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RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 4:17:44 PM   
punisher440


Posts: 4122
Joined: 4/10/2011
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quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

but the russin round is a 7.62 x54 it got a big hind end that boy.

The 7.62x54 is used in the Russian sniper rifle and older rifles,the AK-47 uses the 7.62x39.Same bullet but the 7.62x54 uses a longer cartridge to hold more powder,so longer ranges.

(in reply to mnottertail)
Profile   Post #: 201
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 4:47:42 PM   
BamaD


Posts: 20687
Joined: 2/27/2005
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quote:

ORIGINAL: stellauk

quote:

ORIGINAL: LadyHibiscus

When Stella didn't understand why we cared so much about a document, I was amazed. People fought and died over that document. People still do, though the true purpose of their masters is far more oblique. It's all we have to hold our government up, the notion that we have those inalienable rights. Why everything must be all or nothing, why there can be no small and reasonable adjustments, I don't know. Personally, I don't think that civilians need military grade ordnance.


It isn't so much the attachment to the document which defies my comprehension, but the actual events. I am well aware of how much blood has been spilled to get that document together.

But what use is the Constitution if it doesn't protect some citizens and if some people are still dying? We're talking here about families losing sons and daughters.

After all there's been so much discussion about the 2nd Amendment, but what about the 14th Amendment? It's part of the same document, is it not?

How can it be that the 14th Amendment was so important to some when they wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade and define conception as the start of life to protect 'unborn Americans', and yet nobody is making any mention of the 14th Amendment here?

quote:

ORIGINAL: LadyHibiscus

I don't think that passing more laws will make a shred of difference to gun culture, or to the poverty that fuels the genuine need for protection, or the drug trafficking that is tied in to both.



I agree entirely.

And I don't think it will change the fact that some people will own guns and yeah, if they're so attached to them enjoy the right to 'bear arms'.

But you know to the families of the victims, and to every family of every victim of gun crime, it would make a lot of difference.

It would certainly mean much more than the public outpouring of sympathy and prayers. Words and emotions can be cheap, but when tied to decisions and actions can take on their own significance.

You know at the end of the day a law is just a piece of paper. But I feel in this instance that the passing of such a law would be a fitting tribute to the victims of Aurora, and of Columbine, and of Waco, and of all the other shootings.

I'm not an expert by any means, but surely introducing firearms controls lies well within the spirit of the 14th Amendment?


Because the discussion is about gun rights which are not addressed in the 14th. If the disscussion was about dumping the 14th you would hear a lot about it. Same reason you don't hear a lot hear about the first but if someone announced it had outlived it's usefullness the server would melt down.

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Profile   Post #: 202
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 4:52:18 PM   
BamaD


Posts: 20687
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quote:

ORIGINAL: subrob1967


quote:

ORIGINAL: BamaD


quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

Aswad
The more important question, perhaps, is whether anything should be done. I tend to think not.


I'm afraid we have to differ here. It would be unthinkable that, if something alone the lines of Columbine or Aurora happened here, nothing would be done about it. The last time something like that happened here, far stricter gun control was instituted, including a ban on all automatic rifles. That seems to have put a stop to it. Last time I checked we are still a free society here.

The question of context is most important. For me, this is an extreme act of violence in an already violent society. The murder rate in the US is a multiple of murder rates in comparable countries. There are 2 million Americans behind bars and some 6 million under "correctional supervision". The levels of personal and State violence far exceed those elsewhere. So do the levels of gun ownership. The level of State support for those at the margins is far lower than elsewhere. Violence and crime, and the fear of violence and crime, (which can be just as debilitating) seems far higher in the US than elsewhere.

Some Americans seem to shrug their shoulders and make noises about the price of freedom. I don't see the figures I've just referred to as reflecting freedom at all. If you feel they do reflect freedom, then by all means do nothing. To me, freedom seem diminished by the levels of fear and paranoia I see expressed in many posts here.

All this suggests to me that there is something very basic out of kilter in American society. If events such as Aurora are to be avoided in future, this question needs serious examination.

Actually the assault weapons ban predated Colimbine by several years.



Not to mention Klebold and Harris used shotguns and 9mm pistols... Nary an "assault" rifle in sight.

Already covered and acknowledged. It should be noted that it was illegal for them to have either as they were 17.They broke about 10 gunlaws before they ever showed up that day. More important when making the first post I did not know that tweakable was in Australia. You may have noticed that I apologized to her for the misunderstanding.

< Message edited by BamaD -- 7/24/2012 4:54:42 PM >

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RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 4:53:54 PM   
PeonForHer


Posts: 19612
Joined: 9/27/2008
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quote:


Hardly large amounts, unless you're trying to affect a large area.



I shan't argue with that, for the reason that you yourself alluded to in an earlier post: I'm sure we don't want to be giving out the details. The wrong sorts of people could be making the wrong sorts of notes. Fertiliser bombs were the weapon of choice for the IRA here for decades, at least until they could get hold of Semtex. It had to be used in large quantities to achieve the required ends. Frequently the 'delivery' method was as a car bomb.

quote:

We're fortunate that the western world has largely forgotten the merits of these more effective means of killing.


