StrangeSox

QUOTE (bmags @ Jul 29, 2015 -> 12:04 PM) This is so embarrassing that he is leading in two primaries. I just don't understand these people whose sole standard for the most important person in the world is they just attack and make jokes of liberals and media. Give me the person that just rates the president by their looks anyday. It's the rightwing id unleashed. They finally have somebody unafraid to "tell it like it is." And it's not just liberals and media--he's attacking other Republicans just as harshly.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jul 29, 2015 -> 11:24 AM) I just think the main issue is the NFL continues to seem like it makes up the rules as it goes along. Right. There's a punishment spelled out in the rules/CBA for tampering with the balls, and it's a fine. The suspension on top of that is pretty ridiculous but it's along the same lines as the rest of Goddell's arbitrary decisions.

iirc his name wasn't actually Joe and he wasn't a licensed plumber

ridiculous

QUOTE (knightni @ Jul 28, 2015 -> 12:11 PM) Imagine holding the Olympic Ceremonies at the speedway. That would be one of the most massive events ever. The torch lighting ceremony would have to involve donuts in the infield somehow

Donald Trump's lawyer threatens reporter over ex-wife's allegations: 'You cannot rape your spouse'

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Jul 28, 2015 -> 10:19 AM) I still think Indy could and should do it. An awful lot of facilities already in place and wouldn't have to build a ton of stuff. I think that'd be the only way to do it and not have it be a debacle. Aside from LA in '84 (which did exactly that) and Atlanta, I think they've all lost money for the host cities.

Going to try to get to Shenandoah over Columbus Day weekend again. Tried last year but had to cancel at the last minute due to rainy weather all weekend.

Boston's bid to host the 2024 Olympics was halted by the USOC after Boston's mayor refused to guarantee funding for any shortfalls. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/07/2...pQtN/story.html That leaves Rome, Paris, Budapest and Hamburg in the running.

HH, get out of here with your wild, baseless speculation.

awesome, things have been looking up for you lately steve edit and your avatar cracks me up every time I see it

