Damn, some people are really mad in this thread Thanks for making the fear and loathing quotient, oh rep warriors! Got anything to actually say about your anger?
Pathetic. There will never cease to be a black market for guns in any country. How is this proof that the US mass shooting rate is acceptable? Please post the figures for mass shootings in Turkey in comparison to the US....assuming you can?
Here's an example: a week or so ago one of my son's friendswas a victim of armed robbery. He left the bar downtown and had to pass through "the hood" on the way home, driving his car and stopped for gas. He went into the store to prepay for his gas, came out and a car rolled up with the window rolled down and a gun pointed at him and the driver said said "don't say a word - give me your money or I'll shoot you dead." He responded in a way atypical of my genetic line - he coughed up some cash. Anyone in my family would have immediately sprinted back into the convenience store., dived over the counter, and ditched the car keys and wallet. Then, stood up in plain view of the security cameras. This is the basic "fuck you - kill me then...but you won't get my money or car!" approach. Die on your feet or live on your knees IMO. But I digress: no fucking gun laws in the world would prevent these two hood rats from getting a gun and committing armed robbery. This wasn't their first time, and it wasn't their last. They are smart though - anyone coming out of downtown was at the bars, and will have money. They will also have been drinking - so they can't report the robbery, because when the cops show up the robbery victim will given the drunk test. And the only description of the robbers will be "two young black guys"which narrows it down to about 10,000 suspects. But technically this wasn't a "homicide" because the guy gave up his wallet. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, it could have ended that way. So how again will limiting the rights of people who do not commit armed robbery prevent an armed robbery such as I described? Show your work.
Gun laws can make it extremely hard for those thugs to get guns. Hell, the re ent 'mass shooter' in Germany couldn't get his hands on a real gun with live ammunition even after almost three years of preparation. It will never be impossible to get a gun illegally, but the difference between legal and illegal is enormous.
Germany has spent the last 80 years making sure nobody had a gun, and they hardly had any to start with. The US has enough guns circulating illegally to keep the robbers armed for the next thousand years.
Getting back to Islam: “When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane, not in all things, but in religious matters. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic — for that is a part of his insanity and the evidence of it.” – Mark Twain Which leads me to the ISIS convictions in the Twin Cities On June 3, a Minnesota jury returned guilty verdicts against three Somali-Americans who disputed the ISIS-related terrorism charges brought against them by the office of United States Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger. Ten defendants were initially charged, but six had already pleaded guilty by the time the trial started. The Minnesota trial represents the largest such case ever brought in the United States, yet the news it generated has been obscured by the June 12 Orlando massacre. He then recounts some of the insane things occurring around the trial, and then talks about the defendants. They are all first- or second-generation Somalis who appear to be talented and resourceful young men. They had social lives centered on local mosques. They are all observant Muslims and supplemented their education with Islamic studies. They wanted to live under the caliphate declared by ISIS. They yearned to wage jihad and to die as Islamic martyrs. The group comes from Minnesota’s large Somali immigrant population, officially estimated at 40,000. The true number must be closer to 140,000. The United States attorney himself has used an unofficial estimate of 100,000 in an agreement he entered into with Somali community leaders. If Minnesota’s Somalians were a city, they would be Minnesota’s third-largest, after Minneapolis and St. Paul. For the life of me I have no idea why we let in so many Somalis. The only thing they're famous for is piracy, starving each other en mass, and killing Americans.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner. The sheer number of guns in the US ensures that anybody, anywhere, anytime can get a gun. 99 percent of these people will not commit a crime with the gun they procure. 1 percent will commit crimes. So can some math wizard (I suck at math, and it's not allowed in the Red Room) explain how taking the guns from the 99 will stop the 1 from shoving a gun in my face? Owning guns has always been a "class" thing in Europe. Every activity in Europe is exclusive versus inclusive.You have to have money, take a class, be part of the upper class, etc. to enjoy almost every recreational activity in Europe. I lived there, folks. You have to take classes and pass a test to go fucking fishing - Huck Finn would have been ass out of a job in Germany. The rights to hunting and shooting are echelons above sainthood to achieve in that place. Japan and almost all of Asia are the same. It's apples & oranges really.
So you're saying there are enough guns in the US that gun control could not seriously infringe on even the most extreme interpretation of the Second Amendment?
