Ambrosia Software Web Board: 4th of July - Ambrosia Software Web Board

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Bush wil be remembered more then Clinton, but he (Bush) will be notorious. I think they both will fade away unless Bush can think of a way to mess up the world and USA more. Dean for president 2004! Bush will get smashed in the debates.



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my [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, section on Australia, and golf.

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I have an urge to be like Soviet mikee and post <ignored>, but instead I'm going to respond.

In any debate, one's credibility is harmed when they say or write statements that, while being mildly clever, demonstrate the debator's lack of knowledge, or willful ignorance of the facts. I'm inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and say it's the latter; but that doesn't make it any better. If you have real things to post, please post them - the exchange of ideas is what makes people learn about the world, the people around them, and in some rare cases it actually helps others formulate their own ideas about things. Your comment has done nothing to further the intellectual exchange, and I therefore request that you either come up with something of substance, or simply not post your tripe.

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I'll kill you.
[url="http://"http://taoistmonksquirrel.blogspot.com/"]My life[/url]
Tout que je voudrais est vivre la vie que j'aime.

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Indeed - the Second Amendment was written during a time where local militias played a huge role in the defense of the new nation (not to mention the securing of the nation's independence less than a decade before), and everybody owned a gun. This is clearly not the case today. I'm interested - what do you propose?

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I'll kill you.
[url="http://"http://taoistmonksquirrel.blogspot.com/"]My life[/url]
Tout que je voudrais est vivre la vie que j'aime.

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Unfortunately, this is exactly true. A sitting president lied under oath, and nobody really gave a damn.

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I disagree. People will remember Bush's response to September 11 in a good light, while, paradoxically, his administration may be criticized for centuries to come for many other things, INCLUDING things related to homeland security.

People will always remember that Bill Clinton = Lewinsky sex scandal + impeachment, much as Jimmy Carter is remembered as being attacked by a rabbit. And Carter managed to accomplish more in his four years as president, too...

And, by the way, 1000 posts ain't nothin', boi!

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I'll kill you.
[url="http://"http://taoistmonksquirrel.blogspot.com/"]My life[/url]
Tout que je voudrais est vivre la vie que j'aime.

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Hehe. That's why I'd vote for Jack Ryan in a heartbeat.

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I'll kill you.
[url="http://"http://taoistmonksquirrel.blogspot.com/"]My life[/url]
Tout que je voudrais est vivre la vie que j'aime.

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Correct on all counts.

Now some various responses. I like Lieberman better for the nomination, he's a dumbass but I agree with his policies more than the others' (I'll still probably end up voting for Bush though, at this point anyway).

The Third Amendment doesn't apply at all to our present situation, yet it remains because it is one of our inalienable freedoms and is contained in the Bill of Rights (and I'm not sure about any of you, but I certainly don't want a soldier taking over my home, it probably would never come up even without the amendment, but its nice to have the security, if it does come up).

-Pufer

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"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them" -Issac Asimov

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A few Republicans, seeing as how a majority vote was required to pass the impeachment.

A good leader leads by example. Do you want to live in a country where your leader cheats on his wife? What will that say about our country, what will it say about the values we treasure? If a President can't keep the promise he vowed to his wife when he got married, can you really trust him to keep other promises?

Not to mention it looks pretty bad for a country when their leader gets up on national TV and argues what the definition of "is" is.

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The Executive Branch doesn't do a whole lot to keep a country prosperous. Sure, they can suggest things, and they do have limited powers, but Congress passes most of the laws and government budgets.

We had a technological boom in the mid-90s, Clinton himself had very little to do with that. Sure, he said he wanted every school to have a computer lab by the year 2000 - but that had little effect on the economy.

Someone mentioned taxes somewhere and how Bush was giving tax cuts to the rich. Did you know that some "wealthy" people had 33% of their income taxed during Clinton's reign, while a lot of the poorer families were around 10-15%. Sure, rich people have more money, but a higher percentage means a more significant amount of their money goes to the government. A third of your salary is quite a bit of money, even if you are in a prosperous white-collar job.

I still think some sports stars and celebreties are overpaid significantly, but that's irrelevant.