Lol

Those sure are words

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 05:00 PM) I don't think most people do. A vocal, powerful minority is different. If you were to somehow give an assurance to the NRA that all you wanted were back ground checks and other administrative requirements, and nothing further, I bet they'd happily agree. But they know, correctly, that then in 1 year there would be calls for back ground checks, for gun registries, for purchase limits, for size limits, for ammo limits, those autodetecting things that lock guns if in the hands of the wrong person and on and on. It's not an unreasonable slippery slope argument, it's a very real one given the types of legislation that has been proposed and/or passed. You said above most people support reasonable gun laws but now you say the nra is correct in opposing literally any new law because of a fear of different laws in the future.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 04:54 PM) Well, then don't inject yourself into the argument that's being had. And great, I'm glad you concede your original point that guns have no other purpose than hurting or killing people is wrong. I can use my car to store my groceries, but that's not the intended and designed purpose. Almost all guns are intended and designed to hurt or kill something.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 04:52 PM) If you give an inch, they take a mile. We all know a background check would be just the start. Then it's on to the next thing. That's why they oppose any new restrictions. So you oppose any new gun regulations whatsoever because of a slippery slope argument, but you keep insisting that "most people" have no problem with additional gun regulations.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 04:46 PM) And most reasonable people in this country don't have a problem implementing certain policies. But we also have people seeking full on bans. Some. But again, something as simple as a universal background check couldn't even pass after Sandy Hook. Gun rights absolutionists will oppose any measure at all. More states have actually loosened their gun laws in the last few years. But the person living in the Rockies has very little chance of someone breaking into their home, necessitating a gun for self-defense. I think you get farther with the hunter/nuisance animal control than saying they need them in case of a break-in, imo.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 04:43 PM) 3000 out of 320,760,000 people (as of 4-15-15) is .0000935%. HUGE problem we have there. I am sure it is huge for the 3000 families effected, but as an overall 'epidemic' it is peanuts. You could probably find more than 3000 people who were saved by guns each year to balance that out. This argument proves far too much. Childhood leukemia claims less than 2000 people a year. Barely even an issue, who cares?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 04:35 PM) I assumed we were still talking about the Colorado shooting. I thought he killed 10-12 people. When was anyone talking about the Colorado shooting? This is a thread that started with the more recent mass shooting in a Louisiana theater. Two women were killed and the shooter killed himself. Guns are taboo because they are designed and used to intentionally kill people. That is their purpose. As far as who has the most exposure to gun homicide and violence, it's more urban. Suicides are actually more rural. Trans fats were recently banned. People can talk about and do more than one thing.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 04:29 PM) So because people off themselves with a gun my constitutional right should be disregarded? That's pretty f'd up. Because over 30,000 Americans die every year from guns, we should implement policies to reduce those numbers. What is the threat of someone breaking into your home in rural middle-of-nowhere country versus suburban or urban areas? I think the odds are directly the opposite here. I don't think we were ever talking exclusively about unintentional gun deaths.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 04:18 PM) How much worse could that situation get though? A guy strapped with guns shooting a crowd of people. Let's assume Tex is in the theater and in the middle of the chaos he gets off 10 shots. He accidentally kills (or hits) 2 people, but manages to hit the shooter and kills him before he can reload and kill another 5-10 people. Why wouldn't that be a better outcome? In this case? Because we'd now have 4 people dead instead of 2. And I'd just point out that this happened in Louisiana, not exactly the place with the most strict gun laws. blocked by work filter Absolutely there are cases where the presence of a gun led to a better outcome, but that's not the argument. The argument is if, on the whole, our gun culture is a positive or negative factor. Are we better off with more and more people carrying weapons? Are we better off with tens of thousands of new guns spread across the country every year?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 03:59 PM) Of course the problem with this is the myth-making to prove your point. We've had concealed carry for decades now. Those events don't happen on a regular basis. They're incredibly rare. I agree that they are rare. They still happen more than they should, though, and there's scant evidence that CC makes us safer on the whole. Balta's issue also reaches to private gun ownership in general, where we unquestionably have thousands of deaths by suicide a year that we likely otherwise wouldn't have. Those events are not rare. Look at how strongly groups like the NRA fight against any sort of safe storage requirements. The most ardent gun supporters believe the only way to keep a gun is to keep it loaded and immediately accessible in case of a home invasion. They don't store their guns in a safe but sit strapped day and night. They don't keep their guns unloaded and with a trigger lock but propped up in the corner beside their bed just in case. We do regulate pools and require certain safety measures for them (they need to be permitted, they usually need to be fenced with a self-closing gate). Pools serve a primary purpose that isn't "to kill something," though, and you generally can't kill someone else intentionally with a pool and you definitely can't do it as quickly as you could with a gun. As Jake put it, a gun makes a temporary lapse have a permanent consequence. They're designed specifically to kill something, and they're generally very good at doing that.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 03:58 PM) And let's think about what the theater will look like during the shooting. Has anyone ever looked around a movie theater? I might have special vision but I can see almost everyone in a theater. It's pretty bright with that movie going and everything. Your eyes get adjusted once you are in there for a while. Now, I'm guessing a lot of people are hiding and still others are running away from the shooter. How many people are running towards the gunman and standing really tall to be shot? Is the gunman surrounded by dozens of people standing there waving their arms? What do you think it looks like? I'd imagine it would be quite the disorienting situation with people running everywhere and many not even being able to quickly and accurately realize 1) what's going on and 2) where the shots are actually coming from. As Balta pointed out, at some point, the shooter in this case walked out with the crowd and was attempting to blend in before he spotted the police. That's a whole theater full of people who didn't recognize the man who was just trying to kill them. People get really bad tunnel vision in situations like that. Police and military (and private security forces) train in these high-stress, active shooter scenarios and they can still fail. I don't think you can expect the person who took a 6 hour class on a saturday and goes to the range to shoot at paper occasionally to perform in a situation as crowded and disorienting as an active shooter in a movie theater.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 03:46 PM) thousands of people die every year for no other reason than a gun is present. That was the quote from Balta. NO OTHER REASON. I didn't make those words up, he did. If he meant something else, he should have typed something else. You are the first to jump on whatever fits your narrative, the exact word or the meaning. Well, his exact words are very damn clear there. NO OTHER REASON. Yes, his words are exceeding clear and accurate. If a gun had not been present in many circumstances, the person would still be alive. The gun is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient cause in those cases. I didn't claim to know an exact number. As Jake points out above, there's some pretty specific reasons why we have such poor data on gun ownership and gun violence in this country, but that's really beside the point. Look at the number of suicides by guns and you easily every have the thousands Balta mentioned. Look at incidents of stray bullets or overheated tempers leading to deaths. It happens. I am glad you agree that we can't know ahead of time who is the "good guy" or not, and as Jake says above, it's not a simple, black-and-white categorization anyway. I haven't said anything about complete gun bans, so I'm not sure where you're getting that from. Analogies to cars and water (or any other object that is either necessary to live or serves numerous other useful, primary purposes) are bad-faith arguments; no, we shouldn't ban cars because cars are very very useful for their primary function of transporting people. We do heavily restrict and regulate and license and register cars, though. We should do the same for weapons who primary function is to kill things. No, you're making the same mistake again. The point is that you don't know who the "good guys" are and it's not even possible to know that categorically. But some non-trivial number of gun owners will do something stupid, irresponsible or malicious and it will lead to injury and death for themselves or others. For some, it will be completely unintentional harm. For some others, yeah, they will "snap" and they'll shoot somebody over something trivial. If we reduce the number of guns out there and how many people are carrying them around with them, we reduce the odds of that sort of thing happening.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 03:24 PM) Your #2 wasn't bath faith? You think nobody but the so-called professionals can handle a gun without going psycho. You keep confusing "some" and "literally every single one" in this thread. When Balta pointed out that if you remove guns from the equation of a lot of gun deaths, there would be a lot fewer deaths, you jumped right to "Exaggerate much? No other reason? Got it." When I tried pointing out the difference between necessary and sufficient causes, you jumped right to "so anytime a person dies and a gun is present, they would be alive if the gun wasn't there. Got it.". You can't know who is the "good guy with a gun" and who is the "bad guy with a gun" for now and all points in the future. The "good guy with a gun" could get pissed off while waiting in line for pizza and shoot someone. They could get pissed off at the guy talking in the theater in front of them and shoot someone. They could have depressive issues and shoot themselves. They could leave the gun out where its accessible and a child ends up hurting or killing themselves or someone else. The more guns there are out there, the more the chances of these things happening increases. Absolutely nowhere in there am I saying that "nobody but the so-called professionals can handle a gun without going psycho." You are completely missing the point.