An Inspired Constitution? (Needs a rewrite.j

[Amulek]

13 hours ago, Gray said:

17 hours ago, carbon dioxide said:

On a statistical basis, one is about as likely to be killed in a school mass shooting as they are to be killed by lightning.

Not helpful for those who are victimized

I know. One of the trees in our back yard was victimized by lightning just last year.

The aborist we called to look at it seemed really upset that it couldn't be saved. 

[Scott Lloyd]

18 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Ensuring protection and defense by injuring or killing things.

 

No, ensurance of protection and defense through deterrence and intimidation if possible. A gun might not even have to be fired to achieve protection and defense. Or if it comes to it, firing of the gun to neutralize an assailant might prevent the further infliction of harm or death. 

Edited February 17, 2018 by Scott Lloyd

[CV75]

1 hour ago, Scott Lloyd said:

You need to consider statements like that in the context of the Doctrine and Covenants passages I cited in a post earlier on this thread, passages from which such statements are derived and which refer to “just and holy principles” which apply universally to “all flesh” (meaning all people), not just United States citizens. These principles mainly have to do with allowing people their individual moral agency. 

I think the balance to achieve in this regard is the protection of both moral agency on one hand and on the other, a system that ensures life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which principles in the Constitution’s preamble are framed as unity, justice, tranquility, defense, welfare, and liberty). Amendments need to promote that balance.

In an earlier post I suggested that secret combinations (reflected in government corruption) may promise a measure of tranquility and welfare (reflected in this topic in fewer gun deaths) in return for power and control. By compromising some principles such as justice and liberty for the sake of others, a population’s choices and sense of moral agency are undermined and erode over time, and thus we have the warnings in the Book of Mormon.

This is why the constitutional protections for religious freedom, historically a key factor in a population’s sense of moral agency, are crucial. I think they enable us to strike that balance between personal agency and societal order.

Edited February 17, 2018 by CV75

[Storm Rider]

On ‎2‎/‎16‎/‎2018 at 12:53 PM, Gray said:

America is the only country that regularly has mass shootings. It's the guns.

Never have seen a gun walk down anywhere and started shooting.  Not once.  CFR that a gun shot anyone in a mass shooting.  Does not exist - just to save you some time.

[Metis_LDS]

I hope that this can help.  I have never lived in the USA but I have visited more times than I can now remember. 

From afar now what I see is that the social contract has been broken.  Many nations are not always completely sure about what

their social contract is,  but most nations know quickly when it has been breached.  So dare I say that the repeated

mass killings of students at their schools is a serious breaking of the United States social contract.  What ever is written is

never as important right now as the state of the social contract in any country.

Edited February 17, 2018 by Metis_LDS
added ing to a word

[Scott Lloyd]

1 hour ago, Metis_LDS said:

I hope that this can help.  I have never lived in the USA but I have visited more times than I can now remember. 

From afar now what I see is that the social contract has been broken.  Many nations are not always completely sure about what

their social contract is,  but most nations know quickly when it has been breached.  So dare I say that the repeated

mass killings of students at their schools is a serious breaking of the United States social contract.  What ever is written is

never as important right now as the state of the social contract in any country.

Sometimes, if there is such a breaching of social contract, it can stem from misplaced priorities. 

In the instance of the school shooting this week, it could have been prevented had the FBI followed up on advance  intelligence pertaining to the alleged assailant. Arguably, the FBI was hindered in this regard by the inordinate expenditure of resources on the needless and fruitless witch hunt pursuing supposed Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. With the indictments handed down this week against Russian nationals, essentially for trolling on the internet to try to sow discord in the American political process, there was not a shred of evidence related to alleged collusion with the Trump campaign. 

By the way, if this is an instance of the social contract being breached, it is not the fault of the citizenry at large, which did its job by alerting local authorities in advance to the threat posed by this alleged shooter. The breakdown is on a federal law enforcement level, as talk show host Tammy Bruce pointed out yesterday. 

I say let’s stop wasting their time and resources on chasing fake Twitter accounts of Russians. 

