Creating a thread for the ongoing discussion of how the Internet brings out the worst in people over controversial or psuedo-controversial topics. I shall start:
Apple, for the upcoming releases of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, have replaced the handgun emoji with a water pistol. Now, since I know y’all are normal people, I’m guessing your reaction should be similar to mine: “yay, they made the water pistol green!”.
Meanwhile, the …2nd Amendment Groupies are out in arms. Spotted on both 9to5Mac and MacRumors are entire thread derailments because of repeated complaints that Apple are personally eroding their… I don’t know, their 2nd Amendment Right to use emoji?
Speaking as someone from a country where owning a handgun can, in some situations, gain you a jail sentence longer than that for rape, I don’t get the fuss. Speaking as a member of a community recently attacked by a gunman, admittedly in another country, I think this is a nice compromise. I can’t however put myself into the shoes of an American with the freedoms of the Bill of Rights.
So what do you guys think? Are you Americans reading this feeling threatened by Apple eroding your rights?
(edited: I meant 2nd Amendment, not 4th … I think?)
Anyone who wants to take my guns, however deserves to get shot in the face.
I’m no constitutional scholar, nor a wacko in a compound, but as I recall learning from my friend that used to teach college history, the whole point of the amendment was that the people need to have access to the same arms (guns, weapons, whatever) as the government’s forces (militia, army, whatever), for the reason of protecting the public from the government. I’m not saying I want my own personal ICBM, but in the spirit of the law, it should be just as easy for me to go buy a fully automatic rifle as it is for the army to acquire them. Just sayin’.
As far as I read up on the subject, and from my personal interpretation of the original text, the public of the United States are allowed to bear arms in order to defeat a government that had overstepped its boundaries as an entity. As I read that: the public will have a right to become armed to defend themselves in such times as a monstrous government becoming dangerous. Similar to how you’re only allowed to use fire hydrants to extinguish fire, and messing with them otherwise is an offence.
The problem now is, of course, you cannot hope to overthrow a malevolent government with pistols. Nor with machine guns. You have a nuclear government which has access to enough missiles to obliterate every major point of civilisation on the continent of North America should they feel threatened. They wouldn’t (or at least I hope) do that but they could. There could be no public retaliation to that.
This is not me saying it’s a dumb piece of law, simply one that should be updated. Changing it so that the weapons can be used in self defence against armed attackers, for example.
Except that it says “keep and bear Arms”, so we don’t have to wait around for the government to become monstrous and dangerous (which, quite frankly, it already has).
But, yeah, I think we’re on the same page.
IMO, we’re also not keeping up our end of the deal, because we’re supposed to be keeping ourselves (the non-government public) organized in well regulated Militias. The peacenicks would shit their pants if they thought about that real hard.
Wouldn’t that be [dramatic thunderclap] THE RANGERS? Although, since the Rangers and later the municipal and state Police are now government bodies… Y’know, I lost my thread, but somewhere I think I tried to make the point of you already doing that…
Well, except if there are 1,000 “rebels” in DC I doubt they’ll drop a nuke on it to pacify it. All the big shit goes right out the window in an insurgency, and we have lots of people who can attest to it already annoyed, trained, and armed here. It also helps when those assets are all well known and located by the very people most likely to be fighting the government.
Nah, militias are groups organized by the local people to work and train together to protect the community. The whole point is no governmental control. The local government may be members, and some of them may even be in command of pieces of it, but the federal government itself is not supposed to control it. The US was made so the Feds wouldn’t take over. X number of grand experiments is what it was supposed to be, none of this federal guidelines or anything.
Back on topic… 1) it’s stupid, B] why not just add another emoji? III} I have better shit to worry about than how goofy Apple is. Do no evil polluting child labor exploiting hypocritical beast that it is.
Is it something I could make arguments about, sure. And maybe if it shows up on my Facebook feed posted by someone I don’t like I’ll slap them silly for being so happy about something so stupid. Pretending guns don’t exist doesn’t make them go away.
If you don’t have fire hydrants already installed and know how to use them then what good are they? Here’s the thing, if in Britain they decided to round up all the gay people and put them in camps, who could even slow them down? No knives, no guns, no cricket bats, no weapons of any kind. What if it was just a gang of football hooligans and not the law doing it, but it’s 5 thousand rowdy assholes running around kicking the shit out of gay people, what do you do? They outnumber the “specials” so that’s won’t help much. A gun could stop a crowd, or at least cause it to pause, and more than one gun will stop it.
I was agreeing with you up to this point, but you have made several logical fallacies in this paragraph.
You’ve got a black or white fallacy - either you have guns or people will run riot. There are other alternatives though.
Who is “they”? The government? Where they will certainly have a fair proportion of gay people? Or the police? Same thing applies.
This is an appeal to emotion fallacy.
And a single gun wouldn’t stop a crowd of 500, let alone a crowd of 5000.
If the authorities aren’t willing to use the guns, then they do little to deter the riot. I’m remembering L.A. after the Rodney King incident or the fallout in that little backwater town after the black kid robbed the convenience store.
I think he meant the government with the first “they” or government agents working to enforce the government’s will, because in the second scenario, it was hooligans instead of “the law”.
