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Obama, silent about union violence in Michigan, immediately reacts to Connecticut school shooting

Predictable as the sunrise.  Sayeth the Light Bringer and erstwhile armory to the Mexican drug cartels:

As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.

Yes. And we can begin “coming together” by stoking race hatred, engaging in class warfare, and terming our political opponent “enemies,” or “teabaggers,” or mental defectives — then use every last tragedy, be it the shooting of Gabby Giffords or the Aurora theater shooting or the murder suicide of an NFL linebacker or the Oregon mall shooting or today’s shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, as an opportunity to restrict a basic human right, the right to self-defense (a right disallowed, incidentally, by the law-abiding players in many of these tragedies, thanks to gun-free school zones, or gun-free movie theaters, etc.).  That is, we can pretend our rank and disgusting political opportunism is some moral cloak, to be draped on like public finery only when it can be used to push a leftist agenda.  This is what you mean by taking “meaningful action,” and everyone knows it.

Only, here’s the meaningful action we should all be taking, were we truly serious about reducing the likelihood of such tragedies taking place going forward:  On a personal level, get a concealed carry permit, and ignore signs telling you to leave your guns in the car.  If it’s concealed, and they don’t have metal detectors, then you aren’t carrying. Until you need to defend yourself.  On a societal / political level,  get rid of restrictions on guns in school zones and theaters and the like, because the people who go shoot up these places care not a whit about the restrictions — criminals by definition don’t follow the law — and so they haven’t a fear in the world that they’ll meet any kind of armed resistance.

The idea that doing away with firearms or particular types of firearms (here, the gunman left his rifles in the care and used pistols) will somehow magically restrain violent outbursts has been disproven in countries where strict gun laws are in effect. But most egregious of all about these canned arguments for gun control are that the people who make them either don’t know jack about firearms, or else know they full-well that gun bans or restrictions won’t do anything but exacerbate the problem — yet they believe taking the position will buy them some public moral grace.  It makes them feel enlightened, even as on a practical level it makes them (and us) less able to defend against violent offenders.

Obama and most of the other public leftists who leap on these shootings to begin pushing for gun bans are opportunists of the worst sort.  And it happened while the bodies of those dead children were still warm. That they pretend their opportunism is somehow disconnected from their political aspirations is shameful.  That they pretend that disarming a population makes it safer — while simultaneously trying to maintain the facade of individual freedom — is despicable. And we shouldn’t even pretend to engage their arguments on some level outside of politics.

My children aren’t your children, Barry, and your children aren’t mine — though unlike mine, yours have a security detail to protect them.  Michele is not the dietitian to the collective and you are not its avuncular guardian. Give up your own security detail and we can maybe have a talk about restricting gun ownership.

More, the only thing “we’ve” got to come together on is the idea that, in advance of your willingness to surrender your protection, you and your regulatory henchmen had better not try to stand between me and my ability to protect my family.

There’s a reason gun sales are at an all-time high, and it has nothing to do with millions of people wanting to shoot up an elementary school.  “Progressives” — like, eg., your friend Bill Ayers, who once posited that come the new order, 25 million Americans may have to be put in camps or otherwise disposed of — want a helpless and compliant pool to manage, the “masses,” they like to call it, and it’s a wet dream of theirs to secure not only all political power in their own hands, but all the policing power as well.

Fuck you. Molon Labe.

 

 

 

 

 

1,014 Replies to “Obama, silent about union violence in Michigan, immediately reacts to Connecticut school shooting”

  1. mojo says:

    “Just after the shooting spree, they try to take the guns away from everybody who didn’t do it.”

  2. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I think I might stockpile a few more hi-capacity magazines.

    They’re cheaper than gold, and hold their value just as well.

    More portable and readily convertible too.

  3. beemoe says:

    Union made cudgels would be golden, it seems.

    Cranky, Squid, you taking notes?

  4. BigBangHunter says:

    Here is the live PatchNews feed from Newtown for those interested.

    – Theres a local news personality here on KOGO that probably should have gone to just straight news cast coverage and skipped his show today. He;s totally breaking down on-air trying to cover it.

  5. missfixit says:

    There’s a reason gun sales are at an all-time high, and it has nothing to do with millions of people wanting to shoot up an elementary school.

    well i’m buying guns because i’m afraid of the people who want to shoot up elemntary schools. That and the zombies. and the food rioters.

  6. cranky-d says:

    I run a non-union shop, but everyone gets a percentage of the net so they are motivated to not drive up the cost of production.

    I’d stack my cudgels against any union-made cudgels any time. The craftsmanship is second to none.

  7. cranky-d says:

    Yeah, I split an infinitive. I’m a rebel.

  8. BigBangHunter says:

    “split infinitive” Outlaw!

    – Nothing wrong with that.

  9. LBascom says:

    It may have been me, but watching Obama was like watching a poor actor struggling to display the correct emotion for the scene.

    Like I said, maybe I’m just a cynical bastard.

  10. sdferr says:

    “Like I said, maybe I’m just a cynical bastard.”

    No Lee, it’s just that Obazma’s instincts are colder than any of us can comfortable imagine, I think.

  11. sdferr says:

    comfortably, consarndit.

  12. newrouter says:

    it’s just that Obazma’s instincts are colder than any of us can comfortable imagine,

    baracky does luvs some infanticide/partial birth abortion

  13. BigBangHunter says:

    – Pro-choice is about Adult choice, babies, not so much.

  14. cranky-d says:

    Are you implying that Obama has little to no capacity for empathy?

    Racist!

  15. slipperyslope says:

    If just one of those 5 year olds had a good ’60, this whole thing could have been stopped before it got started.

  16. sdferr says:

    If just one of those 5 year olds had a good ’60, this whole thing could have been stopped before it got started.

    I’d be glad to see this piece of shit got gone.

  17. leigh says:

    Jeff, your Governor is on it .

  18. gbesq1 says:

    What is the matter with you people? Forget gun control – 20 children and 6 adults were killed today. Is that really equivalent to union violence in Michigan? Do you hate Obama so much that you cannot believe that he would have the same reaction as any parent would? Maybe a couple days of silence would be appropriate.

  19. leigh says:

    Fuck off, slippery.

  20. LBascom says:

    That’s stupid slipshod, kindergartners need at least an armed 12 year old around.

  21. LBascom says:

    Maybe a couple days of silence would be appropriate

    Physician, heal thyself.

  22. beemoe says:

    A good ’60?

    I think locking up retards would be a better first step, you would be next in line slope.

  23. beemoe says:

    Maybe a couple days of silence would be appropriate.

    You first.

  24. cranky-d says:

    The latest troll, gbesq1, instantly displays his lack of reading comprehension.

    Good show, sir (or ma’am)!

  25. cranky-d says:

    I’m taking bets on whether the latest from slipshod finally gets him the banning he so desperately wants.

  26. beemoe says:

    I want to hear what a ’60 is first. Google is letting me down.

  27. BigBangHunter says:

    – I would highly recommend that all piss ant Progressives, and Libturds in general. control their urge to chortle and bloviate at every opportunit during events of social tragedy.

    – As much fun as it may be for you amoral soulless bastards, there is a limit to peoples patience.

  28. cranky-d says:

    I cannot figure out what a ’60 is either. It must be fairly obscure.

  29. Ernst Schreiber says:

    That works both ways gbesq1: 20 kids and six adults are murdered, and the first thing the leftist politico-media complex wants to do is start taking away even more civil liberty.

    I have no idea what slippery means by “a good ’60,” but I imagine a teacher or ass’t principle with .40 pistol might have saved a number of lives today. If he or she had that option available, that is.

  30. newrouter says:

    me i’m effin’ sick of the proggtards never letting a crises go to waste

  31. newrouter says:

    winchester 60?

  32. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I’m thinking somebody’s seen Rambo too many times.

  33. gbesq1 says:

    Telling me to shut up is fine, I guess, but what’s your point? And what does the reaction of the leftist politico-media complex have to do with posts that assert Obama was faking it? Even more, why is “Fuck you, come and get our guns” an appropriate response to Obama’s statement? Children were killed today. do none of you care?

  34. Blake says:

    All of you stupid sick twisted leftwing bastards take a good hard look at what gun control will get you. The school where the massacre occured is a “gun free zone.” The twisted sick bastard who opened up purposely chose a soft target. Just like Columbine, the movie theater massacre, the mall shooting and Virginia Tech, Newton is a “gun free” zone.

    You asshole leftists never want to admit there might be a problem with the so-called “gun free zones.” You never want to admit your policies are directly responsible for allowing shootings such as what happened today in Newton. You stupid ass leftists create these utopian “gun free zones” and all these zones shout is “hey evil twisted bastard, here’s a nice soft target for you to take out.”

    Slippery and gbesq1, go fuck yourself.

  35. Jeff G. says:

    The lefties got wind of this post. The wilding is on. See Twitter. Me, I’ll be out with the family.

  36. sdferr says:

    Obazma faking it? Oh hells no. He said and meant: “As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

    Now dipping his fingertips into the corners of his eyes every 20 secs. or so to dab away tears which did not exist? Yeah, ok, he was faking it. But aiming to seize ever more power? Not faking, dumbass.

  37. Blake says:

    gbesq1, shut your pie hole. Fucking jackass. Your type is all concerned about whether or not we care when in fact you should be looking in the goddamn mirror and questioning whether or not fucking gun free zones actually work.

    In my case it isn’t about my taking to the fainting couch, as you liberals are want to to. It is about being royally pissed that something like this happened and you stupid fucks are playing the goddamn emotion card, trying to lay guilt on those of use who support gun rights. The reality is that people like you, gbesq1 are the ones who should be ashamed and feel guilt.

    Fuck off and die.

  38. Ernst Schreiber says:

    As much as Obama does.

    What makes you think you have the moral high ground here?

  39. Jamesclark says:

    I won’t pretend not to be a troll, but you people should stop and consider how vile and repulsive you come off to people who aren’t a part of the tribe. Seek mental help before it’s too late.

  40. Blake says:

    No, the people who are vile are people like you, Jamesclark.

    Gun Free Zone=Soft Target.

    Idiots like you, James, create the perfect conditions for a massacre and then act surprised when a massacre occurs.

    Moron.

  41. beemoe says:

    I have never really cared how “I come off” to goose-stepping pinheads.

    Care to explain why I should?

  42. sdferr says:

    Think like freemen and find oneself repulsive to people who think like slaves? That’s not a difficult choice, if you give it a second or two.

  43. Mattness7 says:

    Wow this article is full of jackoffs, racsists and hillbillys. Keep your fucking guns pussies how dare you make light of this. What kind of fucking disgusting human are you. Before you say some dumb shit about me being a liberal fuck you and fuck liberals too. I really hope all you stupid gun nuts use your firearms to off yourself and not take a bunch of bystanders with you. why don’t you all go drink some more whiskey and beat your wife some more before you go to your klan rally you fucking pigs. you would rather a rich douche bag be in office that wouldn’t change shit he has no real power congress does go back to school and learn how our goverment works dumb asses. who cares about holding on to your small dick replacements when something like this has happened. Put aside the fact that you want to keep killing machines legal and think of the parents whos kids didn’t come home from school today. All you NRA gun pyschos are fucking losers. Guns Don’t kill people oh wait yeah they do sorry.

  44. missfixit says:

    I agree that union thugs punching a journalist is nothing compared to this massacre. This massacre is absolutely the sickest shit that’s happened since, well…the last mass shooting.

    But the Left screeching about banning all guns just make themselves look stupid, like they don’t actually care about these kids dying. because we know that gun grabs would never have stopped someone intent on murdering a bunch of kindergarteners. They were chosen because they were easy defenseless sheep

    SCHOOLS NEED ARMED SECURITY. end of story.

  45. gbesq1 says:

    I was going to post that I appreciate that I have not been banned from the site. That has not been my experience on other conservative sites. I have little interest in engaging with people who agree with me (what’s there to learn?) so this seemed like an opportunity. But the responses to my posts have made me realize this is not the site.

    Ernst: I have no doubt you care as much as Obama or anyone else who can feel for the parents and families. I apologize for suggesting otherwise. I should not have done so.

    Bye

  46. BigBangHunter says:

    vile and repulsive

    – Jebus, give me a fucking break. Moralizing from people who have zero morals, yeh that works.

    – The problem for society is that we simply do not know what to do about mental illness, so we rush to place blame in areas we imagine we CAN control.

    – The problem for the Progressives and the Left is they simply can’t resist using every tragedy as a political opportunity to push their statist bullshit. Since that seems always to be your one trick pony act I would inform any Lefwards trolling here you’re about 11 years to late with the PW audience for Alinsky based crap to work. Save you energies for the typical lo-info types that gravitate to your warped cult.

  47. BT says:

    Mattness7, if words were bullets you would be a mass murderer too! Way to open fire on random bystanders.

  48. beemoe says:

    I have little interest in engaging with people who agree with me (what’s there to learn?) so this seemed like an opportunity. But the responses to my posts have made me realize this is not the site.

    You are going to try to find a site where folks disagree without being so disagreeable?

    Well, you make more sense that mattness, so you have that going for you.

  49. beemoe says:

    If words were bullets mattness would still be shooting blanks.

  50. newrouter says:

    Keep your fucking guns pussies how dare you make light of this.

    well you proggtards brought up gun control before the children’s bodies reached room temperature

  51. BigBangHunter says:

    – Matress7 – Anger can be a g0od start, but useless if its directed at the wrong target.

    – No, as much as it would simplify the problem and allow you to not have to actually think, guns do not get up and walk around shooting people, as much as you want desperately for that to give you flesh to your argument.

    – Which is not just inaccurate, but worse steals the time and spotlight from the ral problem and ever doing anything about it.

    – But don’t feel bad, most of society shares your aversion to thinking seriously and acting intelligently to actually deal with mental illness.

  52. gbesq1 says:

    Beemoe: OK, I changed my mind (or lied, take your pick). I’m back for this: do you have any suggestions?

  53. leigh says:

    Mattness7 , save some of that straw for later.

  54. LBascom says:

    This is a traumatic day. Everyone is very emotional.

  55. beemoe says:

    I’m back for this: do you have any suggestions?

    I suggest first we see if we can find out what was wrong with the kid did the shooting.

    Somebody who kills his own mother and then opens up on a room full of kindergardners before he offs himself, I think we see if maybe somebody should have seen that coming.

  56. newrouter says:

    do you have any suggestions?

    um no more posted “gun free” zones?

  57. sdferr says:

    John Lott’s Website. Buy his book, for a start.

  58. Dalekhunter says:

    So let’s all ignore the fact that, punched reporter = dead children. That’s its own issue.

    Turns out, it’s not about guns at all.
    Mike Huckabee: “We don’t have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem”

    Just arm the children and pray it away!
    #serious

  59. beemoe says:

    So let’s all ignore the fact that, punched reporter = dead children.

    You don’t have to ignore it, it doesn’t exist.

  60. beemoe says:

    And if you think there are a bunch of Huckabee fans here, lololol.

  61. palaeomerus says:

    I just watch Gerldo come on O’Reilly to wallow around in the Connecticut school massacre like a dog rolls around in the remains of a dead bird. He even tried to cry. I despise that butt puppet.

  62. Dalekhunter says:

    According to this post they somehow belong in the same sentence.

  63. leigh says:

    I didn’t see Obama shed a tear over the coffins of the Ambassador, the ex-SEALs that he held the giant spectacle for at Andrews a ways back.

    I’ve likewise never seen him shed a tear over the dead Arab children his Commander-in-Drone self has sent home to Allah.

    Re, today’s shooting: All the shootings he spoke of in his tearful speech took place in Blue states. Coincidence? I think not.

  64. newrouter says:

    So let’s all ignore the fact that, punched reporter = dead children.

    dead ambassador = dead children or dead mexicans = dead children

  65. BigBangHunter says:

    – Dalekhunter. I’m guessing when you do your laundry you must have a hell of a time with all the straw that gets lodged in the washing machine and dryer filters.

    – It would be most helpful of you’d just take a few moments and actually, you know, READ what people post here. Otherwise its all sort of a waste of everyone’s time.

  66. leigh says:

    According to this post they somehow belong in the same sentence.

    Yes. According to your post, they do.

  67. Blake says:

    I don’t bother trying to engage you proggtard dumbass liberals in conversation. You idiots will never examine or admit that you operate from flawed premises. Nor do any of you proggtard dumbass liberal engage in honest debate.

    Matness7, you sound like you’ve got some anger issues. You probably should be locked up before you committ a violent crime or possibly kill someone.

    Proggtard liberals, get back to me when you understand “natural” or God given rights. Until then, there’s nothing to chat about.

  68. beemoe says:

    He also mentioned Michigan and Connecticut in the same sentence, does that mean they are the same thing?

    Quit digging.

  69. palaeomerus says:

    “Wow this article is full of jackoffs, racsists and hillbillys. ”

    Yeah. We aren’t in the mood for dull witted shit heads like you today. This mass shooting didn’t make you any smarter or more righteous than you were yesterday. You are still the same opportunistic dishonest, amoral, clueless, left-wing, statist shitball with the usual candy coated police state to sell. So, go fuck yourself scumturd. Seriously.

  70. Ernst Schreiber says:

    SCHOOLS NEED ARMED SECURITY.

    Schools need armed teachers, principals, janitors etc., missfixit.

  71. beemoe says:

    Or I could go the other way, and ask why you think Obama should wait until someone is killed in Michigan before he condemns the union violence?

  72. slipperyslope says:

    ’60 = the M60 and modern variants such as the M240 – all of which are often referred to as 60s.

    But the Left screeching about banning all guns just make themselves look stupid, like they don’t actually care about these kids dying. because we know that gun grabs would never have stopped someone intent on murdering a bunch of kindergarteners. They were chosen because they were easy defenseless sheep

    (first, I’m not in favor of banning guns, but I do want to point out a problem with your logic)

    If banning guns just means that the shooter would have committed mass murder with some other instrument – sporks, for example – just as effectively – then why do they *always* use guns?

  73. palaeomerus says:

    Yeah, I took today off. Didn’t listen to the radio. Went to go see the Hobbit. Got home, and boom…it’s reporters lining up and essentially making up stories to solve the mystery of yet another psycho who shot up a school.

  74. BigBangHunter says:

    – They can’t stop digging for a second moe. If they stop the walls of their propaganda tunnels will crash down on their empty heads.

  75. newrouter says:

    schools need to take hit me i’m unarmed sign off their backs

  76. sdferr says:

    How high would the pile be if everyone surrounding and charged with guarding the lives of Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Barack Obazma, Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, et alia — government-wide — were to surrender all their firearms into a ceremonial “big fucking deal” stack on the National Mall? Anybody? How’s about they start with themselves, eh?

  77. palaeomerus says:

    ” then why do they *always* use guns?”

    They don’t always use guns. Bombs. Cars. Fire. Sometimes knives and clubs. Someone recently used a #@#$ing bow or crossbow.

    Unless you are seriously asking about the ridiculous tautology of ‘why do they always use guns in every gun massacre’.

  78. slipperyslope says:

    Schools need armed teachers, principals, janitors etc., missfixit.

    Why don’t you just say that every adult needs to carry a gun at all times and in all places as the best way to reduce inappropriate use of guns.

  79. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I was going to post that I appreciate that I have not been banned from the site. That has not been my experience on other conservative sites. I have little interest in engaging with people who agree with me (what’s there to learn?) so this seemed like an opportunity. But the responses to my posts have made me realize this is not the site.

    Take a breath mint and try reintroducing yourself.

  80. newrouter says:

    If banning guns just means that the shooter would have committed mass murder with some other instrument – sporks, for example – just as effectively – then why do they *always* use guns?

    ieds are popular with the jihadi crowd slippery straw

  81. slipperyslope says:

    Someone killed 18 people with a car? With a club? With a crossbow? Links please.

  82. newrouter says:

    Why don’t you just say that every adult needs to carry a gun at all times and in all places as the best way to reduce inappropriate use of guns.

    poll dat on the south side of chitown

  83. palaeomerus says:

    Oh we have an 18 people threshold now? What bullshit.

  84. slipperyslope says:

    ieds are popular with the jihadi crowd slippery straw

    How many IED mass murders are there in the US each year?

  85. LBascom says:

    Turns out, it’s not about guns at all.

    This is true. Like how 9/11 wasn’t about airplanes.

  86. newrouter says:

    Someone killed 18 people with a car?

    Nidal Malik Hasan says you proggtard/infidels are the stupid

  87. beemoe says:

    Why don’t you just say that every adult needs to carry a gun at all times and in all places as the best way to reduce inappropriate use of guns.

    Why don’t you just listen to what we are saying instead of trying to talk for us?

    Why don’t you focus on the inappropriate behavior, rather than the instrument?

  88. gbesq1 says:

    Thanks for the responses to my request for suggestions. I was not clear about my question (see below). But as for gun control: gun regulation is not going to stop someone from shooting up an elementary school. That includes eliminating gun free zones or posting police in every elementary school in the country (who’s going to pay for that?). Today’s tragedy may be a reason to reopen the possibility of having a debate about gun control, but that is all. As for John Lott, I think he falls into the category of people asserting a single cause for the dramatic decline in crime in America over the last 20 years (yes, it did happen). All the multiple regression in the world does not enable us to distinguish correlation and causation, not to mention our inability to identify all the variables.

    As for my intended question: I was asking for suggestions for conservative websites where responses to my non-conservative posts (1) do not lead to an immediate ban, and (2) do not result in responses that I shut my pie hole or that I am a stupid sick twisted leftwing bastard. Of course, “that’s the stupidest fucking idea I ever heard a supposedly sentient being utter” is fine when followed by what’s wrong with the idea.

  89. newrouter says:

    How many IED mass murders are there in the US each year?

    oh you know the media covered the social security bombing in az 2 weeks ago. the baracky has “won” the war dontcha know.

  90. BigBangHunter says:

    – Chi-town, Bummblefucks own hood, has some of the toughest gun ownership and acquisition laws in the country. The Result?

    – A murder rate second only to NYC. a murder a day now is common place.

    – I’m just not going to waste any more bandwidth on this non-cause, non-ussue,

  91. newrouter says:

    That includes eliminating gun free zones or posting police in every elementary school in the country (who’s going to pay for that?).

    changing your stupid policy and removing stupid signs dont cost much at all

  92. beemoe says:

    As for my intended question: I was asking for suggestions for conservative websites where responses to my non-conservative posts (1) do not lead to an immediate ban, and (2) do not result in responses that I shut my pie hole or that I am a stupid sick twisted leftwing bastard.

    My suggestion is to ignore those kind of sites.

    This isn’t one of those kind of sites, we have intramural dust ups here on a pretty regular basis. I was just accused of being a caustic bastard by one of the other regulars here a day or two ago.

    I considered it an honor.

  93. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Why don’t you just say that every adult needs to carry a gun at all times and in all places as the best way to reduce inappropriate use of guns.

    Capital notion.

    Return fire is the surest way to move this kind of person on to the suicide stage of their murder-suicide plot.

  94. BigBangHunter says:

    – and with a knife in China the other day, but maybe we should ban knives.

  95. Blake says:

    gbesq1, you pile straw on a foundation of faulty premises. Why should I respect anything you have to say?

    Again, none of you leftists have the slightest interest in honest debate.

    Yeah, I told you to shut your pie hole, but did you even bother to admit gun free zones merely create soft targets for cowards like the guy who killed all those kids?

    No, instead, you get all emotional and weepy (though your emotion has all the sincerity of a Barack Obama promise) and try to get Second Amendment supporters to feel guilty about what happened today.

  96. Blake says:

    beemoe, damn, you received the honor of “caustic bastard?” Damn, I’m jealous.

  97. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Stoopid html

  98. newrouter says:

    mr “caustic bastard” your car is ready

  99. gbesq1 says:

    Newrouter: I meant the cops in school, not the signs. And, as a member of stupid sick twisted leftwing elite, please believe me when I tell you that parents in communities like Newtown do not want police in their elementary schools and will not feel safer if there are. You can call them all the names you want but it is true. The reality is that, for twisted leftists like us, particularly urbanites, seeing someone with a gun who is not a cop makes us feel WAY less safe. Maybe we shouldn’t feel this way, but there you are. Culture and expectations matter. What feels OK in Arizona does not necessarily feel the same way in New York or even Portland.

    Ernst: I just brushed my teeth, notwithstanding that I don’t know why I needed to. Hope it helped.

  100. geoffb says:

    What is it about the deviantART crowd that they keep coming to PW?

  101. BT says:

    Suggestions?

    Speak to the subject matter

    Listen carefully to the answers then reply.

    Find the ones on site who engage in civil discourse and focus on them.

    Ignore the ones who don’t.

  102. Blake says:

    gbesq1, I see, you’re a member of the “feelings trump thought” crowd.

    It’s grotesque when a grown adult admits their feelings overcome their though processes.

  103. Blake says:

    *thought

  104. BigBangHunter says:

    – gbesq1, that post you just spewed branded you as an un-serious noise source. I don’t even want to know what sorted of tortured logic brings you to type projected lies like “no matter how many names you call the parents”.

    – Where in the hell do you dumb fucks come up with this shit you type?

  105. geoffb says:

    Yeah, I told you to shut your pie hole

    He was first, right out of the gate.

    Maybe a couple days of silence would be appropriate.

  106. gbesq1 says:

    Blake: I think it highly debatable whether having people carrying guns makes one safer, but it is a debate worth having. It is an empirical question, although very difficult to answer. It necessarily includes, for example, questions such as (1) accidental gun deaths, (2) number of criminal acts stopped or ameliorated by armed citizens, (3) efficacy of gun carry in urban v. non-urban environments, (4) effect of availability guns v. weapons of much less lethality in the hands of mentally ill individuals. It seems to me those are the questions that need to be addressed before we can say anything useful about “soft targets.”

  107. newrouter says:

    seeing someone with a gun who is not a cop makes us feel WAY less safe.

    so you look to gov’t 1st to protect you not yourself? me i don’t look at sanfrannan and think the botox will protect me.

  108. Slartibartfast says:

    “All the multiple regression in the world does not enable us to distinguish correlation and causation, not to mention our inability to identify all the variables.”

    But humans made the world warm up, didn’t they?

  109. newrouter says:

    It necessarily includes, for example, questions such as (1) accidental gun deaths,

    why? do you consider cars/bathtubs/5 gallon buckets like that?

  110. newrouter says:

    But humans made the world warm up, didn’t they?

    lol

  111. Blake says:

    gbesq1, I see, avoid the soft target issue, because you don’t care to examine that premise.

    Instead, let’s bring in a bunch of other goalposts before discussing the issue of gun free zones.

    And yet, gbesq1, you have the nerve to complain when I tell you to shut up.

    You’re not arguing in good faith, just as I expected.

  112. missfixit says:

    The reality is that, for twisted leftists like us, particularly urbanites, seeing someone with a gun who is not a cop makes us feel WAY less safe.

    You know, i felt the same way the first time I went through the airport in Paris, and saw all those soldiers with big machine guns roaming around as security. It freaked me out because I wasn’t used to that, growing up in Ohio in the cornfields with all the deer and shit.

    But I’ve grown up since then.

  113. sdferr says:

    Again, how high the pile?

  114. gbesq1 says:

    Blake: actually, the “soft target” claim you make is based on many assumptions which I tried to address in my post. Any social policy has consequences and it is necessary to balance imperfections. Example: your “soft target” argument assumes that armed school personnel will reduce school shootings. Maybe so, but I would like to see some evidence first before I put guns in elementary schools.

  115. BigBangHunter says:

    But I’ve grown up since then.

    – And that is what separates the Left from the rest of society, being grown up, and when you finally realize that then some of their “catch phrases” like the emotional is the political fit their childish ideas perfectly.

  116. happyfeet says:

    he’s so cute when he tries to act like a big boy president

  117. sdferr says:

    But you need no evidence nor ask for any when it comes to the praetorian guard? That’s odd.

  118. gbesq1 says:

    missfixit: calling me a juvenile may be accurate as far as many of my friends are concerned but it is not a response to what I said. Let’s suppose I am right. Telling people not to feel the way they feel is not very useful. You need to tell them why they are mistaken.

  119. happyfeet says:

    well except for that butt ugly caesar cut

    somebody needs to tell him

  120. BigBangHunter says:

    Maybe so, but I would like to see some evidence first before I put guns in elementary schools.

    – Evidence that improved security can lower certain types of crime? Are you serious?

  121. LBascom says:

    Speaking of 9/11, this day has kinda the same feel to me. Like the world is different now, because of this.

    Little babies. How awful.

  122. Slartibartfast says:

    out, damned italics

  123. gbesq1 says:

    Newrouter: actually, that is exactly how we think about, for example, cars. largely because of the insurance industry, cars are much safer because there are negative consequences to the car society. We don’t get rid of cars, but we do think about the harm they can do and what might be done. Why not with guns?

  124. BigBangHunter says:

    – Ok. What we have here is an open italics tag.

  125. gbesq1 says:

    Slartibartfast: I agree about the italics. How?

  126. leigh says:

    Who broke the blog?

    Missfixit, being a victim of violent crime convinced me that being armed was the best solution to keep that from happening again.

  127. Blake says:

    gbesq1, you’re not debating in good faith. I already pointed out the attacks have been carried out in “gun free” zones. Yet, you persist in needing more data.

    Okay, so, how about arming everyone who is capable of carrying a gun at a school and see if there are any more attacks and if there are, how lethal are the attacks? Quite obviously, the current “gun free” zone policy is not working, so, probably best to try another policy.

    But, you’ve already demonstrated that you’re unwilling to examine anything that challenges your premises.

  128. newrouter says:

    Maybe so, but I would like to see some evidence first before I put guns in elementary schools.

    today’s crime wasn’t enough?(va tech, hasan(army base no gun zone!!11!!), movie theatre…)

  129. newrouter says:

    bbh has the html fu ;)

  130. Blake says:

    crap, I tried closing the italics. Obviously didn’t work.

  131. leigh says:

    car society?

    What?

  132. gbesq1 says:

    Bigbaghunter: we are not talking about improved security, we are talking about letting individuals make unregulated individual choices about bringing guns into schools.

  133. newrouter says:

    Why not with guns?

    when mass school shootings reach 30,000/year as with cars let’s talk

  134. gbesq1 says:

    Newrouter: do you seriously think that if staff at elementary schools had the right to bring guns into schools that today would have been different?

  135. Slartibartfast says:

    IOW, making up some more laws that outlaws can ignore

  136. newrouter says:

    we are talking about letting individuals make unregulated individual choices about bringing guns into schools.

    lol proggtard fascism

  137. newrouter says:

    o you seriously think that if staff at elementary schools had the right to bring guns into schools that today would have been different?

    works for alot of homeowners

  138. Blake says:

    gbesq1, gad, can you pile the straw any hire? So, armed and dead is different than unarmed and dead? At least if someone is armed, they have a chance.

  139. geoffb says:

    Let’s just move somewhere nice and safe where deadly weapons are only legally allowed in the hands of the authorities...

    Aug. 19, 1987: BRITAIN Michael Ryan, 27, kills 16 people in small market town of Hungerford, England, and then shoots himself dead after being cornered by police.

    Dec. 6, 1989: CANADA – Marc Lepine, 25, bursts into Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique college, shooting at women he encounters, killing nine and then himself.

    March 13, 1996 – BRITAIN – Gunman Thomas Hamilton burst into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself.

    April 28, 1996 – AUSTRALIA – Martin Bryant unleashed modern Australia’s worst mass murder when he shot dead 35 people at the Port Arthur tourist site in the southern state of Tasmania.

    June 2001 – NEPAL – Eight members of the Nepalese Royal family were killed in a palace massacre by Crown Prince Dipendra who later turned a gun on himself and died few days later. His youngest brother also died later raising the death toll to 10.

    Mdantsane Massacre SOUTH AFRICA 2002 – Bulelani Vukwana 29, killed 11 people and injured 6 in the South African township of Mdantsane after an argument with his girlfriend.

    April 26, 2002 – GERMANY – In Erfurt, eastern Germany, 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser opened fire after saying he was not going to take a math test. He killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman at the Gutenberg Gymnasium, before killing himself.

    London and Sussex murders BRITIAN 2004 – Daniel Gonzalez killed four people and injured two others by stabbing during three days across London and Sussex in September 2004.

    Nov. 7, 2007 – FINLAND – Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed six fellow students, the school nurse, the principal and himself with a handgun at the Jokela High School near Helsinki.

