The IRS doesn't need to outsource to the DoJ or DHS for jackboots, as of last year they've started assembling their very own paramilitary task force, rumored to consist in large part of special operators returning from war. If that doesn't make you feel all warm inside, two to the chest and one to the head might.

I just read through it, and T-Mobile's deal is basically a 0% APR loan with a down payment and fixed $20/month payment, on top of your monthly service charge, for however long it takes to pay off the principal (depends on the price of the phone).

Any competent lender is going to provide you with a contract which spells out what happens when the loan ends, what happens if one or both parties terminate early, etc, and in T-Mobile's case, the loan is contingent on maintaining carrier service, and the remedy is full payment of the balance. Otherwise, people will just quit and get a $600 phone for the price of a $99 down payment.

Similarly, most new auto loans may be contingent on maintaining a service of some sort, like full coverage insurance. I think Washington State's AG has his head firmly implanted betwixt his butt cheeks, since any non-retard should easily tell the difference between the pay up front no-contract, month to month deal, and the other one which includes all kinds of disclosures as to the fact they're agreeing to a loan... But whatever.

I'm not sure how to answer the first question. The best that I can say is except for whatever the eye-witnesses saw or the police know, the details are mostly speculation.

I can say this from personal experience, though: more often than not, people who don't have experience with stress-inducing situations are like dumb sheep when confronted with violence. If someone were to yell "Oh my god he's stabbing people!" 4.5 out of 5 people will turn around on the spot and stare like an idiot until the gravity of the situation finally sinks in, which is usually sometime after the melee is over. The remainder will have the wherewithal to retreat or retaliate.

As Crocodile Dundee pointed out, there are knives, and then there are knives.

Regarding the recent spree stabbing in Texas involving 14 victims, it's said he used an x-acto type hobby knife, i.e. among pointy things it ranks pretty low on the danger scale. As much as I've researched, I've never been able to find what sort of blade the most recent spree-stabber in China used, for all we know it was something equivalent. Prior Chinese nutters used kitchen knives and cleavers, and many of their victims didn't fare so well.

You could block it farther down on the hammer, slide the block up from the bottom so that the slide can move around it, or even make the block be sprung in such a way that it can slide back with the slide while remaining engaged.

In fact, all modern handgun designs do pretty much exactly that. That kind of safety is a mechanism which prevents unintentional discharges due to dropping or ramming into random objects. This safety is only disengaged when the trigger reaches the end of its travel, and it exists on revolvers and semi-autos alike. Many such firearms also have another layer of safety on the trigger, if they don't have a manual safety.

The truth is this: we can all sorts of layers of security to a handgun, to the point where the only thing it can't do is reliably propel a projectile down a length of tube, when its owner wants, err, NEEDS it to do so (seems to be a goal of some legislative bodies). And that's why every modern school on the use of defensive handguns looks down on safety levers and other such things as vestigial organs, of sorts.

The type of pistol the GP mentioned was a M1911, which gets its namesake from the year it was adopted as our military's sidearm, in other words, over a hundred years old at this point. There have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions such pistols owned across the US, since the time my Grandpa's balls dropped. Even if we could make all new guns so they could only be fired after being blessed by the Pope on the third Wednesday after Venus and Jupiter conjoin with the blue moon, it wouldn't do a damn thing to remove the old ones from the marketplace.

The only workable solutions are 1) get people to leave dangerous things they don't understand the fuck alone 2) not put the dangerous thing where people exhibited in #1 can easily access them, or 3) educate people on the proper handling of dangerous things, at such a time as they can maturely handle it, because even if we'd rather have the situation otherwise, our environment is full of hazardous and dangerous things.

Hahaha, wow. Even if someone isn't a friend of the NRA, and they completely disagree with what they represent...if one were to take this article from an objective stance and compare it to reality, it's a complete load of shit. I had to laugh at this this paragraph in particular:

Since 2005, the gun industry and its corporate allies have given between $20 million and $52.6 million to it through the NRA Ring of Freedom sponsor program. Donors include firearm companies like Midway USA, etc.

As a customer of theirs, it should be pointed out that Midway USA is mentioned first only because their customers are given the option to round up their bill to the next dollar, or specify a small donation. That pocket change is accumulated across a multitude of orders, and is pooled together and sent to the NRA. The check they write as a result of these myriad micro-donations is sizable, to say the least.

