Guns, the NRA, the constitution and senseless shootings

With all that security protecting your guns from burglary as well as protecting you from your guns, how can they ever be used for protection?

Hell, by the time you get to those things, whatever that burglar wants, he has already obtained and departed.

According to your statement, the burglar was in the house already anyway. So which is it? Is your story made up or was the burglar in the house?

The reality is that you cannot shoot someone, or assault anyone in self-defense, unless they are on your property.

 

Shit. The more I think about it, the more depressed I get....

Yeah, the Brits who founded this nation may have been cute, with funny accents, but they were some violent MF's. So we inherited some of their imperialist attitudes about the expendability of human life, true, BUT...

Canada had a similar national origin and look how mild-mannered they are.

And, more significantly, the Brits were cool with killing others, but not so much with killing each other. They profited from slavery, but they didn't want slavery practiced in Britain itself...too gauche. They turned much of the world into a living hell but kept things tidy back in England. The Brits got kind of out of hand with whoremongering and drunkenness, but not with murder.

Not having a war fought out here since the Civil War definitely makes us way too casual about war, as the prevalence of chickenhawks attests. But does that make us casual about interpersonal violence as well? Look at the violence in our inner cities...people aren't immune to it or casual about it...the majority of the people living there fucking hate it and recognize it for the tragedy that it is. But it goes on...

 

Don't have a problem with that Inky, except that anytime this happens, the anti-NRA hysterics begin. Charleton Heston has as much to do with what happened today as Xbox.

 

Yep, you're right.

Japan did this, yes. But they only acceded to doing so after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had those not occurred, they would have fought to the death, as they had pledged to do in the service of their Emperor. We're all familiar with the stories of Japanese soldiers still living in makeshift holes on neighboring islands years after the end of WWII.

It's one of the reasons why we bombed Japan, rightly or wrongly. We knew that if we tried to invade, we would lose in excess of a million lives against an opponent which had a mindset totally unlike our own in terms of sacrifice and battle.

 

Canada isn't called on for international support like the U.S. has. Canada didn't save the world's ass during World War II.

It's like apples and oranges.

The next time there's a mass gang shooting, let's hear Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson speak out. Rappers yack about bullets to the head too. Desensitive stuff.

 

Not just Brits, Puritan Brits. And a highly individualized-thinking subset of them, too.

And don't forget the French influence on Canada. That is a large part of their history as well.

We did away with much of our French influence after the Louisiana purchase, but Canada did not.

 

Hmmmm......
How is this similar to radical Islam?

 

That's a good point, Yawn.

There are several tie-ins with Wahabi (extreme) Islam in what I'm discussing, but you point out one I hadn't thought of. Nice job.

 

This afternoon, a talk show host said that the Virginia legislature voted down a bill that would have allowed college students to have concealed weapons on campus. He said police chiefs all over the state were opposed to the bill. He also said had the bill passed, somebody on campus with a gun may have been able to take the shooter out before so many people were killed.
Maybe so, but I'd be a lot more worried about what might happen in a setting with so many 18-22-year-olds, lots of alcohol, drugs and guns and a lot of bad situations being made worse than what happened today.
I don't own a gun and with two events that have happened in my family (a cousin's suicide and a carjacking that happened when my brother's father-in-law's gun was stolen), I don't want to own one.
But to each his own.

 

Yes, that law shouldn't have ever sniffed passing.

Potential positive effects on this morning notwithstanding.

 

The people that settled Britain after the Norman Conquest were tough, "F You," "I'll- do-what-I-want" people, for good or for bad.

This strain only magnified in the wake of Luther's Reformation. Protestantism basically says YOU, the individual, decide what God says, no one else. So you had many splinter groups which decided for themselves how to live. This is the basis of American 'individualism,' these people and their faith/culture.

Many of the harsher, more cynical groups (e.g., Calvinists & Puritans, to a lesser extent) are the backbone of the people who settled this country and fought to secede from England. And again, the ones who stayed and settled here were often even more 'extreme' in their beliefs than were there brethren who stayed in England.

That's why you had people who weren't really overly concerned with giving Indians blankets with smallpox or creating "Manifest Destiny." It was a very rugged, take- what-you-can-get crew, in general.

 

I meant that as one of the terms of their surrender, they not be allowed to have an army or a navy - which remains true to this day. They have a Japanese Defense Force, which we supply. Although that may change in the near future.

And you'll get a lot of argument from historians about what was known or predicted about any invasion of the Japanese mainland. Many folks will tell you Harry only dropped the bombs to jerk Stalin's leash. Remember, we'd already firebombed the major cities to cinders by the time we used the A-bomb.