Yes, I'm sure you're such a soul that you want alcohol banned since it kills nearly 90,000 Americans annually. Tell us about your anti-alcohol crusades.
The only thing I've seen in relation to these facts is your dismissal of them as a "conspiracy theory". What doesn't? And yet, totally justified. Tu Quoque fallacy (not to mention red herring) much?
It seems you are asserting that anyone who supports the idea of gun control is supporting the idea of a gun ban. This would be a false dilemma fallacy. Switzerland is a good example of effective gun control, without a ban. Australia currently has more firearms than they did prior to their gun control legislation... Yet both countries have made dramatic improvements in firearm deaths. Your assertion that the motive is anything other than saving lives is simply false.
1) I explained why they're a conspiracy theory. If you can't answer those points that's not my problem. This is an empty response. 2) I suggest you get a dictionary since you don't know what disinformation is. 3) In your eyes. I'm neither concerned about nor interested in partisan rants in hostile, hack liberal publications. They have a drum to beat and are beating it loudly. That is not a legitimate source when a person is making a claim based on factual data. Those pieces are as good as op-eds in their worth. 4) It means you're singling out the NRA as evil for doing something you're not crying foul for others doing. Why are you doing that, and why isn't it evil when other groups do the same? I expect moral consistency and I'm not getting it.
I'm seeing nothing but across-the-board hostility toward guns and gun manufacturers here. Switzerland is a good example of social proliferation of guns without high murder rates. They have more guns per capita than the US has. And again, if you want to be honest about comparing European rates of gun deaths to the US, you have to look at demographics, even if it gives you the ouches, sorry. Clearly the motive is not saving lives, since they ignore things far more deadly. It's not rational.
I always know who is winning the arguments on a thread - the losers start launching Ad Hiominem attacks And the NRA is using the tobacco industry's play book to write its advertising - and I don't think the Tobacco industry is particularly moral either
.In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis. As such, it can be thought of as a form of selection bias in collecting evidence. http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/confirmation_bias.htm Believe what you will - my views do not match what you have declared here
Perhaps, if you're unwilling to repeat yourself, you could at least provide a quote number? I don't seen anything that vaguely supports your "conspiracy theory" claim. Whereas I am sure you have more experience with disinformation than I do, my question wasn't "what's disinformation" it was - what's the "this" you were referring to in your vague response (requoted below for your convenience): Ad hominem attacks against the sources... Interesting considering that several of those sources were the NRA. That's funny. You want me to go on a gun control forum and list every organization that lines the pockets of politicians, whether they have anything to do with the topic or not? Besides, since morality has something to do with your expectations, please illustrate where the legislation Greenpeace has pushed for has lined the pockets of corporations who make money by selling goods that kill thousands of Americans per year. Moral equivalency?
What you see is subjective, and has nothing to do with the motives of the people posting. Which nicely illustrates that gun control doesn't have to take the form of a gun ban. If you want to argue that gun bans are stupid, I'll be happy to join in. If you want to argue that gun control is ineffective, I have to disagree. As you are taking the conservative standpoint, I assume that by "demographics" you mean "racial demographics" as opposed to socio-economic demographics... right? Right.... You said something about alcohol being more deadly... The lethality of an activity can only be measured in relation to the number of deaths it causes in a set timeframe in which that activity is undertaken. For example, very few people die by being struck by lightning because it doesn't happen very often. That doesn't mean being struck by lightning isn't deadly. Similarly, a vegetarian is less likely to die from choking on a chicken bone than someone who eats chicken daily... If you want to support your assertion that alcohol causes more deaths than firearms, you'll have to illustrate how many deaths there are that stem directly from alcohol consumption as well as the total hours that the average American spends consuming alcohol - and then compare this to the number of deaths that stem directly from shootings and the amount of time the average American spends shooting.
not here. Just because I don't drink means I am against alcohol? I don't have drunken crusades...but that doesn't mean I support drinking and driving. I have an annual party with some friends and they drink, but they know once they start, they cannot leave. Keys get checked out the next day. So what's your beef?
