Now start cleaning that gun and the picture changes. Now take the gun to a shooting range, and remove all the bullets when you take it home and put it on the table. What are the chances that you left a bullet? Now show your friends that there are no bullets. What are the chances that you fire a shot from a gun that you absolutely positively definitely knew had no bullets in it, and kill one of your friends?
So what you're taking great pains to say is that guns aren't inherently dangerous, people are. Because they kill themselves and each other all the time through careless acts. You've done nothing to show inherent danger in that hunk of metal, but you have shown an odd desire to absolve people of their own stupidity, shifting the blame to inanimate objects than cannot, by themselves, hurt you. It's a fundamentally irrational view of reality. Or, more likely, it's a thinly veiled agenda trying to hide behind a bit of fear mongering.
externalities
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
But it sure does make you sound like an eager moral relativist.
I don't think of guns as inherently evil, but they are inherently dangerous.
How? Be specific. If I put a gun on a table in front of you, it will sit there for a thousand years without hurting either one of us. Are you concerned it will spontaneously explode, or grow some sort of nerve tentacles that will intrude into your brain and make you do something awful? Why aren't you worried about kitchen knives, or hammers? More people are killed in the US with pipes and baseball bats than with any kind of rifle (semi-auto or otherwise) - are all cylindrical club-like objects inherently dangerous? How so?
People should treat guns with respect and always assume 1) that they are loaded (even if you JUST took all of the bullets out) and 2) that the gun is about to fire at whatever it is pointed at.
Yes, it's a good habit to treat every gun as if it might go off when you handle it. So you always handle them as if they will, and control that muzzle's direction at all times. Just like you always have to think about where you're swinging an axe, or pointing the front end of a moving car.
Citizens being allowed to carry guns would have stopped neither.
Really? His nice, lazy, all-afternoon hunting down of young people on that island couldn't have ended with fewer deaths if someone on that island had shot him down in self defense before he committed such methodical, unopposed slaughter?
Where is it in the constitution that flying a drone is a protected right?
Ah, another person who never went to school, or certainly wasn't paying attention.
Your rights are not defined in the constitution. The constitution exists to limit the government's power to interfere with your liberty. Some of those liberties are so important that they are also mentioned by name (the right to liberty that by definition includes the right to speak, assemble, protect yourself, etc). Only leftist idiots think that it's the government that grants you your rights. That's 100% Nanny State backwards. Please do not vote.
UAVs are potentially an externality because they can do physical damage anonymously for the cost of the UAV.
Yeah, just like a brick thrown from an overpass or a 40th-floor window - and that costs a fraction of the price of a single UAV battery. Why aren't you in favor of banning bricks? Or would you be happy with simply registering, with photo ID and fingerprints on file, the ownership of all objects that have enough mass to be dangerous?
Gun bans do work and work well.
Not really. Ask any of the dead people in Chicago, where despite very (and even unconstitutionally) severe restrictions, the local thuggery manages to shoot itself up quite regularly. On the other hand, you've got places where guns are readily available (legally) and routinely carried in cars and on person, and which have very low violent crime rates. It's not about guns, and it's never been about guns. It's about culture and law enforcement. Chicago has a violent subculture and no interest in dealing with it. The results are self-evident.
Funny how a President from team A is superman who is imagined to have done everything himself
What are you talking about? I said that Bin Laden was killed by a large team of people working years to make it happen. That was in response to the idiot who said that "Obama" got him. Nice straw man attack, though. Well, not really. Pretty lame, actually.
If gas was this low under a Republican president I could guarantee you that the party faithful would be giving the president full credit.
And would you point out, like I just did, that the Republican president was preventing oil companies from using their gulf wells? Or from being allowed to use new leases on fields? If a Republican president actually DID those things, you'd be able to. Is that what you're saying, that a Republican would be - as it relates to energy policy - exactly like Obama, and that his party would be giving him full credit for that? What ARE you saying?
Anything good that happened during Obama's administration has nothing to do with him
Not at all. Please list some things for which he is actually responsible.
