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Most of Hollywood is full of hypocrites. "Do as I say, not as I do" types.
It is easy for them to pontificate about things they know little to nothing about, because of the adulation poured upon them. In reality, most are under-educated, and have very little practical life experiences. How nice it must be to rail against guns, yet have armed bodyguards to keep you safe. I guess they don't realize that average people don't live in fortresses, nor can they afford 24/7/365 personal protection from armed experts.
Another fool to add to my list of movies not to spend my money on, if they are in it.
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I seriously doubt that I could have said that better myself
Where in the 16 pages of this thread has anyone suggested total prohibition? Where has anyone spoken up and suggested we repeal an article in the Bill of Rights? Do any of these constitutional scholars know what it would take to actually repeal the 2nd Amendment?
Why is it that the only kind of gun control the overly-passionate-gun-enthusiasts understand is total prohibition? What keeps them from wrapping their brains around the concept that mostly the other side wants an end to selling firearms to random hobos in parking lots. We'd also prefer it if the violently insane were kept away from full-auto weapons with hollow point rounds.
But no. It's never that. We never have a conversation about how best to keep firearms away from criminals in fast food parking lots or away from paranoid schizophrenics with a history of violence.
It's always, "You want to take away my guns! You can have my guns when you pry them from my cold dead hands!"
Anyone have a hypothesis as to why?
Well...partly ( a good part) its because we see the futility of dialogue with people who think that fully automatic weapons are available , freely, to anyone. As to the "hobos" in parking lots, which I will expand to include gangs and other criminal interests, there are very strict laws in place, regarding who can.buy/possess a firearm , already. Enforcement is the problem.
That's where we firearms types get sticky on further laws. All the anti gun side is asking for is an expansion of government invasiveness, into OUR lives, because of CRIMINAL activity. We find that unacceptable. Tell me, bow is a law that makes it illegal for me to give my son one of my guns, going to stop some gang member from using his vast amounts of drug money to buy an Uzi? You see, as the anti firearms folks shout , loudly, about "common sense" , the complete lack of it just boggles the mind.
The full auto weapons, in criminal hands, are being smuggled in from Mexico, into the hands of the cartels minions , the gangs. Weapons are stolen, a d go into this supply, but remember...this is an already ILLEGAL trade, carrying stiff penalties if caught. Very stiff. Yet, not even a dent in the illegal arms trade. Just more red tape and government interference in the lives of legal gun owners. (Sigh) I could go on and on...but the futility of it puts me in mind of talking to a bowling ball.
His movies are fiction. Why does that make him a hypocrite? If actors had to agree with the belief system of every character they play in films, it wouldn't be 'acting.'
You think actors who play villains or heroes are villains or heroes in reality? I think Liam Neeson trusts that his audience understands it's all made up and will not be 'trying that at home.'
Right? How about gay actors who play straight characters or vice versa? Do these people complaining about this not understand the difference between reality & fiction? It's not that hard.
Last edited by thefragile; 01-15-2015 at 08:16 AM..
I have two people I know pretty well in Switzerland, one a relative. I have also studied their history, primarily from a WWII standpoint, but firearms are a significant related subject.
I suspect your snide comment speculating I do not own a passport was to try and diminish my viewpoint, but you would be wrong
The fact you believe your 'viewpoint' on Switzerland is somehow validated because you kinda know some people who lives in Switzserland and you have read books about Switzerland in World War II is enough to fully articulate the entirety of your 'viewpoint' and unfortunately, it discredits itself. My ex roommate in college lives in China and last night, I ate a fortune cookie. Allow me to articulate my elaborate theories about a complicated cross-cultural US/China issue...
The passport comment stands true.
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[color=red]Here is your dilemma if you are a non believer(as your words seem to imply). Even if you are correct that no deity exists, rest assured most people do believe in God, myself included.
If there was not God's law to follow, society would devolve much more so than it does now. A simple reason is that we believe that breaking mans law is bad, but a higher law is even worse. Lets say I hated you because you molested a relative of mine. The only thing that might keep you from dying at my hands would be not wanting to have my soul suffering an eternity. You can scoff and say I am superstitious, but you should be thankful so many people are then.
