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.
You're right. Just about anyone who stays up on the news can name a few of the latest goddamned mass murderers, but who here can name just one of the many heroic individuals who were in the right place, in the right time, and properly equipped to stop such an attack, without looking it up?
What was the name of the guy who pounced on Gabby Gifford's attacker? What was the name of the female security guard who stopped a mass murder at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, CO? etc. etc.
In years gone by we used to sing tales of heroic people, give them a pat on the back, or the key to the town, or some such. Today, we mostly blow them off. With a few exceptions such as Cpt. Sullenburger, our biggest heroes are hollow and useless celebrities, and other people with little or no redeeming value. Just another symptom of cultural disease.
The first police reports on the movie theater attacker in Aurora, CO say he not only used the AR-15 which is so contentious, but he also carried in a police-style slide action shotgun, and two pistols. Evidence says one pistol and the shotgun were used after his rifle malfunctioned.
Any rational person would have to agree with your point about appearing to do something.
So you are familiar with the nature of politics!
He was facing a possible sentence of 35 years, even if he was convicted and sentenced to probation (that is, if there weren't some asinine statutory minimum) he would still be labeled a convicted felon thanks to federal law; that certainly limits employment opportunities, no less the personal liberties we all take for granted.
I know I'd be seriously fucking depressed if I had something like that hanging over my head for 2 YEARS of my life. Justice system...huh.
The point was the facts surrounding the most recent incident in China, and those like it are dubious from the start because of political censorship... The best I can ascertain at this point is they don't want to let us know specifically, what kind of knife the attacker used, or the relative or potential lethality of the weapon used to other types. They just don't seem to place the blame on the tool, remarkably.
48 hours, 48 months, doesn't much matter to me when illustrating the fact that human life, especially that of the young, is a fragile thing and it is vulnerable to an unquantifiable number of vectors. Dead is dead, and it occurs to me that a one young life ended prematurely is no less tragic than another, no matter the tool used. Negligent drunk and distracted driving, knives, guns, arson, land mines, cruise missiles, predator drones, helicopter gunships, gas chambers, whatever. The end is the same in each case; it's an abhorrent waste of life.
There is a big disparity in the homicide rates between the two Countries, there is no disputing that, even if Chinese can't be trusted to be completely truthful in their statistics. There is a difference in culture, and most especially, the cultural / economic microcosms of American society which breed the majority of our violence problems. It's possible that if the people of China were allowed widespread access to firearms, the death rate may still not reach parity with the US, just for that reason.
Indeed, there are many areas in the US which show us that high rates of gun ownership and low rates of homicide and other crimes are not mutually exclusive things. It's an extreme minority who are ruining it for the extreme majority.
You think the situation was so different in 1927? Machine guns were completely unregulated up until 1934. You could get a goddamn *M1921 submachine gun* like the ones they used in all of the gangster movies, sent to you in the mail, without a background check, for the low price of ~$200. It wasn't unheard of for larger hardware stores to sell pre-WWI surplus Maxim machine guns and other such things, right off the shelf.
Yeah, there were a lot of school shootings back then, huh? Why the explosives and the planning? Beyond the fact that many farms had explosives, who knows?
The thing that most compounds the issue is Chinese censorship of the incidents; in the bulk of these cases we have no idea about the blade used. It could have been anything from a pocket knife, a non-locking Victorinox multi-purpose tool (a versatile assault knife, right?) to a standard steak knife or even a meat cleaver.
Any idiot could take a grinder to a bar of steel and make an improvised machete, a tool which doesn't need to be reloaded or even aimed, and could fell a grade-schooler in close proximity with every swing. Ask some 500,000-1,000,000 Rwandans about how well that weapon worked for their government-supported killers. Oh wait, you can't. Regardless, or a simple cudgel could have about the same effect on children, and it's not like these kinds of tools haven't been around since we started walking on two feet.
What, you mean like this 200 year old air-powered assault rifle with its 22 round assault-clip?
Check out the rest!
Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8 Ultra-Telephoto Zoom Lens.... Defense Technology Pepper Spray....Banana Bunker...Marshall Ferret Cap....Boy Butter personal lubricant...A book titled "Everyone Masturbates"...And a product designed which claims to give your garbage chute a pleasant peppermint scent whilst simultaneously deodorizing.
Uh, interesting trend here. This HAS to be a shopping list for some kind of sick LOTR / Star Wars nerd / serial killer / stalker with a strange fetish about lubricating ferrets. Retrospectively, it's not much of a surprise, I've already suspected much of that about people who keep ferrets.
That's pretty freaking awesome, I had no idea such a thing existed. I'll have to make it a point to visit one when I'm near one of their locations. Yeah, you'd definitely have to be in substantial population center to make something like that viable.
