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Pate
Trad climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 5, 2013 - 12:21am PT
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now that is some serious punk rock sarcasm!
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Pate
Trad climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 5, 2013 - 12:26am PT
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jim, love ya bro, but that was a retarded and meaningless post.
are you drunk? inquiring mind says yes.
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pud
climber
Sportbikeville & Yucca brevifolia
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Pate, if you cared so much, why didn't you get involved?
You seem to be using this tragedy to push your own political views upon others.
You state the male victim was your friend.
Why have a stand-by attitude when you know your friend is suffering? You then present yourself on a climbing forum as a caring, involved individual when things turn tragic.
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Pate
Trad climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 5, 2013 - 12:43am PT
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pud LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!
you funny little f*#ker.
ignorant too.
the best thing about this lame web site is the drinkers come out at night and the comedy really starts.
ciao as#@&%es.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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rights cannot be asserted, so may as well not bother to exist.
That, right there, is the sort of thinking that is sending this country to hell in a handbasket.
Rights are not merely "nice abstract concepts." They are the very foundation of morality and governmental legitimacy itself. If they don't really exist, then neither does the foundation of this nation. And if they are trivially trammeled upon by the whim of a knee-jerk populace, then majority faction HAS come to rule in this nation, and this NATION might as well not bother to exist (and better for the world if it did not)!
So what about that son and husband's rights, are those less important that yours?
Absolutely not! But you conflate negative and positive rights. They have no positive right to be alive, only a negative one. And my self-defense rights cannot infringe on that negative right in the slightest. The mother violated her son's negative right to life, but you don't correct that situation by violating the negative rights of others.
You treat this situation like they have a positive right to life, which means I have a positive duty to DO something to ensure they live. But they don't, and I don't. They have only a negative right to life, and I have only a negative duty toward it. This means that I must ensure that I do nothing to infringe their right to life, and I necessarily satisfy that duty by doing NOTHING (what negative duties mean).
This country was founded on the fundamental idea of negative rights and duties, the basic idea that if I just leave you alone I don't infringe on your rights. But we've come to turn rights on their heads, and now everybody has all these positive rights to everything, which means that suddenly I've got all these positive duties toward them. FALSE! Not the intention of our founders, and NOT politically-philosophically defensible.
You don't correct violations of negative rights by violating the negative rights of others.
What inalienable right would you lose if you had to wait 7 days to buy a handgun?
The right to be free in my person and able AT ANY MOMENT to defend myself from any threat I might perceive arising at any time. I would give you a thought experiment to show how even a minute of forced delay can be a violation of that right, but thought experiments are lost on you. The sensible among us are starting to get the point and can dream up any number of thought experiments of their own. The point is that you have NO right to tell me that there is one SECOND of my life in which I can't have the means to defend myself against any reasonably foreseeable threat.
What inalienable right would you lose if you were prohibited from selling a gun to a total stranger?
If I own the gun, then it is my property. An early draft of the Declaration read, "...the right to property, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," because Jefferson was very Lockean in his thinking, and Locke equated the right to property with the right to life. Again, too "theoretical" for you, but our founders thought these things through in a way you indicate that you lack the capacity to imagine.
My property IS my life in a very, very fundamental way. We've become so "civilized" that we've forgotten this principle. So, when you infringe on the ways I can deal with my property, including my ability to sell it, then you infringe on my life. It is only provided for the government to do that in extreme cases, and then only when it can be demonstrated that doing so meets a pressing (and temporary) need that can be met in no other, better way. Telling me when and how I can sell anything that is mine is prima facie a violation of my right to life. And you CANNOT demonstrate even close to conclusively that monitoring/controlling the sale of guns solves some (temporary) national problem; or that any such supposed "problem" cannot be better solved in other ways that do not violate my rights.
What inalienable right would you lose if you had to show ID to buy ammunition?
See the first point above. And you guys take SO many things for granted that you literally would think me insane if I tried to explain to you why "ID" in itself violates basic rights. So, I treat that as a lost cause: DOA.
Instead, I'll just say that if that were ALL that gun control folks were after, I'd happily "compromise," say, "No problem!" and then insist that you start requiring ID for a host of other things, such as voting in national elections. Do you realize that in 18 states you can vote in national elections without doing ANYTHING to demonstrate that you are a citizen OR that you really are the person registered to vote in the election? And in 18 others, the "ID" you show does not have to be a state-issued photo ID. So, in the significant majority of states in this great union, we have all sorts of people deciding the direction of this country that have never demonstrated that they even have the constitutional right to do so. Why don't you fix THAT instead of worrying so much about something with so little relative consequence?
What inalienable tight would you lose if you had to keep guns locked away when not in use, and report their theft to police?
