I doubt there are enough competent democrats to make the case.

My personal disgust is voting 'yes' without having read it. I don't care what it is. If you haven't read it, it can wait.

I'm not certain when I first mentioned Trump knew, but here in NY we've known he was a grifter from his first appearance in the news. What offends me at this point (amazing that that's still possible) is that people whom I used to have a modicum of respect for still take his word that he will follow...

So, I've been married long enough to know how pointless it is to argue when you don't fundamentally have a disagreement.

I don't have the energy to have the last word on this, or anything really, so I'm just going to leave this set of statements here. We don't have the sort of ethnic and religious splits among our government and our military that are present in Syria. But if you think for one second, that there will b...

Sadly, the recent example of Syria sits before us. A president and a military more than willing to bomb, gas, poison and starve its own people. They won,, with the help of the Russians. It was the air power specifically that gave them the edge, despite majority opposition. Would America's guns preve...

Clearly an error, my apologies. The order dates to Henry 8, and therefore 16th. I'll endeavor not to type without my glasses in the future.

I'm fatigued by trying to be patient with your tone.

The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. This is England, excluding Northern Ireland, circa 1800, from something allowing protestants to be arm...

It's become a perennially frustrating topic. If only the cops had actually done their difficult job, we might not have had another tragedy this week. Once again, I posit the attempt to compare pineapples to tangerines. Colt and Remington invented the idea of the way the west was won, and with which ...

Most cats, having once jumped on a hot stove, will assume the stove is always hot. We all have our experiences; that's all we've got. The best feature of a board like this is that it allows people to share their experiences. Sometimes, it'll open up some new way to interpret the world. If we let it.

Poverty, Crime, Racism, Sexual assaults, are really big, complicated issues. Controls for experiments are hugely challenging, and legislation that attempts, especially through the passage of a single law or set of laws can be pretty much guaranteed to fail. To talk about crime in general, violent cr...

More spinning our wheels or shooting blanks, choose your metaphor for this microcosm of pointlessness, but here goes: There are places reclaimed from vehicle access. There are places it doesn't make sense to own a vehicle at all, partly because of the expense, partly because of the hassle of alterna...

If you want to tell all the lies you want, you have to do it yourself. Others who aren't as dishonest or pathological will only blow your cover. They won't instinctively know which stories you already made up. That's why grifters don't work long term in teams. They also have trust issues. They think...

I worry frequently, especially in this last year, about how easy it is to devolve to Syria. I worry frequently about uniformed people who have stopped thinking about the illegality of orders, perpetrating violence on innocents. This kind of cowardice is so easy. I can't think of any other way to def...

Nobody on this thread believes banning something is a solution. Everyone on this thread is enlightened enough to understand poverty and racism as the root causes of many "insoluble" problems. I believe the policy discussions on this thread also have a realism attached to them: There's no j...

The only way to administer something that's so entrenched is to approach it indirectly. That's part of what Colt was negotiating. Like cars, everyone needs gun insurance. We likely can't figure out who owns everything, and some folks will choose to be self-insured, but if people are held liable for ...

I think two things are especially notable: First is Phoebe's concern that these events not all end up in some sloppy harassment basket. The issues of force (which are criminal issues), career leverage (which are criminal harassment issues), and consent, shouldn't be muddied. Losing those specifics a...

Not so long ago, The Colt company sat down with some legislators to work out a set of sensible regulations. There was a draft of those regs published, but as a consequence, the NRA punished and basically destroyed the Colt company. I'll see if I can't scare those up. Meanwhile, context makes everyth...

Ya, the reporting on this has been very fishy. It's in no way clear whether this was a personal or political dispute, since they had both kinds of conflicts in the past. These statements absolutely belong in the voting booth, but that's in a place where voting has a prayer of making a difference. Ta...

So, regardless which side one is on in Syria, my guess is that Assad is a frequent topic of conversation. Not because we know him personally, but because of the frequent, tangible impact he has on lives all around us. Is it all bad? Thankfully, no, but it's not good because he gives a shit, it's acc...

There's no good news about this. They've totally lost touch with the fact that taxation needs to be more about incentivizing behavior we want than about politics. I'm beginning to agree with the 'taxation is theft' folks, except they don't understand who's really running off with their cash.