I'm having a really hard time imagining a plausible scenario here: Not about whether someone might disagree with the government, but about possible outcomes of a firearms confrontation with the government. You are not gonna win that one, or even break even.
If you don't like the government, you'll get better results from a trip to the voting booth than a trip to the gun shop. And you'll live longer as well.
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Scarcely a rational reaction. If they don't like the government they've got, they'd do much better by spending their money campaigning to change it.
t
And having guns at home would have saved them? A militia that has put in time setting up a command an control structure and exercised enough to be able to operate as a coordinated group can provide effective resistance against properly trained troops - if the militia outnumbers the properly trained troops. Regimes fall when they upset enough of the army - to the point of mutiny and rebellion - to create an effective opposing army.
Absolutely nothing. Remember Kent State, but remember too the reactions to Kent State. Syria is the current example of a regime that's turned murderous, and international pressure is going to be what gets rid of Bashar al-Assad and his crew of mindless thugs.
I understand that quite a few people are way out of touch with reality. Buying a gun for personal defence is a really silly idea, but Jim Thompson can't understand why.
The US government has been serving the interests of the well-off at the expense of the rest of the rest of the population since the founding tax evaders got rid of the British. Roosevelt's New Deal did redistribute some of the wealth into the hands of the less well-off - the rich had finally realised that having 25% of the population unemployed was losing them money - and it's high time the rich developed a bit more enlightened self-interest.
Since you are a right-wing nitwit, and stupid enough with it that even other right-wing nitwits can notice, you don't realise that this enlightened self-interest pays off for everybody, and write it off as socialism (by which you mean communism).
This means that you've got a rather unrealistic picture of what your government is doing, and an even more unrealistic idea of why it is doing it. "Beserk" doesn't really cover it, but you lack the wit to get closer to the truth.
It was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and ruled by the local communist party, but Tito preserved his independence from Stalin and Stalin's successors.
Life in communist Yugoslavia wasn't too different from life in the Soviet Union - though Yugoslavia was better off - but Serbia and Yugoslavia were never part of the Soviet Union.
Your pot has already boiled. Between CA and IL, it's a race to the bottom (NY and NJ aren't even warming up). There are good reasons I moved out of IL 38 years ago.
If you ever drive US395 up or down the Owens Valley, take time out to visit the Manzanar camp site, north of Lone Pine. Of all the places it is possible to get locked up behind wire, that's the one I'd pick.
--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
You should be scared. Last weekend's South Chicago shooting score: 11 dead, 50 wounded, all black-versus-black, so no media coverage.
Obama seeks to divide the country to the benefit of his reelection, by playing those "bad" whites against the "working-class" blacks, so coverage of Zimmerman-Martin: every 15 minutes. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
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I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Ah, we almost stayed at the Motel6 in Joliet (that's to the south right?) but I had a really bad feeling when we arrived at about 8pm and there was thick bulletproof glass for the cashier's office and it closed around 9pm. Plus I didn't get a good feeling from the people milling about. Then we kept on driving to the next spot on the Motel6 handbook but it was closed... then tried Iowa City but all the motels and hotels were booked solid for a college event... I think actually it was Cedar Rapids, not Des Moines, where we stayed, after looking at a map now. Yeah, we headed north. =3D)
We always stay at Motel6... habit from when my dad would take us driving. Not the most fancy place to stay but the price is great.
Sure. But they all end up oxidising some form of carbon compound to CO and CO2, and the CO gets oxidised to CO2 as soon as it gets to the ozone layer.
r
One of my final year lecturers devoted an hour lecture to the various organic chemical used in explosives; modern "gun-powders" are mostly nitro-cellulose, which isn't all that interesting
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The fact that you imagine that it is possible that firing a gun doesn't produce any CO2 at all means that you don't know what you are talking about. Having a Ph.D. in Chemistry doesn't mean that I know much about hand-gun and rifle propellants, but I do know the basics, which have clearly escaped you.
