Aileron

There isn't much difference, except in a militia the members generally have full time jobs they do should everything be good.

Not quite. People had the power to vote for whoever they wanted to in that election. Bush won because of how the rules are written. What I'm talking about is when people technically have the right to vote, but don't really have a choice in who they vote for. A one name ballot is the easiest example, but there are a lot of other ways to do it. The more sophisticated methods don't work off the individual voter but rather on the community scale. I use the word "backing" to compare it to the good ol'e days when money was backed by gold. Back then the treasury was limited to only print as much money as there was gold in Fort Knox. Nowadays they 'back' money with all sorts of crap, though the concept still holds in a limited sense. If a nation prints money, but doesn't have something physical to back the money, the value of their money devaluates. Voting is similar. You can give the population the right to vote, but if the population doesn't have real physical power, those votes can be easily manipulated and the democracy becomes worthless. And like money, nowadays we have forgotten that and we are attempting to back votes with all sorts of crap. Weapons represent the real physical power, and is comparable to gold in that they are the most basic fundamental manifestation of true power.

SeVeR, 'majority dictatorship' is not democracy and you know it. That logic is how southern states kept slavery until the civil war. The majority of the people voted in favor of slavery - thus they thought they were in control of their government. In reality the government wasn't respecting the rights of everybody. The USSR was like that too. Stalin met every definition of a dictator, yet he and his party got and stayed there by winning elections. How they managed to do it involved several flaws in the democratic process, yet the overall reason is this: The votes of the people had no backing. While people could vote, they held no power. Clearly, the nazi and communist movement gained most of their power by winning a vote. However, all of this is a poor example because we are discussing why the founding fathers put the 2nd amendment in the Bill of Rights, long before these events took place. But, this pattern was clearly present in the Greek and Roman Empires, as well as relatively contemporary countries such as the Holy Roman Empire, Great Britain, and Switzerland. Some leader would use his government power to create a system by which his supporters get kickbacks at the expense of those who don't support him, thereby creating a system where everyone has to support that leader, who could then name himself emperor and pretty much get away with whatever he wanted to. As I wrote, that popular response is militia can overcome the government, and I agree it is a good backup, but unless fatally flawed the system should never come to that. The reason I am giving is that if dictatorships are caused by government kickbacks, one must realize that the ability to live in peace is a big one. SeVeR asked what happens when the militias give vigilante justice. He asked the wrong question. The real question is: "What happens when the Justice system, when having monopolistic control, stops enforcing justice?". Vigilantism is a last resort system for when the primary justice system fails. Without vigilantism, a corrupt government could simply stop offering effective police services to the regions of population compromising the cons!@#$%^&*uents which do not support the current regime. I will mention that gun ownership in urban areas is low - with or without the ban, and prosecution of vigilantes is much harder than simple criminals. To some extent most large cities already have a monopoly in security, and what do they all have? Slums. They all have areas where police do not go, and in those areas the people generally don't like the government, but can't really do much about it. Really, the second amendment follows from the first. The first one outlaws the classic tyrant tactic: "If you speak out against me I'll have to killed.". The second amendment defeats: "If you speak out against me, I'll take away all means of defending yourself, take away police security, and then someone else will kill you." 'Someone else' doesn't have to be connected with the leader at all...on a large scale, just based on random chance done by simple criminals the tactic would weed out the leader's opposition. Also note that constantly letting criminals out of jail highly speeds up the process. Couple it all together and you can see why John Daily has been mayor of Chicago for three generations even though their crime rates aren't exactly low.

I wouldn't go that far. As I said, the loser is going to run as an independent...especially if Obama carries PA but Hillary gets nominated by the DNC.

