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It's more like an astonishing piece of propaganda ; ) Meanwhile drones are happily killing lots of people on other continents and that is ok. Because the stat

It's more like an astonishing piece of propaganda ; ) Meanwhile drones are happily killing lots of people on other continents and that is ok. Because the state has the monopoly of violence. And it is slowly trying to disarm its own citizens as to be sure that the day people realize they're governed by an oppressive government they won't be able to do anything about it. How many deaths in 2012 due to complication related to obesity? How many due to guns? How many due to road accidents? Find your priorities and pick up the good fights. The ones taking away the only thing preventing a dictatorial government from being impossible to revolt against ain't one of them.

bithive123 14y ago
Somehow I doubt handguns and rifles offer much protection against drones. Your thinking is muddled and you seem kind of paranoid.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  I think a shotgun would probably be most effective against drone aircraft, and there has been little to no discussion about changing how shotguns are regulated.
- rhizome 14y ago
  I think we're way beyond any kind of disarmament situation, but a drone can certainly be considered to be a handgun of foreign policy.
- defilade 14y ago
  It's not an issue of handguns vs. drones, or rifles vs. tanks. It's an issue of ~20 million households holding 300 million guns. In the (admittedly unlikely) event that someone has tyrannical aspirations, those numbers present a real obstacle.
  - bithive123 14y ago
    It's mostly in movies and comic books where the tyrants literally round everyone up at gunpoint and violate their rights. I'm not saying "we're all slaves because plutocracy" but your framing of the issue demonstrates a real lack of imagination.
    - hga 14y ago
      Errr ... how familiar are you with 20th Century history? Well more than 100 million previously disarmed people were rounded up at gunpoint and their rights were violated to the point they were killed. Those movies and comic books had some real world inspiration, after all.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        Ah, but all of those crimes against humanity were not committed by current governments that we like! (and of course those that were have the benefit of victor's justice...)
      - ajuc 14y ago
        No amount of guns in people hands could prevent Hitler or Stalin or WW2. Even in WW2 era guns weren't sufficient to overthrow governments. You would need tanks and planes and artillery, and logistic system to support all of this. Since 1945 war became even more expansive and require much more specialized equipment. Guns won't do. Yes, you could organise resistance movements. People did that a lot, even on German occupied areas. And they were thorns in regular army side. But no resistance would suffice to win WW2, because by that time war required very costly machines. You think Jews or Poles could maybe shoot at Germans taking them from homes? Yeah - they did that. And escaped to forests, and ambushed them, etc. Poles even did uprising and liberated Warsaw for roughly a month. Guns weren't that big problem - they massproduced them in homes and hidden factories. Tanks and flamethrowers and bombers and logistic were the problem. Germans retook and obliterated the city to be 90% flat. Do you really think people in USA could overthrow government if it went Nazi? Assuming army is supporting the government. I think it's very naive argument. Also pre-WW2 Poland had quite liberal laws regarding gun ownership - you only needed positive opinion from local police station. Didn't helped.
- coley 14y ago
  They wouldn't. The drone comment, and protect ourselves comment were separate ideas. I think he's trying to bring to light that our country completely stopped for a month after Sandy Hook, but we ignore all of the innocent lives(including children) that get taken by drone strikes. Assault weapons don't stand a chance against drones, but I'm willing to bet they out number them and have a lot more trained operators. My AR-15 was around $900 when I bought it(~2 years ago). Now the same gun is going for $1000+, and there's not even new legislation yet. If these weapons get banned, the criminals that all ready own them will see a gain in their net worth. I don't see how raising the value of 'criminal' assets is going to help anyone. Paranoid is an easy answer. A much more difficult answer is that our country has used it's excessive force on the unarmed before. What's to stop them once their governing body(the citizens) is unarmed?
  - bithive123 14y ago
    Guns may help individuals defend themselves from other individuals (who may or may not be working for the government) in specific interactions (being mugged / taken to the gulag) but surely their raw numbers don't make The Citizenry safer from government oppression. That has to come from somewhere else; leading many people to conclude that "having guns" doesn't protect us from the government any more than "holding leaders accountable" or "having an educated populace".
efnx 14y ago
I think the only thing 'preventing a dictatorial government' is an educated and informed electorate. If we have that, we never have to revolt...
- defilade 14y ago
