I am not "Libertarian." Stop trying to paint me into a political ideology.

Whatever the hell you yourself, I couldn't care less. Everything you just said about big bad government is exposed for being a farce, that's the point.

You couldn't and cannot disprove anything that I think, Putin. You're a brainwashed, partyline swallowing, bleeding heart, and an arrogant prick. I hope you're among the first to go.

If I had a nickle for every death threat some paranoid anti-government turd spewed at me, I'd be rich.

"there is a major flaw in your logic here. Yes, silent successes go unnoticed obviously. However, how can you assume that the successes are the result of gun control laws as opposed to other factors mentioned in this and every other post on this topic? 99.999% of the successes happen because most people aren't psycho."

How do I know?

One indication--

As I showed last time we had a gun control debate, many of the Southern states with laxer gun control laws have more homicides.

We may of course recognize that a homicide doesn't require a gun, but it IS the predominant way of killing in this day and age, and what's more, the correlation between laxer gun laws and more homicides seems no coincidence.

States with tighter laws like CT, NH, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and so on have the best such ratios in the country.

@The Ben Franklin Quote:

1. In Franklin's day, the worst firearm someone could possess was a musket or hunting rifle, not an AK-47 or machine gun or something like that.

2. Am I calling for all guns banned?
No--I'm not an extremist like the Stalinist here.
Am I saying that in the same way preventative traffic measures save lives preventative gun measures can save lives?
Yes.
Are most gun owners responsible?
Yes--with the possible exception of krellin, I don't view anyone on this site who owns a gun, for example, as a potential danger and irresponsible.
But are there irresponsible or wicked gun owners?
Yes.
Can they do considerable harm?
Yes.
Are lives saved worth a LIMITED amount of regulation and restriction when it comes to guns?
I say yes--again:

Everyone here might be a good gun owner.
99.99999% of you might be good gun owners.
But that .00001% that shoot to kill others exists.
It may ruin it for everyone, as it were, but protection against such people is NEEDED.

And that protection is NOT just everyone owning a Magnum in the nightstand, as it were.

Studies have shown time and again, most people can't fire a gun accurately under pressure situations, hence the need for training in the military or police forces.

Whats more, this mentality encourages a level of vigilantism that is legally unacceptable.

Thus, gun control, in moderation, IS needed.

We already have gun control, in moderation.

Studies show? So you're saying that we should take away the right of the People to defend themselves because "studies show" that most cannot fire a gun accurately under pressure? Ok, if you say so.

Maybe we should tighten gun control because defending oneself still results in the death of another.

At the same time, since I have more skill than any of you here with a switchblade and I'm an above average shooter, maybe we should just remove all restrictions on guns so I can rule the country with the guys from the gang I was in for a little while. They knew how to shoot.

"So you're saying that we should take away the right of the People to defend themselves because "studies show" that most cannot fire a gun accurately under pressure? Ok, if you say so."

Did I say take away all guns?
NO.
Did I even say take away most guns.
NO.

Did I say, AGAIN, to take further action at the state, county, and federal level to have an appropriate amount of control over the appropriate firearms in the appropriate areas?

Why yes.

Yes I did.

being an above average shooter does not mean you have the capacity to pull the trigger when it counts and is needed,. And then you got other idiots, who pull the trigger when it does not need to be pulled, or a piece even in play

EXACTLY ^^^^^^^

"Look at third world countries. Lack of government and armed gangsters roaming around kill plenty."

Armed gangsters, sure. But certainly not "lack of government." On the contrary, governments in the third world are often little more than another group of armed gangsters with more guns and men than the average group of armed gangsters, and perpetuate the problem. It's nothing to do with guns.

And while the whole militia thing is stupid - as if anybody could actually defeat the US government in any form of combat anymore - the argument for self-defense from criminals is not nearly as illegitimate as you make it sound.

I'd say most people in Jamaica, Haiti, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria would say the problem is not enough government, not too much of it.

To Putin, everything is illegitimate save his twisted bleeding heart ideology. We should be forced to become sheep for the criminal wolves because guns are dangerous. If you believe in the words of a slaveowing dead white guy who lived 200+ years ago, you're a cultist.

Really, Liberia? Which was run for the longest time by Charles Taylor, a warlord so infamous that his likeness was used as the main patron of fucking arms dealer Nick Cage in Lord of War. Or the Congo, run by good ole Mobutu until the beginning of the absolute clusterfuck that the Congo is now, whose barbarity was completely glossed over by the West because he said all the right things in opposition to communism. I'm honestly surprised you cited the Congo here. Somalia's a similar case, in that an unpopular* government was overthrown by armed forces leading to decades of virtual anarchy. Your examples are proving my point - the problem isn't the quantity of government but the quality of it.

But government is good, it brings about human progress. Face the facts, Putin loves government so much he's going to do whatever they tell him to do. He's going to march off to the FEMA Camp, he's going to take their deadly inoculations, he'll pay his carbon taxes to save the planet from ourselves, and he'll take those deadly inoculations. Bahhhhhh bahhhhhh bahhhhhhh!

Eden, if a civil war erupted here in America, do you think our military (including reserves and national guard units) would 100% stay intact as units loyal to the Federal Government?

I would 100% disagree with that, depending on how things played out.

And, lets be honest, even theentire of the US military would still struggle to put down a popular uprising in the US. It would be almost impossible I think actually without use chemical warfare.

Killing muslims in Afghanistan does not seem to bother most Americans, because it is way over there, and not in front of them. I doubt that detachment would be so easy here, if it was their neighbors getting killed.

No, I will disagree wtih you on this one a lot Eden. Our Military will not go 100% to the Government in the event of a civil war, and I doubt the troops have the stomach for killing their own citiziens.

