It's personal.

[rrneck]

It seems to me that all the big wedge issues that draw the crowds to the streets and the flamebait to this forum concern themselves with matters that are personal in nature. Birth, death, sex, marriage, religion and self defense are all personal issues that people take very seriously.

Any politician that is dismissive about any one of those issues or fails to offer a viable solution for peoples concerns regarding them risks failure at the polls.

Any coalition of voters that supports such a dismissive attitude will find themselves on the outside of the political process looking in.

[sharesunited]

1. "Fear" was symbolically vanquished at yesterday's rally.

Your issue of self defense (i.e. gun rights) goes there.

[rrneck]

3. Thank you

for a fine example of exactly what I was talking about. In the first post too!

Fortunately, the United States is a fairly safe country to live in. Unfortunately, some of us nevertheless experience violence visited against them by those who have the advantage in the disparity of force. Do you have a solution for the problem millions of your fellow citizens will have to face another who assaults them with a knife, club, fists or feet?

Or would you rather be classically dismissive and pay more attention to the care and feeding of your own disembodied ideology?

Does your ideology vote?

[sharesunited]

5. To the extent the United States is an unsafe country to live in, you mainly have guns to thank.

My fully integrated and consistent ideology is simply that none of our other supposed Constitutional rights amount to very much as long as people are presumed to have a "right" of access to guns and ammo.

Clint Eastwood delivers this line in Unforgiven:

When you kill a man, you take away everything he has and everything he's ever gonna have.

[rrneck]

7. Nice quote. That's one of my favorite movies.

It holds equally true when no gun is used.

You're two questions behind.

[sharesunited]

8. Anyone with information should call crimestoppers.

Self defense against disagreement?

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7272336.html

[rrneck]

12. Still two questions behind. nt

[sharesunited]

13. Two answers ahead might be another way of looking at it.

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[sharesunited]

19. A gun crime. And it's the authorities who are forced to ask for tips.

Because you don't need to get any blood on you or risk injury to yourself.

It's just pop, pop, pop and off you go on your merry way.

How convenient.

[rrneck]

23. Still too questions behind.

If all the guns go away, what will people do for self defense?

[sharesunited]

25. Their claimed need for personal self defense will likewise be diminished.

And their utter inability to defend themselves against shots fired first will be ameliorated.

"Guns going away" is an attempt to misframe the desirable public policy objective of fewer and more difficult to obtain. It mocks with magic wand linguistics.

When we are actively making guns and ammo scarce, not more abundant, we'll be headed in the right direction.

More abundant is clearly the incorrect policy.

[rrneck]

27. Word salad.

What self defense solution do you offer not using a gun?

[spin]

32. Do you ever feel like you are tilting at windmills?

Don Quixote, his horse Rocinante and his squire Sancho Panza after an unsuccessful attack on a windmill. By Gustave Doré
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

I do want to thank you for your futile attempts to convince people to "make guns and ammunition scarce". It gives the pro-RKBA posters a chance to reply and for lurkers to view the surprising fact that not all Democrats believe in draconian gun control.

Surely though, it must be disconcerting to post on such a liberal and progressive board like DU and find people who totally disagree with your views.

[sharesunited]

35. There are people who think abortion and same-sex marriage should be banned.

They disagree with me too.

Disconcerting to find such people ANYWHERE.

[rrneck]

38. Yep.

From the OP:

"Birth, death, sex, marriage, religion and self defense are all personal issues that people take very seriously. "

[sharesunited]

39. With the demonstrable difference that your personal self defense choice infringes

upon my right to be secure from bullets entering my body.

Your claimed freedom impacts upon my security.

Does this inherent conflict exist with any of your other categories?

[rrneck]

41. Then demonstrate it. nt

[sharesunited]

42. By getting shot? Um, trying to avoid that. But you're always making it tougher.

[rrneck]

45. You are waaaay too evasive to ever get shot.

Now demonstrate how my choice of self defense methods endangers you. And try not to trot out some vague passive voice word salad about the availability of guns. Show cause and effect.

[sharesunited]

48. Who are you calling vague? Guns and ammo kill very explicitly.

And with attendant injustice.

[rrneck]

49. You missed.

Try again.

Now demonstrate how my choice of self defense methods endangers you. And try not to trot out some vague passive voice word salad about the availability of guns. Show cause and effect.

