Nightingale

I know too many people who have been robbed, hurt or raped because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time to believe that arming yourself is fearful and paranoid. Have you, a friend, or family member ever been a victim of a violent crime? I hope not, but the experience does change your perspective, because it makes you realize that nobody, anywhere, is ever really safe, and and believing that nothing bad will happen to you does not make it so. You can do things to be safer, but since you cannot control the actions of others, you are never going to be in a situation where nothing bad can happen. I'd rather plan and prepare for something happening than be a victim if I don't have to be.

No. I wouldn't want someone to do that to me, and karma seems to have a way of biting you in the ass later on.

It's your civic duty to fill us in on the drama. I just felt this was worth repeating It's more Turtle's story to tell, but Turtle, James and I tried everything to get rid of her, including a rather lengthy discussion about colostomy porn.

I will never forget Turtle and the cougar at lost prairie...

If you're not currently married, go try to catch if you want to.

They are running NCIC checks now and requiring fingerprints on traffic (tickets) stops now. Why would (should) buying a gun be any different? You ain't gonna have any privacy soon my friend. Because driving a car isn't a right?

So you ALSO support those same requirements to exercise any other rights - I'll make sure to remind you of that. Do you believe that criminals and madmen have a right to bear arms? Yes or no? I think that violent criminals shouldn't have the right to bear arms, because they have done something to cost themselves that right. I also think that the insane shouldn't bear arms, provided the appropriate protocol has been followed to judge them incompetent to do so, just like when someone is involuntarily committed. We already have a system in place to prevent violent criminals from purchasing guns legally. I'm not sure about the mental health part. What we don't have is a system to prevent criminals from purchasing guns illegally. What I'd like to see is a greatly increased penalty for committing a crime with a gun. Commit a crime (armed robbery, for example), get ten more years added on to the sentence if your weapon was a gun rather than a knife. Most of the violent criminals have a rap sheet a mile long, from what I saw working in criminal court. Sentences need to be longer for violent criminals, and nonexistent for potheads so we can make room.

Take the magnets out until they're using the door regularly. After that, give it another month, and then put the magnets back in. They'll be so used to pushing the door open that they probably won't notice.

Yeah... making a mess on public land and not cleaning up after yourself is really selfish.

Were they at an actual outdoor range, or just private land? The range around here charges a deposit if you want to use shotguns, and if you pick up your shells, you get the deposit back. Otherwise, they keep it, and you've paid them to pick up. Either way, the range is clean at the end of the day. Personally, I pick up my own.

I'm so sorry.

I was trying to figure out why so many Christians freak out when you write "Merry X-mas" and I came across this and thought it was interesting. It appears that "there is no grand scheme to dilute Christianity by promoting the use of Xmas instead of Christmas. It is not a modern invention to try to convert Christmas into a secular day, nor is it a device to promote the commercialism of the holiday season. Its origin is thoroughly rooted in the heritage of the Church." __________________________________________________ http://www.cresourcei.org/symbols/xmasorigin.html ...The fact that the use of "Xmas" can be associated so easily with crass commercialization rather than locating it within the Christian tradition itself reveals a lack of understanding of heritage and history. The word Christmas originated as a contraction of "Christ's mass". It is derived from the Middle English Christemasse and Old English Cristes mæsse, a phrase first recorded in 1038, compounded from Old English derivatives of the Greek christos and the Latin missa. In early Greek versions of the New Testament, the letter Χ (chi), is the first letter of Christ. Since the mid-16th century Χ, or the similar Roman letter X, was used as an abbreviation for Christ. Hence, Xmas is often used as an abbreviation for Christmas. I have no doubt that some people write "Xmas" because they are too busy or too lazy to write out the whole word. And no doubt some secular people, who are just as uninformed as Christians, see "Xmas" as a way to avoid writing "Christ." And certainly there are secular and commercial motives in the fact that "XMAS" appears in ads and signs because it can be larger and more attention getting in the same amount of space (more bang for the buck). But those factors do not take away the thoroughly Christian origin of the word "Xmas." In this instance, all of the hype and hysteria over supposedly taking Christ out of Christmas by writing "Xmas" instead of spelling out "Christmas" is both uninformed and misdirected. Abbreviations used as Christian symbols have a long history in the church. The letters of the word "Christ" in Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written, or various titles for Jesus early became symbols of Christ and Christianity. For example, the first two letters of the word Christ (cristoV, or as it would be written in older manuscripts, CRISTOS) are the Greek letters chi (c or C) and rho (r or R). These letters were used in the early church to create the chi-rho monogram (see Chrismons), a symbol that by the fourth century became part of the official battle standard of the emperor Constantine... The exact origin of the single letter X for Christ cannot be pinpointed with certainty. Some claim that it began in the first century AD along with the other symbols, but evidence is lacking. Others think that it came into widespread use by the thirteenth century along with many other abbreviations and symbols for Christianity and various Christian ideas that were popular in the Middle Ages. However, again, the evidence is sparse. In any case, by the fifteenth century Xmas emerged as a widely used symbol for Christmas. In 1436 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with moveable type. In the early days of printing typesetting was done by hand and was very tedious and expensive. As a result, abbreviations were common. In religious publications, the church began to use the abbreviation C for the word "Christ" to cut down on the cost of the books and pamphlets. From there, the abbreviation moved into general use in newspapers and other publications, and "Xmas" became an accepted way of printing "Christmas" (along with the abbreviations Xian and Xianity). Even Webster’s dictionary acknowledges that the abbreviation Xmas was in common use by the middle of the sixteenth century. So there is no grand scheme to dilute Christianity by promoting the use of Xmas instead of Christmas. It is not a modern invention to try to convert Christmas into a secular day, nor is it a device to promote the commercialism of the holiday season. Its origin is thoroughly rooted in the heritage of the Church. It is simply another way to say Christmas, drawing on a long history of symbolic abbreviations used in the church. In fact, as with other abbreviations used in common speech or writing (such as Mr. or etc.), the abbreviation "Xmas" should be pronounced "Christmas" just as if the word were written out in full, rather than saying "exmas."