Edited February 17, 2018 by Scott Lloyd

[Duncan]

1 hour ago, Storm Rider said:

Never have seen a gun walk down anywhere and started shooting.  Not once.  CFR that a gun shot anyone in a mass shooting.  Does not exist - just to save you some time.

are you kidding? What was the Las Vegas shooting with then? bows and arrows? Guns kill people, they are designed to expel bullets, why sick people have them the rest of humanity would like the US to answer. The fact that a 18 yr old kid got a AR 15 or whatever it's called, is a red flag that he might not be mentally stable

[Duncan]

1 hour ago, Scott Lloyd said:

Sometimes, if there is such a breaching of social contract, it can stem from misplaced priorities. 

In the instance of the school shooting this week, it could have been prevented had the FBI followed up on advance  intelligence pertaining to the alleged assailant. Arguably, the FBI was hindered in this regard by the inordinate expenditure of resources on the needless and fruitless witch hunt pursuing supposed Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. With the indictments handed down this week against Russian nationals, essentially for trolling on the internet to try to sow discord in the American political process, there was not a shred of evidence related to alleged collusion with the Trump campaign. 

or Trump could have done something or passed a law to get guns from the hands of mentally ill people and saved the FBI time and resources. Trump is like some people I know, it doesn't mean anything to him until it happens to him or interferes with his lifestyle. He's apathetic to it, he just doesn't care about the blood of children and teens. Can you imagine the outrage of Colin Kapernick and the other NFL players carried AR 15's instead of kneeling during the national anthem, you 'd have new gun laws PDQ.I just saw something about if a million Muslims joined the NRA, what would happen? changes

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-signs-bill-revoking-obama-era-gun-checks-people-mental-n727221

Edited February 17, 2018 by Duncan

[Storm Rider]

1 hour ago, Duncan said:

are you kidding? What was the Las Vegas shooting with then? bows and arrows? Guns kill people, they are designed to expel bullets, why sick people have them the rest of humanity would like the US to answer. The fact that a 18 yr old kid got a AR 15 or whatever it's called, is a red flag that he might not be mentally stable

Duncan, please read my post again.  A gun can do nothing - a human kills other people.  There has never been a case of a gun picking itself up and shooting a human.  It is an impossibility.  Humans also use cars, trucks, buses - any vehicle they can get their hands on to kill people.  The weakness of your position is that you put all responsibility for killing a human on an instrument rather than put them blame where it belongs.

The killer in Florida was reported as a problem and the FBI did nothing.  Who is at fault?  You want to blame the gun, but I blame the individual and the FBI for not responding.  

Yes, we have mentally disturbed individuals in our society and I agree with those that would makes laws preventing them from buying any guns, knives or, obtaining a driver's license, or putting them in any position where they could do harm to other humans.  

I would also institute laws preventing assault weapons from being owned by the average citizen.  

What I do not support is blaming things for what humans do.

[Duncan]

40 minutes ago, Storm Rider said:

Duncan, please read my post again.  A gun can do nothing - a human kills other people.  There has never been a case of a gun picking itself up and shooting a human.  It is an impossibility.  Humans also use cars, trucks, buses - any vehicle they can get their hands on to kill people.  The weakness of your position is that you put all responsibility for killing a human on an instrument rather than put them blame where it belongs.

The killer in Florida was reported as a problem and the FBI did nothing.  Who is at fault?  You want to blame the gun, but I blame the individual and the FBI for not responding.  

Yes, we have mentally disturbed individuals in our society and I agree with those that would makes laws preventing them from buying any guns, knives or, obtaining a driver's license, or putting them in any position where they could do harm to other humans.  

I would also institute laws preventing assault weapons from being owned by the average citizen.  

What I do not support is blaming things for what humans do.

I have read it and it seems only in the US that this is happening  again and again and again.  Something needs to be done, not thoughts and prayers, but deeds so that the these crazy guns don't get into the hands of people. You can't deny guns kill people, because they do, whether or they are in the hands of a stable person or not. if they don't kill what are these kids dying from then? how are bullets ending up in their bodies?

Edited February 17, 2018 by Duncan

[CV75]

1 hour ago, Duncan said:

I have read it and it seems only in the US that this is happening  again and again and again.  Something needs to be done, not thoughts and prayers, but deeds so that the these crazy guns don't get into the hands of people. You can't deny guns kill people, because they do, whether or they are in the hands of a stable person or not. if they don't kill what are these kids dying from then? how are bullets ending up in their bodies?

