Grayhome wrote:Ah, but that truly is but an interpretation. An alternative is that the states should have access to such, and may well be more literal.
and
This, on the other hand, I don't recall any basis for. Did you get this out of the Congressional regulation of militias bit? Because saying that is the same as mandating funding is stretching the point a bit too far...
Right to bear arms = citizens have the right to own and operate the most technologically advanced firearms available of the time. Founders didn't want the state to devolve into another monarchy, so everyone having muskets was deemed a good preventer for that. To put down the government if it got uppity. This interpretation is from historians and political scientists who devote their lives to studying History in general and early American History in particular.
I'm well aware of the reasoning behind the right to own weaponry, I was asking why you thought that the government was obligated to pay for it. The requirement to
allow something is
not the same as the requirement to
assist in it.
Grayhome wrote:And telephones didn't exist, nor radios, nor airplanes, nor any of a number of other things.
I will tell you right here and now: if the Constitution was rewritten to compensate for modern technology then the result would be massively inferior, because adjusting such a document to current technology means that it will no longer be as appropriate when the technology changes again. If you attempt to "cover your bases" with a Constitution analogue then you cause problems, because it's role as a foundational document means that it must not change often. Every time that the Constitution doesn't have something that you can apply to a legislative problem, there's a 99% chance that you're approaching the subject wrong.
The constitution was made to adapt. It was designed to be very very hard to adapt, but adaptation was a design feature because the Founders knew there would be future events that they could not predict.
Adapting the Constitution is as easy as passing a law that doesn't violate it, or making a court ruling that reinterprets it, "necessary powers" and all that. The particularly difficult bit is
changing it via amendment, which frankly is not a common necessity.
Grayhome wrote:Outdated is up to interpretation (does it mention telephones? no, but you still have a Constitutional right for the government not to wiretap your phone whenever it feels like it, because that's the way the Constitution was always meant to be treated), and both the open-endedness and the difficulty of amending are themselves some of those intentional features that were mentioned to you. The people who think those are bad things always believe it because they already have something that they want it to say. Gun-control advocates and gun-rights advocates are both stereotypical examples of this.
The three fifths compromise is still a part of the constitution. Even neutered it still exists as evidence to the outdated and clunky nature of the system.
And how is it outdated and clunky if you aren't trying to do something that you just aren't supposed to do with it?
Grayhome wrote:None of this is relevant to gun regulation, and I can't think of any way to tie it to gun violence either. Superfluous.
I was responding to a statement that implied America was a safe place, and giving criticism of that theory. America has a murder rate approaching third world nations. Also why you are criticize me noting social factors related to gun control when a few paragraphs ago you criticize me for not noting social factors that are responsible for gun violence? Nothing is superfluous. All things are connected, and poor morale, failing public health and poverty are recipes for increased crime rates.
I was criticizing you for letting your attention wander to gun control when it's just a bandaid on top of a gaping wound, you should have noted by now that I am ready and willing to distinguish between gun control & gun violence: one is caused by a flawed attempt to suppress social ills, while the other is caused by the ills themselves. And for the record, if you were trying to answer to the social interrelations then you should have written the segue better.
Grayhome wrote:The environmental lobby doesn't seem to help much anyways. They want changes that most of us aren't currently willing to accept, and haven't been pushing stuff that could justify itself on other merits as well (e.g. replanting mangrove swamps, both to absorb C02, and to resist hurricanes). I would hope that they'll improve, and I think that they might have been, but doom-and-gloom aren't enough to drive people to action.
The EPA has been gutted and rotten through for quite a while now. There have been several investigations into fraud and corruption and recent findings have proven that corporate entities illegally influencing the EPA for the purpose of removing or limiting regulations. With ex-CIA, FBI, NSA employees they hire for very, very large sums. Totally agree with you there, really need to give the EPA more teeth.
I was talking about environmentalists as a social group, not the EPA. The EPA sounds like it needs a good anti-corruption campaign first, only afterwards can you make a realistic assessment as to whether it needs more powers (if that CO2 regulation thing got upheld then I'd say that it's teeth are fine).
Grayhome wrote:This post has pretty solidly moved into "the sky is falling!" territory. The sky is always falling, the only reason that we care is because we aren't lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps and getting to work. Obama is unfortunately probably the one at fault for that: he's apparently loath to use political capital on international movements (you know that "pivot to Asia"? that wasn't Obama, that was Hillary: and now we have Kerry, who's more focused on his own legacy than on Obama's), producing an unfortunate duplicate of the servant that buried the money that his master entrusted to him, whereas he's supposed to be acting like the master himself. He didn't get elected to the office of Press Secretary In Chief, he's the President.