Anecdotal: I for one elected to do just that on most of my dozens of orders over the last 7-8 years, even though I wasn't a member of the NRA for most of that time.

The best part, however, is this: they use a seven-year period to inflate this number, and make it look like these companies are coughing up seriously BIG bank, disregarding that consumers themselves are directly responsible for a sizable chunk of that number.

Do the math: If we assume their numbers are right, over those last seven years, 53 Million dollars accounts for...get this...a whopping 3.1-4.5% of the NRA's total revenue over that same period, at best (that revenue being 1.1billion to 1.6 billion dollars, the median being somewhere in between), and the ads they sell in their magazines account for approx. another 10%, as admitted in the article.

So, let's be very generous and say corporations foot the bill for 20% of the NRA's tab. That's funded primarily by corporations, how, exactly?

And a person in a swing state is worth exponentially more so than either Californians or Wyomingites. So what? Our system is designed to protect minority interests against mob mentality. I'd say that's a virtue.

Life isn't fair. It never will be, and you know, damn the people who try to make it so from a little perch on high, where they are absolutely separated from reality. It's like trying to make a river flow uphill. There's a lot of hand waving and magical thinking, and no intellectual connection with magnitude of work required. Communism was man's greatest experiment in which the stated goal was to make life fair; as far as I can tell, it has only ever made life suck.

Of course, what else could one expect of a sociopolitical philosophy whose greatest thinkers were upper middle class or wealthy enough that they never had to work alongside the very subjects of which they espoused so much profundity.

Use a Constitutional amendment, such that it carries all the more weight of law, that prevents local, state and federal government agencies from having access to the 4473 forms under any circumstances, outside of a proper criminal investigation, and following the due process of law. When a dealer closes down, the forms would be better entrusted to a privately run, non-profit watchdog organization, rather than the FBI, where who knows what happens to them--such digitizing and entering into an easy-to-search database, i.e. federal registration. This could be chartered by Congress, much like the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Heck, why not add it to their charter, along with a $0.50 fee assessed during background check, for the future maintenance of the records, for as long as they are statutorily required to maintain them?

Even the most dedicated 2A proponent doesn't want nut-cases, violent ex-cons, and random illegal aliens to have free access to firearms. At a basic level, people recognize that background checks can be a useful means to that end. Most people who are against universal background checks are against them solely because in it's current form, it's tantamount to registration.

Then you haven't checked thoroughly enough. The reason the SS executive protection detail likes to wear those long overcoats these days is so they can conceal a P90 *machine gun* loaded with 50 rounds of armor piercing ammunition. In the old days they'd carry a briefcase loaded up with UZIs and who knows what else.

The point you missed is this: Grandpa's hunting rifle is fundamentally indistinguishable in form and function to many of the world's best military and police sniper rifles, which have been used to deadly effect in those wars. Look at the list of soldiers with the most confirmed kills. They're all snipers. Furthermore, the ammunition is often the same. Example: .30-06 .308 .300 WM are/were widely used in both hunting and sniping roles. Once they force their AWB through, and nothing changes, they're going to be the next obvious target. Slippery slope in action.

Many widely used hunting rifles are either military surplus rifles, or directly related to rifles formerly or currently used in an infantry role. I have a nearly 160 year old, antique military surplus rifle in my collection, with very little practice one can use it to place about 20 accurately aimed shots per minute. For a long time, this was a very inexpensive rifle to own and shoot, and besides being designed for a military role, it was also useful for deer other medium sized game. You think someone couldn't do some serious damage with it? Grandpa's slide action hunting shotgun is likewise has only superficial differences from combat shotguns used by both the police and military for oh...the last 100 years.

No argument. Well, rather, let me put it this way; I'm not claiming that scientology is anything other than a peculiar brand of sophistry / mind control, money and power extortion scheme wrapped in the cloth of metaphysical and spiritual philosophy, which was stolen from various and more insightful source material, with a side of campy 40's and 50's science pulp-fiction.