This is back to the whole pre-crime issue. YOU clearly believe that it is law enforcement's role to "keep us safe" in advance. Wrong! That is not the principle of law enforcement that founded this country. In THIS country (not talking about some ho-hum Euro Socialist Democracy), law enforcement exists to, careful now, enforce laws. That does not mean keeping crimes FROM happening! We all might happen to be in the right place at the right time and serve that role to one extent or another. But both laws and law enforcement were originally intended to discourage the violation of people's rights AFTER the violation could be proved (beyond a reasonable doubt) to HAVE occurred.
If you really get your head around just that basic principle, you'll immediately be able to see how wrong-headed all pre-crime thinking is.
You want Minority Report? Well, as of today, thanks to the NSA, we're already there (as close as you can get without all the psychic BS). As the ditty said, "You asked for it; you got it!"
What inalienable right would you lose if you had to take a training class to carry a gun outside of your own home?
By "had to," I assume that you mean being legally required to. So, see the pre-crime and negative/positive rights points above.
By simply carrying a gun outside my home, I do not infringe on ANY of your negative rights. Not a one. Therefore, you have no right to tell me I can't do it.
By contrast, when you tell me I cannot, under ANY circumstances, provide for my own right of self-defense, you DO violate one of my negative rights. Just leave me alone, and I'll return the favor. That's negative rights in a nutshell.
If I then misuse my gun in some way that harms you, well, now you have a setting for law enforcement to get involved. Not until!
The problem a person like me faces in arguing these points is that this country has drifted SO far from its founding principles that now those principles sound strange, even alien. We've literally turned many things on their heads. So, it's like Kuhn's "incommensurable paradigms." The words we use don't even mean the same things.
And you've demonstrated again and again that trying to achieve clarity about the terms themselves is just an "incomprehensible rant" to you.
You SEE rights so differently from me (and from our founders) that there is nothing I can say to help you. And the typical response to such a statement is: "Well, the founders were great and wise men, but they couldn't look hundreds of years into the future and see all the things we have to deal with today. So our present laws have to take TODAY into account, not 300 years ago," or something like that. Trust me, I've heard it in other threads here on the taco stand.
But that just throws a bare, picked bone to the founders; and, worse, it completely conflates principles with laws. The PRINCIPLES of our founding were timeless, and our laws were ALWAYS supposed to reflect those principles. Those principles are very different from the principles upon which any other nation on Earth was founded. But now we just can't throw those principles away fast enough! We want SO badly to use statistics to compare ourselves to Euro Socialist Democracies, thinking that if we don't "measure up" to them according to this or that statistical analysis, we have to CHANGE SOMETHING!
What you guys don't get is that our founders cried, "Give me liberty or give me death," and they presumed that down through the generations we would always prefer liberty over every other core value! They would never have imagined a generation of "Americans" that would virtually silently submit to the greatest subversion of basic human rights in the history of the world (NSA surveillance). Our FOUNDERS would have risen up in arms, with blood in the streets long before this!
The point of the foregoing paragraph is that we don't even GET what "liberty" means anymore! We don't fight for it! We capitulate and "compromise" to satisfy piles of non-existent POSITIVE "rights," while giving up our REAL negative rights with nary a glance, much less complaint.
Can you stand in an airport security line and HONESTLY cry out (or even think): "Give me liberty or give me death?" Bullshit!
Our founders WANTED a country in which people would die more than in other countries; that is a necessary result of a truly FREE country! So, your statistics leave me COLD, because you are barking up the wrong tree with them. You think you are "proving" something with them. All you PROVE is how unprincipled we have become as a nation! They are completely the wrong metrics of evaluation!
And if you didn't want a long rant, then don't ask a pile of questions all in one post. If I don't answer, you accuse me of punting and being unable to answer. If I DO answer (and, trust me, not nearly as long or developed as the response really deserves), then you accuse me of "incomprehensible ranting." So, I answer, and here's your rant.
Maybe it can do some good. I'm fairly fatalistic about it at this point. I expect to be dead before the real sh#t hits the fan. And you goofballs will have brought it on yourselves.
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fear
Ice climber
hartford, ct
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So the theory is that a woman scorned, and apparently otherwise greatly disturbed (killing her own son because her husband cheated??), didn't have access to A BIG BAD GUN....
That she would have what? Had a good-natured pillow fight that night?
Checked in for counseling the next morning and eventually had a good laugh over it?
People kill people for all kinds of reasons. Some crazy, some not-so-crazy. Always have. Always will. They killed each other before guns, before crossbows, before swords, before spiked clubs, before poison, before fire, hell maybe before we had opposable thumbs.
We're a violent bunch sometimes and no new laws are ever going to change that. You have to get to the root of each situation which is sometimes impossible.
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WBraun
climber
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Why even listen to hedge as he continues his usual ridiculous hypnotic distraction apparatus exercise.
Take all the guns away and still industrialized society's kill millions of living entities a day.
