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It was only a matter of time for the classic “bearing of arms” jokes to surface.
Seriously though, I find it strange that we should be discussing the rights to any part of a bear, perhaps their hide for a rug begins to make some sense, but their arms…that’s stretching it.
After few thoughts I think yes one can have the right to bear whatever they wish including arms but what what they do not have to is the right to pull the trigger.
I see the Former Police Officer Dorner situation has been brought to a suitably violent end. Little old ladies in pick-up trucks may safely drive once more.
I find it so typical that there is a reopening of the investigation into the greviences of the shooter. Really?!?!
I always have to smirk at 'ad hoc' reactionary government decisions. Was the investigation re-opened because he killed people and there was a Media Frenzy? Yes:frown5:. Now a bunch of money and resources have to be re spent all over again. Typical.
Eh, give it a few days and we will be on to something else more sensational.
I read the statement he posted a few days ago, and he may have had a good case for the LAPD to answer - that he was sacked for reporting a collegue who assulted a prisoner . He begins fairly clear and collected, but seems to decend into a rambling, angry tirade, blaming everyone. (paranoia?) On balance I would say he over-reacted.
You're right Tony. Oscar Pistorious - South Africa's double amputee Olympic sprinter - arrested on suspicion of shooting his girlfriend dead.Quote:
Originally Posted by tonywalt
I see your point, Tony, but my understanding is that he was a whistleblower, and I have to wonder why the LAPD couldn't be bothered to look into the allegations rather than summarily firing him. Not that I think he had a good reason to go kill innocent people over it, but that doesn't mean he wasn't wronged.Quote:
Originally Posted by tonywalt
Quote:
Originally Posted by qimissung
I agree Quimmisung, more than you think.
He likely did have a legit grievance and I bet the cops did kick a homeless guy. It just seems so crazy when the police chief is speaking with venom about the pursuit of the accused (it's obvious they were going to shoot him from the press conferences-I found the gung ho language unsettling) and then stating that the grievance case was re-opened. It supports my belief that the police ostracize and squash people who do not graze with the pack.
On Cops: I am on friendly terms with quite a few cops at my local pub and my observation is that they Love being cops- and the charge of Authority and Action sits very well with them. . Last night they spoke of cracking down on ganja dealers on Island. I listened silently with one eye sneaking glances at the rugby match and the other eye stationed to their boring conversation.
Yes, I've heard there can be a very thin line between being a cop and being a criminal.
A little more on the Pistorious thing. It turns out he owned a lot of guns, he had a machine gun by the door and loaded pistols on the sideboard. The details are not known yet, but there was a domestic argument.
Those who insist that guns don't kill people - people kill people can't deny that a domestic argument with loaded guns present is not a safe situation.
The statistics are pretty straightforward, a gun in a home is more likely to be used against a member of the household than against a criminal.
I don't believe your statistics. Anyone can claim to do a study. The accuracy of such a claim could never be proved.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
That's a convenient way to handwave away anything that you don't want to believe rather than engage with data critically. But, whatever.Quote:
Originally Posted by BienvenuJDC
It's also convenient to make a blanket statement that the statistics prove your pointQuote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
In fact the right to bear arm is perilous. People can feel safe no doubt by holding arms but there are dangers and,people are not always in the same state of minds and the likelihoods of misusing arms is very high. Children are more likely to misuse. In fact today we live in complex social constructs. We have polices and armies to protect us. Of course a country need to let its people hold arms if it fails to protect them specially in times of civil wars. Therefore, in normal situations to let people arms become great threats.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/28/texa..._safety_class/
I don't know whether to
:eek::willy_nilly::frown2: or simply :lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:
I have to admit I am having a 'what is this world coming to' moment. This,apparently, is going to be the solution.
Accidents happen, I don't see how that article has a huge impact on the issue of gun control.
It's not that. It's that they are moving forward to arm teachers. I do have a problem with that.
Ah, well I'd agree that it's not the best solution...
They're arming school janitors! Are they mad, don't they watch Scooby-doo?
