What on earth are you talking about? We know who and what he was speaking to. It's been turned into something out of a James Bond movie by people with imagination and too much time on their hands. We were involved in a cold war against communism that was dedicated, in its principles, to removing us and ending Western democracy.
Oh, sure. Absolutely. But they aren't "laws" they're ideas, at this point.
I think the problem is twofold: first, I haven't heard what you'd do to impact the problem that would be different a year from now. Secondly, you have this notion about what's permissible that contradicts your premise that the right should be unfettered (unlike any other right).
That's nonsense. Laws are behavior bans. Anarchy isn't the solution.
No, I see it rationally. You just limited what Nihilo, who believes the Court was clear on what a man can possess, a weapon of war among soldiers, is permitted to own and keep. Once you do that the only difference between you and me is what we're willing to consider and how we're willing to limit.
The point being they are ideas for laws. This isn't a problem that can be solved by trying to imagine every situation and picking the ones to ban. This problem can only be solved by enforcing principles.
Okay. The idea being to find ways to make incidents like Vegas and other mass shootings that happen here, along with making accidental deaths and injury, less frequent. So there's a range of considerations. That's why I've suggested mandatory safety courses, registration, large clip and bump stock bans, etc.
Like saying car safety isn't about imagining what could happen and trying to do something about those incidents. Sometimes a prohibition is a good idea, as with prohibiting the sale of cars without seatbelts, or stopping people from owning RPGs, bazookas, and machineguns. Sometimes it can be about process, as with safety courses.
Everyone is speaking to principle, but that said, such as? What, particularly, would be done differently if you were setting policy? What are your ideas along that line?
No, the words don't lose meaning. What stops is the notion of an absolute right without any other consideration. Right doesn't exist in a vacuum. That doesn't make the fettered or encumbered or right are somehow rendered meaningless. Their use simply describes the actual relationship between the ideas and the application, what necessarily happens as we exercise right.
Already on the books. So if your suggestions are going to boil down to a fuzzy defense of the indefensible status quo you're not really a party to the conversation. That isn't working.
Okay, that is fine. You can call me a conspiracy theorist, if that is the label applied to one who questions things that don't add up. I openly do not accept the story prompted by the government on the Kennedy Assassination. I have a random theory of conspiracy on a couple high profile cases (None of which involve government cover up or anything of that nature; the only cover up that appears most likely is the JFK Assassination).
Your links will be below. Also, your note on the natural evolution of the investigative process does not account for conflicting numbers of guns and casualties. Such things should be set and unchanging. Yet, that is not the case.
Okay, let us use this article as an example. Paddock had incendiary rounds. Where in this article does it provide the source for the claim that a tank was indeed hit? This is basic journalism.
I actually waited over a week post the shooting to begin looking into it. I do this with any inflammatory story or event. Why? Because in today's media, the reporters just push out information, true or false, in order to be the first to sway opinion a certain way. Thus, I just wait for the stories to die down, then I gather information that is considered reputable and closest to fact. We unfortunately live in a decade of false news, where media pushes agendas rather than actual facts and news. (Not taking Trump's side here, as he also does the same thing)
Interesting points you bring up. So, this Paddock amassed over 50 weapons, and never gained any experience firing them? As well as various ammunition. Sure, someone can purchase a gun and some various ammo, and never fire them. But the number of guns claimed to be possessed by Paddock should indicate a "gun nut," who should have had some degree of experience in firing said guns.
Right, because there is no evidence of media pushing agendas, is there.
I don't have an alternate. I am only pointing to facts and evidence not adding up.
Gotcha. I had no idea what shooting you were expressly referring to, so I just assumed it was a generalization based on several shootings.
Allow us to examine various issues though. He had 23 guns with him in his room, right? Why do the pictures show much less than that?
The way to do it is to give people freedom. Any situational laws, like those you are proposing, are not really a range of possibilities but merely different aspects of a single idea. That idea, as Hayek would put it, is the road to serfdom. But you can call it the partial list of the police state.
It's all the same road. You'll just add to the list for the next Paddock. You tell me, where does this list end? Will you finally say when the next next next Paddock happens that you've found the key behavior that fixes the Paddock problem?
Remove all laws that are currently on the books, and replace them with 3 general laws:
But you've said you aren't comfortable with RPGs in the hands of people. That's freedom.
Define that for me. How does a "situational law" differ from any other law?
