posted March 29, 2008 05:58 PM            

quote:

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Some very heavy hitters there and so ends the F-ing argument as to what the founders meant when they debated and wrote the 2nd Amendment.

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Thanks again, jwhop.

All this reading has exhausted me today. I'm taking a break.

posted March 30, 2008 12:45 AM            

Yeah lets keep this amendment and let almost everyone of 11 million new yorkers carry them in buses, trains, schools, offices.

posted March 30, 2008 10:44 AM            

quote:

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The founding fathers wanted their children's children to study mathematics, science etc and their children... art, poetry etc sometimes in the future while they study politics. Every father wants to give their sons the freedom that they didn't have.....Mannu

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Americas freedom wasn't won or kept by those wielding artist sketch books, or those spouting Tennyson from books of poems or even by those engaging in mental masturbation as you do Mannu.

Americas freedom was won and kept by men with guns.

RICHARD HENRY LEE
"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." 1788 (Federal Farmer)

So, rather than disarming American citizens, let's add mandatory co-ed firearms and range instruction to school curriculums starting in the freshman year of high school and continuing through university.

posted March 30, 2008 11:06 AM            

I'm not going to pretend that your words do
not affect me. I'd rather hoped that we could argue with a profoundness of dialogue, but your reaction to my post was flared with a scent of misogyny and authoritarian dismissal that was not to my liking. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, though, but I should admit that I was when I read your first reaction.

You mentioned that you wish you could apply your spit on my eye so that I could see the same as you, right? Sorry if I misunderstand here, though I don't think I am confused, but you are of Indian descent, right? And you live in Jersey? If this is true then you would obviously understand how this could be taken as an insult. Is this some sort of custom in your culture or religion? I am asking seriously here because I've not heard of this from my own encounter with Indian culture.

quote:

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You missed my point your right cerebral that deals with creativity needs to be fixed. Your right brain is the woman in you and your left brain that man.

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Here, I understand your clarification though I find it hard to believe that this was the only meaning behind your first reply.

quote:

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Any how go back to your religion nosis and be contend with the dogmatic definitions of man , woman. Satan , God. And all other craps.

Lets continue our chat after you have done that.

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And with these words I find some offense again. Mannu, you should admit to yourself that you do not know me nor the quality of life that I live and even if you did know, that does not give you the right to be unjust in your judgment. I find it ironic that you tell me to "go back to [my] religion" and to be content with dogmatic definitions. I suppose if I practiced Bhakti Yoga, then you might be able to see the irony in that too.

As for my "mental defecation" comment, I will confess to the spiteful energy with which those words were charged. Do not confuse, however, that with harsh words comes a denial of brotherhood. I do not find that fighting a fair fight is a sin and I know, by my own accord, that one may fight with another without abandoning a love for that other.

The Second Amendment was written and is preserved as a last resort for the people of America to have a viable resource for their own defense. It does not require that everyone own a firearm. It only requires that the American people have access to firearms legally. Without this legal access, it would make it extremely difficult for the people of this country to stand a chance against an ominous, impending threat against our rights and values.

For example, consider the Civil War. Let's just pretend, if you will, that the roles of the Union and the Confederacy were reversed and that the states that were seceding from the Union were the proponents of the abolishment of slavery and the freedom of African-American slaves. Without the Second Amendment, the Civil War would have never happened (or it would've have been forgettable, at the most) and we might still have a slave-based industry to this day. Our forefathers knew of those unfortunate tragedies that would take place. Do you not think that they had tragedies of their own? What they believed in, above all, was a belief that was much stronger than their fears of the errors of which humanity is capable: A belief in the sovereignty of the individual.

Do I think guns are the only viable solution? No. But I am also not naive enough to believe that we have refined our human gifts of discourse and communication to the point of coming to sensible agreements and compromises. So...No, thank you. I will favor that the people of this country have the access that we need to present, at the least, a hopeful opposition against any possible danger.

Beyond any doubt, the message of abolishing a deeply-rooted freedom such as this is one of arrogant distrust and cynical blasphemy against the Spirit of the Individual. I would much rather hope and wait for the age when humanity will put their arms to rest willfully, and not act harshly towards the creation of a world that has crushed this Spirit.

posted March 30, 2008 11:08 AM            

Past = Left brain.
Future = Right brain.

