Says the guy who can't bother to make on Citation when I back up what I say with sources. You never even tried to seriously dispute them. No, it was you who insulted me first by refusing to abide by the burden of proof in a debate. You were the one who claimed all of these things were possible and yet you have refused to offer any proof. I'm only making it plainly obvious to everyone else what the actual sentiment contained behind your words is. ;p

Well gee thar buddy, if that's the way you want to play it, go right ahead. ;p
But you know like Mitt Romney, you could've cleared this one up really quickly, especially since you don't have such a good track record with how you've been dodging things I've been saying. Like how the Tax Calculator was supposedly off on payroll taxes...but no, please proceed.

Just because everyone gets to go to school does not mean everyone learns there. Both the quality of the school AND the quality of the home life of millions of Americans living at or near the poverty line can create calamitous conditions which make it very difficult for children to stay involved and want to learn. Poverty is often a generational trap with one generation after another spreading dysfunctional behavior that without intervention of some kind will just continue on and on.

SNAP is not always available to single individuals and the benefit is rarely enough to feed a family. The minimum benefit is around $200 a month, and not everyone has been personally taught or equipped with how to make that money last the most. Here's another example of the same principle at work with college.

When you grow up in those circumstances no one often tells you at all or makes all of the information available in the manner you might need to make sure you can even do things like get aid paperwork in on time. These situations breed people who are uniquely unaware of how to obtain the proper help even when it's available to them.

Which is of course Asinine because you're treating all regulation and all expenses as equal when they are inherently not. Simple Econ 101 tells us that different investments have different money multiplier effects on the economy. You generate more wealth when you invest smartly, and in many cases the biggest investments are poverty programs like Food Stamps ($1.83 generated for every $1 spent) and Unemployment Insurance.

Sadly, Science disagrees about the rational part. ;p

I'm just taking this space to laugh at you again. Because I was trying to show you the numbers and you just went and said all my numbers were wrong, because you said so. So much for Mr. Superior Rational Mind. ;p

Do you remember the Social Mobility stuff I pointed you to? This is largely the case today for EVERYONE regardless.

Which is like saying that the answer to Rape/Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence is to get government out of peoples domestic lives...despite the numbers going against that belief in just about every instance. Humans aren't machines and trauma causes the rational mind to break down or at the very least malfunction in some pretty horrendous ways.

Couldn't have said it better myself! ;p

And you can't even tell me what I got wrong or why. I posted numbers, you said they were wrong, and refused to elaborate. Do you care to correct this or shall we just end the discussion now? I think it's pretty obvious to anyone else where you stand. ;D

And so what? Your ability to spend less than $1,000 a month now may have been predicated on some entirely exotic arrangements you were able to make with other people out of sheer luck/privilege. You need to do more than say "I did it myself! why is everyone else so darned lazy?!" I make a lot of money right now because I was lucky enough to develop skills in high demand and figure out a way to market myself. I was lucky, not everyone's in the same boat as me. For all I know you only spend $1,000 a month because your Rich parents bought you a condo and pay for any of your emergencies. You again have failed to do your work here in trying to explain how your situation represents a series of choices that are universally available to everyone. Claiming something is true is not the same thing as proving it is, in fact, true.

And how are those investments going to get made? You were perhaps not understanding my larger point regarding education. Those who live in poverty simply do not get a good education, food insecurity makes learning harder, uninvolved and/or stressed out (possibly even abusive) parents also works against this as does the fact that our current model of funding education entrenches privilege by allowing the wealthy to cloister their children. Their development and access to opportunity is cut short from the start.

No, you really just need to understand my larger point. It is simply impossible to give people a basic education on anything if they're regularly worried about being shot, possibly by their own parents, and can't guarantee they'll even get a next meal (let alone have any idea how they're going to get it.) The type of psychological despair that is unique to the impoverished stunts their development and in every study we've born out this link between poverty and education outcomes.

It's not that people are lazy; it's that they're too busy trying to solve problems the rest of society doesn't ever deal with. This is why they seem to be so un-motivated or uninvolved, because they're living in a very different, far more insecure world and experiments on learned helplessness prove that this is what can happen to people if they grow up living under those sorts of conditions.

Send their children to America to work on a farm to exploit the currency exchange rate so that they can finally make enough money in Mexico to eat?
Something tells me this strategy isn't going to work again...

