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Originally posted by AnthonyT:

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Originally posted by MAL4PREZ:
So what the hell? You can only choose a "legal" level of armament if it means you're armed equal to the "constabulary,: and yet you admit that you can never fight them?

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Hello,

I didn't say the people couldn't fight the government, just that it was an awful prospect and they'd be feeding themselves to the graveyard in droves. Any battle fought against the government would be fought against a force with superior arms and coordination. It would be an insurgency. It might last for a very long time. I don't even like to think about it for very long.

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My hope is that the inconvenience of suppressing a heavily armed population causes that route to never be pursued in earnest. Not because the government wouldn't outgun the population (they have full access to military resources, after all), but rather because it would be a horrific prospect, a nightmare scenario where even if you win, you have lived through a bone-chilling, blood curdling awfulness the likes of which no human should ever hope to endure.

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In other words, just because you might come out ahead in a nuclear exchange with Russia doesn't mean it will be fun to nuke them. Nor, from their perspective, does a disparity in armament mean that they should just shrug their shoulders and consign themselves to oblivion.

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So your insecurities do not make you secure - they only serve to put scary guns in the closets of old ladies so that their developmentally disabled sons can use those weapons to murder the children the old ladies teach?

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I'm rather surprised about this "old lady's" armaments.

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Please answer the question YOU asked me: what level of weaponry/ammo do you think appropriate to modern times?

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There are so many uses for guns in modern times that you are asking for a very long list. Do you mean for defense?

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If I chart civil liberties on a graph, using my life as a timeline, I find that we are living in the worst time for civil liberties that I have ever known. We have less personal privacy and less protection from illegal search and seizure than ever before. Women's bodies are being assaulted in ways I did not see in my youth, with invasive abortion procedures and technical outlawing of abortion in one state by making the clinics unavailable.

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I shut down his inflammatory Faux news statements, so he went to personal insults. How trite.

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Originally posted by MAL4PREZ:

I wish I could live 200 years to see what historians will say about the age of the budding internet. The free access to knowledge, to real first hand awareness of people all over the world, is just crushing old barriers.

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:

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Originally posted by MAL4PREZ:

I wish I could live 200 years to see what historians will say about the age of the budding internet. The free access to knowledge, to real first hand awareness of people all over the world, is just crushing old barriers.

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Good luck, Mal. I wish real change on your country. Even though I am a long way away and in a different country, I still feel moved by these tragedies and outraged at the clinging on to outdated ideology which enables them.

Maybe this is the last straw....

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:

My favorite James Bond movie was Quantum of Solace because it was all about our boy James struggling with grief. The combination to me was fascinating to watch. It was an evolution of our mythology. This man who was seemingly prepared for everything, was entirely unprepared for grief. He was forced to do the heavy lifting of finding his way through loss. And he did. Everybody else on the planet hated that movie.

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Originally posted by Oonjerah:
You'd bring excellent insight to it.
So I hope you will discuss it.

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:

Sorry, no.
It's a terrible tragedy and no mistake, but there's no point in discussing causes and solutions because no one here has proposed any, just demanded more problems.

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My understanding is that you want everything the police have to be available to the general public so we can fight them (which is a point with some merit, I believe, given how power tends to concentrate and authority turn bad). But then you say we the people aren't like to be successful in any such violent confrontation. So why again do we allow horrible weapons to be as easy to acquire as chewing gum?

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And I have to hope that the direction of an advanced civilization is toward power shifts without violence or threat of violence. I believe your argument - that only such threats lead to security - is the basis of the insanity of human beings. It's the basis of war and of things like what happened yesterday.

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We're not talking nukes that really can't be used in "small" squirmishes. We're talking about weapons that have no use but to be stroked by people (mostly men) who need such things to stroke and nutjobs who decide to walk into a theater or a place of worship or an elementary school and kill as many people as quickly as possible.

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I definitely do NOT mean that I want a list of your favorite penile-stroking stand-ins.

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I'm asking you to, in very very general terms, define the maximum level of armature that the average American gun enthusiast should have. And what is the maximum level of inconvenience this person should experience in getting their hands on such things?

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