[Vision2020] Gun Talk

Sun Feb 3 12:24:46 PST 2013

Seriously, Wayne:  what on earth is wrong with your cognitive function that
you find it appropriate to trivialize gun violence, and that you fail to
recognize the difference between THE TOPIC and these specious examples you
continue to trot out?

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
On Behalf Of Wayne Price
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2013 11:46 AM
To: Paul Rumelhart
Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Gun Talk

When will the horror end? How many people, civilians, soldiers and native
americans have to die before these killing machines are BANNED!

And there is NO Constitutional protection against it!

NJ Man Charged With Bow and Arrow Killing

BERLIN, N.J. January 30, 2013 (AP)

Authorities say Canfield admitted to dumping the bow and arrows in a wooded
area in nearby Winslow. He is being held at the Camden County Jail.They say
Paulsen was shot in the stomach and died after the arrow tore through a vein
in his pelvis.After the fight broke up, authorities say Paulsen was outside
the home and Canfield followed him with a compound bow and a quiver of
arrows.Twenty-five-year-old Timothy Canfield of Berlin was charged
Tuesday.Authorities say Canfield was at his home when another resident got
into a fistfight Monday night with 25-year-old Kereti Paulsen of Cape May
Court House.A southern New Jersey man is charged with murder after
authorities say he used a bow and arrow to kill another after a fistfight.

____________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

On Feb 3, 2013, at 11:13 AM, Paul Rumelhart wrote:

On 02/03/2013 08:27 AM, Joe Campbell wrote:

I'm "trying to wish away what the Constitution says"? Isn't this just
another way of saying that you think the Constitution says something
different? Why would I wish the Constitution said something different than
it says? I'm very happy with what it DOES say. And I've given a pretty good
argument for my interpretation of it. I haven't heard any argument from your
side, for your radical interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.

How is my interpretation of the Second Amendment in any way "radical"?
"Radical?"  Really?  "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall
not be infringed."  How is a government ban on a complete class of guns
(based almost solely on how military they look) not an infringement of my
right to keep and bear arms?  Doesn't it stop me from buying an AR15, for
example, not based on market forces or recalls based on safety or
popularity, but because the government told me I can't own one?  Doesn't
that infringe on my right to keep and bear arms, if only by restricting what
I can keep and bear?  I don't see how this is "radical".

And for Christ's sake PLEASE stop attributing to me the view that I want to
ban guns. I have not said I wanted to ban anything, not even semiautomatics.
In fact, I've ONLY been talking about the Constitutional interpretation
issue and the ONLY point I've consistently made on this topic is that the
2nd Amendment DOES NOT allow you the right to buy whatever gun you wish;
rights can't possibly have this kind of universal extension since no one has
the right to do wrong. 

When I mentioned the superficial differences between an AR15 and a mini 14
that makes the latter not fall under the "assault weapon" nomenclature, your
suggestion was to ban mini 14's too.  So, I don't know how I ever got it
into my head that you were for the banning of assault weapons.  Oh, and you
haven't responded to my apparently invisible response to your "no one has
the right to do wrong" idea.  That was namely that if you have the right in
the first place, then it's up to the law to determine the bounds of it.  You
don't have the right to libel me, but the fact that you libeled me can only
be determined after it has happened.  Preemptively removing my right to post
to an Internet forum because someone somewhere libeled someone is not
anymore justified than banning a type of gun because someone somewhere
committed a massacre with one.

How do you propose to stop people from doing wrong?  Do you have an agenda
to ban every activity that could possibly lead to such an outcome?

ALL that means is that we CAN and should TALK about banning semi-automatics,
or pretty much ANY gun, as I see it. But we are going to have to muster up
some pretty good reasons in support of such a ban. Gun rights suggest that
unless a VERY good reason can be given, we should not ban guns, or types of
guns. But it allows for the banning of types of guns provided adequate
reasons are given. I've never said anything about banning this gun or that,
though admittedly I don't much care whether or not semiautomatics are
banned. I don't see any use for those guns by private citizens. That doesn't
mean I want to ban them.

This is where I get the "wishing away the Constitution" bit from.  You don't
give a damn about semiautomatics, so let's talk about banning them.  I don't
give a damn about philosophers as a group, so why not take away their right
to a speedy trial?  You have to look to the Constitution first, to see what
the government is even allowed to do.  Then you can take the conversation
from there.

I don't have a dislike of guns -- in fact, I actually LIKE guns very much
(though this is recent) -- and the fact that you keep trying to fit every
liberal into the same hole makes it very difficult to talk with you about
this issue.

