RZ1029
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Posts posted by RZ1029
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<snip>
I thought a lot of people knew about the wikileaks articles that disclosed information about US troops killing over 6,000 innocents. My point is that just because soldiers are trained with guns doesn't mean they will use them right. Everyone with a gun might not use it right. Gun control won't always work due to this.
Anyone could snap at any point, should we limit a person freedom to carry a firearm just to make sure that they don't use it wrong?
<snip>
Have you read the documents in question? Or just the 'interpretation' provided by journalists who have little to no understand of military protocol and whatnot. Now, I'm no expert either, but I did download the better part of it out of curiosity. I haven't made it through the entire set yet, because it's not that interesting of a read. I've run into a lot of documents that probably shouldn't have been leaked, about troop movement and such, but I've only seen about a half-dozen or so detailing reports larger civilian casualties. I've seen dozens of reports with one or two civilian casualties, often due to friendly fire when patrols are engaged in a firefight. I'd say I've seen about 200-300 civilian casualties from about half the reports so far. So unless I find some report detailing a nuke being dropped within danger close range of civilian occupations, I'm not seeing the 6000 casualties. Now, if they added wounded and injured from IEDs/firefights/etc, I could see it reaching 6000, but as a direct result of US troop actions? I don't see it there.
As for limiting their right to carry, depends on their history. If they've proven unstable in the past by either prior arrests, mental issues, or things of the similar nature, I'd say no guns for them. If they've been upstanding citizens, give 'em a gun and hope for the best. Ideal world, they go about their lives and never need to use it. Real world? Based on the projected rate of crime which I believe I mentioned in an earlier post, something like 80% of Americans are (statistically) going to be robbed/assaulted at least once in their life.
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You are correct, the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. Which actually doesn't ban true 'assault' rifles. It targeted firearms of the semi-automatic nature with large magazines. (25+, I think)
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I like the plot idea, just be careful when you tread the necromancer and elf ground, or you risk terrible cliches.
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I'm loathe to make a percentage guess, but I'd say as much as 35% of the US military has had little to no experience with a firearm beyond basic training. We have about as many pencil pushes and desk jockeys as we do combat soldiers. Not to mention the Air Force's recent expansion into the cyber realm.
But that's a big derailment of topic, so time to pull the train back onto the tracks.
As of 2009, the United States has a population of 307 million people.
Based on production data from firearm manufacturers, there are roughly 300 million firearms owned by civilians in the United States as of 2010. Of these, about 100 million are handguns.
So that's about a firearm per individual. However, only about 42% of people asked said they had a firearm in their house, which means the average gun owner owns two firearms.
A 1993 nationwide survey of 4,977 households found that over the previous five years, at least 0.5% of households had members who had used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone "almost certainly would have been killed" if they "had not used a gun for protection." Applied to the U.S. population, this amounts to 162,000 such incidents per year. This figure excludes all "military service, police work, or work as a security guard.
Based on survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 5,340,000 violent crimes were committed in the United States during 2008. These include simple/aggravated assaults, robberies, sexual assaults, rapes, and murders. Of these, about 436,000 or 8% were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun.
Based on survey data from a 2000 study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year.
A 1982 survey of male felons in 11 state prisons dispersed across the U.S. found:
- 34% had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"
- 40% had decided not to commit a crime because they "knew or believed that the victim was carrying a gun"
- 69% personally knew other criminals who had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"
Unfortunately the last bit of data is very old, but I couldn't find anything more recent.
http://www.justfacts.com/images/guncontrol/dc.jpg
All of this data is courtesy of http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp and all the data I pulled I also checked the sources to make sure this wasn't just a lot of bull.
- 34% had been "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"
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Actually... AP rounds are VERY common among shooters with vintage weapons. I have a M1 with about 1500 (ish) rounds of 'AP' ammo. It's not classified as armor piercing by the ATF, but it's a 30-06 round that is capable of piercing most body armors used today. They're really easy to identify because they are black tipped bullets. You run into them a lot at gun shows with older guys who bought up some military surplus some time around/after Vietnam, and sometimes still today. The US over-prepares extremely well and had millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition for a now-obsolete battle rifle.
EDIT:
@marharth
Yep, 500k military means that many more bodies to scavenge for a uniform my size. I'd rather have 500,000 crazies that probably have rarely/never seen combat than 100,000 combat veterans.
