On 1/31/2011 11:54 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> The problem being, most of them are not talking about a "militia".
>> They are talking about everyone being armed, just to be armed.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_%28United_States%29
>
> Every male between 18 and 45 is the militia. If you can get drafted,
> you're allowed to carry a gun as a militiaman.
>
And, if you can't be drafted, you know, like after they removed the 
draft? I am also pretty sure that no one expects you to bring your own, 
basically random, weapons any more... lol

>> The one is making the argument, "removing these will make things
>> better", the other, "adding them will".
>
> No, my point is that you can't really tell until you try it, because
> it's not logical.
>
Chaos social engineering then.. Yeah, that always works *so* well... 
What matters is, "Is it true", not, "I would like it to be", or, "I hope 
it is". There are consequences to being wrong, and just because you are 
not going to pay them is not justification that you can make others pay 
them instead. It *is* true that even rational people can go over the 
edge, and arming them makes that more dangerous. But *is it true* that 
arming everyone counters that? If you don't actually know, its not 
exactly ethical to just shrug and go, "Ah, well.. lets try it anyway."

>> For gun availability to be a positive, you need to show that a)
>> possession of them *does* produce a decline, which can't be attributed
>> to anything else, which I don't think is arguable, and b) it never
>> produces a decline in safety and non-violence, which I *really* don't
>> think is at all supportable.
>
> For availability to be a positive, you have to merely show that it
> doesn't reduce the safety of people. You're requiring people in favor of
> maintaining the status quo that has been part of the constitution for
> 200 years prove that there's *never* any harm from doing so.
>
> My point is that you can't show that outlawing guns would make things
> safer any more than those against video games can show that outlawing
> video games would make things safer.
>
>> end up being declared "temporarily insane", we don't know that games
>> do *jack*.
>
> You don't know that games *don't* do jack.
>
I certainly have enough evidence of a correlation, if not necessarily 
causation, than they do for guns. Causation is the whole problem, and 
even there the "studies" are a bit... questionable, and do not support 
the overall trends, even if they imply bad results.

>> Yeah.. We should just do away with all the laws that keep people from
>> owning/doing things that are deemed dangerous on the books, because
>> *all* of them are a bad idea, and lead to people in plastic bubbles.
>
> Except it's already on the books. If you're going to argue to change the
> constitution, you really need to cite more references than just "well,
> *you* know it's bad, and you can't prove it isn't!"
>
You know, to some extent I have been playing devils advocate here. I see 
no damn reason why, technically, you need to change the constitution to 
set limits and rules of use, on weapons. You are not telling someone, 
"You can't have a gun", by telling them you can't just carry it around 
with you, anyplace you like, etc. You need justification for it, and "I 
am scared and think I need one", is imho, a damn stupid one, especially 
since the last person I want running around with a gun is someone scared 
enough they would actually use the damn thing, because something spooked 
them. Such a person isn't thinking rationally to begin with. But, again, 
you shouldn't need to change the damn constitution to say, "This isn't 
an appropriate place for that, or reasonable argument for having one on 
you." You certainly don't need such to prevent criminals from getting 
easy access, though, there are so many damn loopholes in the system that 
you could be a known serial killer, walk into a gun show, and someone 
would manage to find a loophole that would let you walk out with a gun. 
Guess who are responsible for those loopholes? I'll give you a hint, the 
NRA is partly responsible for them, and the rest are **manufacturers**, 
and while we are currently talking about adjusting the law to ban extra 
large magazines, no one seems to be talking about fixing the loopholes, 
or properly enforcing the existing laws.

As devil's advocate, I have to ask the question, "At what point do you 
conclude that this is unmanageable, and something more extreme has to be 
done to stop it?"

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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