Can't pass gun laws. Won't reform the filibuster. Can't fix anything that needs fixing. What is the Senate actually for?
It seems to be a self serving entity existing within a bubble concerned only with it's own little dramas and interests. Real life cannot enter, and must look down from the public gallery in puzzlement and sorrow.
I was going to wake up this thread (again) but it's all been said. Just Google Jon Stewart's take on Charleston. -"We'll still do Jack****"...... Yeah, that's us!"
In the wake of the Charleston Church shooting, I see that Southern Republicans are lining in droves up to pull the Confederate Battle Flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds, but not a single spineless one of them has mentioned the elephant in the room - GUNS.
So again, (and I think posted this earlier), - guns are for cowards, and by extension for Republicans.
Guns are not necessarily 'for cowards'. That guy who shot it out with the police station in Texas was no coward -- to use just one example.
I agree, Sancho, that owning a personal protection firearm is (slightly) cowardly for most people (there are exceptions). That's because most statistics suggest that we are slightly safer (and our families are slightly safer) if we don't own a personal protection firearm. It's cowardly to irrationally pander to one's fears.
ON a literary website, however, we should use words accurately. I remember G.W. Bush calling the 9/11 terrorists "cowardly" when the only thing we knew about them is that they were courageous. It seems to me that there's a temptation to call macho behavior "cowardly" because it denies the transgressors a virtue they covet. However, in the case of the 9/11 terrorists, it was ridiculous. Owning guns can be cowardly (if it involves irrationally pandering to one's fears), but it is not necessarily cowardly. In general, terrorists (including Dylann Roof) are not cowardly. Cowardly bigots and whackos are afraid to act out their evil fantasies; Roof was not. Cowardice would, perhaps, have been one quality Roof would have benefited from (as would the rest of us).
There are exceptions to every rule. In my original post on this thread I think I said, "'cepting the police and soldiers." But based on our recent history, I'm not even sure about the police anymore. Perhaps a woman with small children walking through a dangerous neighborhood late at night might need an equalizer, but of course that begs the question ... What's she doing there in the first place?
At any rate, I'll stick with my original assessment - guns are indeed for cowards. And Roof is a tremendous coward - he shot unarmed civilians. Had he wanted to act on his poorly thought-out theory of racial inequality in an uncowardly manner, he could have stripped to waist, walked into that church, put his dukes up, and said something like, 'I'm here to fight all you negroes.'
They'd've probably just shewed him away.
What about the man who shoots a Kodiak Bear? Brave? I say coward. The bear doesn't have a gun, therefore it's not a fair fight. Now a guy in a loin cloth hunting bears in the tall grass on Kodiak Island with nothing but a Bowie Knife - that dude has cajones, not much between the ears, but a big ole pair of swinging...oh never mind.
Yes, this is a literary web site, and words have meaning, and I meant what I said.
You have a strange notion of what constitutes cowardice, Sancho. Obviously, attacking a Kodiak bear with one's bare hands takes more courage than shooting it with a 30/06 from 100 yards. But how does shooting the bear indicate "cowardice"? Not all activities for which courage is unnecessary are "cowardly".
Shooting unarmed civilians is not "cowardly". True: it is not as courageous as trying to kill them all with your bare hands, but so what? Most things we do are not as courageous as other potential things we might do. That doesn't make them "cowardly". Clearly, Roof put himself at far greater risk by murdering nine people than he would have if he had simply stayed home and posted racist screeds on his website, or had gone shopping at Piggly Wiggly. Are all shoppers in every Piggly Wiggly store "cowardly" because they could be fighting Kodiak bears with bowie knives instead of buying loaves of bread?
Saying a man who shoots a Kodiak bear is "cowardly" because it takes MORE COURAGE to hunt the bear with a bowie knife is ridiculous. It's like saying the man who eats dinner with his wife and children is cowardly because he could be shouldering his way in amongst the hungry lions to feast upon raw zebra on the African veldt. It's a non sequitur.
You may have meant what you said, but what you said makes no sense.
Here's another rule of thumb for ya, E' - conversations with pedants are always tedious.