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No sh*t shirlock. And they are foreign nationals, which they shouldn't be allowing into the country to begin with. The very last thing we need in America is more Muslims.
Not cool. Period.
@Balagor
Watergate affect you any? Didn't bother me a bit. Iran contra? Meh, it happens. That SA drug lord who was actually innocent: I don't buy it. He was involved in something, if he was killed.
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Look past the safety issues for your own sake, would you rather have 500,000 crazy people with guns or a few crazy people with guns when it comes down to it?
The USA military has killed more innocent people in the middle east then any terrorist ever has, and there the military force with a bunch of weapons. When the time comes do you want to have a military to fight against that is 50 times stronger then you?
It is necessary to have a close to equal armed force to that of the military...
I am also going to say this, f*** hunting for fun. No one needs to be killing s*** for no reason.
I can understand self defense, but do you really need something bigger then a handgun for that?
My set of laws would be that you could have ANY gun that could fit in your house as long as it was locked in a room and never came out. (when it would need to come out the law wouldn't matter at that point.) You should be allowed to keep a handgun/shot out in your house and nothing else.
So I guess I do believe in gun control in a way.
I'd rather have 500,000 nutters with guns. Because if those 500,000 have one, that means I've got a chance. What happens at war is no reflection on society at the home turf. And while you're probably correct, the phrase you're looking for is 'casualty of war'. It's not pretty, it's not 'right', it's not fun, but it's the way things go.
50x stronger than me... nope, no, not really feeling it. There's this silly notion that every soldier is some sort of super killing machine with .50 cal assault rifles. I own three assault rifles, one of which is the exact same thing that the US Marines deploy with. The other two are the tried and true AK-47 and a HK 416. I think I'm pretty well armed. I also own a few hunting rifles, from a .22 squirrel cannon to a 30-30 and a .50 for competitive shooting.
Hunting for fun? Define fun. I hunt, I enjoy it, and I eat the meat, I keep the antlers and skin, and I bury the rest. I see nothing wrong with that. In fact, where I live, that's encouraged due to the massive overpopulation of deer. Our hunting season was actually extended this year because we needed a bigger culling of deer.
A gun in your house does you no good. Except to get inexperienced individuals killed. By your definition, I would buy a gun, it would come home, and go straight into a safe. I'd never learn to shoot it, I'd not even know how it works, probably, because it's illegal for anyone to take it out and try it. “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Depends on the information. IF they actually found an alien at Roswell and have it currently hidden at Area 51, I'd like to know. Does it really matter if I know? No, not really. If they intend to pass a new law without me knowing what's in it? I've got a problem with that. I'd like to have at least a general idea of most things that go through Congress. In those cases, I think transparency should be priority.
Regarding military: there's a reason they don't tell us. If the US was involved in capturing, torturing and killing a South American drug lord, I don't want to hear about it. They're doing what they feel is necessary to keep me safe. If we sent an elite squad of super l33t ninjas or whatever to kill some Communist revolutionary, I don't want to hear about it. I don't need to hear about it, and I really don't care. Sometimes it's better not to tell us. Everything we're told is probably somewhere on the internet, and if it's on the internet, that means it can be found by pretty much anyone. And I'm not particularly fond of the idea of Ahmadinejad being able to Google US troop movements because the US military is now disclosing it's every action to the citizens of the US. Or Al-Qaeda being able to Google the location of the Army Rangers hunting for them and find them on Google Maps by their homing beacon.
Basically: government shouldn't hide anything. Military can, and sometimes should.
Note: I include budgets of every sort in the government department. I'm not abject to having a 'black ops budget'. They want to do something shady and probably illegal? That's cool, just let me know each year how much of my taxes go to that quasi-legal stuff.
EDIT: I voted 2.
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Skyrim.
Skyrim.
SKYRIM.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Have I made my point?
Once more should do it.
I'd like to revise my 2010 GOTY recommendation to Black Ops. It's too fun. Especially zombies.
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Yum, piracy. Ships, booze, wenches an--- oh, wait, wrong kind.
