Las Vegas shooting

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I understand you better.
It helped. It stopped them from killing several people per second. It's a lot harder to pull off mass murder with a truck.

Since when has the difficulty of stopping crimes become an argument against even trying to stop them? Why is this only treated as a legitimate argument with regards to gun control? You still haven't answered that one, Vinod, and it seems to be the point on which a lot of your arguments rest.

i would say they are both difficuklt since they are pulled of by fairly nutty anti-social people who can start spazing out at any moment.

Who said they cannot be stopped? Am i against a the police investigating something like this if it's reported?

You're acting like they are inevitable because you oppose any meaningful legislation that would limit the power of these people to enact mass killings so very easily.
They aren't fairly nutty people who can start spazzing out at any moment. White terrorism is not the same as mental illness.

God forgive me for (kind of) having to agree with Admiral X, but referring to the Las Vegas shooting as "white terrorism" is completely inappropriate, unless some major revelations have come out about motive of which I am not yet aware (if so, please elaborate).

Not every mass killing is terrorism. Terrorism refers specifically to violence committed to intimidate people in order to advance an ideological agenda. It is defined by motive, not by body count. There is a double-standard to an extent against Muslims and Arabs and in favour of white people when it comes to what is considered terrorism, but simply the fact that a mass shooting occurred does not make it terrorism. It is only terrorism if the shooter had an ideological motive.

Also, I would note that one can be both a terrorist and mentally ill. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Alright. I concede the point.

I do still contest Vinod in that most mass shootings are pulled off by sane people who just happen to have some very toxic worldviews.

[The Romulan Republic]

There are a lot of motives. Some are revenge killings, I expect. Some are just straight-up crime (their are some organized crime killings that could qualify as mass shootings, right?). Some definitely are terrorism, like that nut job in Norway or the white supremacist who shot up a black church a couple years ago. Some are probably just selfish, angry people who want to go out in a blaze of "glory" and take others with them.

[Wild_Kraken]

The comparison between types of speech and types of weapons is absurd and illegitimate.

The mentality that the Second Amendment should be limited to muskets is where the absurdity lies. Applying the same logic to the First only helps make it more obvious just how absurd it is.

It's not an apt comparison and so does not show how absurd anything is. Speech in the founders' time is pretty much unchanged now. The different mediums that have developed since that time hasn't fundamentally changed the nature of speech. To use the musket metaphor properly, it wouldn't be muskets == assault rifles, it would be wooden muskets == plastic muskets.

Whereas the right of free speech can be safely extended to all new mediums that arise, extending the right to bare arms in the same manner would quickly lead to a world that would destroy itself.

The Second helps to ensure the First and all the others, frankly.

Oh really? Where was the second amendment when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed? When the Comstock laws were passed?
Where was it during Schenck v. United States? When the Office of Censorship was established during WW2? During the establishment of "free speech zones"? etc. etc. etc. For allegedly helping to ensure the First, there's loads of examples of the First being trampled and the Second doing absolutely nothing.

The insurgencies in Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan are qualitatively different from any sort of hypothetical uprising or rebellion in the United States.

Not really. The Soviets in particular had no reason to pull any punches and to be frank, they didn't. But you seem to be missing the entire point I made, which was the "what, you want to make sure or something?"

Yes, I absolutely want to make sure that the Christian Fundamentalists who view any advancements in LGBTQ rights as tyranny can't overthrow the government.

Oh, but you didn't address the problem I brought up of how is it determined that the government has in fact become tyrannical. It's almost as if you can't tackle the problem because the subjective nature of what people find tyrannical would mean accepting that everyone has an unlimited right to arbitrary violence for any reason, hmmmmmmm...

"Appeal to emotion" lol. I hate to break it to you, but literally every policy has some emotional basis because it's impossible to derive an ought from an is.

Citation needed.

Yeah, citation needed on the is-ought problem, one of the most fundamentally recognized aspects of modern philosophy first discovered by David Hume in the 1700s. And citation needed on the sky being blue, water being wet, and 1 not equaling 2.

Also, are you actually defending legislation like the Patriot Act?

No. Perhaps you're not as logical as you think if you believe that since I disagree with you on a certain subject (gun control is bad) that I must therefore disagree with you on every subject (patriot act is bad).

[Admiral X]

It's not an apt comparison and so does not show how absurd anything is.

To you.

To use the musket metaphor properly, it wouldn't be muskets == assault rifles, it would be wooden muskets == plastic muskets.

Again, we're talking about weapons which were in common use by the military at the time. And, as I pointed out, plenty of the founding fathers left other writings which explicitly state exactly what they meant, so it's not some great mystery or anything. This argument about muskets is completely intellectually dishonest and no one is buying it - not even the people advocating it. It's just a way to be smug while arguing against a civil right you don't think people should have.