I wonder how bright he thinks that I think I am? I know that I've admitted to scoring high in IQ tests, but I've also pointed out that there's a society - Mensa - for dumb people who score high on IQ tests but show no other evidence of intelligence. Even Jim-out-of-touch-with- reality-Thompson baulked at actually joining Mensa after having done well enough on their IQ tests to qualify.
But lots of people who have cars chose to commit suicide in other ways. It takes time to get into a car and get it to a place where you can drive fast enough to be sure of killing yourself by running into something, and by that time you've probably thought better of the whole idea.
Not that this is relevant to the cost-benefit analysis of having a gun in the house for self-protection. The risk you are protecting against is very unlikely, and the danger you are running - a successful attempted suicide with a gun - is much less unlikely. This makes the cost spectacularly larger than the benefit.
Very little.
Unless you track it - it isn't going to run far - and finish it off. Gun-shots aren't always fatal either.
The problem with this new argument is that nobody justifies the gun in the house as a hunting weapon or a target-shooting weapon, and there's no real need to keep them in the house for either purpose. Leave them locked up in a safe at the gun club when you don't need them, and you are much less likely to use them to shoot yourself when hit by a transient suicidal impulse.
No. See The Olive Branch Letters. On a practical basis, *all* empires tend to become a way for people who can manipulate a Mercantilist system to enrich themselves while draining the treasury .
See Rotten Boroughs and that sort for British examples ( James Michener's "Caribbean" is actually not a bad survey ).
Our Revolution was about real class and bad economics, and ending the idea of Divine Right kings. That and logistics... The Colonies were too far to be run from London.
The Founders were always more land speculators than tax cheats. Of course, land speculators live in terror of taxes...
It made a new class of well off at best. All the big enterprises like General Motors reconfigured into rent-seeking apparatchiks, which hastened their demise. There's never been redistribution in any meaningful way in the United states that did any good - it mostly just doesn't work.
WWII simply provided a cover excuse for turning on the monetary tap, while using rationing and other fictions to appeal to the native tendency to austerity. If people weren't terrified of doing well, there wouldn't be the sort of Prosperity Gospel churches offering training to overcome it...
Once a beachhead of rents had been established in Detroit, people in Japan, Korea Germany set about undermining them.
The closest we can get to a story about why this was is "A Monetary History of the United States" by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. Subsequently, there are better analyses of how the gold standard caused this.
Any Socialist form the 1930s to the 1970s worth his salt *was* at least a Trotskyite. Trade Unionism and Fabian Socialism were crowded out.
There haven't been any real Socialists since... just Neoliberals.
"The truth" is that we're still struggling with the sort of issues that divided Jefferson and Hamilton. these issues jumped the banks of the American Experiment and have flooded the world....
TO be fair, those are echoes of the debates around the Bank of England from much longer ago...
But common sense points out that having a gun in the house to protect yourself against a very improbable risk is a bad idea, when it exposes you to the rather more probable (if still unlikely) risk of succumbing to a transient suicidal impulse.
People who talk about courage and intestinal fortitude aren't all that good at exhibiting either - if you need to talk about it, it's because you need to persuade yourself that you aren't actually a coward. If you've got either, all you have to do is remember the last time you didn't act like a coward.
Stationary target practice is a waste of time. The people who truly need pr= oficiency to stay alive, like law enforcement, are always training on pop-u= p quick reaction courses. There are motor memory motions that can only be t= rained, and maintained, through constant repetition. Then there are a host = of other factors like fatigue, low light, multiple targets, increased heart= rate either due to fear factor induced adrenalin or fatigue, major distrac= tions, less than ideal posture/shooting positions, target shooting at you, = pain due to injury, dealing with surprise, and who knows what else...it's g= onna be real rare that you will be able to deal with a situation on your te= rms.
Certainly. That's why I'm taking the course and will qualify up the training ladder to that part of the range with more realistic targets.
