How can someone who is such an advocate for freedom

Did you miss the part about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? I have the right to not be shot dead, and so did 20 kids today. That's the kind of freedom I advocate for.

Actually, I don't believe I will have to do a thing. Others will do it for me. And you should definitely not count on the power of the right-wing. That time is done.

There's someone sending multiple mod points long after the discussion started. Their purpose is to hide this and other anti-gun discussion. Of course it could be anyone, but I know that there are many PR companies that hold multiple moderation accounts on web sites that perform moderation. I can just imagine who they work for.

So, we can't protect kids because we'd be overrun by elk if we did. And besides, we need that duck stamp too badly.

Somehow I am finding these unconvincing. Ecological management could still take place without the gun holder. Probably at a lower overall cost to society.

You would disarm every law abiding citizen

Yeah!

open the way for tyranny

I hope you can detect my sarcasm when I say how well I sleep at night knowing that YOU are out there protecting me from tyranny with your gun. First, you can't do it. Governments have bigger weapons than you. Second, nobody wants you to do it. Indeed, lots of us live in fear that you'll decide that now's the time and start shooting up people.

I, for one, would kill anyone who tries to take away my right of self-defense, and I am hardly alone in this stance. Your proposal would be civil war. I dare you to bring it.

We don't want to take it from your cold dead fingers. You might die of thirst or starve to death, of your own will, while resisting. Would that be such a great cost to society if we could, by doing that, protect a few dozen kids from being the random victims of another gun-holder?

So, you're going to resist tyranny with your firearm, huh? You're going with your firearm down to the MPAA, and to congress, about abuse of copyright and software patenting?

The day when the population of a nation could resist tyranny with handheld weapons is long over. Syria just fired a missile on its own people. There is no shortage in government hands of weapons superior to the ones in your home.

Thanks, but no thanks. The worst thing that could happen to me would be yahoos who think they are defending my freedom with their guns against their perception of tyranny. I prefer peaceful civil discourse, and when that doesn't work, passive resistance.

Pilots get medicals because they are likely to kill people around them, including on the ground, if they have a medical lapse while controlling an aircraft. So it is a balance between the social benefit of the usefulness of an aircraft and the potential to do harm. Firearms, in contrast, have little purpose except to kill. Auditing individuals who wish to use them would not establish a balance, because there is little social benefit in a firearm.

as much as I'd like to see stricter gun control, better mental health care would make it a bit of a moot point whether the nutcases have guns because then they wouldn't be nutcases.

I'm all for better mental care, but I think you're overestimating that it would give us a sane society. The field of mental health medicine has a long way to go to achieve that level of perfection. As it stands, all people today can be expected to exhibit mental illness at some time in their lives, no matter how trusted a member of society they happen to be.

Nobody goes through their whole life being completely sane without interruption. Note that some of the most trusted people in our society, including astronauts and airline pilots, have exhibited harmful mental illness at times.

Don't look now, but the time when you can lawfully operate your car in manual control on an urban road is limited. Maybe 20 years.

Sure, you can kill someone with a broken bottle. Guns, however, make it just too easy.

Our country makes it too easy for nutcases to have guns. I, for one, would give up the right to bear arms for everyone, and not miss it.

These people would, quite rightly, be offended if you said they were just doing it to improve Microsoft's profits- they're there to help others, share their knowledge, talk with others who have similar interests, and other similar personal goals.

Yes, they are. But they could do those same things in a way that sent all of their work to the public benefit. They really are enriching a company that ultimately doesn't have their own interest, or that of their community, in mind.

Should I be unhappy that my thoughts offend them? I'm just sad for them that they don't see that their activities are so misdirected.

Way to piss on all the people who aren't Canonical employees that devote a lot of time and effort to making Ubuntu a successful and welcoming community of users and developers.

As I said in my Linux.conf.au keynote, using your spare time to make Mark Shuttleworth richer isn't smart. We have a lot of real community projects, meaning operated by the community and entirely for the public benefit, where the present Ubuntu volunteers could better spend their time.

Regarding the money, IMO it's not worth the negative part. And let's not forget that Ubuntu is essentially built by projects like GNOME and LibreOffice, and Debian. Should I be overjoyed by the little portion of what they make that they return to those projects?

Do you think it has reached brake even point yet? Do you think it ever will?

I don't really care. What I do know is that it now has a mainly negative effect on the folks who feed it, and thus I evangelize that community folks find something else to do than helping Ubuntu.