Mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando Florida: Political Discussion [SPLIT]

[Kulindahr]

If you work more than 40 hours, the government will punish the employer; time and a half for overtime. Complain to the democrats. If the employer is reducing benefits, have new regulations made them more expensive?

The time-and-a-half rule prevents employers from doing what they do regularly where it isn't in force: exploit a smaller number of employees so they don't have to give additional benefits.

Right there, BTW, is a reason people favoring a free market should support some sort of national medical care: to level the playing field for all employers, especially by ending the bureaucracy that exists to juggle the system as it presently is. That's why this:

Oh if I had it my way all employers would have to contribute in a prorated fashion based on how many hours their employee works towards coverage of things like healthcare, workman's comp and similar benefits. So that someone working 40 hours a week, even if it was for 6 different employers, would be getting exactly the same benefits as someone working 40 hours a week for one employer.

So this little greasy pig coward hole of "I have to do this because the government PUNISHES me for employing people by expecting that I actually pay them" would no longer be a loophole.

That's precisely how it should work.

is a good idea. Require all employers to total up the hours worked for them, regardless of employee pay status, and contribute accordingly (just make it an independent foundation that politicians aren't allowed to play with, not a direct government function).

 

[Kulindahr]

Whoa -- we digressed from an atrocity to employer benefits and wages? Wow.

On-topic, it's been revealed that the killer's weapon was not an AR-15 after all, but a Sig Sauer MCX. I don't know anything about it, except IIRC it's a barely civilian version of a NATO sub-machine gun, the Sig MPX.

 

[TX-Beau]

You can't buy an assault rifle because the government won't let you -- that has nothing to do with the constitutionality of the prohibition.

Under Miller, assault rifles are plainly items that citizens should not merely be able to own but to transport across state lines. The question is how, under the only authority given Congress for addressing that matter, to deal with that fact. "Shall not be infringed" excludes any sort of regulation concerning what kind of weapons Americans can own -- so we have to turn to the authority the Constitution does give Congress, which is in Article I.

You can't buy an assault rife - which I'm glad you at long last admit exists, because it's fucking illegal, because they are REGULATED, and that has everything to do with the constitution.

You can whine and pretend that your imaginings are the law, and that the Constitution is what you pretend it is, but the fact remains that under the laws of the United States of America, REGULATION IS PERFECTLY CONSTITUTIONAL, and that is the end of that.

I feel pain for you that you don't live in the United States of Kuli's Opinion, no doubt that would be less painful for you - oh wait...

Go ahead, tell me I'm just a liar, then you can stick your tongue out at me or something equally as statesmen-like.

 

[Kabluey]

Whoa -- we digressed from an atrocity to employer benefits and wages? Wow.

On-topic, it's been revealed that the killer's weapon was not an AR-15 after all, but a Sig Sauer MCX. I don't know anything about it, except IIRC it's a barely civilian version of a NATO sub-machine gun, the Sig MPX.

Interesting to know. The guy really didn't do things by halves. Bet he was wearing armour.

 

[palemale]

Where does the Constitution bestow the authority to regulate arms?

I seem to remember somewhere in the Constitution where it discusses a "well regulated militia." I wonder where that was? Oh yeah, it's in the 2d Amendment.

 

[palemale]

How will you vote, Kulindahr? You must know that a Hillary will appoint a 5 liberal to the USSC, who will drastically rewrite the 2d Amendment.

The first question I ask before deciding who to vote for is the following: Which candidate is most likely to keep the US a functioning country that does a reasonably good job preserving peace and prosperity and would make us a dysfunctional hell-hole. That question immediately eliminates Donald Trump.

 

[TX-Beau]

The first question I ask before deciding who to vote for is the following: Which candidate is most likely to keep the US a functioning country that does a reasonably good job preserving peace and prosperity and would make us a dysfunctional hell-hole. That question immediately eliminates Donald Trump.

(emphasis mine)

I'm laughing because you left out a word, I do that all the time...

 

[Kulindahr]

You can't buy an assault rife - which I'm glad you at long last admit exists, because it's fucking illegal, because they are REGULATED, and that has everything to do with the constitution.

You can whine and pretend that your imaginings are the law, and that the Constitution is what you pretend it is, but the fact remains that under the laws of the United States of America, REGULATION IS PERFECTLY CONSTITUTIONAL, and that is the end of that.

I feel pain for you that you don't live in the United States of Kuli's Opinion, no doubt that would be less painful for you - oh wait...

Go ahead, tell me I'm just a liar, then you can stick your tongue out at me or something equally as statesmen-like.

Besides the lie in your first line, you are stating that an illegal weapon was purchased legally by the Orlando killer.

