unixknight

I can only address the part where you guys were discussing the NYT as an example of bias and use it to illustrate the problem. I agree that a site's article should be dismissed on the basis of its content and not necessarily its source, but at the same time it is reasonable to be suspicious about the reliability of a source when bias is blatant and obvious. If a site tends to be biased it's certainly a simple enough matter to find independent verification (or refutation) though other sources.

Guys, the bickering is getting comical. The New York Times is, for better or worse, an immensely influential paper in several ways. That said, the influence it has these days has diminished both because of competition with "new media" (e.g. Internet blogs, YouTube channels, Facebook, etc.) but also because it isn't well trusted anymore by people on the right wing. We seem to all agree that the NYT biases left, which suggests that the more to the left an individual is, the more they're likely to trust it. Shortly after the shooting, the NYT published a coupe of articles. One of them is highly critical of Trump, accusing him of using the shooting to push his Muslim-ban agenda. On the same day, the same paper praised Obama doing it to push gun control. Note that both of these articles are from the politics section, and neither is an editorial. So the bias is clear and obvious, and is sharply left. This means the NYT has no credibility with people on the Right. At the same time, it is still influential with those who either share that bias or who read it for its other content, where political bias is either irrelevant or minimal. Articles on the arts, non-political current events, etc. are still as important as ever, minus the audience lost to New Media. So IMHO both Gator and LeSellers are correct, depending on what, specifically, you're thinking of, but I think you guys have been talking past each other.

I said the issue with electric cars "is" and not what it "will be in late 2017."

forgot the quote

Whether or not they'll pay for themselves has everything to do with whether you have a place to recharge for free. In any case, that isn't why I said that. The issue with electric cars is, despite the Government's claims and marketing, the technology isn't mature enough to replace gasoline powered cars. My wife recently needed a new car and, as we were considering options, looked at some electric cars. The trouble with electric cars, besides cost, is twofold: 1) Range. No electric cars that we looked at could make a single one-way trip to my office from home in the event that I needed to use it, and that's assuming no unexpected problems like traffic or detours. Where I work has free electric car charging, but where I live doesn't. So even if I somehow got it to work, the battery wouldn't hold enough charge to get me home then back again for another recharge. 2) Availability of charging stations. Unless you have a charging station installed in your home you're going to need to rely on publicly available charging stations, and they aren't nearly as common as gas stations.

@Carborendum Just like electric cars.

It's really amazing at how all these social changes harm women but people still say it's conservatism that's misogynistic.

Am I the only one who's wondering whether this story (or the FBI's statements) is just an effort to take the heat off of radical Islam and re-cast the killer as a guy who just had his own internal issues?

I'd love for that to be the case, but Christianity remains the safer target for Leftist anger.

@LeSellers I use Duckduckgo too. The thing is, if Google is using your search history to tailor the results in some way, then a test comparing it to Bing and Yahoo isn't valid unless you use those search engines equally often to give them the same chance to build up a profile as Google had. Also, ideally they'd be doing it with a completely clean browser (so there's no local profile to work from) or using multiple machines used by different people. I'm just wondering if that's what they did.

Cool video. I wonder how much of that is a factor in the skewered pro-Clinton results these guys were finding on their Google searches. I guess a better methodology would have been to try the same search from different machines by different people.

They came up because the claim you're making is that this is about saving lives. If your intent is to save lives, and not about guns per se, then you're barking up the wrong tree.

Note: I'm not saying that Clinton is behind this. If this is happening, it's entirely on the Google folks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFxFRqNmXKg

Not many, considering the only people who use those are court-ordered because they already have a DUI conviction. Guns don't require the same level of safety features as a car because they're not nearly as complex. A car is a 3,000 lb. vehicle moving at 60 mph with thousands of individual parts, surrounded by similar devices all operated by people of varying levels of competence. Not exactly the same as a gun I can field strip in 15 seconds to its bare parts. Apples and oranges, my friend.

By arguing facts. People wet their pants over "assault rifles" but in an earlier post I showed data that proves they're used in only a minuscule portion of murders committed with guns. In light of that, it's hard to sound rational when claiming that banning them will somehow make a real difference. Compare the number of murders committed with guns in general and it's comparable to the number committed with bare hands and feet. If you want to keep the gun grabbers on the defensive where they belong, make them explain why they focus their attention on one category of tools that don't even make up the majority of murder weapons. Make them explain why they use "think of the children" as a rallying cry for gun control when more kids die each year in swimming pools and bicycle accidents than from guns. Demonstrate this:

@LeSellers It's always about semantics when dealing with people who make decisions emotionally. They see guns as inherently evil. A necessary evil, some may concede, but evil nevertheless. This is why they say things like "guns kill people." So, their logic is if guns kill, then they're evil and should be banned/severely restricted. We respond by reminding them that a gun is an inanimate object, and this doesn't kill anything because it isn't the agent making the decision. While this is true, the moment you engage in that debate you've lost. What you're doing by arguing against the notion that guns kill is you're tacitly admitting that if they DID kill, then banning them might be reasonable. From the gun grabber perspective, you've conceded their argument and are now just playing semantics to avoid admitting it. When I debate about gun control, I ignore that argument because the question of whether guns kill or not is irrelevant. What matters is A) is the fear of guns justified? (The data says it isn't) and B) Should people have the right to own these tools (The Constitution says we do.)