  If "the only thing 'preventing a dictatorial government' is an educated and informed electorate", then we're screwed.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  the educated and informed electorate is a key thing, but not the only thing that prevents a dictatorial government. The constitutional separation of powers combined with presidential term limits really help, too.
b_emery 14y ago
> The ones taking away the only thing preventing a dictatorial government from being impossible to revolt against ain't one of them. Amen. They can have my Twitter when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
jamespitts 14y ago
When discussing the technical aspects of, say, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, it is impossible to leave our values out of the discussion. However, the topic is html5, in a technical community. Let's talk about the effectiveness of using a bit of animation in what is otherwise a flat picture. The animated, half-mast flag is emphasized, and reawakens our alarm about the violence of guns by associating it with many other national emergencies, including the 9-11 Attacks. Let's talk about the effectiveness of carefully moving our attention to a new topic by employing a fading background connected to the scrolling action. We have little room to pause and think and doubt the material, the next topic is already materializing before us. etc. etc. You may not agree with this message, but it is working. Understanding why your outlook is being countermanded by the techniques employed by the Obama Administration (by way of an html5 developer) may help you see your POV to action far more than your own - text-based - propaganda here.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  I don't feel as if my outlook is being countermanded at all - partly because these policies echo my pre-existing outlook rather than the other way round. But in the context of technical animation, the big difference betweeen this and TV is that I can scroll back and forth as I see fit to review the parts I am interested in, or jump out of the presentation completely to read the proposals in pdf format. This makes it very different from something like a TV ad, where I am a wholly passive consumer of the information unless I change the channel or switch off altogether.
qxcv 14y ago
> Because the state has the monopoly of violence. I'm fascinated by this viewpoint, but I'm afraid I've never fully understood it. How many weapons to the population have to have before the state is no longer considered to pose a threat? Do we stop at clubs or knives? Small arms? Assault weapons? Explosives? Armoured vehicles? Missiles? > How many deaths in 2012 due to complication related to obesity? How many due to guns? How many due to road accidents? Those three are almost entirely unrelated. Complications related to obesity almost only ever affect the physical wellbeing of the obese person. Road accidents arise from the operation of a useful tool by many millions of people, every day, and generally aren't malicious (and thus are more difficult to prevent). This doesn't make these two causes of death any less tragic, but the sort of gun violence the current US administration wishes to legislate against is wanton slaughter of humans, pure and simple. To paraphrase Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine"[0], assault weapons and armour piercing rounds are not useful for hunting[1]. [0]: Now there's something you could call "propaganda". That movie had a lot of good information, but it was often obscured by horrible misrepresentation and questionable conclusions. [1]: Contrary to popular belief, gun control does not preclude those who need weapons in their day-to-day lives from purchasing them. Gun control is not a binary.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  To me, that viewpoint is about considering the ethics of governing itself. Something that has that much responsibility should have a proportionate amount of liability. A monopoly on violence it a huge responsibility that today we balance with the liability that comes inherent in being a democracy. It seems today however that the extent to which the government uses it's monopoly requires a great deal more liability. Since liability requires transparency, the realization that the government has a monopoly on violence should in turn reinforce importance of transparency in all things the government does. If the government feels the need to act independently without overview in some matter, that additional responsibility should come out of a "responsibility budget" that always remains in balance with a liability budget. If you want secret police and your responsibility budget is running low, fill it back up by adding some additional liability (perhaps steeper penalties for government officials that break the law) or free up some responsibility budget by reducing responsibility in other areas (perhaps by disarming other police). Totalitarianism occurs when we give governments a responsibility budget completely decoupled from liability.
lukifer 14y ago
For the record, propaganda is a morally neutral term. Gandhi and MLK Jr. were both brilliant propagandists. I have a complex opinion on gun rights and I don't support all aspects of Obama's plan, but the fact that it is propaganda does not make it inherently wrong.
bruceboughton 14y ago
>> And it is slowly trying to disarm its own citizens as to be sure that the day people realize they're governed by an oppressive government they won't be able to do anything about it. The USA is still a democracy.
- granata 14y ago
  republic

bithive123 14y ago

Somehow I doubt handguns and rifles offer much protection against drones. Your thinking is muddled and you seem kind of paranoid.

