While the North Carolina House of Representatives has finally killed the bill to allow the state to establish a state religion, a new study found that 34 percent of adults would favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion. While 47 percent opposed the establishment of state religion, it was less than a majority.
Another 11 percent thought that the Constitution allowed for the establishment of an official religion. Thus, they are entirely unaware of the workings of the first amendment or the prior rulings of the Supreme Court.
Republicans were the most likely to favor the establishment of a state religion with 55 percent favoring it in their own state and 46 percent favoring a national constitutional amendment.
While the poll reportedly included 1000 people (a sizable group), I still want to believe that it is skewed and that most people recognize the danger of religious-based government in a world torn apart of sectarian violence. Even if these people lack knowledge of the Constitution, they are given a daily lesson on the dangers of state-sponsored religion in their newspapers and news broadcasts. For those advocating such a change, they leave us with the chilling view that, for some, the problem with abusive theocratic regimes like Iran is simply the disagreement with the choice of the religion.
Source: HuffPost
Tony C.
“What benefit do you think accrues to the law abiding citizen for registering his gun, that outweighs the perceived negatives?”
Same answer … your perceived negatives lie within the ownership, not the registration.
Tony C.,
Fears based on the ownership of a gun … not the registration of same.
OS,
Nice evasion but evasion never-the-less which is why the question is rhetorical. The point was in the asking, not in the response because the response is expected based on past behavior.
Non-paranoid, law abiding citizens have no reasonable fear of registration … criminals do and well they should.
Blouise: Why would any law abiding person with a gun not want to register it?
They might worry it creates a legal hazard, that if their gun was stolen and they didn’t report it, or didn’t notice it missing due to lack of use, they might be held liable in some way if the gun was used in a crime.
Particularly in today’s climate of surveillance of citizens without a warrant, they might worry that if they did register it, they might be subjected to an invasion of privacy by law enforcement; reading of their emails, getting put on a no-fly list, or otherwise scrutinized just for owning a gun, thereby increasing the chances of being caught or prosecuted for some technicality of which they were not aware.
Along those lines, they might worry that by registering as a gun owner, they would be subjected to questioning or heightened suspicion by those investigating shootings or gunpoint crimes in their neighborhood (which may be why they bought it in the first place).
I think there are many reasons to not volunteer information you think serves no purpose other than to put you under suspicion or surveillance.
What benefit do you think accrues to the law abiding citizen for registering his gun, that outweighs the perceived negatives?
I think there is an irreducible part of mental illness murders, and simple criminally motivated murders. In Newtown, wasn’t the killer’s mother a law abiding citizen? He stole the guns from her, then killed her with one of them. A criminal could steal a registered gun, a drug addict (like my sister) that knew of a gun could steal it to trade it for a fix.
leejcarroll, I see Allison Schwartz is running for governor in Pa. There is a good chance that she will be the first woman governor of Pennsylvania. The gender gap is huge on the gun control issue.
leejcaroll,
You have some good points, but they all go toward mental health care issues, not registration. Registering what you already own will prevent nothing. It simply means you are in a computer database somewhere, same as your auto tag.
How many law abiding citizens decided to take the law into their own hands and shoot someone? Just because I am law abiding today doesn’t mean I will be so tomorrow,
Registration also lets those who are in the midst of a snit or psychological distress have the time to calm down/rethink/get help.
Blouise,
Here is a rhetorical reply to your rhetorical question. If I am a law abiding citizen, why should there be a need for me to register it?
What I want to see is legislation that will make criminals register their guns. No exceptions.
I can wait.
Gene,
But it might play well for Ava 😉
Blouise,
It probably wouldn’t fly. The best you could argue is mitigation to some form of manslaughter or negligent homicide. No judge (or jury) is going to buy that when you are conscious and otherwise unimpaired that you had no control or reduced control over your actions. For that, you have to argue diminished capacity, but that’s a different tack. For example, I recall a story a few years ago where a guy taking some prescription sleep aid shot his wife while sleepwalking and was charged with murder. They sold diminished capacity because sleepwalking was a known side effect of the drug and medically speaking he literally wasn’t conscious so there was no intent. I don’t recall though what the verdict was, acquittal or guilty of a lesser charge. Again, the action is the thing. Merely being “quick on the draw” isn’t going to be mitigating absent other factors.