Apparently they haven't. It took me all of thirty seconds of Googling to come across a website that gave details of how to make a fertiliser bomb and what it could do.


This Colorado tragedy has reminded me of a certain exchange between Hannibal Lecter and Agent Starling in 'Silence of the Lambs". It went something like

Lecter: "First principles. What does this man want to do?"

Starling: "He wants to kill people"

Lecter - annoyed: "No, he doesn't. The killing is incidental."

Starling then goes on to establish that the killer didn't want to kill people - that was just what needed to happen in order for him to get hold of their skins.

The Colorado killer wanted to achieve something that has yet to be established, as well as killing. Most of us suspect that it was some concoction of glamour, notoriety, awe, (etc, etc, etc). No doubt it'll all become more specific as more is known about the man and his motives. Pretty clearly, though, he was motivated to kill *in a certain way*. At bottom, the point is that if those means had not been available to him, it would have been harder to achieve his (as yet unknown) ends. Perhaps too hard for the fantasy in his head ever to have reached critical mass and hatched into a practical strategy. We're all aware of fantasies like this that never turn into reality. The 'tipping point' is crucial.

In sum, it's much, much too simple to say that 'He wanted to kill, therefore he'd have found away to do it. If not a gun, then something else'. It's important, I think, not to underestimate the view that upturns the more widely known assumption that 'the ends dictate the means'. The means can, and in a million ways do, dictate the ends. At the most paltry end of it, one could even say that of Pavlov's dogs: whereas once their end was to get food, after Pavlov had manipulated their minds it was no longer that, it was for the dogs to get those bells to ringing and start the salivating in their mouths. The principle amongst social theorists, it seems, is summed up by the phrase 'Desires change with the means of achieving them'. As a kid, I might have had fantasies of mowing down lots of people with a machine gun (those people would have been invading Nazis, usually). But then I grew up, learned that there were no Nazis around and I couldn't get hold of a machine gun. My desires changed, and I ended up mowing down bad arguments in pubs, and limited myself to watching films about Nazis being mown down by actors with fake machine guns. I was *entirely* happy. I can assure any concerned readers that I no longer have a desire to mow down people - even (neo-)Nazis - with a machine gun.

Pretty clearly, I think those people who've stressed the upbringing of this Colorado killer, the lack of awareness that he was going off the rails and lack of treatment of all this, are correct. But I also think those who've stressed the allure of guns as not just killing machines but *glamorous* killing machines are also correct. I think it'd also be fair to say that the level of glamour attached to them in the USA is probably way beyond that which would be found in either the average Brit's psyche or the average Norwegian's psyche. In fact the word 'glamour' doesn't cover it, really. The 'frontier spirit', the War of Independence, the Civil War . . . and the Second Amendment - all these cultural experiences, and more, have injected into the American collective consciousness and combine to make the gun powerfully emblematic in the USA in a way it probably isn't anywhere else in the world.

Would something else take the place of the gun, if it weren't there? I doubt it, even after a long, long time. I've felt rage enough viscerally to want to hurt maybe five times in my life. The *first* instinct on each occasion has been to punch, kick and in general to use my muscles. That was true even after four years of karate. If I'd been brought up on a diet of the glamour of guns, and had one handy at the time . . . Yes, I think I might have used it, on one of those five occasions. But, in general: no. My desires haven't been conditioned by the availability and glamour of guns. They're more basic and less civilised (!) When I get into a rage, I'm not satisfied unless my muscles are burnt out at the end of it. Merely pulling a trigger isn't going to cut it for me. And I don't like loud noises, unless I'm the one making them.

quote:

I'm not saying people bent on a massacre would reach for these other means if guns were denied them. Not right away.


Again, I'd take the lesson from Hannibal Lecter. Don't assume that someone who massacres has massacring as his sole motivation. If there were no guns available in the USA . . . no, my guess would not be that people, *on the whole*, would seek out other methods of killing. What they'd more likely do is find ways that are equally as efficient at expressing rage, the need to be noticed, admired, feared, whatever else. Not necessarily killing, much less massacre. The UK's most notorious psychopathic criminals in history have only a fraction of the murders under their belts than their American counterparts. Ronnie and Reggie Kray were perhaps our most infamous gangland criminals, ever. They demonstrated scant concern for human life and are widely recognised as authentic psychopaths. They menaced and even tortured people. But only two murders were ever attributed to them. As for guns: yes, they had them and used them. But the fact of a killing by a gunshot is so unusual and so shocking that, even now, you can visit the Blind Beggar pub on the Whitechapel Road, in London, and see the carefully-preserved bullet hole that was made when Ronnie Kray shot and killed George Cornell. It's pathetic, in a way. Like everything else about the UK, even our notorious psychos are so much smaller than their American counterparts.

quote:

I shan't sully the issue with more than a brief mention of cost, and only because it's going to impact others. Gunshots are cheaper.


But not as cheap as throwing a punch, nor slicing somebody's face with a switchblade, or ramming a broken bottle in their face. These have been the favoured expressions of violence of our delightful criminals since WW2. Disgusting, yes, but the victims have generally survived.

quote:


How many avatars have we seen that involve a big crate of fertiliser and nothing else?


quote:

Quite frankly, that's disingenuous.

