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livinincali
Participant[quote=ocrenter]
Remember this guy did have mental health Care. He went off his meds, remember? Remember people on this forum were blaming medications for his actions? When it was the lack of that was the problem. So how do we force him to take meds everyday? Had we had a national registery on gun ownership that the police had access to, maybe they could have accessed it to see how much of a threat he was to society? Especially if he stockpiled his 40000 rounds within the last month.
[/quote]Maybe he needed to be institutionalized. He did show signs of violence prior to committing this act. This is always a tough area because your taking away somebody’s freedoms.
The number of rounds is certainly excessive but obviously he did not use anywhere near that many rounds when he went on his spree. He could have accomplished the damage he created with 50-100 rounds. Do you flag somebody that buys a lot of ammunition, I suppose you could, but in 99% of those instances it’s probably going to flag a normal law abiding citizen that’s just an avid shooter.
[quote=ocrenter]
Point is accountability of the gun owners and elevating the bar of ownership. If my gun was used and accidentally killed a neighbor’s little girl, I should be at fault. And guns should be just as hard to obtain as a car. And just as every car is registered, every gun should be too.[/quote]These things are already true. It is harder to buy a gun than a car in this state. There’s a waiting period, a registration requirement, etc. I’m not arguing that we remove the current restrictions.
Participant[quote=flu]The thing is though my w2 income didn’t really change *that* much this year from last from the previous year…. Why now? Or was I just randomly selected by my employer? Lol[/quote]
Obamacare made a slight change to the DCA. You can carry over $500 from a previous year if it was not used. Maybe your company is just doing a compliance check with Obabmcare related changes and happened to catch the fact that you had been over the limit.
ParticipantThe bond market is currently telling you the economy is headed for recession or extremely weak growth. The stock market is telling you things are going to get better. One of them is wrong and history says it’s probably the stock market that is wrong.
Personally I think interest rates are going to remain low for some time but I don’t know that we get back to sub 3.5 on a 30 year fixed mortgage. I suppose we could get the ugly situation where everything sells off when the next bubble pops rather than having a good hiding spot. I.e. the great deleveraging that hasn’t happened yet. If it does than none of the assets priced with leverage are going to be good and the only safe spot will be cash. Interest rates will rise while deflation is present. The fed will do everything it can to prevent that from happening but I’m not sure it has the power to do so.
Participant[quote=ocrenter]
I never said guns increase crime rate. I’m saying you get more gun death with more gun ownership. Not all gun death are criminal. Crime rate is actually falling over the last 40-50 years over the entire country, but regardless of per-capita gun ownership.
[/quote]If you actually bothered to open the link and look at the charts, the researchers plotted number of gun homicides vs per capita gun ownership and didn’t find a strong correlation. If you pull out all the developing countries and South Africa and are left with the 25 or so western countries there does seem to be some correlation between gun ownership rates and number of homicides.
So let’s just say the solution is to become like Japan. Repeal the second amendment, make gun ownership illegal and confiscate most of the 300 million guns in this country. That would probably be effective at preventing mass killings by guns. Do you think that is feasible in this country. I would argue that an attempt to go down that path probably gets fairly bloody and might end in civil war. There’s a fairly large segment of the population that isn’t going to give up their guns voluntarily and likely would fight to the death to keep their weapons. This would likely be an effective solution but you might have decades worth of mass killing deaths to implement it.
Solution 2 add more gun control that was discussed after Sandy Hook. Enhanced back ground checks, assault riffle bans, ammunition buying limits, etc. Does anybody here think those additions would have prevented this current tragedy. Do you have any scientific evidence it prevents any future tragedy? If so then this is a reasonable debate to have. It obviously can’t prevent a mass killing from ever happening, but maybe there some evidence that it creates fewer mass killings. I honestly don’t think anybody knows although I’m sure some will argue it’s worth doing even if we can’t measure the results.
Solution 3. Address the mental illness problems in this country. In pretty much ever single one of these cases you have a total nut job that goes on one of these killing sprees. In all the cases there were significant warning signs, but effective action was not taken before the tragedy happened. I personally think it would be more effective to spend the money and resources on identifying and helping those citizens that exhibit these warning signs.
Solution 4? Do nothing. The most likely solution in our current political climate and maybe the only realistic solution in a country that values it’s right to own guns. I’d like to see the debate focus on solution 3 because I think it can get broad support. It might mean taking on the pharmaceutical lobby but I think it’s at least reasonable doable.
Solution ? Do something that isn’t a violation of the second amendment and has a measurable reduction in the number of mass killings? Tell me what it is and we can debate it. It’s not enough in my eyes to say do this because we had to do something. Demonstrate how you think it would reduce mass killings preferably using this case. What do you advocate for that would have prevented this particular case.
