http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/12/27/republicans-cede-judicial-nominations-to-nra Comments On: Republicans cede judicial nominations to NRA by Max Brantley en-us Copyright 2013 Arkansas Times. All rights reserved. This RSS file is offered to individuals, Arkansas Times readers, and non-commercial organizations only. Any commercial websites wishing to use this RSS file, please contact Arkansas Times. robert@arktimes.com (Arkansas Times Webmaster) Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:01 -0500 Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500 Foundation http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
So, why would you want to shoot it? We capture rats and take them to other places far away from homes and release them.

But, the best deterrent for rats is to rat-proof anything you want the rats to stay away from. That's what works for us. When you shoot them, more will show up to replace them. After all, they do reproduce quickly.
Posted by rablib]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 22:24:39 -0600 Arkansas Times Posted by Doc]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:23:42 -0600 Arkansas Times
When I lived on a farm we used steel traps for rats. It snapped their necks. No shooting necessary. We fed the rats to chickens. Saved our .410 and .22 ammo for squirrels and rabbits.

One neighboring farm kept a rat terrier on their farm. If you never seen one work it's a sight to behold. Great pets to boot!

Posted by eLwood]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:08:43 -0600 Arkansas Times
Even WELL REGULATED, the militia men did have a problem with facing, in open battle, the British line. They DID, though, have a great way of sniping at units, killing officers and making a pain of themselves to the British army. IN that fashion, they were very well regulated.
Posted by Steven E]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:00:48 -0600 Arkansas Times
It's time to focus on the REGULATED part of the Amendment.
Posted by Vanessa]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:09:17 -0600 Arkansas Times Posted by plainjim]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 14:34:54 -0600 Arkansas Times http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/mic…

The classic neoliberal way, placing a price/meter on everything... knowing the value of nothing... except on behalf of the rich. As I said, the rich already have a number of militias... and that ignores their most lethal forms of violence, at least domestically - death by spreadsheet.

How much should it cost a poor fellow to own a gun and buy bullets in order to kill a varmint? You are not going to end wanton murderers by penalizing/taxing the hell out of people like me.

I trapped it in a live trap last night... I had a few choices.

I could risk getting a bite by trying to release it.

I could risk it returning to the scene of the crime if I released it... or risk it moving in on someone else's house if I drove down the road and released it. (Folks say you should drive at least five miles before releasing a rat if you don't want it to return)

Or I could shoot it.

A perfectly well behaved citizen should not have to be punished/taxed/denied a liberty in order to continue kill a rat, hunt a deer, defend a home when the need arises. If people want to punish millions like me because of a few nut cases out there... we will soon have no liberties at all. We will all be living as if we are all crazy. And only the most well armed violent aristocrats/government on the planet will have carte blanche to turn on their own even more than they have already.

I would point out to dbi, who suggests we should all just lay down our gus anyway... since uncle sam is already so well armed and so violent.... that Afghanistani's haven't done so... and though they suffer great loss under our relentless terrorism... they still have their country, their culture... the US is heading into the same fate as many others - graveyard of empires.

I would say a well armed citizenry is the only thing which has saved the afghani's from total annihilation.
Posted by Eureka Springs]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:31:55 -0600 Arkansas Times Posted by Doc]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:30:16 -0600 Arkansas Times

Why do Americans love guns? They’re part of our culture.
By Henry Allen, Published: December 25 Washington Post

Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, was a Post editor and reporter for 39 years.


Let me dust off my favorite Sufi parable.

A man loses a ring inside his house. A friend sees him crawling around outside and asks, “If you lost your ring in the house, why are you looking for it here?” “You fool,” says the man, “the light is much better out here.”

And so it goes with people looking for solutions to gun killings in America.

We’re talking about the very best people, the people with statistics and proposals for regulation, crawling around in the sunlight of their social-scientific rationality.

They never find a solution because all their legislation, academic studies, mathematical proofs, and proposals for waiting periods, background checks and buying limits aren’t going to do much more than they ever have.

Nor are the pleas of the progressives asking why anyone would ever want to own a gun — thereby demonstrating their arrogance toward the people who own the hundreds of millions of guns in the United States.

Both the problem and the solution lie elsewhere, in what historian Richard Hofstadter called “America as a Gun Culture.”

It started with New England Indians trying to drive out settlers in King Philip’s War, 1675-76. Some 5 percent to 10 percent of settler men of fighting age were killed. Laws soon required settlers to keep firearms in their homes.