Interesting. Do they define "illegal gun"? Unregistered or reported stolen.

Not on this report, but others I've seen seem to indicate they originated from somewhere in Central and South America. There's a ton of gun smuggling going on in those areas, and lots of weapons that are legitimately sold to law enforcement and the military end up in the hands of smugglers because the supply channels get diverted. If anyone's bothered to track how many are which type of gun, I'd be interested to see that, but if such a report exists, it hasn't come across my desk.

Here in LA, according to the federal data sitting on my desk, most of the illegal guns have come in over the border.

Some of the US schools are now using the Rosetta Stone English software to teach ESL. It's excellent software. I'm not sure if there's a British-English version, but it would be a good start until they can find a class that they like.

Here's an interesting one: (deathpenaltyinfo.org) "Leonel Herrera may have been innocent, but he was not innocent enough to satisfy the Supreme Court. A former Texas judge submitted an affidavit stating that another man had confessed to the crime for which Herrera was facing execution. Numerous other pieces of new evidence also threw doubt on his conviction. Still, the Court said that at this late stage of his appeal, he needed an extraordinary amount of proof to stop his execution. He was executed in Texas in 1993. Another kind of innocence was illustrated in the case of Jesse Jacobs, who was executed in Texas on January 4, 1995. Jacobs had been convicted and sentenced to death after the state had put on evidence to show that he was the actual killer in an abduction ending in murder which also involved a co-defendant. At the later trial of the co-defendant, the state reversed its story and said it was the co-defendant, not Jacobs, who pulled the trigger. In fact, the prosecution used (and thus vouched for) Jacobs's own testimony that he did not do the shooting and did not even know that his co-defendant had a gun. The co-defendant was also convicted, though not sentenced to death. Despite the admission by the prosecution that the arguments they made at Jacobs's trial were false, Jacobs was executed. Jacobs was not innocent in the full sense of the word. He had admittedly participated in the underlying crime, but it is doubtful that the jury would have sentenced him to death if the prosecutors had acknowledged that he was not directly involved in the actual murder. Three Supreme Court Justices were highly critical of this deception on the prosecution's part. Justice Stevens wrote: "It would be fundamentally unfair to execute a person on the basis of a factual determination that the state has formally disavowed. I find this course of events deeply troubling."" Here's another list, summarized from Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance Putnam, In Spite of Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992, and Bedau and Radelet, "Miscarriages of Justice in Potentially Capital Cases." Stanford Law Review 40 (1987) :21-179. http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/wrong/mike.list It's really hard to find evidence like you ask for, mainly because once someone's been executed, the organizations like the Innocence Project start devoting their limited resources to the ones still alive.

Depends on which moderator.

Wide open = not covered by doors and windows.

No, I mean builder. The guy that was responsible for overseeing the planning and construction of the home.

If your builder let you buy a house that it knew was full of wide open holes that damn near anyone could walk through, blaming him would probably be pretty reasonable.

I usually just start making noise about "age discrimination", and they generally shut up and hand over the kiddie menu.

Just purchase .mac. it'll back up all your stuff for you.

Maybe, and if not, they'll either just replace it for you since it's brand new (that's what I'd tell them to do), or take care of dealing with shipping it out for you.

Go to the apple website and make a "genius bar" appointment at your local store. Then, take it in, and they will either fix or replace it. And buy AppleCare while you're there if you haven't already. It's worth it, and you will probably use it.