Under the Constitution, the ONLY power Congress has is to organize, arm, and discipline the militia. Any other view requires hacking out a chunk of the Bill of Rights, which makes clear that unless the Constitution says Congress can do it, Congress can't. So all the approval in the world of a system based on ignoring the supreme law of the land won't make regulation constitutional in the least.

And it's not my imaginings, it's the truth about what the Founding Fathers and Framers had to say. Trying to twist things and pretend they didn't say that is not my forte, but it's the (extremely dishonest and cowardly) strategy of politicians who don't like a particular piece of the Constitution (best recent example: pretending that inanimate objects can have free speech).

It's a good thing we don't live in "the United States of Kuli's opinion" -- my opinion varies from day to day. I don't deal in opinions here; there hasn't been a statement of my opinion in this thread or any of the others on the topic of guns lately, except in the one I started which a certain person keeps trying to hijack.

And you are a liar, or just intellectually lazy because you rarely if ever state my posted positions correctly.


BTW, your fantasy that "that would be less painful for you" is just that, a fantasy. I'm not sure I would like a society where we had no laws that aren't clearly justified by the Constitution; in fact I know I wouldn't, because I would have to wear a gas mask, wouldn't be able to swim in many rivers and lakes, would rarely have access to go to the beach, and a lot more.

 

[Kulindahr]

Interesting to know. The guy really didn't do things by halves. Bet he was wearing armour.

I've read that he was. He tried to buy military grade body armor, but the store owner felt uneasy about making the sale and turned the animal away.

I spent fifteen minutes reading about the MPX, and don't feel terribly enlightened; it's been a lot of technical jargon that would delight fanatic gun enthusiasts but leave my head swirling (I know enough to discuss the guns I and friends have on a practical level, and see little reason to go deeper). About the MCX I've found virtually nothing, except that it is the same rifle changed just enough to go on the civilian market and that the "C" in the civilian version designation supposedly stands for "civilian", which makes little sense since the "MPX" supposedly stands for "Multi-Purpose many ways", X apparently serving as a variable or something (it can be modified in so many ways it's effectively at least a half dozen guns in one)(another source says MPX means military pistol-caliber submachine gun). I also found that it was deliberately designed to look like an AR-15, the most popular rifle on the market across the board at the time Sig-Sauer introduced it (which explains why the rifle was misidentified), and in fact uses a number of standard AR-15 parts.

Yeah, he didn't do things by halves: assuming he had the version most easily misidentified as an AR-15, he spent in the vicinity of $1600 -- $1800 on the thing new (boy, can I think of some better things to do with that much money!).

 

[Kulindahr]

I seem to remember somewhere in the Constitution where it discusses a "well regulated militia." I wonder where that was? Oh yeah, it's in the 2d Amendment.

AH, a favorite liberal fallacy, the one where you change the meaning of a word to suit the current argument.

"Well-regulated" meant well-trained and disciplined (and sometimes well-armed; George Washington used it that way while others at the time didn't).

So there's no authority granted to regulate. That would be ludicrous in the first place, since the purpose of the Bill of RIghts is to restrict federal power, not bestow any.

 

[Kulindahr]

The first question I ask before deciding who to vote for is the following: Which candidate is most likely to keep the US a functioning country that does a reasonably good job preserving peace and prosperity and would make us a dysfunctional hell-hole. That question immediately eliminates Donald Trump.

I think you dropped a negative in the final clause of your question.

But that's an interesting point: given a selection of candidates among whom there is no choice that will be good for the country because all are against liberty more than for it, is there a responsibility to choose the one who will best preserve the nation (if not the Republic)?

I don't think either candidate would turn us into a "dysfunctional hell-hole"; I do think either one will twist the country into something far less resembling the Republic Franklin told the lady Congress gave us than what we have even now.

 

[TX-Beau]

Besides the lie in your first line, you are stating that an illegal weapon was purchased legally by the Orlando killer.

Under the Constitution, the ONLY power Congress has is to organize, arm, and discipline the militia. Any other view requires hacking out a chunk of the Bill of Rights, which makes clear that unless the Constitution says Congress can do it, Congress can't. So all the approval in the world of a system based on ignoring the supreme law of the land won't make regulation constitutional in the least.

And it's not my imaginings, it's the truth about what the Founding Fathers and Framers had to say. Trying to twist things and pretend they didn't say that is not my forte, but it's the (extremely dishonest and cowardly) strategy of politicians who don't like a particular piece of the Constitution (best recent example: pretending that inanimate objects can have free speech).

It's a good thing we don't live in "the United States of Kuli's opinion" -- my opinion varies from day to day. I don't deal in opinions here; there hasn't been a statement of my opinion in this thread or any of the others on the topic of guns lately, except in the one I started which a certain person keeps trying to hijack.

And you are a liar, or just intellectually lazy because you rarely if ever state my posted positions correctly.