A hundred officers with 30 round mags would put a heck of a dent in them. The rest would probably disperse pretty quickly. But because of bureaucratic overhead, the P.R. nightmare, and the mountain of paperwork it would require afterward, those officers are unlikely to open fire. That’s how it ties into the fire hydrant thing - if the citizenry is unarmed and untrained, they’re not going to stand up to a mob of officials or hooligans. Didn’t a mob of hooligans tear up a stadium over there a while back?
Eh, just thinking off the top of my head. Too lazy to Google it. Ha
1000 rebels is a pitifully small number to attempt to overthrow the US Government with. I’m sure there are more than ten times the amount of National Guard who could be deployed in the area in the time it takes for Fox News to work out exactly how to spin the story. Even if you upped that to 100,000 or 1,000,000 rebels, that’s not enough to stop the USAF from dropping something nasty, albeit non-nuclear, on the crowd. Warfare advanced.
My point was that originally the Rangers and Sheriffs were appointed locally with no government interference. This has changed now, but they were the original militias, chosen by the townsfolk.
Actually, an overwhelming majority of people don’t know that here in the UK, those little yellow signs with a big black H on them indicate the location of a hydrant. Hydrants are subterranean here, and if you don’t have the right tool to release them, they stay that way. Firemen know how to use them. Civilians attempting to use them face hefty fines and community service. Similarly, the military know how to operate weapons. It’s a paradigm that I agree doesn’t mirror across the pond, indeed it shows how the militia/self arming system couldn’t work here; there is no establishment to train the average public to use weapons (the overwhelming majority of firearms licenses are awarded to farmers to kill vermin, and ex-servicemen who buy their weapons outright from the army) and if there were to be one, it would have to be government regulated
They’re already appointing ministers who are anti-LGBT - heck Frau Kommandant is appointing ministers who think that things like minimum wage and maternity leave should be scrapped. All those with money are leaving and my partner and I are saving up to leave, either to Ireland or Canada. So your point is kind of moot because the early stages of your point are actually happening, and we’re responding. Just like the Brain Drain in Germany before the attacks against domestic Jews began.
One gun doesn’t seem to stop anyone here at all; ref the terrorist bomber at Edinburgh who had firearms, explosives, and was himself on fire when a member of the public kicked him in the bollocks and put the fire out so that the police could arrest him. Also ref: Raul Moat, who was chased by police and schoolchildren whilst brandishing a shotgun which he had used to shoot … I think 6 people? I forget. The children wrote a song about him
Which time? It’s common. And they usually surrender to the police afterward. Our typical police are armed, at most, with pepper spray; tasers are rare and firearms are only given to special teams to respond to firearms incidents.
I guess my point here is that look at the difference. Yes, we have gun crime in the UK, of course we do. And people own guns - rifles and shotguns - with strict licensing and special laws. Handguns have been illegal since before WWII (you were encouraged to give them to the Army) and our police are, comparatively, unarmed. Our population is smaller, so public protests in any number are proportionally larger; several million people marched against the War in Iraq, a whole 2.6% of the total population. There was violence, ironically, even including firearms, and we dealt with it by arresting those responsible and subjecting them to public shaming. It’s a matter of shame to be in a position of owning a firearm. Northumbria Police, who are my local police force, have one firearms unit who the rest of the force look down on because their solution to situations is pew pew pew.
Aaaaaanyway… yes, the emoji thing is stupid I’m glad we all agree so far!
By and large, shame is dead. Just looking at the subcultures that glorify unwed mothers, criminal activity, and being jobless & living off the government dole.
Propaganda over Welfare spending helped win the Tories the last election. Public opinion polls (data from the Independent newspaper, and the Trade Union Congress) show that the average person asked believed that 41% of state welfare was spent exclusively on the jobless. In actual fact the number is 3%, and the largest chunk (36%) is spent on pensions. The average person believes that more than 27% of dole recipients are claiming fraudulently. The real figure is 0.1%. The average person believes that more than 47% of dole recipients have a claim lasting more than one year. The actual number? In the realms of 12%.
More on that, the average person believes that a household of two adults with two school-aged children would receive more than £240 ($317) per week to live on. The actual amount is £112 ($147). That amount is to pay for food, utilities, and in some cases rent.
All of this misinformation was spread deliberately by right-wing press on the lead up to the election, with the Tory Party proudly announcing that they would strip £3bn from the welfare budget. They deliberately shamed the workless, and prompted the general population to shun them, call them slackers, scammers and thieves and who is actually going to suffer the most from this £3bn cut? The very same right-wing pensioners who voted the Tories in.
And yes, it did work. It worked stupidly well. Unfortunately it also played into the hands of the Employers in a rather nasty way; zero hour contracts. You’re hired, you cannot take another job, but you are not guaranteed any work at any given time. Since you’re employed, you can’t claim jobseekers. Since you cannot take a second job, you literally have to rely on your manager deciding who he likes best in order to get hours and get paid.
They are indeed. They’re specifically designed to get you off the dole in the most unpleasant way possible.
The number of deaths in disabled, starving and other such people who became trapped without state benefit topped the 10,000 mark some point last year. The media tried to keep it quiet but it didn’t work so well. The really shocking thing? The general consensus was “meh”. The public is so conditioned to think that those poor enough to need state assistance to eat are so far beyond contempt that it simply didn’t matter that they died.
This is one of the many reasons I want the fuck out of this country.
