Yukaphile wrote: ↑Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:01 pm
"Cowboy" in the sense of action movie hero like, say, Rambo or Schwarzenegger or McClane.
Well yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Also, have you not watched the first Rambo movie?
Oh, and just so I'm not leaving anyone out:
Shame. Not something that happens very often though (and I honestly have to wonder about the police and if racism played a part), and not enough reason to sacrifice liberty for security.
Yes, criminals try to hide the fact they are going to commit crimes. Like what are you even arguing here? "When they get an illegal gun they must hide it" as opposed to the legal gun they don't have to hide and therefore have less chance of getting caught.
No, I'm arguing that gun laws do not prevent criminals from using guns if they want to, and that the only "criminals" you are going to catch by banning guns are simply the new ones you would have created through such laws.
If you honestly think the laws regarding guns in Canada are confusing then I don't know what to tell you, except you must have had a hell of a time getting a driver's license. It's harder to get a driver's license than a PAL or RPAL license.
You seem to be confusing the license process with the totality of your gun laws.
Moreover, if you think police can seize guns "if they decide they feel like it"
It's literally been done already.
then I bet you think it's illegal to call someone by something other than their preferred pronouns too.
You seem to be heading in that direction.
Finally that handy registration system was unfortunately gutted by the cons in 2012 and now only applies to restricted weapons.
And much like with the system we have here, it's not terribly consistent with how weapons are classified because they mostly seem to be based on features. This is the aspect of gun laws that is the most backwards in both countries. The one thing mine has on yours, though, is that once I get the tax stamp and pass the background check, I can take my nice expensive pre-1986 manufactured/imported machine gun and do pretty much whatever I want with it as long as I take the same precautions I would with any other firearm rather than being restricted specifically to my own property or specific ranges. If I had my way I'd get rid of the restriction on date of manufacture and/or import and the "sporting purposes" aspect of how the ATF judges things with its weird gun autism. Actually I'd probably just roll the ATF into the FBI for that matter.
Stop posting while I'm writing, dammit!
BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:25 pm
I think when you're talking about implications of guns rights in this episode, you have one side of what the episode is trying to say about today's issue of guns and the context of a space frontier station being run by an officer who reports to a communist society. You kinda have to keep those ideas separated imo.
And a kid running around with explosives as part of his science project.
Honestly I see it as any other political thing that Star Trek has commented on in one way or the other. The politics of the writers is pretty clear, though I'm glad they conceded at least a couple of points, and it's amusing that in a few other instances the franchise has undermined the argument on the issue of gun rights without seeming to intend to do so.
Really though I'm surprised there's much to say about gun rights in this thread. The main debacle comes about when it's learned that a practical genocide is about to take place, and otherwise he's not technically breaking any rules. What's interesting is the strain of moral concern put on not only the understandable regard for humanity by Quark, but all the other people on the station who just can't look away from what he's doing this time despite him not breaking any laws.
This is what I mean by the writers showing their politics, because they basically had to make this really one-sided to kind of virtue-signal. This and the way they had everyone who is essentially responsible for Quark being in the position he's in turning on him and treating him like trash the way they did. They've basically made their own version of
Lord of War with this episode (ironically years before the movie ever came out), right down to a completely unambiguous example of selling weapons to someone who announces their intention to just go ahead and slaughter a bunch of people.
Lord of War actually amped it up a bit by having the deal take place right in front of the people he was going to slaughter. If all they'd done is sell guns to people, the writers probably thought that would represent too much ambiguity. The irony is the use of chemical weapons by Sisko himself in his dogged pursuit of Eddington, effectively committing an act of terrorism that could have (and honestly should have but for the magic of Trek science) resulted in thousands or more deaths.
