peacefuljeffrey

That's where you will find me, Senor! Ironically, that's where you find a lot of people who end up dead in office buildings and schools when a crazy person with a gun goes on a rampage among disarmed prey. They duck under tables hoping that they don't get found and murdered, because they have abdicated their right to have and carry the means to fight back. Did you see the movie "Runaway Jury"? You just described the opening scene. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

When we become psychic we'll know. Otherwise it's pure speculation. Boy, the anti-gunners here sure seemed confident when they said they doubted it would have made a difference! I guess their psychic abilities are just more honed than ours are. Or is it just more reasonable to speculate in one direction of neutral than the other? P.S. Check the thread title: I was asking for speculation! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Kev's point seems to be that cars might as well not be licensed and registered, for all the good they do in keeping the wrong people from driving. Raising the idea of fighting gun crime through licensing and registration "because we license and register drivers and cars" is rather absurd. And gun-control people still do it. Imagine that. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I guess all it might take is to be accosted and threatened by someone with a gun in a place where they're supposed to be banned. Say... New York City, Chicago, Washington D.C., England, Australia, Jamaica, Mexico... It'd be easy to see the failure of the gun control that kept YOU from owning a gun. I hope it never happens to you; but realizing that it easily could might be a step toward protecting yourself from having it happen and finding yourself without the means of defense. Do you feel confident enough in your hand-to-hand self defense skills to handle three aggressive jerks who might plan to rape you in a parking lot? This seems like the classic scenario for a woman to contemplate the effectiveness of her rape whistle or her pepper spray. I personally think that they just don't cut it; that there easily could arise a circumstance where a gun is the only self defense device/option that is going to get you through intact. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

This is the big joke. "Increased police presence." This is going to save lives? Unless you increased police presence to that no single cop was ever so far from any other single cop that he could not make eye contact, just how would this stop crime? Do you propose to issue police officer protection on a one-to-one basis with the civlian population? We each get a cop bodyguard? Even if there were one cop on every corner of every block in New York City, plus one on every floor of every building, plus one on every car of every subway train, people who wish to commit crimes could still commit them. All the "increased police presence" would accomplish would be a quicker response to possibly apprehend the suspect, and possibly save the life of the victim. But "increased police presence" as a means to PREVENT crime is a joke, bill. A really bad joke -- worse because it makes people complacent in the belief that they don't need to be responsible for their own safety, and that ends up costing lives when the bitter truth reveals itself in the heat of a criminal act. Agreed. Very good point. I think that kaerock's proposals were a lot of mumbojumbo that look good on paper, and could work if sustained efforts were made for thousands of years to drum the evil intent out of certain elements of our society -- oh wait, we've been trying that... -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Sheeez, if the "Projects" are so darned safe, I think we should start saving the money we've been spending for all the COPS who work there to have guns! It's so obvious they don't need them! Just go in with a smile and pleasant attitude, and the criminals will treat you nice and never stop, rob, rape or kill you. It's worked for kallend, after all! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

LOL ... that's twice this week where I proclaim that ... Kelly wins ... How many gun owners have their gun on them 24/7 ready to defend themselves in the very instant that it may be needed? But I ask you, why do you assume that every circumstance of potential defensive gun use would involve a quick-draw competition? If I have my Glock in a shoulder bag on my passenger seat, and am accosted in a road rage incident, or bump-and-rob, where my car is boxed in and several perps approach my locked doors/closed windows, I would have opportunity to access my gun even if it's in the zipped bag. Likewise, if I were to hear pounding at my front door, and attempts made to batter it in, since my gun is within arm's reach at home, I can easily get to it and to my cellular phone, just in case the attempts to gain illicit entry are successful and I end up in a fight for my life against, say, a trio of thugs with bats, knives, and maybe even guns. (They tend to like to shoot inaccurately with their guns held in the "cool" sideways grip, so my years of practice might just pay off even IF the attackers have guns too.) -Jeffrey Kelly's response was not really that rational. It made illogical suppositions and left out a lot of stuff. -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Did you even read the article? They heard a woman approaching their house, screaming for help. Me, I would have gone downstairs, already on the cellular phone for the police, with a loaded gun in the other hand. If I had seen the guy approaching the girl with a gun in his hand, as she stood on my stoop, I'd have shot him. If I had seen the guy shoot her once in the back, and proceed to close the distance to her so that he could fire the additional shots, I'd have shot him. Your flawed assumption is that an armed homeowner would have come to the front door and opened it but left the firearm upstairs! What kind of sense does that make? My question pertained to, "What if the homeowner couple had been armed AT THE DOOR?" I think that should have been clear, but you seem to want to ignore it. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I'm 3 times older than you and I've worked on the south side of Chicago for longer than you've been alive, and this has not happened to me - ever. Maybe you need a change of lifestyle rather than a gun. Maybe -- just maybe it is arrogant and presumptuous for you to suggest that YOUR lifestyle -- the one that kept you from being robbed or otherwise victimized for so long -- is NOT THE ONE FOR EVERYONE ELSE. Are you really so arrogant to suggest that the way Dave has lived his life has been so wrong, and that if he had just... been... more... like... YOU... he would not have ever been threatened? You don't believe that random crime can happen to random people at random times? I could find you news articles from here in Palm Beach County where people have been robbed and killed in upscale gated communities where the homes go for $800k! But MAN, your post stinks of arrogance! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