Coward is a word generally used as a pejorative, with is how I meant it and which you pointed that out as well. But here's the greater issue and the point of my earlier post today: conservative politicians would rather talk about removing the confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds than do the hard work of gun-control legislation.
You see, they're deflecting the focus from something hard to something easy, which is act of cowardice, in my opinion. Kind of like deflecting this argument from a discussion about Republican political maneuvering into some weird, pedantic, Bill-Maher-ish rant about what constitutes cowardice. And I'm guessing a reflexive response by you whenever you hear the word used in the way I used it.
Well, yes, when I read people (including you) use words incorrectly my "reflexive response" is one of disapproval. Once again, you present a false dichotomy. Is everyone who supports removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Capitol "cowardly" deflecting the focus from gun control? Personally, I support both removing the Confederate flag and passing strict gun control legislation, and I don't think that either position is "cowardly" (they're not courageous, either). Dozens of politicians support removing the Confederate flag, and many of them ALSO support gun control. Are only the Republicans who support removing the flag "cowardly", or are all of the Democrats who support removing the flag cowardly as well?Quote:
Originally Posted by Sancho
I suppose that politicians refusing to address controversial issues because addressing them risks losing votes constitutes a (minor) form of moral cowardice. Still, based on your Kodiak bear example, that's not exactly what you were saying in your previous posts.
Incidentally people seem a bit confused about what gun control can and can not do. In Canada there was a recent shooting carried out with firearms which were illegally purchased and held, but this didn't stop everyone on Facebook from clamouring for stricter gun regulation.
The guns were already illegal and yet they were used to kill someone, oops, what do we do now?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_...in_Switzerland
I've also never been convinced that 'more guns means more gun crime' (though it seems reasonable to me that firearms be a little harder to obtain than they are in the U.S at the moment). I mean virtually every household could reasonably be expected to contain kitchen knives which could be turned into quite dangerous weapons at any moment (actually even stock glasses for drinking out of can be deadly or extremely dangerous when turned into a weapon), but crimes which make use of these implements are relatively rare.
I agree,Clopin. There are clearly no magic bullets to prevent mass murder (to use a trite, but appropriate, metaphor). Nonetheless, I bet limiting the sales of assault weapons would help. I saw an article that showed that Switzerland is the one European country that is armed to the teeth, and although they don't approach the U.S. in gun violence rates, they're still high by European standards. The real question, though, is not the "gun violence" rate, but the overall violence rate, and the extent to which easy access to guns might make violent crimes more deadly. More guns (I'm certain) means more gun crimes; does it mean more deadly crimes? (I bet it does, but I'm not sure.)
However, not everyone who opposes gun control is a heartless bastard who is glad that black preachers have been murdered and flies the Confederate flag from his pickup. We probably shouldn't allow horrific public tragedies to influence our decisions on gun control one way or the other.
In Switzerland .21 of a person dies by gun related homicide per 100'000 of the population, in America the ratio is 3.55/100'000. So Usanians, while being about one and a half times more armed than the Swiss, see about twenty times the gun violence resulting in deaths (accidental deaths in every country seem to be pretty small compared to homicides).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...ted_death_rate
Countries like Japan, Norway and Hong Kong have basically no gun violence to speak of which is interesting. I buy some correlation between fewer guns and fewer gun crimes but it's definitely not a one to one ratio and it can't be extrapolated that way.
Ecurb, you ignorant slut.
Your poor understanding of the concept of cowardice and bravery is only eclipsed in stupidity by your poor reading comprehension, and perhaps your basic misunderstanding of how human language works.
The flag issue is a red herring meant to deflect attention from the real issue, the hard issue, the issue that will cost a Republican Senator his seat if he supports it - gun control. And it will take a Republican to do it, a Republican with spine, someone who knows it'll cost him a steep price but he does it anyway, because it's the right thing to do. That would be bravery, the opposite of cowardice. Gun control is part of the Democrat's platform, which of course requires no special bravery to support. You seem to sort of get it in your last paragraph, but the false dichotomy you attributed to me was purely your invention, a result of your poor reading comprehension.
