Let me start by saying that I believe you are as upset about what happened as anyone else. I also believe that you are trying to be reasonable about this. However...

More guns == more violence. Plain and simple. If you arm more people, more people will be involved in gun violence. This is not a conclusion, but rather a fundamental premise for any argument that involves "if only someone had been armed, they could have stopped this". In other words, the only way for me to be safe from guns is to carry a gun myself. Hence the reductio ad absurdum critique.

If you asked people to decide between no one having a gun and everyone having one, I think most non-gun owners would instantly say: no guns. Gun owners on the other hand would provide a wide array of excuses for their fetish. (His mother was an avowed "gun enthusiast", by the way)

Some will point to boogie men like FEMA or the UN. Others would offer what appears on the face of it to be a reasonable answer, saying that guns were a fact of life for pre-modern societies who lacked sophisticated law enforcement or local fried chicken joints, and therefore it would somehow be unfair if they cant go out and shoot some deer on the weekends because its "part of our history".

All of these reasons are ridiculous. An AR-15 you buy at Walmart is not going to stop a fantasy FEMA tank and no one uses a Glock 9mm to hunt. So ultimately they all fall back on "its in the constitution", as if it was something Jesus said. And oh yeah, there's my new favorite: guys like this will just blow up the school instead. It is now extremely difficult to acquire the necessary chemicals to pull off such a task precisely because reasonable and very effective laws were passed after the OKC bombing. Just ask the idiot who tried it in Times Square earlier this year.

We don't need guns to be safe. They are in fact the reason we dont feel safe in the first place.

Wow you missed the point entirely. Or perhaps that was an attempt at humor. Either way, in a world where grade school teachers are armed in the classroom do you expect gang rapists to avoid guns because they're dangerous or something?

Apparently libertarian tendencies dont go beyond Obamacare and your glock. These people are not "lunatics" the way they are often betrayed in the movies (think Dirty Harry). They are otherwise "normal" seeming people who tend to demonstrate their violent tendencies for only a short time before acting on them.

It is only after a thorough investigation of the person that the tendencies become obvious. So are you prepared to arrest and commit people for posting disturbing facebook entries? On the say of their neighbor? Based on something their high school guidance councilor thinks?

Moreover, you seem to suggest that we allow the same govt you mistrust with basic weapon regulations to regulate the standard of "crazy" in a way that involves monitoring and preemptively arresting people based on "crazy panels" that determine who will shoot a bunch of grade-schoolers and who will just go postal on some deer.

As for the pipe-bomb thing, yes it would be preferable because for most people like this, it is the act of shooting their victims that they seek. Lighting a pipe bomb and running would not allow them to look their victim in the eye. Thats why you never hear about that version of events. Its always the image of a guy in black leather holding multiple weapons in some Call of Duty pose that turns up. They dont want to hear a boom and hope they did the deed. They want to be face to face. And if they blow themselves up right away, they cant roam the halls shooting people they've never even met and dont "care" about.

Right, so the guys doing the raping are gonna come at her with their dicks while she's got a gun? Unlikely. Moreover, most violent crimes occur in such a way that the attacker "gets the drop on" the victim. This suggests that reaching for a gun when someone else is already pointing one at you would do much more harm than good.

Most of these arguments are based on the hollywood-fed groupthink that results in revenge fantasies like yours. "Attractive, gun-wielding woman shoots sleazy toothpick chewing thugs while shouting: You want some too? Come and get it!"

It resulted in strict regulation of fertilizer and the other materials involved, which resulted in 0 incidents like it since. Moreover, that was 20 years ago. How many have died from gun violence since - many many thousands.

So actually, he was not wrong. You are.

Everything you refer to have primary uses that in no way involve violence. Guns have a single purpose. Death. And if you say we still need to kill rats with antlers for fun on the weekends, fine. Get a bow and arrow.

You're an obtuse, insensitive, jackass. Most of those kids would still be alive if he was using a knife or hammer or whatever "tool" you're talking about.

Riiight...so instead of limiting access to weapons that are made solely to kill other human beings (NO ONE GOES HUNTING WITH A HANDGUN) in the name of individual liberty, you propose "identifying" and isolating individuals whom we decide are crazy because of some facebook posts or something they said to their mother.

Another insane rationalization. Oh wait, maybe YOU'RE crazy. I think you need to be isolated...

Why is it so hard to see why this line of thinking is utterly absurd?

What you're arguing is that to protect some theoretical right to "fight oppression" with some semi-automatic AK-47 replicas, every grade-school teacher should be armed. What about waiters? How about the nice lady at the Macy's cosmetics counter? What about movie-theater ushers?

And even if you could convince a sane person that this was somehow a good idea in principle, you'd still have to explain how that would have changed anything in this case. This guy walked into a grade-school classroom where his own mother was the teacher and started shooting without warning. He killed her and then within seconds turned on the kids in the class. For your reasoning to make any practical sense at all, she would have had to not only be armed, but actually be carrying the weapon while teaching the class then pull it and fire with gunslinger-like speed and accuracy. (Or maybe you think the kids should have been armed as well).

Just because you live in a fantasy land where Obama is a communist who wants to take your dirt-farm doesn't mean you'll ever actually get a chance to pull a gun on a mugger (at which point you are statistically almost certain to die by your own weapon anyway).

No one wants to stop you from killing rats with antlers, they just want to make the world a little safer.

It depends on how you define "productive". If you mean churning out line after line of procedural algorithms, you are unlikely to accomplish much while under the influence. But if you're talking about creative problem solving that involves "thinking outside the box", there's a lot to be said for "altered states".