For one thing, you know as well as I that such an avatar is going to light every warning light from here to Gondor.


OK - well, you said it'd take only 200g of fertiliser to kill? A cup of fertiliser, then. You knew what I meant and I think it was disingenuous of you to pretend otherwise. Someone who puts a gun in their avatar, or makes their avatar solely out of a picture of a gun, does so because they think, probably correctly (regarding the most gormless of this site's readership), that it makes them look impressive in some way. A person who'd use a bag of fertiliser as their avatar would either be terminally stupid, or would be conveying the message that he or she is proud to be a farmer who grows carrots, or similar.


quote:

The one thing a gun does not symbolize as an avatar picture, ever, is mass murder.


That's wrong. If it wasn't a symbol of mass murder in the past, it's well on the way to becoming one now. What would you think if someone on this forum - say, that person who currently uses some automatic pistol as his avatar - started using Breivik's weapon as his avatar?


quote:

Freedom from fear isn't liberty, it's material comfort, the hardest drug known to man.


I don't know why you tagged that on the end of your post. It's an opinion that doesn't meld well with the foregoing argument, which was reasoned and had facts to support it. My knee-jerk reaction was flatly to contradict it: freedom from fear most certainly is the first and most important requirement of any sense liberty. You would be going against any of the great political philosophers of liberty in history to argue otherwise. Any human, any *creature*, will require freedom from physical harm first and foremost, as the most basic kind of freedom. It didn't need Abraham Maslow to point that out in the psychological sphere, nor Jean Jacques Rousseau in the political sphere. Have I missed a post where you explained your view on that more fully? It very much does need such an explanation.

To be more generous: Yes, I do think a dose of fear helps to keep one 'alive'. But not fear for one's life. A little bit of fear - like a little bit of red pepper on a meal - that's one thing. I might get invigorated by the fear of losing a tennis match . . . but I'd duck out of ever playing Russian roulette if I had a choice. I kind of understand why John Voigt's character ended up playing Russian roulette out of choice in The Deer Hunter, but he was off his bloody mind when he did so.

Can you point me to where you explicated your view on this matter, Aswad, if you've done so? I haven't found it so far. I'd be very interested in how you came to have this - what I consider to be quite an unusual - opinion.

< Message edited by PeonForHer -- 7/24/2012 5:27:18 PM >

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RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 4:54:33 PM   
Real0ne


Posts: 21189
Joined: 10/25/2004
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quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

The question becomes why?  There are many countries in this world with heavy gun ownership.

Why dont they throw down at a drop of the hat?

Why isn't this happening in Minnesota all the time, I daresay there are more guns per capita here than Colorado, why in colorado twice to minnesotas none?

Why not montana?  Why did the montana living unabomber (well, theres the name) use bombs instead of easily available guns?  What is causing these people to go off out of nowhere? 




Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra,

was a covert illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[1] It controversially used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects.[2][3][4][5] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[6]

The research was undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies.[7] The CIA would operate through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions would be aware of the CIA's involvement.[8] MKUltra was allocated 6 percent of total CIA funds.[9]

Project MKUltra was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.[10]

In 1977, a Freedom Of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents[11] relating to project MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings later that same year.[3] In July 2001 most surviving information regarding MKUltra was officially declassified.[12]

fortunately we made laws against that dort of thing so we know for a fact they would never ever ever do anything like that now days.

< Message edited by Real0ne -- 7/24/2012 4:57:44 PM >

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Democracy; The 'People' voted on 'which' amendment?

Yesterdays tinfoil is today's reality!

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Profile   Post #: 205
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 4:57:13 PM   
mnottertail


Posts: 60698
Joined: 11/3/2004
Status: offline 		Yeah, fuck off with the dumbass nonsensical tinfoil citations.

the fuckin guy was 24 years old the others were 17 substract that from 2000 and come up with something that ended in 1973.  And they were at least college age thruout.

get the fuck outta here with that nonsensical offtopic asswipe.

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Profile   Post #: 206
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 5:43:33 PM   
Aswad


Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:

ORIGINAL: LadyHibiscus

Aswad, I am surprised that your description of the zeitgeist of Norway is such that I really wouldn't want to live there!


Someone has to try to fix it...

Let me be clear on something from the outset, though:

Due to the topics I comment on, my criticism is more frequent than my praise, and I'm setting that straight here.

We are in a colloquial sense the best country in the world to live in. Materially. Culturally. Socially. If you come here and find that you're not content, again in a colloquial sense, then you're not going to be content anywhere, ever. I have no reservations about making that assertion. Our prisons offer a higher standard of living than what most Americans will ever know. Our crime rates are on the order of "no thanks, we don't want to start having crime." and about a tenth of a percent of the population is in prison, counting remands, with a one in ten recidivism rate. Our health care standard is such that if you happen to have better over there, the state will generally pay for transportation and treatment at your hospitals. We're all bilingual, literate and properly schooled. If you want university, you'll have that, no matter who you are. You couldn't get us to warm your chairs for what passes for middle class income over there. People get paid lots more to scrub toilets up here, with no inherent gender disparity, and retire somewhere between 54 and 66 years of age.

