NightSG

More to the point, if you assume there's not a civilization there, (and thus the land is available for the taking) how would you keep every kid tired of his parents' way of doing things from setting out to find his fortune there? Look at the millions of Americans who took advantage of the various Homestead Acts and left the only civilization they knew to get 160 acres of their own hundreds of miles away in the middle of nowhere.

Now, don't go putting logic into it; next you'll be questioning how D&C 58:26-29 is supposed to square with the "not my calling" culture.

How many school shootings were there prior to 1968? Until then, anybody with $80 could mail order a Garand or an M1 Carbine with no restrictions. Seems the more legal restrictions that are put in place, the worse the problem gets.

Used to work in a couple different machining facilities where the occasional custom parts got made (legally) after hours. As for ammo, that was a long discussion on what could be done once the ammo runs out in a survival situation. Never tried to make primers, though. The short version is that anyone who wants a gun badly enough and isn't concerned with legalities will get one, no matter what the law says.

Asked a friend about how he handles such things as a Baptist minister. He said they have a general request for volunteers. If they don't get any, then he does it and uses the time to think about why he's not instilling enough of a service-oriented mentality in his congregation. I know many churches have a half dozen people who volunteer for everything, a couple dozen more who volunteer for several things every year, and a few more who always volunteer for specific things. And that's fine; everything gets done, and if those half dozen are working harder than anyone else, it's by their own request, with no pressure from anyone else. This. People can only be invalidated for so long before they either remove themselves from the situation or develop defense mechanisms that are often worse than just leaving.

Or ever. I guarantee you within a couple hours of asking around (and without mentioning guns) I can find someone with everything I'd need to make a submachine gun along the lines of a German MP 3008 (suppressor adds an hour or two, but not much technical difficulty) sitting in their garage. Probably several people, though really, I could manage most of the process with common hand tools. Rifling the barrel is a pain, but not necessary if you're just planning to use it to sweep crowds at close range. Reliable, accurate weapons are far more of a concern when you're trying to defend yourself and others without harming innocent bystanders than if you're just going for maximum body count in an officer-assisted suicide. Ammo? I've got a couple big Rubbermaid containers of 9mm brass in storage, and probably a brick of small pistol primers. Lead is easy enough. Powder is simple; for a pretty much single-use gun, black powder is perfectly functional. (Actually, I tried several semiauto pistols with BP loads out of curiosity, and even the fairly picky Beretta only started jamming after about 40 shots. The 1911 ran fine until I was out of ammo.) Stable primers can be tricky, but small rifle primers can be used as long as the firing pin spring is strong enough, and mercury fulminate isn't rocket science. If someone is violent and suicidal, you're not going to stop them without superior firepower and good tactics. The only good solution is to keep them from getting to that point, but modern society promotes the mentalities that lead to that situation.

For modern "students," it is; they can't handle the language. Too many of them are getting out of high school barely able to comprehend simple, concise English, so the KJV looks as odd to them as Chaucer does to us. Short of re-educating them from about second grade on, a more simplified Bible is about the only way they're going to understand it. Something like this, maybe: http://babylonbee.com/news/tldr-edition-66-books-bible/

Except for nearly a century of Linotype being the standard, that your dad's employer apparently didn't notice. His job was being done by machines before Idaho was a state.

Yeah, good taste is like that. Especially on F&T Sunday.

What will become of the Department of Candles?

And that's an armed insurgency where any collateral damage is definitely not to innocent Americans trying to go about their daily lives. Right. Start rolling artillery down Main Street, and watch what happens to public opinion.

No, but the more armed defenders there are distributed throughout the campus, the better the odds of one of them having a clean shot early in the incident. One of the first things that becomes apparent when you're the lone security officer on a huge site is that it wouldn't be any effort at all for a potential intruder to track your movements, and plan to enter when you're as far from the initial incident as possible. Depending on communications, that could mean a 3+ minute response time. I know we've run drills at the range to show how many times a typical shooter can fire well aimed shots and reload in three minutes; suffice it to say I could empty three 18-round magazines, two 32-round extended mags, holster the 9mm, run through a full cylinder and three speedloaders in the .357, and still have time left to manually load another 5 .357s before the "fast backup response time" buzzer. That's 144 aimed shots, and I probably could have doubled it if I'd had more mags.