Probably best to avoid a deep religious discussion.
Lets just say that you are DEFINITELY in the majority of people who 'believe' (Nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe in Angels ) but the idea that civilization rests on belief in a superstition is ridiculous. See: Various crime rates in more secularized countries and compare that to the crime rate in any given US state that is 'deeply religious'. We could also compare prosperity, basically any other metric, that does not correlate well with religious belief.... but that is a different discussion.
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You are agreeing with me on the one hand, then implying nothing can be done on the other. I am not suggesting we round up all the minorities and deport them. However I am suggesting that as a society we can stop trying to appease other cultures, and instead need to demand assimilation into our culture. We did it successfully in the past, so there is no reason to believe we cannot again in the future. For those who are criminal illegal aliens, they do need to be deported and/or imprisoned. For American criminals, lock them up for violent crimes.
On this point, we agree.
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Why do you think crime rates have fallen so much over the years? It is because despite liberals best attempts to empathize with prisoners, we take the repeat violent offenders off the streets. That is until liberal judges let them loose due to so called over crowding. How about lets find ways to house them even if it costs more money. That would be something worth it to spend our taxes on. Keep violent predators off our streets, and make them serve all the time they are sentenced to.
That is a complicated question. We throw EVERYONE in prison and have the highest rate of incarcerated individuals on earth, yet also one of the highest murder rates (and one of the highest rates of religious belief).
While nobody argues that crime trends tend to rise and fall with economic opportunity, were your 'formula' to hold true, our incarceration rate should make us a utopia but the opposite is true.
(Also, would Jesus empathize with prisoners, or would he be a Republican, Hangin' Jesus? In this regard, watching the Christian faith perverted into a bastion of right wing ideologues is just as absurd as the exact same thing done in the cloak of Islam)
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You have tangled with the wrong poster to make these assertions, as if I don't know what I am talking about. I have read the Federalist papers many times to glean what the Founding Fathers were thinking when they wrote the Constitution.
While I am not going to get into a religious debate with you as I am not overly religious myself, it is clear that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof " does not mean a society devoid of the very things the FF derived their own moral values from. Instead it just means that government cannot establish a national religion or church such as what they fled in Britain (i.e. Church of England). The second part of that phrase is commonly overlooked by the secular regarding no prohibition.
No, I have 'tangled' with a guy who thinks that because he's read about Switzerland in World War II, he is qualified to proffer commentary about Switzerland to a guy who actually lived in Geneva. How embarrassing.
Nobody is arguing that anything on our founding law mandates a secular society.
Just a secular, non religious government. Unless, of course, you are OK with a monument to Mohammed on the courthouse steps, right next to Hellfire Jesus.
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It is just like how the liberals (many of whom are secular compared with conservatives) ignore what the true meaning of what a militia means based on the meaning in the FF's time. It did not mean a state national guard, rather it meant every able bodied man. It is further driven home by the latter part which again is conveniently ignore, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" . You cannot get any clearer than that , even in todays vernacular.
Right. And that specific concept was rendered obsolete and a total anachronism per various events down through history (including the Civil War, right up to about the Federalizing the national guards). You may be cool basing your life on a 2000 year old fable, but understand that generation by generation, trying to base contemporary laws based on mores of 250+ years ago is less and less resonant (probably because of the Lynn-Flynn effect )
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The bottom line is that we have problems that do not have easy fixes. Trying to disarm the law abiding because of the lawless makes no sense, and is unconstitutional. Instead we need to get at the root of why life has become so meaningless in parts of our society. I see one way of dealing with that is to bring back more religion into our society, as it was a key component in helping to keep all us "superstitious people" in line. God's law will always trump mans law and comes with greater consequences. You should be happy we are so deluded that way, as it benefits you non believers as well. Heck you ought to start teaching it yourself if you want to play a part in helping heal our cultures wounds.
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Good people with explosives really pose no threat to anyone. They're just hard working farmers, blasting stumps and moving earth for the food that feeds us all! At some point, though, society recognized that it was kinda crazy to continue to allow explosives to be sold unregulated, so they put it in check. Did that stop Tim McVeigh or the guys in Boston? No, but it definitely tamped down on 'casual bombings' that were unbelievably common (by standards of today) decades ago.