So someone facing danger or adversity and knowing the consequences and doing it anyway is brave, but someone facing the exact same situation but being blissfully unaware of any personal danger is not brave. A trembling soldier who is about to go over the top and has lost control of his sphincter, but goes over the top anyway, is brave. A soldier who has no clue what awaits him as he charges over the top of the trench but does it with his chest puffed out and his chin set firmly is not brave.
I don't think it's too much of a leap to say that if brave man faces danger and knows the consequences, a coward also knows the consequences but puts others (even bears) in danger instead of himself.
A man who shoots an unsuspecting Kodiak Bear (probably one he baited) from a safe distance (and probably from up in a tree) is a coward. He's not less courageous than the Bowie-Knife guy; he's just not courageous at all. Worse yet, he's a phony-brave man.
A grown man who beats a child is a coward.
A man who shoots a bunch of unarmed church-goers is a coward.
And I hate to agree with Dubya, but he was right - the 9-11 attackers were cowards too. Yes they knew they would die in the attacks, but they were also convinced that their deaths would take them to paradise. Good for them. The people they murdered just went to their deaths in a pile of rubble.
Let's get around to language. When I call a pseudo-tough guy a coward, it's an insult. That's how I mean it, and that's how it's typically received. (And that's when I usually prepare to duck a punch) but it's not using the word incorrectly. It's possibly using the word creatively. When Rush Limbaugh calls Barrack Obama a Socialist, it's an insult. It has very little to do with the philosophy of Socialism. To only use words in a narrowly-defined, academic manner is a dull use of the language and not the way human language works anyway. And possibly it's silly.
And "silly" is a good example of a word whose meaning has changed dramatically over the years. It used to mean something akin to "pious". Then it morphed into something like "touched by God". Then it morphed into something like "touched in the head". And finally it worked its way around to meaning, well, "silly".
Words change over time and so do symbols. I've watched the meaning of the Confederate Battle Flag change in my life time. I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. I watched the flag go up on top of the State House dome, and then I watched it come down, only to be placed in a more prominent place in front of State House. I've watched it go from the sort of thing old women put on the graves of their long-dead ancestors who died in the war, to a bumper sticker on a pickup truck that dragged a black man to his death in Jasper, Texas, which is why it takes no extraordinary bravery for a Southern Republican to call for its removal. For once, they'll be agreeing with the president, it belongs in a museum.
At any rate, E', ( if you're still reading) I was just yanking your chain with the ignorant-slut comment. Also I know your reading comprehension is just fine, maybe a little formal for an informal forum, but just fine nonetheless.
By the way, me and the old lady are about to leave the South for good in the next couple of months. We're moving to the Pacific Northwest - your neck of the woods. Wanna grab a coffee sometime?
It is doubtless true, Sancho, that Dubya was simply trying to insult the 9/11 terrorists, but its strange that he insulted them with the one epithet that we know is false. Calling people about whom we know nothing except that they are extremely brave "cowards" is, if nothing else, interesting.
If the Kodiak bear hunter brags about how courageous he is, a few insults might do him some good. And beating children takes some courage, these days: look at what happened to Adrian Peterson when he did it.
Most important, we should remember the lessons we learned from Custard, the Cowardly Dragon. Belinda, Ink, Blink and Mustard got all the credit for bravery -- but who gobbled up the pirate? Still, since Custard had a "Mouth like a fireplace, chimney for a nose,/ And realio, trulio, daggers on his toes...." he was heavily armed. Are you suggesting that (like Dylann Roof and Adrian Peterson) Custard was actually a coward, because he possessed such armaments? If so, I call "Heresy!" (For those who were abused as children in that your mommies never read you "The Tale of Custard the Dragon", here's a link: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/Custard.html )
Here in the Pacific Northwest we don't have a problem with racism because everyone is white (except a few Native Americans and East Asians). We do have lots of guns, though, and a hefty smattering of gun-nut survivalists. Where are you moving? The Northwest is a big place, but I go to Portland fairly often. Coffee, of course, is our regional passion (along with microbrewed beer and pot, which is now legal in Oregon and Washington). Forget Starbucks, though. Here in Oregon, we hate everything from Washington, because our lives are so idyllic that we have nothing better to do.