Nope, but that Constitution might do something about the men needed to drive that tank: AFAIK, the first line of each branch's oath of enlistment is strictly to defend the Constitution: the orders of the President and one's superiors come after that. Given that, even if the majority did follow an order in direct violation of the Second Amendment, they're virtually guaranteed to have a large percentage only appearing to follow the order, while waiting for the most opportune moment to undermine that effort. Plus there are a lot of veterans among the NRA membership with more and dirtier combat experience than most currently serving. Plenty who'd take their chances defending the Constitution one last time, too. Then, there's a lot of local LE that wouldn't go along with a gun confiscation. They know the territory and the people in it, and some of them have access to the sort of things that will stop a Bradley just fine. A few more would likely join up the first time some fool made the mistake of lighting off a burst of 25mm from the Bradley at a "potential threat" and causing even the slightest collateral damage. Remember, this is the information age; unless you can come up with the manpower to hit every gun owner at the same time, everybody not in the first wave is going to have time to load up, hole up and make themselves very costly targets.

Argyle ISD made the news back in 2014 with this: Medina ISD put up similar signs last year, and at least a few other Texas districts have quietly allowed teachers and administrators to be armed.

It's uncomfortable at first, but I have to say that - purely as an instructional tool - it can be quite productive. Both learning what your partner should see and feel from you, and (in my case) learning to lead a partner who was 6'6" came in handy later. (Though so far the tallest woman I've had on a dance floor was 6'2". I know one who's 6'0", but likes to wear 4-6" heels, so I may try to drag her to a dance someday.) Of course, I also consider aikido and judo instruction to be useful on the dance floor. (Part of it is learning to make someone step where you want them to step through gentle control of their balance, which comes in handy with some dance partners.)

Only if you do it right.

You're missing the other side of it; while the girls should be taught that it's one dance, not a marriage proposal, the boys also need to learn to ask properly, which they won't if the girls are required to say yes.

I tried not judging my bishop, until I stopped by once and caught him digging a pit for his neighbor. The Scriptures are quite clear on that, and there's no exception for the neighbors' septic needs.

You never know. Had a situation where her ex had apparently spent a fair amount of money investigating...a guy who has a name marginally similar to mine. Only other similarity was I'd run for city council the same year the other guy ran for county commissioner. After that, I'm pretty sure he could have sent her video of me setting fire to a busload of pregnant nuns and she would have ignored it.

Use binary and you can get to 1023 on your fingers.

Hardcore alcoholics, aside from driving and whatever they do to finance their addiction, tend to keep it to places where they can drink heavily; bars, liquor stores and home. The beyond morbidly obese, OTOH, insist on being accommodated everywhere.

If you've got a few evenings to spare, this is a very interesting lecture series on the origins of a good bit of the New Testament. I couldn't get the audio-only download to work, but for the most part you'll catch nearly everything just from listening: https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

...and lo, Peter did know that it was time to lay off the greasy foods right before bedtime, that his dreams might be dramatically less screwed up.

Hmmm...well, His car wouldn't break down, and if He ran off the road, He'd just move the road to where He's going. So, better than some of my relatives, at least.

Are you sure? I know Texas has the "declaration of informal marriage" that's filed the same way as a marriage license would be, (and effectively meaningless; the marriage is presumed effective, and therefore legal, from whatever time you represent yourself to others as married, so the declaration just gets it on file with the state) but I've dealt with folks from other states where the common law marriage was recognized, and couldn't actually be formalized without dissolving it first. That's a bit of a problem since the process usually involves separating for some period and/or a formal divorce process: if the couple has kids, that's a big mess for everybody just to satisfy the Church's paperwork requirements.