The Thread Where We Discuss Guns and Gun Control

[Commodore]

A kind of metal wand that Muggles use to kill each other

Which are apparently more effective than magic if Grindelwald's rhetoric is to be believed.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

So from those two instances, it would appear that no, banning standard capacity magazines (what you call high capacity) does not seem like it would do much to reduce casualties of mass shootings.

Surely you must admit that just because one person managed to achieve a massive kill count with a bolt-action rifle, that this is in no way enough evidence to make such a claim. There are such things as statistical outliers.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I believe there are several people here who said gun owners are just paranoid and that Democrats don't want to take our guns.

Well as far as I saw, just about everyone except Biden tonight explicitly said they want to take our guns. Is it still paranoia?

And, as if on cue, a gun owner - a member of the Texas legislature - threatened to shoot one of the aforementioned Democrats on Twitter.

 

[Commodore]

And, as if on cue, a gun owner - a member of the Texas legislature - threatened to shoot one of the aforementioned Democrats on Twitter.

Except he didn't. All he said was that his AR was ready for Robert O'Rourke. Stop getting your news from HuffPo. All he was doing was calling out O'Rourke for his tough guy talk. He'll get up on that stage and talk tough, but is he going to be the one to go door-to-door and confiscate guns? No, because he is a coward. He'll happily implement a policy that will put every law enforcement officer in harm's way just so he can score an ideological victory.

Also, I like how you are perfectly fine with O'Rourke getting up on stage and threatening millions of Americans if they don't comply with his attempt to violate their Constitutional rights (his proposal is a violation of both the 2nd and 4th Amendments), but cry foul when gun owners say they refuse to allow their rights to be violated without a fight.

 

[MaryKB]

Except he didn't. All he said was that his AR was ready for Robert O'Rourke. Stop getting your news from HuffPo. All he was doing was calling out O'Rourke for his tough guy talk. He'll get up on that stage and talk tough, but is he going to be the one to go door-to-door and confiscate guns? No, because he is a coward. He'll happily implement a policy that will put every law enforcement officer in harm's way just so he can score an ideological victory.

I feel the fact you think police officers would be at risk of being shot for trying to collect peoples' guns is a perfect example of why people shouldn't have guns. Wow, scary.

 

[Lexicus]

they refuse to allow their rights to be violated without a fight.

so yea he threatened to shoot him lol

 

[EgonSpengler]

Except he didn't. All he said was that his AR was ready for Robert O'Rourke.

I'm sorry I'm not as stupid as you'd like me to be. Wait, no I'm not.

Stop getting your news from HuffPo.

I don't read HuffPo.

All he was doing was calling out O'Rourke for his tough guy talk.

Yeah, sure.

Also, I like how you are perfectly fine with O'Rourke getting up on stage and threatening millions of Americans if they don't comply with his attempt to violate their Constitutional rights (his proposal is a violation of both the 2nd and 4th Amendments), but cry foul when gun owners say they refuse to allow their rights to be violated without a fight.

I've already stated that I'd like to see a repeal of the 2nd Amendment [edit: as to the 4th Amendment, yes, that's a concern; any buy-back or whatever would have to follow due process, and I think the word "mandatory" is tricky - I'd like to see a voluntary buyback, to start with, see what results that gets]. And the fact that a gun owner might not even try to defend his rights without invoking violence kind of outlines and reinforces my position on guns. And this particular guy is a member of a state legislature, no less, and even he can only make a macho boast. Kind of sums it up, I think. If you gun people want to make me even more opposed to guns, just keep talking the way you're talking. You're all doing a great job convincing me that you're nonviolent.

I feel the fact you think police officers would be at risk of being shot for trying to collect peoples' guns is a perfect example of why people shouldn't have guns. Wow, scary.

I still don't have a link to that article, but iirc, one of the things that correlates with more-relaxed gun ownership laws is an increase in shootings both of and by police.

 

[Commodore]

I feel the fact you think police officers would be at risk of being shot for trying to collect peoples' guns is a perfect example of why people shouldn't have guns. Wow, scary.

The fact that you think the state having a monopoly on deadly force is good for democracy is scarier.

And the fact that a gun owner might not even try to defend his rights without invoking violence

See when you say things like this, it makes me seriously question just how informed you are on the battle for gun rights. Gun owners have been defending our rights without invoking violence pretty much since the first 2nd Amendment Supreme Court ruling back in 1886. It has been a near constant fight within the legal framework of this nation to preserve our rights. The call to arms that we are seeing now isn't something that just sprang up out of nowhere, nor is it the go-to response. It is a last resort that is now being invoked because people like you are making it increasingly impossible for gun owners to defend themselves within the legal framework of this nation.

