Wabash82

Some of us old coots remember when Bartles and James and Zima "wine" coolers were striking the death knell for beer, too. This too shall pass.

Well, I heard the slave ship reenactment was not the school's best work, anyway -- their "The Holocaust Reimagined" choir show during Oktoberfest and end of the school year play, "Vegas Mass Shooting: The Musical" are much harder tickets to get....

I am gone for a day or two and I miss all the fun stuff! Whose making the odds on the fight, and who's holding the money? (Not Muda, I hope!) Is it guns, knives, or just knuckles and teeth? And where in the hell is Elwood!?

I'm sort of unclear as to what the "big lie" is related to dual loyalty. Did not President Trump just say that American Jews who vote Democratic are being "disloyal" to Israel -- which, of course, he could only say if he thinks American Jews (should) have dual loyalties?! In any event, the term "Palestine" comes from the Greeks, and refers to the lands occupied by the Philistines -- who obviously are referenced in the Bible. While I am skeptical Jesus was of Philistine "heritage" -- that seems like the kind of thing his Jewish followers would have found sort of important to mention -- it is a bit disingenuous to say that Jesus couldn't have been a "Palestinian" simply because the Bible doesn't refer to "Palestine".

Well, Muda, you just don't know economics. You see, the Chinese are paying all those tariffs, so if we just put enough of them on enough Chinese stuff (has anyone thought about rice yet?), we can all retire early with the guv'ment subsidy checks we will receive from the Chinese tariff payments - sort of like all the farmers are doing.

Those are drafting issues and can be handled by drafting broadly and then exempting out items that fall within the definition only semantically. But it is all moot. There are some folks who'd like to see private ownership of bazookas, and folks who'd like to ban all private gun ownership. Neither's going to happen. We are going to get lots of conversation, but no action out of these recent incidents, as in the past.

We don't know the limits, but I'd say in my opinion that would be too restrictive under the general logic of the Heller case. (Scalia bent over backwards in Heller to avoid appearing to set hard and fast rules regarding the parameters of permissible limits on types of firearms -- his main goal was to make it clear that the rights protected under the 2nd Amendment (whatever their specific scope) are rights of indivdual persons, and not withstanding the reference to well-regulated militias in the introductory clause, are not rights of the States or right "mediated" through the States.

Beyond the obvious fact that the video creates an ideal set of circumstances -- folks standing on a range, who are not shooting at moving human beings, rushing adrenalin and knowledge that law enforcement may be coming to kill them at any second, and with their reloading magazines laid out before them on a stand -- it does not represent a a "blind experiment" with some control mechanism: the people involved in the video understand why it is being made, and what conclusion the people making the video want to reach. So if they are sympathetic to that desired conclusion -- which their participation in the video would imply -- they obviously can "rig" the outcome by slowing slightly their rate of fire when using the larger magazines. Moreover, Christy's results consistently showed a few seconds of delay in the multiple mag scenario. I again refer you to the recent Dayton incident -- a crime that lasted 30 seconds in total. A few seconds of delay in that crime would have saved lives or injuries. The opportunity to hit him with the chair arose because he paused to reload another magazine. The point of the link of the second article was to emphasize that delays to reload provide potential victims the opportunity to fight back, however long the delay may be last. Well then, NRA data would be equally viewed with skepticism due to apparent partisanship, you'd acknowledge? I am probably being slow on the up take, but I don't understand the boating accident reference. No, I was challenging the implication in your initial post that bump stocks are already "illegal" so passage of explicit legislation by Congress to outlaw them is not necessary. My point was that the status of bump stocks as "legal" or "illegal" has changed with regulatory interpretations because there is no explicit underlying law that clearly bans them. Regulatory interpretations can change from administration to administration; acts of (laws passed by) Congress don't. Yes, I've read the Friedman and Heller decisions several times, and they both clearly support my contention that reasonable limitations on particular methods of exercising one's 2nd Amendment rights do not represent unconstitutional infringements of that right (an unlawful deprivation of the essential liberty). You are going to have explain in more detail what you mean, if you are believe that those cases do not support my position that you are wrongly equating the underlying right (to "bear arms") to possible mechanisms of exercising that right (e.g., having a fully automatic machine gun, or a bazooka, or a cannon -- or a large capacity magazine, or a semi-automatic rifle, etc., etc.).

Hasbro just needs to add a scope to them Jarts and re-brand them as "home defense projectiles" protected by the 2nd Amendment.

Are you serious? A staged demonstration with folks who know what the point of the demonstration is supposed to be?! Here are just two examples (of many) from real life: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/patricia-maisch-describes-stopping-gunman-reloading/story?id=12577933 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/seattle-pacific-university-shooting-heroes-helped-thwart-gunman Here's some of the research: https://everytownresearch.org/assault-weapons-high-capacity-magazines It is the way market forces work. There are other examples with comparable numbers of goods in the market at the time they were banned -- go buy some Jarts. Makes my point: as political winds shift, they can change the regulation again. Laws, once passed, are not quite as easy to "undo" (think Obamacare.) You are conflating the right with particluat potential modes of exercising it. If your favorite form of poster board was banned because it contained toxic chemicals, your right to free speech would not be taken away. You'd just have to make your placards for the gun rights march with some slightly less nice poster board.

