Fox: It's Extraordinary That Charleston Church Shooting Is Being Called a Hate Crime

Congress critters don't have power?

 

I read the bill and disagree with you. I didn't have a problem with expanded background checks. Not sure why any legal gun owner would be against it. Sure, felons who buy weapons at gun shows and the NRA didn't care for it. I expected that.

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Does one member of congress have the power to confiscate my guns? No.

 

Almost all guns sold at guns shows require background checks because most at the shows are dealers. Felons don't get their guns at gun shows. Not sure why you want to expand the power of the Federal government from interstate commerce to intrastate commerce.

 

There isn't just one. There are many lefties out there (including some on PF) who want an all out ban on guns.

 

We didn't want to trade ICBMs with USSR during the cold war. Using your logic, we should have dumped all of our nukes in the ocean and let the USSR take over the world. I don't want to shoot anybody. I just like how criminals knowing that I could be armed encourages them to terrorize churches elsewhere.

 

You're missing what differs between the cold scenario and the church scenario- in the church scenario, we can influence both sides directly where in the cold war scenario, we only have direct influence over one side.

Our "more guns" approach to gun violence is unique in the first world and we have way more murders than other first world countries. Doesn't that suggest that we got the approach wrong?

 

Are you really and truly surprised that he blamed Republicans for thwarting efforts to prevent these massacres, particularly since that is precisely what they have been rather openly doing?

 

How do you influence a crazy guy with a gun? You couldn't stop him yesterday?

 

We influence crazy guys with guns in all kinds of ways. The extent to which we tolerate or actively spread white supremacist beliefs influences the number of people who become white supremacists. Our gun policies influence how many people, and what kind of people, have access to guns and what kinds of guns they have access to. The way we design our mental health system influences how likely crazy people are to be in a position to harm others and get their hands on weapons. The social attitude towards violence and guns influence the attitudes people like this develop. Etc.

 

So are you claiming black people cannot be Christian? What a racist thing to say.

 

They have been doing no such thing. None of the proposed laws would have prevented it.

 

Criminals and crazy people don't care about your influence. Laws only disarm the law abiding. Just ask anybody in that church in South Carolina. Or at least ask their family members. They would gladly have let their relatives defend themselves, but the state made it illegal. Too bad the state didn't protect them.

 

If nothing society can do changes the rate of murder, why do some societies have way lower murder rates than others? Why is ours the highest in the developed world by such a wide margin? Just bad luck year after year after year?

 

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/Republicans_thwart_gun_violence_research_by_CDC.html

http://crosscut.com/2013/02/procedural-games-state-republicans-gun-control/

http://www.redstate.com/diary/candi...ish-dojs-ability-impose-gun-control-measures/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...eb028a-a77c-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_story.html

 

Well no, it's quite ordinary. What else would you expect?

I think it's (*)(*)(*)(*)ing stupid to speculate to his motives, but if you were a bookmaker, surely you'd place racial hate under $2.

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Hate crimes violate civil liberties. The motive of the individual should be taken into account by the judiciary, not the legislature. It's abhorrent on the same basis as mandatory minimums - but since the left's favored little demographics are the victims of crime in this instance, not the perpetrators - they're all for it.

Abolish hate crime legislation. Abolish mandatory minimums. Return discretion to the judge at sentencing.

 

Thanx.

None of these laws were reasonable and none of them could have prevented the shooting in South Carolina

 

I don't get why there is any speculation required. He is openly white supremacist, he picked a black church that has historical ties to the civil rights movement, he announced right before he started killing that he came there because he wanted to kill black people, he accused the black people of raping white women and taking over the country and then he murdered nine black people... There isn't any speculation or ambiguity at all about why he did it.

It is completely within the discretion if the judge. A bias motivation sentencing enhancement makes a higher maximum penalty available for the judge to apply in his or her discretion, or not, as they think is appropriate.

I definitely agree about mandatory minimums though.

 

I'll keep my guns, you keep your hysteria.

 

I haven't heard much about this story since it broke. Forgive my ignorance.

So you agree that someone who murders for racial hate should be treated by the legislature no differently to someone who murders for money? That there should be no difference in the legislation on these matters, and that it should be entirely up to the judge to raise or lower the sentence?

It seems to be to be a separation of powers issue.

 

No worries.

I think the way it works currently is about right. The legislature makes a higher maximum sentence available, at the judge's discretion, for most kinds of crimes if certain circumstances are met. For example, if the victim is a child, for many types of crime, the judge has the option to apply a sentence enhancement to increase the maximum sentence. Also actually, if somebody commits murder for hire, that can increase the max. There are something like 100 sentence enhancements federally. Some are very specific and apply to only one crime, others apply to broad categories of crime. Some of them are there because a particular variant of the crime is much more destructive than the usual variant. Some are there because a particular type of perpetrator is particularly hard to discourage, like gangs. Some are there because the nature of the particular crime makes it much harder to catch the perpetrator, so they need to make the penalty especially harsh when they do catch them to avoid a problem where it actually can be in one's interest to commit the crime. For example, lawyers or accountants who embezzle from elderly people whose estates they manage, very rarely get caught. So, in order to make it not worth the risk, they need to make the penalties higher than they do for other kinds of embezzlers who are more frequently caught.

