[Newfie]

Ibon,

I would only modify your last bit, we have become a society of sociopaths.

Or at least the sociopaths seem to be in charge of our propoganda, err....media and advertising and economics and politics and...???

I'm sorry I kn, it I detect a wee bit of Trump in your arguments. I mean that as a friend holding up a mirror. Not as a personal attack.

[rockdoc123]

The gun registry was implemented in Canada and deemed a massive failure. Not only did it accomplish little in the way of eliminating crime but it was way over budget and it is likely less than 50% of those owning long guns registered them.
It was brought in as a bill in 1993 under Jean Chretien's government. It was in place up until it was repealed in 2011. The original budget was $2 MM Cdn and ended up costing north of $600 MM US. There is still an uproar about the need to destroy records collected during the time registration was in place.
Basically, no self-respecting rancher or farmer registered anything. Most hunters I know told them to piss off...."hell, I'm not registering my Holland and Holland side by side just so one of those liberal bastards can take it away from me" was heard more than once. The RCMP were not fans at all, some stating that it is very unlikely the type of person who would commit a crime with a long gun would step up and volunteer to register. Very little information is available on the effectiveness of the registry which suggests that it did not contribute to a decrease in violent crime (otherwise the liberals would have been tripping over themselves to get to a microphone in order to brag).
So the US should learn from that experience. ON a side note I read a book this past summer by Steven Coonts titled Libertys last stand. Basically a fictional view of what might happen if you had a nutbag President (in the case of this book it was clearly supposed to be Obama ie. his name is President Barry Soetoro) who wants to have a kingdom where he does not have to be re-elected and an assurance to that is to take all the guns away from the citizens. Of course, Admiral Jake Grafton will have no part of this (hey, anyone who has read a Coonts book knows who Grafton is) and gathers up an army of citizens to fight the US army that the President deploys against citizens not willing to cow-tow to his edicts. A bit far-fetched but does point to the original reason for the second amendment.

[Ibon]

I'm sorry Ibon, it I detect a wee bit of Trump in your arguments. I mean that as a friend holding up a mirror. Not as a personal attack.

Naturally, I cannot forsake my American heritage and I still want to fit in with everybody.

[yellowcanoe]

The gun registry was implemented in Canada and deemed a massive failure. Not only did it accomplish little in the way of eliminating crime but it was way over budget and it is likely less than 50% of those owning long guns registered them.

That would be the ill-fated long gun registry which was intended to extend registration to non-restricted firearms. I would certain agree that it was a poor idea that wasn't likely to reduce gun crime. I was also told by an individual involved with the registry that it had been deliberately engineered to be of less use to police than it could have been. For example, if a crime involving a gun was committed you would expect it would be simple to check the registry to see who in the vicinity owned the type of gun used but in reality it wasn't.

Registration of restricted firearms remains in place. Registration of handguns has been in place since 1934. Acquisition of handguns is strongly discouraged. If you live in an urban/suburban area you would pretty much have to join a shooting club before you could get a license to own a handgun, you would only be able to transport the handgun between your home and the shooting club and when the handgun was at home it would have to be securely locked up. Handguns are easier to acquire if you live in a rural area. Assault rifles which are generally the weapon of choice in mass shootings are prohibited in Canada.

[rockdoc123]

Assault rifles which are generally the weapon of choice in mass shootings are prohibited in Canada.

I actually own a sidearm (Blackhawk 41 New Ruger), the rules around getting a Fire Arms Acquisition Certificate to cover that is not as strict as you might think. Yes you need to get fingerprinted and it takes awhile for them to search your background but otherwise not much of a problem. Transporting them from place to place requires a permit but otherwise ownership is not that difficult for a normal citizen. Again the bad guys will get sidearms from the black market and will not be registered so whether or not all the angst over handgun control in Canada is worthwhile remains a question in my mind. As to Assault rifles....someone who is skilled can do as much damage with a bolt action Winchester .308, but that being said all manner of semi-automatic rifles are legal in Canada including something like the Smith and Wesson M&P .223 Rem semi-automatic sport rifle which in the hands of someone semi-competent could do a lot of damage and you can buy one at the Cabelas store at the mall (I guess that would be Bass Pro now).

[evilgenius]

In terms of living, I suggested a registry. I suggested that because it isn't about banning. It takes into account the Second Amendment. A registry doesn't infringe upon anybody's ability to either possess or sell the kinds of weapons that make non gun owners afraid. What it does is introduce transparency into the situation. And transparency exposes owners of those types of guns and gun accessories that would put a person on the registry to how non gun owners would react to them when they have knowledge. If it developed according to my suggestion, where most pistols, hunting rifles and other reasonable use items for which there are considerable examples of use within society, don't place a person on the list, then those people would not come under the scrutiny of the non gun loving public. That's what compromise looks like, not that you get something in return, but that you listen. If you listen that means when you hear the other side considers a thing to be very important you make concessions.