But yeah, I think there's a degree of OK behind it. I won't deny, I've pirated a game or five, but they were games I intended to buy (and did) when I finally had some cash in my pocket that wasn't going toward the necessities. And two of them were games I wasn't sure about, so I used it like a trial version. Happens I liked it, and bought it. If I like a game, chances are I'm going to support the developers. And I think a lot of gamers would agree here.
My personal example, I used to play WoW back in Vanilla. I started out on a Private server using some slightly modded software because I was cheap and wouldn't pay for the real thing. Well, I liked that game so much that I decided it was worth paying Blizzard their money. So I dropped that private server and got a real account, which I held all the way up through WotLK.
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"Such laws [that forbid the carrying of arms] make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides..." (Thomas Jefferson)
Remind me again what the per capita homicide figures are for the US, compared with the rest of the developed world.
The 'prevent homicides' bit doesn't appear to have worked too well, but I guess we have to live in hope.
*cough* Actually, according to Interpol, while our murder rates are higher than most places in the EU, the other crime rates are (generally speaking) lower. Sorry mate. Besides, increase gun control and I guarantee you every crime rate would go up, including murder. Especially where I live. You don't try and break in, because you know Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Johnson, and Little Johnny Johnson know how to shoot and could get to a gun.
Case in point, recently a 15 year old kid shot three intruders with his dad's pistol when they tried to break in one afternoon.
EDIT: Imagine that case, with the 15 year old kid, without a gun. Now you've got one dead innocent kid and three successful thieves. I'd rather have three dead thieves and one successful, innocent kid.
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Lol, they had Modern Warfare 2 on sale today for $30. I picked up a package of a racing game called Flatout, it's DLing, but for $4, looks like a cheaper Burnout.
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Na, I love Black Ops, I have it for the PC. I'm just getting it for the 360 so I can play with some friends of mine. Then I'm getting Reach, because they never made anything past Halo 2 for PC, so I've got to catch up on the story a bit.
I've heard good reviews of Gears, so I'll probably pick it up at some point, but I've played Final Fantasy at a friends house and wasn't really impressed. I've not played any of the Fable games, so I'll give it a try too if it's decently priced.
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One-way valve in the bottom of the cup. That's the red part you see in the cup as they put it on the filler. Really cool idea, actually.
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It's like how North Korea calls themselves the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", when actually they're a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship.
Or the USSR.
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Hey guys, just a little update. I 'got' my 360 today, the 250GB. I plan to get two games, for sure, Black Ops and Reach. Any others I should look at getting? I'm game for pretty much any genre, so throw 'em out there. Especially the exclusives, because I've not been plugged in to the xbox world.
EDIT: Just to clarify the 'got', it actually arrived this past Monday, but it was insisted I couldn't open it until Christmas.
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I'm all for "guns". Regulation doesn't need to get any stricter. There's already limits on who can purchase them. You've got to be a certain age in the States and get a permit. Limiting what firearms a person can own seems a little pointless to me. Believe it or not there are private collectors. Not everyone that buys automatic weaponry is out shooting up neighborhoods. Hell, more often than not if a firearm is used to commit a crime it was obtained illegally. Still, honest people ought to be punished so that the government can maintain the illusion that they're doing something good for people. In the end it's just a bunch of jumping through hoops.
Of course, I do agree that convicted criminals shouldn't be allowed to purchase firearms, and the reason is pretty obvious.
Yep. And the big problem is right up there in bold. Gun control rarely stops criminals... because they do everything illegal.
But, on that happy note, Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Have a nice Kwanzaa!
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Assault rifles should be easy to get as long as they are kept stored... It should be a felony to carry around a assault rifle.
People are stuck on the idea of self protection and hunting... The 2nd amendment is mainly to ensure that the people have a fairly equal force to the military. The least we can do is have assault rifles.
I don't know, it seems to work pretty well for the Israeli.
Also http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/halofanon/images/thumb/5/5d/Gun-ownership-demotivational-poster.jpg/500px-Gun-ownership-demotivational-poster.jpg
EDIT: Smile. If you think that poster is serious, you shouldn't be on the interwebs.
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i got five words for you: from my cold dead hands!
Haha. What guns are those? Looks like a a M4 and a 47 or a 74 and a SKS? Then there's a pistol and some sort of carbine.
