The bill of rights are about personal freedoms, as is made clear during the discussion leading up to them. All states copied these in some form into their own constitutions, and if you go look at those, most are quite explicit this is a personal right. The claim otherwise is a very recent claim.
Congress around 1982 had the Library of Congress issue a study about this in great depth, with millions of citations to historical documents, which give ample evidence and quotes. You may have to dig to find it, but it's a good read to gain more understanding.
Also the second militia act of 1792 actually required all able bodied men to own guns, and this was the law for well over the following century.
The founders had no qualms about everyone having arms.
I've read the Bible at least four times. I'd rather not stone people for being born different. Nor inspire PTSD in children or adults with silly stories about punishment in eternal flames.
Good and evil are even more subjective than how people perceive colors. I hope we can at least agree that murder is wrong, and the tools which facilitate the most murder should be the most heavily regulated.
Might have read it but clearly didn't understand the point of the sacrifice and the new covenant. You shouldn't be telling young children they're going to burn in hell for eternity any more than you should talk to them about sex.
Murder is wrong.
Every citizen worth a damn should own guns and the idea that they should not be regulated by the government is enshrined in the 2nd amendment to the US constitution. Every gun law created since is an abberation that should be abolished.
The first three words of 2A is "A well regulated...". IDK where this idea comes from that guns cannot be regulated.
Shall we say prisoners have the right to bear arms? Felons with a violent past? People with mental illness? Surely there must be limits. Few rights are absolute in every circumstance.
If a person shouldn't have firearms, then they shouldn't be on the street. They should be in jail/prison. Period. I don't know that anyone that has argued that prisoners should have guns. You would have to be a fool. If a person shouldn't have access to guns, then they shouldn't have access to any other freedom. The ultimate purpose of owning firearms is to fight a tyrannical government. For that purpose, less limits is better for the people. This right is absolute, and anyone espousing otherwise is a tyrant or a fool.
I'm not personally against individuals owning guns, but the part that is somehow vehemently opposed is the "well-regulated" part. There's effectively no regulation, and somehow the 2nd amendment has been warped to leave out the part of regulation, to make folks believe they're entitled to guns without limit.
"well regulated" applies not to guns but to militias, and has nothing to do with legal restrictions. It means well functioning, well trained, efficient. It has nothing to do with legal regulations.
The word has many meanings. Learn which one the phrase in the Constitution is using.
100%. The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force. Same in Vietnam.
The US populace is vastly larger and better armed and capable than Afghanistan.
The US military requires a massive economy to function. If it tries to attack itself, those little armed people could stop it, the economy would crash, and the US military would crumble without needed support and supplies.
A final issue is the US troops would lose a lot of soldiers if they were told to go attack fellow citizens. The soldiers would quit, would hesitate, would not want to kill people they view as their own people.
So armed citizenry absolutely have major power against the govt.
Finally, if you were in a country where the govt set out to kill its citizens, would you rather have arms or be completely unarmed?
>The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force.
We had no military objective in Afghanistan.
Our only goal there was to enrich contractors who had stockholders working at the highest levels in the Pentagon and White House. That goal was achieved spectacularly.
The US military would be the defending force, though, which would put The People at a disadvantage. Pushing through the defenses of a multi-trillion dollar military with AR-15s seems unlikely. I don't even think that China's armed forces could defeat the US military, let alone civilians armed with AR-15s
All being said, I am no military guru and I could be wrong
Japan has strict gun control and an extremely high rate of suicide. The US has more homicides per capita by simply beating someone to death by ones bare hands than many countries have total homicide rate (check data in FBI UCR). Restricting suicides and homicides to only those with guns is a dishonest comparison when the rates without the gun restriction are more useful and flip the outcomes of the discussion. I doubt a murder by non-gun is fundamentally different to a family or society than one by a gun, or any other method.
The Obama CDC study on gun control concluded that guns are used to stop far more crimes than they are used for in crimes. It concluded that a household with a gun saw far less bad outcomes than a household without during home invasions. It concluded a lot of things that didn't sit well with the left, so after all the fanfare to make it, it was downplayed by that admin. Read it, it's quite interesting.
He confuses two different places there is energy. Light is made (this is a little bit of a cheat) of photons. Each photon has a wavelength λ, and a per photon energy E where E = hc/λ, h is Plank's constant and c is the speed of light constant. So energy and wavelength per photon completely determines each other (and the color of the light of that single photon).
These energies are very small. You can add a lot of photons per second, increasing the brightness of that color, and this now has the energy per second of all those photons. So you can have a lot of red photons which sum to some energy, or a different number of blue photons that sums to (very, very close) the total red energy.
These are the two energies he confuses in those two places.
Paying more for less is never a positive change, it's an inefficiency that is costing someone and resulting in less goods for society. It's a net loss. That money paying for less is now not being spent where it was before, making that place lose out.
No, it's not corporate welfare. Min wage hikes mean those workers unable to add that much value don't have jobs anymore, are left out of a workforce and thus cannot gain skills, and now require actual welfare.
Requiring companies to pay more than value added by an employee simply fire those workers.
The purpose of govt is to provide assistance, and perhaps training, so those on min wage can gain experience and skills to move up.
You are correct that I was unable to summarize an incredibly complex tangled web of economics, sociology and politics in a few hundred words on a forum. I don't think any of us can do this. Of course it's an oversimplification. Is the comment I'm replying to also not doing this? Are you also not doing the same thing?
My only point is that this seems like an awful lot of confirmation bias. Something everyone suffers from.
Not all people suffer the same level of confirmation bias, especially across all topics. And, for most topics, broad consensus of experts is better and less biased than individuals.
US tax system is the most progressive in the OECD [1]
US top tiny amount of incomes pay vastly more, even per dollar earned, than in any other first world country, where middle and lower class pay a much larger share.
Around the bottom 50% of US taxpayers pay zero federal income tax, and after post tax transfers (aid, etc...) the lowest decent sized chunk get money back, i.e., negative federal income tax.
Then, after already covering the vast majority of US tax burden, the really wealthy end up paying another large chunk in estate taxes (and no, there isn't magic sauce where they all hide all assets in foreign lands - you can simply go over public IRS data, or CBO data and see).
> US tax system is the most progressive in the OECD [1]
Except that being paid in shares is not really calculated as a pay and top levels borrow money from banks with shares as a collateral so basically they pay zero taxes on their income. Even kids know that.
I guess kids don't know how to read or the Internet then.
Simply google "do ceos pay taxes on shares" and you'll see plenty of places making it clear they do. Part of my income at several places has been in shares, and they're always taxed.
Borrowing against assets isn't taxed for anyone, as it's not income, whether it's a common homeowner getting a mortgage, a person spending on a credit card, or any other loan.
Zero of this affects the facts I linked. And your claims are demonstrably wrong.
> The statistic in the article compares average CEO pay to the median income
No, it compares the top 500 CEO pay out of 250k+ CEOs to all workers, which is as ludicrous and misleading as comparing the top 500 worker pay to all 250k CEOs and thinking this is the useful metric to rage about.
Congress around 1982 had the Library of Congress issue a study about this in great depth, with millions of citations to historical documents, which give ample evidence and quotes. You may have to dig to find it, but it's a good read to gain more understanding.
Also the second militia act of 1792 actually required all able bodied men to own guns, and this was the law for well over the following century.
The founders had no qualms about everyone having arms.