    Akihabara Massacre JAPAN 2008 – Tomohiro Kat? hit a crowd with a truck, then stabbed and killed 7 people.

    FINLAND – Student Matti Saari opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwest Finland, killing nine other students and one male staff member before killing himself.

    March 11, 2009 – GERMANY – A 17-year-old gunman dressed in combat gear killed nine students and three teachers at a school near Stuttgart. He also killed one other person at a nearby clinic. He was later killed in a shoot-out with police. Two additional passers-by were killed and two policemen seriously injured, bringing the death toll to 16 including the gunman.

    Sello mall shooting FINLAND 2009 – Ibrahim Shkupolli 43, stabbed and killed his ex-girlfriend in her apartment before moving on to the Sello mall where he shot and killed four people; his ex-girlfriend’s new lover was believed to be among the victims. Shkupolli was later found dead of an apparent suicide

    April 30, 2009: AZERBAIJAN – Farda Gadyrov, 29, enters the prestigious Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in the capital, Baku, armed with an automatic pistol and clips. He kills 12 people before killing himself as police close in.

    June 2, 2010 – BRITAIN – Gunman Derrick Bird opened fire on people in towns across the rural county of Cumbria. Twelve people were killed and 11 injured. Bird also killed himself.

    2010 Bratislava shooting SLOVAKIA 2010 – ?ubomír Harman – Eight people (including the perpetrator) died and 17 were injured after Harman opened fire armed with a Vz. 58 assault rifle in a suburb of Bratislava, Slovakia. Harman is the first gun-wielding Slovak spree killer.

    April 9, 2011 – NETHERLANDS – Tristan van der Vlis opened fire in the Ridderhof mall in Alphen aan den Rijn, south of Amsterdam, killing six before turning the gun on himself.

    July 22, 2011 – NORWAY – Police seize a gunman who killed 69 people at a youth summer camp of Norway’s ruling political party, on the small, holiday island of Utoeya. Anders Behring Breivik is later charged with the killings, as well as with an earlier bombing in Oslo which killed eight people. The trial ended last month with Breivik saying that his bombing and shooting rampage was necessary to defend the country – prompting a walk-out by relatives of his victims.

    Dec. 13, 2011 – BELGIUM – Gunman Nordine Armani killed three people, including a 17-month-old toddler, wounding 121 in a central square in the eastern city of Liege, before shooting himself. The next day Belgian investigators found the body of a woman in warehouse used by the gunman raising the death toll, including the killer, to five.

    2012 Midi-Pyrénées shootings FRANCE 2012 – Mohammed Merah In three events, Mohammed Merah kills 3 soldiers, 1 school teacher and 3 children. Shot by RAID.

  140. gbesq1 says:

    Newrouter: not fair. It’s total gun deaths, not elementary school deaths. I know it’s the Huffington Post but check it out anyway. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-sugarmann/gun-deaths-outpace-motor_b_1955347.html

  141. Blake says:

    crap *higher

  142. leigh says:

    gbesq1, the guns used by today’s shooter were all legally owned by his mother and thus registered to her. He stole them and killed her with one.

    How much regulation do you folks need before you just admit you want our whole society disarmed? Nothing will be enough for you until we’re all defensless chumps, waiting around for the police, like you guys do.

  143. newrouter says:

    unregulated individual choices

    who should the regulator be? the fed gov’t state, local?

  144. missfixit says:

    Okay let’s try this differently. I was scared the first time I saw soldiers with big weapons patrolling an international airport. The first time.
    After that, and after witnessing enough crime and violence by criminals who don’t care about laws, convinced me that I was safer with armed men patrolling, and I got over that initial fear.

    People who are terrified of law-abiding citizens having weapons are usually very sheltered. They have never been mugged, they have never had their children threatened, they have never lived in a bad neighborhood full of drug pushers, and they grew up in sheltered homes where nobody was a hunter or ever owned a gun. In short – it is easy and feels good to ban guns, because they’ve never been faced with real, personal threats.

  145. newrouter says:

    It’s total gun deaths,

    great let’s lump stuff together. wheat from the chaff sir

  146. Blake says:

    crap, I forgot the liberal thought process: unarmed means a chance to crawl on your knees, in the hopes the new master won’t kill you and will toss a crumb once in a while.

  147. leigh says:

    Yea! No more italics.

  148. Ernst Schreiber says:

    as a member of stupid sick twisted leftwing elite, please believe me when I tell you that parents in communities like Newtown do not want police in their elementary schools and will not feel safer if there are.

    That’s because you’ve allowed yourselves to become sheeple.

  149. McGehee says:

    I didn’t do it.

  150. gbesq1 says:

    I am enjoying this discussion, but I still am not getting any evidence. Is it true that homeowners defend themselves against assault? How often? Do bad guys ever turn homeowners’ guns against the latter? How Often. How do those numbers compare to the number of accidental gun deaths in homes? How do we weigh accidental gun deaths in homes against successful defenses? Do we care? Should we? Why aren’t these important questions?

    geoffb: in addition to you properly spelling your name, I appreciate the compilation. These are are highly relevant facts. and need to be included in the debate. So how do we consider them? Are we dealing with mental health issues for which gun control is largely irrelevant? Do these incidents support the “soft target” argument and, if so, how? How do these incidents look when we do a statistical comparison between the countries involved and the USA? Don’s we have to know the answers to these questions before we decide on gun policy?

  151. Slartibartfast says:

    Total gun deaths? Including self-defense?

  152. Darleen says:

    no worries, found the broken tag.

    been following this from work, which is frustrating since I cannot post … AND must run out again in a couple of minutes.

    the “THERE OUTTA BE A LAW” jerks demanding “SOMETHING BE DONE” about “guns”

    well, what are you then going to do about knives? ice picks? fertilizer? moth balls? hammers?

    It isn’t the gun, never has been. Jaysus on a Pony, but in much of the US up through the early 70’s you could find schools with rifle clubs, kids who brought their guns to school (in the car or locked up) so they could go hunting after school.

    It’s the principles, stupid.

  153. sdferr says:

    How high the pile again? 20′? 40′? 60′? Why isn’t that an important question?

  154. Ernst Schreiber says:

    [D]o you seriously think that if staff at elementary schools had the right to bring guns into schools that today would have been different?

    Yes.

  155. geoffb says:

    Of course there is that pesky problem that weapons only in the hands of the proper authorities have led to more deaths than privately owned ones over the past centuries. But who cares about those little inconvenient ones?

    Now we will live” This is what the hungry boy liked to say, as he walked along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people

    “I will meet her” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938.

    “They asked for my wedding ring, which I ….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country.

    Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin; her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death.

    The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass grave alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

    ——

    Each of the living bore a name. The boy who imagined he saw wheat in the fields was Jozef Sobolewsky. He starved to death along with his five other brothers and sisters, in 1933 in a famished Ukraine. The one brother who survived was shot in 1937, in Stalin’s Great Terror. Only his sister Hanna remained to recall him and his hope.

    Stalinslaw Wyganowski was the young man who foresaw that he would meet his arrested wife, Maria, “under the ground.” They were both shot by the NKVD in Leningrad in 1937.

    The Polish officer who wrote of his wedding ring was Adam Solski. The diary was found on his body when his remains were disinterred in Katyn, where he was shot in 1940. The wedding ring he probably hid; his executioners probably found it.

    The eleven-year-old Russian girl who kept a simple diary in besieged and starving Leningrad in 1941 was Tania Savicheva. One of her sisters escaped across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga; Tania and the rest of her family died.

    The twelve-year-old Jewish girl who wrote to her father in Belarus in 1942 of the death pits was Junita Vishniatskaia. Her mother, who wrote alongside her, was named Zlata. They were both killed. “Farewell forever” was the last line of Junita’s letter. “I kiss you. I kiss you.”

  156. Slartibartfast says:

    I vote we just ban assault weapons, once those can be sensibly defined

  157. newrouter says:

    Is it true that homeowners defend themselves against assault? How often?

    quite often. just dont depend on nytwapocbsabcnbcnpr et al to tell you. local news covers these events all the time.

  158. Blake says:

    gbesq1, ever read about the Luby’s massacre from the POV of a gun rights activist who survived the carnage? From what I’ve read and heard (Suzanna Hupp has been interviewed more than a few times) Suzanna had a CCW at the time of the massacre at Luby’s. However, it was illegal for Suzanna to carry in the restaurant. So, like a good, law abiding citizen, Suzanna left her pistol in the car. Suzanna got to witness both her parents be gunned down in front of her, and was unable to do anything about it.

    In Suzanna’s testimony before Congress (it may have been the Texas State legislature, I don’t remember which) it sounded very much like Suzanna is or was dealing with a lot of guilt over what happened.

  159. newrouter says:

    my high school in the ’70’s had a gun range. now it is where condoms on cucumbers is demonstrated.

  160. beemoe says:

    gbesq1 says December 14, 2012 at 7:27 pm

    I am enjoying this discussion, but I still am not getting any evidence. Is it true that homeowners defend themselves against assault? How often? Do bad guys ever turn homeowners’ guns against the latter? How Often. How do those numbers compare to the number of accidental gun deaths in homes? How do we weigh accidental gun deaths in homes against successful defenses? Do we care? Should we? Why aren’t these important questions?

    There have been plenty of studies, a professor at FSU did a massive one a few years back. You never hear of them because they don’t ever say what you want to hear.

  161. LBascom says:

    We don’t get rid of cars, but we do think about the harm they can do and what might be done. Why not with guns?

    There is no constitutional amendment about your car, nor does your car have anything to do with the right to life, unlike how a gun defends that right.

    Stop thinking about tools, and consider, do we have the right of self defense, or not?

  162. Pablo says:

    I want to hear what a ’60 is first. Google is letting me down.

    That’s what one homeboy gets when two homeboys share 3 40’s.

  163. gbesq1 says:

    Ernst: Oh for Christ’s sake. I am no more a sheeple than you. I am more threatened by a private citizen I don’t know with a gun that one without one. I want nothing to do with janitors and teachers carrying guns in my kids’ elementary school. That makes me a sheeple? Puleeeze. And if you want to take my Prius and glass of chardonnay you will have to pry them from my cold dead hands.

  164. missfixit says:

    One of my extremely leftwing friends (who lives in Australia now) was ranting on facebook this evening about how stupid Americans and their guns are the cause of all these tragedies. Then another leftist chimed in about stupid “testosterone driven men” who think “guns solve everything”…then a poor lefty male chimed in and said “hey I’m not a violent person and i don’t own guns” (like proclaiming his meekness and inability to defend himself was a virtue) – it was a big clusterfark of name-calling, bigotry against gun owners, and very bad logic.

    She said that in Australia she never “felt the need” to protect herself with a weapon, therefore “gun bans are good”

    It is all based on feelings. no logic. no reality. just feeeelings.

    On the other hand, there have been multiple home break-ins in my area, jewelry theft, and the like. And I won’t be caught defenseless in that situation with 3 kids to protect.

  165. palaeomerus says:

    “That’s because you’ve allowed yourselves to become sheeple.”

    A chickenshit sheeple who wants to tell other people how to live so he doesn’t ever have to feel weird.

  166. BigBangHunter says:

    – gbesq1 Why should anyone waste time with things that are not the root of the problem?

    – You’re simply dodging the true issue just like society in general. Lack of support/means for people with mental health issues.

  167. Blake says:

    Yes, gbesq1, you’re a sheeple. You fear an inanimate object. Yet, you think nothing of driving the 3,000 pounds of steel that is responsible for more mayhem in the last three dedades than all the gun massacres in the same period of time.

  168. Pablo says:

    Oh, you made Wonkette. That place just hasn’t been the same since the anal sex lady left for Time Magazine.

  169. SBP says:

    “then why do they *always* use guns?”

    Gasoline: 87 dead
    Fertilizer: 168-169 dead
    Boxcutters: 2,996 dead
    Left-wing governments: well over 100 MILLION dead, and still counting

    That would be the sound of you shutting the fuck up we hear, right?

    If you want to save lives, ban left-wing governments.

    P.S. Hi, everybody!

  170. gbesq1 says:

    beemoe: thanks for the link. I’ll read it.

    Blake: I know about Luby but not about the lady with CCW. Thanks. But we need data. That is only one data point.

    Newrouter: I could’ve used the cucumber lesson.

  171. Blake says:

    If obtuseness were armor, gbesq1 could withstand a hit from an asteroid.

  172. missfixit says:

    You know if the government can find the money to fund Obamacare, surely they squeeze out a bit for schools to have security. We pay superintendents like $150k/yr. A couple security guys could be had for less than that.

    Of course, I’m kidding because I know we don’t have any money, for Obamacare or anything else. But you know. Trying to play along.

  173. Pablo says:

    Somebody who kills his own mother and then opens up on a room full of kindergardners before he offs himself, I think we see if maybe somebody should have seen that coming.

    Yeah.

  174. gbesq1 says:

    Bigbaghunter: totally agree with you on mental health.

  175. newrouter says:

    I am more threatened by a private citizen I don’t know with a gun that one without one.

    especially in chicago

  176. beemoe says:

    I am more threatened by a private citizen I don’t know with a gun that one without one.

    You perceive a greater threat, that doesn’t mean there is one.

    Fear of the unknown or misunderstood isn’t rational.

  177. Blake says:

    I already pointed out data: Luby’s was a gun free zone, Newton:gun free zone, Virginia Tech: gun free zone; Columbine:gun free zone, Theater massacre: gun free zone.

    Yet, you insist there is no data to work from.

    How much more do you need?

    Yeah, I know, there is no data set that will ever satisfy you, gbesq1.

    Later, I’m going to watch “Scrooge” staring George C. Scott with my wife.

  178. sdferr says:

    P.S. Hi, everybody!

    Hey Spies! Good to see ya!

  179. palaeomerus says:

    Fuck Wonkette. It’s a PALACE of stupidity over there. Oh look, dead kids! Let’s use them to push our anti-gun agenda! Fucking parasitic imbeciles.

  180. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I am more threatened by a private citizen I don’t know with a gun that one without one

    How would you know a private citizen with a gun was a threat to you?

    For that matter, how would you know he had a gun?

  181. gbesq1 says:

    Blake: well at least you didn’t call me a left-wing shithole. But I will defend making public policy on data, not data points.

    missfixit: there are around 100,000 elementary schools in America. And no head fakes with Obamacare – not relevant here.

  182. newrouter says:

    baracky only likes certain kinds of evil. stuff that makes his sh@t smell good ok

  183. geoffb says:

    The thinking that is in the Obama statement is that “if we just get the smartest people to work together we can craft a law, a policy, a rule, that will fix this thing.”

    The problem is that that is the thinking that when it is done and acted upon always results in what I chronicled above, and it is that desire to go down that old road just one more time, do it right this time of course, that is a worse thing than even this horror that happened today.

  184. Pablo says:

    Schools need armed teachers, principals, janitors etc., missfixit.

    Yup. Armed school guard would be a horrible job and the types you’d get to fill it are not really what you’re looking for. Also, in a situation like this, the armed guard would be the first one to get shot. Then again, it would mean a million or so new government employees to unionize…

    Let people who have skin in the game handle the defense of themselves and their charges. If you can’t trust them with a gun, but you trust them with your kids, you’ve got some rethinking to do.

  185. JD says:

    Don’s we have to know the answers to these questions before we decide on gun policy?

    Nope. The 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution lays it out quite clearly. Don’t like it? Repeal it.

  186. newrouter says:

    But I will defend making public policy on data, not data points.

    you are made for “global warming” too bad that fraud failed too

  187. leigh says:

    SBP! Where the hell have you been?

  188. gbesq1 says:

    Ernst: true, would not be threatened by an invisible gun. But dont ask me to trust someone I do not know with unknown training, unknown reasons for having a gun, and unknown personality. Cops are one thing, my neighbors are something else.

    Beemoe: It is irrational to distrust the unknown with lethal power only if there is a way to make it known.

  189. newrouter says:

    you’ve got some rethinking to do.

    new narrative: public schools are unhealthy to children and the peeps running the show

  190. newrouter says:

    But dont ask me to trust someone I do not know with unknown training, unknown reasons for having a gun, and unknown personality. Cops are one thing

    do you personally vet every cop in your local community?

  191. missfixit says:

    Pablo: kindergarten teachers are the meekest women you’ll ever meet. They couldn’t be trained to carry firearms in the classroom for the most part. This is not a feasible plan.

    gbesq1: every superintendent in America makes a shitload of cash relative to the surrounding area. Far more than the average taxpayers in their districts. We can afford that, but we can’t afford security? seriously?

    So we have: 1. we can’t afford security, 2. security guards wouldn’t be very good anyway 3. kindergarten teachers are not mentally equipped to go to war. 4. gun bans won’t stop the lunatics from targeting schools or movie theaters

    So the solution is?? Locking people up in mental institutions before they do this shit. The mental health laws in the country are crap. However, they can’t be done slap-dash, otherwise they will be abused.

  192. Pablo says:

    The reality is that, for twisted leftists like us, particularly urbanites, seeing someone with a gun who is not a cop makes us feel WAY less safe.

    If that someone were you, and you knew how to use the damn thing, you’d feel differently.

  193. newrouter says:

    But dont ask me to trust someone I do not know with unknown training

    have you’ve done tsa today?

  194. gbesq1 says:

    newrouter: no. got to rely on something.

    All: thanks for the discussion. Enjoyed it. I will raise a glass of chardonnay and have a bit of brie in your honor. May you come to understanding of the eternal progressive truth my fellow sheeples. Merry Christmas. And since I am a pinko libtard whatever, happy holidays.

  195. gbesq1 says:

    final final comment: I am totally with newrouter on TSA. at least they aren’t armed

  196. newrouter says:

    4. gun bans won’t stop the lunatics from targeting schools or movie theaters

    because the clowns have a “kick me” sign on their back. no “gun free” zones. the proggtards failed and wipe their blood soaked hands in their failure.

  197. sdferr says:

    How many adults are present daily as a matter of doing their jobs in the typical public elementary school? Are all these adults to be presumed kindergarten teachers, if not in fact, then in personal psychological make-up? Faugh.

  198. Slartibartfast says:

    Our TSA should look more like Israel’s.

  199. newrouter says:

    newrouter: no. got to rely on something.

    me not the fed gov’t. too many idiots. but you might like it there?

  200. McGehee says:

    Of course there is that pesky problem that weapons only in the hands of the proper authorities have led to more deaths than privately owned ones over the past centuries.

    When seconds count, the police are only minutes away under no legal obligation to come at all.

  201. missfixit says:

    sdferr? do you spend much time in elementary schools? Unfortunately I have to be there on a regular basis. The place is nothing but women and I haven’t met one yet that I felt would be good in a gunfight. Maybe the gym teacher. But that’s it. This is not feasible.

  202. Pablo says:

    Pablo: kindergarten teachers are the meekest women you’ll ever meet. They couldn’t be trained to carry firearms in the classroom for the most part. This is not a feasible plan.

    We’re not necessarily talking about kindergarten teachers, though I suspect the protective instinct is strong there. Wanna motivate them to learn? Show them Newtown. Anyone can be trained to responsibly handle a firearm.

    So the solution is?? Locking people up in mental institutions before they do this shit. The mental health laws in the country are crap.

    That needs a look. Unfortunately, crazy is subjective and the arbiters would be the government.

  203. newrouter says:

    final final comment: I am totally with newrouter on TSA. at least they aren’t armed

    depends on the meaning of “armed”

    During this particular encounter in Chicago, the TSA agent challenged my request to opt out, sneering, “it doesn’t cause cancer.” Trying to avoid an argument, I murmured that it was “a matter of principle,” but she persisted:

    TSA: “WHAT principle?”

    Me (murmuring, tired): “Fourth amendment…”

    TSA: “Oh REALLY?”

    Me: “Are you supposed to be arguing with me about this?”

    link

  204. sdferr says:

    Kitchen workers? Janitors. Grounds crews? Principals and assistant principals. The outnumbered male teacher here and there. C’mon.

  205. newrouter says:

    The place is nothing but women

    why is that? who made it that way?

  206. StrangernFiction says:

    We need to ban death.

  207. StrangernFiction says:

    Oh, did Barry give any shout outs?

  208. leigh says:

    Schools. We need to ban schools.

    And move theatres.

  209. beemoe says:

    But dont ask me to trust someone I do not know with unknown training, unknown reasons for having a gun, and unknown personality. Cops are one thing, my neighbors are something else.

    You trust the cops more than your neighbors?

    What a sad way to live.

  210. leigh says:

    *movie

  211. McGehee says:

    The point is that if all school staff can be armed, the would-be mass murderers will have to assume that at least some of them are. It comes down to the principle espoused by that old bumper sticker:

    I carry a gun three days a week. You guess which three.

    …except in tis case it’s:

    A bunch of this school’s employees carry guns. Guess which.

  212. Pablo says:

    Example: your “soft target” argument assumes that armed school personnel will reduce school shootings. Maybe so, but I would like to see some evidence first before I put guns in elementary schools.

    Would you put armed guards there?

  213. beemoe says:

    kindergarten teachers are the meekest women you’ll ever meet. They couldn’t be trained to carry firearms in the classroom for the most part. This is not a feasible plan.

    I didn’t go to kindergarten, but my first grade teacher deer hunted with a 30-06.

    She appeared to be a woman.

  214. missfixit says:

    you get more male teachers/admins/coaches in the upper grades. But elementary schools self-select for extremely nurturing and child-focused women. They tend to speak softly & wear cardigans. C’mon man.

  215. leigh says:

    why is that? who made it that way?

    Traditionally, school teachers made very little money but had prestige. It was a good job for middle class women as was nursing, but nursing also didn’t pay well and didn’t attract too many men.

    Then the unions got involved and presto! teaching and nursing now pay decent coin, attracted more men to higher paying jobs when factory work went away. And, here we are.

  216. JD says:

    You trust the cops more than your neighbors?
    What a sad way to live.

    A-men

  217. Pablo says:

    Do these incidents support the “soft target” argument and, if so, how? How do these incidents look when we do a statistical comparison between the countries involved and the USA? Don’s we have to know the answers to these questions before we decide on gun policy?

    Given the statistical probability of mass murder by a deranged killer, we shouldn’t worry about it at all.

  218. missfixit says:

    well there are exceptions to all stereotypes. of course.

  219. beemoe says:

    I trust my neighbors with guns no problem, I wish there was some way to keep ballots out of their hands.

  220. newrouter says:

    But elementary schools self-select for extremely nurturing and child-focused women.

    the nuns that taught me were anything but. oh sorry we’re talking gov’t schools

  221. beemoe says:

    I grew up a country boy several decades ago. My teachers were all farm women, I realize that it isn’t that way these days.

  222. sdferr says:

    How many adults fixit? 25? 30? 40? 45? 50? And do you insist that from this number there will not be 5, 8, 10 who would choose to take up concealed carry if given the opportunity, and then do so responsibly? I for one find the contrary hard to believe.

  223. missfixit says:

    I think in our case, the janitor and the gym teacher could handle it. Is that really a feasible plan though.

  224. newrouter says:

    How do these incidents look when we do a statistical comparison between the countries involved and the USA? Don’s we have to know the answers to these questions before we decide on gun policy?

    there’s the 2nd amendment. oh sh!t england and other proggtard nations don’t got that

  225. SBP says:

    @sdferr: You too!
    @leigh: It’s a long story for another time.

  226. sdferr says:

    How many could handle waiting to die at the hands of a mad-gunner while unarmed? Seems to me the alternative is fairly inviting.

  227. palaeomerus says:

    “May you come to understanding of the eternal progressive truth ”

    No, may YOU come to understanding of the eternal progressive truth: pursuing utopia and power leads to misery, tyranny, and failure OVER ad OVER again and each time the progressive will claim that the dismal record of the past doesn’t count because supposedly these progressive ideas have never REALLY been tried, which is why everything went to shit, and next time it will be different.

  228. newrouter says:

    that it isn’t that way these days.

    can you say

    Lena Dunham

  229. palaeomerus says:

    Wonkette is a blog that happened purely because some twerp named Anna Marie Cox thought that Gawker didn’t have enough snark or posts about butt sex. Then it got passed on to people who cared even less about real life.

  230. McGehee says:

    Is that really a feasible plan though.

    It’s a start. First one or two go for it, then they invite their less confident co-workers to the shooting range…

  231. Pablo says:

    I think in our case, the janitor and the gym teacher could handle it. Is that really a feasible plan though.

    In a case like this, it only takes one well placed shot to neutralize the threat. Of course, anyone worth shooting once is worth shooting twice.

  232. palaeomerus says:

    Slippery slope blames Bush because someone pulled his talk-box string.

  233. Pablo says:

    It’s a start. First one or two go for it, then they invite their less confident co-workers to the shooting range…

    Yup. Next thing you know firearms are demystified, and these women realize they’re empowering themselves and that the practice is a lot of fun.

  234. beemoe says:

    Women are fine for the tip of the spear in A-stan but can’t be trusted with small caliber handguns in a school.

    Is this a wonderful country or what?

  235. cranky-d says:

    ’60 = the M60 and modern variants such as the M240 – all of which are often referred to as 60s.

    No, they aren’t. You are a liar. My brother served and shot an M60 to defend his helicopter.

    The M60 is a .308, the M24o is a .223, you are an idiot.

  236. LBascom says:

    Spies, Brigands, and Pirates! I’ve missed you buddy!

  237. missfixit says:

    I didn’t say that “women” couldn’t do it. My position has been that “typical women in an elementary school are not going to be on board with this”

    but ok. I think there are no solutions to this. Other than slapping all the mentally ill back into institutions like they used to.

  238. cranky-d says:

    By the way, all you drive-by trolls can fuck yourselves senseless, if you have any sense to begin with, which is highly unlikely. You don’t get it. Never let a crisis go to waste is the bread and butter of those you support and serve. You don’t stand a chance around here. This place has about the most intelligent commenters on the innertubes. You can wail and thrash and spout your idiocy but it will not leave a mark around here because you don’t pack the gear.

    We get it, and we know how you operate, and what you do to advance your agenda. We will not let it happen as long as we can fight.

    You are lightweights, and out of your league. Do us all a favor and fuck off.

  239. cranky-d says:

    Also, any of you who do stay, note that you are a mouse being played with by a cat.

  240. cranky-d says:

    These drunken rants have been brought to you by Guinness. It’s what’s for dinner.

  241. Pablo says:

    A good friend of mine is married to a little Filipina who stands about 4’10” and probably weighs 90 pounds soaking wet. She can shoot the nuts off a gnat at 100 yards and isn’t the least bit afraid of doing it.

    Training works.

  242. sdferr says:

    Levin’s show tonight. Drag the slider (first turn down the volume!) to 56 mins in to hear his discussion of the issue with John Lott.

  243. newrouter says:

    “typical women in an elementary school are not going to be on board with this”

    a gov’t school? why are men discriminated?

  244. newrouter says:

    that’s the part that grates with the gov’t run indoctrination centers. kick out the men then kick out any sanity. give me some 1880’s wymen. at least they aint stupid

  245. missfixit says:

    oh please. Men don’t go into teaching at that level because they don’t want to babysit 1st graders for 25k/yr.
    That is beside the point

  246. bh says:

    SBP! Hey, man, great to see you around! Actually put a smile on my face.

  247. leigh says:

    That’s one fine rant, cranky.

  248. bh says:

    By the way, BMoe, I meant to say “a gentleman and a scholar”. It was probably just the auto-correct on my phone.

  249. bh says:

    Everyone should go back and read Mattness7 says December 14, 2012 at 5:36 pm.

    That was quite possibly the greatest joke on current leftist thought I’ve ever read. Mattness7 is a freakin’ genius to be able to write satire of that caliber.

  250. newrouter says:

    Men don’t go into teaching at that level because they don’t want to babysit 1st graders for 25k/yr.

    sexist. men don’t go there because the wymens done carved out that niche politically. gov’t “money” its too die for

  251. missfixit says:

    ok be delusional if you want. whatever. Elementary schools actively try to hire men because there are none. We had one guy who taught 3rd grade for a bit, he was treated like a rockstar, but of course he didn’t last long because the pay sucks. He went into administration at a higher level, different school.
    I’ve never seen a man hang around at the level of teaching for long. it’s not because of the women.

  252. geoffb says:

    Pretty good rundown of what is known here.

  253. LBascom says:

    The cool thing about guns, they are as easy to use as, say, a stapler. They have been called “the equalizer”, ‘cuz a 12 year old girl can learn to run off men twice her size with one.

    If that was taught, instead of the idea guns are inherently evil, the world would be more peaceful.

    Get the girls a peacemaker, please.

  254. leigh says:

    Missfixit is correct about elementary school teachers, nr.

    Stop being a prick, please.

  255. geoffb says:

    A man killed his mother at their home and then opened fire Friday inside an elementary school, massacring 26 people, including 20 children,
    […]
    The 20-year-old killer, carrying at least two handguns, committed suicide at the school, bringing the death toll to 28,
    […]
    Police shed no light on the motive for the attack. The gunman, Adam Lanza, was believed to suffer from a personality disorder and lived with his mother
    […]
    Law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity said that Lanza killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, then drove to the school in her car with at least three guns, including a high-powered rifle that he apparently left in the back of the vehicle, and shot up two classrooms around 9:30 a.m.
    […]
    Authorities gave no details on exactly how the attack unfolded, but police radio traffic indicated the shooting lasted only a few minutes. State police Lt. Paul Vance said officers arrived instantaneously, immediately entered the school, searched it completely and found Lanza dead.
    […]
    A law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said investigators believe Lanza attended the school several years ago but appeared to have no recent connection to the place.
    […]
    At least three guns were found — a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols, inside the school, and a .223-caliber rifle in the back of a car, authorities said. A law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said some of the guns used in the attack may have belonged to Lanza’s mother, who had legally bought five weapons.

  256. JD says:

    The BLS says as of 2011 men comprised 18.3% of elementary and middle school teachers.

  257. JD says:

    Mattness7 says December 14, 2012 at 5:36 pm
    Wow this article is full of jackoffs, racsists and hillbillys. Keep your fucking guns pussies how dare you make light of this. What kind of fucking disgusting human are you. Before you say some dumb shit about me being a liberal fuck you and fuck liberals too. I really hope all you stupid gun nuts use your firearms to off yourself and not take a bunch of bystanders with you. why don’t you all go drink some more whiskey and beat your wife some more before you go to your klan rally you fucking pigs. you would rather a rich douche bag be in office that wouldn’t change shit he has no real power congress does go back to school and learn how our goverment works dumb asses. who cares about holding on to your small dick replacements when something like this has happened. Put aside the fact that you want to keep killing machines legal and think of the parents whos kids didn’t come home from school today. All you NRA gun pyschos are fucking losers. Guns Don’t kill people oh wait yeah they do sorry.

    EPIC. I think Mattsky just publicly felted himself.

  258. newrouter says:

    Elementary schools actively try to hire men because there are none. We had one guy who taught 3rd grade for a bit, he was treated like a rockstar, but of course he didn’t last long because the pay sucks. He went into administration at a higher level, different school.
    I’ve never seen a man hang around at the level of teaching for long. it’s not because of the women.

    gov’t schools discriminate. ask the nea. effin’ commies run the “schools”

  259. leigh says:

    State police Lt. Paul Vance said officers arrived instantaneously, immediately entered the school…

    Instantaneously? O-kay, then.

  260. Pablo says:

    What do you suppose an armed elementary school babysitter would make? You know, they guy who would sit around doing jack shit day after day after day. And given that he’d be the first one a committed nutbag would shoot, how many would each school need?

  261. Pablo says:

    State police Lt. Paul Vance said officers arrived instantaneously, immediately entered the school…

    And never fired a round.

  262. William says:

    A maniac steals his mother’s guns, of which she apparently had four even though she must have known he was crazy, and I’m supposed to believe tighter gun control is the obvious answer, and not even examine for a second the leftist idiotic notion that no maniac should ever be locked away for whatever reason. Cause family, love, and puppies conquer all.

    I’m not saying that the above simple solution is the answer here, but I am saying that there are at least two simple knee jerk reactions to this, and I don’t think the obvious one is “Ban all guns cuz teh evil!1!” unless you’re a smug, sheltered idiot.

  263. bh says:

    EPIC. I think Mattsky just publicly felted himself.

    Possibly the greatest comment ever typed at pw. I imagine it took him draft after draft to get it just right.

  264. cranky-d says:

    I still cannot fathom how anyone could have done this. I pretty much dislike almost everyone, and I still could not kill children, or adults either, like that.

