Gun politics thread

All you have to do is look at the likes of California and NY where you see gun laws getting tougher and tougher with no real rhyme or reason. Getting a CCW in NYC is nigh impossible, and even just to keep a gun is insanely expensive.
 
avanti;n3552854 said:
The reason pro gun people and the NRA are right not to give an inch is that if they do, it is very likely they "lose it all", just look at what happened to smoking, you used to be able to smoke on planes, now in many places you might not even be able to smoke in your own home.
If you recall, I was in Italy earlier this summer and it was great to be able to enjoy a cigar with my coffee at a table outside a cafe. Can't do that in the US.

As far as gun rights go, we've given far more than an inch - there are over twenty thousand gun laws in this country. The story above is from Canada but numerous US politicians have openly called for the abolotion of the Second Amendment, so clearly they aren't going to stop if we reach twenty-one thousand laws.
 
LeVeL;n3552865 said:
If you recall, I was in Italy earlier this summer and it was great to be able to enjoy a cigar with my coffee at a table outside a cafe. Can't do that in the US.

As far as gun rights go, we've given far more than an inch - there are over twenty thousand gun laws in this country. The story above is from Canada but numerous US politicians have openly called for the abolotion of the Second Amendment, so clearly they aren't going to stop if we reach twenty-one thousand laws.

Yeah I remember, Italy has a lot of flaws, but luckily the nanny state and political correctness hasn't taken over yet..

I guess you have given more than an inch, but imagine if you hadn't been fighting as you do, it would have been all gone now.
 
LeVeL;n3552931 said:
The School Shootings That Weren't : NPR
That NPR piece focuses greatly on the unreliability of the numbers published by the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos. Since her qualifications for that job have long since been known to be questionable at best, it would be foolish to trust the department's numbers.
 
calvinhobbes;n3553016 said:
That NPR piece focuses greatly on the unreliability of the numbers published by the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos. Since her qualifications for that job have long since been known to be questionable at best, it would be foolish to trust the department's numbers.

Federal DoE has very little to do with the schools here. Schools are handled on the local level with the Feds only providing stupid guidelines like common core.

Regardless of who is the head of DoE the problem is that these are clearly BS stats and yet the gun grabbers will use them to push their agenda. Like Mother Jones who reported any shooting near a school as a school shooting, even if it were a suicide in the parking lot at 3am with no one else around. Or gang related activity that just so happens to be near school grounds.
 
Should also be pointed out that (IIRC) the DoEd stats were unreliable under the prior administration.

Read the article again:

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government's Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn't confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn't meet the government's parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn't respond to our inquiries.

"When we're talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful," says Deborah Temkin, a researcher and program director at Child Trends.

The 2015-2016 school year ended in the summer of 2016.

The CRDC administration collected this data in 2016 and has been tabulating it since. This raw data was generated and mostly collected prior to the current Administration being elected or taking office.

It is probably no coincidence that under the prior Administration additional money was automatically given to schools reporting a school shooting... and that the prior Administration was known to not critically examine whether any event for which Federal money was disbursed actually happened.
 
Last edited:
prizrak;n3553020 said:
Federal DoE has very little to do with the schools here. Schools are handled on the local level with the Feds only providing stupid guidelines like common core.
Do you know how I know that you didn't read the NPR article? ;)

prizrak;n3553020 said:
Regardless of who is the head of DoE the problem is that these are clearly BS stats
Exactly. Which is why this is in the article:

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.
"Far higher than most other estimates." I.e. "BS stats", as you put it.
 
Spectre;n3553053 said:
Should also be pointed out that (IIRC) the DoEd stats were equally unreliable under the prior administration.
Not that I doubt your memory, but do you have a source for that which would provide some more information? I get the impression that school districts don't always know what to report and that the DoE doesn't know how to interpret those reported numbers.
 
calvinhobbes;n3553055 said:
Not that I doubt your memory, but do you have a source for that which would provide some more information? I get the impression that school districts don't always know what to report and that the DoE doesn't know how to interpret those reported numbers.