Surprised I mention the Congo? Let's see, millions killed since the collapse of government authority in 1998, two civil wars. Still haven't recovered. Why is this surprising, exactly?

Mobutu was corrupt, a barbarian he was not. He had to invite Moroccan mercenaries to put down rebellions in his country because he neutered the military to such a high degree. The problem with Mobutu was he destroyed the government's ability to govern.

Sayyad's rule only became unpopular after the stresses of the Ogaden war. None-the-less he did all he could to stave off famine, resettle refugees, and prevent the clannist Ethiopian backed opposition parties from making a mess of things.

I'd guess that most Somalis would gladly take Sayyad back over the current situation. At least under Sayyad, they were doing things like hosting OAU summits and negotiating peace treaties between Tanzania and Uganda.

You know, I don't intend to say anything bad about third world countries, but they have little to do with this discussion. We aren't a third world country. Our laws revolve around us, not the Congo and Uganda.

"Which was run for the longest time by Charles Taylor"

Yes, Charles Taylor, who spent more time leading a guerrilla movement against the Liberian government than running the country. He also initiated a civil war in Sierra Leone. Yep, Charles Taylor, who was so ineffective at governing that he barely controlled a 1/3 of the country. He's your example of government tyranny in action.

The claim around here is that government is the root of all evil and death, etc. You can only claim that by ignoring most of the rest of the world.

Who ever said govt is the rootbof all evil?!? All I said is that Democide has been the cause of billions of innocent deaths. As usual, you slant others words to suit your agenda.

Remember, despite your feelings of hatred towards our Founding Fathers, they formed a nation in which the laws are to restrict the power of government, not the People. We, the People, are the sovereign power, the govt is our servant, not the other way around. "the government shall enact no law restricting the right of the people to ...."

People like Putin always want to tell people what they can and cannot do. They want to give the power to the govt to decide what is right for the People -- that is how tyranny is born. That is what the founding fathers feared.

Stressedlines:

In the hypothetical doomsday where American politicians actually announced the police state - a silly one in and of itself, as announcements of the arrival of one's evil plans are only made in cartoons and perhaps movies - no, of course the military would not stay entirely onside. But I expect that the significant majority of the military would stay onside, yes, so any military-based splintering would not succeed. And more importantly, such a state is called a POLICE state, not a MILITARY state, for a reason. The military would be the 800-pound gorilla blocking the door; the police would be the thugs actually beating your ass. The police would be the main prosecuting arm of the police state, and larger PDs already own military-grade weapons - not to mention that unlike the military, which is trained for putting down foreign threats primarily (perhaps major domestic uprisings would require them, but their training is on foreign threats), the police are trained to deal with their own citizens, and I don't think I have to tell you that they have no problem being serious assholes to their own Americans if required to accomplish whatever objective they have to achieve. That's not a shot at all police, mind, but there's a reason why Paulistas and OWS folks have something to talk about in common, and it's not economic vision.

So no, you would have military defection, but there would not be any trouble enforcing a police state openly if the US govt. wanted to do so for whatever reason. I think those of us who support gun ownership rights need to move away from the Second Amendment, actually. That's clearly talking about a militia, which would, I think, pretty clearly be a doomed effort. My arguments re: guns always stemmed from the Tenth Amendment anyway.

Putin:

"The claim around here is that government is the root of all evil and death, etc. You can only claim that by ignoring most of the rest of the world."

That isn't my specific claim, and I don't see others claiming it, either. Sorry if I missed it and jumped into something without proper context.

My argument would be that suffering (as broadly philosophically defined) exists, that human effort should fundamentally be guided toward reducing as much suffering for as many people as possible, and that everything, government and its policies included, should be evaluated to see if it is in line with such a goal. In the Third World countries, the root of the suffering obviously isn't just government policy. (You could say that it might be, factoring historical context, going back to colonial governments' policies toward Africans, but the point is that today, it's not just a matter of governmental incompetence.) Africa has a lot of problems. The issue is whether or not their governments exacerbate or curb these problems. In Africa's case, most of the "governments" are, literally, little more than particularly successful gangsters. They're not helping. They're not the source of all evil but they're certainly no force for good. They're just not relevant to your argument here because the situations are incredibly disanalogous.

I'll cover the specific country comments in a little while, lot of important shit came up.

The time to worry about your government occurs when A- the police and their families are housed in gated communities and B- the military Are Not Made up of your own children

*sigh*

If you're worried about government takeover/more stringent police state/etc., you should leave. Not in the "love it or leave it" sense, at all - but because that's your only hope. You're not going to beat the American police state as it exists right now. It's just not going to happen. End of story.

I disagree Eden. I agree that the police state as it's developing isn't going to be beat with violence. In fact, I think the architects of the police state are trying to bait the American People into violence as that will give them the excuse they need to really clamp down. What is going to beat the police state, IMO, is information -- the people "waking up" and acknowledging that is has, in fact, "happened here." The powers that be -- foreign banking powers and their domestic lackys -- succeed in large part because their actions remain mostly hidden from the view of the People. This clandestine action, however, is becoming more and more transparent every day, however. People everywhere are starting to see through the lies, the disinformation, and are realizing that there is, in fact, a coordinated agenda to bring down the Republic.

People can mock and disparage all they want, that is their right. But, sticking one's head in the sand, or hiding under the covers is exactly what THEY want you to do. They want the prisoners to police their own prison.

I do enjoy these joke threads. Very funny!

"As I showed last time we had a gun control debate, many of the Southern states with laxer gun control laws have more homicides."

Sorry, obi, somebody who talks as much as you do about how bad he is at math isn't allowed to use statistics. (And yes, you are misusing them here, in case you wondered).