Because you find beating up babies funny Frenchy, that's why. And you should be ashamed of yourself.

Kev, I'm on a brief fact-finding mission in Botswana, trying to discover what exactly is in the water over here. You shall have my full report after the giant mutant day-bats stop chewing on my monitor and telling me to build a mud-pyramid on top of Flinders St station. Shoo! Shoo, giant bats!

Quote from BrandonAGr :

Well said BBT, people like Gunn add nothing to this debate and personally I find people like Gunn much more frightening than CueBall.

In a perfect world we wouldn't ever need a gun, but we don't live in a perfect world. I would rather not live in a nanny state where the government takes everything away that it thinks might potentially cause a problem, because going down that path leads to a state that takes away a lot more than the ability to own a gun.

People keep mentioning these atrocities that were committed with guns and then saying that if only we banned all guns those would never happen. Like I mentioned before, if the world was perfect and banning guns meant *poof* all guns are now gone that would work, but people who want to will still be able to get guns even if you outlaw them. To say that banning all guns might save some lives from one instance is not enough to justify the action, you could also save a hell of a lot of lives by making all speed limits 30MPH or banning public sale of cigarettes, but I don't see these same people advocating those things. Why not, you want to see people die in car accidents?

The likely response is that the greater good is served by allowing those things to exist even with the associated negative consequences, isn't it possible that a certain amount of gun ownership can operate along those same lines?

Just speaking for myself, I'm no advocate of banning everything in an attempt to end crime. I actually said (somewhere in my last enormous post) that it was stupid to think that a gun ban would end gun crime. What I tried to make perfectly clear, however, was that restrictions or a ban on certain types of weapon - specifically assault rifles and other self-loading, automatic or military-style weapons - helps to lessen the impact if someone does decide to go on a killing spree. Of course it's not necessary to have an assault rifle to kill people. After all, you only need one bullet to kill someone, and just one murdered kid on the street is one too many. But if you're in posession of a weapon that can spray 30+ bullets into a crowd in a few seconds and you lose your mind, the damage you cause and its ripple effects will be felt by a much larger number of people than if you were unable to acquire such a weapon.

Crims in this country simply don't bother with military guns anymore. Any halfwit can hold up a 7/11 or a bank with a sawnoff shotty from dad's farm or a pistol (real or fake) and anyone with half a brain will do whatever you want if you stick a gun in their face, so why bother trying to get an M16 on the black market? It's not worth the trouble. It's hard enough keeping the state cops off your trail if you just held up a service station for $500, but if you did it with an assault rifle you'll attract Federal attention and you'll be all over the front page before you know it.

Yes you will. Or search the skins thread

[offtopic]Botswana for the ultimate win![/offtopic]

Gibson's great at plausibility and that feeling of currency, like that could be happening right now, next door. Totally locked me into that book. I think you could almost drop the scifi tag from Pattern Recognition though, it's more a contemporary mystery novel with a shitload of t3h internetz in it Dammit, I think I'm going to have to read it again now!

/waits for Kev to come in and start bollocking on about Phil Collins like Christian Bale in American Psycho shortly before the frenzied stabbings

Some great books in this thread! I read some good books last year actually, not a bad 12 months for my list.

Breaking The Spell - Religion as a natural phenomenon by Daniel C Dennett. A sober, rational look at religion. As far from Christopher Hitchens' style as you could get, but they basically agree with each other.

Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks. An intricate Scottish tale of family, lust and highly successful strategy games Waiting for his next scifi novel. The last one, The Algebraist, was Banksy's usual mind-expanding writing. Very, very immersive, high-concept epic space-opera. Also re-read Excession, which should be made into a very long movie with the original score written by Muse.

@Crashgate - I bought Reality Dysfunction a couple of years ago on holiday but didn't have time to read it. Might just hook into that next. Epic scifi ftw :up: Should throw some PK Dick on the list too.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Just read it. If you're not in love with the heroine by chapter 2 you're broken

God Is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. Never backward in coming forward, Hitch tells you exactly what he thinks of religion and its effect on the world. Exactly what he thinks. This man knows not the concept of word-mincing! Highly inflammatory and flat-out offensive or jolly good fun - depending on your perspective

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Long before he was one of these laughably, oxymoronically-named "fundamentalist atheists" he was a highly respected evolutionary biologist. Following on from his earlier work The Selfish Gene, Dawkins uses Watchmaker to further explain the development of biological diversity on Earth.

