champu

Sigh... What a shit festival of a forum...

I think it's amusing that the article you link complains about the NRA using "look over there!" tactics (not saying they don't, btw) and... doesn't have examples of dropped firearms going off.

Is this sarcasm? If not then please provide a Google search showing "several instances in the past few weeks" because the results I'm getting are more "a few instances in the past several years." and when you read the story some of them had nothing to do with a gun being dropped. I've tried "dropped gun discharge", "dropped gun went off", and "gun fell went off". There are only a couple models of handgun out there, outside of museum pieces, that will actually go off when dropped, and even then only under particular circumstances.

Cemeteries are kinda a waste of space, I suppose.

This belief that the second amendment prevents, or has been twisted to prevent, reasonable restrictions on firearms ownership or use is completely imaginary. There are several very populous states that have passed and continue to pass just about any laws they want on the matter. When I hear complaints about the second amendment I hear a call for restoration of laws overturned on the grounds of a second amendment violation. That's the only thing the second amendment actually means. It's like someone complaining about the fourth amendment despite all the shitty things that have happened over the last couple decades and that the courts didn't stop.

No, like I've said before I get it. About half of Americans are willing to have their society pay whatever price is necessary in order for them to have the privilege of nearly unrestricted access to the tools of war to play with as toys. And the accident of the 2nd amendment turns this privilege into a right. While I suppose you could stretch "nearly unrestricted access" and "play with as toys" quite a [dismissive] ways, your dichotomy is essentially claiming that my stance on firearms doesn't exist. Thanks. It reads like the classic, "On the freeway, everyone driving slower than me is a moron and everyone driving faster than me is a maniac" line. This is exactly why I end up joking with Bill in these threads. But, since you claim to get it, what court case (SCOTUS or circuit with denial of cert) do you think establishes "nearly unrestricted access to the tools of war" as a right? What decision do you feel undermines progress against firearms injuries and deaths in this country until such time as the second amendment is repealed?

We only joke after having the same dozen people wander off from threads where we've made very reasonable arguments only to start a new thread so they can tear into people who don't respond as eloquently... Again... And again... And again... Is there honestly something more you'd like me to elucidate on with regards to firearms or firearms laws?

I propose a common-sense ban on siege engines as they aren't effective for defensive purposes.

A 14 year old is exactly the wrong age to appreciate how paranoid adults around him might be about people with the name Muhammad and what they are or aren't capable of taking lightly. And to your previous question, yes. CPUs, micro controllers, chipset controllers, DSPs... I had a malfunctioning 20 year old copy of the original legend of Zelda for the NES that involved a soldering iron to fix a few years ago and it works fine now. I made the part replaceable this time so in another 20 years I can just pop in a new one

I largely agree, and what I'm espousing is keeping the problems broken up in order to make it easier to stay focused when evaluating proposed measures. You could even make a table with "ways people are getting killed by guns" on one axis and "proposed and enacted gun control measures" on the other. In each cell write an estimated probability of that measure helping prevent that type of injury/death. Multiply and add up against how many of each type of injury/death and you get your potential value of each measure. That's what I would have us do. But here's the thing when someone says, "it's not about what I want": It is about what people sponsoring and voting in favor of city ordinances and state laws want. They want your vote. If you give them your vote when they do stupid crap and you don't tell them otherwise, then don't tell me, "it's not about what I want."

Nice. A friend of mine built a 6.5 Grendel AR to hunt boar. I got a chance to shoot it at a range earlier this year. It's a nice platform. A burger/fries/coke here was $14.44 (~£9.50) so I guess it's something you can save for travels. It was a great day until I started watching the Cubs game.

Sorry, your logic is way off here. You are right that simply and arbitrarily making it harder to purchase a gun will not solve the problem. That still doesn't take away that the easy availability of guns is a large contributing factor. Honestly, I have more respect for people saying that pretty much has to be true, however that shouldn't change for the US due to the 2nd Amendment, therefor we may try to look at some other possible solutions. If you mean that it's too likely that someone will pass a background check despite there being disqualifying information out there because the systems are set up inefficiently, or you mean you can get a friend or family member to buy a firearm for you and give it to you because penalties for straw purchases are too weak and they go unenforced too often, or you mean that there should be a five question quiz (e.g. "A toddler has enough thumb strength to activate a trigger. true/false?") you have to pass to walk out with the gun, or you mean all of those things then say that. Those are areas with room for improvements that can be made that aren't about making it harder to buy a gun. If you mean you want to give county sheriffs absolute authority to decide if someone is allowed to own a firearm and they can be as arbitrarily selective as they want, then say that. That's just about the only thing the second amendment will prevent you from doing.

Re-scoping your concern that there are "too many firearm related deaths and injuries [that occur in a wide variety of events]" as one big "it is too easy to get a gun" problem is not something I agree with doing because then your proposed actions are evaluated against whether they make firearm ownership harder instead of whether they make it safer in any kind of reasonably direct and statistically significant fashion. We could make everyone do 20 pullups and then explain what an eigenvector is before they're allowed to buy a gun. That would make it harder to buy a gun, but that doesn't make it a good or defensible idea. It's a bad way to approach problems.

It's not a controlled "experiment" though. Gun control advocates don't want to do one or two or three things, they want to do ten things (...and then ten more things...) and they want to spam those things all at once. If the tenth thing represents a significant sacrifice to firearm owners and it only maybe (at best) has a chance of helping in already extremely rare scenarios then I'm saying cut the list to nine things and then repeat the exercise. The act of lumping all firearms injuries and deaths together or lumping all shootings involving 4 or more deaths and injuries into one book and plastering "Sandy Hook" on the cover is dishonest, and it's done specifically to promote the types of chimeric measures I'm talking about.

No argument from me that this guy wasn't a dumbass. Also, in a completely un-newsworthy series of events, I went to a range yesterday with a friend. We each shot a couple hundred rounds uneventfully (and my handgun doesn't even have a manual safety ) Afterwords we went to Five Guys which was, by far, the unhealthier of the two activities.