  265. newrouter says:

    I’ve never seen a man hang around at the level of teaching for long. it’s not because of the women.

    yea right

  266. newrouter says:

    I still cannot fathom how anyone could have done this.

    after 9/11 i don’t care anymore. shoot them. oh shit proggtards with gun control.

  267. JD says:

    Mattsky performed the first public auto-felch on record.

  268. Pablo says:

    I still cannot fathom how anyone could have done this.

    I can. He’s fucking nuts.

  269. leigh says:

    Exactly.

  270. LBascom says:

    By the way, to those people critical of mentioning the union violence in Michigan in relation to this, here’s something I’m guessing will never be seen again:

    A speaker at a union protest against right-to-work legislation said if Gov. Rick Snyder signed the bill he would get “no rest” and that protesters would be at his “daughter’s soccer game.”

    Also, when gbesq1 says December 14, 2012 at 7:27 pm I am enjoying this discussion, I threw up in my mouth.

  271. @PurpAv says:

    and that protesters would be at his “daughter’s soccer game”

    Maybe they could drive home on 4 flat tires? Shit happens you know…

  272. cranky-d says:

    I cannot understand being that nuts, then.

  273. beemoe says:

    A maniac steals his mother’s guns, of which she apparently had four…

    They were his Mom’s? What is a kindergarten teacher doing with guns?

    Too bad they weren’t in her desk, probably would have been a lot harder to steal.

  274. LBascom says:

    “Because Michigan workers will not take it laying down — by any means necessary!” he said.

    Any means huh?

    Someone relieve that man of any dangerous objects quick, before it’s too late.

  275. beemoe says:

    By the way, BMoe, I meant to say “a gentleman and a scholar”. It was probably just the auto-correct on my phone.

    No problem, I thought it was funny. I probably do need to try to dial it down a notch or two, this election and my prospects for the future have me in a bit of a mood.

  276. Blake says:

    LBascom, I saw that shit about the Union. Threatening the kids because you don’t agree with Dad’s politics? Pathetic, and, as far as I’m concerned, grounds for a visit from the cops.

    And people wonder why Sarah Palin took a bye on elective office this election cycle.

  277. sdferr says:

    For all this — which is in its own way a necessary but ultimately dirty political work to be done — do we not still have a sense that no amount of cleansing will rid us of the filth of participation in an inhuman act? That the necessary defense of liberty is not enough (and damned that the need is pressed upon us so soon)? That mourning for the innocent lost has also a place in our deeds?

  278. bh says:

    Speaking only for myself, sdferr, I’m not mourning in the sense that I don’t feel grief in the sense that I don’t feel loss. If I actively attempted to feel these things by watching news coverage (I’ve watched none) or dwelling on photos of grieving parents (I’ve seen one or two now), I would do so reflexively and I wouldn’t have any control on how that would grow.

    If I did that in all available instances? I’d be suicidal in a couple weeks.

  279. BigBangHunter says:

    – The Left went into hi speed damage control today, no doubt the hypocrisy was dripping from the Progressive ceiling so badly they were feared of drowning in it. They’re so fucking predictable.

  280. Ernst Schreiber says:

    [K]indergarten teachers are the meekest women you’ll ever meet. They couldn’t be trained to carry firearms in the classroom for the most part. This is not a feasible plan.

    [Elementary schools are] nothing but women and I haven’t met one yet that I felt would be good in a gunfight. Maybe the gym teacher. But that’s it. This is not feasible.

    To paraphrase a teacher in the hard school of life, honors sequence:

    They’d better learn.

    This a Gods of the Copybook Headings thing.

  281. sdferr says:

    Perhaps the term mourning isn’t apt? While it is certainly not the direct loss of one (or many) of those close to us, I feel for my own part an injury of a sort, akin to the injury of that Sept. morning those years ago. This is not to suggest we’re required to seek to find these motions in every crime or inhuman act we may encounter, but at least in this case, and for my own particular state of mind on that subject, to say there is something lacking were this all the thought we should make of it.

  282. dicentra says:

    The reality is that, for twisted leftists like us, particularly urbanites, seeing someone with a gun who is not a cop makes us feel WAY less safe. Maybe we shouldn’t feel this way, but there you are.

    Then you twisted lefty urbanites have two options: Grow up and get over your fear of seeing guns (eek!) or sit tight and wait for the same thing to happen again.

    If you spoiled rotten costals can’t recognize simple cause-and-effect—an armed populace is a damned good deterrent to spree killers, who want to take out as many people as possible before they off themselves—then I don’t know how to help you.

    Apparently, that warm and holy feeling you get by objecting to visible armaments and by proclaiming that you inhabit a gun-free zone (WE’RE BETTER THAN THE KNUCKLE-DRAGGING REDNECKS!) is more important to you than saving the lives of kindergarteners.

    Those are your options: revise your absurd sense of morality or continue to suffer the consequences thereof.

    I think it highly debatable whether having people carrying guns makes one safer,

    Why?

    If you want to shoot up a school, will you choose the “gun-free zone” or the school with the armed principals and teachers?

    The areas of the country with the strictest gun-contro laws have the highest rate of gun crime.

    It would seem that the only thing you’re debating is whether you can stomach the thought that the ignernt rednecks might be right about something.

    You need to tell them why they are mistaken.

    Right. They’ll totally listen to a bunch of cousin-humpin’, Bible thumpin’ rednecks who hate Obama because he’s all black and stuff.

    Criminey. We’re blue in the face trying to tell you mooks that you’re “mistaken,” but agreeing with Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney about the Second Amendment will earn you the mockery and contempt of the hip crowd.

    And we can’t have that, can we?

    but we do think about the harm they can do and what might be done. Why not with guns?

    What a novel idea! None of us who lives in fly-over country—WHERE ALL THE GUNS ARE—is remotely acquainted with the idea that guns might pose a danger.

    we are talking about letting individuals make unregulated individual choices about bringing guns into schools.

    Aaaaand there it is. Individual choice—independent of their betters—Cannot Be Allowed. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?

    How much regulation do you folks need before you just admit you want our whole society disarmed?

    They never seem to understand that outlawing guns doesn’t make them go away, and that people who want to shoot someone will ALWAYS find a way to get a gun.

    Is it true that homeowners defend themselves against assault?

    Good God almighty. Often, all it takes is a brandished weapon in the hands of a steely-eyed homeowner to send the would-be thief running.

    How do we weigh accidental gun deaths in homes against successful defenses? Do we care? Should we? Why aren’t these important questions?

    How do WE weigh? Who’s we, Sparky? The individual gun owners get to make those decisions: those who don’t have kids in the home find that the risk of accidental death is quite small. Other have, oh, I don’t know.

    GUN SAFES!

    I want nothing to do with janitors and teachers carrying guns in my kids’ elementary school. That makes me a sheeple?

    Actually, yes, because you’re insisting that they be left UNPROTECTED against armed monsters, and all to preserve your place at the cool-kids table.

  283. LBascom says:

    I’m a little messed up myself. I can’t help but think of the immense evil unleashed before such innocence. The other children that survived but with wounded souls. The parents going to a home with presents under the tree for little ones that will never open them. The emergency responders that walked into a scene that will haunt them forever.

    It’s all very dispiriting.

  284. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Men don’t go into eduction because the education curriculum is female feminist-centric.

    I lasted less than a quarter in the early 90s.

    And all I wanted to do was get a teaching certficate so I could teach high-school history.

    I imagine that compounds the problem at the K-6 level

  285. bh says:

    I hear what you’re saying, sdferr. Think I do anyways.

    To be completely honest, I suppose I don’t particularly want to have that sort of discussion out loud with other people. Certainly not in a forum riddled with stupidly malicious trolls.

  286. sdferr says:

    Certainly not in a forum riddled with stupidly malicious trolls.”

    Yes, and, noted: couldn’t agree more about that aspect of the deal. Maybe I should have left it at the mere observation that we’re pressed into service in defense of our narrower political rights even when given our druthers we may be apt to dwell on other more comprehensive human concerns? Like parents required to give descriptions of what clothes they sent their children off to school in this morning.

  287. bh says:

    Think I’ll have a drink and listen to some music. That’s about all I have here.

  288. Ernst Schreiber says:

    He left mom’s M-4gery* in the back seat, but the AP wants you to know that it was a “hi-power” rifle

    *going off of something I heard on Levin’s radio show.

  289. dicentra says:

    What kind of a person does this thing? Ace has his number:

    I’ve said this before but I think the media can help reduce these things from occurring. These nutters see themselves heroically, sort of as bigger-than-life agents of mayhem and evil. Now that may sound like a bad thing to you, but it doesn’t sound bad to them: They’ve embraced it.…

    Evil is horrible, but these guys are embracing it for the Power of it. Because they are failures and hopelessly inadequate in their own lives, they contrive a fantasy in which they become Dark Heroes — larger than life and big as death — by murdering a lot of people.

    Obviously we have a debased value system here. But it does seem to me that that one thing they value and cherish is their self-conception of the Big Scary Man, who you should Take Serious Notice Of because he’s Scary and Capable of Anything.…

    I think it would do at least something to dissuade the next potential mass murderer to know, for example, that coverage on him will not focus on the Evil Menace part of him (which is a self-conception he finds flattering), but the Sad, Lonely Pathetic Guy Who Has a Small Dick and Couldn’t Keep a Woman or a Job and Just Couldn’t Hack It part of him. The part that’s actually much more relevant to his crime — masterful men do not have to kill people to let the world know “I exist” — and the party that he’s actually afraid of other people knowing about.

    If I were the media, I’d allow myself to get very personal in publishing accounts of these guys. Personal, and nasty.

    If nothing else, these crimes are crimes of notoriety, and the press should be mindful of the role they play in these monsters’ dark fantasies.

    A personality disorder, huh?

    Sociopathy, no doubt. Autism has jack-all to do with it. (Also, you’re either autistic or you have Aperger’s: you can’t on two points of a spectrum at the same time.)

  290. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I think they want to kill themselves and can’t do it unless they do something so horrifically awful that what they want and what they deserve coincide. Which is why it’s important that somebody start shooting back immediately, so they get to stage two of their sick master plan that much faster.

    Either that or they hate themselves, the world, and everybody in it, and can’t leave it without taking somebody with them.

  291. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Blake says December 14, 2012 at 7:41 pm:

    Yes, gbesq1, you’re a sheeple. You fear an inanimate object. Yet, you think nothing of driving the 3,000 pounds of steel that is responsible for more mayhem in the last three dedades than all the gun massacres in the same period of time.

    That’s because that kind of mayhem is according to plan, so nobody panics, whereas today’s was somebody introducing a litle anarchy into the system.

  292. serr8d says:

    Personally I equate those who rush to take a madman killer’s resultant body count and stack them as objectified evidence to bolster their far-Left fascist ideology to be no better than the madman killer himself. They, too, are using these horrific deaths to draw attention to their own twisted ends.

  293. serr8d says:

    Oh, and hey! to SBP! Don’t be a stranger!

  294. SteveG says:

    cranky-d

    the M240 shoots a 7.62 which is more or less a .308

    the M249 shoots a .223

    That said, just for all the new visitors…. those are automatic weapons and no, we don’t want every kindergarten teacher to have one in the closet alongside the graham crackers. It’d rock if she’d actually shot one out the door of her Humvee in Afghanistan though.

    I read earlier in the day that the largest death toll in a school related mass murder still resides with some idiot school trustee back in 1912 who didn’t use a gun… he used a bomb.

    I’d also read that the assault rifle was found …. well, in the back of the car not in the school…
    When does a gun being black make it assaultive?
    Anyone else hear a dog whistle?

    And wtf was the smartest President ever doing prattling on about AK47’s this AM? Jeez. I’ll bet I could get more cheap chinese knock off AK47’s doing gangbanger parole sweeps through Chicago or South-Central LA than Obama could ever find in the hands of bitter clingers

  295. serr8d says:

    Let’s see just how much was known about this psychotic’s diseased mind. If his mother, ostensibly the closest person to him, had any clue that he was this far gone, and still allowed this madman to have access to these unsecured guns, not only was that a fatal mistake for her but also a criminal act. She may be directly responsible for this tragedy. Let’s let the dissection begin.

    Of course, our now-too-far-left control-freak Liberal Fascist Democrats won’t wait. They want to seize the moment, not to ‘prevent gun violence’ but to take control of this Republic’s citizens’ guns. We are only controllable when we are completely disarmed, as the founders knew when they crafted the 2nd Amendment to make sure we weren’t so easily controlled.

  296. SteveG says:

    Oh yeah

    To all the wonderful newcomers emerging from the primordial ooze… good job missing the point of the title.
    Obviously the President is now expected to speak to a shocked nation, and of course we expect Obama to veer off into attacking AK47’s.

    It’d be nice in less chaotic times if the President could ever find the stones to tell his Village People fanboys in Michigan to eschew all the negativity that surrounds them…

  297. Dang…. Step in it much Jeff?

    Also, WordPress 3.5 is out. might wanna upgrade. :D

    -Pat

  298. sdferr says:

    Step in it? When the American left is blasting it out of a firehose twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every week of the year? It’s impossible to avoid, you idiot.

  299. SteveG says:

    Regarding the post earlier about maybe some union thugs drive home on 4 flat tires?
    Yeah. Try it. You’ll be jailed. However tossing over some guys hot dog cart because he is feeding conservatives? A-OK!

  300. palaeomerus says:

    “He left mom’s M-4gery* in the back seat, but the AP wants you to know that it was a “hi-power” rifle”

    Yeah shorter barrels are all about upping the ‘power’ n’ shit. That’s why the crooks like to saw off da shotguns right ? SCIENCE!(TM)

  301. serr8d says:

    Pat. There’s a reason you’re forever a pariah.

    I hope your mother has secured the knives and forks!

  302. SteveG says:

    And I am an idiot.
    This AM I was watching the news and moving firewood into the house… and some news agency was playing a speech Obama made a while ago about the AK’s and I thought it was a live shot.
    I was thinking: what a fucking clown… which was true, but never knowing that I’d be mirroring the President
    From now on I will try to keep up…

  303. SteveG says:

    Maybe it was the M-4gery* that shoots a .22LR which everyone knows is almost halfway to a .50 cal machine gun.

  304. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Velocity is good.

    If the round is designed to fragment or mushroom.

    Or if you’re Jimmuh Carter and you’re faced with an attack rabbit.

  305. Ernst Schreiber says:

    AP says the police recovered a .223, Mark Levin talked w/ a Fox News reporter who mentioned police were saying they recovered an m-4. I translated that to M4gery, because I doubt Mom has tax stamp for the happy-fun switch.

    I don’t know what caliber the Glock and the Sig Sauer were. I’d guess 9mm and/or .40 before I guessed .22lr, though that would be my 3rd guess.

  306. palaeomerus says:

    A high power rifle makes the same round travel even faster and hit harder! It does this with solar capacitors and a proprietary blend of leprechaun blood, Formula 412 (which is three points higher than Formula 409 on the formulae chemical power scale) and Sanka that was originally developed by the Secret Navy (not to be confused with the publicly acknowledged US Navy) for arctic circle fracking, which was abandoned when it was discovered that you can’t really frack goddamned water, and you need some land to split open, or it won’t work. High power rifles are often used by hillbillies to shoot down low orbit satellites which they think are shiny metal techno-demons a watchin’ ’em from up-ere. A high powered BB gun can cut an Abrams tank in half from 60 miles away, or even more if you use those freaky metric miles.

  307. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Where do I git me one of them bb guns? Is that there one o’ them specials billy-jim and joe-bob cooked up in the shed?

  308. @serr8d

    Yeah, I know I said that to Frum and ya know what? I am fucking proud of it. That asshole son of a bitch has no class at all. Not to mention he’s about as Conservative as Michelle Malkin.

    and if you and your little yarmulke-baiting friends with the persecution complex disorders don’t like it, too bad. I, as a WASP, find it to be absolutely sickening that Frum can say stuff like that, and face no repercussions. But someone like Rick Sanchez pops off, he loses his fucking career.

    It’s a sick double standard and I will always speak out about it.

    Learn it, like it and fucking DEAL WITH IT! Ya asshole.

    *snaps finger and walks away*

  309. Pablo says:

    It would seem that the only thing you’re debating is whether you can stomach the thought that the ignernt rednecks might be right about something.

    ^^^Truth.^^^

    Is it true that homeowners defend themselves against assault?

    Good God almighty. Often, all it takes is a brandished weapon in the hands of a steely-eyed homeowner to send the would-be thief running.

    Sometimes, it’s even better than that.

    Burglar calls 911 to save himself from gun-wielding homeowner

  310. Jeff G. says:

    I’m with bh here. Since I heard about the shooting, I’ve avoided as much media as my “job” here allows. Best I could do was voice my (obvious) displeasure with the opportunistic pols and the morally preening leftists whose irrational, doctrinaire anti-gun position immediately knee-jerked me in the gut — then scoop up my wife and my two young boys and go out for dinner.

    I was asleep by 9.

    To all those visiting here for the first time — the assholes trafficking in phony sanctimony, pretending I don’t care about the dead children — I can only say this: you haven’t a fucking clue how I feel. But more importantly, how I feel about dead children — which I suspect is how nearly every parent feels when they learn of such horrors — is not the issue here. The issue is, what’s the best way to prevent me from having to feel such things again and again and again. And I’ve determined that advertising yourself as a big old feel-good collection of sitting ducks isn’t the best way to go.

    To Missfixit: as others have pointed out, it is the THREAT of their being concealed carriers at a particular location that gives spree killers pause. After all, if you want to go down in a blaze of mass murdering infamy, it would totally suck if you decked yourself out in your trenchcoats and wrote your manifestos, then walked inside the school, pulled out your rifle to shoot the ceiling and make a big grand entrance, only to be put down like dogs by some faculty member with a .40 and some Critical Defense ammo before you can even really begin living out your murder-porn fantasy.

    You’d be remembered as the pathetic wannabe punk you are. And no self-respecting spree killer is going to risk that ignominy.

    We live in a strangely surreal culture, one where people write about accidental gun deaths as if that’s a viable reason to remove a right of self-defense. Grown people make choices, and those choices have consequences. Sometimes the consequences are unintended. But the truth is, we have no idea how many crimes are stopped by homeowners with guns. Except that in areas of the country where guns are more prevalent among law-abiding citizens — and known to be so — picking a target of opportunity is a more iffy proposition for bad guys with ill intent. And so the crime rates reflect that.

    Just as I won’t die for political correctness, I won’t let my family go unprotected because it makes some person with no gun experience and no real idea about self-defense feel (irrationally) safer and morally superior.

    This post took issue with Obama’s (and many in the leftwing media) having used the occasion of this massacre not to mourn the loss of these innocents; but to use the pretense of mourning the loss of innocents to immediately begin screeching for the removal of a basic natural right.

    This is who they are. This is what they do. And as cranky-d said upthread, we all here know that — and we aren’t the type to be cowed. No matter how many Tweets I’m sent in which I’m depicting as a monster who cares not a whit about the children.

    I suspect I care a whole lot more than many of these puffed-up childless lefties who see in such massacres just the latest crisis they can’t let go to waste — having first, of course, set the conditions for the crisis with ill-advised policy in the first place.

    Their demanding I prove my morality to them is a deflection. I’m not looking for their approval. I’m looking for their defeat. So that fewer children ever have to experience the kind of horrors we witnessed yesterday in order for some leftist politician to check off the resume point “tough on guns.”

  311. Pablo says:

    A cop on Fox: “Those are the worst bullets you can have. They’re hollow points, and those are the kind we in law enforcement really hate those because they can actually penetrate a bulletproof vest.”

    Astounding ignorance from a supposed expert. Law enforcement hates hollow points so much that they carry them all the time. And, of course, a hollow point is less likely to penetrate body armor, not more likely.

  312. Jeff G. says:

    Yup. More disinformation so that only cops can have superior fire power. My cop neighbor being the prime example of somebody who should never be able to wield that kind of power over others.

  313. Pablo says:

    AP says the police recovered a .223, Mark Levin talked w/ a Fox News reporter who mentioned police were saying they recovered an m-4. I translated that to M4gery, because I doubt Mom has tax stamp for the happy-fun switch.

    I’m hearing .223 Bushmaster. As for the M-4, they’re marketing semi-autos as such, so that wouldn’t be as implausible as you might think.

    One of the most striking things about all this, beyond the carnage, is the number of things that have been reported that just aren’t true.

  314. Slartibartfast says:

    You’d think that folks on the left that have a frequently adversarial relationship with law enforcement might be a bit wary of things the police say that lefties find argumentally convenient.

    It’s an understandable sin, but one, as our Betters, they really ought to avoid.

  315. Slartibartfast says:

    My wife just now told me: we need to get you another gun, quickly. Today, maybe.

  316. Slartibartfast says:

    That Wonkette doesn’t do nuance well is a surprise to nobody besides maybe Ken Layne.

  317. repubsrock says:

    Damn, Goldstein, Wonkette just named you Stupidest Man on the Interboobs.

    Way to stay relevant.

    The Man is too big. The Man is too strong.

    O!

    All the best.

  318. repubsrock says:

    Hi, happyfeet.

  319. serr8d says:

    Wonkette…isn’t that the shithole that hosted Jack Stuef, the lardassian who posted some awfulness about Trig Palin ?

    Yeah, Wonkette. Certainly they are all concerned about kids over there. May they all wallow in the frying fat of slow-roasted stuffed Stuefs.

  320. palaeomerus says:

    “One of the most striking things about all this, beyond the carnage, is the number of things that have been reported that just aren’t true.”

    I’d think that the Zimmerman case and Benghazi would have promoted glaring reporter inaccuracy from striking to blase.

  321. repubsrock says:

    Yes, James, that’s the one. She hosts a very humorous and popular blog.

  322. cranky-d says:

    Okay, SteveG, in my drunken state I melded the 240 into the wrong weapon. Am I also wrong about them not both being called ’60s? No one has ever used that term around me, including people who have fired them in anger, as it were.

  323. McGehee says:

    One of the most striking things about all this … is the number of things that have been reported that just aren’t true.

    You just described pretty much every story ever reported, at least since Murrow died.

  324. Patrick Chester says:

    Oh noes… a humorous and popular blog. Woe. Woe I say.

    Hm. My initial run on twitter has amusing results. One of the folk who were wailing in Outrage (OUTRAGE!!!) at JeffG decided that my sarcastic tweet in response to his was soooo irrelevant, he spent some time actually informing me of such.

    Again. Woe. Woooooooooeeeee…. ;-)

  325. palaeomerus says:

    “Ernst Schreiber says December 15, 2012 at 1:12 am
    Where do I git me one of them bb guns? Is that there one o’ them specials billy-jim and joe-bob cooked up in the shed?”

    I hear you can pick them up at Walmart Ernst! Walmart! Doom!

  326. McGehee says:

    [Wonkette] hosts a very humorous and popular blog.

    I had no idea so many of her readers were there to point and laugh at her..

  327. palaeomerus says:

    Why when you think about it, any muzzle loaded cannon from the 18th century is a kind of big BB gun…in a way. Ain’t gonna crack an M1’s hide though. You need a hight power BB gun for that.

  328. palaeomerus says:

    “I had no idea so many of her readers were there to point and laugh at her..”
    Anna Marie Cox left Wonkette to die a long time ago and it replaced her with an amateur gossip columnist. She’s over at Time magazine. Which is ironically on its way to being the next Newsweek, which recently went from being a weekly news magazine to a…blog.

  329. McGehee says:

    So “repubsrock” has the facts wrong? Knock me over with a feather!

  330. geoffb says:

    What we seem to need is another group that will be empowered to decide who shall and who shall not be able to buy weapons. Skipping right over the fact that this guy simply stole his moms guns and killed her first before embarking on his day of killing.

    I also would say that “sociopaths, psychopaths and the violently mentally-ill” tend to already have felony records which preclude them from legally buying a gun. But then as in so much from the left the solution to any problem always is to give away some liberty to government in return for the promise of security. Promises that expire upon their assumption of the new power.

  331. Slartibartfast says:

    Mcg, I honestly cannot tell parody from self-parody anymore, so I am keeping mum for now.

  332. Pablo says:

    What are the odds that repubsrock hails from Murfreesboro?

  333. palaeomerus says:

    “and if you and your little yarmulke-baiting friends with the persecution complex disorders don’t like it, too bad. I, as a WASP, find it to be absolutely sickening that Frum can say stuff like that, and face no repercussions. But someone like Rick Sanchez pops off, he loses his fucking career.”

    The problem with Frum is that he’s a smarmy unfair dishonest leftist prick with revolting views.

    It’s not that he’s a Jew. His being Jewish is no reason to hate on him. His behavior is the reason to hate on him. He’s having laffs (not actual laughs) about the right because of a mass child slaying. That is what’s sickening. Being a Jew is NOT what is sickening about him. It’s incidental. Bringing it up is stupid as fuck. Why the hell would you want to?

    I say that as a wasp or possibly a wfsgsip (White franco-swiss-germanic-scots-irish protestant), 75% heavy on the g.

  334. palaeomerus says:

    “Pablo says December 15, 2012 at 8:36 am
    What are the odds that repubsrock hails from Murfreesboro?”

    See if you can commission him to draw you a space stoat with big tits. If he takes the bait then you know what’s up. Or else it might mean that unemployment has finally made faux-manga anthropomorphic cartoon animal smut artists of us all.

  335. Pablo says:

    cranky, I used to carry the M-60. slope has always been a pinhead.

  336. missfixit says:

    Okay Jeff. I agree that teachers should be *allowed* to conceal carry on the premises. My issue is that I think they would freak out about it and not actually carry, and I didn’t think that was going to be very effective in actually STOPPING one of these nuts, plus I don’t think that we’ll ever get past the political left on that one (esp w Obama in charge) – and we will continue to see these massacres. Maybe there will be another ban on certain types of weapons, but it won’t stop the crazies.

    My next thought this morning is that we need to go back to a time when we locked up the mentally unstable. I know that won’t be popular either.

  337. Blake says:

    geoffb, what people like Goldberg ignore is that you cannot stop a madman, you can only limit the body count. (obviously, I’m ignoring the “Minority Report” aspect of the article)

    I think it’s quite obvious that had there been two or three armed citizens at the school at the time of the shooting, the body count would have been substantially less.

    It is also possible there wouldn’t even have been a body count, because the school would no longer be a soft target. Or, there would have been a body count of one, the one being the would be shooter.

  338. palaeomerus says:

    This just in : “Good Ol’ Ass Sex” is in the front running to be Time’s new ‘Person of the Year’.

  339. missfixit says:

    my dad picks up all of my kids every day from the elementary school. He is getting his concealed carry ASAP. But he won’t be in the school all day, so it doesn’t feel quite good enough. I wish our janitor was packing.

  340. Pablo says:

    missfixit, the thing is familiarity breeds confidence.

  341. Darleen says:

    di

    If you spoiled rotten costals can’t recognize simple cause-and-effect—an armed populace is a damned good deterrent to spree killers, who want to take out as many people as possible before they off themselves—then I don’t know how to help you.

    Ok, someone help me here (I’m on my first cup o’coffee … hubby’s company Christmas party last night … er “holiday” party … heh) but I recall a few years ago a shooting in California involving FBI? ATF? armed investigators in their office? Some disgruntled guy came in to shoot his boss and another armed investigator got him before he could shoot others in the office.

    Rather than it being gun free zone so the disgruntled guy could pick off secretaries and file clerks huddled under desks …

  342. Patrick Chester says:

    Oh, this is cute. My twitter account just got suspended.

    “This account, @Sinapus, was suspended for sending multiple unsolicited mentions to other users.”

    Riiiiiight.

  343. Patrick Chester says:

    So if someone tweets something particularly dumbassed, and I call them on it, I’m a bad person?

  344. Darleen says:

    chester, you got twitter gulaged? You must have been right over the Leftist target … their fave SHUT UP tool

  345. Patrick Chester says:

    I’m sending a ticket to support. “I didn’t like what that person” said does not sound like a valid violation of the rules.

  346. McGehee says:

    Welcome to the Obam-ocalypse.

  347. geoffb says:

    One other thing has come out. School was locked up, he broke in, he wasn’t let in.

  348. McGehee says:

    I’d sure like to know whether Adam Lanza and Christopher Krumm had anything else in common besides Connecticut, Asperger’s, and the urge to kill their parents.

  349. Patrick Chester says:

    What’s amusing is one of the people who were making remarks towards JeffG that I made a response towards suddenly has his account protected.

  350. happyfeet says:

    hello repubs and also a joyful holiday season to you

    2013 is a new year and that’s exciting… A new year filled with old friends like the boehner and the pelosi and the limbaugh and the huckabee, but also new friends like the new guy what plays elmo once he passes his background check and a new secretary of state! (it’s rumored that this historically minority-held position might could be filled with a White Male)

    yes sir 2013 promises to be eventful and fascinating

  351. McGehee says:

    …in an educational setting, I would also point out. Just fucking spooky.

  352. McGehee says:

    My 9:49 am was a follow-up to my own 9:46 am.

  353. geoffb says:

    The stupid and the shameless.

    Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who represents portions of New York City, said he was encouraged by Mr. Obama’s statement on Friday afternoon that the mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 young children, requires “meaningful action” by Congress, but hopes those words turn into concrete legislation.

    “These incidents, these horrible, horrible incidents … are happening more and more frequently. And they will continue to happen more and more frequently until someone with the bully pulpit, and that means the president, takes leadership and pushes Congress,” Mr. Nadler said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz.

    Mr. Nadler was asked whether the Newtown tragedy could be the turning point in many Democrats’ longstanding struggle to enact stronger gun laws.

    “I think we will be there if the president exploits it, and otherwise we’ll go on to the next” incident, Mr. Nadler said.

  354. McGehee says:

    Obama couldn’t push Congress to appropriate pork, raise its own pay and go on a mass fact-finding junket to Tahiti.

  355. McGehee says:

    “I think we will be there if the president exploits it, and otherwise we’ll go on to the next” incident, Mr. Nadler said.

    Never let a crisis go to waste.

    Anyway, isn’t Nadler too fat to be a member of Congress?

  356. geoffb says:

    He’s the Chucky Schumer maxi-me.

  357. Ernst Schreiber says:

    One of the most striking things about all this, beyond the carnage, is the number of things that have been reported that just aren’t true.

    Not all that unusual, actually, with a breaking story, and the stress is on getting the information on the air rather than making sure the information is right. With the Portland mall shooting a few days ago, one of the things that jumped out at me was the police spokesman emphasizing that the shooter was wearing a load-bearing vest, not body-armor. That’s a legacy of Aurora.

    Which reminds me, does that Brian Ross asshole still have a job with ABC?

  358. Slartibartfast says:

    I propose that schools be made as secure as an Israeli shopping mall.

  359. Ernst Schreiber says:

    my dad picks up all of my kids every day from the elementary school. He is getting his concealed carry ASAP. But he won’t be in the school all day, so it doesn’t feel quite good enough. I wish our janitor was packing.

    Is he planning to leave his carry piece in the truck and the truck parked a block away? Wait in the truck parked a block away for the grandkids to come to him, or violate the law?

  360. Blake says:

    Something I wasn’t aware of. It appears the Clackamas Mall shooting may have ended when the shooter was confronted by an armed citizen. Link.

  361. Pablo says:

    The thing that strikes me is sheer volume of false facts. This one seems worse than most.

  362. Blake says:

    Ernst, depending on the State, it may be legal to carry on school grounds. For instance, in CA, it is legal to CCW on K-12 campuses.

  363. Lisa says:

    Something was a bit off about that whole presser to me too. And if the title of this post is alluding to the “Rosewood” like attack on that guy’s hotdog truck, I am wondering what the silence is all about as well. So is a “racism pass” issued to dues paying union members? You can totally do a race riot and destroy someone’s business if you are doing it to a conservative or a person providing a service to a conservative organization? I wonder if you pay a little extra in your yearly dues, do you get a lynch-pass?

    So, before I moved (first to Europe then to the Middle East), I used to be a regular here. One of your resident commie delusionals. I am glad to see that the Ole Perfesser is still keeping this site going as well as the regulars like Slartibartfast, Happyfeet, Pablo, JD, Sdferr, et al. I am sad to see that a great deal of the lightheartedness has gone out of the banter here. Most of that is because this country has devolved precipitously and there is not much to laugh at anymore. I take responsibility for my part in that. I voted for this terrible administration in 2008.