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No matter what we do, someone isn't going to like it. If we did nothing, people would have complained that we're too selfish and greedy to bother risking ourselves to help out in the rest of the world. If we do something, people complain about us being too greedy and wanting to control the whole world.

The US does have a tendancy to do what it wants and ignore the other countries in the world, and yes - I think its related to us being the only superpower in the world. I also think that in a few more years, the European Union will become a significant enough power to at least give the US a reason to reconsider its decisions. But, until then we're pretty much alone and we have nobody else to share the flak with.

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"What we do not know, we cannot begin to understand."

[This message has been edited by Avatara (edited 07-09-2003).]

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I'm not sure. It was more of an observation than something to base an argument upon. A right to bear artillery? I guess they'll just have to keep stepping it up as things progress.

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"Humans are hicks."
- Paff's Law
It explains so much...

Arg. Too many people with opposing viewpoints to reply to. I hope this link will explain all.
[url="http://"http://home.comcast.net/~n9ivo/sayit.swf"]Don't click if you have a weak heart[/url]


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my [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, section on Australia, and golf.

When that started, you had me pretty scared, but it redeemed itself at the end, there.

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"Humans are hicks."
- Paff's Law
It explains so much...

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Not a majority vote - a 2/3 vote of the Senate is required (in our present case, that equates to 67 votes). For the record, only 45 Senators voted "guilty" to the charge of perjury against Clinton, and it was a 50-50 vote for the charge of obstruction of justice. The Senate was at the time split 55 (GOP) - 45 (Dems), iirc.

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Agreed - particularly the last sentence of the first parahraph (it's something I said during the entire scandal, and still believe to be true). But the cynical part of me says that the president's going to lie anyway, so it's not worth worrying about...

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I'll kill you.
[url="http://"http://taoistmonksquirrel.blogspot.com/"]My life[/url]
Tout que je voudrais est vivre la vie que j'aime.

OK It was a little shallow, but let me start out by saying Saddam Hussien has done some horrible things in his time as dictator, so removeing him on "false" premisis is debatable,
I will not take that arguement up now! To a Citizen of USA "As Human Rights and acting as a better part, then your adversary" it's just impossible! Not to say I would not to something horrible to a person who had sodomised my little brother.
But Why do you need to bear arms who treathens "the homeland" but it self!
It's own disire to selfdetruct, Crime rate, voteing Bush for office, Isolationism (before sep. 11), striveing for something as empty as money, the loseing of culture.
America is really a great place not as good as Denmark but the USA has something Denmark lacks, maybe the openness, helpfullness, USA has made some of the best movies, written some of the best fiction, the league of nations, helped Europe three times, but I can se change, what if insted of using so much money on police use it on prevention, good education, social services, then maybe there would not be a need for doing crimes, If nobody had Guns then criminals would have a harder time getting them.
OK so you need guns to protect your freedom, but we live in the 21th century, we have seen the fall of dictatorships, because people did not like it, non violent, remember the armed forces are Citizens of USA as well as John Doe,
The reason people needed the right to bear arms, was there was no army before the only parrel you could draw with 18th century and 21th century is if some state wantted freedom, and the federal goverment would not grant it, but because we live in the 21th century people would just sit down and talk because we are all thinking human beings.
So what I'm trying to say It's really a better thing to stregthen gun laws, as it would be a step in a better world.

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Arhhhhhhg Replied
Arthur.
[url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&forum=Ares+Trash+Talk&number=1"]http://www.ambrosias...h+Talk&number=1[/url]

The thing with guns and criminals, unfortunately, is that they don't really need guns. I could probably be successfully robbed by an unnarmed person who seemed scary enough, and somebody with a knife (or even a large stick) could definately do it. And, if they were to need ranged weaponry for some reason, I should think that a crossbow would be able to get the job done quite nicely.

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"Humans are hicks."
- Paff's Law
It explains so much...

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I've heard this argument before, and I don't buy it for a second. Guns make hurting and killing people a lot easier, therefore guns increase the magnitude of any violent crime. And crossbows? Are you kidding? They're extremely rare, for a start, and they only fire one shot before needing to be reloaded.