[Pavulon]

51. So do bud light and ford trucks,

the kill more people than guns do. And the victim of a drunk driving death is just as dead..

A ban will never happen, like the booze ban, and lessons should be taken from the flat failure of that ban and the drug war when discussing a firearm ban or any law that restricts access.

2 constitutional cases back this position.

[Callisto32]

54. Your farce is failing.

Certainly even you understand that self defense requires you to attack another FIRST.

Once you attack someone, you assume the risk of reasonable retaliation on that person's part, including your own death if you attempt a potentially deadly attack.

[spin]

50. They are also tilting at windmills ...

Abortion, same-sex marriage and RKBA are all very liberal and progressive ideas.

The revolutionaries in the American Revolution and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of tyrannical rule. The nineteenth century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, Latin America, and North America. Liberal ideas spread even further in the twentieth century, when liberal democracies triumphed in two world wars and survived major ideological challenges from fascism and communism. Conservatism, fundamentalism, and military dictatorship remain powerful opponents of liberalism. Today, liberals are organized politically on all major continents. They have played a decisive role in the growth of republics, the spread of civil rights and civil liberties, the establishment of the modern welfare state, the institution of religious toleration and religious freedom, and the development of globalization. Political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote, "liberalism is the answer for which modernity is the question".

***snip***

The history of liberalism spans the better part of the last four centuries, beginning in the English Civil War and continuing after the end of the Cold War. Liberalism started as a major doctrine and intellectual endeavor in response to the religious wars gripping Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, although the historical context for the ascendancy of liberalism goes back to the Middle Ages. The first notable incarnation of liberal unrest came with the American Revolution, and liberalism fully exploded as a comprehensive movement against the old order during the French Revolution, which set the pace for the future development of human history.emphasis added
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Ignoring or watering down the Second Amendment only guarantees that the rich and powerful including the multinational corporations with their tentacles already deeply embedded in our society today, will continue to exploit the poor and middle class without fear. We will serve as their slaves while they tell us that they are superior in intelligence and worthy of their power and we should bow at their feet in thanks and submission.

[rrneck]

36. I have discovered

since joining DU and posting here that authoritarianism can rear its ugly head in the most unlikely of places.

I read an interesting book a while back, John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards.

Known for his novels of international intrigue, Saul in his first work of nonfiction delivers a passionate jeremiad on the follies of our age. Reason, he argues, has run amok; instead of the enlightened utopia envisaged by Voltaire, the modern West is a soulless machine run by technocratic elites that promise efficiency but create disasters. The author targets the insane waste of our "permanent war economy," the perils of nuclear power, the co-optation of democracy by vested interests, the news media's focus on false events and manufactured celebrities, the "personality politics" of presidential campaigns. He critiques the Harvard Business School's management teachings, profiles such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Robert McNamara and Charles de Gaulle, flunks our colleges for failure to reward creativity and imagination. He blames novelists from James Joyce onward for "rendering literature inaccessible" and divorcing fiction from social concerns. He roams freely through history, politics, theology, art and film, challenging his audience on every page. This wonderfully provocative inquiry, a work of bold sweep and originality, may nonetheless leave some readers wondering whether misplaced faith in reason underlies all the ills discussed.

While Saul never clearly defines exactly what evil he is railing against, he describes quite well how our devotion to the creation of systems and subsequent loyalty to them instead of to human beings rings true on both sides of the political aisle.

[PavePusher]

44. Has what to do with self-defense?

I swear, you talk just like Iverglas...

[beevul]

21. To paraphrase another eastwood quote...

Dont piss down our backs and tell us its raining.

[sharesunited]

30. That's akin to arming everyone and then pointing to gun crime as a reason we need to be armed.

You piss on our society, and then celebrate its freedom to get pissed on.

[rrneck]

33. So lets get rid of all the guns.

How are people to defend themselves without them?

[RSillsbee]

34. First things first

I want to know how you're going to get rid of all guns

[rrneck]

37. Details details.

Unicorns will descend in pearl chariots driven by singing hobbits to be placed in tiny wicker baskets for use as ballast for the ships sailing to never never land.

[lawodevolution]

24. " To the extent the United States is an unsafe country to live in, you mainly have guns to thank. "

No, objects are not at fault for the violent actions taken by individuals. Like I have pointed out before:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=339915&mesg_id=339915

nations with a low gun possession rate have on average a 5 times higher murder rate than nations with a high gun possession rate backed up by t test with 95% confidence interval.

