So who is going to enforce returning people who don't bother going to court or people who violate the conditions of their release (hanging out with known criminal associates, substance abuse, etc)?

Are the taxpayers going to be stuck with paying for a new enforcement authority or are we going to stick the duty on the police? I hope it isn't the latter because we already have ample evidence the police do poorly in situations like that. A good example would be people who have been getting shot to death or beaten over failure to pay support.

Your talking about it historically though. Historical abuse and mistreatment of Aboriginal people in Canada has been acceptable to discuss for at least a generation or two now, up to formal apologies and enormous numbers of court cases and cash settlements around the myriad past injustices.

The trouble is, even while addressing all the historical problems, there still exist new ones right now.

Typical conditions on Aboriginal reserves in Canada are unacceptably awful. You can have a thriving municipality right neighbouring an aboriginal reserve that is a mess of dilapidated homes, boiled water and grossly increased rates of unemployment, substance abuse and suicide. Small wonder then that increased crime rates also come along with all that.

Even that you can talk about, though the increased crime rate will get you in trouble for flirting with being racist against aboriginals.

What you can't talk about is many of the causes of the disparity.

Aboriginal reserves operate under a different legal framework than the neighbouring municipality. They operate under a different framework of governance. They operate under a different system of taxation. Organisation of all related government services like education, healthcare, policing and civil works like roads, water and sanitation are ALL different if you're on a reserve.

Talking about all that you need to be very careful how you say it, because if your not careful my above observations are a statement that coloniser systems are superior to aboriginal ones.

Private property rights are IMO an even hotter topic. The dilapidated housing on a reserve 10 minutes away from the municipality with everything in order is a direct result of who is responsible for maintaining them. In the municipality if a roof is missing shingles, the owner replaces them. If a window is broken, the owner replaces it. On the reserve though, the community is the owner. Unsurprisingly, that abstraction means maintenance on the homes is worse. If the mayor was responsible for using tax dollars to maintain all the homes in the neighbouring municipality it'd be a mess too. This leads to the poor aboriginal family stuck in a destroyed and overcrowded home and a chief saying sorry, the Canadian colonisers didn't give us enough money to fix your place, go yell at them. This just stirs up the Winnipeg citizens I mentioned earlier to respond with wonderment at why you don't fix your own home up yourself instead of protesting hopelessly for the government to hand out the money to do it for you.

The differential treatment still in place now, today is a cancer and needs to be fixed but calling it out like that would get me in trouble.

Can we also just stop with the fucking bullshit moralising?

Getting drunk is fun. Getting stoned is fun. I haven't done much else, but I'm pretty sure people do them because they enjoy them.

Is it a problem for some people? Unquestionably.

But if you look a little deeper, it's almost never the drugs or the alcohol, it's the debt, or the pressure or the broken family life or anyone of a million things that can fuck up your life. The substance abuse is just a symptom of that. And if you take that away, people will find other ways to be self-destructive.

We didn't learn during Prohibition that you can't force people to stop trying to seek escape or pleasure through substance abuse.

Now there are so many agencies and officials getting money from the 'war' that they will fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.

I say incorrectly secured in the exact fashion that it means. If the gun owner had taken care of their weapon and either made it inaccessible or unusable, then the incidents would not have happened. For instance, in the Sandy Hook shooting, the mother knew her son was mentally unstable and did not properly secure her weapons. This led to her death, followed by many others.

Gun safety means you treat your gun as a deadly weapon, and you secure it so that someone who should not have access to it cannot get it. If you don't, then bad things happen.

We do not have an obsession or addiction to guns, we have a right to them. Like it or not, we are not like other countries and never have been. This defines us and also creates uniquely difficult situations if we do not pay the proper respect to those rights. You can make thinly veiled comments about me being an addict or substance abuser if you like, I prefer to think that I am a citizen of a country unlike any other to this date in history. If that pisses you off, so be it.

I would also like to note that while I have been extremely civil and logical to this point, I have been constantly subjected to comments that try to loop me in with the radical gun nuts. I cannot stress enough that I am not, that I do think we need further gun control. It's as if people can't field a valid argument and feel the need to paint me as such instead, ignoring my repeated comments to the contrary.

I don't want guns banned, but I want them to be like in most other civilized countries where shootings, mass shootings and gun suicides are far less per capita. Severely controlled.

America has an obsession and even addiction to guns, which is shown in the people trying to blame everything else - @Mordhaus you say stuff like "incorrectly secured gun" as if the incorrectly secured somehow negates the gun part. If it was a incorrectly secured handgrenade, what then? Or an incorrectly secured machete?

