overtone

I don't have any guns either. So the question between us is which one of us is more responsible for other people shooting children. I think it's you.

CNN and NPR - essentially the entire non-Fox major TV - have treated Clinton very well. And treated Sanders poorly. Meanwhile, there is a large and persistent demonstration in front of CNN headquarters right now by Sanders supporters, attempting to force them to cover Sanders at all - has that demonstration made the news where you live? Has the current demonstration in Washington against the financial industry's influence on the US government made the news? Has the recently reported ongoing failure of most of the major banks (all bigger than they were when they were too big to fail) to meet the Dodd-Frank safety requirements been analyzed with respect to how the policies of Sanders, Clinton, Trump, and Cruz, would approach the problem we have with them? Not only Sanders himself, but all issues likely to benefit his candidacy and agenda, are missing. That's not so and you know it. From the polling of the superdelegates taken before Sanders was a real possibility and then included in the Clinton delegate count, to the original debate schedule, to the sudden appearance of Clinton's stump speech framing in all the major news reporting from DNC influenced sources, the bias has been nothing if not obvious. You can argue that that is a good thing, and appropriate behavior for a major Party, but you can't argue that it's "fair". Getting attention - even some criticism - from the media is not a bad thing, for a political candidate. Scrutiny and publicity are often the same thing. Sanders has had little scrutiny. Or attention. And name recognition alone - familiarity - explains most of his vote gap. Look at his poll numbers before and after he shows up in some place about to have a primary or caucus - that's proof, statistical proof, of the inadequacy of the news coverage of his campaign. His biggest problem in New York even - near his home State, media center of the universe - is that the New York Democratic primary is closed and the deadline for registering was two weeks ago, before Sanders started campaigning in person. He will not get his normal surge in the vote that we see from exposure. We had a situation similar to this in Minnesota years ago, when a college professor named Paul Wellstone ran for Senate. He had been running for months and was polling around 4%, when he blew up at the media: yet another reporter asked him whether he thought he should still be running if he couldn't get more than 4% of the vote, and he pointed out - bluntly - that one of his problems in getting more than 4% of the vote was that the journalists covering the election were not writing anything about him except about the fact that he was only getting 4% of the vote. How much of the already inadequate coverage of Sanders has been about his percentage of the vote? And the thing was, that changed the election in Minnesota. Because the journalists were embarrassed, and they started covering his issues and comparing his programs and policies and quoting his speeches as they did with the respectable candidates. Scrutiny, in other words. And he won. That's the thing about real journalism - you can embarrass it. It's kind of like Popper's criterion for real science, that it can be falsified. You can't embarrass MSNBC or ABC any more. You can't embarrass CNN - although there are some people trying. Shamelessness is Fox's business model.

So far you haven't seen a single post from me claiming that the US did not need better gun control, in the form of State and Federal laws that restrict gun ownership and gun handling significantly more than they are restricted right now. You have seem many directly otherwise. You haven't seen a single post from me claiming all significant gun restrictions would violate the Constitution, or that the Constitution cannot be amended, or that the Constitution is perfect and all-wise and sacrosanct in the first place. You have seen no posts from me even favoring, let alone recommending, handgun ownership (the core and source of America's problems, imho) for male self defense, or anything else actually. You have seen me mock some - not all, but a significant percentage - of the people I meet carrying guns (for example, guys I have seen pack camping in the north woods with 9 millimeter automatics - in case of wolves, bears, etc). You have heard me describe specific, named factions of the American gun culture as crazy, and the consequences as tragic, and the politics of its membership as dysfunctional. I'm a fellow gun control advocate. And you think you are gridlocked with me. Does this suggest anything to you? The other thing you don't understand is that that is a real question. There are reasons people in the US who think themselves competent - including those who are in fact right, are in fact competent - resist so vehemently a governmental check for competency. That's "reasons", not psychiatric symptoms. And a whole lot of people agree that they are pretty good reasons. -> And you have seen some of them. So how is it that you don't "understand"? Oh, I don't give it that much of a pass. It's far from mere posturing.

Doesn't explain the numbers. No, they weren't. Either one. I'm missing the point I've made most frequently in this thread. Right. And so it goes. Is my point driven in yet? Does anyone need an even bigger hammer? Or as posted: " This is damaging, politically. This is - once again - the core of the gridlock problem. It doesn't matter how many people think reliable and universal background checks, trigger locks in family homes, legal standards for responsible ownership and carry, for example, would be a good idea in a better world (It's over 85% of the NRA membership even, last I checked): they aren't going to hand political power over to people who think like that, talk like that, and preen themselves in public on a moral and ethical superiority they nowhere near possess"

Is anyone doing that? Not in the Democratic oriented media. The people who listen to Fox for their news are mostly Republican voters. Really. Was this before or after every single pundit on TV declared that they were completely surprised that Trump was still in the race? That "nobody saw this coming"? That was I believe early March. Who, exactly, is running that as their narrative? Major media, now. The lefty bloggers I follow have been bemoaning their inability to get that obvious point shoehorned into a major pundit's "narrative" since the debate schedule was published - summer of last year. The Democratic base has been "divided" about the prospect of a Hillary Clinton nomination for twenty years or more.

You have demonstrated the gridlock. I can't think of any direct way to break it. Certainly it would require marginalizing everyone who argues in public as the gun control advocates here post on the topic. How would one go about doing that?