Interesting, maybe we should expand your idea. How about making anyone who buys a scary looking knife register it? If you wanted to own a scary looking knife, you could, but with a registry it would become transparent to the general non scary knife owning public.

Maybe everyone who goes to a psychiatrist should also be forced to register the type of mental health treatment they receive. That way the general non mentally disturbed public would know what ailments those crazy people are being treated for and can base the way we treat them because of the transparency. After all crazy people, statistically are a greater danger to the public.

The list could go on and on, in some cases you would not even need a registry to inform the public. Maybe make people with bad driving records paint their cars florescent orange so we can immediately identify the bad drivers while on the road?

Think of how safer we will all be if these ideas catch on!!!

/sarcasm

You're making a fundamental error, when you say everything should go into the registry. Or, indeed, that it ought, in any further iteration, to encompass more than the agreed upon forms of contentiousness as decided by argument from both sides and in relation to the idea that the Second Amendment means something. The place where you fall into error is in the relationship between the individual and society. Whereas the registry as I propose it doesn't involve any sort of official or governmental recognition of who the average man is, or demand there be an average man, as far as that goes, your take on expansion of it does. The whole idea, from my perspective, is that individuals have the right to function within the framework of society. Those that don't appreciate gun ownership as well as those who do should be able to express themselves. By seeing who owns a registered item, and we are not talking about things that are commonplace in the pubic psyche, but the objects of legitimate contention, people can make decisions as to whether they will buy on a street, or in a neighborhood, where they see that owners of those contentious items reside, for instance. As those actions transpire within society the owners of said items may find they feel disenfranchised. They may seek redress in the courts. The precedents they set may well apply to other aspects of society, where there has been, even if analogically, a similar disenfranchisement. There may exist the possibility of class action, but that is probably not something that this scenario allows. What you get is legal precedent, which would work its way through society via the courts, one case at a time. And, as these actions which transpire outside of legal challenge proceed, one transaction, or not, between individuals or small groups of people at a time.

Your take is very much like the European take on the individual in relation to society. Those societies see the individual, largely, as some aspect of an average man. The legal, tax and other structures approach people upon that basis. Instead of letting people go to hell in their own ways, they try to tell them how many units of alcohol they should be consuming. They tax every sin as if to annihilate it. They meddle into how much people eat, and demand they not waste, or they may have to pay a tax. Not stopping there, they tax use of infrastructure as a means to define the nature of how people interact with each other. They tax cheap things, like energy, until they are so expensive that every really cold winter they find old people frozen to death because they can't afford to heat their homes and pay all of the other taxes. They make you recycle, instead of incentivizing you to. They don't allow individual compassion to be the ultimate decision maker over whether a person will be charitable, it would seem, but attempt to legislate charity out of people based upon their participation in society as 'average' members. In their way of thinking the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

To be certain I am not saying that individuals ought to rule over society based upon certain gained 'rights' as they perceive them, such as land ownership that they feel empowers them to do whatever they want with something they own to the detriment of everyone else. What I am saying is that in a world where everyone is king, eventually everyone will have to stand in line. Going on and on about gun rights and paying no attention whatsoever to those who don't want so much of that is like cutting the line. I said previously that the lack of such a thing may very well overstate property values because it leaves people who disagree uninformed about the makeup of a neighborhood. It doesn't give them an informed choice, but insists that whether there are fringe owners on a street or in a neighborhood or not doesn't matter. It, essentially, demands that those people seeking to buy respect the 'average.' The Second Amendment itself imposes a sort of average, where gun ownership and other basic means of self-defense will never be outlawed, as does tradition when we talk about hunting, but there are these points of contention that no reasonable person could call average in that sense.

As far as you people who seem to demand that a registry would require people to volunteer information about their present state of gun related ownership, I don't get your point. I don't see why a registry can't simply begin with all current transactions. If it involved all of the easy ways to do so, it would eventually gather up the things you are so concerned ought to be included to begin with. People do both buy and sell all of the time. Sure, they would ramp up buying when they realized the registry was about to happen, and before it actually did, but their surpluses would warp things and the markets would be their only very effective means to address that.

[Ibon]

Which is my point. Why are we at such odds with one another? What is the mechanism behind the vitriol?

Understaning the process may, or may not, allow you to do something about it. More likely if you understand it you have a better chance of surviving.
.

I am once again coming back to Newfie's comment which is probably on many folks minds......this vitriol and growing volatility. So I thought I would share an inter-tribal communication with you all. This is a comment I made to my older sibling when she wrote me about the fires out west and her husbands brother whose home is under threat in Santa Rosa. I decided to share this because it is interesting the alliance, tone, cohesion you see in the communication when it is inter-tribal and contrast this when these topics get discussed Extra-tribal like we do here where we have folks with radically different political orientations. The point being that as the society continues to get fractured and split as the central government loses its grip on power and authority you will see inter tribal cohesion increasing among like minded ideologues........ ideology of course constantly getting bent to the will of physical reality regardless if you are on the political right or left. Fire and hurricanes do not discriminate. Unlike our president.