Right now: Guardians Of Power - The Myth of the Liberal Media by David Edwards & David Cromwell. A great eye-opening account of US/UK media slackness, covering the reporting of actions in (so far) Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo and the giant gaps between it and what was actually going on at the time. Wish they'd included Australian media idiocy but there's only so much paper in the world

Very soon: the autobiography of Gunners guitar-lord Slash \m/

edit: forgot Douglas Adams' (may Something rest his soul) The Salmon Of Doubt! It was published after he died and was compiled by his family, friends and assistant from stuff left on his many Macs. He'd started another Dirk Gently novel too, which will now never be completed

Last edited by Hankstar, Thu, 10 Jan 2008 03:58.

While I'm not exactly a fan of what Gunn just wrote or how it was expressed I totally understand where it's coming from. I often find myself frustrated with some US attitudes, especially those related to the prevalent nationalist supremacy, military action, gun laws & other highly charged topics. I try not to let it get personal though (that's led me into some bitter shitfights on a number of topics at this forum and others). I've found Cuey to be a pretty level-headed & non-inflammatory bloke in this thread and elsewhere at lfsforum.net, penchant for carrying cannons in his y-fronts (and my strong disagreement with such behaviour) notwithstanding.

While I do understand US gun culture and why it exists (while disagreeing with most of the defences for carrying guns around publicly) I accept that changing it will take decades at the very least. Considering the following: that it took one catastrophic 35-death killing spree to change Australia's mind on automatic weapons; that the US has experienced perhaps a dozen spree shootings since Australia banned assault weapons and US gun laws have barely changed at all in response to such crimes; that the US gun lobby holds a ridiculous amount of power as US weapons manufacturers produce over half the world's weapons and have a vested interest in keeping sales up - patriotism over the 2nd Amendment notwithstanding; and that guns and gun culture is so deeply embedded in the US psyche, it will have to take one serious, mind-blowing gun-related atrocity (as if Columbine & the Washington sniper weren't mind-blowing, not to mention the Los Angeles "Heat" bank robbery/shootout) to get Congress to stop pandering to the NRA and the gun lobby to do anything meaningful about restricting weapons ownership, or even just making it harder or impossible to get certain types of weapons. I know that restrictions won't be a (ha) magic bullet, but if one spree can be stopped before it starts or even mitigated because some nutter had to wait for a proper background check - nationally, as well as at state level - or couldn't afford to buy a "black" gun because laws had made obtaining them very, very difficult and therefore very expensive or if someone had to wait until they were at least old enough to drive unsupervised before they could own anything more deadly than a supersoaker, I'd say that was a win for common sense.

Quote from daveb948576 :

kiddo? :ices_rofl

Considering you were born when I was in 2nd grade I think it's entirely appropriate - I was seven and would've totally kicked your pudgy baby arse.

Oh, and you started a "wah, LFS is dead", which entitles any forum member to call you anything they like. It's in the rules - well, the part that's only readable by members born in the 1970s, aka The Greatest Decade Of Them All, Man, Because Led Zeppelin Ruled It And Phil Collins Hadn't Been Invented Yet, so I guess you wouldn't have seen it.

RIP LFS? *sigh* :doh:
Look harder, kiddo.

Awesome! Problem solved - build a huge tractor

I love this site. Found by accident a little while ago and I've spent countless work hours having a damned fine chuckle

My favourite englishrussia post: Silent Hill 5. Spooky shit.

Last edited by Hankstar, Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:03.

Quote from CueBall :

If England -an island nation- can't make a gun ban work, what chance does any other country have? Australia, also an island nation, can't get a gun ban to work. Do you think that such a ban has any chance in a nation that has porous borders? No way.

