M_Gargantua posted:

That mindset is driving away good applicants who would make inroads to correcting that mindset. No one wants to be the one guy in twenty with no friends at work because he's the dirty liberal who won't billy club the black man outside the local dive bar.

at the date posted:

Issuing traffic tickets and rounding up drunks in your hometown is similar to patrolling a foreign war zone, you see,

vains posted:

well a popup or 203 flare can kill someone and a chemlight probably wont in most circumstances. so...it sounds like your commander was so terrified that one of you was going to kill the wrong person and he might fry that he made it almost impossible for one of you to kill the wrong person.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

None of that is good, but it's disingenuous to say that Democratic policy positions with respect to minority poverty are as destructive as Republican policy positions.Things can be less bad than other things.


This is such a ridiculous fantasy. When in US history has an underprivileged group won progress on civil rights by arming themselves? The few armed slave revolts were brutally put down. If the march on Selma was armed, they would probably would have been mowed down on the spot. If the LGBT community engaged in any armed attacks during the fight for marriage equality, they would have set the effort back significantly. Arguably the only times that civil rights have been advanced by an armed group in the US, it was the federal government that was armed. I guess occasionally some white nationalists are able to get away with pointing guns at federal agents?

Meanwhile, back in reality, there are 30,000 some people dying from gun injuries annually and that number would go down significantly with meaningful restrictions on gun ownership.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Imagine being so vehement about guns that literally hundreds of thousands of excess deaths compared to other developed nations are a reasonable price to pay for a hobby and (with a handful of exceptions) abstract fantasies about resisting tyranny.

Pursesnatcher posted:

Smart people should stop talking about "gun violence" as a thing separate from and worse than "violence".

If someone caves your skull in with a brick, opens your artery with a knife, or drops a balloon of poison gas at your feet, do you somehow get less dead than if you're shot?

And wth is this talk of "developed countries"? What's a "developed country" anyway? Is Venezuela (more than 10x the US homicide rate) perhaps "underdeveloped"? I mean, it is socialist, but is that enough to exclude it from a list of developed countries? How 'bout Mexico (about 4x the US homicide rate)? It's good enough to be part of the OECD, but mayhaps that's not enough to call it developed? Or let's say, the Philippines (about 2x the US homicide rate). It's got a bigger economy than either Finland, Hungary or Greece, but maybe it's just not that developed? Cuba, then. Another socialist candidate, not a single gun to be found, but somehow it's still got the same murder rate as it's big, evil, capitalist neighbor.

Oh. Oh, I get it. You mean European countries. That's what "developed" is a stand-in for. Gotcha. But wait. What about Latvia and Estonia? I know they've pretty much outlawed private gun ownership, too. So how come they've got almost as much intentional homicide going on as the US? I'll grant you they're a little behind, but poo poo, the US has at most a 20 percent lead on those, not 25 x.

poo poo, sorry. I got you wrong again. You didn't just mean European, you mean wealthy as well. "Developed" means "European and wealthy as sin". You're asking how people feel about the fact that the US has 25x the murder rate of the next European and wealthy as sin country. Well, except Belgium. Belgium, to be fair, only has half the murders per capita of the US, but of course it's not as rich either. GDP per capita is only the 17th highest in the world, at about $45k, so that might explain the unnaturally high murder rate for a European country.

Not that GDP per capita matters for Quatar, which has the 6th highest in the world at $60k (beating the US at 7th, with $59k), and double the homicide rate of the US anyway. But poo poo, Quatar isn't European, so as we've established it's obviously not developed.

OH! I got it now! You mean Macau! The only other developed country in the world, besides the US, is Macau! Third highest GDP per capita, a population of about 650.000, and almost entirely dedicated to gambling, hedonism, and catering to the whims of wealthy visitors. Kind of like that casino planet in the new Star Wars movie. That's the standard everyone should strive towards. Obviously. Because they had a single murder in 2015, which places it at a murder rate of roughly 1/25 of the US rate.

Mr. Nice! posted:

Violence is high in countries that are hotbeds of drug trafficking (namely providing USA supply) and crime? You don't say.

Brazil is a special case because everyone has toxoplasmosis.

psydude posted:

How is having universal background checks the same thing as giving your guns to the government. How is having a national registry of guns any more problematic than tracking vehicles by VIN.

Mr. Nice! posted:

There is no might. If we reduced the number of weapons in this country to a rate similar to other developed nations we would see a massive drop in homicide rate and mass murders. Once again this fact is supported by everywhere else in the world that has done it. We're no different on a base level than English, Aussies, Italians, Germans, Japanese, South Koreans, etc.

Smiling Jack posted:

Well you could take them all to the same hotel room and use them to murder over fifty innocent people

shame on an IGA posted:

I'll buy it if we ditch having a standing military

Kuroyama posted:

I think it's the National Guard that could conceivably be thought of as a militia nowadays.

UP THE BUM NO BABY posted:

Is that a serious response to a Ralph Wiggum image macro? Are you arguing with Ralph loving Wiggum?

UP THE BUM NO BABY posted: