Amy Schumer = anti-gun

[Bill of Rights]

I think there is an error of vowel sound usage somewhere upthread, perhaps within the first seven posts.

More specificity should not be required.

That is all.

 

[OakRiver]

This is moronic. The Lafayette, LA shooter went through a background check. How would this help anything?

1. Reasons
2. Feelings

 

[RobbyMaQ]

To my knowledge, actors and actresses have little to do with the legislative process. moved.

 

[Bennettjh]

I never found Amy Schumer funny, just annoying. I care more about what my cat has to say than what she has to say.

I agree. Is your cat smarter than the average bear?

 

[hopper68]

I thought about seeing her new movie until the shooting happened. Evidently there is something so terrible with it or her that caused the shooting.


Two can play the blame game Ms Schumer.

 

[invent11]

She should stick to comedy because she is an absolute joke

 

[IndyDave1776]

Not all slopes are slippery.

One of the many problems "our side" has is messaging. You cannot wrap yourself in the flag and point at the Bill of Rights and say SEEE!!!1! while the other side is making inroads on public opinion (which, like it or not, DOES MATTER). In the absence of offered solutions to obvious problems (like people passing a background check that shouldn't be able to pass it), others get to fill the vacuum with their blather.

We - "gun guys" - *must* stop getting butthurt when people think differently than us and instead offer practical solutions to real problems, not logical strawmen.

Like it or not, NICS isn't going anywhere;to think otherwise would be foolishly wishful thinking. Furthermore, not all ideas to feed better information into it is a backdoor plan to civilian confiscation.

Can we all agree that the douches in Lafayette and Charleston were, under current law, prohibited persons that should not have passed a NICS check?

If that basic singular point can be agreed to, a logical follow-on question is "How can society prevent this situation (ie. somebody passes a background check that should not have) from happening again?"

An easy answer, a "common sense" answer, an answer that does not involve any additional restrictions on law-abiding gun owners, is by ensuring the NICS system has the information it needs to properly work. AGAIN,the devil is in the details and I'm not inclined to trust any language as written by somebody that has historically not been a friend to firearm ownership...but the premise itself is sound.

1. This slope is extremely slippery as soon as you account for the fact that the standards of mental soundness are ultimately developed by people with political agendas.

2. If the rule of law is not a sufficient argument, you might as well either pick up your rifle or else hit your knees against the floor because the republic is stone cold dead. Your suggestion here falls squarely on the wrong side of the division between a republic and a democracy.

3. Once again, explain please how the 'solution' to an unconstitutional infringement is to make the infringement work more efficiently.

4. The practical solutions are to read the Constitution, do what it says, don't do what it doesn't say, and see to it that people who are too dangerous to roam free with all their rights are either institutionalized, incarcerated, or executed as appropriate to the given individual.

5. NICS is completely unconstitutional and needs to go away. Political expediency does not change that nor does it compel me to passively accept what is not acceptable. Once again, I have already addressed how this makes a damned convenient backdoor. All you have to do is have anyone who is so barbaric as to want to own a gun as automatically being too unstable to be trusted with such an instrument. Gun ban in the bag!

6. The Lafayette and Charleston shooters should either have been institutionalized or left the f**k alone. Once again, there is no constitutional provision for truncating the rights of any free person nor is there any provision for a second-class citizenship.

7. You have based a question on a 100% faulty premise. You do not address the existence of evil and/or insane individuals by refining an unconstitutional power grab until it effectively stops pre-crime. You make the consequences severe enough to deter the evil and you institutionalize the insane.

8. You call this last premise sound? How in the universe is taking an intolerable unconstitutional power grab and refining it rather than drafting new/not directly related legislation such that you hold the status quo level of intolerability somehow a sound idea?

 

[Cygnus]

Yup. She has dissapointed me. Shoulda know by the last name. What a foolish ignoramous. Did youy see her out there with uncle Chuck

 

[Bill of Rights]

IndyDave,
I don't disagree with you in principle at all. You've made a very sound argument. I will be repping you for it. I do wonder what you think would constitute "severe enough" consequences for someone who is planning on killing people and dying in a hail of bullets, however, that are possible under the 8A.