The 1700s brought the “Kentucky rifle,” the long-range symbol of frontier independence. George Washington encouraged “the use of Hunting Shirts, with long Breeches made of the same Cloth . . . it is a dress justly supposed to carry no small terror to the enemy, who think every such person a complete marksman.”

In the 19th century, Samuel Colt brought the gleaming modernity of mass production to gunmaking. The slogan had it that God created man and Samuel Colt made them equal. Cowboys carried Colts the way noblemen carried swords, as blazons of their status. Dime-novel writers invented the quick-draw duels that almost never happened.

The 20th century brought the dark romance of the gangster armed with Thompson submachine guns and private eyes with their snub-nosed .38s. World War II veterans brought home enemy guns as trophies of their victory. Then came the AK-47, weapon of choice against Western imperialists.

Hollywood employs armorers tuned to the tiniest details of gun fetishism. I’ve read that on “Miami Vice,” Don Johnson’s character was equipped with not an ordinary cop’s sidearm but a 10mm Dornaus & Dickson Bren Ten with hard-chrome slide on a stainless-steel frame. How alluring.

Guns get handed down through generations, symbols of patriarchy.

They’re symbols of protection of the home, the romance of industry, equality, cool daring, mean-street savvy, fighting for liberation and family tradition.

There are complications of class, too. Campaigns against “Saturday night specials” were campaigns against the arming of the lower classes. In 1941, a Florida Supreme Court justice wrote an opinion that a gun-control law had been “passed for the purpose of disarming the Negro laborers and. . . was never intended to be applied to the white population.”

Last week an analyst talked to an NPR talk-show host about “insurrectionist” gun owners — a rising of the masses against, presumably, some of the people who listen to NPR.

When elites talk about “armed rednecks” and “gun-toting trailer trash,” they may think their bigotry stays secret. It doesn’t. Those maligned Americans are aware that governing classes throughout history have sought a monopoly on violence, in the manner of the British redcoats trying to seize American guns at Concord, Mass.

Purveyors of guns rejoice whenever America is seized by gun-control crusades — they do little but drive up gun purchases by those who fear total confiscation.

The gun problem, however it’s defined, can’t be solved by statistical correlation between gun ownership and gun deaths, or by sneering at gun owners, or by lawmakers calling for more laws (which is, after all, what they do).

Instead, we need to look at America as a gun culture.

We might start with public pressure on the media and mass entertainment. We might stop catering to gun fetishism. We might increase the number of high school rifle teams, the dwindling of which, following calls for bans starting in the 1960s, has helped leave gun training to movies and video games. We might point out that the great names of American gunsmithing — Winchester, Colt, Smith and Wesson, and Remington — are now just brands bought and sold by corporations. U.S. pistols are so shoddy that our armed forces chose a pistol from Italy, the Beretta. Our police carry pistols from Austria and Germany.

We might think about the cultural effects of turning endless war — Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — into a norm. And we should know that gun culture is founded on a small amount of facts and a large amount of romance.

Changing a culture is a lot harder than changing the law. But look at our cultural shifts on race and gender, on drunk driving and the cooling of the American love affair with the automobile. It takes a long time, and there are no guarantees, yet we might actually find the solution we’ve been looking for in all the wrong places.
Posted by Steven E]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:11:47 -0600 Arkansas Times Posted by Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:48:23 -0600 Arkansas Times
David Frum:
Southerners do not endorse violence in the abstract more than do Northerners, nor do they endorse violence in all specific forms of circumstances. Rather, they are more likely to endorse violence as an appropriate response to insults, as a means of self-protection, and as a socialisation tool in training children. This is the characteristic cultural pattern of herding societies the world over. Consistent with the culture-of-honour interpretation, it is argument-related and not felony-related homicide that is more common in the South.

Sam Wang:
The three states with the highest rate of gun ownership (Montana, Arkansas, Wyoming) have a gun death rate of 17.8 per 100,000, over 4 times that of the three lowest-ownership states (Hawaii, New Jersey, Massachusetts); 4.0 gun deaths per 100,000.

American Journal of Public Health in 2009: "Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault". The researchers compared 677 gun assault victims to 684 individuals from the population at large in Philadelphia, 2003 to 2006. They found that "individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession." It was even worse where there was "at least some chance to resist", which upped the ratio to 5.45.

