StrangeSox

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.

Yeah, and the NYT still doesn't seem to get what they did wrong: "The government" and "a government official speaking off the record who may have political axes to grind" are not the same thing (see: every Darryl Issa committee leak). And nobody seems to have any idea how the word "criminal" got added into the story. This breakdown of the chain of events from elsewhere seems pretty accurate:

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 03:20 PM) 2) for the "good guy" with a gun to screw up and do something stupid, irresponsible or malicious. You just said it there yourself, the good guy will screw up and act like a criminal. No straw man needed, you provided the proof right there. "Do something stupid, irresponsible or malicious" does not immediately lead to "stand up in a movie theater and start shooting people at random." You keep jumping right to the bad-faith extreme in this thread.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 03:14 PM) Reading through the comments one thing becomes clear. Most of the non gun owners believe that non criminals with guns will act like criminals with guns. Criminals do not follow the same laws as the rest of society. Some criminals have severe mental disease or defects. You also assume non criminal gun owners will do the stupidest possible thing. In the theater they will just stand up and start shooting in any random direction like some cartoon character. Remember these are really normal people. They are doctors, lawyers, professors, truck drivers, construction workers, secretaries, and from every walk of life and background. They don't suddenly veer their cars into traffic, they don't randomly start killing people. But somehow many of the people here suddenly think I'm as crazy as the criminal that is killing people. It just isn't so. There are millions and millions of very responsible gun owners who just would not do the things that some people here think they would. Your caricatures would be laughable if they weren't so wrong. that's an impressive takedown of a straw man, well done!

QUOTE (Tex @ Jul 27, 2015 -> 03:15 PM) The way to reduce gun violence is to reduce the number of criminals that are carrying guns. If you removed all the guns from people who will not commit a crime in their lifetime, how will that reduce gun violence? this is not knowable, and reducing the overall number of guns makes it 1) harder for criminals or the mentally ill to get their hands on a gun and 2) for the "good guy" with a gun to screw up and do something stupid, irresponsible or malicious.

the only way to reduce gun violence is to continually increase the number of people carrying guns everywhere they go

Is McCormick pretty much at capacity year-round? I have no idea.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 12:21 PM) So, there was another nice version in the tales of how the media "loves" hillary clinton last night. The NY Times ran a big scoop on how several inspectors general had asked for a DOJ investigation into Hillary Clinton's email "scandal". The NY Times had their big headline - DOJ asked to investigate Clinton's emails for classified information!!!!" Within a couple hours, the story had been pulled and rewritten entirely. The DOJ was not being asked to investigate the use of Clinton's private email box in any way, shape, or form, instead they were being asked to see whether the State Department had properly handled the emails once they were handed back over to the State Department. There was no request of an investigation specifically of the former Secretary, it was a request to investigate the later handling of those emails. The NY Times got their headline, "DOJ asked to investigate Clinton's emails" was all over the news while I was at the gym, and I had to actually sit down at my computer and look into it to find out that "oh, they're actually not caring about Clinton's private emails at all and the story is being run in a way that is completely BS". Yay media cheering on Hillary by making stuff up to make her look like a criminal! The NYT public editor goes over what went wrong here NPR (and I'm sure plenty of other media outlets) had pretty terrible coverage of this Friday afternoon, going on at length about how damaging this was for Clinton, how terrible it looked etc. etc. and then threw in an 'oh by the way the New York Times had to retract the core of the story, whoops probably should have mentioned that before railing on Clinton for five minutes' at the very end.

Yeah, discounting the deterrence and cultural/social signaling effects of laws to zero seems pretty silly.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 04:43 PM) IIRC the CDC site I was looking at earlier said it was like 1,600/year. Laws are already on the books in like 30 states to "prevent" that. It still happens. People still fight strongly against any sort of law that requires you to keep a gun unloaded and locked up. The whole Heller case was over mandatory trigger locks.

The shooter in this case was a man with a history of mental illness including an involuntary commitment for bi-polar disorder, violent outbursts and threats towards those around him and extremist ideology. Nevertheless, he was able to legally purchase a gun.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 11:13 PM) The guns just didn't decide to go on killing sprees. Nice try. Nobody is arguing that, but you're either being deliberately obtuse or

I'd imagine a rich person moving to Singapore is mainly to dodge taxes

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 03:53 PM) They don't die just because a gun is present. A human action is required. Guns are inanimate objects and do not just go off and hunt people down. http://nbc4i.com/2015/07/23/armed-citizens...ruiting-center/ http://www.people.com/people/mobile/articl...0902537,00.html

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 03:58 PM) so anytime a person dies and a gun is present, they would be alive if the gun wasn't there. Got it. In some but not all cases of deaths caused by guns, the person would still be alive if a gun had not been present.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 03:53 PM) They don't die just because a gun is present. A human action is required. Guns are inanimate objects and do not just go off and hunt people down. Necessary vs. sufficient causes. Would the person still be alive if a gun had not been present?

Coming to a neighborhood near you: gun-firing drones

Plus, we should also care about "gang violence" related deaths anyway. A lot of times it's innocent bystanders, and even when it's not, it's still a major part of the cycle of poverty and violence.

QUOTE (ChiSox_Sonix @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 03:31 PM) And people who buy guns (legally) have to register with the government as well. I'd fully support initiatives that made guns harder to obtain, but that's still a long ways from a complete and total ban. Yeah but even something is minor as universal background checks couldn't pass a couple of months after Sandy Hook, and after some minor Colorado gun regulations were passed, gun activists successfully recalled two of the legislators. Their is a small but very vocal absolutionist pro-gun minority (including the NRA) who fight against any new gun laws and actively work to weaken what ones we do have.

Who said it, Donald Trump or Frank Reynolds (Danny Devito on Always Sunny)?

Max Fisher with a pretty thorough takedown of former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's criticism of the deal in Politico.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jul 24, 2015 -> 08:12 AM) You aren't angry that a 59 year old guy decided to kill a bunch of people? I dunno if anger is the right word. Saddened, sure. Doesn't make me want myself or a bunch of other people to start carrying guns, though. This seems like an especially terrible reason to carry a gun. That's largely due to our own myth-making about stranger-danger, and I'm not sure how carrying a gun helps that anyway. And when parents do send their kids to play at the local playground by themselves, they get DCFS called. I don't think vigilantism is the answer.

If it's already showing signs, I think it might be too late. Might be worthwhile contacting somewhere like the Morton Arboretum and asking for advice, though. They do have a website on it: http://www.mortonarb.org/trees-plants/tree...erald-ash-borer

Carrying out of anger seems pretty terrible.