At the end of the day, if you need a supernatural man in the clouds to tell you what you what to do via his 2000 year old fairy tale, I couldn't care less. Thank you for your service, God Bless America and Texas, (insert whatever other imbecilic mantras tend to accompany that sentiment here). Just understand that I don't want your horse**** contaminating my government, my kids and I for damn sure do not accept it as the basis for the continued allowance of being able to sell 5 handguns in a Wal Mart parking lot to the black guy wearing the red bandanna and driving a 1987 Buick on 22" gold spinners.
Whatever 'cultural' problems that need to be fixed warrant our full attention but in the meantime, how about we stop with policies that permit guns to flow into these dysfunctional cultures that in turn not only causes havoc in their neighborhoods, but yours as well.
Why? Because we've seen this progression towards banning private gun ownership through history in other countries. The confiscation of private guns in other nations didn't happen overnight. It was a gradual progression. With every restriction placed upon gun ownership, another step towards confiscating guns was taken. Don't believe it can happen here? Some cities and states have tried their best to ban private gun ownership. Get the wrong judges in the US Supreme Court or the wrong people in Congress and it could happen.
The Supreme Court cannot invalidate a constitutional amendment. That isn't how it works. And the Bill of Rights is considered the "holiest of holies" by our judicial branch (and basically everyone else).
So how exactly does your slippery slope argument go from "putting more teeth in restricting private sales to felons and whackjobs" to "jackbooted FEMA troops kicking in your door to confiscate your shotgun?"
Evel Knievel couldn't make that logical leap even with a rocket-powered motorcycle.
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Originally Posted by tofur
The gun control movement knows that you can't bite off too much at any one time or people will freak out (although they are so stupid that they try it anyway and do damage to their cause). It's a battle of a thousands paper cuts, they take a little, then a little more, then a little more, until eventually it's so hard and expensive to own and shoot guns that it becomes defacto total prohibition. That's the game plan of gun grabbers and that is why gun enthusiasts don't give an inch.
Again, the slippery slope. It is ALWAYS and I do mean ALWAYS a quick jump from "They're going to confiscate everyone's guns" to "it started off small in other countries, too -- and then they were gassing their own unarmed citizens."
I cannot imagine living in such fear all the time. Nobody is suggesting we rip out a passage of the Constitution and light it on fire.
Easy. They don't want to have a conversation about the demographic/sub-culture that is responsible for 90%+ of all the violent gun crime in the USA. Even more still, they don't want to discuss what it would really take to fix it. To do that would go completely against all the false narratives they spin every single day and they simply won't go there.
Do you want to know more? See : Results of 1/2 century liberal progressive government controlled social engineering. Hopedfully you like the R-word.
What demographic? The criminal demographic? Or are you implying a racial demographic?
Guns are EVIL..... in the hands of an evil person. I think in most of Neesons movies he plays the good guy who puts and end to the evil with his fists and a gun and sometimes a grenade or 2. What is he complaining about? America was built by good men with freedom in their hearts and a gun in their hand.
Neesons movies are just ramped up John Wayne cowboy fliks.
Notice he didn't have the ballz to speak out about Muslim extremist terrorism! I guess that's no problem compared to the amount of privately owned guns in the USA?
Because when you make laws preventing people from having guns, youre taking them from the hands of law abiding citizens leaving the criminals the only ones with guns. Taking away a private citizen!'a ability to defend themselves makes them far more reliable on the government. Let the private citizens own guns if they wish.
One of the first things Hitler did when he became dictator (aka "Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor") of Germany was to outlaw all private citizens from having guns. This way if they disagreed with his gruesome policies, they were helpless to fight back against his party military minions.
It's Waldo. It's always about the racial demographic with him.
Do you ever make a post where you are not attacking someone?
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) but the idea that civilization rests on belief in a superstition is ridiculous. See: Various crime rates in more secularized countries and compare that to the crime rate in any given US state that is 'deeply religious'. We could also compare prosperity, basically any other metric, that does not correlate well with religious belief.... but that is a different discussion. 
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