What makes you think the law is about a range of possibilities? How is that different from any law aimed at a particular outcome?
And yet we've had those sorts of laws or fetters if you like from the beginning of our compact and we're still not serfs. A few hundred years of them and we have women and minorities added to the list of free peoples within our compact.
If necessary, sure. That's what you do when you try something and it doesn't quite work. You don't leave the square wheels on the chariot.
When the cost/benefit finds a balance society can live with (either).
I don't know. Maybe he wasn't as smart as you think, or maybe crazy would have undone him, the way many a terrorist is undone trying to access illegal markets they don't have personal inroads into. What I do know with dread certainty is that left unchanged the recipe for another incident like that is sitting on the kitchen table.
See, you're doing it again. You can't say law is the problem then keep a few laws, that freedom is the solution and keep a few bars. As with your bazooka problem, on some level you have to know you're arguing against yourself.
We don't make laws because or only when we believe everyone will obey them.
What frequently makes lunatics happy is the death and maiming of other people they don't on some fundamental level recognize as having a fully vested humanity that they believe they possess.
People are free to defend themselves and don't have to wait to do it. That's not what the conversation is about. It's about the limits of what's reasonable as an implement of self-defense, when we move from that to a place where all we really do is jeopardize more people, making all of us less safe and, presumably, less happy.
No, my way is rational and leads to people trained to be less likely to kill or maim themselves or others, possessing weapons that would be less likely to approach a Las Vegas total. It is the path of increased safety and the happiness attending it.
Self evidently untrue. Where there are better and stronger gun laws, those peoples/nations have demonstrably fewer murders. If that doesn't make you happier then by all means, take up smoking, cross against the light, and run with scissors down every available hallway.
No, that's not what defines a conspiracy theorist and I only noted your objections were hard to categorize otherwise. A conspiracy theorist is someone who creates an unreasonable reality from the appearance of reasonable parts, more often than not. Human beings are native geniuses with pattern recognition. It's built into us. It's why we see faces in wood panels and animals in clouds. And absent serious rational concentration, it's what produces from otherwise reasonable people, conspiracy theory, a hybrid between fact and wood panel, reasonable consideration and cloud animals.
Doesn't surprise me. It would be surprising if this one was the only one, but it almost never works out that way.
It depends on two things: the questions you're asking and your level of expertise in the particular. By way of example, as an attorney I frequently find people with wrong headed understandings of law, even regarding the principles and function of the court system. And I'm always happy to dispel notions that run contrary to the actual and help someone steer into a better grasp of any of that. A person who has been the victim of simple and understandable ignorance on a point or thing can't and shouldn't be chastised for it, unless they cling to that notion in the face of explanation by someone who doesn't have their lack. So if I have a misinformed medical opinion and my physician corrects me, I may (if I'm feeling stubborn) double check his correction with Web MD or the like, but when confirmed I'll conform my belief to reason and fact.
It really does. I even told you how and why. Initial reports take in a changing landscape of information. Some of it witness based, most of it witness based early on, more and more balanced by forensic evidence as the scenes are processed. I believe I noted one case I worked where no one was killed, but there was a lot of damage, different witnesses, involved and uninvolved in the direct circumstances. The testimony varied greatly, even in close proximity of the incident, which isn't unexpected. There are a number of perfectly innocent reasons for it. The value of the testimony is in agreement and in shoring up forensic evidence on the points considered, where there is a great deal of it to be considered.
Not true for the reasons given and illustrated prior and to a lesser extent above. Your resistance to the relatively easy explanation by someone with experience in taking depositions, examining and using witness testimony and empirical data tells me that your bias, tendency, conspiracy streak is running your show. At that point you stop being reasonable.
The article noted:
Yeah, that's largely not true. For the most part differing media outlets act as a system of checks and balances. There's always the margin, but on the whole reporters and the media do a good job of getting out a remarkable amount of information daily. People often mistake the glaring exception for the rule, but the court system has the same problem. You can search and find hundreds of alarming cases of miscarriage of justice and it seems alarming until you understand the volume of processing and how slim that illustration is.
I don't know what his proficiency was. Do you? I know he wasn't military. I know he had no experience shooting from his position, shooting with the adrenalin that had to be in play, with the fear of being found out too soon to complete his idea and the idea of escape (which evidence suggests he entertained) having fled with the firing of those 200+ rounds at the guard. He made unseasoned mistakes in a number of choices, thank God. He looks like a guy with money, opportunity, a degree of mental instability, and some notion of calculating for his fire.