    I remember arguing fiercely with the Ole Perfesser about classical liberalism vs. the sham progressivism that is practiced and called liberalism in this country. I have always believed in the innate goodness of a society that protects it’s most vulnerable and takes an active role in regulating the economy to promote a fair distribution of wealth. When you get to travel around the world, you are quickly disabused such notions. Nations have been experimenting with government and economics for millennia. Using one to regulate the other does not ever do a thing to promote freedom. It is merely an instrument to do the exact opposite.

    It is not even the faux progressivism that alarms me (meaning, authoritarian government expansions disguised as benevolent “people-powered” social programs). It is the tribalism and simmering race and class resentment that is terrifying. A social program can be reversed. Even the most egregious power-grab can be corrected. Authoritarians can be deposed. Stoked-up race resentment and class-warfare cannot be reversed, however. It takes on its own life and keeps going until it burns out or everyone is hacked up a la Rwanda. And if we are very busy hanging white people and rich people from the lamp posts, we will not be terribly concerned with reversing a government expansion or looking critically at our terrible new dictator for life. I have always thought white people were just being paranoid. That they were just so used to their white privilege that they could not stand to share their privilege with anyone else. I generally made fun of the whole concept. No one gives a crap about your white asses, I would say. Go fondle your guns, dude. Wolverines!1!! But resentment of white men is the gasoline that has been poured over the dry brush. This is a real thing. When the incendiary – whatever that will be – is thrown on that, the conflagration will be be a diversion – but it will not be controllable or stoppable. Because that kind of shit never is.

    I sound totally dramatic and over the top, I know. But I feel pretty strongly about this. And if any of you remember me at all, you know that I was always the one to throw cold water on dire predictions of a sinister future for this country. Especially about progressivism. I have always thought it was a force for good, even when it was misguided. But I don’t see that now. I am not some Alex Jones wacko or a god-bothering Christianist hoping for red-heifers and signs of the apocalypse. It just took me being away from my little enclosed echo chamber for a couple of years to see things clearly. Living somewhere where people have been manipulated with class and cultural resentment since before the Ottoman empire, I can look at my old peers and see that we have been similarly herded like cattle by our own predators. At least the Arab autocrats have perfected this craft and expertly divert their mass’s rage outward and away from their country. But our rage is being directed at our neighbors.

    Just let me get back to Abu Dhabi before everyone starts shooting.

  364. Darleen says:

    and takes an active role in regulating the economy to promote a fair distribution of wealth.

    There’s your problem, when you give Big Gov the power to steal from the producers under a something as subjective as “fair” you cannot help but get a government that operates under the same moral precepts as a shoplifter or mafia goon.

  365. Blake says:

    Lisa, in the coming meltdown, even a place like Abu Dhabi probably will not be a safe haven. Abu Dhabi is too tied into the Western Financial system. What happens when Abu Dhabi goes broke and can no longer afford to buy off the population?

  366. missfixit says:

    I am a Christianist I suppose – and it this point I see Armageddon on the horizon. Never thought I’d see the day. I am sad that all the light-heartedness has gone from this place too, but I can clearly see why.

    Gird your loins – that dumbass Biden was right about something at least.

  367. Roddy Boyd says:

    I just can’t shake the astonishing devolution downwards this killing represents. Such utter, astounding evil directed at those who are the definition of helpless. The unleashing, as Lisa noted, of the profound anger and resentment towards each other is also sickening. The public square is a disgusting place.

    We are coming apart, as many here have noted, at the seems in ways big and small.

  368. Blake says:

    Oh, and full credit to you, Lisa. Most of the leftists we deal with refuse to learn anything from experience or history. Congratulations.

  369. Roddy Boyd says:

    Lisa,

    I had wondered what happened to you. You are correct–this place was where one could find some sharp humor. If memory serves, JD used to call you “SugarTits.”

    Glad you are well, in a professional sense, under the sad circumstances.

    (I used to post as McGruder, now I use my name.)

  370. SteveG says:

    cranky-d

    I figured you knew the difference and was just trying to help… that said, man did I get out on a limb and then start sawing.
    I have so little faith in Obama to be decent enough to let a crisis go to waste, that when I saw that old clip on TV (I had never seen it before) That I just assumed (which makes an ass out of me *insert juvenile snicker* ) I assumed that of course Obama would try to turn another mental health tragedy into political movement. Forward! are it were.

    To be honest I blame the ACLU and the courts for hamstringing parents and the state by denying even parents the right to medicate their mentally ill 18 yr old plus children.
    I remember people blaming Reagan for putting the mentally ill out onto the streets, but it was the ACLU and the courts who made the law.

  371. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I just can’t shake the astonishing devolution downwards this killing represents. Such utter, astounding evil directed at those who are the definition of helpless.

    We’ve been here before.

    Of course, then there was no reason to get all worked up. No over a bunch of religious freaks (Who doesn’t like buttons, anyways? Weirdos.) and especially not when a Republican President and Congress can’t be moved towards legislating more gun control, right?

  372. Ernst Schreiber says:

    To be honest I blame the ACLU and the courts for hamstringing parents and the state by denying even parents the right to medicate their mentally ill 18 yr old plus children.
    I remember people blaming Reagan for putting the mentally ill out onto the streets, but it was the ACLU and the courts who made the law.

    I blame Ken Kesey and Jack Nicholson.

    And Walt Disney too.

  373. Diana says:

    Lisa has come into the Light! Welcome back from the brink.

  374. leigh says:

    Damn, Goldstein, Wonkette just named you Stupidest Man on the Interboobs.

    Shows what she knows.

    Jeff is the Honey Badger of the Interwebs.

  375. cranky-d says:

    Lisa was cool even before she came to her senses.

  376. beemoe says:

    repubsrock says December 15, 2012 at 7:54 am
    Damn, Goldstein, Wonkette just named you Stupidest Man on the Interboobs.

    Way to stay relevant.

    Wonkette is the one who likes it up the ass, like thor.

  377. beemoe says:

    And welcome back, Lisa! Don’t be a stranger.

  378. leigh says:

    Lisa was an honest Lefty. Welcome back!

  379. BigBangHunter says:

    The other children that survived but with wounded souls.

    – Yes, but maybe “that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”. Children are vastly more resilient and adaptive than adults. The adults in any tragedy will generally further traumatize the kids due to emotional/overwrought reactions themselves.

    – Thats only human. Its also, in this sort of case, symptimatic of the true problem, and why these events will continue until society decides that facing our monsters is better than burrying our heads in the sand or looking for anything “else” we can blame it on so we don’t have to tackle the real cause, lasck of mental health programs support and recognition.

    – But hey, yammering on and on about gun control lets us all avoid that terrifying prospect, some of us actually suffer from mental health issues, and it gives the Left the perfect templete to play head games with every crisus. So you know, win, win!

  380. Silver Whistle says:

    Lisa and Spies back – a silver lining. It’s good to see you both.

  381. Lisa says:

    Yes! I fucking loved that name. Those were fun days. Though I am totally embarrassed when I think of all of my rattling on about collectivism (and “national conversations about race” lolz) at 40 years old. I sounded like a marginally literate freshman at NYU.

  382. Silver Whistle says:

    Oh Sugartits, I hope you liked Brussels.

  383. Blake says:

    Lisa, is there a 12 step program for recovering liberals? If so, what step are you on?

  384. TBPlayer says:

    I’ll take grotesquely false equivalents for $1000, Alex.

  385. guinspen says:

    Casey Stengel is running this joint?

    Who knew?

  386. Silver Whistle says:

    I’ll take grotesquely false equivalents for $1000, Alex.

    Because …?

    Didn’t think so.

  387. beemoe says:

    I’ll take grotesquely false equivalents for $1000, Alex.

    This anonymous poster thinks his intellect is the equal of any of the regulars here.

    Who is TBPlayer?

  388. cranky-d says:

    Perhaps he’s from Tennessee. Those guys have been silent a few months.

  389. BigBangHunter says:

    – Ok, false equivalemcy for $1000 it is….”Finding any fault with this politician or his policies is constantly characterized as racist”?

    …….. dut dut dut dut dut dut dahhh, dut dut dut dut dahhhh
    ……. *ding*
    ……Any one?…..Bueller?

  390. BigBangHunter says:

    = When you see the hive of cockroaches turn out in ernest you can bet your bitter-clinger white supremist bible thumping ass that Jeff the Goldstein is over the target.

  391. sdferr says:

    Well now, here’s an idea.

  392. Lisa says:

    Great to see you too Silver! Hugs to everyone. I am going to be here in this heavily armed enclave of one percenters in Wellington for the next month visiting my sister. Hope I get to catch up with everyone while I am here.

    Access to Western websites is spotty over yonder, though they constantly swear on a stack of camels that they do not censor or manipulate access to the web.

  393. Lisa says:

    (Loved Brussels, btw. I want to go back! But one goes where the work is.)

  394. sdferr says:

    Ah, and Lisa! S’good to see you back (not just here at pw but in the good ol’ USofA too for a time? Christmas bonus!)

  395. McGehee says:

    Lisa, I always liked you. I always thought it was because you could be respectful and fun in your disagreement with the rest of us. I confess I suspected it meant you were open to our point of view even as you argued against it.

    See what that gets you?

    So, are you back, or just visiting? I think we all missed you.

  396. Blitz says:

    missfixit says December 14, 2012 at 7:59 pm

    Pablo: kindergarten teachers are the meekest women you’ll ever meet. They couldn’t be trained to carry firearms in the classroom for the most part. This is not a feasible plan.

    Not always true Miss. My daughter is a teacher, and trained in self defense with handguns, rifles and shotguns. She always thinks the schools are safe, but not safe enough. You’d have to have her explain it, but there are a lot of what she calls ” whackjobs” out there, and wishes she could carry.

  397. McGehee says:

    I am going to be here in this heavily armed enclave of one percenters in Wellington for the next month visiting my sister. Hope I get to catch up with everyone while I am here.

    Access to Western websites is spotty over yonder

    Ah. Well, I hope you have a Plan B in case the Gulf states do prove vulnerable to the Arab Winter troubles that have befallen places farther to the north and west.

  398. sdferr says:

    Maybe we can draw Lisa out later on her interactions with Gulf Staters and their views of the confrontation with their hegemonic neighbor Iran? But later, as mentioned, may be better.

  399. LBascom says:

    Hi Blake, your link at December 15, 2012 at 11:01 am is broke, would you try again please?

    Hiya Lisa, glad you stopped by!

  400. Jeff G. says:

    I was awarded Wonkette’s Stupidest Man on the Internet! Which would have been cool if the trophy wasn’t of a bronze Jessica Cutler taking it in the pooper.

  401. BigBangHunter says:

    – Dah Hildebeast did a faint today, so maybe health issues will “prevent” her from appearing on Benghazi.

    – Drip, drip, drip.

  402. leigh says:

    Hill has a concussion. She’ll be unable to recall any signigicant details now.

  403. leigh says:

    significant, I mean

  404. McGehee says:

    I sure hope her concussion doesn’t cause her to go shooting people like a football player.

  405. McGehee says:

    signigicant

    RACIST!

  406. leigh says:

    Damn. Caught out by a misspelling. ; )

  407. cranky-d says:

    What would Freud have said about that?

  408. Pablo says:

    LISA!!! Good to see ya, chickie.

    Yup, it’s all your fault. Told ya.

  409. sdferr says:

    Something Rousseauvian no doubt, along the lines of Spellification and It’s Discontents.

  410. McGehee says:

    People who intend to parachute in and insult the host under a pseudonym like “TBPlayer” should consider not using an email address that actually contains their real name. Jeff isn’t the only one who can look at that information.

    Of course, he’s free to log in to his dashboard and change the email address on his PW user account, if he belatedly wishes to preserve his pseudonymity…

  411. Blake says:

    LBascom,

    Looks like I screwed the html pooch. One more time about the armed citizen versus Klackamas shooter.

    Sorry about that.

  412. leigh says:

    Could be sdferr. Freud is usually my default guy to blame.

  413. Blake says:

    Wow, I am html link challenged today.

  414. McGehee says:

    Blake, how are you inputting the URL? It winds up as an empty <a> tag, without even a href.

  415. leigh says:

    Blake, there will be no beastiality on this thread, mister.

  416. Blake says:

    McGehee, I would swear I’m putting a href in, but, knowing me, possibly not.

    The third link should do the trick. (that last one’s for you, leigh)

  417. LBascom says:

    Thanks. Looks like he held off shooting because of danger to bystanders.

    Armed AND responsible. How woulda thought?

  418. LBascom says:

    who, not how…

  419. Blake says:

    Yeah, amazing, isn’t it LBascom? A youngster who is not a trained cop or security guard acted responsibly. Imagine that.

  420. sdferr says:

    O for zeus’s sake, this didn’t happen because the Federal gov. slipped funding. Shit. Fucking progressives never quit.

  421. LBascom says:

    Seems outlawing guns isn’t the cure all some would have us believe. Who knew?

    The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year – a rise of 89 per cent.

    Also, what the hell are those Bobbies packing? Pre-Sturmgewehr 44 grease guns?

  422. leigh says:

    From what I have been able to ascertain from the garble of news on this topic, the young man was mentally ill. With what exactly, we don’t know. As was mentioned upthread, mom knew about this and still had (presumably) unsecured weapons in the home. Was the kid on meds? We don’t know. Mom should have been making him take them and if he was intractable and uncooperative, she should have had him in a halfway house or some sort of a group home, provided the whole mental illness thing isn’t just a go-to leap of logic from the media.

    This all boils down to a bunch of bad parenting, feel-good mental health treatment or lack thereof that led to the tragic outcomes we will all be beaten about the head and shoulders with for the next week or two.

  423. sdferr says:

    Tear-gas canister lobber? Bean-bags? Dunno.

  424. leigh says:

    Also, what the hell are those Bobbies packing?

    Whistles.

  425. BigBangHunter says:

    – Wouldn’t pay that much mind Jeff. Getting an award from a Leftie skank whos only claim to fame is poop-shute sex is like getting a $20 dollar discount bj from a hooker with stage 4 TB.

  426. sdferr says:

    ‘Z’at it? Rubber biscuits.

  427. LBascom says:

    Thought it was one of these for a minute there…

  428. BigBangHunter says:

    – Actually, the Brits “responde” to the situation as it presents itself, and will issue firearms when deemed necessary. Which results in even more people getting mowed down. Brilliant. 007 just can’t be everywhere at once for bloody sake!

  429. sdferr says:

    Someone may have already developed an actual grease shooter, with the proviso the “grease” splatters all over the rioters with a stink worse than turds and skunk paste combined, which would tend to concentrate the rioting mind on seeking lavage.

  430. Ernst Schreiber says:

    This all boils down to a bunch of bad parenting, feel-good mental health treatment or lack thereof that led to the tragic outcomes we will all be beaten about the head and shoulders with for the next week or two.

    In other words, Tuscon all over again –save for the leftwing activism for which to shut-up the media.

  431. Dalekhunter says:

    “This all boils down to a bunch of bad parenting, feel-good mental health treatment or lack thereof that led to the tragic outcomes we will all be beaten about the head and shoulders with for the next week or two.”

    In a country where guns are less expensive than comprehensive mental healthcare, because “commies.”

  432. McGehee says:

    DK, why do you hate the universe?

  433. Ernst Schreiber says:

    In a country where guns are less expensive than comprehensive mental healthcare, because “commies.”

    I’d say because “comprehensive”

    just for starters.

  434. LBascom says:

    In a country where guns are less expensive than comprehensive mental healthcare, because “commies.”

    If there was a point to that, it flew over my head.

  435. dicentra says:

    When you get to travel around the world, you are quickly disabused such notions.

    Damn straight. Every spoiled American (i.e., all Americans) need to spend some time in some dysfunctional economies and see how incredibly good we have it here.

    And to understand why that might be.

    And it’s good to see ya Lisa. I was wondering what happened to you. Sorry that your bubble got burst, but as they say, “The truth will set you free, but it will make you miserable first.”

    I have always thought white people were just being paranoid. That they were just so used to their white privilege that they could not stand to share their privilege with anyone else.

    It’s easy to see things that way. Whites were privileged, and they didn’t want to let Those People into the club.

    But it’s not 1953 anymore. Sometimes when you reverse the tide, it rebounds and comes back magnified tenfold.

  436. Ernst Schreiber says:

    If the gun market were as heavily distorted as the health insurance and health care markets are, maybe they wouldn’t be less expensive.

  437. geoffb says:

    Nice to see Lisa and SBP commenting. I hope you both have a wonderful Christmas.

    Been at a gun show this afternoon. Didn’t buy any as I already spent that money on Wednesday. Just something to do on a rainy day. Safest place in town.

  438. leigh says:

    In a country where guns are less expensive than comprehensive mental healthcare, because “commies.

    Is there some sort of reversal of knowledge filter you run all the comments here through, dalek? No one mentioned commies excepting you. Certainly I did not and I wrote the comment about which you are having comprehension problems.

  439. leigh says:

    geoff, my son’s wrestling club is raffling off a Mossberg 500 field and security shotgun. $1 a chance or 6 chances for $5. Need not be present to win.

  440. BigBangHunter says:

    ….because “commies.”

    – Why do you hate the Unions?

  441. geoffb says:

    So, how do you propose to do this over the intertubes leigh?

  442. leigh says:

    I don’t really. I was just mentioning it to rile up the lurkers and lefties.

  443. Pablo says:

    Wow. Robbie Parker, a father whose daughter was murdered yesterday is speaking to the press. This guy has his head screwed on straighter than I could ever imagine being possible.

    Damn, my heart breaks for him. His little girl had a stand up Daddy.

  444. Pablo says:

    In a country where guns are less expensive than comprehensive mental healthcare, because “commies.”

    Yeah, commies must be why the costs to produce a simple tool are less than the cost of hours upon hours upon hours of the labor of a number of highly educated professionals and the overhead required for them to provide their services. Idiot.

  445. […] end with Jeff Goldstein, who expresses exactly the way my thinking on this matter runs [worth quoting in full]: Predictable […]

  446. BigBangHunter says:

    – The Left has stepped up to a high pressure fire hose to spew teh hipocracy:

    “Pro-Union Activist Threatens the Michigan Governor: ‘We’ll Be at Your Daughter’s Soccer Game’

  447. Slartibartfast says:

    Welcome back, Lisa. You were missed.

    Jeff’s link back to that old Jessica Cutler post gave me some highly stifled chuckles.

  448. newrouter says:

    It appears that union protesters would have little luck finding the governor at the soccer field. According to a player profile on AnnArbor.com, his daughter participates only in softball and volleyball.

    link

  449. Pablo says:

    It just took me being away from my little enclosed echo chamber for a couple of years to see things clearly. Living somewhere where people have been manipulated with class and cultural resentment since before the Ottoman empire, I can look at my old peers and see that we have been similarly herded like cattle by our own predators. At least the Arab autocrats have perfected this craft and expertly divert their mass’s rage outward and away from their country. But our rage is being directed at our neighbors.

    Yes, this. Any chance you’re spreading a bit of this around while you’re back?

  450. beemoe says:

    In a country where guns are less expensive than comprehensive mental healthcare, because “commies.”

    Well there is your answer, Dale. The Democrats should mandate handguns and put themselves in charge of distribution.

    Few years you wouldn’t be able to find one anywhere.

  451. missfixit says:

    My-Parents-Are-So-Proud-of-my-Famous-Asshole Krispies

    oh Lord have mercy. sorry i missed that.

    Leigh: me and my mom are looking for purses that would be good for CC. got any suggestions?

  452. Bob Belvedere says:

    For your comment on Hillary Rodham and her ‘concussion’ McGehee, you have been awarded the THE SPOT-ON QUOTE OF THE DAY at:
    The Camp Of The Saints

  453. LBascom says:

    I found my tin foil hat, and I’m going there:

    But Unruh insists the sporadic conversation continued even after Holmes was moved to another cell in the area. He says that Holmes told him “he felt like he was in a video game” during the shooting, that “he wasn’t on his meds” and “nobody would help him.” He says Holmes also mentioned NLP — presumably, neuro-linguistic programming, a much-scorned and outmoded approach to psychotherapy — and claimed to have been “programmed” to kill by an evil therapist.

    “When he got out to his car, he wasn’t programmed no more,” Unruh says. “It sounded kind of crazy. He was trying to run it by me, basically.”

    Oops, they forgot the” kill yourself” programming.

    Say, anyone interested in talking about Benghazi?

    Imma go throw this hat away and lie down now…

  454. leigh says:

    Galco is your friend, missfixit. They have many different styles of bags.

    Coranado handbags is another one.

    They are both pricey, but I’ve had mine for over 15 years and it looks just like a Coach bag.

  455. missfixit says:

    thanks i will check it out Leigh! Just in time for Christmas. :(

    JHoward – I tweeted that pic. awesome

  456. sdferr says:

    WJC says to believe her: “When she says she’s got a headache, she means she don’t want no funnin’. Best to just stay clear.”

  457. Pablo says:

    Israel, JHo?

  458. leigh says:

    Looks like Israel to me.

  459. LBascom says:

    There is one fatal flaw to arming teachers. It would expose the lie to children, that guns are only for police and bad guys. This must not happen! Generations of indoctrination will be ruined!

  460. McGehee says:

    For your comment on Hillary Rodham and her ‘concussion’ McGehee, you have been awarded the THE SPOT-ON QUOTE OF THE DAY at: The Camp Of The Saints

    I want to thank all the abnormally small people I trampled into the dust to get where I am today. You like me, you really, really like me!

  461. McGehee says:

    Not to worry, Comrade Bascom. We’ll just issue teachers badges and uniforms like the TSA.

  462. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I’m going to go ahead and guess M-1 carbine.

    That’s a nice lookin’ teacher.

  463. BigBangHunter says:

    – Plus that way the Lefturd activists can have both a teacher and a parole officer. all in one.

  464. happyfeet says:

    her stocking was hung on the chimney with care in hopes that lisa the expat soon would be there

    I didn’t think you’d make it so I ate your chockit bar

    sorry we can go to Cracker Barrel and you can pick out something tasty for to replace it

    and merry christmas to you Mr. spies it’s our last christmas without the obamacare, so that makes it a very special christmas indeed

    btw my niece says we have to wear green n white on monday cause of those are the school colors of the connecticut kids

    she doesn’t say which green though

  465. newrouter says:

    algore green perhaps?

  466. happyfeet says:

    monday seems forever away

  467. Darleen says:

    In a country where guns are less expensive than comprehensive mental healthcare, because “commies.”

    It’s one of the many hysterical and cynical memes the gungrabbing Left is running through Twitter. Some are demanding the NRA be charged as accessory to murder, Bill Moyers is conspiracy mongering that the NRA has America under the gun.

    I’ve been seeing the same Healthcare v Guns stupidity all over the place.

    Usually goes “If everyone has guns society will be better but if everyone has healthcare it wont?”

    As if the NRA or any Constitutionalist has been demanding Big Government PROVIDE at taxpayer expense, a gun for everyone!

    Ed Shits … er Schultz … says the Founding Fathers “had slaves, oppressed women and were not tolerant” so that negates the legitimacy of the 2nd amendment or something.

    The Left’s barely contained giddiness at dipping their hands into the blood of these children and running through the streets is disgusting beyond words.

    I’d say “shame on you” to them, but they are far beyond shame.

  468. cranky-d says:

    Shame is not even on their radar. That’s a big part of the problem.

  469. newrouter says:

    but they are far beyond shame.

    start referring to the shooter as a pete singer abortionist

  470. happyfeet says:

    soledad keeps touching herself when she thinks nobody’s looking she’s really getting off on this

    it’s kinda disturbing to tell you the truth

  471. Darleen says:

    JH

    Thanks for that pic … I’ve put it up on Twitter, too.

  472. BigBangHunter says:

    – When your life is pitifully empty of anything approaching human kindness and sustenance like the typical Progressive/Lefturd, the only thing Left is to be a pariah, At least that way you get a sort of attention.

    – Even ridicule and loathing is preferable to being ignored when your soul is a burned out husk, and the only thing that makes you happy is otheres misery.

  473. BigBangHunter says:

    – I have no idea who Soledad is, other than a local mountain, but maybe ita a message she doesn’t need you or something.

  474. newrouter says:

    obrien – cnn

  475. happyfeet says:

    soledad has always seemed very distant

    I think it’s cause she has her own agenda

  476. newrouter says:

    the real ? (who watches cnn) is answered

  477. LBascom says:

    Holder: We Must Answer ‘Hard Questions’ About Gun Rights

    Already been done…a hundred years ago not withstanding.

  478. beemoe says:

    I lol everytime I hear Soledad mentioned thinking about the time she got pissy about the man keeping her down or some shit and it turned out nobody even knew she was black.

  479. beemoe says:

    Holder: We Must Answer ‘Hard Questions’ About Gun Rights

    You could start by answering hard questions bout Fast and Furious, asswipe.

  480. happyfeet says:

    oh. I thought she was vaguely hispanic like that chick bieber’s been hooking up with

  481. cranky-d says:

    “Hard Questions about Gun Rights” means “You should not be able to defend yourselves, subjects, so we’ll take that basic human right which precedes the Constitution by thousands of years away from you.”

  482. newrouter says:

    “Hard Questions about Gun Rights”

    meanwhile at gun control inc

    10 shot, including 4 teens, Friday afternoon and night

  483. Pablo says:

    You could start by answering hard questions bout Fast and Furious, asswipe.

    Boom. +eleventy

  484. JHoward says:

    Israel, JHo?

    Yes. So, you know, Jooos and other unsavory types given to lax airport security and murderous tendencies.

  485. beemoe says:

    By the way, repubsrock is thor. I recognize his lame ass schtick.

  486. beemoe says:

    Justin Bieber’s murder, castration plotted, police say

    Investigation focusing on micro-surgeons?

  487. happyfeet says:

    Mr. thor is back?

    twas the night before Christmas and 40 below when proteins went up in search of their foe!

  488. Betsy, Sew Faster says:

    happyfeet says December 15, 2012 at 5:56 pm
    oh. I thought she was vaguely hispanic like that chick bieber’s been hooking up with

    They’re Latino until they are forced to defend themselves from a more equal more equal than others other.

    Or they’re a verified Republican voter.

    At which point they are White (hispanic)

  489. leigh says:

    Soledad O’Brien’s parents named her after a prison and a potato dish.

    I don’t get it.

  490. happyfeet says:

    whatever she is i did notice they let her do a “news special” called *Who’s Black In America* that nobody watched but I bet she gets gobs of stupid awards for

    I wondered why a vaguely hispanic white Latino was doing a show on black people but I figured maybe she had a little sumpin sumpin going on with the donlemon, who looks like he’s eager to lose his virginity

    to a girl

  491. rnabs says:

    Why aren’t morons like dale k, etc, the recipients of a psychopath’s rage? Really.

  492. leigh says:

    I see by her bio that her mother is Afro-Cuban, whatever that is, and her father is Australian. And that her real name is Maria Teresa O’Brien. And she doesn’t speak Spanish.

    It’s looking pretty good for me getting my Tribal benefits since I have high cheekbones and old family pictures with Indians in Tribal dress. Headdresses and the whole nine yards. I had a Shawnee woman at the post office tell me that she could tell by looking at me that I’m Indian. Who am I to argue with an old Indian woman?

  493. happyfeet says:

    so was her mom a commie I find that really easy to believe

  494. leigh says:

    Commie mommy. Aussie daddy. It’s all starting to make sense.

    Oh, and she dropped out of undergrad at Harvard and then went back after she had her career revved up to ‘earn’ her degree. In Journalism.

  495. LBascom says:

    I’ve been thinking it over, and I think I know how to stop this sort of thing in the future.

    Make it a HS grad requirement, every student must have at least one semester of fire arm proficiency, and pass a test for concealed carry*.

    The class would cover constitutional principles of the right to life and self preservation, basic familiarity of weapons, and practical application. Second semester covering tactics and advanced concept (reloading, military philosophy) available.

    *Test scores not official, permits authorized through the sheriff dept. of your county exclusively.

  496. sdferr says:

    It’s not clear that she could have helped snapping to become a brain-dead indoctrinated leftist moron, poor girl. She went to all the wrong schools.

  497. leigh says:

    I’ve been behind mandatory conscription for at least two years after high school for ages now. You don’t see this kind of shit going on in Switzerland where everyone owns a rifle and knows how to use it.

  498. newrouter says:

    Charlotte Bacon, 2/22/06, female
    – Daniel Barden, 9/25/05, male
    – Rachel Davino, 7/17/83, female.
    – Olivia Engel, 7/18/06, female
    – Josephine Gay, 12/11/05, female
    – Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 04/04/06, female
    – Dylan Hockley, 3/8/06, male
    – Dawn Hochsprung, 06/28/65, female
    – Madeleine F. Hsu, 7/10/06, female
    – Catherine V. Hubbard, 6/08/06, female
    – Chase Kowalski, 10/31/05, male
    – Jesse Lewis, 6/30/06, male
    – James Mattioli , 3/22/06, male
    – Grace McDonnell, 12/04/05, female
    – Anne Marie Murphy, 07/25/60, female
    – Emilie Parker, 5/12/06, female
    – Jack Pinto, 5/06/06, male
    – Noah Pozner, 11/20/06, male
    – Caroline Previdi, 9/07/06, female
    – Jessica Rekos, 5/10/06, female
    – Avielle Richman, 10/17/06, female
    – Lauren Rousseau, 6/1982, female (full date of birth not specified)
    – Mary Sherlach, 2/11/56, female
    – Victoria Soto, 11/04/85, female
    – Benjamin Wheeler, 9/12/06, male
    – Allison N. Wyatt, 7/03/06, female

  499. leigh says:

    She didn’t have a prayer, sdferr. Her mom and dad met at Johns Hopkins. (Sorry Jeff)

  500. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I see by her bio that her mother is Afro-Cuban, whatever that is,

    What that is is that she’s got more slave blood than the white guy in the Oval Office.

    That’s what that is.

  501. LBascom says:

    I don’t like mandatory conscription. Mandatory civics instruction I can get behind.

  502. Pablo says:

    Assuming the use of force continuum is included in that, I like it, Slart.

  503. Pablo says:

    Err, Lee.

  504. sdferr says:

    Seems to me LBascom the idea is good enough (which is to say appealing on its own merits to the likes of high schoolers) that it ought not be necessary to make mandatory, but leave to voluntary election (so as not to have to struggle against the tide of current paedagogic doctrine), yet you’d still have enough graduates to see an improvement in the cohort’s general knowledge, skill and historical understanding to make quite a difference in the world they go on to inhabit.

  505. leigh says:

    Civics instruction would depend on who was doing the teaching, though. If it’s through the schools? Eh.

    I like the idea of the citizen soldier and everyone being familiar with firearms, firearms safety and owning a firearm that they know how to use properly. Maybe not conscription, but a summer school sort of a boot camp thing before college or work.

  506. newrouter says:

    Mandatory civics instruction

    taught by nea proggtards?

  507. LBascom says:

    18 were female. Why do guns hate women?

  508. Pablo says:

    Soledad isn’t Latino, she’s Cajun. At least a quadroon, maybe an octoroon. Also, she’s half white as a ghost, like Obama.

  509. leigh says:

    No kidding, Pablo. My swarthy half Portuguese cousins are darker than her.

  510. LBascom says:

    It wouldn’t hurt for the nea proggtards to become proficient enough to teach the course as well…

  511. missfixit says:

    well since everyone in Israel is required to enter the service, it makes it easy to train and arm their population. Whereas here….like .02% of the population serves in the military? So we get to all be sitting ducks I guess.

    Leigh those purses are expensive. i’m thinking ankle holster.

  512. leigh says:

    They are expensive. But you deserve it. ; )

  513. missfixit says:

    thing is, me carrying at work all day doesn’t really make me feel better. Because my kids are at school.

    i want to homeschool. but what would i do for $$

    Prostitution never looked so good :(

  514. LBascom says:

    Sdferr, my idea of making it mandatory was to make it universal. All the little skulls full of mush (along with those teaching them)would have to learn basic firearms use and safety, along with the principles of the right to self defense.

    Still sounds better than the draft to me.

  515. newrouter says:

    i want to homeschool. but what would i do for $$

    how much do you need to make?