Welcome to dealing with the US government. This has been going on for *years* - your interpretation has at least some basis in fact, but this is not confined to just DoEd (I am using this abbreviation because for many 'DOE' is Department Of Energy, the people in charge of nuclear reactors); pretty much *all* departments of the Federal government have issues with this. That's the reason it takes the government around a year to decide what the 'real' stats are for pretty much anything. The stats for US crimes committed in 2017 won't be released by the Department of Justice until *later this year* to use one example. They *just* released the "preliminary" report for the first half of 2017 recently.

But here's another earlier example of DoEd screwing up with data: https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_...rdized_tes.php

"We know it's wrong but we're going to release it as gospel anyway!" And this under the prior admin.

To use another example of such events, the Dallas crime rates, as reported by the Dallas Police Department to the Federal Department of Justice had a similar issue not too long before. Unfortunately, the original link to the story seems to have gone down the Internet memory hole but I quoted it in an earlier post here:

Spectre;n1933600 said:
Relatively low. We have Houston (where all the criminals of New Orleans went and don't want to leave, causing an enormous spike in crime) as a major issue, and Dallas used to be rated as high nationally, but it turned out we were reporting our crime improperly to the FBI and DOJ.

A bit of explanation and an example - If three car burglaries occurred in a 5 block radius in the course of a 24 hour period, Dallas was reporting them as three separate crimes. The DOJ/FBI requirements say that you're supposed to report them as one 'spree crime' not three separate ones; same thing for murder. Everyone else was using the DOJ specs to report and we weren't up through 2008. :p I leave it up to you to determine which is the more 'honest' method of reporting crime rates. I believe that San Antonio had a similar problem; see the link above for more information.

More about crime reporting: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/...-seems-7939077


And don't even get me started on the Census data.
 
Last edited:
calvinhobbes;n3553054 said:
Do you know how I know that you didn't read the NPR article? ;)


Exactly. Which is why this is in the article:


"Far higher than most other estimates." I.e. "BS stats", as you put it.

My point is that it has little to do with Betsy Davos and her DoEd as Spectre already demonstrated.
 
Is Betsy DeVos actually relevant here or is this some sort of weak dig at Trump? The point is that every time someone says "omg there are daily school shootings in America!!!1!" it's blatantly false. Europeans especially seem to picture the US as the wild west, which is laughable.
 
LeVeL;n3553090 said:
Is Betsy DeVos actually relevant here or is this some sort of weak dig at Trump? The point is that every time someone says "omg there are daily school shootings in America!!!1!" it's blatantly false. Europeans especially seem to picture the US as the wild west, which is laughable.

I'm pretty sure the NPR article was intended as such but the fact of the matter is that no matter what the administration the Federal government sucks at collecting and interpreting most data. Even in cases where they're actually doing okay on the actual interpretation part, it can be confusing or difficult to find out what the Feds are looking/asking for on their forms.

NPR was notably *uncritical* of similar types of statements made under Obama - which is disgusting. People (especially organizations that claim to have journalistic credits) should be critical of *all* such government statements, check any assurances made against facts, and generally don't take things at face value, no matter who's in power - not just when the people you hate are running the country.

Something worth noting - the political electees and appointees come and go, but the same bureaucrats run the agencies no matter who the administration is. So just because Obama was elected or Trump was elected does not automatically mean that everything changes at an agency. In fact, usually only policies and the people at the top change and the actual daily workings of the agency stays more or less the same with the same people. So the people in charge change but the incompetence goes on.
 
Last edited:
I'm a liberal gun owner and Kavanaugh scares the shit out of me. Sure, he would be friendly to gun rights, but the cost is too high - he would roll back civil rights to the mid-20th century. Women would no longer have say over their bodies, gerrymandering would be protected rather than challenged, marriage equality would be rolled back, corporate greed and corruption would be the law of the land. This guy is fucking nuts, even in his answers to the confirmation committee, he stated he would cite Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) to overturn Roe v. Wade; Glucksbergwas disavowed as a legitimate legal test by SCOTUS already in 2015 during the marriage equality decision.
 
