JayC

Well technically Amazon doesn't own any businesses in TN...  Amazon contracts with a seperate business to provide distribution from warehouses in TN.  This is a critical difference...  but these businesses have NEVER had to collect sales tax before.   I'll be getting rid of my Amazon prime membership as well.    

Well, Harwell is the low hanging fruit here...  Who lives in her district that can primary her from the right?  Force her to answer questions...  We don't have to win, we just have to scare the pants off her enough to know we're watching...   Start a club in west Nashville to go to every one of her town hall meetings and ask firearms questions over and over again...  Wear Harwell doesn't support the 2nd Amendment T Shirts to all of her rallies.  Call her out for not signing the letter to allow legislators and law abiding citizens to enter the capital armed.   Finally, pick better laws to support...  The parking lot law was a bad law that a large chunk of libertarian/business owner republicans won't ever support.  I quit volunteering with the TFA over it...     But the vast majority of those same people would support repealing 39-17-1359 covering any government buildings what so ever.   BTW, my point is there are still some compromises left, it's just a question of which bad laws need to be repealed, not new laws that make our gun laws more complicated and worse.    

You're not taking into account the age of the people...  you walk into your average sitdown restaurant and the vast majority of under 21 will be poorly represented...  So it's likely much higher than 7 out of 100...  probably closer to 12 to 13 out of 100.  That doesn't factor in the lack of felon's and the mentally ill in your restaurant either :)   Also, the nicer and higher price your restaurant is, the higher that number goes... because HCP permits are more heavily weighted towards older more affluent residents.  Mostly because of the high cost of getting a permit in TN.   And trust me as a business owner I don't want to tick off ~15% of my business, that is the difference between keeping the doors open and going bankrupt.    

+1, been saying this for years...  nothing but security theater, and they're not even good at that.

Oh I think there is, we'll only repeal half the firearm laws this term, instead of all of them ;)  The other half can wait for next term ;)    

Back out the felon's, mentally adjudicated and minors under 21 and see what it does to those numbers...  If HCP permit holders would vote pro-2nd amendment, there is little we couldn't get passed.

Take away the officers 'special' carry rights and make them carry under open carry laws...  see how fast they want those laws expanded.  

It was a mad man with a gun killing 3 people in a McDonald's that caused me to go out and get my carry permit the next week...  I made the decision that very second that I would never be unarmed again, and that I would never be herded into a backroom and killed execution style.   I might very well die, but I'm not going to die like that.    

I've always thought most of the gun laws in TN were 'likely unconstitutional'.  

We can't win the 'war on drugs' ever...  it's impossible to stop human nature, and it's impossible to win over the populace when there is no victim.  The VAST majority of violent crime in our country comes from the War on Drugs not from the drugs themselves.   When was the last time you saw two beer companies doing drive by shootings over territory?     We must accept the fact we can not stop people from using drugs (and don't really have the moral right to do so either), that all we're doing is making the problem that much worse...  we're using the war on drugs as an excuse to violate so many fundamental rights, and increase the costs of regular goods and services in the process.   Here is the simple math, a kilo of coffee costs about $25 in Nashville...  a kilo of cocaine costs ~$34,000...     What do you think the market is for cocaine in Nashville in a given year?  Lets say it's 2000 kilo's of cocaine - I know it's probably much lower but lets assume the worse case...   Right now that is a 68 million dollar market for cocaine...  That's worth fighting over in any business...  The markup on that product when broken down to street value is real money...   Now lets say we drop the price of cocaine down to $50 a kilo (basically a 100% tax)...  You're talking about 1.7 million...  less money than a bad fast food restaurant gross in a year.  Not enough profit to run a criminal enterprise off...   Now, you'll say if you make drugs legal there will be a huge uptick in property crimes, because people will steal and rob for drug money...  well people are already stealing and robbing for drug money...  And we've just reduced the costs to 1/700th what they're paying today...  That means for every 700 robberies they're doing today, they can do 1 and score the same amount of money...  also, it's cheap enough that begging for money on the sidewalk for a day pays for weeks worth of their habit.  I'm assuming we can all agree your average coke head isn't going through a kilo of cocaine a year?   At the end of the day, we're making the drug problem on society 100 to 1000 times worse than if we just legalized it completely and did nothing.        

You're right but you don't loose your gun rights over simple assault.    