I take pride in our accomplishments and our heritage, which includes essentially founding what became the legal system of the western hemisphere back in the 9th century, being on par with more or less any other nation in terms of suffrage and rights for women since about the 11th century or so, having some of the most extensive humanitarian and diplomatic participation in the international community out there, and possessing armed forces that any country would be proud to serve or train with. Plus, obviously, towering number 1 on the UN Human Development Index ever since we stopped sharing the slot with Japan.

On the subject of Norway, this is an instance where I can vouch for something by Michael Moore, who is more succinct and gets the point across better than I can. Please take the time to view the linked video clip in its entirety, omitting the first 1:15 unless you are a fan of the guy generally and want to include his political stab at the folks back home. It glosses over a few details, but if you are from the USA, you can for all practical purposes consider this video clip to be an accurate presentation of our living standard, politics and culture. This whole paragraph is linked.

quote:

Is the population that homogeneous there?


Any population has variation. We do have very strong conformity pressures, though, and a society engineered to imprint the "shared" values from an early age. Indeed, the law dictates teachers and the like must do so. It is the foundation for trying to abolish private schools, which is why we have few of them. The socialists realized at an early stage that children are the real future- if you want to have a bloodless revolution, schools are it. That's the scary thing about the far right: their propaganda unfortunately has so much truth to draw on that they can draw a twisted picture that resembles it. And the rest recoil from it reflexively with an equally limited degree of reflection, which by association excludes any consideration of the parts that are actually true, which in turn drives moderates toward the fringes. So far, that has benefited the far left. That is changing.

Most teachers are associated with Socialist Left, Labor or Red, with very few Conservative and Liberal voters. The journalists and press are largely members of Liberal or Socialist Left, with some Conservative and Labor. Up until the 90's, we had a state broadcasting monopoly. The law dictates that while parents are allowed to raise their children with a fairly wide bit of leeway, a teacher must always attempt to impress our "shared" values on them, even in private schools. Public schools have even heavier bias, and the current Labor, Center and Socialist Left government (representing about 30% of the voters) continue to make it a priority to clamp down on the human right (literally) to have private schools. Homeschooling is essentially nonexistent. There is obviously the same bias at the kindergarden and preschool stages, also public. In the past 60 years, Labor has governed the country, except for a couple of brief interruptions, and in spite of a landslide vote to the right this term. Gerrymandering is benign compared to this term. Labor, as I've noted elsewhere, is the direct descendant of the Communist Party of Norway, pretty much all the realists they had.

In essence, we are where Communism meets reality and forges something from it. Good and bad.

The problems that follow from this might be obvious. That they are palpable is evidenced by the fact that we still have a lot of right leaning voters and a growing liberal and even libertarian movement, both of which are demonstrably non-socialist. Or by the fact that there are people that support the massacre of last year on political grounds. Or that I'm not ecstatically happy about the place and the politics in it. Or the fact that the only reason you no longer have to file an application to change your toilet seat is because the paperwork overwhelmed the OCR machines and the database servers.

I think we can seperate the good from the bad. If we fail, I may have to move, the way things are going.

If we succeed, we will be the apex of human civilization, period.

IWYW,
— Aswad.



_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


(in reply to LadyHibiscus)
Profile   Post #: 207
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 7:15:47 PM   
LadyHibiscus


Posts: 27124
Joined: 8/15/2005
From: Island Of Misfit Toys
Status: offline 		And to me, it sounds like an absolute circle of hell. As a lifelong edge person, I would have been an early suicide statistic. But conformity is the price you pay for...what? A standard of living?

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RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 7:45:50 PM   
Hillwilliam


Posts: 19394
Joined: 8/27/2008
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quote:

ORIGINAL: Yachtie


quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

its a .223.   the 7.62 nato round is actually a .308  shell the 30-06 is old school M1 Garand


Just went and checked. I do that, mix up numbers. 47, 74. Lol, my checkbook never balances.

No worries. I checked repeatedly as I kept forgetting which was which.


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Profile   Post #: 209
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 8:40:36 PM   
Aswad


Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: LadyHibiscus

And to me, it sounds like an absolute circle of hell. As a lifelong edge person, I would have been an early suicide statistic. But conformity is the price you pay for...what? A standard of living?


Welcome to my life as a weed in the Garden of Eden...

Defiant and tenacious are sort of survival prerequisites when you're me and here.

You would probably enjoy visiting, though, as you don't run into it unless you're actually living here.

IWYW,
— Aswad.



_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 8:41:38 PM   
Musicmystery


Posts: 30259
Joined: 3/14/2005
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quote:

You would probably enjoy visiting


Whew!

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RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 9:00:46 PM   
BamaD


Posts: 20687
Joined: 2/27/2005
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

quote:


Hardly large amounts, unless you're trying to affect a large area.



I shan't argue with that, for the reason that you yourself alluded to in an earlier post: I'm sure we don't want to be giving out the details. The wrong sorts of people could be making the wrong sorts of notes. Fertiliser bombs were the weapon of choice for the IRA here for decades, at least until they could get hold of Semtex. It had to be used in large quantities to achieve the required ends. Frequently the 'delivery' method was as a car bomb.

quote:

We're fortunate that the western world has largely forgotten the merits of these more effective means of killing.