You make the mistake of thinking that having a gun for protection against those elements of society that "social outreach" has not yet fixed is somehow exclusive to working toward the fixes you mention. Even if we reached that point, where jobs and education are so wonderful, you believe that there could then never be the aberrant psychotic, or just greedy malcontent, who is looking for the even easier way to wealth? How does your pie-in-the-sky touchy-feely approach help us in the now? (even if it could help is in the later) -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Hmmm. You mean scared of them enough not to trust them with firearms? i am not so scared of armed people to also buy a gun to try to defend myself, if that is what you mean. That is not what he meant. You express that you think we gun owners are scared of the people in the world. He was expressing that you who don't like people owning guns are scared of letting good people own guns for fear of what they might do. The only thing you have to fear from someone like me who owns a gun is what I would do to you if you ever attempted to commit a crime against me. The solution for your safety is simple: don't be a criminal, and people like me won't hurt you in our own defense! We are harmless unless threatened. People send bombs in the mail, too. I guess we should forbid everyone from using the mail, because some are not up to the responsibility? A threat like that is a crime. If he came for you one day, and had a gun, do you think you are better served by NOT having one of your own? You'd prefer to limit yourself to fighting him and his gun by using a golf club, a cricket bat, a fireplace poker, what? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Actually no, because although i have been robbed several times, there has not been any situation that a gun would have helped me more than my legs. I see. So you have no problem escaping and leaving the person who robbed you emboldened and able to rob the next person like you? No, they want to get what i own, the harm part is a supposition of yours. Given the option beetwen losing my wallet, my watch, and my shoes or having to pull out a gun, and kill someone, i prefer to loose just money. If someone attempt to rob me, and i cannot beat the crap out of him for whatever reason, i will give him my personal belongings and call the police. Don't you realize that you have to count on the "better nature" of a person who just robbed you to even LET you leave with your safety, sans your money and jewelry? That's more than I'm willing to count on, given that the person showed just how civil and righteous he is by just having robbed me... Yes, I do keep it near me just about 24/7. Strange things can happen. Someone you were completely unaware of was even casing your house ("casing" means keeping an eye on it for the purpose of determining if it's worth attempting a crime there) might one day come busting your door in. If you have nothing to defend yourself with, what will you do but suffer whatever he wants to do to you? I don't worry about LOSING my gun because I'm not an IDIOT. I'm a responsible person who is fully capable of keeping tabs on my firearm. I've done so for 11 years. I don't share your feelings about that, not even one iota. It's not such a great responsibility -- not such a tremendous burden -- that you don't get accustomed to it and learn to handle it very well. In contrast, the alternative -- not having a gun for defense when your life is on the line -- is the cost that truly is too great to bear. All it takes is one...serious... "what if." -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Well, you have Kennesaw, Georgia, where households are required by town ordinance to have at least one gun. See, if you have a gun, and it can be useful, you have the option of using it or not, depending on circumstances. If you don't have a gun, you don't have the option of using it if it would be useful or not using it if it would serve no purpose. All you have the option of doing is not using the gun that you don't have. It seems silly to deliberately limit one's options. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I don't have enemies. But there are people out there in the world's population who would take an opportunity to take from me what is mine, up to and including my life. When I am able to be armed, the total set of people I do need to "fear" is smaller than the set of people I need to fear when I am disarmed. That much is truth. