story about a 3X or 10X or whateverX improvement on Li-Ion batteries that will never, ever get out of the lab. or if it does, will be too delicate or too slow or too expensive or too whatever to use in electric cars.

If we ever do get the electric car, then we only have to start work on the 86 or so nuke power plants of the same size as the one at Palo Verde, Az, our largest, in order to completely replace petroleum and leave the oil in the ground. Of course, the sad thing there is going back to propellers, connected to electric motors, 'cuz there's no electric substituted for a jet engine.

But of course we can't build even 1 nuke because of the envirowackos, so until they get the H out of the way, we might as well continue drilling...

Wanna fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax eliminates the income taxes and the IRS, both good things, but also institutes a sales tax on new retail items and services for sale. It has a mechanism called the "prebate" that pays each citizen enough money to pay the Fair Tax on the basic living expenses of someone making money at the poverty level. Every citizen from your favorite street person all the way up to Bill Gates gets this prebate.

Significantly, non-citizens, such as these foreigners working here, DO NOT get the prebate. That means that they will not get the monthly payment from the gov't to defray the cost of the Fair Tax for spending up to the poverty level. That means that if they want to send our dollars back to the old country, they're going to have to do it without help from us. That will make them demand more $$$ from employers here, and make the playing field a bit more level. No more taking American jobs just because you're sole claim to fame is being willing to work for peanuts.

Such policies have raised 250,000,000 people out of poverty in India and 400,000,000 people out of poverty in China. Yes, they do work. They're just not working here because they've been taxed and regulated out of the country.

Liberalism is the ideology of envy, resentment, hatred, and self hate - which you demonstrate by your "asshat company's pursuit of profits" phrase. In reality, that pursuit of profits is repeated on a personal level for every one of us. But with the company operating nearby, many local people's pursuit of profits, to get or keep themselves out of poverty, works better than if the company is NOT nearby.

They're likely to start fracking in this area. I say bring it on. If there's a minor earthquake and something cracks or moves, or maybe one of my trophies falls off a shelf and breaks, well, that's what I have insurance for...

The "ground water contamination" is, if you look at the article, from METHANE, where some water wells have had methane for decades. Its not a big deal, you can drink water with methane in it, and you only need a simple construction to vent off the dissolved gas so that it doesn't accumulate in the house and blow something up.

Methane in drinking water occurs naturally, and as a result of coal mining operations, and sometimes any sort of drilling, with or without fracking. The whole thing is yet another "Lets tear America down" pack of lies, and the sooner we buck up and quit being scared of the boogey men that are peddling this nonsense, the better off we'll all be.

You got it - these people that attack any economic activity at all are enemies of the country. Hang 'em from the lamp posts, I say. They will all have us crawling around with sub-poverty income if we let them make us afraid of absolutely everything that involves turning a wrench or drilling a hole...