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only
Ares Webboard Moderator, and all-around Nice Guy

True about the magnitude. The statement regarding crossbows is because I would not wish to be at the wrong end of one, and I doubt if most people would. However, as you said, they are rare, expensive, and not very efficient, and most people wouldn't bother to build one if they wanted a weapon.

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"Humans are hicks."
- Paff's Law
It explains so much...

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Not exactly, crossbows are cheap as dirt and readily available (I'm a wholesale dealer of brand name knives, swords, firearm accessories, and crossbows on the side (on the side meaning that I don't have much business due to my laziness, but I do have the wholesale dealer license)), they are, however, incredibally inacurate for most practical applications (unless you are a pro crossbow marksman of some sort or want to shell out for a thousand dollar grafite affair somewhere). If you do manage to hit someone with a medium power crossbow, you could easily do as much damage as you could with, say, a solid lead bullet fired from a .380 auto yet there are no regulations on a crossbow (I can legally sell one to a five year old if I saw fit in almost every state in the union (I could also sell the said five year old a shotgun here in NM, but that is beyond the point)) whereas there are regulations up the yinyang on even a .25 caliber handgun just about everywhere, even though it is far less powerful than your average crossbow.
-Pufer

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"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them" -Issac Asimov

[This message has been edited by Pufer (edited 07-11-2003).]

Oh, I agree that a crossbow is a pretty formidable weapon, and like Avatara, I wouldn't like to be on the other end of one. But I think we can all agree that even a fairly sophisticated crossbow pales in comparison to a modern sidearm, at least when it comes to killing power.

That's why I can't see them replacing guns in crime. They're unregulated in New Zealand too (save perhaps for an age threshold, ditto for bows), but you never hear of crossbow crime. In fact, in my life I've only ever heard of a crossbow being used in crime once, and that was in Australia, by a crazy teenager. He nearly killed two of his schoolmates- before being overpowered while trying to reload.


Anyway, the problem we come back to is magnitude. Gun crime is considerably worse than knife crime. If possible, it would be good to have a society without handguns - rifles and shotguns serve a purpose and are damned hard to conceal, so they're not really an issue. New Zealand is a fairly good example of that - practically every murder makes the front page, and very few of them are committed with guns.

The reason the NZ approach, a ban on handguns and MSSMGs (Military-style submachineguns) won't work for America is that the entire country is already saturated with the damned things. Sure, you can take them away from law-abiding citizens, but that's only going to exacerbate the issue, because that's not going to take them out of criminal hands. It's a really nasty situation.

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only
Ares Webboard Moderator, and all-around Nice Guy

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This stance is very logical and the reason why many Americans support the continued legality of firearms. I love that this concept can be so clear to foreigners (I get the feeling that this might cause offence, I certainly don't mean any), yet be beyond the comprehension of so many Americans who face this problem every day. I am constanly amazed at how naive so many people are in assuming that passing a law will instantly remove all firearms from the streets. I believe that people should sit down and think about their stance on all issues prior to "hitting the streets" in protest, if people would only do this it would remove a lot of the senseless conflict that reigns in the political system today. If everyone would just consider the opposing opinion once in a while life would be a lot easier.
-Pufer


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"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them" -Issac Asimov

If people sat down and thought about the issue more, it would probably help, I agree. It's not only the gun control lobby who ascribe to idiocy - the NRA is particularly repulsive, particularly in its attempts to block gun safety measures.

There are some promising gun safety features coming in - fingerprint recognition, etc, which should definitely become standard. When all law-abiding citizens have owner-only guns, then you can freely seize the unsafe ones as and when they become available. And stealing "lawful" firearms to use for crime will be that much harder.

Not that I expect to see this happen, of course. The gun companies make big profits from criminal demand for guns. And the NRA...

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only
Ares Webboard Moderator, and all-around Nice Guy

Indeed, it would be nice if everybody could stop being hicks. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to avoid Paff's Law other than slow but steady changes in society, which have been going on (mostly unnoticed, it seems) for quite some time.

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"Humans are hicks."
- Paff's Law
It explains so much...

