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.
Then Sony should have stood their ground and let those theaters take the heat instead. Other smaller theaters would have probably stepped up and shown it, and the public probably would have responded by going out to see a movie that they wouldn't have otherwise seen just to give a big middle finger to the attackers.
Any one sane doesn't like armed-to-the-teeth wanna-be vigilantes walking around with an axe to grind.
I agree, and it's difficult to find a practical reason why someone would need to walk around with more than 1 gun on them, or a long arm that isn't easy to handle. I live in Arizona, and it's not all that uncommon to see people walking around with a handgun in the open (and I imagine far more people have them concealed), but I've never seen anyone walking around with a rifle or shotgun outside of hunting. There's just no reason for it. Not that it necessarily needs to be illegal, but people just don't have a daily reason to do it. If someone was walking around with an assault rifle slung across their back they're more likely to get made fun of by people with a little P228 or
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.
This city has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, but it literately is a warzone.
You're stretching the literal definition of war with that claim.
That may be true but a key difference in the US is that gun rights are codified into law and in the culture. What is the "Wild West" without guns? In Arizona, to this day, you can walk into a bank with a gun with no problems.
You can't walk with a gun into any business that has a sign saying that firearms are not allowed, even if you have a concealed carry permit. Convenience stores post those signs, if a bank (or any other business) wants to make it illegal to walk in there with a gun then all they need to do is put a sign up. A business without a sign can still ask you to remove your gun provided that they have a secure place for you to store it while you're there. There are other places where you're not allowed to carry a concealed weapon, for example within a certain range of a school. You're never allowed to bring a weapon to a polling place on the day of the election. You also can't walk into Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station with a gun, or secured areas of the airport, or a jail. You can walk into a bar with a gun as long as the owner doesn't prohibit it, but you can't drink alcohol with a gun on you.
But you know what's prohibited here? Nunchucks. That's not a joke, either. You can walk down the street without a license carrying a loaded shotgun in each hand, handguns strapped all over your waist and legs, and rifles slung over your back, but nunchucks are illegal. We need to draw the line somewhere. This isn't the wild west any more.
I just have to wonder if it's not just a PR stunt.
I think it's much more likely that Sony is trying to shift media attention away from all of the information that was leaked, and onto the story of the threats and the movie. Pulling the movie all of a sudden makes the threats seem much more credible, and now that's what the media is talking about. The real story here is all of the data that was stolen from Sony, like the story about them wanting to go after DNS to take down piracy websites. The movie isn't the story, but that's where the narrative is being steered.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. -- Jerome Klapka Jerome