Wheelgunner

Running. There's nothing like a good run that kicks your ass so you can't think about anything other than not stopping.

  In the interest of fostering a better theoretical understanding of our legal system, I'll explain it to you like a professor explained it to me:   A judge should base his understanding of a law on the plain meaning of the statute.  Generally that's all that happens, because most statutes don't contain ambiguous language.  For example, a statute might say "No person shall eat at a ham sandwich on Mondays."  That's pretty clear; don't eat a ham sandwich on a Monday and you're gonna be fine.     But sometimes a statute is not clear.  "No person shall not ever avoid not eating a sandwich, unless said person isn't refraining from eating a sandwich on a day not Monday.  The above-mentioned sandwich shall in no case be of ham."   If the language of a statute is not clear, well, a judge isn't going to base his decision in a case on gibberish he doesn't understand.  So how does he make sense of it?  He goes and looks at what the legislature said about the statute back when it was just a bill.  A lot of times, the lawmakers state on the record what they're trying to accomplish with a bill while they're drafting, redrafting, and debating it.  What they say the intention of a law is indicates what its purpose is, even when the statute itself kinda fails at that job due to incomprehensibility.

(LOL!)   You hit the nail on the head though.  "Needlessly explosive."  If Citrus County keeps him on the force, it's just a matter of time before he shoots somebody for having a tinfoil wrapped sandwich in their hand. 

I thought I read somewhere that Congress alone controls our aggressive entrance into wars. I must have been mistaken.

  Very good point.

So now the President is considering military intervention options, because there is some indication that the Assad regime killed several hundred Syrian civilians with chemical weapons?   If the logic goes that chemical weapons are a particularly effective means by which to kill large numbers of civilians, and therefore "we" have a duty to intervene to prevent said killing of large numbers of civilians, then why have we not done so before now?  In other words, how is this one particular alleged chemical weapons attack worse than the months-long artillery bombardment of whole Syrian cities by the Assad regime?  How is this one particular alleged chemical weapons attack worse than  Assad's forces calling in attack aviation against mixed rebel and civilian targets for months?   My point is that the Obama administration has been content watch Assad's forces kill utterly massive numbers of civilians for the past - oh, I don't know... two years or so.  Ergo, it's absurd for O to draw some arbitrary line in the sand and say, "You can kill thousands of women and children with indirect fire, Assad, but by golly I will not countenance your forces accomplishing exactly the same thing with gas.  When you use a CHEMICAL to kill them, then that's a whole different act!"   No, it's not.   Shifting gears a bit, other members have made some good points against intervention related to the senselessness of aiding nations or peoples who hate our Nation.  I'll add to that line of thinking that interfering in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation is almost never a legitimate means of conflict resolution.  How do y'all think we would have reacted if, during the Bloody Kansas period of American history, Ottoman Turks had deployed an army into the United States because the Sultan couldn't ethically watch the American bloodshed?

You could look at the south end of Murfreesboro, too, near Christiana.  That would put you kinda off the beaten path and in a fairly rural environment.  It would also  give you shopping at the new outdoor mall in M'boro 15 or 20 minutes away from your home.  If I were seeking work in that city, I'd start looking when school starts up in the fall (right about now).  Lots of kids quitting their summer jobs to go hit the books. 

This.   Also consider that these gatherings of the people's representatives rarely remain within the bounds set forth by the electorate.  During the French Revolution, for example, the people voted for representatives and sent them to voice their concerns to the king.  But when the representatives assembled, they sort of forgot the limited nature of their mission, and instead opted for creating a written constitution and instigating something that eventually morphed into the Terror.  My point is that, given the great liberties popular representatives take during tumultuous times, and given the average quality of modern American politicians, We the People might not get what we bargained for out of a constitutional convention.   This is not to say I'm opposed to holding one.  It's just a worry of mine that looms large any time I think about the possibility of actually accomplishing a CC.

Randall53, you're right that these sheriffs deserve props for their position on this issue.   But I think factions like the "Dream Defenders" - who seek to repeal the Florida "stand your ground" law - have caused a great deal of controversy and confusion by conflating two distinct self-defense concepts.  See, they are working to end the statutory provision that governs "stand your ground" type scenarios.  But even if they succeed in causing this statute to be repealed, their action will not change the legitimate use of force in "stand your ground" situations.  That is because fundamental rights we enjoy are not gifts that government bestows on us at its pleasure; rather, they are the legitimate domain of all free men.    This distinction may seem highly technical and thus unimportant, but quite the opposite is true.  It is critically important.  We have our rights because we were born.  We believe all men have these rights.  But we know that governments often disagree with this fact, and therefore memorialized our rights in the Constitution.  The Constitution didn't give us our rights, and we have others that simply weren't written into it but that are no less legitimate for that.      In light of all this, it is clear that only repealing a State's "stand your ground" statute would in no way detract from a free man's legitimate, God-given human right to defend himself, particularly from a lethal threat.  Who knows whether a particular judge would agree with this; it's hardly the point.  Did the Armenians lack a legitimate recourse to defending themselves from the Turkish military in the 1890s because there was no "stand your ground" statute in their homeland?  Were they doomed to "flight rather than fight"?  What about Southern blacks who were attacked by lynch mobs in the Jim Crow era?  Was the legitimacy of their defensive use of force determined by racist laws in their home state?  Clearly not.   Again, it's good that we (the media, the gov't, and citizens) are having this discussion.  But at the end of the day neither you, nor I, nor the people of Florida need a statutory permission slip to exercise our human rights.   (Edited for clarification)

This whole concept of "hate crime" is just as absurd as "gun violence" or "domestic violence."  The conduct (violence against a person) is already against the law.  There's no need to tack on some politically motivated category in order to create a new crime... unless the federal government is looking for a way to assert itself in matters that should have absolutely nothing to do with federal law.