  516. newrouter says:

    Sdferr, my idea of making it mandatory was to make it universal

    no do it at a state level

  517. sdferr says:

    Ooh, let’s for sure leave the military draft out of the conversation. For one, it’s a well settled issue for now. For another, it just doesn’t belong. Whereas your own idea on the other hand is very pertinent to the raging questions on the scene, and in many respects a great beginning. I don’t know why universality is a “value” or to put it plainer, aim, in this instance though, where our nearer principle is liberty? But I’d be happy to entertain your arguments for it (universality, that is). But then, would we be well advised to make similar arguments to introduce a teaching of say, Homer, Virgil, Aquinas, and others?

  518. LBascom says:

    no do it at a state level

    Oh…well, yes. Do it constitutionally.

  519. LBascom says:

    But I’d be happy to entertain your arguments for it (universality, that is). But then, would we be well advised to make similar arguments to introduce a teaching of say, Homer, Virgil, Aquinas, and others?

    More in line with HS grads should be proficient in reading, writing, and arithmetic, is my thinking.

  520. serr8d says:

    Couple things on the psycho kid Adam Lanza stand out…

    Marsha Lanza said her husband [kid’s dad] saw Adam as recently as June and recalled nothing out of the ordinary about him.

    Ryan Lanza [kid’s older brother] had been extremely cooperative and was not under arrest or in custody by Saturday morning, but investigators were still searching his computers and phone records. He told law enforcement he had not been in touch with his brother since about 2010.

    Well, there’s a tight family group. A loner kid, ‘brilliant’, ‘goth’, ‘LAN parties’ (video gamer), ‘skinny’, introverted, and with easily noted mental impairments, living in a McMansion on a hill with his mother, who was ‘overbearing’.

    The kid suffocated on acute loneliness.

  521. missfixit says:

    after this year I could probably pay all bills and feed my kids etc for $2500/mo… maybe less.
    engineering doesn’t work as a freelance job. Unless you’re in coding i suppose. Been wracking my brain about this for 8 months now with no solutions. besides cooking moonshine and general illegal activities.

  522. missfixit says:

    did daddy dearest abandon Adam Lanza? Seems an epidemic these days. I had a leftist scream at me that I was a fool to own a firearm because one of my kids would likely get his hands on it someday. And I guess one of my kids could go nuts.

  523. sdferr says:

    In some sense there won’t be any learning worthy the name learning without reading, mathematics and writing (which is more or less just reading done over again from the productive end). But surely reading and maths. Whereas learning without knowledge of the use of firearms and instruction in the historical context of their development and use? Easy peasy, as that’s being done now. So it seems like we’d need more explanation. We could sooner offer the civics lessons as a universal need on the simple grounds that we presume the kids grow up to be citizen-voters, and in that respect stand in need of education to those ends.

  524. newrouter says:

    can you work from home?

  525. LBascom says:

    Maybe it’s just spite. If they can throw God from the classroom on 1st amendment rights, we should go on offense with regards to 2nd amendment rights.

    Inalienable rights are so hundred years ago…

  526. BigBangHunter says:

    – Well fellow bitter-clingers, Butler beat Indianna today, and I’m headed out for some Kimchee and Borgogee with my kiddo, his suster and his cousin from Korea after the Aztecs roundball game thats coming in a few.

    – Seven more days to the apochalypse, so might as well enjoy,

  527. missfixit says:

    yes. i want to work from home. was going to ask my boss but i already know the answer.

  528. sdferr says:

    So while we’re at it we may as well toss in mandatory Latin and Attic Greek. Oh, and French, German and Mandarin Chinese. But hey, eat your peas.

  529. beemoe says:

    gbesq1 says December 15, 2012 at 7:29 pm

    Hi guys. Any comment on the following? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930121512.htm

    Yeah. Stay the fuck out of Philadelphia.

  530. Pablo says:

    Hi guys. Any comment on the following? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930121512.htm

    Yeah, let’s not try to extrapolate the denizens of Philadelphia across the entire American population.

    As identified by police and medical examiners, they randomly selected 677 cases of Philadelphia residents who were shot in an assault from 2003 to 2006. Six percent of these cases were in possession of a gun (such as in a holster, pocket, waistband, or vehicle) when they were shot.

    These shooting cases were matched to Philadelphia residents who acted as the study’s controls. To identify the controls, trained phone canvassers called random Philadelphians soon after a reported shooting and asked about their possession of a gun at the time of the shooting. These random Philadelphians had not been shot and had nothing to do with the shooting.

    Maybe if you could tell me how many of the shot while carrying Philadelphians were ignorant, untrained gangstas, we could talk.

  531. Pablo says:

    OK, beemoe did it better.

  532. LBascom says:

    Missfixit, relax. Your kids are as safe in school as they are anywhere.

    If your going to worry, they are probably in more danger getting to school than they are at school. But that level of worry is destructive. Faith and hope are virtues.

  533. leigh says:

    Did you list your house yet? If you can sell it or rent it, you can get out of there and get to goat herding.

  534. missfixit says:

    ha! Leigh if i could sell enough goat cheese to pay the bills I’d be set :)

    Faith and hope are virtues yes. That have been dwindling the last 2 years at a horrific rate.

  535. LBascom says:

    Sdferr, I don’t understand. Are you arguing there should be no mandatory standards for graduation?

    Not many Americans speak Latin, there are millions of guns in the US. Is that immaterial?

  536. cranky-d says:

    Most shootings occur among people who know each other, as in rival gang members. If you remove that element from the stats, gun crimes are quite low.

  537. leigh says:

    You could make goats milk soaps. They are all the rage and cost a fortune, but are relatively easy and inexpensive to make and the children can help out.

    I think the cheeses are going to take finding a cheesemaker to help out until you get it knocked.

  538. beemoe says:

    The Philly study also only covered folks who were actually shot. Someone who successfully defended themselves without getting shot weren’t counted.

    But there attackers would have been counted as victims, of course.

    Pretty laughable stuff.

  539. gbesq1 says:

    Beemoe and Pablo: do you think Chicago, DC, New York, LA, Kansas City, Miami, etc. are any different? 45% of the US population lives in cities with > 1 million population.

  540. newrouter says:

    but i already know the answer.

    depends on how you sell it. commute, lunch, breaks, water cooler bs eliminated. you do your job and home school. maybe take a small pay decrease for a productivity clause. if you have elementary age kids i push this up til they are in middle school where a cyber school plus some of you works. just my $0.000002(thx bernanke)

  541. leigh says:

    <700 people in that study, too. No access to the data and how it was compiled, either.

  542. sdferr says:

    No, I’m not arguing that […no mandatory standards for graduation?], let alone much of anything (as yet), save perhaps that I think the idea you presented is both worthy in substance on its own legs to be ‘useful’ in the sense of improving the general knowledge and skill in a future population, and to that extent, worthy enough to avoid the probable pitfall of the struggle to make it universal, as opposed to see it instituted in instruction as an elective offering (which I assert! would be popular enough to make a serious dent in the prevalent ignorance now ruling the scene; even if only taken up by a part of the whole population of high school students. Half a loaf, to gist the thing I believe, is better than none. And indeed, so much better as to make a promise to change the whole psychological climate, to speak loosely, surrounding concealed carry and firearm liberty in general. It may even turn out to be so popular that the voluntary demand could catch on to become ‘cool’, and result in the end in near universal adherence on its own.).

  543. LBascom says:

    Umm, OK. I’ll take half a loaf to none.

  544. geoffb says:

    In mid-September, the University of Pennsylvania released a study paid for by the NIH with $639,586 of your tax dollars. The study’s “conclusion” claimed people who possessed guns are 4.5 times more likely to be shot than people who do not possess them.

    As usual, media all over the country publicized this latest “good” news. Gun-ban groups jumped on the bandwagon.

    Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke announced: “The study’s findings show once again the risks of gun ownership and how having more guns correlates with more gun violence. This research severely undermines the argument by gun pushers that carrying a gun automatically makes a person safer. In urban areas, gun possessors, far from being protected by their guns, are at an increased risk of harm. Restrictions on carrying guns clearly make sense as a smart public safety strategy.”

    The lead author of the study was Dr. Charles C. Branas of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. He was assisted by four Penn colleagues, including Douglas J. Wiebe of the Firearm and Injury Center.

    The researchers interviewed shooting victims in Philadelphia within a few days of being shot and tried to find the ones who possessed guns at the time of their shootings. About three-quarters cooperated. Although the study included people who were killed, it does not explain how data was gathered about them. Perhaps it came from police reports or interviews of people who knew the deceased.

    The researchers then used random telephone calls to try to find a “control”–a similar person who had not been shot. They attempted to find persons who lived in neighborhoods with similar economic and racial characteristics, who had similar income levels and so on.

    This is called the “case-control method.” The shooting victim is the “case” and the other person is the “control.” Case-control has been used successfully in genuine medical research, most famously in the studies showing that smokers were much more likely to get lung cancer.

    Case-control is also widely used in anti-gun research, although with considerably less validity, partly because finding “controls” who really match the subjects is much more difficult.

    After analyzing the numbers, the Branas team announced, “individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. Among gun assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist,” the likelihood “increased to 5.45.”

    In conclusion: “On average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses are possible and do occur each year, the probability of success may be low for civilian gun users in urban areas. Such users should rethink their possession of guns or, at least, understand that regular possession necessitates careful safety countermeasures. Suggestions to the contrary, especially for urban residents who may see gun possession as a surefire defense against a dangerous environment, should be discussed and thoughtfully reconsidered.”

    A few flaws in the study are clear.

    First, the study said a victim was “possessing” a gun even if the gun was “in a nearby vehicle, or in another place.” It obviously tells you nothing about the risk or utility of the victim’s gun if someone gets shot in a park while his rifle is a quarter-mile away in a pickup truck.

    Second, if the study failed to measure gun ownership accurately, then its conclusions are invalid. The authors acknowledge that if just 5 percent of the shooting victims who did not say they had a gun actually did have a gun, then the study would show no statistically significant risk from gun possession.

    The study would also lose significance if it underestimated gun ownership by the controls–the people who were interviewed by phone and who might not be willing to tell a stranger they own a gun. Strangely, Branas and his co-authors neglected to disclose what amount of non-reporting by the controls would undermine the study. A skeptical reader may wonder if under-reporting by even a small percent of the controls would undermine the findings.

    Third, 83 percent of the shootings occurred outdoors. Presumably, a significant number of the rest occurred outside the home, in public places such as bars. In Pennsylvania, carrying in such circumstances almost always requires a Right-to-Carry permit. A person carrying a gun without the required permit would, by definition, be breaking the law.

    The study excluded persons under the age of 21, who in Pennsylvania cannot obtain Right-to-Carry permits. The study also made no effort to determine if any of the gun carriers were illegal aliens, to whom permits cannot be issued.

    So the study actually provides no information about whether its purported risks are applicable to the law-abiding population, because it provides no information about how many–if any–of the gun carriers had lawful Right-to-Carry permits. Additionally, according to the study, 53 percent of the shooting victims had prior arrest records. The researchers tried to find controls who also had arrest records, yet the study did not report what the arrests were for or make distinctions among types of arrests.

    Obviously, a “control” who had one arrest record for drug possession 10 years ago is no fair match for a “case” who had an arrest record for armed robbery last year, and three prior arrests for assault. The latter person is much more likely to spend time with, and provoke violent confrontations with, other dangerous people.

    In fact, illegal gun carriers with prior criminal records are more likely to be involved in violent confrontations than other people. It is possible that they carry illegally possessed guns because they are even more inclined to consort with violent people and get into fights. But that proves nothing about whether gun carrying by the law-abiding who have Right-to-Carry permits is dangerous.

    Moreover, the study’s assumption that the “case” people who were shot were comparable (except in their rate of gun possession) to the “control” people who were not remains unproven.

    The Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed J. Michael Oakes, a professor of Epidemiology and Community Health at the University of Minnesota. “There are some sketchy things going on here,” he said.

    “The foundation of the case control study is the sense that those who are the cases are exactly the same as those who are in the control group,” Oakes explained. The Inquirer summarized Oakes’ observation that, “Branas is assuming the people who were shot were no more likely to have guns than a group of controls of the same gender and racial mix.”

    “It’s a big stretch,” Oakes said.

    University of Chicago Economist Jens Ludwig is one of the most experienced, and most intellectually rigorous, academic supporters of restrictive gun policies. Yet he, too, was skeptical of the conclusion.

    “They can’t tease out whether guns are contributing to assault or assault risk is contributing to gun ownership,” Ludwig said.

    In other words, people who are especially at risk of being attacked might be more likely than other people to carry guns, rather than the other way around.

    Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck put it succinctly: “It is precisely as if medical researchers found that insulin use is more common among persons who suffer from diabetes than among those who are not diabetic (something that is most assuredly true), and concluded that insulin use raises one’s risk of diabetes.” Or as Jacob Sullum quipped on Reason.com, it’s like discovering that people who are wearing parachutes are much more likely to suffer injuries from falling than people who don’t wear parachutes–the risk comes from jumping out of a plane, not from wearing a parachute.

    The Philadelphia Inquirer should be commended for interviewing three outside experts about the story. Unfortunately, most of the coverage in the rest of America’s so-called “mainstream” media simply reported the study’s shaky conclusion as if it were a proven fact.

    After its release, Kleck wrote a short essay about the Penn study blasting it as “the very epitome of junk science in the guns-and-violence field–poor quality research designed to arrive at an ideologically predetermined conclusion.” Kleck noted the authors had announced guns do not have protective value, yet the authors had not even studied whether a single victim even used a gun defensively.

    The Penn article, Kleck wrote, “is merely a reflection of the fact that the same factors that place people at greater risk of becoming assault victims also motivate many people to acquire, and in some cases carry away from home, guns for self-protection . . . For example, being a drug dealer or member of a street gang puts one at much higher risk of being shot, but also makes it far more likely one will acquire a gun for protection.”

    Research on people who actually use guns for protection shows the opposite of what Branas and his colleagues claim. Kleck and Jongyeon Tark examined data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual study by the Census Bureau and the Department of Justice that asks individuals if they were crime victims in the last year and, if so, collects information about the circumstances.

    Of those who used guns defensively, the Kleck and Tark study found only 2 percent were injured after they used guns. (“Resisting Crime: The Effects of Victim Action on the Outcomes of Crimes.” Criminology, vol. 42, 2005.) These findings were consistent with previous studies of actual defensive gun use, which found such use does not increase the victim’s risk of harm: Gary Kleck, “Crime Control Through the Private Use of Armed Force,” Social Problems, 1988; Gary Kleck & Miriam A. Delone, “Victim Resistance and Offender Weapon Effects in Robbery,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1993; Lawrence Southwick, “Self-Defense With Guns”, Journal of Criminal Justice, 2000.

    But the Philadelphia story was not marketed for people who are familiar with social science studies of defensive gun use. It is simply a propaganda tool for people who unquestioningly believe newspaper accounts of what scientists say–and who never notice that their local paper prominently promotes anti-gun studies but never reports the release of studies about the safety benefits of gun ownership.

    Unfortunately, one thing is clear: Much more of the same type of disinformation–funded by your hard-earned tax dollars–is likely to come our way in coming months and years.

    Plus.

  545. gbesq1 says:

    Beemoe: Please. The study looked at that.

    My experience yesterday (after the stupid fucking proggtard etc etc stuff calmed down a bit) was that my interlocutors were not interested in data. “Soft target” is not the end of the conversation, it is the beginning. The soft target argument REQUIRES that fewer people die in violent incidents when the potential victims are armed that when they are not. This is an empirical question, however difficult it may be to answer. I would ask the following question, although I suspect I know the answer: if the science says what the Philadelphia study concluded, will you change you mind about gun-free zones? You don’t have to, but you need a reason (as in reasoning to an idea) if not.

  546. happyfeet says:

    cnn says a lot of the kids what didn’t get shot are sad and anxious

    the anderson cooper says maybe counseling would help and asks the sanjay goopta if he thinks that’s a good idea or not

    the sanjay goopta says yes sometimes counseling helps but sometimes it takes a long time but sometimes it doesn’t take a long time

    i smell peabody

  547. sdferr says:

    To make shorter, it’s just my experience that the (even potentially justifiable) arguments about ‘mandatory’ aren’t likely to be successful, so may as well be avoided from the jump (unless they’re really good, i.e. really strong — in which case, we’d have to see them to judge). If they’re in any way based on non-universal principle (like my desire to see more people educated in dead languages, say). they’re doomed to time-wasting squabbling.

  548. John Bradley says:

    The only actual bit of data in that Philadelphia study is that, in the period listed, 6% of the people shot were carrying a gun at the time.

    The “matched the cases to a control group” of Philadelphians who had nothing to do with the incidents, presumably to see what the carry-rate of the average non-shot Philadelphian happens to be. They don’t report what that number was in this ‘news story’, so we’re only to assume it was lower than 6%. Or not, they don’t say.

    So the only take-away I’m getting from the data is that there’s some degree of correlation between people who get shot, and people who fear getting shot, because they live in shitty neighborhoods, or engage in high-risk jobs (like, say, drug dealing and/or general gang-bangery) — and thus carry.

    To which… “duh!”

    Also, I’d suggest that “getting shot” or “shooting someone” isn’t exactly a disease, and as such would appear to be well outside the purview of the field of epidemiology. Sort of like how “US Senator and Divinity School Dropout” wouldn’t indicate knowing shit about “climate science”, but whatever.

    Also, this quote: from study author Charles C. Branas, PhD, Associate Professor of Epidemiology. “Will possessing a firearm always safeguard against harm or will it promote a false sense of security?” sort of gives the game way. False dichotomy, anyone?

  549. missfixit says:

    depends on how you sell it.

    yeah I’m getting up the nerve to ask him after Jan 1st. as of right now he won’t even let me have my office away from the sales dept, he is making me wear earplugs so I can concentrate on my equations. If that gives you any indication. lolz

    so who’s taking bets that this time the gun grabbers will be successful?

  550. cranky-d says:

    I wouldn’t care if a lot more people died by firearms. Self-defense is a fundamental right. If you take away that ability you create a society in which the strong prey on the weak. That’s how it is already in many cities. You are kidding yourself if you think taking guns away from law-abiding people will cut down on crime. It does just the opposite.

    The police cannot help in your defense. It’s up to you.

  551. newrouter says:

    will you change you mind about gun-free zones?

    advertising your defenselessness is proggtard stupid. would you like a “kick me” sign on your back?

  552. John Bradley says:

    But I see everyone else already said the same things while I was writing that. I may curse you all with my dying breath, but I’ll probably have forgotten about it by then.

  553. sdferr says:

    About data.

  554. cranky-d says:

    Gun-free zones are a special case that lets criminals know that the law abiding people who make up a good chunk of their prey will not be able to defend themselves. In other words, they make places good hunting grounds.

  555. missfixit says:

    shouldn’t we be more focused on locking up all the mentally unstable people? Seems like none of this shit would happen if it weren’t for the nutbags.

  556. cranky-d says:

    In other words, gun-free zones don’t work because criminals, by definition, will disobey the law. Nothing more need be said, really.

  557. newrouter says:

    If that gives you any indication

    if you are doing work that requires alot of thought ask to do it a few days a week as a test. instead of 8 hrs/day you might be able to solve more things within 9-12 hrs/day(because you are at home and pondering a problem while cooking dinner) in a less distracted environment.

  558. Pablo says:

    45% of the US population lives in cities with > 1 million population.

    I don’t. Sucks for them, huh?

  559. missfixit says:

    ask to do it a few days a week as a test

    ok. I am going to try, worst he can do is say no right? he probably won’t fire me because I’m the only employee left who can operate some expensive software there. #YAY

  560. leigh says:

    gbesq1 , that study is garbage. See geoffb’s lengthy post above.

  561. missfixit says:

    Kathleen whats-her-face was onto something when she wrote about this country being divided between the city dwellers and the rural. There is some truth to the idea that what works for one group doesn’t work for the other.

  562. BT says:

    I don’t own a gun. Never have.

    The day i buy a gun is the day they ban them.

  563. Pablo says:

    BTW, have you noticed that all those murderous shitholes have long been run by Democrats? I have.

  564. geoffb says:

    All these little studies which never get to the real nub which is that no matter how many laws against guns you have, two classes of people will still have them. Those whose lives revolve around breaking the law and the ones empowered by the State to have them.

    As much horror, terror, and murder are committed by the armed criminal element it is, has been, and always will be dwarfed by that done at the behest of those in power in a government. This has been chronicled over and over again. Disarm the general public and at some point it will become easier to simply eliminate some of that same public who have become political problems and since they are not armed it is not hard to do. Reasons always abound to just do it, and do it again, and again. And still the call goes out that the fire can’t burn this time because this time we shall do it right.

    When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
    And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

  565. Pablo says:

    I’d suggest you get ahead of the curve, BT.

  566. Pablo says:

    Come for my guns and you’ll get my ammo at a rate that can be measured in feet per second.

  567. newrouter says:

    ok. I am going to try, worst he can do is say no right?

    well the work at home thing also has big brother. a lady i know who does it has her keyboard activity monitored. tradeoffs. so i would say ask folks doing this already before going to the boss. don’t rush it. also can you do cyber school in your state?

  568. BT says:

    Pablo,

    I have been sorely tempted as of late.

  569. gbesq1 says:

    Pablo: actually, it doesn’t. From ages 4-17 lived in small towns in Colorado, Oregon, and Alabama. Went urban after that. I like cities. Different strokes. Still love the mountains. After the holidays (dare I call it Christmas?) I plan on taking hunting/rifle course so I can track and shoot Bambi. Then I will eat her.

    newrouter: the vast majority of residents of major cities are not gun owners and I suspect almost none of them feel vulnerable. The world has changed. Crime rates in American cities are where they were in the 50s.

  570. Jeff G. says:

    On the Branas study.

    More.

    As others have already noted, these kinds of studies — which as John B points out gives away the game in the framing — are notorious for including victims who were at the outset the attackers, but then were shot. It’s playing with data, not science — and the data it plays with is heavily weighted toward reaching a preconceived conclusion.

    GIGO.

  571. Pablo says:

    Pablo: actually, it doesn’t.

    So you’re OK with the state of things then? So what are you looking for?

  572. leigh says:

    Bambi was a him. Learn the difference or Mr. Ranger will write you up.

  573. palaeomerus says:

    “newrouter: the vast majority of residents of major cities are not gun owners and I suspect almost none of them feel vulnerable.”

    Substantiate these “suspicians” of yours. Hell, substantiate the ‘vast majority’ stuff too.

  574. BT says:

    the vast majority of residents of major cities are not gun owners and I suspect almost none of them feel vulnerable. The world has changed. Crime rates in American cities are where they were in the 50s.

    Suppose they held a gun buy back program and nobody came.

  575. Pablo says:

    Those evil gun shows? Nobody ever gets shot at them.

  576. Jeff G. says:

    From the Reason article by Sullum:

    The one explanation the researchers don’t mention is the one that will occur first to defenders of the right to armed self-defense: Maybe people who anticipate violent confrontations—such as drug dealers, frequently robbed bodega owners, and women with angry ex-boyfriends—are especially likely to possess guns, just as people who jump out of airplanes are especially likely to possess parachutes. The closest Branas et al. come to acknowledging that tendency is their admission, toward the end of the article, that they “did not account for the potential of reverse causation between gun possession and gun assault”—that is, the possibility that a high risk of being shot “causes” gun ownership, as opposed to the other way around. While the reseachers took into account a few confounding variables related to this tendency (including having an arrest record, living in a rough neighborhood, and having a high-risk occupation), they cannot possibly have considered all the factors that might make people more prone to violent attack and therefore more likely to have a gun as a defense against that hazard. To take just one example, not every criminal has an arrest record. Yet it seems fair to assume that criminals in Philadelphia are a) more likely than noncriminals to be armed and b) more likely than noncriminals to be shot. That does not mean having a gun increases their chance of being shot. Certainly they believe (as police officers do) that having a gun makes them safer than they otherwise would be. Nothing in this study contradicts that belief.

    I bolded the important bit.

  577. newrouter says:

    newrouter: the vast majority of residents of major cities are not gun owners and I suspect almost none of them feel vulnerable.

    the shots fired and injuries and deaths weekly in chicago make your observation false

  578. missfixit says:

    yeah don’t forget those doe tags or you get in trouble. the DNR man cometh.

    The “vast majority” have no fear? hmm don’t know about that.

  579. newrouter says:

    the issue in chicago isn’t guns. it is young black men with illegal guns. but i’m the coward pointing that out. thank you holder.

  580. Pablo says:

    Just the fact that it’s Filthydelphia-centric is enough to discard it, AFAIC. Do it again in Dallas and get back to me.

  581. Jeff G. says:

    45% of the US population lives in cities with > 1 million population.

    There it is: cities cause gun crime!

    Time to ban cities. Quick, someone ring up Dr Branas. I smell a research grant!

  582. leigh says:

    I won’t speak for anyone else, but if some random person called me up to ask if I had guns in the house and a bunch of demographic information because they were gathering information for a study I didn’t volunteer to participate in I’d hang up on them.

    Or if I were feeling fiesty, tell them a lot of lies to skew their study.

  583. Pablo says:

    There it is: cities cause gun crime!

    Except that they don’t, because:

    the vast majority of residents of major cities are not gun owners and I suspect almost none of them feel vulnerable. The world has changed. Crime rates in American cities are where they were in the 50s.

    I think we’re all good here. There’s really nothing to worry about, aside from the fact that those ignorant white folks in Newtown are suddenly flooding into churches. That’s probably unconstitutional.

  584. gbesq1 says:

    leigh: Holy moly. Really? I am not being sarcastic – I always thought Bambi was a girl. Good thing Mr. Ranger is a nice guy. I hope the gender of the deer is not relevant to tastiness.

    paleoramus: it is hard to collect data in the US. check out http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/31/politics/gun-ownership-declining/index.html

    another interesting article. What say you?http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dranove/htm/Dranove/coursepages/Mgmt%20469/guns.pdf

  585. Pablo says:

    Or if I were feeling fiesty, tell them a lot of lies to skew their study.

    We are legion.

  586. sdferr says:

    Timewasters anonymous. /s

  587. Jeff G. says:

    Why is our new friend simply listing studies that skew his way and having us defend against them? Why not reverse the trend and cite studies that he need defend against?

    It could be fun. For instance, have at it, gbesq1.

  588. Jeff G. says:

    Here’s another. Get busy! (Note: you can click through to the actual study in pdf form)

  589. Pablo says:

    I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

    You want to understand? Go read this right now.

  590. gbesq1 says:

    Jeff G: well aimed, although I would prefer not to have to pay for the articles. I am soon off for the holidays – thanks for the reading materials. But sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander – you ought to be reading and commenting on my citations, new friend.

  591. LBascom says:

    If they’re in any way based on non-universal principle (like my desire to see more people educated in dead languages, say). they’re doomed to time-wasting squabbling.

    Ah, that’s the point though. The right of self preservation IS a universal right, uniquely presented in the DOI, and the ideology of that should be a mandatory point of instruction for every school child.

  592. palaeomerus says:

    “paleoramus: it is hard to collect data in the US. check out http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/31/politics/gun-ownership-declining/index.html

    Does not support either of your claims.

  593. palaeomerus says:

    “But sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander – you ought to be reading and commenting on my citations, new friend.”

    They were unconclusive cherry picked local shit. Utterly worthless.

  594. LBascom says:

    Oh damn, I’m way behind. Oh well.

    shouldn’t we be more focused on locking up all the mentally unstable people?

    Depends on who gets to define who is mentally unstable.

    I remember TEA partiers being a terrorist threat to the DHS.

  595. slipperyslope says:

    But I’m glad it’s still important to say “No” to gay people who want to marry each other. Because, you know, decline, America, tyranny, socialism, immoral.

  596. leigh says:

    We are legion.

    Heh. We are indeed.

  597. gbesq1 says:

    paleoramus: details please

  598. Pablo says:

    I’m glad it’s still OK to say no to men who want abortions.

  599. leigh says:

    Get lost, slippery.

  600. palaeomerus says:

    “gbesq1 says December 15, 2012 at 9:33 pm
    paleoramus: details please”

    Philadelphia study + CNN article contain no useful data that supports either of your claims. They are insufficient and advocacy material to boot.

  601. slipperyslope says:

    I’m glad it’s still OK to say no to men who want abortions.

    And to men that want unicorns. No. There, I said it.

  602. palaeomerus says:

    “newrouter: the vast majority of residents of major cities are not gun owners a

    I suspect almost none of them feel vulnerable.

    The world has changed. Crime rates in American cities are where they were in the 50s.”

    These are the wild unsubstantiated claims your ‘citations’ so far have utterly failed to support.

  603. slipperyslope says:

    Like I said earlier, apparently everyone should carry a gun in all times and in all places because that would greatly reduce shootings.

  604. Pablo says:

    And to men that want unicorns. No. There, I said it.

    Yeah, twice. Which is enough.

  605. LBascom says:

    slipperyslope says December 15, 2012 at 9:30 pm

    But I’m glad it’s still important to say “No” to gay people who want to marry each other.

    Fuckin’ slipshod…just when you think he’s irredeemable, he throws a lifeline!

  606. Pablo says:

    I’d rather you not carry a gun, slope. That should be reserved for teachable people.

  607. slipperyslope says:

    I’m probably a better shot than you. Remember, I can afford ammo.

  608. palaeomerus says:

    Let’s have more of Mark Shields ranting that it is easier to purchase an automatic weapon in US that it is to rent a car. Let’s have more of even Rupert Murdoch babbling that they ought to outlaw sales of machine guns in the US. Or Bob Costas ranting about why does someone need to buy a bazooka on O’Reilly.

    And these people are passed off as smart and informed.

  609. LBascom says:

    Like I said earlier, apparently everyone should carry a gun in all times and in all places because that would greatly reduce shootings.

    See there! that’s what I’m talking about.

    Meanwhile, in San Fransisco, people argue whether everyone should wear pants.

    Odd world…

  610. palaeomerus says:

    “I’m probably a better shot than you. Remember, I can afford ammo.”

    From what I’ve read Pablo was an SP in the Airforce and a SAW gunner.

  611. slipperyslope says:

    The shooting that result from that in SF are less fatal (but still messy)

  612. LBascom says:

    How much HIV is in that skid mark?

  613. slipperyslope says:

    FWIW, I’m a liberal, Obama voting, socialist and tyranny supporting Democrat that’s not in favor of banning guns.

  614. BT says:

    But I’m glad it’s still important to say “No” to gay people who want to marry each other. Because, you know, decline, America, tyranny, socialism, immoral.

    I understand NYC is beautiful this time of year.
    What’s that.
    That wasn’t the point of your post?

  615. slipperyslope says:

    How much HIV is in that skid mark?

    Less than there used to be, but you’re still gonna want to give yourself a good scrubb’n.

  616. gbesq1 says:

    paleoramus: it’s all in the FBI crime stats. The dramatic decline in crime since the early 90s is real. Easily available just by googling crime rates in american cities. The fact is not a disputed issue. Why is highly disputed.

  617. palaeomerus says:

    “paleoramus: it’s all in the FBI crime stats. The dramatic decline in crime since the early 90s is real. Easily available just by googling crime rates in american cities. The fact is not a disputed issue. Why is highly disputed.”

    Substantiate all three claims.

  618. slipperyslope says:

    Like I said palaeomerus, I’m in favor of gun ownership.

    You might also want to cite statistics about the % of burglaries that happen in the UK while the residents are home.

  619. leigh says:

    slipperyslope says December 15, 2012 at 9:51 pm

    FWIW, I’m a liberal, Obama voting, socialist and tyranny supporting Democrat that’s not in favor of banning guns.

    Sure you are. Just like you’re a 1% with a McMansion and privately schooled kids and a trophy wife and. . .

  620. newrouter says:

    But I’m glad it’s still important to say “No” to gay people who want to marry each other. Because, you know, decline, America, tyranny, socialism, immoral.

    yes let us talk about the”freaks of nature” now according to darwin. ANTI – science

  621. palaeomerus says:

    “Like I said palaeomerus, I’m in favor of gun ownership.”

    I don’t care what you claim to be in favor of.

  622. LBascom says:

    you’re still gonna want to give yourself a good scrubb’n.

    I just avoid the place altogether. And touching anything from there.

    Hollywood too.

  623. Blake says:

    palaeomerus, gbesq1 is a lying proggtard who loves to build utopian sand castles on premises of sand.

    gbesq1 is not debating in good faith. He claims his data is worth a look at while ignoring the incontrovertable fact/data all of these massacres have occurred in gun free zones. Doesn’t matter if you point out it’s obvious the gun free policy isn’t working. gbesq1 just waves his hands and says “not enough data.”

    gbesq1, shut your goddamn piehole. You’re just another stupid proggtard who is worth less than the dog shit I pick up in my backyard.