53.75% of poll respondents keep a gun by their beds! What a truly (*)(*)(*)(*)ed-up country you must live in. But that's 'freedom' for you. Personally I prefer the freedom to sleep peacefully knowing the chances of my encountering a gunman are vanishingly remote.
People in England are imprisoned for politically incorrect speech. People in England have no defense for creeping totalitarianism in their own government other than standing on a street corner and complaining. That makes you sitting ducks. And how is England's violent crime rate coming along?
I'm sorry, you want evidence that the Democrat-controlled US Senate killed its own bill and blamed the NRA? I guess your only understanding of US politics is what they post on angry liberal hack websites. Why are you obsessing about US politics, anyway? You're in Australia.
Saying I did something that I did not is apparently not an ad hominem attack. Okie dokie. As I said, the Democratic Party uses similar tactics. Gun control groups use similar tactics. You're only complaining about one group doing this, and that answer to that is in your own biases. Speaking of which... Exactly, which is what you are engaging in which you depend so heavily on hostile, agenda-driven liberal hack websites and are unable to cite a more independent source with actual, so yet again you are accusing me of doing what you are doing. Government statistics are legitimate evidence; they are not op-ed pieces from biased websites. Political op-ed websites do not overrule government statistics. What part of this do you not understand? Your websites are claiming the NRA is issuing marching orders without bothering to defend such a wild accusation, yet for some odd reason you want me to believe these people. So this makes two times you've accused me of doing what you are doing. I haven't "declared" anything, I've proven it with government statistics. Your views do not match reality, so much so that you are unable to defend them and instead paste a gaggle of hostile political articles because indeed those types of articles are where your belief arises to begin with. I'm a former liberal Democrat, I don't need to see more of their screeds. I already know what they believe in. You need to deal with presenting information and arguments of higher quality. "This liberal hack website says..." is not an argument. Honest, actual debate goes beyond posting biased political screeds with no sources for the wild claims they make. You'd learn that in any basic college-level class in reading or writing.
I'm not going to repeat myself. Too many people have tried to play that game with me. The topic was claims of NRA disinformation, not someone getting angry about the NRA opposing something. If you want to claim the NRA was wrong in opposing something, then state your case. I don't care if a liberal group got angry and cried foul. Gun control groups give money to politicians and you don't cry foul. Why? Yet again, the NRA is being held to a different standard. When you say they "buy politicians" for donating like everyone else, yes it is. When Bloomberg throws money at someone, he wasn't trying to "buy politicians"? Yes it does, which is why I smell something when people are singled out and held to a standard and condemned when others aren't. You're moving the goalposts and now saying that "lining the pockets of politicians" is now suddenly not bad unless you sell something that can kill people in one way or another, and indeed in this you only really mean GUNS because I've already shown that alcohol kills far more. That explains the use of hostile left-wing political hack sites and selective outrage against the NRA. We already have gun control. We already have too much gun control. Are you ready to call for the same laws for the sale, use, and possession of alcohol that you do for guns since it kills far more people? They overlap. If you remove the largest violent crime demographic in the US, what would American crime rates look like compared to other countries? And what demographics do those other countries being compared with have? This is another movement of the goal posts. Government data isn't to your liking, so let's invent an arbitrary way of re-tallying the figures. X number of people misuse alcohol for years and it eventually kills them or someone else. Y number of people mishandle guns for years and it eventually kills them or someone else. You're fixating on speculative nonsense about how long something has to be misused before it kills them because one method of death involves a trigger and the other doesn't. Do you have any scholarly reason to do this? No - you literally just invented that. Right here. Far more die by alcohol than by guns. If this is about lives, then you should have already been calling for at the minimum the laws against booze you want against guns, yet you haven't and remain silent about the alcohol issue while trying to off the cuff rationalize about guns.
Actually, I'm VERY arch-Conservative and I have guns (plural) by my bed. When and if "da boyz in da 'hood" come to kick in my front door, they will get QUITE a surprise....