I agree with you here, but the problem is when getting bogged down in the debate over whether guns themselves kill, you're implicitly acknowledging that, if killing IS their purpose, they're therefore inherently bad things and that scores points for the gun grabbers' side.

I see a big issue with the way this debate is framed. People bandy about terms like "assault weapon" like that means something. It's a tactic because a phrase like that sounds scary, so it's easy to talk about "reasonable limits" on "assault weapons" but there's one problem... That term means NOTHING. It literally means nothing. Nowhere in any military or gun enthusiast document is the term "assault weapon" defined. It's a phrase that means a little something different to everybody, which is what makes it so valuable as a way of recruiting people to participate in the gun banning agenda... Just say "Let's ban assault weapons!" and that sounds perfectly reasonable, because it's easy to stigmatize someone who supports private ownership of military weapons. (Think of the children, people!!!) It's kinda like when people start screaming for a ban on fully automatic weapons... Tell you a secret, they're already banned unless you have an extremely expensive and difficult to obtain Federal collector's license. It's all rhetoric. In the '90s there was a Federal "assault weapons ban" which was just an arbitrary list of features on rifles that were restricted. For instance, a rifle couldn't be sold with more of the following 2 features: Pistol grip, flash suppressor, semi-automatic fire, ammo clip with a capacity greater than 5 rounds, etc. Any rifle that had more than 2 of these features would be considered an "assault rifle" for the purpose of this law and was thus banned. Also, imported rifles had to have a certain percentage of their parts made in the USA. During the time of this law being in effect, I owned 2 rifles that would be considered "assault rifles" had they had but one more of those features: An AR-15 .223 semi-automatic rifle with a 20" fluted barrel. It had no flash suppressor, so it wasn't an "assault rifle." It did have a pistol grip and 30 round magazines. It was just as effective as it would be with a flash suppressor, but since it didn't have that little feature it was perfectly legal. I also had a Maadi AKMR (civilian version of the AK-47) imported from Egypt. It had a single stock, no pistol grip, fired 7.62mm ammo and was semi-auto. It wasn't an "assault rifle" because it didn't have a pistol grip, even though there was an opening in the single piece stock so that you still held it exactly as you would if it had a pistol grip. I also bought a couple of 30 round magazines, made in the Czeck Republic, so technically every time I snapped one of those clips on, it became an "assault rifle" and thus illegal, even though it was exactly the same as if I'd bought U.S. made clips of the same capacity and performance. These laws were utterly arbitrary and made to make gun control enthusiasts happy. They expired in the early 2000s and the difference in the homicide rate in the U.S. changed not a whit for the law being in place.

Let's not get bogged down on hypertechnical definitions to prove whether guns are designed kill or not. The question we should be asking is whether or not it's reasonable to think that restricting peoples' access to them is an effective way of making society safer. The argument that less guns = less crime (or even that less <insert type of gun> = less crime) is an emotional argument based mostly on wishful thinking and Hollywood. If yuo look at the actual data (like the numbers I presented above) you'll see the reality, and that's a little different from the emotional assumptions.

I love these debates where someone shows a series of pictures of firearms to somehow make us feel the fear that would make us agree with them. Turns out, it doesn't work because guns aren't scary. They're hunks of metal and are only involved in bad things when a bad person has one. Also, the assault weapons ban was a meaningless law and does NOT need to be resurrected. The problem is that there isn't a clear need for such restrictions. Handguns are used in the vast majority of instances where people are killed. I mean VAST majority. In 2012: Handguns 6371 Rifles 322 Shotguns 303 Unspecified 1749 We ignore unspecified, since we can't account for the type. Weapons referred to as "assault weapons" fall under the category of rifles. As you can see, only about 5% of murders committed with firearms were done with rifles, and that includes simple hunting rifles. Barely more than shotguns. Also keep in mind that this only accounts for murders, not accidents or justified police shootings. In fact, in that same year 678 people were murdered with bare hands and/or feet. More than twice as many as were killed by these terrifying weapons. So why are we wasting time trying to ban "assault weapons" when we should be talking about hand control laws? So the amount of attention paid to "assault weapons" is a marketing tactic, not a legitimate issue. *I deliberately picked a left-leaning source so as to avoid any a ppearance of looking for numbers biased to my favor, but this is from England and the author seems to have confused Washington state with Washington DC, because they placed the location of the Navy Yard shootings in the State

Oh man, you're right! She's good...

@anatess2 That video made my day.

Yeah the media calls everything an AR-15.

Indeed we do, and it's nice, to be honest. If we all though the same these forums would just be a boring echo chamber. Our views don't mean anything if we never let them be challenged.

Let's play link tennis! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/08/14/military-veterans-see-deeply-flawed-police-response-in-ferguson/?tid=a_inl