There are not an insignificant number of cases where a normally responsible person becomes an irresponsible person,

When we're talking about irresponsible enough to commit homicide, yes, that is an insignificant number. (In terms of frequency; of course in personal terms any murder is highly significant to those, to friends and family of both the victim and, in a different sense, the murderer.)

Murder is something people work their way up to. 90% of murder suspects in Milwaukee in 2001 had a criminal record; the same proportion was found in NYC in 2003 through 2005. Keep in mind this is just guys (mostly, some women too) who got caught at previous crimes, more would have committed crimes and not been caught, and more would have displayed irresponsible but non-criminal behavior (the sort of stuff a good mental health system would catch).

The good citizen who suddenly snaps and kills is a favorite fictional trope, but bears little relationship to criminological reality.

Making a zip gun from plastic tubing is, however.

Citation needed.

However, it is easy enough to understand a reluctance to accept the casual and uncontrolled production of murder weapons.

Roughly 6% of murders are committed with fists and feet. Not only are such weapons produced in an uncontrolled manner, we even give out tax breaks to those that produce them.

the State has no power to overturn economic realities

Right. And one of those economic realities is that health care is not an area where a "free market" can efficiently allocate resources. Buyers and sellers do not meet in the marketplace with equal power and full knowledge.

If you think corporate profits are the only reason, or even the major factor in the exorbitant expense of health care, you are naive. It's expensive because it takes vast resources to do the job.

It takes no more resources to provide an American citizen with health care than a German or a Japanese one. Yet every other developed nation has better outcome at less cost. The difference is the obscene profits realized by companies like United Health.

Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer, unless it's serious

Guess how long I had to wait for United Health to approve an MRI?

there should be no worries about medical records being leaked and/or used against individuals or organizations since the IRS will keep those safe for all of us.

No, the ACA does not allow the IRS to access your medical records.

They're so eager to begin, they simply walked in and seized without explanation approximately *sixty million* medical records in California

The allegation is that they exceeded the authority of a warrant and demanded copies of servers containing records for ten million people from an unnamed company. Is it true? Neither you nor I know. But the suit is unrelated to the ACA.

duckduckgo returns whatever bing returns :) It's just an anonymizing front end to bing.

No. It's not.: "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing, Yandex, and Blekko." Please don't FUD on the Duck.

Google does not want an app out there that comes standard that downloads all their videos.

I'm sure Google doesn't. So what? "Want" and "is legally entitled to" are very different things. Google isn't legally entitled to tell MS what sort of software MS can write.

The API comes with terms of service.

Meaningless. As Google has argued itself, an API is not subject to copyright, therefore you cannot impose TOS on someone writing code that uses it.

I'm no fan of MS, but Google sucks also. Google doesn't get to tell MS what sort of software MS can write. It's a remarkable and accidental occurrence, but it looks like MS is on the side of software freedom here.

I mean, in most rampages so far, we have seen the perpetrators use long guns.

No. Not only have plenty of rampage shooters used handguns, some have used revolvers.

Campo Elias Delgado killed between 26 and 30 people (accounts differ and some may have been killed by police in the crossfire) and wounded 15 with a knife and a single revolver..

Wellington Menezes de Oliveira killed 12 (not including himself) and wounded 12, using two revolvers and firing over 60 shots.

Charles Andrew Williams killed 2 people and wounded 13 with a single revolver.

Thomas Hamilton, the Dunblane shooter, killed 17 people (not including himself) and wounded 15 more. He had four handguns: two six-round revolvers and two 9mm pistols.

George Hennard, the Luby's shooter, killed 23 (not including himself) and wounded 20 with two semi-automatic handguns.

Jiverly Antares Wong, the Binghamton shooter, killed 13 people (not including himself) and wounded four more with two handguns.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Foot Hood shooter, fired 214 rounds from a single handgun, killing 13 people and wounding 13.

Patrick Henry Sherrill, the Edmond post office shooter, killed 14 people and wounded six. He had three handguns and fired approximately 50 rounds.

Howard Unruh killed 13 people and wounded 3 with a Luger (a handgun).

The demonization of rifles is completely irrational, not just in terms of their overall use in homicides but in terms of their use in spree shootings.

Guns should be feared. If someone points a gun at you then you should be afraid, even if you have your own gun.

The proper object of fear here is the person pointing the gun. If someone seriously threatens to kill me, you bet your ass I'll be afraid, whether they have a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or their own hands and feet. (More people are murdered via hands and feet than via either rifles or via blunt objects.)

Personally I think we are better off not living in the wild west, where our only protection is a revolver and our posse.

It is a fact of human existence that the only direct protection a person has against someone intent on violence is their own ability to use defensive force ("a revolver"), or the ability and willingness of others to use force on their behalf ("our posse"). That's true whether you live in ancient Rome, the Wild West (which was probably not as "Wild" as our mythology makes it out to be), a gang-controlled part of a city, or a low-crime gated community.

Indirect forms of protection, where we have socioeconomic, educational, criminal justice, and mental health care systems that don't lead to people developing along violent lines or make serious efforts at reform if they do, may have more overall impact. But when a crazed stalker breaks into your home, it's past the time where those can come into play.

I don't believe it is actually legal to make a refusal an admission of DWI. But they can make the penalty the same.

No, they can't.. DWI is a crime and can land you in jail. Declining a search or declining to testify is never a crime, and can at best lead to a revocation of a privilege (driving on the public roads).

Since the comparison is between trying to generally reduce access to firearms and an attempt to reduce drunk driving deaths, the relevant death comparison is all gun deaths and all drunk driving deaths.

No, it's not, because the majority of those "gun deaths" would simply take place via other means if guns magically vanished, not to mention that legal attempts to reduce access to firearms have always failed; while drunk driving deaths would not occur at all if drunk driving magically stopped. (Whether legal attempts to reduce drunk driving have worked is an open question; they've generally been accompanied by public awareness campaigns that may have had more to do with any observed effect than an increase in legal penalties.)

Anything you disable, will re-start shortly and cannot be uninstalled (without rooting and voiding warranty).

Voiding warranty, my eye. If you don't root your gorram phone., it's not "yours" in any meaningful sense. If a hardware problem develops, do a factory reset and send it back for a replacement

So, yeah...unwanted services on my phone, not an issue.

freedom of speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you like

Uh, yes, actually, that's exactly what it means.

Restrictions can be placed on where, when, and how you say it in order to protect the rights of others (you don't have a right to blare it from loudspeakers at 3am and disturb my right to reasonable peace and quiet, you don't have a right to say it while waving a knife and disturb my right to reasonable safety, etc.), but in terms of content, you can say whatever you damn well please. Any government that doesn't recognize that doesn't recognize freedom of speech.