Your gun free utopia already exists, it's called Nigeria. When they have a mass violence event there, the body count is in the hundreds.

[PavePusher]

43. Hahahahahaha!

Right, no place was ever unsafe before guns were invented.

Pull the other one, it's got bells on...

[jazzhound]

6. Permit me to offer you some fine caviar to spread on

your meme -- since it's utterly lacking in quality as a stand-alone:

[proteus_lives]

10. Fear is what you're about.

[sharesunited]

11. How can that be? If I were on the side of fear, wouldn't I be on YOUR side?

You start with the premise that you must have access to guns and ammo.

Then you justify such a "need" by promoting fear.

The desire to have your weapon precedes your reason for having it.

And the desire to have your weapon completely disregards the widespread harm caused by your claimed "right" to have it.

Honestly, I think you've got it backwards.

[proteus_lives]

14. You're wrong (intentionally so)

"You start with the premise that you must have access to guns and ammo."

Access to my Rights. That is what you hate and refuse to understand.

People making choices is what you fear and one day you're going have to deal with that fear.

[sharesunited]

17. Here's an example of someone making a choice.

And you empowered him to do so.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/one-person-dead-6-injured-in-chicago-bar-shooting/story-e6frf7jx-1225945908876

[beevul]

20. Actually the bill of rights empowered him.

What of it.

[sharesunited]

22. Well, let's say the willful misinterpretation of an obsolete anarchronism empowered him.

Along with your political support of or acquiescence in such misguided nonsense.

[spin]

29. Strange that the highest court in the land doesn't consider ...

the second amendment to be obsolete.

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Straw Man]

53. Empowered?

Martial artists are empowered by their skills and their fists to commit deadly assaults. Both should clearly be outlawed. Let's make fists scarce!

[proteus_lives]

40. His crime, his choice.

You're proving what I said. You're terrified of people having choices.

He chose to commit a crime. I wasn't in that bar and I don't know that man. How could I have empowered.

You live in fear.

[PavePusher]

46. Has what to do with self-defense?

Also, it happened in your fantasy-land of Chicago, where mere Citizens may not be armed. Explain, if you can, how anyone was made safer by your whims?

[rrneck]

15. Any thinking person

starts with the premise that people's lives have value.

Any thinking person takes into consideration the value of every life on both sides of any disparity of force.

Anyone with any genuine feelings toward the safety and well being of others would not dismiss the life of another in favor of some personal ideology.

[spin]

26. I bought my first handgun ...

for my wife to use for self defense as the neighborhood we were living in had a prowler and I worked night shift.

I took her to the range and we both discovered we enjoyed shooting.

At no time did I promote fear to justify buying a weapon and I had no interest in owning a handgun prior to hearing about the prowler.

After 40 years of shooting, I own a small collection of rifles, shotguns and handguns, none of which have caused any harm to a living creature. They have however punched a lot of holes in paper targets.

[rrneck]

28. Soda cans the world over blanch in fear at the mention of my name. nt

[PavePusher]

47. Save the Cans!

Switch to pumpkins....

http://thetruthaboutguns.com/2010/10/brad-kozak/finally-a-40-caliber-pumpkin/

[SteveM]

55. Yes, "and/or fear."

[AtheistCrusader]

52. Sure thing. I'll toss out my guns, my smoke alarms, my first aid kits, my fire extinguishers

and all that 'fear' mitigating stuff I keep around.

My kid will especially appreciate the removal of the safety latches from the kitchen cabinets.

[virginia mountainman]

2. Your OP...

Has repeatedly been proven correct time and time again...

Only fools would argue different.

[jazzhound]

4. Thank you for underlining the reason that so many

Democrats are passionate about gun rights and argue strongly to expose the lies associated with many aspects of gun "control". While some may take the unfounded insults from the pro-"control" folks personally to some degree, the far greater offense is the punch received by the Democratic Party.

It's not the first time that the first post proves the point of a thread author in this forum, either.........nor do I think it will be the last.

Well stated.

[proteus_lives]

9. Agreed.

"Birth, death, sex, marriage, religion and self defense are all personal issues that people take very seriously."

So true.

[jazzhound]

56. kick, NT

[jazzhound]

57. kick NT

[jazzhound]

58. kick NT