I'm not saying you're a bad person at all (or tha other pro-gun people are), but this is what alcoholics or substance abusers do about their substance.

What is unfortunate is that he doesn't seem to truly acknowledge that he has a substance abuse problem. Charming story, if it were not within the context of other wild nights, and my heart aches for him.

I think you missed the whole point of the video. When you say "Muslims" are you referring to people who live in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, or Canada? Because you're going to find wildly different rates of violence (towards women or otherwise) based on where those people are practicing their religion. In fact I'd wager you'd find more Christians and atheists beating their wives in a country like Canada than you would Muslims--probably for reasons that have nothing to do with religion (alcohol or substance abuse, history of being abused themselves, etc.).

Why do "Muslim countries" seem more violent or more violent towards women? Maybe because of the fact that the ones that are most talked about in the news have majority populations that live literally like it was 500 years ago? Or maybe because the ones that pop up in the news frequently (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, etc.) are controlled by autocratic regimes that rule with an iron fist and are far more concerned with keeping power than promoting democracy and human rights? Or maybe because of local tribal practices that pre-date Islam and have continued until today (i.e. female genital mutilation)?

If you're going to compare countries, then compare apples to apples. Compare Saudi Arabia to 1500s England in terms of the rights of women and religious freedom, because Saudi Arabia is an Islamic monarchy much as 1500s England was a Christian monarchy. Compare human rights in a developing country like Indonesia to early 1900s U.S., where other religions were ostensibly tolerated but Christian norms were de facto.

But comparing human rights in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan to the modern U.S. and then generalizing the results to all "Muslim" countries is, as Reza mentioned, just stupid.

You seem to think that eliminating guns will somehow eliminate mass shootings. However, there is zero correlation to the number of legal gun ownerships with the number of homicides. In fact, here are some statistics for you:

At present, a little more than half of all Americans own the sum total of about 320 million guns, 36% of which are handguns, but fewer than 100,000 of these guns are used in violent crimes. And, as it happens, where gun ownership per capita increases, violent crime is known to decrease. In other words, Caucasians tend to own more guns than African Americans, middle aged folks own more guns than young people, wealthy people own more guns than poor people, rural families own more guns than urbanites --> But the exact opposite is true for violent behavior (i.e., African Americans tend to be more violent than Caucasians, young people more violent than middle aged people, poor people more violent than wealthy people, and urbanites more violent than rural people). So gun ownership tends increase where violence is the least. This is, in large part, due to the cultural divide in the U.S. around gun ownership whereby most gun owners own guns for recreational sports (including the Southern Caucasian rural hunting culture, the likes of which aren't found in Australia or the UK or Europe, etc.); and about half of gun owners own guns for self-defense (usually as the result of living in a dangerous environment). Most of the widespread gun ownership in the U.S. predates any gun control legislation and gun ownership tends to generally rise as a response to an increase in violent crime (not the other way around).

There were about 350,000 crimes in 2009 in which a gun was present (but may not have been used), 24% of robberies, 5% of assaults, and about 66% of homicides. By contrast, guns are used as self-defense as many as 2 and a half million times every year (according to criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University), thereby decreasing the potential loss of life or property (i.e., those with guns are less likely to be injured in a violent crime than those who use another defensive strategy or simply comply).

Interestingly, violent crimes tend to decrease in those areas where there have been highly publicized instances of victims arming themselves or defending themselves against violent criminals. (In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of home burglaries occur when people are in the home, whereas only 9% of home burglaries in the U.S. occur when people are in the home, presumably as a result of criminals' fear of being shot by the homeowner.) In short, gun ownership reduces the likelihood of harm.

So, for example, Boston has the strictest gun control and the most school shootings. The federal ban on assault weapons from '94-'04 did not impact amount and severity of school shootings. The worst mass homicide in a school in the U.S. took place in Michigan in 1927, killing 38 children. The perpetrator used (illegal) bombs, not guns in this case.

1/3 of legal gun owners obtain their guns (a total of about 200,000 guns) privately, outside the reach of government regulation. So, it's likely that gun-related crimes will increase if the general population is unarmed.

Out of a sample of 943 felon handgun owners, 44% had obtained the gun privately, 32% stole it, 9% rented/borrowed it, and 16% bought it from a retailer. (Note retail gun sales is the only area that gun control legislation can affect, since existing laws have failed to control for illegal activity. Stricter legislation would likely therefore change the statistics of how felon handgun owners obtain the gun towards less legal, more violent ways.) Less than 3% obtain guns on the 'black market' (probably due, in part, to how many legal guns are already easily obtained).

600,000 guns are stolen every year and millions of guns circulate among criminals (outside the reach of the regulators), so the elimination of all new handgun purchases/sales, the guns would still be in the hands of the criminals (and few others).

The common gun controls have been shown to have no effect on the reduction of violent crime, however, according to the Dept. of Justice, states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate. A 2003 CDC report found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws reduced gun violence. This conclusion was echoed in an exhaustive National Academy of Sciences study a year later.

General gun ownership has no net positive effect on total violence rates.

Of almost 200,000 CCP holders in Florida, only 8 were revoked as a result of a crime.

The high-water mark of mass killings in the U.S. was back in 1929, and has not increased since then. In fact, it's declined from 42 incidents in 1990 to 26 from 2000-2012. Until recently, the worst school shootings took place in the UK or Germany. The murder rate and violent crime in the U.S. is less than half of what it was in the late 1980s (the reason for which is most certainly multimodal and multifaceted).

Regarding Gun-Free Zones, many mass shooters select their venues because there are signs there explicitly banning concealed handguns (i.e., where the likelihood is higher that interference will be minimal). "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns," says John Lott.

In any case, do we have any evidence to believe that the regulators (presumably the police in this instance) will be competent, honest, righteous, just, and moral enough to take away the guns from private citizens, when a study has shown that private owners are convicted of firearms violations at the same rate as police officers? How will you enforce the regulation and/or remove the guns from those who resist turning over their guns? Do the police not need guns to get those with the guns to turn over their guns? Does this then not presume that "gun control" is essentially an aim for only the government (i.e., the centralized political elite and their minions) to have guns at the exclusion of everyone else? Is the government so reliable, honest, moral, virtuous, and forward thinking as to ensure that the intentions of gun control legislation go exactly as planned?

From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary. Do they really want to deprive those who are culturally acclimatized to gun-ownership, who may be less fortunate than they are, to have the means to protect themselves (e.g., women who carry guns to protect themselves from assault or rape)? Sounds more like a lack of empathy and understanding of those realities to me.

There are many generational issues worth mentioning here. For example, the rise in gun ownership coincided with the war on drugs and the war on poverty. There are also nearly 24 million combat veterans living in the U.S. and they constitute a significant proportion of the U.S.' prison population as a result of sex offenses or violent crime. Male combat veterans are four times as likely to engage violent crime as non-veteran men; and are 4.4 times more likely to have abused a spouse/partner, and 6.4 times more likely to suffer from PTSD, and 2-3 times more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, unemployment, divorce/separation. Vietnam veterans with PTSD tend to have higher rates of childhood abuse (26%) than Vietnam veterans without PTSD (7%). Iraq/Afghanistan vets are 75% more likely to die in car crashes. Sex crimes by active duty soldiers have tripled since 2003. In 2007, 700,000 U.S. children had at least one parent in a warzone. In a July 2010 report, child abuse in Army families was 3 times higher if a parent was deployed in combat. From 2001 - 2011, alcohol use associated with domestic violence in Army families increased by 54%, and child abuse increased by 40%. What effect do you think that's going to have, regardless of "gun controls?"
("The War Comes Home" or as William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies said, "A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.")

In addition, families in the U.S. continue to break down. Single parent households have a high correlation to violence among children. In 1965, 93% of all American births were to married women. Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women (a rate that rises to 53% for women under the age of 30). By age 30, 1/3 of American women have spent time as a single mother (a rate that is halved in European countries like France, Sweden, & Germany). Less than 9% of married couples are in poverty, but more than 40% of single-parent families are in poverty. Much of child poverty would be ameliorated if parents were marrying at 1970s rates. 85% of incarcerated youth grew up without fathers.

Since the implementation of the war on drugs, there's a drug arrest in the U.S. every 19 seconds, 82% of which were for possession alone (destroying homes and families in the process). The Dept. of Justice says that illegal drug market in the U.S. is dominated by 900,000 criminally active gang members affiliated with 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities, many of which have direct ties to Mexican drug cartels in at least 230 American cities. The drug control spending, however, has grown by 69.7% over the past 9 years. The criminal justice system is so overburdened as a result that nearly four out of every ten murders, and six out of every ten rapes, and nine out of ten burglaries go unsolved (and 90% of the "solved" cases are the result of plea-bargains, resulting in non-definitive guilt). Only 8.5% of federal prisoners have committed violent offenses. 75% of Detroit's state budget can be traced back to the war on drugs.

