Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[smjjames]

Another threat of government shutdown could be on the horizon.

Ordinarily, I'd refuse to believe anybody could actually be that stupid. But these are the House Republicans, so here we are, I guess.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Republicans loose both the political battle the last shut down was over as well as the public opinion fight? Why would they even want to repeat that?

Yes they did and the saner republicans don't want to repeat that, but then you've got people like Ted Cruz who could easily hijack it. It's these people who make me want to say 'You want a default? You REALLY want a default? Okay fine, default it is. It's what you wanted, enjoy your ostracizing.'

[Bauglir]

It is probably legal, as they probably have the necessary permits. My point is that all that is needed to shut them down is to revoke said permits, and the mere fact that they put a notoriously uncontrollable SMG in the hands of an extremely small girl means that an indictment on reckless endangerment charges is about as open-and-shut as it's possible to be.

Okay, then, the law needs to be amended to make it clearly illegal to allow people without appropriate permits to handle weapons that require a permit, even if the weapon's owner has one. Perhaps only in the context of a business, if there's some unexpected domino effect here, but I think it's fairly safe to say that their business model, which explicitly involves putting powerful weapons in the hands of people untrained to use them, should be outright illegal. Sorry, I thought you were saying it already was.

Re: House Republicans
FJ makes a good point that I hadn't considered. Passing legislation, holding a majority in the House, or the health of their party is not a goal of the politicians we're talking about. Reelection is, and as long as they're obstructing the functioning of the government they can tell the voters in their gerrymandered to hell districts that they're fighting the power. It hadn't quite occurred to me that nationwide opinion is irrelevant, and to a certain extent it's even better for them to be widely hated because it cultivates the myth of oppression among their loyal constituents. Ah well, American politics, folks.

[MaximumZero]

Another threat of government shutdown could be on the horizon.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready to start arresting purely obstructionist politicians for treason. Look, if you've got a good reason to go against something, cool, but "it was those other guys' idea!" isn't a good enough reason to lose the government billions of dollars.

[Strife26]

One of the damn things do the fifty of the damn things for the army ALONE, give me the second to find it.

Edit: http://oathkeepers.org/oath/ this is relevant since at least four years ago they made up a third of the military, they also have a page detailing what orders hey wouldn't follow(basically one which would cause a civil war/ Revolution.)

still googleing.

What? If the Oathkeepers are a third of the military in anyone's mind but their own, then I'll eat my helmet with my patrol cap for desert.

There's certainly a fair number of people in the military who are aware of the very important concept of a limited government (and also a fair number of anti-democratic types as well who are vaguely annoying)

... that oath doesn't say a damn thing about supporting the people of the united states.

E: Actually, that oath would by all appearances appear to be an explicit declaration of allegiance to the federal government. Guess we better hope there's a lot of oathbreakers in the military if the rebellion ever comes around.

The Oath damn certainly does say things about supporting the people of the United States. "To protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

Y'know, that piece of paper which limits the powers of the federal government and is one of the most important documents in history? Yeah, that thing. If there's going to be some bullshit entertaining B-novel plot with the New World Order taking over, the idea that the military would roll over and take it is kinda silly, regardless if we're saber rattling Oathkeepers or militiamen or whatever the militia de jour is.

I mean, soldiers are people too, at least most of us are.

[Frumple]

Um... the constitution =/= the people. Flat out? It's a document, an idea, a set of strictures, but. Not people. The people of the united states are regularly in contravention of it, and insofar as I'm aware they never actually got around to enumerating anything about succession or violent rebellion. Soldiers siding with the constitution doesn't really tell us a single bloody thing about how they'd partition in the case of revolution. Still, I'd definitely say that particular oath presents a lot more fealty to the federal government (by and large the actual manifestation of the constitution) and its officers (like, y'know, the president, and everyone and thing else described in the oath) than any portion of the US citizenry.

Regardless, like you say, soldiers are people. If the country did schism to the point of wide scale violence, there's not going to be some malarkey majority-of-military-sides-with-one-group bull. The military will almost certainly splinter to whichever side their family and friends are on, more or less like what happens in every other case of major civil war when there's no major mitigating forces preventing it. Almost no one will put some half-assed oath over the lives and safety of their children, family, and home.