  624. newrouter says:

    You might also want to cite statistics about the % of burglaries that happen in the UK while the residents are home.

    why point to a country? do states statist.

  625. bh says:

    Wait, why isn’t gbesq1 reading Jeff’s link to a free .pdf and studying it intensely? He seems to have enough free time to engage in comments.

  626. bh says:

    Also, what Blake said.

  627. slipperyslope says:

    Sure you are. Just like you’re a 1% with a McMansion and privately schooled kids and a trophy wife and. . .

    I think I’m more like a 2%, but close enough. And that doesn’t buy a McMansion. We inhabit a 1928 3,500 sq foot hovel in a great neighborhood. And, she’s a trophy wife to me.

    I just avoid the place altogether. And touching anything from there.
    Hollywood too.

    Just don’t think about it too much with you order honey prawns in China town. Now Hollywood – that place really is a pit.

    yes let us talk about the”freaks of nature” now according to darwin. ANTI – science

    newrouter, why do you hate gay people and black people so much? Did something happen in your childhood that involved a gay black person? Just trying to help. If you can’t tell us about the guy you strangled to get an erection, who can you tell?

  628. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I had a leftist scream at me that I was a fool to own a firearm because one of my kids would likely get his hands on it someday. And I guess one of my kids could go nuts.

    Demystifying firearms and their use goes a long way towards minimizing fetishization of same.

    It’s a tool. Nothing more, nothing less.

  629. bh says:

    I love it when trolls pretend they’re productive members of society.

    I’m happy and successful but my true joy in life is trolling a blog that’s beneath me over and over again under different names.

    Yes, that certainly adds up.

  630. Blake says:

    slippery, you must be gay and black, I guess, ’cause I surely do hate you.

  631. palaeomerus says:

    “newrouter, why do you hate gay people and black people so much? Did something happen in your childhood that involved a gay black person? Just trying to help. If you can’t tell us about the guy you strangled to get an erection, who can you tell?”

    And this is why nobody here takes any of your smarmy shit seriously anymore.

  632. missfixit says:

    well the one good thing they have going for them on this anti-gun crusade, is that the Chinese guy who attacked 22 schoolchildren couple days ago? he only had a knife. so the kids didn’t all die because all that stabbing isn’t quite as deadly effective as shooting.
    so i still think that schoolyards need some kind of protection besides a sign that “hey some of the ladies here might have a pistol. maybe. but likely not.”

  633. palaeomerus says:

    “I’m happy and successful but my true joy in life is trolling a blog that’s beneath me over and over again under different names.”

    How is a blog that makes you look stupid almost every time you post anything beneath you? I don’t buy the happy or the successful part. Dim, snarky attention whores are generally neither.

  634. sdferr says:

    “. . . schoolyards need some kind of protection besides a sign . . .”

    Claymores?

  635. slipperyslope says:

    I love it when trolls pretend they’re productive members of society.
    I’m happy and successful but my true joy in life is trolling a blog that’s beneath me over and over again under different names.
    Yes, that certainly adds up.

    We need to have a meetup. I’ll show you my 1040A if you show me yours.

    well the one good thing they have going for them on this anti-gun crusade, is that the Chinese guy who attacked 22 schoolchildren couple days ago? he only had a knife. so the kids didn’t all die because all that stabbing isn’t quite as deadly effective as shooting.

    That’s odd. I had been led to believe that if people couldn’t get guns, they’d use something else, and that it would be every bit as effective. You mean guns are more lethal than sporks?

    Heresy! (you should denounce yourself)

  636. Blake says:

    “. . . schoolyards need some kind of protection besides a sign . . .”

    See picture above of the gal with the carbine slung across her shoulder. Use said picture as the warning sign.

  637. leigh says:

    The kids the guy in China got stabby on will probably get infections that will lead to complications and maybe even death. Stab wounds are actaully worse than GSW.

  638. newrouter says:

    newrouter, why do you hate gay people and black people so much? Did something happen in your childhood that involved a gay black person? Just trying to help. If you can’t tell us about the guy you strangled to get an erection, who can you tell?

    pointing out the obviouis is “hate”? go ax the raptards?

  639. leigh says:

    slippery, stop it with bragging about your income. It’s crass and highlights your poor manners.

  640. bh says:

    Tell us another one, ss.

  641. palaeomerus says:

    “That’s odd. I had been led to believe that if people couldn’t get guns, they’d use something else, and that it would be every bit as effective. You mean guns are more lethal than sporks?
    Heresy! (you should denounce yourself)”

    Yeah. Knives are ineffective and hardly a threat. Good thinking.

  642. Blake says:

    slippery, you dumbass.

    Oklahoma city bombing. No firearms involved. 168 dead.

    World Trade Center. No firearms involved. 3,000 dead.

    Haymarket riot bombing. 12 killed.

    1910 bombing of the LAT. 21 killed.

    1920 Morgan bank bombing. 38 killed.

    1927 bombing of a school in Bath, Michigan. 46 killed.

    The list of bombings is long, deadly and even more indiscriminate than the recent spate of massacres by firearms. Someone coming at you with a bomb is a lot harder to stop than someone with a gun.

    Link

  643. newrouter says:

    , why do you hate gay people and black people so much?

    Jamie Foxx Jokes About Killing ‘All The White People’ In His New Movie

  644. newrouter says:

    why do you hate gay people and black people so much?

    demonrat losers i say

  645. Ernst Schreiber says:

    We should restrict the First Amendment’s speech guarantees to those who have funny or interesting things to say. Most people are boring. Why should we have to listen to them? We could set up local American Idol like panels of experts who could audition potential speakers, weed out the cranks and bores, and issue speech permits to the ones who have a genuine need to publically speak.

  646. Blake says:

    oh, and slippery, palaeomerus is a lot smarter than you are. By a wide margin.

  647. slipperyslope says:

    The kids the guy in China got stabby on will probably get infections that will lead to complications and maybe even death. Stab wounds are actaully worse than GSW.

    Tell that to the 28 people that are dead in Sandy Hook you fucking moron.

    Blake – congratulations, you’ve proven that bombs are more lethal than guns. Would you admit that knives are less so? If not, why do we arm police and soldiers with guns when just a knife would obviously be more effective.

  648. bh says:

    slippery, stop it with bragging about your income. It’s crass and highlights your poor manners.

    He doesn’t understand any of the tells he’s showing, leigh. He imagines that successful people are always bragging about their money so he does so.

    How he imagines that a happy, well-adjusted person would make a hobby of trolling a blog over and over again under different names is beyond me though to be honest. Go figure.

  649. Blake says:

    Ernst, I have to laugh when you say that. Can you imagine how many people would be shocked to find out just how unoriginal they are? Hell, I know I’m hardly original. I cling to my quirks and eccentricities, but, in the end, I get up and go to work every morning like most people.

  650. slipperyslope says:

    bh – I just think it’s funny that you’re more worried about my tax rate than yours. It’s cute.

  651. Ernst Schreiber says:

    And there should definitely be a Federal Speechifier license for bloggers. And commentators should only be allowed to comment through a licensed Federal Speechifier Person. I mean, we can’t have people thinking that just anyone can report the news, can we?

  652. Blake says:

    That’s odd. I had been led to believe that if people couldn’t get guns, they’d use something else, and that it would be every bit as effective.

    Fuck you, slippery, I won’t let you move the goalposts. Right there, quoting your own words and I showed you exactly what you don’t want to admit. So, you change the subject.

    Asshole.

  653. slipperyslope says:

    So if people couldn’t use guns (or bombs) they would likely kill fewer people?

  654. newrouter says:

    I just think it’s funny that you’re more worried about my tax rate than yours. It’s cute.

    slippey leading the charge for a flat tax rate!

  655. beemoe says:

    Remember that a fair percentage of our trolls have turned out to be academics, bh, and their behavior makes perfect sense.

  656. BT says:

    Tell that to the 28 people that are dead in Sandy Hook you fucking moron.

    You think they could hear her?

  657. newrouter says:

    So if people couldn’t use guns (or bombs) they would likely kill fewer people?

    ask the rwandans ? huti tuties take your pick

  658. Blake says:

    good God, beemoe, now there’s a thought. slippery as an academic.

  659. Ernst Schreiber says:

    well the one good thing they have going for them on this anti-gun crusade, is that the Chinese guy who attacked 22 schoolchildren couple days ago? he only had a knife. so the kids didn’t all die because all that stabbing isn’t quite as deadly effective as shooting.

    Probably because the guy didn’t know how to work a knife against human anatomy.

  660. slipperyslope says:

    slippey leading the charge for a flat tax rate!

    Actually, I care more about your tax rate than mine. Please don’t hate me.

  661. missfixit says:

    yeah okay i wasn’t talking about machetes. I don’t actually know what kind of knife the Chinese guy used on those kids – from the sound of it (22 stabbed? no deaths?) he was using a butter knife.
    So machetes – gotta ban those too.

  662. bh says:

    Yeah… maybe that’s it, BMoe. They’re bizarre people.

  663. newrouter says:

    Actually, I care more about your tax rate than mine

    with a flat tax you don’t care

  664. slipperyslope says:

    ask the rwandans ? huti tuties take your pick

    Why do we give our police and soldiers guns when machetes are so much better?

    I’ve got my eye on this bad boy, but I don’t see where to mount the scope..?

    http://www.hayneedle.com/sale/condorbolomachete.cfm?source=pla&adtype=pla&kw=&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=TXSP065&gclid=CIj8gZKdnrQCFal_Qgodoz0A6Q

  665. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Puppies.

    They’re so cute when they chase their tails like that.

  666. beemoe says:

    He seems to be a bit smarter than Professor Caric, but definitely in the ballpark.

  667. missfixit says:

    you pick the weapon most effective for your combat zone. Here you need a gun. In the middle east it’s bombs and rockets. in Rwanda a machete was good enough.

  668. slipperyslope says:

    I’m looking for advice for a good rail system for my machete…

  669. Blake says:

    I don’t know who Professor Caric is, but I’m guessing that doesn’t set the bar very high, beemoe.

  670. slipperyslope says:

    you pick the weapon most effective for your combat zone. Here you need a gun. In the middle east it’s bombs and rockets. in Rwanda a machete was good enough.

    No, no, no. If the shooters in these mass murders couldn’t get a gun, they would use something else and kill just as many people. That’s what I keep hearing over and over. Apparently this awesome thing they would use would be a machete. So I wonder why we’re keeping this super weapon from our boys in blue.

  671. bh says:

    I don’t know who Professor Caric is, but I’m guessing that doesn’t set the bar very high, beemoe.

    Oh! A pw archivist type person should provide some links here. It’s really, really good stuff.

  672. missfixit says:

    crossbows!

    that’s next. stupid things are so f-ing dangerous

  673. bh says:

    Quiet, ss, we’re trying to think of past dummies you most remind us of.

  674. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Heh, almost caught it that time!

  675. bh says:

    Who knows, you might have been one of them.

  676. slipperyslope says:

    crossbows!

    Yes, I’m sure someone armed with a crossbow would kill just as many people. We should obviously take those outdated M16s out of the hands of marines and equip them with the best in crossbows.

  677. missfixit says:

    ha i remember professor caric, but it was so long ago it’s vague. how do you guys keep all these idiots straight in your memory.

  678. Blake says:

    shoot, I’ve been around PW off and on for going on a decade and I missed Caric? I feel so ashamed.

  679. missfixit says:

    well i think i got lucky and stumbled in a few times when Caric was here. that’s why i don’t remember details

  680. bh says:

    Ric Caric, that was it.

  681. Ernst Schreiber says:

    No, no, no. If the shooters in these mass murders couldn’t get a gun, they would use something else and kill just as many people. That’s what I keep hearing over and over. Apparently this awesome thing they would use would be a machete. So I wonder why we’re keeping this super weapon from our boys in blue.

    I think we just met our next spree killer.

  682. newrouter says:

    Yes, I’m sure someone armed with a crossbow would kill just as many people.

    there is always jihadis with a prius or an airplane

  683. bh says:

    Okay, here’s a bit from Dan.

  684. newrouter says:

    slippey you be doing federal $ doing this stuff?

  685. beemoe says:

    Caric was, and I assume still is, an idiot of truly epic proportions.

    One of the dumbest motherfuckers I have ever encountered, and a tenured professor at a state university.

  686. palaeomerus says:

    “Yes, I’m sure someone armed with a crossbow would kill just as many people. We should obviously take those outdated M16s out of the hands of marines and equip them with the best in crossbows.”

    Awwww. Your smart assed nonsense argument lead you to name a select fire weapon in military hands. That’s too bad.

  687. missfixit says:

    One of the dumbest motherfuckers I have ever encountered, and a tenured professor at a state university.

    a tad redundant.

    whatever happened to him?

  688. Roddy Boyd says:

    The two weapons were a Glock and Sig Sauer, both handguns and both 9mm.

    How are they going to ban those? Only the hardest of the most obsessive anti 2nd amendment set wants to ban handguns.

    I don’t see any end to these, ever.

    These=mass killings.

    There is seemingly an endless supply of profoundly ill and alienated people for whom the celebrity and infamy of mass slaughter of the truly helpless–only Neo-Natal units and an old age home have a denser collection of less mobile targets–more than justifies their death.

    It’s not going to end. Today was Alabama and apparently another Oklahoma college student was prepping something, but was apprehended.

    We could only wish they were automatic.

  689. palaeomerus says:

    “I’m looking for advice for a good rail system for my machete…”

    Yeah machetes are no problem. Just ask the Tutsi genius.

  690. bh says:

    He’s still at MSU it appears, missfixit.

  691. Blake says:

    Ah, thanks for the link. Now I remember Ric. Knew how to put together quite the little eye rolling screed, didn’t he?

  692. newrouter says:

    “The two weapons were a Glock and Sig Sauer, both handguns and both 9mm. ”

    (CBS News) NEWTON, Conn. – It’s still unclear what — if any — connection suspected gunman Adam Lanza’s mother had to Sandy Hook Elementary School, the scene of the mass murder on Friday. But we do know the weapons Adam Lanza used to kill his victims came from her home.

    As new details emerge, the scope of the horror expands. Lanza apparently sprayed two classrooms at the school with relentless fire from a semi-automatic assault rifle.

    link

  693. sdferr says:

    Gun club skeet, h/t Maggie’s

  694. missfixit says:

    only Neo-Natal units and an old age home have a denser collection of less mobile targets

    please lets not give them anymore ideas. Jesus the next one will be a children’s hospital or something.

  695. palaeomerus says:

    So what we’ve learned that there is a secret liberal massacre threshold that crossbows, bombs, cars, knives, and machetes can’t reach but guns can, and that more restrictive gun laws would somehow guarantee us smaller more single digit massacres which is a reasonable improvement because nobody would use a gun for a massacre illegally. The murder law has no force but the gun ownership law is absolute. Because smart.

  696. Blake says:

    palaeormerus, I’m copying that for posterity. Hillarious.

  697. Ernst Schreiber says:

    How are they going to ban those? Only the hardest of the most obsessive anti 2nd amendment set wants to ban handguns.

    For starters they’ll cap magazines at 10 rounds. (Puppy would stop chasing his tail for that probably.) And then, after some sick sonofabitch drops 20 to thirty people by bringing a couple of spare magazines with him, they’ll ban semi-auto handguns.

    After that, they’ll wait for somebody with an old fashioned wheel gun and speed-loaders to get his hate on.

  698. beemoe says:

    Speaking of idiots, slope got crossed up and is over there posting in that Caric thread you linked.

    lmfao!

  699. missfixit says:

    yeah i was kinda wondering if SS would be okay with people dying in massacres as long as they were maybe less than 10 people at a time and the weapon was anything besides a gun. (9/11 was an outlier and not okay. of course.)

  700. palaeomerus says:

    Most of the killing in the Batman theatre was done with a pump action 12 guage. The unstoppable high powered military grade semi-automatic 100 round AR-platform gun of doom jammed.

  701. Blake says:

    I guess we’ve solved the question about liberals knowing what year it is.

  702. palaeomerus says:

    Just wait till slippery finds out about molotov cocktails.

  703. missfixit says:

    and rocks!

  704. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Yesterday the Bushmaster was in the back of the car. Today, it’s a “long gun” Interesting.

  705. Blake says:

    I’m sitting here, laughing like crazy, because slippery is posting on a 5 year old thread. Priceless. Absolutely priceless.

  706. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I hope somebody remembered to close the door after bh let the puppy out.

  707. missfixit says:

    shhh! maybe he won’t come back.

  708. bh says:

    Good times.

  709. Blake says:

    The puppy was cute, briefly, until it was discovered it was impossible for the puppy to learn anything.

  710. Blake says:

    later all.

    This shooting shit has to stop. These cowardly assholes need to take one between the eyes before the body count starts.

  711. John Bradley says:

    Caric was, and I assume still is, an idiot of truly epic proportions.

    True ’nuff, certainly, but could he make a paella? An awesome paella? Could he serenade a bored-looking cat with classical guitar music? No, I say! As such, I hereby nominate William Yelverton as the most amusing PW troll of the last decade. Truly, for he is the King of the Dumbfucks.

    ‘Slope and Mr. “I slammed my left hand down on the keyboard and some gibberish spewed forth” are but pale imitations of the Greats.

  712. Pellegri says:

    I am one of those nurturing, soft-spoken, cardigan-wearing sorts of ladies.

    I’m still thinking about getting my CCW permit.

  713. Ernst Schreiber says:

    The Ruger LCP is available in pink.

    Helps maintain the nurturing, soft-spoken, cardigan-wearaing image.

  714. Pablo says:

    I’m probably a better shot than you.

    I would love to test that theory, for money.

  715. Pablo says:

    Blake – congratulations, you’ve proven that bombs are more lethal than guns. Would you admit that knives are less so?

    Why would he do that? They aren’t. Both can kill you just as dead.

  716. Pablo says:

    If not, why do we arm police and soldiers with guns when just a knife would obviously be more effective.

    Contrary to what that nitwit Obama would have you think, we arm soldiers with knives too.

  717. geoffb says:

    That cbs report must be crap. The rifle was found in his (mother’s) car.

  718. Pablo says:

    They seem to have changed that fact, geoffb. Now, the Bushmaster was found with the shooter.

  719. McGehee says:

    Why aren’t morons like dale k, etc, the recipients of a psychopath’s rage?

    Professional courtesy.

  720. geoffb says:

    The journolistas need to have better minders to coordinate their spins. Susan Rice for Journolista Czar, she knows how to manage the talking points.

  721. McGehee says:

    palaeomerus, gbesq1 is a lying proggtard who loves to build utopian sand castles on premises of sand.

    I first read that as “promises,” which…

  722. SDN says:

    I wonder how SS (appropos initials) and gbesq1 will spin this:Clackamas man, armed, confronts mall shooter

    “I’m not beating myself up cause I didn’t shoot him,” said Meli. “I know after he saw me, I think the last shot he fired was the one he used on himself.”

    Armed, present, didn’t fire because he didn’t have a clear shot….. and didn’t need to. Contrast that with 2 of Mayor Bloomberg’s finest, who opened up like they were playing “Grand Theft Auto” and with predictable results: Police: All Empire State shooting victims were wounded by officers

    Three passersby sustained direct gunshot wounds, while the remaining six were hit by fragments, according to New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. All injuries were caused by police, he said Saturday.

    And this ain’t Fox, it ain’t an NRA press release, so read it, weep, and STFD and STFU.

  723. JHoward says:

    So if people couldn’t use guns (or bombs) they would likely kill fewer people?

    The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is not to take out half a city block, slope, perps and innocents alike. (For that option we have increasingly armed cops over the years.) I wonder, do you know the purpose of the 2nd Amendment?

    Do you care?

    Conversely, do you suppose your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of fallacy involves wholesale bans on fertilizer and airliners? How about down at the small end 64 oz sodas?

    In other words the answer is contextual, assuming the question was serious. My mind is somehow clouded with doubt at the prospect of divining your intentions therein.

  724. Slartibartfast says:

    As much fun as you’re having with ‘slope, just consider that if he’s not who he says he is, he probably doesn’t believe most of what he’s saying.

    He even got the logical fallacy wrong. If you were to pick a favorite from the legion he employs, ‘strawman’ would be more apt.

    Long and short: you’re being played, and by someone who may someday realize they’ve wasted a decade or more of their life as an internet troll.

    Which is pretty pathetic. Stop enabling his dysfunction.

  725. JHoward says:

    gbesq1 has left y’all a Mack truck-sized logical hole: Re: Philadelphia, what visible telltale has gun toters being shot more than everybody else?

    Is it the bulge under the tee shirt*? No? Then if not association and precondition, what?

    That “study” is quite bogus.

    *in my state one million legally carry concealed. We don’t have a Philadelphia.

  726. geoffb says:

    Previously shelved (Republicans to blame BTW because they pushed on F&F so hard) ideas are being taken down and dusted off as now doable if done promptly by executive order.

    I will bet that before two years are over we will find out that all the FBI insta-check data has been saved somewhere even though that is not supposed to be done. I just can’t imagine this crew throwing away such an excellent and useful list of their enemies. BAMN always.

  727. Pablo says:

    Long and short: you’re being played, and by someone who may someday realize they’ve wasted a decade or more of their life as an internet troll.

    slope is but a ball of yarn, Slart. It is to be played with, not taken seriously.

  728. Pablo says:

    It is far from clear whether any of the proposals — which centered on improving the background check system, and did not call for banning weapons — could have prevented the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school on Friday.

    No, it’s quite clear. They would have done nothing to prevent the massacre. The shooter tried and failed to purchase his own gun.

  729. Pablo says:

    It is far from certain, however, that the White House would be willing to wage a fight against the powerful gun-rights lobby 80 million gun owning Americans or take attention from competing concerns, like negotiations over the looming fiscal deadline.

    FTFY.

  730. serr8d says:

    True ’nuff, certainly, but could he make a paella? An awesome paella? Could he serenade a bored-looking cat with classical guitar music? No, I say! As such, I hereby nominate William Yelverton as the most amusing PW troll of the last decade. Truly, for he is the King of the Dumbfucks.

    ‘Slope and Mr. “I slammed my left hand down on the keyboard and some gibberish spewed forth” are but pale imitations of the Greats.

  731. Lisa says:

    Why aren’t morons like dale k, etc, the recipients of a psychopath’s rage?
    I got excited for a second there because I thought that this conversation had shifted to daleks. Damn. Seriously, there has got to be a Dr. Who allegory somewhere in this whole mess.

  732. McGehee says:

    Trolls like DK have found a way to get the TARDIS through the void between parallel universes?

  733. BigBangHunter says:

    – 758 comments….We have us a Mega-thread.

    – Resist the urge to keep a Progressive tard for a pet. Yes its fun pulling their wings and ridiculing them but they’re unteachable and impossible to paper-train.

  734. John Bradley says:

    If not, why do we arm police and soldiers with guns when just a knife would obviously be more effective.

    Knives are not especially effective against people armed with guns, you know, like criminals and enemy soldiers and such. That whole “death at a distance” thing, y’see.

    Knives, tire irons, chainsaws, etc. all work just peachy on unarmed victims, particularly if you can run faster than they can. Old ladies and little kids: not known for their exceptional sprinting abilities.

  735. Lisa says:

    Okay, so this goddamn thread is too big for me to sort through it to see if anyone has discussed the epic number of stabbings that have also been happening. I was actually reading an article about some dude stabbing his way through a school in Henan Province, China when the news of the Newtown massacre popped up on my news alerts. Seriously, as a former libtard (I am still pretty hardwired toward libtardishness, so don’t get too excited) how can we be talking about the instruments of violence as the solution when the problem is that people are suddenly feeling the need to randomly off each other? I do not a fondler of guns. I am fairly indifferent about guns one way or the other. But let’s just set aside the gun debate for a second and ask ourselves whether we really believe that this guy (or any of the other shooters and stabbers that have made news in the last ten years) would have decided to just stay home and take up hydroponic gardening if he could not get his hands on some guns. If you are really honest with yourself, you know that he would have gone and rented a U-Haul, filled it up with fertilizer or some other thing that would blow up, and drove it into that school (or movie theater, or mall, or courthouse). I want to know what the goddamn hell is going on. The crazies have always been with us. The cruel and brutal have always been with us. And ever since the first time someone stuffed a ball of lead into a barrel with some charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur – guns have been with us. Sometimes a few of them get together and cause a senseless war or brutal genocide. The craven have always preyed on us. They have robbed us, raped us, beat our asses and sometimes killed us in pursuit of their own ends, so we have been careful to not consort with sketchy types, beware of dark vans parked next to our cars in the mall parking lot, and try to create and maintain decent neighborhood communities where we could look out for each other. And on the whole, we were always mostly able to trust that the guy two cubicles down or the emo kid who skateboarded to school past your house every day was NOT going to suddenly decide to kill you and everyone within a half mile of you one day. Why isn’t that the central issue being discussed? Is it too scary to wrap our minds around? That maybe we are collectively losing our grip on humanity and don’t know fuck-all what to do about it?

  736. McGehee says:

    Rule #1 when you’ve pulled your gun on somebody: don’t let him get close. The advantage of your gun evaporates if he can get close enough to slash your gun arm with a long knife, or jam a spear through your chest.

    And if he gets out of your sight his options multiply.

  737. beemoe says:

    Can’t find it now, but Pablo linked up thread to a piece by the mother of a disturbed kid.

    Heartbreaking and scary. Would be interested in somone starting a new thread on this problem, this one is getting hard for me to load.

  738. McGehee says:

    The crazies have always been with us. The cruel and brutal have always been with us.

    And we used to lock them up and leave them there.

    Plus, our popular culture fetishizes all the things that encourage people to act out rather than learn to cope.

    Why isn’t that the central issue being discussed?

    Banning tools is easier, especially if one’s political camp has built its power base on emotionalism.

  739. BigBangHunter says:

    – Its human nature to avoid the really hard to deal with issues in life, particularly when you have to face certain realities that bruise your ego, or that society as a whole treats with distain.

    – Like the old joke about the guy who loses his watch in an unlit pitchblack alley and spemds hours looking for it under the nearest street light because he can’t see anything in the alley.

  740. Lisa says:

    Banning tools is easier, especially if one’s political camp has built its power base on emotionalism.

    I am just flummoxed by the sheer stupidity of it. It is like trying to ban forks to combat obesity. I have had the opportunity to visit places like Sweden and Norway where, while they are not as heavily armed as the US, they are pretty heavily armed. Gun ownership tops 50% in both countries – and they manage not to blow each other’s heads off every other day. As a matter of fact, gun violence is almost non-existent. I have also been in the Netherlands where almost no one has a gun – and they manage quite nicely as well. Conversely, Yemen is full of guns – and it is a dangerous shithole. But in Palestine, very few people own guns – but it is an even more dangerous shithole. It really does not make much of a difference how many guns are around. If you are an unstable, violent country, you are still going to be fucked until you fix your instability and tendency toward violence.

    When I say this to anyone they just look at me like I just farted loudly.

  741. Blake says:

    Actually, Lisa, in liberal circles, a loud fart is more socially acceptable than an honest and open discussion about firearms.

  742. Lisa says:

    Sadly true, Blake.

  743. sdferr says:

    “. . . in pursuit of their own ends . . .”

    Against which, we might think, we have devised government, or political order — to put it another way — to implement higher ends of our own, safety against attack (whether from other political entities or from criminals) being among them. The safety, of course, is an ultimate and not immediate matter, as for instance in the case of Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the attacks of 2001. Whether we retain our understanding of our connection from any circumstances in the given here and now to the aims or ends of our political arrangements is often a problem to ascertain. Too often, it seems to me, we lose or have lost contact with the necessary core of those motivations, to pursue frivolous ends or intentional distractions, and frequently these latter themselves are designed to alter the ends of our original compact — often for the benefit of a narrow faction or of individual powers. We might even see such a case here, were we to look closely enough.

  744. geoffb says:

    A couple of related things, here, here. Found at Althouse.

  745. palaeomerus says:

    Yeah here’s another bullshit lefty-favorite book someone wrote in a fit of naivete or dishonesty.

    http://www.amazon.com/Three-Cups-Tea-Mission-Peace/dp/1606862170/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355680912&sr=8-1&keywords=cups+of+tea

    So what?

  746. palaeomerus says:

    Here’s yet another one.

    http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Balance-Ecology-Human-Spirit/dp/B005M4TFV4

    Stupid books are stupid.

  747. Blake says:

    Okay, everyone, I’m going in..I’m going to click the link provided by dalek.

    If I don’t come back, it’s been nice knowing you.

  748. Blake says:

    My eyes, my eyes…..

    You take that shit seriously, dalek?

    Wow, just wow.

  749. McGehee says:

    DK hates the universe. If he didn’t he would take one for the team.

  750. Silver Whistle says:

    3. It has the power to distort our constitutional thinking. It says that the right to “bear arms,” a military term, gives anyone, anywhere in our country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons. Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his “religion” of slaughter. Moloch brooks no dissent, even from the highest court in the land.

    So much stupidity, so little time. Anyone, anywhere, has had the power to mow down civilians since man first snatched up the jawbone of an ass, a stone hand axe, or a sharpened, fire hardened wooden shaft. Murder and mayhem have been common in man since there was such an animal.

    And the Second Amendment has referred to an individual right since its inception, irrespective of the ignorant attempts to rewrite history. Please, get a clue, wipe the snot from your nose, and grow the hell up.

  751. McGehee says:

    “The right of the people” appears multiple times in the Bill of Rights. In each case the right in question is an individual right. SCOTUS had no choice but to recognize this fact.

    If reading plain English the same way wherever it appears means the Court is “cowed,” then cowed is what it should be.

  752. McGehee says:

    Furthermore, the Court has never held the Second Amendment to refer to anything but an individual right. It’s just that until relatively recently it managed to avoid ruling on the substance of the question — and Warren Berger, the son of a bitch, claimed it had to be a collective right because it mentioned “well-regulated militia,” completely glossing over “the right of the people.”

  753. leigh says:

    What a profoundly stupid book.

  754. McGehee says:

    It comes lowly recommended.

  755. LBascom says:

    If Dale wants to see Moloch, I suggest he look to planned parenthood for “Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire”.

    Literally a million times more innocents butchered than the tragedy at Sandy Hook…

  756. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Haven’t clicked on the link Dale K. crapped on the thread, but this bit of it jumped out and caught my attention: our-moloch

    Our Moloch is the 3000 other lives that (on average) were destroyed on Dec. 14th as well. But, since that’s according to plan, nobody panics. We just call it choice and move on.

    To answer Lisa’s question, what’s going on is that we live in a noisome culture of death, and reckless hate. And political correctness, among other things, prevents us from riding out to meet it.

    Meanwhile, the tree is dry.

  757. Blake says:

    LBascom, dalek is okay with Planned Parenthood, because PP is sanctioned by his god, the state. Nevermind that the state bears more than a passing resemblance to Moloch.

  758. leigh says:

    Hoo boy, Ernst. I think the hair on my neck just stood up.

    Thank you.

  759. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I’m going to go ahead and guess that it was Luke’s Gospel that got a rise out of you, and not the artful way I worked both The Dark Knight and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to explicate the signs of the times.

  760. happyfeet says:

    the right to have an abortion comes from the same shit-stained constitution what gives us the right to bear arms

    we live in a little country what at one time had a profound reverence for individual liberty

    it’s a problem

  761. Pablo says:

    Why isn’t that the central issue being discussed? Is it too scary to wrap our minds around? That maybe we are collectively losing our grip on humanity and don’t know fuck-all what to do about it?

    To do that, we’d have to recognize that the Utopia we’re supposedly building has some unintended consequences. We can’t have that, it doesn’t serve the “greater good”, so let’s scream about people owning guns and how they really don’t need to be so free, do they?

  762. Pablo says:

    the right to have an abortion comes from the same shit-stained constitution what gives us the right to bear arms

    Which amendment is that?

  763. McGehee says:

    Seems like the right to survive gestation is in that constitution a little more firmly, chirpyfeet.

  764. McGehee says:

    Something about how no one shall be deprived of life without due process. The only processing going on at a Planned Parenthood abortion mill is the initial stage of producing Soylent Green.

  765. leigh says:

    The whole thing was artful, Ernst. But yes, Luke was the one that caught my attention.