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I disagree that rules of grammar are "archaic" or at all no longer necessary. In the paper the other day, a woman was quoted saying, "Now I don't have nobody to help me." Without any other contextual information, what do you think she meant? Clearly, the empirical meaning of her statement is that she is no longer without someone to help her: she now has someone to help her. But we know that "ebonically speaking," she was saying, "There is no one to help me." This kind of deterioration -- encouraged by people like you who claim falsely that rules to prevent it are "archaic" -- means that now, people treat interpersonal communication with an "anything goes" attitude, and consistency be damned. In this way, we can end up with misunderstandings between writer and reader, or speaker and listener. In the extreme, we end up with dialects so distinct that speakers of one cannot understand or be understood by speakers of another. This sentence is a perfect example. You did not break up two separate thoughts with a period, and if read to oneself in the manner in which it is typed, the whole sentence ends up sounding "breathless." There is nothing archaic or unnecessary or hard-to-understand about good, classic paragraph structure. You group sentences that are linked by a common thought together in a paragraph. Change the thought, and you should change the paragraph. Written on the page, the smaller paragraphs are easier to keep one's place in while reading; neater to look at; less daunting to read; better organized for easier comprehension. This seems to be the common "defense" of letting rules of grammar and speech deteriorate: "it's an adaptation." An adaptation to what?! LAZINESS? That's all it really comes down to. People don't have the patience or the work ethic to express themselves properly, because it takes effort to learn how to in the first place, and then more effort to do it all correctly. An excuse like that is just a way for those who write incorrectly to claim that those who expect people to write correctly are "making a big fuss over nothing." Often this excuse is offered indignantly, in a cynical attempt to put blame for the problems on the people who hold the standards of proper language use up, rather than where it belongs: on those who fail to communicate according to the logical, sound, established and preferred rules for communation. Specious. If all of us posted our understandable messages here in "telegraph-speak," would they be pleasant to read? Would there be much style to them? How artistic could a novel be if the writer was lazy enough to resort to such spartan technique? It seems to me that the effort made to be an apologist for bad syntax could easily be used to get it all right. It's funny, but you are using decent grammar, spelling and syntax in order to defend the lack of it. Why? What is the BENEFIT of not communicating according to useful, helpful rules that have existed for so long? If we are going to make a change to how we do things, isn't it incumbent on those who push for the change to explain and clarify just why the change is even necessary? Show us why it's BETTER to not differentiate between "your" and "you're," between "there" and "their." What is the utility in stripping language of these eminently useful and important differentiations?: It's only in the recent generation or two that people have really gotten so lazy in their communication, I think. It used to be a point of pride, to be able to craft a decent letter. Read some of the books that contain letters from soldiers of the Civil War, World War I, World War II... and compare them to the e-communications of Gulf War I and II vets... There is a startling difference. The latter read like journals from an ADD ward in a children's hospital. Some I have seen published in newspapers seem to contain nary a coherent thought or passage. I have a friend who now lives out of state. She's in school for criminal justice. She called me the other night asking for help with her grammar homework! She could not determine the subject and verb in some of the simplest sentences you can imagine! She did not even seem to understand what a verb even is! I think it was news to her when I said, "A verb is an action word -- it tells that something has been done." It was difficult for me to conceal my derision that she could be 36 years old and never have learned this stuff. Oh, but she likes to go out "clubbing"! I may not be old (33) but I feel I can identify more with my dad's generation, filled with dismay at the intellectual priorities (or lack of them) of younger generations. I think that more and more kids are being permitted to just not care about school and learning, and to get out of school essentially not knowing jack shit. But they can tell you who's won the recent Hip Hop awards, and which celebrity is fuckin' which other celebrity. Do you remember the handful of mean, bullyish, dumb kids in your classes who made fun of the kids who got good grades and learned their school lessons? I think that their mentality has been asserted more strongly in recent years, and now it truly has become unpopular to be smart in our primary schools. The mentality that it is "cooler" to be less smart now has the upper hand. Again, what is the call for NOT using them, that you want us to abandon what was accepted for so long? You're the one seeking the change. You're the the one who has to make the defense, the argument for it. That's irrelevant. You might as well ask what good a radio broadcaster's grammar does you since without the radio to process the broadcast transmission into sound coming from a speaker, we'd never understand him. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I loved this post! Are you married? Wanna be?! You more eloquently said what I was getting at in my post. Thanks. Blue skies, -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I think it is very important. I also think that people are so lazy nowadays that they downplay it, and even criticize those who do think it's important, to cover for their inability or unwillingness to do the work, to learn to get it right. Poor grammar, or not bothering to capitalize or punctuate when you type, is indicative of a lazy character, I think. If instead of typing, we were painting a room, grammar would be like taping off the trim and being careful not to leave drips or thin spots, and most of the typing we see on the internet would be like not bothering with a dropcloth and splattering the carpet, edging around trim without taping it off and streaking the trim as a result. There is a right way and a wrong way to do most things, and most people settle for the easy, lazy way out when it comes to grammar, or writing and speaking in general. I acknowledge that a person can be an absolutely wonderful person even if they write like shit and have atrocious grammar skills. It's just that like anything else, you make an impression with the way you type -- you tell people a bit about how bright you are, and beyond that, how willing you are to make your work presentable, neat, and correct. If someone posts something on the internet that absolutely ignores spelling, grammar, and punctuation, I think somewhat less of them, or at least, by contrast, I think well of people who type with an evident degree of intelligence and skill. Blue skies, -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I would not be different even if I could. Blue skies, -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Wow, another aperesis donor! I started doing that as a senior in high school. As I understand it, now they have a machine that can do the donation using only ONE arm! For those who don't know, aperesis donations centrifuge the blood and take out part (usually platelets for clotting, or plasma), and return the rest of the blood, reconstituted with saline, to the donor. It used to be done with a needle in each arm (going out and coming in) and take about an hour and a half. (OUCH!) I have been prohibited from donating for about a year or more, now, since they instituted a new (and paranoid?) rule that if you spent more than 3 months in England between like '88 and '96 or something, they are worried you might carry vCJD (the human version of Mad Cow Disease), and they won't let you donate. I was in England for just over 3 months in '92, and the first time they asked me if I had been there, the question did not seem new even though it was. I told them yes, and they said sorry, you can no longer donate. I have B+ CMV- blood. The CMV- aspect made my blood safer to give to premature babies and cancer patients -- weak immune systems -- so they were always hounding me for donations, and I was glad to give them. If they EVER rescind the Mad Cow rule, I'll give again. It's kind of ridiculous: on one hand, the authorities tell us there is nothing to fear from Mad Cow Disease, that it's under control, etc., and that they DON'T believe you can get it from blood... but on the other hand, they NEED the blood DESPERATELY, and if there was any possibility that it would be safe from Mad Cow, they'd take it. I think they're not telling us all they know about it. In the meantime, NO WORD yet on a test for Mad Cow carrying. They can tell if you've HAD it -- by autopsying your brain after you've died of it. I wonder if they won't let British people donate blood in Britain if they've lived there the whole time. I mean, I was there from September to December 1992, and I can't donate in the U.S. for fear I might spread vCJD. What does that mean for donating blood AT ALL for people who live their whole lives in U.K.?! Ironically, there was a blood drive here today at work, in support of a local little girl with some type of leukemia. Blue skies, -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Lol...but we took that picture on the hotel balcony, not the beach! My avatar is another part of it. See ya later!

Post them HERE, like I did! (See my edited post above!) Your wish is my command! Just wait til I get home, about 02:30 EDT... (or 06:30 UTC!) I'll take some new shots and upload 'em, and also post the already-taken ring shots. You'll like.

Geez, cool site, but do the give you enough f***in' popup windows?! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I do that to a lot of people. It's almost a curse. That's why I carry handy wipes everywhere I go. That way I can just hand them to people when we meet. The passenger seat in my car is pretty much ruined. I'll bet it's not just a little bit fragrant, too! LOL!! Blue skies, -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Ooooh, I have good hands! I'll do some pics of them later tonight when I get home. Are we gonna post 'em in this thread, or is someone starting "Show Me Your Strong Hands"? I even have some cool shots already taken of my hands with a knotted 550 cord ring on each finger. It's pretty cool! Black, Blue, Green, Red, Yellow rings on each finger! Blue skies, -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Oh my... I can't believe I'm doing this! I'm sure I'll regret it later but whatever! Regret it? I hope you don't! You made me so happy!!