Participant[quote=Jazzman]
You say this isn’t about the 2nd amendment yet make proposals about laws that attempt to further restrict gun ownership through various means. Hoping to find a clever way of greatly restricting gun ownership without violating the principals of the 2nd amendment.Tell me what is there to violate? An anachronistic right that is irrelevant to contemporary society, or the sanctity of life? It would be a Knave of Hearts Trial. If the founding fathers were alive to ask, there is little room for doubt as to how they would reply. You either speak for humanity, or your speak for the pro-gun industry. Choose at your peril.
[/quote]Then for you the solution is quite clear change the second amendment. Either remove it completely or change it to be more narrowly defined. If it was so clear cut and obvious to everybody why haven’t we gone down the path of seriously changing the second amendment. We have a democratic process that can be pursued to make that change. The fact is that the American people as a whole don’t seem to be ready to go down that path and make that change. They value the freedoms and protections that the second amendment offers.
Owning a gun or agreeing that there is a right to own a gun does not make you anti-humanity. Those things are not mutually exclusive. There’s been millions of Americans that have owned and used guns that value life and humanity just as much as you do.
It a terrible thing that happened. It’s a terrible thing that will happen again unfortunately, but this world has risks. Terrible things can happen in a police state where guns are banned. In many cases far worse things have happened, especially when a tyrant comes to power.
Participant[quote=Jazzman]I saw the only real outpouring of emotions from the father of one of the Isla Vista victims. It wan’t the usual staged, weepy, emotionally restrained, official press-type announcement. It was raw, highly charged, and very condemnatory of the fact that nothing is being done to prevent these incidences. The man had all but fallen to pieces. Watching this poor man in utter despair was gut wrenching.
Whatever your beliefs about gun-ownership and mass slayings, don’t we owe it to him to do something. Nothing is being done, and I find it despairing that people aren’t on the street demanding change. From the outside it appears as bordering on extreme selfishness.[/quote]
This is exactly the problem. We have this strong emotional desire to do something to keep this terrible thing from happening again and don’t use any logic to figure out if what we do is going to be effective. We need to use logic and research to determine if something is going to be effective, and I haven’t seen much evidence that attempting to further restrict gun access will lead to the desired outcome. It would be nice if it was that simple. It’s complex problem that requires a complex solution. We’ve been going down the path of more and more gun control and yet it doesn’t seem to be working as advertised.
Chicago has incredibly strict gun control laws, bordering on being in violation of the 2nd amendment yet still have one of the highest homicide rates in the country. CA has pretty strict gun control laws and yet this incident happened here. We’ve been increasing gun control laws over the years and yet it’s not producing the desired result of fewer homicides. When do we consider that might not be the correct solution.
Participant[quote=ocrenter]
American rate of death by gun (homocide and suicide) is at 10/100k, most of the OECD countries are below 1/100k.You do the math on that one.[/quote]
Here’s a recent study with graphs. If do some cherry picking you can arrive at a conclusion that more guns = more deaths. Of course we can always cherry pick data to suit our agenda.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/03/guns-neither-increase-nor-decrease-crime-rate.html
Participant[quote=Jazzman]
Democracy came alive with Obamacare. I’m not clear what you mean by “purely a democracy”, but if left to my interpretation I take it to mean powerful lobbyist are fundamental to American democracy. Indeed they are!
[/quote]Pure democracy is often refereed to as a system where 2 wolves and a sheep vote on which one is for dinner. Pure democracy doesn’t protect minority rights. It lets the majority decide without any checks or balances. I.e. The ban on same sex marriage in CA wouldn’t have been able to be constitutionally challenged.
Suppose for a moment the the majority opinion on gun control is to put a massive tax on guns. Make them too expensive for the common man and basically have the effect of banning them. That type of law would be challenged to the supreme court on the basis that it violates the second amendment. In this case the minority who believes in the ability to own guns might win because that right is protected by the 2nd amendment of the constitution.
You say this isn’t about the 2nd amendment yet make proposals about laws that attempt to further restrict gun ownership through various means. Hoping to find a clever way of greatly restricting gun ownership without violating the principals of the 2nd amendment.
Participant[quote=ocrenter]I for one am glad the elephant in the room is finally being discussed.
I’ve been posts on this thread trying to figure out this guy and watching the typical cry about need for better mental health assessment and access and awareness in the media. But nobody seem to want to talk about how this guy managed to get 3 guns and 40000 rounds of ammo.
Here’s the bottom line. People LIE when they go in to see their doctors. They lie about how much they drink, they lie about how much they exercise, they lie about how much cookies they eat. So how many would be mass murderers will tell their doctor they have a bunch of guns and ammo in the car?
[/quote]If what you say is true and that people lie, what recently discussed gun control laws would have prevented this situation from happening? What background check enhancements, what assault riffle ban, etc. prevents this situation from happening again? Are we doing something that actually will make a difference and prevent these scenarios from happening or are we doing something just to make ourselves feel better that we did something.
The democratic majority in this country isn’t going to change the second amendment right now. We can eliminate gun related mass murders but it requires a police state that most of us aren’t willing to trade in exchange for never having another gun death.