I never said he had no experience. That's your pile of straw. I said something very different. I repeated a little of it just now.
Sometimes a field will catch fire. It's reasonable to take precautions against it. When you find yourself presuming the field, every field, is about to catch fire you've crossed a line into something else.
And you're wrong on that for the reasons given. That you resist with no other narrative presenting itself to your mind speaks to whatever it is that makes you someone prone to imaginative use of that pattern recognition. You should recognize that and take steps.
I don't know how many were in what part of the room. I don't know if they'd removed some of the weapons before a particular photo was shot or what angel covering what part of the room each photo expresses, and so on. Any number of relatively innocuous explanations.
Depends on the ejector. Likely below the window. Look at the photos of the place and see what's directly beneath it.
There's also very little of the window glass on the ground below. Why? Because there's an intervening surface below those windows.
We were talking about both/either.
we agree.
I am glad to find out you are an attorney. This indicates that you should be able to proceed logically. For the time, let us ignore a generalization that attorneys care more about success than truth. It will enable us to proceed with reason, rather than goals of "winning" our case.
Eye witness testimony is not what I am questioning. Do you not classify the published statements of police and investigators as separate from "eye witness testimony?"
Okay. Let us proceed with this. Give evidence of the expended brass. Provide a theory on the lack of guns in all the pictures. By your argument, if you cannot sustain your position with proof and theory, then you are letting bias run your claim.
Do not misdirect points on media bias into miscarriages of justice. Those are two very separate, and statistically different, topics.
You are right, you never said it. You just implied it.
Right. But neither of us has crossed that line. Unless, you are implying something without direct statement....
interesting, coming from an attorney. In court, you don't "prove" innocence or guilt; you simply convince parties of either doubt or affirmation of applied charges. Alternate narratives are not necessary for proving guilt or innocence.
So you admit that the number of guns present in the pictures does not align with the numbers we are told were present?
Right. So why the lack of brass? Why do none of the reports give the location of missing brass? Glass is mentioned, but not brass. Is this not reasonable lack of evidence in support of the number of shots fired?
In this context, it would be the freedom to defend one's self, not freedom from any laws.
Situational law creates a new law for each new situation. Law based on principle covers laws against certain behavior that would work, generally, in all countries and all time periods.
You'll never be able to tweak the bans to stop the next Paddocks until you have a police state.
You aren't being rational. The next Paddock will kill as many or more people by getting around your laws, and you put a lot of innocent people in legal trouble for having bump stocks and high capacity mags. And when that happens, you'll enact even more draconian laws, and even more innocent people will be in legal trouble. Have some mercy and avoid the road you are going down.
If you want to talk about crime rates as a population then that's a different topic. Let's get done with how to stop Paddocks first.
:noid:
Well there's a thing you don't hear that often.
Sure. I always do.
Isn't that like, "You're a [redacted], but let's put the petty aside for now." :chuckle:
Are you of the opinion that those are mutually exclusive? This isn't a case, it's a conversation. You appear alarmed and suspicious. I don't believe you have any reason to be, at least past a point (the point where you're given a reasonable alternative that doesn't require a conspiracy whose existence cannot be buttressed by any particular reason/motive).
It's responsible for a lot of what you heard early on, pre-forensic processing.
Early statements from police tend to be reflections of available testimony and preliminary forensics. They're only as reliable as the sources and, from time lines to brass, those can be as prone to movement and correction. That's why the best investigations are mum until the data is in and correlated. But in cases like this the public has a deep seated desire to understand and there's a degree of obligation to attempt to answer that desire.
I have no reason to suspect that happened. The two articles you noted, one day apart, agreed on the totals.
By accounts, including video, an awful lot of shots were fired. Guns that fire shells leave brass somewhere. In this case, the most likely somewhere would be amongst the glass caught on a ledge below the shooter's two positions.
I haven't seen an exhaustive photo layout of the room that would give you a clear picture of the various guns counted by the police. There are guns in the limited perspective photos released to the public.
I'm only assuming that the police are capable of counting and did so. There's no reason to believe they aren't and didn't.
It's a parallel illustration of a principle, not a confluence of the different lines. I don't believe you can make and you certainly hadn't prior to the declaration made the case against popular media on the whole. I noted the less cynical version of how that belief comes into being and why it is mistaken by using a parallel, miscarriages of justice. Given the imperfection of human beings and sufficient volume you can produce nearly any illustration you want, but you can't produce it as a rule unless it demonstrably is one.