More often than not, breakthroughs in understanding tend to come from a reevaluating of previous assumptions. So for example, if you've been banging away at a problem for a week and cant seem to see a way out, cannabis can provide a bit of "distance" from the problem while not completely removing you from that space.

That said, I would never recommend - and in fact would strongly discourage - people from using during the bulk of their work. It is far too disruptive to normal cognitive function to allow for proper concentration and it is especially bad for learning. You just dont retain anything properly. It's a tool in the toolbox like any other.

The difference is in the history and direction of the subsidies you include in your equation. Their current vectors.

I understand that because food and fuel are arguably in the same range in terms of necessity and there are giant corporations on both sides, it is easy to make them appear equivalent.

The banks are a special case here wherein they are accused of and in many cases proven to have shot themselves directly in the foot. And when they can't perform their function because their too busy bleeding to death. Therefore the lack of any alternative system of currency exchange - aside from pigs and bales of wheat - the feds had no choice but to stop the bleeding and buy them all Segways so they could go about their business.

They got away with murder and the motto has been "never again" ever since. I agree.

The oil companies are a different story. Because of a century of not only subsidies but the entire US military to back them up, they have established themselves as the most profitable firms on the planet. Bar none (except Apple, which is really astounding BTW).

On the other side of your equation you have farm subsidies and Hollywood. Now I'm not sure what you mean about Hollywood, but I'm fairly sure whatever it is its 0.01% of the bank bailout and aircraft carriers dont protect the honey-wagons on a location shoot.

I also agree that farm subsidies are out of control. But precisely because farming is big business, you can't suddenly choke off millions of dollars of what is effectively "income" and not expect them to slash costs. Which would inevitably reduce the quality and quantity of what they produce. You know, bread and stuff.

Now when someone in power has the cajones to go after these subsidies in a rational way, I will support them even if they are attacked relentlessly by Karl Rove's PAC. But until then we have bigger fish to fry.

Look, as a share of what we spend, there is no comparison. And as outrageous injustices go, hedging with swaps has already written its own chapter in the history books and oil itself may well be humanity's undoing.

Basically, I dont question the numerators in your equation. It's a basic 1-1. But the denominators that are waaaaay off.

First of all, you can replace two with six and my statement still stands. I don't think anyone believes the people to which you refer are "flawless".

My point was simply that for a candidate to reasonably claim the support of a plurality of 300+ million people (something none of the other candidates can even come close to claiming - not necessarily for lack of merit), they must make compromises. The reasons for this are obvious:

• 1. Money
• 2. Electability (again nothing to do with merit, just the realities of how the general public chooses a leader - which is very different from choosing policy).

I agree we need a system that encourages more and better choices, but I stand by my statement. Which was, by the way, not central to the larger point about Obama's (possible) second term.

Does everyone really have that short a memory?

How about...

• When Obama and Congressional leaders (from both parties) sat around and discussed "alternatives" to the healthcare overhaul which had already passed with a normal majority but was being held up by filibuster in the senate?
• When the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell saying that their top priority - in the face of crippling financial collapse caused in no small measure because of his own parties policies - was to "make him a one term president"? Which was then acted on...
• When the House held up passing a quite standard extension to the debt limit in the hope of making Obama look weak and in favor of "increasing the debt" in the name of - as Paul Krugman puts it - summoning the confidence fairy? Which of course resulted in the rest of actually starting to question the ability of the US political system to deal with the problem.
• When Tea Party affiliated candidates started turning the Republicans against themselves in the name of some idealized and quite fictional "good ol days" when the government didn't do anything more than ensure that the harbors were safe and contracts were enforced? The effect of which has been to scare all Republicans from being at all reasonable with regard to taxes?
• When every single Republican candidate said they would not accept even a 10-1 ratio of tax cuts to new revenue?

I can go on and on.

Yes, Obama and his team have not done a good enough job explaining these things, which is why Bill Clinton's otherwise obvious logic had such an impact at the Democratic convention.

Yes, there has been very little from Obama on what exactly he plans to do differently in the next four years - I think mainly because whomever wins will have to make difficult decisions and neither side is willing to "go first" and illustrate just how they would inflict the inevitable pain.

Yes, the core of both parties are hopelessly corrupted by the now billions of dollars spent on elections.

But just about every election is a choice between two flawed individuals. In this case I am going to choose the individual who seems most likely to do what he says and has some grounding the same kind of life I do. Obama has not lied per se. I believe he just greatly underestimated what he would face when he took office. In fact, NO ONE knew what he would face when he was nominated as the Democratic candidate, and very few really understood what he would face even as he was sworn in.

The first term is always the learning period. I believe Obama has learned his lesson (in no small part because he has stopped talking uniting and started talking about getting things done). I believe he will make better decisions in the next four years, and I simply do not trust Romney to do the same.

Yes, we should adopt Socialism because that's much better at adapting to a fast changing technology marketplace. Instead of small companies producing disruptive tech, you have giant institutional monopolies (see cable/phone/car companies, etc) doing whatever they must to maintain "stability" and such.

Much better.

What? How about this? I for one would like to avoid making foreign policy based on assumptions and hearsay. Or perhaps you're a Mittens man and would rather jump to wild conclusions before any real information is available?

And before you start wailing about how some of those early baseless assumptions turned out to be partly true, I would remind you that a broken clock is right twice a day...

Also, while the attack was clearly a blow to our local Libyan intelligence operation - in addition to the obvious human tragedy - the impact of the movie and its subsequent protests are more troubling because they demonstrate how there is a downside to greater freedom of expression in the region. There is clearly an attempt by extremists (religious and governmental) to hijack that freedom to let everyone know that they are still a potent force. The trick is to respect the protests while not allowing them to be completely one-sided. The counter-protests in Libya are a good example of this.