As Syc noted in another thread, I'm a lazy fuck, so I was wondering if ya'll had noticed in the news anywhere that a St. Louis judge had blocked the implementation of concealed carry in Missouri? (probably one of Syc's more liberal relatives) :rolleyes:

My apologies...just giving you shit anyway. :)

I didn't know much about the whole dual citizenship thing before reading that...interesting. Though how did you get UK citizenship? By virtue of your father being a Brit? Or were you born there?

Ep, I posted about that last weekend in the Manifestos. And why aren't you reading the Manifestos? Tsk, tsk.

Another gun debate?

[/quote]So, how to build a culture that doesn't want to use deadly violence? Obvious: create more hippiess [quote]

Or remove regulations surrounding Marijuana ownership, concealed and otherwise, and usage. More pot/Less crime. Now there's a study to fund.

I always thought that too, warch. We often speculated the reason there was so much great pot, cheap, in Viet Nam was the commies were subsidizing it.:D
But last night there was some show on the discovery channel or someplace. I had company,so I really wasn't paying attention to their investigation how Shaka Zulu beat the British Army, until they concluded the Zulus had pot with a thc content of something like 25%(:eek: ) and that gave them the stamina.
Fight, if that's true, I want to know how they could walk???

You make it sound like allowing CCW will turn civilized places into the Wild West. The Wild West is merely in movies and stories these days. :)

Not all of it. Sure, you can ban certain guns...of course, they'll still make their way here anyway. Banning shit doesn't work very well in this country...alcohol, drugs, etc.

I agree with UT to a point in regards to local culture, but Austin still has the same laws regarding guns as Houston or West Texas (more or less).

Pot to stop violence...shit! That would be great!

"Mr. Brown, you are ordered to smoke 4 joints a day. You will be required to have the THC content of your marijuana checked once a week..."

But then someone will want to corner the pot market, violence will be used to gain territory, and it will all go to...ummm...pot.

As long as technology continues to grow, so will the guns...and everything else. Bigger, faster, more powerful, etc.

Now there's something I can support. I dont use pot but am solidly behind decriminalizing it. There's too much money spent harassing pot users.

And the argument that pot is a "gateway drug" is totally lost on me, I have never believed that.

Guns, pot, alcohol, spray paint or ice cream. There's nothing you can name that somebody won't use irresponsibly. The focus on specific items being a threat to the general public is misdirected.

The threat to the general public is the attitude that I'm more important than you are. My pleasure is more important that your health and welfare. I bear no personal responsibity for insult or injury to anyone else while I'm pursuing happiness. Oh...and lawyers.:D

I wouldn't feel loved if you didn't give me shit, Syc. I've been more or less working again, so I'm not keeping up quite as well as I was...

Working...cool. I was afraid you wouldn't be able to get me a nice xmas gift. Seriuosly man, that's good to hear.:)

I know...it's just that St. Louisan picking on a Kansas Citian love that others just don't get.

Selling blood or platelets? Playing your Moog on street corners?

Hopefully it's paying the bills...and hopefully you won't be marginalized for too much longer.

Willingly.

For just one single if overwhelming example: genocide happens to unarmed populations, not to armed ones. With an armed population, a genocide recedes so far from practicability as to be something invisible.

For arms as an expression of power: In a properly constituted republic, political power is sourced in the polity, the electorate. Arms are instruments of the power of life and death. Hence, power, period. If you go around impairing the electorate's power, in time you have something other than a republic -- generally a despotism, as loss of power by one group is generally being engineered by another group, rather than an anarchy. (Parenthetically, an anarchy is no more sustainable than an autarchy.)

So in the end, a republic's electorate should retain, in fullest measure, the power of life and death. It dovetails with the power of the vote. It also guards the rights of anyone in a minority, should the power of the vote no longer suffice. If that should ever occur, ugly things follow.

This philosophy is not unique to the United States. See Switzerland.

In Rwanda, no one was really armed with much more than a machete, and both sides had those. It's just that the aggressors chose to use theirs.