Excuse me while I go philosophic for a moment...Scientology, like academia, religious teachings, and indeed, many political philosophies, condition the mind with various filters which operate on a conscious and subconscious level, where the mind is altered in its perception of the universe. First, these filters start out small and relatively harmless. So, we have "Why don't you take a free stress test", they use that as an opportunity to inject some memes into the brain, and even a relatively care free person now has a huge set of problems, and only they have the solution. Ten to fifty thousand dollars later (however deep their pockets are), this person understands, in his heart of hearts this system is out to save humanity. Deeper in, that individual is gaining the powers of a god, through which only he can save the souls of billions of people.

Little different than the US communist party's strategy through the late 40's to 70's. They get their claws into some naive and impressionable cute thing, who then becomes a recruiter (even if she isn't conscious of her role), to any number of horny young men who will gladly go to a meeting, write their name down and receive a free copy of the communist manifesto or whatever--if there's even the slightest possibility they'll get to fuck. And you know, the ideas on their basic level seem innocent and even positive enough.

I've noticed a big change of political tactics, especially regarding gun control in the wake of our recent mass killings. There are a few new memes being bantered about in the media. "Weapons of war" is my new favorite. They used to call them 'assault weapons', but I can only guess the idea that any weapon is an assault weapon if it's used in an assault confounded some people. It ignores that any number of useful and common implements in this society have existed as weapons of war at one time or another.

After all, once upon a time, a lowly musket ignited by flint on steel was at the cutting edge of infantry warfare technology. Secondly, it construes a mental image, especially to the uninitiated, that differentiates a scary looking rifle from a less scary looking hunting rifle, even if the hunting rifle is arguably more lethal in many ways. "Even if we can only save one life, we have to take action" That's the icing on the cake.

I digress.

The real question to ask is this: is scientology any more or less dangerous than other belief systems in the wild? Up until now they've been more of a predator on the individual and familial level. Even though there are clearly aspirations for greatness, they're a niche group. There are others which already operate on the national and international/cultural level without the scrutiny scientology receives. I'd say they rank pretty low these days, knowledge of their tricks is prophylactic enough to bring them to a halt.

It has everything to do with the same way the inane, implausible or the impossible make their way into any belief system. Some basic ideas have value. Ten commandments, etc. Many atheists would agree, there's some good life lessons and bits of wisdom here and there in the bible, heck...even in the Koran. Trouble is, the good ideas are the attack vector to the mind for the truly crazy and dangerous shit, which tends to outweigh and drown out the good stuff.

There have been a few 5cm+ autocannons throughout history, most were abandoned in trial phase, if they ever made it past prototype. Germans in WWII in particular were very interested in big firepower, they developed and even fielded a few, one such cannon flew on a couple different airframes late in the war as a heavy-bomber destroyer. Interestingly, it was often paired up with a telescopic sight, as a sort of bomber-sniper, but the muzzle flash ruined a pilot's night vision, and it was prone to malfunction. Others were relegated to Anti-Aircraft-Artillery roles, where bigger shells usually proved superior to rapid fire of lots of small shells.

Anyway, it is possible, though incredibly, stupidly, expensive for a US citizen to own up to a 40mm Bofors, which is actually classified as a machine gun, and was once again developed for anti-aircraft roles. It can go though a five round clip like mad, and it actually uses clips, not magazines.

Anyway, it's the wrong argument to make; nobody needs more than a meal in their belly, water to drink, and some basic shelter. If we're to have only what we need, let's follow the chain of reductio ad absurdum to it's end: Having anything more than a pot to piss in (a dangerous weapon, in itself, don'tcha know) is superfluous, and the government is justified in taking it away from you.

I acknowledge that, it's just an illustration of the dangers and risks people take for granted, and also the futility of humans applying animism to inanimate objects, whilst ignoring risk from real life animate actors.

Yeah, I'll let you tell that to my neighbor's daughter, who had her face mauled and permanently disfigured by the very dog the family got to protect their home. The same dog had a habit of catching squirrels and cats before it turned on the kid, and to say you'd be upset at the aftermath...well, it would be an understatement, to say the least. It also lunged at neighborhood kids, attacked neighbors, postmen, other dogs and god knows who, or what, else prior to this. But daddy was attached to it.

Remember that movie All Dogs Go to Heaven? I'm pleased to know this one returned to the place it came from. And people have the audacity to say guns kill?! Show me an autonomous gun with a brain, emotions, a hair trigger and some method of aiming itself, then and only then, they'll have a considerable opinion on the subject. Any tool has its advantages and disadvantages.