Veg, just ignore JDS...he's so stupid I'm actually astonished that he knows what a p90 is. You wouldn't want to hunt dear with an SMG anyway. They don't have a long enough effective range. Well, if we are debating why it should be there, I think it is best to quote the rationale in the Bill of Rights - it is necessary for "the security of the free state". 'free state' means any democratic government. The biggest threat to democratic governments is when anti-democratic people are elected into office and government consolidates power away from the masses. Generally, democracies face virtually no actual threat from foreign tyrannies, as by structure tyrannical countries just cannot allocate people towards jobs effectively, and cannot maintain moral of their forces over the long term. Nearly every democracy in history fell not from outside invaders but from internal forces, and the Founding Fathers knew that. In a democracy, power must rest with the people. While voting power is what is used, that power must be backed by something physical. The most popular statement is that firearms represent power to overthrow government. However, it also provides different kinds of power. It provides power to secure one's home from criminals should police fail, and power to enact mob justice should the justice system repeatedly fail. While I won't argue that revolutions and vigilante justice can lead to ugly things, the threat of those things is necessary for government to be kept in line. DC is failing those two things. Really, the citizens of DC need firearms to take back their city. I will admit that lack of weapons in the populace can lead to security, but only in a top-down government. In feudal Europe when swords were expensive, and feudal Japan where metal blades were regulated, Knights and Samurai could secure their territory from criminals, but also they needed to search homes at will, restrict travel, and took their own council as to whom was a criminal. However, democracy is a bottom up government. It relies on the people deciding their own destiny. The problem with DC is simple: The government is democratic and can't take the reigns of destiny, and the people are lazy and won't take them for themselves. You can't have a no-gun, no-citizens arrest, no-report any crimes, no-cooperate with police, populace with a government with a free government and expect crime to be handled. And that is where the danger to democracy lies. Because people can vote out democracy if they decide the task of securing themselves is too difficult, and it becomes more difficult if the right to bear arms is infringed too much.

Bak, do you attempt to murder ex girlfriends to the point where the only thing stopping you is lack of access to a gun? No. Neither does anyone else. Nobody flies off the handle that much except the mentally unstable. You know, if I recall, all of the perpetrators of the school shootings from Colombine to VT, with exception to the Amish School House in Lancaster, were atheists. Since we have a correlation between atheists and school shooters, maybe we should outlaw atheism! Oh right, that would be against the Bill of Rights. Do you know what is also in the Bill of Rights, right after the paragraph which forbids outlawing religion? There's another paragraph which says you can't outlaw guns. I will say that Washington DC is an interesting place. The crime is so bad that the honest citizens who are NOT criminals go immediately home after work, lock the doors, and don't come out until the next day. Meanwhile criminals get free reign of the city all night. Its the only city in history that makes prisoners out of their citizens but lets the criminals reign free. The only thing they need is to take the last shadow of a doubt away from citizen possibly having a gun in their homes so the criminals can do home invasion at will.

Actually nuclear plants are turned off regularly, though they operate for months at a time. They can be turned off in about a second, though it takes two or three days to turn one on. Even though the power plant is turned on, lower power usage does equate to less fuel consumed, !@#$%^&*uming ofcourse that the load on the power plant is significant to begin with. It takes a certain amount of fuel to keep the generators going even if no electrical power is put out, analogous to idling a car. The electrical power used up translates to physical resistance to rotational momentum in the generators, which then would demand more force from the turbines, which would need hotter steam to push them, which would need more fuel to burn. Lowering the amount of electricity used would decrease the resistance in the turbines and decrease the amount of fuel needed to maintain the cycle. Less electricity = less resistance = less rotational energy = cooler steam = less fuel. Be careful when energy benefits are labeled in the form of cars taken off the road. That number of cars is insignificant and isn't even close to a percentage point. Meat is however a good way to get a lot of protein and vitamins (as long as whatever you are eating was getting enough vitamins it its diet, which sadly isn't the case in a lot of farm animals...I say eat deer). Actually, I think this CO2 thing is way to prevent companies from making synthetic gas. That stuff could be made at about $40 a barrel.

Hey Sama, its your lucky day! They already ration electricity in Communist countries!

If I degrade low enough in society to have the drive to rob someone's personal property I would be more than willing to allow them to shoot me. ditto for me.

Don't put words in my mouth. Race has nothing to do with why he was nominated. All I said was that he has less than normal experience. I did mention that there are those who are only voting for him because of race, but that didn't get him nominated. Also, don't put words in the mouth of preachers. Last I checked you don't go to church on a regular basis, so you have no idea what stuff they say, and your entire opinion is based upon a stereotype of an entire profession, and a stereotype which is generally incorrect at that. The leadership of the democratic party is rigging their primaries with an iron fist. They have had Hillary Clinton chosen as their presidential candidate for at least a decade. Just the other day I was watching Die Hard III, made in 1995, where Bruce Willis* made a joke about her running for president back then, which shows how long planning for her nomination has been obvious. The leadership of the democratic party was certain to not mess up her primary by nominating anyone with more strict time-in-office experience than her, because if they did she'd have to go through the trouble of campaigning and debating. *The similarity between the names John McClain and John McCain is kinda scary, isn't it? Obama was chosen as a possible VP candidate as wall as a 2012/2016 candidate. He had less experience than Clinton, but would have enough to run for president in 2012 and also would still be young enough by then to do so. Even I respect Obama in a way. He was clearly set up to fail but managed to pull off great success. Also, he will absolutely be a strong candidate for president some time in the future, especially after he finds out the proper answer to his 'reverend' friend, which he will. The fact that this is coming out now only proves that Obama has officially reached the big leagues. Its politics at its finest! I'll say something else about Obama. Texas screwed up. Rush Limbaugh was wrong. Texas republicans should never have voted for Clinton to keep this race hot. It would have just been better to take Hillary out of the race and be done with it, especially because this little piece of history could have been saved for October to be released by the McCain campaign. I guess it is up to us Pennsylvanians to do things right and send Hillary Clinton into retirement. There will probably be a record number of registered democrats who will 'cross party lines' in November. Don't be alarmed. Pennsylvania conservatives are in NO WAY planning on messing up the democratic primary in our best interests. Bwahaha ha ha BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

As absurd as it sounds SeVeR, yes there is infact a time limit beyond which people predisposed to peace would give up fighting, and it certainly does matter how long a war has been going on. Otherwise one can pull out all sorts of crap from history to fight over. The formation of Israel should be history by now. I wouldn't expect everyone to like it, though it should be expected that they accept it. Bak's example does show what I mean. Modern Native Americans don't go around shooting people currently. I mean sure, they don't like that their ancestors lost their lands, and they do use their right to speak out against it, but on the other hand they have realized that the war is over and they lost. The point is that if Israel were a foreign occupational force, it wouldn't have civilian support necessary to support itself for this long. It does. And because of that any true effort to eliminate Israel means routing millions of people from the homes they have lived in for decades. The question is then for what lofty purpose would we be routing those people for? Oh, so that a different group of people could move in... Look, I might give that fifty years ago the goal was to resist an occupational force, but today, they are fishing through history in order to conjure up an excuse to be violent.

No one is going to fear a weapon which is non-lethal. There actually needs to be real, drastic consequences for intimidation to be effective.

My RTS at the moment is Company of Heroes. It was a strange Christmas gift I didn't really want, but it really grew on me. Cool things about it: Tanks and armored cars are actually bullet proof. Infantry have to actually hit them with some sort of anti-tank weapon. At the same time, its hard for a tank to single out infantry with a 75mm gun. They need an actual machine gun. Additionally, the difference between attacking a unit from the front and attacking from the side is extreme. Also, HMGs and AT guns can quickly tear infantry and tanks respectively apart. Overall, the Warcraft tactic of building a large army and ordering it to walk to the middle of the enemies' base will just get them killed. Virtually the entire environment is destructible, and furthermore integrated into cover for infantry. An open field could get hit with artillery, be riddled with impact craters, and the craters become cover for infantry. Or a wall can serve as cover for infantry until a tank comes by and blows a hole through it. Also, the way the rules are set up reflects the European theater of WWII well. For instance, the game version of the Axis have really powerful tanks as well as upgrades to make them have veterency coming out of the box. Meaning that in a multiplayer game, all the Axis guy has to do is delay and cause a stalemate and he wins, while the Ally guy needs to try to rush the battle as much as possible.