OS,
Here’s a rhetorical for you:
Why would any law abiding person with a gun not want to register it?
I don’t understand the “advertising” part. If I run a classified that I want to sell grandpa’s shotgun how is that handled? Fees? We have a local “Trading Post” paper that is nothing but ads. Some commercial services are offered, such as home repair, portable buildings, roofing and the like. However, there are personal ads for everything from baby cribs, to musical instruments, and guns.
Gun registration is not enacted in a number of states. If the Feds told local law enforcement in most rural areas to go out and register guns, they would get a big belly laugh. A few days ago I tried to explain this to someone on Daily Kos. The person told me he bet the sheriff would if a federal agent came and ordered him to.
My reply to him was that the sheriff would point to the big map of the county on the wall and tell the agent, ‘”There it is. We have 350 square miles of land, much of it nearly vertical, with about a thousand miles of mountain roads. The population of the county is 60,000. There may be as many as two or three guns for every man, woman and child in the county. So be my guest and have at it.
We cannot stamp out meth or pot growing, so how are they going to locate all the guns? This incident may give a sense of the magnitude of the problem. A National Guard helicopter took off from the local airport a few years ago. Radio contact was lost abruptly just a few minutes after they took off. The military and local law enforcement searched for the crash for a week before the downed helicopter was found. They even called in specialized equipment to search the bottom of a nearby TVA lake. It had hit the mountain right next to the airport. If it took them a week to find a Blackhawk helicopter only a couple of miles from the airport, how are they going to locate all those guns and register them?
‘ “It was my autonomous nervous system that shot him” isn’t a valid defense. ‘ (Gene)
Perhaps only because an exceptionally skilled attorney hasn’t taken the data available and used it on a jury.
I can see it in a Grisham novel. Just picture the lowly paid assistant in shirtsleeves and the equally lowly paid but beautiful secretary with her note pad both shaking their heads, “No boss, it’ll never work. No jury’s going to buy that. Why are we taking this case anyway?”
On a more serious note, this is exactly the kind of thing that could be proven or disproven if the gun merchants would allow proper studies and research to be conducted. But like the religious bigots now taking control of so many governments, the gun merchants don’t want any possible avenue that might lead to the defaming of guns left open to researchers … how dare you question the Prophets … how dare you threaten the Profits!
Gene: “It was my autonomous nervous system that shot him” isn’t a valid defense.
Of course not, because then nobody would ever be responsible. Thus we should not allow the use of tools that respond so easily, with lethal force, to any glitch in the autonomous nervous system.
Senate aides: Bipartisan deal reached on gun background checks
By Ed O’Keefe and Tom Hamburger
4/10/13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-aides-bipartisan-deal-reached-on-gun-background-checks/2013/04/10/fa4fe9a6-a1db-11e2-be47-b44febada3a8_story.html
Excerpt:
A bipartisan group of senators has struck a deal to expand gun background checks to all commercial sales — whether at gun shows, via the Internet or in any circumstance involving paid advertising, according to Senate aides familiar with the talks.
The law would not cover private transactions between individuals, unless there was advertising or an online service involved.
The agreement forged by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) would be more stringent than current law, which requires checks only when purchases are made through a licensed dealer, but less strict than the requirements originally sought by President Obama and congressional Democrats, who were seeking to expand background checks to nearly every kind of sale.
The agreement should secure enough bipartisan support to allow the Senate to launch debate on an overarching bill that would expand background checks, make gun trafficking a federal crime for the first time and bolster federal funding for school security plans. Senate Democratic leaders have said they will permit senators of both parties to introduce amendments to the measure.
“It was my autonomous nervous system that shot him” isn’t a valid defense.
I have not been paying close attention to the background check negotiations. However, the background check will have to be reasonable. I see no way they can accomplish it without grandparenting those firearms already out there. If they do that, the background check becomes more or less meaningless. Also, where will they get their data? The no-fly list? We have already seen what a SNAFU that is. Senator Ted Kennedy was stopped at the gate and was subjected to the usual bureaucratic BS because somebody put him on the ‘no fly’ list. And how about all those pre-school age kids on the no-fly list. HIPAA makes medication and doctor visits off limits; however, I do know the DEA tracks sales of controlled drugs.