No sarcasm here; what I'm saying is that crime is not stopped by eventual consequences- Little Johnny gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar (literally) and is told he will not get supper as a result, he doesn't care: he got the cookie. OTOH, if you immediately upend little Johnny and send his little stinging butt to the corner, he learns quickly and permanently that there are consequences to his actions that he does not want.
If you don't stop thieves by jailing them: if the loss of freedom and imposition of regimented lifestyle and lifelong stigma and oh yeah, the likelihood of having that big cellmate named Bubba who wants to tattoo a female chest onto your back are not deterrent enough, what is a sufficient deterrent? Personally, I'm of the opinion that that in and of itself is "cruel", albeit not unusual. The practice usually associated with the Muslim and Arabic cultures of chopping off a thief's right hand sounds barbaric, although it is effective. It's not like we can just spank adult thieves and send them to the corner.... That needs to happen in childhood, but past that point, that ship has sailed, so to speak.

We cannot institutionalize ALL of the insane. The issues here are many, but primarily, we don't know who they all are, and even if we could with certainty identify everyone who fits that description today, what happens when someone snaps tomorrow? He's not crazy, he's just angry, and does an evil thing by committing whatever crime enters his head. Secondarily, a reason we deinstitutionalized the insane was that they were being treated as subhumans, warehoused in a building until they died, not treated in any way that was effective. Don't misunderstand me-I agree that they need to be segregated out of society, but there are some big problems that need answers (such as how to choose who is to be segregated-psychopath/sociopath are two obvious answers, but what about someone who's just depressed or just angry?) before we start locking people away with no hope of reintegration.

So.... How do we effectively deter the evil of cold-blooded murder without running afoul of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment?

Blessings,
Bill

...7. You have based a question on a 100% faulty premise. You do not address the existence of evil and/or insane individuals by refining an unconstitutional power grab until it effectively stops pre-crime. You make the consequences severe enough to deter the evil and you institutionalize the insane....

 

[KLB]

So.... How do we effectively deter the evil of cold-blooded murder without running afoul of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment?

Blessings,
Bill

I'll chime in on this one. Sadly, we cannot. There are people that are evil and will do evil deeds. I imagine most of them either think they won't get caught or the thought just never occurs to them. All we can do is hope to remove their ability to do so once they have acted.

 

[IndyDave1776]

IndyDave,
I don't disagree with you in principle at all. You've made a very sound argument. I will be repping you for it. I do wonder what you think would constitute "severe enough" consequences for someone who is planning on killing people and dying in a hail of bullets, however, that are possible under the 8A.

So.... How do we effectively deter the evil of cold-blooded murder without running afoul of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment?

Blessings,
Bill

Let's see...

1. We have to start with the understanding that it is not possible to expunge evil from the world. It has existed from the beginning of human culture through the present and there is nothing we can do to change that fact. I would emphasize that making life difficult and encroaching on the rights of those who are disinclined to engage in evil in the first place will make no difference whatsoever.

2. Our founders would find the ideas of what constitutes 'cruel and unusual' that some people espouse today laughable. As history indicates, they had no problem whatsoever with the summary liquidation of evil-doers by their intended targets or others who happened to be present at the time of their predatory acts. They also had no problem with convicted evil-doers being executed in a timely fashion. They did not have a problem with the idea that people who are incarcerated should have to work, and I mean honest to goodness hard labor, not the sorry excuse for it that we now see in prison. When I worked for the DOC, inmates received $1/day for working, and most of them were overpaid. The idea of prison is that it should be sufficiently unpleasant that people really, really don't want to be there. You know you have a problem when people see it as a mere occupational inconvenience or will engage in 90 to 180 day crimes for the free room and board. I would argue that a significant part of this problem is that your lefties who are accustomed to a middle class or better mode of living have an entirely different idea of 'cruel and unusual' than do most criminals. I hate to break the news to them, but having to live without satellite television is NOT torture, and being forced to live at a standard of living that would distress a middle-class liberal is often an IMPROVEMENT in standard of living over what these people have on the street.* On that note, Sheriff Joe Arpaio ran afoul of a lawsuit for eliminating cable, forcing the inmates to settle for broadcast television. A federal court deemed this cruel and ordered him to reinstate cable service. Joe being Joe, there choices were Disney and the Weather Channel. The man may have a pompous streak that plenty of people find annoying, but he is absolutely correct that jail should be a place people DON'T want to be. In reality, the inmates most deserving of, well, discomfort generally do pretty well as they want while the staff will pick on the ones who aren't dangerous enough to be perceived as a threat. When it is all said and done, prison is not a deterrent because we have collectively adopted the notion that being segregated from society constitutes and effective punishment when it does not. That segregation must be sufficiently unpleasant that those so segregated will make a point of not returning. For example, my grandfather knew a man who had been to prison, and a middle of the road prison at that, not the worst. One day they were walking together and the man started to reach of an apple on a tree that they were passing (which no one would have given a damn about) and then pulled back as soon as it occurred to him that taking an apple would be theft and he really, really did NOT want to go back to the State Farm. * Returning to this previous thought, I find it amusing that those making the decisions can understand what they choose to understand. Case in point, getting sent to 'Club Fed' with the politicians is such a punishment that if it weren't for not being allowed to leave I would consider volunteering to go, which rests on the premise that some enlightened soul realizes that with the type of people so incarcerated, that is a huge reduction in their standard of living. While I disagree with the outcome, it demonstrates that they should be able to see that if you actually increase the standard of living of those incarcerated in the name of not being 'cruel and unusual' you have in fact incentivized crime, not deterred it.