So here it is...

Volatility on the rise on all fronts.

I was just reading about Santa Rosa on the NYT website during my insomnia session and then your email arrived.

I was up if florida dealing with irma consequences and then came back here in panama dealing with neonatal nate consequences with major landslides and washed out river crossings.

And reading about Trump doesn't help and weaving them all together as interconnected makes you come to the conclusion that yes these are heightened volatile times.


It's like the fire rages, the hurricanes rage and the culture rages. All this raging. There is an over arching interconnection that we can't see but it is there. I understand it from the ecological

perspective of human overshoot , these stresses the ripple through the environment and then reflect in society and culture.

This is not slowing down, there is of course the pendulum that swings back and forth but I fear that the pendulum arching up to the maximum point of volatility is decades away.

I cannot help but fear for our offspring. And then again, volatility heightens both the sacred and profane. For all those primitive Trumps out there this has to galvanize as well a contrast that we have

to assume our children will embrace. Hardships also grow spines. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. etc.


When we were safe and young in Cottonwood drive we would ingest mommy's stories of passing german soldiers on the streets of Rome during the war and uncle nino's castor oil and we would

ingest Pa's stories of rationed gas and going to war and depression hardships with agrarian toil. What always made these stories feel like an epic novel was the volatility and struggle that

made them all feel like heroes.

I think our children are going to live through the upcoming decades with external conditions that will be similar. This makes me both afraid and weirdly happy for them.

What was our generation then? A very strange mix of over indulgence and brilliance. Utopic at the same time as the seeds of dystopia were also being planted.

I don't know anymore scratching my head like grandpa....

[Newfie]

I'm sorry Ibon, it I detect a wee bit of Trump in your arguments. I mean that as a friend holding up a mirror. Not as a personal attack.

Naturally, I cannot forsake my American heritage and I still want to fit in with everybody.

Utterly lost, unless you were saying, in jest, you want to mimic the Average Angry American. Is that the persona we have now adapted? To be American is to be outraged?

I prefer confused or perplexed but you may be more accurate.

[Newfie]

Yellow/Evil/Rock et al.

Elsewhere I was just reminded that lawn darts have been banned since 1987. Maybe that's why there have been no mass killings with them? LOL.

But also in NY wrist restrained sling shots are banned.

From POLICE.UK
"Knives. It is illegal to: sell a knife of any kind to anyone under 18 years old (16 to 18 year olds in Scotland can buy cutlery and kitchen knives) carry a knife in public without good reason - unless it's a knife with a folding blade 3 inches long (7.62 cm) or less, e.g. a Swiss Army knife.

Examples of good reasons to carry a knife in public can include:

taking knives you use at work to and from work
taking knives to a gallery or museum to be exhibited
the knife is going to be used for theatre, film, television, historical reenactment or religious purposes, e.g. the kirpan some Sikhs carry
A court will decide if you’ve got a good reason to carry a knife if you’re charged with carrying it illegally."

In USA knife laws are by state. See KNIFEUP.ORG
For NY
"What is Legal to Own
It is legal to own a hunting knife
It is legal to own a dirk or dagger
It is legal to own a stiletto
What is Illegal to Own
It is illegal to own a pilum ballistic knife
It is illegal to own a metal knuckle knife
It is illegal to own a cane sword
It is illegal to own throwing stars
It is illegal to own any knife if you are not a U.S. citizen
It is illegal to own any knife adapted for use primarily as a weapon
It may be illegal to own a gravity knife, without a valid hunting and/or fishing license
It may be illegal to own a switchblade knife, without a valid hunting and/or fishing license"

[Newfie]

A few years ago I went downstairs to the underground rail station to buy annewspaper. The papers had been just delivered and were started ll. Kind with a plastic strap. I t is a small enclosed stor, I paid the lady and she said Ineed to find a box cutter." That said "No problem." , bent over and cut the strap with my simple 3" folder.

I stood up with my paper while slipping the knife back into my pocket when I saw her face. She was at least extreamly upset if not terrified. I quietly left and beat feet back to the office. Had I approached her, say to buy a candy bar, things may have gone badly.

Also, when I load my hunting guns into the car I try to do it discreetly, if not secretively. I'm always concerned that some busybody will call 911 reporting an armed man or some such nonsense. Everthing is 100% legal and the guns are in hard cases. But the area is tho he with PETA and other liberal do-gooders and stupid cops. I've no way to store them adequately at the remote cabin so I'm stuck keeping them at the house in the city.

