Uncle Ben's Rice...

[BoSoxGal]

wes, if you firmly believe that good will win, how do you explain the incredible income disparity in this country and the resulting lack of life, liberty and the pursuit if happiness that it creates? How do you explain the current oligarchy we have in lieu of an actual democratic republic?

eta: Are the rich people more 'good' than you? More 'good' than me? More 'good' than 90% of American citizens?

[wesw]

joe, do you really believe that when the "right" was taken away, the "privilege" wouldn t follow, at least for the vast majority.
the elite would certainly retain the privilege (wink wink).

i like the bill of rights just the way it is for now, thanks,

and my constitutionally give right ensures that it will remain.

that s not such an outlandish view is it?

[wesw]

faith, big sky, faith

but god helps those who help themselves, i ve found.

[Big RR]

Wes--do you believe the only way to fight tyranny is via violent resistance. Gandhi brought down British rule in India without firing a shot; he also brought moslems and hindus to the bargaining table by force of his personality, not force of guns. Martin Luther King helped save us from what might have been a very costly race war by nonviolent resistance.

I recall during the antiwar movement there was a time when many became disenchanted and embraced the same sort of violence they condemned the US government for perpetrating, but that is usually not the answer. Sometimes passive or active resistance caries much more weight. It ended the war, brought some significant racial reform, even brought down a presidency. That's a pretty good record.

[wesw]

agreed RR.

but I ll tell you, if mobs run riot and burn and pillage, fight or flight becomes necessary. when the mob rules surrender is not usually a good idea.

the right to bear arms is important in many ways.

[Joe Guy]

joe, do you really believe that when the "right" was taken away, the "privilege" wouldn t follow, at least for the vast majority.
the elite would certainly retain the privilege (wink wink).

That's what I meant by being paranoid. If the government took away the privilege of owning guns, it would result in more people having guns illegally.

i like the bill of rights just the way it is for now, thanks,

and my constitutionally give right ensures that it will remain.

that s not such an outlandish view is it?

Not outlandish, but an opinion that relies too much on the 2nd amendment as the reason we have all of our other rights.

[wesw]

well perhaps not the reason, but the guarantor....

[Sue U]

Joe Guy is spot on. Repealing the Second Amendment doesn't take anyone's guns away, it simply makes gun ownership a privilege rather than a right. The my mind, the most important things would be to get all firearms registered, all gun owners licensed, and require owners to take safety courses and have appropriate storage facilities. I'd also implement a gun buy-back program for anyone who doesn't (or doesn't want to) meet the minimum qualifications for ownership.

I see race wars and I see regional conflicts and I see lawless anarchy in or future and it scares me to death. you scare me to death.

You are delusional. Violent crime is at its lowest rate in 45 years. "Race wars"? "Lawless anarchy"? WTF? Where do you see this? Is that what your town looks like? Mine sure doesn't, and neither does anywhere else I've been to in this country. Oh, and BOO!

I don t hate you, I just think that you and people like you, are demonizing and dividing people for some pie in the sky ideal of utopia that will never come to pass.

Who have I demonized? Who have I divided? What "pie-in-the-sky ideal of utopia" are you even talking about? You are just making shit up.

well perhaps not the reason, but the guarantor....

Did it ever occur to you that no other industrialized democracy anywhere in the world thinks that a constitutional right to gun ownership is necessary to guarantee their rights? It's simply not. By claiming it is, you are simply ignoring the overwhelming empirical evidence. The American gun fetish is a cultural sickness that kills more than 15,000 people a year by homicide and another 17,000 by suicide. It's time to start controlling it so as to put an end to it.

[dales]

The American gun fetish is a cultural sickness that kills more than 15,000 people a year by homicide and another 17,000 by suicide. It's time to start controlling it so as to put an end to it.

Cut the histrionics, it does your cause a great disservice.

[Sue U]

Facts are stubborn things, but they're still facts. When you have something substantive to contribute, feel free.

[dales]

The American gun fetish is a cultural sickness....Facts are stubborn things

When they are "facts" and not overly-emotional hyperbole they might hold some weight.

[BoSoxGal]

[liberty]

Facts are stubborn things, but they're still facts. When you have something substantive to contribute, feel free.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Amanda Blackburn, a pregnant pastor's wife shot in her home Tuesday morning during an apparent robbery, was removed from a ventilator Thursday and has died, officials said.

The Marion County Coroner's office confirmed Blackburn, 28, was moved from the hospital and pronounced dead after her organs were donated. An autopsy will be performed.

The church founder and young mother was critically injured in the shooting around 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Her imminent death spurred a surge of sympathy and prayers on social media Tuesday and Wednesday as friends, family members and strangers mourned with public posts. Blackburn had been shot in the head, officials said.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Pregnant pastor? I suppose that can happen. Sad story.

[Sue U]

Tell me how it is not diseased for this culture to tolerate a mass shooting every day and 1500 gun homicides every month because of a belief in the fantasy that "guns make us safe." This country is sick. Ask anyone who's not from the U.S.