But no, I certainly don't think the fed's going to flip out and declare military ascendancy or some stupid shit like that. There's absolutely no need when partisan politics and careful (and not so careful) sociological engineering is happily eliminating any use for doing so. I just think the idea that the soldiers' oaths are going to have a major effect on the decision making of even a large minority of the soldiers to be honestly kinda' farcical.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If the President defines the domestic enemies of the Constitution as those peace-disturbing seditious traitors in the streets, then there are going to be at least some people who are gung-ho with the "machine gun into submission" way of doing things.

But it's irrelevant, since anything like this happening in the open means that CONUS quickly descends into societal collapse.

[Strife26]

Flat out, you understand neither oaths, nor the constitution, then.

[GavJ]

Breaking oaths to defend friends and family is not really up for some sort of hypothetical debate. It is simple historical fact, many times over.

Some proportion more troops will always remain loyal than their respective families do out of simple discipline and unit camraderie and such, but not that much more. Maybe 50% higher loyalty, if you're lucky.

If you wanted nearly zero desertion in civil war, you'd have to take kids away from their homes at age 5 or whatever and indoctrinate them as soldiers their entire lives.

[Frumple]

Flat out, you understand neither oaths, nor the constitution, then.

Then someone will have to explain things a bit. Calling the constitution "people" is actually not something I've ever heard before, and is one of the odder formulations of the concept I could imagine. Especially considering parts of it are specifically directed towards curtailing the actions of the general population. An idea, the framework of an ideology, sure. But "people", not so much.

As for oaths, I've only very, incredibly rarely met or heard of people that actually hold to them in anything approaching high stress situations. Or even for any particularly lengthy period. Certainly, they might hold to some other, deeply held, principle -- but an oath? An oath is but words, and for the vast majority of people I've seen that make them, they're words forgotten minutes later and only invoked, at most, when convenient, and often even then only nebulously.

Don't get me wrong, I understand and appreciate the sort of mystique and fantasy of the unbreakable oath and all that junk, I just massively, incredibly strongly, doubt that's anything even remotely resembling reality. It happens, but not in anything approaching significant numbers. I trust action well enough, but an oath has genuine worth equal to the length one can throw it.

[RedKing]

which makes it actually a quite reasonable weapon type to consider for a "protecting against an unjust military" conception of the 2nd amendment.

There is no way that the weaponry available to the general population is going to be able to hold off the government. It's an outdated concept that has no practical application, only catering to that big old gun fetish.

Not entirely. Sure, they might not be able to take out a tyrannical government entirely.

But tyranny isn't really about who's at the top, it's about who's at the bottom. You can't run a totalitarian regime if your bureaucrats and secret policemen are being shot up all the time.

Hunting rifles are perfectly sufficient for that. Urban insurgency lives off of mobility - what good would a heavy machine gun do?

Few people are advocating for ready access to heavy machine guns. The .50 caliber weapon that kicked off this tanget was a .50 caliber semiautomatic rifle. The (extremely common) confusion likely arises from the name of the cartridge, which is designated .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun to differentiate from other 12.7mm ammunition.

Not sure if we're talking about the guns available at Bullets and Burgers or just in general circulation, but they do advertise access to an M2 Browning .50 cal machine gun. The fully-automatic kind, which should NOT be available to the civilian market, as far as I'm aware.

Actually, they have a number of belt-fed machine guns available, which boggles my mind:

M240 Bravo
Browning .50cal
M60E3
Bren gun
M249
PKM

They also offer an M203 grenade launcher. 


Also, their website is back up, and not a single note about recent events. Classy.



And really? Do we want to rehash the idiotic "what would happen in a second Civil War" hypothetical again? Let's just say if it happens the country is pretty much fucked, regardless of how many guns Jethro has.

EDIT: And some people are acting like only the United States has the concept of an oath of service and a Constitution to defend. There have been plenty of civil wars in history where both sides felt that they WERE defending the law of their land. Look at the recent near-war in Iraq when Nouri al-Maliki claimed that by extending a deadline to choose a new PM, the government had "violated the Iraqi Constitution". From a technical standpoint, he was correct. From a common sense standpoint, he was desperately trying to cling to power on a technicality. Some people are going to follow the common sense interpretation, some are going to follow the literal interpretation. Most are going to follow whatever prejudices and political leanings they already have, and then argue whichever interpretation lends legitimacy to their choice.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

'You want a default? You REALLY want a default? Okay fine, default it is. It's what you wanted, enjoy your ostracizing.'