However, that's really on the other end of the spectrum from what I envisioned, thoughâ"for the most part it could just be a regular theater, without most of the suck associated with movie theaters, and a few interesting perks on the side. For example, it would be fairly inexpensive to implement, and high profit (relative to the capital investment in a building, fixtures like seating, sound and projectors) to have some fancy tasting, but cheap to make flatbread mini-pizzas at the concessions stand, panino sandwiches, a few local draught / craft beers, things like that in addition to the high fructose gut rot you'd usually find in a movie house.
Example: Here in Colorado, there is a great restaurant in a town of about 500, tops, which just happens to be on one of the best motorcycle canyon routes nearest the metro area. Fly fishers, hikers, other sportsmen, and residents of larger surrounding mountain towns are their main customers during the week, and they stay busy despite the odd location. On weekends with reasonably good weather, they very nearly have to beat people away with a stick. It's a destination. High quality eats, regional wines and beers, they flow freely, and it's not inexpensive. When seasonally available, they serve wild game meats, and generally, everything is done exceptionally well, and that keeps them coming.
As an independent theater, it would be easier to be nimble. You could have a calendar of special events where you're going to show a marathon of oldies but goodies and cult classics that are inexpensive to license, and use social media to spread the word. If there was a quirky but attractive theater like I describe, just a little closer to the metro area, I'd bet it would bring the people in from dozens of miles away.
I used to work part time for a FFL/SOT dealer, so I'm also pretty familiar with the whole process--though, certianly not to the level you are I'm quite sure. Ignorance about these things is remarkably pervasive, even amongst the firearms community. So, that's part of the reason I choose not to fall into the trap of using that term, and point out its political origins to people like the OP. If one non-gunner reads it and becomes even slightly enlightened, it's worth it.
Degette's bill is apparently going to call for the non-transference of grandfathered magazines, much the same way you'd have to destroy/relinquish your post samples. My guess is they want it to be a matter of attrition, so two, maybe three generations later (tops) there will be no privately held firearms--or at least none of the sort that would be useful to oppose tyranny.
Independent of a government, or stateless voluntary social contract of some kind, the right to do whatever is the base state of nature; that's pretty much the crux of the issue, philosophically. The idea that a government can only levy laws which serve to restrict and to restrain is congruous with that line of reasoning. If it's not illegal, then it is legal. That's how it works.
The enlightenment era liberals which made up the bulk of the founders called this "law of nature", and limiting Congress from imposing upon this natural right by specifically enumerating it was seen as protecting something previously in existence.
You don't see many laws which exist to state "yeah, this is legal", especially outside of the Constitution itself--those tend to be the paragraphs which regulate things like elections, to conduct census, to authorize congress to mint money, to establish a patent office, to declare war, etc.
No. I agree. But there are many many law enforcement (and -esque) groups that do have at least cursory gun handling standards and require time on the range.
Like the NYPD cops who were attempting to stop a bad guy in Times Square? They only shot nine or so innocent bystanders, despite approaching him from the rear. Like my local cops? Anytime they have to shoot at someone dangerous in a car, it looks like that car took a few dozen rounds of buckshot, 50-70 rounds on average.
I know cops, I know cop culture. The only ones who reliably shoot well are the ones who are themselves enthusiasts, and often train on their own dollar unless they're SWAT. They have better training budgets, obviously. Hell, I know a cop that did not know how to disassemble and clean her duty weapon, leaving it prone to malfunction from years of qualifying practice, and years of accumulated lint and dust. I know another cop that shot himself in the calf muscle while re-holstering, because he forgot to keep his finger out of the trigger guard. Enthusiasts who attain a license of their own volition or sense of duty to their families just don't seem to have these problems quite as often.
The best argument that I have for people arming themselves is this: another two cops I know left a dog-walker scarred and with nerve damage after they beat him up, because he told the driver of the car the cops had pulled over that he would be a witness in court that he stopped at the red light.
Another cop from the same department inexplicably helped the face of a young man become more intimate with the pavement for no discernible reason, as said teenager was on the phone with his father, who himself was a Sheriff's Deputy in a neighboring county. The young man was not acting threatening or aggressive, and the police would have covered it up, manufacturing a statement which could not be corroborated with the witnesses. Were there no video footage, or a witness on the other end of the phone, they would have got away with assault and battery, under the color of law.
Some cops might be good, maybe even the majority; but when something like this happens, even the good ones tend to toe the thin blue line, and give their own the benefit of the doubt over any reasonable quantity and quality of testimony. That PD had to pay out about 1.5 million in settlements for brutality last year, and I wonder how much more we did not know about, that just got shuffled under the rug. We should give these people a monopoly on the use of force? Now, to me, that's crazy.
FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis
