BF2S Forums Gun politics, firearms ownership, and US 2nd amendment discussion

-Sh1fty- wrote:

There is no need for gun control. Law-abiding citizens purchase guns and do not commit crimes. You can sell them an M1 Garand or a fully automatic M4A1 with all their tacticool gadgets and it won't change a thing. Criminals do not obey laws, period. There is no argument anybody advocating gun control can use in their favor. The statistics simply aren't in your favor. Wake up and face reality. There are 270 million registered guns in the United States. No amount of laws is going to change that number and if weapons are seized it will only leave the criminals with weapons.

If you think safety has anything to do with it, whatever happened to personal responsibility? If you fuck up, you face the consequences. If you or your kids accidentally shoot yourself it is not the job of the government to come in and plan daddy. This also applies to drug use, alcohol, sex, etc. The government isn't our "Big Brother" or dad whom we must seek for discipline. If you fuck up, the government is to punish you, but it is not to punish you preemptively.

The Constitution of the United States is to be considered a freaking sacred Bible by which to run the country. It took our forefathers a long time to write it up, and many drafts and corrections were made in order to produce a document as close to perfection as possible. If the Second Amendment is "old" and needs to be reevaluated, then the same can be applied to every Constitution. When that happens there is no more value and our Amendments don't mean zilch. Our Second Amendment is not to be infringed upon, and currently it is so thanks to people like Feinstein.

The U.S. military is sworn to uphold the Constitution, not the President or Congress' laws, first. This is another simple example of the many proofs we hold to show how important this document is.

The mother of Adam Lanza was a law abiding gun owner.  Just saying.

Also you do not know jack shit about US history, sorry but seeing you lecture on it is just kind of pathetic.  People have fought and died TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTION.  To END SLAVERY.  Womens suffrage.  To ban alcohol and then to end the ban 12 or so years later.  "The Constitution of the United States is to be considered a freaking sacred Bible by which to run the country", well, to be fair about it, not many people take the bible as literally as you do, so unless you are going to say that stuff to other fundamentalists such as yourself it's not really serving your argument very well. 

Go get a law degree and teach constitutional law for a few years then come back and tell us about it.

-Sh1fty- wrote:

Shit happens - you can't fight crazy with good reasoning. Mass shootings are not a daily occurrence and banning scary-looking weapons is a joke.

As for the Constitution you are right. I don't recall seeing the Amendments that said women couldn't vote and slavery was legal but those indeed were terrible and I'd appreciate it if you'd point me to the parts that allowed it.

Alcohol is a perfect example of the Constitution needing to be upheld. There was no reason to ban alcohol and it made things worse. Banning drugs made things worse. Banning guns will make things worse as well. Crime rose from 1994 to 2004 and when the AWB expired crime dropped again.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

So now that you know (and to save you the trouble, Bobby was shot with a handgun), tell me again that we need assault rifles to "combat tyranny."

Spearhead wrote:

You completely missed my point.  If the Constitution were as perfect as the Bible since its inception, then why was there a need to modify it at all?

The bible has been modified constantly.

Even the most religious nut has to concede that point.

-Sh1fty- wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is to be considered a freaking sacred Bible by which to run the country. It took our forefathers a long time to write it up, and many drafts and corrections were made in order to produce a document as close to perfection as possible. If the Second Amendment is "old" and needs to be reevaluated, then the same can be applied to every Constitution. When that happens there is no more value and our Amendments don't mean zilch. Our Second Amendment is not to be infringed upon, and currently it is so thanks to people like Feinstein..

lol
lol
lol

lit scholar shifty. the fact you conflate in your mind the "sacred bible" and a political constitution written several centuries ago is VERY telling. you are told your entire life to consider the bible 'infallible' and 'perfect'... no text is ever perfect. a text is a work-in-progress, always, and meaning is always ambiguous. if you obey a document literally, by the meaning of its words, ahistorically, then you are tyrannized by that document. why? because historical/contextual situations change; paradigms shift; language itself has an ever-changing and hybrid meaning. when people follow the bible by the letter, you get nutjob fundamentalists who look hopelessly out of touch with reality. when people want to follow a document, a document which was written in a specific historical moment to answer a range of specific historical problems, to the letter... they come out as out of touch fundamentalists, too. there is absolutely NO reason to consider a constitution "sacred bible". this can only result in reactionary behaviour and a total retardation of all progress - principles antithetical to the true democratic, progressive spirit.

i'm sorry but following a document 'just because' it is a document that exists, and 'just because' it has been "redrafted" by many minds, makes no sense at all. the founding fathers of america were not perfect omniscient beings, they were not demi-gods descended from the heavens with divine edicts - they were just a bunch of white statesmen trying to establish their own democratic experiment. the american democracy isn't the 'only' way to do it, and the constitution is not the one reigning 'master document'. i wonder why people aren't blindly and unquestioningly following the political documents written by plato about greek democracies and republics? oh yeah, that's right: because it's batshit insane to instill RELIGIOUS belief in some dude's writing. people are flawed. thoughts are seldom perfect. large abstract systems have to shift and adapt, they cannot remain rigid and unchanging. that's how cultures stagnate and degenerate; it's how empires fall into decadence and senescence; in short, it's how you lose sync with world-historical reality.

shifty i'd keep your orgasms for the bible. at least that's losing relevancy these days, and is thus becoming quaint and benign.

