Yeah, problem is, there is no organization dedicated to gun rights. The NRA is also as right-wing as it comes.

Only half joking, my freshman math professor actually did this. He was finishing up his doctorate at the time he taught the class I was in. Couple years later he was in a CS class with me. He'd decided the pure math jobs out there were crap, but math programming there was a market for.

And just why do you want to know where I work? So that you can complain to my boss that I made you look stupid and that he should fire me for that?

No, he wants to know where you work so he can complain to the politicians that your company is costing his company money.

Which is exactly the strategy that Cary Sherman of RIAA suggested when SOPA failed.

If it's about "Hollywood vs. freedom", Hollywood loses.

But if the debate can be reframed to "MPAA vs. Google", or "RIAA vs. Telcos", Hollywood wins, because they can just point the finger and say "Look, we're only saying the things we say because we work for Paramount, Universal, and other MAFIAA organizations. But you're only saying that because you work for Google, a telco, or an ISP, you're a lobbyist just like us!" and with the debate framed in a context that the politicians will understand, Ari and Sherman can easily demand a law that transfers wealth from "Northern California" to "Southern California" (by transferring the cost of preventing piracy from "Southern California rightsholders" to "Northern California companies whose customers happen to infringe on those rights").

The problem is that tanks and jets are pretty good for larger scale destruction, they aren't so good for keeping a population in check. For that you need soldiers on the ground, and that is real hard to do if you are literally getting shot at from every windows (the US doesn't have 10,000 armed citizens, it has more like 100,000,000). I mean yes, ultimately the government could (in theory, if the soldiers would obey) simply turn its nuclear weapons on the citizens and level all the cities. Ok fine, but to what end? What do you get as ruler of a glass radioactive parking lot?

The US military is well equipped to unleash destruction, as we've seen. However they are not well equipped to do an occupation, as we've also seen. So it would be rather difficult for the government to suppress a massive rebellion with high tech weapons, and not also annihilate its cities at the same time.

Also you might ask how useful the planes would be if a massive armed force attacked the airfields and so on.

Large amounts of people with small arms are quite an effective guerrilla force.

Sadly, people who watch Fox News likely do think that way about human languages like Arabic or Persian.

People just see 'that squiggly terrorist-speak' and freak out.

Close enough to what I was going to say to tag along here instead of starting a new thread. I use Kitchenaid kitchen shears, or sometimes Cuisinart ones. The former was part of a kit, the latter came with a food processor, either way they are decent but not fantastic. Scissors or shears make quick work of this packaging once you get home and need to open it.

It's an important aspect of the book that people use the terrible slur nigger as easily as they use any other word. Changing it to anything else is revisionist bullshit and the people responsible should be carted off to someplace they can no longer harm our societal development.

Operational security in a declared war is completely different from a secret war.

Amen. I can't stand the NRA. I just wrote them a nastygram demanding they cancel my free subscription to one of their crap rags because the cover nauseated me... it demanded that I buy some stupid coin or Obama would succeed in turning my country into a Muslim retirement home or something, I didn't actually open the fucking thing. But I am a member because a) the ACLU doesn't believe in the full bill of rights and b) it's a prerequisite for the use of many (most?) shooting club ranges because the NRA provides range insurance to all members and the clubs can't afford the insurance themselves. I sure haven't put the sticker on anything.

There's Washington DC. They have some of the toughest gun laws in the US, yet also one of the highest violent crime and murder rates.

So you have to ask is it really the gun laws doing it, or do the places have lower crime for other reasons?

You have to realize that there are many different conditions in different countries that lead to different crime rates. One example is Canada, quite a low homicide rate. Now they aren't nearly as gun friendly as the US (but then pretty much nobody is) but civilians can get firearms up to things like AR-15s. Also guns could easily be illegally smuggled from the US, since the border security is very, very lax.

It isn't as easy as just saying "Oh well this European country doesn't allow guns and they have less crime." Ok sure, but maybe they just have less crime period. The guns don't make much difference.