help in planing

In England a man was recently impression for shooting a burglar for robbing him in his own home at knife point.

I will assume that you meant "imprisoned".  The Tony Martin story has been floating around the US neocon press lately and they've conveniently left out most of the details but then I wouldn't expect anything less.  In that case the home owner:

1) had had his firearms license revoked because he had been shooting at random passing cars
2) possesed a firearm that was illegal under British law (not all are but certain kinds are just like in the US)
3) he shot the intruder in the back outside his home

If you'd like more facts than fiction you could look at this - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1466593,00.html
 
As I said...everyone already knows their opinions are facts, their facts are perfect, and their minds are already made up...and not to be confused by any actual facts that contradict their existing facts.

Better point is that it makes no difference. Theres no way to solve this little problem in this country.

We have the highest rates of murder and violent crimes on earth. Smart people know why. How it happened is apparent. Now we get to live with the results.

But then again, when your president tells you you're safer and freer when you're a lot less of both, its easy to see where some folks can get confused.
 
Get Over it! No right or wrong here....Remember, everybody's got one.

PEACE
 
Flowgirl I agree with you that not all liberal citizens are for gun control. However almost all democratic political office holders are. The more liberal the state the more gun control. There is my bone of contention.

As far as the "protecting myself" argument...very few people actually successfully defend themselves with a firearm and/or prevent a crime.  The few instances where it does happen are widely publicized.  You are far more likely to be killed or have a family member be killed by your gun than you are trying to protect yourself with it.

This is simply untrue. The press is always talking about all the children who are killed with handguns. One would think that having a gun in the house is more dangerous then not having one. In fact what the press fails to mention is that almost all of those deaths are among the 14-17 age group, and are largly drug related.  More children drown in a bucket of water a year then are killed by accidental handgun shotings.

While it is true that firearms are associated with approximately 30,000 deaths; the majority of them suicides; in the U.S. annually, firearms are used far more often to save lives and protect property. Award-winning survey research demonstrates that guns are used as often as 2.5 million times a year in the U.S. for protection. This is three to five times as often as they are misused by criminals.



I will suggest that the link between crime and "race" is actually one of crime and poverty.  If you eliminate those at the bottom of the economic ladder (particularly when the disparity in incomes is enormous) that you will skew your statistics in a way that makes you feel warm and fuzzy.

Hyperborea this is a tricky anology. On the one hand in Maryland the vast majority of blacks are middle class and up. These people are for the most part lawabiding.
In Baltimore there is a certain bravado among the dealers and the attics. I cannot speak for other metro centers, but I assume that this is a universal truth. Right now in Baltimore we have a case of an upstanding citizen who was going to be a witness in a drug related murder. Guess what happened? The house was torched and the whole family perished. This is just one of many retaliations against people who try to change the system. We even have a dvd going around town, put out by some dealers, that lays down the law of the street to all who squeal.
Society glorifies these scum. We have gangster rap, the bling bling, the Wire, hollywood, NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton ect....
I an not a racist, but the truth is that black poor commit more violent crime then white poor. I have seen the statistics.
 
We're experiencing "statistical drift". That occurs when one looks at statistics that have been crafted by someone to tell a story and that story is appealing to the reader.

From the implausible children drowning in buckets of water to the claim that most of the "child deaths" are "black criminals".

I've seen the stats. And the ones produced by the gun haters. And the ones produced by those who favor guns. They dont look anything alike. It does take bit of effort to look at the methodologies and mitigations to see how the data is being spun.

But you have to want to do that.

For example, the federal government (Center for Disease Control's National Center for Health division) reports that approximately 25 children die of accidental drownings in buckets each year.

They also report the average number of children under the age of 13 who die accidentally and unintended from gunshots is 214.

Roughly 87 children per year under 5 are killed accidentall by a handgun in their own homes.

One hundred and thirty four were murdered intentionally by a gun before their tenth birthday.