  766. Blake says:

    Well, McGehee, all pro-aborts try to claim they aren’t really aborting a baby, life, etc. Therefore, it isn’t murder when a woman choses an abortion. (though, shooting and killing a pregnant woman generally results in a double homocide charge, but, I digress)

    Anyway, when a woman gets pregnant with a Buick, Mini-14, or similar inanimate object, then we can discuss whether or not abortion is, in fact, murder. Until such time, abortion is murder, plain and simple.

  767. happyfeet says:

    nobody should be deprived of liberty without due process Mr mcgehee

  768. happyfeet says:

    soylent green is pickles

  769. LBascom says:

    Which amendment is that?

    The one right before the “penalty is a tax” amendment SCJ Roberts discovered.

  770. McGehee says:

    nobody should be deprived of liberty without due process Mr mcgehee

    We generally do subject murderers to due process, unless they work at Planned Parenthood. They get a free pass.

  771. geoffb says:

    Some quotes from one of the links I put above. Long comment again, for which I apologize.

    For those of us who came of age in the 1970s, one of the most shocking aspects of the last three decades was the rise of mass public shootings: people who went into public places and murdered complete strangers. Such crimes had taken place before, such as the Texas Tower murders by Charles Whitman in 1966,1 but their rarity meant that they were shocking.

    Something changed in the 1980s: these senseless mass murders started to happen with increasing frequency. People were shocked when James Huberty killed twenty-one strangers in a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California in 1984, and Patrick Purdy murdered five children in a Stockton, California schoolyard in 1989. Now, these crimes have become background noise, unless they involve an extraordinarily high body count (such as at Virginia Tech) or a prominent victim (such as Rep. Gabrielle Giffords). Why did these crimes go from extraordinarily rare to commonplace?
    […]
    At least half of these mass murderers (as well as many other murderers) have histories of mental illness. Many have already come to the attention of the criminal justice or mental health systems before they become headlines.
    […]
    In the 1960s, the United States embarked on an innovative approach to caring for its mentally ill: deinstitutionalization. The intentions were quite humane: move patients from long-term commitment in state mental hospitals into community-based mental health treatment.
    […]
    The Kennedy Administration optimistically described how the days of long-term treatment were now past; newly-developed drugs such as chlorpromazine meant that two-thirds of the mentally ill “could be treated and released within 6 months.”

    At about the same time, two different ideas came to the forefront of American progressive thinking: that there was a right to mental health treatment, and a right to a more substantive form of due process for those who were to be committed to a mental hospital.
    […]
    Neither a right to treatment nor a more demanding application of due process alone was particularly destructive, but in combination they made hundreds of thousands of seriously mentally ill people homeless, where many died of exposure and violence. They fell through the cracks, living shorter, more miserable lives, and often greatly degrading the quality of urban life for everyone else. A fraction became something quite a bit more unsettling than the mentally ill person begging on the street or disrupting the public library: they became the mad mass murderers of the modern age.
    […]
    Nor were these problems specific to the United States and its “gun culture” as some contend. Other nations which started down the same road toward deinstitutionalization a few years after the United States have suffered many similar mass murders.
    […]
    When The New York Times did a detailed study of 100 U.S. rampage killers in 2000, they pointed out that there was often plenty of warning:

    Most of them left a road map of red flags, spending months plotting their attacks and accumulating weapons, talking openly of their plans for bloodshed. Many showed signs of serious mental health problems.

    . . .

    The Times’ study found that many of the rampage killers… suffered from severe psychosis, were known by people in their circles as being noticeably ill and needing help, and received insufficient or inconsistent treatment from a mental health system that seemed incapable of helping these especially intractable patients. . . .

    The Times found what it called “an extremely high association between violence and mental illness.” Of the 100 rampage murderers, forty-seven “had a history of mental health problems” before committing murder,
    […]
    There is no shortage of these tragedies that have one common element: a person whose exceedingly odd behavior, sometimes combined with minor criminal acts, would likely have led to confinement in a mental hospital in 1960. After deinstitutionalization, these people remained at large until they killed. The criminal justice system then took them out of circulation (if they did not commit suicide), but this was too late for their victims.

    Much more there.

  772. McGehee says:

    And there’s a reason why, in the whole sentence, the things of which no one should be deprived without due process are — in order — life, liberty and property.

    That’s ’cause life is more impor’nant.

  773. Danger says:

    Welcome back Lisa!

    The humor is still here: Happyfeet still delivers some wicked one-liners (when he isn’t stuck on abortion loving, Palin hating or googoo for gay marriaging) and newrouter can get in a pretty funny jab himself (when he isn’t declaring DEFCON 4 on Happyfeet and proggreissives;)

    JD has franchised out his anti-bigotry crusade but he still occasionally does personal webinars to keep us all in line.

    Cranky (only in the Grumpy old men sense of the word)-d still makes me laugh daily and I’m comforted that he and Squid have Cudgels, Pitchforks and all of the anti-riot/zombie acopolypse equipment I’ll need to keep my bunker well stocked.

    bh remains a staunch and dedicated assistant-head hall monitor that leverages his brand of funny to defuse and redirect discussions gone awry.

    Lamont and Alpuccino make occasional cameos and force all of us to change out keyboards and monitors (yay early upgrade!;)

    Geoffb brings the internet-fu, Google, Yahoo and Bing are all competing for the rights to franchise his skillz. Little known fact: Ask.com (along with all of the other similar sites) is actually a redirect to Geoffb’s mailbox.

    Serr8d and Darleen do magic with photoshop and bring the troll outrage bursting out of the earth’s crevices. We all jockey for a position in line, load our shotguns and conduct a socialist skeet shoot.

    Sadly, we have lost a couple of giants to Cancer. Rick Locke and Brian Texeira (BJTex) brought wisdom, insight and grace that we will never forget and that we will never be able to replicate.

    Donald and Serr8d lost their wives but soldier on and check-in with us giving all of us hope that survival from tragedies is painful but possible.

    As you noted Team America is feeling the effects of a full-blown, all-night, party like it’s 1999, hangover and seems to be content with more of the hair of the dog that bit them. I hope that you and others that return after an extended absence will forgive us if we dont display quite the same level of humor and optimism as in past years.

    Oh and one more thing,
    Could you upgrade your gravatar please! I’m sure you’ll find that we are very appreciative of naturally sweetened life giving mammory gland containers here at PW ;)

  774. cranky-d says:

    Just to be pedantic, the bill of rights does not outline the only rights we have. It was intended to give examples of rights that were already protected by the existing document. The Constitution is not a “The government can do everything but the following” kind of thing, but a “Here are the very few things the government can do” kind of thing.

    The right to life is a no-brainer. To actually have the “right” to kill any innocent in the Constitution, it would have to be amended to account for that. Currently, it’s not there. However, enforcing anti-abortion laws such that they weren’t there just to be used arbitrarily against political enemies would be so onerous that it would violate most of the rest of the rights we still (somewhat) enjoy.

  775. Pablo says:

    Haven’t clicked on the link Dale K. crapped on the thread, but this bit of it jumped out and caught my attention: our-moloch

    Don’t waste your time. A sample:

    The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. How do we worship it? Let us count the ways:

    1. It has the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism.

    Denying proggy myths comes from religious fundamentalism, you see. Definitely not from, you know, the facts.

  776. McGehee says:

    enforcing anti-abortion laws such that they weren’t there just to be used arbitrarily against political enemies

    I’m having trouble parsing this.

  777. happyfeet says:

    encroachment on even the most distasteful exercisings of freedom are diminishing of Liberty and give succor to those who wish its demise

  778. happyfeet says:

    *encroachments* plural I mean

  779. McGehee says:

    Including the freedom to kill the most defenseless human beings alive. Got it.

  780. palaeomerus says:

    “The fact that the gun is a reverenced god can be seen in its manifold and apparently resistless powers. ”

    ???

    Really? An adult wrote this, and it got published ?

  781. Blake says:

    geoff, interesting thesis, however, the huge flaw in the mental illness argument is the majority of these people go after soft targets. Someone who is interested in a high body count before offing themselves is aware enough to know they are not going to get the body count they desire if they go after a group of citizens known to be carrying arms.

    I would tend to argue these mass murderers wouldn’t have been mass murderers, had they been raised in an environment that was more disciplinary. The younger generation has been raised in a “consequence free” einvironment and as such, live in a world that is geared more toward instant gratification, no matter what the outcome or consequence.

    I think the knowledge of instant and severe consequences, more than likey, restrained a lot of people 40 years ago or so. Those kinds of constraints have been lifted, leading to our current problems.

  782. palaeomerus says:

    I think guns are more of a Dagon or a Nisroch myself. On the outside maybe a Forsetti. Maybe.

  783. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I think about that a lot leigh

  784. McGehee says:

    Well, McGehee, all pro-aborts try to claim they aren’t really aborting a baby, life, etc.

    That certainly appears to be chirpyfeet’s position.

  785. Blake says:

    geoffb, I think I worded things badly. Instead of using the word “environment,” I should have used “culture.”

  786. happyfeet says:

    no fetuses are wee small babies you should have to answer to god for when you delete one but you shouldn’t have to answer to idiot americans

  787. leigh says:

    geoff, both the articles you link upthread are very good. (The second one I find disturbing due to the seeming lack of insight on the part of the writer, but it could be that I am just unfamiliar with his style.) I have been looking for articles about deinstitutionalization since there is a lot of incorrect information out there. Mainly of the IT’S ALL REAGAN’S FAULT!!!! variety.

    The crux of the matter isn’t that guns are necessarily a problem; we have always been an armed society. The speed of daily living and its impact on people who are either unable to cope due to mental illness or societal indulgence is what I find to be the problem in the main.

    The problem is societal and I put the blame on Sociologists and mushy headed psychology majors of the Rogerian stripe. Taking responsibility is an empty phrase that means nothing when used as one of the mantras of self-help groups. I’m not a fan of group therapy, anyway. They generally devolve into bragging and one upmanship.

    I have a lot to say on this topic, but I need to streamline it first.

  788. leigh says:

    I think about that a lot leigh

    Moi aussi.

  789. Pablo says:

    Liberty doesn’t include having some dude kill your baby.

  790. leigh says:

    Happy, I really don’t understand your glee about aborting baby people. Your own mother, whoever she was, could have opted to have you sucked into a sink instead of going through pregnancy and birth and letting nice Lutherans adopt your squalling ass.

    You think you’d count your blessings and stop being a shit-stirrer.

  791. happyfeet says:

    well there’s every reason to let women make their own decisions cause of if you don’t then they are not equal to the mens

  792. happyfeet says:

    besides my mom kept me too long to abort me she was hoping the dude she was fucking would leave his wife

    fail

  793. palaeomerus says:

    “the right to have an abortion comes from the same shit-stained constitution what gives us the right to bear arms”

    right to bear arms -> Explicitly written in 2nd Amendment, 1788

    right to an abortion :

    Penumbras and Emanations of other rights generate a right to privacy as illuminated by William O. Douglas , 1965

    -> ” the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state’s two legitimate interests in regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting women’s health. Arguing that these state interests became stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the trimester of pregnancy.” 1973

    -> Webster v. Reproductive Health Services 1989 – Modified trimester framework for determining right to an abortion –

    -> Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992 affirmed right to an abortion and struck down one cause of restrictions of that right (spousal notice) but upheld the other four (informed consent of health effects of procedure, 24 hour waiting period, parental cocsent requirement, reporting mandates on abortion providers)

    -> Stenberg v. Carhart, 2000 – allowed states to outlaw partial birth abortions EXCEPT where the “health” of a woman was threatened- (effectively making it legal whenever health, any form of health including stress reduction, was claimed as the reason for the procedure)

    -> Gonzales v. Carhart, 2003 -said congress had the right to nationally ban partial birth abortions –

  794. Pablo says:

    Really? An adult wrote this, and it got published ?

    By a book reviewing outfit, no less.

  795. leigh says:

    Brain + scissors = dead

    It’s never too late, sayeth Obama.

  796. happyfeet says:

    it is what it is mr. pal

    at one time there was hope that the question may one day return to the states

    but Team R pizzled away the presidency once too often

  797. palaeomerus says:

    That part of my above “right to bear arms vs. right to an abortion post”, right after the 2nd ” -> ” was supposed to mention “Roe Vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton”, and say that the text was quoted from Wikipedia. I did not hit CTRL-Z again though and so it got left off.

  798. palaeomerus says:

    “it is what it is mr. pal”

    Is that Aristotle or Popeye ?

  799. palaeomerus says:

    So what’s next? Punch and Judy puppet shows about the danger of guns? Maybe a cartoon with a Captain Planet like superhero who appears to save kids from the guns that are taking over their minds?

  800. geoffb says:

    It takes both a man and a woman to make a baby, but only one of the three people involved gets to make the decision to make that threesome into two. That is a strange equality, like unto the some are more equal than… variety.

    Not to worry however as once Obamacare gets going in full all those decisions will devolve to some panel somewhere making at least the remaining two fully, equally, powerless again. It’s all for the best I’m sure.

  801. geoffb says:

    I need to streamline it first.

    Always my problem, solving of which I’ve given up.

  802. beemoe says:

    no fetuses are wee small babies you should have to answer to god for when you delete one but you shouldn’t have to answer to idiot americans

    What if I don’t believe in God?

  803. happyfeet says:

    it is a strange equality it’s sort of a highly imperfect level playing field thing

  804. leigh says:

    It’s part of the culture of death, geoff. Killing babies in the womb is A-OK. Applauded, even, by some.

    It’s not much of a leap to infanticide, spree-killings at the elementary school, tire irons to the back of your spouse’s head, poisoning the neighbor’s dogs, &c.

    Once you greenlight one, it’s hard to put the brakes on the rest of it. Kind of like that domino effect they were always going on about when talking about the Commies when we were kids.

  805. happyfeet says:

    if you don’t believe in god you’re probably going to hell with adam

  806. palaeomerus says:

    “It’s all for the best I’m sure.”

    Hail Leibniz!

  807. leigh says:

    Always my problem, solving of which I’ve given up.

    Heh. I can most definately relate.

  808. cranky-d says:

    From the late Ric Locke:

    There are far too many abortions in this country. I cannot think of a worse condemnation of any society than to note that a substantial fraction of its young women prefer to kill their children rather than bear them. But that’s a symptom, not a cause, and treating symptoms without addressing the underlying cause is effort wasted at best. More often, it constitutes draconian measures that not only exacerbate the problem but cause new ones. Protecting the Unborn requires at minimum the ability to discover they exist, and that, in turn, requires the Pussy Patrol, empowered to examine young women at will in order to find out if there’s an Unborn to Protect. It’s not just that this would require a massive apparatus of Investigators, Examiners, and Regulators, the constitution of which tosses any smallest pretense of “limited, non-intrusive Government” in the toilet and flushes twice; it’s also that any volunteers for that duty are immediately suspect, for reasons it would be otiose to elaborate.

    To do the above would violate many liberties women enjoy to protect the lives of the unborn.

    So, if one is not going to enforce a law protecting the unborn at all times (that would be impossible in our current system, as no one would put up with it), the law would then exist to be enforced just in special circumstances. I don’t care for laws that are routinely violated and enforced just when someone wants to make a point or punish a political enemy. I would rather they didn’t exist in the first place. The fact that we already have a truckload of such laws does not excuse making more of them.

  809. sdferr says:

    Aristotle or Popeye?

    Both, yet, I believe, each is truncated at some loss.

    The Aristotle one ends: “. . . and what it is, we don’t know, and is that which remains the thing to be discovered.”

    The Popeye one, on the other hand, ends: “. . . and that’s all what it is. End of story, for I, Popeye, embody the whole.” (He was a follower of Descartes, this Popeye.)

  810. happyfeet says:

    nobody wants to be tossed into a lake of fire

  811. happyfeet says:

    i wonder who’s in charge of the tossing or is it more like a laundry chute

    nobody tells me anything

  812. happyfeet says:

    nicely said Mr. Ric

  813. BigBangHunter says:

    – feets must be referring to the XXVII amendment:

    “The individual right to murder the unborn by anyone not choosing to raise the little bastards shall not be abridged.”

  814. happyfeet says:

    no it’s number 14 silly

    the same one where we get a debt limit from btw so we for sure don’t want to repeal it willy nilly

  815. LBascom says:

    With all due respect to Ric,

    Protecting the Unborn requires at minimum the ability to discover they exist, and that, in turn, requires the Pussy Patrol

    is utter and complete bullshit.

  816. McGehee says:

    The least we can do is defund Murder, Inc. Planned Parenthood and return authority over abortion laws to the several states.

    I will not be preached to about life or liberty by someone who thinks it’s “liberty” to kill a baby, but Christofascism to tell women to keep their damned knees together.

  817. happyfeet says:

    can you elaborate Mr. Lee?

  818. McGehee says:

    Don’t worry, chirpyfeet. No one’s going to draft you to go looking up any old girlfriends.

  819. BigBangHunter says:

    – Abortion + legal theft = responsibility avoidence.

    – But you can call it something else if you like. Doesn’t chnage anything, but maybe it helps you hide your nagging doubts.

  820. happyfeet says:

    cnn says everyone should take a bath for to start the healing

    i’m not shitting you

  821. happyfeet says:

    i would love a baby wazzle i think but i would have move for sure

  822. leigh says:

    All the networks need to observe a day, no a week, of silence about angsty crazy shooters and their targets. Ixnay on the soft photo montages of happy smiling young’uns and heroic teacherettes accompanied by string music.

    No sense in egging on copycats.

  823. happyfeet says:

    have *to* move for sure

    my tablet doesn’t like this long thread

  824. leigh says:

    They aren’t babies for long. They are small people.

  825. Silver Whistle says:

    What if I don’t believe in God?

    Guilty as sin, but free as a bird!

  826. happyfeet says:

    yes the wazzles grow and grow this is why you can’t procrastinate going to disneyland

  827. BigBangHunter says:

    – Leigh, the press has always pandered to tradgedy and the macabe. They’re the ghouls of society. They depend on these things to make a buck. The only time we were “comparitively” free of yellow journelism was at the height of WWII.

    – Lincoln, the founding fathers, they all had to endure the crazy fucking press. The reason its more obvious now is they have such a target rich invironment with the political division in the nation right now, and they incite, and they use it relentlessly.

  828. newrouter says:

    I heard a chilling new phrase on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Saturday morning: “independent mothers,” from a caller who clearly was one herself. If this euphemism catches on, we might as well turn out the lights on civilized society.

    Was “single mother” really so stigmatizing? Of course not. It was scrupulously nonjudgmental, having been purged of the unpleasant echo of “marriage” that still hovers around the now-archaic term “unwed mother.” And while the phrase “single mother” may have been value-neutral, the culture around it operated overtime to celebrate the “strong women” who were raising their children solo and to obliterate from public consciousness the males who regrettably still played a role in reproduction. The iron-clad rule in the MSM has been: When writing about single mothers, one must never, ever ask: Where are the fathers of their children? Male parents of poor children have simply been disappeared from mainstream discourse, too irrelevant to even think about.

    And yet, apparently, there was still too much suggestion of deficit in the phrase “single mother.” Someone, somewhere, has decided that another rebranding was in order. If single mothers are “independent,” then married mothers are “dependent.” Marriage is thus a detraction from the ideal feminist state and signifies participation in a compromising, patriarchal institution.

    link

  829. leigh says:

    They’re the ghouls of society.

    That’s the truth, BBH. I knew a news anchor back in the day and I asked him once “How the hell can you stand there in the front of the smoldering ruins of someone’s home (and by extension, their life) and ask them ‘How did you feel while you watched your house burn to the ground?'”

    He shrugged and said “It’s a living.”

    Cripes.

  830. Dalekhunter says:

    http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local/indiana&id=8922348

    47 every so necessary implements needed to fight some imaginary govt. foe. . . or something

  831. geoffb says:

    The three self-blinded mice rats.

  832. palaeomerus says:

    “Cedar Lake is about 45 miles southeast of Chicago.”

  833. happyfeet says:

    finally a wedge issue team r is on the right side of

  834. palaeomerus says:

    So the 47 guns as Moloch MADE the Illonois man threaten a school? Is that the shit I am being asked to swallow?

  835. leigh says:

    Say, doesn’t DiFi keep an M-1 at her mountain retreat in Colorado? She used to.

  836. Silver Whistle says:

    Dalekhunter hasn’t met a logical fallacy he wasn’t in love with, palaeo.

  837. LBascom says:

    can you elaborate

    What is the purpose of any law?

    Should the law against murder be dropped because of it’s miserable failure in ending murder, and the misguided belief of some it requires a pussy patrol assault weapons ban?

  838. happyfeet says:

    it’s a that government is best what governs least thing mr. lee

    can society get along in absence of abortion criminalization

    yup it can

    can society get along in absence of a prohibition against murder most foul

    nope

  839. slipperyslope says:

    I cannot think of a worse condemnation of any society than to note that a substantial fraction of its young women prefer to kill their children rather than bear them.

    A substantial fraction of men make it very clear that they would like their mate to get an abortion. Something that none of you have apparently ever noticed ever.

  840. palaeomerus says:

    Apparently whenever Slippery Slope uses the word ‘apparently’ silly, sloppy, childish, bullshit assumptions follow which will then be passed off as if they were valid taunts or deep thoughts.

  841. leigh says:

    Men who don’t want children shouldn’t have unprotected sex with women with whom they don’t have a dedicated, monogomous relationship.

  842. leigh says:

    I figured well-heeled slippery would be off watching a professional football game from his skybox, not trolling the interwebs with us knuckledraggers.

  843. Silver Whistle says:

    It’s a woman’s right to choose, you sexist, oppressive bastard, slipperyfuckstick. How dare you insinuate otherwise.

  844. slipperyslope says:

    Men who don’t want children shouldn’t have unprotected sex with women with whom they don’t have a dedicated, monogomous relationship.

    No shit. They just don’t seem to get mentioned much in these conversations about sluts that want free birth control lest they become independent mothers or baby killers.

  845. LBascom says:

    can society get along in absence of abortion criminalization

    yup it can

    Yeah, our society is real fucking healthy, ain’t it.

    Still, I was objecting to the notion that protecting life requires a pussy patrol. Like how it being illegal to sell human kidneys doesn’t require an organ patrol.

  846. leigh says:

    They get mentioned quite often, slippery. Do you really think we’ve not discussed this before?

    Independent mothers? This means they aren’t on public assistance, yes? Never married mothers is more like it.

  847. slipperyslope says:

    I figured well-heeled slippery would be off watching a professional football game from his skybox, not trolling the interwebs with us knuckledraggers.

    The new upper class isn’t very into sports. ’cause it’s a dumb way to spend 3 hours.

    That said, I do like to take in a Mariners game a few times a year when I’m up in Seattle, mainly for the photography opportunity, but I’d never watch a baseball game on TV.

  848. leigh says:

    Snob.

  849. Lisa says:

    Danger: Great to see you. Thanks for the updates. I am devastated to hear about Rick and BJ. My deepest condolences to Don and Serr for their losses.

  850. palaeomerus says:

    From Insty: “U.S. Falls Out of Top 10 On Prosperity Index For The First Time.”

    http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/12/balancing-economic-control-and-entrepreneurship.html

    ———————-

    Also from Insty: “top-5-foreign-policy-screw-ups-of-2012”

    http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/14/top-5-foreign-policy-screw-ups-of-2012

    ———————–

    Brits smarter than democrats: ” susan-rice-was-brought-down-by-the-long-shadow-of-benghazi-not-race-or-gender”

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100194182/susan-rice-was-brought-down-by-the-long-shadow-of-benghazi-not-race-or-gender/

    ————————–

    ‘Bout d’em nice lookin’ unions ya got…it’d be a real shame if someptin’ were to happen to ’em.

    http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/2012/12/13/whats-the-matter-with-michigan/

  851. palaeomerus says:

    “The new upper class isn’t very into sports. ’cause it’s a dumb way to spend 3 hours.”

    Yah, that must be why sports tickets are so high priced and hard to get and the satellite sports packages are so expensive. It must also be why an F1 track opening near Austin filled up the local hotels.

  852. Lisa says:

    McGee: I hate wading into the topic of abortion. But if we are going to have a serious discussion about our devolving respect for the life of our fellows, we have to talk about that. One of my old bosses once told me that no issue facing modern society is unconnected to the legalization of abortion on demand. Because she was a devout, god-bothering papist, I tried to dismiss it as just religious cray-cray. But she planted a bug in my head and I often play a game in my head similar to the Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon game with abortion and public policy issues. Damn her eyes.

    The fact that unless you shoot or stab a BUNCH of kids, you don’t even make page one anymore could reasonably be connected to legalized abortion on demand. Though neither the US nor China are the most violent places for children, both of these countries seem to have lots of incidents where the children are the target, not the collateral damage. Neither are they political or terrorist targets. They are selected to be murdered by people for no particular reason. Is it related to both countries high abortion rates? Fuck if I know. It is worth exploring though.

    But, on the other side of that argument, a student of history could point to periods as recent as a few centuries ago when human life was not considered all that valuable at all, and people were profoundly indifferent to human suffering. And there was no abortion on demand. Not only that but the bible and public policy were pretty much one in the same (or the Queran, if you lived over yonder). One only has to pick any village or city and check out the ordinances that were dreamed up during the Middle Ages and were not wholly abolished until the advent of the Industrial Age. Or check out Charles V’s criminal code, The Carolina, written in the 16th century. It reads like a rejected George Romero torture-porn script. And this was the actual law. Torturing, dismembering, burning, roasting, boiling, and dropping people in caustic substances for misdemeanors (or just for the fuck of it, if your Feudal Lord was off his meds and feeling frisky) was pretty routine shit.

    This conversation is worth having, no matter how uncomfortable and patriarchal and retrograde it seems.

  853. happyfeet says:

    abortion prohibition is not compatible with a philosophy of limited government mr. lee

    that’s how come it got legalized to begin with

    prohibition made for an icky america

  854. beemoe says:

    Independant mothers like Julia?

    I am getting tired of even calling it Orwellian. It is too fucking absurd.

  855. palaeomerus says:

    “No shit. They just don’t seem to get mentioned much in these conversations about sluts that want free birth control lest they become independent mothers or baby killers.”

    Why would they? The subject of interest in those discussions is other people aka the public being forced to pay for free birth control even though birthcontrol is cheap and easily available. Why should someone be obligated to detour to some stupid rhetorical device that suits you in such discussions?

  856. beemoe says:

    They just don’t seem to get mentioned much in these conversations about sluts that want free birth control lest they become independent mothers or baby killers.

    How much do they get mentioned in conversations where they would rather the mother of their child not abort it?

  857. leigh says:

    This conversation is worth having, no matter how uncomfortable and patriarchal and retrograde it seems.

    I’m glad you’re back, Lisa. We never met, since I was just lurking back then, but I always enjoyed our posts.

  858. palaeomerus says:

    “prohibition made for an icky america”

    Prohibition was a national policy. Abortion was made a matter of national policy (on false premises, specifically a false rape claim) in order to take it away from the states 185 years after the nation was founded. On the basis of a right derived from penumbras and emanations found in a 1965 case. And this was based largely on an induced state of confusion regarding what a human fetus is before the law.

  859. beemoe says:

    abortion prohibition is not compatible with a philosophy of limited government mr. lee

    And legal abortion is not compatible with a philosophy of basic human rights.

    What we have here is a conundrum.

  860. slipperyslope says:

    Lisa – I think the reason we’re so shocked by violence is because it has become the exception rather than the norm.

  861. McGehee says:

    One only has to pick any village or city and check out the ordinances that were dreamed up during the Middle Ages and were not wholly abolished until the advent of the Industrial Age.

    Modernity does have its advantages as well as certain downsides.

    This is why civilizations tend to follow an arc that seems almost foreordained, as the prosperity and liberality that make it possible for people to not worry where their next meal is coming from, also detaches them from the dangers and challenges of the world outside their civilized bubble and they get ideas like a “right” to food, housing and healthcare, but not a right to self-defense or to hold and espouse their own devoutly held beliefs. As soon as any civilization in history eclipses all others in its day, it begins to die. Rome was toppled by outside forces but it was rot from within that made it toppleable (I hereby declare that a word).

    To make sense of it, just think of a set of balance scales, with good things on one side and bad things on the other. No matter how many things get piled on the good side, a counterbalancing weight of bad is sure to appear on the other. Life in the so-called “state of Nature” lacks the sheer mass of both good and bad that civilization offers.

    We were never promised Heaven on earth, and our attempts to create it give the story of the Tower of Babel new meaning every day.

  862. Slartibartfast says:

    abortion prohibition is not compatible with a philosophy of limited government mr. lee

    that’s how come it got legalized to begin with

    prohibition made for an icky america

    Really? Did happyfeet just threadjack this thread, too?

  863. happyfeet says:

    mr. moe… what ric said about causes and symptoms

    me i think the best way to address abortion is to work towards a prosperous america

    the more disgustingly third world we become as a little country the more quixotic banning abortion will become, especially when we start having to turn piggy piggy independent mothers away from the welfare trough

    you might be able to ban it in a few states, but i doubt you’d accomplish very much as far as actually decreasing the number of abortions goes

  864. happyfeet says:

    actually no mr. slart it was yonder lifeydoodles what said the newtown massacre was eclipsed daily by the horrific toll of abortion

    or something

  865. palaeomerus says:

    “the more disgustingly third world we become as a little country the more quixotic banning abortion will become, especially when we start having to turn piggy piggy independent mothers away from the welfare trough”

    Yes, Happyfeet. The surplus population must at times be liquidated so the trains to run on time. So our Dear leader always says. Juche!

  866. cranky-d says:

    To know if an abortion has occurred, you have to know there was a pregnancy. To know there was a pregnancy, you would need to test women all the time to see if they’re pregnant. Then, if the pregnancy was terminated (which can be done in a wide variety of ways, or it could have spontaneously ended), you would need to know the circumstances of that termination to know if charges need to be brought. In other words, a pussy patrol.

    When you already have an independent human being whose existence can be proven, you can enforce murder laws. When you don’t, you cannot necessarily do so without gathering said evidence, which you would probably have to do before the fact to be sure. I believe that is what Ric meant, though of course he is not here to tell us.

    I’m sorry I helped carry this conversation off-track.

    I think abortion is murder. However, I don’t think we can stop it by legislating against it, because those laws are basically unenforceable. I also don’t think the government should support it or sanction it in any way.

  867. McGehee says:

    (Addressed to chirpyfeet, lest anyone misconstrue)

    The difference is, the lifeydoodles have thought about the issue and its friction between rights of one and rights of another, and arrived at a position that satisfies more than just how they feel.

    Your chirps, on the other hand…

  868. happyfeet says:

    no mr. pal it’s just most womens what have abortions already have kids, and sometimes they have to do best by the kids they already have

    it’s a fallen world can i get an amen

  869. McGehee says:

    most womens what have abortions already have kids

    Got a link, assertion monkey?

  870. happyfeet says:

    gosh that is an arrogant assumption you are making mr. mcgehee

  871. happyfeet says:

    no i don’t have a link that is my own assertion

  872. LBascom says:

    prohibition made for an icky america

    If by “icky” you mean much less casual sex and unwed mothers, indeed.

    If I were king for a day, I would have a federal law granting a woman’s choice to abort. UNTIL there is a babies beating heart (I’m not sure exactly, let’s say the first trimester). After that, only under extenuating circumstances (health of the mother, blah, blah) granted(or not) by the various states.

    Also, it would be prohibited for any tax funded government entity to fund abortions. It would be completely on the dime of the one making the “choice”, then and now.

    Plus, if the pregnancy occurs in and from a marriage, both parents must agree to an abortion even in the first trimester.

    People act like it’s a major imposition and a nearly an impossible thing to keep the little sperms off the egg, but it really isn’t!

  873. happyfeet says:

    it just makes sense

  874. McGehee says:

    To know there was a pregnancy, you would need to test women all the time to see if they’re pregnant.

    Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

  875. happyfeet says:

    government funding just raises the price… it’s like college

  876. McGehee says:

    it just makes sense

    You’ll pardon us if we don’t consult you on what makes sense.

  877. happyfeet says:

    you do so at your own peril mr. mcgehee

  878. McGehee says:

    To know there was a pregnancy, you would need to test women all the time to see if they’re pregnant.