I'm sorry I'm not as stupid as you'd like me to be.

The fact that you read that tweet as a threat indicates otherwise.

so yea he threatened to shoot him lol

No, he didn't. There is literally nothing in that tweet that a reasonable person would interpret as a threat.

 

[Lexicus]

No, he didn't. There is literally nothing in that tweet that a reasonable person would interpret as a threat.

gun owners say they refuse to allow their rights to be violated without a fight.

k bro you're just making yourself look ridiculous.

 

[Estebonrober]

The fact that you think the state having a monopoly on deadly force is good for democracy is scarier.



See when you say things like this, it makes me seriously question just how informed you are on the battle for gun rights. Gun owners have been defending our rights without invoking violence pretty much since the first 2nd Amendment Supreme Court ruling back in 1886. It has been a near constant fight within the legal framework of this nation to preserve our rights. The call to arms that we are seeing now isn't something that just sprang up out of nowhere, nor is it the go-to response. It is a last resort that is now being invoked because people like you are making it increasingly impossible for gun owners to defend themselves within the legal framework of this nation.



The fact that you read that tweet as a threat indicates otherwise.



No, he didn't. There is literally nothing in that tweet that a reasonable person would interpret as a threat.

So when the dad stands on the porch with his shotgun on prom night? That's not an implicit threat? I just want to be clear on the level of stupid I'm dealing with this time.

 

[Lexicus]

The fact that you think the state having a monopoly on deadly force is good for democracy is scarier.

I'm cool with Communist militias being armed and ready to check the police but individual reactionary dingbats who buy arsenals to enact their Turner Diaries fantasies....no

 

[MaryKB]

The fact that you think the state having a monopoly on deadly force is good for democracy is scarier.

I trust a police officer with a weapon (even if I'd prefer we're more like the British) than you, especially when you seem to think shooting people for carrying out the peoples' democratic mandate is "good for democracy."

How do you feel about our government owning nuclear weapons? You're not allowed to have one, right? How do you feel about Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons? Do you feel only an authority you approve of should have a monopoly on the deadliest force?

 

[El_Machinae]

The US government literally disarmed Iraqi civilians. Like, literally. It's two-faced thinking, especially for someone who literally participated

The fact that you think the state having a monopoly on deadly force is good for democracy is scarier.

Again, I point out that the 2A hasn't delivered on democracy. You've run the experiment. Suffrage. Slavery. The War on Drugs.

The 2A didn't help, because it doesn't. It's not theoretical

 

[El_Machinae]

But, again, I think it's silly to take legally purchased guns. Just make buying guns a licensed privilege, and you'll just see the problem erode over time without violating any original fundamentals

 

[Manfred Belheim]

To be fair, if you tell someone that if they come and punch you you'll fight back, that's not exactly a "threat" I don't think.

 

[Commodore]

How do you feel about Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons?

I've stated multiple times in the past here that I think it is the right of both Iran and North Korea as sovereign nations to defend themselves how they see fit. I may not like the idea of them having nukes, but the US and the rest of the world really don't have any legitimate grounds to oppose their acquisition of those weapons. Especially while we possess the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The fact that Bolton was willing to go to war over the issue is one of the reasons I'm glad he's gone.

I'm cool with Communist militias being armed and ready to check the police but individual reactionary dingbats who buy arsenals to enact their Turner Diaries fantasies....no

Yeah, yeah we get it, you hate democracy and believe only people you agree with should have rights.

Again, I point out that the 2A hasn't delivered on democracy.

This is only true if you apply modern standards to the past. And I would say it has delivered on democracy. While there hasn't been some grand armed uprising, there have been smaller uprisings throughout our history that has forced the government to act on certain issues. Again I point to the Virginia Coal Wars in the early 1900s. While that armed uprising was crushed, it did go a long way to bring the plight of the American worker to the forefront and greatly strengthened the labor movement which culminated in the passing of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.

Then there was the Battle of Athens:

In 1946, a group of veterans and disgruntled citizens went to war with the local government of Athens, Tennessee. The small farming community had spent the 1940s dominated by a crooked political machine led by sheriff and legislator Paul Cantrell, who was known to rig elections in his favor through ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Corruption ran rampant until 1945, when hundreds of young men returned to Athens fresh from the battlefields of World War II. After they experienced repeated harassment by law enforcement, the ex-GIs organized their own political party and ran several veterans for local office in the hopes of ousting Cantrell and his cronies once and for all.
The “battle” unfolded during a tense Election Day on August 1, 1946. When the veterans’ accused Cantrell of vote fraud, armed sheriff’s deputies began beating and detaining the GI’s poll watchers, and one officer even shot an elderly voter in the back. After Cantrell and his deputies confiscated the ballot boxes and barricaded themselves inside the local jail, hundreds of ex-GIs armed themselves with high-powered rifles and laid siege to the building. The two sides traded fire throughout the night, leaving several men wounded, but the deputies finally surrendered after the veterans began lobbing dynamite at the jailhouse. When the votes were counted, the GI candidates were declared the winners and immediately sworn into office. Their upstart political party would go on to restructure local government and clean up much of the corruption in Athens.

