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In all honesty, for all the freedom-related speech in the US and the so-called constitutionally protected rights against government corruption and abuse, I'm sh
by purephase 13y ago
In all honesty, for all the freedom-related speech in the US and the so-called constitutionally protected rights against government corruption and abuse, I'm shocked that Americans are not in the streets rioting right now.
- rayiner 13y agoAmericans are a very order-loving people. It's hard to get them to riot or protest about anything, much less something like NSA surveillance that has no visible negative impact to the ordinary person.
- purephase 13y agoThese "order-loving people" are the same ones that buy-out all ammunition when a vague proposal is put forward to improve gun registration... I'm not sure how to reconcile these positions at all.
- tsotha 13y agoI don't see any conflict. Legal gun buyers in the US are the most law-abiding people in the country.
- irishcoffee 13y agoThere was a run on guns. Generally when an item goes 'on a run' there is panic behind the purchase.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoHow does that contradict the statement that legal gun buyers are law-abiding?
- tsotha 13y agoI didn't see any signs of panic. It's just common sense to buy something you want if there's a chance it may become unavailable..
- rayiner 13y agoAmerica can be pretty-well described by a Protestant sense of order with a frontiers-y gun culture. The guns are there for hunting, shooting criminals, and in case the order breaks down, not to fight the order the exists now. Watch the show Jericho for a pretty good idea of much of America thinks. I.e. people who had no beef with the government as it existed, but kinda fantasize about what would happen if the government collapsed and they were on their own.
- XEKEP 13y agoThese law-abiding citizens should demand the same from their government, shouldn't they?
- CamperBob2 13y agoI'm not sure how to reconcile these positions at all. It may help if you understand that these people don't trust the government to keep order. It's not wild-eyed anarchists who are buying that ammo.
- purephase 13y agoIt's more that the groundswell of support for the 2nd amendment, even going to far to stockpile in lieu of any possible changes, should apply equally to other amendments. Particularly ones that are as important as the fourth. Sure, there were some protests on Independence Day and I applaud the efforts of those involved, but it seems like regular Americans are largely either unaware or just don't care about it at all.
- rayiner 13y agoAmerica has a deep gun culture, and they have a deep "your home is your castle" culture. That's what the 2nd and the 4th mean to your typical American, and that's what they care about. The extension of that to "your Google Drive is your castle" is too abstract and theoretical. People largely don't care about non-visible impingements on their liberties (and arguably are justified in doing so). It's kind of a "what's the sound of one hand clapping" thing. The 4th amendment is alive and well in America, at least as far as your typical white American voter is concerned. The most egregious violations happen to inner city minorities, who are so segregated from the rest of the population that the mainstream voter has probably never even met a black youth who has been stopped and frisked for no reason. And while you hear about no-knock warrant disasters in white neighborhoods, but it's extremely sporadic, to the point where your typical person probably can't say they know someone personally that it has happened to. And if you don't read the outrage blogs, you probably have never even heard of it. My parents have no idea what a "no-knock" warrant is. It just doesn't happen in their upscale Republican suburb. But gun registration and licensing chaffes everyone. Even your most upstanding, law-abiding white American has to submit to a background check like some sort of criminal, and that makes people mad.
- nitrogen 13y agoAmericans don't take to the streets because people on the streets are vulnerable to riot police with tear gas and mass arrest enclosures.
- rayiner 13y agoYou wish. The fact is most Americans wouldn't even conceive of protesting. It's unseemly and the kind of thing you'd expect the French to do, or worse people in uncivilized places like the Egypt. Your typical American thinks of tear gas and mass arrests as being for dirty hippies like those OWS protesters (young, unemployed, urbanites--triple whammy), not regular folks like themselves. And that's probably true--what kind of tear gas and mass arrests were used on Tea Party protestors?
- jamesaguilar 13y agoRiots don't really work, for the most part. And anyway, no one is actually being harmed by this -- at least not in a way that they could see or guess.
- dllthomas 13y agoAmericans are in the streets rioting right now, but about the Zimmerman trial...
- tippytop 13y agoThe issue has been making it's way toward the mainstream despite the security establishment doing their best to keep it on the fringe. The leadership has the most to lose---their reputation for establishing an un-American system. The tide is turning though, and it's important to get representatives voting on the record. With continued public outcry, if this thing is really put to a vote, the numbers will swell in opposition because politicians, if anything, are ego driven, and no one wants to be on the wrong side of history.