Oh, the gun buy backs are useful. People turn in rusted out shotguns and .22 rifles for a fixed amount of cash which they put towards better guns.
I actually saw some Turkish people I know saying roughly this on Facebook. They'd be more concerned if their country wasn't getting attacked.
http://lawofficer.com/2016/06/attorney-general-fight-terror-with-love/ We are all really just over thinking the whole terror thing. Loretta Lynch instructed us to just love more! Have you hugged a terrorist today? I know, kind of hard unless you have long arms to get around that pesky suicide vest. Anyway is it just me or does the pic in the article make her look like a female Al Sharpton? Hand that woman a bullhorn!
You have that reversed. We have to concern ourselves with the ones who are terrorist and those who aid and abet them. which if you count the Pew study, is no small number when you factor in the overall size of the general Muslim population globally.
How large is the terrorist element of that grater 1.9 billion population though. Is it 1/10th of 1 percent? Something that size while very small in terms of the overall population, is still quite a large number of potential bad actors. It might make you feel better to believe that statistically, those numbers are insignificant, but they are not. You make the mistake of believing that a hard appraisal of the terrorist threat, their size, and their support base is a complete condemnation of the entire Muslim population. It is not. One can separate how you view the terrorist element from how you view the greater Muslim population, no?
No. (You might be ignoring the term 'seriously', but really who knows, since all you're giving me to work with are ominous but false statements.)
(1) You have now completely switched the topic. We were discussing whether that minuscule minority gets to define what Islam is, not if they are dangerous. Of course terrorists are dangerous; they are just as dangerous if they are terrorists for other causes. But if Islam is an incredibly bad predictor for terrorism, then we shouldn't connect those two concepts in our mind. (2) As pointed out above, a -- very high -- upper limit is not 1/10th of 1 percent, as you suggest, but a probably much-too-high maximum of .00006%. That's the question. If you have to ask, as you just did, why we shouldn't believe the tiny terrorist minority's claims about Islam, then apparently you can't. But you should.
Or for the Bayesially challenged, that means that if you hear a person is Muslim, you should bet on that person being a terrorist in 0,0000249% of all cases. This is, once again, about two orders of magnitude smaller than the bets that a person who is recognized as a US citizen is a rapist.
Um, your math is nuts. ISIS has perhaps 50,000 members, with probably twice that supporting them. Then you have tens of thousands of members of various African terrorist organization, tens of thousands in Hamas, tens of thousands in Hezbollah, tens of thousands in the Talian. Tens of thousands in various Iranian terrorist units. And of course there's Al Qaeda. And that's just the fighting age males. And as we've seen in Orlando, lots of other Muslims have no problem helping them. So it's closer to 0.1% in terrorist organizations, and according to a wide variety of polling they have the support of a whole lot of other Muslims because they're carrying out the commands of Allah.
Palestinians, etc: the number of people bearing arms and able to participate in combat in the Qassam Brigades, alone, may be as high as 25,000. Similar numbers would be distributed among the Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the National Resistance Brigades, the military wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Mujahideen Brigades, which broke away from Fatah, and other smaller paramilitary groups." So over 100,000 of those. ISIS: The Department of Defense estimated on Wednesday that the Islamic State currently has 20,000 to 30,000 members in Iraq and Syria, which means the jihadist group that controls swaths of land in both countries has suffered no appreciable net loss of fighters since President Obama first ordered U.S. airstrikes in August 2014. And the DoD is under White House pressure to low ball their estimates, just as they do with the Taliban: On Jan 3, 2011, an unnamed NATO official in Brussels said there were "up to 25,000" Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, according to a Jan. 6 story by Associated Press reporter Slobodan Lekic. The same 25,000 figure - the mid-point in the 2009 estimate - had been provided earlier by "several military officers and diplomats", according to the Lekic story. So we're already up to 150,000 fighters in only three conflict areas.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/worl...nbul-airport-massacre-mastermind-human-rights This just keeps getting better. The Chechen terrorist who was the mastermind of the airport in Turkey is wanted in Russia for terrorism related offenses and has also been arrested in Ukraine on terrorism charges but was ordered released by EU courts on the fear he might not get a fair trail in Russia. He also was accepted as a refugee in Austria. So we have a known terrorist wanted in multiple countries even before his most recent attack in Turkey yet he still gets in the EU as a refugee. Just wonderful.