Apparently they haven't. It took me all of thirty seconds of Googling to come across a website that gave details of how to make a fertiliser bomb and what it could do.


This Colorado tragedy has reminded me of a certain exchange between Hannibal Lecter and Agent Starling in 'Silence of the Lambs". It went something like

Lecter: "First principles. What does this man want to do?"

Starling: "He wants to kill people"

Lecter - annoyed: "No, he doesn't. The killing is incidental."

Starling then goes on to establish that the killer didn't want to kill people - that was just what needed to happen in order for him to get hold of their skins.

The Colorado killer wanted to achieve something that has yet to be established, as well as killing. Most of us suspect that it was some concoction of glamour, notoriety, awe, (etc, etc, etc). No doubt it'll all become more specific as more is known about the man and his motives. Pretty clearly, though, he was motivated to kill *in a certain way*. At bottom, the point is that if those means had not been available to him, it would have been harder to achieve his (as yet unknown) ends. Perhaps too hard for the fantasy in his head ever to have reached critical mass and hatched into a practical strategy. We're all aware of fantasies like this that never turn into reality. The 'tipping point' is crucial.

In sum, it's much, much too simple to say that 'He wanted to kill, therefore he'd have found away to do it. If not a gun, then something else'. It's important, I think, not to underestimate the view that upturns the more widely known assumption that 'the ends dictate the means'. The means can, and in a million ways do, dictate the ends. At the most paltry end of it, one could even say that of Pavlov's dogs: whereas once their end was to get food, after Pavlov had manipulated their minds it was no longer that, it was for the dogs to get those bells to ringing and start the salivating in their mouths. The principle amongst social theorists, it seems, is summed up by the phrase 'Desires change with the means of achieving them'. As a kid, I might have had fantasies of mowing down lots of people with a machine gun (those people would have been invading Nazis, usually). But then I grew up, learned that there were no Nazis around and I couldn't get hold of a machine gun. My desires changed, and I ended up mowing down bad arguments in pubs, and limited myself to watching films about Nazis being mown down by actors with fake machine guns. I was *entirely* happy. I can assure any concerned readers that I no longer have a desire to mow down people - even (neo-)Nazis - with a machine gun.

Pretty clearly, I think those people who've stressed the upbringing of this Colorado killer, the lack of awareness that he was going off the rails and lack of treatment of all this, are correct. But I also think those who've stressed the allure of guns as not just killing machines but *glamorous* killing machines are also correct. I think it'd also be fair to say that the level of glamour attached to them in the USA is probably way beyond that which would be found in either the average Brit's psyche or the average Norwegian's psyche. In fact the word 'glamour' doesn't cover it, really. The 'frontier spirit', the War of Independence, the Civil War . . . and the Second Amendment - all these cultural experiences, and more, have injected into the American collective consciousness and combine to make the gun powerfully emblematic in the USA in a way it probably isn't anywhere else in the world.

Would something else take the place of the gun, if it weren't there? I doubt it, even after a long, long time. I've felt rage enough viscerally to want to hurt maybe five times in my life. The *first* instinct on each occasion has been to punch, kick and in general to use my muscles. That was true even after four years of karate. If I'd been brought up on a diet of the glamour of guns, and had one handy at the time . . . Yes, I think I might have used it, on one of those five occasions. But, in general: no. My desires haven't been conditioned by the availability and glamour of guns. They're more basic and less civilised (!) When I get into a rage, I'm not satisfied unless my muscles are burnt out at the end of it. Merely pulling a trigger isn't going to cut it for me. And I don't like loud noises, unless I'm the one making them.

quote:

I'm not saying people bent on a massacre would reach for these other means if guns were denied them. Not right away.


Again, I'd take the lesson from Hannibal Lecter. Don't assume that someone who massacres has massacring as his sole motivation. If there were no guns available in the USA . . . no, my guess would not be that people, *on the whole*, would seek out other methods of killing. What they'd more likely do is find ways that are equally as efficient at expressing rage, the need to be noticed, admired, feared, whatever else. Not necessarily killing, much less massacre. The UK's most notorious psychopathic criminals in history have only a fraction of the murders under their belts than their American counterparts. Ronnie and Reggie Kray were perhaps our most infamous gangland criminals, ever. They demonstrated scant concern for human life and are widely recognised as authentic psychopaths. They menaced and even tortured people. But only two murders were ever attributed to them. As for guns: yes, they had them and used them. But the fact of a killing by a gunshot is so unusual and so shocking that, even now, you can visit the Blind Beggar pub on the Whitechapel Road, in London, and see the carefully-preserved bullet hole that was made when Ronnie Kray shot and killed George Cornell. It's pathetic, in a way. Like everything else about the UK, even our notorious psychos are so much smaller than their American counterparts.

quote:

I shan't sully the issue with more than a brief mention of cost, and only because it's going to impact others. Gunshots are cheaper.


But not as cheap as throwing a punch, nor slicing somebody's face with a switchblade, or ramming a broken bottle in their face. These have been the favoured expressions of violence of our delightful criminals since WW2. Disgusting, yes, but the victims have generally survived.

quote:


How many avatars have we seen that involve a big crate of fertiliser and nothing else?


quote:

Quite frankly, that's disingenuous.