The solution is the one proposed by Booker T Washington: Black people need to earn professional positions, and after that everything would take care of itself. Problem 1: There seem to be a lot of them who want to grow up to become gangsters, pimps, rap artists, and professional athletes. All are waste of talented individuals, where criminals run counter to society, and there are probably a lot of individuals who would be good businessmen and engineers who instead focus all their talents on being a mediocre basketball player. Additionally, black individuals who do go to college for the purpose of being a professional all to frequently major in things like "Race Relations", and other stuff too vague to get a job. The solution would involve a large population of blacks majoring in Accounting, Engineering, Science, Medicine, etc. to offset the current problems. Problem 2: There is a tendency to blame everything that goes wrong in life on white people. Blacks go to college, and they have difficulty. That's because everyone has difficulty in college. They also have problems getting a real job after college, just like everyone else. Those situations are inherent, but because blacks are convinced of 'subconscious racism'*, they tend to sit in the mud rather than overcome the difficulty. From my life, I had difficulty in college graduating with a math major, and in the ten months since I graduated the only job I got was working in an !@#$%^&*embly line putting stuff in corrugated boxes for minimum wage. If I were black, I'd probably blame my situation on the system, but since I'm not my only choice is to try to find a way to solve my problem. The best way to describe the situation is that old Ziggy cartoon, where Ziggy is standing beside the "Ladder of Opportunity", only to find that the lowest rung of the ladder is 10 feet off of the ground and too high for him to reach. People generally need to create means of getting on that bottom rung on their own. The societal solution is that there cannot be an excuse for people failing to reach that bottom rung, because with that excuse they convince themselves its impossible. Overall, the solutions are known, and have been stated even by black people such as Booker T. Washington, J. C. Watts, Bill Crosby and Colin Powell. The only reason those solutions aren't put into practice is because the NAACP has become a corrupt political machine which demonizes and sues anyone who proposes the solution in a public theater. Probably because when black people earn a respectable living on their own, they will no longer need the NAACP in its current capacity. If I were a politician, and this post was my speech, I'd be put out of office. *Subconscious Racism is a complete and total piece of bull!@#$%^&*. The notion of the subconscious has frequently been used fill in a failed hypothesis with imaginary data, and has been used that way since its inception. Sigmund Freud himself stated that people have a subconscious desire to have sex with their parents, because such a desire would conveniently 'prove' one of his theories without having to go through the trouble of identifying empirical patterns in the subject's behavior to justify his claims. Observe as I use the process to prove a bung theory: Hypothesis: Bak has a desire to learn knitting so he can put on a chicken costume and play the role of the character "Baps" from "Chicken Run". Observed data: (Pretending I spent time stalking Bak) Bak has not purchased any knitting supplies, has not been requesting lessons from people who know how to knit, has not been spending time in or near a costume shop, and has not been watching "Chicken Run" more often than usual. Conclusion: I'm right, but his desire is subconscious, which explains why the data is completely inconsistent with my hypothesis. The notion of the subconscious is all too often used as subjective bung, and probably is why Psychology is not considered an actual science. Subconscious Racism is simply one example of it being used in this way.

That thing isn't nearly as ridiculous as the Soviet farming plan to irradiate crops, but yeah, it was the 50s. Look, all I was trying to do was counter Lynx' constant "let them do it" philosophy. The notion is an absurd piece of philosophical theory, except even the most bookish of philosophers have proven it wrong by now. The biggest problem is that when you let criminals hold their own lives as hostages, you give them a free p!@#$%^&* and become an enabler, and that's only the first of a very long list of flaws. It doesn't mean shoot to kill muggers on sight, but you can scare them off, capture them (what ever did happen to the concept of 'citizens arrest' anyway?), to wound them, all of which better alternatives than letting him go on a crime spree. But, two men with knives isn't absurd at all. Being in a neighborhood where no one would respond to a call for help is also not absurd. I will admit that getting yourself and a family cornered in such an area would require some mistakes to be made. Though that last part is a problem with our thinking. The thought process is that the family is being irresponsible for going into a bad area. Okay, maybe that's true on the individual level, but what about the societal level? Why should certain neighborhoods be written off and effectively become forbidden areas for free people to travel? Doing so only creates a base of operations for criminals to multiply. I don't think incentives for turning in guns is a good idea though. The incentives should be towards proper security of the weapons as they are stored, because in the hands of a responsible owner, a weapon is a positive force. I'd say a heavy safe, bolted to the floor, with some sort of biometric scanner lock, would be perfect. Criminals couldn't get access to the weapons, and in an emergency the owner could still retrieve the weapon quickly. That's what should be given the incentive.

Okay, how about this: You, your wife, and your teenage daughter are walking home when you are suddenly cornered by two guys armed with knives who wish to rape your wife and daughter.