That's great.  I don't have a great like of guns, to me they are a tool.
They can be fun to target practice with, but I'm not fanatical about them.

Getting back to my point and your misunderstanding of it, saying that ALL
rights CAN be curtailed is not the same as saying that "you can curtail it
however you want." Speech can be curtailed. You cannot curtail speech
however you want. In this way, it is different from (say) smoking crack. We
can curtail ALL instances of smoking crack but not all instances of speech.
There is no right to smoke crack. That is what having a right does: it gives
you a kind of presumptive entitlement; it doesn't give you universal
entitlement. That is absurd. If we have no universal entitlement to speech,
then we have no universal entitlement to anything. And I've already made the
point about speech.

It's too bad there's no document out there that we could refer to that would
tell us exactly and in what ways our rights can be curtailed by the
government.  We could then refer to that document when the subject of a
specific right comes up.

You might wonder: How does your owning a gun interfere with my rights? Well,
it COULD do so in many ways. Consider that a great many guns are stolen each
year; a great many of those are used in crimes. You could be as careful as
you wish but no matter how careful you are, some gun that you buy COULD be
used to kill ME. So in theory at least we already have a situation where one
set of rights (your right to own a gun) is being weighed against another set
of rights (my right to life). The situation is absurd since the likelihood
some gun that you own being used to kill me is small. But all that means is
as the likelihood of threat to life (or harm to interests) rises, the more a
consideration of these kinds of issues matter when determining whether or
not your right can be curtailed.

That's why we have laws that govern the misuse of firearms.  You don't get
to inhibit my right to do something solely because I could do something bad
with that right if I chose.  When you have a Right, you have a Duty to
exercise it responsibly.  Consequences for not doing so fill our law books.
Banning something because it might be used in a bad way is more akin to
thought-crime.  No one has done anything bad yet, so why are they being
punished for it?

But this is NOT an argument for banning guns! This is an argument that even
though we have gun rights, we can ban guns just the same. In other words,
the NRA interpretation -- your interpretation -- is a bad one, an absurd
interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. 

I'm not a member of the NRA, mainly because they flip out on this stuff and
do lots of harm, in my opinion.  Still, I'd like you to explain how a ban on
a class of guns is not an infringement on my right to keep and bear arms.
The logic that since you can control guns in some manner already that you
should then be able to ban them as well doesn't hold up.  There are
restrictions on speech already, so should we be able ban classes of speech
simply because we've already allowed ourselves other ways in which we can
restrict speech?  The existence of obscenity laws justifying the banning of
negative speech about the government?  As I've said before, we have a
document already that lays all this out for us.  The onus is on those
wanting to restrict a right further to provide some kind of Constitutional
basis for it.

But I take all rights seriously. We'd have to have a damn good reason to
ever ban any gun.

Well, I'm glad you're not for just banning them on a whim.  

Paul

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 5:22 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

Oh, I'm listening.  I just think you're trying to wish away what the
Constitution says.  What good is a Right if you can curtail it however you
want?  MY Right to bear arms should not be infringed because some other
a-hole with an AR15 and a couple of screws loose caused a tragedy.  If he
had survived, and was convicted in a court of law, then his freedom would
have been taken away, if not his life.  I still have that right to arm
myself that was very clearly laid out in the text of the Bill of Rights.

I'm not saying that my right to bear arms should override your right to walk
around in public without getting shot by me.  I am saying that your dislike
of guns and/or wish that no one had them does not override my right to bear
arms.  This seems very clear to me.  We're talking about where rights
collide.  But for rights to collide, you have to have them in the first
place.  The First Amendment analogy would be to take away your right to post
freely on the Internet because some a-hole on a forum somewhere libeled me.

Paul 

On 02/02/2013 04:28 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:

I've told you this before but you don't seem to be listening: any right can
be violated for the right reason; there is NO right to do X regardless; all
rights have limitations given their nature. You can't allow people the right
to violate the rights of others, for instance. Thus, when rights bump up
against each other, one of them has to give. 

And it says "the right of the people ... shall not be violated" not "folks
can own whatever kind of gun they wish, and for whatever reason or purpose."
Curtailing my speech by prohibiting me from slanderous public comments is
not a violation of my rights since I never had the right to harm your
interests in the first place. I can speak freely ... up to a point.
Essentially a right is something you can do so long as it doesn't bump up
against the rights and interests of others. Because NO ONE has a right to do
wrong. 