For one thing, you know as well as I that such an avatar is going to light every warning light from here to Gondor.


OK - well, you said it'd take only 200g of fertiliser to kill? A cup of fertiliser, then. You knew what I meant and I think it was disingenuous of you to pretend otherwise. Someone who puts a gun in their avatar, or makes their avatar solely out of a picture of a gun, does so because they think, probably correctly (regarding the most gormless of this site's readership), that it makes them look impressive in some way. A person who'd use a bag of fertiliser as their avatar would either be terminally stupid, or would be conveying the message that he or she is proud to be a farmer who grows carrots, or similar.


quote:

The one thing a gun does not symbolize as an avatar picture, ever, is mass murder.


That's wrong. If it wasn't a symbol of mass murder in the past, it's well on the way to becoming one now. What would you think if someone on this forum - say, that person who currently uses some automatic pistol as his avatar - started using Breivik's weapon as his avatar?


quote:

Freedom from fear isn't liberty, it's material comfort, the hardest drug known to man.


I don't know why you tagged that on the end of your post. It's an opinion that doesn't meld well with the foregoing argument, which was reasoned and had facts to support it. My knee-jerk reaction was flatly to contradict it: freedom from fear most certainly is the first and most important requirement of any sense liberty. You would be going against any of the great political philosophers of liberty in history to argue otherwise. Any human, any *creature*, will require freedom from physical harm first and foremost, as the most basic kind of freedom. It didn't need Abraham Maslow to point that out in the psychological sphere, nor Jean Jacques Rousseau in the political sphere. Have I missed a post where you explained your view on that more fully? It very much does need such an explanation.

To be more generous: Yes, I do think a dose of fear helps to keep one 'alive'. But not fear for one's life. A little bit of fear - like a little bit of red pepper on a meal - that's one thing. I might get invigorated by the fear of losing a tennis match . . . but I'd duck out of ever playing Russian roulette if I had a choice. I kind of understand why John Voigt's character ended up playing Russian roulette out of choice in The Deer Hunter, but he was off his bloody mind when he did so.

Can you point me to where you explicated your view on this matter, Aswad, if you've done so? I haven't found it so far. I'd be very interested in how you came to have this - what I consider to be quite an unusual - opinion.

Wouldn't Jack the Ripper be ahead of the Krays?

(in reply to PeonForHer)
Profile   Post #: 212
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/24/2012 9:20:22 PM   
Aswad


Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

Fertiliser bombs were the weapon of choice for the IRA here for decades, at least until they could get hold of Semtex. It had to be used in large quantities to achieve the required ends. Frequently the 'delivery' method was as a car bomb.


Quite so. I grew up with a different news picture than today. It wasn't a lot of people talking about how the Muslims are just right around the corner all the time, even when nothing was happening. It was shit actually going down in a real, bad way. And not just once. It was West Germany. France. Ireland. Not trivializing what happened in London, by any means, just relating the shift I see in media attention. I remember when, watching the news, I got an impression of how huge a step forward it was to start building real bridges with the IRA, even if I wasn't old enough to fully comprehend the situation. That sort of thing is rarely mentioned in current rhetoric about terrorism. Fuck, when I heard an associate of one of the guys from Shankill is adopting the manifesto by ABB as his future political platform, even the idea of it gave me the creeps. That's one constellation I don't want to see, ever.

I feel that it is important to point out that we in Norway owe a debt to the people of your islands for the expertise and sharing of experience that has enabled us to avoid several would-be acts of terrorism, and to deal with the single successful large scale one better than we would have otherwise. It cannot undo what your people have experienced, or give meaning to it, but at least your misfortune has saved lives, which I hope may bring some small comfort to those posting from around those parts that been hit in some way by such events. Whatever island it is they call home.

I should also preface this reply with a note that I am in agreement with most of what you said. My post was too superficial for a serious debate, and in that regard I apologize for not having given the topic the treatment you deserve it to have, and in advance for opting not to delve much deeper into it in this reply.

quote:

Apparently they haven't. It took me all of thirty seconds of Googling to come across a website that gave details of how to make a fertiliser bomb and what it could do.


Yeah, I know. Fortunately, most of those are not optimal, and a novice bomber will not know which source to trust. That has been the one mitigating element when it comes to explosives. Novice bombers are apt to kill themselves in making the booster, and will generally not construct an optimal tertiary charge. That's one of the reasons I think the ingredients for AP should remain around. It will probably stop more terrorist plots than the police do, and in a very final manner at that.

As was well publicized, ABB included explicit instructions in his manifesto. I won't comment on the technicalities thereof on this side of the board. Suffice to say that it can turn a would-be corpse into a would-be amateur, which does lower the bar for mass murder with explosives, but it will not measure up to a competent effort. Thankfully. It remains to be seen whether it will lead to any increase in such events.

quote:

Lecter: "First principles. What does this man want to do?"


I agree. I glossed over this. Sorry about that.

quote:

The Colorado killer wanted to achieve something that has yet to be established, as well as killing.


Yes. I think a thorough investigation is in order. We can speculate, but it is better to put it on firm ground in each case.

quote:

Pretty clearly, though, he was motivated to kill *in a certain way*.