Yeah.  Phony scandals.   Don't you love how when a random black teenager's poor decisions land him in a coffin it's a legitimate national concern, but when a direct representative of the authority of the United States of America is killed by enemy forces in his own embassy, that attack merely amounts to a "phony scandal"?   Modern America is a tough pill to swallow.  Can you imagine the public (and government) reaction if a different ambassador with the surname of Franklin had been killed during the course of his official duties in France?

Truth. Most of what gave us our American identity is self-confidence and stubborn self-reliance on the individual level. These days most Americans don't even have enough self-confidence to take a hard look in the mirror, and think that self-reliance is somehow related to how much they can defraud their fellow taxpayer.

New career as an armed security specialist with Brinks or Loomis!

Quiet you!  Move along.  All in the interest of your safety.

The most dangerous part about a man wielding the notorious thumb and forefinger is how difficult it is to disarm him.

We need to get a form letter posted on the forum that members can easily print it out and mail or email to their phone service provider.  This is a request for interested members to put their concerns into formal language and make it available ASAP.   There are innumerable ways for this app to endanger or undermine our community.  While the first thing that came to mind was some anti marking our home addresses, it is just as likely that businesses allowing the carry of handguns will be marked as unsafe and experience a serious loss of revenue -- for supporting our rights.   We have to jump on this one quick, guys.  We're not dealing with some stick in the mud politician who won't change his mind regardless of how many letters he receives.  Nope, this time it's private businesses (telecommunications companies) that absolutely will respond if enough consumers make a stink.

If the liberals are correct that the guns themselves - the physical objects - are the reason for the violence and murder rates then implementation of Representative Davis' plan would cause Chicago to implode in a violent supernova. You see, the Guard has thousands of assault rifles, machine guns, and even handguns.

Statist politicians - who, incidentally, are the imminent threat to the American people - have worked hard to earn our international reputation.  Most of our leaders today are double threats: they afraid of a free population and thus seek to curtail our rights, and simultaneously support isolationism in the most dangerous sense.  Through their constant military, political, and economic interference within our own borders and abroad, they cause the United States to be ostracized by the international community.  Unlike the version of isolationism popular in the early twentieth century, this modern form is a near-permanent decision that is difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

I carry a grudge because I'm a sore loser.

Sometimes I hike with a 45 oz. 6" barrel revolver.  I carry it in a cross draw leather holster on my belt, and it's very comfortable.  That's what I'd recommend for stuff like camping and hiking.  Academy sells a holster made by a company called Allen that might work for you.  The best way to go is to order one from Simply Rugged, but you won't be able to get that in a week (more like a month, but the quality is top notch).

Nice score!  It's good you got one now - I've heard that FN has begun restricting sales of the new Five Sevens to military and police.  If that's true then your new gun will only appreciate in value.

And who do you think the Qataris are going to come crying to the next time some (Muslim) Saddam-wannabe tries to annex Qatar instead of Kuwait?     Yeah, infidels.

MY understanding of the sequester is that the "reduction" is actually a cut to the annual increase in federal spending - meaning that, at worst, next year the feds will have to live off the same amount of money they had the year before.   In my book that's not a cut at all, so I'm with you 100% that there is absolutely no reason for us seeing catastrophic effects now.

I'll call you a realist.  Bernie Goetz took out four bad guys with a .38 J-frame.

I like the sentiment behind this proposal, but I'm not convinced it would set a good precedent.  I'm already very uncomfortable with the State requiring us to pay a fee before we are allowed to exercise a right.  In fact, when you look at Article I, Section 26 of the Tennessee Constitution it seems clear that it does not allow such fees.  And that's without even touching the federal Constitution's 2A, which probably was intended to prohibit the rise of any kind of statist prerequisites for owning or bearing firearms.   Conceptually, recognizing different rights for different categories of citizens is so deeply flawed and so recently relevant that I'm somewhat astounded this bill was ever written.  The Jim Crow era is well within living memory.  Making veterans or firefighters or police officers or teachers members of a privileged class does not help the dilemma of logic: if we all have the same rights, why don't we all have the same rights?   Shake a veteran's hand.  Mow his yard for him.  Treat him to lunch.  Tell him you're proud of him - and not just on Veterans' Day.  But giving him a lifetime permit to do something he has a right to do in the first place?  To this veteran that smells like an effort to cast illegal restrictions of my rights in a better light.