It has worked here actually - it hasn't completely erased gun crimes (and you'd have to have been an idiot to think that would work) but it significantly reduced gun crimes involving automatic and semi-automatic weapons. It wasn't an all-encompassing ban on firearms, it was a specific ban on self-loading and assault weapons. The point wasn't to rid the country of all firearms (and therefore gun crimes) but to eliminate a particular kind of weapon that made it easier to kill lots of people quickly & efficiently. The government doesn't begrudge anyone the right to own target pistols, hunting rifles, shotguns etc, it simply drew the line at military or military-style weapons which are unquestionably designed to kill human beings. Our soldiers and cops aren't trained to frighten people by pointing guns at them, they're trained to kill them with weapons that are designed specifically for that purpose - weapons which are best kept out of the public sphere. I think the fact that we haven't experienced a crazed shooting spree since Port Arthur and since the subsequent gun ban is testament to its effectiveness. Of course that doesn't mean that there haven't been any gun deaths in the last decade. What it does mean, though, is that any potential nutters out there haven't been able to just grab an assault rifle or Tec-9 or a couple of Glocks and obey the voices whenever they get persistent.

Again, the point of Australia's assault weapon ban wasn't to remove every gun from every hand in some ridiculous utopian idea of a gun-free nation. It was to eliminate, as far as was practicable, military-style semi and fully automatic weapons from the marketplace and impose severe penalties on anyone who deals them on the black market in an effort to prevent large-scale firearm casualties, which it has done.

Last edited by Hankstar, Wed, 9 Jan 2008 23:53.

Lerts for president!

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Kev, along with the Ninja-Star Dildo?

I actually patented that already...

Sigged :up:

Last edited by Hankstar, Wed, 9 Jan 2008 05:09.

If these idiot record companies had got with the times ten years ago when the first mp3 players came out and got into online sales of their music, long before Jobs had a brainwave & cornered the market with iTunes this wouldn't be an issue. If, right now, they stopped chasing uni students who share mp3s and put some serious time & effort into making their entire catalogues available for purchase online (DRM & restriction-free) they'd make so much cash they wouldn't need to be chasing kids around.

Radiohead may have been laughed at by some people for saying "pay what you want to download our new record", but they made more money doing that than they did combining all the online sales figures of all their previous records. What that says to me is (a) EMI are greedy arseholes and (b) people are basically honest and are happy to pay for the things they want. Treat them like criminals and they'll continue to act that way, say "screw you" and rip whatever they want, using WMP, iTunes and every other legally-obtained software program out there.

It seems a lot like a chicken/egg argument when talking about US gun culture. Are the armed criminals the problem which requires citizens to protect themselves, or is it the fact that they can get guns as easily as anyone, legally or not? Is that huge black market for guns the problem or is it just an extension of the enormous legitimate market which could be, if not solved then seriously curtailed by serious punishment for gun trafficking and strict gun ownership laws? Gun control is like a dirty word in the US, especially in some areas of the country. Even relatively relaxed ideas like criminal background/mental history checks before selling guns to people are treated like heresy. Certainly, the black market will always be there if you're denied a legal weapon but if gun manufacturers were held to much stricter standards about where their guns go, how many are sold, who owns them and if gun sellers were held accountable for every gun they sell, perhaps the black market wouldn't be so huge.

In any event and for whatever reason, the gun-related problems the US experiences seem unique in the developed world (the spree-shootings, in particular, are almost chillingly common). The UK (which doesn't even arm its regular cops), Australia, New Zealand to name just three countries I'm familiar with, basically prohibit carrying handguns of any type and have tight restrictions on other weapons like shotguns and rifles. Semi-auto assault rifles were outright banned here after the Port Arthur massacre in the late 90s, where one man killed 35 people (add to that a high school colleague of mine who suicided a year after he survived the assault, due to the mental trauma). I don't believe there's been anything like it here since then. Of course we still have armed robberies and shootings, they're unavoidable, but we don't have people walking up to total strangers semi-regularly and blowing them away, or camping in the back of car a mile away and sniping the innocent.

But to blame spree-killings on guns alone is missing half the point. What social phenomena are happening to make this brutal way of expression "ok" with some disturbed people? Is it really stuff like violent media? Then why don't these spree shootings happen in Stockholm or Sydney where it's just as easy to buy GTA & watch The Matrix as it is in New York? Obviously these people are damaged to begin with and keeping them from watching Rambo or playing a PSX isn't going to make them "better", but what if they couldn't just go and buy a couple of guns and make the world pay? Guns don't make people crazy but they make it a lot easier for people who are to go and destroy a dozen lives before anyone knows what's going on.