At the end of the day, most people in our society would consider living like the rich of ~1780 to constitute cruel and unusual punishment and have changed their ideas of 'cruel and unusual' in similar proportion. I believe it clear that the prohibition on 'cruel and unusual' was a much narrower thing that it is now considered, and that they are entirely different qualities than living a harsh existence. I find it clear that the intent is that the staff constitutionally are not to bring their Marquis de Sade home entertainment sets to work, not to suggest that life behind bars should be pleasant.

3. Transitioning into effective deterrent, in order for any punishment to be a deterrent, the first requirement is that there must be a reasonable probability that it will in fact be applied. When I started work for the DOC, the training staff put forth a highly spurious argument that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime because it is on the books and there is still crime. The bottom line, although I can't remember the actual number 20 years later, is that a murderer who acts in the absence of an audience (as opposed to opening fire in a crowded environment full of witnesses) has a single-digit chance of being identified, a relatively small chance of the prosecution developing enough of a case to bring charges, a single-digit chance of being sentenced to death, and practically no chance of being executed before either receiving a modification to the sentence or dying of old age. This is about as much a deterrent as the possibility that Scotty might beam Darth Vader down as I finish committing the crime to telekinetically choke me to death.

4. As for the insane, you have some very good points. The first problem is that in practice, those same people have been relocated from the state hospitals which have been closed down to the prison up the street. The only differences in practice is that they are being treated as criminals rather than patients and do not receive the specialized care that one would expect from a mental institution. I do not believe that in most cases it is possible to preemptively identify these people or sort out, barring examples from the extreme ends of the continuum of mental soundness (or lack thereof), those who are definitely dangerous from those who are not. This brings us back to the point that justice in most all forms congruent with a free society is reactive in nature given that it is not possible to proactively impose 'justice' (i.e., punishing pre-crime) without severely abusing the rights of all upright members of the society.

5. The prevailing trend of increasingly harsh law enforcement in general society backed up with increasingly soft treatment under incarceration is a dangerous combination which is doing much harm. Frankly, it leads me to the conclusion that the reason we have this problem and are having this discussion is that those in positions to influence the outcome need crime as the justification to attack our rights and sure as hell don't need the system to actually stand as a deterrent.

6. If we want to solve the problem, as with many of our present problems, a very good start would be to look at times in our history in which those issues were not the problems they now are. No, we have never been free of crime, but there were times in which the volume of crime was much lower and the severity of crime was much less intense. There was a time when most people didn't lock their doors at night and yet did not live in fear of crime. If you did find yourself on the receiving end of crime, generally someone stole something. In most cases, you didn't have to worry about them backing a truck up to your door, emptying the house, killing you, raping your wife and children, and probably killing them on the way out. We didn't have people walking into theaters or churches and opening fire on the occupants. Even the most coarse of reprobates generally respected clean living even if they did not choose to participate in it themselves. I would break it down something like this:

6a. John Adams remarked that our system of government was suitable only for a religious people. Before the bricks start flying, let me clarify my thoughts here. You cannot have freedom in a society in which the people will act unacceptably in the absence of a law against everything conceivably possible that a person can do wrong. In order for freedom to work, you need a society which is largely self-regulating, and Adams raised the standard condition of the day which established self-regulation. I have noticed that the more this quality is demonized by the 'enlightened' minds and rejected by the younger generations, the worse off we get. I am not going to start a religion/different religion/no religion argument, but the trend is what it is. The less general respect we have for clean living, the worse off we get.

6b. Once again, 'cruel and unusual' was understood to have a much different meaning in generations past which did NOT prohibit incarceration from being a harsh mode of living. On a separate note, I will say that the above-mentioned example of inmates being buggered by their 7 foot tall cellmate is not an acceptable situation and prevention, well, varies.