First you need to give some examples of people who can survive admirably on low wages with dignity. You can't just insinuate that people are able to live like that well without even the slightest shred of proof that is, in fact, the case. Not after I just posted links showing the crushing poverty many face. That's like saying "I'm going to pretend your evidence does not exist, because I simply don't like it!"

No, I mean if you get into a serious accident and have to spend two days in the hospital that the hospital bill alone if you have no health insurance will be $40,000. Yes, normally you have liability in the case of cars but people perform hit and runs every day so that means not everyone has their bills paid for but everyone who gets hit has to go to the hospital if they get injured. That right there is a classic example of how a single bill can destroy someone's earnings.

Secondly, $250 a month is not do-able for everyone. I even went so far to lay the math out to explain it, but apparently you do not like to give credit to anything which disagrees with your position regardless of its potential veracity.

LOL, your critical mistake is assuming these people have sufficient starting capital to make investments. Not all investments are created equal and you yourself should know that access to top funds with high returns is only available to the major players who have a considerable pot to invest. Not only that we have to deal with the consequences of low socioeconomic status, which often result in poor education outcomes and little interest that would even lead someone down the path of making proper investments let alone guarantee they would be able to pick smart long term investments to make for 45 years.

Remember that whole 2008 crash? Yeah, a lot of those middle-class investors like you're trying to encourage here lost their entire life savings because Goldman Sachs was able to pawn off all of its toxic assets onto pension funds and other investment vehicles predominantly used by America's non-mega-wealthy classes. Your advice does not in any way guarantee the outcome you assert and omits a great many determining factors which would work to prevent this outcome from being universally achievable.

Currently? We print it, and despite the unrelenting shrieks of the Austrians we have not had any runaway inflation even with three rounds of QE AND ongoing QE. "Money" in abstract is a tool for commerce, it represents liquid value for trade and it's an entirely abstract concept. Gold is not money, Silver is not money, Platinum is not money. All of those things are precious metals that while highly "Valued" are not universally valuable to everyone. So while Gold, Silver, and Platinum may be somewhat useful mediums of exchange they are nothing like the guarantees we have on requiring people to exchange paper dollars. With paper dollars even if someone has no use for Gold, Silver, or Platinum (even to trade with someone else) they can still buy and sell the items they want to customers who want them.

Why is it the Federal Government's job to ensure you get a return on your contribution? Why does our system of self-government have to be subordinate to our economic system? I'm not even necessarily saying that the government shouldn't try and make sure you can earn money that way. Merely that your ability to make money should be entirely secondary in relation to Government's primary mission of securing liberty and wider prosperity in equitable proportion to all citizens. You shouldn't be able to make money doing things we can prove are harmful to the wider society. Like the financial collusion which fostered the crash of 2008. That was the banks making their buck on the backs of pensioners and taxpayers, I hardly think we should pay "The Market" the kind of deference that allows those situations to happen.

The raw size of our debt doesn't matter so long as inflation keeps interest payments manageable. We can effectively "Borrow money" forever. You see, the error here is that you're comparing personal finances to Fiscal Policy of a nation state that prints its own money and borrows in its own currency. We are also the world's reserve currency, which gives us a pretty sweet deal when it comes to issuing bonds. Interest rates are so low right now people are effectively PAYING US to hold their money because of the week economy.

Now tell me again, what exactly is the means with which this debt is going to be an insurmountable problem? Can you actually do the math to show me how catastrophe is going to materialize? Because if not then you're no better than the Austrians who keep insisting that Weimar Germany and Greece are hiding around every corner.

Did you not read what I just wrote? They DO if people are too poor to pay to get themselves good food or medical care. Those people, are much more likely to get sick, and because we don't mandate paid sick-leave that means they're also the most likely to spread disease to everyone else. Similarly if they die, and they can't even afford a funeral plot, what exactly happens to the body? I mean it might get taken care of eventually, but by whom?

All of these things cause public health and sanitation issues because all of them contribute towards fostering an environment ideal for the unchecked spread of contagious disease. This occurring entirely because you decided to deny the poor proper access to the healthy food, medicine necessary to stay well, and in some cases the education necessary to even know how to take care of themselves at all.