And 30' is a lot further away than typical self-defense with a pistol.
And... The AR-15 is for _combat_... a different kind of target altogether... us WV and KY country boys specialize in sniping ;-)
[Turns out some Hatfield's married into the Thompson family, and my wife is related to the McCoy's (via Bundy). :-] ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Oh, BULLSHIT. This has been going on for decades, long before Obama was even born. What a load of scapegoating. Obama isn't responsible for the mess we're in, any more than I am. You may hate liberals and want to blame all your problems on them, but the fact is there is no simple cause (and thus no simple solution) to our problems. The more you try to blame it on a single factor, the less you're ever going to see any kind of solution.
And you think Obama's got control of the media? Not so. The media is big business, motivated by profits and not by reality or truth or fairness. It panders to what the public wants to hear, period. Obama has nothing to do with it. If the public wanted to hear about Obama's sins, the media would gladly comply.
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Well, I suppose one ought to be more concerned if he's Black. However, considering that Chicago has 3 million people, 11 isn't such a large number. I'm guessing you're more likely to get hit by a car, than a bullet (though I don't have the statistics to back this up, so I don't insist on it).
BTW - if there was no media coverage, how did you find out about it? There must have been some kind of coverage. But of course, murders in Chicago aren't exactly *news*. It's kind of like announcing it's cold in winter.
To my understanding, Joliet has a really bad gang problem. I don't know what the murder rate is there. I suspect it's pretty high - possibly rivaling Chicago in per-capita deaths. Again, I don't have statistics. The media probably doesn't bother much with Joliet, since in terms of absolute numbers it's not as alarming as Chicago.
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No, Bill, I'm not talking about a government that still operates under its Constitution - I said a government gone *mad*. We already have serious erosion of peoples' rights in the name of "security" and "safety." The government is simply ignoring the rules it's supposed to be following.
It may happen that the courts - eventually the Supreme Court - nudge the government back on track. In that case, yes, voting and campaigning is probably enough.
But if the government goes crazy - if it starts to just break down doors in the middle of the night, haul people off to jail without trial
- then we've gone beyond what elections can fix.
Oh, yes, they already do this, sometimes. Constitutional protections don't apply to "terrorists" and "drug dealers." The government doesn't have to prove someone's a terrorist; they just nab them and put them away, in many cases for years.
Most people are OK with the government doing this to those nasty terrorists and drug dealers. They might not like it if they became targets.
Hmm... by that logic, when I'm out at night, I shouldn't bother carrying pepper spray with me, because I wouldn't be able to fight off an armed attacker, or a couple of attackers.
Much of the use of having weapons is deterrence, just like the nukes. The government knows that a huge percentage of the population is armed. If they pull a Storm Trooper stunt a few times, people *will* band together. The existence of a vast number of firearms in the hands of the population may be an important factor in preventing the government from getting any further out of line.
Yeah, Kent State, the Chicago Democratic Convention, and thousands upon thousands of illegal searches and seizures against "hippies." When people demonstrated peacefully, the cops often went after them with tear gas and clubs.
We saw something similar in Seattle, not so long ago. We're not far from that now.
And if you notice, Syria (or at least al Assad) doesn't give a rat's ass about world opinion or sanctions. They'll be the last people to be affected by any sanctions. People will go hungry and cold while those guys live just as comfortably as ever.
The world is doing what it always does - standing there, wringing its hands and saying, "gosh, you really shouldn't be doing that." We've got them quivering in their boots.
At the rate we're going, those guys are likely to die of old age before they leave power. In the meantime, people keep dying.
See, Bill, here you go again. You seem unable to accept the notion that anyone could disagree with you without being stupid, crazy, or a "right-wing nut."
I'll say it again. It's entirely possible for someone to disagree with you, without having to be ignorant or insane.
--=20 It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears. -- Marcus Porcius Cato
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