Gambling though you just throw away money, at least with a gun you get to keep the gun.

I went to Laughlin once. Don't get the appeal.

Many people go to Vegas for the perks (especially if they are a preferred customer) and only expect to break even, if that. It's more a game and lifestyle if you're good at it, and a debilitating addiction if you are bad at it.

What gun problem?

If I was the piece of **** you all think I am I would dismiss Sandy Hook as a conspiracy. You want to stop mass shootings like Sandy Hook? Arm the teachers. Now, I do realize that it's slightly more complicated considering that most of these shootings are deranged left-wingers so it might seem sketchy to arm a bunch of left-wing teachers but I would much rather not see the guns of the concealed carrying teachers than armed security in every school which is where we're going to end up because guns, rightfully, aren't going to go away.

You maniacs on the left fervently chase morals out of every aspect of society and then you're "shocked" when evil prevails?

What the ****?

You are deeply misinformed.

Totally normal and not extreme world view. Totally capable of rational middle ground discussions. How dare anyone suggest Republicans aren't reasonable people?

How can anyone have that kind of money to drop, yet be unable to find a person?

It's like, if you had four figures and a weekend, and were.. competent.. you could find a partner.

Maybe I'm just weak-willed, but I find "properly" gambling to be very hard to do. Sitting there optimizing the right move for hours on end is strenuous.

you see

Leftists are a bunch of gun-hating wimps who want guns banned, and would be helpless in a crisis without the strong Republican ubermensch to defend them.

But also they’re a bunch of terrifying armed terrorists. They shoot up schools and disrupt perfectly sensible moderate Republican demonstrations like the one in Virginia.

It’s a particularly chilling disingenuity if you’re familiar with how the Nazis sounded back in the day. Not that I’m ever surprised when Wookie06 mainlines radical right wing propaganda, he’s been riding the right wing straight to hell as long as I’ve known him.

Yes, the same line of reasoning crossed my mind. I guess you'd have to really dislike being around women to want to replace their body with a lifeless doll.

It doesn't sound like fun to me at all. I imagine that the people who do this were already drawn to the idea of gambling and became psychologically invested in doing well, and were actually intelligent enough to avoid losing all their money. And by then, the casinos (for whatever reason) would be throwing ridiculous all-expense paid hotel packages just to draw them to their casino, probably for a sort of halo effect (since neither side will really be taking much money from the other).

Actually, this is quite on topic (in addition to the economic analysis Jon`C provided): remember that guy who committed mass muder from that hotel balcony in Las Vegas? He was one such customer of the casinos: older, retired guy with time on his hands, and enough brains to get good at gambling without losing money.

I actually don't think of you as a piece of **** at all, but half way through reading this post, you are really giving me second thoughts. Arm the teachers? The ****? Why should probably take a breather, and while you're a at it, why don't you watch the video that Roger Spruce posted. You are pretty much embodying the "seething 10%" stereotype mentioned by the comedian, and it bothers me to think that I might be talking to such a person right now.

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who was confused reading his post. So the (primary and secondary, mind you) teachers are radical leftists, but so are the muderers who shoot up schools? (Nevermind that the guy who shot up the school in Florida was a far right, Trump supporting sadistic racist).

The only explanation for the level of confabulation going on here is that Wookie is seething with rage while typing his posts. Watch that video and take a good look in the mirror, Wookie.

The only thing Taxi Driver got wrong was Travis attacked people who were dangerous.

I'm sure the desire for distance is mutual.



So if you're good enough at gambling to not lose money.. good for you, but it doesn't seem much of a life to aspire to. It's like being a really good store clerk. I guess that's cool if it's your thing, but like.. why

If he weren't dead, you could have asked the guy who murdered all those people in Las Vegas if he found it to be a fulfilling lifestyle. On the other hand, I never did look back to see if the autopsy turned up any neurological abnormalities.

Every time a conservative student walks into my class, I'm glad. Because, yes, I've found another victim. Another good, moral student I can corrupt with my cultural Marxism. I rub my hands gleefully knowing of all the ways I can dock points for moral behavior, and then dock further points for having too much privilege. Every time a white guy comes in with an ace paper, I return it with a red D. Hard work doesn't pay off in Reid's classroom. It's socialist immoral, anti-gun kill zone. Did you know five students died in my classroom from Muslim attacks? Praise be unto Allah.