Look, maybe while we are at it, Europe should demand that Constantinople be returned to Christian hands. This at!@#$%^&*ude that 'Israel is occupying Palestine' is plain ridiculous. Its been half a century since Israel was formed. Occupations always fail. If this were an occupation, it would have failed within at MOST 20 years

(Back to SeVeR's post a page back, my point was only to establish the proper line of thinking. JDS's argument wasn't following democratic lines.) It means they are ignoring multiple contributing factors which have a higher correlation to the outcome than the one they wish to focus on. For instance, you could have a person who abused drugs and own a gun commit suicide. Now, the data could clearly state that the suicide rate amongst drug abusers, gun or no gun, is extremely high, but we don't know that because the conclusions were only based upon one variable. The point is that there are a LOT of biased statistics on this matter, and while I do think that the NRA's stats are more accurate based on the fact that the rate that they never have to go back and issue an apology, I think it would be wise to come to this conclusion: For every statistic that the pro-gun control supporters create, there will be another statistic from anti-gun control people which says the exact opposite, and vice versa. If any conclusion is to be come to, we must all admit that the numbers can easily be manipulated and we should all give up trying to prove this issue by statistics. There are two proposed models for a solution: One is that if weapons are centralized to the government, that the average costs of obtaining a firearm offset the average profits of crime. The other is that if weapons are decentralized to the populace, it becomes extremely difficult for a criminal to gain a physical edge over the populace over the long term, thus decreasing the average profit of crime. The problems with the liberal model are as follows: 1) It is dependent upon the government to solve all crime problems. If the police fail, the criminal population can take over the entire community. 2) It favors criminal organizations which can afford high capital investment, granting an edge to organized crime. The benefits to the conservative model: 1) Power is decentralized. 2) There is a backup to police failure. 3) Single criminals have virtually no impact on crime. Gangs are required to gain an edge. This means that the criminal goes through the difficulty of networking, though does not get the benefit of a centralized criminal organization. I guess the major difference isn't the amount of violent crime, which is dependent upon the amount of people in the populace predisposed to violence, but it does affect the type of violent crime. With centralized guns, you have a lot of small time criminals who can grab a small weapon and get a reliable advantage over those weaker than themselves. Also, you favor large organizations with both investment capital to acquire illegal weapons as well as offset the government with bribes or threats. With decentralized guns, criminals need to form a gang in order to get a reliable edge over the populace. Since gangs need loot divided amongst themselves, they need to go after high dollar targets such as banks. However, if a gang operates in any one area too long, probability catches up to them and they lose at the hands of either police of militia. Now, I haven't addressed the issue of the suicidal killer, but in my opinion that issue will not be solved by weapons, but by dealing with the societal issues that are causing these people to develop.

Yes, but the consequences of letting attacks on civilians go is worse. If we don't, we send the message that attacks on civilians are okay as long as the west doesn't feel up for a war at the moment.

JDS, I can only argue based upon conditions on planet Earth. You are so out in space I don't even want to argue.

JDS, you obviously have no understanding of the difference between a democracy and a monarchy. Yes, elected leadership is a major difference, but it is not the major difference. The difference between a democracy and a monarchy is that in a democracy, citizens by default have a right to do whatever they want, and laws are installed in the interest of society. In a monarchy, the citizens have no rights other than the ones the government deems to permit them to have. Taking away a right because 'they don't need it' is the exact at!@#$%^&*ude which was the foundation of every dictatorship in history. Sorry, your thought process is beyond opinionated or even misguided. You have reached the point of being evil in the way you think. Please, consult a psychologist or a priest before you hurt somebody. As for me, I don't believe in de-clawing cats, and don't believe the idea works for humans either. (PS - My father got mugged in the DC area. If he had a handgun with him it probably wouldn't have happened.)

Bak, who has the time? JDS, stfu I'll admit that there is one flaw in the plan for this boycott though. The truth is that the US is the number 1 importer of oil, and that Saudi Arabia is the number 1 exporter, but this in turn implied a myth that the US imports a lot of oil from Saudi Arabia. Infact, the majority of the oil coming into the US comes from Canada and Mexico, and the majority of the oil coming out of Saudi Arabia goes to Europe. I guess some economist thought the general public was to dumb to figure out that if Saudi Arabia cut the flow of oil to Europe, that Europe would then need oil from Mexico and Canada and thus raise the demand for the oil the US needs, so that myth was formed. Really though, the boycott would need to be European based to have the most impact.

I got this in a spam mail, but I think its a good idea. I for one am going to buy from Hess from now on. Even you liberals would probably agree with me on this one.

I think Penn State had to give a big payout to the black caucus a few years back because some kid shouted "n----" out of a dorm window. That wasn't technically a lawsuit but was still pretty ridiculous given how it was in response to a single word of speech.

It was a good try at a funny story, but it just came out bizarre. The closest I came to that is how I became the not-so-proud owner of a copy of Dungeon Lords because Gamestop won't give refunds. I say go to Wal-mart. They don't sell products that nobody buys, and they give refunds.