American are amongst the hardest working people on the planet, per capita. We are the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet, bar none. That wealth has been concentrated into the upper 1% of Americans.
Trickle-down economics will do that to you, yes, a study of old European nobility will teach you that much. Reagan was wrong, and so was Ayn Rand, and whoever it was that said "greed is good".
Grayhome wrote:Notably example of this is the Wallmart family.
Small-town local grocery stores are often worse. Sure, the money stays local, and they do buy services from others, but so does Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart pays it's employees better (painful to hear, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that it's accurate). When a Wal-Mart moves in it actually usually results in an increase in the general standard of living, the biggest problem with Wal-Marts is that they usually don't integrate well.
Grayhome wrote:So basically, we're being torn apart by social ills, so we need to focus our efforts on guns? Yeah, no, we need sustained, good social reform programs. That'll take care of a host of ills at the same time. Guns are a distraction, and the more focus that gets paid to them, the less that gets paid to the root issues.
As discord said, the problem isn't gun regulations, but instead societal.
Yes, the problems are societal. And guns are a big part of our societal problems. I see them as one and the same issue, guns do not magically become separate entities above and beyond all criticism because of reasons. Regulating guns is merely one of many steps it will take to get America back on track.
Regulating guns won't do jack squat to the social triggers, and simultaneously disenfranchises those who consider them important. You may have forgotten, but liberals are not the entirety of the nation, like conservatives they aren't even a half.
Grayhome wrote:Another is raising the minimum wage to $22.50 an hour,
Haha, not going to happen. It's a known fact that hikes in the minimum wage destroy a portion of the jobs that they theoretically increase the wages for, for the simply fact that those jobs no longer produce enough profit to keep the employees. Increase the cost of goods, you say? This leads to a cycle commonly known as deflation.
Besides which, the people that are most commonly at minimum wage are actually part-timers, so it's unlikely that your $22.50 an hour would directly affect them, as part-timers are on a lower pay scale. If you want real increases in general pay then you need to take a look at corporate governance structures, as well as removing employee pay for... let's say the bottom 90% per income of an employer's employees, or everyone expect for the three highest-paid employees, whichever number is higher,
before tax rates are calculated, so that high pay can make a big dent in a company's taxes. Add to that a per-employee corporate fine for anyone paid less than some certain amount, and an equivalent fine for contract workers. Take that, increase shareholder authority by law (non-relinquishable) so that they can e.g. set the pay for the board & executives without any input from said top-tiers, and require a yearly statement to shareholders stating long-term (let's say 15 years) and short-term per-year profit projections, as well as current tax rates vs the tax rate resulting from increasing the pay of lower-paid employees, and you'll start seeing progress. The board & executives of many major companies (Nike, for example) have greatly exaggerated incomes at the expense of both shareholders and employees (the stats for Nike should be online somewhere, you should go look them up). The problem isn't the minimum wage, so changing that will at best produce spotty results. The problem is a failure to keep a tight leash on corporate leadership; even Carl Icahn, figurehead of corporate raiders, agrees that it's a major problem.
Grayhome wrote:supplying free health care,
I've never seen a good explanation of how this will genuinely help. Free emergency care, and covering the most extreme cases, sure, I can see that (the process of dying is usually enough to bankrupt those involved), but medical care in general? No, too expensive, especially with the Baby Boomers upon us.
And don't cite Medicare, if Congress didn't keep passing supplemental compensation for it then all of the doctors that accept it would go bankrupt, it doesn't quite pay for the cost of treatment in many cases, much less enough for a doctor to pay back their student loans.
Grayhome wrote:improving the (internationally mocked) American educational system,
This I can whole-heartedly agree with, but unfortunately the biggest problem is itself often social & outside of the school (e.g. domestic arguments, even if violence isn't involved), and there's few parts of that which schools are actually capable of dealing with (free meals are, fortunately, one of those; it would be nice to see the "keep your land fallow and we'll pay you" system switch to "give us all of the crops and we'll pay you for them tax-free", so that they could be funneled into that system).
Grayhome wrote:and massive increases to NASA’s budget and massive cuts to military spending.
Regardless of what you've been told, our military spending is actually quite sustainable. The budget problem is entirely in the form of social programs, mostly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (but really, Medicare). Why? Because they expand
with the population demographics, while military spending doesn't (I'd expect the bulk of military spending to shift to cheaper technologies for a while, in fact, just due to their sufficiency for most purposes).
As for NASA, I think we should fund it more, but it would be irresponsible of me to say it like you have.