Oh really? Where was the second amendment when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed? When the Comstock laws were passed?
Where was it during Schenck v. United States? When the Office of Censorship was established during WW2? During the establishment of "free speech zones"? etc. etc. etc. For allegedly helping to ensure the First, there's loads of examples of the First being trampled and the Second doing absolutely nothing.

People fought those things, and it didn't have to be with firearms. But for a perfect example of it being used as intended, ever hear of the "Battle of Athens"?

Yes, I absolutely want to make sure that the Christian Fundamentalists who view any advancements in LGBTQ rights as tyranny can't overthrow the government.

Do you also want to make sure LGBTQ people can't fight back if some fundamentalist religion (of any kind) gets into power and tries to start rounding them up into camps? You realize that the first gun control measures this country ever had were to ensure that non-whites couldn't defend themselves against the KKK, right?

Oh, but you didn't address the problem I brought up of how is it determined that the government has in fact become tyrannical. It's almost as if you can't tackle the problem because the subjective nature of what people find tyrannical would mean accepting that everyone has an unlimited right to arbitrary violence for any reason, hmmmmmmm...

It largely depends on what the response is to working through the system. If that avenue is cut off, then that pretty much only leaves the one, doesn't it?

Yeah, citation needed on the is-ought problem, one of the most fundamentally recognized aspects of modern philosophy first discovered by David Hume in the 1700s. And citation needed on the sky being blue, water being wet, and 1 not equaling 2.

So you really have nothing to back up your assertion, which frankly is horrible in light of legislation like the Patriot Act being passed through such mentality, as indeed every piece of legislation meant to curtail civil liberties has.

No. Perhaps you're not as logical as you think if you believe that since I disagree with you on a certain subject (gun control is bad) that I must therefore disagree with you on every subject (patriot act is bad).

You advancing the viewpoint that legislating through appealing to emotion makes me wonder about that considering that this is always what is done when attempts are made to curtail civil liberties. The Patriot Act is simply a more recent and highly visible example, so I had to ask.

[Madner Kami]

Riddle me this:
How exactly is restricting access to firearms to certain groups of people, who are a relatively obvious threat to the society at large (e.g. insane people, members of radical groups), a bad thing?
Where exactly is the problem in being able to ID any weapon and being able to trace it back to the (at least theoretical current) owner?
Why exactly is it a civil rights issue, if the government keeps records of who sells which weapon to which person?

[Admiral X]

We already do that.

[Madner Kami]

We already do that.

That's the theory, here is the practice. I vividly remember a documentary that showed the database, a bunch of boxes stocked whereever there is room left in a building that is under threat of collapsing, due to all the weight from the paper. If they want or need to find a gun-owner, they call an importer or manufacturer, who then have to call a wholesaler, who then has to call a retail gun dealer, who has to check his personal records for a yellow piece of paper, that the guy who bought the gun, signed. This isn't registration, this is obfuscation.

[LittleRaven]

This isn't registration, this is obfuscation.

I doubt you'll find anyone more unhappy with the ATF's methods of control than gun owners. They are, after all, the ones who have to deal with it the most.

And it is absolutely asinine. Their systems are hopelessly outdated, they take forever to respond to anything, and they offer no clear rules on any subject - everything is an individual, closed review. They quite deliberately obscure their decision making process, which frustrates both purchasers and manufacturers. I suspect they do this in order to maximize their power - after all, if they would just publish a rule book, then manufacturers could just go by the book, instead of having to wine and dine the ATF any time they want to do anything.

Reforming the ATF is one of the great areas where you could probably get both sides to come together - after all, both sides hate how they currently do things.

[Madner Kami]

Blaming the ATF, when it's Congress and NRA that interfere as much as they can, resulting in the fucked up status quo there is?

Why is the ATF required to trace guns, but with crappy technology?

The 1968 Gun Control Act gave the ATF authority to regulate federally licensed gun dealers. In 1978, the ATF tried to make dealers report most sales each quarter. The National Rifle Association and other groups denounced the plan, and lobbied to kill the reporting requirement. Congress did as the gun lobby requested, blocking the quarterly report proposal and reducing the ATF’s budget by $5 million: the amount the agency had sought to update its computer capacity.

“From that point on, if you even said ‘computer’ at ATF headquarters, everybody ran and hid in a closet,” says William Vizzard, a former ATF special agent and emeritus professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento.

The war on searchable technology continued. In 1986, Congress enacted the Firearms Protection Act, which bans the ATF from creating a registry of guns, gun owners or gun sales.

Congress also put a rider barring the agency from “consolidation or centralization” of gun dealers’ records in every spending bill affecting the agency from 1979 through 2011, then made the prohibition permanent, under law.

[Admiral X]

If we already have laws on the books that we can't enforce, than what do you think more laws will do?

As for registration, gun rights advocates are generally against that because it inevitably leads to confiscation, and there are examples of this in both the US (California specifically) and Canada.

Back to actual news: Las Vegas Sheriff: The shooter did leave a note and he might have had help planning the massacre

So maybe this was meant to be something bigger.