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I agree completely that many members of the NRA don't look at safety or even logic when they are defending their stances on firearms. I, however, believe that the media (especially the international media) paints the NRA in a far worse way than it should be portrayed. Certainly there are the hicks floating around, but there are hicks in just about every organization around, yet their rhetoric is all that is heard around the world. There is the other side of my NRA that isn't spoken about. The NRA provides both firearm safety and training classes to gun owners free of charge and the Eddie Eagle program teaches youngsters in schools to not touch firearms and basic safety without making judgements on whether firearms are good or bad (also free of charge). The NRA being against safety is also a load of bull, the organization spearheaded the push to make the sale of trigger locks mandatory with every gun sold both by pressuring congress and the gun makers themselves, then, when it was found that some resellers were selling faulty or ineffective trigger locks the NRA (not the companies) sent out free gun locks and safes to everyone affected by the faulty locks. I am a proud member of the NRA and have gone to NRA sponsored classes so that I can teach others about the good that can come from firearms and how to use them safely.

The NRA, and myself, are against all current measures to begin ballistic fingerprinting for two major reasons. Firstly, the current bills in front of Congress in support of this measure are sponsored by one Diane Feinstein of California who drafted them to state that "effective immediately, all firearms sold in the United States must be fingerprinted balistically in order to create a system of one-owner firearms" which is OK, but it goes on to say that (these are not direct quotes, I'm paraphrasing to save space) "All other non-fingerprinted firearms are to be declared illegal and shall be confiscated." This second part basically makes every firearm ever created, anywhere illegal in the US (with the exception of the dozen or so prototypes in existance), the earliest possible date of final, approved releasal for these new firearms (according to Smith and Wesson) is still three to five years away! Ms. Feinstein's measure would leave the entire law-abiding populace unarmed for three to five years (this isn't taking in to account the supply and demand aspect of it which would raise the amount of time to around seven years before the first new-gun would find itself in civilian hands). Each one of the prototypes in existance cost between 250 thousand to one million dollars to produce at present. Oh yeah, since there would be no way to fingerprint target pistols/rifles or shotguns they would be permanantly outlawed for all purposes. Her bill also eliminates all high caliber rifles which effectively bans all hunting rifles in America. Additionally, its sister bill contains the addition that all magazine fed handguns would be illegal.

Feinstein's bills would make it so all of our firearms would be confiscated without repayment (At this time I have around three grand worth of firearms, my three grand would go out the window) and around seven years from now we will be able to buy a million dollar revolver that only shoots $50 bullets which will be destroyed if we die (only one owner, remember) that will be so underpowered that we would be better off throwing it at the perp than shooting him.

My point with this unbelievably long post (I thank you for reading it) is that nobody hears the whole story (even the NRA didn't supply all of this info, I had to get a copy of the bills to get all of this), yes ballistic fingerprinting sounds like a good idea, but the bill that it is contained in, doesn't just fingerprint guns, it bans them, but the media just says that the NRA is fighting this good idea because they are a bunch of hicks who can't see the bigger picture, sometimes the bunch of hicks sees the picture more clearly than the public as a whole. I'll clarify some of this tomorrow when its not this late at night, thanks again for reading this far.

-Pufer

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"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them" -Issac Asimov

OK, I'm willing to agree that the NRA is typecast a lot. Any organisation that big cannot be represented by a stereotype - the membership is just too diverse. Free gun safety lessons are also a good thing - provided, of course, that they're values-neutal. But that should be something with parents and education types can work out with the NRA, shouldn't it?

What worries me greatly is the belligerent NRA. You know, the side which organises gun rallies in the Columbine area immediately after the shootings? Yes, I've seen Bowling for Columbine too. Interesting documentary, particularly as it ends up going nowhere.

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only
Ares Webboard Moderator, and all-around Nice Guy

I think 1 bullet should cost $100. Guns should be then made cheaper. If 1 shot was $100 people would think twice about shooting in anger, but if you were in real danger it would be worth shooting your $100 bullet at someone.

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my [url="http://"http://home.ptd.net/~hart1"]Home Page.[/url] Now with a link farm, picture gallery, Australia section, and golf log.

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I remember that one from Richard Pryor...

"I'd pop a cap in your ass... if I could afford it!"

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Ich. Fahr. Omnibus!

"If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith."
      -- Albert Einstein

If people are angry enough to kill somebody, they probably don't really care about the $100...

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"Humans are hicks."
- Paff's Law
It explains so much...