Now, you could just make the maximum sentence always be higher and let the judge decide completely. But, there are kind of competing pressures. You also have the problem of a particular judge who is just over the top about punishing criminals or who is running for an election where he wants to appear particularly tough on crime or whatever. So, you do want maximums that keep things from getting totally unreasonable. For example, you don't want somebody who gets in a simple bar fight where nobody is seriously hurt getting sentenced to 10 years in prison, right? So, we set the max for assault to about 2 years usually. But, there are some kinds of assault where 10 years would probably be appropriate. For example, say that a gang of neo Nazis goes to a Jewish neighborhood, driving around in a truck blasting Nazi music and swinging bats around threatening everybody, then they jump out, grab a 12 year old Jewish girl, pull her into the back of the truck, and beat her while they drive around the neighborhood so everybody can see as they beat her within an inch of her life and she loses an eye and can't walk for 9 months. 2 years doesn't seem sufficient for something that heinous. It isn't at all like the bar fight. They intimidated tons of people, it was much more brutal, it terrifies maybe hundreds of thousands of Jewish people nationwide who hear about it, people move out of that neighborhood, etc. So, sentence enhancements are a way to strike the balance where the ordinary variant of the crime, like a bar fight, has a reasonably low maximum while the more serious variant has a higher maximum. In that case, depending on what state they're in, they might get a sentencing enhancement for conspiracy, for picking an underage victim, for threatening others, for having weapon (the bats) and for picking a victim based on their religion, so you might end up with a richly deserved maximum sentence of 10 years.

I do agree that it is right for it to be left at the judge's discretion though. There certainly are cases where, for example, somebody picks a victim based on their race that actually aren't any worse than the ordinary variant and judges should not be forced to apply higher penalties in those cases.

 

Guns break laws, is that what you're saying?

 

I like shooting targets myself, seems totally legit to me. Doubt you'd find much argument from other gun owners. I really don't see the issue with owning firearms.

 

If this sounds reasonable to you for the reasons you described, you need new friends. Clearly you cannot trust them. They're likely stealing from you as we speak. Out of curiosity do you check to ensure their drivers license is valid and their insurance is up to date before loaning them a car? Would you do the same if you were to sell a car, despite the fact that it's not required of you? Have you ensured they have no prior DUIs? I'm sorry but the law is absolutely ridiculous. To assume that everyone is a criminal until proven innocent is not our system of law. BTW, any weapon bought before 2015 is tradable even with this law as you simply have to say it was sold before the time frame. This solves nothing and puts an unnecessary burden on gun owners who wish to sell, trade, or lend their fire arms. I don't see how a reasonable person could support this kind of bs.

 

That guy saying the shooting was the result of anti-Christian sentiment is no more or less valid than you saying it was the result of racism.

You look at a White person shooting a Black person and you're convinced it was an act of race hate.

That guy looked at it and was convinced it was an act of Christian hate.

You have have a cognitive bias compounded by a lack of being able to distinguish between fact and opinion.

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[video=youtube;mmsPSvXKSZA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmsPSvXKSZA[/video]

 

I don't really see the interest gun owners have in making off the books gun swaps as a particularly important interest. Certainly not more important than keeping guns out of the hands of known felons, domestic violence perpetrators and insane people. I mean, if we just say you can't buy a gun from a dealer if you're a felon, etc., but you can just have your buddy buy the gun and lend it to you perfectly legally, that's kind of silly, don't you think?

That said, there probably are easier ways to do it than making people go down to a gun dealer. You could just say that the gun lender can be fined, for example, if they loan a gun to somebody and it turns out that person is not legally allowed to have a gun. Then people who know for sure that the person is legally allowed to have a gun wouldn't be hassled and it would give people an incentive to be responsible about it. And it would give law enforcement a way to go after people who are just using the pretense of lending to get away with selling guns to felons and whatnot.

I dunno. It's like everything else. We create some kind of loophole to accommodate the perfectly reasonable person and then criminals exploit the loophole. It's like that thing about not needing to register guns you build yourself. It was intended to just make things easier for gunsmithing nerds, which was fine. But now you have guys who basically just mail order like 100 AK-47s in like 2 pieces that need to be clicked together, that counts as making your own gun, so it is all legal and off the books, and then they sell those AK-47s to gangs and the cartels and whatnot... We can't make the rule on the basis of the most optimistic best-case scenario, we need to make the rule keeping in mind that people abuse the rules.