And if any of the conservative ****bags speak up, do you know what I do? I ****ing call them xir, then I uproot a tree and smack them so hard they fly off into the sky and disappear into a twinkle.

Also I let all the black kids cheat. They should be able to since privilege.

Isn't being a liberal awesome?

I guess a life of gambling wasn't satisfying enough..?

This actually reminds me of how conservatives speak about China.

>China's economy is experiencing unprecedented growth!

Conservatives: Wow! Their shift to capitalism has been superb!

>China's spreading propaganda through language institutions

Conservatives: WHAT! Those communists are evil! Too bad their inferior socialist system will fail.

Same with Venezuela.

>Venezuela doing well

Don't be fooled, Venezuela is capitalist!

>Venezuela doing poorly

That's what you can expect from socialism!

Ugh. Recently I started venturing more into Eichmann in Jerusalem and it's just so depressing. That Nazism and the holocaust could have happened. The banal descriptions of how high-ranking SS members implemented the final solution for some reason makes it 100x worse than some insane high-level evil.

ikr?

If Wookie06 is following the playbook I think he is, the next step is either accusing us of taking everything too seriously, or pretending to be the victim despite calling everybody who disagrees with him a terrorist.

According to the New York Times, there's a rich Republican donor in Florida who is threatening to stop donating to Republican campaigns if the party doesn't support a ban on assault weapons.

While I appreciate the gesture, isn't this kind of a red herring? Will this really do much to reduce gun violence? Moreover, would another assault weapons ban be another gimmick like it supposedly was before, with silly loopholes, like banning scary looking guns but allowing almost identical ones?

AWB’s target isn’t firearm ownership rate, it’s firearm manufacturer profitability. “Whales” buy military style firearms, the majority of firearm consumers don’t. The secret mission objective is to drive the pushers out of business.

Hey, I think I found a secret. What if all the fervor surrounding Second Amendment rights was really about profit, and that it's not that liberals are coming for your guns, but that gun manufacturers are coming for your wallet? In this world, a few dead kids are just a minor detail, and if Wookie is under the yoke of this corporate propaganda, it would certainly explain his ambivalence toward their safety.

Not trying to make this unduly personal or moralistic, but it's just a theory.

Life experience tells me that “think about the children” is something conservatives say, not something that they do.

Beyond that, it’s a pretty uncontroversial opinion. Money talks. Gun manufacturers and retailers depend upon selling high margin product to “whales”. NRA memberships are bought by “whales”. The US government wants to keep it easy and fast for “whales” to buy guns. The real reason the US won’t ever do anything about mass shootings is because these “whales” are broadly indistinguishable from potential mass shooters.

You’ll note that there is basically no traction to undo what few restrictions remain. ‘Cause there’s no money in them. Anybody who knows anything about guns would expect full auto to be free and you’d never get an economy of scale on a civilian M61. If anything the remaining restrictions make gun companies more money because it makes using those weapons an exotic experience.

Yeah that all makes sense, but I think the big thing is that at this point, any law that made a popular firearm illegal on a national scale would be impossible to fund. You either pay everyone a handsome sum ('market value' but the market value will skyroket as soon as the law is spoken of) or you pay cops to go taking all the guns. I don't see the US funding gun turn-ins before it funds single payer, so I don't know why it's even worth talking about those kinds of laws. Expanded background checks are a legal nightmare, and the only other solution I have heard, expanding NICS to private citizens through gun stores, got shot down by somebody at some point.

So I would just buckle in for the status quo tbh.

Besides we will be at 2+* warming before we can get any of that done and it won't matter and everyone will want guns so lmao who cares when climate apocalypse is winding up

Is anybody aware of any government programs / policy anywhere in the world that have succeeded in reducing gun violence, in countries with comparable levels of gun ownership to the United States (uhh... oops), without simply confiscating / buying back most of the firearms?

I am highly skeptical that we wouldn't be able to save a few hundred more kids before the apocolypse with incrementally better policy, were it not for the gun lobby / culture.