It's certainly true that human beings have bias and that some outlets are tailored to serving it, but that argues against a larger, monolithic bias. Bias toward or against what? Bias writ large and if so by what empirical measurement, and so on.
Not sure what you mean in particular about the first. The second point was a matter of polling and as the election grew closer most of that polling indicated a shrinking gap. Clinton actually did prevail by millions of popular votes. The election turned on a few states and by remarkably thin margins, which is how you have a man win the presidency while losing the popular vote. How is that an illustration in support of bias?
I'll defend both this way: you have the straight news and then you have news programming that isn't trying to be that. Most of the lineup in a 24 hr. operation is going to be geared to draw in and capture the attention of a particular audience. It's a version of op/ed. It is up to people who tune in to realize that Hannity is an op/ed, not an objective word or view on world events, reported with an effort to remove a particular perspective from it.
I really didn't. I didn't have to believe that in order to make my point about why there's nothing really surprising about the number injured and killed by his efforts.
An assertion can be false. An assumption is at best mistaken, because it's not purporting to be the truth, only one potential explanation, in this case one aimed at your curious belief that there was something awry in the final tally of wounded and killed. From a shooter's perspective there really isn't for any number of reasons, most of which I set out in my last on the point, from darkness to distance, adrenaline to shifting positions, to wasting time trying to ignite fuel tanks, etc.
No, implying a lack of understanding or consideration of a number of points that readily answered on the point. I have a good friend who retired from the Marines as a Gunney. I asked him about the tally and if it surprised him. He said it didn't, but that it wouldn't have surprised him if there were double the fatalities either. His tick list was largely in line with mine and he added that a lot of luck is in play when you have people who lack muscle memory response to intensely stressful periods of time. He said that even when he was involved in an ambush situation where he had high ground and numbers, the stress was so intense that the first time he understood the reason for all the drilling he'd been put through and why they put him through it with the levels of stress added in.
I've already been pretty direct on the point. You appear invested in conspiracy, which is evidence in your repeated resistance to reasonable explanations and in line with your own admissions in terms of investing personally in conspiracy theory. I don't mean to be coy at all.
We aren't in a courtroom and I haven't suggested standards of proof, which change depending on the nature of the charge. I didn't use any of those terms or do more than note your resistance and apparent investment, as I do above.
Right, though in criminal defense it's a fairly common tactic and most investigations are vitally concerned with motive. The reason for noting it is simple, you appear to believe there's something odd in the narrative given by authority. You don't appear to be able to connect that suspicion to any reasonable narrative that encompasses motive, the thing that moves any real criminal conspiracy.
What people? The dead are dead. The killer is dead. Absent any reason and evidence to think otherwise only the truth is in the balance. I'm sure the ongoing investigation will provide more understanding in sum.
I don't note any attempt to stockpile or make a representation with the one or two pictures I've seen. Those don't encompass the entire room, running from window to window. I've seen a couple of limited angle shots with a few of the guns present in them from the total collected by police, according to their report, one you've given me no reason or motive to suspect.
What guns in what part of the process and moved by whose accounting?
I answered that before and above. You're assuming a lot of things needlessly.
Who said there was a lack of brass? Based on what evidence or testimony? Lack of brass directly below the window on the inside of the room? That's easy and I've spoken to it. Now a lot of brass might be in the room, depending on the ejector and the stance of the shooter. And that brass wouldn't be pooled around the gun. But my best guess is that most of it is among the glass below.
Why would they? Who is asking about the brass and why? Outside of a forensic accounting, I don't see the relevance.
How was glass mentioned in what you read? I mean particularly how. I'm sure the shots fired is a best guess estimate. Especially early. I don't see how they can have more than that.
Because I asked for accounts from authority with shifting numbers. The two media reports you gave me didn't do that and I don't watch YoutTube videos for news.
What misdirection? Witness reports constitute the early dominating part of the news cycle, because forensic evidence hasn't been fully processed and understood. I noted that and that you're going to get a wide and varying account using that lens. I also mentioned the value of it in points of agreement supported by forensic evidence. I'm explaining something to you that you don't appear to have much experience with to offer reason why your concerns, while initially understandable, shouldn't survive sustained inquiry. That's all I've been doing.
I'm assuming he's a witness to the event. I've spoken to the problem of relying on any one witness to an event.