@marharth
I don't think assault rifles should be easy to get. Long rifles (hunting rifles, bolt action or semi-automatic, and shotguns) don't bother me at all. Maybe a background check should be done to check for any prior violent offenses, not just gun crimes. Handguns I think you should have to take a concealed carry class (which includes a background check) just to teach them how to carry safely so they don't shoot their important bits off by accident. There was a guy around here recently who did that and was then arrested for concealed carry without a permit.
Assault rifles I think should require a little more control, simply for the fact that about 60% of police offices in the US are not equipped to handle that. I live in backwoods nowhere on the East coast of the US. The only police department with enough firepower to even compete with that is the local Sheriff office that has ONE team of SIX people (their SWAT team) that is actually trained to use automatic weapons. There are about a half-dozen other officers who assist the SWAT team and have their own, privately owned, assault weapons. I don't want the local gangs to have more firepower than the cops, who're supposed to protect me.
That being said, to get one shouldn't be so annoyingly impossible like it is now. First off, get rid of the stupid tax on them. That's just some Democrats hating on gun owners. I think a safety class, a thorough background check (looking for anything more than a misdemeanor, I'd say), and registration with your local police department should be sufficient.
OR, option two, just an across-the-board safety class and background check that's pretty thorough and allows you to legally purchase and own any sort of firearm that isn't banned for civilian ownership. This would include the hunting safety class, the concealed carry class, and a background check thorough enough for assault rifle ownership. Probably would cost about $200 to get, but eliminate the $650 I pay the government every year just because I own guns. ($90 for concealed carry class, hunter safety is usually free and background checks are usually about $75, plus a little extra for the ATF, they gotta make their money somehow.)
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GOTY: Donkey Kong Country Returns
I cried. So hard. It made me sad. Then I went and played my old-school Donkey Kong on my ancient gameboy color that mystically still works. (And they say made in Japan is bad?)
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I managed to get three decent pictures between the clouds here. I'll try to remember to upload them in the next day or so. I've not processed them yet.
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Given what you have read and the fact you said "Actiony-Fiction Type" [sic] I would recommend anything and everything by Tom Clancy, especially the Jack Ryan series (be sure to get and read them in order.) If you are a voracious reader, that should cover you until at least mid February-April depending on your time and speed. It is a bit of a sidestep in your genre but you won't be disappointed.
Is there a book to Ghost Recon: Future Soldier? But I shall definitely look into these, as I've played a few related games, and rather enjoyed them. And judging by his Wikipedia page, that should keep me pretty busy.
EDIT:
@Calliton .... thanks.
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<snip>
that seems to be all I can remember off the top of my head
Appreciate the recommendations, and I intend to do so. I went to a semi-local Renaissance Festival last year and she was there signing and selling her books. I bought the first one and read it in two days, then ordered the rest the next day.
As for everyone else, I appreciate the suggestions and shall be making a trip to the book store today!
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Good Evening/Morning/Night/Happy Hour/What-have-you Nexinians!
I'm looking for suggestions regarding reading to be done. I read a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and some fiction, but I've recently run out of books to read. And I'm looking for reading suggestions. I don't have a lot of time to run down to the local (understocked) book store, so I usually order online, but it's so hard to tell what's a good book online with the whole 2-line description they give you.
Just for a rough overview on what I have read and enjoyed:
- Paolini's work, not the best writing but I liked the story.
- Gail Z. Martin's Chronicles of the Necromancer
- Some of the Dune series, but not all. I liked the House Atreides series especially.
- Asimov's Foundation.
- All Lord of the Rings books, including Christopher Tolkien's work.
- The Harry Potter series at the urging of some of my younger compatriots
- A few miscellaneous books about the Halo universe, mostly because they were on sale. Decent books, though.
- All of Pratchett's works.
- Also, enjoyed the Bourne series. Stuff like that's interesting.
If you've got anything, I'd appreciate it. If you don't mind, drop the title, author and a brief (non-spoiler pl0x) description.
Thanks Nexinians,
RZ
Do you agree with the majority?
in Debates
Posted
I like this question. It's so very loaded. By nature, people want to think they're independent thinkers who never just go with the majority. More often than not, we're in the majority by not being in the majority, if that makes sense. For every person that stands up to say they don't want to be in the majority, they just come a little closer to being the majority.
I'm going to answer: when it suits me, because it's true. Sometimes I disagree with most people, sometimes I agree with them and sometimes I disagree and go with it, for better or worse.