MartinCron 14y ago
I think a shotgun would probably be most effective against drone aircraft, and there has been little to no discussion about changing how shotguns are regulated.
rhizome 14y ago
I think we're way beyond any kind of disarmament situation, but a drone can certainly be considered to be a handgun of foreign policy.
defilade 14y ago
It's not an issue of handguns vs. drones, or rifles vs. tanks. It's an issue of ~20 million households holding 300 million guns. In the (admittedly unlikely) event that someone has tyrannical aspirations, those numbers present a real obstacle.
- bithive123 14y ago
  It's mostly in movies and comic books where the tyrants literally round everyone up at gunpoint and violate their rights. I'm not saying "we're all slaves because plutocracy" but your framing of the issue demonstrates a real lack of imagination.
  - hga 14y ago
    Errr ... how familiar are you with 20th Century history? Well more than 100 million previously disarmed people were rounded up at gunpoint and their rights were violated to the point they were killed. Those movies and comic books had some real world inspiration, after all.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Ah, but all of those crimes against humanity were not committed by current governments that we like! (and of course those that were have the benefit of victor's justice...)
    - ajuc 14y ago
      No amount of guns in people hands could prevent Hitler or Stalin or WW2. Even in WW2 era guns weren't sufficient to overthrow governments. You would need tanks and planes and artillery, and logistic system to support all of this. Since 1945 war became even more expansive and require much more specialized equipment. Guns won't do. Yes, you could organise resistance movements. People did that a lot, even on German occupied areas. And they were thorns in regular army side. But no resistance would suffice to win WW2, because by that time war required very costly machines. You think Jews or Poles could maybe shoot at Germans taking them from homes? Yeah - they did that. And escaped to forests, and ambushed them, etc. Poles even did uprising and liberated Warsaw for roughly a month. Guns weren't that big problem - they massproduced them in homes and hidden factories. Tanks and flamethrowers and bombers and logistic were the problem. Germans retook and obliterated the city to be 90% flat. Do you really think people in USA could overthrow government if it went Nazi? Assuming army is supporting the government. I think it's very naive argument. Also pre-WW2 Poland had quite liberal laws regarding gun ownership - you only needed positive opinion from local police station. Didn't helped.
coley 14y ago
They wouldn't. The drone comment, and protect ourselves comment were separate ideas. I think he's trying to bring to light that our country completely stopped for a month after Sandy Hook, but we ignore all of the innocent lives(including children) that get taken by drone strikes. Assault weapons don't stand a chance against drones, but I'm willing to bet they out number them and have a lot more trained operators. My AR-15 was around $900 when I bought it(~2 years ago). Now the same gun is going for $1000+, and there's not even new legislation yet. If these weapons get banned, the criminals that all ready own them will see a gain in their net worth. I don't see how raising the value of 'criminal' assets is going to help anyone. Paranoid is an easy answer. A much more difficult answer is that our country has used it's excessive force on the unarmed before. What's to stop them once their governing body(the citizens) is unarmed?
- bithive123 14y ago
  Guns may help individuals defend themselves from other individuals (who may or may not be working for the government) in specific interactions (being mugged / taken to the gulag) but surely their raw numbers don't make The Citizenry safer from government oppression. That has to come from somewhere else; leading many people to conclude that "having guns" doesn't protect us from the government any more than "holding leaders accountable" or "having an educated populace".

efnx 14y ago

I think the only thing 'preventing a dictatorial government' is an educated and informed electorate. If we have that, we never have to revolt...