I lied? What was the lie? What was the premise, why was the premise false, and what evidence do you have that I was being intellectually dishonest in making that statement? Secondly, are you telling me with a straight face that it will not create a public health hazard to have a very large underclass of poorly educated people who can't afford healthy food and can't afford proper medical care, and who probably can't afford to take off from work when they get sick? That won't contribute to the spread of disease? My point is that overall public health is determined by the general population's education in living healthy as well as their access to necessary resources such as food or medicine. Cut off a very large segment of the population from both of those and you significantly increase the risk of spreading disease because you are now forcing people to eat, live and work in unhealthy conditions. Do you wish to dispute this? Then please do so directly.

I'm financially illiterate? LOL, you couldn't even tell me why the paycheck calculator's numbers were wrong. By the way, I've gotten official pay stubs from multiple jobs and can assert therefore with at least some confidence that their payroll tax numbers have never been off. (State and Federal withholding do vary though but we were talking exclusively about Payroll taxes at the time) If you wish to say they're wrong you don't get to avoid the hard work of proving them wrong. After all, if the math is bad shouldn't someone so financially literate be able to refute that with THE CORRECT MATH? ;)

Like me? LOL! I make over 50K a year, and am easily going to be making over 100K per year when I retire. I do App development for a major advertiser and can easily get a referral to any number of large companies looking to pay around six figures for what I do. The only reason I'm not making six figures already is because I love where I work and value more in life than just dollar signs. I also happen to know what being poor is really like much more than most because unlike most of the spoiled children whose parents paid to send them to Ivy League schools I moved out on my own with money I had earned and started my life for myself over 350 miles away from where I was born with nothing other than a suitcase full of clothes and some personal knickknacks after high school.

I'm no Horatio Alger character, but I've actually lived at multiple ends of the socioeconomic spectrum and I am eternally grateful for the compassion living like that has taught me. Granted, I don't know what the truest despairs of crushing poverty are because I could have at any time called for outside support, I simply chose not to out of pride.

Oh, I do have plenty of angst, but it's nothing to do with my retirement savings. As for the compelling argument? That's easy, EMTLA requires the emergency room to treat anyone who has a serious health problem. This means that like it or not you are ALREADY paying for their mistakes, only, you are paying a lot more than you have to because you're only paying for the expensive surgeries and treatments that have to take place late into someone's condition because they were not able to start seeing a Dr. early and get proper preventative care.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and the numbers do bear this out in a lot of cases. So by agreeing to pay for everyone's healthcare we all actually save more money over the long term because we can smartly levy the taxes to make them as painless as possible for everyone, and also by putting the entire country into a single risk pool Uncle Sam is in a much better position economically to negotiate drug prices and the price of services in hospitals. This means that in many cases the ridiculous markups (over 400% in many cases) can be done away with, and since everyone is paying in who can afford to individual contributions are all much lower than they are now.

So really, you're not even debating about whether or not to pay for their mistakes you're merely negotiating on price. Now tell me, why would someone so smart and "financially literate" want to pay what could be 10x the cost? Sounds a little bit like a paranoid fear of Government is over-riding that sound judgement of yours. Of course I'd love to hear you explain how any of the above is still not sufficiently convincing (by bringing up additional verifiable problems I had not considered in my above statement.)

Your move. :)

Going to actually TRY to back that up with more than your own opinion or do we get to hear about how you, too, are "The Voice of God" who merely hath speak to fashion thine words into truth? ;p

Assuming you CAN save 10-20% per month. Tell me, how are wal-mart workers trying to support a family on minimum wage going to do that? They can only starve themselves so far before it cuts into their productivity after all. Not everyone has something to cut, hell even people who make more can get saddled with massive medical or student loan debts. Student loans, by the way, are non-dischargeable, which means you get the carry that lovely saddle to your grave no matter what happens.

Really? I can save $40,000 to cover an emergency hospitalization because a drunk driver just performed a hit and run on me? And I can do that making minimum wage?

Really? Even these folks here? (I can start quoting stories if you really aren't going to bother trying to understand my point here.)

Or your parents, damn them for being born poor! right?! ;p
Seeing as socioeconomic mobility is at its lowest levels ever.

LMAO! Here's an example (From a tax calculator) of what your average 40 hour minimum wage job paycheck is going to look like after withholding.
Bi-weekly Gross Pay $660.00
Federal Withholding $46.64
Social Security $40.92
Medicare $9.57
California $3.72
SDI $6.60
Net Pay $552.55

Now if you add up all the payroll taxes and multiply by 26 to get your yearly payroll tax cost? That's $1,581.06. That might be enough to cover regular preventative checkups if you're healthy and some prescriptions if you get sick. That's not enough to cover the cost of a serious disease or even a single 24 hour hospital state. Remember, not all insurance lets you get away with a quick co-pay, in many cases you have a deductible that has to be met first and that can be even higher than the number I gave above. Mine on my current plan for instance is $1750.