Participant[quote=Jazzman]
Democracy died the day gun control legislation failed. You can turn the other way, and accept that we live in democracy in ‘name only’, and tolerate the pervasive influence special interest groups enjoys over the democratic process.[/quote]Did democracy die when Obamacare was passed? Our government is a constitution republic. If our government was purely a democracy same sex marriage would still be banned in California. Sometimes laws are passed or not passed even if the majority opinion is contrary to that.
If you want to change the second amendment there’s a mechanism to do that but we all know there’s not enough support on your side of the argument to make that happen.
The question that nobody knows the answer to, but would immediately end this debate is the following. Would those new gun control laws that didn’t pass have prevented this incident? My gut feeling says probably not, but I don’t know.
ParticipantMinimum wage does not and should not equal what the head of household for a family of 4 needs to make to support that family. Minimum wage is for the lowest skilled and least experienced members of the work force. It’s a wage for those that are learning the basics of work ethic and teamwork.
I bet most people here worked some entry level, low to minimum wage job in their teens. It probably taught you some basic skills and you quickly left and moved on. It’s suppose to be a stepping stone, not a career. I know there’s a small segment of the population near the bottom of the ability to learn a skill bell curve that needs some assistance, but a huge raise in minimum wage is not the best solution to help those people.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]
To argue that gun controls don’t work is not honest. They do work and it will cost money to enforce.[/quote]It’s impossible to prove or disprove that gun controls work. How many gun related deaths have background checks actually prevented. How many people were caught with illegal firearm were prevented from subsequently committing a murder.
How many murders were prevented because somebody with a gun stopped a would be attacker intending to commit murder. We don’t a definitive answer to any of these questions and in order prove gun control works you would at least need to have some answers the the questions above.If we want to determine if the return of investment of enforcing those laws is good, it would require us to to put a value on someone’s life. These things are all difficult to do in an objective logical fashion so we let our emotions dictate the decision process. It’s probably a good idea to have some gun control laws. It’s probably ok to have some costs associated with enforcing those laws. It’s certainly possible that focusing money and efforts on treating mental illness would be more effective at preventing gun related deaths than more gun control.
ParticipantThe gun debate is all about fear. Most of those advocating for increased gun control are doing from a position of fear. Afraid that they or their friends/family could be a victim a crime committed by a gun. Many laws are created from a position of fear. How many billions per year do we spend on airline security because we’re fearful of 9/11 happening again.
I’m a lot more fearful of a government that has the power to actually enforce and maintain a total ban on guns than a random idiot that uses a gun to commit a crime.
Participant[quote=joec]Does anyone else see this minimum wage fight as simply being welfare so the poor masses don’t revolt and start doing bad things to everyone else?
I suppose I look at it as not really a “business” case or logical analysis, but as shown time and time again in history, the “haves” really don’t want to see what will happen when the have-nots get too pissed off with the current situation. I think in France, some kids and young people torched hundreds of cars in a street. This isn’t good for anyone.
[/quote]Thanks for bringing up France it’s a great example of how minimum wage doesn’t necessarily help employment prospects. For example minimum wage in France is 1430 euros per month ($1959 in US dollar terms). France also has a work week of 35 hours per week so if you assume 4 weeks per month and divide by 35 hours per week you end up with a minimum wage of $14/hr in US dollar terms. In France youth unemployment is about 23.5% compared to the US’s 18.5%.
In Germany youth unemployment is less than 10%. Guess was minimum wage Germany has. That’s right, none. It has a law stating you can’t pay an immoral wage but that’s decided on a case by case basis by the courts. For example a entry level grocery store worker in Germany can be paid the equivalent of $7 US dollars per hour and it’s not immoral.
Also if you’ve every been to France and Germany you’ll know that’s it’s a lot cheaper to live in Germany than in France. Compare Berlin to Paris. Honestly you’d probably be better off in Germany as a cashier in Berlin than a cashier in Paris even though you might get double the monthly salary. It’s all relative.
Can Walmart afford to pay it’s workers $13/hr in San Diego. Sure. With automation, price increases, laying off the weakest performing staff, etc, they’ll make it work. Of course it’s only better for those that happen to work at Walmart and keep they’re job. Also those designing/building those automated systems. Anybody who was already making $15/hr and doesn’t get a corresponding raise loses because they are now forced to pay higher prices for things. In addition those that lose their job to automation are now on the welfare roles somewhere.
People posting here who are making $100K don’t really care. The price increases at the grocery store or restaurant are fairly negligible in their budget. Food/Entertainment is probably less than 10% of their budget so a 10% increase in prices for low skilled labor in restaurants and general goods/foods stores only adds 1% to their overall budget.
While people have linked studies that show minimum wage increases haven’t greatly negatively impacted the economy. Nobody has linked a study that shows major increases in minimum wage greatly improve the overall economy. I thing the realty is at best minimum wage increases changes the winners and loses and prefers experience over youth.
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