I wish someone would shoot Feinstein in the head with a crossbow bolt

aynrandroolz wrote:

-Sh1fty- wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is to be considered a freaking sacred Bible by which to run the country. It took our forefathers a long time to write it up, and many drafts and corrections were made in order to produce a document as close to perfection as possible. If the Second Amendment is "old" and needs to be reevaluated, then the same can be applied to every Constitution. When that happens there is no more value and our Amendments don't mean zilch. Our Second Amendment is not to be infringed upon, and currently it is so thanks to people like Feinstein..

lol
lol
lol

lit scholar shifty. the fact you conflate in your mind the "sacred bible" and a political constitution written several centuries ago is VERY telling. you are told your entire life to consider the bible 'infallible' and 'perfect'... no text is ever perfect. a text is a work-in-progress, always, and meaning is always ambiguous. if you obey a document literally, by the meaning of its words, ahistorically, then you are tyrannized by that document. why? because historical/contextual situations change; paradigms shift; language itself has an ever-changing and hybrid meaning. when people follow the bible by the letter, you get nutjob fundamentalists who look hopelessly out of touch with reality. when people want to follow a document, a document which was written in a specific historical moment to answer a range of specific historical problems, to the letter... they come out as out of touch fundamentalists, too. there is absolutely NO reason to consider a constitution "sacred bible". this can only result in reactionary behaviour and a total retardation of all progress - principles antithetical to the true democratic, progressive spirit.

i'm sorry but following a document 'just because' it is a document that exists, and 'just because' it has been "redrafted" by many minds, makes no sense at all. the founding fathers of america were not perfect omniscient beings, they were not demi-gods descended from the heavens with divine edicts - they were just a bunch of white statesmen trying to establish their own democratic experiment. the american democracy isn't the 'only' way to do it, and the constitution is not the one reigning 'master document'. i wonder why people aren't blindly and unquestioningly following the political documents written by plato about greek democracies and republics? oh yeah, that's right: because it's batshit insane to instill RELIGIOUS belief in some dude's writing. people are flawed. thoughts are seldom perfect. large abstract systems have to shift and adapt, they cannot remain rigid and unchanging. that's how cultures stagnate and degenerate; it's how empires fall into decadence and senescence; in short, it's how you lose sync with world-historical reality.

shifty i'd keep your orgasms for the bible. at least that's losing relevancy these days, and is thus becoming quaint and benign.

Fundamentalist rationale will tell you that god guided the entire process (writing the bibles until the KJV came into existence ofcourse, that one's perfect). Problem solved, nothing to think about anymore. It doesn't hold up to any scrutiny but that doesn't matter to them. 'goddidit' becomes the answer to everything.

-Sh1fty- wrote:

Crime rose from 1994 to 2004 and when the AWB expired crime dropped again.

Stop making up statistics.  Violent crime did not have a correlation like that.  It has been dropping for a long time, with a couple blips here and there.
If you are going to argue something, use real numbers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2 … -epidemic/

I kind of buy into the theory that crime rates are down because of abortion.  Haven't really researched it much but it makes sense to me.  Less overpopulation = more stability.

Also, what is all this shit about "scary looking weapons"?  The AR-15 was developed for military purposes.  Do you really blame people for mistaking civilian versions for the military versions?  Don't infantry fire in semi-auto in actual combat to remain accurate?  I think people should have access to firearms for self-defense.  Weapons which were designed for the military have no useful application in the civilian world.  If any and all regulation were unconstitutional, then I should be able to buy a full auto Tommy gun that they banned in the 1930's.

Last edited by Spearhead (2013-01-26 12:57:24)

Spearhead wrote:

I kind of buy into the theory that crime rates are down because of abortion.

i think extreme religious nutjobs are right. evolution lets them breed, and are not weeding them out like the theory led us to believe. i blame the warning labels we put on everything, and the rampant political correctness. We should not mention a mass murderers name in the media, we should remove warnings from everything, and we need to stop having the public pay for intensive health care from idiots who wind up in the hospital from vehicle accidents and other self inflicted stupidity.

Let God sort them out.

err we have had 55,000,000 confirmed abortion in the last 40 years
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 … medium=RSS



crime has not gone down because of this but because life is a little less harsh then it was before. 'have more abortions so that crime goes down' is a really nasty argument to make in favor of the right to choice. it is the second most aggravating argument i hear coming from neo-malthusians. the other being "the third world needs to stop having babies''.

Again Uzi I said I had not researched it very well.  To me it is not very far fetched to suggest that, when applied to millions upon millions of people, easy access to family planning would lead to fewer unwanted pregnancies.  It's not that people aren't having children at the same rates, or that people still aren't having children when they probably shouldn't, it's that fewer people are having fewer unwanted children.  Do you really think a rate of 2 children per couple compared to god-knows what it was 50 or 100 years ago has no statistical impact?  Plenty of families even in the 50's had more than 5 children.  Today that is considered by many to be weird.  That would help contribute to you're rising average age theory -- sure, people growing older, more boomers growing old and dying off, but that could be because there aren't 30 year old women with 12 children at home, could it not?

Also, to poschy -- I would like to know more about the correlation between urban population and crime -- as one of the lead articles pointed out, crime inside the city has actually dropped relative to non-urban areas.  I'm mostly interested in the 40's, 50's, and 60's.  The "Great migration" of african americans going north, which then contributed to the white flight out into the suburbs after WW2.  Too much for me to look up but I'll come back later.

So, do any of the other theories fit as well as the lead theory?  That seems like a lot of strong correlations around the same thing. 
I'll be honest, the theory is new to me, but if the correlations are at 90% for national, regional, municipal, and international samples, that's pretty darn convincing.  If true, such a strong correlation indicates this might be one of the best things to go after in order to reduce crime rates.
The lead effect theory is definitely worth looking into a bit more!