In this one, the armed uprising directly prevented attempted voter fraud by the incumbent governing officals. What's better for democracy than that?

 

[Lexicus]

LMAO look at the first one on his list:

1. Wilmington Insurrection of 1898
On the morning of November 10, 1898, a throng of some 2,000 armed white men took to the streets of the Southern port town of Wilmington, North Carolina. Spurred on by white supremacist politicians and businessmen, the mob burned the offices of a prominent African-American newspaper, sparking a frenzy of urban warfare that saw dozens of blacks gunned down in the streets. As the chaos unfolded, white rioters descended on City Hall and forced the town’s mayor to resign along with several black aldermen. By nightfall, the mob had seized full control of the local government, some 60 black citizens lay dead and thousands more had fled the city in panic.

While it took the form of a race riot, the Wilmington uprising was actually a calculated rebellion by a cabal of white business leaders and Democratic politicians intent on dissolving the city’s biracial, majority-Republican government. Once in power, the conspirators banished prominent black leaders and their white allies from the city and joined with other North Carolina Democrats in instituting a wave of Jim Crow laws suppressing black voting rights. Despite its illegality, state and federal officials ultimately allowed the power grab to proceed unchecked, leading many historians to cite the Wilmington insurrection as the only successful coup d’etat in American history.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I'd never heard of him before this morning, but evidently this Brisco Cain guy has a history.

Texas Monthly, 20 Jun 2017 - "2017: The Best and Worst Legislators"

The Monthly list of 10 Best featured 8 Republicans and 2 Democrats, if you're wondering what it's overall attitude is. Of Cain they wrote,

We typically exempt freshmen from the Worst list. We usually forgive their trangressions, because they don’t know how the Legislature works. So just know that we tried. We tried really hard to give Briscoe Cain a pass. But he left us little choice.

When we asked Capitol insiders for Worst list suggestions, his name, almost universally, was the first one mentioned. During one floor debate, when a fellow legislator fell ill with a serious intestinal ailment, Cain objected to the usual procedure of granting the lawmaker an excused absence and called for a record vote. He was the only no vote. But one particular moment, during the budget debate on the House floor, best exemplifies Cain’s uninformed and belligerent performance this session. He offered an amendment to defund a state council that promotes palliative care. He called it a “death panel.” Under questioning from his colleagues, it became clear that Cain didn’t know that palliative care is the treatment of terminally ill people for pain and anxiety to ease their passing. He eventually withdrew his amendment, but not before he’d very nearly zeroed out funding for a good program without actually knowing what it does. Thankfully his colleagues saved him from himself in that instance. Unfortunately, there was no one to save the rest of us from Briscoe Cain.

Last year, Cain showed up at a Texas Democratic Party event, distributing ironic signs with a gun on his hip. His gun was on his belt, under his shirt, which he lifted when he was asked about it - I don't know if that's legally brandishing, and I guess the cops decided that it wasn't, or at least that it wasn't worth it to cite him in this case. They did ask him to leave.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 22 June 2018 - "Republican prankster booted from Texas Democratic convention"

A Houston-area Republican state representative trying to prank Texas Democrats was forced to leave the state Democratic convention Friday, but not before showing what appeared to be a sidearm.

State Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, was removed along with a local political consultant and other activists giving Democrats fake yard signs reading, "This home is a gun-free safe space."

 

[El_Machinae]

You're using case studies instead of statistics. It's like pointing out that Grandpa shot the intruder when other regions have much lower levels of home invasion. You have to attribute cause properly.

But corrupt elections. Has the Second Amendment caused there to be fewer corrupt elections, proportionally, than the rest of the Commonwealth? Look at gerrymandering for example. After the courts, the final solution to gerrymandering is violence against the politicians.

Given that American politicians are more subject to the Second Amendment when it comes to gerrymandering, are they less likely to gerrymander than the rest of the Commonwealth?

Is there any measurable deterrent effect? You have a couple corrupt elections, I will point out the widespread disaster of the War on Drugs. Honestly, I think my case study wins

 

[Commodore]

LMAO look at the first one on his list:

I didn't say that one was good for democracy, now did I? Nor did I claim the entire list was comprised of uprisings that were positive.

I will point out the widespread disaster of the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment though.