What a moron ......
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rwedgee
Ice climber
canyon country,CA
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This gun will have no serial # and no wait period. And best of all....included is ALL THE BEER I CAN DRINK !!! Now that's America !!!
Self build parties are the new "mens Tupperware" parties. I've lost way more friends to cars than guns. Besides Facebook is to blame for this anyways. It's probably destroyed more lives because crazy people think those FB friends are real. What if she ran them over ? Would you want a 24hr delayed start on the car ? Blame crazy people and the mental health care system(or lack of it). Her friends should have stopped her. Oh wait...you were one of the friends who did nothing and now feel guilty ??
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Murder rates in other comparable democracies, where they've outlawed guns, prove you wrong.
Even if that were true, which it's demonstrably not (there are many counterexamples showing that what you've got with your chosen statistics is at best a correlation rather than "proof" of causality), as I said, you are barking up the wrong tree.
The USA was never SUPPOSED to be just another Euro Socialist Democracy, so comparing what "they have" with what "we have" in terms of deaths by gun is patently irrelevant. It's entirely the wrong mode of evaluation.
Their entire societies are based upon communitarian assessments of "compromises" between liberties and security. OUR government, by STARK contrast, was designed to secure ONLY ONE THING: liberty. And it was designed on fundamentally libertarian (philosophical rather than political) principles.
So, I evaluate the present success of the American body politic by looking at how free we are, not how many of us die in this or that pursuit or how many deaths could have been prevented by this or that legislation. Since legislating security (as if) is apparently your primary consideration in this discussion, we're in truly incommensurable paradigms.
Nuff said.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Wow...
I hear you loud and clear on that one, captain.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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I do not want to get involved with the debate as such. Condolences to the people, the father, the family, a young man is dead. That is very sad.
Argue amongst yourselves, but this is a tragedy. And pick California, Mexico, Syria... pick wherever you choose. Death by violence, death by automobile, death by climbing... I know that I am stating the obvious.
I am not religious, but this young man did not deserve to die. Who does? I lost my closest brother to cancer a little over a year ago. At 62, Jennie's age, Mac did not deserve to die. But fate chooses these things.
This young man did not deserve to die at the hands of the mother who gave birth to him.
Outside of what Pate wrote, I have no knowledge of the circumstances. But it seems that...
I do not know.
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mdavid
Big Wall climber
High Springs, FL
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That's an extremely sad situation. I'm not sure a background check or waiting period would have changed the outcome, no one will ever know.
Hate to break it to you but most psychologists/therapists aren't recording the unhinged folks and taking away their guns, or logging it anywhere a background check will find.
Media glorifies ultra violence and trains our youth to ignore their conscience. We abort baby humans at an amazing rate, torture animals prior to butchering them and generally act like the as#@&%es of the earth.
We have conditioned ourselves to ignore the suffering of other creatures in the search of a larger burger and clogged arteries. Our compassion is almost non existent.
Only a fool would put humans in charge of this planet.
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Dr. Christ
Mountain climber
State of Mine
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Still not a single logical reason to oppose a 10 day waiting period, other than: I don't want to... I shouldn't have to... we don't even know if it will work... you can't make me... whaaaaaah.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Ineffective is a good enough reason for me. We have more than enough do-nothing laws on the books now as it is.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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I'm a gun owner, shooting enthusiast and self defense advocate. I have zero problem with a State mandated waiting period and background check for gun purchases/sales. In CA it's two weeks, from a manufacturer or between individuals.
I do have a problem when the various gun transfer laws extend down to me handing a gun to a friend at the range to try out. Applying a waiting period or background check under those circumstances is absurd. I think this was one of the problems with the law the Senate kicked to the curb recently.
How do y'all feel about me lending a gun to my wife? Let's say her gun is in the shop for repair. I'm going out of town. I tell her my gun is in the safe good to go should the need arise, or a friend calls up and wants her to go to the range for some target shooting. Or maybe she wants to take a tactical course, but the instructor requests she bring a semi auto but hers is a revolver...
All you folks who want fewer guns in circulation should consider the unintended consequences of such rules (I.E. my wife would then want multiple guns.)
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FRUMY
Trad climber
Bishop,CA
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Kris, I really don't shoot much anymore, but I have lent out rifles at the firing range & shot other people guns. I've never heard of a waiting period to use a friends gun.
You could fill a library with what I haven't heard of.
Last year when my neighbor finished the howitzer he made in his garage, he invited a few of us out to fire it off, I must have fired a dozen different peoples rifles. We were passing them around, there were several police officers there.
But I think you are talking about future legislation.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Mark I'm quite sure that provision was in the background check law the Senate did not pass. Not a waiting period but a background check, as handing the gun to another person was considered a transfer. Whether it got negotiated out before the final vote or not I have been trying to look up, but I have other work to get done right now.
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