Unless: we're actually doing kids a favor by letting them get shot, because it will save them from a slow and agonizing death of famine and tribal war.

Canada and the United States are not incomparable. Somewhere around 26% of Canadian households have firearms, compared to around 32% of American households. (These numbers were eyeballed. Research in this area is exceptionally poor; I'm not confident the difference between the two is statistically significant given the quality and spread of surveys I've seen.) Canada and the United States are also roughly similar in terms of culture and policing, so they're about as good as you can find if you're trying to isolate policy impact.

The research on Canadian firearm legislation is not conclusive. The Canadian CFSC/PAL regime (1995) appears to have significantly decreased gun homicides and suicides, but the effect on overall homicide, suicide, and firearm-involved accidental death is unknown. (This doesn't mean what you think it means, for complicated statistics reasons. E.g. the overall homicide rate may have been reduced due to CFSC/PAL, or maybe because of faerie magic. You don't know, so you aren't allowed to say. You need fantastically strong evidence to attribute broad social changes to any specific policy and current studies do not satisfy that need.)

The CFSC/PAL also appears to have had zero effect on firearm ownership. This is expected, because the programs were not intended to have any.



For reference, the CFSC is a day-long firearm operations and range safety course administered by (private) range instructors. It teaches you not to use rimfire rounds with your glock. The PAL is a firearm purchasing license and you can get it as long as you pass the CFSC and you have at least two friends who aren't scared of you. The RCMP will also automatically suspend your PAL if you become a person of interest. This scheme would have prevented most recent mass shootings in the US, the one in Las Vegas being the only noteworthy exception. It's still waaaaaaaaaay easier to get a gun than drive a car here, lol.

That sounds promising.

But what about Wookie's suggestion that we arm the teachers?

Public school teachers can't be trusted to teach, I don't know what kind of crack he's smoking to think they're trustworthy to be armed guards of children.

Basically what I'm saying is, and I understand that this is going to be a super unpopular opinion because lots of people are very attached to the way we currently do things, our adaptation of the German system really ****s kids up. Our modern graduated school system was originally designed as a combination daycare and factory work inculcation center. The system as a whole is designed around wildly unrealistic assumptions of uniformity of student need and demand for a specific kind of labor that no longer exists. Social pressures are applied systematically to ensure students exhibit acceptable behavior. The system publicly shames students into performing well enough academically, effectively encourages children to terrorize those who perform better or behave differently, forces children to organize into unstable social groups that would never form naturally. It's a miracle there are as few school shootings as there are. It's an incredibly stressful environment and there is no actual rationalization for doing any of this bull**** anymore. We've been using better, proven means of educating children for literally thousands of years - they aren't secret, they just aren't good for programming factory workers. All of this is why you'll never catch a rich person or a college professor sending their kids to a public school. No way.

In other words, if you want teachers to be responsible for stopping school shootings, you've at least assigned the responsibility correctly. A gun, though? Wrong tool, too late.

Buy them toner and paper first.

Huh, so our education model is literally a tool to control and repress people. That's one of those things I always expected would be true if I did the history, but hey, turns out it's not that far down.

Honestly, I wonder if the kind of repressions that led to Freikorps/proto-Nazi groups in Germany had any similar cause in the school system to what causes mass shooters in America.

Yeah but do you have ~The Second Amendment~ guaranteeing your right to buy five AR's?

You been watching Fox lately, Wookie?

[quote=Rush Limbaugh]
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh called for concealed carry in U.S. schools on Sunday in response to the deadly shooting at a Florida high school that killed 17 and injured several others.

“The solution is we need concealed carry in these schools,” Limbaugh said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “If we’re not going to take action, we better have mechanisms in these schools to stop it when it breaks out.”

Limbaugh suggested Sunday that to prevent more mass casualties, open concealed carry laws should be extended on school campuses.

“If we don’t do that, then all the rest of this is nothing more than political posturing for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election,” Limbaugh said of the measure.

Limbaugh and other right-wing commentators in the past have suggested that if school officials or students were armed, casualties during mass shootings could be reduced.


[/quote]

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/18/limbaugh-guns-schools-concealed-carry-416864

We should arm the children.

Oh. ****. He's actually advocated that in the past.