6c. In generations past, we had a stronger sense of concern for honoring the rights of citizens and did not have the incessant drone about coddling criminals. Just as with the example of the child and the cookie jar, we need to have actual punishment, not merely separation from something that is not as good as the alternative anyway. When a criminal can have his crime rewarded with an increase in his standard of living, there is no deterrent. We need to return to placing emphasis on the well-being of those who are on the receiving end of crime rather than those who are committing the crime. There needs to be sufficient attention paid to the rights duly retained even by criminals, but it is not acceptable that the rights of the criminal trump the rights of the victim.

6d. We need to eliminate the prevailing trend of warehousing and worse yet releasing people who need to be liquidated.

6e. Last and most important, we need to end the persecution of those who see to their own safety and security. Yes, we need to be vigilant regarding cases of someone 'defending' himself from something the perpetrator did last week, but then again, if the system made some convincing pretense of working, this would not be an issue. That said, just like the prison staff who make life miserable for those who are not dangerous and allow the worst and most dangerous to run the place, the system makes life a living hell for those who are generally lawful and find themselves in need of taking care of business because they are a better source of revenue than most criminals and they are less likely to push back in violent fashion. If citizens are persecuted for the low probability of pushing back, one or the other of those conditions needs to change.\

6f. In order to return to the conditions in which our society functioned better, a necessary element is the removal of traitors and other domestic enemies from positions of public trust and authority since they are clearly untrustworthy, should not be allowed to have any authority whatsoever, and are the primary problem.

7. After such a time when we manage to return to our roots, violation of the oath of office for anyone under such an oath should be made a capital offense. As it is, that oath in enforced by little more than the honor of those taking it. The honor of the dishonorable doesn't count for much! By contrast, the threat of a rope around the neck if one violates that oath would count for much more. Once we get to this point, it will amaze most people how many of our problems they will find to be wholly contrived and magically disappeared. After we get rid of the people who profit financially and politically from our misfortunes, common criminals will be a relatively easy issue to address.

 

[steveh_131]

I thought she was kinda funny. I wish she would have stuck to being funny.

 

[jmpupillo]

Amy Shumer is only funny in the most disgusting way(s) possible. She is practically a whore (both literally and figuratively) for shock effect and attention. Don't get me wrong I think its funny, but good Lord, there are limits to that form of comedy.

And now suddenly she a moral person. Give me a break. How the hell can anyone take her seriously?

 

[oldpink]

Why waste so much time with an unfunny anti-gun bimbo when there are some other comedians out there who are genuinely funny without making you hate them when they start babbling after their standups?
Jeff Foxworthy and Jim Gaffigan for G-rated to PG-rated.
I still think Chappelle is awesome for PG-13 to R-rated.
Stanhope for anyone willing to deal with brutally honest and damn raw language.

 

[Joe G]

4. You hit pay dirt regarding false accusations. This also includes the actions of public officials who perform their jobs as an extension of their personal narratives rather than objective fact. For example, because Vermillion County has a public official who categorically dismisses the possibility that a woman can be guilty of domestic abuse, my brother is taking a long, long series of court-mandated 'anger management' classes because his ex-wife hit him and my nephew while he tried to shield my nephew (while she walked away with official sympathy). I would say that to some extent he brought his grief on himself marrying someone who is batsh*t crazy, but that doesn't excuse the official position that he is automatically at fault by virtue of having a Y chromosome.

Sounds a lot like when they say non-caucasians can't be racist.

 

[Gunner72]

This is news to me. I never thought she was real funny either. Tried one of her shows on DVD a couple of weeks ago and couldn't get through it. It was one of the stupidest things I have seen. She was doing comedy skit about eating sh!? Now I know that's all that comes out of her mouth anyway.

 

[Indyhd]

Someone actually thinks Jim Gaffigan is funny ?

IndyDave...very insightful post. I have often said the same about our prison system. They need to be so bad nobody would EVER want to go back.

 

[Leadeye]

I'd much rather watch Christina Hendricks jumping rope.

 

[hoosierdaddy1976]

I'd much rather watch Christina Hendricks jumping rope.

Well no ****!

 

[actaeon277]

Amy Schumer Increases Personal Security While Pushing Gun Control for Americans - Breitbart

“Do you have increased security at your shows now because of it?” Dunham asked. “Because people are so f**king nuts.”
“Yes. Security is up,” Schumer replied. “I’m really trying to protect myself. I am not being an idiot.”