And by the way, more than half of all children killed by a gun that are under 19 are white. In 2002, 1639 white children under 19 were killed, while only 1112 black children under 19 were killed.

These stats from a federal agency thats been under the direction of pro-gun politicians for 4+ years now.

More children do drown in buckets than asian/pacific island children killed by guns. Barely.
 
FORMAL NAME INFORMAL NAME % ALL DEATHS
(1) Diseases of the heart heart attack (mainly) 28.5%
(2) Malignant neoplasms cancer 22.8%
(3) Cerebrovascular disease stroke 6.7%
(4) Chronic lower respiratory disease emphysema, chronic bronchitis 5.1%
(5) Unintentional injuries accidents 4.4%
(6) Diabetes mellitus diabetes 3.0%
(7) Influenza and pneumonia flu & pneumonia 2.7%
(8) Alzheimer's Disease Alzheimer's senility 2.4%
(9) Nephritis and Nephrosis kidney disease 1.7%
(10) Septicemia systemic infection 1.4%
(11) Intentional self-harm suicide 1.3%
(12) Chronic Liver/Cirrhosis liver disease 1.1%
(13) Essential Hypertension high blood pressure 0.8%
(14) Assault homicide 0.7%
(15) All other causes other 17.4%

This is a statistic chart of causes of death in the usa, so we see that homicide, is very very small, and other causes like kennedys car is even less, for those that dont remember that he drowned his girlfriend and walked around for 3 houres "hickop" trying to figure out how to get to his next 3some. and as for the girl with the hubby that is in the millitary I take it and liberal? he is in the minority. most millitary personel are conservitive.
the dems try to gut the millitary every chance they get.
It is also funny how the libs throw insults but never a counter ideal. maybe because they dont have any.
 
And by the way, more than half of all children killed by a gun that are under 19 are white.  In 2002, 1639 white children under 19 were killed, while only 1112 black children under 19 were killed.
 

Yes but blacks are only 11 percent of the population. So if you are a black "child" you are about 5 times more likely to be killed by a gun
 
You guys scare the sh*t out of me! :'(

ed teach would be jailed in Canada.
 
Yes but blacks are only 11 percent of the population. So if you are a black "child" you are about 5 times more likely to be killed by a gun

Well, according the US census blacks make up 13% of the US population and with 1112 child gun deaths that is 85.5 per percent of the US population.

Whites make up 75% of the US population and with 1639 child gun deaths that is 21.8 per percent of the US population.

What is the ratio of black child gun deaths to white child gun deaths as a percent of the population?  That's 85.5/21.8 = 3.9.

Hmmm, what's the poverty ratio for blacks compared to whites in the US?  Well for blacks the poverty ratio is 24.8% and for whites it is 8.2%.  That becomes 24.8 / 8.2 = 3.02.  Well, those two look remarkably similar.  I'll stand by by suggestion that the "hidden" variable for the difference between the "races" in the US is poverty.
 
I thought we were talking about early retirement planning - and then we drifted off into nice talk about the Broadway show I was planning on attending. Then we went into guns, and next liberals vs. conservatives and now Canada vs. the U.S.

At least with regard to Canada, we won't be talking about guns - nobody has any.

What, exactly, does this have to do with ER?
 
When our founding fathers said it was OK to own guns it was like the wild west.  No Police and really no army to protect the public.
No one really needs a gun today in my opinion.  Nothing good can happen with guns.  
I'm sure we have all picked up the paper and read about the deaths that occur every day that are caused by guns.  Yes we will all die from something but what does that have to do with the price of Onions in China?
We all have an opinion but guns are just not rational in mine.
Regards,
JOE
 
and as for the girl with the hubby that is in the millitary I take it and liberal? he is in the minority. most millitary personel are conservitive.