I was never really anti-gun, but once I realized that I had a very sheepish attitude toward guns which was a direct holdover from my days as a partisan liberal Democrat, I began to analyze the rationality of it and so rejected the mindset completely. Internalizing ******* fetishism is not a reason to be for or against something. I can certainly remember times in the past before I ever held a gun in my hand that I wished I had one, having lived in a high crime area in the inner city. One occasion in specific left me thinking I'd have to try my chances with a kitchen knife. There was an agitated man wandering in my apartment building, going door to door, cursing and trying to kick doors in. He would randomly go to doors, it seemed, though he kept coming back to mine, trying to kick it in. I could see through the eye hole that he fit the description of a wanted serial rapist in the area at the time and I didn't have a telephone. Lucky me, the deadbolt held and he eventually gave up. My walls were shaking every time he kicked my door. Needless to say, I don't have to worry about such things anymore. Hail Smith & Wesson. Interesting because usually the left-bleeding heart types ooze with sympathy for the perpetrator and tend to blame the gun owner for defending themselves: "You could have just aimed for the leg," "They are desperate and just want to take stuff. Let them, it's not worth killing them over it" and so forth. I'd say you're not quite the bleeding heart you think you are.
So, what is your plan if this happens again - shoot the person through the door and face court on a murder charge or invite them in and hope that the castle doctrine applies?
Attention ~ I understand that this is a contentious subject, and appreciate opinions of all members. But please, address the topic and do not turn this further into a personal conflict. Thank you.
In other words, you never addressed it. How much money are we talking about? Please illustrate that "gun control groups" are anywhere near the lobby that the NRA is. Sorry, I thought you were the one who wanted "moral equivalency"... A financial donation to a politician in order to save a particular type of tree (or whatever) is hardly the moral equivalent of a financial donation to a politician so that he will protect your ability to make a profit off of the deaths of his constituents. You mean like the NRA "hack sites" I used as sources? Yeah, we have a bunch of laws. Like making it illegal to sell a weapon to a felon, then preventing universal background checks so that the law is unenforceable... I'm all for scrapping the unenforceable laws and implementing laws that will actually reduce the ability of criminals and the mentally unstable to obtain weapons, without impacting the rest of us. I've already addressed why this is a strawman. What do you mean by "the largest violent crime demographic in the US"? Are you talking about the poor? Using your rationale (that only the total number of deaths should be counted, with no consideration for deaths in relation to frequency/duration of use), you could also argue that terrorism kills very few people each year, so maybe we shouldn't try to stop that either.
Two very bad ideas. One, always know your target. Say that the police mistakenly SWAT your house and you are half asleep and you shoot through a wall and kill a cop. Or a friend thinks it is a good idea to "surprise" you. Never shoot without knowing your target. Two, shooting someone at "knee" level. You are more likely to miss and you are also more likely to hit an artery if you don't miss which means they will bleed out and die much quicker than a gut shot. Always center mass.
If I don't have a firearm near my bed, that means I am sleeping in a hotel and am traveling by plane. Otherwise always.
Fun story that just happened to me this past weekend. I was at a coworker's retirement party on the other side of the valley (PHX). When it came time to leave, Siri (damn you Siri) directed me to take a different route home rather than the route it brought be there with. I stupidly listened to her and long story short ended up in a very seedy part of the city. It was about 11:30p.m. I pulled up to a red light and a white Ford Excursion pulled swiftly up beside me and 3 hispanic men rushed towards my window (they pulled up to my left side and I had my windows down). The started to say "What's up homie?" and "get the (*)(*)(*)(*) out of the car". In a matter of about 3 seconds 2 of them were trying to reach in my drivers side door and one had ran around to the passenger side window, which was also open. Luckily, I had my Glock 27 chambered in my cup holder, I pulled it out immediately and said "You chose the wrong motherf@cker!" in my most intimidating tone. They all 3 ran back to their truck and sped off. It happened so quick i'm still in shock and that was on Saturday night. So glad I didn't have to fire, and THANK GOD I CARRY!