You are right in the Aurora case. Gun access was probably a crucial factor this time. I'm not at all certain that legal access was a crucial factor, though. I would mention the Joker thing as an element to ponder, too, but I won't pursue it. You've made a good point and made it well.

quote:

We're all aware of fantasies like this that never turn into reality.


Perish the thought.

quote:

The means can, and in a million ways do, dictate the ends.


Clearly. Thanks for reminding me.

quote:

[...]make the gun powerfully emblematic in the USA in a way it probably isn't anywhere else in the world.


I agree. People are rushing to buy guns in Colorado now, and it's nothing but a security blanket. Crazy shit. I really can't imagine seeing a gun as a security blanket in that way. And I am positive it is a very bad sign that it is occuring. Especially since Aurora was one of those cases where guns could only worsen the outcome. Talk about ineffective measures. If I were a gun merchant, I would blacklist any customer that wanted to buy a gun as a security blanket without a conversation and a known good course, and anyone- period- that wanted to buy one "in case" of another Aurora. I don't need that blood on my hands.

quote:

Like everything else about the UK, even our notorious psychos are so much smaller than their American counterparts.


Doing everything big may well be as important as the gun worship element.

Massacres as supersized murder, sort of.

quote:

You knew what I meant and I think it was disingenuous of you to pretend otherwise.


I actually missed it. Sorry. Mea culpa.

quote:

That's wrong. If it wasn't a symbol of mass murder in the past, it's well on the way to becoming one now.


By "ever", I meant in the present tense, i.e. "in any current instance", not in the future or atemporal sense. It can certainly become a symbol of mass murder, at which point we're back to the terminal stupidity and bringing aid to Gondor. Currently, however, a user with that avatar does not intend to convey mass murder.

Did I miss your point again, or did you misread me?

quote:

What would you think if someone on this forum - say, that person who currently uses some automatic pistol as his avatar - started using Breivik's weapon as his avatar?


That would disambiguate things in a very useful way, much like the fertilizer. "Hi, I'm a psycho, please don't date me."

On the flip side, would you consider this SFW picture the same way as the person you're referring to? (link)

quote:

It's an opinion that doesn't meld well with the foregoing argument, which was reasoned and had facts to support it.


You seem, in the subsequent paragraph, to have misunderstood my meaning, then reasoned your way to parts of it when being generous. But I'll try to explain myself better. First, though, let me comment on points of departure. Said philosophers were, for the most part, not in a position to experience freedom from fear. Not to the extent I have been. And I've obviously not been in a position to know as much fear as most of them have probably experienced, at least not fear with due cause. Our views will necessarily be drawing on different experiences, lending themselves to conclusions that may not be opposed to each other, but rather complementary, or even elements of a continuum.

This is a hard thing to articulate well, and I will neither insist that I am right, nor claim to be of the same caliber as these men in any way. But I will say a few things in defense of my position. First and foremost that you should see this as a parallell argument, not a direct counterargument. Second, that freedom from physical harm is not freedom from fear. Fear can pervade a person, or a society, without physical harm or even a credible threat of it. Third, that a domesticated animal in a decently sized cage is free of fear if you're treating it well, but does not know certain liberties of its free-ranging counterparts, nor the liberty of the one that actually domesticated it. Fourth, degrees are important. Abject terror and complete absence of fear are extremes. Fifth, fear has several dimensions to it, ranging from the immediate and palpable, through the existential, via the empathic, to the personal. Finally, for a sort of disjoint but related sidebar, consider agoraphobia and freedom in bondage.

Please also note that I am stating freedom from fear is not the same as liberty, I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive or anything like that. Indeed, a modicum of freedom from fear is a prerequisite for most elements of liberty, and some elements of liberty are a prerequisite to freedom from some kinds of fear. But they are not a single entity, not one and the same. And freedom from fear is an essential, even foundational, element of comfort in a certain sense of that word, a sense in which comfort is indeed a hard drug in my experience. Like most drugs, it is one that can be enjoyed without harm when not taken to excess. The main harm would be complacency and the loss of vitality. As you say, a bit of red pepper is good.

I shouldn't have tried to encapsulate it in a brief statement. Brevity is, regrettably, not my strong suit.

quote:

To be more generous: Yes, I do think a dose of fear helps to keep one 'alive'. But not fear for one's life.


I never meant to say fear for one's life, certainly not in the sense of a fear that derives from credible threat.

Fear is not a single entity. As you say, it can be a stimulant. The first time you attempt something new, it may well involve a degree of fear. Moving out into the world for yourself the first time can involve an element of fear for many, if not most. It also clearly has an element of liberty to it. Throwing caution to the wind and riding the adrenaline through a near terminally stupid kink scene that you should've thought carefully about can have an element of liberty to it, as well, though an inadvisable one. Bungee jumping. A parachute drop.

In the most free state I have been in, I knew no fear whatsoever. Note that it was a state that resulted from overcoming all fear at the time, of which there was a great deal. Liberty beyond fear, where I had taken myself, without any external change. I guess I'm trying to reiterate that we've probably just been talking about different things from different perspectives, not opposing views on the same thing.

