DukeNukeEm

A big place that is almost entirely populated has near infinite possibilities for travel. How many cities with 100,000 or more people are there within a day drive from Chicago? Rockford, Gary (NW Indiana), Aurora, Naperville, Milwaukee, Madison, Springfield, Peoria, Bloomington-Normal, Champaign-Urbana, Joliet, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Grand Rapids, Quad Cities. And from those places individually how many 100,000 pop cities are there within a days drive? Let's pick Indianapolis (and we wont even repeat cities from the first list): Evansville, Louisville, Lexington, Frankfort, Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Springfield OH, Toledo. So let's say you've gotta make a two stop trip from Chicago, there are 144 possible routes ONLY COUNTING MAJOR CITIES. And that is one sub region, of one region, of one half of the USA. Yea, I doubt trains or bicycles can cover those kinds of travel needs.

I said that they, oddly, have fewer restrictions on car making. Oddly, like you wouldn't figure it'd be that way over there. The UK is more of a police state than the USA. If you can get around London in any capacity without being caught by CCTV I'll give you a million dollars. It kinda confirms the slippery slope, I mean those cameras are there "for your protection."

I drive for a small-ish OTR carrier based in Oregon driving the lower 48. I won't say which because Reddy will email them. I've never fallen asleep, never been pulled over and have passed inspections at Banning, Cottonwood and this one scale in NJ which doesn't.have the reputation of the first two but is absolutely insane. I drive legal. If some drunk kills himself by driving into my tandems I go to jail if I'm not legal. I'm not about to risk it. Craziest story I have is when the convoy I was in got hit by a massive storm outside Vegas and the lead truck (who was dead heading) got picked up and thrown on its side. I was loaded to 78.5k lbs and the initial burst of wind pushed me all the way onto the shoulder. It was a rush.

Deal with what? One line of my post? And then, instead of agreeing that maybe manufacturer requirements don't work you turn into a raving maniac for UK idiocy. You said cars are made safer because if they weren't hordes of people would die, but elsewhere they don't have those laws and everything is fine. The UK also has speed cameras, want to copy that one? A nice $75 fine for going 5 over? Car insurance is also ludicrous over there, more than a car payment. And you can't honestly be advocating a VAT tax, you're warped and brainwashed but you aren't stupid enough to think that's a good idea. The USA is also made up of 50 states, many of which are much larger than Great Britain. So making cars insanely expensive to own is going to do some serious damage to the economy. But, as usual, were supposed to put up with it because SAVING LIVES IS GUD CHANGE HAS COME 2 AMERICA

If I were incompetent I'd be fired.

I drive 11 hours a day. And yes I do enjoy it. That said the entire maintenance of our roads is a crooked scheme of lazy workers and graft to the naked eye. They don't bother hiding it.

I giggle with anticipation of all these government workers actually having to get a real job without some criminal union protecting their incompetence. Welcome to the real world guys! You may have to work once and a while.

Its pretty simple, government's primary job is to protect its people's civil and property rights from enemies foreign and domestic. For foreign enemies you keep a military (federal) and for domestic enemies you have police (state/local). Yay, add in courts, mail, fire protrction and some large scale civil engineering projects (dams mostly) and that's it. That's the extent of the governments involvement in our lives. Personally I don't very much like police because they are intent on making my already difficult job more difficult but I understand they are something we do need

Yea I when I used to look out over my old hometown I'd hear about all the murdering but think "At least we can have guns in Chicago.' And you know what? I do love that feeling. To not love it means you're either a massive puss or you're so politically self conscious you refuse to indulge yourself in your own humanity. Are 50 or so dead people a year (on the very high side annually) out of 300 million worth the right for every American to enjoy it? I think yes. And I'm not even scratching the surface on the true intent of our 2A rights.

Police happen to be one of the handful of functions you need the government to perform. And the legislation and regulation that has set automakers back further and further has saved how many lives? Please, go pull out you crash statistics and tell me what ounce of good those BS laws have done other than force larger, heavier and less efficient cars onto the market. The UK, oddly has about 1/4 the regulations regarding car safety features but they have many fewer accidents and fatalities. Also, they basically hand out Class D licenses to anyone here, I spend 11 hours a day driving and I'll tell you the reason people get killed out there isn't because their car isn't safe. By the way you kinda slipped saying that people won't buy deathtraps and companies making them will go under. So why regulate them? I mean other than forcing companies who make safe machines to add some gizmo doesn't solve anything the market already takes care of. Still, after all this time you've never said at what point enough will be enough. An earlier post insinuated you think there will never be an end to this stomping on our rights in the name of safety. I think I know the answer as to why. You know there will always be human suffering. Something bad is always going to happen to someone and there's little reason to it. You've been sufficiently brainwashed by academia and the government to think this mechanism of human existence is preventable or at least mitigatable. So as long as there's suffering (and there always will be) there will be you, the loyal servant to the state who agrees that "Yes! Feeding the government massive sums of money will fix it!" And the problems will go unfixed, and we'll lose more of our freedoms, and they'll ask for more money because the first batch wasn't quite enough, and they'll get that money and eventually youll be mired in an existence of wage slavery--because you're much more useful to the state as a compliant serf than a free individual. And all the people that could stand up to it? Well you took their guns away. You could say this reality is all but upon us right now.

Its the great con of our times. Government promises they can solve something, they just need money. When they make no difference they say they needed more money. The state has no solution to mass shootings, they claim to when they ask for more money, stripping a large chunk of the population of their rights (the mentally I'll) and trying to finally get rid of those pesky guns.... but ultimately when they get everything they want nothing will change. Then they'll ask for more, and still nothing will change.