I think it's a real possible outcome of a Article 5 convention.     Congress not the states gets to call the convention itself, which means they can and would define the rules of the convention, who is eligible to be seated at the convention, how many representative from each state or other interested parties, the rules of order, and whether or not the entire thing would be open to the public.   Then once the convention passes proposed amendments...  those Amendments can be approved by one of two methods, the first being the state legislatures, and the second is a convention in 3/4th of the states...  Congress gets to pick which one, and again since Congress would be calling the convention so Congress gets to set the rules...   Who is eligible, how many representatives and from where, and whether other interested parties get seated at those convention.     The instant 2/3rd's of the states apply for a convention everything after is at the whim of Congress, the states have 0 control over who gets selected, or even if they the legislature gets to vote on the proposed amendments or not.   It could be a huge mess...  it likely would be a huge mess...     You know how badly I want to see this country change back towards our natural rights and a much smaller government than what we have today...  These aren't the Amendments to do that... and this isn't the method to do it either.    

6.8,   In all fairness some famous RINO's are also NeoCon's...  such as our 'beloved' favorites John McCain and Lindsey Graham.   Technically neoconservatives policies only deal with foreign affairs, and not domestic policy at all.  They generally believe in an interventionist foreign policy.  People such as Peter King from NY, any just about anybody on the editorial staff at the Weekly Standard :)   The basic ideas were imported from the Democratic party and aren't traditional republican values...  They tend to bleed over into domestic policy anytime you see an opportunity to grow the Government in the name of national security.   Mark Levin is for sure a Neoconservative without a doubt...    

Gun,   I'm a conservative...  but as you probably are aware there are different types of conservatives...  and a lot of overlap between them...  NeoCon's are part of the republican party, and a part I generally don't agree with...   It's not anything but a label for the policies they advocate...  Where I am more in the Traditionalist/Libertarian wing of the party.   And my doctor doesn't let me watch more than 5 minutes of MSNBC a year because he's worried my blood pressure will spike and I'll have a stroke ;)  I personally find Fox News to be too progressive/big government for my taste ;)  

Well my definition of a NeoCon is a conservative that promotes "democracy" and "national interest" by means of military force.  You often see similar views on domestic issues as well, support for law enforcement violations of the 5th Amendment, support for the War on Drugs, support for a big standing Army, and support for using the government to interfere in American's daily lives to 'protect' us...  While wanting to limit the Federal government, they believe the state governments have unlimited authority to regulate everything.   Mark Levin has in the past supported ideas that I would describe as NeoCon in nature...  Hannity on a regular basis supports the NeoCon ideology...  And the Weekly Standard is run by a bunch of NeoCons (who are big supporters of Mark Levins book), so anything they put their stamp of approval on concerns me a little bit.   I'm not saying that some of his proposed Amendments aren't good ideas...  Or if we could manage to get some ratified it would be a bad thing...  I'm saying that most of his amendments don't cover the real tyranny we see in our day to day lives...  It doesn't reduce the size of the Federal government to historic levels...  It doesn't re-establish many of the protections of rights we've lost over the years...   He's calling for a cap of federal spending at 17.5%, which is high, very high, the average since WWII has been 18%...  Historically our government lived off of 2-3% of GDP before FDR...  By leaving the spending so high, you doom Americans into paying 30-35% of their income in taxes forever....  The cap should be much lower.   The amendments don't require a balanced budget or prevent deficit spending...  which are the real problems that will soon ruin us as a nation....   You notice it doesn't deal with monetary policy at all either, like getting rid of the Federal Reserve?   Gun Sane, if you knew me, you'd know I'm not watching MSNBC ever ;)  FoxNEWS is a little too progressive for my tastes ;)   BTW, none of this really addresses the fact that once a Article 5 convention is called by the states, we loose complete control over what happens...  We can go in with these 11 Amendments and come out with 20 new ones that have nothing to do with these...   And in the Hannity interview he (Mark Levin) glosses over that part...  He asserts that we have nothing to fear because the state legislatures have to approve the Amendments...  but that isn't the case...  in the case of a convention Congress can hold ratifying convention(s) that bypass the legislatures entirely.    This isn't the way to fix the issues in Washington...  This road is a much quicker way to slide into tyranny.    

No I'm positive I'm talking about Mark Reed Levin, who is very much a neocon.  The fact that a neocon like Hannity is calling him "the Great One" kinda proves my point.    