Now, if you were working SEVERAL jobs and managing 80 hours per week at three places total (which is what your typical minimum wage worker is doing) then yes, you MIGHT be able to afford healthcare IF YOU ARE SINGLE. Try doing that with a family to support. Rent for a two bedroom will easily run you at least $1200 anywhere reasonably populated, add on top of that food for several people, gas, essential toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc and that number gets stretched thin very quickly. Yes if you work three jobs you can probably still manage to survive, but you are effectively one disaster away from financial catastrophe.

More cost-effective compared to what? Letting poor people slowly starve to death on the streets until their rotting corpses choke our gutters? Oh certainly not! It's much cheaper to let the masses deal with the huge variety of public health and sanitation problems caused by creating a massive underclass who cannot even afford to eat or get treated for diseases and to refuse to pay to even haul the bodies off somewhere they don't regularly expose massive numbers of people to any number of contagious diseases! No, far cheaper to force everyone to deal with every problem ON THEIR OWN! and if they die? It was all THEIR FAULT for being stupid, the BEGGARS!

But, it is certainly much more empathetic than forcing everyone else to deal with the problems YOU created by hoarding all the wealth to yourself through your business practices which over generations CREATED THE POOR UNDERCLASS that now is too sick, feeble and week to take care of itself because you took away their only sources of food or medicine in the name of "cost cutting."

You sound like a kid who doesn't even know what the hell he's whining about. You have no numbers, no sources and I just managed to without even having to dig that deep refute about everything you just had to say on the matter. We are worse off according to what measure? You can't just say we're all worse off if you can't even explain quantifiably HOW we are worse off. You just said we're worse because: "Big Mean 'ol Uncle Sam wants to take care of those STUUUUUPID POORS, and I CANT STANDS IT RAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHH!!!"[/Golem]

You haven't actually explained fully what the harm caused by the program is and why the alternative is not only realistic but eminently achievable even in the worst scenarios of poverty. But you certainly wasted no time CLAIMING these things are so. You usually need to offer more than your own beliefs in your opinions as evidence that they are true. ;p

F@*!K The last sentence got trimmed. That was a link to a site that offers good historical analysis of the verbiage in the 2nd Amendment by looking at the writings of the Founders to explain what those words meant at the time. This is critical to understanding how the words have evolved since then, and how the problems we face have changed.

So glad you asked! The Guardian probably has the best full summary and charts but I can give you the same data a few ways. Sadly there's no report of guns per household but you can see the trends. Overall gun ownership is on the decline or stagnant while gun purchases are going up. Seems to suggest this quite strongly, yes?

Holy selective reading Batman! I think we're facing our arch-nemesis again ....The Straw-Man! The point is that you've can't even manage an actual intellectual defense the purpose of the 2nd amendment. You remind me of how at the opening of Starship Troopers Casper Van Dien's character just banally quotes the textbook about the difference between a citizen and a civilian (when asked by the professor) without understanding what those words mean. Later near the end of the movie after most of his friends have died he realizes the true nature of the sacrifice those words entail and he gives a proper answer as if he were there.

You come off just like that: You can quote your civics textbooks but I doubt you'd know true Public Virtue if it bit you in the ass. You're just trying to defend your own pre-existing opinions by very poorly attempting to claim they're constitutionally justified. When challenged you'll spew any quote or sound bytes that at least superficially seems to support your point without ever trying to understanding what those words truly mean. As Inigo Montoya would say: You keep using these words...I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Here we go again. What the hell am I citing here? I'm not QUOTING SOMEONE I am explaining what appears to be an evident principle regarding the evolution of our constitutional principles with regard to the present situation. If you want to claim my assessment is wrong you are perfectly free to. But that requires you to explain IN FULL WHY I AM WRONG. Which means highlighting the specific error I made, explaining why it is an error, and THEN giving your own answer with an explanation of why it is more correct. My point in the previous post was that even IF IT WAS originally meant to stop a Rogue government, even IF it was meant to offer us this protection. It does not and will no longer suffice for billions of obvious reasons, the most important ones I gave directly in my last post. Of course seeing as you've decided to edit out all of the paragraphs I spent EXPLAINING EXACTLY WHY THIS IS SO it sure does SEEM crazy.

