... and I can make that complaint without being a hypocrite because I've opened less political threads than just about anyone who posts regularly on the CMB and they're generally non-controversial.




For the most part the problem is not guns, heck it isn't even violence. People want guns outlawed to decrease the murder rate. I say our goal is to decrease harm done without reasonable cause to other people, including limiting their freedoms and feelings of self-reliance, contorl over their own existence, and personal responsibility. We don't monitor who buys a camera for fear they'll invade someone's privacy, film it, and upload it to the web, and I'd bet that happens more often then shootings and is certainly an immoral and often criminal act, and hardly a minor one. This obsession with spree killers, a statistical hiccup even among murders, is to people like me trying to require camera specific ID stamps to every video or photo - easily circumvented, over-reactionary, and needlessly invasive.



No, you know I don't, but you've an emotional need to assume just about everyone who agrees with me does, in spite of the fact that it very obviously isn't true. It's like someone telling me that *I* am a rare exception to the alleged sexism, racism, and homophobia of the right. Or me proclaiming you a rare exception to the left's pagan mysticism about nature, fascist tendencies, and approval of infanticide. Difference being I recognize that those are rarer and more exaggerated than many on my side think and you operate under the assumption that these things describing your 'enemy' are Gospel.



Why do I have to admit that? Gun control was a major issue in the 90's but got pushed to the back burner after 9/11, if it's been brought up more very recently it is simply that the left feels emboldened by the recent elections. It has come up every time one of these spree killings happen.



I don't consider it 'just a given', I just haven't seen many suggestions from the left that look like they could achieve much useful without too high a cost. The right has proposed several possible partial solutions, these get rejected by the left on the same claim, the price is seen as either too high or counterproductive or both. As to the web tool, I think you're lying to yourself, its primary purpose is an attempt to appeal to people emotionally, personally I don't think it will be very effective, but that isn't my objection here. My objection is to you posting yet another political thread on guns. You're like A2K on his economy posts, you just won't accept that most of us feel over-saturated on the subject. There is a point on any given subject with an audience where virtually every member either has a view that realistically won't change, or simply refuses to read anymore on the subject for now because they feel harassed, or they feel they've absorbed enough for now and need time measured in months to contemplate and consider it. In the meantime the people who keep posting it force others of us to keep rebutting their comments or risk conversions from weariness or an apparent absence of reasoned counter-arguments encouraging someone to think there are none.

I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm asking you to lay off with the '... and another thing' threads.