BTW, your fantasy that "that would be less painful for you" is just that, a fantasy. I'm not sure I would like a society where we had no laws that aren't clearly justified by the Constitution; in fact I know I wouldn't, because I would have to wear a gas mask, wouldn't be able to swim in many rivers and lakes, would rarely have access to go to the beach, and a lot more.

This is all your imagination, you opine and obfuscate, and pretend, and various and sundry other silly pretend shit that makes you feel, I don't know - AND YET, regulation is perfectly constitutional and there is nothing you can say that will actually CHANGE THE LAW.

Which is that all your pious opining is not the fucking law of the land, even with LaPierre and the rest of you whining otherwise.

PERIOD.

Tell us all, IS REGULATING FIREARMS LEGAL?

Why yes, it is.

Deal with it.

 

[Kabluey]

Yeah, he didn't do things by halves: assuming he had the version most easily misidentified as an AR-15, he spent in the vicinity of $1600 -- $1800 on the thing new (boy, can I think of some better things to do with that much money!).

I assume that this crime was his priority.

 

[xbuzzerx]

So there's no authority granted to regulate. That would be ludicrous in the first place, since the purpose of the Bill of RIghts is to restrict federal power, not bestow any.

You've filled the air in the discussion after the last dozen or so mass shootings saying that Congress has the power to regulate the militia, and that the militia is the gun owning citizenry, and has failed to exercise its responsibility to do so.

Now you say that the government has no such right at all.

Since you fill these arguments with calling everyone else liars, you should at least get your position straight.

 

[palemale]

(emphasis mine)

I'm laughing because you left out a word, I do that all the time...

Yes, I left out the word "which" in between the words "and" and "would" in the bold-faced text.

 

[Kulindahr]

This is all your imagination, you opine and obfuscate, and pretend, and various and sundry other silly pretend shit that makes you feel, I don't know - AND YET, regulation is perfectly constitutional and there is nothing you can say that will actually CHANGE THE LAW.

Which is that all your pious opining is not the fucking law of the land, even with LaPierre and the rest of you whining otherwise.

PERIOD.

Tell us all, IS REGULATING FIREARMS LEGAL?

Why yes, it is.

Deal with it.

You really are averse to actually reading the Constitution, aren't you?

Upholding law in the face of the plain meaning of the words in the Constitution is the first step toward reaching another "when in the course of human events" point, because it turns law into the toy of whoever can gain control of the apparatus of government. The Right would love your logic: it would justify them passing laws allowing only Christians to have churches, etc. etc., and they could claim it's legal because they made a law saying so -- and the Constitution be damned.

 

[TX-Beau]

You really are averse to actually reading the Constitution, aren't you?

Upholding law in the face of the plain meaning of the words in the Constitution is the first step toward reaching another "when in the course of human events" point, because it turns law into the toy of whoever can gain control of the apparatus of government. The Right would love your logic: it would justify them passing laws allowing only Christians to have churches, etc. etc., and they could claim it's legal because they made a law saying so -- and the Constitution be damned.

You're really adverse to admitting that your opinions aren't Constitutional Law aren't you.

 

[Kulindahr]

I assume that this crime was his priority.

I presume he figured he'd be dead before it was all over, which is another item supporting the assumption that this was his priority.

Someone on the Truth About Guns blog raised the question of whether he put the rifle on credit, and if so who's stuck with the bill now that he's dead -- and if whoever it is could make a case for refusing to pay for a weapon used in such a crime. Plainly someone this twisted would have no qualms about saddling someone else with paying for the instrument of his crime.

 

[Kulindahr]

You've filled the air in the discussion after the last dozen or so mass shootings saying that Congress has the power to regulate the militia, and that the militia is the gun owning citizenry, and has failed to exercise its responsibility to do so.

Now you say that the government has no such right at all.

Since you fill these arguments with calling everyone else liars, you should at least get your position straight.

No, Congress does not have the power to regulate the militia, not in the modern meaning of the term. And it does not have the power to regulate guns, under any meaning of the term -- no such power is assigned to it. What it has is the power to arm, organize, and discipline the militia, and since all of us are the militia, that means rules that apply to everyone (unless a legal distinction within the militia is established, as I proposed in my thread on Article I Sec 8).

 

[Kulindahr]

You're really adverse to admitting that your opinions aren't Constitutional Law aren't you.

You're not arguing constitutional law -- you have yet to cite the Constitution. And since the Constitution plainly says that unless the Constitution assigns a power to Congress, Congress doesn't have that power, pointing to that power in the Constitution is the only place to start.

I know we've grown up in a bastardized understanding of constitutional law where phrases meant to limit the government are inverted to grant it the very powers it was meant to restrict, but that doesn't make such actions constitutional. By your approach, ANYTHING could be made constitutional just by getting away with it long enough -- like treating corporations as people. So how about being consistent, and joining benvolio in championing the Citizens United decision?