On the previous page I provided a link to an article listing over 75 countries' gun death rates. The USA falls around the high average. I think whatever motivates people to kill others with guns (mental illness, money, power, tribalism, fear, etc.), there seems to be an inverse correlation between government corruption and gun deaths. The motivation to kill, I think, would be reduced by facilitating within a society the exercise of moral agency in a life-affirming direction, which endeavor to thrive woukd prevent criminal tendency, ideological and ethnic extremism, and mental illness, or to subdue moral agency as corrupt governments do, which pressures individuals and society to take more of a dystopian, survival approach.

[The Nehor]

5 hours ago, Storm Rider said:

Never have seen a gun walk down anywhere and started shooting.  Not once.  CFR that a gun shot anyone in a mass shooting.  Does not exist - just to save you some time.

And I should have a strategic missile silo in my backyard. After all they do not fire themselves.

Oh, and guns are starting to shoot themselves:

 

[ttribe]

4 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

Sometimes, if there is such a breaching of social contract, it can stem from misplaced priorities. 

In the instance of the school shooting this week, it could have been prevented had the FBI followed up on advance  intelligence pertaining to the alleged assailant. Arguably, the FBI was hindered in this regard by the inordinate expenditure of resources on the needless and fruitless witch hunt pursuing supposed Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. With the indictments handed down this week against Russian nationals, essentially for trolling on the internet to try to sow discord in the American political process, there was not a shred of evidence related to alleged collusion with the Trump campaign. 

By the way, if this is an instance of the social contract being breached, it is not the fault of the citizenry at large, which did its job by alerting local authorities in advance to the threat posed by this alleged shooter. The breakdown is on a federal law enforcement level, as talk show host Tammy Bruce pointed out yesterday. 

I say let’s stop wasting their time and resources on chasing fake Twitter accounts of Russians. 

You vastly overestimate how much the Russian election investigation is impacting other investigations.  In fact, given that the Russia investigation is being run out of DC, and the shooting (and tip) occurred in Florida, I have it on good authority that there is exactly zero connection between the two. None.

[Scott Lloyd]

4 minutes ago, ttribe said:

You vastly overestimate how much the Russian election investigation is impacting other investigations.  In fact, given that the Russia investigation is being run out of DC, and the shooting (and tip) occurred in Florida, I have it on good authority that there is exactly zero connection between the two. None.

The agent on the news report said the FBI field office in Miami was never notified of this guy’s murderous intent and was thus hindered from acting, this despite numerous tips and reports in the FBI system. Clearly the system broke down. It’s reasonable to wonder if resources were not taxed by the collusion witch hunt. 

[ttribe]

13 minutes ago, Scott Lloyd said:

The agent on the news report said the FBI field office in Miami was never notified of this guy’s murderous intent and was thus hindered from acting, this despite numerous tips and reports in the FBI system. Clearly the system broke down. It’s reasonable to wonder if resources were not taxed by the collusion witch hunt. 

Given what I know about the inner-workings of the FBI (and I've spent 3 hours on each of the last three Thursday nights at the FBI field office in Phoenix) the breakdown would have been elsewhere.

[strappinglad]

Trump has property in Florida....nuf  said !

[Amulek]

2 hours ago, Duncan said:

I have read it and it seems only in the US that this is happening  again and again and again. 

Nope. This kind of mass violence happens all over the world; we just don't here about it much.

Here's a PolitiFact column from just a couple of years back when President Obama made a similar statement:

Quote

Here are a just a few examples of mass shootings in other countries:

• On July 22, 2011, a total of 80 people were killed in Norway when Anders Behring Breivik, a political extremist, bombed a government building in Oslo and then went on a shooting rampage on the island of Utoya, just outside the city.

• On March 11, 2009, in Winnenden, Germany, a teenage gunman killed 15 people. The majority of the victims were children and teachers killed when the shooter opened fire in three classrooms in a local secondary school. The gunman shot two other people before killing himself after being cornered by the local police.

• On Sept. 23, 2008, in Kuahajoki, Finland, a gunman shot 10 people to death after opening fire on a classroom in the Kuahajoki School of Hospitality. After killing the students, the shooter burned the victims’ bodies.

In sum, then, Obama is wrong to say that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries." Clearly it does happen elsewhere, and not in trivial numbers. Seven of the countries saw double-digit numbers of people killed in mass shootings during that period.

By contrast, the second part of Obama’s claim -- that "it doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency" -- isn’t entirely off-base.

We compared mass shooting incidents across countries is to calculate the number of victims per capita -- that is, adjusted for the country’s total population size.