Alaskan gun-owner and hunter Shannon Moore recently observed, "At this point in time, you're going to need more than a few guns and monster clips. You'll need weapons-grade uranium, a few tanks, a submarine and an army of your own to go up against our 3 million strong military." Clearly, what was once a living possibility is no longer the case. The rationale dies, because the underlying facts do not support it.

I would think as Americans are learning to give up cigarettes, Twinkies, drunk driving, wearing fur coats, lead based paint and asbestos, we'd do well to look down our long judgmental noses at people who worship guns. Come on rednecks and paranoids, your guns are more likely to get you in trouble than to defend yer American Freedom which is a product of your imagination anyway.

Your hobby is killing people! The NRA is the advertising arm of the gun manufacturing industry. Their mission is to scare you into buying more and more powerful guns and ammo. What else could explain gun and ammo sellers selling out their stock just before Christmas? Scrooge gave Tiny Tim a turkey for Christmas, not a Glock. NBC is in trouble for just showing a 30 round clip on TV, how many 30 round clips were found under Arkansas Christmas trees 2 days ago?

Mass murderers of children are no doubt crazy! But it's also crazy to fill your home with high powered weapons. To those of you who do......don't you feel the least bit crazy? Now that you can't adopt a Russian orphan, does that make you want to buy another gun? Where does this end?
Posted by DeathbyInches]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:34:49 -0600 Arkansas Times Posted by Hackett]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:36:03 -0600 Arkansas Times
We now know very well as many founding aristocratic fathers knew then regulated American militias terrorize, threaten, occupy, torture, murder, arm, oppress, on behalf of the rich - then Shays and Whiskey Rebellions, now on a horrific neoliberal global scale. Liberals like Boxer have no problem with that, in fact are suggesting we turn it up a few notches in schools... despicable, even more so than the NRA, imo.

This post details much of the reasoning (and lack there of) at the time of the 2nd amendments penning. It was penned in a convoluted manner intentionally. There is good reason on both sides to cherry pick. It's simply not worded in a complete manner which justifies demanding it all be interpreted as such.

http://williamhogeland.wordpress.com/2012/…
Posted by Eureka Springs]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:10:26 -0600 Arkansas Times Posted by couldn't be better]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:43:22 -0600 Arkansas Times
It's cheaper now to give to the NRA than to let the certain punishment of citizens liberals want on this front to raise costs of gun ownership exorbitantly.

And still NO mention by the AR Blog of the liberal Senator Boxer wanting to put more guns in schools.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn…

Defend your right to shoot rats at a free (as in liberty) and affordable rate, before it's too late. Join the NRA.

Republicans may be like a broken clock, right twice a day... but this is one of those times.

As for the gist of the main post... this is yet another reason why playing whack-a-mole (getting all worked up over one judicial nominee in an entirely corrupt system) will never work. Linda Greenhouse asks us all to ignore the real power in need of dramatic change.... bribe based money in the political process. I don't know if this country will ever base their decisions on merit based process.... but until we take all corrupt financial influence out of the process entirely... we have no chance of doing so at all.
Posted by Eureka Springs]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:42:11 -0600 Arkansas Times
"STUDY: CONSERVATIVES MORE LIKELY TO MAKE UP FACTS IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY THEIR BELIEFS

Two psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto from the University of California-Irvine conducted a study to evaluate how liberals and conservatives dealt with so called hard truths in areas that they may not be prone to believing because of their ideologies. The study looked at four areas – two of these areas are supported by liberals and detested by conservatives and two are supported by conservatives and detested by liberals:

#1 – Educating kids on condoms

#2 – Embryonic stem cell research

#3 – The death penalty

#4 – Water boarding captives

Even though both liberals and conservatives alike had a tendency to rationalize their views … conservatives created a new reality essentially in all four of these areas in order to square their thought process. The conservative movement by and large suffers from this; another term for this is cognitive dissonance. For whatever reason – the brains of conservatives just make stuff up in order to justify their support for two conflicting beliefs.

Conservatives are against “socialism” but love Medicare. They hate Obamacare but nominated a guy who created the model for Obamacare. They’re against abortion but don’t want to teach kids about condoms. They don’t like Wall Street but want fewer regulations. The list goes on.
.....
http://www.classwarfareexists.com/study-re…
Posted by eLwood]]> Thu, 27 Dec 2012 09:24:34 -0600 Arkansas Times