And right now I am talking from a predominantly right brain.

Every thing appears in existence in its own time. I don't wanna rush people in to my pattern of thoughts. Was fun discussing this thread.

Sigh...I will go in to silence.

posted March 30, 2008 11:39 AM            

quote:

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Jwhop - All that is past. Check your calendars today. the year is 2008..Mannu

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"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Perhaps or perhaps even probably Mannu, you are one whom cannot learn those lessons from history; for all of history records that citizens have more to fear from their own governments than from any invader.

I understand your oblique attacks on the concept of private ownership of firearms and especially your last comment to me. You have nothing on point to say. Here's some more wisdom from history for you.

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt" -- Voltair "

posted March 30, 2008 11:47 AM            

Chill buddy. I replied to pidauas's post before jumping to this thread. This how we talk here Nosis. But guess you are very sensitive. Will keep that in mind when talking to you. I believe we all should do fine here as long as you do not take anything personally. I was being very metaphorical but you seem to taking things literally. Do you actually thought I will spit in my hands

Later on I thought you did agree that you liked non sequittor. So I didn't justify what you said. So not sure why you would bring this up again. Perhaps I will be contend to know that it came from ego. It seeks answers when none exists.

I agree with you that no one is spiritually superior than the other. I think its important for me to tell you now that I believe we are all buddhas and christs waiting to be recognized. And I am not born to hindu parents or grand parents.
So you were very presumptuos earlier. Although I love vedic culture for many things besides their concept of personalizing Gods.

Take it easy, Take it easy

posted March 30, 2008 11:51 AM            

You said >>>>Here's some more wisdom from history for you. "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt" -- Voltair "

And I did say I am going in to silence. Didn't I? I thought I wrote in english. If you or others think I am a fool when I open my mouth. How does it make any difference to me, when I know I am free from your beliefs ?

posted March 30, 2008 12:05 PM            

***edit

posted March 30, 2008 12:09 PM            

Heh not a farewell comment though. Did you mean my concluding post?

posted March 30, 2008 12:13 PM            

Yeah, Just because I don't have any followers to be considered of any significance.
I am pondering if having power is really a good thing to have.

posted March 30, 2008 04:09 PM            

I will take it easier.

I cannot help being sensitive to certain things as I can neither help my taking some things personally. I do not wish to be without these qualities.

posted March 30, 2008 08:36 PM            

Talk of synchronicity - theres going to be a movie soon on that comic book played by a brit guy:

http://tintin.francetv.fr/uk/

Interesting.

posted March 30, 2008 08:38 PM            

Chill. Its good to have these qualities without identifying them as you. When you start identifying too much, its our ego at play.

posted March 31, 2008 12:42 AM            

Vermont is one of the safest states in the USA. There, anyone of age and not a felon can buy a gun and carry it concealed without a permit.

Washington DC is one of the deadliest cities in the USA. It is separated from Arlington, VA by the Potomac River, connected by a bridge. Yet Arlington is so much safer to walk in than DC. About the only difference? In Arlington, those 21 and not a felon can buy and carry a gun concealed. And if it's not impressive enough that Arlington has a lower rate of robbery, rape, and homicide than DC, then how about the ENTIRE STATE of VA combined is also lower than that of DC?

It's true that VT had 33 dead. VT was also--like nearly every mass murder zone--a "gun free zone." In contrast, the Appalachian School of Law shooting happened in the same state in 2002. Total: 3 dead. The difference? Students were allowed to have guns in their cars, and more than one student ran and grabbed their before running back to save lives. Which do you prefer, 33 dead, or 3 dead?

Comparing VT to Appalachian is just one more way to show that gun control will kill far more than guns ever will.

And if you think if ALL guns were legally banned (note, not banned, just illegal, which is a huge difference), that wouldn't stop massacres, either. For example, this KNIFE massacre (and it's not an isolated incident) left more dead and wounded than the NIU shooter did:
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/english/200106/08/eng20010608_72155.html

Btw, note that he was on medication. So are the vast majority of all other mass murderers--and a great many parents that kill their entire families (like Andrea Yates that drowned her children one by one), etc:
http://www.ssristories.com/index.php

Speaking of which, schools have become more and more like prisons, with zero tolerance and metal detectors and being declared gun free zones...and yet the number of school shootings have only skyrocketed. Don't you think it's time to try something else? Something beside "feel good" legislation that not only fails, but actually makes the problem worse?