It's probable that the earliest "humans" emerged from beings with a fair amount of technology - fire, stone tools, shelter construction, probably crude nets and rudimentary gathering/carrying apparatus - and the social organization to match. It's hard to imagine where else the kind of physiological adaptations that require such a long childhood could have obtained the necessary evolutionary pressure from.

When a Scientific American columnist reviewed "The Bell Curve", he called it the "Quot Score". I favor that term, myself - it's easy to spell (I never know where to put the periods in I.Q.) He also published a graph, like real scientists always do, showing Quot Scores graphed against hat size according to various styles of hat. IIRC the French Beret showed a low Quot Score associated with small berets, rising to a maximum with midsize berets, and decreasing to low with very large berets. The curve for cowboy hats was a horizontal line.

But as you can see, my slow comets onto a smaller Earth - with the water soaking in and swelling the planet - takes care of all those objections. Look at all the water soaked into the rocks under Mt Everest, swelling and pushing it up! Science has discovered it, it's scientific fact. Here's a report about the science: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2878885/Huge-quantities-Earth-s-oldest-water-discovered-deep-underground-supporting-unknown-lifeforms.html

The problem is not mutual exclusion. The problem is that the crazy has gridlocked the gun control option. And if this thread has demonstrated nothing else, it has demonstrated that the gridlock on gun control has not magically let go. Yet.

Wait for the gridlock to erode, and people to forget. Then meet as reasonable folks, and I think it would be fairly easy. I think things would go quite smoothly. Meanwhile, if the problem is kids getting shot, there is a lot we can get done in the realm of better drug laws and enforcement, lead abatement, income inequality, etc etc etc. Any time.

- - - So lessee: instead of abandoning gun control and discussing other and far more likely approaches to reducing gunshot injury in the young, as I suggested, I am bid to repost my earlier suggestions for gun control - that were ignored for fifty pages and then their existence denied - so that we can begin again the endless task. So I do. And one of them is chosen - trigger locks on handguns in homes with children. But the point is made that racial disparity in the stats - particularly the black race, and Minnesota stats, specifically mentioned - seems to indicate too large a role for intention, that assuming as we might racial neutrality in accident, accident can be playing only a very minor role and trigger locks then of only very small benefit. But I pointed out that we have reason to think both accident and "borrowed" use might play a larger role among Minnesota blacks than among other races, due to various cultural factors I have observed and the obvious economics of gun ownership among the black people who are getting shot. So - my argument goes - trigger locks in children's homes have more promise than an initial glance at the racial bias in the injury stats might suggest. And they have the same basic justification that other child-conscious restrictions on exercise of Constitutional rights have, such as on speech (porn) or religion (can't beat the kid for God). And that's the response. {those two quotes} The gun control advocates want that kind of reasoning and agenda to be given power over others. Like I keep saying: gridlocked. The crazy is on both sides, and nothing will help but time. Or as put before: In other words, no, we can't have trigger locks. Why not? Maybe because they wouldn't work, but nobody's looking into that much. Instead, because a lot of people think gun control advocates are irrational, emotional, unreasonable, nannystate authoritarians who can't be trusted with power. Where do you suppose they got that idea? Meanwhile, we can get a lot of the benefit we need, kids not getting shot, without gun control. If we had decent drug laws, for example, how much of the 400% racial disparity - concentrated as it is in the drug law enforcement hot spots among black people - vanishes, and in the right way? If it's only 20%, against all expectations, it would still outweigh the entire possible effect of trigger locks among white people in Minnesota.

Trigger guards that lock would still be a barrier, to the kid who is "borrowing" the gun from a relative etc. But yeah, crime and gang prevention cuts to the root of the problem the guns decorate and symptomize. And we're getting to the first full generation largely free of leaded gas - community adults, maternally, or self exposed. There is, btw, a cultural observation that might apply: when I'm working out of a truck into a household the kids tend to behave according to race - as a general rule white kids stand around cluelessly and have to be moved when they're in the way, yellow kids line up against a wall and whisper to each other, brown kids hide behind handy adult relatives, red kids crowd around but not cluelessly, and black kids run around alertly clear of the work but will be up in the truck playing with stuff behind my back. So I kind of suspect black kids might have more accidents with a household handgun left around, and trigger locks might be a larger benefit in black homes than the stats indicate. Balance that against the likelihood that the guns involved in this stuff are not bought by the household adult for the house in the first place.

In closed primaries among black people, she has dominated. Otherwise, she's breaking even or losing. Those are not Democratic primary voters. Clinton is getting a lot of good press in the MSNBC and related media, where the Democratic primary vote gets their news and Sanders has been oddly shut out. And her name recognition is very high - Sanders still struggles there, especially among black voters. The winning candidates in both Parties are the ones who started with the highest name recognition.

They said in the OP link that 75% of the very young were "accidental" injuries. In the teens - which seem to be majority - the proportion of "accidentals" was much lower, but unspecified. The inverse correlation with prevalence would seem likely, just guessing here, to imply a lower percentage of true accidentals. So would the very large gender and racial skew. By thumbnail calculation, if young black teenage boys with half the prevalence exposure to guns as white boys nevertheless have four times the gunshot injury rate (as per the OP stats), that would work out to eight times the likelihood of them getting shot by accident with a given gun they happen to be near, if accidents are dominating these statistics. They don't seem all that much more clumsy or careless to me, when I meet them. First guess is one should seek another explanation.