Yeah, I know that feel, but then I remember 'Even if making them eat their own shit is worth another (more severe) global economic crisis, they own FOX news, and FOX 'news' owns the ratings.'
One guess who they'll blame for the nasty consequences.

Hunting rifles are perfectly sufficient for that. Urban insurgency lives off of mobility - what good would a heavy machine gun do?

Well, to play the advocate, defending against hunting rifles != as defending against .50 BMG.
Although, doing my research just now, found a nifty new technology in the form of ALON transparent aluminum/ceramic.
So maybe it would be about the same nowadays.

It is probably legal, as they probably have the necessary permits. My point is that all that is needed to shut them down is to revoke said permits, and the mere fact that they put a notoriously uncontrollable SMG in the hands of an extremely small girl means that an indictment on reckless endangerment charges is about as open-and-shut as it's possible to be.

Okay, then, the law needs to be amended to make it clearly illegal to allow people without appropriate permits to handle weapons that require a permit, even if the weapon's owner has one. Perhaps only in the context of a business, if there's some unexpected domino effect here, but I think it's fairly safe to say that their business model, which explicitly involves putting powerful weapons in the hands of people untrained to use them, should be outright illegal. Sorry, I thought you were saying it already was.

Re: House Republicans
FJ makes a good point that I hadn't considered. Passing legislation, holding a majority in the House, or the health of their party is not a goal of the politicians we're talking about. Reelection is, and as long as they're obstructing the functioning of the government they can tell the voters in their gerrymandered to hell districts that they're fighting the power. It hadn't quite occurred to me that nationwide opinion is irrelevant, and to a certain extent it's even better for them to be widely hated because it cultivates the myth of oppression among their loyal constituents. Ah well, American politics, folks.

I'm with Shonus on this one. The firm can (perhaps should) get it's permit revoked, any other staff that can be held accountable should be, and the family can/should sue their asses.
But what ya said,

Okay, then, the law needs to be amended to make it clearly illegal to allow people without appropriate permits to handle weapons that require a permit, even if the weapon's owner has one

Wouldn't exactly work & isn't the problem. The problem is they gave it to a child- someone who is physically unable to control said weapon, and because of that and some lax safety, one of their employees is dead and a little girl is probably traumatized.
You need to be able to have technically untrained people handle & fire the weapon if you want them to become trained.

Saw the video of the poor guy, hindsight is 20/20 but just in those few seconds:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-he didn't have a strong enough grip on the weapon
-his head was too far forward
-they had at least 5 rounds in the clip. I suspect more.

This looks like one of those cases where 'shit happens', and the family, perhaps both, should be contacting the company for redress.

[Bauglir]

Yeah, that's a good point - I clearly did not think through the implications very well. So, yeah, to the extent that training's being done, and they've demonstrated proficiency with whatever prerequisites (if any) are reasonable, fine, but that's clearly not what their business is selling.

[GavJ]

Note, for sake of relevant reference here, that handguns are responsible for something like 40x as many murders as assault rifles (in 2011, 6,220 vs. 323 rifle, only some of which are assault, I'm guessing half)

And according to http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf there are as many rifles as handguns in the US. Using my (very generous) 50% assault rifle pretend guess, that would mean 2:1 ratio of handguns to assault rifles.

Which would mean every handgun is 20x more likely to kill you than any one given assault rifle. Change the guess about assault rifle ratio if you want to, but it ain't gonna sway that result much.

[Bauglir]

I agree, and it's entirely irrelevant.

EDIT: Actually, to spell that out, the absolute number of fatalities caused by handguns is totally beside the point when the topic of the conversation is how legal it ought to be for a business' product to be "The opportunity to shoot guns you can't legally own, at least not without more paperwork than you're willing to put up with", and the related issue of a culture that supports that business model by glorifying guns as symbols of freedom and strength.

MORE EDIT: In other words, if you're trying to cut down on fatalities, handguns are absolutely the way to go. If you're talking about shitty business practices, it's not exactly an issue.

[GavJ]

I agree, and it's entirely irrelevant.

Are you talking to me? Of course it's relevant. If handguns kill way more people than machine guns, then why freak out about how omgsodeadly machine guns are for criminal use?