Good work thar buddy, sadly I notice these things! ;p

You can't just cut all of the wheat out of my field (context out of my posts) so you can snipe at all the scarecrows (create a series of easy to target straw men to knock down.) I'd say it's you who's obviously out of your element. IF YOU HAD OBVIOUSLY STUDIED THIS then YOU WOULD EASILY BE ABLE TO CORRECT ME. You, however, have not done this. You've said I'm wrong without ever explaining why. You're speaking in short sound bytes rather than talking in paragraphs and falling back on the convenient defense of asking for evidence whenever I make an assertion in hopes that I wouldn't have done my research and you could defeat me without having to ever actually prove anything yourself.

I am explaining that according to my understanding of the 2nd Amendment and constitutional principles; they were all adopted to serve practical purposes. These purposes however do not remain static, they're created to solve problems at the time but as the world around us changes so do the problems we face. This I would hardly think is a controversial idea. But if it truly is then why can you not do the dignity of explaining why since you're obviously oh-so-educated on the matter? For someone claiming to know so much you sure seem averse to demonstrating that superior knowledge you have.

LOL, says the guy who couldn't even refute one thing I said formally in his response. Hahaha, I http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndmea.html

You're muddling the functional definition of fear in the present context. "Fear" is being used as a less-inflammatory substitute for "Phobia" and it's meant to express that these concerns of theirs are entirely without basis in observable reality. That's what one means when they say one is "Fear based." Meanwhile, yes, Liberals want a safety net, but it's harder to say that these fears are entirely irrational. In fact nowadays everyone's getting very good at messaging to show how easy it can be for just about anyone to fall through the cracks; all it takes these days is often a medical emergency.

It's all about separating out who's trying to responsibly govern and make Government responsive to the present needs (not to be confused with wants/desires, though there is some overlap) of the public.

Dealing with fear is a big problem. I find myself fighting with it a lot today still. I went through similar problems as yourself. I had a mental illness that wasn't discovered until much later but the bullying was horrible. 2, 4, 6 kids at once and then they'd exploit the school's zero tolerance policy by running to a teacher right afterwards to lie in concert about what just happened. It was ME trying to attack them they'd say, and with six against one who's the teacher going to believe?

Also had really religious parents who thought the answer to all of this for the longest time was "More Jesus!" Suffice to say the entire thing drove me crazier than I already was and today I still have scars from that experience. But my politics evolved over time because I was able to separate a number of concepts out regarding morality and public policy to help distinguish between sensible personal decisions and sensible public decisions. Because while I, like you, don't ever want to be bullied again, I also realize that I alone am not sole arbiter of truth or justice in the world. This is a government by and for us all which means that to truly serve us all in many ways government must strive to be value-less and empower its citizens as best as possible to find meaning/value/happiness in their lives on their own terms.

On point #2 you're viewing the government in an unrealistic way. You're viewing logical possibilities without attempting to calculate their realistic probability and you're missing a lot of other options because they don't fit with your prevailing narrative. Just because the government CAN do something does not mean IT WILL. You're taking a huge amount of unrealistic hypotheticals and using them to justify what sounds like outright paranoia. Dude, seriously that isn't healthy and you probably need to see a therapist about this. No Joke, I had no small end of help needed in my own situation to see past these things. You might think you're being pragmatic but the problem is that when you have a lot of those bad formative experiences it can create a negative bias where you'll color events far more likely to happen then they really are.

This is why trusting SCIENCE is so important. You can use the sciences to route around defective cognitive biases like this and answer serious questions about whether or not this is actually a pressing concern.

#3: Again, more hypotheticals. What laws are you objecting to? Why are you objecting to them? When you express your concerns so devoid of any real-world context it makes an honest answer to your fears impossible. If your fears have no basis in real situations then how can I possibly allay them? Also, if they have no basis in real-world situations, what authority do you have to believe these fears deserve any serious respect?

You want a government that will protect "Your rights." But without going any further to enunciate what you believe are "Your Rights" (as you are obviously using the word in an irregular fashion that warrants redefinition) all you're doing is boxing yourself in. Maybe you're a really sensible guy, but we don't know that from how you just wrote your post. You pushed a bunch of vague implausible fears as your justification for a paranoid belief we should restrict the Democratic Voting Rights of others.