Keep in mind that Kavanaugh can't make law, nor can he single-handedly speak for the whole court. With Roe v Wade and with marriage equality a new case would have to start, make its way all the way up to SCOTUS, the Justices would have to decide to take on these cases, and then they would have to reverse precedent (in the case of Roe, 40-something years of precedent). I just don't see any of that happening, especially since Kavanaugh has repeatedly stated that these decisions are settled law. I also can't imagine thousands (tens? hundreds of thousands?) of marriages getting annulled - seems crazy but what do I know. Government should just stay out of marriage altogether.

As far as abortions go, I don't really agree with the phrasing that it's about women's control over their bodies, seems sensationalist. I actually do get the pro-life argument somewhat, although I'm pro-choice. My view can be summed up as follows: at 1 week, it's not a freaking human being; at 9mo it is and it doesn't seem moral to abort something that's about to be born - I think most people will agree with me so far. The question then becomes at what point does this "something" become a human that you would not kill. I don't have an answer to that, but just mentioning that I understand both sides of the argument. I really wish the GOP would drop these two topics, gay marriage and abortions.

Anyways...

​​​​​
 
LeVeL;n3553269 said:
Keep in mind that Kavanaugh can't make law, nor can he single-handedly speak for the whole court. With Roe v Wade and with marriage equality a new case would have to start, make its way all the way up to SCOTUS, the Justices would have to decide to take on these cases, and then they would have to reverse precedent (in the case of Roe, 40-something years of precedent). I just don't see any of that happening, especially since Kavanaugh has repeatedly stated that these decisions are settled law. I also can't imagine thousands (tens? hundreds of thousands?) of marriages getting annulled - seems crazy but what do I know. Government should just stay out of marriage altogether.​​​​​


There are groups ready to dive into cases shortly after this guy gets in. While he can't single-handedly speak for the court, he is clearly a handpicked hardcore right wing corporate pawn that will shift the court's balance.

Remember, the guy he is replacing went back and forth, and was reasonable in doing so. I see no sense of rational, or reasonable in anything this guy has said. It is even more disconcerting how he he being forced through without doing a thorough job of vetting his past actions and opinions while in government. He was there during a lot of questionable actions during the Bush Jr. era, and he would have written several opinion papers that they are hiding. If this was done by a democrat, you would be up in arms about it. Let the papers see the light of day, and I will not say it is the sham it is now looking like.


​​​​​
As far as abortions go, I don't really agree with the phrasing that it's about women's control over their bodies, seems sensationalist. I actually do get the pro-life argument somewhat, although I'm pro-choice. My view can be summed up as follows: at 1 week, it's not a freaking human being; at 9mo it is and it doesn't seem moral to abort something that's about to be born - I think most people will agree with me so far. The question then becomes at what point does this "something" become a human that you would not kill. I don't have an answer to that, but just mentioning that I understand both sides of the argument. I really wish the GOP would drop these two topics, gay marriage and abortions.

Anyways...

​​​​​


Late term abortions are already against the law.

I don't trust republican controlled states not to try some of the same shit that has recently been struck down as unconstitutional again. We see this merry-go-round of changing laws, and seeing them struck down, with no rebound in services, or availability for years to come.
 
Considering the GOP is already trying a state-by-state approach to add layers of bureaucracy that close clinics or make the process so challenging or unpleasant that women are functionally barred - yeah, this would severely shift the balance of the court for a generation.

Remember, the GOP wouldn't even hear Obama's nomination to the court, citing how close it was to the election. Now, when faced with the same situation with the added factor of Trump facing nearly certain impeachment the moment the Democrats take back Congress, the GOP are scrambling to get their nominee confirmed as soon as possible. The guy was caught perjuring himself in his own confirmation hearing, for fuck's sake! Of course none of that matters to the GOP, who will happily embrace whatever double-standard it takes to cram their agenda through.

The GOP platform is Party before Country.
 
Top