Accepted unemployment statistics suddenly become unreliable and unfavorable
Only when they are deliberately misrepresented in essentially unprecedented circumstances, such as we now have (millions abandoning their search for work, and no longer being counted), and millions more being employed
A wind-down of US forces in the Middle East becomes new wars
So the war in Syria that wasn't happening while Bush was in office is NOT new? The conflict in Ukraine is not new? The occupation by the Islamic State of huge swaths of Iraq and Syria actually dates back to Bush's watch? Are you actually paying attention? The point is that people are saying that Obama "ended two wars"
You then declare Obama a failure without anything other than your backwards logic to support it.
Actually, I was very clear above. He's failed to keep the phony promises he made as a candidate. He's racked up more debt than all of his predecessors combined, expanded practices he said were unacceptable, contradicted himself on countless subjects... which of those things are you considering successes?
Many conservatives believe Obama is anti oil
It's probably because they watch what he actually does, rather than listen to what he reads from a teleprompter.
the USA has expanded and continues to expand its energy capacity hugely
Yup. But not because Obama has done anything to enable that expansion. Exactly the opposite. People with private and existing leases are working those resources with new technology. Obama isn't making new leases available, is still enforcing a moratorium on lots of drilling, etc. He's not responsible for the oil/gas glut, it's simply happening while he's in office, even though it would be happening even faster and across a wider part of the economy if he lifted the blocks he's put on much of it.
Don't give credit to the President for anything good that happens in the U.S. (Lower Gas Prices, the end of the War in Iraq and Afganistan, killing Bin Laden, unemployment below 8%)
If he were actually responsible for any of those things, we could talk about it. Actually he can't be responsible for ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because those are still raging on, and our troops are still there. And he can't be responsible for unemployment below 8% because it's not below 8%. And lower gas prices? Explain what he's done to make that happen. Let me guess - you're going to mention something about more drilling in the US, right? Nope. He's only clamped down on that, in areas where he has any authority. And - killing Bin Laden? Please specifically explain his role, and how the intelligence and special forces people who actually did the work were stuck, and too dumb to finish the job until he provided his expertise in
exactly what has he failed at???
Well, let's see. He's got one "signature" piece of legislation rammed through. He promised all sorts of things about it that turned out to be at the very least simply miserably wrong, and in many cases were deliberate lies. The result? Higher (not lower) health insurance costs and deductibles for millions of people (and we haven't even see the result of the employer mandate kicking in - just wait!), tens of millions still uninsured despite the giant rate hikes applied to others to buy them insurance, higher taxes on those that actually pay taxes, and more debt accumulated on his watch than every other president before him combined.
Or we could look at his promise to run the "most transparent administration in history"
a war he and Cheney outright lied about
What? Saddam wasn't, after all, shooting at the planes enforcing the no fly zone? He wasn't violating the UN's oil-for-food agreement? He wasn't continuing to import and build long range weapons? He never did have that stockpile of VX that the UN inspectors documented, and could no longer account for? Saddam actually honored all of the conditions of the cease fire that accompanied his being beaten back from invading Kuwait? Oh, right - he violated essentially every one of them, continued to slaughter people by the thousands using WMDs, and did everything possible to obstruct UN inspections - and never stopped targeting allied aircraft keeping him from slaughtering even more people in the north and south of the country. And of course, your preferred governing party (as previously manifested by the Clintons) not only supported removing him from power, they - and their Democrat counterparts in congress - voted specifically to authorize the use of force about which you're complaining. And they reviewed (and cited) exactly the same intelligence that the administration saw - you know, the same intelligence separately arrived at by several other countries' own agencies and sources. None of which painted a nice rosy picture of they guy you're feeling sorry for.
And the recession? You mean the one that was already beginning to take shape before Clinton left office? The one that's almost entirely due to incredibly foolish home loan policies about which the Bush administration warned the Democrat-controlled congress, but which that congress not only turned a deaf ear, but insisted that the underwriting bodies and banks did more of. That recession?
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