Let me tell you a thing or two about bullies. Once they can't use their fists anymore, they're a lot easier to beat. You've just got to work your head a bit more. ;)

What is wrong with your brain? Do you not understand how to rebut with substance? You do not just say "Hurr! Durr! I be OFFENDEDED @ u! u R wr0ng! Bcuz I sai so! I am right! I am right! I am right because I say so!"

A victim of what? A Victim of Whom? How in the hell do we know you're not just an angry spoiled child whining that his toys got taken away if you don't FILL IN THE BLANKS HERE! Tell your story before you go telling someone else they're blaming the victim here. You need to ESTABLISH FIRST WITH THE FACTS THAT YOU WERE INDEED A VICTIM before claiming such status.

Enlighten us as to what this "everything" is.

Gun ownership stats show that over time fewer and fewer people are owning guns but sales are going up. It seems a small minority of gun owners is stockpiling weapons and that's just the data. It's not meant to reflect on YOU specifically but a general trend among gun owners.

Because the idea of taking out a rogue government is beyond the realm of fantasy nonsense. The people who feel the need to stockpile arms are usually doing it out of paranoid fear of a government going rogue. Thing is, in any realistic situation where the government goes Rogue we are not going to see Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. An F-22 will drop a J-DAM on any city found harboring insurgents, Sherman/Sheridan's Scortched Earth strategy will be updated to devastating effect and the insurgents will quickly find themselves responsible for wiping entire sections of civilization off of the map as we try to end the conflict swiftly.

The Media apparatus that was able to smear an entirely Non-Violent Occupy protest series would have A FIELD DAY with an armed and violent insurgency that has tinges of sexism, racism and homophobia in its ranks. They will have the entire country hating you faster than you can say "Zucotti Park", only this time they'll be fully successful at isolating you from general population support in all but the deepest strongholds of paranoia.

Let's face it, WACO, TX proved a hard truth. No matter how many guns you have, even if you have fully automatic weapons and Rocket launchers to take out helicopters...if the government wants you dead they have more than enough manpower and heavy armarments to kill you. THIS is why the idea of boogeymen and fantasy nonsense has to constantly be bandied about. We must kill dead this unrealistic idea of resisting a fully armed federal military with violent force. All you would be doing is sending your friends and relatives to die an ultimately pointless death that will not only not change things the way they want but may in fact make them ACTIVELY WORSE if they were even to try. It is beyond foolish.

Not quite sure on that one myself but I think it's a reflection of the fact that if we're serious about taking down a rogue government we have to immediately legalize full auto rifles as well as explosives and rocket/grenade munitions so the general population might have a fighting change (for about two days) against the military.

I understand the second amendment very well thank you very much. You seem to think constitutional principles exist independent of the physical world or historical context; I am here to inform you that they do not. The founders had a wide range of beliefs and if you'd remembered your history we almost DIDN'T have a constitution because of The South and The North fighting amongst themselves for starters. Every amendment written was written for specific reasons. Here's what Alexander Hamilton for instance had to say on the matter of what made "A Well Regulated Militia."

The point? The meaning of the amendment at the time was entirely different. We had just won our freedom from England and people were still wary of maintaining any sort of standing Federal Army as they still had fresh memories of what the English used their vast standing Federal army for. The Militias, at the time were groups chartered by the State for self defense. You see them still today in that each state has its own National Guard regiment. These militias were basically smaller state-based armies meant to do what we ostensibly do today with our national guard and patchwork of police organizations (Which today more resemble a paramilitary force than an old school policing organization.)

Militias were not merely private citizens who could at any time be drafted up to fight for their country like in WWII or Vietnam. People volunteered to join their militias and were regularly trained, kept set amounts of powder, shot and muskets, etc. Of course at the time many private citizens on the frontier especially would still have arms anyway, but those were for practical reasons at the time.

But the Right to Bear Arms was truly a "Right to self defense" only expressed in a bit more artistic language. Militias were necessary for the defense of the state without a Federal army, we now have a federal standing army (despite still technically having militias and a police force too.) and of course individuals need a right to personal self defense when they are threatened, which I think the second part sums up nicely. However we can't view the constitution and its words as independent of the history and culture of their times. It's paramount that we keep that context so we can understand what the founders concerns truly were and how those concerns have morphed as the world around us has changed. They reflect real worries about human nature getting the best of us and leading down the road to Tyranny.