Maslow, incidentally, doesn't seem to adequately address the question of regression. A threshold condition is necessary to reach a higher order of need, that is clear enough. But it is not a given that being deprived of the basal needs will automatically remove the higher order of need, i.e. induce regression. Certainly not on a permanent basis in all people. I'm just thinking "out loud" here, so don't take this as some definitive assertion. People do go all lord of the flies under the right circumstances, but just because the higher needs may go unmet doesn't require them to disappear. Higher order privation doesn't exclude lower order privation, or vice versa. I'm thinking development. Need can drive that, and it's somewhat stage based in most dimensions. I don't think the higher stages are lost, although it's quite possible they atrophy. It's a bit outside the scope of this thread, though, so maybe PM would be better?

For that matter, maybe I'm rambling and just need to sleep.

IWYW,
— Aswad.



_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


(in reply to PeonForHer)
Profile   Post #: 213
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/25/2012 4:46:36 AM   
Moonhead


Posts: 16520
Joined: 9/21/2009
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: BamaD
Wouldn't Jack the Ripper be ahead of the Krays?

There aren't any British serial killers who didn't rack up a bigger body count than the Krays. That's sort of peon's point. I can't really see what they have to do with this conversation as they were professional criminals who were more interested in activities that made money than random murders.

(I think Mary Ann Cotton holds the UK record, having poisoned twenty odd victims. She kept things low key, though, and so attracts less attention than more showy peers like John George Haigh or Peter Sutcliffe.)

_____________________________

I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)

(in reply to BamaD)
Profile   Post #: 214
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/25/2012 5:45:36 AM   
Real0ne


Posts: 21189
Joined: 10/25/2004
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Yeah, fuck off with the dumbass nonsensical tinfoil citations.

the fuckin guy was 24 years old the others were 17 substract that from 2000 and come up with something that ended in 1973.  And they were at least college age thruout.

get the fuck outta here with that nonsensical offtopic asswipe.


█ ██ There is NEVER a conspiracy. ██████████████████████████████ Everything █████ ██ is ███ fine. ████ Everyone knows that ███ you can trust ██████ ███████ your government █████ ███ Just go back to sleep.

~Idjit

_____________________________

"We the Borg" of the us imperialists....resistance is futile

Democracy; The 'People' voted on 'which' amendment?

Yesterdays tinfoil is today's reality!

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session

(in reply to mnottertail)
Profile   Post #: 215
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/25/2012 5:49:50 AM   
Real0ne


Posts: 21189
Joined: 10/25/2004
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad
It wasn't a lot of people talking about how the Muslims are just right around the corner all the time, even when nothing was happening.




Yeh but that is acceptable terrorism.

Its not the fact its terrorism but who the perp is that counts.



_____________________________

"We the Borg" of the us imperialists....resistance is futile

Democracy; The 'People' voted on 'which' amendment?

Yesterdays tinfoil is today's reality!

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session

(in reply to Aswad)
Profile   Post #: 216
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/25/2012 7:29:42 AM   
Nosathro


Posts: 3319
Joined: 9/25/2005
From: Orange County, California
Status: offline 		Not to change the subject, but on my Face book a friend showed me all these types of firearms that are legal in the US, next to it was a list of French Cheeses that are not allowed to be imported into the US....darn and some of them I have had and miss.

(in reply to Real0ne)
Profile   Post #: 217
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/25/2012 9:22:37 AM   
Moonhead


Posts: 16520
Joined: 9/21/2009
Status: offline 		That's because most of the riper and stronger cheeses aren't pasteurised, I think.
(Which is hilarious when you think about where Pasteur came from, really...)

_____________________________

I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)

(in reply to Nosathro)
Profile   Post #: 218
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/25/2012 9:41:41 AM   
Real0ne


Posts: 21189
Joined: 10/25/2004
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: Nosathro

Not to change the subject, but on my Face book a friend showed me all these types of firearms that are legal in the US, next to it was a list of French Cheeses that are not allowed to be imported into the US....darn and some of them I have had and miss.



well people in this country have not figgered it out yet that everything good is being snatched up by the gub.

Look at burzynskis PROVEN cancer cures,
the fda went so far as to steal his fucking patents and sued him 5 times which caused CONGRESS to ask WTF do they think they are doing.

That is one out of 30,000 agencies all competing to increase their pie trough.

You want it you gotts go to texas because hw is not allowed to market it beyond those borders

oh yeh! gub is the good guys all right

_____________________________

"We the Borg" of the us imperialists....resistance is futile

Democracy; The 'People' voted on 'which' amendment?

Yesterdays tinfoil is today's reality!

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session

(in reply to Nosathro)
Profile   Post #: 219
RE: 2nd amendment - 7/25/2012 10:24:24 AM   
LadyHibiscus


Posts: 27124
Joined: 8/15/2005
From: Island Of Misfit Toys
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: Nosathro

Not to change the subject, but on my Face book a friend showed me all these types of firearms that are legal in the US, next to it was a list of French Cheeses that are not allowed to be imported into the US....darn and some of them I have had and miss.



I love the one that shows the Kindereggs as illegal here! Choking hazard, yanno. I had a sub who would bring them over from Canada for me.

_____________________________

[page 23 girl]



(in reply to Nosathro)
Profile   Post #: 220
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