And don't forget what fertilizer can do...or even gas in a bottle...the deadliest massacres done by a lone individual against a school was done not with guns but with explosives. Do we really want to see that make a comeback?

I believe that you're better off looking at why the USA--from individuals to the government--are quick to act with violence (as opposed to Canadians, Finnish, and Switzerland, which also have many guns in circulation). For that matter, why the UK has become more violent. And also look at psyche meds being peddled like candy that are clearly linked with these acts, be it with a gun, knife, drowning in a bath tub, or other method.

But please don't mindlessly pursue feel good legislation that leads to far more deaths (and other acts of violence) than guns ever will. As this victim who lost her parents in a mass shooting says, it wasn't the madman or the guns she's mad at, but those who legislated her out of her right to carry her gun into Luby's (and btw, her gun was in her car outside, and the mass murderer also chose Luby's as a "gun free zone" as he waited for like 2 hours for 2 armed cops to leave):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ksjN2B6Ax8

posted March 31, 2008 01:09 AM            

There was more than one reason that study was debunked, but here's the main thing I recall: the study only counted deaths. So the vast majority of cases where a gun is shown and a criminal flees is not counted. The rare cases where someone actually has to shoot a criminal but the criminal survives (as the one acting in self-defense called 911, if she hadn't already) are not counted. Only death was enough to be counted. And counting only that, then yes, more innocent died because the criminals were attempting to kill and didn't call 911. However, more lives have been saved than have been taken, though the gun itself was not fired.

For example, I know of an elderly, arthritic woman who came home to be surprised by a home intruder. He smiled at her sadistically and slowly approached her. She pulled her gun that she carried and his attitude instantly changed, and rather than pulling an Uzi, he ran for the door. She didn't shoot him as he ran, but called 911 as soon as he left. Her case was not counted, but it likely saved her life, and from other horrors.

If it was in your power, would you have taken that gun from her hand before she entered her home? Because that's what you're talking about doing.

I personally know a guy who was taking meds to his sick Aunt just released from the hospital after surgery. She needed that desperately. He didn't have a car, but he had a gun. As he walked the meds over, a gang of youths, probably mistaking him for homeless (as it's a sport to beat up and rob the homeless in that town by some of the local teens), came rushing at him. He quickly drew his guns and shouted, "Think about it!" They thought fast, turned tail and ran. Violence averted. They didn't "escalate the situation," they went to find easier prey. Had they succeeded, not only would he have been injured and robbed, but his Aunt would be in real bad shape.

If it was in your power, would you have taken that gun from his hands before he left?

Someone I know from the same shooting range I go to even shared a peripheral benefit. A man molested her daughter and threatened to kill her and her mom if she told anyone. In this case, her mom was not only a gun owner, but did well in competitive shooting. As a result, the little girl felt that it was her mom who would kill him if he tried anything, so she told. The mom didn't go down and blow him away, though I wouldn't have cared if she had. Instead, she took her daughter to the sheriff's station where they had her call from a special phone and say, "I'm going to tell," without saying what she was going to tell. He incriminated himself and repeated his threats. He was so busted, there wasn't even a plea bargain offered to him. AND it turned out that he was guilty of others. And would've likely been guilty of more still had that little girl not been brave enough to say something--brave enough because her mom had a gun and knew how to use it.

As for criminals also using guns, I was a runaway and mingled with criminals, so I know some things about them. Criminals don't get their guns from WalMart. They get them from their dealers--dealers who also offer illegal ammo (like the "cop killer" bullets). These include dealers ultimately from China and Russia, which even smuggle in and sell armaments, not just guns. (One group from the Red Mafia was even busted trying to sell a NUKE to undercover cops in Florida, after they already sold other military surplus to them! Granted, they didn't have it on them, but they supplied everything else they offered, and agents felt it too dangerous to let them smuggle THAT into the USA. Granted, your average street criminal won't be able to afford anything that fancy, but they can get guns easy enough.) You can't stop the flow of guns to criminals anymore than you can stop the flow of crack.