What are the consequences of leaving it up to people themselves to decide what is best for themselves? I think we should almost never even ask that question. Murder is illegal. Doesn't matter if you shoot, stab, beat, drunkenly run over, shove into railroad tracks or zap them with a laser... if something you did kills someone at the least its manslaughter and at most its murder. Both of those things are crimes. People will commit these crimes no matter what, and really the best defense you have against them is vigilance and preparedness; not the damn government. Banning stuff people use to kill each other is just redundant, and also prohibits people from exercising free will within the boundaries of the law. Everything that could possibly infringe on someones property rights or right to live has been made into a crime by law. Its been done, the government did its part to solve the problem by punishing people for doing it. That's the most they can do, what more are you expecting? What comes after guns? No more cars? Ban open flames? Ban garage door openers? You're chasing the magic dragon dude. And now I am going to say there's a slippery slope here. If you can say there's a societal benefit to prohibiting people from doing something, then there should also be a correlating similar benefit to forcing people to do something. "You, unit #2840987193, have been relegated to lifetime farm duty until the age of 60. Remember, if forcing you to do this work makes it so even one four year old gets to eat it was all worth it." Of course the four year old will grow up to meet the same fate as the man who was just forced into servititude because by the time.the four year old is eighteen there will be many four year olds who need saving. Hyperbolic example? For now, yes. But the point still stands that you're infinitely more concerned with saving people's lives than you are preserving a life worth living. Every time you pass a law that grants security you are stripping freedom, this is an intrinsic irrefutable law of legislation. So I'll ask this one more f***ing time before I just cement my assumption that you're a state worshipping shill who leads such a pathetic excuse for a personal life that you meekly grasp onto to your precious society because god help you if you ever had to do something for your own damn self... at what point do you say to yourself "enough laws have been passed and now I'd rather see the consequences of inaction rather than the consequences of action"?

Oh they'll come pouring out. You've yet to really address the argument I'm making about over-legislation though. You misidentified it (almost purposefully) as me saying were creating a slippery slope but the entire post revolved around how were well past that point and have started going full on nanny state through what are now sizeable increments. I just wonder what kind of freedom you think Americans should have? Not what you want to tell other people not to do (you do LOVE insinuating that you just know better), but what should we be allowed to be? Say? Own? Do?

CCW is undoubtedly what he's referring to, even if for the past 90 years now we've seen a steady erosion of the 2A for the sake of compromise. For now though America-hating government worshipers seem to be stopped dead in their tracks, finally gun rights people have woken up to the scheme and are unlikely to accept any "deal" from the bleeding hearts.

I don't think he was referring to that particular limitation of the first amendment, it was more along the lines of if you lock people up for saying hateful things about the government then you're going to have less people who hate the government out in society and fewer terror attacks. Lives saved? Sure. But at what cost? At what point do we realize that in the process of stupid-proofing our country by banning everything risky we've essentially sentenced all those lives saved (and those would were going to live anyways) to meaningless existence where deviating from a politically correct liberal norm is bound to break some kind of law. Don't even start to call this paranoia or me alluding to some grand conspiracy, because I'm not. There are too many laws in this country and entirely too many people who somehow think we need more. We've long since made all the necessary laws to protect the right to property, liberty and life; now were in this habit of confusing causation and correlation where we ban things that in and of themselves are harmless but when abused can lead to someone committing an act we already have a law against. We're basically on this legislative hunt to eradicate every trace of suffering in this country, something we'll never be successful at, and have willingly signed away freedom after freedom in that pursuit.

Balta, for your sake I'm going to quickly update you on where the gun debate is now. There's little serious doubt that banning guns would put a massive dent in homicides. The issue is whether we can even successfully legislate away all of our problems by banning stuff, and that even if we could would we really want to live in such a sterilized, controlled society. Or we could just accept that because we are allowed to do or own certain things we have to assume the risks of bad things happening because those rights. So no amount of university studies or statistics really affects the argument at all.

Is anyone even reading the part where I said "probably not open war or anything wild"?

like when a country with 7 million German immigrants went to war with Germany twice. Confrontation with China is a matter of when not if. We don't really need them and soon they won't really need us, once we cross that threshold and China becomes increasingly aggressive something will happen. Probably not open war or anything wild but I seriously doubt we'll be on good terms with China 10 years from now.

Yea but if you don't vote for the racist that makes you sexist.

At some point you're going to have to hold someone personally responsible for their actions, not blaming lead content.

Its an epidemic, it was bad before Zimmerman walked and now its getting worse.

How about just not spending all that money? Israel isn't our ally by the way, they've been causing more problems than they solve for a long time now.

OK, we have to stop thinking of war in terms of easy outcomes. Dropping $10m bombs out of $1b airplanes is always going to be expensive. I don't even know what it costs to empty the Sixth Fleet out of Naples into a holding pattern in the Med, much less start using it for war, but I cannot imagine it being cheap.

We party is what we do! No more sweating out what those loony toons will do next. The same applies to Israel by the way.

You don't actually believe the military when they say minimal collateral damage, do you? I mean its such a well known bold-faced lie I'm surprised the press report isn't in green. If Assad has one lick of brains he'll hide his good s*** in the middle of cities, naturally the rebels will do the same. The American military is lot known for giving a rats ass about civilians that are being used as human shields in those situations. Not that they should have to, you'd figure if we go out bombing we'd have reasons that compel us beyond making us feel good or enforcing international law by breaking it that would make those casualities acceptable.