Moontanman

Possibly I am conflating the anti gun sentiments here with the national debate. I do get gun control propaganda from the Democrats that are against things like concealed carry and gun ownership in general not to mention that useless idea that the style of a weapon has anything to do with the actual killing power. I can say that almost all the people I do know that have military style weapons are ex military and seem to have an attachment that has more to do with nostalgia than wanting the deadliest weapon. There does seem to be a bit of a masculine issue connected with military style weapons as though prohibiting them would some how emasculate males or maybe more accurately that somehow possessing such a weapons makes you more of a man or allows you to show off your manhood, possibly similar to having the fastest car or highest 4X4. I am by no means claiming to be an expert on this but over the years i have noticed that some men do seem to connect their masculinity to certain objects that convey the illusion of personal power. Guns, to some, seem to satisfy this need to "show off", but I don't think the majority of people who own guns do so as a power display but the ones that do seem to be making the most noise about it. I do think there is room for a middle ground and that both sides are ignoring the majority of the people who actually own guns...

No problem...

Yeah, I feel the same way, reason is being ignored and that means reasonable people are being ignored. We can argue back and forth all day with people who do not live in the USA and all we establish is that their culture is different from ours and a direct comparison really can't be made. As a gun owner I feel very much disenfranchised in this national debate, where are the people who are not gun lovers or gun haters? People who simply have guns for practical purposes? Sometimes it feels like polarization is the only thing our political system is good at...

Precisely...

I agree this is not exactly a good analogy... No they are for hunting, sport, fun, and protection...

40 billion light years away does not mean the light started 40 billion years ago... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe

Please give some evidence of that assertion...

If that link was to a picture of you then you clearly have issues, the individual in that photo is no more unusual looking than anyone else i have ever seen. In fact he would not raise an eye brow where I live and I live in one of the most homophobic areas i know of... get over your self dude or get professional help but stop using insulting language to insult a entire group of human beings...

Not all men who appear to be effeminate are homosexual, not all homosexuals are effeminate in appearance, your argument is trivially falsified not to mention nonsensical and smacks of a self hatred that suggests you need professional help.

I grow tomatoes upside down every year, like hanging baskets, works fairly well but tomatoes still try to grow up, the vines are generally not strong enough to make much progress fighting gravity, a tree would be interesting to grow upside down... I grow them in five gallon buckets...

Then you should outlaw 22 rifles, most of them are used to shoot targets of some sort, occasionally they are used to shoot at varmints but so are the pretend assault rifles. They look scary, they are no more dangerous than the non scary ones.. I've shot a semi auto 30.06, it takes some practice but you can shoot multiple times accurately, I prefer bolt action, safer, more reliable and more practical but then I am not a gun lover, practical is the most important thing to me, not fire power... The guns that shoot a 223 round are fun to shoot, plastic jugs full of water are great targets, you get a nice satisfying explosion... As far as 100 round drums, I agree, I see no need for that.. but there is semi auto shot gun with a 100 round barrel clip I'll take over the world heh heh heh

This topic has lurched back and forth from one extreme to the other with some people taking the position that guns should be freely available in all their forms and others taking the position that no guns should be allowed at all... Is there no middle ground? Why is does so much of this thread boil down to "I love guns" vs "I hate guns" Did no one simply grow up around guns that that were simply tools? A quite specific tool but just a tool, no love no hate involved. I don't sit around polishing my gun dreaming of the day I'll get to use it as some gun owners are portrayed nor do I fear it so much I keep it locked up out of reach and useless... I have lots of dangerous tools, my skill saw, my chain saw, lawn mower, weed eater, reciprocating saw, drills, knives, the list goes on, I love none of them (well except for maybe my lawn mower) I hate none of them (well except for maybe my weed eater) but the rest are tools, tools that have to be used in the proper way with proper safety precautions taken. Love, hate, politics, fear, these things do not belong in this debate, all they do is muddy the water... Politicians are using this muddy water to further their own agendas with no regard to anything but votes and fear is the main ingredient, fear that I will lose my gun or fear that I will use my gun to kill needlessly... to really reach an agreement in this the fear has to be removed to a safe distance so the heart of the matter can be exposed ... I grew up around guns, guns were everywhere in the house, easily accessible, if you needed a gun you simply picked one up and put it to use... I won't lie, if you picked up a gun you better have good reason to do so or you risked a severe ass kicking but the idea of guns being inherently dangerous simply wasn't part of my up bringing but neither was the idea of I love my gun and you'll have to take from my cold dead hands... Most of this debate is as weird as snake suspenders to me...