Hmm. I would agree that the military averaged out is probably a little to the right of center, but you'd probably be surprised at the diversity of opinion in the ranks (especially since the start of this war). Most military folk are too busy doing their job to get wrapped up in politics, and have experienced enough of the world to know that there aren't simple answers to problems. Usually the most extreme conservatives I've met have never served (nor sent their kids to serve), and yet seem most likely to use military service as a litmus test for patriotism. Odd.

As for cuts to the military - after the end of the Cold War both sides were equally eager to reap the spoils from a military draw down - liberals for social programs and conservatives for tax cuts (let us remember that Cheney as SecDef under Bush-1 was responsible for huge cuts in defense). They were probably both wrong. Conservatives may wave the flag a little harder, but if you think they are friends of the military then ask a few who will be affected by Bush's proposed cuts to veterans programs.

BTW, I've read through this thread and still can't figure out how we got on the topic of gun control. I know my observation is even further off topic, but hell, my spouse is due home in a few weeks and I'm feeling a little exuberant. It's an even better feeling than finishing the taxes last night and realizing that we're paying no federal income tax for 2004. :)
 
I've looked back at this thread to try to figure where it ran off track. I think I found the source of the problem in the original post. ed teach ends that post by saying . . .
. . .any way opinions are welcome. thanks
:D :D :D
 
 I know my observation is even further off topic, but hell, my spouse is due home in a few weeks and I'm feeling a little exuberant.  It's an even better feeling than finishing the taxes last night and realizing that we're paying no federal income tax for 2004. :)

Flowgirl, I'm very happy for you that your man is heading home safely. Peace and joy to both of you!

Mikey
 
"White collar crime" is an oxymoron.

Now, let's take Martha Stewart.
She did what is done EVERY DAY, millions of time in total.
Who cares?
JG

I care. I hope than when Martha is rehabilitated re-enters society that she'll be subject to a long waiting period before she can buy a glue gun.


BUM
 
Well for 454, you have it all wrong, as a liberal, there was no wild wild west, when the constitution and the bill of rights was written. the east was settled.
the cities were bustling, and the reasons for gun owner ship was to keep the power of government in check. to keep it with "the people"
No good can come from gun owner ship? Well I say no good can come from the first amendment, freedom of religion is of no good today, our founding fathers did not consive of all the Moslem,Buddhist, and other non Christian religions, so I say take it out of the bill of rights, religion is just a crutch for the weak minded. and televangelists that take old peoples money so they will have to eat cat food so Bennie hinn can have the live of riley.
and freedom of the press. the founding fathers never conceived of the internet, TV. radio. and we now have a nice big central government to tell us what is going on.
Oh ya you liberals don't like the central government. oh well I say shut down the internet. and TV news, and radio, both concretive,and al Franken, You libs would probably like the latter as the liberal radio shows are on the verge of bankruptcy, they just don't draw the audience that the rush , hanity, and other shows do.
So I am with you get rid of the first and second amendments. give me my 40w light bulb, bike, and seeds to start my herb garden, and I will join a commune, and we can all talk to the animals. because no good can come from , guns, internet,radio,TV, cutting trees,eating animals,wearing animal products,OOP's I will have to throw out my 40w light bulb,, no power plants. they make nasty enviro waste, and we cant have that. just give me the bike, wait, there will be no reason to go any where, nothing to buy. I surly don't need any ammo for the guns I don't have.
I can just hoe my herb garden.
you liberals are all the same. you talk out both sides of your mouths, just like Ted Kennedy, Jane Fonda,Rosie odonald, and many others, they want to take the guns out of our hands, but they have body guards with Uzi's to protect them. another case of the left that knows what is good for the little people. That my friends is why the left is loosing, and has been since the revolution of 94. You just cant see that you have lost the white house, sen, and HR, the majority of gov's, and many state cong. you just don't get it, even when you loose, you go farther to the left.
even your gu ru Billie "I like to do nasty things with my cigars" Clinton, understood that he needed to at least play like a centrist to win.
but the Howard deans "yeeeeahhh" still are taking the party leftward ho.
I say fine, and you will keep loosing, even with the propaganda, and out right lies of F 9/11 from mikei mooron, and the liberal press, giving bush a bad wrap at every turn, you could not pull it off, instead you sit by and talk about, if we could have just go 40k more voters in Ohio, if if if. if my aunt had balls she would be my uncle.
you live in if.
You attack so may fronts you make hitler look like a pin point front.
The logic you people use is amazing to me, police are the only protection we need, well in the liberal cities, a pizza will arrive faster than a cop when someone is raping or stabbing you or your kids, I wonder if you will think a colt under the pillow is a bad idea when that happens?
I frequent a local coffee shop that is mostly a liberal hang out, one of the old hippie, love peace we don't need an army, if every one just loved oneanother girls.
She was going to live in her vw bug [as we speak] and go around the beaches of fla. for a couple of months.
I was joking around and told her that she needed a gun to take with her, and did she want me to lend her one?
She said she did not believe in self defense,and if someone wanted to rape her well rape away.
Typical liberal crap. and how do you argue with that kind of mentality? you don't, you just vote against it.
The liberals are killing this country, they are the ones involved in the aclu, and sewing property owners for not having water available to the illegals that cross our southern boarders, they went to court with the Nazi's in Chicago to get them the right to march in Skokie ill. a mostly Jewish community. aclu? a bunch of hippie nut jobs that are mad because the 60s "we are going to change the world" fell flat on its face, Look at George carlin, he used to be all about this we can change the world, now he just rants on about how we as humans are going to all die, and good ridens to us. we screwed up the planet, blablablablbabla. he is loosing his audience. every one I talk to is sick of his "no hope fu@k hope" attitude. Well when you are a anti white, industry,chemical, liberal, you will always loose.
I will venture to say that most of us here would not be if it were not for "industry, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, ect.
and how many times have you conservatives talked to a liberal "we need to take care of the earther" and they get in there SUV and drive off to buy a new DVD player so they can watch the home movies that they took with the new Sony cam, of the last vacation they took in which they flew to canon? Hypocrites.
 
