Dem congressman: Force gun owners to get rid of assault weapons - Polidicks

Sure. How do you ensure that it stays enforced between generations, when the humans responsible for upholding it just suddenly decide to not interpret it that way anymore?

There was an Equal Right Amendment that would have passed if not for Phyllis Schlafly. Ironic that a woman defeated an amendment that would have given women complete parity with men.

LGBT people are not protected under the Civil Rights Act, shouldn't that probably be changed? It's basically down to where you live based on whether you get fucked or not.

Yeah, they say all men are created equal. But, when slavery was a thing slaves were not viewed as human. That is why they where considered lower in social class and papers at the time did everything they could discredit and make blacks seem less superior to justify slavery. I do not even know how anyone can truly say all are created equal when we treat everyone else as second-class citizens. So the Constitution could greatly benefit from some specification and added protections.

Sorry

remember to buy your 55 gal drums and dig a hole in your garden before gun confiscation begins, rather than afer

You can't abolish the second amendment, that would violate my second amendment rights!

It would set a dangerous and unacceptable precedent. That's reason enough for me right there to not even consider it. Why not pour the herculean effort you'd need to actually have even a snowball's chance in Hell at removing an amendment (any amendment) into something that'd, y'know, actually fix the problems we have? Why not fix healthcare, education, income inequality, and the myriad of other issues that contribute to crime overall? Not only would that cut down on gun crime, it would cut down on crime on the whole, and improve quality of life for a huge number of people. That is a goal I would support. Arbitrary restrictions on the masses as a result of misuse by a tiny, tiny minority are not okay.

My post was a joke, but have a big think about who right now is preventing measures from being taken that would improve those things?

Oh believe me, I've thought about it quite a lot. The problem I see is that (by and large - I don't think everyone in both parties is like this) one side doesn't enact change because it doesn't benefit them, and the other side just wants an immediate fix without putting in the required effort. Neither side wants to admit that the other has ideas of merit, for no other reason I can see beyond following party lines. Neither side has reasonable, common-sense ideas. Republicans will scream all day about how we need to arm teachers, Democrats accuse gun owners of being unreasonable while trying to legislate them out of existence and ignoring the root of the problem they think they're solving. For actual progress to be made, both sides need to put their heads together, hash out what the actual problem is, and agree on a compromise (an actual compromise). I don't see that happening any time soon in this political environment. I'll also admit that I took your original post waaaay to seriously. Sorry about that

The thing is that removing guns does really help crime control. This helps alleviate chronic poverty as it makes people more focused on living instead of surviving. It will not completely, but it will partially reduce gang influence and intimidation ability as well, meaning more people will be getting educations.

If only it were that simple. The country is literally falling apart from the inside-out. People have stopped giving a shit about anyone's problems but their own, that's why nobody bothers to do anything about it, or when they finally do, it's ineffectual.

This is an interesting view. Where does it come from?

Just observation. Not saying it's totally tangible, nor the norm all-over, but it seems more and more, there's too many people who just flat-out don't give a shit about anyone other than themselves. I see it from the people who think welfare users (or others who use tax-funded programs, like food stamps or HUD or the Pell Grant) are just bums looking for a free lunch, and the welfare/etc. bums, however few, that are so proud of their exploits that they're dumb enough to brag about it, proving the other side of the aisle right, exploiting a system meant to help those who need it. I see it in the people who think everything should be privatized because they don't like paying taxes to "pay for other people's stuff", and then they bitch about the price of privatized goods. I see people stealing not out of some dire need, but for some materialistic want, or even stranger still, the thrill of it. I see it in people who just don't understand why I can't "just stop being so sad all the time". I've seen it in people who claim to hate drame, yet are the greatest catalysts for it (one of my older jobs had several of those, holy shit it really wore-down my nerves). I've seen it in people who are so cock-sure in their understanding of basic, inarguable principles that they reject any notion that they could possibly be incorrect (such as someone arguing that there should be continuity between the primary and secondary windings of a transformer. Fun fact: There shouldn't be, if there is something is very wrong). I see it in people who claim people are too easily offended and should "grow thicker skin" become incredibly offended and defensive when the tables are turned. I've seen it in many people who claim to follow a faith that promotes well-being among neighbors, who then turn around and gossip and slander their fellows as soon as they're out of ear-shot. But worse yet, I see people who stand idly by while these things and more happen around them, not wanting to get involved for whatever reason, either because they're too tired, too lazy, too numb, or who simply don't want to get into the middle of things so that they can continue living in the space they've carved out for themselves, as distant from the insanity or the apathy as they can manage. I think Terry Pratchet said it best: “Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.”

So because of anecdotal evidence and a few people out of hundreds of millions? I'd hardly call a few people bragging about abusing their welfare (which they're arguably only doing to feel some level of control over their environment) and an encounter you had with someone uneducated evidence of the western world tearing at the seams.

I get what hes saying though. Ive had conservative friends who act like generosity = hand out. One went so far to tell me that if i do something nice for someone, they need to pay me back period. Its this mentality of "fuck you got mine" that is hurting society as a whole. I've seen people barely crawl out of poverty only to be a snob to others who havent yet, saying they are lazy or bums. Its disgusting, and the people who say that shit have the balls to say they are the reason everything is turning to shit.

Removing guns will not alleviate chronic poverty. Directing funds into the education system, into fixing infrastructure in places where it's been well and truly allowed to rot, and into a livable minimum wage? Those would fix chronic poverty. Right now, all removing guns (from law-abiding citizens - criminals wouldn't participate in a mandatory buyback) would do is piss off a huge amount of the population. The education system isn't worth a damn as it stands, and gangs not having guns wouldn't make it look more appealing than it already does. And do you really think gangs wouldn't turn to other weapons or methods of intimidation if they didn't already have guns? The problem is *far* too multi-faceted to expect one single thing to fix it, naturally. Pouring effort into fixing the roots of crime in general would work, eventually. Employing methods that are currently, and ought to remain, illegal to remove all guns from law-abiding owners wouldn't fix anything.

Guns are now a factor which creates poverty? I know H&K overprices their stuff but this is ridiculous

Next he'll tell me guns actively siphon education from the minds of children.

They get suspended for making Pop-Tarts into them.

Don't even think about visiting a gun range either, you criminal.

This is just the personal experience of one guy, and I pointed out it may not be the norm everywhere, but if it's happening here, where I can see it right out in the open, odds are (seemingly increasingly so) it's happening elsewhere. And I didn't say the entire western world was tearing itself apart at the seams, I said the US was falling apart from the inside. "Tearing itself apart" implies that people are actively working to destroy something, "falling apart from the inside" implies that things are slowly going to pot, but nobody does anything about it. As for the ones who openly bragged about abusing aid programs (ie signing up for classes using aliases to get Pell Grant money and then never attending, you know, the sort of people who are making the program adapt so that you have to pay the grants back if you don't pass/attend), they also openly bragged about how easy it was to steal from Wal-Mart. Even dumber was they ran a miniatures shop, and if we had any games there (which many friends insisted for whatever reason) that took too long for a typical day, he'd have the gall to say "Well you can just leave your (ludicrously expensive) minis here, overnight!" Like, thanks but no thanks, Tweaks McGee.

That or guns are a contributing factor to the opioid crisis.

Survivor's Bias is what this is called.