Grayhome wrote:Also Germany and Japan should be allowed to rearm,
I'm pretty certain that we don't have the authority to stop them, no matter how much clout we have. Also, Germany is a noteworthy supplier of military submarines, and Japan "doesn't have a military", but only because they cheat by calling it something else: a system which I'm pretty certain that the US started, since we were using technically Japanese military ships for minesweeping pretty quick after defeating them, I think in Korea. I haven't looked at the German restrictions, but I can tell you that the Japanese restrictions don't keep them from having a military, but instead from practicing expeditionary warfare.
And at least as far as the Japanese go, dropping all of their constitutional restrictions on their military would cause too much political fallout with their neighbors to justify it.
discord wrote:grey:
Guns make killing easy and therefore a much more attractive choice. A good example is Japan for gun control,
no, access to guns make them a good choice.
what you need to understand is that there are basically two different kinds of murder, premeditated and crime of passion, only one of these is affected by bans and regulations at all.
In the US, a lot of it falls under "crime of passion" in one way or another (usually it's hormonal teenagers, from what I understand, who've likely armed themselves for s3elf-defense from all of the
other hormonal teenagers). It's one of those things where we'd be better off dropping the regulations on cannons, and placing them on handguns instead. Kinda hard to do a hit-and-run with a
literal artillery piece, seeing as how they're unwieldy.
discord wrote:nunchaku ban even worse, easier to make, and just like the shuriken better tools for the goal(kill someone) is readily available.
such laws undermines the authority of the law, since they are silly, loss of respect for silly things is expected.
Nunchaku, aka sticks-on-a-chain. How the hell does anyone think that a ban would even work? Two nice, solid sticks, some screws, and rope, and you have a home-made set. The only reason they would have needed metal chains in medieval Japan is because the Samurai that would have been targets were always wearing swords.
discord wrote:whoever pushed that through legislation should be frickin tried for treason.
Well-intentioned idiocy is not sufficient grounds for treason charges.
discord wrote:gun laws should focus on safe storage and handling of dangerous tools, not removing them altogether.
this would effect the part which law CAN affect, easy access of legal guns(not buying them, having one handy when you walk in on your spouse fucking someone not you in your bed, having to go to the gun safe, opening it up, getting the gun, loading the gun, walking back to confront'em gives both time to cool down a murderous rage and time for the stupid fuckers to GTFO!)
Unfortunately it requires registering all firearms to properly implement (you need to be able to place blame if someone gets murdered), and lots of people in the US rightfully fear that such a thing would result in their guns just being taken away eventually, because people like Greyhome want to do precisely that.
Grayhome wrote:As for very strict laws reducing gun crimes, generally yes it does work, yet don`t forget that they always was a marked increase in other weapons crimes. Violent criminals will use are tool to achieve their ends.
Yes, violent criminals will use other tools to achieve their ends, which is why many items besides guns are regulated. But a gun is a far more efficient killing tool than a knife and that is why they are more desirable to criminals-I really feel like I am repeating myself here.
The majority of gun crimes in the US are committed by gangs, in some way or another. These are crimes that either wouldn't be stopped by illegalization, or wouldn't be stopped by lack of access, you'd only change the details. Pipe bombs, for example, are very easy to make, and a gang member isn't going to be good enough with a gun to be more effective, so intentional gang warfare won't be stopped. That leaves heat-of-the-moment crimes, which just leaves you with everyone carrying around a big knife instead of a gun, once again failing to stop the problem, because seriously, what are you going to do, illegalize cooking at home? There's a reason I compared swords to kitchen knives: for non-military actions,
there is no difference.
Completely ineffective, if you want to stop gun violence in the US then you need a better mental health system (not drugs, mind you: confinement, because the crazies that do mass shootings can't be trusted out in society at all, so free drugs won't help: they won't reliably take them), and to have neighborhood-level civic organizations that you get the children into at a young age (preferably 13 or 14 at the
latest). As we know from both human behavior and from watching elephants, teenage behavior becomes much more level-headed when an adult is a part of the lives of said teenagers, it's no coincidence that both poverty and violence congregate around "broken households": the psychological underpinnings of the participants are undermined, and can only be repaired by providing some sort of substitute. Until such substitutes are put in place, no solution to gun violence can
exist, for the simple reason that the manifestation of the problem will simply shift elsewhere.
Grayhome wrote:Yes it is more expensive to buy things here because the pharmaceutical companies load all of the costs onto the American consumers, because they can get away with it. Then they sell the same product to other nations for vastly reduced prices. That is old news by the way...
They sell those same products to other nations because they're already making it and those nations have laws on the books requiring it, so as long as they make
some profit they don't care
too much. Eliminate their ability to charge whatever they want in the US and they just stop developing drugs, because they can't justify the expense. You might say that development will then move to the independent labs that currently do a lot of it, but
they won't be able to sell the patents for as much anymore (simple economics), which in turn will reduce both their ability to stay afloat
and the availability of financing for them.