I am with you brotha. here is a funny story I found a while back.

PAINT THEIR SWASTIKA GREEN
by Brien Bartels

Whenever a group of enviro-lefties get together a lot of clumsy comparisons get thrown around concerning Republicans, free-marketeers, businessmen, and their alleged resemblance to fascists and Nazis. Which is odd because those groups, however much you like or loathe them, are of various Christian denominations or even Jewish, don’t advocate street violence or eugenics, don’t tend to subjugate individuals to abstractions like racial purity, etc. In fact the list of dissimilarities goes on and on.
But, when you look at the political wing of the environmental/socialist movement, the various Green Parties of the world, you see the following ominous parallels.
The Green Party is led by a bunch of pagan, vegetarian dropouts. So were the Nazis. Hitler was a failed artist and vegetarian. The leader of the SS, Himmler (another soy-sucker), wanted his Black Corps to be the vanguard of a pre-Christian back-to-the-land movement. The rituals and symbols he devised to replace Christian services looked like really bad art direction of a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle .
The Green Party claims to stand for workers’ rights. "Nazi" is short for National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Sometimes the Greens wear animal costumes to political functions. The Nazis went to their rallies in drag as well.
The Greens stand up for farmers and peasants, foreign and domestic. The Nazis were wonderfully agrarian, even advocating organizing farming. They just wanted the farms to be in the Ukraine, tended by the untermench .
The Greens advocate "decentralization." The Nazis practiced decentralization by giving their colonial governments life and death power over the organic farmers in their jurisdiction.
The Greens wage a defensive war of sabotage and propaganda for the oppressed peasants of the world. The Nazis waged a defensive war for the oppressed Aryans of Central Europe.
Greens occasionally smash shop windows to get their point across. One word: Kristalnacht.
I’m not sure, but I imagine the Greens disapprove of smoking tobacco. The Nazi regime tried to ban smoking in public places, forcing its soldiers to set an example of abstinence.
The Greens hate guns, especially private ownership of guns. The Nazis inflicted on the world groundbreaking "gun-control" laws, which they tested by confiscating the arms of German Jews.
The Greens are big tree planters. Seven years ago, an aerial survey of the former East Germany revealed a stand of larch in a forest of pine. These trees, planted by an early and flamboyant supporter of Hitler, formed a huge bright green swastika for a few weeks in spring and a flaming yellow one in the fall. (Ironically, the Germans, those engineers, fooled around for five years before removing the swastika, because they thought cutting down only the larches would just leave a swastika shaped hole in the forest. I guess they eventually got permission to flatten even de-Nazi-fied trees.)
The Greens want investment in alternative energy. The Nazis pioneered not only synthetic oil from coal (to cope with the small problem of a hopeless war) they also invested a ton of Reich marks in an alternative energy system exploiting an until-then useless substance called uranium.