Thirty seconds elapsed between Dayton shooter's first shot and when he was shot dead by police. He was the guy with the 100 round magazine. Killed nine and wounded 20+ others in those thirty seconds. Are you sure that even a few seconds' delay in the rate of fire wouldn't "change things"? Those are seconds that potential victims use to escape, and police officers use to close and neutralize a perpetrator. This is the "perfect is the enemy of the good" or, "If it can't fix it immediately, it's useless" position. Yes, they won't go away over night. They WILL immediately become more expensive on any black market, and over time will disappear from the places where non-hardened criminal people -- which describes most these mass shooters -- would have no way to get them, just like fully auto weapons have become since they were generally outlawed. I can think of one "serious shooter" who had one in Vegas.... He seemed to do okay with it. Policies can be changed overnight. Federal laws cannot be. "A" problem? Per my earlier comment, I'd say that quite different "societal problems" gave rise to the El Paso shooting, the Dayton shooting, and the various mass shootings in Chicago last weekend. Unless we are going to just declare every person who ever shoots any other person for any reason to be "mentally ill", we have to face the fact that we are never going to eliminate all the many things that motivate some human beings to kill another human being -- or a whole bunch of them at once. What we can try to do is reduce the availability to such persons of technology that is specifically and directly (and effectively) designed to make accomplishing that end easy for them.

These are relative things, but yeah, just like those laws when they are/were actively enforced. They generally worked to significantly reduce the things they were designed to reduce. Obviously, they didn't/don't work perfectly-- they didn't eradicate marijuana use, or stop all alcohol sales, or eliminate all illegal immigration. But it is only when we start talking about gun violence that suddenly the standard for assessing "usefulness" becomes 100%, ironclad effectiveness. The real world doesn't work that way. If a uniform result is desired, a federally-established and enforced standard is more effective in achieving that result han a patchwork of state or local standards that can be evaded simply by driving a few miles.

Did he leave a manifesto linking the shooting to his alleged left wing views?

The Chicago situation is relevant in two respects. First, it demonstrates that the problem of gun violence in the U.S. is not simply a mental health issue. There are insane shooters, and stoned shooters, and criminal shooters, and racist shooters, and religious-fanatics shooters, and just evil shooters. Attempts to suss out in advance who the next mass shooter is by focusing on such traits -- watch that guy because he's a Muslim; keep tabs on that fella because he's got a prescription for Xanax; send the cops to look into that guy, he talks about Hitler on 8chan -- are futile. If you want to reduce gun violence in the U.S., you have to make it more diffficult for anyone and everyone to get a gun, or to get guns (and accessories) of a type that can shoot lots of bullets very quickly. Second, Chicago shows that it is impossible to do the above simply with local (city- and state-level) laws, it will take national legislation.

Not for long -- they are already working on the robots to repair the robots. 😳 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/25/will-we-really-need-humans-to-fix-the-robots/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/gizmodo.com/a-self-repairing-space-robot-on-the-international-space-1580869685/amp

I love the "logic" of pieces like this: because some people falsely claimed they were victims of racism, that somehow indicates that actual acts of racism must not be occurring? I guess we can advise our wives and daughters and female friends to relax -- since some women have been caught lying about being raped, that must mean that real rapes don't actually happen much. And the thread deviates into a demand for statistical support for Dante's (admittedly inane) statement about other countries closing their doors to Americans, yet no one has questioned exactly what evidence this essay's author relies on when he makes the bald assertion that, "America is one of the least racist countries in the history of the world...." Measured how?

Yeah, of course. It makes complete sense that having to obtain counterfeit licensing documents in order to scam people is "easier" than not needing to obtain any documents at all to pull off your scams, because the libertarians did away will all licensing requirements....

Moving from state to state to find more victims and stay ahead of the law is a pretty common con man's tactic already. Can't imagine why we'd want to make it even easier for them. Simply having greater reciprocity between states in regard to honoring each other's licensing decisions would help alleviate many of the cost-associated concerns you've mentioned, while still protecting the public.

Wasn't it the mainstream media who "outed" the state legislator as a hoaxer? I don't believe it is "fake news" for the media to: (i) report on a viral social media posting by a public figure who has made some charged allegations of racism or other misconduct by another person; (ii) look further into the public figure's social media allegations to see if they are true; and (iii) report if/when the public figure's social media allegations turn out to be exaggerated or untrue? I mean, isn't that pretty much exactly what the media does most every weekend after one of the President's twitter storms?

Wow, this is pretty low. The parents paying off the debt after the fact does not somehow change the fact that they (apparently) sent their kids to school on those prior occasions without breakfast or lunch, or the means to buy it. So if the school system truly believes that this failure by the parents was evidence of possible neglect, the school system should report the parents to child welfare authorities -- and, indeed, may well have a legal duty to do so -- regardless of whether the parents later settle their debts to the school system. Which means the school system is either lying in its supposed view of the parents' (alleged) failures to feed their kids or send them with money to buy breakfast/lunch, or it is willing to use the welfare of these children as leverage in an "extortion" effort. ("We won't rat you out for neglecting your kids if you pay up.")

I don't "get it" because the meme doesn't make any sense if a person claims he (metaphorically) "doesn't see color." The meme makes sense only if it is appreciated that the two eggs externally do not look the same. That's why your claim to (metaphorically) "not see color" is such an eye roller....

I don't get it -- two eggs in the pan in both photos ("I don't see color.")

Or as Einstein called it, "spooky action at a distance"... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.engadget.com/amp/2019/07/12/bell-quantum-entanglement-image-university-of-glasgow/

I only attended "government school" for kindergarten and law school. In the former their was only one coloring book page with a picture of Lincoln (I made his beard purple), and in the latter we only had time to review some of his slightly less satanic activities, like freeing millions of slaves....

You #sjw types just insist on applying your modern, "woke" PC sensibilities to historical figures. Shame!