Levin in a smart man...  but the fact is there has never been a convention called under Article 5, we have no clue what a modern supreme court would do if Congress decided that calling a convention allowed them to set up the rules...     I've read Levin's work on the subject and I'm not convinced the Article 5 process could not be used sometime down the road to remove vast parts of the bill of rights.  Or complete change the government...   There is no requirement that the convention be held in the open, subject to public oversight...  There are no requirements that votes be recorded on the passing of proposed Amendments.    Congress would have the authority under Article 5 to decide all of that with no input from the states...   Mark Levin is a John McCain style establishment Republican, pardon me if I don't fully agree with his assessment that nothing could go wrong.  I don't think he and I agree on exactly what 'Liberty' means either...  

As I read Article 5:   "The Congress, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments..."   I cut out the parts that don't apply to a Con-Con...  So congress shall call a convention...  which means Congress decides on how delegates to that convention are called, the decided who is or isn't seated at that convention, and decide how amendments can be proposed at the convention.   The states have no legal control over any of it....  Congress is completely in the drivers seat...  nothing in Article 5 prevents the Con-Con from writing an entirely new Constitution...  which is exactly what happened at the last Con-Con.  Once 2/3rds of the states make application to Congress, Congress is in charge not the states.  

The instant 38 states vote for a convention, their ability to control anything having to do with the convention ends...  Congress can select the members from each state, and can even have the same delegations approve the proposed Amendments the very same day.   The states can't legally place limits on what can or can't be voted on at the convention...   An article 5 convention would be a singularity, once started there would be no control from the states where it goes, or what it does.  Nobody can predict what comes out the other side.     

You know I'm right there with you...  the country is broken...  but it's broken at a much more fundamental level than the federal government...   State, and local governments are just as broken if not more so than the Federal government...  Our own legislators are happy to allow clearly unconstitutional laws stand....  the waste money and spend our taxes dollars like drunken sailors just as bad as the congresscritters do...  What makes you think sending a bunch of those low lifes to an article 5 convention will solve anything?   I just don't think it can be solved through the political process anymore... I hope you're right, but an Article 5 convention scares me to death...  remember what happened last time the people were tricked into a constitutional convention?  The got a whole new constitution that gave a lot of rights away.    

Just remember that Article 5 grants the rogue government not the states the power to setup the constitutional convention.   Then lets look at Article 5:     So congress sets up the requirements for delegates to the convention, and you can't have those crazy terrorist tea party members as members...  then once they come up with the new Amendments to the Constitution, Congress declares the same people they hand selected to run the convention from each of the states are now the "conventions" of each state.... which can ratify those amendments right then and there.   We now have new amendments to the Constitution without a single state legislature, or voter approving a single one of them.   Article 5 isn't written well, they never imagined that Senators would be directly elected, so it never occured to the framers to place more restrictions on congress in Article 5.   Just remember that 'Heritage' was all for an Obamacare style healthcare solution back in the 1990's, it's not like there aren't a bunch of neo-cons in the republican party who would love to make some changes to the Bill of Rights anyway possible during an Article 5 convention.   Things are bad, they're getting worse...  there is a far greater chance that an Article 5 convention would result in things getting much worse quicker, than getting even a slightly bit better.  Just remember for every person that thinks like you, Chuck, and myself, there are ten people who think government doesn't have enough power like Robert, DaveTN and DaveS who call themselves republicans.   The argument between establishment republicans and establishment democrats isn't over whether the government needs more power or not, only where IN government they need more power.  

I don't think it would be a good idea...  too many things could go wrong.

Anytime you give F-TROOP the benefit of the doubt, they'll find a new and better way to disappoint you.  

There is no way you'd face an intent to go armed charge for carrying a stripped lower :)  You need to make some friends in the gun community in your neck of the woods :)   BTW, if you want to make things interesting...  ask them for a ride to the Smokey Mountain Pet Resort at 1868 Country Meadows Drive, and go next door to the gun range ;)  

If they think there is too much competition now, wait 20 more years when they're competing against computer driven trucks, and 90+% of CDL drivers are laid off.   Truth is there is probably only 1 job that has even a worse future than truck drivers, and that is cargo airplane pilots...  if you're making $100+k a year working as a flight crew member for FedEx or UPS, I sure hope you're within 10 years of retirement, otherwise you better start training for a new job now.   Truck drivers won't fare any better in the long run...  if you're under 40 and a truck driver, IMHO you better start looking for a new line of work now...  if you don't believe me just look at what happened to the car industry in Michigan when they started to 'automate'.