In the days of the British Empire wasn't it traditional (maybe just for military men) for a man to wait until he was 30 or so and then they were expected to marry a young girl, usually mid teens or something like that? I might have gotten that from a novel about the British Empire... but it reflects the age old idea that men should have experience and women should be innocent and pure...

True but one is no more dangerous than the other, semi auto is just that semi auto, semi auto comes in everything from 12 gauge shot guns to 22 riffles, actual machine guns are not available to the general public...

Like most medical advances the general population will give credit to god for allowing the researchers to "discover" the ability to grow back limbs... circular reasoning spinning at near light speed...

Hypothetical technology...

No we do not, if you think you do feel free to show it... No they do not... No it does not follow since your claim is not true... You have absolutely no evidence of any miracles what so ever... no one has ever been raised from the dead, and if it had taken place then historians would have recorded it... they did not so there is no evidence it happened... What impacted the world was the Roman Emperor Constantine deciding to make everyone worship his new religion, often under pain of death, one that he made up out of parts of Paganism and Judaism and a New Jewish Sect...

Do you realize how... I can't think of a word that is not insulting, gullible is the best I can do, but do you understand how gullible you have to be to believe this? This walking dead thing is only mentioned in one place... I mean one place ever, it is not mentioned anyplace else in the bible, no other historian mentions this anyplace. Do you really think that the dead rising from their tombs and walking around wouldn't have been noticed by everyone? That would have been the most noticed miracle ever, absolute proof of god's powers, that particular event would have been recorded by every historian of the time had it happened, you could not possibly have kept it a secrete yet it is only mentioned in that one passage, no other gospel even alludes to it. I am going to suggest the OP watch this series of videos to understand that being a theist doesn't preclude being a scientist but it does mean that being a creationist is not just being ignorant being a creationist is being willfully stupid... Watch or not, there are 14 videos involved but the first is very telling...

I'm not sure how to answer that but the premise is that the entire ship would be contained inside the warp bubble...

I never suggested you could... Metaphysics? Again, metaphysics? I'm not sure what you are getting at here, but Dolphins realize we can manipulates objects enough to actually come to divers for help when tangled in nets... My dog come to me with help when he has a bone stuck in his mouth. I agree that we define intelligence and our definition cannot really be used to describe intelligence in non human animals but the metaphysics part puzzles me...

Space inside the bubble is flat so time runs like it does in any other flat space... There is no causality violation with a warp bubble, You cannot get to someplace and back before you left, this technology does not allow for time travel AFAIK....

Please elaborate on the bolded part of this statement, are you saying it was a Muslim/Jewish/Christian service? Or the President Biden and their wives represented all three religions?

This is a false analogy, take a beaver embryo raise it away from any other beavers, let it loose in a creek and it will build a damn, they do not have to learn to build damns, termites are the same way, they do it with no contact with other termites and their behaviors are limited to what they are born with. This makes no sense, a human raised in the total absence of other humans would not be intelligent by your system and could not naturally do much more than throw rocks. Whales have huge complex brains, a complex social system, and they pass down culture. Would you deny them their intelligence? They have no use for technology any more than a worm does... Some birds use tools, have language and pass down both knowledge and culture to their off spring, your statement is trivially falsified...

We can measure behaviors of animals and some of these behaviors appear to be intelligent to us. There are so many variables it's difficult to compare one humans intelligence against another via methods like IQ much less an animals intelligence. . We often use tests like, letting a chimp watch another chimp solve a problem and seeing if the chimp that watches gets the test right faster than chimps that did not see the problem solved. I think it's interesting to note that while chimps require many years to learn behaviors from other chimps and are hard wired to do so due to the group mentality some animals can learn directly from others and not only do not socialize with other members of their species they only live a couple years at most to accumulate experiences and yet score very high on intelligence tests. The common octopus is an example of this, in some ways it would be like a human with no knowledge of other humans or technology of any type discovering fire independently... Intelligence is one of those things that is hard to measure but we seem to know it when we see it...

I think we should stop calling these weapons assault rifles or insinuating they are more dangerous that other semi auto weapons... they are not. They are not military weapons either, no military would arm their men with these rifles. I think the real problem with these guns is the false bravado that comes with them, protect the proletariat from the government, horse feathers... home protection... this is critical, no one should ever fire a high powered weapon inside a building, it's simply not fair to your neighbors who could be killed many houses away with a high powered rifle... Hunting... I have called these assault rifles high powered weapons but compared to a real hunting rifle they are not, a 30.06 packs much more fire power and kills much cleaner and if it is semi automatic can be fired just as fast as these pretend military riffles. That leaves these "assault" weapons with only one real use, they are toys, collectors items fun for target practice but not much practical use for anything else...