    Then again, this might be a way to make pro-aborts oppose ObamaCare…

  879. Lisa says:

    Contraception is reasonably affordable for a gal like myself. But all contraception is not created equal (since the most effective contraception is a cocktail of hormones – it carries lots of risk and is not suited for everyone). And it is not universally available. And though they keep saying that major advances that would vastly improve the efficacy, affordability, and availability of contraception for all are around the corner – we are not there yet.

    Though the pill was a cultural game changer, it has not evolved beyond what it was at its inception. We can inject it in our arm, wear it in a patch, or stick it on an IUD. But it is still the mildly carcinogenic dose of progesterone. Sometimes it does not work. It causes some women to get fatter and hairier (and I am quite sure that they were not trying to avoid pregnancy by taking a pill to turn into a bearded fat lady and thus never get laid again). It could carry a small chance of acting as an abortifacient (and if you are a god-botherer, that might be disturbing to you). And it always, always increases your chances of finding a dreaded lump somewhere.

    Just saying that to clarify with some of you cockbearers that contraception is not like popping a Cialis and a couple of hits of ecstasy. It is kind of crappy and not much fun. And most of us aren’t getting Jenna Jamison level humping action just because we are on birth control. We are in committed relationships or married. Or not getting laid at all. But when you take birth control, you generally keep taking it because it is such a pain in the ass to find what works best and then take it for the appropriate amount of time for it to be effective.

  880. cranky-d says:

    Can you tell in the first few months a woman is pregnant just by looking at her, McGehee? You’re a wizard, then. Go you!

    If I were king for a day, I would have a federal law granting a woman’s choice to abort. UNTIL there is a babies beating heart (I’m not sure exactly, let’s say the first trimester). After that, only under extenuating circumstances (health of the mother, blah, blah) granted(or not) by the various states.

    Lee, that totally works for me.

    However, it’s still murder to kill the baby before that time. It’s just not one we would enforce.

    Maybe now I’m making more sense? I prefer just to snark. Maybe I’ll go back to that and leave the important stuff to others who explain things better than I do. Besides, I should be working anyway.

  881. Lisa says:

    Now you know more about contraception and girlie bits than you have ever wanted to know. Feel free to stab out your mind’s eye with a hot poker now.

  882. leigh says:

    I’m tired of having this discussion about abortion.

    I say we just repeal all the statutes pertaining to murder and call it a day. Unlock the jails and let those people go! They probably all had a damned good reason for doing what they did and who are we to judge?

  883. BigBangHunter says:

    – feets, you and your fellow baby murder lovers can mince words from now til doomday. Murder is murder no matter how you dress up the pig.

    – Ypu dodge dealing with that hard fact by pretending a baby inside the wob has lesser rights than the mother. That is the sum total premise everyone of your arguments keads back to. Its pure bullshit, and I would like to see it challemged on exactly that basis, but you’ll move heaven and earth to avoid that happening, which says it all about your real motives.

    – Slipperyshit seems to think theres no Progressive males or something.

  884. cranky-d says:

    Lisa, in general I’m not a fan of taking medication that doesn’t actually help a person with a health problem. That might be because I’ve had to take medications daily since before my teens (asthma and allergies), and it bothers me that I’m tied to them.

    It’s a conundrum.

    As a parting gift (really this time) let me note that if abortions had been easy to get when I was conceived in 1963, I likely wouldn’t be here. I should not know this, but I do, and yes, my bio parents raised me. If abortions had been as socially acceptable as they are now, my best friend and his twin brother (born in 1973) would not be here either.

    So, I’m definitely conflicted.

  885. happyfeet says:

    a baby inside some lady’s womb is none of my business really and i don’t want my morally risible piece of shit government getting involved either

  886. palaeomerus says:

    “And it is not universally available. ”

    Neither are shoes. Or Gum.

  887. slipperyslope says:

    I’m tired of having this discussion about abortion.
    I say we just repeal all the statutes pertaining to murder and call it a day.

    Because taking a morning after pill is exactly the same as shooting up a first grade. Dipshit. Even if you’re pro-life, you don’t believe that, and I can prove it.

  888. slipperyslope says:

    As a parting gift (really this time) let me note that if abortions had been easy to get when I was conceived in 1963, I likely wouldn’t be here.

    If contraception had been available, my 9 of my 10 other siblings wouldn’t be here either. Except they aren’t here because contraception was available. And yet, I’m not conflicted about contraception.

  889. palaeomerus says:

    “Can you tell in the first few months a woman is pregnant just by looking at her, McGehee? You’re a wizard, then. Go you!”

    We’ll put a network of sensors in all the toilets and have a satellite that scans people and determines from biometrics whether they are likely to be pregnant or not.

    Then we’ll put no-murder sensors in everyone too so we can detect murder impulses or the sort of pain, fear, and shock that a victim experiences during the attemped murder process and that will call the cops.

    Or we could just tell doctors not to fucking do it on a state by state basis except in certain circumstances to be determined by said state, and bust up a back0alley abortion ring whenever we find one.

    Y’know, like we did until 1973.

    Or we could do the chips and sensors thing. It could all be solar powered and have zero carbon footprint. Waddya say?

  890. palaeomerus says:

    “Because taking a morning after pill is exactly the same as shooting up a first grade. Dipshit”

    Yeah, the silly asshole ACTUALLY just typed that and thought it was pretty good stuff.

    Sheesh.

  891. slipperyslope says:

    Or we could just tell doctors not to fucking do it on a state by state basis except in certain circumstances to be determined by said state, and bust up a back0alley abortion ring whenever we find one.

    Or you could get out of the business of telling everyone else what to do all the time. And I thought you hated tyranny?

  892. Lisa says:

    We are THIS CLOSE to a total game changer in contraception. They are either on phase two or three in testing the contraceptive vaccine. The efficacy is somewhere around 100%. The affordability will mean it will be available even to the poorest countries. The non-pregnancy related benefits (in preventing fibroid tumors and polycystic ovarian syndrome or whatever the hell you call that shit) are off the charts.

    It is creepy but cool because it works by flipping some switch that will, for as long as she wants it to, cause her body to hunt down and kill those lil swimmers. Somehow it does something to regulate your lady hormones too.

    I wonder what our conversations about this kind of thing will be when contraception becomes so easy, effective, and cheap that only the droolingly stupid and the ferociously devout are having unplanned pregnancies?

  893. slipperyslope says:

    Lisa – expect half the people here to hate it because it will let a woman fuck without getting permission from her pastor which is why a school and a mall and a movie theater got shot up. And Jeff won’t like it because marriage is only for making babies so gays can’t have it.

  894. slipperyslope says:

    I, on the other hand, think it might be one of the most important advances for the entire planet.

  895. newrouter says:

    It is creepy but cool because it works by flipping some switch

    i think it is called the todd akin switch

  896. palaeomerus says:

    “Or you could get out of the business of telling everyone else what to do all the time. And I thought you hated tyranny?”

    The FED is telling the states what to do. And I do hate tyranny. Roe V. Wade WAS tyranny.

  897. palaeomerus says:

    “Lisa – expect half the people here to hate it because it will let a woman fuck without getting permission from her pastor which is why a school and a mall and a movie theater got shot up. And Jeff won’t like it because marriage is only for making babies so gays can’t have it.”

    Slippery is afraid of no straw man!

  898. happyfeet says:

    that sounds neat lisa i hope it happens soon

    then Team R can focus full time on opposing the scourge of gay marriage

  899. Lisa says:

    Slipperyslope: It is incredibly exciting!!!

  900. palaeomerus says:

    “The affordability will mean it will be available even to the poorest countries.”

    You mean like Illinois and Philadelphia, and Georgetown University Law school ? Gosh!

  901. palaeomerus says:

    Of course once we identify any mutant males with super-survivor sperm they’ll have to be sterilized or tattooed or kept in colonies.

  902. LBascom says:

    To know if an abortion has occurred, you have to know there was a pregnancy. To know there was a pregnancy, you would need to test women all the time to see if they’re pregnant.

    See this is the bullshit part, and the same confused thinking that makes proggs want to ban guns because of murder.

    A law is just a standard. The law against murder doesn’t stop murder, it can only judge a murderer.

    When abortion has no judgement, life itself is devalued.

  903. Slartibartfast says:

    I told you ‘slope picked the wrong logical fallacy for a handle.

  904. LBascom says:

    Humm, I get the feeling happy and slipshod are more comfortable yalking about gay people than baby people.

  905. slipperyslope says:

    You mean like Illinois and Philadelphia, and Georgetown University Law school ? Gosh!

    Heaven forbid that women get better and cheaper contraception. Esp women who want to complete college. I mean, what the fuck does some chic going think she’s going to do with a Law degree? Arbitrate disputes between the 4 year old and 6 year old?

    You know, when women someday enter the work force, businesses will need to make accommodations so they can do things like rush home and cook dinner for their family. Mitt Romney said so.

  906. palaeomerus says:

    “Heaven forbid that women get better and cheaper contraception.”

    Yeah man. I’d hate to see anymore bleached jackal gnawed skulls on the roadside from all those lost caravans that tried to make the treacherous journey to Walmart.

  907. slipperyslope says:

    I get the feeling happy and slipshod are more comfortable yalking about gay people than baby people

    I actually think that after a certain point, abortion is murder. I just don’t think that point is 1 nano-second after conception.

  908. Lisa says:

    Lol @ Newrouter. And you don’t even have to have a legitimate rape for it to work!

  909. slipperyslope says:

    Yeah man. I’d hate to see anymore bleached jackal gnawed skulls on the roadside from all those lost caravans that tried to make the treacherous journey to Walmart.

    The woman vote will belong to your party in 2016, just stay on course.

  910. LBascom says:

    Let’s pretend expensive, bad contraception is a problem in America!

  911. palaeomerus says:

    Anyone notice how Slippery is now the champion of all new contraception and therefore Protein Wisdom must be agin’ it if’n he’s fer it ? The dude never made a cartoon he was a afraid to take a weak, tenuous, confused shot at.

  912. happyfeet says:

    i love babies they’re the future plus they almost always like me back they’re so much fun

    plus i usually get to take them to disney later when they’re really little my favorite is peter pan cause you get to fly then later they get older and we can stay up late and ride splash mountain over and over and i love that one the best cause it’s an adventure but also it tells a story like the haunted mansion which is my second favorite

  913. palaeomerus says:

    ” The woman vote will belong to your party in 2016, just stay on course.”

    Yeah there is only one woman vote and it is totally powerless against democrat voodoo.

  914. slipperyslope says:

    Yeah there is only one woman vote and it is totally powerless against democrat voodoo.

    Outside of white guys, what other demographic gives you the majority of it’s vote? Yeah, you guys are really cook’n. Like I said, stay on course. I’m rooting for you to fail and I’m not even particularly worried that you’ll get a clue.

  915. Lisa says:

    LBascom: It is not expensive to me. But it is not good for everyone. We have not changed the method of preventing gestation since the inception of the pill. The efficacy rate is 80ish percent. And we know that dosing up with progesterone does increase one’s risk of cancer. If we can have a 100% percent effective rate, make it cheap with few hassles and side-effects and NO risk of cancer – that is something to be excited about.

    They come out with a new boner pill every 18 months. What the heck is so awful about FINALLY making some really significant improvements to contraception?

  916. Slartibartfast says:

    Heaven forbid that women get better and cheaper contraception. Esp women who want to complete college.

    I’m going to have to do some reading to even figure out which logical fallacy this is. It’s like a cross between appeal to ridicule and strawman.

    Fortunately, like a lot of crossbreeds it is sterile.

  917. Slartibartfast says:

    Maybe with a sprinkling of red herring.

  918. slipperyslope says:

    Lisa – there’s apparently something these guys just find reprehensible about a woman not being filled with fear and guilt if she wants to do someone. Even their husbands they ought to be servicing out of marital duty, not because they really like it.

  919. Pellegri says:

    UNTIL there is a babies beating heart (I’m not sure exactly, let’s say the first trimester).

    Actually the cardiac smooth muscle cells get going by day eight, when the fetus is still an unrecognizable blobby mass.

    With a beating heart.

    I’ve always found science makes me less likely to accept progressive mores, rather than more.

  920. Slartibartfast says:

    Maybe ‘slope has created a genetically modified fallacy that is completely new. If so: best patent it posthaste.

  921. slipperyslope says:

    I’m going to have to do some reading to even figure out which logical fallacy this is. It’s like a cross between appeal to ridicule and strawman.

    I’d be very interested to know when you can recognize a fallacy.

  922. Slartibartfast says:

    Your level of interest is of no interest to me.

  923. leigh says:

    Why would being pregnant prevent a woman from finishing college? I worked on my doctorate with two kids at home and completed my course work and dissertation when I was five months pregnant.

  924. leigh says:

    I’ve always found science makes me less likely to accept progressive mores, rather than more.

    Well said.

  925. Pellegri says:

    It is creepy but cool because it works by flipping some switch that will, for as long as she wants it to, cause her body to hunt down and kill those lil swimmers. Somehow it does something to regulate your lady hormones too.

    That IS interesting. Given women already have pretty serious issues with autoimmunity, though–some of which are actually suppressed by exposure to seminal contents (no really, pre-exposure to a guy’s semen can prevent pre-eclampsia if you’re later carrying his babeh)–how extensive have the studies been? Is this going to be like the penicillin moment for birth control, where everyone gets prescribed immunological birth control and then years later when everyone’s allergic to penicillin (or in this case has lupus and rheumatoid arthritis), only THEN do we decide that maybe it was a bad idea?

    I agree current birth control solutions are not incredibly super and that more research is definitely warranted in fixing the side effects. But in defense of boner pills, birth control drugs are modifying a hormonal situation that underlies basically everything a woman’s body does, including things like bone maintenance and calorie consumption–where boner pills are mostly just inhibiting the breakdown of a single chemical (nitrous oxide). It’s hardly surprising it’s easier for drug companies to rebrand Yet Another Nitrous Oxide Inhibiter for helping with erectile dysfunction, while getting new birth control pills through the regulatory chute is nearly the same kind of slog that faces chemotherapy drugs.

    It’s more the underlying biology than anything. And unfortunately biology is pretty damn misogynistic and does reward women for being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen up until menopause.

  926. Pellegri says:

    Which is why I kind of roll my eyes when people go “SCIENCE!!!” in defense of whatever dumb thing it is that’s trending on tumblr. SCIENCE!!! tells us what is and what we can do about it, technically.

    Culture (which includes ~le religions~) tells us what we should do with what is. Biology is a hot, steaming, angry mess that doesn’t care about what “feels good” to espouse.

  927. palaeomerus says:

    “Outside of white guys, what other demographic gives you the majority of it’s vote?”

    I’m not terribly impressed. 47 to 51 is pretty doable.

  928. Pellegri says:

    Also, please stop telling me that as a woman I am being ~suppressed~ by my male relatives or culture or whatever for my desire not to bone things OR use birth control (in order to bone things without getting pregnant).

    Seriously. Cut it out. I don’t speak for you, you don’t speak for me.

  929. slipperyslope says:

    Why would being pregnant prevent a woman from finishing college? I worked on my doctorate with two kids at home and completed my course work and dissertation when I was five months pregnant.

    You’re right, it makes it easier. More women getting pregnant during college would then logically lead to more women graduating. Why has no one thought of that?

  930. palaeomerus says:

    “I’d be very interested to know when you can recognize a fallacy.”

    No, your whole posting history here is people exposing your idiotic fallacies one after the other.

  931. palaeomerus says:

    “You’re right, it makes it easier. More women getting pregnant during college would then logically lead to more women graduating. Why has no one thought of that?”

    30 year old law students who spend 70K on tuition expeicially!

  932. leigh says:

    Pellegri, the scientifically illiterate among us are trying to convince themselves that biology isn’t destiny after all.

    They are in for one rude wake up on that score.

  933. slipperyslope says:

    Culture (which includes ~le religions~) tells us what we should do with what is.

    Which is just another way of saying we decide what we should do – which I’m fine with. Like, we should require vehicle passengers to wear seat belts, and we should make there be a penalty for denying someone housing or employment solely on the basis of race. I’m fine with us making these collective decisions.

  934. palaeomerus says:

    ” Lisa – there’s apparently something these guys just find reprehensible about a woman not being filled with fear and guilt if she wants to do someone.”

    It’s true Lisa. You heard it from Slippery Slope and there is NO more reliable witness on what guys here think than that guy! Shucks! Why he embodies honesty, intellectual rigor, and lateral thinking…you know, when he isn’t just making shit up wholesale, moving goal posts, and behaving like a fool. (4% of the time)

  935. LBascom says:

    Hi Lisa. I’m an old fashioned guy (you may remember me as lee), and believe if young ladies and men were taught (as an ideal standard) to have sex with only their husbands and wives, we could go back to the days where half the people didn’t depend on government assistance, worry about STD’s and unwanted pregnancies, or think contraceptives were a right.

    Crazy, I know. You may as well try and control the weather!

  936. BigBangHunter says:

    I’d be very interested to know when you can recognize a fallacy.

    – Yes, we could tell early on you are fallacy challenged.

  937. palaeomerus says:

    Slippery Slope to women: ” They gonna putchoo all back in chains! “

  938. LBascom says:

    there’s apparently something these guys just find reprehensible about a woman not being filled with fear and guilt if she wants to do someone.”

    I don’t want a woman to feel fear and guilt AFTER she does someone. It would be good if she (and/or he) felt a sense of self worth and responsibility when she wants to do someone.

  939. Slartibartfast says:

    I don’t think there are many here who care all that much about things like sex and contraception. Most of us just have a problem with people demanding to be provided with contraception at our expense, rather than ponying up for it themselves.

    But that’s probably way too complicated for the likes of a slippery-slope hawker.

  940. beemoe says:

    I take back what I said about ‘slope being a bit smarter than Ric Caric.

    He obviously has risen to the challenge.

    When he starts talking about sperm armies using shipping containers to get around balloon fences in the uterus we will know we have a new champion.

  941. Lisa says:

    Pelligri: You are correct, damn your eyes.

    The fact that it is hard to get our bodies to gestate or not gestate according to our dictates and in defiance of our biological imperatives has been a challenge. Men and their simple issues. Sad-boners and baldness. There are little pills to take care of both. Happily, Cthulu, god of pain and humiliation, created proctologists and yearly prostate exams to bring balance to the universe.

  942. BT says:

    I think Leigh is to be congratulated for juggling all the various components of her life and going forth and getting the degrees she sought, no matter the obstacles in her way.

    Your condescending mockery reveals more about you than her.

  943. leigh says:

    Thank you, BT.

  944. Pellegri says:

    and we should make there be a penalty for denying someone housing or employment solely on the basis of race.

    Except to the extent these policies become deleterious to everyone involved. Yes, saying “racial discrimination is not okay” is perfectly good and in fact should be ensconced in law.

    Deciding (as happened before the housing crash) that denying someone who happens to be a racial minority a loan constitutes discrimination when there are other perfectly valid reasons for that denial (such as poor financial history or insufficient evidence of employment), and then using the law to bludgeon lenders into compliance with what we think “should be” does not work.

    So it goes with other matters of social policy, which is why I would rather leave that outside the realm of law except where there are negative rights (the right not to be harmed or defrauded or stolen from, say) that need to be protected that social mores would otherwise infringe on (cultural permissibility of certain kinds of rapes and murders comes to mind).

    I am not saying this is an issue where one philosophy–political or otherwise–has all the pain-free answers to these questions. But I do believe that less legal regulation gives us more freedom to develop morally, and more moral development means less legal enforcement is required because people don’t even consider doing bad things.

  945. leigh says:

    When he starts talking about sperm armies using shipping containers to get around balloon fences in the uterus we will know we have a new champion.

    That’s awesome, BMoe. Well done.

  946. palaeomerus says:

    Prostate exams are neither painful nor humiliating, merely annoying. It’s the sphygmoidoscopies that I dread. And they put you out for those, or at least I never remember them. At least now they can tell what they saw as soon as you are half out of the sedative instead of making you wait five long nervous days for your results.

  947. Pellegri says:

    The fact that it is hard to get our bodies to gestate or not gestate according to our dictates and in defiance of our biological imperatives has been a challenge. Men and their simple issues. Sad-boners and baldness. There are little pills to take care of both. Happily, Cthulu, god of pain and humiliation, created proctologists and yearly prostate exams to bring balance to the universe.

    Indeed. :)

    Fortunately for men, prostate cancer remains a disease more of them die with than die of. Not so for female reproductive cancers, and a part of that is the total hormonal nightmare we live with.

    And that’s not to say there’s not a good bit of medical inequity just because we haven’t done enough study of women’s problems. Some of this is due to the default assumption on the part of a lot of people (regardless of sex) that women are just men with boobs and an innie, so women’s medical issues are identical to men’s. The mortality rate from heart attacks among women because the symptoms are totally different and no one realized that for a long time comes to mind.

  948. palaeomerus says:

    Don’t forget testicular cancer. So, what’s the sexual dimorphism doing to our average life spans these days?

  949. Lisa says:

    Great conversation all – how I have missed you!

    I am baby sitting and I am trying to decide whether to put the yappy little dog outside and the whiny five year old in the bath then bed – or put the whiner outside and put the dog in the bath.

    Both of them are smelly and annoying. Also – I have not watched kids shows in a long time. I know that when you look at any of them objectively – it appears that they were created by someone who was rolling pretty hard on hallucinogens. That said: My niece and her buddies are in love with this exceptionally odd show with a black guy in an orange freakwig and tight shiny orange body suit. I don’t understand what the hell. Also, what the fuck is the striped monster thing supposed to be? And the orange pickle cyclops thing? Is this a real show or am I having a protracted acid flashback?

  950. beemoe says:

    women are just men with boobs and an innie

    I have a hard time believing any man who has ever lived with a woman thinks that.

  951. Lisa says:

    PS: Leigh and those like her who achieve their goals are to be commended. Going to school after you grow up and have to pay bills is hard. Going to school after you are grown up, have to pay bills, and raise a family is straight up badass.

    Good night all.

  952. LBascom says:

    Is this a real show or am I having a protracted acid flashback?

    I’m wondering if you been hitting the Qatar hashish a little hard. But then I haven’t watched children’s programming in a decade, so what do I know?

  953. leigh says:

    ‘Nite Lisa.

  954. Slartibartfast says:

    Back on the topic of firearms: I had been considering a .223 semiautomatic, but seeing as those are probably going to be made illegal soon because they are very much more deadly at close range than a Glock and a few spare magazines, I may have to settle for a .243 Thompson/Center Venture bolt-action. That’s probably going to be legal until one like it kills someone important, and then it will be considered too dangerous for regular citizens to own.

    So maybe I should just skip forward a couple of steps and buy into a break-action.

  955. JD says:

    SUGARTITS !!!!!!!!

    Oh, slurpysloop is a mendoucheous twatwaffle.

  956. Pellegri says:

    I have a hard time believing any man who has ever lived with a woman thinks that.

    I am pretty sure that it’s, hm.

    Well. I think most men who have lived extensively with any woman know it intuitively. It doesn’t mean they may not make assumptions about women’s health in a professional capacity that are fallacious.

    The trend in medicine prior to the last, oh, thirty years has been that women’s health, aside from issues of their breasts and their uteruses, is functionally identical to men’s health. In some respects that’s an okay assumption to make; things like infectious diseases (outside of STIs) don’t show a lot of discrimination between the sexes in terms of symptoms if you control for age, provided the women you’re looking at aren’t pregnant. (STIs, on the other hand, generally hit women very differently and sometimes–but not always!–a lot harder, like chlamydia causing sterility due to fallopian tube scarring in women while men can be symptomless carriers. Or HPV causing genital warts in both sexes but cancers only in women.)

    But as we have an increasingly aging population subject to more of the diseases of age–heart disease, most cancers, arthritis, etc.–and as medical care is weeding out most of the sex-blind causes of death, like infectious diseases, poisoning, shock, and violent trauma, we’re gradually discovering that in fact men and women are distinct, medically. I think it’s really interesting–but I also think in some ways that the “women-distinct” forms of medical treatment have lagged behind problems that plague both sexes and even some problems that only affect men (see Lisa’s above comment on ED and male pattern baldness). This is not necessarily a perception of women as “less valuable” to society, as I am sure some people might interpret it, but the fact a lot of the differences that result in distinct issues for women happen under the hood. Aside from emotional changes that not everyone gets and the bleeding, it’s hard for anyone aside from the woman in question to tell where she is on her menstrual cycle–and as I’m finding out, even the non-bleeding phases of the cycle result in hormonal changes that cause me problems my male relatives just don’t have. In the past, prior to the understanding of how pervasive hormonal control of biology is, it would be easy to overlook those issues as being because of my different biology.

    Whereas when a man can’t get it up, it’s pretty obvious something is wrong.

    anyway tl;dr men are different than women biologically.

    Don’t forget testicular cancer. So, what’s the sexual dimorphism doing to our average life spans these days?

    Last I checked, women still get a few more years on average. I don’t think that’s controlled for violent or accidental death, however, which has been predominantly a male occupation. (Sorry, guys.)

    @Lisa: That’s apparently Yo Gabba Gabba (warning: psychadelic flash loader), which I have never seen, just found via googling “orange pickle cyclops”. So it is a real thing, or you’re on some really fantastic drugs that will destroy us all.

  957. Slartibartfast says:

    …maybe muzzle-loader would be ahead even another step. Flintlock, anyone?

  958. Pellegri says:

    ON THE OTHER TENTACLE, the ignorance of sexual differences in diseases does go both ways. Men and suicide, and men and eating disorders, are two examples of things that have only recently been coming into light, even in academia. The fact that women attempt more suicides but men succeed at more certainly has a lot of alarming implications for mental health. It is, after all, very hard to get successful suicides in for treatment for severe depression. Not so much if you fail.

  959. Pellegri says:

    Cannon, imo.

    Park it on your lawn and make a show of practicing loading and firing it every day at dawn.

    No one will mess with you then.

  960. LBascom says:

    OK, Pellegri convinced me. Women should be paying way more for health insurance…

  961. McGehee says:

    I stepped away to watch Nutcracker: The Movie on Netflix. It seemed a better use of my time than rolling my eyes at slippy and chirpy, and waiting for the former to realize Lisa knows us better than he does.

    I’ve also got a bunch of old favorite Christmas specials saved up on the TiVo, but we’re saving those for next week. Still a few to record before then, come to think of it.

    What I’d really like is to have these shows from their first broadcasts, complete with the old commercials. God, I’m old.

  962. McGehee says:

    The fact that women attempt more suicides but men succeed at more

    That’ll change as more women become more adept at using weapons effectively, sad to say.

  963. leigh says:

    Women seldom use weapons to commit suicide. Homicide, sure.

    Women usually take pills or lock themselves in the garage with a running car.

  964. McGehee says:

    I think that has a lot to do with the fact women do tend even now to be less familiar with weapons.

    And it isn’t just the knowledge but the psychological effect of having that knowledge. When you know what it would take to end a life, when you’ve thought about it and in many cases trained for it, it completely changes your way of looking at it.

    Someone proficient with weapons is less likely to fail if he or she tries, but is also I think less likely to try unless he or she is absolutely serious about it.

  965. leigh says:

    You do occasionally read about women who shoot themselves, although it seems to be generally in the South where women may be more likely to be familiar with weapons, so you’re probably right about that. There are quite a few historical documents of women killing themselves with shotguns. A pretty ugly way to go if you’ve ever had the misfortune to see crime scene photos of same.

    Drowning is another biggy with women.

  966. McGehee says:

    I’ve seen pictures where the only way to know that was someone’s face is because the caption says so.

    I can’t think of anyone I hate so much that I’d leave myself in that condition for them to find.

  967. Pablo says:

    ” Lisa – there’s apparently something these guys just find reprehensible about a woman not being filled with fear and guilt if she wants to do someone.”

    No, dumbass. It’s only reprehensible if she wants to do everyone and have me fund her consequences.

  968. Pablo says:

    In lady-related gun news, my 80-ish mother is currently considering what her first gun will be. Lord, but I raised that woman right. I just hope I don’t cry on the occasion of her first trip to the gun store.

  969. Pablo says:

    “Outside of white guys, what other demographic gives you the majority of it’s vote?”

    The sentient and the self sufficient.

  970. Slartibartfast says:

    Speaking of cannons.

  971. Patrick Chester says:

    Heh, Slip is using the “I’m wealthy” claim? Yeah, typical troll. Amazing how they’re always wealthy, well-to-do, have “superior” college degrees, etc. compared to all the mere peasants in their midst.

    Alas, even if such claims were miraculously true, none of that changes the fact that they’re jackasses.

  972. leigh says:

    Oh, he brings it up daily, Patrick. He even tried to insult bh about his income. Wnated to have a tax return measuring contest.

    It is to laugh.

  973. Patrick Chester says:

    Slip blathered:

    I’d be very interested to know when you can recognize a fallacy.

    Reading your posting history can provide some examples. Usually something like, oh:

    You’re right, it makes it easier. More women getting pregnant during college would then logically lead to more women graduating. Why has no one thought of that?

    Which isn’t what the person you were speaking to meant. You likely knew it, and tried that because you couldn’t deal with her actual point: that it was possible for a woman to complete a degree while having children to care for. She didn’t advocate what you wrote above, you made it up so you could pretend to be clever.

    Alas, you’re not. Just a simple-minded liar who makes up crap and pretends it’s what your opponent believes.

  974. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I had been considering a .223 semiautomatic, but seeing as those are probably going to be made illegal soon because they are very much more deadly at close range than a Glock and a few spare magazines, I may have to settle for a .243 Thompson/Center Venture bolt-action. That’s probably going to be legal until one like it kills someone important, and then it will be considered too dangerous for regular citizens to own.
    So maybe I should just skip forward a couple of steps and buy into a break-action.

    I guess it all depends on whether or not you believe the FBI discards those background checks like they’re supposed to.

    Me? I think there’s boxes and boxes of data at the National Archives.

    Or maybe it’s all on a hard drive or three. Who knows?

    If you’re seriously thinking about .223 semi-auto, I’d go ahead and get one while you know you can. Banning future sales is a lot easier than confiscating legally purchased firearms.

    Is the Venture the dial-your own caliber (so to speak) TC rifle? Or am I thinking of a different TC model?

  975. bh says:

    Outside of white guys, what other demographic gives you the majority of it’s vote?

    People who understand contractions?

    Sorry, there’s something about watching a witless troll try to put on airs that brings this out in me.

  976. Patrick Chester says:

    @leigh: If he claims his house looks like a castle, I may have run into this troll under another ID.

  977. leigh says:

    He has 3700 square feet, Pat. And his place is vintage 1928 in a ‘great neighborhood’. He’s got three kids and I believe, claims to have employees.

    He’s a 2%er he says.

  978. Patrick Chester says:

    A “father of three”, eh? That was another claim by the troll I met elsewhere. Could be using the same template.

  979. Pablo says:

    If you’re seriously thinking about .223 semi-auto, I’d go ahead and get one while you know you can. Banning future sales is a lot easier than confiscating legally purchased firearms.

    I can’t imagine why anyone would buy anything chambered for .223 rather than 5.56 these days. Is there something enticing out there that’s a whole lot cheaper up front? If not, then why?

  980. leigh says:

    It’s been a regular Trolls R Us this weekend,

  981. Slartibartfast says:

    Wow, 3700 square feet. I’m not sure how my dick can possibly measure up to that.

  982. BigBangHunter says:

    – Just keep it rolled up Slart and no one can step on it.

  983. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I can’t imagine why anyone would buy anything chambered for .223 rather than 5.56 these days. Is there something enticing out there that’s a whole lot cheaper up front? If not, then why?

    good point

  984. Pellegri says:

    Belatedly, yeah. I do think more women will succeed at suicide if they’re more proficient with what they’re using to take their own lives.

    I would however like to see more studies done on method of suicide, success, and proficiency with said method. I am almost sure scientists, for example, typically pick to poison themselves in ways that are more “successful” than just downing a bunch of sleeping pills.

    I am morbid like that however.

  985. sdferr says:

    Which (the acute knowledge possessed by ‘scientists’) is why the Hippocratic Oath. Folks just couldn’t trust ’em, time was. They knew how to kill without getting caught, not to mention being privy by dint of their service to all manner of otherwise hidden privacies.

  986. McGehee says:

    He has 3700 square feet, Pat.

    <snicker>

    Ask him how many more years he’ll be paying on that mortgage. Debt substantially reduces how much of what you have is really yours.

  987. Pablo says:

    I do think more women will succeed at suicide if they’re more proficient with what they’re using to take their own lives.

    Equality!

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