This point seems very clear. I've made it over and over. If you could spot
the flaw in the argument, I'd be interested to know what it is. But you
won't even talk about. You just keep making the same false claim about gun
rights, over and over again.

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 2:40 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

My idea doesn't match the current narrative going around, eh?

The Bill of Rights, of which the 2nd Amendment is one, doesn't give us any
rights.  They are already ours.  All it does is limit what the government
can do with regards to those rights.  For example, for the 1st Amendment,
it's "Congress shall make no law...".  For the 4th Amendment it's "The right
of the people ... shall not be violated".  In the case of the 2nd Amendment,
that limit is "the right of the people ... shall not infringed".  The well
regulated militia part is explanatory, a reason why the "shall not infringe"
part was put there.

I'm having a hard time reconciling the word "ban" with the words "the right
of the people ... shall not be infringed".  They appear to be diametrically
opposed to each other, to me.  But then I guess I don't drink the Kool-aid.

Paul 

On 02/02/2013 01:54 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:

You have a faulty understanding of the notion of a constitutional right.

On Feb 2, 2013, at 1:38 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

On 02/02/2013 01:09 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:

1/ ban those guns too maybe

If only there was some Constitutional backing for that.  If that still
matters, anymore.

2/ and the drones. 

I wouldn't "ban" them, necessarily.  Better to use drones that put boots on
the ground.  I'd simply suggest that we stop using them as our President's
personal kill toy.

Someday I'd like to hear this story from the perspective of one of the
remote controllers of the drones.  How exactly does an average drone
assassination go down?

Paul

On Feb 2, 2013, at 10:55 AM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:

You know, I could get behind these attempts to portray people who are
against the assault weapons ban as sociopaths or schizophrenics, if it
weren't for the following things:

1.  If the proponents of these bans weren't so disingenuous with their
wording.  "Assault weapon" is a look-and-feel definition, not a usage-based
one.  A Ruger Mini 14 is just as deadly in a spree shooting as an AR15, but
it's not considered an "assault weapon" because it doesn't look enough like
a movie prop.  I've both made this kind of comment on this list before and
have seen it made here many times.  I haven't seen anyone answer it.  What
is the use of banning a weapon based on how military it looks?  Why ban guns
with barrel shrouds?  All they do is keep you from burning yourself on the
barrel.  Or bayonet mounts?  Are we really worried about the latest rash of
gun stabbings?  My conclusion: it's only useful politically.

2.  If they weren't so intent to ride the "think of the children" wave.  If
the deaths of school children should be driving our behaviors, then how
about we overhaul the drone program?  Lots of children are dying every day
via drones, all OK'd by our sitting President.  I posted an article about
that a few days ago, I think.  So why is the outrage over Newtown driving
the assault weapons ban but there is no outrage over drone-killings?  The
only differences I can see are that the Newtown angle has been in the news
non-stop while there is very little reporting on personally sanctioned
assassinations by our President and that the children killed by drones are
brown and not white.  "Foreign" and not "domestic", if that makes you sleep
better.  Also, every new gun-related incident gets center stage attention,
as if these kinds of tragedies haven't been happening all the time.
Suddenly, a switch is thrown and we're all outraged about them.

Now, I can get behind better background checks.  I'd like to see more focus
on how we can keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill as well, as
long as we're careful about people's rights so a random Joe can't be
suddenly labeled "mentally ill" because he or she owns an AR15 or for some
other trumped up reason.  Better databases covering gun sales would also
make sense, though I can understand the concerns that if they know about
your guns they can also come take them away.  More training on gun handling
and safety would also not go amiss.

But this push to ban "assault weapons" is blatant political theater.  The
magazine size restrictions are idiotic, as well.  It takes a second to swap
a magazine if you've practiced it a few times.  Pick up the magazine,
release the current one and let it drop, shove the new one home. 

tl;dr version: gun control is currently all about political expediency when
it should be all about actual effectiveness.

Paul

On 02/02/2013 09:26 AM, Moscow Cares wrote:

<mime-attachment.jpg>

Seeya round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares"

http://www.MoscowCares.com <http://www.MoscowCares.com/> 

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

"There's room at the top they are telling you still 

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill 
If you want to be like the folks on the hill."

- John Lennon

On Feb 2, 2013, at 9:05 AM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> wrote:

Understanding why we need assault rifles:

<Tom Tomorrow Glib Guns TMW2013-01-30colorKOS.png>

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com

  <http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg> 

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