defilade 14y ago
If "the only thing 'preventing a dictatorial government' is an educated and informed electorate", then we're screwed.
MartinCron 14y ago
the educated and informed electorate is a key thing, but not the only thing that prevents a dictatorial government. The constitutional separation of powers combined with presidential term limits really help, too.

b_emery 14y ago

> The ones taking away the only thing preventing a dictatorial government from being impossible to revolt against ain't one of them. Amen. They can have my Twitter when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

jamespitts 14y ago

When discussing the technical aspects of, say, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, it is impossible to leave our values out of the discussion. However, the topic is html5, in a technical community. Let's talk about the effectiveness of using a bit of animation in what is otherwise a flat picture. The animated, half-mast flag is emphasized, and reawakens our alarm about the violence of guns by associating it with many other national emergencies, including the 9-11 Attacks. Let's talk about the effectiveness of carefully moving our attention to a new topic by employing a fading background connected to the scrolling action. We have little room to pause and think and doubt the material, the next topic is already materializing before us. etc. etc. You may not agree with this message, but it is working. Understanding why your outlook is being countermanded by the techniques employed by the Obama Administration (by way of an html5 developer) may help you see your POV to action far more than your own - text-based - propaganda here.

anigbrowl 14y ago
I don't feel as if my outlook is being countermanded at all - partly because these policies echo my pre-existing outlook rather than the other way round. But in the context of technical animation, the big difference betweeen this and TV is that I can scroll back and forth as I see fit to review the parts I am interested in, or jump out of the presentation completely to read the proposals in pdf format. This makes it very different from something like a TV ad, where I am a wholly passive consumer of the information unless I change the channel or switch off altogether.

qxcv 14y ago

> Because the state has the monopoly of violence. I'm fascinated by this viewpoint, but I'm afraid I've never fully understood it. How many weapons to the population have to have before the state is no longer considered to pose a threat? Do we stop at clubs or knives? Small arms? Assault weapons? Explosives? Armoured vehicles? Missiles? > How many deaths in 2012 due to complication related to obesity? How many due to guns? How many due to road accidents? Those three are almost entirely unrelated. Complications related to obesity almost only ever affect the physical wellbeing of the obese person. Road accidents arise from the operation of a useful tool by many millions of people, every day, and generally aren't malicious (and thus are more difficult to prevent). This doesn't make these two causes of death any less tragic, but the sort of gun violence the current US administration wishes to legislate against is wanton slaughter of humans, pure and simple. To paraphrase Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine"[0], assault weapons and armour piercing rounds are not useful for hunting[1]. [0]: Now there's something you could call "propaganda". That movie had a lot of good information, but it was often obscured by horrible misrepresentation and questionable conclusions. [1]: Contrary to popular belief, gun control does not preclude those who need weapons in their day-to-day lives from purchasing them. Gun control is not a binary.

jlgreco 14y ago
To me, that viewpoint is about considering the ethics of governing itself. Something that has that much responsibility should have a proportionate amount of liability. A monopoly on violence it a huge responsibility that today we balance with the liability that comes inherent in being a democracy. It seems today however that the extent to which the government uses it's monopoly requires a great deal more liability. Since liability requires transparency, the realization that the government has a monopoly on violence should in turn reinforce importance of transparency in all things the government does. If the government feels the need to act independently without overview in some matter, that additional responsibility should come out of a "responsibility budget" that always remains in balance with a liability budget. If you want secret police and your responsibility budget is running low, fill it back up by adding some additional liability (perhaps steeper penalties for government officials that break the law) or free up some responsibility budget by reducing responsibility in other areas (perhaps by disarming other police). Totalitarianism occurs when we give governments a responsibility budget completely decoupled from liability.

lukifer 14y ago

For the record, propaganda is a morally neutral term. Gandhi and MLK Jr. were both brilliant propagandists. I have a complex opinion on gun rights and I don't support all aspects of Obama's plan, but the fact that it is propaganda does not make it inherently wrong.

bruceboughton 14y ago

>> And it is slowly trying to disarm its own citizens as to be sure that the day people realize they're governed by an oppressive government they won't be able to do anything about it. The USA is still a democracy.

granata 14y ago
republic