Discussions about this issue always make me think of the general US image that a large percentage of the world has: big, strong, well-armed & able to pretty much do what it wants to other countries. Killing people is fine if you're defending the Homeland. With us or against us. It's certainly not new either, the US has practising gunboat diplomacy since the end of WW2 on every continent on Earth but, just recently, it's become a lot louder & more blatant than it's ever been in my lifetime. Just how much of this macho nationalist supremacy trickles down to everyday people, do you think? Plenty of people grow up damaged and insane for whatever reason, but what if they're constantly exposed to a political/media system that constantly, at every turn and on every channel, pushes the line that America is the greatest nation on earth and uniquely qualified to police the world and tell everyone else what to do, and anyone who gets in the way will be crushed? How about if you add the ability to legally - not just legally, but easily & quickly - acquire any weapon you want to your insanity & delusions of grandeur?

Lerts: just so you know, I'm going to copy & paste every single one of your posts into Notepad and start writing a science fiction novel

:doh: A choice between a very, very decent race sim and some rockstar fantasy dress-up toy (which is mostly loathed by anyone in an actual band). Seriously, what answer would you expect at this forum? What next - a choice between a G25 and a Harry Potter costume?

I dress like an American tourist. People just assume I'm heavily armed or CIA or just wanting to complain about the weather, poisonous animals or coffee and stay away from me

Credit to you, Cuey :up: The US definitely needs more people who are vigilant and give a shit about what their government does, armed or not.

I'm not a big fan of guns myself. I'm not totally anti-guns but I draw the line at people walking down the street with them concealed or keeping them under their desks or going hunting with Kalashnikovs (one shot at a time, softcocks!). I grew up in the country, where guns are all over the place but really just regarded as another tool at a farmer's disposal. Noone talks about home defence Down Under, unless they don't mind being labelled a tad paranoid When a natural disaster hits, people here tend to look for Red Cross & army choppers (which always seem to arrive pretty rapidly), not for marauding bands of armed looters. There's just not a big gun culture in Australia, which I'm thankful for. Farmers have them, sporting shooters have them, cops and soldiers do as well, of course. Spree-shootings are very, very rare (though we do love a good serial nutjob, shout-outs to Snowtown and the Balanglo state forest). But then we've never had to defend ourselves militarily against an occupying force or a tyrannical regime (got a bit dicey in the 40s though) and we've not had a civil war, so the need for local militias has barely even been discussed. The biggest gunfight on Australian soil lasted about 20 minutes and was brought about by harsh, petty beauracracy during our gold rush (the Eureka Stockade). One thing Australians can't stand (and will happily open fire on) is a bloody beauracrat Our nation's federation & Constitution were all brought about by vote and not spurred by armed revolution like in the US. Because of that, I can definitely see where the gun culture springs from and why the US seems to be unique in that way.

Last edited by Hankstar, Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:50.

I can't help but wonder where all these well-armed, concerned citizens have been while the US government has been steadily eroding & flat-out removing their civil rights and pissing all over their Constitution for the last 8 years ... oh, that's right, voting for Bush. Twice! I guess as long as people can keep assault rifles in their office (2nd amendment, people) the government can do whatever the hell it wants, right?

Not maligning you CueBall, you seem like an intelligent person, but the US populace seems to have lost that "don't tread on me" mentality that was sparked during the Revolution. Your country is staring down the barrel of the biggest threat to its liberty since the 1770s (I don't mean these boogeyman "Islamofascists", I mean the Whitehouse) and noone's doing a goddam thing about it. The President swore an oath to defend the US against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and promptly became the worst enemy of all US people, in plain sight of everyone. And they all just let him. Even when the Dems finally won the balance of power in 2006, after six years of copping it in the back passage and watching the people cop it, they just bent right back over again and said "please, continue the reaming" (OT: it's amazing how far you can bend when you don't have a spine - I'm convinced Democrats are related to squid).

Quote from seinfeld :

Troll troll trolly trollity McTroll

*yawn*

Headphones if racing when the gf is home watching telly, speakers cranked otherwise.

It's 1988: Metallica or Megadeth?

I'm sure GT and other console games with RL tracks would be invaluable track-learning tools, but I'm sure most pro drivers take the attempts at physics with a grain of salt or two.

Better a furry than a scaly. Don't see the attraction in reptiles, myself.