Point being, a government program is unlikely to solve any issues with regards to guns and the whole notion of gun control legislation is severely misguided in light of all that I've pointed out above. In fact, a lot of the violence is the direct or indirect result of government programs (war on drugs and the war on poverty).

(And, you'll note, I made no mention of the recent spike in the polypharmacy medicating of a significant proportion of American children -- including most of the "school shooters" -- the combinations of which have not been studied, but have -- at least in part -- been correlated to homicidal and/or suicidal behaviors.)

I guess I must be out of the loop as far as how the Republicans see things. This is just me talking. I am bi-vocational. I work as a substance abuse and marital counselor and I also own my own business, These are just things I have thought through, not been told about.

I am wondering if there will be enough money to fund the ACA without the employer mandate.

I am wondering if there isn't going to be civil disobedience on a massive scale with our young people who don't yet have insurance but now must buy it.

I read the article from Forbes and also the one from Reuters on a Google search because I was having so much trouble trying to navigate the healthcare.gov website. After repeated unsuccessful attempts and some strange pages popping up I began to think it was more than just overloaded servers causing the problem.

Until you mentioned the Republicans wanting to delay the mandate for a political advantage in 2014 I hadn't really given it much thought. Honestly, I really don't care why the Republicans want to delay the mandate. You wrote that there is absolutely no reason that the current admin may want to delay. I thought of a few scenarios that might end up being good reasons to delay it.

And just an FYI, I need to sign up for this. So the delay is hurting me. I'm not for delaying it. But the delay for me isn't coming from the the Tea Party. It's coming from the freaking website.

This is one of my favorite films, and I haven't actually seen it yet. I have it reserved as soon as it gets into the local library.
Not even for scenes like this (which are fantastic), as much as the core concept.

Amazing individual performs beyond human capability while in the shadow of one of humanity's most damning curses; addiction and substance abuse, and is threatened with the worst punishment for the greatest action.

I literally know nothing of this film beyond that, and what I saw here, but that right there is a phenomenal example of true drama. I want to hug the person who came up with this script to absolute, breathless death.

Ironically, sadly, like all addictive substance abuse raps, this is still a commercial for Nike.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

Heh. I thought the obligation of the police bit was rhetoric.

Nope, it was an attempt to get you to remember something, anything, about the era that led to the Civil Rights Act.

It means going back to a time where this happens anytime one of those "out-groups" shows their face in the wrong place.

You're going to have to explain to me why that's justice, and why that's freedom, because it looks to me like violent oppression and a criminal deprivation of liberty.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
You're always talking about how we can harness the power of voting & democratic systems to eventually overcome things; and you're almost guaranteed to make actual progress thru those means if Paul were POTUS.

Paul is antithetical to "progress." His vision of a perfect society is an America where we unwind everything that's happened in the last 100 years. Possibly more, depending on how seriously you take his position on the Civil War.

There are a couple issues where, purely by accident, Paul agrees with me. I want the war in Afghanistan to end because I think it's stupid, not because I think America should never get involved in international politics. I want the drug war to end because it's a terrible way to solve the problem with substance abuse -- universal healthcare would be a lot better. Paul is just as mad about the drug war as he is about the FDA (or the EPA, for that matter).

Ron Paul stands in steadfast opposition to everything I care about. Even on the issues where we seem to agree, we turn out to be miles apart when you get down to the details.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

So why are you letting a little thing like Gasp a Racist Conservative Republican, stop you from acting in your own best interest.
[Since you're neither black nor gay. I think you'll be okay either way, @NetRunner]

To quote MLK, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Even if all I cared about was my own ass, the "freedom" to discriminate against black or gay people would also mean people have the freedom to discriminate against whites, or men, or straight people, or liberals, or atheists, or gamers.

The protections against discrimination protect me as much as it does any given out-group.

I hit the character limit for the title!>> ^Crosswords:

Oh sure use a misleading provocative title pull me in for some outrage, then do the ole competent cop switcheroo on me.
I hope this guy gets sent away for a long time. And I don't think its just the alcohol society, though that's certainly the largest and legal part of it, its the substance abuse society. Its not enough for people to simply enjoy the state altering effects of drugs, they have to get as high as possible then stumble out loose their freshly uninhibited self against society.


>> ^PoweredBySoy:

Best video title ever.