Calculating it this way shows the United States in the upper half of the list of 11 countries, ranking higher than Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Germany and Mexico.

Still, the U.S. doesn’t rank No. 1. At 0.15 mass shooting fatalities per 100,000 people, the U.S. had a lower rate than Norway (1.3 per 100,000), Finland (0.34 per 100,000) and Switzerland (1.7 per 100,000).

We’ll note that all of these countries had one or two particularly big attacks and have relatively small populations, which have pushed up their per-capita rates. In Norway, that single attack in 2011 left 67 dead by gunfire (plus additional bomb casualties). Finland had two attacks, one that killed eight and one that killed 10. And Switzerland had one incident that killed 14.

Still, while the United States did rank in the top one-third of the list, the fact that three other countries exceeded the United States using this method of comparison does weaken Obama’s claim that "it doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency." In at least three countries, the data shows, it does.

 

Edited February 18, 2018 by Amulek
Fix for weird formatting

[Calm]

Frequency is not amount, but how often something occurs.

Unless I missed it, you post does not address that and I would be interested in seeing those stats.

Found this:

Quote

 

The chart does show that the United States has more mass shootings -- and more people cumulatively killed or injured -- than the other 10 nations combined, partly because it has a much bigger population than all but China.

Still, using this data, it’s easy to dispense with the first claim Obama made -- that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries."

Over the decade and a half studied, the researchers found 23 incidents of mass shootings in the other 10 countries, resulting in 200 dead and 231 wounded. In the United States over the same period, there were 133 incidents that left 487 dead and 505 wounded

 

If one counts how often a mass shooting occurs compared to population numbers, US comes out on top I believe. 

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/22/barack-obama/barack-obama-correct-mass-killings-dont-happen-oth/

Edited February 18, 2018 by Calm

[Scott Lloyd]

1 hour ago, ttribe said:

Given what I know about the inner-workings of the FBI (and I've spent 3 hours on each of the last three Thursday nights at the FBI field office in Phoenix) the breakdown would have been elsewhere.

All I know is that the FBI was notified and failed to act. And it wasn’t a local glitch. 

[Amulek]

It is really really hard to get good statistics - especially once you start looking outside the US because every country measures these events differently. What might be considered a mass shooting here might get categorized as a terrorist attack somewhere else, for example.

The point I was simply trying to make is that, just because we don't hear about attacks in other countries, doesn't mean they aren't happening. For example, I don't pay a lick of attention to anything related to Istanbul (at least, not to anything that doesn't get referred to in a They Might Be Giants tune), but apparently there was a mass shooting there last year (link). 

Edited February 18, 2018 by Amulek

[MiserereNobis]

5 minutes ago, Scott Lloyd said:

All I know is that the FBI was notified and failed to act. And it wasn’t a local glitch. 

And, given the size of the FBI and all they have going on around the nation, it is an incredibly LONG stretch to try to connect the glitch to the Russia probe, especially without any evidence other than the two are going on at the same time. I’m actually surprised you tried to; your reasoning is usually much clearer. 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Oh, and guns are starting to shoot themselves

 

Well I figured they would be upset at the way they have been misused but suicide?

Maybe they just want to self police instead of having gun control.

We should all take time to sit down with one and thank them for all the good they do- it is the only compassionate thing we can do for them, and to tell them that if it gets really bad, to reach out for help.  Suicide is never a good answer.

 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, ttribe said:

Given what I know about the inner-workings of the FBI (and I've spent 3 hours on each of the last three Thursday nights at the FBI field office in Phoenix) the breakdown would have been elsewhere.

Your knowledge on virtually every topic is truly encyclopedic. 

[Scott Lloyd]

29 minutes ago, MiserereNobis said:

And, given the size of the FBI and all they have going on around the nation, it is an incredibly LONG stretch to try to connect the glitch to the Russia probe, especially without any evidence other than the two are going on at the same time. I’m actually surprised you tried to; your reasoning is usually much clearer. 

It’s a question of finite resources system-wide. 

And it’s not just I who is wondering about it:

 

[MiserereNobis]

13 minutes ago, Scott Lloyd said:

It’s a question of finite resources system-wide. 

And it’s not just I who is wondering about it:

 

It’s the classic causation vs correlation logical fallacy. All we have right now is correlation: the two events happened at the same time. Without further evidence, it is a glaring logical fallacy to try to turn it into causation.