If you look on packaging for a controlled drug, there will be a letter C with a Roman numeral in the center. It looks almost like a copyright symbol. Here is the list of what each schedule means.
http://www.justice.gov/dea/druginfo/ds.shtml
The drugs listed in each schedule is not comprehensive, but examples. New meds are coming on the market all the time, and some of them will be scheduled as well.
I don’t know how far down the list the DEA monitors and keeps data, but I suspect all of them. Otherwise they would not call them “controlled” or “schedule.” I am wondering if you have been taking anything on the schedule, for any reason, you might be prohibited from passing a background check. That would be a backdoor attempt to shut down the firearms industry.
I know a lot of people, including police officers, who take some of those medications. As Darren can tell you, law enforcement is one of the most stressful jobs out there. Many officers take medications to help them sleep. Hypnotics, such as Ambien and Lunesta, are controlled. Or if one has been on pain medication, how about them?
Finally, who pays for it? Will this be another one of those unfunded mandates? Small town police departments and sheriff’s offices simply don’t have the resources. Some have already said they would like the fee for a background check to be prohibitively expensive. I don’t have any problem with a waiting period of a few days. However, a waiting period is not going to deter the person determined to commit suicide.
Gene: Five seconds or five days, the duration of intent is not relevant until the decision to kill is acted upon. We aren’t punishing people for their thoughts.
I believe you are doing precisely that; because we are not talking about five seconds, we are taking about one one-hundredth of that time, 50 milliseconds; 1/20th of a second. The gun allows intent of that duration to be acted upon, and I believe (based on other reaction-time experiments done without any lethal consequences, just winning or losing a game) that if the gun did not allow that, most such impulsive murders would not occur.
Suppose instead the gun could read your neurons and turn the imagining of pulling the trigger into actually pulling the trigger. Because an overly sensitive gun is doing that; a person’s motor cortex is not completely under their conscious control, and under emotional stress (including fear and anger) it is (demonstrably) even less under their control.
A tool that translates a muscle twitch into a lethal event is not something we are evolved to “choose,” you can claim that act was under their conscious control all you want, that does not make it true. In the lab, people begin muscular actions and suppress them all the time in the sub-second time frame; the mind may appear seamless but it is composed of independently acting modules, some taking action and others suppressing it; and that competition becomes apparent under stress at sub-second time intervals.
If the gun, like more natural human powered weapons, did not respond with lethal force to a 50 ms impulse, I believe it would kill fewer people.
I do not believe there would be much difference for increasing the delay beyond one second, motor cortex activation and repression are resolved by then, and at that point I believe a trigger pull after that point really is the result of persistent intent.
But I also do not believe that is something we can distinguish after the fact, so I don’t think it is a good idea to even try after the trigger has been pulled.
Thus the point of intervention is the tool itself; with a latency of less than half a second, I think the problem is in the tool, it is grossly mismatched to the much slower human scale speed of decision making.
Just as I would not want my computer to read my mind and post my unedited thoughts on this blog, I do not want my gun to read my mind and kill somebody without my persistent intent to do so.
Gene: On Levitt: Yes, that is one. Here is an excerpt from his page 6, journal page 382:
*********** BEGIN QUOTE
Panel-data analyses using states, counties, metropolitan statistical
areas, or cities in the United States have generally obtained relatively con-
sistent estimates of the impact of unemployment on crime. A 1% change in
the unemployment rate is typically found to increase property crime by 1–
2% contemporaneously but often has no systematic impact on violent crime
rates (Lee, 1993; Levitt, 1996, 1997; Raphael and Winter-Ebmer, 2000)[7]
Studies that substitute other measures of the labor market conditions at the
bottom of the distribution reach similar conclusions (Gould et al., 1998;
Machin and Meghir, 2000). The consistency of these results across data sets,
included covariates, and degree of aggregation is encouraging, as the
national time series data yield results that are much more sensitive to the
particulars of the estimation.
(7) See Freeman (1995) for a survey of this literature.
*********** Back to Tony
You can see by the references it is not just his own study (although he does reference his own peer-reviewed work in there). The specifics of the references will be in the bibliography at the back; in particular, here is the Freeman reference:
Freeman, R. (1995). The labor market. In Wilson, J. Q., and Petersilia, J. (eds.), Crime, ICS Press, San Francisco.
Unfortunately, my university library does not have that publication in digital form, or I’d go look and see what it says. I will say that other papers I have read dispute the link between unemployment and property crime; it is not a universally accepted link in sociology.