[Ibon]

I'm sorry Ibon, it I detect a wee bit of Trump in your arguments. I mean that as a friend holding up a mirror. Not as a personal attack.

Naturally, I cannot forsake my American heritage and I still want to fit in with everybody.

Utterly lost, unless you were saying, in jest, you want to mimic the Average Angry American. Is that the persona we have now adapted? To be American is to be outraged?

I prefer confused or perplexed but you may be more accurate.

It was humor and sarcasm....

[rockdoc123]

A few years ago I went downstairs to the underground rail station to buy annewspaper. The papers had been just delivered and were started ll. Kind with a plastic strap. I t is a small enclosed stor, I paid the lady and she said Ineed to find a box cutter." That said "No problem." , bent over and cut the strap with my simple 3" folder.

I stood up with my paper while slipping the knife back into my pocket when I saw her face. She was at least extreamly upset if not terrified. I quietly left and beat feet back to the office. Had I approached her, say to buy a candy bar, things may have gone badly.

and she probably wouldn't have blinked or had a second thought if she saw a holstered sidearm under your jacket. Such is the weirdness of this world. I suppose in places you can easily get a concealed carry license but auto knives are completely illegal. Some places carrying a larger than 3" assisted opening knife in your pocket isn't a problem but having a 3" auto is jail time. Throwing stars are illegal? What the heck? What average citizen could do any damage except cut themselves trying to figure out how to throw them? Are the authorities worried about a sudden influx of ninjas? And it is illegal to own any knife adapted for use primarily as a weapon. Just how in God's name could you tell? A 3" pen knife innocent looking gentlemens pen knife can do as much damage as a 5" out the front automatic tactical knife in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing.
It may be illegal to own a switchblade knife, without a valid hunting and/or fishing license. Right, someone is going to go and chase down a 10 point buck and take it down with their handy dandy microtech automatic knife? or instead, they have the intent of diving into the nearby lake and stabbing themselves a nice lake trout for dinner? You have to wonder if the folks who come up with these laws are doing it just for laughs.

[vtsnowedin]

Imagine if Newfee had been a black man wearing a hoody!

[Ibon]

Imagine if Newfee had been a black man wearing a hoody!

That is exactly what I was going to post but I hesitated.

[Newfie]

Imagine if Newfee had been a black man wearing a hoody!

That is exactly what I was going to post but I hesitated.

Rock123.....had I a visa or holstered sidearm in that environment I most likely would have been taken into custody or worse, perhaps much worse.

VT,
Were I black man in a hoody she would most likely have not blinked an eye. She and I were of differing cultures. So I don't know that but I surely see it elsewhere. The working underbelly of Philly, and most large cities, is majority black. And becoming majority black ghetto. I frequently have great difficulty understaning the strong dialect. Makes for fun times when the airport security guard, with a bad attitude, is trying to move a mob of distressed and delayed passengers.

That was then, at the time I was just another fat old bald white guy wearing dockers and sporting a beard.

TODAY I look different. Once I set my retirement date I let my beard and hair grow. Standing in line to get some chineese food from a street vendor a homeless man worked the line lookIng for handouts. Except he skipped me, just a knowing nod and moved on. Bums working intersections often just skip me, even my Wife noticed it. She jokes I have a bum union card.

I see the looks in folks eyes, especially a 50 something white guy. I walk into a Tims of Dunkins and the locals give me the once over. Imagine a fatter old George Carlin although some kids confuse me with Santa. Bald, with a pony tail, still sorta blond into grey, ratty jeans, kinda biggish, suspenders, t-shirt under a flannel. Younger folks, especially women are more likely to "get it." Then I can get a nice eye twinkle.

So yeah, I get the whole idea of stereotyping and pigeon holing and paranoia pretty well. Visually I don't fit in, never mind I'm a professional engineer and can probably buy and sell them thrice over. They don't know that. Except maybe in the live aboard community, to many drop outs there. The bum with a beer is as likely to be a multimillionaire as homeless.

[Newfie]

All that baloney above is to say this........

We in the USA have always been an amalgamation of groups, mixed but never cohesive.

At one time the white man ruled and provided order. One knew the pecking order. Think Youvoslavia, The Man ruled. It sucked but there was order. The West celebrated the fall of The Man. But the vacuum of power was filled with civil war and ethnic cleansing. In summation, when were they better off?

Where are we on that timeline?

[vtsnowedin]

Bald, with a pony tail,

Newfee I was with you right up to that. The only thing sillier looking then a young man with a pony tail is an old man with a bald top pretending the tail down his back makes him still look young.
At least you are not sporting a "man bun" which I find is just an advertisement of the wearer's stupidity.
I suppose we should let them self identify as idiots so we can avoid wasting time talking to them.
Your wife lets you go out in public like that? That surprises me.