According to this, firearm possession among criminals actually INCREASED after the Brady check went into effect:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fuo.htm

Meanwhile, states that pass CCW permits see less violence, while those that add gun control see more violence (or at least have violence decrease much less than the other states that go another way). Likewise, violence in the UK has gone up. I'm not even sure that the UK is less violent anymore (though I know that Vermont is a lot less violent than the UK, and most people can buy a gun and carry it concealed there without a permit). But even if it is, violence still rose, according to Scotland Yard. That says to me--and our failed experiments have gun control have proven this as far as I'm concerned--that our violence would also rise. Given how violent we already are, how eager do you think we are to see that happen?

More about the failed effects of the gun bans in the UK:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7047039.stm

quote:

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Gun crime in the UK seems to making headlines almost every day.

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quote:

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Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

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More there. And: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/10/AR2005121001222.html

quote:

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During his training to become a British police officer, Ben Johnson recalled, an instructor told him and other recruits, "If you ever see somebody carrying a gun, turn and run away as quickly as possible."

"It was a bizarre situation," said Johnson, 34, a former police officer in Garland, Tex., and U.S. Army soldier who moved here with his British wife three years ago and became this country's first non-British police officer. He said running from trouble was exactly the opposite of what he learned as an American cop.

Now Johnson is publicly challenging one of the great traditions of law enforcement in Britain, what he calls the "old-fashioned idea of the unarmed bobby on the beat." He has written to his chief asking for permission to carry a gun, arguing that Britain is no longer safe for unarmed and under-trained police officers. He says he will resign if the chief refuses.

Johnson's case has caused a media furor here, partly because an American -- a Texan no less -- is claiming he feels less safe as a police officer in Britain than he did on the beat in the United States, which is routinely portrayed here as a gun-drunk Wild West.

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quote:

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Johnson said his decision was sealed by last month's death of unarmed officer Sharon Beshenivsky, a mother of three, killed as she responded to an alarm at a travel agency in the city of Bradford. She was the second police officer to be fatally shot in the past five years; in the same period two officers were stabbed to death and at least 44 were injured by firearms, according to government statistics.

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Mencken would understand:

http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/2nd_Amend/uplifters_try_it_again.htm

When will people learn?

And even if you could rid the world of guns (or just guns for anyone not in the government, and we'll overlook how that can turn out, too), so what? You've created a world where the elderly, disabled, and women have to live in fear. To a lesser extent, anyone who is not a beefed up felon with years of lifting weights in prison and getting into fights, possibly more than one, being a threat to anyone else. Meanwhile, massacres continue to happen by the deranged. Just what would you have gained, besides even more violence and death?

That is, why pursue gun control anymore?

posted March 31, 2008 02:01 AM            

Having discussed briefly how the world is perceived by our left brain/right brain. And thanks to Nosis for presenting that great gif animation. Many must still be having hangovers and some still not convinced that two different people can see that dancing girl moving in opposite directions.

There are more such mysteries I would like to share but only to the sincerest. And the fact is I am not a Master yet. Many secrets will be revealed at the feet of a Master. Upanishad in hinduism means exactly that - sitting at the feet of a Master. And sitting has a very different meaning here. Its not a physical sitting. It means the zen sitting. For christians I will point out the tale of Mary and Martha sitting at Jesus's feet. One was really sitting, the other was not.

If I were to operate on you then I am bound to leave you in a state that is similar to fate of a patient whose gut has been opened and I do not know what to do next upon seeing you wake up slowly

Before we can abolish that second amendment. We have to abolish the myth of pain in the minds of criminals who perpetuate crimes.

I wanted to speak more on "fight or flight response". But I am glad that chapter 5 covers a little bit of it in Tolle's book. May be he will talk about it today. And he also discussed "pain body" in detail. A very delicate subject:

http://linda-goodman.blogspot.com

posted March 31, 2008 02:20 PM            

But look what these people did. They killed Martin Luther king with a gun. And they even killed Gandhi with a gun.

posted March 31, 2008 07:48 PM            

LMAO..

Mannu.. you have been exposed in too many ways. From what I found out about you, from your inability to understand LAW and our CONSTITUTION (okay.. I say OUR but who knows where your loyalty lies).... Just give it up.

You and VDI are SOOOOO much alike but you lack the information and understanding to make real points.

I can't speak for all American's but I can say.. than you for TRYING to tell us our law and constitution.. Maybe you should stop looking at where to aim your marshmellows at our perceived glass houses and insteadd look at your OWN.. LMAO....