And of course, there is the whole fetish for Volkswagen Mini-buses.
_________________
 
Looney-tunes is looney- tunes where ever you find it - left,right,or center.

It's like art - you know it when you see it.
 
Flowgirl, I'm very happy for you that your man is heading home safely. Peace and joy to both of you!

Mikey


Thanks Mikey! It's been quite a rollercoaster ride, but the 45-day vacation we're headed on at the end of next month is sure to take the edge off. :D Will be blowing a nice chunk of savings to live it up a little on a backpacking trip around Europe, ER-consquences be damned! I figure John Galt would be proud - but he's right - sometimes you do gotta live for today.
 
D-mm teach. at least JG keeps it short and sweet.

MJ :-/
 
Ed teach, I must have hit a nerve.
Is your real name Drudge or Hannity?
Are you saying that in the 1780's no one was walking around with guns and that you could go to a phone and dial 911?
In the early 1800's our own V. President shot Hamilton and was never charged, yet you say the east was settled!
Yea sometimes it is good to have a gun if your getting raped or some other horrible crime.
But how many children are killed with guns everyday. Stray bullets killing bystanders and other unnecessary killings with guns.
Laws are always changed so don't say that what was good in the 1700's society is necessarily good now. Everything in life is subject to change.
As I said this is only an opinion.
I hope after you read this you can sleep tonight.
Regards,
JOE
 
It is exactly because of people with opinions like yours that the founding fathers put the second amendment into the constitution, You are all wrong on the changing constitution, if that were the case the thing would not be worth the paper it was written on.
It is the stability and farsightedness of the instrument and the concept that makes this this piece of paper priceless.
If you had children and told them that it is ok to hit your brother when you are 10 but when you are 15 that's a paddlin?, firearms are not a problem, liberal easing of criminal punishment is one of the big problems, you know mom sat them backward on the toilet seat so let Willie Horton go? the first gun control was begun by dems. after the civil war to keep guns out of the blacks hands. dems were the ones fighting to keep the slaves, and did not want former slaves with firearms. I don't blame them, if I were a dem, in 1866 I would not want a black with a gun next to me either. fortunately the second amendment will not be striped in my life time, and guns will be legal, except for the blue areas of the county, and who in hell would live there, to high taxes, no guns, high crime. why is it that the blue areas "Mecca for dems" has all the high crime? I would think that with all the dems it would be paradise.
look at a map of voting, no one state is completely blue, and many states are red. you guys will keep loosing, and we have the house, sen.,and white house.
for cripe sake we even took the gov. of California. they are getting tired of liberal crap.
 
Speaking of liberal crap - being one of them thar lifelong liberals, in the 70's with stocks being the dumper so to speak, did some research on gun collecting - the number 15%/yr comes to mind if done well.

Have no idea how gun collecting (shooters and keepers) is doing today - but if one develops knowledge and skill in that area:confused:?

More than one way to skin a cat. Of course in retirement one may have to sell some favorites.
 
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