Well, of course Custard is the only truly brave one in the poem. Belinda, Ink, and Blink are the phony-brave. And the Pyrate (the only one with a firearm) is the coward. Custard, like my trembling soldier going over the top, despite knowing the consequences, faces his aggressor with grit. Even though Custard is well armed, he must close with the enemy. The Pyrate, by contrast, holds a stand-off weapon (and a bottle of rum for courage), and merely needs to flick his finger to kill his enemy - the coward's way. Although in the poem it seems he is too drunk to hit what he's aiming at. And that's good news for Custard but no slight on his bravery.
So I think bravery can be perspectival, and also a function of proximity to the threat. Most of us think of an Army Sniper as a brave man, but I've known foot infantry soldiers who consider the sniper business to be somewhat cowardly. You see a sniper hides himself and fires his weapon from a great distance. The foot soldier has to look the enemy in the eye. Of course an Army Sniper could look at an Air Force Fighter Pilot in the same way a foot soldier looks at a sniper. And I suppose a fighter pilot could look at a Predator Drone Pilot, who is sitting in a trailer in Nevada killing people 4000 miles away, with contempt. By the same token a man with only a knife might consider a man with an M-4 a weak-kneed panty waist, and a man with only his fists...I can take this to absurd levels, but I can find no way to assign bravery to a man who beats a child. That man is a coward, despite the societal repercussions he will face. Now the child who places himself between his little sister and his drunken abusive father is truly brave.
Ah well, if I could figure out how to get to work from Eugene, I'd move there in an instant. Great place. My wife has relatives over in Springfield. We're presently working on a short-sale house in Gig Harbor, WA and short sales can take a while. I'll be working in Seattle and she'll probably be working in Olympia. I'm relatively familiar with area south of Seattle, being as I spent a fair amount of time at Fort Lewis years ago.
As for, Portland...I'm in. I've had the pleasure of spending several fine, rainy afternoons browsing the stacks at Powell's on Burnside. And I agree, those people up there do seem to have an unusual affinity for a good cup of Joe. You know what goes well with coffee - ice cream! Last year, on a hot summer night, I left Powell's and in a moment of weakness stopped at Ruby Jewell's scoop shop a couple of blocks away. Mmm-Mmm good.
The argument that you can turn broken sticks into weapons is silly. Lets drop some firewood to the Kurds and some broken glass. That'll frighten these Jihadi coves. Yanks hate and fear themselves and their governments. So they need ****-extensions to feel better, more secure. It'll give their opponents something to pry from their cold dead paws. What's a few thousand domestic shootings. It's a price worth paying to live in the land of the brave und the Frei. Gawn yerselves. Blood s funky fun. How come this comes under "discussion" and "serious"
Someone's had his wee dram o' Yank hatred this morning, eh? ;-)
I strongly suspect I'm a coward, but have never been tested. If I was threatened with some sort of deadly violence I think I would react with some fairly pathetic grovelling or some intense running away, or some such. Andy Mac Nab (ex SAS) discribes more than once how difficult it is to get up and move under fire, when all you want to do is bury yourself deep into the ground. You train and train and train, but only when the time comes do you find out - you either got it or you aint. Someone said a brave man dies but once, a coward a hundred times, but according to Andy it's the same fear for both - some control it better than others.
Oh, I don't know, Mick. I believe that a brave man is also a humble man, not a braggart. Knowing what I know of you, I'm sure that anybody stupid enough to threaten your family would not enjoy facing your wrath.
If I were to continue my above theory of bravery as a function of proximity to the threat, I'm going to have to consider internet tough-guys. I propose that they are a group who falls squarely in the phony-brave category, ^ennison for instance.
And the funny thing about this post is that by calling him out, I'm also putting myself in the phony tough-guy category.
Which is probably true.