[wesw]

perhaps you should leave then.

that s what all the immigrants do. they don t have the courage and/ or power to make their own countries better, so they abandon them to come to this hellhole called America.

move to the middle east, or central America, or Africa if you want to be safe

liberty and safety don t go together.

move to Russia, you ll be safe enough, unless you question the powers that be....

[wesw]

sue, yoor dismissal of my views as delusional is the wrong path to take.

I take your views very seriously.

I am articulating what millions believe.

as are you.

we should not dismiss one another

down that road lies disaster for us all

[rubato]

Next to me, you have the integrity of smegma. Try your hardest to get the order right.

The original line of argument (not subsequent) is that It would not have been quite so simple to oppress people who were armed as it was to do so to people who were defenseless. That's the contention which, as I remarked at FIRST, seems unremarkable to me.

And false.

Then, other people with honest motives, unlike yours, dragged in the impossibility of a few armed people to prevent the Wehrmacht (and presumably SS etc.) from implementing the final solution. I chose the date of 1936 as representative of a time BEFORE WHICH the issue was not overcoming the awesome power of the Wehrmacht but fighting the Nazis as they rose to power.

The Nazi came to power in 1933. And you fail to show how a few personal weapons owned by a small minority with no military organization could have had any effect on that outcome which is greater than the same group with no weapons.

However, just to make a point - Warsaw Ghetto. Did the Germans have an easy time rounding up those Jews? Was it a cakewalk? Sure, the good guys lost out in the end - but then so did almost all those who went like lambs.

In my view, the Warsaw Ghetto resistance proves that guns make a difference - maybe not in outcome but definitely in pain on the oppressors

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising shows that there was no difference in outcome. The killing of Jews wasn't even slowed down. It is emotionally satisfying to us that they fought back but it is probably just as satisfying for some nationalist Japanese to read of the "Banzai" suicide charges against better-armed, fed and prepared American troops in WWII. It is possible that some English breasts swell with pride at the charge of the light brigade.


I will keep repeating it for your benefit. In Denmark and Bulgaria the Jews were saved by their neighbors w/o the use of guns. Because their neighbors loved them and would die for them. Because the populations of those countries were moral people. (It helped that Germans were seen as outsiders, but in many occupied countries the hatred of Jews was so deep it did not matter)

According to the census of June 1933, the Jewish population of Germany consisted of about 500,000 people. Jews represented less than one percent of the total German population of about 67 million people.

They were a small minority surrounded by a population who had absorbed the lessons of anti-semitism promoted by the church for 1,000 years. The ground had been plowed, fertilized and planted with hatred. The population as a whole found nothing morally objectionable about oppressing Jews.

The only thing that would stop Hitler from coming to power is if the population thought oppressing and killing Jews was wrong and objected to that policy. But the overwhelming majority looked forward to torturing them, stealing their goods, taking their apartments, destroying their businesses, and then killing them. If his anti-semitism and hate-mongering had resulted in an overall reaction of moral revulsion he would have been stopped. 1% of the population with magic amulets (guns) would have no effect.


yrs,
rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

Again with the "stop Hitler from coming to power". You really are off on your own fantasy world as to what other people have written. Shame it's in writing or you might be believable.

Let's see - I wrote that armed people might have made it more difficult for the Germans.

. . . had guns been common in post-WW1 Germany, then the Jews (and gypsies and homos and Christians and....) may not have been so easy to round up . . . Whether it is a practical notion is not relevant - what's relevant is that it's neither novel nor outrageous.

The Germans had planned to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto in three days, but the ghetto fighters held out for more than a month. Even after the end of the uprising on May 16, 1943, individual Jews hiding out in the ruins of the ghetto continued to attack the patrols of the Germans and their auxiliaries. The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest, symbolically most important Jewish uprising, and the first urban uprising, in German-occupied Europe. The resistance in Warsaw inspired other uprisings in ghettos (e.g., Bialystok and Minsk) and killing centers (Treblinka and Sobibor).

May not have been so easy to round up vs. Germans planned for three days... took more than a month

QED

[Big RR]

agreed RR.

but I ll tell you, if mobs run riot and burn and pillage, fight or flight becomes necessary. when the mob rules surrender is not usually a good idea.

the right to bear arms is important in many ways.

wes--facing an angry mob after all civil authority has broken down is often a no win situation no matter what you have; there are many crazy people who might well try to mow down anyone they can and not care a bit. But when we discuss fighting government sponsored tyranny, I think you have something very different; in that case you have a more coordinated effort planned and carried out not by crazies or zealots, but people just doing their jobs. And those people can many times be swayed by passive resistance, having consciences and not being swayed by the rhetoric.

It is easy to rationalize what you are doing when your job is just to move crowds of people into the boxcars; it is likely to meet force with force in an uprising; But what I they just sit down and refuse to go? How many can you carry or shoot before breaking down yourself? Face it, even in the extermination camps the killings were behind closed doors and most people never saw them. if they were mowing people down with machine guns or running firing squads day and night, might it have made a difference? Perhaps. It might cost a lot of lives, but so does compliance and resistance. This third way has worked in the past when confronted with superior forces.

And that's my point, when faced with a force against which you cannot win (and I don't care how well armed you are, you will not defeat the US Army), fighting to the death might seem heroic, but passive resistance might well have a better chance.