However we must understand that tyranny is simply not defined by an amount of arbitrary restrictions on things. It's defined by a loss of the ability to make meaningful choices for yourself in your life. Although that can be tricky since meaning itself is a subjective illusion. We have to find a balance between enabling each person to find meaning in their life and restricting certain choices we can prove scientifically lead to vast and unnecessary loss of life. We can and do place reasonable restrictions on the weapons civilians can carry entirely because they have no practical need for them as part of this balance. If we already admit this is a valid distinction to make then you've already lost the argument sir. Either you need to argue everyone has the right to own strategic ICBMS or you admit that lines must be drawn and we are merely debating over where the line should be drawn and why.

I think we need to recognize that the 2nd amendment exists to solve practical problems. It seeks to empower individuals to defend themselves against criminals, deadly animals, or to use them for other noble purposes such as hunting for food or just practicing your shooting for fun on targets. It doesn't truly exist anymore to protect you from the government because there's simply no way for you to match the kind of force available to Uncle Sam except by giving everyone an ICBM. You know why?

Because even in the most positive but realistic civil war scenario do you know what the Rogue Federal Government in that situation would do? If they thought for a moment they were seriously going to lose all it'd take is for them to launch ICBMs at home to nuke the entire country to ash. Sore losers would much rather sacrifice themselves to ensure your victory is only Pyrrhic, how are you going to deal with that without the ability to counteract nukes? War Games wasn't just a movie man, it was trying to teach us all a lesson about fighting a nuclear power. Even when they lose, they can still make sure you lose too.

Still more Banal nonsense. I am sick of these sound bytes. Preserving freedom FOR WHOM, AND FREEDOM TO DO WHAT? You need to actually answer these sorts of questions in your exposition if you don't want to look like your head is full of sand. You're not even enunciating a specific reason why you need these guns, you're simply falling back on a stupid principle you believe in, without even attempting to explain its importance in practical terms (referencing real problems that can actually be solved by what you're proposing) and then you have the nerve to tell others they're the ones who are full of it?

Trusting "proven criminals" needs to be expounded upon further. Do you mean the police, the politicians, etc? You know this is the part of your response that almost sounds coherent yet again you fail to expand on the ideas and offer any real references to specific problems, people, etc. You need to explain WHO you are railing against and WHY THEY ARE A PROBLEM if you want to be taken seriously. Not just through out a bunch of paranoid "ERRRYBODY BE CROOKS YO!" sound-bytes and hope people just decide to randomly believe you because you sound confident about what you're saying.

All in all, you need to work on disguising your outrage better thar buddy. Because it's seeming pretty obvious you wrote this whole thing without a SECOND thought. *drumroll* ;p

err, that has NOT EXCELLED at anything other than being able to continuously produce novel luxury goods*

Too much Freedom itself isn't the problem, it's a sort of truism though meant to reflect what can be a serious problem.

Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face, so to speak. But without govenrment or an apparatus to "defend" freedoms there's absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it anyway. Therefore if the other person decides their fist should be lodged firmly in my gut we can say the other person has "too much freedom" because they are so free from the practical consequences (punishment) for their actions that they now use their freedom to act to remove my freedom to act.

The answer isn't to make people "un free" the answer is to make people more accountable for their actions and the consequences thereof. Make power accountable and things fall nicely into place. Put a cop between me and Fisty McSwinger and I we both might be better off. The Cop prevents him from hitting me and as a result we both go off and do our own thing peacably.

In an interconnected, interdependent world those with power over others should by definition be less free than those without. Their power should be held accountable to the people. Our entire system of government is based on this idea. What the founders just never imagined was how private business could slowly evolve into today's government-challenging international behemoths. Nobody imagined a private chartered corporation could render entire swathes of nation states impotent to its whims and all done through the seductive powers of commerce.

The real issue isn't so much "too much freedom" or "too little freedom" it's "too little accountability to the people in institutions of power" and that includes governments as much as big businesses. Which, when you think about it, companies like G.E., Apple, etc. are like their own little private nations for the money they make and the influence they wield in national governments. Call me crazy, but I don't think a market system that has excelled at anything other than being able to continuously produce novel luxury goods and entertainment should be able to hold sway over the policies of national governments ostensibly formed to help support all of their citizens and not just the exclusive aims of their richest 1% or 0.1%.

Also, that 1-2% is still thousands of lives or more saved each year. It's a small percentage but it's of a number so large that it's still significant.