i don't have time for a point by point rebuttal, so let me hit the highlights....
You can't by-name attack the GOP like that and then criticize your party for not be left-wing enough and expect anyone not to view you as a democrat. Nobody agrees with their party down the line, except by freak coincidence.
i'm not asking for agreement on party lines. i personally don't agree with political parties in general, but since they are convenient ways to identify policies, they do their jobs for the most part. however, the current crop of GOP legislators at the national and state levels are pushing policies which have no basis in reality (voter ID laws, the NC sea level law, the VA redistricting debacle, and others which i don't have time to list). when the dems start pushing policies which have no basis in reality, we can all sit and point to those policies and ridicule them appropriately.
There's nothing calm and polite about throwing around words like paranoid, unhinged, and coward. The National Gun Registry concept is more about future fears, but also comes down to how these checks as suggested do nothing, I can still go buy a gun and sell it to a criminal and be totally safe from the law. So an NGR seems like a logical follow up to many because the current form is so neutered useless that it seems like it only exists to be a vessel for future expansion. Why on Earth would you expect people not to wonder what the game plan is when a group known to mostly 'not favor gun registry' in the same way they 'didn't favor gay marriage' until last year suddenly propose a useless feel good measure?
Look, you keep calling us paranoid but when we know damn well much of the left wants them banned entirely our 'paranoia' has justification, it's only been a few months since you were saying we should mirror the Australian policy of not treating self-defense as legit grounds to own a weapon.
and there is that paranoia again. "the left wants them banned entirely", really? point me to anyone in a position to make gun laws who says we need to ban all guns. we've had a national registry for automatic weapons since 1986 and yet none have been seized in a government crackdown unless they've been used in crimes. the government is pretty aware of where those guns are, who owns them, and nobody seems to be worried about them being taken away. trying to say that "one day, maybe someone might come to take the guns away" is not an argument that is reasonable when the reality proves otherwise.
and it is not only possible to still own guns in australia, but people still get killed by them on a semi-regular basis. you keep insisting that the number of gun deaths in the US is acceptable to you, but to me that sounds like you think murder is perfectly acceptable as long as people use guns to do it. well if we implemented an australian style system of gun ownership, we'd still have an acceptable murder rate to you. or at least, i'm assuming that a high murder rate is ok to you, so a lower one should be as well. what makes their system work so well is that someone commits a horrible crime with a gun and they say "let's figure out how to keep this from happening again". in the US, the same horrible crime has our lawmakers saying "this law would not have stopped the horrible event that just happened, therefore it won't stop any horrible events ever". for most of us, this is no longer an acceptable position to take. we've been doing worse than nothing for 20 years, it's time to try something else now.
"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman
- 18/04/2013 03:15:15 PM
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- 19/04/2013 11:01:31 PM
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